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Chapter One
James Madison's Political Thought: The Ideas of an Acting Politician
Jack N. Rakove
Introduction
James Madison's stature as America's greatest political thinker is dominated by the leading role he played in the adoption of the federal Constitution of 1787 and the subsequent amendments that Congress proposed to the states in 1789. On both occasions, his agenda for political action was strongly shaped by his 1787 analysis of the “Vices of the Political System of the U. States,” a title which covered fundamental problems of federal and republican government (PJM, 9:348–57). Madison's reputation as a political thinker is also tied more directly to the critical essays that he wrote to support his political goals, particularly his 29 contributions to The Federalist during the ratification debates of 1787–1788. Scholars generally regard these essays as the strongest, most original statements of the underlying theory of the Constitution. They represent an American answer to the work of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, with his paradigmatic views of the optimal size of republics and the separation of powers. Madison made Montesquieu, “the celebrated oracle” of eighteenth-century political science, his effective target in Federalist 10 and again in Federalist 47–51. By arguing that an extended, socially diverse national republic could better protect personal liberty and the public good than the small homogeneous polities that Montesquieu idealized, Madison rebutted one of the standard arguments of early modern political theory. Similarly, his discussion of the separation of powers moved away from the rigid division between legislative, executive, and judicial branches that many readers found in Montesquieu, opening the way for a scheme of checks and balances that better accords with the framers' ideas of a constitutionally balanced government.
Commentary on these essays and Madison's other contributions to The Federalist sustains a cottage industry of scholarship. Academics often write of “the Madisonian Constitution,” as if the decisions of 1787 were distinctively his legacy, and they treat The Federalist essays as the authoritative exposition of the document's meaning (Thomas, 2008). Because Madison has attained this status, scholars often focus their attention on the public statements of his ideas, as the mature expression of his thoughts and the sources most likely to influence others. Yet Madison arguably did his most creative thinking, not to convince others, but to shape his own course of political action. He was not, to borrow his own words in Federalist 37, merely “an ingenious theorist” conjuring “a constitution planned in his closet or in his imagination.” He did not regard himself as a political philosopher writing in the abstract, but as a political actor who sought to understand how the deliberations and decisions of government reflected deeper patterns of republican politics. “He had a historian's mind, which was a great intellectual advantage,” the late political theorist Judith Shklar aptly observed. “It enabled him to penetrate to the logic of collective action even when on the surface there seemed to be nothing but random irrationality and partisan wrangling” (Shklar, 1991:6). To understand Madison's political thought, it is essential not merely to know what he wrote in his various papers, but to see how the questions he pursued emerged from the specific crises he faced.
Broadly speaking, there were three major phases in Madison's political thinking. The first and arguably the most creative phase began in the mid-1780s, when he assessed lessons drawn from service in the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Virginia legislature to fashion the agenda of constitutional reform he pursued in 1787. During this period, Madison focused on the problem of legislative misrule within the states, which he traced not only to the parochial qualities of lawmakers, but also to the influence placed on their deliberations by the people themselves. The second major phase in his thinking began in the early 1790s, as Congressman Madison and his close friend and ally Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson moved to oppose the financial and foreign policies of President Washington and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. During these years, Madison thought far more seriously about the nature of executive power than he had done previously. Equally important, he reconsidered the role of public opinion in republican government, moving beyond his fearful views of the 1780s to ask how the public could be mobilized to maintain constitutional norms. This phase of his political thinking culminated with the Republican electoral victories of 1800–1801. Over the next 18 years, Madison played much more the role of statesman than political thinker. After retiring from the presidency in 1817, however, he spent the remaining two decades of his life contemplating the meaning of the American experiments in republicanism and federalism. Though he wrote no published treatise during these years, his papers and other memoranda often discussed the Constitution and the political values it represented.
Revolutionary Experiences
Already a serious reader, young Madison left the family plantation near Orange, Virginia, in 1769 to attend the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Then 18, Madison entered college at a relatively late age, which proved an intellectual advantage. He formed a close relationship with the college's new president, John Witherspoon, who both invigorated the college's Presbyterian identity and advanced the broader learning of Scotland's great period of Enlightenment. Some observers think that Madison's views of human nature grew from Calvinist roots at Princeton, but the evidence for this is flimsy, and Madison never wrote directly about his religious convictions (Sheldon, 2001). After he returned to Virginia in 1771, however, he saw religious belief as an absolute natural right, not a liberty to be extended at the discretion of the state.
