James Madison and the problem of founding

Review of Politics

Volumn 58, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 561-595

  Rosen, Gary ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0007146579     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500020180     Document Type: Article

References (161)

1. Letter to Edmund Randolph, 10 January 1788, in The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson, William M. E. Rachalet al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962-1977;
2. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977-), 10:355. Hereafter Madison's Papers will be cited by volume and page number as follows: PJM, 10: 355.
3. Madison was not much of one for philosophical name-dropping, but both Hobbes and Locke do make the occasional appearance in his writings. As a young man, Madison quoted Hobbes in his commonplace book, and at Princeton he cited both Hobbes and Locke in his notes on "logick." See Commonplace Book, 1759-72 (exact date uncertain), PJM, 1:16;
4. and Notes on a Brief System of Logick, 1766-72 (exact date uncertain), PJM, 1: 35. In his maturity, Madison included the works of both writers in the books that he recommended for purchase by Congress. Only Locke, however, is mentioned by name in Madison's own writings-on three occasions, to the best of my knowledge.
5. See Report on Books for Congress, 23 January 1783, PJM, 6: 85;
6. and, for references to Locke, "Spirit of Governments," 20 February 1792, p. 183;
7. "Helvidius," No.1,24 August 1793, p. 203;
8. and Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 8 February 1825, p. 349, in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, ed. Marvin Meyers (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1973).
9. See, for example, Federalist, No.40, p. 265;
10. No.43, pp. 295,297;
11. No.44, p. 301;
12. and No. 51, p. 352, in The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961). (Hereafter all citations from The Federalist will be by essay and page number of this edition, e.g., Federalist 40: 265.)
13. In addition, see Madison "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments," ca. 20 June 1785, PJM, 8:299- 300;
14. and Speech on Citizenship, 22 May 1789, PJM, 12: 179-182
15. Also see his speech in the House of Representatives introducing amendments to the Constitution, 8 June 1789, pp. 164,168;
16. and "Report on the Virginia Resolutions," 1799 - 1800, pp. 232-237, in Mind of the Founder. 4 Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Classics, 1985), p. 211.
17. Mind of the Founder , Ibid., p. 687.
18. Ibid., p. 183.
19. Charles Beard does not mention any of the essays in this series in his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913), despite their obvious relevance to his thesis, nor do they receive serious consideration in Fame and the Founding Fathers, ed. Trevor Colbourn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), the collected writings of Douglass Adair. More recent commentators also give Numbers 37-40 short shrift. There is no sustained discussion of them, at least as they relate to the role and significance of the Federal Convention, in George W. Carey, The Federalist: Design for a Constitutional Republic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989);
20. Morton White, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
21. or Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (London: The Athlone Press, 1981).
22. The notable exception is David Epstein, The Political Theory of The Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
23. Nicomachean Ethics 1141b26.
24. J. Allen Smith, The Spirit of American Government (New York: Macmillan, 1907);
25. Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution; Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927).
26. See, for example, John P. Roche, "The Founding Fathers: A Reform Caucus in Action," American Political Science Review 55 (1961): 799-816;
27. and Calvin C. Jillson, "Constitution-Making: Alignment and Realignment in the Federal Convention of 1787," American Political Science Review 75 (1981): 598-612.
28. Judith N. Shklar, "The Federalist as Myth," Yale Law Review 90 (1981): 942-944
29. See, for example, his Letter to William Short, 6 June 1787, PJM, 10: 31: The Convention contained "in several instances the most respectable characters in the U.S. and in general may be said to be the best contribution of talents the States could make for the occasion."
30. Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 24 October 1787, PJM, 10: 208.
31. Federalist, 37: 234-235
32. Ibid., pp. 231-232
33. Ibid., pp. 237-239
34. Ibid., p. 233.
35. Ibid., 18:111-113
36. Ibid., 20:128-29 (emphasis in the original). Cf. Hamilton's like observations in Federalist, 15:93-94.
37. See his speeches of 30 May 1787,29 June 1787,30 June 1787, and 14 July 1787, PJM, 10: 18-19, 86-87, 88-90,100-102. This is not to say, of course, that he meant to do away with the states, only that he did not want them to have any direct role in the new government.
