JUNE CASEY: My
name is June Casey. And on behalf of the
Harvard Law School Library, I'd like to invite you
to today's Book Talk. We're here to celebrate The
Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President,
and released this month by Random House Publishers. And I can tell you, I just
got my copy this past week. And I have an ethical dilemma. I know I have to put this
is in the faculty bookcase, but I also want to take
it home to read it. Just the photographs alone. NOAH FELDMAN: Take
it home to read it, and then put it in
the faculty bookcase. It's a simple solution. JUNE CASEY: That
might take a while. It's actually a hefty volume. But I want to let you know
that the [? coop ?] is in the back of the room
with copies for you to take home as well. So today, we have our author,
Professor Noah Feldman, who was the Felix Frankfurter
Professor of Law and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program
on Jewish and Israeli Law. Our panelists include our
guests, Professor David Armitage, who is the Harvard
University Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History. We also have
Professor Bruce Mann, who is the Harvard Law
School Carl F. Shipper Jr. Professor of Law. And another special guest,
Professor Eric Nelson, who is the Harvard
University's Robert M. Beren Professor of Government. So before we get started, I have
just a quick reminder for you. As the sign says, today's
talk is going to be recorded. And any remarks that you make
during the question and answer period will be recorded. And the talk will be posted
on YouTube about a week or so after today's talk. Thank you for joining me. And now I'll pass the
microphone over to our panel. NOAH FELDMAN: Thank you so much. And thank you so much
to the law school library for organizing
this great event and to all of you
for coming out. I'm really grateful
to you, and I'm glad there is room for
everybody in the room. And I hope people will make room
for people who look like they need seats to sit down. I'm going to be extremely brief. I, first of all, just want
to really express my deep appreciation to my colleagues
and friends who are here-- they're still my friends because
the comments haven't happened yet-- to discuss and
comment on the book. I wrote it simply because I'm
a constitutional law person, and Madison is, to my mind, the
most significant single figure in the history of
the United States with respect to
constitutional thought and one of the handful of
most significant figures globally and historically
in that same respect. I am not a
professional historian of late 18th and early
19th century United States. Consequently, I had a very,
very, very steep learning curve. And I worked extraordinarily
hard, I learned a great deal, and I am certain that I'm about
to learn many things, including things that I ought to have
learned before having sat down to write the book. The book is roughly
divided into three parts. And it's central argument
is that Madison's own intellectual career
can be productively divided, with respect to
its internal tensions, into three distinct periods. In the first, he sought
to produce a constitution under the framework of hoping
to produce something that would facilitate
reasoned conversation without political
partisanship that would unify the country more
effectively than it had previously been unified. I have many, many
details on that and, I think, new arguments
about the structure of how it happened in the book. But that's the overarching
picture of his first life. In his second life, he
discovered that the goal had been evanescent. Notwithstanding the ratification
of the Constitution, he discovered that there
was deep, fundamental, and inevitably partisan
disagreement that had to occur. Because he did not simply
think that his opponents, predominately those
surrounding Alexander Hamilton, were wrong about policy. He thought that
they were actually trying to subvert
the Constitution and the idea of
Republicanism itself. So having produced a
nonpartisan constitution, he then went and produced
a deeply partisan political structure,
a political party, indeed, with Thomas
Jefferson, thereby inaugurating a mode of
deep political partisanship in the United States
that crucially involved the Constitution itself. And that's why, I argue,
in the United States, we engage in this particularly
strange phenomenon where we constantly say how much
we value part bipartisanship and how sad we are about
how partisan our country is. And then in almost
the same breath, we condemn our
political opponents for subverting the Constitution. So that's a very
strange combination. I think it looks
very weird if you look at us from the outside. And Madison, I argue,
is a significant figure inaugurating both of
those distinct features. In his third life,
Madison set out to do for foreign policy
what he had already done for the domestic Constitution. That is, he wanted to create a
Republican foreign policy that would enable a
republic-- that is to say an entity without a standing
army and with no Navy to speak of-- to coerce foreign actors to
do what he wanted them to do, what the United States
wanted them to do. His goal was to use economic
sanctions to do that. He came very, very, very
close to succeeding. But ultimately, found himself
launching the War of 1812 because his theory was
not quite good enough. This was another period of
radical retrenchment for him. The war went very badly. And then ultimately by,
really essentially-- I would say it's partly
a stroke of luck, and partly the fact that
it's much easier to defend a country with militia
then it is to invade a country with the militia-- the United States
survived the War of 1812, and Madison ended his
life as a bipartisan hero, primarily by virtue
of having gone to war and not lost the
Republic in the process. That's the structure
of the book. And you'll hear no more from me
until after my colleagues have spoken, in which case,
I might be able to offer a word or two of comment. And now, I'm going to turn
the floor over to them. Have you decided in which
order you wish to speak? BRUCE MANN: No,
but I'll go last. ERIC NELSON: Alphabetical? BRUCE MANN: I'll go last. ERIC NELSON: Alphabetical? NOAH FELDMAN: All
