Jeffrey C. Isaac

Oases in the Desert: Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics.

Hannah Arendt never wrote systematically on the subject of democracy. In her book of greatest relevance to the subject, On Revolution , she criticized liberal democracy, and defended a conception of virtuous political “elites,” leading most commentators to view her as an opponent of democracy. I argue that Arendt defended a distinctive conception of grass-roots democracy, and that her conception of elites is distinctively democratic rather than anti-democratic. I bolster this argument by examining her historical context, and conclude by assessing the relevance of Arendts conception of democracy.

For a More Public Political Science

M any scholarly journals contain Editor Introductions designed to furnish brief yet inviting summaries of each issue’s contents. Ever since June 2005, when I became Perspectives Book Review Editor, I have written Introductions that do more than summarize. I have sought to highlight common themes and promote a “problem-driven” and thematic approach to inquiry, in order to help bridge the subfield and methodological divides that have plagued the modern discipline of political science in the United States, and to foster a robust and relevant “political science public sphere.” Perspectives on Politics, by its very title and origins, is a journal that highlights the perspectival nature of political inquiry. It is a unique journal, and editing it requires a special attentiveness to the best ways of promoting productive dialogue across scholarly differences and stimulating productive debate within scholarly agreements. This is an ongoing interpretive process, involving communication with reviewers, board members, authors, and readers, and involving editorial judgments of consequence. This interpretive dimension of inquiry is not unique to Perspectives. It is, arguably, characteristic of all journals and indeed of all human living. But Perspectives is uniquely committed to foregrounding, and owning, this interpretive dimension of political science inquiry. One reason I write elaborate Introductions is to highlight the connections and synergies behind the production of every issue we publish, thereby encouraging readers to read and think broadly beyond their normal comfort zones. The second reason is because every issue bears the imprint of my editorial judgments and decisions, and it seems only right to call attention to these judgments and decisions, and to allow them to be an explicit part of ongoing discussion about the political science contained in our journal and about political science in general. Perspectives on Politics is a “flagship” journal of the American Political Science Association. As its editor, I am an important professional “gatekeeper,” and I make consequential decisions for individuals and for the discipline. Why not be explicit about this? Why make believe that I am simply enacting the anonymous and ineluctable requirements of “science?” Everyone knows that this is not the case. And yet we so often pretend. Why pretend ? This issue’s Introduction is different from any I have written before. For while it comments on the contents of this issue, it has a much broader and more candid academic-political purpose. It is an Editorial in the true sense, an effort to promote the scholarly praxis at the heart of the journal’s mission. I feel the need to explain this praxis, but also to defend it. For in my opinion it faces a number of challenges associated with what I will call a resurgent neo-positivism within the discipline. I don’t think this neo-positivism is a bad thing. A robust political science public sphere ought to be pluralistic. Intellectual vitality is a good thing, and the tendency of which I speak is a resurgent, revitalized, neo-positivism, animated by a sincere commitment to a conception of political science that has value for many colleagues and that ought to be respected. But it does not speak for all of political science, and indeed in many ways its manner of speaking is rather narrow and technocratic. As a long-time participant in discussions about the future of the discipline, as an APSA Council member and as an editor, it has become clear to me that it is important for me to use this space to reflect on the past, present, and possible futures of our discipline. My purpose is simple: to clarify, defend, and expand the spaces in political science where broad and problem-driven scholarly discussions and debates can flourish. And my goal is equally simple: to provoke critical discussion in the I have shared this piece with many colleagues, and with the entire editorial board, before publishing it. I would like to thank the following for their helpful criticisms and comments: Rick Battistoni, Michael Bernhard, Charli Carpenter, Dan Drezner, Henry Farrell, Ange-Marie Hancock, Marc M. Howard, Bryan Jones, Mary Katzenstein, Peter Katzenstein, Ira Katznelson, Bob Keohane, Marc Lynch, Samantha Majic, Liz Markovits, Anne Norton, Paul Pierson, Andy Sabl, Jim Scott, Rogers Smith, Joe Soss, Paul Staniland, Dara Strolovitch, Sid Tarrow, and Kathy Thelen. And I would like to thank especially these current and former members of my editorial staff, who are amazing in every way, for their comments: James Moskowitz, Margot Morgan, Adrian Florea, Rafael Khachaturian, Katie Scofield, Brendon Westler, Laura Bucci, Rachel Gears, Pete Giordano, Katey Stauffer, and Fathima Mustaq.

