Despite its origins in explorations of the political and institutional history that had become unfashionable in History departments, the Political Science subfield of American Political Development has drifted toward the “history‐from‐below” view against which it was originally a reaction. Perhaps this is a normal tendency in democratic cultures that ground their legitimacy on the will of the people. But it may also be due to a failure of APD scholars to appreciate that even in a (...) democratic country such as the United States, the state may acquire autonomy from the public will because of the vast scope of state activity, and the restricted ability of the people to monitor, understand, and control that activity. Philip E. Converse's signal contribution to the public‐opinion literature can thus be the starting point for a revision of American political history with an eye to the autonomy that political elites may gain from public ignorance of their actions. (shrink)

Although cities were given no role in the constitutional order of the United States, the new nation posed the same potential threats to the accumulation of capital and wealth as European monarchs posed to long-powerful urban centers. In mobilizing for self-protection and advancement, American business developed new practices and discourses of citizenship that sustained a central role for the community as the locus of social provision. The strategy combined opportunity-hoarding through restricted membership in civic groups and obligation-hoarding through the (...) alignment of diverse networks of voluntarism with this civic core. The linkage of business interests to this hybrid charitable-civic configuration constituted a source of resistance to nationalizing tendencies driven by demands for social protection. This alternative model of social provision and civic organization sustained a distinctive pattern of political membership and state development. By fiercely defending the capacity of privately governed civic networks to provide substantial social support, this history of business influence through community organizations lives on in the partial and fragmented character of the American welfare state. (shrink)

The revival of Anglo-American political philosophy began in the 1970s with the publication of A Theory of Justice by John Rawls and Wittgenstein and Justice by Hanna Pitkin. This revival was facilitated by the turbulent political processes occurring after the Second World War that required philosophical understanding, but the long-dominant utilitarian approach could not fully meet this task. Traditionally, the main issue in political philosophy has been the question of power, spe- cifically its political organization (...) and legitimacy. Rawls demonstrated that the political organiza- tion of power is derived from how we understand ethical norms and what norms (rules) we follow in social interaction. Thus, the main question of political philosophy is not power but justice. He also demonstrated that political freedom is closely linked to equality. Rawls’s theory had a deci- sive influence on the political philosophy of the twentieth century, the development of which was largely based on criticism or reception of his ideas. Today, we are witnessing the beginning of a break with tradition, which was expressed by Rawls and suggested that the political is based on the possibility of consensus and ethical agree- ment. The current developments in political philosophy are closely connected with the rethink- ing of Rawls’s legacy, and we see this in the development of non-ideal political theories. (shrink)

International migration is increasing not only in absolute terms but also as a percentage of the global population. In 2019, international migrants made up 3.5 per cent of the global population, compared to 2.8 per cent in the year 2000. Over the past two decades, a philosophical literature has emerged to investigate what justice requires with respect to these vast migrant flows. My article criticizes much of this philosophical work. Building on the work of Charles Mills, I argue that the (...) terms in which many Anglo-American philosophers presently debate migration justice neglect and even obscure consideration of the ways in which current migration flows may be shaped by Euro-American colonialism and neo-colonialism. Such exclusions produce systematic biases in much of our philosophical literature. To develop less biased understandings of migration justice, I propose that Anglo-American philosophers should revise our methods and our conceptual frameworks to enable exploring the possible extent and ethical implications of colonial and neo-colonial influence. This is one part of the much larger task of decolonizing our political philosophy. (shrink)

Historically, American political science has rarely engaged popular culture as a central topic of study, despite the domain’s outsized influence in American community life. This article argues that this marginalization is, in part, the by-product of long-standing disciplinary debates over the inadequate political development of the American public. To develop this argument, the article first surveys the work of early political scientists, such as John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson, to show that their reformist (...) ambitions largely precluded discussion of mundane activities of social life such as popular culture. It then turns to Harold Lasswell, who produced some of the first investigations of popular culture in American political science. Ironically, however, his work – and the work of those who adapted similar ways of speaking about popular culture after him – only reinforced skepticisms concerning the American public. It has thus helped keep the topic on the margins of disciplinary discourse. (shrink)

The essays in this collection investigate two political traditions and their critical interactions. The first series of essays deals with the development of natural rights individualism, some examining its origins in the thought of the seminal political theorist, John Locke, and the influential constitutional theorist, Montesquieu, others the impact of their theories on intellectual leaders during the American Revolution and the Founding era, and still others the culmination of this tradition in the writings of nineteenth-century individualists (...) such as Lysander Spooner. The second series of essays focuses on the Progressive repudiation of natural rights individualism and its far-reaching effect on American politics and public policy. (shrink)

