James Madison — Universal History Archive
How James Madison, Elinor Ostrom, and Mahmood Mamdani warned us about systems that can’t stay balanced
We all have toxic traits. One of mine is widening a person’s argument to take away their moral grounding so they have to acknowledge the bigger picture. It’s hilarious. I don’t even have to disagree with them. Just open the lens a little… dopamine rush.
And my excuse is balance. In politics, working toward balance used to be a sign of seriousness. Now it’s a sign of disloyalty. Disloyalty to ideals. A party. Even an identity.
I’m Nate Sowder, and this is unquoted, installment 12. Today we’re looking at how three people — James Madison, Elinor Ostrom and Mahmood Mamdani — saw the same problem from different angles: What happens to a system when one idea, one identity, or one group starts carrying more weight than it was ever built for.
James Madison — History First
James Madison: The architect of a system that could survive
Most people meet Madison as the soft-spoken intellect behind the U.S. Constitution, The Federalist Papers and The Bill of Rights. A thoughtful designer in an era of loud personalities… it’s a tidy version of him, and it’s true, but it leaves out important details that earn him a place in this series.
Madison spent his early career watching a country lose its footing. Under the Articles of Confederation, states behaved like independent rivals. New York taxed goods coming in from New Jersey. Virginia and Maryland fought over navigation rights. Each state was convinced it saw the situation correctly and expected the rest of the country to comply. Of course, it didn’t work that way, and what emerged instead was a tangled mess of competing systems that produced exactly the kind of chaos Madison feared.
Shays Rebellion — America in class
Then came Shays’ Rebellion. A small group of farmers in Massachusetts pushed the state close to collapse over debt policy. Madison noticed how little it took to shake the whole system, and that moment told him more about the country’s stability than any debate ever had.
He saw the same instability inside Virginia. Religious groups (Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians) each fought to define public life according to their own doctrine. Each new majority produced a new attempt to legislate ‘certainty’ (a topic we’ll tackle another day). It convinced Madison that no group, no matter how principled, can be trusted with the whole system.
These observations led to a very important insight:
People don’t balance themselves. Their interests need to be balanced for them.
His education was important in helping him articulate this.
Montesquieu warned about concentrated power.Hume explained why factions form and why they don’t disappear.The Scottish Enlightenment taught him that complexity survives by distributing conflict rather than suppressing it.
So Madison built a republic that relied on a balanced system.
A large republic makes it harder for any one group to dominate.Layered governments force negotiation instead of obedience.Separate branches introduce friction (deliberate, sometimes frustrating friction) to keep hardline views from turning into authority.Even procedural delays weren’t accidents; they acted as insulation.
Building and planning for durability, however, meant he could build for unity.
And this is the part of Madison worth remembering: he understood that certainty is a destabilizer. Once a group believes it sees the whole picture, it stops feeling like it needs to listen. Once listening stops, balance goes with it. And after balance, legitimacy is a fast follow.
The system he designed survives because this heavy load is ‘distributed’. We only really notice his work when someone tries to remove that balance.
*Cough cough*
Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom: The proof that balance can be built
Elinor Ostrom usually appears in the public imagination as the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. She spent her career far from academic models and closer to the places where cooperation was something people needed in order to eat, drink, farm and survive.
Her research took her into forests in Nepal, irrigation systems in Spain, fishing communities in Turkey and water boards in Los Angeles. Each place had the same problem in a different scenery: a shared resource, a mix of competing interests and the constant possibility that one group might push its agenda far enough to throw everything off balance.
Ostrom watched closely at how these communities behaved. She noticed that the systems that worked well weren’t run by a single leader or by a perfectly unified community. Instead, they relied on rules that spread responsibility across the people who depended on the resource(s). Boundaries were clear. Rules were shaped by the people who had to live with them. Monitoring was handled locally (because outsiders didn’t understand). Disputes were settled quickly and without big ceremony. And when conditions changed, the rules changed with them.
These were places built by people who understood imbalance because they felt it the moment it appeared. That’s the heart of Ostrom’s contribution: Balance works when it’s shaped by the people closest to the problem.
She saw that when decision-makers were at a distance from the decisions they were making, they had a confidence they hadn’t earned. The closer they were to the problem, the more careful they were with the solution.
Ostrom also paid attention to the early signs that signaled a system was in trouble. For instance, if a single group found ways to steer the rules in its favor, and the system lost its ability to balance out. The worst failures happened when outsiders stepped in with a single fix and applied it everywhere. Solutions that looked great from a distance often unraveled the arrangements that had kept the community stable in the first place.
This is important and confirmed something Madison understood intuitively: balance doesn’t maintain itself. It has to be built. And it’s built best through local negotiation, small adjustments, and shared constraints that prevent any one perspective from becoming the entire truth.
For her, balance was more resilience than a moral posture. And the places she studied didn’t have the luxury of ignoring that. They depended on it.
