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³ See, especially, Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960)Google Scholar, Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, and Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

⁴ Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 9.

⁵ Kahn, Ronald and Kersch, Ken, introduction to The Supreme Court and American Political Development, ed. Kersch, Kahn and (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 19–21Google Scholar.

⁶ Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development, 77–78.

⁷ Ibid., 25.

⁸ Interestingly, however, earlier approaches such as “systems theory” and structural-functionalism took these questions seriously. See, for example, Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁰ de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Mansfield, Harvey C. and Winthrop, Delba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 7. This is true of ancient understandings of constitutionalism insofar as such understandings wrestle with the aims of a polity across time. See Aristotle, Politics 4.1.

¹¹ See, for example, Murphy, Walter F., Constitutional Democracy: Creating and Maintaining a Just Political Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹² See the exchange between Sotirios A. Barber, “Normative Theory, the ‘New Institutionalism,’ and the Future of Public Law,” Rogers M. Smith, “The New Institutionalism and Normative Theory: Reply to Professor Barber,” and Shapiro, Martin, “Political Jurisprudence, Public Law, and Post-Consequentialist Ethics: Comment on Professors Barber and Smith,” all in Studies in American Political Development, no. 3 (March 1989): 56–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁴ Barber, “Normative Theory,” 59.

¹⁵ Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, 28.

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¹⁸ Nichols, James H. Jr., Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Mark Tushnet, “The Inevitable Globalization of Constitutional Law,” Opinio Juris (blog), http://opiniojuris.org/2009/06/11/the-inevitable-globalization-of-constitutional-law/.

²⁰ Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development, 9.

²¹ Ibid., 120.

²² Ibid., 123.

²³ Skowronek, Stephen, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Intercurrence “refers to the simultaneous operation of different sets of rules, to a politics structured by irresolution in the basic principles of social organization and governmental control, and it describes the disorder inherent in a multiplicity of ordering rules” (Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development, 118). More simply, intercurrence is defined as “intervening” or occurring while other events are already in progress. The word is drawn from the medical lexicon, which defines it as a disease or pathology occurring while another disease is in progress.

²⁵ Ibid., 77.

²⁶ Ibid., 184–85. See also Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, “The Study of American Political Development,” in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. Katznelson, Ira and Milner, Helen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002)Google Scholar.

²⁷ See, especially, Dahl, Robert, “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policymaker,” Journal of Public Law 50 (1957): 562–82Google Scholar. See, following Dahl in various ways, Howard Gillman, “Party Politics and Constitutional Change: The Political Origins of Liberal Judicial Activism,” in The Supreme Court and American Political Development, 138–68; Whittington, Keith E., The Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Graber, Mark, “Constructing Judicial Review,” Annual Review of Political Science, no. 8 (2005): 425–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ See, for example, Clayton, Cornell and Pickerill, J. Mitchell, “The Rehnquist Court and the Political Dynamics of Federalism,” Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 2 (2004): 233–48Google Scholar, and McMahon, Kevin, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)Google Scholar. For a powerful critique of the “regimes” literature, see Keck, Thomas, “Party Politics or Judicial Independence? The Regime Politics Literature Hits the Law Schools,” Law and Social Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2007): 511–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Graber, “Constructing Judicial Review,” 446.

³⁰ Orren, Karen, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 1. Long before The Search for American Political Development, for example, Orren defined development as “fundamental reconstruction.” For an illuminating discussion of why these differences matter, see Finn, John, “Transformation or Transmogrification? Ackerman, Hobbes (as in Calvin and Hobbes), and the Puzzle of Changing Constitutional Identity,” Constitutional Political Economy 10, no. 4 (1999): 355–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³² Israel, Jonathan, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 37. To recognize the potential of ideas, one only need think of placing American institutions—and the formal separation of church and state—on a country like Iraq or Afghanistan. For these institutions to make sense they would have to coincide with a mindset that thought about government and civil society in a particular fashion.

³³ Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955)Google Scholar; Greenstone, J. David, The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, 43.

³⁴ Greenstone, Lincoln Persuasion, 6.

³⁵ Huntington, Samuel P., American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 222–25Google Scholar.

³⁶ Smith, Rogers M., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. This has also been true of much of the literature on party realignment, which is often driven by constitutional ideas. See, for example, Milkis, Sidney, Political Parties and Constitutional Government (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Ceaser, James W., “Foundational Concepts and American Political Development,” in Nature and History in American Political Development: A Debate, by Ceaser et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 5.

³⁸ Rogers M. Smith, “What If God Was One of Us? The Challenges of Studying Foundational Political Concepts,” in Nature and History in American Political Development, 145, 161.

³⁹ Smith, “Which Comes First,” 92.

⁴⁰ Hartz, Liberal Tradition in America, 32.

⁴¹ Greenstone, Lincoln Persuasion, 285.

⁴² Huntington, American Politics, 261.

⁴³ Smith, Civic Ideals, 9.

