Feldman (Law/Harvard Univ.; Cool War: The Future of Global Competition, 2013, etc.) returns with a substantial biography of our fourth president.The title's "three lives" refer to distinct phases in the career of James Madison (1751-1836). He appears first as the primary architect of the Constitution at the Philadelphia convention in 1787 and a major proponent of its ratification, accomplishments which alone would have cemented his place in history. There followed a bleak period leading the opposition in the House of Representatives during the Federalist ascendancy in the 1790s. Finally, Madison returned to executive power as Thomas Jefferson's secretary of state and then as president. Introverted and bookish, Madison was inclined to grand political theories and a nave expectation that people and nations would act rationally. He crafted a political system intended to accommodate the clash of disagreement while maintaining personal amity, and he went to great lengths to maintain friendships with his opponents. Ironically, he nevertheless became a leading partisan in a system he had designed to render parties unnecessary, and he began the unfortunate practice of labeling policies he disagreed with as unconstitutional, leading to breaks with former friends George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Feldman's scholarly yet accessible account emphasizes the evolution of Madison's views on the Constitution and his hard-earned flexibility as well as the maturation of his viewpoints and skills as he learned to adapt pure theories of government to political realities and then to make public virtues of the practical necessities. The richly detailed narrative, while occasionally lacking fire, is suitable for general readers; Feldman's presentation of Madison's adventures when the British burned the capital in 1814 is particularly rousing. The author skates over some setbacks and controversial decisions, like the rejection of a British armistice offer early in the War of 1812, and makes a brave job of harmonizing Madison's lifelong devotion to personal liberty with his status as a slaveholder. A timely biography presenting a valuable counterbalance to the current enthusiasm for Hamilton. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

