Colleen A. Sheehan: The Mind of James Madison: The Legacy of Classical Republicanism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Although the American Founders wrote in plain English, framing understandable laws grounded on self-evident truths, their political thought has tied scholars in knots for a long time. Part of the problem has arisen because subsequent political writers have done what political writers so often do: bent the words of distinguished predecessors for contemporary purposes. (The example of the ‘elastic’ or ‘living’ Constitution should suffice.) Yet even without such calculated distortion the Founders prove difficult to classify into neat ideational categories, as scholars are wont to attempt. ‘Ancients’ or ‘moderns’? Christians or ‘secularists’? ‘Liberals’ or ‘republicans’? Jefferson tried to help, saying that the Declaration of Independence was informed by the ideas of Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sydney. But how compatible, really, are their ideas? Brave but none-too-convincing attempts have been made to reconcile them, and sometimes also to throw in elements of everything from the Hebrew Bible to the Scottish Enlightenment, but the core of the Founders’ thought remains elusive. It just doesn’t seem to ‘fit’ any pre-existing matrix.
Colleen A. Sheehan takes her readers a long way into the center of this labyrinth, or at least into the James Madison Wing thereof. Previous scholars have sifted through Madison’s occasional essays and speeches, uncovering many of the principles underlying his arguments; in her previous book, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government, Sheehan herself did just that. Her finest contribution in this second study, the result of an effort never before done with such care and precision, has been to track down Madison’s self-identified references to previous political thinkers, using these as an Ariadne’s thread along the pathways of his intention—in this case leading us into a place we want to find, not out of a trap we want to escape. Along with her succinct analysis of Madison’s arguments she includes the relevant documents written by Madison, documents that firmly support that analysis.
In 1791 Madison wrote an outline for a group of essays Sheehan titles “Notes on Government”—quite possibly a projected book, never completed. Readers of the Papers of James Madison will recognize an overlap between these and the materials designated as “Notes for the National Gazette Essays,” but the editors of the Papers didn’t know that Madison had written more extensive notes, which have the look of book chapters; this seems likely when one considers Madison’s outline, in which the “Notes” are listed in the form of a table of contents. Some confusion (and frustration) arises because parts of the book chapters may have been sold by Madison’s ne’er-do-well stepson and his loyal wife, Dolley; once dispersed, they would never be found.
Madison’s “Notes” provide what amounts to a handbook for thinking about political founding, a genre that Cicero pioneered in De Re Publica and De Legibus. The first three of thirteen chapters concern what might be called the circumstances antecedent to the founding of a government: the size of the nation, external dangers to that nation, and “the Stage of Society” of that nation—i.e., what we would now call its level of economic, social, and cultural development. The five central chapters concern the characteristics of the people themselves, their opinions, education, religion, the presence of slaves, their control over other distinct peoples or nations who are not slaves. The next four chapters concern government itself, including such institutional devices as checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism, and the way in which these devices fit together in the United States government. The final chapter concerns “the best distribution of people in [a] Republic,” which turns out to be a study of the right way of life for such a regime. In Sheehan’s words, “The ‘Notes on Government’ move from a concern for the stability of the political order to a concern for the liberty and ultimately the happiness of the citizens, reflecting a deliberate progression from the lowest but most immediate political objective to the highest human aspiration.” Throughout, she puts particular emphasis on Madison’s view of the role of public opinion in political life
Among the many thinkers, ‘ancient and modern,’ Madison consulted in preparing the book, Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Hume stand out. But he drew the most citations and quotations from Jean Jacques Barthélemy’s vast Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grèce dans le Mileu du Quatrième Siècle Avant l’Ère Vulgaire. Staged as a fictional narrative of the travels of a real Scythian philosopher (sketched by Diogenes Laertius) who lived in Greece and studied with Aristotle for a quarter-century during the flourishing ‘golden age’ of Athens, just before and during its conquest by the Macedonians, the Voyage serves as “a comprehensive reference source for classical Hellenic culture and thought.” It took Barthélemy some thirty years to write it, even as it has taken Professor Sheehan approximately the same amount of time to study and distill the lessons he, Madison, and Madison’s other sources can teach us about the regime of republicanism under the conditions of the modern world, and particularly the condition of modern statism. What has Aristotle to teach us about that? Barthélemy would redeem him from his dismissive modern critics, and Madison concurs. If Aristotle’s more prominent student, Alexander the Great, is said to have demonstrated the impotence of the small, ancient poleis against a powerful empire-builder, so Aristotle’s less prominent student, Anacharsis ( as interpreted by Barthélemy) would vindicate the political liberty and happiness Aristotle identified found in the polis.
