A particular understanding of James Madison’s constitutional thinking now dominates American scholarship, especially in law. According to this view, Madison was frightened of popular politics and deeply suspicious of majority rule. Having witnessed politics in the states during the critical years just after the Revolution – more, having experienced state government firsthand during an exasperating three-year stint in the Virginia Assembly – Madison had come to see democracy as the problem, particularly as it was practiced in the popularly elected state legislatures. Yet rather than give in to despair, as some of his contemporaries were wont to do, Madison set out to find an answer. And he succeeded brilliantly, shepherding in a new national constitution while helping to create what Gordon Wood has called a fresh “American Science of Politics” – the theoretical framework of which he spelled out in his writings as Publius.