This Week's Suggested Book
from the Ashbrook Center
(Monday, March 23, 1998)
 | | The Sacred Fire of Liberty:
James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic
by Lance Banning |
Cornell University Press
543 pages, January 1995
Hardcover, 35.00
ISBN: 080148524X
A percentage of the proceeds from your purchase of this book from Amazon.com will benefit the
Ashbrook Center.
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." Read the rest of Christopher Flannery's review of this book...
- Table of Contents
-
- Acknowledgments
- The Madisonian Madison: An Introduction
- Ch. 1. James Madison and the Nationalists, 1780-1783
- Ch. 2. The Crisis of Confederation Government, 1783-1787
- Ch. 3. The Crisis of Republican Convictions
- Ch. 4. The Virginia Plan
- Ch. 5. To Perpetuate the Union
- Ch. 6. To Redeem the Republican Name
- Ch. 7. "The Practicable Sphere of a Republic": Madison, The Federalist, and the Republican Interpretation of the Constitution
- Ch. 8. The Virginia Ratifying Convention
- Ch. 9. Spanning the Abyss: Madison, the Bill of Rights, and the Inauguration of the Federal Republic
- Ch. 10. The Great Divergence
- Ch. 11. Opposition Leader
- Ch. 12. Retrospect and Prospect
- Appendix: The Personalities of "Publius"
- Notes
- Index
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