A Strange Drift to the Right: The Civic Historiography of Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent strives to contribute to the project of "democratic theory," which aims to bring people together across ideological differences. Sandel wants to revitalize citizenship by uniting religious conservatives and those committed to a more just political economy through an appeal to the American tradition of civic republicanism. However, his project is fundamentally incoherent. First, Sandel's narrative conflates the republican and religious aspects of the American founding, ignoring the fact that civic republican political theory actually developed in direct opposition to the ideal of a Christian polity. Second, his version of civic republicanism deviates from the historic tradition in a way that renders it much more conservative than it actually was and might still be. Third, his reading of American history consistently highlights conservative themes. Consequently, Sandel ultimately undercuts the progressive aspects of his own vision, detracting from rather than contributing to the transideological aspirations of "democratic theory."     

The Blues Voice of Houston Baker,Jr. as Political Theory: An(Other) American Paradigm?

The work of Houston Baker, Jr. in Afro-American literary studies is almost unparalleled. Baker argues that in America there is a distinctive American cultural language, a vernacular, only black Americans share in by virtue of their race. This distinctive language is the result, he argues, of their condition with regard to the larger American culture and society. Baker claims that because of the "special circumstances" (chattel slavery and continued racism) that black Americans found and continue to find themselves in they have had to devise social, cultural, and political strategies that were significantly different from the dominant "white" culture. Thus, Baker argues, special analytic "tools" are necessary for grasping the ultimate messages contained in the cultural (political) works of Afro-American writers and thinkers. It is my argument that Baker is engaging in an explicitly political project. My intention in what follows is to "decode" Baker's work, to ferret out the assumptions and political theory behind his attempt at transfiguration of American cultural discourse. It is my contention, finally, that his method is unlikely to secure what is in its broadest form a very worthwhile political project.     

What Is Political Science? What Should It Be?

This paper examines the five myths that govern political science: that it studies politics; that it is scientific; that one can study politics cut off from the other social sciences and history; that the state is neutral; and that the bulk of the work in the discipline furthers the cause of democracy. Within political science, there have been three main approaches to criticizing these myths: a moderate one that treats the elements in these myths as more or less disconnected; a radical one that sees a systemic connection between these elements; and a Marxist one that names this system "Capitalism" and privileges the role of the capitalist state in explaining both politics and political science.     

Biopolitics for philosophers

Abstract

Roberto Esposito is an influential Italian political philosopher engaged in a renewal of the Foucauldian project of an ontology of the present. In his recent book Bíos, he rereads biopolitics through the lens of his paradigm of immunization (Esposito, 1998, 2002) and tries to explain how, in modernity, a politics of life ‘continually threatens to be reversed’ into a politics of death. His philosophical analysis is profound, and his genealogical reconstruction of the modern superimposition of politics and life innovative. However, his claims are weakened by his usage of a very abstract notion of biopolitics, which fails to take note of the current impact of scientific programmes on the human condition and the emergence of new biopolitical figures. The review suggests that lack of any interest toward the history of science as well as toward more empirically-oriented analyses remains a serious shortcoming of influential political philosophers.     

Academic freedom 1979: The West German case

Abstract

Given the continued significance of ideology as a social and political phenomenon, political science must consider the important contributions made to ideology theory made over the last thirty years by Louis Althusser. In this essay, I offer a critical exegesis of Althusser's views, focusing on the concept of reading, on the various conceptions of ideology held by Althusser, on the distinction Althusser made between ideology and science, and on his theory of the subject. This study of his thought makes three claims: (1) that Althusser's views, billed as a radical break with bourgeois thought, can be assimilated easily into social scientific understandings about ideology; (2) that Althusser's theory has internal difficulties rooted in the tension between positive and negative conceptions of ideology; and, (3) that Althusser left unanswered the key question of the means to ideological liberation.     

A Political Science of Punishment: Francis Lieber and the Discipline of American Prisons

This article examines the history of political science in relation to the history of the prison. It considers how theories of the state in political science have assumed that proper states should punish with prisons, and traces these ideas to the work of Francis Lieber, the first academic political scientist in the USA. Because his ideas about prison reform were central to his conceptualization of the discipline as a science of punishment, his theory of the state is an understudied part of the history of mass incarceration. Lieber argued that the state had a moral duty to punish its citizens with the prison, and an obligation to manage the risks of democracy through the prison's principles of scientific certainty, less eligibility, and disciplinary solitude. By examining the life and work of Francis Lieber, this article offers new ways of thinking about political science's past, and its status as part of the history of the American prison.     

