It is a curiosity of American politics that more than two centuries into “the American experiment,” we so often invoke the founding. President Barack Obama frequently invokes “We the People” in his speeches and links current issues to the long-standing project of creating a “more perfect Union.” Just as surely, in the name of “We the People” the Tea Party movement persistently criticizes President Obama for undermining the nature of America’s union. In The Lovers’ Quarrel, Elvin Lim explains why this is so, arguing that America has had two foundings, not one. Unique among modern democracies, America’s two foundings lend a peculiar character to American politics. As Lim argues, America’s first founding occurred with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and its second founding with the Constitution of 1787. These two foundings speak to profoundly different understandings of “We the People.” Indeed, they point to two different conceptions of the American political order, and the resulting antagonism drives American political development.

The Lovers’ Quarrel is an ambitious and provocative book with a clever title. It offers a sweeping reframing of American political history that brings to mind such works as Samuel Huntington’s American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981) and Walter Dean Burnham’s Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (1970). It is refreshing to encounter a work on American politics that, drawing on ideas and institutions, offers an overarching theory to account for its most resilient features. In doing so, Lim highlights what is uniquely American about American political development and American political thought (the phenomena, not the subfields) and draws together scholarship within American political development (APD) and American political thought (APT) that too often sits apart.

The idea that the Constitution was a departure from the Revolution of 1776 has long historical resonance. But Lim is not interested in the “purity” of the Revolution; he is interested in how these two different foundings—where “We the People spoke twice”—give legitimate voice to different understandings of Union, Liberty, Truth, and Republicanism. Americans have continually fought over the same thing—federalism as it speaks to how Americans are constituted—because “we have never conclusively settled the question of just who we are” (p. 27). The first founding, best captured by the Anti-Federalists, conceived a Union of states committed to “negative” liberty, where rights were jealously guarded against power. It also embraced an idealistic conception of Truth—consider the Declaration’s pronouncement of “We hold these truths” and its appeal to God (or at least to Nature)—and a republicanism that trusted in the people while being skeptical of elites. In contrast, the Constitution, best represented by Federalists, embraced a national Union of the people and was committed to a “positive” view of liberty that recognized the need for governmental power to solve collective problems. The Federalists were more pragmatic in their understanding of truth, trusting in reason and the new science of politics. Distrustful of democracy, they cultivated a national republicanism based on Burkean representation and institutions that could channel and educate the demos.

These conceptual clashes are familiar. Certainly, the Anti-Federalist elements in Thomas Jefferson’s, Andrew Jackson’s, and Ronald Reagan’s presidencies, as well as the preoccupations and rhetoric of the Tea Party, have been noted. So, too, have Abraham Lincoln’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s articulation and reshaping of Federalist ideas and institutions. Yet Lim’s framework sheds new light on the persistence and form of this conflict, where actors attempt to prioritize one of the two foundings (p. 4). Take an example that threads its way through several chapters: The Anti-Federalist preference for “the presidency as a place of moral statesmanship, as a ‘vindex injuriarum—an avenger of public wrongs’” (p. 54). Scholars too often read the Anti-Federalists as fearful of all power. Yet Jefferson’s and Jackson’s vision of the president as a “defender of the public faith” empowered by the people traced its origins to Anti-Federalists (p. 77). The Progressives’ plebiscitary presidency drew on this Anti-Federalist inheritance—and not only when it came to the presidency. Defending states’ rights, Woodrow Wilson quipped about Teddy Roosevelt’s nationalism that “ours is a program of liberty and theirs is a program of regulation” (p. 111). The maturation of the Anti-Federalist/Federalist dialectic is a mix that would please neither: plebiscitary democracy combined with a formidable state and tending toward presidential government (p. 204).