Madison entered politics as a delegate to Virginia's Fifth Provincial Convention in the spring of 1776. He secured an amendment to Article XVI of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. As drafted, the article offered religious toleration on behalf of the state; with his amendment, it instead recognized a right to free exercise inherently belonging to the citizens of Virginia. Madison returned to the new legislative assembly in the fall of 1776, where he first met Jefferson. Although defeated for re-election the next spring, Madison was soon appointed to the state executive council. In March 1780 he joined the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress. He served three and a half years there without a leave before he was term-limited out of Congress under the Articles of Confederation. After returning to Virginia, he represented Orange County in the House of Delegates for three terms (1784–1786).
These two sustained rounds of deliberative politics – first in Congress, then in the Virginia legislature – provided the experience upon which Madison fashioned his critique of American federalism and republicanism. Federal concerns originally dominated his thinking. He formed an unfavorable impression of Congress when he first arrived in March 1780, but over time he came to appreciate the dual difficulties under which it labored (PJM, 2:6). For Congress to act effectively, it first had to attain internal consensus, which proved hard enough with members frequently absent and individual delegates sometimes seeking to hamstring its deliberations. But even after achieving consensus, it still had to persuade the state legislatures to fulfill their obligations to the federal Union, a nearly impossible task because Congress had no influence over state politics. After he returned to Virginia, Madison became a dominant figure in the assembly, where he worked hard to promote pro-federal attitudes. But the longer he served, the more disillusioned he grew over the narrow provincialism of ordinary legislators. Moreover, by 1785 he found the poor quality of republican governance within the states troubling. In his increasingly jaundiced view, legislative demagogues and hacks whose standards of political judgment fell far below the high ideals of republican theory dominated state politics. Not only were they indifferent lawmakers; they were also all too vulnerable to the passions and interests that swirled through state politics. Over time, this “disgust” with the internal government of the states became at least as important a stimulus to Madison's thinking as his original concern with the weakness of the general government.
From these experiences, Madison began to rethink the dual problems of federalism and republicanism. To make the Articles of Confederation work required legislators in each of the states to develop more informed attitudes about the provincial stake in the collective national interest. Within each of the states, he wanted to see representatives acquire a capacity to deliberate and to appreciate the process of framing legislation. At first glance, these issues seemed to be discrete. But the more Madison thought about them in the mid-1780s, the more he believed that the collective problems of federalism and republicanism could be tied to a common set of causes.
One early expression of Madison's thinking came in 1785, when a college classmate's request for advice on a constitution for Kentucky prompted Madison to record his thoughts about the state constitutions written in the mid-1770s. Madison began with a sharp critique of the lack of “wisdom and steadiness” in state legislation. The states sorely needed, he thought, true senates capable of checking impulsive legislation, committees that were technically qualified to draft legislation, or an institution like the joint executive-judicial council of revision in New York, which held a limited negative over legislation. Properly constructing the judiciary posed another concern; indeed, in Madison's view, the judiciary mattered far more than the executive. Rejecting a popular republican maxim that “Where annual elections end, slavery begins,” Madison thought that three-year terms would not only insulate representatives from impulsive public opinion, but allow lawmakers who ordinarily served only a term or two to learn their business (PJM, 8:350–57).
Yet by 1785–1786, the problem of federalism was becoming far more urgent. Like many supporters of a stronger Union, Madison hoped that the adoption of individual amendments to the Articles would demonstrate that Americans could give Congress additional power without reducing the essential autonomy of the states. But as the revenue and commercial amendments proposed in 1783 and 1784 languished short of unanimous approval, Congress was disparaged as an “imbecile” body. Any further reforms it proposed seemed likely to fail. Overcoming some early misgivings, in January 1786 Madison supported a resolution in the Virginia assembly to invite the other states to attend a convention to discuss giving Congress authority over commerce. Elected a commissioner, Madison prepared for the meeting at Annapolis in September by beginning to rethink basic questions of republican and federal governance.
During this period, working with a “literary cargo” of books that Thomas Jefferson shipped from Paris, Madison began a course of study on the history of “ancient and modern confederacies” (PJM, 8:501). Madison came away from this reading convinced that the recurring flaw in most unions was their failure to accord adequate authority to the central governing institutions. The inherent problem confederations repeatedly faced was not that they encouraged a dangerous flow of power to the center, but rather that member states retained too great a check on how these confederations operated. That diagnosis easily fit the American situation in the 1780s, but the works Madison consulted provided no ready solution to the evils they diagnosed (PJM, 9:4–24).
The sharp sectional division within Congress over the Mississippi River, which Spain had closed to American navigation in 1784, heightened Madison's concerns about American federalism. Madison found this regional split ominous for another reason, implying as it did that a Union of 13 states could devolve into several regional confederacies. Equally important, it encouraged him to consider a broader problem: whether majorities which had the right to rule in republican governments should do so when their decisions violated the basic public good. In a private letter to James Monroe in October 1786, Madison casually remarked that he had been wondering whether “the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong” (PJM, 9:141). Republican government was premised on the principle of majority rule. But should those majorities retain that power when they pursued policies inimical to the fundamental rights and interests of minorities, whether of states or the people themselves?
