America’s 250th has brought forth a wide array of books both praising and criticizing the American Founding. Included among this host of works is the first notable biography in quite some time of James Wilson, the namesake of the Institute that hosts and edits this online journal. The biography, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution, is the product of Jesse Wegman, a lawyer and legal commentator as well as senior fellow at the progressive Brennan Center. Wegman’s writing bona fides are considerable: he was a member of the New York Times editorial board and the previous author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, a book in which Wegman gives considerable treatment to Wilson’s role in shaping the Electoral College at the Constitutional Convention.
Wegman writes from the Left. That is no bar to good history; the late Gordon S. Wood proved as much. But the subtitles of Wegman’s two books give the game away. Wegman is interested less in historical recovery than activist revision. The Wilson who emerges in The Lost Founder is a Founder the contemporary Left can finally claim without wincing: champion of “the people,” foe of filtered elections and a malapportioned Senate, the man who put popular sovereignty at the center of the constitutional design and then told the country that knowledge of the law ought to be “diffused over the whole community.” Wegman has traded a more demanding, and more interesting, Wilson for one pre-fitted for contemporary breakdowns in the polity.
Wegman’s book ultimately is a missed opportunity because Wilson resists Wegman’s easy pigeonholing. Wilson held that sovereignty when traced to its source is found in the man, as brilliantly articulated in his Lectures on Law as well as in his noteworthy opinion in Chisholm v. Georgia. He wanted the principles of the law taught to citizens, not so they could refashion the law to suit the moment but rather so that they would know when the law had drifted from its rational and moral foundations.
If Wegman’s book is indeed a missed opportunity, it presents ample ground for a critical symposium at Anchoring Truths. We have assembled scholars and writers steeped in Wilson’s writings who can distinguish the laudable aspects of Wegman’s book from the problematic ones, particularly on Wilson’s animating philosophy. In the year of America’s 250th, the Institute’s namesake is owed at least this: to be understood correctly.