In the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle emphasizes the importance of circumstances on moral conduct. The same action might be right in one circumstance, wrong in another, and it is the purpose of practical reasoning or prudence to find the best way forward. Intentionally or not, Madison follows Aristotle’s example in his first three chapters, which concern what Sheehan calls “the circumstantial influences on government: the size of the territory to be governed, the nature and extent of foreign danger, and the level of development of the society to be governed. “Madison thought that no one had yet given adequate consideration to the interaction between each of these variables and the formation of public opinion or to the extraordinary political benefits that might be accrued if one did.”
Extending and refining his own thoughts as recorded in The Federalist, to which he had contributed several years before he read Barthélemy, Madison explained that small republics prove vulnerable not only to foreign invasion but to internal faction. As Sheehan restates it, “When the people can too easily unite, government is unable to impede factious combinations of the majority against the minority,” as exemplified by the slavery and religious persecution seen in the modern world. But states might be “too large,” as well; “overgrown empires” “tend toward tyranny and ultimately impotency”—tyranny, because sprawling empires make it difficult for peoples to combine in opposition to their oppressors, impotency because no one can know enough about a huge place to govern it well. Although most previous political thinkers (notably Montesquieu) had judged republics fit for small places, monarchies fit for large ones, Madison demurred. Montesquieu had offered Great Britain as the one country which had solved the dilemma of size by eschewing the civic virtues of small republics for commercial society and a government featuring separation and balance of powers. Madison countered: “the best provision for a stable and free Govt., is not a balance in the powers of the Govt. tho’ that is not to be neglected, but an equilibrium in the interests & passions of the Society itself, which can not be attained in a small Society.” Hence the need for an “extended” republic, as Madison argued in Federalist 10. Madison now saw that even his own contributions to The Federalist hadn’t accounted for these social influences adequately.
Madison further objected to the British-style mixed regime (praised not only by Montesquieu but by his fellow revolutionary and sometime rival, John Adams) because it institutionalized hereditary monarchy and aristocracy, retaining elements of feudalism in the face of the natural rights of the people. While endorsing the advocacy of federalism by historians William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and David Hume as an institutional device by which small political societies might defend themselves against imperial threats, he rejected their assumptions that such federations might include disparate regimes. Federal governments must comprise compatible regimes. As a republican, Madison sought federal republics, not federations of any sort; commerce alone will not suffice to bind politically heterogeneous republics into a stable federation. The European confederacy that the historians envisioned as the counter to ambitions for universal monarchy would have been just such a motley design. In practice, insofar as the Peace of Utrecht embodied such hopes, it had led to a continent bristling with standing armies, “making the peace of the world depend on a cold war,” itself lasting for only a generation. Rousseau’s later proposal for such a federation, the mirror-image of the historians’ vision, rejected commerce while valorizing republicanism. Here, Madison concurred with Montesquieu, who insisted that republican regimes must supplement a commercial political economy in order to secure a lasting peace within a federal Europe. What today many call the ‘theory of democratic peace’ is really the theory of commercial republican peace, although for Madison ‘commercial’ meant commercial agriculture, with manufacturing and industry playing a subordinate role in a genuinely “civilized” society.