right, David Armitage. DAVID ARMITAGE: Why not? BRUCE MANN: In fact, that's
how we're sitting [INAUDIBLE].. DAVID ARMITAGE: Thank
you so much, again, to Harvard Law School
for organizing this. But thanks, most
of all, of course, to Noah for the enormous
gift of his book and also, more contingently,
for providing the perfect segue to the beginning of
my remarks because I want to begin in
the War of 1812, somewhere very far
from where we sit now and, indeed, very far
from the places that are occupied by James
Madison during his life and during his biography. He was a remarkably
undertraveled man with a remarkably cosmopolitan,
indeed, global viewpoint, like many of the
founding fathers. But one incident that I'm
pretty sure he wasn't aware of, happened in November 1813 in
the midst of the War of 1812 when a 33-year-old
New Englander called David Porter was
tasked with defending US Naval interests
in the Pacific against British shipping. And in the course
of that process, he found himself in
the Marquesas Islands. Bear with me, we're getting
to Madison in a moment. He found himself in
the Marquesas Islands where he took possession of
one of the islands, Nuka Hiva. He set up a small
fortified settlement with the initial accord
of the local indigenous people, the Typee-- more famous for being written
about by Herman Melville-- founded a settlement
over which he ran up the stars and stripes,
fired a 13-gun salute, made a declaration
of US possession, and then named this settlement,
Madisonville, on the island of Madison's Island. Why did he do this apart
from the strategic necessity of doing that in the global
context of the War of 1812, something we forget when
we think of it as a purely hemispheric in the Americas? He did this because,
he said at the time, that the Marquesan islanders,
the Typee in particular, had quote, "requested
to be admitted into the American family." And he reciprocated
on that occasion by saying that he thought they
were very appropriate members of the American family
because of what he thought of as their attachment
to, what he called, pure Republican policy. And I mention this not just as a
colorful anecdote, and not only because of Madison's
probable ignorance about this global
moment, but in fact, to point up the
global importance of Madison himself and also,
the remarkably rapid, truly global-- meaning inter-hemispheric,
transregional, transoceanic spread of this American ideal,
which Noah very persuasively argues was attributable in very
large part to Madison himself, both through his initial
genius as the only beggeter of, at least, the original
version of the Constitution as we recognize
it now, but also, as its greatest
promoter and defender through the three phases
of his life, that, by 1813, even Pacific
Islanders could engage in an intercultural
dialogue about some of these ideals, which
would've been inconceivable 30 or 40 years before and
that a settlement could be founded in the
name of the, then, President Madison himself. The ending of this
particular episode is rather less glorious than the
ending of Madison's own life. That, after a few weeks,
the local civil wars descended into conflict with
the Americans themselves. The Typee accused the
Americans of being the posteriors to the private
parts of their enemies, attacked them, and
ultimately drove them out. And that particular episode
ended ignominiously, but leaving at least a trace
on older maps of Madisonville itself. The story that Noah tells is,
of course, a very different one. It's about ultimately
the global-- the very unlikely, and indeed
unpredictable, and probably unpredicted success
of both James Madison and his various innovations. He traces this
through three lives, as the subtitle of
the book has it, and as he's already explained. And I just want to
reflect for a moment about the process of writing
the book in that mode. As we all know, lives
do not have arguments. Lives are lived
forward, chaotically, along multiple paths. While many of us,
or some of us try to shape the course
of those lives, but in and of themselves,
they do not have arguments. The dilemma of any
biographer, therefore-- and it is very acute
and steep dilemma-- is whether or not to equip
a biographical study, a soup to nuts, cradle to grave, or
cradle to grave and legacy after the grave study
with an argument. And I think it's particularly
appropriate in the case of Madison to endow
retrospectively the chaotic forward-looking
contingent and groping messiness of a human
life with an argument. Because, as Noah shows,
especially in the first third of the book, when Madison is
more the man of reflection than the man of action
that he will become, Madison was very aware--
as indeed were many of the founders of their
potential legacies, of the importance of the moment
at which they were acting, indeed, of the
potentially universal-- we might now translate
this as global-- implications of their activities
on the behalf of humanity or of mankind, that they were
being watched by the world. And what they did,
and what they created could potentially
have a global effect. And the backward-looking
Madison of the early phase-- backward looking only in the
precise sense of someone who did his researches and put
any dilemma, particularly political and legal dilemmas,
into a longue duree context, often going back to
the ancient Greeks. We see in the first
third of the book, Madison the great researcher--
the author, for example, of the remarkable
paper on ancient and modern confederacies-- trying to place the punctual
moment of the present into the long
perspective of the past with all available knowledge. This was a man who was
thinking about his own moment as, if not a culmination,
at least a pivotal turning point in nothing less than
world history, even if that was the history of, as it were,
the Mediterranean and Atlantic World at that point, but
with implications potentially for generations as
yet unborn as well as the whole globe at the time. We see the unfolding
of this man who was situating his own
moment, his own life, into these longer arguments
and longer processes unfolding in such a way that,