Contemporary political discourse is marked with the language of democracy, and Western countries in particular seek to promote democracy at home and abroad. However, there is a sublimated conflict in general political discourse between a desire to rely on alleged political experts and a desire to assert the supposed common sense of all men. Can the struggle between the democratic and aristocratic values embodied in this conflict be reconciled? The question is perennial, and raises issues that are (...) central to constitutional design. Aristotle, developing in significant ways insights made by his teacher Plato, grapples with it in his Politics. Aristotle's views on these matters are relevant—by way of the American Founders'—to contemporary American politics and modern democracies generally. During the eighteenth century, the Founders, some of whom explicitly reached back to Aristotle's work, also struggled—especially in The Federalist Papers—with these thorny issues of constitutional design. They created the U.S. Constitution in part to address these very same problems and issues. We are living in some ways, then, in the shadow of Aristotle's political theorizing, albeit as transposed by the American Founders. Both Aristotle and some of the American Founders theoretically favor aristocracy over democracy, but concede that in practice a blend of the two has to be integrated into the fundamental structure of political society. We need to reconnect with these important political discussions in order to come to terms with aristocratic and democratic values in our current circumstances. Footnotesa I am grateful to Fred Miller and David Keyt for many helpful suggestions and thoughtful questions throughout the editing process. I would also like to thank Irfan Khawaja for valuable feedback on an earlier version of this essay. (shrink)

The last decade or so has seen an explosion of scholarship by American law professors on what has become known as administrative constitutionalism. Administrative constitutionalism is a catchphrase for the role of administrative agencies in influencing, creating, and establishing constitutional rules and norms, and governing based on those rules and norms. Though courts traditionally get far more attention in the scholarly literature and the popular imagination, administrative constitutionalism scholars show that administrative agencies have been extremely important participants in (...) class='Hi'>American constitutional development. Section I of this essay identifies three different versions of administrative constitutionalism—(1) Engagement with Existing Constitutional Doctrine; (2) Resolving Questions of Statutory Meaning that Implicate Constitutional Questions; and (3) Shadow Administrative Constitutionalism—and provides examples from the scholarly literature to illustrate these distinct manifestations of administrative constitutionalism. Section II of this essay discusses the normative turn in administrative constitutionalism scholarship. Much of this normative literature is implicitly or explicitly premised on the notion that agencies are more likely to pursue progressive goals than are other government actors. Section III of this essay disputes the notion that agency constitutional decision-making is “democratic” and that agencies are naturally inclined to serve progressive goals. Finally, Section IV of this essay notes that scholars who support broad agency autonomy to work out and enforce their own constitutional visions have failed to consider how their work fits in with the economic and political science literature on agency behavior. One can predict, based on that literature, that agencies given broad autonomy under the guise of administrative constitutionalism will primarily be inclined to expand their scope and authority at the expense of countervailing considerations. (shrink)

European absolute monarchy was the model for all subsequent versions of statism. The rise of the centralized state apparatus that claimed a monopoly of the (legitimate) use of force within a given territory went hand in hand with the intellectual pursuit of describing it. America, both during colonial times and even more so at the founding of the republic, was relatively free from absolutism. The US, born without a sovereign, could not know the peculiar development of a fundamental state (...) category such as sovereignty, first defined by Jean Bodin in the 16th century. Sovereignty, in American political discourse, was…. (shrink)

This article explores the influence of Confucianism on Anglo-American political theory. It describes two recent developments in contemporary Anglo-American political theory which have allowed for substantial engagement with Confucian political theory and may set the stage for further interest in East Asian political theory more generally. One is the communitarian critique of liberal universalism and the other is the feminist emphasis on the politics of the family. This article discusses East Asian contributions to the (...) debate on universalism versus particularism and to the debate on family and justice. (shrink)

Annotation. In this sequel to his Morality, Politics, and Law, Michael Perry addresses the proper relation of moral convictions to the politics of a morally pluralistic society. While his analysis focuses on religious morality, Perry's argument applies to morality generally. Contending that nojustification of a contested political choice can be neutral among competing conceptions of human good, the author develops an ideal of "ecumenical politics" in which moral convictions about human good can be brought to bear in a productive (...) way in political argument. (shrink)

