The political theorist Montesquieu had the idea that size matters greatly when it comes to the viability of a republic. Republics, he says, are popular governments that are driven by the principle of virtue—such a love of the republic that one refrains from satisfying their “particular passions” in order to devote one’s “passions for the general order” (Montesquieu 43). As such, republics can only exist in a small territory, he argued, because in large republics there emerges opportunities for great wealth, and individuals are more likely to sacrifice the common good in order to pursue individual goals. As Montesquieu writes, one can achieve greatness “only on the ruins of his homeland” (Montesquieu, 124). In a large republic, the centrality of the common good is sacrificed to “a thousand considerations,” whereas in a small republic, “the public good is better felt, better known, lies nearer to each citizen” (Montesquieu, 124). One has a vested interest acting to ensure the public good only in a small republic. Yet, according to Montesquieu, small republics suffer from a serious flaw: namely, they are unable to defend themselves from a larger foreign force, the invasion of which dissolves the republican civic institutions and leads to the expropriation of all property (Montesquieu, 130). Montesquieu offers a solution for this conundrum about republics—death by internal vice in a large republic, or by external invasion in small one—by highlighting the historical successes of federal republics. Federal republics combine the strength of virtue that is cultivated in a republican government with a means for collective defense by an assemblage of states (Montesquieu, 131-132).
Publius, the shared name under which The Federalist Papers were penned, argued for the support of a United States Constitution that would erect a much more powerful federal government than existed under the Articles of Confederation. In Federalist number 9, Alexander Hamilton argued that the opponents of the Constitution—the anti-Federalists—wrongly cite Montesquieu’s praise of small republics in their favoring of the status quo of a decentralized Confederacy (Federalist 9, 43). The small republics that Montesquieu wrote about, Hamilton points out, were much smaller than most of the states in the Confederacy. They were ignoring, Hamilton argued further, the fact that Montesquieu saw the expansion and maintenance of republican government as being possible only by the establishment of a confederacy, as evidenced in the passages of Montesquieu cited above, which Hamilton quotes at length (Federalist 9, 44-45). James Madison, in Federalist number 10, points out there is a tendency for “factions” to arise in popular governments, which he defines as a “number of citizens” 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” (Federalist 10, 48). Such a tendency for factions, Madison argues, has been the “disease under which popular governments have everywhere perished”—regardless of how small they were (Federalist 10, 47). The institutional structure that would be created by the Constitution controls the effects of the inevitable emergence of factions (Federalist 10, 50). In a relatively small republic, there is strong likelihood that a faction that is large enough to impose its tyrannical will on the rest of the population will emerge. In a large enough republic, there are many more interest groups, and the particularities of each are so various that it is much less likely that “a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens,” and if one does, they will have trouble acting because of the mutual distrust between the groups (Federalist 10, 53).
One of the important features of the arguments of Montesquieu and Publius is their agreement about the power that was possible through the establishment of confederate republics. As Hannah Arendt points out, Hamilton and Madison trumpeted Montesquieu’s historical and theoretical treatment of confederate republics, as they argued that the viability of republican government hinged on the creation of a confederation, as opposed to the mere “alliance” under the Articles of Confederation (Arendt, 144-145). She writes that the “true objective of the American Constitution was not to limit power but to create more power” by creating “an entirely new power center” to compensate the lost power now that America was no longer part of the British Empire (Arendt, 145). The state governments are strengthened under the scheme of the Constitution, as they possess “certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power,” even as they are “constituent parts of the national sovereignty” via their “direct representation in the Senate” (Federalist 9, 46). Arendt points out that Madison had argued that “the very establishment of the Union had founded a new source of power which in no way drew its strength from the powers of the states, as it had not been established at their expense” (Arendt, 144).
Montesquieu might have been amazed at how picturesque the United States was as large republic. Tocqueville agrees with Montesquieu regarding the corruptive nature that exists in a large state, especially considering that majority action, rather than a strong prince, is the only means to combat the “Great wealth, abject poverty, big cities, lax morality, personal egotism, and the confusion of interests” in a republic (Tocqueville, 187). Tocqueville reckons that it entirely possible that the logic of Hamilton and Madison is correct: that a larger population means a more diverse set of interest groups, which makes it more difficult for a “unified majority” to form and enact schemes that undermine the public good (Tocqueville, 187). There is something else that tempers the destructive passions that might arise in a condition of freedom—that is, the “republican spirit” of Americans. The “public spirit of the Union,” however, is “not itself anything other than a summing up of provincial patriotism” (Tocqueville, 190). Much as Montesquieu thought that it was in the self-interest for one to sacrifice their passions for the benefit of the public good, Tocqueville points out that an American, in defending the Union, “is defending the growing prosperity of his district, the right to control its affairs, and the hope of establishing plans for improvement which are to bring him wealth” (Tocqueville, 190). It is the Union’s very size, its commercial spirit and talented population that provides its strength. As Tocqueville writes, “The Union is as free and happy as a small nation, as glorious and strong as a great one” (Tocqueville, 191).
Montesquieu thought that only by being subsumed into a confederacy would a small republic have the power to survive. As Alexis de Tocqueville was able to observe during his travels in America, republicanism, which Montesquieu thought was necessarily a very local affair, was thriving notwithstanding the establishment of a very powerful Union. The people, Tocqueville observed, were truly sovereign at the level of the township, which operated as a participatory democracy. What Tocqueville saw in the United States was essentially Montesquieu’s idea of virtue; it was a place where freedom did not mean that men had the “right to do anything he liked,” as “social duties were imposed upon him more various than anywhere else” (Tocqueville, 85). It was the fact that such associations, such “confidence in one another,” as John Adams said, predated the Revolution that something much larger was able to be assembled. To the men of the Revolution, Arendt writes, “power came into being when and where people would get together and bind themselves through promises, covenants, and mutual pledges” (Arendt, 173). Tocqueville writes that, when the Revolution broke out, there was little that the “upper classes” could do to stop the tide of such democratic forces (Tocqueville, 69). Democratic seeds had been planted in the township and they grew up from there, to the county, then the state, and ultimately the Union (Tocqueville, 72). If a small republic is dependent upon a confederation for its very survival, it is equally the case that for the United States, the Union could not have sprung into being without the existence of its smallest parts.
Works Cited
Arrendt, Hannah. On Revolution. London, England: Penguin Books (2006).
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The Federalist Papers (Rethinking the Western Tradition), ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press (2009)
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. London, England: Penguin Books (2003).
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