resist health and environmental regulations, corporations use scorched-earth legal tactics to protect or increase profits, employers exploit workers, powerful countries bully weak ones, and prosecutors use extortion and deceit to maximize convictions. The adversarialist theory is not the only source of these practices, but it lends them powerful support, loosening the restraints of conscience and distorting our moral compass. Harmful practices are conducted openly, without embarrassment—sometimes indeed with righteous satisfaction, as vice assumes the mantle of virtue.
Invisible hand arguments that convert self-interest or adversarial contest into public good earn our trust when their causal mechanisms are clearly explained, their enabling conditions fully recalled, their claims carefully tested, and their limits duly noted. These requirements are often evaded, however, as we succumb to the counterintuitive charm and flattering convenience of the central idea. A theory that yields important insights when properly circumscribed propagates harmful myths when reduced to a simple form. Background conditions on which the logic depends (for example, free entry and full information in the market context, equality of arms in the legal context, a shared recognition that certain strategies are off-limits) are forgotten, or it is forgotten that their preservation requires other than self-interested motives. When the theory becomes ideology—when it is imposed on rather than tested by experience—pathologies appear. The costs of generalized self-interest go unseen (because they do not fit the theory) or even cease to be regarded as costs. (Social Darwinism is the extreme example of this tendency.) A Panglossian circularity enters our reasoning. The result is that our characters are warped—our ends altered, and habits of self-restraint (on which most valid forms of the theory depend) eroded. Vice parades as virtue, while true virtue is mocked as self-indulgent preening. Responsibility is dissipated, because the “system makes everything turn out all right.”
The adversarialist reading of Madison draws on the famous passage in Federalist 51 arguing that, since men are not angels, a well-designed constitution uses “opposite and rival interests” to supply “the defect of better motives.” “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison writes. “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Offices should be arranged in such a manner that “the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights” (Fed. 51, pp. 319–20). We should not misconstrue these remarks, however.
Hume held it “a just political maxim that every man must be supposed a knave.”20 Montesquieu argued that no republic could survive without virtue.21 On this question, Madison sides with Montesquieu. His Federalist essays are saturated with references to virtue. His constant fear is that men of deficient virtue will be chosen for positions of political authority, and this in fact becomes one of his main arguments for an extended republic in Federalist 10. His adherence to Montesquieu is made plain in the conclusion to Federalist 55:
As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another. (p. 339)
In the Virginia ratifying convention, he rebuked the adversarialist conceit in the clearest terms:
I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.22
These words echo the assertion in the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights that “no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” I find no hint in Madison’s writings that the effort to be virtuous may ever be relaxed. Deviations from angelic motivation and understanding are to be expected and planned for, not celebrated or encouraged. The view, widespread in contemporary American political culture, that self-interest legitimately determines the political choices of citizens, candidates, and elected officials is wholly opposed by his theory.
Madison writes in the peroration of Federalist 51: “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society” (p. 322). I take it that this is the attitude proper to citizens and officials, not just those watching from the outside. We should elect representatives “whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and to schemes of injustice” (Fed. 10, p. 128) and “whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice [the interest of their country] to temporary or partial considerations” (p. 126). We should reject “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs” who “may by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means first obtain the suffrages and then betray the interests of the people” (p. 126). In Federalist 57: “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust” (p. 343).
When Madison writes, “No man is allowed to be judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity” (Fed. 10, p. 124), he implies that the attitude appropriate to elected officials and the citizens who choose them is that of an impartial judge, seeking only to attain a just outcome as determined by the rights of all parties: “what are many of the most important acts of legislation but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens?” The task of Federalist 10 is to devise a system that selects political officials genuinely motivated by justice and that minimizes their temptations to deviate from justice.
Let us note that Madison’s preoccupation with justice is by no means limited to the rights of property. The man who wrote the “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” drafted the Bill of Rights, and sought to mobilize state resistance against the Alien and Sedition Acts is animated by a far broader conception of human dignity. In the ringing defense of unalienable rights that concludes the 1785 Memorial (a passage Lance Banning calls the most explicit statement of “the consistent core of fundamental principle that guided him through all the turns of his career”),23 Madison invokes freedom of the press and trial by jury but not property. Property may receive the emphasis Madison gives it in Federalist 10 because recent economic conflicts raised its salience in readers’ minds. Even in the warning against majority tyranny that concludes Federalist 10, however, fear of religious persecution is mentioned before fear of paper money (p. 128). Madison does not favor unlimited accumulation of wealth, and he retains the traditional republican fear of sharp economic divisions. In 1792 he argued that the spirit of party faction should be combated by (among other means) opposition to “an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches” and “by the silent operation of laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.”24 We should take Madison at his word when he claims his primary allegiance is to justice.
If his conception of justice is in some respect mistaken, we should correct it, as he himself would desire. He would hardly claim immunity from the forces that distort opinions about justice. (Madison’s compromises with slavery—he did not free his own slaves, sold some of them to another master, and although
