In 1790, Thomas Jefferson called James Madison "the greatest man in the world." In the 1990s, academic historians generally frown on such talk. They insist that because there is always disagreement about what is great and what is petty, we must acknowledge that there is no rational foundation for the distinction. Jefferson is closer to the truth.

James Madison's greatness was different from that of Washington or Lincoln. He did not display their moral grandeur. His greatness was best displayed in the sustained, penetrating, architectonic thought that earned him the epithet "Father of the Constitution." Lance Banning is alive to the greatness of Madison. In The Sacred fire of Liberty he attempts to recover the essence of Madison's architectonic thought, what he calls his "founding vision."

It is important to do this because it is "Madison on whom we unavoidably depend to comprehend [the American experiment's] intellectual foundations." If we have misunderstood Madison's founding thoughts and actions, "we have misunderstood the Founding." To understand Madison and the American founding, Banning undertakes a "developmental" study. He tries to trace the "evolution" of Madison's vision in the act of his founding thoughts and deeds.

Banning's book must be a work of recovery because, be argues, we have indeed misunderstood Madison--gravely misunderstood him in many fundamental ways. Between us and Madison's constitutional statesmanship lies a great heap of modern scholarly misinterpretation. Banning's book is a sustained effort to correct the many grievous errors, promulgated over most of this century, in what have become the prevailing views of the nature of Madison's founding vision and therefore of the founding itself. These fundamental errors have been committed by the most eminent scholars of the American founding. Charles Beard's prestigious errors have been corrected for decades and need (and receive) no special attention from Banning, though their influence has proven remarkably durable even among the most learned students of these matters. Banning singles out for explicit correction Irving Brant, Madison's great biographer; Martin Diamond, who did so much to revive the serious reading of the Federal ist; and Gordon Wood, whose work has established the leading historical paradigm for founding studies for the past thirty years. Banning holds each of these great scholars responsible for fundamental misinterpretations of Madison's thoughts and deeds. There are, he contends, grave flaws "in most analyses of Madison's position at the Founding." These errors of interpretation are a constant theme in Banning's book, not only in his endnotes but interwoven in the text from beginning to end. It is from this mountain of errors, as much as from the mere mists of time, that Madison's founding vision must be "recovered."

Two tendencies of modem scholarship seem to be the cause of most misunderstandings of Madison's founding statesmanship: a "fixation" on the chronic misinterpretation of Federalist 10 and "a nearly universal disregard of the confederal dimensions of his thinking." Almost equally misleading is the idea, made popular by Gordon Wood ("the leading modern student of the new American republic"), that "Madison repudiated early revolutionary thought and moved American decisively toward modern, liberal assumptions." These errors are related to one another and to other standard misreadings of Madison. They are connected, for example, with an exaggeration of Madison's nationalism in the 1780s; a misinterpretation of Madison's purposes and actions at the Constitutional Convention; and an inability adequately to explain Madison's role as opposition leader in the 1790's.

Banning's "developmental" study of the thought of the Father of the Constitution may be unsettling to those seeking a firm foundation for constitutional interpretation. But he does not mean to lead his readers on a futile search for a founding vision that is always changing, never complete. Although he treats Madison's most famous writings in the Federalist as merely "a snapshot of his changing vision, not a thorough, full, or finished exposition of his views," he does suggest that Madison's vision ripened to fullness and that it is accessible to us. According to Banning, Madison's constitutional understanding reached its essential fullness by 1793.

This may seem inconveniently late for a citizen wanting to trace constitutional arguments to the intentions of the Father as he framed and ratified the supreme law of the land in 1787-88. As a historian, Banning is content to acknowledge that Madison and the others who framed the Constitution "did not know from the beginning quite what it implied." However, in the course of writing a series of essays for the National Gazette, in 1791-92, Madison's founding vision solidified. These essays mark "another major landmark in the evolution of his thought." As Banning writes: "Not, indeed, until the contributions to The Federalist and to the National Gazette are seen as parts of one evolving corpus--not until the sets of essays have been read together, each within its context and as each explains the other--can we grasp Madison's vision as a whole." This is the next necessary step in understanding Madison's statesmanship, and thus the Amer ican founding--a step Banning refrains from taking in this book; he recommends the recent work in this area by Colleen Sheehan.

