Whig Out. - Review - book reviews

National Review, Nov 8, 1999 by Richard A. Samuelson

Mr. Samuelson is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of Virginia.

American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding, by Gary Rosen (Kansas, 237 pp., $29.95)

Recently in these pages, John O'Sullivan highlighted the tradition of Tory conservatism ("Types of Right," Oct. 11). That tradition holds that "government is the art of managing the state" and regards the job of the politician as fundamentally reactive, "to deal with problems as they crop up." While O'Sullivan notes that the U.S. does not have much of a history of Toryism, he suggests that the GOP is now starting to think along Tory lines, and casts George W. Bush as a leader in the Tory mold. In American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding, Gary Rosen reminds us why few American conservatives ever went down the Tory path. Rosen's book, which began as a Harvard dissertation, is lively, intelligent, and cogent. Because it accepts the existence of the state as a given, Toryism, as O'Sullivan describes it, ignores certain key questions, such as, What makes a state legitimate? and, What is a state's purpose in the first place? Tories tend to see it as the job of a politician basically to deal with "problems," but this raises the question of what a "problem" is, and of how to evaluate the relative merits of proposed solutions. It is precisely because they never lost sight of questions like these that the Founders were Whigs, not Tories. They broke with Britain because of disagreements on questions of right and wrong, not on strict calculations of cost and benefit. After all, the taxes Parliament had tried to impose on the American colonists were not terribly high. The colonists objected not to the amount of the tax, but to taxation without representation.

After 1776, the Americans had no state to accept as a given. So they were compelled to create a new one, or new ones, to serve their political ends. For that reason Madison became fixated on the "problem of founding": how to create a free nation. That problem had two dimensions, theoretical and practical. On the theoretical level, the question was that of what makes a state legitimate. The practical question was that of how to create a state that serves its appointed ends.

Like many other American political theorists at the time, Madison turned to "contract theory" to solve the problem of legitimacy. As the Declaration of Independence stated, governments derived "their just powers from the consent of the governed." That is, government is legitimate when the people create it to secure their rights. The problem was that while the people were the only legitimate source of political authority, they generally lacked the talent to create well-formed governments. In Madison's words, "Whatever respect may be due the rights of private judgment, and no man feels more of it than I do, there can be no doubt that there are subjects to which the capacities of the bulk of mankind are unequal." Madison solved the problem of founding by going back to first principles and seeking to clarify the ends of politics. Since his own day, writers and politicians have cast Madison as a cold rationalist. Not true, Rosen argues. Such a portrait overlooks Madison's almost mystical devotion to the republican cause, a devotion that was "directed toward the achievement of a certain kind of human dignity, a rational refinement of the spirited insistence on self-government." In other words, Madison believed that self-government is good for the soul, and he looked to contract theory to serve that end.

His contribution in this field was innovative. Conventional contract theory portrayed the creation of governments as the fundamental act of self-government because "God's creatures imitate the divine by creating the constitution under which their legislators act." Madison instead argued that man finds his political "spiritedness" not in the "high politics" of founding, but rather in "everyday politics." He thought that elites have to take the lead in creating a working government, but then let the people take over.

To instill in the people a proper veneration for self-government and for themselves as self-governors, Rosen writes, Madison tried to create "a kind of godless civil religion, with the Constitution serving as an altar." Madison hoped that, inspired by such quasi-religious reverence for the American constitutional compact, the people would keep their government limited: within its appointed bounds, and serving its appointed ends. He hoped that the elite would be similarly inspired. After the compact was in force, their job became to guarantee the security of the compact. This was because the people would take on the burden of self-government only if elites forced them to do so. In this way, Madison provided a framework for judging what was, and was not, a state problem. Although Madison's political enemies, and even some of his friends, accused him of flip-flopping when his narrow political needs required, Rosen argues that Madison was actually consistent because his method of judging means in terms of ends never varied. He never lost sight of the larger goal of securing self-government in the United States, and Rosen explains all of Madison's intellectual work in terms of that goal.