again, I think it's appropriate in this
case, as in relatively few other cases, to endow an
individual punctual human life with an argument, and
to draw conclusions looking back upon that
life about its shape and its meaning. And I came into the book, as
I often come into biographies, skeptical about the possibility
of dividing a life into phases, endowing them with significance,
and segmenting that human life into moments which could be seen
as cumulative building blocks within an argument. But I came away from
the book, both, deeply impressed with the
detailed research-- there is no important and,
indeed, many unimportant episodes which gain
in importance because of their organization
within into the larger weft of the book itself, that's
untreated within the biography itself. And I think the book,
therefore, rises to the two great challenges
of any biography. One is to give it a
shape, which does not seem externally imposed
or unidiomatic or untrue to the life itself. In this case, this
is someone who, I think if he were
writing his own biography, would have assented
to Noah's divisions and to the significance
that he endows with them. But I also think, as a
very humble historian, that I've not yet been
tested by a biography. That's the greatest
test of any historian. And you're much too modest
in saying that you're not functioning as a very prominent
historian of the early republic in the early 19th century US
in a global context, now Noah. I think this is a major
achievement of a work to have synthesized
so much material, to have dealt delicately with
so many controversial issues, in the context of a
book which is genuinely a page-turner, which,
again, allows one to follow the life of Madison as it
was being lived without too many presentiments
of where it might go or what its
significance might be. But to do that
also in such a way that, by the end of the book,
the reader is fully convinced of, not just the
shape of the life, but also, more importantly,
of its significance as well. So I just wanted to end
with three possibilities, hopes possibly, about where
you might go next from this. One very important
thread of the book, which is made quite
explicit and the first part, but provides a very
important structural device in the second and third
parts is the thread within the book which
one might describe as a history of
political friendship in the late 18th century. I think this is a
wonderfully rich approach to, not only Madison's
personal relationships, but also how he conducted
his political relationships, especially with major
characters like Monroe, and Hamilton, and
Jefferson, for instance, as you show in
[? particularly ?] in the last two
thirds of the book. But there is, buried within
the texture of the book itself, a very important study,
I think, of the revision and the reimagining
of friendship in a political context in
the late 18th century, which could be drawn out in
independent studies of which Madison would simply
be one part, but a very important part. I think you've shown
that very significantly. The second might be the promise
that's laid out actually in the very last pages of the
book, the very final paragraphs of the book where you state
very challengingly, possibly controversially, that the
major theme that emerges from Madison's life, and
accounts for its significance, is that he invented
the modern ideal of an invented
federal constitution. I quote you here, "a
liberty protecting constitutional government." And here's the perhaps
controversial gauntlet thrown down, "the most
influential American idea in global political history. It may indeed be the most
important political idea of the modern era." As we used to say on British
examination papers, discuss. And I hope possibly
that might challenge you to think about a
follow-up book on that really, as it were, to cash
out that claim, not specifically about
Madison, but to tell us more, as it were, about the importance
of that idea on a global scale and to calibrate that against
other potential candidates for the role of most
important political idea of the modern era. I also hope, just in conclusion,
that you might, at some point, maybe not immediately, return
to the art of biography as well. I think you are
an extraordinarily skilled and compelling
biographer now. You've passed that
important hurdle. But the biggest
challenge of all might be to write the biography of
someone whom you do not admire, or for whom you do
not feel sympathy. We all would think,
here, for example of Bernard Bailyn's
great biography of Thomas Hutchinson-- that the real
challenge is to imaginatively inhabit the world,
the life, of someone with whom you do not
feel instant sympathy and whose significance one
might wish to downplay, to put it very mildly. Maybe that will be the ultimate
challenge, at some point, is to face writing a biography
of someone detestable, though important rather than
someone who is friendly, companionable, almost
entirely admirable within the limits of his
own times, of course. And as you've shown, I think
in magisterial fashion, undoubtedly significant, not
just for an American audience, but for the global
audience as well. So thank you once
again for the gift of this remarkable recreation
of a remarkable life. [INTERPOSING VOICES] ERIC NELSON: Well, it's,
first of all, a pleasure to be able to participate
in this event. Noah served as a discussant
at a similar symposium for a recent book of mine. I was reflecting on this
as it occurred to me that that book was 250 pages. So I look forward
to Noah's attendance at my next three book panels. But it's an extraordinary book. And I have to say, in a
way that I didn't expect, it challenged very deeply
my somewhat unreflective commitments and
predispositions about how to do the history of political
thought in this period. And I want to maybe
use my few minutes just to explain that, and then just
raise a few quibbles, just in the spirit of the occasion. NOAH FELDMAN: [INAUDIBLE]
law school [INAUDIBLE].. ERIC NELSON: The way that I-- the sort of intervention
which is, I think, very powerful, but subtle
goes something like this. So when we think about the
