The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects on the Inauguration:

James Madison’s Answer to Hate & Dissension

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© January 19, 2017

As we approach the inauguration of our forty-fifth President of the United States tomorrow (January 20, 2017), it might be well to give pause to one of the giants of our Founding Fathers, who is not commonly recognized for either his brilliance or his singular contributions to the stability and solidarity of the United States as a fledgling country. 

James Madison (1751 – 1836) was one of the three co-authors of the Federalist Papers upon which the U.S. Constitution is based.  He was the fourth president of the United States after Thomas Jefferson.  

Jefferson is remembered for his brilliance and high profile while Madison is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution” for his pivotal role in drafting and promoting the United States Constitution and the "Bill of Rights" through a fractious and self-interested and neophyte Congress. 

By comparison, France went from rule to ruin after the French Revolution of 1789 with Emperor Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette losing their heads to the guillotine.  The abrupt change from absolute monarchy to formal constitutionalism had no precedent not even in America.   

Hatred and vilification were rampant with madness, divisiveness and antagonism so evident that no one was safe from the subsequent “Reign of Terror.”  Thousands died on the blade of the guillotine, as one historian put it that the “streets were choked in blood.”

Radical revolutionaries came to the fore in the persons of Georges Danton (1759 – 1794) and Maximilien Robespierre (1758 – 1794), both men were enthusiastic supporters of guillotine justice, and both men were to end their short lives with their heads on that block.  Danton was 34 and Robespierre was 36. 

How could France have become a slaughterhouse?  

After a splendid vision of a peaceful and just, libertarian and egalitarian nation, rabble rousers came to power, not patient and judicious leaders as they did in the United States in the persons of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, John Adams and James Madison.

The Founding Fathers of the American Republic were able to channel the outrage of the people into effective and enduring reform; the French were not.  Instead, the French leadership abandoned the moderate legacy of the Enlightenment expressed in their 1791 Constitution for a panoply of rights destroying the first and most important right, the right to life, abandoning due process, while vindictively disposing of their enemies at will.

You could ask: why this failure?  

Historians tell us that Danton and Robespierre were absolutely convinced that they were right; that they believed they understood the “general will” of the French people, hence they were morally right with whatever they did.  Opposition to them was not only mistaken, but evil and traitorous, hence the justification for lethal punishment at the guillotine.  The sheer ferocity of the times reflects more a psychological than a political atmosphere. 

The “psychosis of fear” was aroused to the point of savage hatred.  Fear of what might happen was cloyingly ubiquitous.  Distrust blanketed the land.  Civility and the civil society collapsed.  It became the right against the left, then all against all until no one was safe.    

JAMES MADISON & THE LIBERTY OF THE PERSON

James Madison was slight in build, short in height (5 foot 4 inches tall) and not a captivating presence or speaker.  He didn’t make sledgehammer statements like Thomas Jefferson did.  Nor did he look up to the much taller man who stood at six-two.  He read the philosophers of the Enlightenment and was a special admirer of the Scotsman David Hume on human nature, working quietly behind the scenes with Hamilton and Jay on the Federalist Papers.

He understood the possibility of disunity in a diverse society and addressed this in his Tenth Federalist Paper combining his philosophical and empirical perspective to reach a profound insight into human nature and its implications for an ever changing and always potentially divisive society.  

What follows is taken from the Tenth Federalist Paper and stands with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man, and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning Government and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for preeminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to cooperate for the common good.

So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts.  But the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various unequal distribution of property.

With the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the United States of America President tomorrow, January 20, 2017, in this climate of hate and hostility, I thought it was a good time to give pause why we as a nation continue to survive.