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almos t believe, he remarked, that God himself had intervened. He could see
no evidence whatsoever of "the pestilential influence of party animosi–
ties," the disease considered inherent in virtually all deliberative bodies,
always threatening to contaminate and undermine them.
How had such amity and concord been possible? Perhaps the members
of the Convention approved the Constitution, Madison hypothesized,
because they possessed "a deep conviction of the necessity of sacrificing
private opinions and partial interests to the public good." Ironically, such
willingness to sacrifice one's own interests for the good of all was not to
be expected of citizens of the new federal union. Unless there were some
extreme crisis and overwhelming sense of shared purpose, Madison antic–
ipated neither consensus nor unity in the new republic. The Convention
represented a privileged moment in American politics, a moment of har–
mony that produced a Constitution incorporating and even enshrining the
principles of disharmony and conflict. Mter that founding moment, unity
would never again be the goal of government. On the contrary, the new
federal government was carefully structured so that people and interest
groups would collide rather than concur.
Indeed, as soon as the Constitution was agreed to and signed in
Philadelphia, conflict over it commenced. Would the state legislatures vote
in favor of the new federal government? Anti-federalists were galvanizing
their followers and drumming up opposition. James Madison was troubled
that even in Virginia, distinguished men such as Patrick Henry, Arthur
Lee, Benjamin Harrison, and others were opposed to the Constitution.
On the one hand, he could only regret this dissent, but on the other, he
knew well that just such pluralism and conflict were the fundamental
underpinnings of his political vision. When Alexander Hamilton proposed
that he, Madison, and John Jay help strengthen the Federalist position by
publishing a series of essays in New York newspapers, Madison readily
agreed. Returning to New York that November, he drew up, in less than
a week, one of the masterpieces of modern political thought. Two words
describe the import of Federalist 10:
diversity
and
conflict.
All "closed systems" move toward entropy, toward disorder. So states
the second law of thermodynamics. Madison's plan for American govern–
ment seemed to take into account this law of physics. Free rein was given
to citizens
to
act in their self-interest, to form factions,
to
enter into con–
flict with one another, and the predictable result would be disorder and
tumult. The government would make no attempt to eliminate conflict–
that is, non-violent and rational contention-only to moderate it and pro–
vide channels for it.
In France, however, the momentum of the Revolution was toward
order, not tumult, toward oneness, not multiplicity. Far from accepting