Madison thought that human societies proceed in stages from savage to civilized, following changes in public opinion. Sheehan rightly judges it crucial to understand that this progress was not “an inevitable historical process”; nor was it “an unmixed blessing” (in that Madison could go part-way with Rousseau). The ‘civilization’ of opinion followed from an unintended but widely noticed consequence of modern science. Aiming at the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, the technologies invented by modern science replaced spears, bows, and arrows with firearms that enabled professional armies to replace citizen militias in the service of the large and centralized states first proposed by Machiavelli. This “made the ferociousness of the citizen-soldier a thing of the past” because it limited the need for hand-to-hand combat. “The hyper-manly spiritedness and violent passions of the Roman warrior were no longer necessary to the preservation of a republic,” and “citizens were no longer citizens in the classical republican sense” of arms-bearing militiamen. Within the modern states, “the new citizen could now envision himself and his interests as distinct—perhaps even separate—from the state.” This brought on the dilemma first articulated by Rousseau, one that would haunt modern political thought from German Idealists to English Romantics to Nietzsche to the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and beyond: “The loss of civic virtue (in the classical sense of love of one’s fatherland) as the defining element of republican government” and a consequent over-tameness of commercial society, with its “ethics of ‘manners’ or ‘politeness'” punctuated (it might be added) with spasms of rudeness and even savagery.
Madison “did not think [any of his predecessors] had thought through the political problem far enough.” Beginning with the justly famed argument of the tenth Federalist on “the interactive effect of the factor of territorial size/population” on public opinion in support of republics big enough to defend themselves against foreign enemies and domestic faction, Madison criticized the men he called the “great oracles of political wisdom.” If the size of the modern state, sometimes rivaling that of the ancient empires, produced a loss of self-confidence in the individual citizen, who despairs of his prospects for effective self-government in the belly of mighty Leviathan, a diverse modern society featuring a free press, good roads, interior commerce—in a word, much-improved communication of persons, opinions, and things—in effect recovers some of the cohesiveness and citizenship of the ancient small republics. In this, “the circumstantial influences of size of territory, external danger, and stage of society might be employed for the benefit of the liberty of the citizen in such a way as to affect the formation of public opinion and sustain the spirit of a genuinely republican government.” Montesquieu’s spirit of commerce need not mean “the atomization of citizenship,” as his critics had charged, if “the commerce of ideas could maintain and reinvigorate the spirit of genuine republicanism” through a new science of politics describing and promoting “the politics of public opinion.”
Sheehan devotes a substantial chapter to “the power and authority of public opinion,” calling Madison’s chapter on the subject “the pivotal thesis of the entire work.” All governments depend upon public opinion for their continued existence, as tyrants continue to learn; regimes of liberty formalize this sovereignty. “Madison argued that the degree of respect due to public opinion depends on whether it is in flux or settled.” If in flux, “government may influence it; when it is settled, government must obey it.” A settled opinion means not only consensus but the opportunity for the public “to communicate and coalesce” around that consensus. In making public opinion central to his new political science, Madison departed from both Montesquieu and Adams, who put greater emphasis on institutions, and instead followed the lead of Hume, who noticed that institutions themselves depend upon it—as when public opinion will throw its weight sometimes behind Parliament, sometimes behind the Monarchy. Admittedly, Montesquieu made much of moeurs in the modern world, calling public opinion the “universal master” of that world. But for him, institutional analysis predominated. This begs the question: where do institutions themselves come from. Madison found support for his thesis on the power of public opinion in Book V, chapter 12 of Aristotle’s Politics. There Aristotle refutes the Platonic conception of a natural rotation of regimes by remarking that there are many examples where regimes change without going through the (perhaps deliberately fanciful) cycle proposed by Socrates in the Republic. For example, although tyrannies often collapse quickly, many last a long time if the tyrant satisfies his people with moderate (if illegitimate) rule, and sometimes democracy and oligarchy will oscillate, overturning one another with no other regimes types intervening. Again, public opinion prevails, not some natural law.