history of political thought, which is what I notionally do-- when we say, as is
very common to say now, that we have to put
theorists in their context. We have to reconstruct
their context so that we can understand
the intentions of their work, the way in which
they're intervening, in existing debates, what it is
they're trying to accomplish. In order to give a
good historical account of what their
interventions are, we need to reconstruct their context. And usually, what
we mean when we say that we have to
reconstruct their context is a discursive context. We want to reconstitute
the ocean of texts, pamphlets, books,
interventions that they're responding to to decode
what it is they're doing and to put them in
dialogue with others and understand that
sentence A and paragraph B is actually a move in
relation to this pamphlet that was doing something different
or using this concept, but deploying it in a slightly
different way, and so on. So that tends to
be the sort of MO. And the idea is to show, in
a way, the extent to which these different figures are
using, deploying, and then criticizing a common language
and a set of common tropes, topoi, and all the rest. And what Noah shows
in this book is that that is a singularly
unpromising way of reconstructing the
context of James Madison, or at least the context through
which we should understand the content of his
important interventions in political theory. And this is something
that I think many of us who've worked
on the period have noticed. Madison is a very,
very strange figure. He seems to stand almost
outside of the discursive norms and conventions of the time. I mean, there are
often attempts to argue that it was Adams who
was the odd man, out or Hamilton who was the
odd man out in relation to particular claims that they
made or ideas that they held. But actually, in terms
of their participation in a recognizable discourse or
set of discursive traditions and practices, the one
who stands out is Madison. And as I say, those of us
who've worked on this material have had to struggle with this
in various different ways. My own struggles
have had to do more with the first third of the
book, Madison's first life, where it's always been a
point of amazement for me that Madison seems to have
been very uninterested in the American Revolution. That is, the first
extended comments we ever find him making
about the revolution and the constitutional conflict
with Britain come in 1774-- so very, very late. Now, part of that's
a matter of his age. But if you think about
Hamilton, in '74, he was already publishing
his pamphlets in response to Samuel Seabury,
very much responding to a whole set of other
pamphlets and arguments that had been made
throughout the colonies and in Britain itself. He had a very cosmopolitan
sort of perspective and was intervening
very recognizably in that set of debates. Madison didn't. And in essence, that has
sort of jarring and sort of strange ramifications. So one minor point that
Noah, very rightly makes early in the book, is to say
that Madison's first comments in relation to the
revolutionary crisis were provoked by
his accidentally getting his hands on a text
by Josiah Tucker, the sort of English divine and writer. And he writes in a letter that,
having read Tucker who's trying to defend the claim
the parliament has some jurisdiction over America,
he concludes it's actually, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],, Tucker has
convinced him of the opposite. That actually he makes the
case so badly that Madison is prepared to
conclude that actually parliament has no
jurisdiction over America. This is 1774. So the patriot
movement had reached that conclusion five years
earlier, at least, if not six. And so the fact
that Madison is sort of standing outside of that
tradition is very striking. And one could give
many more examples. And in essence, Noah gives,
I think, or at least I would characterize,
one of the implications of the book, is to give
a more generic answer or solution to that puzzle and
to say that actually, Madison is not the kind of figure
whose political thought is best studied context
truly in the discursive sense of contextualism, but
in a different sense. Where, what we're interested
in the case of Madison, is much more his life than
the field of discourse in which he was
swimming because he wasn't really swimming in it. And in fact, one of the
striking things about Madison is the degree to which
he excluded himself, removed himself from those
notions, sometimes very intentionally in these prolonged
periods of withdrawal and kind of private meditation. But for Noah, I think,
Madison's context is politics and in a
very particular way. And I think he
helps us to see what is strikingly
unusual, completely idiosyncratic about Madison. And that is, he was
the first career politician in this country. And that was his identity. That was how he saw himself. And that makes him unlike any
of the other major figures. So obviously,
Washington and Hamilton would have seen themselves,
first and foremost, as soldiers. Hamilton then is,
well, whatever he was. Adams and Wilson, first and
foremost, as a British lawyers using that career as
leverage to mobilize in the political contests in
which they found themselves. And one could go on. Certainly Franklin would have
seen himself and Jefferson primarily as a citizen of the
Republic of Letters in a way-- and Noah is very
good in highlighting the degree to which that
was not true of Madison. Madison did not think of
himself as a man of letters, as a kind of
philosoph who was sort of exploring the realm of the
mind and all of its pursuits with his peers. He was doing politics. And his horizon was always
very, very practical. And his reflections
on these issues were always motivated by very
specific political questions. There's a particular duty. We want to understand if it
poses a threat to the union. Well, that's going
to lead me to think about constitutional structures. There's this particular
question about the urgency of our finances. That's going to lead me to think
in a different way about such and such a thing. That's very, very different
from these other figures. He's approaching these
