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Heroes of Progress, Pt. 44: James Madison

Introducing the "Father of the U.S. Constitution," President James Madison.

Alexander C. R. Hammond — May 15, 2020

Today marks the 44th installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org titled Heroes of Progress. This bi-weekly column provides a short introduction to heroes who have made an extraordinary contribution to the well-being of humanity. You can find the 43rd part of this series here.

This week, our hero is James Madison. Madison was a Founding Father and the fourth president of the United States. He composed the first drafts, and thus the basic frameworks, for the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Madison is often dubbed the “Father of the Constitution” and he spent much of his life ensuring that the U.S. Constitution was ratified, and that freedoms of religion, speech and the press were protected under the law.

James Madison was born on March 16, 1751 in Port Conway, Virginia. Madison was raised on his family’s plantation. His father was one of the largest landowners in the Piedmont area. Although Madison was the oldest of twelve children, just six of his siblings would live to adulthood (a common occurrence at that time – even among the wealthy). In the early 1760s, the Madison family moved to the Montpelier estate in Virginia.

As a teenager, Madison studied under several well-known tutors. Unlike most wealthy Virginians of his day, he did not attend the College of William and Mary. Instead, in 1769, he enrolled at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), which Madison chose primarily for the College’s hostility to episcopacy. Despite being an Anglican, Madison was opposed to an American episcopate. He saw it as a way of strengthening the power of the British monarchy, and as a threat to the colonists’ civil and religious freedoms.

At the College of New Jersey, Madison completed his four-year course in just two years. After graduating in 1771, Madison remained in New Jersey to study Hebrew and political philosophy under the college’s president (and another future Founding Father) John Witherspoon. Madison’s thinking on philosophy and morality were strongly influenced by Witherspoon. Terence Ball, a biographer of Madison, noted that in New Jersey, Madison “was immersed in the liberalism of the Enlightenment and converted to eighteenth-century political radicalism.”

In 1773, Madison returned to Montpelier. Without a career, he began to study law books and soon took an interest in the relationship between the American colonies and Great Britain. In 1775, when Virginia began preparing for the Revolutionary War, Madison was appointed as a colonel in the Orange County militia. As he was frequently in poor health, Madison never saw battle and soon gave up on a military career. Instead, he pursued a political one. In 1776, Madison represented Orange County at the Virginia Constitutional Convention, where he helped to design a new state government, independent from British rule.

During his time at the Virginia Constitutional Convention, Madison often fought for religious freedom and he was successful in convincing delegates to alter the Virginia Declaration of Rights to provide for “equal entitlement” rather than just “tolerance” in the exercise of religion. While at the Convention, he met his lifelong friend, Thomas Jefferson – a Founding Father, who became the 3rd President of the United States.

Following the enactment of the Virginia Constitution in 1776, Madison became part of the Virginia House of Delegates and was soon elected to the Council of State for Virginia’s Governor, who was then Thomas Jefferson. In 1780, Madison travelled to Philadelphia as a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress – a body of delegates from the thirteen American colonies that would create the United States of America.

The Articles of Confederation were ratified by the Constitutional Congress in 1781 and served as the first Constitution for the thirteen colonies. The Articles gave great powers to the states, which acted more like individual countries, than as a union. Madison felt that this structure left the Congress weak and gave it no ability to manage federal debt or to maintain a national army. Determined to change that, Madison began studying many different forms of governments.

In 1784, Madison re-entered Virginia’s legislature and was quick to ensure that a bill, which pledged to give taxpayer-funded financial support to “teachers of Christian religion,” was defeated. Over the following years, Madison spearheaded a movement that pushed for changes to the Articles of Confederation. That effort eventually culminated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, again in Philadelphia.

At the convention, Madison presented his plans for an effective government known as the “Virginia Plan.” Madison noted that the United States needed a strong federal government, which should be split into three branches (the legislative, judicial and executive) and managed with a system of checks and balances, so that no branch could dominate another. Throughout the Constitutional Congress, Madison took extensive notes and tweaked his plan to make it more acceptable. In the end, the Virginia Plan underpinned large parts of the U.S. Constitution.

