The request to interpret the meaning of the historical record of citations for our article on the “New Institutionalism” is in the tradition of asking successful entrepreneurs to explain their successes, and is probably equally misguided. We interpret the charge as an invitation not to describe the real mysteries of fashion in citations but rather to explore why this article might have been cited if citation counts reflected valid judgments of scholarly significance. The context for the article is a long history of intellectual struggle between partisans of two logics for taking, describing, or assessing human action. The first logic is one of consequences. It is a logic that sees human behavior as driven by anticipation of its consequences and evaluation of those consequences by some kind of utility function that reflects the desires of the actor. In discussions of political systems, scholars attracted to such a logic talk of the pursuit of interests and rational choice. They emphasize incentives and the complications of understanding rationality in an ecology of rational actors.