Chapter 2: Further Reading

The political theory of the American founding is one of the most extensively studied topics in American intellectual history. The works below are organized by category, with brief notes on what each offers. The reading is essentially infinite; what follows is a starting point. Work in this area continues — you should expect to find more recent scholarship by the time you read this list, especially on the contested topics in section 4.

1. Primary sources (read these first)

Madison, James, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. The Federalist. Edited by Jacob E. Cooke. Wesleyan University Press, 1961. (The Library of America edition, The Debate on the Constitution, edited by Bernard Bailyn, includes both Federalist and Anti-Federalist writings and is often the most useful single volume for students.) The eighty-five essays remain the most influential commentary on the Constitution ever written. Federalist Nos. 10, 51, and 78 are the standard assignments; the entire collection rewards reading. Available free at the Library of Congress (guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers) and the Yale Avalon Project.

Storing, Herbert J., editor. The Complete Anti-Federalist. 7 volumes. University of Chicago Press, 1981. Storing's compilation is the canonical scholarly edition of Anti-Federalist writings. The single-volume abridgment, The Anti-Federalist, edited by Murray Dry, is more accessible for students. Brutus, Centinel, the Federal Farmer, and Cato are the essential authors. Storing's editorial introduction, What the Anti-Federalists Were For, has been published as a separate paperback and is one of the best short books on the founding ever written.

Madison, James. Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. The most detailed contemporary record of the Convention, kept by Madison and not published until after his death in 1840. The Norton Critical Edition (edited by Adrienne Koch) is widely used; the Bicentennial edition published by Liberty Fund is also excellent. Reading the Convention day by day is the best way to understand how the Constitution was actually made.

The Constitution itself, with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The pocket Constitution distributed by the Cato Institute is free; the National Archives website (archives.gov/founding-docs) has high-resolution scans of the original documents and accessible transcriptions.

2. Histories of the founding (the canonical scholarship)

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1967 (revised 1992). The single most influential modern study of the intellectual world the framers inhabited. Bailyn argues that the Revolution was driven by a coherent ideology drawn from English opposition thought, classical republicanism, and Enlightenment philosophy. Won the Pulitzer Prize. The follow-up volume, The Origins of American Politics (1968), is also essential.

Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. University of North Carolina Press, 1969. The other indispensable modern history of the founding generation's political thought. Wood's argument that the founders engaged in a "fundamental reconstitution" of republican theory in the 1780s is a major intellectual achievement. Pair with Bailyn for the standard reading list. Wood's later Empire of Liberty (2009) covers the early republic.

Berkin, Carol. A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution. Harcourt, 2002. A compact, readable narrative of the Philadelphia Convention. Berkin's account of the personalities and the daily debates is more accessible than the more academic histories and is an excellent first book on the Convention.

Maier, Pauline. Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788. Simon and Schuster, 2010. The definitive history of the ratification debate as it played out in the state conventions. Maier emphasizes how contested ratification actually was and how much the Anti-Federalists shaped the final outcome. An essential corrective to histories that treat ratification as a foregone conclusion.

Rakove, Jack N. Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution. Knopf, 1996. Won the Pulitzer Prize. Rakove engages directly with the originalism debates, arguing that the framers' "original meanings" were often plural, contested, and deliberately ambiguous. Indispensable for students who want to understand the modern interpretive debates in their historical context.

3. Madison and the Anti-Federalists (specific figures)

McCoy, Drew R. The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy. Cambridge University Press, 1989. McCoy's portrait of Madison's later career, including the evolution from Federalist No. 10 to the Virginia Resolutions to his old-age writings on nullification. Particularly good on Madison's struggle with slavery in his retirement.

Banning, Lance. The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic. Cornell University Press, 1995. The most detailed scholarly account of Madison's political thought, arguing for greater consistency than other readings allow. Pair with McCoy for the two main schools of Madison interpretation.

Cornell, Saul. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828. University of North Carolina Press, 1999. The best modern study of Anti-Federalist political thought and its long influence on American political development. Treats the Anti-Federalists as serious thinkers, not merely losers.

Storing, Herbert J. What the Anti-Federalists Were For. University of Chicago Press, 1981. The introductory essay to the seven-volume Complete Anti-Federalist, published separately. About 70 pages. The single most important short essay on the Anti-Federalist contribution to American political thought.

