James Madison

In American Sphinx, Madison serves as the recurring foil who sharpens the book’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Where Jefferson treated the Constitution as a “merely convenient agreement about political institutions that ought not to bind future generations,” Madison “had a deep appreciation for the Constitution as an artful arrangement of juxtaposed principles and powers with abiding influence over future generations.” The book casts Madison — alongside Adams and Hamilton — as a thinker who began from “the presumption that the intimacy of local politics could not be replicated at the national level,” whereas Jefferson did not think in that conventional fashion.

The contrast is most pointed on judicial review and constitutional authorship. Madison “accepted, and had all along accepted, the principle of judicial review,” holding that the framers intended the Supreme Court to be the ultimate arbiter of federal-versus-state jurisdiction. The book also relays Dolley Madison’s note that Jefferson, absent during the Convention, derived his understanding of it from Madison — “whose opinions guided him in the construction of that instrument” — leading the author to conclude that on constitutional questions “Jefferson often did not know what he was talking about.”

Context: James Madison (1751–1836) was a principal architect of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, co-author of The Federalist Papers, and the fourth President of the United States.

Where this appears

• American Sphinx — recurring foil to Thomas Jefferson on judicial review, federalism, and whether the Constitution binds future generations; cited as the true author/repositor of constitutional intent.