Founders' Library · Founding era (1779–1787)
The Federalist No. 10
Why this matters
The Federalist No. 10 belongs in the Founders’ Library because it names the political conditions the school-trust architecture was built to sustain. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance committed the new republic to forever encourage schools; Federalist No. 10, published in the same season, explained why a republic of educated citizens was the only kind of government that could survive the pressures of faction. The school-trust lands are the institution by which Madison’s “enlightened statesmen” and his deliberating citizenry were actually to be produced — at scale, across generations, in townships that did not yet exist when Madison wrote.
What’s in it
- The problem of faction — defined as a number of citizens, majority or minority, united by some common impulse adverse to the rights of others or the permanent interests of the community.
- The two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction — removing causes (impossible in a free society) or controlling effects.
- Why removing causes fails — liberty is to faction what air is to fire; and the diversity of human faculties guarantees diverse interests.
- The unequal distribution of property — named as the most common and durable source of faction.
- The distinction between a pure democracy and a republic — representation and the extended sphere.
- The advantages of the extended republic — refining and enlarging public views through a chosen body of citizens; a greater variety of parties and interests rendering majority oppression less likely.
- The conclusion — the Union as a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.
Most-quoted passages
“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
Madison’s working definition. The Library carries it because the question of who acts in the permanent interest of the community is the question every fiduciary asks — and the school-trust trustees are, at the structural level, supposed to be answering it.
“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”
The famous passage on liberty and faction. The school-trust system is one of the institutions designed to manage this trade-off — to produce a citizenry capable of liberty without the incessant collapse into faction.
“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man… But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.”
A frank acknowledgment that material interest drives political behavior. The school-trust lands were the founders’ answer to one form of unequal distribution: a permanent endowment, held in trust, generating income for schools, accessible to children whose parents owned no land at all.
“It may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves… Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”
The clearest statement of why education matters to Madison’s republic. Representation refines the public voice — but only when representatives are the kind of people education produces, and only when the citizens choosing them are themselves educated enough to choose well. The Library treats this as the political-philosophical premise the school-trust system was built to satisfy.
“Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens…”
The argument for the extended republic. Worth holding alongside Article III of the Northwest Ordinance: the same year, the same authors, the same project. The extended sphere requires extended schooling.
How it connects to the Library’s argument
The Library’s drift-of-purpose argument has two halves: the physical drift of the corpus (lands sold below value, proceeds diverted) and the conceptual drift of the purpose (schools redefined from citizen-formation to human-capital production). Federalist No. 10 belongs to the second half. It documents what the founders thought public education was for. Madison’s case for the extended republic assumes a citizenry capable of reading newspapers, parsing argument, and choosing representatives on the basis of judgment rather than passion. That citizenry does not arise spontaneously. It is produced — by townships, by schools, by the income flowing from Section 16.
When the schools cease to perform citizen-formation, the Federalist 10 architecture is no longer being sustained by the institution Madison’s peers assumed would sustain it. The drift is not announced; it is gradual, invisible, and structural. The Library carries Madison’s text so that the original purpose remains legible against the institution’s current shape. The reader can decide for herself whether the schools she pays for today are producing the citizens Federalist No. 10 required.
How to engage
- Full text (Avalon Project, Yale Law School): https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
- Library of Congress: https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10
- Founders Online, National Archives: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0178
- Submit a correction or annotation: /contribute/
Curated by
Library editorial team, 2026-05-07. This editorial summary is the Library’s contribution and is open to community revision.