Arnold Schwarzenegger's celebrity status allowed him to project a symbolic masculine persona that was effective in gaining political power as California governor. The well-known violent tough-guy persona that Schwarzenegger developed in the mid-1980s contributed to a post—Vietnam era cultural remasculinization of the American man. But this narrow hyper-masculinity was often caricatured in popular culture and delegitimized. In the 1990s and 2000s, Schwarzenegger forged a credible masculine imagery by introducing characters who were humorously self-mocking and focused on care and (...) protection of children. Schwarzenegger's resultant hybrid masculinity, the “Kindergarten Commando,” represents an ascendant hegemonic masculinity always foregrounding muscle, toughness, and the threat of violence and following with situationally appropriate symbolic displays of compassion. The equation of toughness plus compassion composing the Kindergarten Commando is asymmetrical, with toughness eclipsing compassion; this has implications for the kinds of policies that U.S. elected leaders advocate. Republicans utilize this masculine imagery in national politics to gain voters' trust in times of fear and insecurity and continue to employ a strategy that projects a devalued feminized stigma onto more liberal candidates. (shrink)

This review-essay offers an extended engagement with Fernando Ignacio Leiva’s Latin American Neostructuralism, one of the most important contributions to contemporary Latin-American political economy. It situates Leiva’s critique of neostructuralism against the wider backdrop of Latin America’s contradictory turn to the Left since the late 1990s, and compares the treatments of change in Latin-American capitalism over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries developed by the schools of classical structuralism, neostructuralism, and neoliberalism. The essay (...) finds that Leiva’s critique of neostructuralism and his explanation for its influence on large segments of the region’s Left is the best work on the topic currently available in English. Leiva systematically demolishes neostructuralism’s claim to be a progressive alternative to neoliberalism. At the same time, it is argued that Leiva’s theoretical framework is compromised by its uncritical adoption of categories from French regulation-theory, and its nostalgia for elements of classical structuralism and its associated development-model of import-substitution industrialisation. Further, it is found that Leiva’s implicit attachment to certain myths propagated by the Marxism of the Second and, especially, Third Internationals regarding the national bourgeoisie’s role in Third-World capitalist development leaves him unduly dogmatic about the necessity, and unduly optimistic about the possibility, of building a progressive stage of capitalism in Latin America today. The same mythologies prevent Leiva from drawing the appropriate conclusions as regards the urgent necessity of rebuilding the socialist project in Latin America and internationally. (shrink)

The methodology of Latin American economic structuralism has been generally interpreted as an implicit extension of classic French structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and others, without careful examination of the methodological pronouncements of Latin American economists and social scientists. The present paper provides a detailed treatment of how Latin American structuralist methodology was formed between the 1950s and 1970s, with emphasis on Celso Furtado's views. Furtado was influenced by both C. Lévi-Strauss's and F. Braudel's apparently incompatible approaches to (...) structure and history. Furtado's suggested combination of structure and history was based on the use of economic models to interpret successive historical structures, plus the development of the notion of creativity as a link between structures and processes. It differed in some important aspects from the ‘historical-structural method’ usually associated with other Latin American authors such as Sunkel, and Cardoso and Faletto, built on ex.. (shrink)

A constitutional democracy is characterized by "governing pluralism": there is no single source of sovereignty and no single consensus on what political life should look like. Starting from this premise, and using the United States as the example of such a democracy, the work treats the ethics of three kinds of political leaders in American politics. The work examines the offices of senator, moral activist, and community organizer, in each case trying to identify the distinctive purpose of (...) the office or the contribution it makes to the democratic regime; a distinctive mode of action or set of habits conducive to fulfilling that purpose, and a set of dispositions or regime-relative virtues that people must have in order to engage in such actions consistently. ;The work concludes that a senator should focus on accommodating but restraining public opinions with a view of making possible his own consistent pursuit of public-spirited projects; that a moral activist should aim to extend the democratic principles of equality, liberty, and majority rule more widely, and towards this end must be able to mobilize a moral or religious association around a cause while speaking about that cause to a larger public in more widely accepted democratic terms; and that an organizer should promote civic self-assertion and the enlightened pursuit of interest by bringing together, and developing the capacities of, ordinary citizens through face-to-face contact. ;This plurality of ethics goes along with a single, consistent theory of democratic politics and democratic character rooted in the work of Aristotle, Tocqueville, and the authors of the Federalist. The work takes from these authors a theory of "democratic continence" under which the proper political aim for both leaders and ordinary citizens is not the good life, rational justified standards of right, or the highest virtues of human beings, but qualities of perseverance, self-restraint, individual and collective discipline, dogged self-assertion, and the enlightened pursuit of interest. Democratic politics does and must reject high moral aspirations for the sake of realism, toleration, and sympathy for the lives of ordinary people. (shrink)

