In her excellent new study, Colleen A. Sheehan argues that James Madison is preeminent among the Founders in his insistence on the civic cultivation of public opinion. Madison’s purposes, seemingly inconsistent at different points of his political career, ultimately cohere, she believes, in his quest to secure republican self-government in the infant nation.
Madison’s record as statesman, polemicist, and intellectual has rarely been adequately understood, even by our most thoughtful historians and scholars. Scholars from Progressive-era thinker Charles Beard to Martin Diamond, J.G.A. Pocock, and Gordon Wood more recently, locate Madison’s political contribution primarily in the mechanics of the Constitution that he shaped. The survival of elected government, under the Madisonian Constitution’s innovative structuralism, famously depends on the interplay between the enlarged sphere of the continental republic, the separation of powers, and institutional self-interest. Free and limited government would find its lasting guarantor in the struggle among the clashing interests of the federal government and civil society. Madison’s equation also placed great weight on the power of the federal government and the elites that would fill its ranks. If the American republic was to avoid the passions that crippled ancient and classical republics, a strong federal government would be necessary to temper the public mood.
Sheehan’s emphasis is different. She begins with a Madison whose faith in self-government had been shaken after American independence, thanks to the states’ majoritarian abuses of property rights, threatened and actual public rebellions, and the near impotence of the government operating under the Articles of Confederation. The young statesman faced the discomfiting reality that majority rule had not remained virtuous—or even lawful—in the young nation. Madison wanted to find the right remedy for this ancient republican disease.
