Beneath it all was a darkly realistic view of human potentialities, reflecting the chastened Calvinist view of human nature that permeated eighteenth-century America and informed the thinking of the Framers themselves, making them suspicious of concentrated power. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison warned, because although a society needed the energy of its ambitious men, the most ambitious men were likely also to be the worst if they became corrupt, and the causes of faction were everywhere “sown into the nature of man.”