The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Poltical Science and Political Praxis [Introduction]

The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. By the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Forward by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, and John A. Nagl. Introduction by Sarah Sewall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 472p.

Review Editor's Introduction

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The Politics of Global Disorder

As I write this introduction, barely eight weeks have elapsed since the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and if there were a honeymoon period, it has most definitely passed. In Pakistan, a weak and divided regime is tottering. To its west, the U.S.-installed regime in Afghanistan is in retreat before the Taliban. In a globalized world, no country has been spared the stresses caused by the financial crisis. And here in the U.S., the severity of the downturn has reignited rancorous partisan debate. The topic of Robert Batess When Things Fell Apart —the focus of our featured symposium—is the breakdown of political order in parts of Africa. But, apropos earlier discussions about area studies and its limits in which Bates was an important participant, the problem of ensuring effective and legitimate governance is hardly the provenance of the “less developed” world.

The Challenges of Multiculturalism in Advanced Democracies

I began drafting this Introduction the day after the December 2 mass murder in San Bernadino, CA committed by two suspected ISIS sympathizers, and within weeks of the November 15 coordinated mass murders in Paris committed by ISIS sympathizers. A taste of the violence that engulfs the Middle East on a daily basis was thus visited upon the “homelands” of the United States and France. The immediate response in both countries was a call for greater “domestic security” (in post-9/11 parlance, “homeland security”) and a determination to upgrade the air war against ISIS in the territories of Syria and Iraq now occupied by “the Islamic State.” ISIS (“The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”) or ISIL (“The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”) or Daesh (a perjorative Arabic acronym?)—by any of these names, a new entity, barely one year old, now claims sovereignty over a substantial territory crossing the boundaries of longestablished Middle Eastern states, inciting and organizing violent terror attacks throughout the world in the name of its “caliphate.” ISIS emerged out of the civil wars in Iraq and Libya that followed the U.S.-led toppling of the regimes of SaddamHussein andMoammar Qadaffi, and it has found fertile soil in Syria, where the violent repression of the Assad regime set off a vicious civil war. This Middle East inferno has brought to the fore a wide range of pressing issues. The murder and displacement of millions in Syria, Iraq, and Libya has caused a refugee crisis of epic proportions. The aerial attacks being conducted by the United States, France, Great Britain, and Russia raise questions about the pragmatic and moral limits of aerial bombing campaigns and remote-controlled drone strikes —questions accentuated by the October 2015 U.S. bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan that killed 30 and injured many more, all civilians. The haphazard and uncoordinated response of many intervening states—epitomized by the Turkish downing of a Russian plane over (disputed) Turkish air space—highlights the lack of any meaningful form of global governance capable of dealing with the issues in play. The current crisis poses intellectual and also practical challenges, as Marc Lynch notes in his “Praxis” essay, “Political Science in Real Time: Engaging the Middle East Policy Public.” This issue of Perspectives contains a wide range of articles, essays, and reviews that shed light on various aspects of this situation. Our lead article, Wendy Pearlman’s “Narratives of Fear in Syria,” presents a “thick description” of ordinary Syrian experiences of fear based on interviews with 200 Syrian refugees. Pearlman distinguishes between four types of fear—silencing fear, surmounted fear, semi-normalized fear, and nebulous fear—and traces the way that fear is articulated by her respondents in connection with the evolving political situation confronting the Assad regime and the Syrian population. As she writes: “Before the uprising, fear was a pillar of the state’s coercive authority. Popular demonstrations generated a new experience of fear as a personal barrier to be surmounted. As rebellion militarized into war, fear became a semi-normalized way of life. Finally, protracted violence has produced nebulous fears of an uncertain future.” Pearlman insists that the lived experience of fear is an important dimension of politics that ethnographic accounts can capture in a way that more institutional accounts cannot. While she acknowledges the limits of such ethnographies, she argues that: “Study of these testimonials aids understanding of Syria and other cases of destabilized authoritarianism by elucidating lived experiences obscured during a repressive past, providing a fresh window into the construction and evolution of national identity, and demonstrating how the act of narration is an exercise in meaning making within a revolution and itself a revolutionary practice.” Holger Albrecht and Dorothy Ohl’s “Exit, Resistance, Loyalty: Military Behavior During Unrest in Authoritarian Regimes” analyzes the central role that military actors have played during the Arab uprisings of 2011 and their aftermath. Like Pearlman, Albrecht and Ohl also draw on extensive fieldwork. They also develop a principal-agent model based on the insight that “disaggregating ‘the’ military and parsing the interests of different agents in that apparatus is crucial for explaining exit, resistance, and loyalty patterns at the start of an uprising and as it continues.” They then apply this model to explain “varying degrees and types of military cohesion in three Arab Spring cases: Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria,” and conclude: “During Syria’s unrest, the military saw most commanders remain loyal while subordinates across a range army units defected, in the vast majority of cases doing so