Banning insists that it is time again to emphasize the differences between Hamilton and Madison--to remind ourselves once more of the split personality of Publius. For all they held in common--and there was a great deal--important differences between these two founders were there (largely unspoken) from the beginning in the early 1780s, continued through their collaboration on the Federalist, and finally were brought roaring to surface by changing circumstances in the early 1790s. One of the great mistakes of modem scholarship has been the failure to distinguish Madison from Hamilton in the right ways and to the right degree.

In reviving this old and not merely academic question--in drawing out the distinctions between Madison and Hamilton--Banning insists that his "object is to understand the founders, not to judge them." He does not, he writes, "side with one against the other." But Banning succeeds in judging Madison impartially perhaps as well as Madison succeeded in finding a "dispassionate umpire" to arbitrate the fundamental political disputes within the federal republic. Banning's scrupulous and fair-minded scholarship does not prevent Madison from appearing as the hero that he is. He is not, perhaps, as generously impartial to Hamilton.

Banning takes trouble for example, to correct the "error" promoted by misreadings of Federalist 10, "that Madison held a Hobbesian view of human nature." In another passage, he goes out of his way to describe Hamilton as "a Hobbesian of Machiavellian in his conception of the world." He admits that certain passages of Federalist 10 "may readily suggest" that Madison was a Hobbesian, and certainly the same may be said of some of Hamilton's passages. But he rightly advises the reader to look at the whole of Madison's thoughts and deeds to discover the true understanding. Nowhere in Madison's writing, to mv knowledge, is there as pointed and explicit a repudiation of Hobbes as the following, written by the young Hamilton:

Moral obligation according to [Hobbes], is derived from the introduction of civil society; and there is no virtue, but what is purely artificial, the mere contrivance of politicians, for the maintenance of social intercourse. [But] Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed, that the diety . . . has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensibly, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. . . . This is what is called the law of nature. . . . Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind. . . . The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by any mortal power.

Madisonian impartiality requires some notice of this powerful repudiation of Hobbes by one accused of--or credited with--being a Hobbesian.

In thus repudiating Hobbes, Hamilton was affirming the principles of the American Revolution: the laws of nature and of nature's God on which "depend the natural rights of mankind" to secure which governments are instituted among men. In this, Hamilton was in perfect harmony with Madison. Charting the "evolution" of Madison's founding vision, Banning insists that the fixed point of constancy in Madison's statesmanship was his unwavering devotion to the principles of the Revolution of 1776. "Revolutionary principles and a determination to preserve the revolutionary order linked all of Madison's ideas into a complex chain." However Madison's constitutional understanding "developed," whatever he learned in founding the American federal republic, he evolved "without abandoning the Revolution."

In Banning's view, it seems to be precisely his undying fidelity to the "fundamental maxims of the Revolution" that marks the most important distinction between Madison and other "nationalist" founders such as Hamilton. Other framers and founders might fairly be accused of "reactionary" designs against the Revolution of 1776, but Banning cannot emphasize too much that Madison is to be distinguished from these reactionaries. There was "no hint" of "such a counterrevolutionary attitude in Madison himself"

In this matter, Banning's "impartiality" deserves to succeed in rescuing Madison from the misrepresentations of modern scholars since Charles Beard. Banning's example, it may be hoped, will inspire studies of equally scrupulous impartiality to illuminate the revolutionary fidelity of other founders and of the founding itself.

The relation of the Constitution to the Revolution is a theme that leads naturally to the general question of the meaning of the Constitution itself. Banning cites Gordon Wood's view that "the Constitution . . . was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period." Banning agrees with Wood that many supporters of the Constitution were anti-republican elitists with designs to remove power from the people and place it in the hands of a privileged few. James Madison, however, was emphatically not one of these. Madison "thought the Constitution perfectly consistent with republican philosophy." Banning notes: "The Constitution he defended . . . would not produce a government unresponsive to the people's needs or will." It was "a wholly democratic remedy for democratic ills." He makes a good case that Madison was true to his liberal-republican convictions in drafting and explaining the Constitution. But what of the Constitution itself? Madison and Wood cannot both be right: The Constitution cannot be "intrinsically . . . aristocratic" in Wood's meaning and "perfectly consistent with republican philosophy" in Madison's.

