James Madison's Montpelier We The People Spring 2018 WTP_Spring_2018_FINAL_web | Page 13

SPRING 2018
What is James Madison’s principal legacy as a political
philosopher?
NF: “One is the idea that a constitutional structure
can protect liberty, while simultaneously allowing
effective government. A second fundamental one is
that a federal structure can work because different
sovereigns can rule different aspects of people’s
lives. And both of those ideas can be found all over
the world today.”
“Those underlie his fundamental constitutional
design. Those things were both thought of as deeply
in tension with each other prior to Madison. The
thought was that if you had a constitution that
strengthened government sufficiently, it would
contravene liberty. But Madison showed that
they could in fact be made consistent and that an
effective central government could exist with the
protection of liberty. With respect to federalism,
his insight was that a greater federal sphere could
actually have the impact of protecting minorities
and thereby protecting fundamental rights.”
“It sounds so obvious today that it’s like, ‘It can’t be
Madison who thought of that.’ But it really is. The
way to think of it is that before Madison, people
thought that every majority-based government
would devolve into either dictatorship or anarchy.
Madison was the pioneer of showing how a
Constitution with balanced powers could save
you from either of those two extremes. It could
save you from a tyranny that violated rights or
an anarchy where the government couldn’t get
anything done. In particular, in the case of a federal
government, before Madison it was believed that a
federal system would come apart at the seams and
would be unable to govern effectively, but Madison
showed that a federal system could achieve a lasting
balance between power at the center and power at
the periphery, through the states.”
Why do you characterize Madison as the Newton or
Einstein of “governmental physics”?
NF: “The reason he’s the Newton or the Einstein
of that physics is that people used to believe that if
you had states, they would pull away and go flying
off into their own orbits, or, alternatively, that the
gravitational pull of the center, the sun, would pull
those planets in and they would be destroyed by the
sun. That was the theory and he showed that that
wasn’t right, that you could continue to have those
planets exist as they went in orbit around the sun.
And that was a metaphor that was explicitly used at
the convention, by others and by him.”
How would you characterize the importance of
Madison’s approach to religious freedom as a basic right?
NF: “The Declaration mentions life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness, which substitutes for
property, but it doesn’t say anything about religious
freedom. Madison helped raise religious liberty
and the freedom of speech, and the freedom of
conscience more broadly, to be on the same level as
the other three. It makes him very relevant today,
because as Americans, while there are times when
we are worried about threats to our life, liberty, and
property, it could be argued that we’re more often
worried about threats to our freedom of religion
and our freedom of speech.”
What is the best way to engage young people with
Madison’s legacy? Aren’t they tired of Founding
Father myths?
NF: “Every millennial can understand that Mark
Zuckerberg through Facebook took a technology
that was out there and adapted [it] to allow certain
new kinds of human interactions on a new scale,
and Madison was a bit like that. Zuckerberg
didn’t invent the computer and Madison didn’t
invent the idea of a constitution, but Madison
invented a particular form of the technology that
enabled the different people who participated in
the constitutional structure to interact with each
other in new ways, to create new forms of networks,
new forms of rights, new forms of protections, and
new forms of interactions. I often use that with
my students as a way to connect to contemporary
issues. They all understand that the architecture of a
system, the architecture of a network has huge and
determining effects.”
How do you explain Madison’s role as a slave owner
when you are explaining his constitutional legacy?
NF: “The way to deal with it is to be totally honest.
I’m not trying to protect Madison against anything.
You have to be totally aboveboard and direct
with people, as I think Montpelier is. I think my
biography is the first biography of Madison to be so
direct and explicit about this and it’s very much in
the spirit of what Montpelier has been doing. You
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