Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thirty years ago, the works of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and the "Ideological" school of historians dominated our understanding of America's revolutionary period. So hegemonic was their historiographical synthesis that historians essentially abandoned writing on the political thought of the founding generation, as if all that had to be said had been.	1
Some historians might be surprised to learn, then, that we are in the middle of a historiographical revolution that is reinvigorating our knowledge of the founding period. This new scholarly synthesis was launched by Ralph Lerner's withering assault on the methodology of the "ideological" school in The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (1987) and was reinforced by Michael P. Zuckert's systematic deconstruction of the "republican" interpretation of the founding in his Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (1994).	2
Following in their footsteps, a younger generation of historians and political theorists has begun a systematic rethinking of the founding period. New books on the political thought of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Wilson, and John Adams have dramatically reconstituted the historiography of the founding period. Gary Rosen's book is an important contribution to this growing body of literature. Rosen's purpose "is to rehabilitate Madison as a constitutional thinker and a statesman" (p. 12). To that end, Rosen studies Madison's thought from the inside out—he examines the philosophical context of Madison's thinking and the ways in which the Virginian thought through the constitutional and political problems of his day. Rosen's Madison is self-consciously a philosophical statesman.	. . .