It is commonly supposed that the genius of the founding fathers (though this expression partakes of more than a little romanitas) lies partly in their conscious break from the classical past. Surely, the discussion of classical republics in The Federalist stresses that such polities offered more in the way of flaws to avoid, rather than examples to be imitated. Among the other benefits of The Mind of James Madison, it causes us to reconsider Madison's relationship with classical republicanism. What is most remarkable is that this legacy of classical republicanism was less that of Madison spending hours communing with Plato and Aristotle, but rather that his ardent study of the classical past involved issues of institutional design as well as civic virtue. Madison was interested in the size of republics, the features of leagues they formed, and the types of enemies they faced, as well as the qualities of citizenship they sought to cultivate. This Madison—interested in what we might term “geo-politics,” or the prosaic matters of size, external danger, and public opinion—is, if not altogether new, less familiar.

In March of 1791 in a Philadelphia boarding house, James Madison delved into works of political philosophy and history. Precisely why he did so always seemed rather opaque. The Constitutional Convention was over; the papers of its great defense, The Federalist, had already been published. It is generally presumed (in so far as the decisions of the editors of The Papers of James Madison represent consensus) that the results of his labors, the “Notes on Government” are notes for the National Gazette essays, otherwise known as the Party Press Essays. However, Lance Banning thought that Madison had higher aspirations for the Notes (Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison & the Founding of the Federal Republic, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 349). The National Gazette essays were more along the lines of op ed pieces, as Sheehan notes, rather than an elaborate work of political theory in the grand style, and the latter was what Madison intended his Notes to be preparation for, according to Sheehan.

Although scholars have long known of the existence of Madison's 1791 notes, they remain unappreciated or comparatively unexamined. More than being worthy of a second look, Sheehan asserts that the “Notes on Government constitute the most ambitious philosophical project of Madison's scholarly career” (p. 4). This is a bold claim, and an arguable one; but I, for one, am persuaded of the scope and extent of Madison's intentions. Of course, a critical caveat is the fact that Madison did not finish them: What survives is approximately seventeen pages of notes and an outline—an architect's blueprints and sketches of interior rooms, not the building. Anyone who has looked quizzically at a blueprint would agree that there is a difference between the two; nevertheless one can discern intentions from plans. Sheehan's lucid essay and her exquisitely elaborated annotations make it possible to visualize what might have been. Part I of The Mind of James Madison is an explanatory essay on the notes, putting them in their proper context, and Part II comprises an annotated text of the notes themselves. In addition, all of Madison's Party Press essays are here published together for the first time.

Most striking in the Notes, is a Madison who was more of a civic republican than commonly supposed, even as early as 1791, and who was ill at ease with leaving the future of the American republic entirely to institutional design. Institutional design mattered to Madison, of course, but he was more interested in institutional arrangements related to federalism and territorial size rather than the separation and balance of powers. Territorial size and public opinion absorbed the majority of Madison's attention. The reasons Sheehan speculates for why this was so are illuminating. Rather than the studious acolyte of David Hume and Scottish philosophers, Madison was dissatisfied with the 18th century Scottish school and the emphasis it placed on “institutional arrangements and economic self interest” at the expense of ethos and paidea (p. 17). These Notes show that in Madison's eyes, Montesquieu abandoned character and ethos, which were a necessary compliment to institutional design. Active participation was as critical as the security of individual and property rights. As Sheehan writes, “Madison's republican vision required a very extensive territorial union - much larger than the moderately sized European nations and much tighter than the league of these nations that was envisioned by other republican thinkers of his time” (p. 18). This helps us to see what Madison thought the Constitution was: the blueprint of a federal republic that strangled majority faction and promoted the development of public opinion, for which education is a crucial element.

The Notes themselves are just that, replete with innumerable references to theorists familiar and arcane. The annotations are nothing short of a scholarly triumph, a labor of meticulous devotion that is a gift to Madison scholars and to all students and scholars of political science. The Notes are organized into thirteen chapters, which together form an outline of a systematic work of political thought. The first chapters cover the various influences on government, including the territorial size, foreign enemies, the stage of society, public opinion, education, and domestic slavery. Clearly, the apex and culmination would be a description of the novel federal republic found in the United States. Among the happy discoveries of Sheenhan's excavations is Madison's reliance on Jean Jacques Barthélemy's Voyage of Anacharsis, a popular exploration of the intellectual, artistic, literary, and political culture of Ancient Greece first published in 1788.

While the long term implications of this work remains to be seen, one can draw a few cursory conclusions. Together with Alison La Croix's The Ideological Origins of American Federalism, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) the Notes are an antidote to the claim that Madison was primarily worried about the danger to private rights posed by democratic majorities in state governments. Doubtless this was a necessary concern, but one that is not sufficient in grasping the multifaceted nature of Madison's achievement—to construct a federal system that would link the state republics together and cultivate the commerce in ideas necessary for true citizenship (p. 109). Economic rivalry and commercial competition was not enough, according to Madison. Sheehan's scrupulous care in explicating Madison's support for a constitutional negative on state legislation, and how this aspect of sovereignty is not to be confused with the prerogative associated with royal or executive power, is especially noteworthy (p. 100–106).

It may be that a more rounded understanding of Madison's political thought, made possible by this edition of his Notes, reveals less of a change from the Madison of the Federalist to the Madison of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Sometimes the search for continuity is ill advised—Cardinarl Newman claimed that to be perfect is to have changed often. Nonetheless, the Notes make an important contribution to that debate by showing that Madison did not make a volte-face at some point or other, but rather his political thought was always anchored in a classical preoccupation: the quest for the ideal republican citizen.