James Madison and the Future of Limited Government.

• Author: Bond, James E.
• Position: Book Review

Edited by John Samples Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2002. Pp. v, 246. $10.95 paper.

The lives and philosophies of the founding generations fascinate us, as a decade-long blizzard of new biographies and studies attests. James Madison and the Future of Limited Government is, however, neither biography nor study; rather, it is a debater's handbook. It offers not a Madison for all seasons, but multiple Madisons for any season. Here readers will find handy bits of Madisonian wisdom with which to bolster their argument on any contemporary policy issue.

Do you, for example, demand direct democracy? John Samples, the collection's editor and the director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government, introduces us to Madison the advocate of direct democracy. Although Madison in Federalist No. 10 bemoaned the evils of direct democracy, he would now endorse direct democracy, we are told, as the cure for the ills of today's transformed polity: "Madison offered republic cures for political ills.... Scholars of American collective choice understand well the republican ills of our time: rent seeking and minority rule. Direct democracy provides a democratic remedy for these republican maladies" (p. 179).

Do you want to support multiculturalism and to advocate the common good? Tom Palmer presents Madison as a "real" multiculturalist who "openly embraced a pluralistic constitutional order [and] ... believed that such was essential to maintain liberty" (p. 71). In addition, Palmer argues that Madison defined the common good as the protection of equal rights and property under the rule of law and thus "sought to create a stable system of government that can effectively promote the authentically common good and at the same time resist the natural tendency of human beings toward factional conflict" (p. 77).

Do you long for peace and believe that transnational government alone will ensure it? If so, you, too, can summon Madison in defense of your cause. In perhaps the most ingenious of the many clever essays in this collection, the philosopher John Tomasi mines a Madison essay that appeared in the National Gazette on February 2, 1792. Entitled "Universal Peace," it concluded that "'a universal peace ... is in the catalog of events, which will never exist but in the imagination of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts'" (p. 220). Nevertheless, Madison did offer, according to Tomasi, "some pacific remedies in the...