The Liberal Prince on the Democratic Seesaw

When I think about James Madison — as I often do, even while doing laps in the university pool — two visual images swim into view. One is the familiar portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1805, in which Madison appears so aloofly serious and dispassionate as to recall Francois Truffaut’s portrayal of the physician Itard in his film, L’enfant Sauvage. But the other portrait conveys a strikingly different impression. This is Asher Durand’s more intimate painting of 1833, which captures the deep, brooding power of Madison’s intellect at the late moment in life when he realized he had “outlived” not only his “contemporaries” but even “myself.” Stuart’s Madison looks somewhat abstractedly away from the painter, but Durand had Madison’s complete attention, making us the humbled objects whom his penetrating gaze challenges.

Both portraits would have served Richard Mathews well in this middle volume of a projected trilogy that began with The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson (1984) and will conclude (he now informs us) with Alexander Hamilton and the Creation of the Heroic State. The interpretive and normative themes which guide this project were clearly announced in the first volume and are both reprised and elaborated here. Jefferson was the true radical democrat who understood that our fulfillment as humans could only be attained through a politics of participation that included the recognition that each generation (however its span is measured) retains both the right and duty to frame its own constitution. Jefferson’s dream of an America grounded in sociability, community, participation, and continued political possibility was the road not adventured; instead we have been saddled with the “nightmare” (p. 279) first conjured by Madison and Hamilton, true liberals both. They were the real allies whose decisive collaboration in the late 1780s imposed on the American people the Constitution that permitted the triumph of market society and its attendant evils. In this story, the half-century political alliance between the two Virginians neither masks nor outweighs the profound philosophical differences between them. Mathews thus rejects the conventional story of this great friendship, which usually emphasizes how a sober and discriminating Madison repeatedly tugged his impulsive friend back from the sudden enthusiasms and “round” expressions to which Jefferson was prone.

How should historians evaluate this argument, which is avowedly anchored in the concerns of normative political theory, and which arguably draws greater inspiration from the writings of the late C. B. Macpherson, Sheldon Wolin, and even N. O. Brown, than from the usual lineup of those scholars who have fashioned the dominant interpretations of the origins of American political ideas and ideologies? Historians found much to fault with the first volume, and it is noteworthy that Mathews’s revisionist view of Jefferson garners only a single mention in the text of the not unrevisionist essays collected in Peter Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (1993). I doubt whether a similar volume commissioned to commemorate the quarter-millennium of Madison’s birth in 2001 would pay any greater attention to If Men Were Angels. Yet it may be worth asking why Mathews can get certain facets of Madisonian thinking right, yet produce conclusions that fall somewhere between wrong-headed and silly.

There are, I think, three main lines along which a respectful but critical assaying of this installment in the Mathews project can deploy: (1) its quest for the essential Madison; (2) its now more fully articulated reappraisal of his relationship with Jefferson; and (3) its mega/meta-historical argument about the relation between the Madisonian Constitution and the foreclosing of political participation in the less-than-truly Jeffersonian democracy we have inherited.

As to the first of these broad headings, historians can find much to accept, or at least take seriously, in Mathews’s account of the historical Madison. For Mathews, Madison was the “constant liberal prince” in a quasi-Machiavellian sense of the term. That is, Madison framed in the 1780s a compelling...