Commentary: The Third Wave of McCarthyism: Co-opting the Language of Inclusivity

In 1967, the burgeoning discontent of many political scientists culminated in the establishment of the Caucus for a New Political Science. The Caucus included political scientists of many diverse viewpoints, but it was united methodologically by a critique of behavioralism and by the idea that political science should abandon the myth of a value-free science. In recent years, political scientists have authored numerous commentaries on “the tragedy” of political science, “the crisis” in political science, and “the flight from reality in political science,” while in 2000 these discontents resurfaced in the “perestroika” rebellion, which again denounced the American Political Science Association as an organization that promotes a “narrow parochialism and methodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational choice, statistical, and formal modeling approaches.” This paper reviews the intellectual origins of New Political Science by examining some of the major works of the late 1960s and early 1970s purporting to establish the foundations of a new political science. It concludes that new political science offers a methodological critique of behaviorialism and a sociological critique of the relationship between political science and political power, but there is no consensus on what constitutes a new political science beyond its critical stance toward the existing discipline.     

Introduction: configurations of risk

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a preliminary investigation into the possibilities of utilizing some of the methods and concepts developed under the auspices of ‘govermentality’ in a Chinese context. The way in which the reproductive regularities of the population have emerged as a problem for Chinese governmental reasoning will serve as a point of departure to conduct this investigation. The goverment of reproduction is shown to involve techniques that differ in significant respects from those deployed in liberal government, in particular the reduced role of professional expertise and a reduced emphasis upon the construction of a self-governing subject. This paper also suggests that the development of a concept of the Chinese ‘race’ plays a pivotal role in the way in which the problem of the ‘quality’ of the population is formulated. The paper concludes with some reflections on the implications of this for work on govermentality.     

Pyongyang: Rules of engagement

The article attempts to re-construct the motivation behind the current North Korean policies, especially in the domestic sphere. It is argued tht North Korean leaders have valid political reasons not to imitate the Chinese-style reform, and are likely to limit themselves to moderate changes which would not jeopardize political stability and the domination of the present-day elite. The most critical factor is the maintenance of control over the access to information.