Yet Lim’s analysis, gripping as narrative, cannot bear the weight he places on it. It is far from clear that the “two foundings” stand so starkly in contrast to each other. The Declaration’s insistence on individual rights “against government” is not inexorably in opposition to the “Constitution [which] enumerates the powers of government” (p. 5). Nor must we see the Bill of Rights as an Anti-Federalist effort to cabin the Federalist Constitution (p. 8). James Madison, in fact, rejected the most sweeping changes proposed by Anti-Federalists, viewing the Bill of Rights as a way to secure the (Federalist) Constitution. Lim attempts to fit these complex conceptions into one of his two foundings, giving us binaries: rights against power, states against nation, democracy against aristocracy. These recurrent tensions in American politics—and the resulting disharmony— are sewn into the fabric of the American regime. But it is doubtful that this is because we have had two foundings. Indeed, rather than each “text” representing a founding, the tensions highlighted by Lim inhere in each text and each founding moment.

Madison was not confused in wedding the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. In Federalist 40, he even justified the Constitution by way of the logic and principles set out in the Declaration. Similarly, Lincoln drew on the Declaration to better secure and preserve national Union under the Constitution, where both rights and national power were essential. And Obama, who has quoted Lincoln more than any other recent president, similarly invokes the Declaration. To be sure, acts of interpretation can be acts of transformation. Politics often takes place by way of language, framing and reshaping our understandings in ways that can be the source of political development. It is no coincidence, as Lim points out, that our list of “great” presidents includes those who oversaw “durable shifts in federal authority” along these lines (p. 201).

Lim’s analysis of figures like Lincoln and Obama is attentive to creative synthesis and provides insight into their interpretive acts (pp. 94–99, 190–95); yet these more subtle readings belie his more sweeping claims, which compel him to place these actors within the contours of one of his two foundings. Still, it is not clear what we gain by placing such figures squarely within Lim’s two-foundings thesis, rather than attending to how their thinking attempted to overcome this disharmony in order to meet the needs of their generation.

Today, same-sex marriage could get a ringing endorsement from the Declaration’s insistence on equality, but so, too, could conservative critics’ attempt to point to its arguments about Nature. Defenders of same-sex marriage could also turn to the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty and equality against the states, while critics can argue that the Tenth Amendment leaves definitions of marriage to the states. Rather than two singular foundings, we see that ideas set in motion by the founding generation become part of the political struggles over bringing the American polity to life as it is constructed over time. Yet this makes it difficult to speak of a moment of founding in contrast to subsequent development. Lim reveals that we cannot escape the burdens of wrestling with these questions ourselves: In Lincoln’s words, “the dogmas of the quite past are inadequate to the stormy present. … [W]e must think anew, and act anew” (p. 103).

Lim is also too apt to place scholars as “developmentalists” or “foundationalists” (pp. 14–16)—usually APD and APT scholars, respectively—with the former focusing on institutional change and the latter focusing on essential ideas. This categorical mind-set cuts against Lim’s commendable effort to bring these subfields into dialogue. This habit can also lead to stilted readings. So Jeffrey Tulis and I are considered “developmentalists” who are also—indeed, first and foremost for Lim—“foundationalists” because we think ideas are essential for apprehending institutional change (p. 15). Why this makes one a foundationalist more than a developmentalist is not clear. Perhaps it is because I think some constitutional developments are essential—the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, where I would agree with Lim that its importance was in wedding the protection of rights and equality to national power (p. 83). If so, it is not clear why Stephen Skowronek, the quintessential developentalist for Lim, is not a foundationalist on occasion—for example, in his recent and cogent critique of the unitary executive, tellingly entitled “The Conservative Insurgency and Presidential Power” (Harvard Law Review, 2009). (I should note, however, that Lim’s persuasive critique of my earlier work led me to alter my thinking).

Even if Lim’s overarching theory of two foundings fails to persuade, he offers a compelling portrait of federalism as the central struggle in American political development. The Lovers’ Quarrel illuminates our understanding of the past while also clarifying contemporary issues by connecting them to a potent historical trajectory.