38. Federalist, 37: 233-234
39. Epstein, Political Theory of The Federalist, pp. 111-118
40. Federalist, 10: 61; 14: 88.
41. Ibid., 37: 238.
42. Ibid., pp. 233-234
43. Ibid., pp. 234-235
44. For the comment on Locke, see "Spirit of Governments," 20 February 1792, Mind of the Founder, p. 183.
45. For Madison's zoological interests, see his Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 11 February 1784, PJM, 7: 419;
46. Notes on Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, ca. May 1786, PJM, 9: 29-47;
47. and Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 19 June 1786, PJM, 9: 78-80. The last item is an especially revealing instance of Madison's faith in scientific investigation. It contains a lengthy description of his dissection of a weasel and concludes with the assertion that his own findings "certainly contradict" those of Buffon.
48. Federalist, 37: 235.
49. Ibid.,
50. Ibid., 43: 297.
51. Ibid., 37: 235-236
52. Letter to Archibald Stuart, 30 October 1787, PJM, 10: 232. Federalist, No.37, first appeared several months later, on 11 January 1788.
53. In both the Nicomachean Ethics (1181b) and the Rhetoric (1360a), Aristotle recommends that legislators, those whose prudence (phronesis) is "architectonic," undertake the study of regimes-their numbers and kinds, what preserves and destroys them, and which are advantageous for particular sorts of cities. He recommends, that is, an inquiry like the Politics. Thus, political science {politike), which he likewise characterizes as "architectonic" at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics (1094a27-8), refines and expands the practical understanding of the great political man, providing him with alternatives unavailable to prudence alone.
54. See Nicomachean Ethics 1094bl2-28.
55. Federalist, 9: 51-52.
56. Cf. Madison's remarks in Federalist, 14: 84-85, 88-89; 47: 324;
57. and 63: 427-428
58. Federalist, 51: 349. Madison refers to prudence in its grand, political sense elsewhere in The Federalist as well. Thus, in concluding his account of the motives of representatives under the Constitution, he writes: "It is possible that these may all be insufficient to controul the caprice and wickedness of man. But are they not all that government will admit, and that human prudence can devise?" (57: 387). At the same time, and not unexpectedly, Madison speaks of prudence in the democratized sense to which we are accustomed, particularly as it applies to business matters. Here it summarizes such bourgeois virtues as sobriety, caution, and foresight: "An individual who is observed to be inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all, is marked at once by all prudent people as a speedy victim to his own unsteadiness and folly." "What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce, when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?" (62: 420, 421). This transformation of the meaning of prudence, well underway in Madison's time, may explain why he tends to use the word "judgment" when speaking of the intellectual virtue appropriate to politics.
59. For an exhaustive listing of Madison's usage of "prudence," "prudent," and "prudently" in The Federalist, see The Federalist Concordance, ed. Thomas S. Engeman et al. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), p. 440.
60. See Adair, "'That Politics May be Reduced to a Science': David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist," in Fame and the Founding Fathers, pp. 93-106;
61. Roy Branson, "James Madison and the Scottish Enlightenment," Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 243-49;
62. and Wills, Explaining America, pp. 179-264.
63. See his Notes for a Speech Favoring Revision of the Virginia Constitution of 1776,14 or 21 June 1784, P]M, 8: 78;
64. Speech on the Term of the Executive, 17 July 1787, PJM, 10:103-104;
65. and Federalist, 47. For useful general discussions of Montesquieu's place in the debate over the Constitution, see James W. Muller, "The American Framers' Debt to Montesquieu," in The Revizml of Constitutionalism, ed. James W. Muller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 87-102;
66. and Judith N. Shklar, "Publius and the Science of the Past," Yale Law Journal 86 (1977): 1286-1296
67. Federalist, 20:128.
68. See, respectively, Theodore Draper, "Hume & Madison: The Secrets of Federalist Paper No. 10," Encounter 58 (February 1982): 34-47;
69. and Epstein, Political Theory of The Federalist, p. 101.
