“Madison, Citizenship, and Deliberation”
Speech given on James Madison’s Birthday at James Madison’s Montpelier
In 1774, a young James Madison was home from university and filled with anxiety about what to do with his life — an anxiety he betrayed in his correspondence with his friends. He recommends law and politics to one of them, calling it “a sort of General Lover that wooes all the Muses and Graces.” Madison didn’t dedicate himself to the life of an active citizen and leader, though, until he found himself drawn in by the needs of his community — for representation, for religious liberty, for an example of leadership. I have taken, and still take, inspiration from Madison’s choice — and my life has been dedicated to civic engagement and a belief in the continuing education of our body politic. Cultivating citizen virtues binds us all of us here together, whatever form that cultivation takes — whether we serve in the military, support a place like Montpelier, volunteer in our communities, take on activist causes, or just teach in our classrooms.
Madison embodied this in his active public life — from the Virginia Convention of the 1770s to the Constitutional Convention to Congress, the Presidency, and establishing universities, he cared less for an individual office he might hold than for the health of the republic, seeking to create a civic society in which citizens were, as he wrote in 1792, “to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it, as well as obey it.” As Louis Brandeis put it about a hundred years later, I believe that, “the most important political office is that of the private citizen.” With the office of citizen come responsibilities to civic engagement which American citizens have been trying to live up to since the beginning of our Constitutional order, when “We the People” were responsible for debating and ratifying our social contract. And as was eloquently, passionately, and, to my teacher self, stirringly, upheld by thousands of students across our country on Wednesday.
The operative word there, of course, is trying. We don’t always live up to the demands of the office of the citizen. James Madison himself was keenly aware of our weaknesses — in that same 1792 column he noted that humans were all too often “ignorant…surprised….divided” and that such a citizenry would often fall into the grip of bad governance.
When some are not able to live up to their responsibilities, Madison’s genius was to understand that the solution was to “widen the sphere,” and create the proper constitutional framework so more people could exercise the office of citizen, and a few failures would matter less. But Madison and his contemporaries failed at this — citizenship was not granted to many of our ancestors. Montpelier has begun to tell the story of that failure in the past two years, with their masterful and moving Mere Distinction of Colour exhibit. It’s worth noting that the name for that exhibit was taken from Madison’s statement at the Constitutional convention that,“We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” Madison made that argument while holding people in bondage himself, yet recognizing that the systems of oppression in which he participated represented a failure of his nation’s civic aspirations.
Ultimately, though, he remained an advocate for the way an active, informed citizen body was the only effective ballast for the state to remain afloat and stable. As he wrote in that same short but rich 1792 essay, “So in the institutions of man let there be no mystery,” advocating a knowledgeable and well engaged citizenry, so that their liberty would, again quoting Madison, “be no where so safe as in the hands most interested in preserving it”. Thus, it falls to everyday Americans to ensure that we constantly revitalize our body politic, dispel the mysteries that surround us, and keep our nation in the hands of its proper sovereigns, private citizens. I’ve tried to dispel those mysteries in the classroom for over a decade, and now as a state legislator in my first term. Many of you build the citizenry that Madison desired, too — you do it through community leadership, through military service, philanthropy, or advocacy. Together, we can ensure the kind of programs Madison would have hoped for — from the Center for the Constitution just down the hill here, to Americorps, Project Citizen, and my personal favorite, We the People, and bring citizens of all ages, colors, backgrounds, and beliefs into the office of citizen together.
But why spend so much time on James Madison, besides that it’s his house and his birthday we’re attending? He has been a model for my intellectual and political engagement, my students may shudder when they hear his name! But why do I still engage with his writings? And think others should?
By way of answering that, I would like to suggest a framework for how we should think about Madison and civic engagement in our very busy, or more appropriately seemingly busy, year of 2018.
Madison’s importance lies in his embrace of solitude and deliberation. In the rapid-fire, experimental world of the American revolutionary experience he stands out because of his ability to step outside of the day-to-day battles. This understanding of Madison as a thinker whose valuation of “solitude” is so important was only clarified to me upon reading a 2009 speech by the literary critic William Deresicwicz titled, “Solitude and Leadership.”
Deresicwicz suggested a problem with the contemporary civic world, saying “what we don’t have…are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army — a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.”
For Deresiewicz, the problem in contemporary life, is its demand for constant engagement in short-term crises and fleeting news cycles. Saul Bellow diagnosed this same problem saying, “the noise of life is the great threat, the sounds of the public sphere, the din of politics, the turbulence and agitation . . . Have now reached an intolerable volume.” This din, this noise, leads people to believe that they never have the time to think, only act.
Deresiewicz goes on in his speech. “Multitasking,” he says, “ is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas.”
This solitude does not mean locking yourself away, of alienating yourself from society. It can often be more of a mindset and a willingness to avoid Bellow’s “din, his turbulence and agitation”. In fact, others can be necessary to this particular kind of so-called solitude to be effective. — to quote Deresiewicz one last time, “introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person.”
