A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison by Jack N. Rakove (review)

This short book began as lectures at the University of Oklahoma during 2009. Jack N. Rakove, who edited James Madison's papers, has been writing on Madison and matters related to the Constitution for four decades. This current work focuses on the period in which Rakove believes Madison did his most creative analytical thinking: the 1780s. The title phrase "A Politician Thinking" is a reflection of Rakove's overall goal in the book, which is to capture the process by which Madison worked out solutions to ongoing problems.

Rakove's main thrust is that Madison's thought was dynamic. Rakove pushes back against scholars reading Madison's contributions to the Federalist Papers as the foremost evidence for his thought. Rakove leans heavily on Madison's personal writings, including correspondence and memorandums in the ongoing documentary editing project The Papers of James Madison. In Rakove's view, Madison's most revealing work was not material he wrote for publication but rather his private letters and memorandums: "Madison did his best thinking not to persuade others but for his own analytical purposes" (p. xii).

Rakove sees Madison's key ideas as developing from his experiences and his analysis of them in the years leading up to the Constitutional Convention. Until 1801, Madison's political experience was primarily in legislatures. Madison's time in the Virginia House of Delegates was crucial. His mistrust of state legislatures was rooted in firsthand observation of the amateurs with whom he served in Virginia. Madison also came to realize that the structure of the government under the Articles of Confederation reflected the unusual circumstances of the Revolutionary War, with its wartime unity of purpose and fixation on the executive as the source of tyranny. The "'enthusiastic virtue'" of state legislatures was unsustainable (p. 24). Like individuals, states could not be expected to remain wholly virtuous indefinitely.

The Confederation government's most crucial weakness, in Madison's view, was the states' mandate of "voluntary compliance" to congressional decrees (p. xii). Madison's original Virginia Plan sought to weaken state government powers by giving the national government veto power over state laws. While the Constitution ultimately restrained states less than Madison had hoped, he still supported ratification because he felt a window of opportunity to reshape the government was closing, and he feared opportunities for constitution-making would disappear if factions developed along geographical lines.

While Rakove is fawning in his admiration of Madison in places, he solidly builds his case for the man's genius and innovation. Madison's views changed after 1789, again due to his political experiences. Madison in the 1780s was far less sanguine about human nature (Rakove does an excellent job showing intellectual differences between those two close friends, Madison and Thomas Jefferson). Unlike Jefferson, Madison rooted the ultimate source of injustice in the weaknesses of the people at large, whose vices their elected representatives would inevitably reflect: "There was thus a bleakly conservative tone to Madison's view of the political intelligence of ordinary citizens, a nagging belief that the source of republican injustice lay in their desires and ambitions" (p. 102). He was also distrustful of public opinion, regarding it "as far more of a problem than a solution. Wherever public opinion coalesced, its perceived existence would work not to correct but to confirm the self-interested and opinionated behavior of individuals" (p. 114).

Starting with the ratification debates, Madison began to think more positively about the power of public opinion as a force that could be molded. His perception of the relative dangers of the differing branches of the national government also shifted during the George Washington administration. The potential positive force of the press became apparent to Madison during his struggles against Alexander Hamilton's agenda.

Rakove ends his work with a leap ahead to the early nineteenth century, discussing the slavery issue...