Americans have long prided themselves on living in a country that serves as a beacon of democracy to the world, but from the time of the founding they have also engaged in debates over what the criteria for democracy are as they seek to validate their faith in the United States as a democratic regime. In this book John Gunnell shows how the academic discipline of political science has contributed in a major way to this ongoing dialogue, thereby playing (...) a significant role in political education and the formulation of popular conceptions of American democracy. Using the distinctive “internalist” approach he has developed for writing intellectual history, Gunnell traces the dynamics of conceptual change and continuity as American political science evolved from a focus in the nineteenth century on the idea of the state, through the emergence of a pluralist theory of democracy in the 1920s and its transfiguration into liberalism in the mid-1930s, up to the rearticulation of pluralist theory in the 1950s and its resurgence, yet again, in the 1990s. Along the way he explores how political scientists have grappled with a fundamental question about popular sovereignty: Does democracy require a people and a national democratic community, or can the requisites of democracy be achieved through fortuitous social configurations coupled with the design of certain institutional mechanisms? (shrink)

The system of development assistance for Africa in recent years has become one of the most important tools in the rivalry between world powers on the continent. Due to the increasingly important position in the global system of China which is now competing with traditional donors, the problems with development assistance are gaining in importance as a potential area for competition among global powers. The aim of the article is to analyze the development assistance of China and (...) the United States for Africa as part of the these two superpowers’ global rivalry. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of the emerging new players in the global arena of telenovelas. Latin American telenovelas have had phenomenal success in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. There has been an effort to localize the genre of telenovelas in some of those countries. The Croatian case emerges as a specific example because of its recent trend in the domestic production of telenovelas. Studying the political-economic aspect of this imported genre by examining debates surrounding the domestically (...) produced Villa Maria could help us understand some of the logic of the global media flow. Given the commercial development of broadcasting and the subsequent rise of U.S.- and Latin American-produced fiction, this article is an analysis of the political-economic and globalization debates that emerged in the Croatian press around domestically produced telenovela Villa Maria. (shrink)

This article describes a generally trend in American thought that is skeptical of social and political institutions. This trend can be described as a sort of philosophical anarchism. It develops out of pragmatist and skeptical criticism of absolutism in both philosophical and political systems. This paper traces this theme from its early roots in American Christian anarchism, through transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, and on to the work of William James and Jane Addams. It also (...) outlines explicit connections between these American philosophers and anarchist authors, such as Tolstoy and Kropotkin. (shrink)

The Political Crisis and Christian Ethics addresses themes in political philosophy in the context of a crisis in democracy after the denial of the 2020 election by the Republican candidate for president. The refusal to accept the results of the election divided the electorate and drove the president's followers to fail in their attempted coup attempt in January of 2020. Democracy is defended in Reinhold Niebuhr's writing on politics and in Barack Obama's use of the theologian's thought. It (...) is developed further in the political theory of Paul Tillich. The themes of just peacemaking are reviewed in Paul Tillich's critique of John Foster Dulles' work and in the author's critique of just peacemaking in the work of Glen Stassen. Domestically the issues of race, inequality, ecology, and healthcare are addressed from the perspective of prophetic realism. The book concludes in terms of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of education and religion and a vision of the good president. In summary, The Political Crisis and Christian Ethics is a volume of American, Christian political theory in a period of overcoming the trauma of 2016 with Christian ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

This is an exploration of the political thought of the American transcendentalists focusing on Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. They were writing at a time when the American state was thought of as sacred, the two cities of Augustine, the City of God and the City of Man, combined as one. Indeed the Augustinian metaphor was a powerful one, frequently invoked in this period. American republican democracy in the City of Man enabled citizens through their participation in (...) the state to achieve something close to the spiritual status of the City of God. The transcendentalists, with their emphasis on the importance of individual freedom, did not accept this analysis, according to Daniel Malachuk. They looked at American democracy and saw much that did not support individual pursuit of goodness nor a society that approached the status of the City of God. For example, the continued existence of slavery hardly fit with a godly place. Malachuk argues that the separation between the City of God and the City of Man remains important to transcendentalists who thought that individuals needed to be given space by the state to pursue their individual development. (shrink)