⁴⁴ Tulis, Jeffrey K., The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, 7.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 8.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 9.

⁴⁷ Ceaser, James W., Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, 10.

⁴⁸ Tulis and Ceaser, in fact, take up questions of impeachment and demagoguery in this manner: Jeffrey K. Tulis, “Impeachment in the Constitutional Order,” and Ceaser, James W., “Demagoguery, Statesmanship, and Presidential Politics,” both in The Constitutional Presidency, ed. Bessette, Joseph M. and Tulis, Jeffrey K. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Jacobsohn, Gary Jeffrey, The Wheel of Law: India's Secularism in Comparative Constitutional Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 27.

⁵⁰ Thinking in these terms also invites us to consider what Mark Brandon calls “constitutional failure.” See Brandon, , Free in the World: American Slavery and Constitutional Failure (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Jacobsohn, Gary Jeffrey, “Constitutional Identity,” Review of Politics 68, no. 3 (2006): 361–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵³ Tulis, Jeffrey K., “On the State of Constitutional Theory,” Law and Social Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1991)Google Scholar: 712.

⁵⁴ I do not mean to rule out original meaning or suggest that a constitution must “evolve.” Development is different from evolution. Indeed, development is primarily concerned with constitutional foundations and identity and, therefore, takes some form of original meaning seriously insofar as original principles must be kept “alive” if the constitution is to endure.

⁵⁵ Jacobsohn, “Constitutional Identity,” 394.

⁵⁶ Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 41.

⁵⁷ As president of the American Political Science Association, Gabriel Almond insisted that “whatever political science may become, one of its peculiarly important ingredients will be what it has been.” He even insisted, against some contemporary behavioralists who sought to be too “scientific,” that there was “no cause for shame in this past,” a past, as Almond explained it, that included the likes of Aristotle, Montesquieu, and The Federalist (Gabriel A. Almond, “Political Theory and Political Science,” American Political Science Review 60, no. 4 [1966]: 878). See also Almond, Gabriel A. and Genco, Stephen J., “Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics,” World Politics 29, no. 4 (1977): 489–522CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ Politics 1252a20. The translation is from Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Everson, Stephen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Politics 1288b29–30.

⁶⁰ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 7.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Regime and the Revolution, ed. Kahan, Alan S. et al., vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 241–47Google Scholar. See also Democracy in America, 45–53.

⁶³ Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development, 1.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 194.

⁶⁵ Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 45; Murphy, Constitutional Democracy, 37.

⁶⁶ Kersch, Ken, Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 8.

⁶⁷ See Thomas, George, “The Qualitative Foundations of Political Science Methodology,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 4 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 858, and Thomas, , “What Dataset? The Qualitative Foundations of Law and Courts Scholarship,” Law and Courts 16, no. 1 (2006): 9–10Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ See, respectively, Skowronek, Building a New American State, 38; Kersch, Constructing Civil Liberties, 12; and Smith, Rogers M., “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 549–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁹ Murphy, Constitutional Democracy, 13.

⁷⁰ Macedo, Stephen, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Locke, John, A Letter Concerning Toleration, in Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Shapiro, Ian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Madison, James, “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” in The Mind of the Founder, ed. Meyer, Marvin (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1973)Google Scholar. See Thomas, George, “James Madison: Secularism and the Logic of American Constitutionalism,” in Secularism and the Enlightenment, ed. Nadon, Christopher (New York: Columbia University Press, Forthcoming)Google Scholar.

⁷² de Coulanges, Numa Denis Fustel, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, chap. 7.

⁷³ Thus an APD work like Morone's, JamesHellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar rests on a normative understanding of religion and morality (a point Morone is aware of).

⁷⁴ See, for example, Jacobsohn, , The Wheel of LawCrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hirschl, Ran, “The Rise of Constitutional Theocracy,” Harvard International Law Journal Online 49 (2008)Google Scholar: 72.

⁷⁵ Whittington, Keith E., Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Whittington, Constitutional Construction, 10.

⁷⁷ Whittington, Keith E., Constitutional Interpretation: Original Intent, Judicial Review, and Constitutional Meaning (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ A work like Kevin McMahon's Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, for example, seeks to describe the New Deal as “pursuing a more rights-centered agenda,” but this fact depends on a value judgment about how we define rights. Other scholarship has illustrated that the Progressives were often “anti-rights” and many New Dealers sought to limit what counted as “civil liberties.” See, for example, Thomas, George, The Madisonian Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 115. These “facts” quickly engage us in a debate about “values.” Similarly, a work like Hirschl's, RanTowards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, which is preoccupied with an empirical analysis of the emergence of powerful judiciaries across the globe, is at root concerned with the health of this development. Hirschl is concerned that the rise of judicial power is being used in ways that empower elites and is harmful to democratic government.

⁷⁹ Jeffrey K. Tulis, “On the State of Constitutional Theory,” 714.