James Madison and the Classical Republican Tradition

The thesis pursued here is that Madison, in articulating the principles of political philosophy underlying his defense of the proposed constitution in his contributions to the Federalist Papers of 1787-8, can best be understood as at once invoking, enriching, and on several key points all but abandoning the "classical republican" or "civic humanist" tradition. I analyze the ambivalent character of Madison's response to Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli and Rousseau with respect to the quality and complexity of the body politic, the principle of representation, the containment of factionalism, and the nature of political legitimation and renewal. Imly general consensus, James Madison's renown as a political thinker rests on a dual foundation. Most historians continue to bestow on him the title "Father of the Constitution"; and all agree that his contributions to the Federalist Papers-a series of eighty-five hastily composed, anonymous "letters to the public" printed in New York's leading newspapers in 1787 and 1788-helped establish this remarkable document as the most authoritative commentary on the u.s. Constitution ever written, and perhaps as the one indisputable American classic in political theory.1 Much less widely recognized, and argued for only fairly recently,2 is the fact that, thanks largely to Madison's influence, both documents belong to a single though complex tradition of experience and thought known as classical republicanism or civic humanism. Originally practiced in Periclean Athens and in pre-imperial Rome, it found its first great philosophical articulation in Aristotle. After a long hiatus, it flourished once more in the fifteenth-century Florence of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, had a brief rebirth in seventeenth-century Holland, and played a key role in the seventeenthand eighteenth-century revolutionary political history of England and her American colonies. Characteristic of civic humanism from the first was broad popular participation, and on occasion even popular sovereignty, through the instrumentalities of "mixed" government in a tight-knit community that sought to minimize, or at least temper the political effects of, socioeconomic differences between individuals and classes. RepUblicanism provided a fourth alternative to the so-called "classical" options: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, embodying elements derived from each of them but itself reducible to none of them. Pervasive in this tradition is a fear of corruption from within, and a corresponding preoccupation with citizenly virtue,