James Madison: Proponent of Big Government?

Alison LaCroix. The Ideological Origins of American Federalism. (2010)

Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia. LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multi-layered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work: it was the system.

What is old is new again. LaCroix has pointed us, once again as historians did a century ago, in the direction of structures and institutions. She is out to slay giants, in this case Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood. Unfortunately, her selectivity in the evidence presented is obvious. The founders relied upon are Hamilton, Madison (pre-1793), James Wilson, and John Marshall. No Mason, Henry, or John Adams. Her implied conclusion that these men would support the reach of the national government today is flimsy. The debate regarding structure did not happen in a vacuum, although one can not know that from this work.