I write to note a fundamental area of agreement with Professors Orren and Skowronek. And yet given this shared concern I think the study of ideas should be at the center of developmental approaches to politics. Professors Orren and Skowronek write, “The time has passed when familiar claims about constitutional foundations and normative commitments can be ventured confidently without serious consideration of confounding evidence. Making inquiries into these areas specific and empirically tractable will be, we think, value added.” I agree with this general assessment. Indeed, I have written a book, The Madisonian Constitution, which seeks to examine tensions within American constitutionalism and empirically trace how constitutional understandings and constitutional change have necessarily been partial and incomplete. In fact, I suggest that constitutional conflict has been an ordinary feature of American constitutionalism precisely because the American constitutional order is structured around agonistic principles and institutions.Footnote ¹ From the perspective of political science, understanding these tensions might also prove helpful in sustaining the American polity. But let me be clear: I do not think there is an easy foundation to be arrived at in the study of the American polity, or any other polity. Nor do I long for a world untroubled by “facing the facts,” nor for a time untroubled by historicism, positivism, or social science.Footnote ² I do think, however, an at times uncritical acceptance of historicism and positivism has led political scientists unnecessarily to turn away from the study of ideas and values that make up the political community.

I find the turn from ideas particularly curious. And in my essay I did wonder if it stems from a too easy acceptance of elements of historicism and positivism insofar as they are understood to create difficulties in “measuring” ideas (and especially “values” based on ideas). Yet I venture that even accepting historicism, we could still examine ideas and values. That is, we could examine the importance of ideas and values to political development whether or not we can say that such ideas and values are true in any foundational sense. And while I do think that truth is important in the social sciences, the aims of my essay were more limited. I argued that we could study the values of the polity without ourselves judging the truth of those values. Turning to the polity, for example, comparative constitutionalism might examine the values and ideas a constitution rests upon without making judgments about the ultimate foundation of such values. One could thus easily be a historicist, or an antifoundationalist, and still examine and weigh the values—conflicted though they are—that make up a polity. One could even insist that a constitution must—to be a constitution—have a positive foundation while adhering to a broad philosophical antifoundationalism.

I turned to Aristotle and Tocqueville because these political scientists—and, yes, they are worthy of the name—long ago wrestled with the normative and empirical tensions inherent in a polity. And yet, one worthy part of wrestling with political development in these terms is not only to take ideas seriously but to take the values that are attached to these ideas seriously as well. Taking ideas and the values attached to them seriously does not return us to a simpler time (if such a time ever existed); it does not even return us to a simpler mode of analysis. These thinkers offer enough complexity—absent some of the jargon—to delight even scholars of American political development. Thus one need not be a believer in easy foundations to wrestle with how ideas and values animate the constitution of a polity and its development, as is evident in a work like Gary Jacobsohn's Constitutional Identity.Footnote ³

As for positivism, I again did not offer a blanket condemnation, but an insistence that scholars under its sway too easily posit that we cannot measure ideas or values and, thus, must focus on facts. Professors Orren and Skowronek presume that this is the ready state of the world—the world we inhabit—and therefore presume that “values” cannot be evaluated in the same manner as “empirical facts.” But values and facts are not as easily separated as many adherents of a stringent positivism suggest. So, again, I am not reluctant to “face facts,” but concerned about a tendency to “make values into facts” and “facts into values.”Footnote ⁴ It was in this vein that I briefly spoke of religion as it illuminates the way in which how we categories facts may well depend on the ideas and values that constitute a polity.

Professors Orren and Skowronek do take up such issues, but we should note how they take them up. They treat ideas as part of culture and note the rich history of APD scholarship that carefully attended to such issues. And yet they want to move beyond the study of culture. For them, developmental scholarship may more profitably focus on institutions. If history offers us “sites” of development, focusing on institutional change allows us to examine concrete episodes of development that are more readily testable in social scientific terms. I find this problematic insofar as it leads Professors Orren and Skowronek to downplay the study of ideas.Footnote ⁵ Ideas may be harder to study than institutions insofar as measuring how ideas drive political development may be more elusive than a similar focus on institutions—though I would hasten to add that this is not immediately clear. Yet even if it were, we should not abandon the study of ideas, which may be the driving force in fashioning institutions and creating institutional change. It may well be that we need to study “ideas in determining the form and content of institutional change.”Footnote ⁶ Ideas offer a normative and empirical understanding of the world that shapes how agents create, alter, and act within institutions. Ideas may well frame how we, as social scientists, study and understand the world.

Let me return to my discussion of religion as illustrative of this point. Professors Orren and Skowronek take up religious authority in The Search for American Political Development to note how different religious orders (as part of the political order) have “intercurred” with one another throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My point was simply that to understand religion in terms of American political development we would need to understand how ideas framed religion in constitutional terms. For example, I am currently working on the political development of the distinction between the public sphere and the private sphere in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This distinction began in thought against preexisting institutions (or a prior site, in Orren and Skowronek's language) that did not accept, or often even consider, this conceptual distinction. If we turn our eye to educational institutions in existence in the earlier years of the American republic, for example, they are most aptly characterized as “church-state” schools. Harvard and Yale, for instance, were founded and funded by a combination of the state and the church, rather than being the private institutions we now consider them. If such blurred lines are problematic to us—and they became so with the fashioning of a new constitutional order—they were not problematic at the time, because the inhabitants of the early American polity did not think of the civil sphere as different from what came to be dubbed the private sphere. The creation of these separate spheres was part of a conscious effort to soften the tension between civil authority and theological authority by creating the civil sphere as distinct and separate from religious authority, which came to be removed to the private sphere.Footnote ⁷ But for this effort to succeed it had to map onto the mindset of citizens. The people needed to digest this mindset so that they would conceptualize and act upon these constitutional categorizations.

It was this shift in thought—“a durable shift in governing authority”—that was a precursor to the alteration of church-state colleges into the private institutions we thus label today. And part of this development included reconstructing the curriculum and organization of the university to displace theology from its center. As part of constitutional development, educational institutions would embrace, and foster, the separation of knowledge from religion in much the manner that politics was separated from theological authority. Moreover, this aim was put forward in a self-conscious manner by thinkers and actors such as James Madison. As Madison put it, “there seems to be no alternative but between a public University without a theological professorship, and sectarian Seminaries without a University.” Altering educational institutions was understood as a necessary part of American constitutional and political development based upon the ideas that animated the new constitutional order. The new polity would need a mindset—including patterns of thought, the organization of knowledge, and our mode of political discourse—that began from shared political principles and not theological foundations.Footnote ⁸

The constitution of a polity, in this sense, is far more than a set of institutional arrangements: a constitution seeks not only to bring into being a government, which necessarily includes the resultant “civil society,” but to transform our ideas about issues such as the proper relationship between the civil and the religious. Thus what we, as scholars and citizens, would label, as a matter of fact, a private institution today depended on a value change that developed over time based on ideas about the proper constitution of political authority. This change may well be placed within Professors Orren and Skworonek's broad terms. And let me be clear about both my admiration for their scholarship and my benefiting from it. It is not clear to me, however, that we can make sense of the sort of shifts in governing authority they seek to understand without making sense of the ideas (and values) that are so often behind them.

In James Madison's language, ideas offer a “mental picture” of the world. Ideas, in this sense, can make, or constitute, the world we inhabit.Footnote ⁹ I do not wish to flee such a world, but, like Professors Orren and Skowronek, to understand it. I doubt we can do that without paying more attention to ideas.