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Forum: The Madisonian Moment
James Madison in Intellectual Context
Jack N. Rakove
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JAMES Madison's stature as the leading American constitutionalist of the eighteenth century is beyond dispute. Madison was the most original constitutional theorist of his generation, the most discriminating, and the least inclined to abide by conventional wisdom or simple formulas when there were distinctions to be drawn, alternatives to be weighed, or new phenomena to be explained. Although possessed of a recognizably academic temperament, Madison also drew repeatedly on his own political experience to temper, reject, and supercede the lessons he derived from his extensive reading in history, philosophy, and political theory. |
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As with the study of other political thinkers, the task of understanding Madison's ideas has to take account of the political concerns on which he acted, the discursive and rhetorical conventions in which he had to couch and express his ideas, and the sources from which he drew. Together, these constitute the context in which Madison framed his analysis of the problems of federalism and republicanism and the agenda for constitutional reform to which it led. Only after this context, in all its complexity, has been established can we pose the more daunting question of explaining his creativity during the great Madisonian moment of the late 1780s. |
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On two of these broad headings—political concerns and rhetorical conventions—scholars have attained a high level of consensus. Madison thoroughly summarized the political concerns on which he acted in his famous memorandum on "the vices of the political system of the U. States," compiled in the early spring of 1787, and the concurrent letters in which he laid out the political calculations governing his preparations for Philadelphia.1 Nor is there any uncertainty about the swirling variety of "languages," "discourses," and "ideologies" that set the vocabulary and grammar of political discussion that Madison, like all disputants in the constitutional debates of the 1780s, had to manipulate. |
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The sources of Madison's ideas, or the intellectual influences that shaped his thinking, remain more elusive. If (to coin a phrase) we are what we read, it is no less true that there is no ready prism or formula that enables scholars to identify those writings that seem to spark or catalyze an original turn of thought in someone poised, like Madison, for a course of political action. Madison does not give us much help in this respect. Save for the well-known notes on ancient and modern confederacies, he rarely offered critical commentaries on his readings or helpful citations identifying the authors he esteemed.2 That has not stopped scholars from trying to identify such sources, however. The best-known effort in this respect is Douglass Adair's concise and famous essay suggesting that Madison drew critical inspiration from his pre-Convention reading (or rereading) of David Hume's essay on the "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth."3 In Adair's vivid account, Madison found there the electrifying solution to the problem of explaining how a stable national republic could be created from the disparate economic interests of the states. Subsequent commentators have refined and disputed this thesis, but regardless of its merits, Adair's argument offers a remarkable example of how the search for intellectual influences can turn into a hunt for smoking textual pistols. |
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Like Adair, the three contributors to this Forum are all concerned with this problem of locating likely sources of influence for Madison's political and constitutional theory and with enlarging our understanding of the intellectual context in which he thought, wrote, and acted. |
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