Above all else, Madison's political thought and practice forces us to confront the problem of constitutional imperfection. Because no constitution can address every political problem, and because those who live under constitutions will find ways to make them compatible with their deepest ambitions, constitutions are necessarily imperfect. As a result, the philosophically inclined will want to understand whether their constitution recommends a doctrine of how to treat constitutional imperfection. With respect to this problem in the context of the U.S. Constitution, scholarship on the political thought and development of the early republic has uncovered three great traditions associated with the three most dominant political thinkers of the period: Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison.

This evidence presented in this book, however, complicates our understanding of these traditions by showing where Madison departs from Madisonian constitutionalism. In place of Publius Madison, who argued for veneration of the Constitution and seemed to rely on elite representatives to “refine and enlarge” the public view, this book has presented a fuller Madison by considering in him in several of the contexts of his long career. This wider perspective reveals that Madison did not always see veneration of the Constitution as an unqualified good. Rather, at times, Madison worried that veneration would stand in the way of necessary reform. This wider perspective also further confirms that Madison's opinions about the Senate remained complicated by the deal with the small states, and it reveals that this deal – both its terms and its consequences – gave Madison additional reasons to doubt the possibility of true deliberation by legislative elites, both during times of founding and during times of normal politics. On a related point, this book also shows that Madison turned to the democratic logic of the argument for “responsibility” even before he was forced by his break with Hamilton to organize the opposition to Washington's administration. Further, in using responsibility to connect the president to a national majority, Madison was likely limiting the damage he believed resulted from the equality of states in the Senate, but he also laid the intellectual groundwork for Jefferson's Revolution of 1800.