After the Constitution was written, the document needed to be ratified by nine out of the thirteen states. Initially, the document was met with resistance, as many states believed that it gave too much power to the federal government. In order to promote the Constitution’s ratification, Madison collaborated with Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. Together, they wrote a series of anonymous essays supporting the Constitution, titled the Federalist Papers.

After the publication of 85 essays and extensive debate in the Constitutional Convention, the U.S. Constitution was signed in September 1787. The document was eventually ratified in 1788, after New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution. In 1790, the new federal government became functional. The innovative and enlightened ideas of the U.S. Constitution have stood up to the test of time, and today it is the world’s oldest written constitution still in operation.

Madison was immediately elected to the newly formed House of Representatives and began working on a draft of the Bill of Rights – a list of 10 amendments to the Constitution that spelled out the fundamental rights held by every U.S. citizen. They included, among others, freedom of speech, religion and the right to bear arms. In the Ninth Amendment, Madison also stipulated the existence of unenumerated rights. After a substantial debate, Madison’s work paid off and the Bill of Rights was enacted into law in 1791. These amendments were unique for their time, for they stipulated that governments do not grant rights to the citizenry. Instead, it is the citizens who grant powers to governments to protect the people’s “pre-existing” rights.

After a disagreement with the Federalist leader, Alexander Hamilton, over Hamilton’s proposal to establish a national bank, Jefferson and Madison founded the Democratic-Republican party in 1792. It was the first opposition political party in the United States. Madison left Congress in 1797. He returned to frontline politics in 1801, joining President Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet. As secretary of state, Madison oversaw the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, which doubled the size of the new nation.

Between 1809 and 1817, Madison served as the fourth president of the United States. Much of his presidency was marred by overseas problems. In 1812, Madison issued a war proclamation against Great Britain. Trade between the United States and Europe ceased, which severely hurt American merchants. At the same time, New England threatened to secede from the Union. Madison was forced to flee the new capital of Washington in August 1814, after the British troops invaded and burned down several buildings, including the White House, the Capitol and the Library of Congress.

In 1815, the war ended in a stalemate. After two terms as president, Madison returned to Montpelier in 1817 and never left Virginia again. He remained an active and respected writer. In 1826, he became a rector of the University of Virginia, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819.

Like many of his contemporaries in the South, Madison owned slaves. That said, Madison worked to abolish the practice of slavery. Under his leadership, the federal government purchased slaves from slaveholders and resettled them in Liberia. Madison’s last years were spent sickly and bed-bound. In June 1836, he died from heart failure. He was 85 years old.

Madison was instrumental to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The U.S. Constitution was the world’s first single-document constitution. The Enlightenment principles of individual rights and freedom that it championed became the basis for dozens of other liberal constitutions created by governments across the world. For creating the legal framework that protected countless people from government abuses, James Madison is deservedly our 44th Hero of Progress.

Blog Post | Urbanization

Lessons From Adam Smith’s Edinburgh and Paris

Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity.

Chelsea Follett — Mar 14, 2024

Summary: Amidst the turmoil of modern times, evidence reveals significant progress across various metrics, from rising life expectancy to declining global poverty. Cities have emerged as epicenters of innovation and progress throughout history, fostering collaboration, competition, and freedom of thought. By exploring the unique environments of cities like Edinburgh and Paris, where intellectual liberty thrived, Chelsea Follett uncovers the vital role of peace, freedom, and population density in driving human achievement and societal advancement.

This article appeared in Adam Smith Works on 2/8/2024.

Has humanity made progress? With so many serious problems, it is easy to get the impression that our species is hopeless. Many people view history as one long tale of decay and degeneration since some lost, idealized golden age.

But there has been much remarkable, measurable improvement—from rising life expectancy and literacy rates to declining global poverty. (Explore the evidence for yourself). Today, material abundance is more widespread than our ancestors could have dreamed. And there has been moral progress too. Slavery and torture, once widely accepted, are today almost universally reviled.

