Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals is a grand project and an impressive achievement. As one expects from Smith's work, it combines scholarship and moral seriousness, and the effort to relate theory to practice, the present to the past. Notable for Smith's command of the details of policy – court decisions, statutes, and administrative history – Civic Ideals is also an invitation to rethink the nature of the United States as a political society, an inquiry into our political identity and purpose.