1. See my "Deadly Hermeneutics; or, Sinn and the Social Scientist," in Idioms of Inquiry, ed. Terence Ball (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 95-112.

2. On the notion of "interpretive communities," see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), esp. chap. 15.

3. The U.S. Constitution's interpretive community, as Francis Lieber averred, includes not only the lawyers, judges, and courts but the entire citizenry, as James Farr points out in "The Americanization of Hermeneutics: Francis Lieber's Legal and Political Hermeneutics," in this volume.

4. Strictly speaking, originalism is not a single doctrine but a fairly close-knit family of doctrines sharing a common assumption: viz., that judges and other interpreters must return to and regard as authoritative the original source, whether that source be construed as author, authorial intent, text, or, more broadly, the moral, historical, legal, and political context in which the author worked and/or the text was composed. For present purposes I shall be dealing mainly with the "original intent" version of originalism. For a useful taxonomy of types of originalism, see Paul Brest, "The Misconceived Quest for Original Understanding," Boston University Law Review 60 (1980): 204-38. In defense of originalism, see, inter alia, Robert Bork, "Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems," Indiana Law Journal 47 (1971): 1-35, and "Tradition and Morality in Constitutional Law," in Views from the Bench: The Judiciary and Constitutional Politics, ed. Mark Cannon and David O'Brien (New York: Chatham House, 1985); Raoul Berger, Government by Judiciary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977); Henry Monaghan, "Our Perfect Constitution," New York University Law Review 56 (1981): 353-96. For criticisms of originalism from several perspectives, see, inter alia, Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), chaps. 6 and 7; Dworkin, "The Bork Nomination," New York Review of Books, 13 August 1987, 3-10; Gregory Leyh, "Toward a Constitutional Hermeneutics," American Journal of Political Science 32 (1988): 369-87; Michael J. Perry, "The Authority of Text, Tradition, and Reason: A Theory of Constitutional 'Interpretation,'" Southern California Law Review 58 (1985): 552-602; and Perry, Morality, Politics, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Unlike many other critics, Perry believes originalism to be both coherent and plausible, but less so than nonoriginalist approaches to interpretation.

5. On the methods and justifications for constructing "conceptual histories," see Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). For the execution of particular conceptual histories, see the mammoth Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-Sozialer Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972-), 5 vols. to date; and Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680-1820, ed. Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1985-), 2 vols. to date. For more anglicized and americanized versions of conceptual history, compare The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Conceptual Change and the Constitution, ed. Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988); and Terence Ball, Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

6. Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1981), 154.

7. See, e.g., E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, n.d.). The point applies not only to law and literature but to the natural sciences as well. See E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, rev. ed. (New York: Humanities Press, 1952); Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957); and Stephen Toulmin, "The Construal of Reality: Criticism in Modern and Postmodern Science," in The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 99-117.

8. Here I think of the amusing and instructive tale of the "born-again" Christian outfielder, Pat Kelly, as told by Fish, Is There a Text, 269-72.

9. On various versions of the commensurability problem as it appears in the discourses of anthropology and other disciplines, see Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), esp. part 3.

10. See, e.g., Clifford Geertz, "From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding," in Interpretive Social Science, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 6; and Peter Winch, "Understanding a Primitive Society," in Rationality, ed. Brian R. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970).

11. Geertz, "Native's Point of View," 229.

12. Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (New York: Penguin, 1981), 280. Wills quite appropriately appends a glossary of terms for the Federalist Papers.

13. For an explication of the notion of discourses, see J. G. A. Pocock, "The Concept of a Language and the Métier d'Historien: Some Considerations on Practice," in Languages of Political Theory, chap. 1; James Boyd White, Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. chap. 3; and my Transforming Political Discourse, chap. 1.

14. On the historicity of human existence and the inescapable necessity to start—though not to stay—with our present "prejudices," see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975). Some of the legal and constitutional implications of Gadamer's hermeneutics are traced by Leyh, "Toward a Constitutional Hermeneutics."

15. The scholar who has done most to reconstruct the history of an identifiable "Atlantic Republic Tradition" is J. G. A. Pocock, particularly in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic.Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

16. See my Transforming Political Discourse, chap. 3, esp. 48-54.

17. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

18. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1966), 101.

19. Daniel Walker Howe, "The Language of Faculty Psychology in The Federalist Papers," in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, chap. 7.

20. Although I take a somewhat dimmer view of originalism than does Perry ("Authority of Text" and Morality, Politics, and Law), I agree with his conclusion that its primary defects are practical ones.

21. What follows is a much abbreviated and simplified version of the tale told by Donald Kelly in "Civil Science in the Renaissance: The Problem of Interpretation," in Languages of Political Theory, chap. 3. See also Ball and Pocock, introduction to Conceptual Change and the Constitution, esp. 9-11.

22. See above, n. 4.

23. Cf. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); and The Founders' Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

24. Though not alone among the founders, Hamilton came to believe the Constitution a failure. "Perhaps no man in the United States," he wrote in 1802, "has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself; and contrary to all my anticipations of its fate ... I am still laboring to prop the frail and worthless fabric." Quoted in John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), 543. Others among the founders, including John Adams, arrived at almost equally critical if less gloomy conclusions. See John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). See further and more generally, Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1986).

25. Cf. 10 United States Codes 672 (f), Sec. 522.

26. Decision and eighty-one-page opinion in U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, No. 87-5345 (6 Dec. 1988). In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled against Perpich et al.

27. See Records of the Federal Convention 2:129-37, 158-59, 323, 353, 380-83, 570, 595; and Founders' Constitution 1: 173-211.

28. In addition to the debates noted in n. 23 above, see Hamilton, Federalist 29.

29. For different variants of reception theory, see, inter alia, Fish, Is There a Text; The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); and, more generally, Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984).

30. This and all following quotations come from Madison, Federalist 37.