Only by first recognizing this vast incommensurability, has it been possible for historians to decipher the original meanings of the period’s countless texts, to actually understand what political and constitutional writers were talking about, and to be able to reconcile the endless array of apparent paradoxes that, from our skewed contemporary perspective, seemingly defined the period’s thought. This last point has been especially critical. For why did Founding-era Americans care so deeply about representation but largely ignore voting? Why did they obsess over mixed constitutionalism but often ignore the separation of powers? Or why did so many of them assume that protecting liberty meant, not restraining political power, but giving the right sort of political institutions power? Such questions cannot be answered without a healthy appreciation for the period’s otherness. Revolutionary-era historians have disagreed over a great deal, but few if any have rejected this insight.[10] Grasping this period on its own terms requires crossing the conceptual chasm that separates us from citizens of the eighteenth century. It requires, in short, a deep brand of historicism.[11]
Because the past is so foreign to us, because historicism is so essential, the object of translation must follow in kind. Followers of Originalism 2.0, likely because they implicitly deny the foreignness of the Founding era, tend to be fond of what might be called atomistic translation: they believe that the past can be translated into the present through term-for-term substitution. Originalist investigations thus often focus on specific words or phrases that appear in the original Constitution. But if the past is indeed so foreign, then a different form of translation is required: holistic translation. This is about far more than putting meanings in context. Originalists have always been interested in context. This is about putting them in complete—or as-complete-as-possible—context. And contextualizing meanings holistically requires situating individual linguistic components in the whole conceptual vocabulary of which they were initially a part. If we more or less share a conceptual vocabulary with those in the past, such holistic translation is unnecessary—and originalists’ atomistic translation assumes as much. But if the past is a foreign place, understanding the meaning of historical words requires interpreters to first translate the whole language of which the words were mere components.[12] When influential historians Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, or Keith Baker defended the essential importance of first reconstituting the whole discourses in which political texts and arguments appeared before processing individual meanings or arguments, they had this kind of holism in mind.[13] When historian Eric Nelson so skillfully showed how understanding the constitutional phrase “executive power” within the context of the American Founding required first resuscitating the languages of Whig and Royalist constitutionalism, he was making much the same point.[14]