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The spatial mapping of American political evolution that Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have accomplished over the past decade and more is of enormous significance to the subfield of American Political Development (APD). But the mathematical complexity of the procedure which Poole and Rosenthal devised for classification of congressional roll call has hindered APD (and undoubtedly other) scholars from fully appreciating the full significance of what Poole and Rosenthal have accomplished. No straightforward explanation that is at once accessible, intuitive, and fairly rigorous is currently available. This paper seeks to fill that gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary American political thought the issue of memory and the dream of America have largely centered on Louis Hartz’s (1955) now classic The Liberal Tradition in America and scholarly reaction to its main thesis of the relentlessness of Lockean liberalism in American political discourse. As alluded to above memory serves to authorize an individual’s experience of and participation in the world. In a similar way collective memory authorizes the public/political sphere in which individuals must situate themselves and find a path in the company of others. This paper engages the question of authority in politics and the founding of the public sphere. The Hartzian thesis and Thomas Dumm’s (1987) elaboration of and reaction to it will map the terrain of American memory and the implications of that remembrance for the authorization of the dream of the American public sphere. With that in mind, I intend to explore the dimensions of a radically democratic rendering of that dream by Sheldon Wolin in his attempt to explode and multiply the narratives comprising collective memory and hence authorizing the public sphere in America, raising questions about the role remembrance has to play in our understandings of and hopes for politics. Through Arendt’s work on the nature and importance of authority in politics and her interpretation of the uniqueness of the American Revolution I hope to develop a critique of Wolin’s construal of remembrance and narrative as warrants for the creation of truly democratic political space. By way of a preview, the purpose at hand is not to discredit Wolin’s vision, but rather to deepen its meaning by probing what he leaves unattended to and what Arendt tantalizes us with--namely the centrality of emotion, of attachment, to founding the political realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]