Madison's Audience

Although James Madison's The Federalist No. 10 is the ur-text of American constitutional theory, the centrality of Madison's essay in modern constitutional debate cannot be explained solely by the originality or depth of its analysis. Rather, the commanding position of The Federalist No. 10 in today's debates rests at least as much, if not more, on the supposition that it played a crucial role in 1787 in shaping the Constitution. Yet most of what we know about Madison's theory comes from Madison's own notes and writings. In this Article, Professor Kramer asks how Madison's argument was received by his audience. Beginning with the assumption that novel ideas require close consideration before they are understood, much less accepted, Professor Kramer examines the evidence to support the claim that Madison's theory influenced the other Framers and Founders. He finds that Madison's argument, particularly those aspects that are important to theorists today, played essentially no role in shaping the Constitution or its ratification. Madison did not find an audience until well into our own century - a conclusion with potentially significant implications for how we understand and think about the Constitution. From the perspective of history, it suggests that in some respects the Founding may have been a more conventional intellectual event than we have been led to believe, and that the Founders may have been less aware than we like to assume of those characteristics of their society that we have come to associate with its modernity. From the perspective of law, although pure originalists have become increasingly rare, virtually everyone who works with constitutional theory treats the Founding as if it were entitled to special weight or consideration. While the role of historical evidence varies from scholar to scholar, moving The Federalist No. 10 from the center to the peripheries of the Founding will necessitate theoretical adjustments of some sort by most of them.