This kind of reflection and thoughtful dialogue are the cornerstones of James Madison’s career. In his letters with Thomas Jefferson, his study of ancient republics in the run up to the Constitutional Convention, and his carefully penned federalist papers, we can see that he is carefully engaging not only with the concerns of the moment, but with the larger structures and ideas which undergird them because he was unafraid to engage in thorough, clear thinking. Madison knew how to strike a balance between skirmishing with his political opponents and building original ideas that would outlast the temporary partisan skirmish- his fight for religious liberty in Virginia exemplifies this, as does his approach to writing and refining the bill of rights. His solitude, this willingness to “be alone with his thoughts” helps James Madison stand out, not only as a political genius, but as a model for civic engagement. Let me briefly show two moments in his life where a withdrawal from the “noise of life” to greater reflectiveness led to important political achievements.
When Madison left the heady youthful culture of the University of New Jersey in the early 1770s, it was a cold dash of water at first — he had gotten used to the “din of life,” and wrote his friends in big cities to express his yearning for that day-to-day bustle. However, this moment ended up helping him to learn the introspection, the solitude of clear thinking, that would be valuable to his career. While William Bradford and others were getting deeply stuck into frantic protests against English authorities, the politics of the intellectual community, or the latest literary fads and frauds of Philadelphia, and more, Madison was reading his father’s library, teaching his siblings to read, and asking sophisticated questions. He also saw more deeply into the conflicts surrounding him about religious freedom in Virginia than his contemporaries. His letters in the 1770s are full of questions like “how far is a religious establishment important to the state,” and “what is a good plan of books and reading for the study of governments,” and commentary like “that diabolical …principle of persecution rages…and to their eternal Infamy the Clergy can furnish their Quota of Imps for such business.” His willingness to engage in a kind of clear solitude of thought, engaged with but not consumed by the Revolution growing up around him and the specific leaders and persecutions in Virginia’s struggle for religious liberty, gave him the ability to engage more effectively than others when the time came for action on those issues in Virginia, both in 1776 and in 1786, as documents like the Memorial and Remonstrance and passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom show us.
Similarly, Madison’s preparation for the Constitutional Convention highlights the importance of a particular kind of solitude for preparing to effectively hold the office of citizen or leader. He asked Jefferson to deliver him a “literary cargo” from his posting in France, with the most recent volumes of Montesquieu, historical encyclopedias, and studies of continental government. He spent his free time in 1785 composing a series of notes — both on the politics of the Continental Congress and state legislatures and on the broader principles derived from the history of other republics, from ancient Greece to his contemporary Netherlands. He was no hermit — visitors came and went, he attended the Annapolis conference, and corresponded with his former colleagues in Richmond and New York — but he maintained a kind of intellectual focus, an inner space more isolated from his immediate concerns. The result was the Virginia Plan, the revolutionary document which propelled the Constitutional Convention in a new direction when it met, and gave the gathering purpose and revolutionary potential.
Madson’s gift for being alone, and the intellectual creativity that can come with it, are absolutely essential to cultivating better citizenship today. In a world where twitter, television news, facebook, the churn of neverending political scandals and campaigns, threaten to consume even the sharpest and most civically responsible, few of us of take the time or energy to think deeply and elevate the office of the citizen to its greatest potential. In our past, the greatest evolutions of our union have been when we and our leaders have engaged in that kind of civic transformation. For example, the framing and, a century later, practical fulfillment of the 14th Amendment’s promises of equality are examples of deep thinking born of intellectual engagement by two generations of civil rights leaders. The New Deal and Great Society’s ability to radically reimagine the federal government’s relationship to citizens and the economy, too, was an act of such transformational civic leadership. To meet our challenges today, we need such engagement.
So, actions matter. We need citizens, like those brave students, to protest, to knock on doors, register voters, defend us, and, yes, hopefully, propel our nation forward. But we also need to be introspective, to carry some of that Madisonian spirit around with us when we think about, or discuss, the truly important issues of our day. Abraham Lincoln captured some of this spirit in his Cooper Union address, at another moment when national politics urgently needed men and women to rise to the office of citizenship. “The facts with which I shall deal this evening,” wrote Lincoln, “are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts, and the inferences and observations following that presentation.” We must take the timeless principles of civic engagement — especially the principles of productive solitude — and apply them vigorously to our own circumstances. Whatever your role in our democracy, legislator, teacher, activist, or voter, there are modes of thinking and old ruts of conflict begging to be transcended. There are new Virginia Plans among you that will spur new approaches to our civic life and inspire your fellow citizens. Take Madison as your example, and season your action with solitude, your Twitter with some Thoreau, and wish him a happy birthday by donning the invisible badges and robes of the office of citizen with passion, yes, but also with consideration.