This new edition of Will Kymlicka's best selling critical introduction to contemporary political theory has been fully revised to include many of the most significant developments in Anglo-American political philosophy in the last eleven years, particularly the new debates over issues of democratic citizenship and cultural pluralism. The book now includes two new chapters on citizenship theory and multiculturalism, in addition to updated chapters on utilitarianism, liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, socialism, communitarianism, and feminism. The many thinkers discussed include (...) G. A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, William Galston, Carol Gilligan, R. M. Hare, Chandran Kukathas, Catherine Mackinnon, David Miller, Philippe Van Parijs, Susan Okin, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, John Roemer, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Iris Young. Extended guides to further reading have been added at the end of each chapter, listing the most important books and articles on each school of thought, as well as relevant journals and websites. Covering some of the most advanced contemporary thinking, Will Kymlicka writes in an engaging, accessible, and non-technical way to ensure that the book is suitable for students approaching these difficult concepts for the first time. This second edition promises to build on the original edition's success as a key text in the teaching of modern political theory. (shrink)

The paper examines the contours, features and developments of two faces of pluralism, as well as their interactions. First of all, based on the analysis of the pluralist theories, it underlines that pluralism is not perceived now only as a particular American school of thought, but mostly as a generic concept with meanings and connotations that vary from one epoch to another. Second of all, it scrutinizes the political pluralism in the United States, more exactly the relationship between (...) constitutional pluralism and party pluralism, as well as the pluralism of interest groups. The religious pluralism is seen both as denominational pluralism and as diversity of religious organizations. The paper shows that, in spite of the common ground in the constitutional provisions and much interference in their development, each of the two faces of pluralism has followed its own dynamics. Next, it focuses on the new religious pluralism, which has nourished controversies regarding its effects on democracy in America. Although prestigious scholars have warned that these new challenges face real perils, the author of this paper sides with those who see them less of a threat than an opportunity for democracy to develop new interactions and participative tools, without abandoning its principles and values. (shrink)

The social thought of Castoriadis and Lefort address Old World constellations. Yet both are positioned in a critical relationship to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and pose questions about power, the political and citizenship relevant to different civilizational settings. Two political philosophies that emerged in the era of revolutionary critique are examined in this paper alongside Castoriadis and Lefort. Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of republic and empire and Simon Bolivar’s creed of independence were American visions that connected with the (...) political imaginary. Each set down traditions open to interpretation and mythologisation. Both invoked an older rivalry of two images of the New World, as American or as Colombian, which was really a rivalry of Spanish and British Empires and their civilizational influences. Where earlier republican visions developed at the cusp of virtue and interest cultures had posed a particular range of questions about democracy, civic constitution and independence, American states now contained democratic and authoritarian potential. Even though Castoriadis and Lefort did not make these American contexts the centre of their work, each conceive the political and politics in ways that are relevant to American modernities. A key argument put in this paper with respect to Castoriadis and Lefort is that Castoriadis’s conception of creation is more salient to the republican revolutions more generally, while Lefort’s notion of political imaginary finds a strong case in the North American revolution. (shrink)

This book makes the powerful argument that Latin America needs to be a more central part of the discourse on emerging globalities and in the pursuit of an inter-civilizational focus to avoid West-centric perspectives. It deploys a cultural political economy approach that sees the global political economy as inescapably cultural and allows us to avoid the hyper-rational analysis of economics. It explores various aspects of contemporary Latin America from the revival of dependency theory, the ‘pink tide’ governments since (...) 2000 and, in particular, the potential of the Andean Buen Vivir political philosophy, to offer a distinctive paradigm for sustainable global development. The book provides a de-colonial frame and shows how many recent and new social science perspectives emerging globally are connected with Latin American scholars and Latin American social experiments: namely, dependency, decolonial and post-colonial epistemologies, post-neoliberalism, and the notion ofPluriverse. The book focuses on the cultural, the ethical, the economic and the political, and environmental dimensions of this transformation, which represents a reaction and alternative to the Western cultural, including ethical, economic, political, environmental crises. The readership for this book includes all who are fascinated by the globalization lens on the one hand, and the experience and lessons of Latin America on the other hand. (shrink)

