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Madison on Democracy, Property, and Civic Education: A Reply to Matthews and Sheehan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Alan Gibson
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Extract

Professors Richard Matthews and Colleen Sheehan raise two questions about my essay on James Madison and public opinion:(1) Can Madison be considered a genuine partisan of democracy? (2) Do Madison's writings on public opinion suggest that he believed that the government should try to foster a common opinion among the citizenry?

Sheehan and Matthews diametrically disagree. Like Martin Diamond and Lance Banning, Sheehan argues that Madison was a thoroughgoing democrat not only during the 1790s, but even during the years surrounding the formation of the Constitution. According to Matthews, Madison was the quintessential classical liberal and a proponent of “thin” democracy who believed that citizens should participate in politics primarily as voters who select elite men to make decisions for them.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , Winter 2005 , pp. 69 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

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References

1. Madison, to Jefferson, , 17 10 1788,Google ScholarThe Papers of James Madison [PJM hereafter], ed. Hutchinson, William T. et al. (17 vols. Chicago and Charlottesville: University of Chicago Press and University of Virginia Press, 1962–), 11:298–99;Google ScholarMadison, to Jefferson, , 24 10 1787,Google Scholaribid., 10:214; Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, James, and Jay, John, The Federalist, ed. Cooke, Jacob E. (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), No.44, p.305; No.46, p.320, and No.57, p.387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Federalist, No. 49, p. 340.Google Scholar

3. Federalist, No.49, p.340.Google Scholar See also Madison, to Jefferson, , 02 4, 1790, PJM, 13:19.Google Scholar

4. Sheehan, Colleen, “Madison v. Hamilton: The Battle Over Republicanism and the Role of Public Opinion,” American Political Science Review 98 (2004): 405–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Federalist, No. 26, pp. 168–69.Google Scholar

6. Hume, David, “Of the First Principles of Government” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985, 1987), p. 32.Google Scholar

7. Similar problems arise in the interpretation made in Nedelsky, Jennifer, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), pp. 16–66.Google Scholar

8. Madison, James, “Speech of Tuesday August 2nd” in Notes of Debates In The Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison, ed. Koch, Adrienne (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 403.Google Scholar

9. “Note on Madison's Speech of August 7,1787, ca. 1821” in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, ed. Meyers, Marvin (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1973, 1981), p. 398.Google Scholar

10. Madison, to Wallace, Caleb, PJM, 8:353–55.Google Scholar Lance Banning points this out in The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison & the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p.137.Google Scholar See also pp. 136, 182–83, 187, 447–48 n. 78, 460–61 n. 59, and 461–62 n. 69 and 70 for an interpretation that sharply contrasts with Matthews's.

11. “Note on Madison's Speech of August 7, 1787, ca. 1821” in The Mind of the Founder, p. 400. Madison's emphasis.Google Scholar

12. See Madison's, essay “Property,” PJM, 14:266–68.Google Scholar

13. Madison, James, “Speech of Tuesday August 2nd” in Notes of Debates, p. 403.Google Scholar

14. “Speech in the Virginia Constitutional Convention, 12 2, 1829, with Memorandum on Suffrage, in Mind of the Founder, pp. 402, 406–408.Google Scholar

15. “Note on Madison's Speech of August 7, 1787, ca. 1821” in The Mind of the Founder, pp. 399–400.Google Scholar See also Nedelsky, , Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism, pp. 52–62.Google Scholar

16. See McCoy, Drew, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 120–35.Google Scholar

17. “Note on Madison's Speech of August 7, 1787, ca. 1821” in The Mind of the Founder, p. 400.Google Scholar

18. Federalist, No. 57, p. 385,Google ScholarFederalist, No. 52, pp. 354–55.Google Scholar

19. United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 2.

20. Matthews cites Forrest McDonald who, in turn, cites—but misrepresented—Chilton Williamson's classic study, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1960).Google Scholar Contrary to McDonald's contentions, Williamson concludes that between 50% and 75% of adult white males were eligible to vote in the 1780s. See Williamson, , American Suffrage, p. 38.Google Scholar Summarizing the estimates of a number of scholars (including the Neo-Progressive historian Jackson Turner Main), Donald Lutz concludes that 65% to 75% of adult white males were qualified to vote in the states during the 1780s. Lutz, Donald, “Political Participation in Eighteenth-Century America,” Albany Law Review 53 (1989): 331,333–35.Google Scholar

21. Federalist, Nos. 52 and 57, pp. 354–55, 385.Google Scholar

22. Sheehan, Colleen, “The Politics of Public Opinion: James Madison's ‘Notes on Government,” The William and Mary Quarterly 49 (1992): 609–627. Quotes are at 611, 622.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. “Public Opinion,” PJM, 14:170.Google Scholar Sheehan's interpretation that Madison believed that the political system should try to create a common opinion among the citizenry springs from an initial misreading of a specific point. In several points of his correspondence during 1787 and 1788, Madison describes his central goal—the “great desideratum”—as the “modification of the sovereignty” so that the national government is at once neutral between the different interests in the society and yet also sufficiently restrained from setting up an interest independent of the whole society. Later, in his 1791 National Gazette essay “Public Opinion,” Madison maintains that “public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.” Reading Madison's understanding of popular sovereignty from 1791 back into his writings from 1787, Sheehan suggests that Madison's “great desideratum” was a goal of modifying the sovereignty of public opinion. Sheehan then reads Madison's “notes on government” and his essays for the National Gazette as addressing this same problem of modifying and educating public opinion to make it consistent with the regime's principles of political right.

Note, however, that Madison refers to the “great desideratum in Government.” He is not talking about a process in the society, but rather a restructuring of the political system. Furthermore the sovereignty that Madison talks about modifying is not the sovereignty of public opinion. He had not yet reached the conclusion that public opinion was integral to popular sovereignty. When Madison spoke of the goal of modifying the sovereignty in 1787, he was advancing his pet proposal of a universal veto on all state laws. Madison's point here was that, unlike the British monarchy, the national government in the United States could, if properly structured and made dependent on the people, be trusted to wield a universal negative over state laws because it would not be able to set up an interest independent of the whole society but would also be impartial between the interests of the whole society. See Sheehan, , “The Politics of Public Opinion,” p. 620.Google Scholar Madison's statement about the great desideratum is found in a number of places including Madison, to Jefferson, , 10 24, 1787, PJM, 10:214.Google Scholar The quote from "Public Opinion" is at PJM, 14:170.Google Scholar

24. “House Address to the President,” 11 27, 1794, PJM, 14:391;Google ScholarFederalist, No. 10, p. 58.Google Scholar