James Madison and the Conditions for Nationalism
Size Matters
This article is based on a presentation first delivered at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 2024 American Politics & Government Summit on a panel sponsored by American Reformer on “American’s Exceptional Nationalism.”
Much to the chagrin and outrage of many people whose opinions used to matter more, discussions of nationalism—Christian and otherwise—and regime change are much in vogue these days. Furthermore, great recovery work is happening in these pages and elsewhere in the wisdom of prior ages to remind us of what is possible and what is prudent. One theme that is recognized but not often examined is the effect of size and scale on the possibilities for national politics and regime analysis.
James Madison, the chief architect of the American constitution, understood republicanism as a regime type in which the people as a whole—through their representatives—is sovereign. The recent reelection of Donald Trump, against all imaginable odds, might seem to evince that the American people are still effectively sovereign, but of course nothing about Trump’s electoral story is normal. What’s more—to paraphrase Federalist 10—Trumpian statesman are not to be counted on as always available to take the helm; Trump’s elections are better interpreted as the exception that proves the rule and a response to the fact that something is seriously broken in Americans’ ability to muster an electoral majority to effect their will.
What if the size and scope of the American territory and population proves a determinative influence on the type of regime we have, despite what we call it or want to think of it as? In fact, Madison himself pondered this same question in 1791, when the United States had only 14 states, in “Notes on the Influence of Extent of Territory on Government” that he recorded in preparation for an anonymous essay he wrote shortly thereafter called “Consolidation.”[1. James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, ed. Robert A. Rutland, Thomas A. Mason, Robert J. Brugger, Jeanne K. Sisson, and Fredrika J. Teute (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 14: 132-3.] These notes and essay are a proper complement to his more famous argument in favor of an extended republic in Federalist papers 10 and 51. The thesis of this latter argument is that “A Govt. of the same structure, would operate very differently in a very small territory and a very extensive one.” In short, the smaller a territory, the more the regime will take on a more popular, democratic character, and the larger a territory, the more it will take on an imperial, monarchic character.
Admirers of the American founding can easily become accustomed to understanding Madison’s arguments for the extended republic as a theoretical principle, unassailable and essential to the republican operation of our regime. The founders themselves, however, saw the mechanism of the extended sphere as one of the “inventions of prudence,” as Madison calls it in Federalist 51. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, indicates his own view of the prudential—not propositional—character of this mechanism by asking, “Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere?” To which he provides a somewhat unreassuring answer: “Let experience solve it.”
Size of Territory and the Total State
In his 2024 book, The Total State, Auron MacIntyre muses on the causes of the transformation of republicanism into authoritarianism. MacIntyre argues that the rise of “the total state” is an “inevitable consequence of adopting the social structures that allowed civilizations to scale well beyond their natural capacity.”[2. Auron MacIntyre, The Total State (New York: Regnery, 2024), 137 (my emphasis).] He interprets Robert Conquest’s first law of politics—viz., that “everyone is conservative about what he knows best”—to imply that “institutions usually have the clearest vision of their purpose at their founding because they’re still small enough to stay focused on why they were created.” Taking Conquest’s laws as reflections upon experience, we can see that MacIntyre thus answers Washington’s question above in the negative by arguing that it is also inevitable that republics on a large territory will be sustained by adopting social structures that allow for scaling beyond their capacity. In syllogistic form, the argument is this:
Major premise: All institutions that rely on social structures that allow for imprudent scaling will devolve into authoritarianism.
Minor premise: All republics that grow too large become so out of reliance on social structures that allow for imprudent scaling.
Conclusion: All republics that are too large will devolve into authoritarianism.
For this article, I grant MacIntyre’s major premise, and I investigate the minor. I want to find some limiting principle within the American federal regime that would reasonably enable us to determine if our republic (or confederation of republics, if you prefer) has scaled beyond what is prudent. I assume that if it has scaled beyond what prudence would dictate, then it has become reliant on social structures that will—according to MacIntyre’s logic—too easily devolve into authoritarianism.
