Vol. 11 No. 6 (June 2001) pp. 305-307.

THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF JAMES MADISON by Garrett Ward Sheldon. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 143 pp. Cloth. $32.00. ISBN: 0-8018-6479-8.

Reviewed by Joseph Reisert, Department of Government, Colby College.

Although he is widely revered as the "father of the Constitution," James Madison is nevertheless not usually studied as a political philosopher. His works typically loom large only in specialized courses on American political thought, which seem to exist so that the writings of our indigenous political thinkers can be studied without their being overshadowed by the far greater intellectual achievements of men like Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. Even courses on American political thought often begin with Locke and Montesquieu, as if to underscore that without them such courses would be substantially lacking in philosophical heft. Despite its title, Garret Ward Sheldon's book, THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF JAMES MADISON does not challenge the conventional assessment that Madison was no philosopher; it does, however, do a fair bit to vindicate Madison's claim to a different and perhaps nobler title: that of statesman.

At first sight, Madison's political career may seem to exhibit less the statesman's steady devotion to principle than the politician's slavish attention to expediency. An advocate of a strong national government in the Philadelphia convention, he (unsuccessfully) opposed Alexander Hamilton's plan for the creation of a national bank-only to sign into law as President an act authorizing the re-chartering of the national bank. Principal author of the Virginia resolutions calling for the state "to interpose" itself in order to bring an end to unconstitutional federal action, he bitterly inveighed against John Calhoun's suggestion that the state of South Carolina might "nullify" actions of the national government felt to be destructive of the permanent interests of the state. Sheldon argues, however, that despite these changing political stands, an "underlying coherence" can be discerned in Madison's political thinking. In his account, Madison emerges as the consistent advocate of a balanced federalism, taking the side of the national government when the fractiousness of the state governments threatened the union with anarchy and taking the side of the state governments when the national government overstepped its constitutional authority. Sheldon suggests further that Madison's commitment to federalism can be traced to his Calvinist worldview, which treats human nature as "egotistical and domineering," requiring to be restrained by wisely designed institutional restraints.

Sheldon examines Madison's political thinking chronologically, beginning with his education at Princeton and devoting a brief chapter to each of the major episodes of his political career. The narrative is crisp and clear, and Sheldon's account is lucid and thoroughly readable. His work is less an account of Madison's philosophy, however, than it is his political and intellectual

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biography. That is as it must be because Madison wrote and thought under the pressure of events; he did not produce any abstract system of thought but rather designed real-world, institutional solutions to urgent, practical problems.

The first chapter, which summarizes Madison's upbringing and education, provides a useful reminder that the staunchly Calvinist college the young James Madison attended hardly resembled the Princeton of today. Its president, Dr. John Witherspoon was an orthodox Calvinist divine as well as a patriot (he went on to sign the Declaration of Independence). Whatever degree of influence he may have exercised upon the development of the young Madison's thoughts, it is clear that the two men were in a substantial degree of intellectual accord. Sheldon documents a number of similarities between Witherspoon's political ideas and Madison's, and despite the loss to history of Witherspoon's letters, there is ample biographical evidence to confirm that the two men were personally close. After completing his undergraduate curriculum, Madison stayed on at Princeton for six months of advanced study under Witherspoon in Hebrew and theology, and fifteen years later, Witherspoon's Princeton awarded Madison an honorary degree.

In the chapter on Madison's early career in state government, Sheldon argues that Madison's devotion to the cause of religious liberty (including his enthusiasm for the disestablishment of the Anglican church) was grounded in his Calvinist piety. Although some of the evidence he introduces supports this hypothesis, other evidence suggests that Madison's opposition to the Anglican establishment was based more on political principles rather than religious ones. Madison may have been horrified as a Christian to have seen Baptist preachers imprisoned for daring to dissent from Anglican orthodoxy, but he was also troubled as a patriot by the observation that the states most fertile in republicans were those of the northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, where the Church of England was weakest.

This tendency to overstate the influence of Calvinism upon Madison's political thinking is on display throughout the work. Space allows for a consideration of only a single example, but this one is representative of many. After summarizing the lessons Madison derived from studying the historical experiences of confederated governments in Europe, Sheldon describes Madison's conclusions as follows: "The reality, in Madison's Augustinian Christian worldview, was that confederate forms of government either promote or accentuate certain human sins: narrow, selfish, parochial interests, which led to certain definite political consequences like disorganized and inadequate foreign relations...." The reference to Madison's Augustinian worldview adds nothing here: he sought to establish a stronger national government in the United States because our own national experience and the historical record confirmed that confederated systems tend to suffer from predictable and very serious political problems. It is true that these problems can be articulated in the traditional language of sin and vice, but Madison's opposition to confederative systems is not grounded on the fact that they tend to encourage certain sins. It is that the sins they tend to encourage are particularly destructive from a political point of view.

The heart of the book is an account of Madison's effort to strengthen the national government of the United States, first as a member of the Congress established by the Articles of Confederation

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and later on at Philadelphia and in the struggle to secure the ratification of the Constitution. Curiously, his role in shepherding the Bill of Rights through the House of Representatives is passed over in silence, and his opposition to Hamilton's plan for the creation of a national bank is lumped in with his opposition to the Alien and Sedition acts several years later. Considering the brevity of his book, Sheldon devotes a considerable degree of attention to the Virginia Resolutions. He effectively documents the "civic republican" tenor of those documents but only hints at the factors that would differentiate Madison's notion of "interposition" from Calhoun's theory of "nullification." The fundamental difference between them was this: Madison sought by the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions to encourage further political action (consistent with the Constitution) in order to secure the subsequent repeal of the offending Acts of Congress, whereas Calhoun claimed the right of a single state in effect to veto an Act of Congress. It might have been added that, given the far-reaching effects of the Sedition Act, criticism of the Act could only safely be voiced in the traditionally protected domain of the legislature. Sheldon's last chapters summarize Madison's service in the Executive Branch and his contributions to American public life during his long retirement from office.

Although Sheldon's periodically strained references to Madison's Calvinism detract somewhat, they do not substantially impair the value of this little book. THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF JAMES MADISON provides a solid introduction to Madison's political career and to the main lines along which his political thinking developed. The difficulty of the project Sheldon undertakes is considerable, however, for what we really should want to know about Madison is not so much the general principles that governed his thinking about politics as the specifics of how he applied those principles to the concrete situations that confronted him. We should want to know, in short, about the quality of his judgment as a statesman. No quality is more elusive than this, because it is the nature of judgment that it cannot be reduced to rules. It is here that the brevity of Sheldon's work proves to be most disadvantageous, because we can only judge the wisdom or error of a statesman's judgments in light of the detailed circumstances in which they were made and with full knowledge of the consequences that followed from them.


Copyright 2001 by the author, Joseph Reisert.