IN APRIL 1789, James Madison, a member of the House of Representatives and a trusted friend of George Washington, ghostwrote the new president's opening message to Congress. Then he drafted the House's official response to the president. As if that wasn't head-spinning enough, Washington then asked him to compose his response to the response. Madison was truly "in dialogue with himself," as the editors of the Madison Papers put it. But the congressman was also in conflict with himself. Engaging in that dialogue violated his own carefully crafted blueprint for the separation of powers. As the Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman demonstrates in his illuminating and absorbing political biography, "The Three Lives of James Madison," Madison would remain in ongoing dialogue and conflict with himself for the rest of his life. Feldman explores Madison's reactive and improvisational thinking as it played out in the three uniquely consequential roles, or "lives," he had - as constitutional architect and co-author with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of the "Federalist Papers," political partisan and wartime president. The new nation, an idea still in progress, would inevitably call for reassessment, flexibility and innovation, and Feldman skillfully navigates the zigzag path of Madison's recalibrations. Except for his position on the issue of slavery, which Madison's allegiance to his planter class would cause him to consistently blur in a fog of words, he adjusted his theoretical ideas and practice of politics to the continuous flux of events. Madison's first life was as a proponent of an enduring constitution for a consolidated, centralized republic to replace the loose and dysfunctional alliance of states created under the Articles of Confederation. The Virginia Plan he brought to Philadelphia in 1787 became the basis for the convention's agenda. The delegates, however, would not always go as far as he wanted, especially when it came to his wish to clearly establish the sovereignty of the national government over the states. His proposal for a congressional veto over state laws in order to control, as he argued, "the centrifugal tendency of the states" was overwhelmingly rejected, leaving him fearful that the Constitution might codify a constant tension and conflict between the national government and the states. Madison's adaptive genius was on full display with the Bill of Rights. Much of the opposition to the Constitution turned on its lack of a guarantee of individual rights. Thomas Jefferson also lamented this absence, but Madison initially failed to see the need for such assurances, which he described as mere "parchment barriers," easy for "overbearing majorities" to override. But less than a year later, Madison, now a representative fulfilling a campaign promise to his constituents, introduced a series of such amendments in the House. "Without Madison, the bill of rights would not have been enacted," Feldman writes. "The entire episode showcased Madison's unique combination of theoretical brilliance and practical political flexibility. Although theory had told him a bill of rights was not necessary, political controversy and the need to get elected had shown that it was." The sharp differences between Madison's vision of the new republic and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's triggered Madison's second life as a partisan politician. He was taken aback by Hamilton's Federalist blueprint for transforming the new United States into an economic powerhouse. The first phase was to be financial centralization through the national government's assumption of state debts. At a dinner in June 1790, Madison and Jefferson negotiated a compromise with Hamilton, and the mostly satisfied Virginians came away with their own concession, an agreement to locate the new national capital along the Potomac. But a few months later Hamilton raised the stakes once more with a proposal to create a national bank. Once the full scope of Hamilton's ambitions was revealed, Madison accused him, as he wrote in a newspaper article in 1792, of trying "to pervert the limited government of the Union, into a government of unlimited discretion." In a move to halt the Federalists and their Hamiltonian agenda, Madison and Jefferson organized the nation's first political party, the Republicans - even though the notion of party politics ran against Madison's constitutional design to dampen the effect of factions. His shift away from total national sovereignty over states' rights became complete in 1798 after Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Sedition Act, targeting Republicans and their newspapers by restricting First Amendment rights. In reaction, an incensed Jefferson wrote his Kentucky Resolutions, arguing fatefully that the states had the power to nullify federal laws and even threatening "revolution and blood." Troubled by Jefferson's intemperate radicalism, Madison offered a moderate alternative in his Virginia Resolutions, contending that the states had the right "to interpose" against federal legislation they viewed as unconstitutional. Although the man who had once championed a national veto over state laws now seemed to assert the right of states to reject acts of Congress, Madison insisted that interposition meant only an appeal to public opinion. How exactly that was to happen remained conveniently obscure. IN MADISON'S third life as secretary of state under President Jefferson and then as president himself, he was forced to reassess repeatedly his own foreign policy positions. As secretary of state, he had preferred to maintain neutrality with regard to the burgeoning conflict between Britain and France. Britain, however, was determined to bring its former colonies to heel by harassing American commercial shipping and impressing American seamen. Madison turned to the tactic of economic coercion with a ban on trade with Britain. "The efficacy of an embargo," he confidently remarked to President Jefferson in 1805, "cannot be doubted." But while it crippled the American economy, the embargo did virtually nothing to curb the British, and in June 1812, President Madison backed into war. The nation, he declared, could not remain "passive under these progressive usurpations, and these accumulating wrongs." After two years of fruitless conflict, both parties were ready for compromise. The signing of the Treaty of Ghent at the end of 1814 re-established the prewar status quo. By claiming that the American effort "cannot fail to command the respect" of all other nations, Madison "set an influential precedent," Feldman astutely comments, "for subsequent American unwillingness to shine harsh light on wars that produced mixed results," a precedent that resonates today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Feldman does not discuss the elder statesman's role in the fraught nullification crisis of the late 1820s and early 1830s, but it's only a further example of Madison's political flexibility. South Carolina, furious about federal tariffs, cited Madison's Virginia Resolutions to argue that every state had the constitutional right to nullify federal laws and even withdraw from the union. For the rest of his life Madison rejected such an extreme interpretation of his Resolutions. The last of the founding fathers beseeched Americans to cherish and perpetuate their union, but the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions along with Madison's unwillingness to call for the abolition of slavery would continue to imperil the republic he so treasured. By the time of his death in 1836, the political order that Madison the dazzling political theorist had helped to design had been transformed by the partisan cofounder of the Republican Party, and had then barely survived a war under the executive leadership of the same man. Feldman's deeply thoughtful study shows that the three identities of James Madison constituted one exceptional life, which effectively mirrored the evolving identity of the American republic in its most formative phase. In Feldman's capable hands, Madison becomes the original embodiment of our "living Constitution."