Science studies,climate change and the prospects for constructivist critique

Abstract

Starting from the debates over the ‘reality’ of global warming and the politics of science studies, I seek to clarify what is at stake politically in constructivist understandings of science and nature. These two separate but related debates point to the centrality of modern science in political discussions of the environment and to the difficulties, simultaneously technical and political, in warranting political action in the face of inevitably partial and uncertain scientific knowledge. The case of climate change then provides an experimental test case with which to explore the various responses to these challenges offered by Ulrich Beck's reflexive modernization, the normative theory of expertise advanced by Harry Collins and Robert Evans, and Bruno Latour's utopian vision for decision-making by the ‘collective’ in which traditional epistemic and institutional distinctions between science and politics are entirely superseded.     

Reflections on Politics and Academia: An Interview with Michael Parenti

Michael Parenti, the author of more than twenty books on a wide variety of topics, has taught political science and social science at several universities. He is a founder of the Caucus for a New Political Science. In recent years he has been devoted to writing and public speaking, lecturing across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in political science from Yale University. He currently lives in Berkeley, California. The following interview was conducted in early February 2012.1 ¹ Michael Parenti would like to thank Carl Boggs for his efforts in putting this interview together. He considers it a privilege to be interviewed by someone of Carl's caliber.      

Martin Luther King's Civil Disobedience and the American Covenant Tradition

Daniel J. Elazar introduced the covenant idea to political sciencein his four-volume work, The Covenant Tradition in Politics.As he showed, American government and society are indebted tocovenant ways of New England Puritans and their doctrine, "federaltheology". Puritan covenants fostered polities whose framesof government and patterns of civil order established a federalmatrix antecedent to modern American federalism. The moral orientationof covenant has also influenced modern American political thought,as evidenced by the public philosophy articulated by the Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement(1954–1968). In such works as "The Letter from the BirminghamCity Jail," King challenged his contemporaries' ideas aboutlaw and justice, Americans with an opportunity to examine moderncovenant practice.     

Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president

ABSTRACT

From the time of his nomination as the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential candidate onwards, Barack Obama was the target of a panoply of political attacks. Conservatives, Republicans and even some Democrats played on his alterity in a way that previous non-white political hopefuls, particularly the Reverend Jesse Jackson, had not had to endure. If the intricate twists and turns of Obama's past did not make those attacks particularly surprising, the way in which he chose to deal with them was. In what stands as a deliberate pre-emptive attack, Obama used two substantive texts, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, to create and shape a historical narrative of his own past in such a way as to present himself to the US voting public as a truly American figure, worthy of the presidency. By the time he was running for high office, therefore, Obama had already used his knowledge of the discipline of history to create a usable past with which he and his supporters could denude many of those political attacks of their potency, whether they were focused on the years of his upbringing in an Islamic state, his familial ties to Kenya, his religious background or his purported links to radicalism.     

Paradigm,School, or Sect? Some Reflections on the Status of Rational Choice Theory in Contemporary Scandinavian Political Science

There is a marked difference between American and Scandinavian political science when it comes to the position of rational choice theory within the discipline. In the US it is said to have become "probably the hottest thing going in political science today", whereas in Scandinavia it seems at present to linger on the borderline between a school and a sect. As part of a possible explanation for this difference, this article points, on the one hand, to some differences between the status of American and Scandinavian political science and on the other hand to some differences between dominant intellectual traditions. The intellectual differences may in turn be linked to differences between American and Scandinavian politics. Thus, in some respects rational choice theory appears to be more congenial to the American than to a Scandinavian political setting. The article concludes with a short discussion of how ongoing changes in Scandinavian and, more generally, European politics might affect the scientific status of rational choice theory in the future.     

The Dialectical Liberalism of Richard Hofstadter

This essay examines Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, alongside some of his unpublished writings from the 1940s, in order to reassess his contributions to the history of American political culture and thought. After exploring some of the implications of Hofstadter’s critical analysis of mid-century liberalism, the essay then considers how we might bring his insights into the present.     

Kenneth B. Clark and the problem of power

ABSTRACT

During the early 1960s African American psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, known primarily for his involvement in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court desegregation decision, began organizing an ambitious anti-poverty programme called Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. (HARYOU). Dissatisfied by the lack of progress in school desegregation in New York City and discouraged by the inability of traditional social welfare organizations to address the problems of race and poverty, Clark argued that a new approach had to be developed to mobilize the black poor to gain the political and economic power that would solve their problems. At the same time, he theorized that a new form of racial segregation was beginning to develop in urban areas that foreshadowed increasing social isolation, economic dependence and declining municipal services for many African Americans. He called this new development ‘internal colonialism’ and hoped that HARYOU would be a demonstration project in the Kennedy–Johnson administration's War on Poverty that would address these problems from multiple perspectives. Nonetheless, the plan aroused the political opposition of Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. The dispute with Powell drove Clark from HARYOU and caused him to re-evaluate his thinking regarding African American leadership. He increasingly viewed the ‘ghetto’ as both a prison and a cocoon that satisfied white and black social, economic, political and psychological needs. By the end of his HARYOU experience, Clark coined the term ‘the new American dilemma’ to describe and theorize about an increasingly isolated and powerless black population in many urban centres. The term also signified his belief that the problem of power was intricately tied up in, while also separate from, the problem of race.     

