 studying the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Why is it relevant? Your students can still participate in the system even if they don't understand it. Why should they be informed?" He explained that if a surgeon is doing heart surgery, he must understand the system he is doing surgery on. Hence, if citizens want to improve their government and "get it to where they want it to be," they have to understand our system of government and be able to apply reason to it. So we all have a "vested interest in learning how to make sense of Madison's Constitutional Order."
Madison believed that for a government to be legitimate, it should be based on the consent of the people and protect their liberties. The Declaration of Independence explains that the British government was neither a government of consent nor did it protect colonists' liberties. British philosopher John Locke, who lived about 100 years before Jefferson, said yes, you could have a constitutional monarchy that is a legitimate government -- if it protects the fundamental rights and liberties of the people. So Madison was interested in designing a government that would be successful in achieving this goal.
Madison's Federalist #10 is perhaps the most famous of all the essays in The Federalist Papers, which were written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in an attempt to explain the Constitution and to get the people of New York to ratify it. In it, Madison explores how best to manage human beings and how to get us to have a government that would protect our liberties. Human beings, by their nature, tend to ask selfishly and will form factions -- groups that will try to bend government power to meet their own needs at the expense of everyone else. Madison said that we could not control the causes of faction, but that we could control for its effects. If you "extend the sphere" and make a large republic, no one faction will be large enough to gain a majority.
Professor Marion also highlighted a lesser known part of Federalist #10. He said that "Madison's republic is all about comfortable preservation -- life, liberty, and property -- protecting the safety and happiness of the people." Professor Marion explained that for Madison, it was important to protect people's property rights which were a result of the "diversity in the faculties of men." People all have different abilities, special talents, and things that make us distinctive. We can't get rid of factions by giving everybody the same opinions, passions, and interests. But we can make it more probable that our new republic would succeed if we encouraged these diverse interests and protected people's property. Professor Marion said that "property is the fruit of people's labors." By protecting people's property, you are encouraging them to use their faculties to effect their safety and happiness. Hence, when you protect property, you end up getting a safer, happier republic.
Madison was generally pleased with the Constitution that came out of the Convention, even though it didn't match his original vision. For example, one design element he originally wanted was a "Council of Revision" made up of the President and the Supreme Court who would have the power to review Congress's work before it became law. Now, the Supreme Court can only declare a law unconstitutional if a case is brought before the Court challenging the constitutionality of the law. The Supreme Court currently only has the power to determine if a law is constitutional. Madison would have given the Council of Revision the power to decide whether a law was wise. Professor Marion said, "This tells us what he [Madison] was shooting for -- what he wants to call into being to get us a certain way of life." He wanted a government that passed "wise" laws.
The rest of Professor Marion's lecture dealt with the addition of the Bill of Rights. I'll try to compress what he explained into a short paragraph or two. The Anti-federalists were opposed to the ratification of the Constitution because it did not have a Bill of Rights. They argued that 