Reconstituting the Study of American Political Thought in a Regime-Change Perspective

Abstract

The story of American political thought has been told in many different ways. Three genres stand out. The first is written within the larger framework of intellectual history and takes the form of anthology and narrative summary. Among its most prominent features are an eclecticism of sources (from Roger Williams to Walt Whitman to Erich Fromm) and a heavy emphasis on the period from the first New England settlements through the victory of Jeffersonian democracy.' A second form is constitutionalist. Charting the major struggles over legal and institutional relationships through time, this perspective gives prominence to landmark court decisions and articulations of major constitutional issues by party and political leaders. As articulated in the late nineteenth century, it examines the major forms of constitutionalist thinking that lie behind these constitutional and institutional struggles. 2 The third genre, I label populist-progressive. Here, the story of American political thought is

The Nominations Presidents Make: Appointing Supreme Court Justices

“…Regimes are often defined as stable partisan governing coalitions in American national politics (e.g. Burnham 1970;Eisenach 1990;Lowi 1967;Skowronek 1982). Orren and Skowronek suggest that regimes often come about by "elite engineering ... rearranging institutional relationships to stabilize and routinize governmental operations around a new set of political assumptions" (Orren and Skowronek 1999, 693).…”