This article considers the methodological limits and possibilities of a cultural turn in comparative religious ethics by “translating” the Latin American Indigenous meanings of buen vivir (living well), a subsistent mode of interdependent flourishing resistant to Western models of extractive development amid the Anthropocene. It problematizes the methodological challenge of translating Indigenous cultures from within a Western colonial political economy that has historically relegated Indigenous Americans to the primitive level of savage inferiority according to a stadial theory (...) of socioeconomic development. However, constructive methodological options for translating Indigenous cultures emerge from the Journal of Religious Ethics's existing conversations about comparative religious ethics. On the one hand, recent critical anthropology and ethnography, abetted by intellectual history, provide tools for ethicists in the recovery of Indigenous critiques and meanings against longstanding Western cultural patterns. On the other hand, nativizing the concept of the religious classic thematizes the normative dimensions of Indigenous cultures, demonstrating how the translation of buen vivir points to intercultural dialogue rather than cooptation and manipulation. (shrink)

This article explores several challenges African-American political thinkers pose to the continental tradition of European political philosophy as represented by two eminent theorists, Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth. It focuses on the three sharpest points of disagreement between them—over the nature of the political subject and her motivations for becoming political; the need for normative grounds as a basis of political critique; the quality of political temporality—and shows how a range of African-American (...) political thinkers have developed rigorous accounts of all three of these matters. These accounts not only expose the limitations of Rancière's and Honneth's views but also provide a capacious theoretical framework able to hold their disagreements in productive tension with each other. (shrink)

An account of successive legal theories in England and America against a background of the varieties of natural law in the ancient, medieval and modern worlds. The outcome in Legal Realism provides insight into contemporary issues in law and the judicial process and their relation to moral philosophy. As Levy shows, legal theory has always been inspired by forces outside the law in philosophy and politics. In England the philosophy of Utilitarianism as expounded by Bentham and Austin brought legal positivism (...) into prominence as an alternative to natural law. In the United States the philosophy of pragmatism spearheaded by James and Dewey and shared by Justice Holmes gave the functional turn resulting in the movement of Legal Realism. After sketching the background of varieties of natural law in the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, Levy presents leading figures and trends in England and the United States. The book is written so as to be intelligible to lawyers, philosophers, and students of cultural history and social science. (shrink)

James Harrington (1611-77) was a pioneer in applying the methods of Machiavelli and other civic humanists to English political society and its landed structure. In the century after his death, his ideas were adapted to become an important ingredient in the vocabulary of both English and American political opposition to the methods of Hanoverian parliamentary monarchy. There has been no complete edition of Harrington's writings since 1771, or of Oceana, his best-known work, since 1924. This is a (...) modernised edition, and includes all of his prose works on political subjects. The critical introduction attempts to revalue the evidence concerning Harrington's life and writings, to locate them in the context of Civil War, Commonwealth and Puritan thinking and to trace the development of Harringtonian and neo-Harringtonian ideology during subsequent generations. (shrink)

This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency in the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its impact on political science in the last three decades. The article’s second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis’s thesis by Ann C. Pluta, which manifests many of the misunderstandings that have persisted since The Rhetorical Presidency’s original publication. Habits of thought revealed in Pluta’s misunderstandings, I argue, (...) are emblematic of the political culture that is amenable to the simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic of rhetorical presidents like Donald Trump. Elements of the broader political-science world that are on display in Pluta’s article are symptomatic of political pathologies sustained and aggravated by the culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit and purport to study—the culture of the rhetorical presidency. (shrink)

The Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association is a bedrock of the profession. The contextual factors of society affect the Ethics Code of the APA, resulting in an ever-changing document. The context of the reorganization of the APA after World War II created an initial impetus toward a formalized code. A key contextual feature of the Code's development was the use of the Critical Incident Technique, which was based in the empirical aspirations of the psychological field. This (...) article explores the historical context around the APA's decision to draft an ethics code, reviews its development, and discusses its role for psychologists today. (shrink)

