Skip to main content
← Portfolio

Source book

Zen and the Art of Citizenship

A memoir and civic manual on the preamble plus 25 founding principles. The source spine for every other Liberty's Principles Media property.

theartofcitizenship.comPrint & digital editions, July 4, 2026.

What it is

Zen and the Art of Citizenship: An Inquiry into Principles(ZAC) is the source book that supplies the principle ordering used across every Liberty’s Principles Media product. It is at once a memoir — the founder’s journey from seventeen-year-old enlistee through the Gulf War, law school, practice, and the long rebuild — and a plainspoken civic manual that walks the reader through the preamble plus twenty-five principles in the arc-of-life ordering Bradley developed.

The arc moves from the individual outward: individual, then family, then society, then governance. The structural choice carries the argument. Most popular treatments of the founding principles present them as a list to be memorized; ZAC presents them as a ladder a citizen actually climbs.


Who it’s for

Adult readers who want a single book to ground their understanding of what the founders argued and why. High school and college civics instructors looking for a primary source they can teach. Veterans who recognize the arc. Anyone whose civic education ended in eleventh grade and who has been quietly aware of the gap since.


The problem it addresses

The most popular treatments of the founding principles in the modern market are either dry textbooks or partisan polemics. ZAC takes a third path: lawyer-curated, memoir-anchored, non-partisan, and willing to put the writer’s own life on the page so the principles read as lived rather than recited.


Related property

The principle library that anchors this book is also available as an interactive teaching platform: The Citizens Compass, a separate Liberty’s Principles Media product with Family, Citizen, and Educator modes.


Press & partnership

Press copies, podcast and interview requests, classroom adoption inquiries, and academic-licensing requests should each be routed through the appropriate page below.