Recent years have seen a plethora of popular and academic books on the founding fathers of the United Sates. In James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government, Colleen Sheehan contributes to this literature by examining the founding father who may be both the most important and the least understood.
Madison's political thought is as difficult to pigeon-hole as his influence on America is profound. He resists convenient categorization and almost invites charges of inconsistency; many scholars perceive a change from Madison's writings in the Federalist Papers about the danger of the tyranny of the majority to his writings a few years later against the Federalists about the danger of a tyrannical federal government. Sheehan argues that Madison was not inconsistent but rather merely “changed his emphasis” as times dictated (7); he always wanted to secure popular self-government and simply addressed different threats to it at different times. While the book seeks to explicate a consistent Madisonian philosophy, it also purports to fill a gap in the vast scholarly literature on the founder and fourth president by examining Madison's “Notes on Government” and his “Party Press Essays,” which consist of 19 articles that he wrote in the pro-republican National Gazette newspaper in 1791–1792.
Sheehan's book is organized “dialectically rather than chronologically” (12). Successive chapters describe Madison's general republican politics in the early 1790s, the difficult political context in which he espoused his ideals (that is, the dominance of Federalist policies promoted by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton), various contemporary French authors whom Madison studied, his complex overall theory of republicanism, his positions on major political issues during the administrations of George Washington (such as promoting industry and the conflict between England and France) and John Adams (such as the Alien and Sedition Acts), and the main themes of his “Notes on Government.”
The presentation of Madison's allegedly complete and coherent republican theory (contained mostly in chapters 4 and 7) is the book's most important feature. Sheehan discerns six components of Madisonian republicanism: the extent of territory, representation, both separation of powers and checks and balances, federalism, elite influences on public opinion and the influence of public opinion on government (85). Much of this is familiar and conventional, but Sheehan's account stresses the last two components. According to Sheehan, Madison's republicanism bridged the chasm between the aristocratic few and the democratic many (56) by calling for the sovereignty of a united, informed, moral public voice. In practical political terms, this required pushing for a significant political role for enlightened public opinion (10). Thus, Sheehan's Madison emerges as something of a deliberative democrat or a civic republican with an appreciation for “the commerce of ideas” (94) and an uncanny prescience for the power of mass communication.
Sheehan's book is often interesting and even provocative, but it is not without its shortcomings. First, Sheehan might say more in terms of justifying her ostensible focus on a select set of Madison's writings. She notes that there is no other book-length treatment of some of these works (7), and her time frame roughly matches the point at which critics contend that Madison's views changed, but these considerations are not fully developed.
Second, the book's dialectical organization has the ironic result that at times it obscures—both chronologically and intellectually—the allegedly consistent character of thought that Sheehan attributes to Madison. Even when the parts add up to a convincing whole, the order of their presentation can be confusing (perhaps like Madison's views themselves). Another consequence of the book's unusual organization is that it is somewhat repetitive, as the same points repeatedly come up in slightly different contexts. And the chapter on the French Enlightenment's influence on Madison seems out of place: Sheehan notes that Madison's version of republicanism emerged from the English–French war of ideas in the 1790s (11), and the connections that she makes to some two dozen French authors may be of interest to intellectual historians, but this could be better integrated with the analysis in the rest of the book.
Third, Sheehan's account is bracketed by invocations of Robert Frost's poetry as a perceptive interpretation of American democracy and spirit, and she intends for the book to explain how Madison created not just a nation but also the spirit and the moral habits that sustain it, but that aspect of her analysis is not as clear or convincing as it might be. Madison is certainly an important figure in American civic religion, but the precise nature of his influence on the national ethos and the function of that spirit in the nation's politics remain somewhat ambiguous.
These points notwithstanding, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government is an informed and intriguing addition to the literature on the American founders. The book will appeal to fans of Madison and to scholars of American political thought and the American founding.
