Willie Nelson

President James Madison - Father of the Constitution

James Madison lead the way in creating new democratic institutional structures while writing The Constitution of the United States of America and the Bill of Rights. His writings in the Federalist Papers provided a method for creating a system of checks and balances, rights and guarantees.

The Federalist Papers are a series of 85 articles advocating the ratification of the United States Constitution. The Federalist Papers remain a primary source for interpretation of the U.S. Constitution because the essays outline a lucid and compelling version of the philosophy and motivation of the proposed system of government.

The authors of the Federalist Papers wanted both to influence the vote in favor of ratification and to shape future interpretations of the Constitution. According to historian Richard B. Morris, they are an “incomparable exposition of the Constitution, a classic in political science unsurpassed in both breadth and depth by the product of any later American writer.”

In Federalist No. 10 James Madison discusses the means of preventing rule by majority faction and advocates an extended republic, is generally regarded as the most important of the 85 articles from a philosophical perspective.

it is complemented by Federalist No. 14, in which James Madison takes the measure of the United States, declares it appropriate for an extended republic, and concludes with a memorable defense of the constitutional and political creativity of the Federal Convention.

In Federalist No. 51, James Madison distills arguments for checks and balances in a memorable essay often quoted for its justification of government as “the greatest of all reflections on human nature.”

James Madison considered the constitutional republic to be a necessary step at the time on a progressive path that had to be protected from corruption and dissolution by internal mechanism. This constitutionalism was radically liberal in its day and has been under attack ever since.

The progressive path leads us toward true democracy and away from the unilateral power exercised by sovereign states. Sovereignty in all its forms inevitably poses power as the rule of the one and undermines the possibility of a full and true democracy.

The progressive path must challenge all forms of sovereignty as a precondition for establishing true democracy on a global level. In each age, the progressive path provides opportunities such as discovered by James Madison.

Today technology allows us the ability to communicate and cooperate on a level and at a scale James Madison could not imagine. The new democratic institutional structures that can be implemented today hold the potential to move the world down the progressive path to world peace.

Tags: democracy

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