Where did all this progress come from? Certain places, at certain times in history, have contributed disproportionately to progress and innovation. Change is a constant, but progress is not. Studying the past may hold the secret to fostering innovation in the present. To that end, I wrote a book titled Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World, exploring the places that shaped modern life.

The origin points of the ideas, discoveries, and inventions that built the modern world were far from evenly or randomly dispersed throughout the globe. Instead, they tended to emerge from cities, even in time periods when most of the human population lived in rural areas. In fact, even before anything that could be called a city by modern standards existed, progress originated from the closest equivalents that did exist at the time. Why is that?

“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace,” urban economist Edward Glaeser opined in his book The Triumph of the City. Of course, he was hardly the first to observe that positive change often emanates from cities. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.”

One of the reasons that progress tends to emerge from cities is, simply, people. Wherever more people gather together to “truck, barter, and exchange,” in Smith’s words, that increases their potential to engage in productive exchange, discussion, debate, collaboration, and competition with each other. Cities’ higher populations allow for a finer division of labor, more specialization, and greater efficiencies in production. Not to mention, more minds working together to solve problems. As the writer Matt Ridley notes in the foreword he kindly wrote for Centers of Progress, “Progress is a team sport, not an individual pursuit. It is a collaborative, collective thing, done between brains more than inside them.”

A higher population is sufficient to explain why progress often emerges from cities, but, of course, not all cities become major innovation centers. Progress may be a team sport, but why do certain cities seem to provide ideal playing conditions, and not others?

That brings us to the next thing that most centers of progress share, besides being relatively populous: peace. That makes sense, because if a place is plagued by violence and discord then it is hard for the people there to focus on anything other than survival, and there is little incentive to be productive since any wealth is likely to be looted or destroyed. Smith recognized this truth, and noted that cities, historically, sometimes offered more security from violence than the countryside:

Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were in this manner established in cities, at a time when the occupiers of land in the country, were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence; because, to acquire more, might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the country. […] Whatever stock, therefore, accumulated in the hands of the industrious part of the inhabitants of the country, naturally took refuge in cities, as the only sanctuaries in which it could be secure to the person that acquired it.

Of course, not all cities were or are peaceful. Consider Smith’s own city: Edinburgh. At times, the city was far from stable. But the relatively unkempt and inhospitable locale emerged from a century of instability to take the world by storm. Scotland in the 18th century had just undergone decades of political and economic turmoil. Disruption was caused by the House of Orange’s ousting of the House of Stuart, the Jacobite Rebellions, the failed and costly colonial Darien Scheme, famine, and the 1707 Union of Scotland and England. It was only after things settled down and the city came to enjoy a period of relative peace and stability that Edinburgh rose to reach its potential. Edinburgh was an improbable center of progress. But Edinburgh proves what people can accomplish, given the right conditions.

During the Scottish Enlightenment centered in Edinburgh, Adam Smith was far from the only innovative thinker in the city. Edinburgh’s ability to cultivate innovators in every arena of human achievement, from the arts to the sciences, seemed almost magical.

Edinburgh gave the world so many groundbreaking artists that the French writer Voltaire opined in 1762 that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” Edinburgh gave humanity artistic pioneers from the novelist Sir Walter Scott, often called the father of the historical novel, to the architect Robert Adam who, together with his brother James, developed the “Adam style,” which evolved into the so‐called “Federal style” in the United States after Independence.

And then there were the scientists. Thomas Jefferson, in 1789, wrote, “So far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.” The Edinburger geologist James Hutton developed many of the fundamental principles of his discipline. The chemist and physicist Joseph Black, who studied at the University of Edinburgh, discovered carbon dioxide, magnesium, and the important thermodynamic concepts of latent heat and specific heat. The anatomist Alexander Monro Secondus became the first person to detail the human lymphatic system. Sir James Young Simpson, admitted to the University of Edinburgh at the young age of fourteen, went on to develop chloroform anesthesia.

Two of the greatest gifts that Edinburgh gave humanity were empiricism and economics. The influential philosopher David Hume was among the early advocates of empiricism and is sometimes called the father of philosophical skepticism. And by creating the field of economics, Smith helped humanity to think about policies that enhance prosperity. Those policies, including free trade and economic freedom that Smith advocated, have since helped to raise living standards to heights that would be unimaginable to Smith and his contemporaries.

