Running through most, though not all, of the articles in this issue of Perspectives on Politics is the theme of competing interpretations of the same event or activity—a subject all too familiar to those of us with partners, children, or political convictions. Some articles directly address alternative readings; in other cases, competing interpretations appear across articles or between author and commentator(s). There are also surprising substantive resonances among articles in this issue, especially about Louis Hartz's thesis of the liberal tradition in America.

In February 1957 Lloyd Rudolph and I set forth into the “heat and dust” villages of Thanjavur district, South India, with 10 Indian graduate students from Madras Christian College. Our objective was to conduct a survey on political consciousness. Six hundred urban and rural Tamils scattered across three districts constituted the random sample we had selected from the first electoral rolls of recently freed India. V. O. Key, that witty and groundbreaking doyen of electoral behavior analysis, had enticed us into survey research. Upon our return, the Michigan Survey Research Center provided a methodologically intense summer.Susanne Rudolph is the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Chicago and past president of the American Political Science Association (srudolph@midway.uchicago.edu). She studies comparative politics with special interest in the political economy and political sociology of South Asia, state formation, Max Weber, and the politics of category and culture. An earlier version of this address was presented at the annual meeting of the association on September 2, 2004.

In 2001 and 2003, the Bush administration engineered two enormous tax cuts primarily benefiting very wealthy taxpayers. Most Americans supported these tax cuts. I argue that they did so not because they were indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely failed to connect inequality and public policy. Three out of every four people polled said that the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people has increased in the past 20 years, and most of them added that that is a bad thing—but most of those people still supported the regressive 2001 Bush tax cut and the even more regressive repeal of the estate tax. Several manifestly relevant considerations had negligible or seemingly perverse effects on these policy views, including assessments of the wastefulness of government spending and desires for additional spending on a variety of government programs. Support for the Bush tax cuts was strongly shaped by people's attitudes about their own tax burdens, but virtually unaffected by their attitudes about the tax burden of the rich—even in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from (or misconnected to) a variety of relevant values and material interests.Larry M. Bartels is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (bartels@princeton.edu). He directs the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. This article is a revised and abridged version of a paper originally presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association and subsequently presented in seminars and conferences at the University of Michigan, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Brookings Institution, Harvard University, Demos, and Princeton University, and at the 2004 meeting of the Russell Sage Foundation's University Working Groups on the Social Dimensions of Inequality. The author is grateful to numerous seminar and conference participants, colleagues, students, and friends for their criticism and support. He is also grateful to the Russell Sage Foundation for generous financial support of his research through a grant to the Princeton Working Group on Inequality, and for additional support of the primary data collection on which the present report is based.

