What is it about?
The Federalist remains the best single account of how American democracy is supposed to work. Yet it is also incomplete. This book provides a comprehensive survey of what recent scholarship adds to Madison's vision. Mixing modern social science with a detailed knowledge of history, this study asks where the Framers' scheme has gone wrong -- and what can be done to fix it
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Why is it important?
Madison's theory provides a unique blueprint for understanding the American system. At the same time, American government has changed in ways the Framers could not possibly have foreseen. This book reviews how scholars from de Tocqueville to Anthony Downs have revised and extended Madison's vision to accommodate these changes. It then updates the analysis still further by asking how Madisonian theory can help us to understand and address our own hyper-polarized politics.
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This page is a summary of: We Hold These Truths, November 2023, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/9781108990646.
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