Seth Paskin
speaker
1,271 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 21 Sep
Seth Paskin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Or you could get everybody identical opinions and interests, but that's simply not how people are made.
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You're not going to be able
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To do that.
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So in the end, the causes of faction are sown into the nature of man, and that the most durable of all is the inequal distribution of property.
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So those causes can't be removed, and it leaves us only with control and the effects.
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So, to control the effects, he makes this move that in a pure democracy, a small direct entity where everyone is voting on everything offers no cure for this problem because a passionate majority can act immediately and without any check.
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It's in a republic, by contrast, that you get two remedies.
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First, you get representation, where you have elected delegates that refine and enlarge the public.
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view, filtering popular passion through deliberation, so it's a tempering effect.
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And second, you have scale.
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So in Madison's day, the conventional wisdom was drawn from another political theorist named Montesquieu, and that held that free governments had to be small.
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You had to be like a Greek polis in order for it to work.
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And Madison says, no, that's not the case.
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In fact, what you want to do is you want to extend the republic over a very large territory, and you want to have a great multiplicity of interests, and that makes it much harder for any single oppressive majority to form, and it makes it harder still for them to act in concert.
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Size becomes a safeguard.
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So
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Just to put it together, he says that faction is going to be inevitable and it's rooted in our human nature, and that you manage the effects rather than eliminate the causes, and that a large representative republic is better than a small direct democracy, and it's the very diversity of a big nation that'll be its protection against tyranny.
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Yeah.
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I think also there's an implicit idea that the things that are actually good for the most of the community will be the ones that people agree on.
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Right.
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Showing 801–820 of 1,271 · page 41 of 64
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