Colleen A. Sheehan is Professor of Politics and director of the Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in American political thought and politics, and in literature. She has served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and is currently a member of the Pennsylvania State Board of Education. She is author of James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge, 2009), coeditor of Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the Other Federalists, 1787–1788 (1998), and author of numerous articles on the American founding and eighteenth-century political and moral thought, which have appeared in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly, the American Political Science Review, the Review of Politics, and Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal.

'Colleen A. Sheehan places James Madison's 'Notes on Government' in the history of political thought and thus further reveals Madison as a political philosopher and not just a partisan tactician. In addition to this important discovery, she has included Madison's 'Notes' in a book that is now indispensable for seminars in American political thought and the early republic.' Jeremy D. Bailey, Ross M. Lence Distinguished Teaching Chair, University of Houston

• Part I: 1. An itinerant scholar in Mr Jefferson's library; Excursus: travels with Anacharsis; 2. Circumstantial influences on government; 3. The power of public opinion; 4. The federal republican polity; 5. Postscript; Part II: 6. 'Notes on Government'; 7. Additional notes on government; 8. Madison's convention notes and his letter of October 24, 1787, to Thomas Jefferson; 9. Party press essays.

Colleen A. Sheehan is Professor of Politics and director of the Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in American political thought and politics, and in literature. She has served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and is currently a member of the Pennsylvania State Board of Education. She is author of James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge, 2009), coeditor of Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the Other Federalists, 1787–1788 (1998), and author of numerous articles on the American founding and eighteenth-century political and moral thought, which have appeared in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly, the American Political Science Review, the Review of Politics, and Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal.

'Colleen A. Sheehan places James Madison's 'Notes on Government' in the history of political thought and thus further reveals Madison as a political philosopher and not just a partisan tactician. In addition to this important discovery, she has included Madison's 'Notes' in a book that is now indispensable for seminars in American political thought and the early republic.' Jeremy D. Bailey, Ross M. Lence Distinguished Teaching Chair, University of Houston

• Part I: 1. An itinerant scholar in Mr Jefferson's library; Excursus: travels with Anacharsis; 2. Circumstantial influences on government; 3. The power of public opinion; 4. The federal republican polity; 5. Postscript; Part II: 6. 'Notes on Government'; 7. Additional notes on government; 8. Madison's convention notes and his letter of October 24, 1787, to Thomas Jefferson; 9. Party press essays.