That brings us to the last but by no means least secret ingredient of progress. Freedom. Centers of progress during their creative peak tend to be relatively free and open for their era. That makes sense because simply having a large population is not going to lead to progress if that population lacks the freedom to experiment, to debate new propositions, and to work together for their mutual benefit. Perhaps the biggest reason why cities produce so much progress is that city dwellers have often enjoyed more freedom than their rural counterparts. Medieval serfs fleeing feudal lands to gain freedom in cities inspired the German saying “stadtluft macht frei” (city air makes you free).

That adage referred to laws granting serfs liberty after a year and a day of urban residency. But the phrase arguably has a wider application. Cities have often served as havens of freedom for innovators and anyone stifled by the stricter norms and more limited choices common in smaller communities. Edinburgh was notable for its atmosphere of intellectual freedom, allowing thinkers to debate a wide diversity of controversial ideas in its many reading societies and pubs.

Of course, cities are not always free. Authoritarian states sometimes see laxer enforcement of their draconian laws in remote areas, and Smith himself viewed rural life as in some ways less encumbered by constraining rules and regulations than city life. But as philosophy professor Kyle Swan previously noted for Adam Smith Works:

Without denying the charms and attractions Smith highlights in country living, let’s not forget what’s on offer in our cities: a significantly broader range of choices! Diverse restaurants and untold many other services and recreations, groups of people who like the same peculiar things that you like, and those with similar backgrounds and interests and activities to pursue with them — cities are (positive) freedom enhancing.

The same secret ingredients of progress—people, peace, and freedom—that helped Edinburgh to flourish during Smith’s day can be observed again and again throughout history in the places that became key centers of innovation. Consider Paris.

As the capital of France, Paris attracted a large population and became an important economic and cultural hub. But it was an unusual spirit of freedom that allowed the city to make its greatest contributions to human progress. Much like the reading societies and pubs of Smith’s Edinburgh, the salons and coffeehouses of 18th‐century Paris provided a place for intellectual discourse where the philosophes birthed the so‐called Age of Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a movement that promoted the values of reason, evidence‐based knowledge, free inquiry, individual liberty, humanism, limited government, and the separation of church and state. In Parisian salons, nobles and other wealthy financiers intermingled with artists, writers, and philosophers seeking financial patronage and opportunities to discuss and disseminate their work. The gatherings gave controversial philosophers, who would have been denied the intellectual freedom to explore their ideas elsewhere, the liberty to develop their thoughts.

Influential Parisian and Paris‐ based thinkers of the period included the Baron de Montesquieu, who advocated the then‐groundbreaking idea of the separation of government powers and the writer Denis Diderot, the creator of the first general‐purpose encyclopedia, as well the Genevan expat Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. While sometimes considered a counter‐Enlightenment figure because of his skepticism of modern commercial society and romanticized view of primitive existence, Rousseau also helped to spread skepticism toward monarchy and the idea that kings had a “divine right” to rule over others.

The salons were famous for sophisticated conversations and intense debates; however, it was letter‐writing that gave the philosophes’ ideas a wide reach. A community of intellectuals that spanned much of the Western world—known as the Republic of Letters—increasingly engaged in the exchanges of ideas that began in Parisian salons. Thus, the Enlightenment movement based in Paris helped spur similar radical experiments in thought elsewhere, including the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. Smith’s many exchanges of ideas with the people of Paris, including during his 1766 visit to the city when he dined with Diderot and other luminaries, proved pivotal to his own intellectual development.

And then there was Voltaire, sometimes called the single most influential figure of the Enlightenment. Although Parisian by birth, Voltaire spent relatively little time in Paris because of frequent exiles occasioned by the ire of French authorities. Voltaire’s time hiding out in London, for example, enabled him to translate the works of the political philosopher and “father of liberalism” John Locke, as well as the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton. While Voltaire’s critiques of existing institutions and norms pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond even what would be tolerated in Paris, his Parisian upbringing and education likely helped to cultivate the devotion to freethinking that would come to define his life.

