Madison, a moderate Federalist, lamented the inability of the newly created government to curb the occasional excesses of economic populism, such as Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts, where debtors attempted to take over the local government.

Madison and others gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to create a stronger, but still limited, federal government. In response to demands by Anti-Federalists for amendments that protect individual liberty against the government, Madison introduced the Bill of Rights in 1789.

Unable to foresee the Leviathan national security state, Madison, in his Bill of Rights, was more concerned with abuses by Congress than the executive branch. But he had an even greater blind spot for abuses by the private sector, because he was focused on protecting the property rights of the few against the tyranny of the many.

For example, economically populist Anti-Federalists, including Thomas Jefferson, backed an amendment to prohibit Congress from granting monopolies or setting up “any company with exclusive advantages of commerce.” Madison, who also mistrusted monopolies, was less convinced that they should be “wholly renounced.” He responded to Jefferson that “monopolies are sacrifices of the many to the few,” and in America, where the power rested with the people, “it is much more to be dreaded that the few will be unnecessarily sacrificed to the many.”

There is, therefore, a tension in modern libertarian appreciations of Madison. They exaggerate his opposition to abuse of federal power and ignore his failure to anticipate abuse of corporate power.

Today, the foes of corporate monopoly power include those on the Tea Party Right and the Occupy Wall Street left. But on the right, the Madisonian devotion to property rights, and Jeffersonian suspicion of regulation, are so strong that the same principled libertarians who oppose N.S.A. data collection shrink from efforts to regulate Google or AT&T.

In his speech on intelligence reform on Friday, President Obama called on Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to develop options for how the bulk telephone data collection program could continue without the metadata being held by the government itself. But telecom companies have resisted being the repository for the data, and an anti-regulatory Congress is unlikely to require them to do so or to impose meaningful limits on what they can do with the data they hold.