Varieties of Empiricism in Political Science

Jeffrey C. Isaac Book Review Editor T he “identity politics” of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality have been at the forefront of the politics of “advanced industrial societies” at least since the emergence of new social movements associated with the sixties New Left. Demands for political and social inclusion have shaped the development of public discourse, party politics, and social policy, and they have profoundly impacted the research agendas of political scientists across the discipline. In recent years much attention has turned to the specific challenges of “multiculturalism” presented by the growth of large, visible, and increasingly politicized groups of Muslims within the “advanced industrial societies,” from Britain and France to Canada and the U.S. Perhaps no society has come to exemplify these challenges more than the Netherlands, a country long regarded as a bastion of tolerance and liberal accommodation, which has recently been beset by conflicts that test not simply its political self-understanding, but its deeper identity as a “European” nation. These conflicts—symbolized by the highly publicized controversies associated with the figures Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali—have been widely covered in the media and have been the topic of much recent analysis. Paul M. Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn’s When Ways of Life: Multiculturalism and its Discontents in the Netherlands (Princeton University Press, 2007) is an important new book that focuses directly on the recent politics of the Netherlands and its broader significance. The book brings to bear on this topic the most advanced tools of public opinion research, and it builds on Spiderman’s earlier pioneering research on the political psychology of prejudice and the politics of race. The book raises questions of fundamental importance to the political identity of liberal democracies. It is also an excellent example of the ways that the methods and concepts developed in the study of American politics are part of a broader scholarly discourse that addresses problems of broader scope and relevance. So it seemed like a perfect book around which to organize a symposium, bringing into conversation a range of political science perspectives. The contributions of Will Kymlicka, a renowned political theorist of multiculturalism; Jonathan Laurence, an expert on Western European politics with a focus on challenges of Muslim incorporation; and Robert Rohrschschneider, an expert on European public opinion research, make clear that political scientists shed light on political problems from a range of angles, and that our overall understanding of the political universe is enhanced when these diverse viewpoints can be brought into productive contact. | |

Modernization and Politics

Perspectives on Politics is a scholarly journal of political science. Our mission is to publish excellent political science research and writing that engages matters of real political consequence, bridges conventional methodological and theoretical divides in the discipline, and is framed and written in a manner that speaks to our broad political science readership. This is what we mean in calling the journal “A Political Science Public Sphere.”

