The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

Appeals to “community” and to “the common” have become increasingly frequent in political thought. In this chapter, I focus on some of the reasons for the appearance of such appeals in the landscape of contemporary political thought. This chapter also highlights some of the uncanny intellectual links across the entire political spectrum, from European post-Marxist and American communitarian philosophers to the public intellectuals of the neofascist “New Right.” These links emerge and play out in a broader intellectual field that is shaped both by the political economy of Western Europe and North America after 1945 and by the failure to address the obvious shortcomings and negative effects of this political economy. Against this broader background, current appeals to community in political thought can be seen as a response to the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to a legitimation crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. But I am also going to suggest that appeals to community invariably tend to drift into an antidemocratic direction.

This chapter investigates Pindar’s construction of the relationships by which communities are constituted: relationships between families, individuals, and the polis; between the inhabitants of the polis and their past; and between different polis communities.  It surveys civic values, as well as the passages where Pindar discusses specific constitutional forms.  Because Pindar’s lyric expresses political issues through the lens of poetic concerns, assimilating civic and military conflict to vicissitude, it maps some of the strategies by which Pindar subsumes the political into the poetic.  A final focus is the nature of Pindar’s Panhellenism and the connection of Panhellenism to elite mobility.  Pindar’s Panhellenism projects competitively local claims for eminence into a broad Greek arena and characterises the mythico-historical past of Greek cities as one of migration and elite movement. The interaction of local identity with the Panhellenic arena is thus driven by the mobility of heroic and then athletic elites.

The 1920s saw hope as well as gloom. Coexistent temporalities comingled. Key themes overarched: (a) novel metropolitan life; (b) shifting class differences; (c) changes in the state; (d) gendering of social relations, social practices, and political action; (e) Europe’s relation to empire; (f) cultural life and ideas; (g) democracy’s uneven fortunes. The welfarist complex crossed regime differences (democracy versus dictatorship), embracing population and national health; a normative family; social services delivery; goals of national efficiency. Eugenicist ideas claimed an appealing coherence, whose refusal presumed key enabling factors: intact democracy; strong labor movements; liberal systems of law; and pluralist public spheres. By 1939–1940, that left only Sweden and Britain. Widening of democracy brought the welfarist field distinct cohorts of educated young men and freshly enfranchised young women. The 1880s generation passed 1914–1918 as young adults; the “war youth generation” missed the war but craved an equivalent; interwar cohorts joined the post-1918 world as it started collapsing. Those lives turned on an enabling modernity. They knitted together the “modernist wish.”

After 1917–1923, Europe’s polities varied across democracy and dictatorship. The agrarian east and south passed under dictatorship: Iberia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Greece. Liberal constitutionalism lasted in France, Britain, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. In Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia democratic republics faced polarized political cultures. Italy was fascist; the USSR socialist. Corporatism – government-brokered convergence of organized interests – shaped constitutional states, above all in Scandinavia, with its strong labor movements. Corporatism in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was inflected by social democracy, but in societies riven by liberal-conservative enmities and religious, regional or ethno-cultural cleavage. Fascism beckoned as an extreme remedy for chronic parliamentary instability, where leftist defense impeded capitalist stabilization. Nazism and its state mapped onto this topography. Via the Belgian Plan de Man, the French Popular Front, and the Spanish Civil War, the polarizing fallout from rightwing radicalization cast western Europe into crisis.

This chapter considers the place of democracy in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By conceptualizing democracy, in pragmatist fashion, as a “way of life,” Emerson can be shown to have engaged democracy throughout his career in several different dimensions, both within and beyond official, state, or legal power relations. While Emerson participated in a discourse that was skeptical of the social dynamics of democracy in mass society, he simultaneously upheld his commitment to a philosophy of history that recognized in what he called “the democratic element” a driving force toward greater justice and equality. Democracy furthermore provided the key through which Emerson interpreted his own practice and poetics as a freelance lecturer. Emerson’s commitment to a transcendentally conceived notion of justice at times came into conflict with democracy’s requirements of negotiation and compromise, particularly in the context of radical abolitionism and the Civil War. As this chapter argues, Emerson tirelessly strove to resolve this conflict.

Of humble origins and mixed race, Bernardo Monteagudo (1789–1825) was born in Tucumán, in the River Plate (Argentina today). He graduated in law from the University of Chuquisaca and soon became involved in the wars of independence against Spain, first in Upper Peru and then in Buenos Aires, where he stood out for his radical republicanism, which he originally displayed as a polemicist in newspapers. Embroiled in the internal conflicts of the revolutionary movement in the River Plate, he was forced into exile in 1815. In 1817, he joined the army of José de San Martín, which drove the Spaniards out of Lima in 1821, when Peruvian independence was declared. Monteagudo became San Martín’s right hand and was practically in charge of governing Lima while San Martín continued the fight against the royalist forces elsewhere. Monteagudo’s authoritarian rule provoked wide resentment and, following two days of riots, he was expelled from the city in 1822. Written a year later as a defence of his actions in government, his Memoir offered a systematic examination of the conditions that, in his view, made democracy unworkable in Peru.

The challenge of finding appropriate tools for measurement validation is an abiding concern in political science. This chapter considers four traditions of validation, using examples from cross-national research on democracy: the levels-of-measurement approach, structural-equation modeling with latent variables, the pragmatic tradition, and the case-based method. Methodologists have sharply disputed the merits of alternative traditions. The chapter encourages scholars – and certainly analysts of democracy – to pay more attention to these disputes and to consider strengths and weaknesses in the validation tools they adopt. An appendix summarizes the evaluation of six democracy data sets from the perspective of alternative approaches to validation.

This chapter concludes the volume by reflecting on the ongoing value of concept analysis in the social sciences. It revisits the tension between hyperfactualism – obsessive attention to granular detail – and the necessary abstraction that enables generalization. Conceptualization, the authors argue, helps scholars not only communicate more clearly but also observe and describe phenomena more effectively. Far from being a distraction, conceptual work sharpens empirical inquiry. The chapter highlights the interplay between conceptualization and measurement, especially in validity assessment, and underscores how concepts represent and structure knowledge. Attention to concepts also facilitates integration and translation across time, space, and disciplines, as seen in such examples as the V-Dem project. Issues of conceptual boundedness, typologies, and traveling are revisited, drawing on contributions from cognitive linguistics and classic debates between lumpers and splitters. The authors also reflect on how digital tools and formal modeling offer new avenues for concept innovation. Finally, they affirm the importance of teaching concept analysis as a way to clarify students’ thinking, research design, and disciplinary communication. In sum, the chapter defends the overconscious scholar: one who sees in concepts not distraction, but a path toward cumulative, communicable, and intellectually satisfying scholarship.

This chapter focuses on teaching the formation and analysis of concepts in research, emphasizing the importance of clarity in defining and measuring concepts. It presents a structured approach to conceptual thinking, outlining four steps: formulation, contextualization, operationalization, and measurement. Bussell highlights the role of examples and typologies to deepen understanding and discusses challenges in concept analysis, using “democracy” and “corruption” as primary examples. The chapter underscores the iterative process of concept development and its role in fostering rigorous academic research.

Conceptual confusion remains a persistent challenge in political analysis. W. B. Gallie’s 1956 theory of “essentially contested concepts” remains a foundational attempt to address this issue by highlighting the normative dimensions of key political terms. This chapter revisits Gallie’s framework, applying it to the concepts of democracy and the rule of law. We explore both the strengths and the controversies surrounding his seven proposed criteria for contestedness. Critics have argued that several of Gallie’s criteria are overly narrow or ambiguous. In response, we contend that Gallie actually offers both restrictive and broader interpretations of these criteria, and we propose ways to reconcile his intentions with the critiques. Further criticisms claim Gallie encourages conceptual relativism or is too optimistic about resolving disagreement. We acknowledge these concerns but argue that his framework – especially when refined – offers a promising basis for fostering reasoned debate over contested terms. While political concepts often reflect deep normative divisions, this analysis shows how Gallie’s approach, enhanced by our proposed clarifications, can help structure more productive scholarly dialogue. The chapter concludes with a schematic summary of these refinements, presented in Table 10.1, to guide future work on conceptual disagreement and contested meaning in political science.

Disaggregation has been an underappreciated tool for the formation and utilization of concepts. This chapter argues that disaggregating multidimensional concepts can be useful in four ways. It can (1) resolve dilemmas of “awkward fit,” where some empirical cases seem to fit in the categories established by a concept at best awkwardly, at worst inappropriately; (2) address the challenge of “middle cases”; (3) strengthen measurement validity; and (4) avoid a problem of tautology. The use of disaggregation will be examined with respect to important and complex concepts such as corporatism and democracy.

It is well past time to take scholarly disputes about words seriously, for where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Conceptual disagreement is a manifestation of disagreements about ideas. Yet no attempt has been made to measure the degree of conceptual disagreement that exists or to track those concepts identified as essentially contested. Accordingly, it is unclear how one might distinguish contested from uncontested concepts or test propositions about the causes of contestation. This chapter begins by introducing an approach to measuring conceptual contestation within social science. Next, the chapter explore factors that may help to explain variation in conceptual contestation. The characteristics of concepts – their value, abstraction, and normativity – explain most of the variability in conceptual contestation.

When scholars extend their models and hypotheses to encompass additional cases, they may need to adapt their concepts to fit new contexts. Giovanni Sartori’s work on conceptual traveling and conceptual stretching provides helpful guidance in addressing this fundamental task. Sartori’s framework draws on what may be called a classical understanding of conceptual hierarchies. Each successive concept as one moves down the hierarchy is a “kind of” in relation to the one above it – such that it may be called a kind hierarchy. Concepts have clear boundaries and defining properties shared by all cases deemed to fit the concept. This chapter examines the challenge to this framework presented by two nonclassical approaches: Wittgenstein’s family resemblances and Lakoff’s radial structures. According to these alternative perspectives, concepts may not be sharply bounded, and some attributes may not be shared by all cases viewed as corresponding to the concept. Because they only partly correspond to the concept, this may be called a part–whole hierarchy. With such patterns, strict application of a classical framework can lead to abandoning concepts prematurely or modifying them inappropriately. This chapter discusses solutions to these problems, suggesting that these two forms of hierarchy can productively be used together.