James Madison’s Internet Problem

James Madison escaped the cutting cold of February and April 1787 camped out in New York City, distilling his thoughts in advance of the Constitutional Convention soon to convene in Philadelphia. Much of his political philosophy, on which so much of our system of government depends, first fell into place and onto paper during this time.

Of particular note, it was here and now that the seeds of the Madisonian theory of republican government — which he often referred to as “confederation” or “confederacy” — having been planted the winter prior as he consumed and considered volume after volume of political history at Montpelier, began to flower. We have been harvesting an uninterrupted constitutional bounty from this snowbound rumination since.

But in reading Ralph Ketcham’s authoritative biography of our fourth president, I came across this nugget upon which rests much of the political theory undergirding Madison’s “Virginia Plan,” that would soon form the foundation of the U.S. Constitution drafted during an age where horse-borne messengers and printed parchment represented the most cutting edge of communications technology [emphasis mine]:

At the crystallizing moment in New York, he may have read David Hume’s ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,’ an explicit rejection of the notion, hallowed by Aristotle and Montesquieu, that ‘no large state…could ever be modeled into a [republican] commonwealth.’ To the contrary, Hume asserted, as probable. Democracies, prone to turbulence, became more so in small territories because, there, passions were readily communicated and easily became dominant. In a large republic, on the other hand, the greater number of factions, and the physical difficulties of effective collusion on prejudices and passions, would hinder hasty, irrational measures against the public interest.

In the late 18th Century, communication at the speed of light across a country of our size, or even across the 13 colonies, was unfathomable — even to the broadest minds of the time, like a Madison or a Hume or a Jefferson. But today, “effective collusion on prejudices and passions” over great distances is not only possible, it is pervasive. Little in our lives, personal, professional or political, would be possible without the powerful ability to instantly communicate with anyone, anywhere about anything. Can you imagine a modern presidential campaign, a protest movement, or a product roll out without the Internet, long-distance telephony or broadcast television? Madison concluded:

“The great desideratum in Government is such a modification of the sovereignty as will render it sufficiently neutral between the different interests and factions, to controul one part of the society from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the whole society.”

Even the most news-blind person could attest to the fact that our large republic today contains multifarious faction that more or less balance out one another. That pillar of Hume-inspired Madisonian theory appears to be sturdy, though it may be wise to further explore the current meaning and implications of “modifying the sovereignty” of individual citizens and lower levels of government.

What of the other bedrock notion? Much scholarly ink, of which I am ignorant and by which I would love to be enlightened, has surely been spilled on the subject. Mining that ink, like sifting through Ketcham’s, could yield us a wicked jewel more rare than finding a flaw in James Madison’s thinking: a professorial political theorist proved right in real time.

In 2016, as flash protests and millisecond movements circle the globe in the time it took Madison to wet his quill pen, we could be witnessing the final unraveling of a critical component of American political theory fathered by the Father of the Constitution.