For students of the early American republic, James Madison has long
been something of a riddle, the member of the founding generation
whose actions and thought most stubbornly resist easy summary. The
staunchest of Federalists in the 1780s, Madison would turn on his
former allies shortly thereafter, renouncing their expansive
nationalism as a threat to the Constitution and to popular
government.
In a study that combines penetrating textual analysis with deep
historical awareness, Gary Rosen stakes out important new ground by
showing the philosophical consistency in Madison's long and
controversial public life. The key, he argues, is Madison's
profound originality as a student of the social compact, the
venerable liberal idea into which he introduced several novel, and
seemingly illiberal, principles.
Foremost among these was the need for founding to be the work of
an elite few. For Madison, prior accounts of the social compact, in
their eagerness to establish the proper ends of government,
provided a hopelessly naive account of its origin. As he saw it,
the Federal Convention of 1787 was an opportunity for those of
outstanding prudence (understood in its fullest Aristotelian sense)
to do for the people what they could not do for themselves. This
troublesome reliance on the few was balanced, Rosen contends, by
Madison's commitment to republicanism as an end in itself, a
conclusion that he likewise drew from the social compact,
accommodating the proud political claims that his philosophical
predecessors had failed to recognize.
Rosen goes on to show how Madison's idiosyncratic understanding
of the social compact illuminates his differences not only with
Hamilton but with Jefferson as well. Both men, Madison feared, were
too ready to resort to original principles in coming to terms with
the Constitution, putting at risk the fragile achievement of the
founding in their determination to invoke, respectively, the claims
of the few and the many.
"As American Compact" persuasively concludes, Madison's ideas on
the origin and aims of the Constitution are not just of historical
interest. They carry crucial lessons for our own day, and speak
directly to current disputes over diversity, constitutional
interpretation, the fate of federalism, and the possibilities and
limits of American citizenship.
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