SPRING FALL 2017 2018
Jack Rakove and his book A Politician Thinking : The Creative Mind of James Madison overlay editorial footage of an Occupy Movement protest , an example of Madison ’ s principle of free speech in action .
MADISON ’ S MIND , OUR DEMOCRACY
Understanding how the ideas of the Father of the Constitution shape our lives today with Jack Rakove , author of A Politician Thinking : The Creative Mind of James Madison
It ’ s possible that the moniker “ Father of the Constitution ” has actually hindered the American public ’ s ability to understand James Madison ’ s fundamental contributions to our political philosophy , culture , and government . As the operating manual for our nation , the U . S . Constitution was the product of “ many heads and many hands ” and our understanding of it is shaped by our circumstances ; but the ideas it represents and activates in our body politic bear Madison ’ s fingerprints in a number of foundational ways .
Madison ’ s greatest admirers tend to be lawyers whose “ con law ” class changed their lives or political scientists whom experience has trained to appreciate the delicate balance of opposing forces our system of republican democracy represents . That ’ s because Madison wrote in closely constructed paragraphs that modern readers find hard to parse ; it ’ s because
Madison was part philosopher and part political pragmatist ; it ’ s because he was an empirical problemsolver who strove to create unified solutions to age-old problems of forming working republics and confederations of autonomous states ; and , ultimately , it ’ s because those solutions in turn encountered the working problems of being put into practice .
So how do you distinguish Madison ’ s contributions to the American constitutional experiment from the equally important contributions that Washington , Jefferson , Franklin , Adams , and Hamilton — the other five members of the “ big six ” of the Founders — made to the American Revolution ? That ’ s in part what Montpelier board member Jack Rakove , the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University , has spent the last few decades trying to resolve .
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