The Mind of James Madison
The Legacy of Classical Republicanism

This book provides a compelling and incisive portrait of James Madison, the scholar and political philosopher. Through extensive historical research and analysis of Madison's heretofore underappreciated 1791 'Notes on Government', Madison's scholarly contributions are cast in a new light, yielding a richer, more comprehensive understanding of his political thought than ever before. Tracing Madison's intellectual investigations of republics and philosophers, both ancient and modern, this book invites the reader to understand the pioneering ideas of the greatest American scholar of politics and republicanism - and, in the process, to discover anew the vast possibilities and potential of that great experiment in self-government known as the American republic.

Part I: 1. An itinerant scholar in Mr Jefferson's library; Excursus: travels with Anacharsis; 2. Circumstantial influences on government; 3. The power of public opinion; 4. The federal republican polity; 5. Postscript; Part II: 6. 'Notes on Government'; 7. Additional notes on government; 8. Madison's convention notes and his letter of October 24, 1787, to Thomas Jefferson; 9. Party press essays.

Colleen A. Sheehan is Professor of Politics and director of the Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in American political thought and politics, and in literature. She has served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and is currently a member of the Pennsylvania State Board of Education. She is author of James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge, 2009), coeditor of Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the Other Federalists, 1787–1788 (1998), and author of numerous articles on the American founding and eighteenth-century political and moral thought, which have appeared in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly, the American Political Science Review, the Review of Politics, and Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal.