No Tyrants: James Madison, George Mason, and the Battle to Block Authoritarian Power in America

A brilliant new telling of the creation of the bill of rights, featuring George Mason and James Madison as sometimes allies and sometimes foes during their struggle to enshrine safeguards against the ever-present danger of tyranny and the abuse of power in early America.

We celebrate America's founders for creating a new nation on the bedrock principle of “We the People.” But they understood that the people's liberty would not survive long without a broad array of safeguards to prevent abuses of power. In No Tyrants, Stephen D. Solomon, the author of Revolutionary Dissent and founding editor of First Amendment Watch, invites readers to see the world as the founders did. These learned people were well versed in the history of tyranny; they knew it to be the common experience of mankind and dealt with it firsthand under the oppression of George III and Parliament. It was no surprise, then, that they made prevention of the “Monster Tyranny” a consuming project of America's founding.

With original archival insight, Solomon tells the dramatic story of the relationship between James Madison and George Mason, two of the founders most committed to preventing tyranny in the new America. As close political allies at Independence and then bitter opponents on the Constitution, they were central characters in building strong safeguards against oppression in the nation's founding documents. Even then, they understood that liberty would endure only with a citizenry that practiced public virtue in times of trouble. No Tyrants shows how their work to prevent tyranny in America reverberates to this day.