In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice--whether through "color-blind" policies or through affirmative action--provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In Color Conscious, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful, their essays tackle different aspects of the question of racial justice; together they provide a compelling response to our nation's (...) most vexing problem.Appiah begins by establishing the problematic nature of the idea of race. He draws on the scholarly consensus that "race" has no legitimate biological basis, exploring the history of its invention as a social category and showing how the concept has been used to explain differences among groups of people by mistakenly attributing various "essences" to them. Appiah argues that, while people of color may still need to gather together, in the face of racism, under the banner of race, they need also to balance carefully the calls of race against the many other dimensions of individual identity; and he suggests, finally, what this might mean for our political life.Gutmann examines alternative political responses to racial injustice. She argues that American politics cannot be fair to all citizens by being color blind because American society is not color blind. Fairness, not color blindness, is a fundamental principle of justice. Whether policies should be color-conscious, class conscious, or both in particular situations, depends on an open-minded assessment of their fairness. Exploring timely issues of university admissions, corporate hiring, and political representation, Gutmann develops a moral perspective that supports a commitment to constitutional democracy.Appiah and Gutmann write candidly and carefully, presenting many-faceted interpretations of a host of controversial issues. Rather than supplying simple answers to complex questions, they offer to citizens of every color principled starting points for the ongoing national discussions about race. (shrink)

An historical overview of the United Nations sustainable development initiative reflects a convergence of political and ethical concerns, and a need to incorporate business and the ethics of business into an inclusive perspective. Underlying all of the resolutions and recommendations ensuing from that initiative is the age-old question of “the one and the many,” with which theology and philosophy have grappled for centuries, and sociology and politics in more recent times. Inherent to sustainable development is a need (...) to overcome that question, especially with respect to the power of the wealthier nations. Good old American Pragmatism offers a solution which, at once, respects individual and communal sovereignty while positing a dynamic interaction between the two. That interaction offers an optimistic approach to global business and to global business ethics. (shrink)

Judith Shklar was a formative political thinker whose oeuvre defies traditional labels, and whose legacy is subtle but substantial. Her work emerged, as one observer has pointed out, between the "end of ideology" discussions of the 1950s and the early 1990s discussion of the "end of history." Shklar contributed significantly to American political thought by arguing for a new, more skeptical and stripped-down version of liberalism that intends to bring political theory and real-life experiences closer together. (...) This book is the first to comprehensively explore how Shklar's ideas emerged, how her political theory developed, and the impact and legacy she left behind."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Taking Emerson as his starting point, Cornel West’s basic task in this ambitious enterprise is to chart the emergence, development, decline, and recent resurgence of American pragmatism. John Dewey is the central figure in West’s pantheon of pragmatists, but he treats as well such varied mid-century representatives of the tradition as Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W. E. B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling. West’s "genealogy" is, ultimately, a very personal work, for it is imbued throughout (...) with the author’s conviction that a thorough reexamination of American pragmatism may help inspire and instruct contemporary efforts to remake and reform American society and culture. "West... may well be the pre-eminent African American intellectual of our generation."—The Nation "_The American Evasion of Philosophy_ is a highly intelligent and provocative book. Cornel West gives us illuminating readings of the political thought of Emerson and James; provides a penetrating critical assessment of Dewey, his central figure; and offers a brilliant interpretation—appreciative yet far from uncritical—of the contemporary philosopher and neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty.... What shines through, throughout the work, is West's firm commitment to a radical vision of a philosophic discourse as inextricably linked to cultural criticism and political engagement."—Paul S. Boyer, professor emeritus of history, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Wisconsin Project on American Writers Frank Lentricchia, General Editor. (shrink)

