From Aristotle and Hobbes through Bentley, Truman, and Riker, many writers have claimed, more or less directly, that they are founding or helping to found a true political science for the first time. Modern scholars have usually expressed this aspiration via criticism of earlier “unscientific” approaches. Thus William Riker in 1962, advocating rational choice theory as the basis of political analysis, dismissed “traditional methods—i. e., his-tory writing, the description of institutions, and legal analysis” as able to produce “only wisdom and neither science nor knowledge. And while wisdom is certainly useful in the affairs ofmen, such a result is a failure to live up to the promise in the name political science ”. l Subsequently, rational choice has indeed become the most prominent pretender to the throne of scientific theory within the discipline.

Conventional wisdom maintains that the enduring structures of American politics make rapid policy change unlikely. This proposition is confirmed by much political science. Our institutions are designed to bridle and domesticate reform impulses, dissipating the constant pressures for new political and social arrangements. The separation of powers establishes numerous veto points, making initiatives of any kind difficult. The political culture's firm commitment to broad participation and due process places a much higher value on consultation than on decisiveness or direction. Special interests tolerate only incremental changes. The major parties clothe themselves in the familiar as they move toward the political center and its embrace of the status quo. New ideas are of only marginal importance; their transformative power is routinely blunted by one of America's oldest ideas, pragmatism. Stability, not innovation, is the master theme of our politics.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

In May, 1990, a conference was held at UCLA on the theme of “American Politics in Historical Perspective.” Panels were organized on political institutions and social history, on periodization, and on political identity. The panel presentations on political identity are printed below, along with some of the exchanges among the conference group. Slightly edited for clarity, they are offered to readers in the interest of conveying some of the intellectual ferment currently surrounding the focus on political identity and its use as an approach in historical study. The editors of Studies in American Political Development do not endorse any of the views or interpretations expressed.

The literature on the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 is curiously at odds with our understanding of the politics of the Gilded Age. Labels like “the party period” and phrases such as “the triumph of organizational politics” and the “full flowering of the American party state” attest to the vibrant partisan life of the late 19th century. Stephen Skowronek offers one important reason for this state of affairs: The nature of electoral competition in these years further extended the hegemony of party concerns over governmental operations. More than ever before, the calculations of those in power were wedded to the imperatives of maintaining efficiency in state and local political machines and of forging a national coalition from these machines for presidential elections.

Scott James is gutsy to attempt a refutation of the power of district-level constituency interests on regulatory policy voting in an arena like railroad policy. I believe that his case is weak, but I want to emphasize that party and district political economy interests are intimately interrelated. Party is, as the author argues, a powerful (the most powerful) coalitional mechanism. Representatives often support positions that represent the preferences of party colleagues and not their own, in order to win or maintain political control and support for critical policies, so long as those “vote trading” issues do not represent central concerns at home. Thus southern agrarians included important labor provisions in the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act in order to get the support of Northern Democrats who had already loyally backed the (agrarian) Democratic position on the tariff bill of 1913. On such a vote, representing an intraparty, biregional coalition bargain, party will naturally “predict” voting positions better than region. But the legislative history leaves little doubt from whence each policy (labor, tariff, and antitrust) originated.

Professor Sanders raises several issues, not all of which can be addressed adequately in this brief response. Therefore, I will confine my remarks to those issues which I consider most important, in particular, those that bear on the key theoretical differences between us. I also take issue with her interpretation of the Hiscock vote.

Taming the Prince has a claim on our attention not only for its theoretical qualities and for its politics but because at one time both would have been considered extreme. As a theory it is possibly the first attempt to compose a philosophical discourse about a singular political office, variously named kingship, prince, executive, or president, and to situate it within the con-text of (what used to be confidently called) “the history of political philosophy.” Mansfield's treatise is distinctive, not as a history of an idea or of a concept, indeed not historical in the usual understanding of that term, but as the passionate assertion of an expansive conception of the executive, virtually Gaullist in its grandeur, in its contempt for interest-politics, its dismissive silence about parties, and its scorn for democracy.

To be taken seriously is the hope of a serious author, next to which being agreed with is a petty affair. If this sentiment sounds inhuman, and too good to be true, it is because it abstracts from the desire for recognition, which can take the form of desire for political power. Sheldon Wolin takes my book Taming the Prince1 seriously as—as if it were!—an important political influence. He flatters the all-too-human side of my soul by fastening on the book's conclusion and working backwards from that.