The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic.

• Author: Belz, Herman

In recent years some historical sociologists, critical of the tendency of Marxist and other forms of grand social theory to disregard empirical evidence, have urged a strategy of "bringing the state back in" to the study of politics. Their point, a methodological one, is that formal institutions of government really do exist and have a significant impact on the course of political events. Most constitutional and legal historians have not required instruction on this point, but the idea of "bringing the states back in" might serve as a useful description of recent developments in constitutional jurisprudence that reflect the exhaustion of nationalism as a creative intellectual and political force.

Lance Banning's new book on the political and constitutional thought of James Madison in the American founding signals this intellectual development in historical scholarship. Banning shifts the focus of study from the "republicanism versus liberalism" problem that has preoccupied historians for a generation, to the older and more fundamental issue of centralization versus states' rights. The direction of Banning's work is particularly important in view of his reputation as a leading exponent of the "republican-ideology" interpretation of early American constitutionalism.

In a 1988 essay Banning distanced himself from republican ideological orthodoxy in arguing that republican virtue did not, in essence, mean "self-surrender," but rather "vigorous assertions of the self within a context of communal consciousness and a willingness to live by the community's decisions" ("Some Second Thoughts on Virtue and the Course of Revolutionary Thinking," in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, edited by T. Ball and J.G.A. Pocock. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988, P. 200). Banning stated that the fundamental premise of a properly balanced republican constitutionalism was the existence of self-interested individuals and groups.

Banning's study of Madison presents the results of a fresh examination of the sources based on a deeper understanding of what is now generally recognized as the liberal republican political philosophy of the American Revolution. Revolutionary principles, Banning writes, "always meant both firm securities for private rights and the perpetuation of a form of government that derived entirely from, and remained responsive to, the body of an equal people" (p. 213). Madison, acknowledged in recent scholarship as the most penetrating...