Candidate Qualities through a Partisan Lens: A Theory of Trait Ownership

Using Petrocik's (1996) theory of issue ownership as a point of departure, I develop and test a theory of "trait ownership" that provides an explanation for the origins of candidate trait perceptions and illustrates an important way that candidates affect voters. Specifically, I argue for a direct connection between the issues owned by a political party and evaluations of the personal attributes of its candidates. As a result, the American public views Republicans as stronger leaders and more moral, while Democrats hold advantages on compassion and empathy. I also draw on "expectations gap" arguments from psychology and political science to demonstrate how a candidate may gain an electoral advantage by successfully "trespassing" on his opponent's trait territory. National Election Studies data from the 1980–2004 presidential elections are used to demonstrate the existence, durability, and effects of trait ownership in contemporary American political campaigns.     

The Quest for Certainty and the Demise of Political Theory

In this paper, I contribute to the ongoing conversation in New Political Science regarding the status of political science in general, and political theory in particular. I argue that the quest for certainty and desire to quantify knowledge has not been limited to empiricist political scientists. The emphasis on quantification and deductive logic is found in many places within the political theory tradition itself. Time and again, mathematics and the physical sciences are held up as the model for all knowledge. I argue that this focus has led theorists to distance themselves from politics, either out of despair or disdain for the ambiguity and variability present in political life. While I do not propose that Aristotle provides a magic remedy for the current problems in the discipline, I suggest that his combined interest in logic and the close examination of material detail provides a perennially viable framework for political theory.     

Plato in WeimarWeber revisited via Foucault: two lectures on legitimation and vocation

Abstract

The text that follows brings together two papers about resonances between late lectures: Weber's lectures of 1918 on science and politics as vocations, and Foucault's final courses (1980–84) on subjectivity, truth and the political. The title alludes to Foucault's 1983 discussion of Plato's political experiences in Sicily, as narrated in his Seventh Letter, juxtaposed to Weber's public interventions in Germany at the time of the foundation of the Weimar Republic. Linked to this is an exploration of the centrality in the work of both Weber and Foucault of an historical ethnography and ethology of the political, and of the forms of connectivity in our cultures between ethics, truth and government.     

A Critical Theory of the "Rationality" of US Foreign Policy: The Case of the American War in Vietnam

The attacks of September 11th, 2001, have increased the urgency of understanding the relationship between war-making and political culture. This essay uses Frankfurt School critical theory to analyze the development of the increasing "rationalization" of US foreign policy during the Cold War, focusing heuristically on the case of the US war in Vietnam. Particularly developing a Habermasian reading of these phenomena, the essay argues that, despite elite management and "steering" strategies, "subsystemic imperatives" are never completely "uncoupled" from the "cultural lifeworld." In the case of the US war in Vietnam, contradictions between elite political and economic instrumental rationalities and interests, and the broader American political culture and values, led to legitimation problems and loss of trust which have continued into the present period.     

What Mr. Spock told the earthlings: the aims of political philosophy,action-guidingness and fact-dependency

Abstract

Recently, G. A. Cohen introduced an influential distinction between fact-sensitive and fact-insensitive principles arguing that all basic normative principles are of the latter type. David Miller rejects this claim submitting that the validity of basic normative political principles depends on some general propositions about human nature and societies; for example, that men’s generosity is ‘confined’ and that nature has made ‘scanty provision’ for his wants. Miller ties this view of the nature of basic political principles to the view that political philosophy ought to guide people engaged in real-world politics and claims plausibly that in order to fulfil this purpose, political philosophy must be informed by social science. I argue that Miller neither succeeds in showing that basic principles can be fact-sensitive, nor establishes any connection between the Cohen-Miller disagreement on fact-sensitivity, on the one hand, and the nature and aims of political philosophy, on the other hand.     

The Public Purpose of Political Economy

ABSTRACT

For too long the discipline of political science has ceded research on the dynamics of the national political economy to the field of economics. In this article, we explore the cost of this cession in the context of the public purpose. Following John Kenneth Galbraith, we define the public purpose in terms of its independence from the market economy and the planning system. Political scientists, and especially political theorists, are uniquely qualified to theorize power relations relative to a host of challenges that have emerged in today’s rapidly transforming national economies. Galbraith’s critique of mainstream economics, coupled with his understanding of power as an inescapable and perpetual dialectical process, provide guidance for theorizations that should attend to rather than deny the contested domain of the public interest and collective good.