Appropriately known as the Father of the Constitution, James Madison may be the most important but least-known of the Founders. He created a federal republic that balanced the extremes of anarchy and totalitarianism. An idealist in his early years, he believed people would unite for the good of all. With Alexander Hamilton, he wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers to persuade delegates the Constitution was the best instrument to extend liberty to the most people in the new country and abroad. But putting theory into practice strained friendships, leading to political adversaries and ultimately enemies. When the Constitution's implementation created political parties, the idealistic Madison became the pragmatic leader of the Democratic Republicans to counter Hamilton's Federalists. In his first life, Madison created the Constitution. In his pragmatic second life, he recognized the political realities. His deepening understanding of the need for agreement and negotiation marked his third life, including his presidency. More than just a favorable biography of Madison (Feldman acknowledges and examines Madison's less-than-exemplary treatment of Native Americans and African Americans), this is a thoroughgoing history of the period from the Founding Era to the so-called Era of Good Feelings. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University

James Madison and his ideas about individual liberty and republican government are Feldman's topics in this intellectual biography. Feldman opens with Madison's first political appearance, as a 25-year-old member of Virginia's 1776 convention to draft a state constitution. Making an impression as erudite and rational, Madison persuaded the body to disentangle religion from the state. His subsequent study of historical confederations made Madison one of the best prepared members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Relying on Madison's record of the proceeding, Feldman outlines the extent to which Madison's political principles were embodied in the new federal constitution. On to the 1790s, when Madison and Thomas Jefferson formed a party to battle Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists. Triumphant in 1800, the political duo's dilemmas between their constitutional conscientiousness and the exigencies of exercising power animate Feldman's discussions of their presidencies. Not neglecting the discord between Madison's political theories and his actuality as a slave owner, Feldman identifies Madison's lasting legacies in this important contribution to the history of the early republic.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2017 Booklist

Richly detailed and propelled by clear, thoughtful analysis, this comprehensive biography by Harvard constitutional-law scholar Feldman (Cool War) traces the arc of Madison's career from his early influence on the Constitution through his role as cofounder of the Democratic-Republican Party to his tenure as America's fourth president. In addressing each of Madison's distinct "public lives," Feldman situates his subject within a particular historical moment, while also attending to his complex relationships with Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and other key thinkers of the early republic. Madison emerges as an intense, introverted figure: his social awkwardness hardly endeared him to the public and his strongly held political beliefs often pushed him into conflict with former allies. Yet as Feldman shows, Madison's deep concern for liberty and the potential danger of faction also enabled him to change his mind on crucial issues, including the power of a centralized government. In addition to his well-developed portrait of Madison, Feldman offers lucid readings of founding documents such as The Federalist papers, reinterpreting these texts with a fresh perspective informed by close attention to language and the law. With its lively prose and political acumen, this biography will be of interest to general-history readers and scholars alike. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

James Madison (1751-1836) was instrumental in framing the constitutional government that serves the American people today, with his efforts at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Madison ended the "Genius" phase of his political life, as Feldman (law, Harvard Univ.; Cool War) labels it, by successfully persuading his fellow Virginians to ratify the new form of government at a critical point in the process. The politician was prepared to retire until he saw his concept of republican government threatened; he entered the second phase of his political life as a partisan, representing a Virginia district in the First Congress. Here, he became increasingly adept at practicing politics while becoming political enemies with Alexander Hamilton, a former partner in ratifying the U.S. Constitution. Madison viewed Hamilton's political ideas as threats to true republican government. It led him, along with Thomas Jefferson, to form the first political party (Democratic-Republican). In his third political life, as Jefferson's secretary of state and later as president, Madison tried to remain faithful to his ideals. -VERDICT Based on primary and secondary sources, this is an insightful examination on how theories and ideals are applied and changed by real-life circumstances. [See Prepub Alert, 4/17/17.]-Glen Edward Taul, formerly with Campbellsville Univ., KY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.