“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 677 I. LOCHNER IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL CANON......................................... 680 II. LOCHNER AND CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE .......................................... 696 III. LOCHNER AND CONSTITUTIONAL ETHOS ............................................. 706 IV. LOCHNER AND CONSTITUTIO...

Widespread historicism and rampant empiricism, two of the most common characteristics of today’s culture, acquire a particular relevance in light of the problem of the permanence of values in history. Today’s historicistic mindset does not take the form of a rigorous or precise theory, even though it derives from nineteenthand twentiethcentury historicism, whether in its idealistic, materialist...

W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its histor...