In Federalist 10, Madison had argued that an “extended” republic—a country with a large territory and a population governed by elected representatives—will cure the disease of faction by encompassing so many factions that no one faction will predominate and tyrannize, provoking the ‘outs’ to overthrow their masters. In the “Notes,” Madison retained this insight but added that the “equilibrium” provided by the extended republic can (in Sheehan’s words) “serve as a political and social environment in which public opinion could form and provide the primary stabilizing element of the political order,” an order which would “allow for the refinement and enlargement of the public views” that Madison had valorized in The Federalist as the way in which prudence can rule under the regime of republicanism. Madison owed this refinement and enlargement of his own views to Barthélemy. Aristotle’s argument in the Politics against ‘regime rotation’ does indeed refer to what these latter-day authors call “public opinion,” but Aristotle does not identify it with any particular term, and it is easy to see why John Adams overlooked this nuance altogether. Near the center of her book, Sheehan writes, “The central importance of Aristotle’s Politics to [the original, Scythian] Anacharsis’ understanding of political phenomena is revealed in the exaggerated literary conceit Barthélemy employed in [his chapter 5:62]: Anacharsis not only engaged in discussions about politics with Aristotle directly, but he also allegedly received from him an advance copy of the Politics, which he closely studied and from which he composed a précis.” Barthélemy deploys this invention to highlight his own interpretation of Aristotle, one that foregrounds the power of public opinion, a power Aristotle effectively acknowledges but keeps to one side.
Aristotle does explicitly acknowledge the crucial role of public opinion in the regime of democracy. Given the increasing social egalitarianism of the modern world, nowhere more obvious than in America, Barthélemy proves to have been a Tocqueville avant la lettre, and Madison, among the founders of a regime in the most democratized of the modern civil societies, immediately perceived the importance of his argument. One important consequence of social democratization is the increased irrelevance of Aristotle’s political remedy for the perennial struggle between democrats and oligarchs, the ‘mixed’ regime, exemplified most prominently in the minds of the American Founders by Great Britain. Without an oligarchy formalized into an ‘aristocracy’ in modern civil societies, the Aristotelian mixed regime becomes impossible, at least in the form Aristotle conceived of it. However, another feature of Aristotle’s political science remains not only relevant but increasingly relevant in modernity. Aristotle wanted what he called the “middling” element of society to serve as a balance-wheel between the many poor and the few rich, moderating the ambitions of each. Modern, commercial, political economy generates a much more substantial middle class than anything Aristotle saw, one that can not only play one faction against the other but rule more or less directly through its representatives. The moeurs of such societies, already predominant in America, will yield what Barthélemy calls “the solid foundations of the tranquility and happiness of states” by giving republican political institutions the chance to operate on the minds and hearts of citizens, and vice-versa.
A similar benign ‘slanting’ of Aristotle’s political science may be seen in Barthélemy’s treatment of the Politics IV:8. Barthélemy claims that Aristotle regarded liberty as the principle of democracy. What Aristotle actually writes is that equality is the principle of democracy, and that issues surrounding political liberty are framed by that principle. However, this turns out to be preliminary to an accurate statement of Aristotle on liberty, which he defines not as “doing what one wants, as is maintained in certain democracies,” but “in doing what the laws enjoin, which secure the independence of each individual”—a point Montesquieu reaffirms in The Spirit of the Laws. Sheehan intervenes to observe that Barthélemy defines liberty under law not only in Montesquieu’s sense of personal liberty but in the ‘ancient’ Aristotelian sense of participation in political rule. Madison follows Barthélemy on this. He “did not reduce the idea of the liberty of the citizen merely to security or the opinion of security,” but added to this “the older notion of the citizen’s liberty, which is manifest in the citizen’s active participation in the sovereignty,” while at the same time maintaining that under the modern conditions which make extended republics possible, citizen participation may be reborn and vindicated if founders get ruling institutions right.