Alas, one seeks in vain to find such a limiting principle clearly outlined in Madison’s writings. All we discover are hints that it is a very real possibility that we could expand to a point beyond which we could not in truth hope to maintain our republican character and suggestions that we were approaching that limit in the 1790s. Madison then confounds us even more when, after delivering these subtle warnings, he gives an unqualified endorsement of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which effectively doubled the size of the American territory. Below, I provide the reader with a number of these hints and warnings from Madison and then some closing reflections tying Madison’s thoughts to MacIntyre’s logic about large social structures and the Total State.
A Republic within a Practicable Sphere
In Federalist 10, Madison argues for an extended republic as a mechanism for ameliorating the ill-effects of faction as a means for depoliticizing the whole in order to prevent a tyranny of the majority. When the people’s will is filtered through representation and their bodies spread out over an extensive territory, they are depoliticized insofar as they are less involved in directing power through deliberation and are less able to effect power through force. “Extend the sphere,” he explains, “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; or if such common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” His hope is that thus depoliticized, the people’s passions will more effectively give way to their collective reason through representatives.
Nonetheless, Madison acknowledges that depoliticization can be taken too far, beyond a practicable range, rendering the people ineffective when their will and action are needed. Most explicitly in Federalist 51, Madison claims: “the larger the society, provided it lie within a practicable sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government.”[3. Federalist 51 (my emphasis).] However, in Federalist 23, Madison complicates this point. He explains that should it in fact prove impossible to maintain republican government in a large republic, then “it would prove that we ought to contract our views, and resort to the expedient of separate confederacies, which will move within more practicable spheres.”[4. Federalist 23 (my emphasis).] Thus, the meaning of Madison’s use of the term “practicable sphere” is frustratingly ambiguous. Nevertheless, Madison gives us a few clues to decipher his thought.
First clue: ratio of electors to elected delegates. Madison describes the ratio between electors and elected delegates to Congress as a mathematically determinative limit. In a gradually expanding republic, delegates must at some point either represent too many constituents or else themselves increase in number to compose a mob immobile with respect to deliberation. Hence, this ratio must evince a limit to the size of a republic (even if each member were a Socrates). In an overly extended sphere, it must be the case either that there are too many constituents per representative for accurate representation or else too many representatives assembled together for effective deliberation.
Second clue: the nature of government. Madison acknowledges that the very nature of government has a limit to the extent over which it can affect influence. At the Constitutional Convention, Madison recorded Roger Sherman’s comments on Madison’s own speech at the Convention on the extended sphere: “The gentleman (Mr. Sherman) had admitted that in a very small State, faction & oppression wd. prevail… Were we not then admonished to enlarge the sphere as far as the nature of Govt. would admit.” Also in Federalist 14, Madison notes that a “natural limit” to the size of a republic must be recognized based on the practical need and logistical difficulties for representatives to be able to meet regularly, given 18th century transportation and communication technology.
Third clue: a golden mean. In a letter written to Thomas Jefferson on October 24, 1787—just one month before Federalist 10 was published—Madison gives a thorough explanation of the reasons why a republican territory must be neither too large nor too small. Speaking of his theory of the extended sphere, Madison divulges to his compatriot:
It must be observed however that this doctrine can only hold within a sphere of a mean extent. As in too small a sphere oppressive combinations may be too easily formed agst. the weaker party; so in too extensive a one, a defensive concert may be rendered too difficult against the oppression of those entrusted with the administration. The great desideratum in Government is, so to modify the sovereignty as that it may be sufficiently neutral between different parts of the Society to controul one part from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the entire Society.[5. James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, comprising his Public Papers and his Private Correspondence, including his numerous letters and documents now for the first time printed, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900). Vol. 5. 11/27/2014. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1937#Madison_1356-05_267 (my emphasis).]
If a mean is desired, we must know how to find and understand the extremes.
Fourth clue: private notes. In his private papers, Madison records what he entitled “Notes on the Influence of Extent of Territory on Government,” in preparation for the anonymous essay “Consolidation,” mentioned above. In those notes, Madison asserts that “A Govt. of the same structure, would operate very differently within a very small territory and a very extensive one.”[6. James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, ed. Robert A. Rutland, Thomas A. Mason, Robert J. Brugger, Jeanne K. Sisson, and Fredrika J. Teute (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 14: 132-3.] He uses the British government for an example, and he conjectures that if that government were contracted into a territory the size of London, the monarchy would likely be subverted by “the force of public opinion and feeling.” Conversely, if that same government were stretched onto a territory the size of China, the extensive size would “gradually enable the Executive branch of the Govt. to overwhelm the others, and convert the Govt. into an absolute monarchy.” Consequently, a republic should fall somewhere between a city-state the size of London and an empire the size of China. These clues are all we have to go on for determining the prudential size of a government from Madison.
