Hamilton, Madison, and their colleagues made one truly original contribution to political thought, which was to reject the long-standing view, shared by some of history’s greatest thinkers (including Montesquieu himself), that republics should be small and homogenous. They suggested instead that a large republic, with diverse people, would be the best way to produce a deliberative democracy. In their conception of democracy, as Justice Louis Brandeis put it, “the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary”—and deliberation would entail circumspection, not intuition. Theirs was a
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