The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts represent dramatic legislative breakthroughs. Taken together, they have fundamentally reshaped the nation's fiscal landscape. In view of the voluminous and largely sanguine literature on American democratic responsiveness, one might assume that this policy turnaround was broadly consistent with voters' priorities. In this article, we show that—in contradiction to this prevailing view, as well as the claims of Larry Bartels in this issue—the substance of the tax cuts was in fact sharply at odds with public preferences. Tax policy was pulled radically off center, we argue, by the intersection of two forces: (1) the increasing incentives of political elites to cater to their partisan and ideological “base”; and (2) the increasing capacity of politicians who abandon the middle to escape political retribution. In accounting for these centrifugal forces, we stress, as others have, increasing partisanship and polarization, as well as the growing sophistication of political message-control. Yet we also emphasize a pivotal factor that is too often overlooked: the deliberate crafting of policy to distort public perceptions, set the future political agenda, and minimize the likelihood of voter backlash. By showing how politicians can engineer policy shifts that are at odds with majority public preferences, we hope to provoke a broader discussion of voters' capacity to protect their interests in America's representative democracy.Jacob S. Hacker is Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University (jacob.hacker@yale.edu) and author of The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States and The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security. Paul Pierson is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley (pierson@berkeley.edu), where he holds the Avice Saint Chair in Public Policy. He is the author of Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis and Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. The authors are grateful for the comments and suggestions of Akhil Amar, Daniel Carpenter, Peter Hall, Michael Heany, Jennifer Hochschild, Richard Kogan, Theodore Marmor, Andrew Martin, David Mayhew, Nolan McCarty, Bruce Nesmith, Peter Orszag, Eric Schickler, Theda Skocpol, Richard Vallely, Robert van Houweling, Joseph White, and three anonymous reviewers, as well as participants in a workshop at Harvard University sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. Rachel Goodman, Pearline Kyi, Joanne Lim, and Alan Schoenfeld provided able research assistance. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Why do some ethnofederal states survive while others collapse? The puzzle is particularly stark in the case of the former Soviet Union: the multiethnic Russian Federation has managed to survive intact the transition from totalitarian rule, whereas the multiethnic USSR disintegrated. The critical distinction between the USSR and Russia lies in the design of ethnofederal institutions. The USSR contained a core ethnic region, the “Russian Republic,” a single region with a far greater population than any other in the union. This core ethnic region facilitated dual sovereignty, exacerbated the security fears of minority-group regions, and promoted the “imagining” of a Russia independent of the larger Soviet state. In place of a single core ethnic region, the Russian Federation contains 57 separate provinces. This feature of institutional design has given Russia's central government important capacities to thwart the kind of centrifugal forces that brought down the USSR. This holds important lessons for policy makers crafting federal institutions in other multiethnic countries.Henry E. Hale is an assistant professor of political science at Indiana University (hhale@indiana.edu). His book on the development of a national party system in the Russian Federation will be published by Cambridge University Press. The author is indebted to many who provided helpful advice and support, including Andrew Buck, Mikhail Filippov, Edward Gibson, Yoshiko Herrera, Juliet Johnson, Pauline Jones Luong, Daniel Posner, Olga Shvetsova, Jack Snyder, Ashutosh Varshney, the anonymous reviewers of earlier drafts, and participants in the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security workshop and a seminar at the Russian and East European Center, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

When doing political science research, how do we know that one story is not just as good as the next? Every historical school of thought purports to provide a “true” account of its subject matter. But contradictory schools of thought can not all be given equal weight. While much has been written on the epistemological question of objectivity in history, remarkably little work has been done regarding the practical problem encountered by political scientists faced with multiple narratives and historical bias. This essay develops a pragmatic method, which aims to evaluate historical narratives according to their utility in solving analytic and political problems. I illustrate the approach through the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where multiple, conflicting accounts of the “story” are vivid and copious. I conclude that while historical objectivity is elusive, some narratives are better than others at adjudicating both political science debates and “real-world” political problems.Jonathan B. Isacoff is assistant professor of political science at Gonzaga University (isacoff@gonzaga.edu). The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild, Bob Vitalis, Ian Lustick, and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Revising historical accounts when new evidence comes to light or when old evidence begs to be reconsidered is surely one of the major tasks of the scholarly historian. The practitioner should ideally possess the ability to unravel the past before our eyes in a clear and unbiased fashion, both at phenomenological and causal levels. Some would argue that a scholarly historian can not, any more than can a microbiologist investigating the minuscule parts of an organism, detach the circumstances of his or her act of observation from the object itself. In this view, historians' accounts of the past are subjective narratives by default if not by design. Narratives can, it might be argued, be disproved—but factuality cannot be proved. Yet even this is not as straightforward as it might seem: the best one can do is simply to accumulate narratives, not with a view to displacing older with newer ones, but to develop a larger or, pointedly in this context, more useful, picture of reality.Sari Nusseibeh is a visiting fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (snusseib@ radcliffe.edu), and professor of philosophy, al-Quds University, the Arab University of Jerusalem, of which he was appointed president in 1995.

Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America was the dominant interpretative text in American political thought for a generation. In the late 1960s the Hartzian hegemony came under severe attack, and by the 1990s his interpretive framework had been declared obsolete. Critiques allege two basic, related flaws: (1) Hartz's interpretation ignored the diversity in American political thought, particularly, though not exclusively, on questions of race, and (2) his analysis exaggerated the extent of the consensus in American political culture. These critiques are based almost exclusively on Hartz's analysis of selected periods of early American political development. I argue that Hartz's basic concepts are powerful analytical tools that continue to provide the most compelling analysis of recent American political development. I test the Hartz thesis by constructing a plausible interpretation of the 1960s based on the concepts employed in The Liberal Tradition.Philip Abbott is Distinguished Graduate Professor at Wayne State University (aa2393@wayne.edu). His recent books include Exceptional America: Newness and National Identity (1999) and Political Thought in America: Conversations and Debates (2004). The author is grateful to Jennifer Hochschild for her encouragement and to the anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics. Christopher Duncan and Max Skidmore also provided very helpful advice.

Explanations of the unique character of American political development—i.e., its exceptionalism—must consider and explain a wide range of phenomena. Why has the United States been relatively immune to the kinds of social movements and political parties commonly found in other industrialized democracies? Why is there no American Left? Why are American unions as politically weak and numerically insignificant as they are? Beyond parties and movements, we must also seek to understand the absence in the United States of the public goods that are commonly associated with the emergence of social democratic parties in other countries: comprehensive and redistributive policies in the areas of welfare, housing, education, and health care. Understanding these absences requires, in my view, that serious attention be paid to the ways in which race and certain ascriptive practices have shaped the development of the American nation.Richard Iton is associate professor of African American Studies and political science at Northwestern University (r-iton@northwestern.edu). He is the author of Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left, and In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era (forthcoming). The author thanks Joseph Carens and Barnor Hesse for their comments on earlier drafts of this response.

Phillip Abbott is too modest. His essay seeks to defend, against its many critics, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, which was published half a century ago. Abbott bases his defense mainly on his discovery that certain concepts of Hartz's—“the liberal enlightenment,” “the American democrat”—remain valid and helpful in explaining the politics of the 1960s and after. Yet the merits of Abbott's interpretation of that phase in our political history rise or fall on his own thinking, not Hartz's—his use of Hartz's book, and not Hartz's book itself. If Hartz's work gets him where he wants to go better than Judith Shklar's or Rogers Smith's does, that's fine. Gratitude is a worthy sentiment, too often forgotten in our narcissistic academic culture. But by now, Hartz is mainly a figure of historical interest. I'm less interested in whether Louis Hartz was right than in whether Phillip Abbott is right—not about Louis Hartz but about the events of 1960s and their legacies.Sean Wilentz is Dayton-Stockon Professor of History and director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University (swilentz@Princeton.edu).

Howard Dean's presidential bid was notable for many things, including the mixed reaction it drew from political scientists. Many scholars found Dean's ultimate failure predictable. Longstanding political science wisdom suggests several explanations for Dean's defeat: the central issue of electability, which seemed to weigh heavily against his campaign; the fact that primary voters are more moderate than party activists; the well-documented difficulty of regaining lost momentum. Less systematic factors—such as numerous verbal gaffes and one infamous scream—surely contributed as well.Matthew Hindman is an assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University (matthew.hindman@asu.edu). This research was supported by the National Center for Digital Government, with funding from the National Science Foundation under grant no. 0131923. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild, Larry Bartels, Chris Karpowitz, Gabriel Lenz, David Lazer, Alan Abramowitz, James McCann, and the three anonymous reviewers for their contributions.

Never in America … has there been a matter requiring more good judgment or more vigilance, or demanding a clearer and more thorough examination.” José Martí's observation on the first effort by the United States to unite both Americas at the Pan-American Congress in 1889 is relevant again today. Efforts to unite the two hemispheres are underway with the proposal to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas and the flurry of preliminary bilateral and regional trade agreements that the Bush Administration has been pushing in Latin America. It appears that Latin American leaders have taken the quote to heart—most trade negotiations now focus on forming a united regional front. The aim of “regionalization” is to unite countries in Latin America into small groups prior to their integration into a larger, hemisphere-wide trade bloc.Luisa Angrisani was educated at Fordham University, where she completed a master's degree in international political economy and development, specializing in Latin America. She joined the Economist Intelligence Unit and is presently a regional editor, assessing political, economic, and financial conditions in Latin America (luisaangrisani@eiu.com). She has also written several articles, most recently for the National Interest.

