ABSTRACT
James Madison has long been known as the father of the United States Constitution. In 1957 Douglass Adair pointed out that Madison's analysis of the causes of faction was derived in large part from the essays of David Hume, particularly the essays "Of the First Principles of Government," "Of Parties in General," "Of the Independency of Parliament." Madison, in the tenth Federalist, defined faction as a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion. Hume's perfect commonwealth was an adaptation and revision of the one that James Harrington had proposed a century earlier in Oceana. What Hume proposed, in only slightly less bewildering detail than Harrington, was to divide the whole country into 100 counties, each of which would be "a kind of republic within itself". Madison therefore sought safety in numbers, in large numbers of people voting.
