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The Madison Principle – First masters degree in Psychology

The Madison Principle is a set of rules, susceptible to no further analysis, for effective management consulting in the field of change leadership. It is derived from the unusual but effective education of President James Madison, and identifies the use of a meta-language for change leadership.

The Madison Principle - First masters degree in Psychology

A meta-language is a special language used by a person outside the observed group. It is effective for describing the observed group without the author becoming one of the people being observed. It allows the observer to remain aloof from the management organization, and in that respect, to minimize the distorting effects on the group of their being observed.

A meta-language therefore uses an unusual and separate vocabulary, specifically designed to be incomprehensible to the observed group. This article develops the thesis that the unique education of James Madison contained all the indicia of a meta-language that can be used to observe, discuss and analyze groups subject to corporate governance.

Princeton was the College of New Jersey in the Time of James Madison

James Madison graduated in 1771 from what was later to be named Princeton University. His Princeton studies included Latin, Greek, science, geography, mathematics, rhetoric, and philosophy. His academic program placed great emphasis on the oratorical skills of speech and debate.

Today’s students of business rarely study Latin, Greek, science, geography, mathematics, rhetoric or philosophy. Instead, they study economics, finance, human resources, elementary law, and marketing. As a result, they are trained for functionality within the organisation, without an understanding of the a priori linguistic structure of the business.

The Princeton Schooling of James Madison

Madison’s combination of subjects is indicative of a methodology for constructing a meta-language to describe the organisation. Latin and Greek leads to study of the great rhetoricians, the ancient lawyers and philosophers, whose subsisting tenets continue to construct today’s ideas in psychology. For example, it is arguable that the Stoic Philosophers were Freud’s inspiration for the science of psychoanalysis.

Rhetoric was defined by Quintilian as the art of a good person speaking well. (Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory). This definition imports the facet of ethics into oratory, from which discipline the student learns that ethical behavior implies likelihood of success in achieving one’s goals. (Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics). Thus, schooling in rhetoric would train the student to lead a work group through oratory, so that the group would be more likely to achieve its goals. This is in contra-distinction to the contemporary forms of bureaucracy now used to manage business groups.

A James Madison School of Thinking

The study of science and mathematics is the field of endeavor of the political elites. Science has been defined by Lacan as the information that the master gleans from the knowledge of the operative employee. Mathematics is a universal system for the transmission of information, regardless of the language spoken by the proponents. (Jacques Lacan, The Reverse Side of Psychoanalysis).

In these ways, Madison’s fields of education gave him the ability to develop the philosophical basis of operative knowledge such as was possessed by knowledgeable employees, and as well, it gave him the ability to re-focus his perspective on how the political class would both view and use that knowledge as science.

Access to the Meta-Language via an Online Degree in Psychology

Today’s masters and bachelors degrees in psychology are taught both face-to-face and online. Each is as effective an educational method as the other. These degrees incorporate a metalanguage of psychological terms, such as “attribution,” “psychopathology,” “ego,” and many more.

While these terms are rarely used inside the work groups of managed organisations, (in fact they are actively spurned as inappropriate), they are very effective as a meta-language for describing organizations and identifying their pathology. For example: Freud’s small but intense treatise on the group ego is a complete explanation for a method of how to choose a group leader.

The Madison Principle

The Madison Principle can now be seen as the use of meta-psychological ideas and their unique meta-language to observe, describe and analyze managed groups. Because the Madison Principle gives access to the employed, the employee managers, and as well as to the political class, it is a complete system for identification of problems on all three organizational levels.

The Madison Principle, in practice in the field, uses sophisticated oratorical technique for developing and implementing new policy. It uses the ancient Greek systems of rhetoric to make organizational rules that depend for their force on the general and willing consent of the employees.

These theoretical ideas are further explained in the fields of sophistical rhetoric, working in the same way and using the same tools as the making of a binding statute by a legislature, delivered orally and written up as policy. Consider the following sequence:

Identifying the organizational foundation stories.
Selecting from ancient philosophy certain widely accepted principles for the target organisation.
Conducting organizational research to gather empirical data.
Applying the sophistical techniques of “how to make a law.”
Using techniques for making, reverse engineering and interpreting policy
Delivering the new rule to the staff as an effective and successful act of change leadership.

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