In 1983 Martin Shapiro worried that the “new jurisprudence of values” being promoted by the new generation of public law scholars in political science would “serve as a cover for slipping back into playing ‘little law professor’ for undergraduates.” Proponents of the “jurisprudence of values” in political science, who engaged in constitutional theorizing about individual rights and the structure of governing institutions, would “writ[e] conventional case law doctrine” that “contain[ed] no distinctive political analysis.” Worse, the fruits of the behavioral revolution might rot should normative concerns take center stage in public law inquiry. Rather than further integrate the study of courts into mainstream political science, public law scholars would spend their time telling Supreme Court justices how to do their jobs. Shapiro predicted, “[P]olitical scientists trained in the empirically oriented ‘American politics’ field will be shoved to the edges of ‘public law,’ and political jurisprudence will be converted to ‘legal and political theory.’” Abandoning American constitutionalism was the best antidote for the threat a jurisprudence of values presented to the social science study of law and courts. Students of the judicial process, Shapiro declared in 1989, should explore “any public law other than constitutional law, any court other than the Supreme Court, any public lawmaker other than the judge, and any country other than the United States.”Mark A. Graber is a professor of government at the University of Maryland, College Park and a professor of law at the University of Maryland School of Law (mgraber@gvpt.umd.edu). He is the author of Transforming Free Speech, Rethinking Abortion, and Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. The author thanks Rogers Smith, Howard Gillman, Keith Whittington, Ran Hirschl, Jennifer Hochschild and several (not-so) anonymous reviewers from their advice and encouragement. Apologies to the numerous talented young students of public law whose fine works were omitted to conserve space.

Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World. Edited by Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 268p. $70.00.

Since the fall of the Soviet Bloc regimes, it has become accepted wisdom that the market system has triumphed—that relying on the free, independent exchange between economic actors is a far superior way of allocating resources than attempting to “plan” from above. At a general level, this accepted wisdom is hard to dispute. Yet, like all such propositions, its heuristic usefulness cuts two ways: Embracing it wholesale makes for an easy bet; it also, however, encourages one to overlook a more complex and ambiguous reality that lurks beneath the surface. We might agree, for example, that markets confer myriad economic and political advantages. What we might less readily agree on, however, is what, precisely, we mean by “markets.” As the essays in Markets in Historical Contexts make clear, if we mean institutions that are “not encumbered by geography, weight, unequal access to information, government regulation, or particularistic agendas” (p. 226) (not to mention cultural context), then we will quickly find ourselves running afoul of social science's ultimate limit: reality.

Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups. By Cynthia Burack. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 224p. $42.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Are groups necessarily destructive? This question is the focus of Cynthia Burack's new book. To address it, she constructs a conversation among psychoanalytic political theorists, psychoanalytic group theorists, and black feminist theorists. As the structure of the book makes clear, Burack hopes to broaden her audience to readers unfamiliar with any or all of these discourses. She intends to convince students of politics and feminists (particularly black feminists) that psychoanalytic theory can contribute much to understanding the dynamics of that ubiquitous feature of political life, groups. Furthermore, she wants to bridge the disciplinary gap between those who study groups and those who engage in discourse analysis. Discourse analysts are presently primarily located in humanities and cultural studies, and when they employ psychoanalytic thinking, it tends to be the Lacanian strand. Burack argues for a different tack, psychoanalytic object relations theory, particularly as articulated by Wilfred Bion, D. W. Winnicott, and Melanie Klein.

The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination. By Eyal Chowers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 260p. $49.95.

This is an extremely rich and provocative work, wide in learning, filled with thoughtful interpretations of Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Michel Foucault, among others, and containing many insights into the ways that “modernity” and its consequences for the self have been conceived in the last century. It is also a disturbing work, pointing to what the author argues are apparently inescapable dilemmas for “us” posed by both “our institutions” and “our notions of identity” (p. 197). And it will be a very contested work, first, because of what I think are a number of questionable assertions the author makes about the views of those he discusses, particularly Nietzsche and Weber; second, because of the completely unhistorical and uncontextual methodology the author employs to throw light on these thinkers so close to us in time, yet immersed in such different social and cultural milieus; and third, because of the larger thesis and framework of the interpretation, which convey great depth of concern and sincerity, but which, I think, are very problematical as an interpretation of these thinkers. To deal with the book adequately would require much more extended treatment than a short review can give it here.