Winner of the 1999 Best Book in Ecological and Transformational Politics presented by the American Political Science Association's Section on Ecological and Transformational Politics The discipline of political science has reached a crossroads. The frequency with which terms such as "post-liberal," "post-modern," "post-patriarchical," "post-materialist," and "post-structural" are used in contemporary political discourse testifies to the pervasive conviction that an era has ended. Similarly, phrases such as "new world order," "new paradigm," "new age," and "third wave" convey (...) the widely-shared expectation that what lies ahead politically will be qualitatively unlike what has gone before. Transformational Politics argues that traditional political science is failing to identify and address fundamental political phenomena of our time and proposes an alternative value-based political science that not only studies phenomena, but also uses knowledge to promote democracy, sustainability, and social conscience. Part I of the book defines transformational political theory as an emerging paradigm and draws on a wide array of theories—empowerment, feminist, democratic, communitarian, chaos, quantum, conflict resolution, self-actualization. Part II examines how a transformational perspective guides the study of politics in both research and teaching. Part III offers guidance about how to practice the theory and apply the study with a concern for creating a better world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 (2002) 549-550 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, editors. The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Vol. 3 of Millenarianism and Messianism in Early (...) Modern European Culture. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Pp. xxv + 190. Cloth, $85.00. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a significant body of scholars called attention to the idea of the millennium in English thought during the seventeenth century. These scholars argued that, especially during the epoch of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth, 1640 to 1660, religious speculation that history was moving toward its imminent consummation in a thousand-year reign of Christ exercised powerful influence on English politics and society, both in England itself and in colonial New England. To a lesser extent, scholars also noted the persistence of millennial anticipation after the Restoration, including speculation by mathematicians and scientists such as Isaac Newton.Richard H. Popkin, in addition to his well-known work on the history of skepticism, has played an important role in fostering and contributing to continued scholarship on millenarian and messianic ideas in the early modern era. In The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Popkin collaborates with James E. Force to publish eleven papers from a 1998 conference at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. The book interprets the work of biblical exegetes, theologians, and scientists in the two centuries from 1600 to 1800 and places millenarian ideas in such varied contexts as Whig politics, the production of almanacs, Jewish-Christian relations, and early modern theories of geological history.The essays that comprise The Millenarian Turn are most successful when they reconstruct the millennial ideas of particular thinkers, relate these ideas to other aspects of a given individual's thought, and trace the revision of millennial ideas through successive generations. For example, Sarah Hutton of the University of Hertfordshire carefully describes the influential commentary on the Book of Revelation by the Cambridge biblical scholar Joseph Mede (1586-1638), in order to demonstrate the paradoxical point that Mede's theories were appropriated for dramatically different political and ecclesiastical purposes by Puritan radicals and by Church of England apologists. Margaret J. Osler of the University of Calgary shows that the physicist and chemist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was not only preoccupied with questions about the extent and limitations of human knowledge, but also consistently extended these questions into his views on the afterlife, in which he identified heaven with enlarged capacities for knowing the beauty and harmony of the cosmos. And Reiner Smolinski of Georgia State University expertly traces the series of exegetical and theological shifts from early seventeenth-century millenarians to the New England minister Cotton Mather (1663-1728), who became "the first American to develop a fully coherent premillennialist system in the modern sense" organized around the idea that Christ's return at the beginning of the millennium would purify the world from "wickedness, death, and destruction" (166).As these three examples suggest, The Millenarian Turn makes an important contribution through the chronological span of its essays. Chapters usefully describe the principal millenarian exegetes of the early seventeenth century (Thomas Brightman, Joseph Mede, J. H. Alsted), but nine of the book's eleven chapters focus on the continued vitality of millenarian ideas after 1660. In this regard, the book stakes out an important agenda for future scholarship on the cultural history of millenarian and messianic beliefs and movements.At the same time, it must be said that Force, Popkin, and their colleagues could have done more to explore the cultural work done by millenarianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Having provided extensive evidence of the... (shrink)

Devoted to the whole of Hamilton’s political writing, this accessible and teachable analysis makes clear the enormous influence Hamilton had on the development of American political and economic institutions and policies.

This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place—from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the (...) South, where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower. (shrink)

Aureli advances a fresh, spirited and combative account of the idea of ‘autonomy’, connecting Italian architectural debates from the 1960s with the politics of class-autonomy that was being developed and advanced by workerist theorists such as Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and Toni Negri. Aureli’s account focuses on Aldo Rossi’s architectural ideas and the project of the No-Stop City proposed by the young avant-garde group Archizoom. The Project of Autonomy is not simply envisaged as an historical exploration of the 1960s; primarily, (...) it is conceived as an intervention in current architectural theory, drawing on the author’s interest in Tronti’s politics to challenge the contemporary popularity of a broadly post-Negrian ‘autonomism’. This review questions aspects of Aureli’s reading of Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri. Furthermore, although Aureli’s discussion of Red Vienna opens up onto vital questions of strategies for social change, which remain pertinent to contemporary arguments over ‘enclaves’ or ‘zones’ of resistance, his antagonism towards Tafuri prevents his argument from either exploring or advancing the debate which he has initiated. (shrink)

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across (...) deep moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships. (shrink)

This article considers how diplomacy can be refined and amplified within the field of multicultural education. Focusing on Native American peoples in particular, I argue that the multiculturalist emphasis on cultural diplomacy overlooks the political difference of First Nations peoples. In contrast to a multiculturalist cultural diplomacy, the article develops diplomacy according to a decolonial framework that seeks to dismantle colonial perspectives of Native American political difference. Drawing upon theorists and historians of diplomacy, as well as (...) Indigenous and decolonial writers, the article seeks to provide the terms through which teacher identifications as decolonial diplomats can be fostered toward Native Americans. (shrink)