Before I respond to Thomas Spragens's commentary on my book, I want to thank him for the thoughtful and gracious tenor of his review. Despite our differences about the legacy of the McGovern campaign of 1972, we agree that the campaign was a watershed in the development of contemporary liberalism and that it deserves reexamination by those who seek to address liberalism's future in American politics.

Why have American liberals been losing most political contests in recent decades? Theorist Thomas A. Spragens argues that the core of liberalism's problems lies in an ill-conceived transformation in public philosophy. In a “political treatise informed by scholarly resources” (p. ix), he defends an older liberalism, which he describes as populist and progressive, and decries a new one that he associates with the social justice approach of John Rawls. Shifting his attention back and forth from theory to practice, Spragens constructs an argument that liberalism will not recoup its political fortunes until it rediscovers its “populist heart” (p. xvii). Bearing some resemblance to previous treatises by Richard Rorty and Michael Sandel (along with important differences that Spragens notes), Getting the Left Right is provocative and powerful as theoretical critique and advocacy, but is less effective in providing a historical explanation for contemporary liberalism's troubled state.

On the opening day of the 1972 Democratic convention, the women's caucus gave George McGovern a standing ovation. Its first meeting was packed, with 700 female delegates in attendance, exuberant over their numbers at the convention—triple the representation from four years earlier—and their new clout in presidential politics. Of all of the presidential candidates appearing, only Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for president, was greeted with enthusiasm comparable to the warm reception for McGovern. Most of the women at the meeting were fervently anti-war and respected McGovern for his early and courageous stance on Vietnam. However, the size of the gathering attested to another of McGovern's achievements: his chairing of the reform commission that had rewritten the Democratic Party's rules on delegate selection, leading to the huge leap in the representation of women. As Liz Carpenter, a former White House aide to LBJ, put it when introducing McGovern, “We know we wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for you.”

Adam Sheingate has made an important contribution to the literature on political entrepreneurship. He takes a concept that has been widely but casually employed by political scientists studying institutions and policies and sets out to supply that concept with clarity and content. Appropriating the concept for historical institutionalism, he connects the role of the political entrepreneur to the processes of institutional change, posing a powerful challenge to the familiar view of institutions in equilibrium. Especially important for readers of this journal, he expands upon previous uses of the concept by arguing that it offers a new vantage point on American political development, with political entrepreneurs posited to be critical sources of endogenous change.