The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. By Robyn Eckersley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 344p. $62.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Some argue that market democracies do not engage in war with one another, and therefore that if one promotes markets, franchise, and elections, or democratic-capitalist states, this will lead to international peace and cooperation. This idea has informed both the theory of international law (e.g., a right to democratic governance) and the practice of American foreign policy (e.g., Bush Doctrine). A counterargument is built on the suspicion that institutional political/economic process is largely independent of the propensity of a state to cooperate in international relations, and that a focus on democracy and markets as a cure-all for international dispute settlement distracts both theorist and practitioner from the real problems that plague the international system. These skeptics call the focus on the creation of democratic states the “consoling myth.”

Citizens Without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion. By Leonard C. Feldman. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. 224p. $35.00.

American attitudes toward the homeless tend to shift back and forth between compassion and compassion fatigue, between supporting policies to provide resources to the homeless and supporting punitive policies to exclude them from public spaces. This ambivalence is often explained by invoking “economic functionality” and/or “a cultural logic” (p. 5), but neither of these approaches is adequate. Rather, Leonard Feldman argues, we should see the problem of homelessness as a “problem of sovereign state power” (p. 18). Citizenship, and political life generally, are defined in opposition to “bare life,” or “mere physical existence”: Citizenship as full membership is constituted as the exclusion of bare life” (p. 18). Feldman continues, “Home-dwelling citizen and homeless bare life are political statuses, not social statuses or elements of personal identity” (p. 20), and so an adequate response to homelessness must also be political. He calls for a move toward a “pluralized citizenship” (p. 21), in which we deconstruct “the rigid oppositions between … bare life and citizenship.” Acknowledging a plurality of ways of dwelling, we can then recognize “that those displaced from ‘house’ and ‘home’ must dwell … and that public policy should be oriented toward enabling dwelling, not criminalizing it or reducing it to the stripped down client relationship of the shelter” (p. 147). More specifically, rather than repressing the habitats and networks that the homeless have themselves created, we should recognize these communities, including, in particular, “politicized homeless encampments” (p. 107) as participants in the political processes through which we formulate policy.

Rights, Democracy, and Fulfillment in the Era of Identity Politics: Principled Compromises in a Compromised World. By David Ingram. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. 280p. $70.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

David Ingram situates his work within the tradition of critical social theory and traces its normative impulse to the young Marx's aspiration for human fulfillment. However, in order to avoid the trap of utopianism, he adopts a pragmatic attitude and highlights the importance of compromises. At the same time, by remaining cognizant of the price paid for normative compromises, he is able to maintain his pragmatic attitude without losing sight of the aspiration for human fulfillment and perfectibility that inspires his work.

Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. By Ira Katznelson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 208p. $29.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.

This eloquent volume, which originated as Columbia University's Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures in 1997–98, has a dual mission. The first is personal. It is a “critical homage” to the post–World War II scholars who were Ira Katznelson's teachers. Practicing their craft “in the midst of a moment stamped by the greatest shocks and stresses the Enlightenment tradition had ever faced,” these scholars produced a powerful revision of American Enlightenment liberalism that Katznelson believes could serve as a guidepost for today (p. 157). Confronting the “twentieth-century compound of total war, totalitarianism, and holocaust,” they would neither simply reaffirm the faith in reason and science as secular grounds of moral progress nor simply repudiate ideals of autonomy and freedom as “mere fantasy or, worse, the main source of radical evil” (pp. 33, 39). They “sought instead to renew and protect the Enlightenment's heritage by appropriating and transforming social science, history, and the study of public policy” so as to provide illumination in the face of desolation (p. xiii). Katznelson's principal aim is to show how the work of this group might make possible a subtle intervention into “today's fervent but thin controversies about social inquiry and the status of Enlightenment” (p. xv).