ABSTRACT
Let me begin with the question of the nature of human relationships. In fact competing claims about the nature of these relationships resonate throughout the rst three parts of this book. On the one side we have frequently encountered the claim that individual passions are inevitably self-seeking, compelling, or at least inclining people to experience other people as mere means to, or as obstacles that inevitably impede their successful pursuit of, selsh advantage. Hobbes’s claim, referenced in chapter 1, that by nature humans seek ever greater power over others was echoed in chapter 2 both by Montesquieu’s assumption that “every man invested with power is apt to abuse it” and by Madison’s claim that “power is of an encroaching nature.” It was, you will recall, Madison’s distrust of the passions that led him to argue either (in Federalist 49) that those passions should be regulated by a government that is (somehow) committed to reason or (in Federalist 51) that conicting passions should be arranged in such a way that, in eect, they cancel themselves out. is latter argument was renewed in chapter 6, in which, starting from the assumption that the “latent causes of faction are . . . sown in the nature of man,” Madison in Federalist 10 recommends the multiplicity of competing factions in an “extended” republic as the antidote to the formation of an organized and eective majority faction and thus as the only guarantee that the public interest will prevail.