By the time Madison wrote to Monroe, the Annapolis Convention had met and adjourned, with too few delegates present to act. But rather than depart empty-handed, the commissioners instead called for a second meeting of the states to consider the general failings of the Confederation. Returning to Virginia, Madison took the lead, first in stopping at Mount Vernon to inform George Washington of this stratagem, second in shepherding through the assembly a resolution inviting the other states to appoint delegations, and third in assuring that Virginia's delegation would testify to the gravity of the meeting by appointing a prestigious delegation that included Madison and three eminent Georges: Mason, Wythe, and, most important, Washington.
Setting the Constitutional Agenda
Madison gave himself one further momentous task: to prepare a working agenda for the Convention set to meet at Philadelphia in May. The preparation of this agenda marked a distinctive, even unique, moment in the history of political thinking, certainly for the United States and arguably for modern constitutionalism. In this enterprise, Madison combined his scholarly reading with the reflections he drew from his own political experience and from knowledge of events in other states. The process began at the family home at Montpelier, where the room we now think was his study looked directly west to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the expanding republic that lay beyond. But the conclusions appear to have come together in the early spring of 1787, in New York City, where Madison had regained his seat in Congress.
A great deal of academic debate has concentrated on the sources of Madison's originality, particularly his hypothesis that an extended national republic embracing an array of interests would better secure liberty and the collective public good than the smaller, moderate-sized republics of the separate states. The inspiration for this debate came from essays published by Douglas Adair in the 1950s. Adair rejected the predominant Progressive view, grounded in Charles A. Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), which used Madison's ideas to argue that economic interests provided the motivating force behind the Constitution. Adair argued instead that Madison's real concern was to challenge the fundamental tenet of political theory which held that republics could operate only in small homogeneous societies, where citizens could maintain the self-regulating civic virtue – the capacity to subordinate private interest to public good – that stable republics required. First before the Convention, and then in Federalist 10, Madison rejected this premise. The inspiration for this challenge came, Adair suggested, from Madison's reading of the political writings of David Hume, particularly his essay, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” (1957).
Adair's essays liberated the analysis of Madison's political thinking from the materialist economic framework favored by Beard and his followers. Interpreters came to understand that Madison was speaking the language of republican political thinking that had flourished in Europe since the early sixteenth century. Measuring exactly how closely Madison had followed Hume has remained a subject of some dispute, with no tidy resolution. Adair treated Madison's recourse to Hume almost as a eureka-moment of revelation. But the idea that Madison had a sudden literary aperçu hardly does justice to his thought process. The central problem that Madison faced in imagining what course the Convention would take was not primarily concerned with slaying the conceptual ghost of Montesquieu. It was rather to diagnose the deficiencies of republican and federal government, and then to ask which changes would best attain the two great ends of republican governance: securing the public good while protecting the private rights of citizens.
Madison developed his agenda in four documents. One, the 12-point memorandum on “vices of the political system of the United States,” he wrote essentially for himself. Here Madison concisely analyzed not only the basic collective-action problems of the federal Union, but also a quite different set of evils that he labeled the “multiplicity,” “mutability,” “injustice,” and “impotence” of state legislation (PJM, 9:353–57). The other texts were letters to three friends and allies: Jefferson, Virginia governor Edmund Randolph, and Washington. Here he laid out the rudimentary outlines of a constitution, beginning with the proposition that representation in the national legislature should be apportioned among the states on the basis of population, rather than the one state, one vote rule of the Confederation. The reconstituted federal Union would be a government in the full sense of the term, with a structure similar to the three branches that operated in all the states. To deal with improper and unjust legislation within the states, Madison proposed to give the national legislature a negative on state laws, to operate “in all cases whatsoever” (PJM, 9:317–19, 369–71, 383–85). That phrase came heavily freighted in American political language, because Parliament used exactly the same term in its Declaratory Act of 1766 to define its jurisdiction over America. Madison borrowed this idea from the king's prerogative power to veto laws passed by the colonial legislatures.
The decision to link the defects of state lawmaking with the inadequacies of national authority reveals just how expansive an agenda Madison contemplated. Short of abolishing the states altogether, this was as radical a program as anyone in 1787 could imagine. It also required merging two distinct subjects, national issues and state-based problems, both demanding urgent reform. But in Madison's view, the defects of federal and state governance under the Articles of Confederation were ultimately tied to one common source: the incapacity of state legislatures to deal responsibly with their complementary duties both to external national governance and to internal self-governance. When it came to describing federal vices in the memorandum, Madison did not direct his complaints against decision-making within Congress or the formal lack of congressional authority per se. Instead he repeatedly faulted the state legisl...
