What is Wrong With One of Hamilton's Most Famous Federalist Papers

In Federalist 15, Alexander Hamilton asks, 'Why has government been instituted at all?' He gives us this answer: “Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.” Hamilton and his fellow Founders believed that freedom (mainly of white male adults to obtain and retain property) requires careful protection, and they felt sure that the key to accomplishing that goal was to restrain groups (or 'factions') from getting up to mischief. Although Hamilton took factions to be nothing but bundles of individuals who each have fundamental rights, he believed that restricting the allowable activities of the factions themselves (conceived as whole units) was absolutely crucial to the preservation of personal liberties.

Was it that Hamilton denied that factions might have their own desires, so that they, unlike real persons, do not require protection of (the merely metaphorical) 'freedom to pursue their own happiness'? Not at all. Indeed, his view that groups are infected with 'a poison of spirit' that causes them to act with less 'rectitude and disinterestedness' than individual persons, surely requires the existence of corporate purposes, strategies and wills.

But if there are general wills, what has them must resemble individual persons in being more or less free, more or less autonomous. Now, it is hard to deny that, all else equal, more liberty and autonomy, more opportunities for successful free choices, is an unalloyed prudential good. (The more good, the better!) But an understanding of that fact will move one to recognize that the main point of government is not, as Hamilton thought, to constrain the passions of men (or factions), but rather to maximize successful choices. Such maximization requires the precise deciphering of what is wanted by both persons and factions so that the utmost can be done to bring those states of affairs into existence.

In the case of social choices, let us call the methods for such precise deciphering and subsequent faithful endeavors to obtain what is wanted 'fair democratic procedures.' It will follow that the only restraints that are absolutely fundamental to a praiseworthy polity are those that are necessary to limit any activity—by person, institution, faction, or the government itself—that might serve to restrict or pervert the operation of fair democratic procedures.

[From the final chapter of Democratic Theory Naturalized: The Foundations of Distilled Populism]