James Madison: America’s First Politician

How do you clear up an issue like James Madison? The fourth president is likely one of the most confounding figures in early American historical past; his political trajectory appears nearly deliberately inconsistent. He was each for and towards a robust federal authorities. He wrote concerning the risks of political events within the
Federalist Papers after which helped to discovered the Republican Celebration just some years later. This so-called Madison drawback has occupied students for ages. 

As Jay Price exhibits on this incisive new biography, the underlying logic of Madison’s seemingly combined file comes into focus solely once we perceive him primarily as a working politician. Whereas different founders cut up their time between politics and different vocations, Madison devoted himself singularly to the work of politics and in the end developed it right into a distinctly American idiom. He was, in brief, the primary American politician.