4. Modern interpretive debates (steel-manned on both sides)

Originalist defenses:

Scalia, Antonin, with Bryan A. Garner. Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Thomson/West, 2012. Justice Scalia's most extended treatment of textualist and originalist methodology. The introduction by Frank Easterbrook is also valuable.

Barnett, Randy E. Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. Princeton University Press, 2004 (revised 2014). Barnett's libertarian originalism, defending an aggressive reading of the Ninth Amendment and the privileges-or-immunities clause. One of the most ambitious modern works of originalist constitutional theory.

Solum, Lawrence B. "What Is Originalism? The Evolution of Contemporary Originalist Theory." In The Challenge of Originalism: Essays in Constitutional Theory, edited by Grant Huscroft and Bradley Miller. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Solum's overview of the varieties of contemporary originalism, including the distinction between original intent and original public meaning.

Living-constitutionalist and pragmatist defenses:

Strauss, David A. The Living Constitution. Oxford University Press, 2010. The most accessible book-length defense of common-law constitutionalism — the view that constitutional meaning develops through judicial precedent and political practice over time. Strauss argues that this is what the Court has always actually done.

Balkin, Jack M. Living Originalism. Harvard University Press, 2011. Balkin's effort to synthesize originalism and living constitutionalism: original meaning fixes the principles, but the application of those principles to specific cases evolves. A major work of constitutional theory; widely cited in modern debates.

Brennan, William J. "The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification." Speech delivered at Georgetown University, October 12, 1985. Justice Brennan's defense of dynamic constitutional interpretation. Frequently anthologized; available in The Great Debate: Interpreting Our Written Constitution, published by the Federalist Society.

Reformist:

Levinson, Sanford. Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It). Oxford University Press, 2006. Levinson's argument that the framework itself is structurally undemocratic — the Senate, the Electoral College, the lifetime tenure of Justices, the difficulty of amendment. Calls for a new constitutional convention. The strongest modern argument for institutional reformism.

Sabato, Larry J. A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country. Walker, 2007. A specific reformist agenda with twenty-three proposed amendments. Sabato is more centrist than Levinson; his proposals span both ideological directions.

5. Slavery and the founding (the contradictions)

Wilentz, Sean. No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding. Harvard University Press, 2018. Wilentz argues that the Constitution, while accommodating slavery, deliberately refused to recognize property rights in human beings — an antislavery posture available to abolitionists in subsequent decades. Controversial but important. Pair with critical responses to get the full picture.

Waldstreicher, David. Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. Hill and Wang, 2009. The opposite reading: a forensic account of how the Constitution actually protected and entrenched slavery. The major modern work arguing that the framers' compromises were more substantively pro-slavery than Wilentz allows.

Foner, Eric. The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. Norton, 2019. The Reconstruction Amendments as the corrective second founding. Essential for understanding how the modern Constitution differs from the founding-era document.

Douglass, Frederick. "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Speech delivered July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York. The single most important nineteenth-century engagement with the contradictions of the founding. Available in many anthologies and online.

6. The classical and English background

Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton University Press, 1975. The classical-republican intellectual context within which the framers worked. A demanding book; the chapters on the American founding are the most accessible entry point.

Reid, John Phillip. Constitutional History of the American Revolution. 4 volumes. University of Wisconsin Press, 1986–93. The English constitutional tradition as the framers knew it. Reid's argument is that the Revolution was, in its self-understanding, a defense of English constitutional liberty against an innovative imperial project.

7. For students writing papers

The Federalist Papers are available free, in many editions, online. The Anti-Federalist Papers require more searching; the Storing edition is in academic libraries, and the Constitution Society maintains free online texts of the major essays. Madison's Convention notes are at the Avalon Project (Yale Law School). The National Constitution Center (constitutioncenter.org) maintains an interactive Constitution with clause-by-clause commentary by both originalist and living-constitutionalist scholars — useful for steel-manning exercises.

For current commentary on contested constitutional questions, follow the Volokh Conspiracy (originalist-leaning, hosted at Reason), Balkinization (living-constitutionalist-leaning, hosted by Jack Balkin and colleagues), SCOTUSblog (case-focused, ideologically neutral), and the Yale Law Journal and Harvard Law Review online forums.

The reading is, again, essentially infinite. What you do with it is up to you.