questions very differently. So one way of putting
that is to say that-- I mean, we've recently been
hearing a lot about the return of political, political theory. This is political history
of political thought, as opposed to intellectual
or discursive history of political thought. And in the case of
Madison, it clearly works. That's one dimension
of the life. The other, I think, is
the capital L, life. And that's what's maybe the
most interesting and surprising revelation of the book
is the degree to which it is important to
understand Madison, that he was, again, unlike
any of these other figures-- a bachelor who didn't
have to run his family estate in the formative period
of the first third of the book. He had a living father
who was doing that. And so he had none of
the other entanglements and preoccupations that
these other figures had. He was just doing this. And the medium through
which he thought about his political
approach to political theory was, as David pointed
out, in the context of these extraordinary
political friendships. And he only had
political friendships in this later period. So unlike the very
early period that Noah talks about when he's at
Princeton, after Princeton his only close
friends are friends with whom he is engaged
in the political sphere and with whom he's discussing
these particular and specific issues of legislative design,
constitutional design, lawmaking, and so on. And Noah, I think, makes a
very strong implicit case that that's the right way to
think about Madison's very peculiar context. And the way in which he's
rather doing his own thing in very striking ways,
ways that would seem very strange to someone who
was trying to reassemble his context discursively,
where often we sort of hit a brick wall. I mean, in that respect
the exceptions really are the ones that prove the rule. So when he gets
to The Federalist and he starts writing
about the new government as feudal structure rather
than federal, confederal. There, you finally exhale. And you say, oh, thank god. You know, he's actually
talking like Adams, like Hamilton, like all
of these other people who are reading Smith and thinking
about feudal confederacies and all the rest. But it's precisely the rarity
of those moments that sort of calls attention to them. So I think that's,
at least for me, what was the really provocative
contribution of the book. Quibbles. On some of the-- and I say quibbles, they're
really friendly amendments because Noah was
really pushing me to think about how original some
of these arguments that Madison is known for making
actually were. And what I found myself
thinking sometimes is that I might dissent
modestly from a very strong claim about originality. But still, give the man credit
for doing something very different with a received idea. So for instance, I
don't think it's true that the federal
negative is his idea or that is that
it was a new idea. The federal negative
is, structurally, the idea of a kind of
central legislature-- that would wield the
negative in relation to the kind of
subsidiary legislatures-- was a constitutional
picture that was deployed pretty often in
the early 1770s in the context of the imperial crisis
by people trying to imagine how it
might be resolved by creating an imperial
federal legislature. And it was a kind
of recognizable move in that set of arguments to
say that the legislature should inherit the negative
of the crown. So that the federal
legislature should be using a negative to sort of-- at the center of a kind
of federal arrangement of different dominion
legislatures. But where I think
you're right is that, although the sort of
the device in this context was not new, the purpose that
Madison assigned it really was. No one in '74, '75,
or even earlier, Bancroft, Galloway,
these other people who were thinking
along these lines. No one ever thought
of that as a device for the protection
of minorities. They thought of it as
simply the institution of what they called
a pervading power, a kind of harmonizing power. And they were thinking of
it particularly in relation to trade. That, if you were going to
have these individual dominion legislatures doing
their own thing, you needed someone keeping
them all on side making sure that they weren't
at cross purposes and they were maintaining
some kind of balance of trade, and that's why you
wanted the negative. So I think-- and maybe
this is my pitch. I think very often he's
taking received ideas and retooling them and applying
them in different ways, getting something
new out of them. And I think that's equally
true of the extend the sphere argument where I think the debt,
not only to Hume whom you talk about, but also to Smith,
in particular in relation to religious sects, is there-- but again, repurposed and
given a very different kind of coherence. And also, and this is where I'll
end, the problem of faction. So one of the things
that Noah argues is that it's not only
Madison's solution, as it were, to the problem that's
a novel contribution, but his posing of the problem. The problem of
tyrannical majorities, of interested
majorities in a republic as a kind of poison
pill, that's this kind of potentially fatal flaw
in republican governments. Namely, that if you
take it as given, as Madison does, that you're
not going to eliminate divergent interests,
then what do you do about the possibility
of a majority interest that will behave tyrannically? And here, again, my instinct is
to say it's not that Madison-- the novel contribution isn't the
specification of the problem, because that problem had been,
I mean, to say that the-- just to give one example had
been the central royalist criticism of republican
political theory and the beginnings of democratic
political theory, precisely the idea that what
it amounted to was the tyrannical rule of the
majority in its own interests, and running roughshod over
the liberties and properties of subjects, which is why
it was the monarch who was the great defender of
the liberties of subjects. I think it's not so much
that that's the novelty, but, as it were, accepting
the royalist critique of republicanism rather