Nature and Politics

M odernity and modernization have been central themes of social science at least since the writings of Max Weber at the turn of the 20 century. In his classic “Science as a Vocation (1917),” Weber wrote that: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’” These words have been the topic of much interpretive disagreement. What is not in doubt is that Weber saw that modern society was characterized by the global development and spread of scientific knowledge and technological rationality. Modernity heralded at once the increasing specialization and differentiation of social life and an aspiration to regulate and control this increasing diversity. The relationship between “modernization” in general, and politics has preoccupied scholars for decades. Some have claimed that modern social and economic change brings in its wake the rationalization, modernization, and perhaps the liberalization of the state. Others have questioned this expectation. Much of contemporary political science can be seen as an extended contribution to this conversation. And the articles contained in this issue of Perspectives can similarly be seen as discussions of the complex political ramifications of modern social and cultural change. Our first two articles address a theme of growing importance in comparative politics—the strategies, tactics, and political technologies whereby authoritarian regimes constrain, channel, and coopt oppositional politics. Calvert W. Jones, in “Seeing Like an Autocrat: Liberal Social Engineering in an Illiberal State,” analyzes the reasons why Gulf state elites promote policies of social, economic, and educational modernization that promise some liberalization of their profoundly illiberal societies. As she writes: “In the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other Persian Gulf monarchies, recent state efforts to shape hearts and minds conform, incongruously, to liberal ideals of character . . . liberal social engineering in the UAE is a particularly striking or ‘muscle-bound’ manifestation of a broader phenomenon. In its exuberance, it suggests a mutated form of ‘high modernism,’ displaying the classic self-confidence about the state’s ability to foster progress and redirect human nature through top-down social engineering that James Scott famously identified with high modernist ideology. Yet this high modernism is a curious amalgam of Western-style liberal culture, neoliberal enlightenment, and continued authoritarianism, and so it stands apart from the types of authoritarian social engineering that Scott investigated. It therefore deserves careful analysis.” Jones adopts an interpretive approach, drawing on “extensive palace-based ethnography and interviews with ruling elites, including several with a ruling monarch” to offer a “look into the ‘black box’ of autocratic reasoning.” While she does not disparage dominant “rationalist” approaches to the study of authoritarianism, she insists that “the ethnographic evidence suggests that the reasoning behind such ‘rational’ planning is better explained by ruling elites’ emotional investment in a certain stylized idea of the West than a detached consideration of costs and benefits for themselves . . . Thus, instead of the sophisticated calculations about political survival emphasized in recent work on autocratic liberalization, I stress memory and emotion linked to the West as important influences over reasoning, fostering an eccentric, high modernist-like desire to impose a liberal culture purged of politics.” (For another discussion of the relationship between “modernism” and state-building, see Don Herzog’s Undisciplined review of historian Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre.) In recent years the social and political ramifications of the new digital and social media technologies have been a major source of debate (we have featured two Critical Dialogues on this topic: A December 2011 dialogue between Phillip Howard, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam and Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, and between Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg’s The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics, and Sidney Tarrow, Revolutions in Words, 1688– 2012). On the one hand, it is clear that these technologies often play an important role in empowering citizens and facilitating the mobilization of political oppositions. On the other, it is clear that the oppositional uses of these technologies are often frustrated by political incumbents employing a complex repertoire of power-maintaining

The Rule of Law, Democracy, and Intelligence

The broad theme of “nature and politics” has been ubiquitous at least since Aristotles Politics, the fourth century BCE text often considered the founding work of political science. Long before “political science” took the distinct disciplinary and institutional forms with which we are familiar, the effort to understand the sources and the range of political experience was typically linked to reflection on nature—the nature of politics, the nature of human beings, the nature of existence, and the nature of “nature” itself. In contemporary, post-World War II political science in the United States, much of this reflection about nature has until recently been linked to the work of Leo Strauss and his followers, who saw themselves as heirs to a philosophical discourse at odds with modern social science . At the same time, serious consideration of nature as a theme of political science never disappeared and in recent decades has dramatically expanded. (And of course interpretations of the science of nature, i.e., “science,” have been at the center of political science, especially since the advent of behavioralism.) One source of this expansion of interest in nature has no doubt been the growing politicization of “the environment” and heightened attention to the natural world as both the setting in which human interaction takes place and the object of extraordinary human transformation and degradation. Another source has been the politicization of identities—race, gender, sexuality—that had long been considered natural and whose contestation raised anew questions about “human nature” and its limits, variations, and transformations. A third source has clearly been the technological and theoretical development of “the natural sciences” themselves, and the growth of new discourses—evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience—that raise new questions about the complex relationships between the non-human dimensions of nature—physics, chemistry, biology and especially neurobiology—and human individuals and the social worlds that human individuals inhabit.