Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution by Jack Rakove is one of the most challenging books I’ve ever read. Normally, I can plow through works like this in a week or two. But with Original Meanings, I often found myself struggling to get through more than six to ten pages before my eyes glazed over. Still, I persevered, chipping away at it month after month until I finally reached the end. And I’m glad I did. For all its difficulty, this 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner taught me a great deal and ultimately proved well worth the effort.
Original Meanings is packed with insights and arguments about the drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution in 1787–88. But one theme stood out above all others: James Madison’s profound disillusionment with, and fear of, the newly established state governments. As Rakove writes, “We simply cannot understand how or why the Constitution took the form it did unless we make sense of Madison.” And it turns out that we cannot fully make sense of Madison without appreciating his deep-seated, almost visceral aversion to grassroots democracy.
In the years immediately following the Declaration of Independence, eleven of the thirteen newly independent states quickly adopted their own constitutions. Only two—Delaware and Pennsylvania—framed theirs through specially elected conventions, and none of the new constitutions were submitted to the people for ratification. In virtually every case, executive authority was sharply curtailed, leaving the legislatures as the dominant branch of government.
Madison experienced the consequences firsthand while serving in the Virginia state assembly during the 1780s. Under the Articles of Confederation, delegates to Congress were limited to serving three years out of every six. When Madison reached his term limit in Philadelphia, he returned to Richmond to serve in the Virginia legislature. What he witnessed there—and learned about the workings of other state governments across the fledgling republic—shocked and dismayed him.
The quality of the representatives was poor. Legislative debates were narrow and parochial. And the unchecked power of the state assemblies was, in Madison’s view, downright terrifying. He became convinced that the American people needed to be protected from the weaknesses and excesses of their own elected legislatures.
By the time Madison arrived in Philadelphia in May 1787, he was determined to confront what he saw as the fundamental dangers inherent in the majoritarian premise of republican government. American statesmen no longer had to rely solely on the political theories of Montesquieu and other Enlightenment thinkers. They now had a decade of practical experience with republican government from which to draw their own conclusions.
“Madison went to Philadelphia in the grip of a deep passion,” Rakove writes, “convinced that he had found a complete remedy for the vices of the American political system.”
Madison’s central argument was that state politics and politicians were inherently, and perhaps hopelessly, parochial. Neither state legislators nor the constituents who elected them could be counted on to place the broader interests of the Union above their own narrow, local concerns. As Rakove observes, “[Madison’s] ideas of federalism, representation, and the separation of powers – the crucial theoretical issues that the Constitution would face – all reflected his disillusion with the failings of the state legislators and citizens alike.”
Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution warned that the proposed system of government threatened to establish a kind of aristocracy: the rule of the few, ostensibly the best. Judging from Rakove’s analysis of Madison, their concerns were not entirely misplaced. Madison believed that a national legislature, drawing representatives from a much larger republic, would attract a more capable and public-spirited class of lawmakers than the parochial state assemblies he had come to despise. “In contrast to the petty demagogues and untutored novices who gave state assemblies their sorry tone,” Rakove writes, “a national congress could recruit a superior class of lawmakers whose decisions and deliberations would rise far above the corresponding proceedings in the states.” Madison was not seeking to replace republican government with aristocracy, but he was determined to insulate national policymaking from the passions and prejudices of local majorities. His larger ambition, as Rakove describes it, was “to render the Union politically independent of the states and the states legally dependent on national oversight.”
Madison sought to keep the new federal government relatively small and exclusive, believing that the prestige and power of national office would attract a more capable and distinguished class of political leaders. Anti-Federalists, meanwhile, recoiled at the small size of the proposed House of Representatives, fearing it would quickly become “a haven for ambitious aristocrats.” Madison fired back in Federalist No. 55: “Had every Athenian citizen been Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” To the Anti-Federalists, the proposed Senate was even more alarming than the House. “Like the Convention that had created it,” Rakove writes, “the Senate loomed as a conspiratorial den.” Interestingly, of the three branches of the proposed federal government, it was the executive that aroused the least concern among Anti-Federalists.
Madison drew three critical lessons from the recent experience of government under the new state constitutions. First, the abuse of legislative power posed a greater threat to liberty than the arbitrary exercise of executive authority. Second, individuals and minorities needed protection from fractious popular majorities acting through elected legislatures. And third, a strong national government was potentially less dangerous than the petty despotisms of state and local government. It is remarkable how far Madison’s thinking had evolved since the early days of the Revolution, when his principal concern had been the arbitrary and distant authority of an all-powerful monarch. By 1787, his overriding preoccupation was no longer the tyranny of a king, but the tyranny of political factions exercising power democratically through the state legislatures.
Madison now argued that the central challenge of protecting rights was “no longer to protect the people as a collective whole FROM government but to defend minorities and individuals against popular majorities acting THROUGH government.” In other words, the people themselves, exercising power through their elected representatives, had become the principal threat to liberty. Madison believed these dangers were most likely to emerge within the states. Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786–87 loomed large in his thinking, illustrating the potential dangers of popular unrest and factional politics. Economic measures such as paper-money laws and debtor-relief legislation, often championed by vocal local factions, threatened property rights—one of Madison’s deepest concerns. He was determined to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of individuals against the encroachments of legislative tyranny. His central argument was that the national government must serve as a “disinterested & dispassionate umpire in disputes between different passions & interests in the State,” thereby curbing “the aggressions of interested majorities on the rights of minorities and of individuals.”
In closing, Rakove places considerable emphasis on Madison’s “theory of faction,” most famously articulated in Federalist No. 10. Madison defined factions as groups “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” The danger arose when these factions gained political power and elevated their own narrow interests above the common good. “The public good is often decided,” Madison warned, “not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
Madison believed these factions posed their greatest threat at the state level, where they could exercise power through local legislatures with relatively few restraints. Curbing these excesses of legislative misrule was a central motivation behind Madison’s vision for the United States Constitution of 1787. Indeed, if any branch of the new national government were to become despotic, Madison feared it would be the House of Representatives—the most democratic branch and therefore, in his view, the most susceptible to the passions of popular majorities.
There is, of course, much more to Original Meanings than what I’ve covered here, but these are the arguments that struck me most forcefully. For anyone interested in the framing and ratification of the Constitution, particularly James Madison’s pivotal role in shaping it, Original Meanings offers a deeply researched and remarkably insightful account. Just be prepared for a demanding read. Rakove’s scholarship is formidable, but his prose can be downright turgid. For all that, I’m glad I persevered.
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