than attempting to reject it and then trying to offer a
solution to sort of domesticate it, which is how I would think
of what the intervention is building, in some
respects, on other earlier republican theorists
who had taken as given the ineradicability of
different humors, or factions, or interests. But again, doing this
with kind of a novel and much more
sophisticated sort of engagement with the material. So anyway, those would be my
quibbles, such as they are. But I think it's a
very important book, a very provocative book. And also just, we can't repeat
enough, just a terrific read. I mean, it's extremely
well-written. It's very judicious. You avoid the temptation
of going native in your subject, which is
the occupational hazard of biographies, particularly
I find, of American founders. That is, it seems impossible
to read a biography of Franklin where Adams isn't
a tin pot dictator, and Hamilton isn't Caesar. And then, vice versa. You read the Adams biography,
and then Franklin is a lush. The ability to sort
of give a fair shake to each of these
figures and to notice, as you do particularly I think,
in the excellent discussion of the bank, being
willing to show where Madison is behaving
disingenuously and arguing spuriously. So it's extremely
fair-minded, and rich, and you should all read it. BRUCE MANN: OK. As the law school
member of the panel, I wish to incorporate by
reference everything that's been said so far. It is, as everyone
here has said, a really a remarkable
accomplishment. And I hadn't quite
realized until I read it what it was that made
the match of biographer and subject in this case such
a particularly appropriate and felicitous match. And to do that, in part, let me
sort of step back a little bit and talk about the
genre as it applies to biographies of the founders. Many of you have doubtless
heard the phrase Founders Chic. And it became popularized
maybe about 20 years or so ago when you had a spate
of biographies of members of the founding generation
written for general audiences, but by biographers
who were, themselves, quite learned people. And in this literary
genre of Founders Chic, it was often fascinating
as much for what we learned about the
subjects as what we learned about the biographers, certainly
for dealing with biographies of prominent people,
particularly, those figures that
have been written about in successive generations. You see different
interpretations of the subject that
reflect, in large part, in effect, the
political social milieu of the time of the biographer. And I remember when I was in
graduate school, the sequence that we studied was successive
biographies of Oliver Cromwell, which had
him ranging anywhere from this enlightened figure
to a 1930s-era fascist, and again, depending
upon the politics and period of the biographer. With the Founders Chic,
it's interesting to see who gets written about first. Putting aside the
multivolume biographies that were written from the
late '30s into the early '60s, whether there it
was Dumas Malone's, the multivolume
biography of Jefferson, or Irving Brant's multivolume
biography of Madison, it's the later sequence. Jefferson, of course, has always
attracted a lot of attention, in part because
everyone is attracted to Jefferson's
contradictions, which part of the contradictions,
they emphasize, whether it is the Declaration of
Independence Jefferson, or it's the slave
owning Jefferson, if it is Jefferson the aesthete,
or Jefferson the debtor. With someone like Jefferson,
reading the various biographies are often put in mind of
the proverb of the blind men examining the elephant. They each sort of grab
onto a particular piece. And through their
limited senses, examine the hell
out of that piece. But Jefferson provided
material for it. With Benjamin Franklin, it
was because he was his own-- the self-presentation,
self-creation of the figure, from the humble
printer to the very learned man who wore homespun
and charmed the hell out of large numbers of people. He also provided an appealing
individual, the subject. Madison sort of
effectively has been left for last among the members
of the founding generation to attract treatment
of this kind. And I think in part-- part of it is
associated with what Eric mentioned that he was not
as interested in or as involved in the revolution. Of course, with Washington,
you have this great soldier. With Jefferson, you have the
author of the Declaration of Independence. Even with John Adams,
you have this figure who was deeply involved
in the political arguments for independence. But as mentioned,
Madison was younger. But yes, Hamilton
was younger too. But Hamilton was a soldier. And it was the multiplicity
of Hamilton's, personality and his intellect
that would ultimately attract what was,
for the Founders Chic, the ultimate
treatment, of course, which is that by Lin-Manuel Miranda. But with Madison,
I think, perhaps, the impediment to
there not having been a treatment of
this kind before is, in part, because of the-- to understand
Madison, you really do have to understand
the Constitution, and you have to understand
constitutional law. And that is simply the starting
point, which is why I think, in part, of the
pairing of the subject and biographer here is
particularly appropriate. And in retrospect, an
inevitable pairing because, as Noah mentioned, he
approaches this as a scholar of constitutional law. And he has thought
about it deeply. He's thought about
it for a long time. He's written about it. In that sense, this is the
ultimate originalist biography because of the way
he does get inside Madison's contributions to the
Constitution and his commitment to it. And so it would not have been
possible to write about James Madison without
having the familiarity with the Constitution
that Noah does. And quite frankly, none
of the other authors who have contributed
volumes on founders had that kind of
knowledge or understanding of the Constitution. As superb historians
as many of them were-- not all, but many-- none was a lawyer. None had studied
the Constitution either with the understanding
of its origins that Noah does. Because I think
to understand it, you have to understand its
