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Public Opinion and the Formation of Civic Character in Madison's Republican Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Colleen A. Sheehan
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Extract

John Adams's complaints notwithstanding, no one of the American Founding generation has been so consistently misunderstood as James Madison. In recent decades a small handful of scholars have made significant strides toward correcting the Madisonian record. In addition to the justly acclaimed study of Madison by Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty, the thoughtful work of Alan Gibson stands out in this regard. In particular, Professor Gibson's efforts to parse the contemporary debate over the character of Madison's political thought constitute a distinctive and valuable contribution to the literature on Madison and the Founding.

In his most recent essay, “Veneration and Vigilance: James Madison and Public Opinion, 1785–1800,” Professor Gibson makes three central claims, namely, that Madison never wavered in his commitment to popular sovereignty and deserves to be considered a leading and prescient democratic theorist of the Founding, that Madison's conception of the nature and role of public opinion in the 1790s signifies a substantial revision of the earlier Humean understanding of public opinion he embraced in the 1780s, and that Madison did not seek to foster civic education in the American republic. I agree with the first of these claims, though I would make the case for Madison's democratic credentials even more emphatically than Gibson does. In general, however, Gibson and I share common ground in the recognition of the critical importance of the concept of public opinion in Madisonian theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , Winter 2005 , pp. 37 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

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References

This author is grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Earhart Foundation, whose generous support of her work on the republicanism of Madison during the 2004–2005 has made the preparation of this review article possible.

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15. See Sheehan, , “Madison and the French Enlightenment: The Authority of Public Opinion,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2002): 925–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a more extensive treatment of the development of Madison's thought throughout the late 1780s and early 1790s than can be offered here. Madison's attention to French texts on public opinion—a number of which he carried with him in 1790 to his lodgings in Philadelphia—is helpful in explaining the continued concern he had with developing more fully his understanding of the force and authority of public opinion in republican government.

16. See Sheehan, , “Madison's Party Press Essays,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 3 (1990): 355–77Google Scholar; Sheehan, , “Madison v. Hamilton: The Battle Over Republicanism and the Role of Public Opinion,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 3 (2004): 405–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially p. 415.

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18. Gibson claims that in the 1790s Madison regarded public opinion as a channel of communication between the people and their representatives, but that in the 1780s he was simply not concerned with this issue. At the same time, however, Gibson argues that “in the 1780s and the 1790s [Madison] conceived of the relationship of the people to their government as a process of mutual influence, censorship, and judgment.”

19. In an earlier essay, Gibson claims that there is “no evidence that [Madison] expected a substantial number of public policies to result from the transfer of popular majorities into legislative majorities” or that he expected public policy to form as a result of collective action by a nonfactious national majority. Rather, Madison “seemed to have believed that most public policies would be formed by representatives who consulted the views and interests of their constituents and then compared and related these to the public good” (“Impartial Representation and the Extended Republic: Towards a Comprehensive and Balanced Reading of the Tenth Federalist Paper,” History of Political Thought 12, no. 2 [1991]: 290Google Scholar. See also Gibson, , “America's Better Self: Diamond, Madison, and the Foundations of the American Regime,” Political Science Reviewer [1999], p. 109.)Google Scholar. According to this analysis, the extended republic, and not impartial representatives, is central to Publius's scheme to achieve an impartial umpire in republican government. But although Gibson demonstrates how a large territory helps to prevent the formation of a factious or impartial majority, he does not show how it promotes impartiality except by establishing the conditions that allow for the achievement of an impartial legislative majority. Thus impartiality depends ultimately on a few worthy public officials, with the extended republic serving only as a negative means to this positive end. In this analysis, Madison's call for a practicable sphere (Federalist, 14:68Google Scholar; Federalist, 51:293Google Scholar; cf. PJM, 10:214Google Scholar), his concern that legislators meet under one roof and are subject to the contagion of opinion and passion (PJM, 9:354Google Scholar; Federalist, 58:328–29Google Scholar; PJM, 14:165–66, 13:93–94Google Scholar), and his appeal in Federalist, No. 51, to a “coalition of a majority of the whole society” to achieve public decisions based on “justice and the general good” (Federalist, 51:291Google Scholar, emphasis added) are neglected.

20. Federalist, 49:285Google Scholar. Whereas a too extensive territory precludes the communication of ideas and the formation of public opinion, a practicable extent of territory allows for the communication of opinion and the maintenance of the rulers' responsibility to the people. (See Federalist, 14:68Google Scholar; Federalist, 51:293Google Scholar; cf. PJM, 10:214Google Scholar; Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty, pp. 195–233Google Scholar, especially 212 n. 61.) Indeed, Madison's argument for limiting territorial size to a practicable sphere—in both the 1780s and the 1790s—makes sense only if he envisioned a process of communication between the people and their representatives and the formation of a national public opinion. It is important to emphasize, however, that the proper extent of the territory is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the attainment of a modified and reasonable public opinion (see, for example, Federalist, 63:353–55Google Scholar). In Federalist, No. 49 and in his Convention speech of 12 June 1787, Madison did not argue against direct appeals to the people per se, but against direct appeals in certain cases, i.e., in those involving drafting or changing the Constitution. In his congressional speech of 15 August 1789, he argued against the practice of “instruction” of representatives. These are instances in which a direct appeal to the people would short circuit the layered constitutional processes, which provide the conditions for a complex network of political communication, public deliberation, and the refinement of popular opinion.

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