No Ordinary Historian: Lance Banning and the Founding

Lance Banning advanced the serious study of the American founding as much as any scholar of the past half century. This essay examines Banning's revisionist interpretation of Jeffersonian political thought, his contributions to the liberalism-republicanism debate, and his interpretation of the political thought and career of James Madison with an eye to establishing his enduring contributions to the study of the American founding. Banning's contributions, this essay argues, included his stewardship of the liberalism-republicanism debate and his interpretation of Jeffersonian political thought as Janus-faced. The Jeffersonians, he argued, fused a concern for corruption and constitutional imbalance that could be traced to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English radicals with a vision of a commercial agrarian and increasingly democratic republic in America. Banning's most important contribution, however, was to establish the broad contours of consistency in Madison's political thought. More than any previous Madisonian scholar, Banning convincingly addressed the James Madison problem.