subsequent history as well. The second part that
I think turns out to be key to
understanding Madison, and I think is
part of what makes, again, the pairing of
biographer and subject so effective in this case, is
the extent to which Madison learned to become a politician. And this echoes Eric's comment
about the Madison being the first real politician. As I read the book,
I watched Madison acquiring political skills. I suppose some people are
born with political skills, but not very many. But on the other hand,
you can learn them. You just have to be aware. You just have to learn
to understand people. You have to try to figure
out what motivates them. And in the course
of Noah's book, you watch Madison
learning political skills until he becomes a very,
very good politician. And it really is quite
remarkable to watch. We often think today, when
the word politician is used as an epithet, of politicians
as being, on principle, people who are solely
interest in advancing their own interests,
or the interests of their constituents, or
their handlers, you name it. But in reality,
the politicians who have the most
enduring impact are those who do adhere
to principles, who do have ideals, who
do have a larger vision, who, when they do
make compromises, as all politicians must, they
still adhere to the principles so they can distinguish between
what is core and what is not. That is what you see
Madison doing and doing so very effectively. And I think also
in this, to echo in part what David
had mentioned, the role of friendship,
which is very powerful and one that I had not
really appreciated before. It's particularly
interesting with, I think, Madison and Hamilton. And it's interesting, in
part, because the two, in so many ways, were so
very much like alike-- ferociously intelligent
men who were widely read and who tried to influence
the world around them in the only way
they knew how, which was through their writing
and their arguing. Hamilton was probably more
feverishly devoted to that than Madison and more driven. But in a sense, I got the
feeling in reading this, that it was, in part,
their very similarities that ultimately drove
them apart and not simply that they wound up on opposite
sides of the political divide. But I think that the
appreciation of Madison, as a politician, and
what one could accomplish with political
skills is something that I know that Noah has
an appreciation for as well because I also know Noah
as an astute commentator on the current
political issues, often with their
constitutional dimension. But Noah has always been
very good at interweaving the constitutional
and political. And I think that is
something that shows itself very powerfully in the book. And so it is those two pieces
that I think were essential-- and certainly after
reading this book-- are essential to
understanding Madison. And I think they are
the particular skills that Noah brings
into, or his basis for understanding the subject. Now, I think, for-- I imagine is as
David was saying, that the thinking of other
things that Noah could take up from this, I could also imagine
Noah saying, look at this, and said, I gave seven years
of my life to this already. There is no way
I'm going to do it. NOAH FELDMAN: The Middle East
isn't working out that well [INTERPOSING VOICES] BRUCE MANN: That may be. That may be. And also, and David did point
out it's part of the dilemma with biographers. They question personal sympathy. It would be hard to spend
that much time with someone you did not like. There has never been, for
example, an adequate biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,
great justice of the Supreme Court. And in part, it appears
one of the reasons is that the biographers
who have tried, when they dig deep
into his papers, really can't stand the man. So when Mark De
Wolf Howe, who was on this faculty, oh,
in the '40s, '50s, was tackling a biography of
Holmes, he was in the library, and this wizened old
historian came up to him who found out what Howe
was working on, and just said, Holmes has killed many
an historian-- beware. NOAH FELDMAN: And
then Howe died. BRUCE MANN: And then
Howe died, right. Exactly. And so it's probably
better to stick to subjects that you like. But this is a remarkable
accomplishment. I think it is, of the various
entries into the genre of Founders Chic,
to me, it's clear why a treatment of Madison
had to wait this long. And effectively, it
had to wait for someone with Noah's combination
of skills and insight to come along. And to echo what my
colleagues have said, you look at the size--
to call it a page-turner, you could look at it
and say, well, there are a lot of pages to turn. But it is wonderfully
written and will well repay study for a long time to come. NOAH FELDMAN: Thank you. I'm extremely grateful
to all three of you, among other things, for
reading the entire book and engaging with it. And I just thought I would just
say, very briefly, in response, I accept all of the
quibbles, I think, as true. I accept the
analysis of why I was a reasonable fit with Madison. I wouldn't say I was constantly
in sympathy with him. Among other things,
he has a style of writing that tends
towards the indirect. And the more complicated
something becomes, especially personally,
the more abstract he gets. He's a deeply
repressed human being. And having written a book in
which Felix Frankfurter was one of the four main
characters, I've had the experience of
someone who was both-- I both identified with him and
also saw enormous flaws in him. He's, by the way, the person who
assigned the Holmes biography to Howe, that killed Howe. But the great thing
about Frankfurter is how unrepressed he was. Whatever was on his
mind at that moment, he would immediately put it to
paper or say it to somebody. So in that sense, I've
had the experience of writing about someone
where it was on the page. In the case of Madison, it's
always between the lines. And that is challenging
over a long period of time. I just want to
say, because I know there are a lot of law
students in the room, that partly, writing
a book in the genre that historians of political
thought can respond to is meant as a statement
