Usually, it is bad form for an author to bother much about a review. And anyone who has actually written a book knows that readers might turn it to their own purposes. However, I fear that readers of Law & Liberty will be misled by Jesse Merriam’s review of my Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism since the New Deal. Rather than review the book I wrote, Merriam complains that I did not write the one he thinks I should have.

I am a historian, and the book announces itself as an intellectual history of post-New Deal conservative constitutional thought. It never attempts to be the theoretical manifesto or brief for current action that Merriam seems to want. True, it ends with a straightforward plea for more and better civic education and deeper conservative engagement with the shortcomings of Congress. Any regime that does not inculcate its principles via education is doomed, and although we Americans have been improving on this score there is still much to be done. My direction of conservatives’ attention to Congress is waved off as a feckless response to the challenges presented by the nation’s pluralism, a definitive feature of the polity, though now an increasingly polarized one. There is no magic bullet for curing the problem of “faction,” but reviving American national institutions like Congress is a better way to manage it than the withdrawal into identitarian localism that Merriam seems to prefer. Perhaps he would benefit from a rereading of Federalist #10. Of course, Congress has far too often entered into realms more properly left to the states in their diversity. But it is highly unlikely that any thorough reversal of this development can occur without changes in the way Congress functions.

Even more elementally, the history of ideas and institutions that Merriam finds trifling is, in fact, of much relevance to our contemporary circumstance—that is, if one thinks the past is of any use for guiding choice in the present. I do, and so the book I wrote explains how various kinds of conservatives made sense of the new constitutional order and their respective places in it. This is how it speaks to “what is truly ailing our constitutional order.” Indeed, Merriam seems not to have grasped that charting the contestation over the bona fides of constitutional conservatism is a major theme of the book, and that the clash of constitutional visions amid the reality of the New Deal order was a major reason that conservatism could not cohere more programmatically and effectually. To adapt from Lincoln, if we are to better judge what to do, and how to do it, we must know not only where we are, but where we have been. A work of history has done its job if it has brought the experience of the past to bear in this way.

The review chides me for slighting the topic of identity. One can retreat to one’s garden with kith and kin, but politics is conducted with others in the public square, and it requires engagement with the institutions of governance and the intellectual discourse surrounding their development. That is what I wrote about, explicitly disavowing (on page one of the introduction) “direct concern here with the formation of conservative political identities.” Maybe someday he will write a book about that, but I made it clear enough that I did not.

To correct every error would overly try readers’ patience, but a few more might be tolerable. Why does a book on conservative thought analyze neoconservatism? It should be obvious that, love it or hate it, neoconservatism was of direct constitutional relevance in the era under examination—yes, in some areas more than others. Why no umpteenth treatment of the l’affaire Bradford and the NEH? There must be a half dozen books on my shelf treating this well-known episode, and the introduction again explicitly brackets such material unless it directly influenced the development of institutional-intellectual constitutional discourse that is the book’s actual subject, which this episode did not. The book treats the well-known clash between Frank Meyer and Harry Jaffa about Lincoln in National Review, for example, because it did have such influence.

It is jejune and wrong for a reviewer to describe as “miscellanea” a book that runs to nearly 370 pages (including notes) in explicating the most salient conservative constitutional thought of the previous half-century, especially amid the failure to engage the book’s substance. It is a characterization that bespeaks a reviewer with his own axe to grind irrespective of the book. I hope serious readers will not be dissuaded by such an effort. I invite them to read the book I actually wrote, rather than the one Merriam thinks I should have.