Toward a More Perfect Union

A posthumous collection of Herbert Storing’s essays on the American founding, edited by Joseph M. Bessette. Storing’s characteristic move is to take the founders’ own arguments seriously as political philosophy rather than as rationalisations of interest — reading the Anti-Federalists as a coherent alternative constitutional vision, defending the design of the presidency and the Senate on their stated grounds, and treating slavery and the founding’s compromises as problems internal to the founders’ own principles.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in The American Experiment section, where the curriculum moves from theories of the best regime to one actual constitutional design and the arguments made for and against it at the time.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on The American Experiment. A structured curriculum shared March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”; the full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Government — the constitutional design the essays defend and criticise.
• Democracy — the founders’ republic as a contested answer to it.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.