Amitai Etzioni has written a stimulating and provocative defense of a communitarian conception of legitimacy. He contrasts this view to what he calls the deliberative view. In what follows, I argue that Professor Etzioni cannot do without the deliberative view and that indeed he has more in common with Habermas than he thinks.

I write to note a fundamental area of agreement with Professors Orren and Skowronek. And yet given this shared concern I think the study of ideas should be at the center of developmental approaches to politics. Professors Orren and Skowronek write, “The time has passed when familiar claims about constitutional foundations and normative commitments can be ventured confidently without serious consideration of confounding evidence. Making inquiries into these areas specific and empirically tractable will be, we think, value added.” I agree with this general assessment. Indeed, I have written a book, The Madisonian Constitution, which seeks to examine tensions within American constitutionalism and empirically trace how constitutional understandings and constitutional change have necessarily been partial and incomplete. In fact, I suggest that constitutional conflict has been an ordinary feature of American constitutionalism precisely because the American constitutional order is structured around agonistic principles and institutions. From the perspective of political science, understanding these tensions might also prove helpful in sustaining the American polity. But let me be clear: I do not think there is an easy foundation to be arrived at in the study of the American polity, or any other polity. Nor do I long for a world untroubled by “facing the facts,” nor for a time untroubled by historicism, positivism, or social science. I do think, however, an at times uncritical acceptance of historicism and positivism has led political scientists unnecessarily to turn away from the study of ideas and values that make up the political community.

Although the United States has elected an African American president, since that election there have been numerous indicators that racism remains a persistent, and complex, issue in America. Shortly after President Obama took office, for example, renowned Harvard University professor Henry “Skip” Gates was arrested for being uncooperative with the responding officer when police mistook him for a burglar at his own home. This incident served as a small reminder of the resilient nature of racism in the United States. More importantly, there has been an increase in the number of hate groups since 2008, and the proposed plans for an Islamic cultural center near the site of the former World Trade Center have initiated a wave of anti-Islamic sentiment. Despite the hope that Barack Obama would usher in a new era in race relations, it seems as though his election has brought to the surface tensions that some people assumed had disappeared. Among scholars of black politics, race serves as the central construct. In some cases, race serves as a lens through which other variables such as class and gender are filtered. In other cases, race serves as the key independent variable explaining a number of factors that influence the lives of blacks. Each of the texts reviewed in this essay examines issues of race to varying degrees, and each one reveals the complex nature and long-lasting impact of race on American society.

“Religion” has retaken a front seat in the news. Its presence in the media is echoed in the concerns of policymakers, whence it is more strongly felt again in the thinking and writing of social scientists. Concerning religion, “resurgence” is a word that shows up in many a social science title of late. For scholars such as sociologist Rodney Stark, this language is merely further evidence of a deep-seated secularist inattention in the social sciences: religion has never been absent from human affairs, it just hasn't been of interest to prejudiced scholars. “Pluralism, not secularism, is the dominant trend in an ‘age of explosive, pervasive religiosity,’” argues former secularization theorist Peter Berger in the title words of his 2006 article. The three books under consideration here do not share directly in either of these arguments. Nor do any make a claim for “resurgence,” though each author acknowledges some version of the secularization myth and its dismantling in developments and events of the recent past, and each knowingly writes in that context (Benne, 2–6; Buruma, 1–3; Beiner, xiv n11, 4–5, 312).

Amitai Etzioni advances arguments about two forms of legitimacy, what I will call empirical legitimacy and substantive legitimacy. Empirical legitimacy is a matter of what people consider to be legitimate. It is assessed through the methods of social science—conducting surveys, for instance. Substantive legitimacy is a matter not of what people happen to think but of what is legitimate in the sense of being just or morally right. Etzioni's argument about empirical legitimacy, namely, that it is shaped through collective processes that involve emotions as well as reason, I find broadly plausible. Then he makes an argument about substantive legitimacy, one that explains how we are to know if an “act” (a term he uses broadly) is truly just or moral. This latter argument I wish to explore further and to raise questions about.

Martha Nussbaum, in a reaction to the cultural relativism that pervades much of social science, made the following comment:

If the end of a legal system is the well-being of its people, as Madison claims in Federalist, No. 45, and if it is irrational to sacrifice means to ends, as Madison says in Federalist, No. 40, then Cicero was right to conclude that salus populi suprema lex, that the people's welfare is supreme law—that the people's welfare should prevail over conflicting legal arrangements.