Jay Cost > Quotes

“Experience is the oracle of truth,” he pronounced in Federalist 20, “and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.” Madison argued that experience had demonstrated that a “sovereignty over sovereigns… is a solecism in theory,” and in practice it substitutes “violence in place of law, or the destructive coercion of the sword, in place of the mild and salutary coercion of the magistracy.”24”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“When asked if anything was the matter, he responded that it was “nothing more than a change of mind, my dear.” Soon after, he was gone. One would like to think this a final and fitting Madisonian elocution, a clear-eyed understanding of the thin veil that separates life and death, but it is impossible to say.22”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“every day’s delay settles the government deeper into the habits of the people, and strengthens the prop which their acquiescence gives it.”18”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“nation so diverse that no group could rule by itself. Factions would check one another, and eventually the only way past such a stalemate would be to meet in the middle. In this process of finding common ground, something approaching justice and the public interest might be achieved, without the need for a king or a class of nobility. The implication was that, if practiced on a large and diverse enough scale, politics itself could solve the essential problem of government.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“People are simply too selfish for that to work. He believed that a central authority possessing the power to “sanction” the states was the only solution to the problem of collective action. Again, this is precisely the kind of idea that modern economists say is necessary. If the states intended to undermine the national interest, the national government had to set them straight.16”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Thus, Madison became the first theorist of a truly national American politics, the idea that the strength of the union was in its diversity. Other thinkers called for a stronger union for the sake of economic prosperity and international prestige, but Madison’s approach was predominantly political in its argument. Only by forging a stronger union among its disparate parts, he urged, could the United States actually secure the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“he would give it a fuller treatment in Federalist 10, where he argued that politics was essentially a matter of properly distributing the benefits and burdens of government. In a republic, he would write, “justice ought to hold the balance between them.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“If one group amounts to a numerical majority, its members can dominate government for themselves, but in an extended republic—one that includes a diverse array of economic, social, geographical, religious, and other groups—“society becomes broken into a greater variety of interests, of pursuits, of passions.” With no single faction able to take total control, the factions will “check each other,” forcing people to find common-ground solutions that work for the entire community.23”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“What Madison had hit upon in the “Vices” was a problem that modern economists call the collective action dilemma—namely, the challenge that individual agents (be they people or sovereign states) face when they try to work together to produce a good that will benefit them all. In many circumstances, it is in the interests of each agent to cheat, or not work for the public benefit, and instead let the others do the work. Since everybody has such an interest, the result is that nobody works to make things better. This is exactly what had happened among the thirteen states when it came to instituting commercial and financial regulations, enforcing international law, and supplying money for the national treasury. Collectively, the nation would be better off if the states did what they were supposed to do—pay their requisitions, abide by international treaties, and enact responsible monetary policy—but each individual state had an incentive to free ride, as today’s economists would say, placing its own concerns above the national good.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Still, the accomplishments of the final two years of Madison’s term can hardly be understated. With the president’s encouragement, men like Dallas, Clay, and Calhoun charted a new course for the nation, to lasting effect. James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, who followed Madison in the presidency, would advocate the same policies. Over the next generation, Clay would place them at the center of the “American System,” his political alternative to the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. Eventually, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant would call for internal improvements, a strong monetary system, and industrial protection—ideas that can all be traced to the policy initiatives Madison championed following the War of 1812.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“annual address to Congress, Adams proclaimed, “The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact.… Roads and canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and intercourse between distant regions”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Philosophers since the very beginning of Western civilization have been confounded by a riddle embedded deep within human nature. People cannot create justice among themselves spontaneously. We are too selfish to place the needs of our neighbors or the community ahead of our own desires. This is the primary task of the state: to act as a neutral third party to settle our disputes and promote our common interests, because we cannot do so on our own.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“The way he practiced politics was an extension of how he designed it on paper, as a search for common ground among factions.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“As German chancellor Otto Von Bismarck is once reputed to have said, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The events in the last half of 1814 had proved that adage right.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“As an alternative, the convention adopted what has come to be known as the Supremacy Clause, establishing the “Constitution and the laws of the United States” as the “supreme law of the land,” and thus signifying congressional authority over the states but not going so far as to give Congress explicit power to strike against them.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Madison’s opposition to the established church anticipates a dominant political concern of his career: the government should not play favorites but rather act as a neutral arbiter that seeks to balance the interests of the various forces in society.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Even a great rhetorician will struggle to convince a person of what he knows not to be true.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“For Madison, the answer to the essential problem of government was politics. He would force all factions in society to argue, debate, broker, and compromise with one another until they found a solution that most of them could live with. This would secure justice for all groups and promote the general welfare.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“It was not enough, Madison believed, to establish a system of government whose purpose was to find equitable common ground. The United States also needed leaders who took this to be their personal mission. Compromises must be made. Seemingly competing interests must be reconciled. And above all, government should not privilege one group over another, for favoritism is contrary to the bedrock of justice upon which all government should be founded.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Laws are necessary to “mark with precision” the duties of citizens, but when they proliferate beyond the minimum necessary number, they transform into a “nuisance of the most pestilent kind,” as it becomes impossible for citizens to know exactly what the government requires of them.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“In that essay, he would enumerate a long list of potential causes of factional strife, and he saw religion as one such force. “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation,” he would write, which is why it was essential that government stay out of the religion business. To “extinguish religious discord,” he wrote in the “Remonstrance,” the state had to refrain from choosing religious winners and losers. Any other policy would only encourage the sorts of “civil wars” seen in early modern Europe, during which “torrents of blood [had] been spilt.”23”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Federalist 10 and 51, widely read by students,”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Sometimes the wish is the father of the thought,”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“To Madison, Hamilton’s system was too heavily biased in favor of the commercial interests of the large cities, whereas in a republic the benefits and burdens of policy should be evenly distributed across the populace.”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician

“Madison’s examination of confederacies such as those in ancient Greece and in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland revealed a similar pattern: those that lack a strong central authority are doomed to fail. He would conclude that an imperium in imperio, or a government of governments, “is a solecism in theory” and in practice subverts the “order and ends of civil polity, by substituting violence in place of law, or the destructive coercion of the sword in place of the mild and salutary coercion of the magistracy.”14”
― Jay Cost, James Madison: America's First Politician