Sheehan, Colleen A. The Mind of James Madison: The Legacy
of Classical Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
xvii + 275 pages. Ordering links for hardback and paperback.
(I read this for a project I was working on and decided it deserved a review.)
(I read this for a project I was working on and decided it deserved a review.)
During the period 1791-2, during his time in the House of
Representatives and before his tenure as Secretary of State and his Presidency,
James Madison, the philosopher of the American Revolution, drew up a series of
notes on his philosophy of governance, which survive in a handwritten notebook.
No-one is quite sure what his intention was for these, whether they were just
written for his own edification or whether he intended ultimately to edit them
into a book. In any event, he did not do so.
In The
Mind of James Madison, Villanova professor Colleen A. Sheehan has published
a transcription of these notes and written a commentary on them. The book is
divided into two parts: Sheehan’s commentary on the notes and a transcription
of the handwritten notes themselves, with extensive quotes from Madison’s own
citations. The transcription and quotes alone are a valuable service to
scholarship. The commentary is valuable for a modern scholar who does not wish
to dig through the primary source material.
The commentary is written for an academic
audience. She assumes a knowledge of the period and the major works authors of
the period would have read; there are few concessions to a lay reader. After an
establishing chapter on the context of the notes, she follows Madison’s order,
with chapters titled “Circumstantial influences on government,” “The power of
public opinion,” and “The federal republican polity.”
As a lay reader, I am not equipped to judge the
work; it seems (for an academic work) straightforward enough and I have relied
on Sheehan’s commentary as a secondary source. She is, however, a deeply
conservative academic and, like anyone, will be apt to see views most congenial
to her own in works she studies. In any event, I believe the book is an
important one and recommend it to anyone who is seriously interested in the
thinking of the founders of the United States of America.
No comments:
Post a Comment