James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government

'Colleen Sheehan's Madison is driven by an overarching concern: What would it take for this American population to become - and remain - a self-governing people? More was at stake than survival and prosperity. For Madison the new national community could flourish only if the people had good reasons for respecting themselves. Sheehan's engaging account of America's beginnings enlarges our understanding of the hopes and fears, successes and failures, not only of a notable man but of a generation of founders.' Ralph Lerner, University of Chicago
'This book constitutes the most important contribution to the scholarship on James Madison produced in recent memory. In it, Colleen Sheehan demonstrates that Madison's ruminations on politics in the early 1790s and thereafter, and his activity as a politician in the early republic, need to be reinterpreted in light of his Auseinandersetzung with a group of late eighteenth-century French writers - including Mably, Moreau, Necker, Turgot, Condorcet, Chastellux, Dupont de Nemours, Le Trosne, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Mercier de la Rivière, Volney, Mirabeau, Brissot de Warville, Barthélemy, and the like - who debated the significance of what Montesquieu had, in his Spirit of Laws, called communication, and who wrestled with the importance of a powerful phenomenon, more or less unknown in France until the second half of the eighteenth century, which they termed 'public opinion.'' Paul Rahe, Hillsdale College
'Sheehan's insightful and incisive analysis of the thought of James Madison once again confirms for us his greatness as a political thinker and his importance as a proponent of popular republican government.' Gordon Wood, Brown University