Above: The former James Blaine House, Washington DC

The Philosopher Kings   2025

The Philosopher Kings: ​The 'Other Founders' Who Created the Greatest Constitution in History.
Six volumes. 150 to 190 pages ea. 

                    The enduring honor of the profession they so eminently graced…”


In this splendid six-volume series, the greatest legal minds of the Constitutional Convention are presented together in their own words as a detailed overview of the brilliant and complex debates that went into creating the most revolutionary government in human history.  This series looks at the extraordinary accomplishment of a group of philosopher-lawyers who changed the course of world history. Their ideas, beautifully argued and expressed in precise, clean, literary language, represent the height of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition of modern democratic institutions. These men constitute the most influential class of thinkers in the history of the United States.

This original, intricate editorial project has been carefully curated to present the best select writings of and best scholarship on each profiled lawyer-founder. Each profile consists of three literary categories: first, the best scholarly minds of yester-decade and yester-century whose analyses we judge to have been the most eloquent in presentation; second, the select writings and speeches of each founder within and outside of the context of the Constitutional Convention. These are in addition to the select correspondence of each featured lawyer-founder. With beautiful art work throughout—both classical Old Masters portraits and never-before published illustrative portraiture—the hardcover version of this series is printed fine paper, designed and printed in Milan.

Our elegant series brings together this outstanding group of minds in the format and with the thoroughness that they merit as a distinguished, but largely forgotten, class of thinkers at the very height of their powers. What's more, it is published in volumes as attractive in their individual design as their contents are luminous in their substance.
  

        Among the main points about this series made in the Introductory essays of each volume:

• ~The Constitutional Convention included among its fifty-five sitting members, thirty-two or thirty-three lawyers, some of whom were judges of State Courts and many of whom later rose to places of high administrative or judicial distinction under the newly created government. Then, too, of fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, twenty six were lawyers.  And when in 1913 scholar Max Farrand published The Framers of the Constitution, he famously ranked the top four Founders, naming, in order, James Madison, James Wilson, George Washington and Gouverneur Morris; when Clinton Rossiter made his list fifty-three years later, the ranking did not change. Remarkably, three of the four ranked were lawyers. Just what was it about the study of law and profession of lawyer that made these men such exceptional thinkers, whose legal reasoning changed the course of world history?


• ~To list the lawyers of the Convention would be, with few exceptions, to name the most illustrious figures in it. As outlined in the series volumes, among these men one finds the preeminent examples of Madison, who became President of the United States and Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury.  But there are also Wilson, Rutledge, Ellsworth, Blair and Paterson who went to the Supreme Court, with Rutledge and Ellsworth being respectively appointed the second and third Chief Justices. There are Roger Sherman, the man who, a lawyer without formal legal education, signed all four founding documents; Abraham Baldwin, and  Rufus King, who became United States senators, and King twice ‘Minister’ (ambassador) to England. There is Gouverneur Morris, Minister to France and a U. S Senator; Randolph, an Attorney General; Charles Pinckney, a U.S. Senator and Minister to Spain; Richard Bassett, also a U.S. Senator, Governor of Delaware and a United States Circuit Judge; Caleb Strong, who was ten times Governor of Massachusetts; Dr. Johnson, a U.S. Senator and President of Columbia College, while Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was offered a place on the Supreme Court bench, and the positions of Secretary of War and Secretary of State, but declined all three.


• ~James Wilson was called “second to James Madison”, was credited with being the principal architect of the Executive Branch and rivaled Gouverneur Morris in his capacity for influential eloquence, while Jefferson himself borrowed from his writings; George Wythe was Chancellor of Virginia and a famous preceptor of law, who numbered among his students Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Monroe and Henry Clay; Luther Martin, was then leader of the American bar, later defended Aaron Burr when tried for treason; William Livingston was several times governor of New Jersey, while David Brearley was Chief Justice of that State and for eleven years head of its Supreme Court; James Wilson led the Philadelphia bar; while Gunning Bedford, Jr., so distinguished for his eloquence, was Attorney General of Delaware and the first judge of the United States District court for that district.  John Dickinson was the reputed author of the Articles of Confederation, while George Read had been Attorney General of Delaware and became a U.S. Senator and Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court.  It is an extraordinary group of men.


• ~Of the most important committees of the Convention, lawyers predominated in their membership. The Committee of Detail, which prepared the draft of the Constitution after its basic principles had been exhaustively discussed, was composed of Rutledge, Randolph, Gorham, Ellsworth and Wilson and all but Gorham were lawyers. The Committee of Style, appointed to phrase and arrange the Constitution, consisted of Johnson, Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Madison and King were all lawyers; “while to Gouverneur Morris we probably owe that wonderful lucidity of expression and condensation of statement which have made the Constitution a master piece of literary style”, in the words of the Journal of the American Bar Association in 1927.


• ~The so-called "Virginia Plan," which formed the nucleus of the Constitution, was probably largely drafted by Madison. It was sponsored in the Convention by Randolph, as was the "New Jersey Plan" by Paterson and the "Pinckney Plan/' by Charles Pinckney. As we have seen, all of these were lawyers.


• But perhaps the crowning glory of all the work of 1787 was the judicial structure of the Federal Government. It occasioned comparatively little disagreement in the Constitutional Convention, but it stands as a towering monument to the ability and the foresight of the delegates. To Wilson, Rutledge, Ellsworth and Randolph it is mainly due “and had lawyers had no other share in the proceedings of the Convention, their work alone in this respect would entitle them to the enduring honor of the professional they so eminently graced.” ​​ ​

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The Series:

Volume One:   Roger Sherman ~Spencer Roane ~ Oliver Ellsworth ~ James Wilson

Volume Two:  Gouverneur Morris ~ Rufus King ~ William Patterson ~Edmund Randolph ~
    John Lansing

Volume Three:   John Rutledge ~ George Wythe ~ William Churchill Houston ~ George Read ~
Robert Yates

Volume Four:  John Dickinson ~ William Samuel Johnson ~ Gunning Bedford ~ William Few ~
Charles Pickney

Volume Five:   Abraham Baldwin  ~ Caleb Strong ~ William Livingston ~ David Brearly ~ Luther Martin

Volume Six:  William Richardson Davie ~ Alexander Hamilton ~ Richard Bassett ~ John Blair ~ James Madison 

Below:  Chapter Pages from Volume One

(continued from previous column) We have wandered so far awav--and in more ways than one from those ideals of the Founders, that, whenever we turn back to them, seem to be forever not without an effect of warning and reproach.  The desire to celebrate the founders is too often a matter of partisanship or merely an academic reference, or the interest of antiquarians and collectors.  Then, too, contemporary journalism has set about rewriting these histories and biographies to suit the ideologies and biases of our times, with no respect to tradition, to objective scholarship, to even historical context and in the process too much of our natural reverence for this country’s greatest historical characters has dissipated.  It is our hope you will find ample treasure in this series of the mostly unsung heroes of the Convention and the founding of this country, each of whom was a triumphant example of the stateliness and power of the legal profession and its immeasurable influence upon the history of this country.

Our books feature original artwork by a Milan-based artist who has enjoyed over a dozen international and Milan-based solo exhibitions over the past twenty years, and has been featured in national newspapers.