Sheehan then points to a contemporaneous National Gazette essay, “Spirit of Government,” whose Montesquieuian title begins with Madison paying “tribute to Montesquieu’s recovery of a conception of politics that recognizes that the stability and character of a government depend, in the final analysis, on the general spirit of the nation.” But while Montesquieu offers a tripartite regime classification consisting of despotism, monarchy, and republic, based respectively on the principles of fear, honor, and virtue, Madison’s three regimes do not match these. They are: government operating by a permanent military force; government operating by such force supplemented by the motive of private interest (that is, bribery and corruption); and “the genuine republic,” whose energy derives from public opinion as a whole, refined and enlarged so as to make reason, prudence, rule. The first regime attempts to abrogate public opinion altogether; the second attempts to corrupt it; the third attempts to refine it. On this latter point, Sheehan refers readers to Federalist 49; rightly understood, public opinion in a well-designed republic will rule itself by reason, not by passion, whether fear or material self-interest. Such reasonable self-government will amount to “the way of life of a people.” For Montesquieu, a passion animates each regime; for Madison, reason can be made to animate one regime, the regime of genuine republicanism.
Sheehan suggests that the very title of Madison’s essay serves not only as an allusion but as “a corrective to Montesquieu’s title.” The title “Spirit of Government” suggests “the essential vitality of the regime that is actually embodied in the ruling authority” (the persons who constitute the ruling body). This contrasts with the structural/institutional emphasis of The Spirit of the Laws. Aristotle understands a regime to have four dimensions: a ruling body (one, few, or many, good or bad); a ruling structure or set of institutions whereby the persons who rule do their ruling; a way of life consisting of what Tocqueville would call habits of mind and heart; and a purpose. In the Madisonian republic the people rule via the now familiar systems of separated and balanced governmental powers and of federalism. Their way of life consists of commerce broadly and rightly understood as commerce in goods material, moral, and intellectual. And they aim at security of property rightly understood not only as the wealth of nations but as each individual’s unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These regime elements work to produce the ethos or character of the people. Madison puts it somewhat differently. The “spirit” of the government links the ethos of the regime to its “hypothesis” or main principle (liberty for democratic republics). Despite his respect for the rule of law, Madison knows that “laws never simply rule,” requiring as they do the support of “the fundamental opinion on which the society rests.”
Woodrow Wilson derided the United States Constitution as a work of political Newtonianism, wherein no political progress is possible because it forces citizens to run around in circles, checking and balancing one another like planets in the solar system. Modern science, by contrast, is Darwinian, evolutionary, ever-changing and ever-progressing toward new and higher life-forms. This criticism may mete out rough justice to Montesquieu, but not to Madison. In Madison’s estimation, Montesquieu’s departure from Aristotle, whereby political ‘moderation’ emerges from the institutionally-managed clash of interests, passions, and ambitions, fails to respect “the vital human spirit of republican citizens” seen in Aristotle. To be sure, Madison’s “aspiration to recapture the classical idea of the spirit of modern republicanism… did not mean that he desired to institute the kind of harsh regulations and singular institutions that Lycurgus or the Romans employed to train the citizens in virtue.” In the Christian era, such a restoration of classical citizen education would lead only to fanaticism and uncompromising spiritual and physical warfare—exactly what Montesquieu and Madison intended to tame. “As firmly committed as Montesquieu was to the creation of a political order in which individual conscience and the freedom of the individual are recognized and respected,” Madison nonetheless “sought to construct the political architecture of republican government with a purpose substantially beyond liberal pluralism,” namely, to “plac[e] power and right on the same side.”
As did Aristotle and Cicero, Madison looked to citizen education as a means to achieve this purpose, inasmuch as “the primary responsibility for the ‘defence of public liberty’ does not depend on institutions but rather on the soundness of public opinion.” Schools form only part of this effort. “In the modern age, scientific and technological discoveries had made possible the communication of views and opinions over a large swath of territory”; this “commerce of ideas” provides “an environment for the quarantining of factions and the refinement and enlargement of public opinion in a republic.” Frustrated by their inability to get very far with their passions, the citizens of the extended republic must learn to talk with, rather than at, one another. “The politics of public opinion in a large, populous territory makes possible the education and moderation of the sentiments and views of the citizenry and provides a real opportunity for the flourishing of the great experiment in self-government.”
