We appreciate Dan Carpenter's thoughtful assessment of our book and are eager to respond to his reflections about the political theory of the republic of statutes. He is right that we did not discuss some highly entrenched statutory schemes that might well deserve small-c constitutional status as superstatutes. Although we do treat the Defense of Marriage Act as a superstatute in our chapter on the antihomosexual constitution and its disentrenchment, we might have included a chapter on the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938 (along with the many subsequent amendments that helped shape the drug enforcement regime we have today) if we had as many original things to say about the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) administrative constitutionalism as Carpenter did in his book. It would have been a big chapter, too.

Dan Carpenter's massive new study of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a definitive study of regulatory politics and administrative behavior destined to stand alongside other classic studies of administrative agencies, such as Herbert Kaufman's The Forest Ranger (1960) or Martha Derthick's Policy Making for Social Security (1979). Like Carpenter's earlier work, Reputation and Power is marked by deep erudition, thorough scholarship, painstaking attention to detail, and a wide-ranging attention to alternative disciplinary paradigms. And it is argued with great craft, subtlety, and creativity both in developing its historical narrative and in its cogent theoretical analysis.

How do republicanism and regulation coexist? How does the politics of administrative constitutionalism constrain and enable the action of regulators in their governance of economic, political, and scientific realms? How can an adaptive republic strike a set of appropriate, lawful, representative, and efficient balances among the contending interests in regulatory policy? These are what I take to be the central questions raised by John Ferejohn in his perceptive review of Reputation and Power. His answer, as applied to US pharmaceutical regulation, is not intended to be definitive but aims, rather, to pose a set of hypotheses and questions.

Few books can be called workmanlike as well as exciting, analytic as well as poignant. Hiring and Firing Public Officials achieves those rare pairings by methodically pursuing an academic coup. Justin Buchler aims to replace electoral theory's dominant “market paradigm”—whose pioneers include Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942) and Anthony Downs (An Economic Model of Democracy, 1957)—with a more accurate “employment model,” and to defend that new model against all manner of attack. Buchler prosecutes his goals doggedly, repetitively, and quite effectively. The result is an intelligent, important new book that may not dazzle but will challenge settled convictions and change more than a few minds. The author's occasionally defensive tone is understandable given the nature of his ambition. His book advocates paradigmatic revolution and, to borrow from Mao Zedong, revolution is not a dinner party.

I am encouraged by Ben Berger's reaction to my book, and hopeful that other readers will be as open-minded. Of course, the drawback of Berger's Cassandra comparison is that if it is apt, that will not be the case. Similarly, the drawback of any attempt at a paradigm shift in Kuhn's terms is that nearly every attempt fails, and it is difficult for the author himself to distinguish a negative reaction motivated by philosophical conservatism from a negative reaction motivated by intrinsic weakness in the unconventional argument itself.