The Best of the OLL No. 35: James Madison, “The Utility of the Union As a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection” (1788)

This is part of “The Best of the Online Library of Liberty” which is a collection of some of the most important material in the OLL. A thematic list with links to HTML versions of the texts is available [here](/pages/best-of-the-oll). Madison’s essay on faction for *The Federalist* papers is a classic defense of an “extended republic” in which the geographic scale of the country and the number of different groups who inhabit it act as a counterweight to the dangers of self-interested factions.