Specifically, influences on public opinion in addition to the features of the extended republic itself include education, religion, slavery, and “dependent dominions”—that is, colonies and such domestic dependencies as (in the U. S.) Indian territories. Slavery, for example, inclines a people away from republican self-government, inculcating habits of tyranny. Economic dependency of any kind, whether of bosses and industrial workers or of unequal trading relations with foreign countries themselves amount to a form of slavery, both curable by freedom of commerce. These several influences will interact; the anomalous existence of slavery in a democratic republic may disappear as education and religion change minds and hearts. This had proved impossible in the ancient world; Aristotle saw that much-improved machines might replace slaves, but never conceived of the kind of science that could produce such technology. Additionally, low-tech society necessitated a face-to-face politics of speech, limiting “the operation of public opinion to a small territory” and, with demagogues leading the way, making faction “an ever present danger.” “Conversely, Madison believed that Montesquieu’s solution failed to attend to the fact that there is always a prevailing opinion in free societies and that liberty cannot be achieved or maintained by a primary dependence on political mechanics.” Madisonian political science occupies “the interstice between two theories,” Aristotle’s and Montesquieu’s.
Democratic republicanism might fall prey to demagogues, even in the extended republic. To counteract this danger, Madison in Federalist 63 proposes the moral principle of responsibility. “Responsibility” means both responsiveness to those one represents and a moral obligation to secure their rights and the rights of the nation as a whole. Not only representative government but federalist fosters responsibility. A republican empire or what Jefferson called an “empire of liberty” would consist of a federation of states, states enjoyed considerable but not exclusive self-government as republics in their own right. The ultimate earthly sovereign, the people as a whole, divide their power between the state and federal governments, permitting the federal government to ‘reach into’ the states and govern individuals within them, but only by means of specifically enumerated constitutional powers for the legitimate security of unalienable natural rights. These features distinguished American federalism from both the feudal system of largely decentralized political authority and the British Empire, with its strictly subordinated colonies. It also distinguished the federalism of the United States Constitution from the too-decentralized Articles of Confederation system, a sort of feudalism without the social hierarchies that gave feudalism its form. Madison went even farther than the Constitution, advocating federal veto power over state laws. And he was as firm as Washington when it came to secession: In a word, ‘no.’ A compact is a compact; once entered, it binds. In sum, federalism “is more than a structural device; it is a necessary principle in the formation of a united and effective voice and to the union of a sovereign people in an extensive territory,” gathering public opinion from the more local levels of the self-governing people” for whom (unlike European ‘statists’) governments are never sovereign. The commercial, democratic, and federal republic best conduces to a public opinion animated by a rational intention to preserve political liberty in defense of natural right and a rational capacity to reason prudentially in order to fulfill that intention.
Madison’s esteem for reasonable means to rational ends brought him to prefer farming to any other middle-class way of life for America. Farmers grow enough crops to feed themselves, manufacture their own necessary and useful tools, thereby preserving the independence of their households. Factory work in cities not only injures citizens’ health, making them unfit for military self-defense; it also subjects them to the market vicissitudes seen in a political economy which traffics in too many luxury items, themselves vehicles for dependency upon the passions. “Vying with the manufacturer of luxury goods for the lowest kind of human occupation is the sailor,” confined for months below deck in dark and unsanitary conditions (“his mind, like his body, is imprisoned within the bark that transports him”), only to be liberated offshore for riot and debauchery. On the higher end of the scale Madison locates the merchant, the lawyer, the physician, the philosopher, and the clergyman, whom Madison calls the farmers, “the cultivators of the human mind,” the “manufacturers of useful knowledge,” the “agents of the commerce of ideas,” the “censors of public manners,” and “the teachers of the arts of life and the means of happiness.” Of these “literati,” Madison places the philosopher and the divine at “the apex” of the learned professions, “tasked,” as Sheehan writes, “with the civic responsibility of looking after the minds and souls of their fellow citizens.”
Although many scholars have seen that the American Founders drew their political thought from many disparate sources, yet somehow making it distinctively their own, Colleen Sheehan is the first to choose one major Founder and to perform the patient and meticulous work needed to study his writings, read his sources, and make the careful interpretive discriminations that bring out his unique contribution to the understanding of politics. Although there has been much talk of ‘American Exceptionalism,’ her readers now know much more exactly what that means.
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