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Much important work on American political development does not feature the study of political ideas. This article sketches a general framework of how politics proceeds, the “spiral of politics.” It suggests how and why idea generation and reformulation may comprise a crucial stage in politics. It thereby highlights the need for interpretive studies of ideas, while also indicating how different sorts of political science research can be constructively connected.

This essay argues that American political development (APD) has much to gain by paying more attention to ideas and American political thought. Recent APD scholarship has been preoccupied by institutional analysis and downplayed the importance of ideas. Turning institutional analysis around, institutions are embedded in ideas. How we understand institutions is often an artifact of thought, and institutional authority may be determined by our ideas. To sketch how ideas might illuminate political development, this essay turns to Madison'sMemorial and Remonstranceas an effort to alter our ideas and reconstruct the political order.

The intellectual schism between ideas and institutions has been nowhere more evident than in contemporary presidential studies. In sharp contrast to mainstream presidential studies, American political development scholars have viewed certain presidents as formative actors, who have redefined the social contract with rhetoric that has informed structural change. Examining the relationship between Franklin Roosevelt’s rhetoric and institutional reforms, this essay argues that FDR had a rather coherent understanding and program of reform that gave constitutional form to the progressive tradition born of the early twentieth century. The construction of the New Deal political order thus argues for the importance of probing the philosophical contours of institutional developments.

The Anti-Federalists lost the battle to defeat the Constitution but won back through interpretation what they lost in constitutional construction. To counter Anti-Federalists’ accurate depictions of the proposed constitution as one that would radically alter the existing regime,The Federalistadopted a rhetorical structure that facilitated an opposing political tradition layered over the constitutive logic of the Constitution. Our analysis of the developmental logic embedded in founding political thought, the rhetoric used to defend that political logic, and the subsequent appropriation of Federalist rhetoric by the losers of this debate illustrates the mutual dependence of American political development and political thought.

The relationship between American political thought (APT) and American political development (APD) as phenomena as well as subfields in American Politics has not been sufficiently theorized. This essay takes up what I call the Second Founding of 1787–89 as the critical case for examining the close relationship between APT and APD. The statesmen of that era were thinkers and developmentalists of the first order; they understood the inseparable link between political justification and political change. This dynamic relationship between American political thought and development practiced in 1787–89 can be used as a blueprint for understanding the entwined cycles of political justification and change in American politics.

I argue that, especially if we want to consider what the study of American political thought has to offer the study of American political development, we must look at the use that American political thought makes of literature. Ultimately, I argue, American political thought tempers American political development with a sense of tragedy.

This essay tracks how Grace Lee Boggs's lifelong engagements with Chinese political thought and US revolutionary praxis co-developed. We first show that Lee Boggs's concepts of roles and revolution drew on Confucian and Maoist philosophy; we next show that Lee Boggs later traced alternative, US-based genealogies of both concepts, just as she engaged more deeply with Asian American activism. Lee Boggs as a reader of Chinese thought tended towards cultural hybridity, transcontinental intimacies, and general intellectualism. We propose that these tendencies could be usefully developed in both Asian American political thought and political theory as a whole.

What does the trend of “realism” in political theory portend, if anything, for how social and political scientists do their work? We can best see where realism’s rubber hits the road by re-examining the methodological comparison between political science and political journalism, according to which the academic field has long harbored assumptions of its own superiority. When the comparison between these two approaches to knowledge about politics is explicitly made, political science is typically justified by reference to distinctive (and higher) purposes and methods. Here, we reconsider conventional assumptions by reconstructing the journalistic practices and methodological reflections of two early figures in the American muckraking tradition, Lincoln Steffens and R. S. Baker. While their purposes were similar to those upheld by advocates of a publicly engaged political science, their methods, somewhat more surprisingly, are also applicable to the academic profession. Several anti-scholastic lessons on method—relevant to qualitative, quantitative, and interpretive approaches alike—emerge from the muckrakers’ example. The realist movement in political theory is congruent with the proposition that political science’s superiority complex is less easily defended and more obstructive to good research practice than even the most civically engaged researchers commonly assume.

While “inclusion” has been seen as a central mode of redressing ongoing injustices against communities of color in the US, Indigenous political experiences feature more complex legacies of contesting US citizenship. Turning to an important episode of contestation, this essay examines the relation between inclusion and the politics of eliminating Indigenous nations that was part of a shared policy shift toward “Termination” in the Anglo-settler world of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reading of Indigenous activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), it demonstrates how the construction of what I call the “civic inclusion narrative” in post–World War II American political discourse disavowed practices of empire-formation. Widely considered a foundational text of the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement, the work repositioned Indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization. Deloria’s work provides an exemplary counterpoint to the enduring thread of civic inclusion in American political thought and an alternative tradition of decolonization—an imperative that continues to resonate in today’s North American and global Indigenous struggles over land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.

The African Americans who wrote the Liberian constitution of 1847 represent one of the few instances where Americans engaged national constitution-making after 1787. While the Liberians adopted many aspects of the American constitution, they also made substantial changes implicitly critiquing the American original and forging a uniquely African American constitutionalism. Examining the Liberian constitution contributes to three fields of study: comparative constitutionalism, American political development, and African American political thought. In comparative constitutionalism, the Liberians show the adaptability of American constitutional principles to the west coast of Africa. In American political development, the Liberians provide a snapshot of what a subset of Americans disliked about the American constitution and what they changed when given the chance. Finally, the Liberians demonstrate how ideas of black nationalism and American constitutionalism may be intertwined in African American political thought.