II: Political Thinkers and Ideas Penseurs et Idées Politiques
| DOI | 10.1177/002083451706700602 |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Abstracts |
700
II
POLITICAL THINKERS AND IDEAS
PENSEURS ET IDÉES POLITIQUES
67.6585 ALBERTUS, Michael ; GAY, Victor — Unlikely democrats:
economic elite uncertainty under dictatorship and sup-
port for democratization. American Journal of Political Sci-
ence 61(3), July 2017 : 624-641.
Motivated by a puzzling set of democratic transitions, we examine how
elite uncertainty about dictatorship — a novel and generalizable causal
mechanism impacting dem ocratization — can induce elite support for
democracy. We construct a noisy signaling model in which a potential
autocrat attempts to convince economic elites that he will be a faithful
partner should elites install him in power. The model generates clear
predictions about how two major types of elite uncertainty — uncertainty
in a potential autocratic successor's policies produced by variance in the
pool of would-be dictator types, and uncertainty in the truthfulness of
policy promises made by potential autocratic successors — impact the
likelihood of elite-driven democratization. We demonstrate the model's
plausibility in a series of cases of democratic transition. [R, abr.]
67.6586 ARLEN, Gordon — Cold war prophecy and the burdens of
comparative thought: a case for revisiting Louis Hartz.
Polity 49(4), Oct. 2017 : 548-574.
Pushing against Louis Hartz’s reputation as an overly complacent con-
sensus historian, I highlight his forceful critique of America’s liberal
blindness, a critique reaching back to the Founding and culminating in an
engagement with the politics of his own Cold War moment. Alarmed by
the rise of McCarthyism, Hartz warned against an intensifying American-
ism at home and advised increasing contact with cultures abroad in the
hopes of facilitating the sense of relativity engendered by the experience
of seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The result, I argue, is a
genre of prophetic liberalism, which compels Americans to transcend
their liberal-absolutism-cum-isolationism, and which still affirms core
enlightenment values. Hartz underscores the need for political theory’s
comparative vocation — one that alerts Americans to crucial blind spots
within their national experience. [R]
67.6587 AVRAMENKO, Richard — The grammar of indifference:
Tocqueville and the language of democracy. Political
Theory 45(4), Aug. 2017 : 495-523.
This essay analyzes what Alexis de Tocqueville calls an “application of
linguistics to history.” Beginning with Tocqueville’s position that language
is the ground of meaningful bonds between people, I argue that the
internal logic of a language — the grammar — is correlated with the
internal logic governing the social order that both begets and is begotten
by that language. Social orders therefore have both linguistic and politi-
cal grammars and, as the internal logic of language changes, so too can
the political grammar. This essay thus traces what Tocqueville envisions
as the historical importance of language: from the language of aristocra-
cy and the grammar of difference, to revolutionary language and the
grammar of concurrence, to democratic language and the grammar of
indifference. It concludes with Tocqueville’s suggestion of how good
grammar might be taught in democratic ages. [R] [See Abstr. 67.6589]
67.6588 BATROUNI, Dimitri — One Nation, disconnected party: the
evocation of One Nation aimed to unite the nation, in-
stead it highlighted the [UK] Labour party’s divisions.
British Politics 12(3), Aug. 2017 : 432-448.
This paper explores E. Miliband’s evocation of One Nation in his 2012
Labour party conference speech. It first surveys the views of members of
the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and key advisors to Miliband on
One Nation, with a focus on the debates surrounding its purpose and
substance. What becomes clear is the amount of confusion amongst
backbenchers and shadow cabinet members of the PLP regarding its
purpose. Second, the paper explains the respective, and drastically
different, positions of the Policy Review team and Miliband and his
leadership team over the purpose of One Nation. Third, this paper
highlights that there was a fundamental disconnection between the two
principal centres of policymaking under the tenure of Miliband’s leader-
ship. [R, abr.]
67.6589 BENSON, Sara M. — Democracy and unfreedom: revisit-
ing Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. Political Theory
45(4), Aug. 2017 : 466-494.
This essay reexamines the famous 1831 prison tours of Alexis de
Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. It reads the three texts that
emerged from their collective research practice as a trilogy, one conven-
tionally read in different disciplinary homes (Democracy in America in
Political Science, On the Penitentiary in Criminology, and Marie, Or
Slavery: A Novel of Jacksonian America in literature). I argue that in
marginalizing the trilogy’s important critique of slavery and punishment,
scholars have overemphasized the centrality of free institutions and
ignored the unfree institutions that also anchor A merican political life.
The article urges scholars in Political Theory and Political Science to
attend to this formative moment in mass incarceration and carceral
democracy. [R] [First of a series of articles on "Democracy in America".
See also Abstr. 67.6587, 6615]
67.6590 BONEFELD, Werner — Authoritarian liberalism: from
Schmitt via ordoliberalism to the euro. Critical Sociology
43(4-5), 2017 : 747-761.
Hayek’s warning about the potentially illiberal character of democratic
government is key to the German ordoliberal thinking that emerged in the
context of the crisis of the Weimar Republic. The ordoliberal thinkers
were keenly aware of Schmitt’s political theology and argued with him
that the state is the predominant power in the relationship between
market and state, conceiving of this relationship as free economy and
strong state. They maintained that the establishment of social order is
the precondition of free economy; law does not apply to disorder and
does not create order. The liberal state is the "concentrated force" of that
order. The contribution argues that ordoliberalism is best characterized
as an authoritarian liberalism and assesses its contemporary veracity in
relation to the EU. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 67.6424]
67.6591 BURGESS, J. Peter — The real at the origin of sovereign-
ty. Political Psychology 38(4), Aug. 2017 : 653-668.
This article revisits the concept of sovereignty in political theory by
applying tools adapted from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It critically
reviews the premises of political subjects assumed by sovereignty and
formulates a widened concept of sovereignty based on a general under-
standing of the “self,” “self-relation,” and “identity” as the fundamental
components of sovereignty. It then focuses on the concept of the “Sov-
ereign Good” common to French histories of political thought and of
particular interest to Jacques Lacan, [who] points to a path according to
which an idealized and universalized notion of the sovereign is made
possible and energized through an identification of the real with the
Sovereign Good. By understanding sovereignty as supported by the
Lacanian real, we can better understand the forces that drive it to self-
preservation. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 67.6532]
67.6592 CABRERA, Luis — “Gandhiji, I have no homeland”: cos-
mopolitan insights from BR Ambedkar, India’s anti-caste
campaigner and constitutional architect. Political Studies
65(3), Oct. 2017 : 576-593.
While the domestic political and legal thought of BR Ambedkar has
gained increasing notoriety, the international dimensions of his work
have received relatively little attention. Ambedkar, in fact, staked out a
distinctively universalistic approach to democratic citizenship and legiti-
macy which has important connections to and can inform current cosmo-
politan dialogue. He rejected uncritical loyalty to the state, and he criti-
cized presumptions of unity within states, arguing that foreigners’ support
for the self-determination of an “Indian people” would merely perpetuate
caste oppression within the country. The latter argument provides a
significant challenge to some recent nationalist and moderate cosmopoli-
tan accounts, which reject some comprehensive universal rights claims,
or suprastate political structures to support them, in the name of respect-
ing a state’s domestic culture. [R, abr.]
67.6593 CALISE, Mauro — Theodore Lowi's decalogue for political
science. Rivista italiana di Politiche pubbliche, 2017(1) : 5-
18.
Of all the founding fathers of modern political science, Th. J. Lowi stands
out for his charismatic personality. In reviewing the legacy of a classic,
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