The writing style throughout leaves much to be desired. In the conclusion, Piper suggests that his research indicates considerable continuity over time on the ideological position of liberals and conservatives regarding constitutional interpretation, a federalist polity, and the positive role of the administrative state while attitudes about presidential-congressional relations and judicial interpretation changed dramatically. Liberalism in particular has shown signs of possibly terminal illness since the late 1960s, and the end of the Cold War has recently removed a major source of unity in an increasingly divided conservative coalition. Perhaps the most valuable attributes of this work include its broad historical scope, a large research base of secondary accounts by scholars as well as political memoirs and journal commentaries by participants and contemporary observers, and nine tables summarizing congressional roll call analyses to determine ideological divisions in Congress and how they changed over time. In this account, liberalism and conservatism are not presented as simplistic caricatures but rather as serious, complicated ideologies involving debates not only between liberals and conservatives but also among diverse proponents within each camp.
Piper appreciates the irony of unintended consequences over time as well.
By the 1980s, Reagan and Bush conservatives came to favor strong presidential leadership, an activist anti-Communist foreign policy, and executive branch use of the administrative state and judicial appointments for their own conservative ideological ends. During the same period, neo-liberals learned to appreciate and use congressional power, a principled foreign policy, increasingly professionalized state governments, and judicial review to stay in the debate. The parties of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt had come a long way in just sixty years according to Piper. A reading of this sophisticated work suggests that political and neo-institutional history truly has been revived under the leadership of a new generation of political scientists and historical sociologists such as Theda Skocpol, while historians are only beginning to catch up. In , eds.