By allowing for an unusual degree of intellectual liberty and providing a home base for the Enlightenment and the far‐ranging Republic of Letters, Paris helped spread new ideas that would ultimately give rise to new forms of government—including modern liberal democracy.

Surveying the cities, such as Edinburgh and Paris, that built the modern world reveals that when people live in peace and freedom, their potential to bring about positive change increases. Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity. I hope that you will consider joining me on a journey through the book’s pages to some of history’s greatest centers of progress, and that doing so sparks many intelligent discussions, debates, and inquiries in the Smithian tradition about the causes of progress and wealth.

Blog Post | Science & Education

Introducing Our Upcoming Book, Heroes of Progress

Human Progress Team — Feb 27, 2024

Over the past two centuries, humanity has become massively more prosperous, better educated, healthier, and more peaceful.

The underlying cause of this progress is innovation. Human innovation―whether it be new ideas, inventions, or systems―is the primary way people create wealth and escape poverty.

Our upcoming book, Heroes of Progress: 65 People Who Changed the World, explores the lives of the most important innovators who have ever lived, from agronomists who saved billions from starvation and intellectuals who changed public policy for the better, to businesspeople whose innovations helped millions rise from poverty.

If it weren’t for the heroes profiled in this book, we’d all be far poorer, sicker, hungrier, and less free―if we were fortunate enough to be alive at all.

Considering their impact on humanity, perhaps it’s time to learn their story?

Heroes of Progress book advertised on Amazon for pre-order

Heroes of Progress Book Forum

On March 21st, the author of Heroes of Progress, Alexander Hammond, will present the book live at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He will be joined by Marian Tupy, the editor of Human Progress, and Clay Routledge, the Archbridge Institute’s Vice President of Research, who will speak on the individual’s role in advancing human progress and the need for a cultural progress movement.

Learn more about the event here.

Praise for Heroes of Progress

Making an inspiring case for progress at this time of skepticism and historical ingratitude is no easy feat. Yet, by relentlessly outlining the extraordinary ability of individuals to shape our world for the better, Alexander Hammond does just that.
— Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Innovation is a team sport achieved by people working together, using precious freedoms to change the world, so it’s sometimes invidious to single out one person for credit. But once an idea is ripe for plucking, the right person at the right time can seize it and save a million lives or open a million possibilities. Each of these 65 people did that, and their stories are both thrilling and beautiful.
— Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

The figures in this book are the overlooked and often unknown figures who have transformed the lives of ordinary people, for the better… This book is a correction to widespread pessimism and is both informative and inspirational.
— Dr. Stephen Davies, author of The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity

Superman and the Avengers are all very well, of course, but the real superheroes are thinkers, scientists, and innovators of flesh and blood who saved us from a life that used to be poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Alexander Hammond tells their inspiring stories in this magnificent book that will leave you grateful to be living in the world these men and women created.
— Johan Norberg, author of Open: The Story of Human Progress

The 65 innovators honored here made us happier, healthier, and longer-lived. Indeed, it is thanks to some of them that we are here at all. Their story is the story of how the human race acquired powers once attributed to gods and sorcerers―the story of how we overcame hunger, disease, ignorance, and squalor. I defy anyone to read this book and not feel better afterwards.
— Lord Daniel Hannan, president of the Institute for Free Trade

The 65 fascinating stories in Heroes of Progress are
testaments to the ingenuity of humankind in delivering a richer,
healthier, and hopefully freer world. Alexander C. R. Hammond
provides an inspirational reminder that when individuals are
free to speak, think, innovate, and engage in open markets, the
heroic potential of humanity knows no bounds.
— Lord Syed Kamall, Professor of politics and international relations, St. Mary’s University

In Heroes of Progress, Alexander Hammond reminds us that human minds are the fundamental driver of every discovery, invention, and innovation that has improved our lives. By telling the stories of pioneering men and women who have advanced civilization, this book not only honors past heroes of progress, but also provides inspiration for the next generation to use their uniquely human imaginative and enterprising capacities to build a better future.
— Clay Routledge, Vice President of Research and Director of the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute