This article reports the results of a 2008 national survey of political theorists. The results, based on 1,086 responses from professors at accredited, four-year colleges and universities in the United States, provide information about the demographic characteristics of political theorists, opinion data on the place of political theory within political science, the proportion of political theorists in political science departments, teaching loads, expectations for tenure, the experience of political theorists on the academic job market, and, finally, rankings of theorists, journals, publishers, professional organizations, and Ph.D. programs.

Amitai Etzioni has written something of a pocket guide for public intellectuals, proffering hard-won lessons from his own time in the trenches. I wish that I had read his primer before I tried to break into the club. And I hope that PS readers seeking to be PI players read his guide with the right mix of humor, curiosity, and skepticism about the rules of success that Etzioni evinces.

In the English constitutional tradition, subjecthood has been primarily derived from two circumstances: place of birth and time of birth. People not born in the right place and at the right time are not considered subjects. What political status they hold varies and depends largely on the political history of the territory in which they reside at the exact time of their birth. A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations—what I will call collectively jus tempus—creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines. This concept has myriad implications for how citizenship comes to be institutionalized in modern politics. In this article, I briefly outline one route through which jus tempus became a constitutive principle within the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and how this concept works with other principles of membership to create subtle gradations of semi-citizenship beyond the binary of subject and alien. I illustrate two main points about jus tempus: first, how specific dates create sovereign boundaries among people and second, how durational time takes on an abstract value in politics that allows certain kinds of attributes, actions, and relationships to be translated into rights-bearing political statuses. I conclude with some remarks about how, once established, the principle of jus tempus is applied in a diverse array of political contexts.

Multi-issue activists are sorely understudied, despite their acknowledged importance as bridges between social movements and issue domains. In this article we explore multi-issue activism, beginning with a large sample of AIDS activists and charting the degree and nature of overlapping issue involvement, the key role of “initiator” issues, and individual characteristics that promote multi-issue activism. We demonstrate that the great majority of these AIDS activists had sizable prior and ongoing participation histories in other issues, suggesting that movement across issue areas may be the norm rather than the exception. We also show that involvement in specific past issues served as gateways to later involvement in AIDS, that psychological engagement in politics prompted cross-issue activism even among these already activated individuals, and that unique personal characteristics (in this case gender and sexual orientation) led to more issue interconnectedness.

I have lived a life in which I have often been involved in public debates and controversies, but not as a public intellectual whose ideas were embraced by the White House or celebrated by the New York Review of Books. Mine has been a very different kind of experience that could be characterized more as an against-the-grain persistence in digging into some fundamental questions of social inequality that were fashionable a half century ago but were abandoned by most Americans with influence and power. I am convinced that we have no viable policies in place that will produce a healthy and successful society as our vast racial transition continues. My research has convinced me that there are much better answers.

Barack Obama was denied a landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election. In the face of economic and political woe without precedent in the post-World War II period, the expectation of an overwhelming win was not unreasonable. He did win, but with just a 52.9 percentage point share of the total popular vote. We argue a landslide was taken from Obama because of race prejudice. In our article, we first quantify the extent of the actual Obama margin. Then we make a case for why it should have been larger. After reviewing evidence of racial bias in voter attitudes and behavior, we conclude that, in a racially blind society, Obama would likely have achieved a landslide.

Matthew Moore's survey of political theorists in U.S. American colleges and universities is an impressive contribution to political science (Moore 2010). It is the first such survey of political theory as a subfield, the response rate is very high, and the answers to the survey questions provide new information about how political theorists look when compared to political scientists overall. We are roughly the same age, for example, and are slightly more likely to be female. The survey also gives us a picture of political theorists' conditions of employment: about half of us get jobs in the first year upon receiving our Ph.D.s; most of us teach at schools that range from 1,000 to 10,000 students; most of us are not at Ph.D.-granting institutions.

A short time after 1206 and before 1215, a Londoner assembled a massive collection of older and near contemporary English laws, called the Leges Anglorum by historians, and inserted long interpolations and spurious codes that enunciated many of the principles that guided the baronial opposition to King John and later became part of the Magna Carta. To those familiar with the struggle leading up to the creation of the Magna Carta, these principles should cause no surprise. These ancient laws were made to proclaim that “in the kingdom right and justice ought to reign more than perverse will” (ECf4, 11.1.A.6; Liebermann 1903, 635). In another part of the collection, King Arthur, making his first appearance in English law, is credited with establishing as law the requirement that all nobles, knights, and freemen of the whole kingdom of Britain swear “to defend the kingdom against foreigners and enemies” (ECf4, 32.A.5–7; Liebermann 1903, 655). More surprising is the attribution of the regularly assembled Hustings court in London to the Trojans (who became the Britons). The seventh-century West Saxon king, Ine, suddenly looms large in the ranks of Britain's lawmakers; he not only reigns for the good of all, but is also given the lordly virtues of twelfth-century chivalric romance: he is “generous, wise, prudent, moderate, strong, just, spirited, and warlike” (as was appropriate for the time and place) (ECf4, 32.C.2, 32.C.8; Liebermann 1903, 658–59). A confection of bits of other law, attributed here to King Alfred, orders an end to vice, national education for freemen, and unity for all “as if sworn brothers for the utility of the kingdom” (Leges Angl, Pseudo-Alfred 1–6; Liebermann 1894, 19–20). Finally, in the grandest statement of English political ambition, Arthur appears again as the great conqueror, whose spirit was not satisfied by Britain alone: “Courageously and speedily he subjugated all Scandinavia, which is now called Norway, and all the islands beyond, namely Iceland and Greenland, which belong to Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Gotland, Denmark, Samland, Vinland, Curland, Runoe, Finland, Wirland, Estland, Karelien,Lapland, and all other lands and islands of the eastern Ocean as far as Russia” (ECf4, 32.E; Liebermann 1903, 659).

This survey's importance comes not from what it informs us about political theory as a field, but rather from the function it serves within debates over the component areas of the field of political science. Rather than answering whether political theory “belongs” within political science (an unanswerable question), the survey uses quantification of qualitative experience and data collection to consolidate political theory as a subfield. Thus success of this project relies upon and reinforces disciplinary norms, operating as a process that attempts to bring a normative political theory into existence. The rank ordering of departments, journals, and individual theorists proves appealing not only for the competitive, horse-race valuation of those people and institutions, but also for how they ultimately resist this project by showing the anti-normative heart of political theory: an important and useful survey indeed.

Why are differences so political significant? Too often political science discussions of differences assume they are immutable. The attendant implication is that the political divisions attached to these variations—in religion, ethnicity, race, or any of the other dissimilarities that frequently enter political life—are considered rigid and inflexible. This commentary draws on recent work in moral and social psychology and evolutionary biology to suggest that the critical political factor surrounding differences is not their immutability but rather the moral and political salience we accord such differences. Simple experiments in social identity theory—and a conversation with an incensed 12-year old—demonstrate that the psychological process by which differences between people and groups become deemed ethically and politically relevant is totally socially constructed and hence can be restructured in a fashion that leads to more tolerant treatment of those judged different.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Charles McIlwain observed that the new histories of the Magna Carta were portraying the charter as a “document of reaction” that could only fulfill its purported greatness “when men [were] no longer able to understand its real meaning” (McIlwain 1914, 46). Characteristic of these early-twentieth-century writers was Edward Jenks, who, in his 1904 article “The Myth of Magna Carta,” came to the conclusion that the real beneficiaries of the document—the liber homo of Article 39—were not “the people” we traditionally imagine, but rather an “aristocratic class … who can no more be ranked amongst the people, than the country gentleman of to-day” (Jenks 1904, 269). Although Jenks's position is often criticized as extreme, it is nevertheless the case that virtually all of the Magna Carta's modern commentators recognize vast historical inaccuracies in the Whiggish accounts of the charter's development up until the late nineteenth century (Radin 1946; Reid 1993; Halliday 2010, 15–16). What these new revisionist histories suggested was that the Magna Carta's great provisions—due process and trial by jury—only became great when, forgetting or ignoring the charter's seemingly lackluster beginnings, generations subsequent to 1215 gave them new meaning.

Like many political scientists, I willingly align myself with the intellectual side of the public intellectual title, but I make no claim to having a public identity. Still, I am moved to join in the shared confessions of public intellectuals (PI) by responding to Amitai Etzioni's article, because the ten-point distillation of his trials and tribulations so strongly resonates with my own experiences. However marginal they may be, frequent media commentaries and interviews have given me enough exposure to the treacherous pathways between scholarship and the media to sufficiently understand the PI's dilemma.

Matthew Moore's survey and analysis reflect an enormous amount of work, for which all of us who study or teach political theory should be grateful. They offer us a fascinating snapshot of who is teaching political theory today, of how they understand and think about what they are doing, and of how they think others think about theory. Much that is included in his analysis (and especially in the longer paper from which the report here is selected) is well worth further study and debate, as it opens a door to the ways political science in general (and not theory alone) is being taught around the country: what political scientists think they are doing when they/we teach their material, what training they/we have, and even what modal teaching loads are.

If English and American constitutional thought rests on one shared foundation, it is the principle that executive power, in order to be legitimate, must be subject to law. In the thirteenth century, the English jurist Henry de Bracton declared that “the law makes the King”—rather than the King makes the law—and urged, “Let the King … bestow upon the law what the law bestows upon him, namely dominion and power, for there is no King where will rules and not law” (White 1908, 268). Bracton no doubt had in mind some of the recent provisions of the Magna Carta (1215), which provided a formal codification of this principle. The rebel barons who imposed the Magna Carta on King John were animated by a desire to limit arbitrary executive power, and, in Article 39, they secured a promise from the monarchy that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned, or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” (Turner 2003, 231). In the fourteenth century, Article 39 was redrafted by Parliament to apply not only to free men but also to any man “of whatever estate or condition he may be,” and this process of reinterpretation continued throughout the next several centuries as Parliament expanded “the Charter's special ‘liberties’ for the privileged classes to general guarantees of ‘liberty’ for all the king's subjects” (Turner 2003, 3).

A while ago we lost Peter Bachrach, one of the pre-eminent academic figures of the twentieth century. After he died on December 14, 2007, a group of his former students and colleagues gathered at the APSA annual meeting in Boston to celebrate his life and career. The audience included family members, “academic grandchildren,” and admirers of his work. The speakers' themes included power, poverty, activism, legal theory, and equality, and this symposium grew out of the panel. This range and variety of topics indicate the scope and depth of his impact. His 1962 APSR article, “Two Faces of Power,” co-authored with Morton Baratz, is the most frequently cited article in the history of the political science profession. Although I suspect this distinction would have amused Peter, terms like faces of power, nondecision, and deciding not to decide are familiar even to those who don't know Bachrach and Baratz's work on power (Bachrach and Baratz 1962, 1963). These writings taught scholars to listen for what is not said and look for what is not shown. That was a crucial lesson for feminist legal scholars like my classmate and fellow panelist, Elizabeth Schneider, and me.

Upon my first reading of the Etzioni autobiography, I recalled my favorite book review, written by a nine-year-old, who also should have won a prize for the youngest author and the shortest review ever: “This book told me more about penguins than I wanted to know.”

The legacy of the Magna Carta is apparent in the Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding detainees' rights. Asked to evaluate strong claims of executive power, the Court has had occasion to consider the origin and scope of habeas corpus, which many scholars see as a product of the Magna Carta. The majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush (2008) traced the history of the writ of habeas corpus back to the Magna Carta and relied on that lineage to rule that Guantanamo detainees were entitled to petition for habeas corpus, even though Congress had explicitly denied them that right in the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA) and the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act (DTA).

Despite the size and growth of political science and sociology relative to other disciplines, political science and sociology graduate students have received a declining share of funding for dissertation field research in recent years. Specifically, political science and sociology students are losing out to competitive applicants from humanities-oriented fields that provide strong training in area studies and language. These trends are explained by multiple factors. On the funding demand side, changes in graduate training within political science and sociology are undermining students' ability to conduct contextual work, thus leading to lower quality applications. On the funding supply side, the structure of selection committees may be privileging certain disciplines and approaches. We offer suggestions on how to begin reversing these worrisome trends in dissertation funding. Doing so is crucial to ensuring the continued participation of political scientists and sociologists in international comparative research.

First, I am grateful to PS for putting together this illuminating symposium. Second, given the strict space limitation set aside for my response, please see My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message for all that I would love to say here.

My subject is the way Peter Bachrach addressed the question of poverty. But given that I was his student and research assistant and that I am a political scientist largely because of him, it is impossible to resist a few words about the experience of being in his classrooms. Peter was an inspiring teacher of politics. The substantive content of his courses was legendary, and he possessed an extraordinary capacity to elicit participation from classes of pre-feminists at our well-bred women's college. I know this cost him. Peter had an extra shirt in his Bryn Mawr office so that he could change out of the one he had sweated through during the considerable exertions of getting us to talk, let alone think.