70. See Edmund S. Morgan, "Safety in Numbers: Madison, Hume, and the Tenth Federalist," The Huntington Library Quarterly 49 (1986): 95-112.
71. Letter to N. P. Trist, February 1830, in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (New York: R. Worthington, 1884), 4: 58. Hereafter Madison's Letters will be cited by volume and page number as follows: LJM, 4: 58.
72. Federalist, 47: 323-331
73. "Helvidius," No.1,24 August 1793, Mind of the Founder, p. 203.
74. Wills, Explaining America, pp. 28-33.
75. Anne M. Cohler, Montesquieu's Comparative Politics and the Spirit of American Constitutionalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988), p. 149.
76. For her strained defense of the dominant influence of Montesquieu, see pp. 148-169
77. Thus, for example, he cited both thinkers by name in an early paper on money and its value in circulation (though dismissing their views as "manifestly erroneous"). "Money," September 1779-March 1780, PJM, 1: 302-309. I would include under the heading of political science questions relating to "political economy"-that is, to the place of commerce in the political order of a liberal republic-in which case Adam Smith should also be added to the list of major influences on Madison. For a valuable discussion of this subject (despite a gross overstatement of Jefferson and Madison's attachment to classical models)
78. see Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980).
79. Letter to N. P. Trist, February 1830, LJM, 4: 58.
80. Letter to Nicholas Biddle, 23 February 1823, LJM, 3: 302.
81. "Spirit of Governments," 20 February 1792, Mind of the Founder, p. 183.
82. Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 8 February 1825, Mind of the Founder, p. 349.
83. Federalist, 38: 239.
84. Cicero, De Re Publica, trans. C. W. Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), pp. I l l , 113.
85. Federalist, 38: 241.
86. Madison thus offers testimony to the fact that the "self- conscious" creation of constitutions-as opposed to their growth or development-is not an eighteenth-century invention, as Charles Howard Mcllwain argues in his influential book. See Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940), pp. 14, 23.
87. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 25-26.
88. Federalist, 38: 239-241
89. Ibid., 37: 238.
90. Ibid., 38: 241.
91. Ibid.,
92. Remark of Pierce Butler, 5 June 1787;
93. Speech of Gunning Bedford, 30 June 1787, in Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison, ed. Adrienne Koch (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. 73, 229.
94. See "Lycurgus," in Plutarch's Lives, trans. John Dryden (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 53.
95. In addition to the passage cited in the preceding paragraph, seeFederalist, 2: 9; 20: 128. Several of these points are suggested by Charles R. Kesler, "The Founders and the Classics," in The American Founding: Essays on the Formation of the Constitution, ed. J. Jackson Barlow, Leonard W. Levy, and Ken Masugi (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 83.
96. Epstein, Political Theory of The Federalist, p. 32.
97. Federalist, 38: 240.
98. Ibid., p. 246.
99. Ibid., pp. 242-243
100. Cf. Gorgias 464;
101. Laws 720b-e; Nkomachean Ethics 1141b23-4,1104a9;
102. and "Lycurgus," p. 53.
103. See Stephen G. Salkever, "Aristotle's Social Science," Political Theory 9 (1981): 500-503.
104. For a brief, helpful discussion of the differences between Plato and Aristotle in the use of this analogy (and the source of my cites above), see p. 508 (note 50).
105. Federalist, 39: 250, 251.
106. Ibid., p. 253.
107. Kesler, "The Founders and the Classics," p. 84.
108. Federalist, 37: 233.
109. Ibid., 39: 250.
110. Letter to James Monroe, 21 June 1786, PJM, 9: 82.
111. Cf. Federalist, 18:114, where Madison compares the Achaean and Amphyctionic leagues and notes "a very material difference in the genius of the two systems.
