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Race and the Making of American Political Science (American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law) - Softcover

Buch 13 von 21: American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law

Blatt, Jessica

 
9780812225099: Race and the Making of American Political Science (American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812225090 ISBN 13: 9780812225099
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Race and the Making of American Political Science shows that changing scientific ideas about racial difference were central to the academic study of politics as it emerged in the United States. From the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, scholars of politics defined and continually reoriented their field in response to the political imperatives of the racial order at home and abroad as well to as the vagaries of race science.
The Gilded Age scholars who founded the first university departments and journals located sovereignty and legitimacy in a "Teutonic germ" of liberty planted in the new world by Anglo-Saxon settlers and almost extinguished in the conflict over slavery. Within a generation, "Teutonism" would come to seem like philosophical speculation, but well into the twentieth century, major political scientists understood racial difference to be a fundamental shaper of political life. They wove popular and scientific ideas about race into their accounts of political belonging, of progress and change, of proper hierarchy, and of democracy and its warrants. And they attended closely to new developments in race science, viewing them as central to their own core questions. In doing so, they constructed models of human difference and political life that still exert a powerful hold on our political imagination today, in and outside of the academy.
By tracing this history, Jessica Blatt effects a bold reinterpretation of the origins of U.S. political science, one that embeds that history in larger processes of the coproduction of racial ideas, racial oppression, and political knowledge.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jessica Blatt is Associate Professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction
Chapter 1. "The White Man's Mission": John W. Burgess and the Columbia School of Political Science
Chapter 2. "All Things Lawful Are Not Expedient": The American Political Science Association Considers Jim Crow
Chapter 3. Twentieth-Century Problems: Administering an American Empire
Chapter 4. The Journal of Race Development: Evolution and Uplift
Chapter 5. Laying Specters to Rest: Political Science Encounters the Boasian Critique of Racial Anthropology
Chapter 6. Finding New Premises: Race Science, Philanthropy, and the Institutional Establishment of Political Science
Epilogue

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

* * * * *

Introduction

A few years ago, the Journal of Theoretical Politics featured a startling announcement: The results of a new analysis of genetic and attitudinal data heralded "the end of ideology as we know it." The philosophers, the implication went, having only interpreted ideology, had been missing the point. Science was finally poised to offer a rigorous, empirical account of its wellsprings. Our ideologies were in our genes.

Specifically, an interdisciplinary team from political science and behavioral genetics claimed to have shown that most conventionally understood sources of ideology were instead a "cultural veneer" overlaid on a "potentially divergent underlying structure of genetic differences." Put simply, the idea was that in important instances our genes determine which of the available political preferences we are likely to choose. Even more simply, certain kinds of bodies are predisposed to certain kinds of politics.

The article (the title was, in fact, "It's the End of Ideology as We Know It") was part of a special issue dedicated to research on "genes and politics," or what practitioners call "new empirical biopolitics." This vein of political science research goes back to the 1970s but has only recently achieved greater visibility. A high point came when a 2005 article on the heritability of political attitudes made the cover of the American Political Science Review (APSR), the discipline's flagship journal, and attracted a respectable amount of media attention. Since then, a small but prolific group of researchers has been claiming to identify genetic bases for our attraction to liberalism or conservatism; levels of social dominance; likelihood to join political parties, vote, or employ particular decision strategies; gender differences in political behavior; feelings of political efficacy; receptiveness to populism; negative attitudes toward out-groups; and even "Machiavellianism."

Much of this work is ambitious, calling on us to radically revise our understanding of political life. For one writer, the "shopworn," "competing . . . paradigms of behavioralism and rational choice are in their last throes," to be replaced by a new, "sociogenomic" synthesis. The APSR's editor was particularly struck by the popular media attention accorded the 2005 cover article, musing that it might someday "emerge among the most important articles the APSR has ever published." And while few political scientists have rushed to retrain in genetics, the continued appearance of work on the biology of politically relevant differences in respected political science journals suggests that other editors and peer reviewers remain interested in this approach.

The 2005 study and others that followed have of course come in for criticism. Critics such as the geneticist Jon Beckwith and the political scientist Evan Charney fault "empirical biopolitics" for often reifying political categories in ways that do violence to the historical record. They also note that its claims often require us to resort to tortured logic to accommodate previously intelligible phenomena, such as the emergence within a generation of a solid, small-government Republican bloc in the American South (where support for the New Deal had been strong). Finally, critics point to methodological issues, including that these claims seem to rely on an outdated, genes-as-blueprint paradigm, rather than on newer understandings in which DNA is part of a dynamic, epigenetic system.

Moreover, while genes and politics researchers distance themselves from the suggestion of racial implications, the deeply racialized dynamics of American political life make racial implications hard to avoid. If preference for liberal policies is significantly genetic, the pervasive attachment of African Americans to the Democratic Party, for example, could seem to imply that racial distinctions, rather than being "socially constructed," map on to meaningful biological differences. Similarly, if genes and politics researchers are right, "gender gaps" in voting behavior constitute powerful evidence against feminist briefs for the social construction of gender. In short, all sorts of observed racial, gender, and other disparities might be biological in basis and, by implication, less susceptible to change than liberals (in thrall to their genes, no doubt) might like to believe.

Specific arguments aside, it is clear that this literature is part of a larger resurgence in biological determinism in the United States in the twenty-first century. That resurgence has taken the form of bald-faced racism, as in the newfound prominence enjoyed by white supremacists (the so-called "alt-right"). It also takes more benign-seeming forms, such as the commercialization of racially specific medicine, a thriving ancestry-testing industry, and the column inches given to deterministically minded science writers like Nicholas Wade. Many scholars fear that this cultural and scientific moment bodes a return to past follies, as when early twentieth-century eugenics advocates wrote confidently of hereditary "unit characters" for everything from "pauperism" to "ability in literary composition" and "thalassophilia" ("love of sailing"). Claims about innate social and political characteristics can also seem to open a door to the rehabilitation of long-discredited theories of innate race and sex differences or even a "backdoor" to ethically murky human engineering efforts.

This book focuses on the early years of U.S. political science, not its current state. I discuss the discipline's recent, partial embrace of biological determinism here because, just as it evokes an earlier, troubling moment in the history of science, it also recalls ideas central to U.S. political science at its origins. Now we are told that radical new research shows that "a correlation exists between political involvement and physiological predispositions" or that political liberalism is substantially determined by a genetic predisposition to "seek out new experiences." However, the idea that our politics are born into us—indeed, specifically that some people are innately cut out for self-government and progress while others are by their very constitutions more suited to traditional forms of authority—was in a real sense the precept on which U.S. political science was founded in the late nineteenth century.

The Victorian scholars who formalized the study of politics in the United States in the 1880s did not have the language of "genes." What they had was "race." John W. Burgess and Herbert Baxter Adams, who between them founded the first two doctoral programs in politics in the United States, taught that Anglo-Saxons were the bearers of a "Teutonic germ" of liberty. It was Anglo-Saxons who created, and were fit to enjoy, democratic institutions. It was also they who carried forward the potential of civilization. As for the rest, some might eventually be assimilated, but most were more suited to authoritarianism (at home) or colonial domination (abroad). The first U.S.-trained cohort of political science Ph.D.s learned that adhering to a priori fictions of equality and social contracts had only...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812225090
ISBN 13 
9780812225099
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
216
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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