What does the Constitution "intrinsically" mean, to use Gordon Wood's surprising term? The term is surprising coming from Gordon Wood, who is not ordinarily associated with such discourse. He is better knows for his view that there is and can be no intrinsic meaning to the Constitution--that, in his words, "The Constitution means whatever we want it to mean." According to Wood, while it "may be a necessary fiction for lawyers and jurists to believe in a 'correct' or 'true' interpretation of the Constitution in order to carry on their business, . . . we historians have different obligations and aims." Here he expresses the prevailing view of the historical profession, heard often in recent discussions of the question of "original intent." There is no "intrinsic" Constitution; there is no "true interpretation" of the Constitution. As the historian and Madison scholar Jack Rakove has recently: "historians have little at stake in ascertaining the original meaning" of the Constitution. Unlike lawyers and jurists, and presumably citizens and statesmen, who must have their "fictions" of the true meaning of the Constitution, historians can "revel in . . . the ambiguities of the evidentiary record."

James Madison did not think that the idea of a "true interpretation of the Constitution" was a "fiction." His greatest efforts and accomplishments as a statesman may be said to have been devoted to elucidating the true meaning of the Constitution. There is perhaps no greater gulf between Madison's understanding and the "prevailing views" of modern and contemporary scholarly authorities than that which separates them on this issue. As the leading participant in the Constitutional Convention, as co-author of the Federalist, and as defender of the Constitution in the Virginia ratifying convention, Madison bad reflected upon the meaning of the Constitution more deeply and thoroughly than had perhaps any other American. When the Constitution became the supreme law of the land, Madison continued and--Banning tells us--even intensified his exegesis. During the first session of the first Congress under the new Constitution, Madison was compelled to cond uct "a more minute examination of the [Constitution] than be had ever undertaken." The occasion was the question of proper procedures for removal of executive officials. In seeking to interpret the Constitution, Madison sought to expound what "the Constitution intended." He admitted the great difficulty of this task, even for one as intimately familiar with the framing and ratification of the Constitution as he. All he could do, he said, "is to weigh well everything advanced on both sides, with the purest desire to find out the true meaning of the Constitution and to be guided by that and an attachment to the true spirit of liberty."

This was just the beginning of a lifelong effort to establish and perpetuate the sovereign authority of the true of the true understanding of the Constitution as the foundation of American political life. In this work Madison necessarily and self-consciously combined the role of historian with the role of founder and statesman. It could be said that he combined all these roles in the single role of the elusive "disinterested . . . umpire," attempting to arbitrate justly the most fundamental and divisive disputes about the terms of the American social compact.

Madison understood the Constitution to be a compact, consent to the terms of which bound the Americans together as one people. His understanding of this consent, which lay at the root of legitimate self-government, was part of a "complex chain" linking the American constitutional order firmly to the revolutionary principles of 1776. "The authority of constitutions over governments, and of the sovereignty of the people over constitutions," he wrote, "are truths which are at all times necessary to be kept in mind." To those truths that must at all times be kept in mind he would add the truth that the people themselves are bound by a superior authority. Though the majority may possess superior power, they have no right to impose--a la Gordon Wood--whatever meaning they prefer on the American compact. "There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied and which therefore more often needs elucidation than the . . . one that t he interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong."

In the great political crisis that Madison lived through in his long life--many of which are beyond the scope of Banning's book--he never endorsed the view that the Constitution "means whatever we want it to mean," that whoever happened to hold power at a given moment had the authority to expound in a binding way the meaning of the Constitution. In Madison's view, free government is founded not on the arbitrary and tyrannical will of transient majorities but on moral principles informing any truly sovereign consent: "The sovereignty of the society as vested and exercisable by the majority, may do anything that could be rightfully done by the unanimous concurrence of the members; the reserved rights of individuals (of conscience for example) in becoming parties to the original compact being beyond the legitimate reach of sovereignty, wherever vested or however viewed."

These are pious self-delusions or cynical poses in the Gordon Wood view, a view that prevails among contemporary professional historians. From this point of view, it was a "necessary fiction" at best that Madison was engaged in producing as co-author of the Federilist, as champion of the Constitution in the Virginia ratifying convention, or for that matter during the crisis of 1798, the Missouri crisis, or the nullification crisis, when be devoted himself to teaching his countrymen what the truth was about their constitutional relations to one another. The most important issues in most of American political history appear, in the "prevailing view" of professional historians, to be pointless clashes between "necessary fictions" led by combatants who are hopelessly deluded or cynical: It is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. The historians' "obligation," apparently, is to point this out, so that their grateful fellow citizens can re vel with them in the ambiguity. One wonders where this obligation comes from and is grateful that Lance Banning has in some measure risen above it. There is nothing cynical and very little that is self-deluded in his James Madison. Madison was a faithful tender of the Sacred Fire of Liberty.