Civics In A Year
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?
Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.
Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.
Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
Civics In A Year
If Men Were Angels: Madison's Defense of Constitutional Design
Dr. Alan Gibson continues his analysis of the Federalist Papers with a deep dive into James Madison's arguments for separation of powers in Federalist 51. Madison outlines his revolutionary approach to maintaining constitutional balance by harnessing human nature and self-interest rather than relying on parchment barriers or periodic constitutional revisions.
• Madison rejected simply writing down powers on parchment as insufficient to prevent encroachment
• Jefferson's proposal for constitutional conventions was dismissed as harmful to constitutional legitimacy
• The famous "ambition must be made to counter ambition" solution connects personal interest with constitutional duty
• Madison's system requires giving each branch the means and motives to resist encroachment from others
• The legislative branch is identified as most dangerous, requiring special constraints
• Executive and judicial independence are established through indirect elections and lifetime appointments
• Complete separation of powers is impossible; even Montesquieu's ideal English system featured power-sharing
• Anti-Federalists misunderstood separation of powers as requiring complete separation without checks and balances
• The Constitution meets the proper standard of separation of powers through its system of checks and balances
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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership
Welcome back everyone. This is a continuation of Dr Alan Gibson's Federalist 51. Federalist number 48 says that you can try to just write these powers down on a piece of parchment. You can enumerate the different powers exercised by the different branches, spell it out in language on a constitutional parchment, spell it out in language on a constitutional parchment and you can hope that everybody will obey those commands that are in that parchment. And Madison says that's not going to work. We've seen from experience that that's simply not going to work.
Speaker 1:In 49 and 50, he deals with two other what he calls external ways that you might maintain separation of powers. One of them is a proposal from Thomas Jefferson about the state government in Virginia. And Jefferson says whenever two of any of the three branches again he's talking about the Virginia state government, it's a proposal in a constitution he's proposing. He says that whenever two of the three branches call for a constitutional convention to maintain separation of powers, then that's or three branches that separation of powers was being violated, then you call a constitutional convention and you address that issue. Madison rejects that for a number of famous reasons. He believes that that will hurt the institutional legitimacy of your Constitution If you keep trying to reform it. You're going to rob it of respect and veneration, is his phrase. The other proposal is whether, then, waiting for these two branches to agree with each other that a new constitutional convention is necessary, you have one called at periodic intervals. So Jefferson believed that a generation was every 19 years. And another thing that he wrote he said that you should. This is a part of his ethos of the earth belongs to the living and that each generation should govern itself. And anyway, he says, every 19 years you should have a constitutional convention. Madison says that one is also wrong. It's subject to the same kinds of criticism as spontaneous judicial review. I mean constitutional review. I mean constitutional review is so he rejects those three methods of maintaining separation of powers in 48, 49, and 50.
Speaker 1:Then, when you get to Federalist no 51, he lays out this very famous argument for how separation of powers is actually going to be, for how separation of powers is actually going to be institutionalized in the American political system. And his answer turns out to be that you're going to give to everyone. His famous phrase is the answer consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist the encroachment of others on their powers. And then he goes into the very famous language that he uses ambition must be made to counter ambition. The interests of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control abuses of government. But what is government itself? But the greatest of all reflections of human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. Incidentally, when I was grading advanced placement exams one year, some of the high school AP graders were wearing shirts that said if students were angels, or something like that. They had this kind of shirt that they were doing like that.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what Madison is saying in all of that is that the different representatives of the different branches are going to have a natural incentive and inclination to protect the powers that are given to that branch of government by the Constitution. And what you have to do is to ignite their interest in preserving their sphere of constitutional authority if it's invaded from another branch. And so you mix the powers of the government in such a way as to give each of the branches some agency and control over the other branches. You intersperse their powers. You incentivize each of the people who exercise those powers to protect their sphere of constitutional power, and that will, over time, provide the most realistic and practical means for maintaining separation of powers. You put human nature and interest in service of the preservation of separation of powers. You don't try to make it an extraordinary sacrifice. In other words, for the system to achieve separation of powers doesn't require a kind of superhuman effort by the legislatures. What it requires the different branches, what it requires is that they have a real interest in the power that they exercise in the constitutional system. And that is his solution to this problem.
Speaker 1:Now, that solution, if I can go back to what I said earlier about the legislative branch being the branch most likely to try to usurp the powers of the other branches he says that that solution also entails controlling principally the legislative branch. So your system of separation of powers is going to be based upon human nature and incentives based on interest. It's also going to control the legislative branch first and it's going to do that by giving power and independence to the other branches of the government, so to the president, the judiciary and even, within the legislative branch, the Senate, are going to have longer terms of office. They are going to also share powers with the other branches, and it is these features. They're going to have indirect elections and they're going to have longer terms of office, and that is going to give them the independence from the legislative branch to check that branch when it tries to invade their powers. So it's essential to establish both executive independence and judicial independence. You establish executive independence by having the executive elected from some branch other than the legislative branch. They considered legislative election of the president at the Constitutional Convention and eventually rejected it because it was a fundamental violation of separation of powers. And so if you elect the president, of course the president is elected in a complex manner through the Electoral College, but most importantly, it is independent of the legislative branch.
Speaker 1:No-transcript, in effect, for life or for good behavior under the Constitution. So the scheme of separation of powers itself fortifies the other branches over the legislative branch to allow them to prevent encroachments of power by one branch on the other branch. I did this somewhat out of order, but I do want to go back to Federalist no 47, because that makes an important point too. And what Madison has to show is that the Constitution achieves the integration of the idea of separation of powers in it. But what he says there is that, as I said earlier, you cannot have a complete and total separation of all of these powers. You can't do it and no one has ever really achieved that or even tried. He says Montesquieu is considered the oracle of separation of powers.
Speaker 1:He's considered the person and Montesquieu celebrates the English Constitution. But the English Constitution has a system of checks and balances that shares power between all of the branches too. So it can't be proper to judge the Constitution against this unrealizable standard of what it means to have separation of powers. He also says that none of the state governments themselves achieve the kind of separation of powers that the anti-federalists are wanting. The anti-federalists look at any time there's a combination of powers in the system and they say, oh, that's a violation of separation of powers. The Anti-Federalists were particularly annoyed by the Senate because the Senate exercises some executive powers and has some control over judicial appointments and things like that, and they thought that was a fundamental violation of separation of powers and would result in tyranny.
Speaker 1:Madison's response to that is no, these powers are properly placed there to control invasions from other branches. And it's also the case that you have to have this and it's not a violation of the standard. When you get a proper understanding of separation of powers and what that standard is, you will understand that the Constitution meets that standard. So just to reiterate the primary points that I was making here, madison surveys, across Federalist Numbers 47 to 51, these different ways of preserving and maintaining separation of powers. He rejects the idea of simply writing it down, of having spontaneous constitutional conventions called or periodic constitutional conventions called, and he favors instead the internal organization of the branches sharing some degrees of power so that they can resist encroachment from the other branches. And he argues in favor of the Constitution meeting the standard of separation of powers when that standard itself is properly understood. And those are the two major points that are carried across those papers but also especially culminate in Federalist no 51.