112. Federalist, 51: 351-353
113. Ibid., 14: 84.
114. Letter to Edmund Pendleton, 24 February 1787, PJM, 9: 295.
115. Federalist, 39: 250.
116. Epstein, Political Theory of The Federalist, p. 119.
117. See Leviathan, pp. 239-241, and Second Treatise, p. 354, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
118. Hobbes utterly suppresses this aspect of the social compact, but it is visible in Locke's right of revolution. See Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 257-261
119. Federalist, 57: 387.
120. Ibid., 43: 297.
121. Ibid., 39: 251.
122. See his "Vices of the Political Systems of the United States," April 1787, P]M, 9: 348-357
123. Federalist, 42: 283.
124. Ibid., 51:253; 55:374; 63:425.
125. Ibid., 37: 233.
126. "Republican Distribution of Citizens," 5 March 1792, Mind of the Founder, pp. 184-186
127. Cf. Epstein, Political Theory of The Federalist, p. 124;
128. and Politics 1253al-19.
129. Federalist, 49: 340-341
130. Speech on Title for the President, 11 May 1789, PJM, 12:155. Needless to say, Madison's quasi-classical concern for virtue can be overstated. Alexander Landi, for instance, simply cannot support the claim that Madison, "as it were, added Locke to Aristotle" ("Madison's Political Theory," The Political Science Reviewer 6 (1976): 84 [emphasis in the original]).
131. Federalist, 40: 258, 263. See also 39: 253.
132. "All efforts to restore energy to the federal government have proved ineffectual, when exerted in the mode directed . . . by the confederation," announced Hugh Brackenridge in defending the Constitution. Robert Whitehall, speaking for many a fellow Anti-Federalist, thought it clear that the members of the Convention had "set aside the laws under which they were appointed." See Brackenridge, Pennsylvania House of Assembly, 28 October 1787, p. 199;
133. and Whitehall, Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention, 28 November 1787, p. 201
134. in The Founders' Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), vol.1.
135. Federalist, 40: 258-259
136. See Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 3:574-75 for the commission from Delaware; pp. 559-86 for all the states.
137. For Madison's awareness of the problem with respect to Delaware, see his Speech on Proportional Representation in the Legislature, 30 May 1787, PJM, 10: 19.
138. Federalist, 40: 259-260 (emphasis in the original).
139. Ibid.,
140. As William Paterson averred in Philadelphia, "the Commissions under which we [act are] not only the measure of our power, they [denote] also the sentiments of the States on the subject of our deliberation." Speech of 9 June 1787, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, p. 95.
141. Federalist, 40: 263 (emphasis in the original).
142. See the congressional debate in The Founders' Constitution, 1:195-198
143. See Records of the Federal Convention, 3: 566 (Pennsylvania), 572 (New Hampshire), 574 (Delaware), 577 (Georgia), 579-80 (New York), 581 (South Carolina), 584 (Massachusetts), 586 (Maryland).
144. Federalist, 40: 263.
145. Richard Henry Lee, Speech in the Continental Congress, 27 September 1787;
146. Richard Henry Lee to George Mason, 1 October 1787;
147. Luther Martin, "Genuine Information," 1788, in The Founders' Constitution, 1:196, 201, 203.
148. See "A Republican Federalist," No.3, 9 January 1788, in The Complete Anti-Federalist, ed. Herbert J. Storing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4: 172-73;
149. and Martin, "Genuine Information," 1788, The Founders' Constitution, 1: 203.
150. For Madison's intent to make such "encroachments" on the state constitutions, see his letters to George Washington (16 April 1787) and Edmund Pendleton (22 April 1787), PJM, 9: 385, 395.
151. Federalist, 40: 263
152. Ibid., pp. 264-266 (emphasis in the original).
153. Ibid., 265-266 (emphasis in the original).
154. Ibid., 37: 231.
155. Cf. Leviathan, pp. 227-29 and Second Treatise, pp. 330-32.
156. Federalist, 37: 232.
157. Speech of 12 June 1787, PJM, 10:49.
158. For other references to this important class, see Speech in the Federal Convention, 5 July 1787;
159. Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 9 December 1787;
160. and Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 19 February 1788, in PJM, 10:93,313,519;
161. and also Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, PJM, 11: 95.