Mahmood Mamdani
Mahmood Mamdani: What happens when categories replace systems
Mahmood Mamdani (yes, Zohran’s father) isn’t a household name, but his work explains something most people feel without knowing how to articulate it: Societies don’t fall apart because people disagree.
Where Madison studied factions and Ostrom studied shared resources, Mamdani studied the aftermath. He saw that societies fall apart because people get sorted into identities so rigid that disagreement stops being part of politics and starts becoming the whole point of it.
His work in East Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East all circled the same problem: When politics harden around identity categories, balance becomes impossible. The categories do the thinking for you.
What he found was more unsettling than ideological and was baked into the structure itself.
He showed how colonial administrations divided people into “natives” and “settlers,” assigning rights and responsibilities based on identity rather than citizenship. Once those categories were in place, everything that followed (representation, punishment, land access, even the definition of violence) was shaped by the category, not the behavior.
The pattern was brutally consistent:
People stopped seeing each other as individuals and started treating each other as types.Arguments became personal because they were tied to who someone was, not what they said or did.And instead of working within the same rules, every group insisted its own view set the rules.
Once a political system runs on identity rather than structure, the entire framework begins to tilt to one side. Laws formalize conflict rather than stabilize it and public life stops being about negotiation and becomes a contest to control the category that sits closest to power.
This is the core of Mamdani’s warning: once a group can define categories, it no longer needs to define the argument. The system starts carrying their weight for them.
Here are some of his examples:
In Rwanda, colonial administrators turned fluid social identities into fixed racial categories, replacing political negotiation with inherited status. This was a shift that left the society permanently off-balance.In Sudan, laws distinguished “tribes” in ways that reshaped land rights and obligations, guaranteeing that every political conflict would be read as ethnic rather than structural.In Uganda, colonial policy created systems where citizenship and identity pulled in opposite directions, ensuring that no debate stayed a debate for long.
Different places, same mechanics: Certainty, hardened into identity becomes a destabilizer.
And this is where Mamdani plugs directly into the argument I’m making.
Madison feared the dominance of one single group.Ostrom showed how to prevent it through shared rules and distributed responsibility.Mamdani shows what happens when none of that holds true. When people collapse a complex political world into a few fixed categories and then defend those categories as if their survival depends on it.
He explains the modern reflex where expanding someone’s frame feels like an attack. Nuance becomes betrayal, and balance? Well, that looks an awful lot like disloyalty.
I’m not saying people are unreasonable. I’m saying their political identity is doing too much work. Once that identity carries the whole argument, the whole thing starts to slide.
Where All Three Collide
You don’t need to be a political theorist to feel when a system is off-balance. People sense it in small ways before they can articulate it. A policy feels rushed. A rule changes too quickly. Decisions start to look engineered for someone else’s benefit.
What Madison understood, Ostrom proved, and Mamdani diagnosed is that imbalance isn’t dramatic… at first. It appears in places where one idea or one identity starts carrying more weight than it should. And once that happens, people react the same way they do when you widen their argument: they retreat into the part they understand and defend it like it’s the whole story.
You see this in every procedural fight we pretend is about ideology. Gerrymandering is a fight about boundaries. The filibuster is a fight about friction. Court expansions, emergency powers, rule changes, executive orders … each one chips away at the balances that were designed to slow certainty down.
What we don’t see is people panicking because of any specific outcome. The reason? Things change. Just wait a bit and balance should bring things back in order if it was a bad decision.
Don’t you think it’s interesting that panic actually comes from people reacting to systems when it’s those systems that feel like they’re being manipulated or unbalanced?
Madison would recognize the pattern immediately.
Ostrom would see the loss of shared constraint.
Mamdani would see identity doing more work than structure.
When a system becomes too easy to take advantage of, the people inside it start holding their positions tighter. Balance stops feeling like a responsibility and starts feeling like a betrayal. There’s an irony there that’s hard to miss.
The thing a plural society needs most is the first thing people abandon when they feel the least bit of instability.
And once identity becomes the primary way people organize themselves, even small adjustments feel like attacks. You’re not disagreeing with their idea; you’re threatening the category that idea is supposed to protect. The politics stops being about governance and becomes about defending a sense of self.
Reflection
This essay took me a while, but the longer I read about these three, the clearer the pattern becomes.
People cling to their ideas because the alternatives feel unsafe. Balance threatens certainty, and certainty is where people place their moral grounding.
But every system that survives (every republic, every community, every shared resource) survives for the same reason: it never lets one idea, one identity, or one group do all the work.
Madison designed for that.
Ostrom documented it.
Mamdani warns what happens when we lose it.
If the world feels louder or angrier than it used to, I don’t think it’s because we’re more divided. I think it’s because our desire for balance is getting weaker and it’s become a risk instead of a responsibility.
It doesn’t have to stay that way.
It just requires something we aren’t great at right now: looking at the bigger picture.
When one idea does all the work was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.