also about what constitutional law can be. Constitutional law
involves, first of all, people who are not
lawyers like Madison. Madison flirted repeatedly with
actually qualifying himself as a common lawyer. But in the end, he never did it. And as Eric pointed
out, that's partly because he had become
a career politician, and he didn't need to do it. It's also that, as
Eric also mentioned, he inherited a
plantation, and so he didn't have the financial need
to go out and become a lawyer. But ultimately, it was that
he self-conceived himself as a statesman who would
teach himself as much law as he needed. And once in a while,
that went awry. I mean, when he was
Secretary of State-- Henry, you'll appreciate this-- he tried to write a book
of international law. It's his longest book. It's about 200 pages. It's unreadably bad and
not very convincing, mostly because you can see
himself trying to learn international law as he went. And as someone who once tried to
teach myself international law as I went, it's a very,
very hard thing to do. And it shows that
you don't really know what you're doing as you do it. So first of all
constitutions, are so important that they should
not be left to the lawyers and are not left to the
lawyers in the real world. Second, constitutions
engage ideas. And they engage ideas in
a very particular way. They engage ideas-- and this
very much I think came out in the comment
each of you made-- they engage ideas on
the political dimension. It's a lovely idea to imagine
writing a constitution behind a veil of ignorance. But it's also utterly
incomprehensible because real human beings
writing a real constitution couldn't possibly do so
behind a veil of ignorance other than the
inevitable ignorance about the future that's real. If you knew nothing
about who was going to fill the jobs
that you were designing, you would not be able to
design a constitution at all. If you limited the drafting
of a constitution to people who weren't going to play
a role in the future state, or at least knew
they wouldn't, you would be excluding the most
effective and intelligent politicians from designing
the document that was designed to facilitate active politics. So all constitutions,
everywhere, are actually drafted,
not against the backdrop of ignorance, but against
the backdrop of constant updating of information
and guessing about how the politics of the
given polity in the future are being shaped in the moment. So the second point here,
for you law students, is that constitutions
are about ideas. And those ideas are
political ideas, and they are in
constant engagement with actual real-world
politics, and that never stops. That's the way in which-- in a way, it's a biography
for originalists, but it is not an
originalist biography, because we see Madison's
conception of the Constitution fundamentally
transformed in the years after he led the
process of its drafting. So it calls into question,
in that sense, the idea of what originalism could mean. Because if you think it
means what the Constitution's public meaning was
when it was ratified, within a couple of years,
the people most involved in it did no longer believe that
it meant the things that they had been saying publicly,
and I think, indeed, privately believing that
it meant previously. Last but not least,
constitutions are made by human beings
who engage on dimensions of human interaction. And this brings us to
the friendship point that all of you mentioned. And in fact, my working
title for the book was Friends and Enemies
in the Early Republic. And then someone
said to me, maybe you should call
the book Frenemies. I thought that was
maybe a bad idea. But the notion of political
friendship and the capacity of human beings to form
political friendships-- and, indeed, to become enemies,
which is one of the things that happens in a true friendship. There is the possibility
of becoming a true enemy. And at some point,
Madison and Hamilton went from being true
political friends to true political
enemies in the deepest Schmidian sense of the term-- is that those friendships
are simultaneously in the realm of
ideas, in the realm of formation of alliances, and
still exist at the human level. And, I'll close with this. James Monroe, who was one
of Madison's closest friends in his life, right up
there with Jefferson, and a constant ally and
a rough contemporary, twice tried to destroy
Madison's political career by running against him
at crucial junctures. He tried to run against him
after Madison, believe it or not, had just gotten
the Constitution ratified in Virginia. He tried to run against
him for the House in a gerrymandered district,
gerrymandered by Patrick Henry. And had he won, Madison's
political career would have been in
serious, serious trouble. I don't know if it
would have been over, but it would have been in
very, very bad trouble. Then he ran against
Madison again when Madison ran for president. And in each instance, the
idea was, we're friends, but I'm taking you down. And in each instance, Madison,
rather extraordinarily, insisted, well,
this is political. It's not personal. Now, that was both
true in the sense that Madison tried
very hard to transcend the political division,
and a noble lie, a fiction designed to try to
preserve a friendship that mattered deeply to him. And then, when he was
president, after being saddled with a terrible Secretary of
State, Madison turned around, and he hired James Monroe
as his Secretary of State. And this was, in part, a
great political act and an act of political alliance. It was also that he badly needed
a good secretary of state. But above all else, he
also needed a friend. He sought after that
actual human connection. That's always a dimension
of our existence. And I know we do everything
we can, here at Harvard Law School, to drum out of you
the idea that the law ought to reflect or express
human connections. But it does, it will, and,
ultimately, it should. So on that note, I want to thank
my colleagues and my friends David, Eric, and Bruce
for participating today. And thank all of you so much
for coming and participating. Thank you. Please join me in giving a round
of applause to the panelists. [APPLAUSE]
