Michael Calvin McGee characterizes the ideograph as a link between rhetoric and ideology. This chapter explores the development of the ideograph <police power> in the time leading up to, and the court’s opinion in, the landmark case Floyd v. City of New York (2013). In this case, a bright spot in New York’s sullied history of stop-and-frisk, twelve Black and Hispanic individuals succeeded in a class action lawsuit against the city, alleging that the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk policy violated their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and their right to equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. The chapter shows that ideographic inquiry offers more than a useful tool for education and analysis or a method for predicting societal beliefs and behaviors: It is a force for persuasion.

Although I have regularly cited Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography in the twenty-five years or so since it appeared, it is only with the current reissue of the work that I have gone back and read it through from beginning to end. About ten years after it was published, I gave serious thought to writing a revised version, both to incorporate much material that I had left out of the original and also (naturally) to update it in the light of more recent scholarship. In the end, I decided not to do so, mostly from the belief that scholarship is an ongoing conversation, and that a work, once published, becomes part of that conversation, dependent on its time and context. Authority and Tradition appeared at a particular point in the discussion of the nature of Greco-Roman historiography, when the linguistic and literary turn was becoming more and more prominent, and the book reflects that moment.