Large Social Structures and Natural Propensity of Government
These clues are generally not helpful enough to act as a guide for policy, and we are only left to conjecture why Madison does not mention them again after endorsing the acquisition of the Louisiana territory. Did he change his mind? Nevertheless, Madison does help us approach an answer to the question, “has the republic of the United States grown dependent on large social structures that can scale beyond what is prudent?”
In “Consolidation,” Madison emphasizes the important role that the states play as “local organs” through which public opinion is collectively conveyed to the federal government. He then describes the condition of the people deprived of such effective local organs: “the impossibility of acting together, might be succeeded by the inefficacy of partial expressions of the public mind, and this at length, by a universal silence and insensibility, leaving the whole government to that self-directed course, which, it must be owned, is the natural propensity of every government.”[7. Madison, The Papers of James Madison, 14: 138 (author’s emphasis).] In other words, smaller communities such as towns, counties, and states functioning as a kind of effective conduit of the will of citizens is the republican exception; the norm is for a large imperial government to operate upon, not through, subjects. This is the “natural propensity of every government” that, presumably, operates on a large territory.
When the Constitution was written, it stipulated that “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand” citizens. The number of representatives reached 435 in 1913 and was frozen at that amount through the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, despite criticism that the act was unconstitutional. In 1913, the population was just over 97 million: today it is nearly 335 million, that comes out to each representative representing nearly 800,000 people on average. This kind of increasingly attenuated representation is maintained through what we might reasonably call “large social structures” such as the media, constituent services apparatus, and a collective faith that physical propinquity does not matter in a technological and digital age.
In Federalist 14, Madison suggests that improved transportation and communication can help in fact reverse the ill effects of extensive geographic space between citizens. He mentions roads, accommodations for travelers, and safe passage along the eastern seaboard, for example. More explicitly, in an essay entitled “Public Opinion,” Madison claims that “whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people, and Representatives going from, and returning among every part of them, is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits, and is favorable to liberty, where these may be too extensive.”[8. Madison, The Papers of James Madison, 14: 170 (author’s emphasis).] If Madison is correct, then improved transportation and intercommunication throughout society nullifies the ill effects of extensive space between citizens in a large territory. One thinks here of an analogy with business made more efficient and scalable through corporate management processes, outsourcing, supply chain logistics and telecommunication technologies. Mechanisms such as these, though, seem to be further examples of what MacIntyre means by “large social structures” that are scalable beyond what is prudent. We must ask today if such technology allows government to exert force beyond what it would otherwise naturally be capable of and if that supernatural force is able to be subject to republican means of control, such as congress’s fateful choice earlier this year to maintain communications surveillance on American citizens through FISA warrants is a telling example.
As mentioned above, Madison illustrated his idea of the influence of the extent of territory on a government with a hypothetical illustration. He conjectured that if the government of Great Britain were stretched to the size of China, “the Executive branch of the Govt.” would “overwhelm the others, and convert the Govt. into an absolute monarchy.”[9. Madison, The Papers of the James Madison, 14: 133.] The fact that the present expanse of the United States is almost identical to the size of China, which was roughly the same size when Madison was writing, ought to give us great pause. If the size of our territory is the same as that of the hyperbolic extreme in the example Madison provides between empire and city state, then maybe we should adjust our expectations for the conditions for nationalism and republicanism.
Like the other improvements to the science of politics, Madison meant for the extended sphere to be ancillary to the imperfect civic virtue of citizens in order to help them gain what was in their true interest, viz., a stable republic. This essay contends that, unfettered from an intended limit, the theory of the extended sphere becomes a kind of Frankenstein’s monster—a product of science that ends up having the capacity to destroy its maker. Practice in civic virtue has always been the only real guard against the tyranny of bureaucratic inertia of the “self-directed course” that is the “natural propensity of every government,” but is it any practicable match for the forces that tend toward the Total State? I pray we don’t have to wait for experience to prove it.
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