What does the furor over the “politicization” of Coretta Scott King's funeral reveal about contemporary black mourning practices? What does it reveal about black political thought, rhetoric, and practice? Identifying two key modes of mourning and their concomitant conceptions of democracy, this article situates the funeral within a tradition of self-consciously political responses to loss that played a significant role in abolitionism and the struggle for civil rights. Tracing the tradition's origins, and employing the speeches of Frederick Douglass as an exemplar, it considers the approach's democratic value and the consequences of its failure. Arguing that the response to the King funeral indicates that the tradition is in decline, the article locates causes of this decline in significant changes among the black population and in the complex consequences of the tradition's previous successes. It concludes by considering the decline's potentially negative impact, both for African Americans and for the broader political community.

Understanding of the phenomenon of political protest has been inhibited by the view that protest is fundamentally extraordinary or unconventional in character and that those who use it do so because they lack the resources to employ more conventional means of political expression. This article challenges this unqualified view by examining survey data based on black and white samples from the city of Milwaukee which relate to racial attitudes toward protest, the social characteristics of protest participants, and to the uses and organization of protest in the two racial communities. The analysis reveals widespread support for protest in the black community in contrast to the general antipathy found among whites. Both black and white protesters are found to be socioeconomically better-off than nonprotesters in their respective racial communities, but a variety of indicators suggest that black protesters are more integrated and typical members of their community than white protesters are of theirs. Data on the uses and organization of protest show that it has become an institutionalized feature of the black pursuit of urban politics in Milwaukee in contrast to its generally ad hoc and less frequent role for whites.

We may conclude from all this that protest represents a widely accepted, integral part of black politics in the city, while for whites protest is indeed unconventional, a violation of dominant social norms. This conclusion is used as a basis for speculating on the relationship of protest participation to the possession of social resources and on the capacity of social resources to offset the costs incurred in the form of social disapproval for violating white norms against protest behavior.

Migrants are politically marginalized in cities of the developing world, participating in destination-area elections less than do local-born residents. We theorize three reasons for this shortfall: migrants’ socioeconomic links to origin regions, bureaucratic obstacles to enrollment that disproportionately burden newcomers, and ostracism by antimigrant politicians. We randomized a door-to-door drive to facilitate voter registration among internal migrants to two Indian cities. Ties to origin regions do not predict willingness to become registered locally. Meanwhile, assistance in navigating the electoral bureaucracy increased migrant registration rates by 24 percentage points and substantially boosted next-election turnout. An additional treatment arm informed politicians about the drive in a subset of localities; rather than ignoring new migrant voters, elites amplified campaign efforts in response. We conclude that onerous registration requirements impede the political incorporation, and thus the well-being, of migrant communities in fast-urbanizing settings. The findings also matter for assimilating naturalized yet politically excluded cross-border immigrants.

This paper appraises the relationship between judicial biography and judicial behavior research in two ways: (1) conceptually, by comparing them as modes of inquiry; and (2) empirically, by making an inventory of the behavioral content of 15. leading judicial biographies. The central theme is that judicial biographies and judicial behavior research are complementary. Conceptually, they have important common premises and problems as well as major differences. Empirically, judicial biographies also offer considerable insight into judicial behavior. Using generous standards, the inventory of 15 biographies derived 2,232 behavioral-like propositions in eight categories of behavioral research. More importantly, the biographies suggest a substantial number of hypotheses worthy of empirical investigation and validation. When viewed as case studies in judicial politics, judicial biographies thus become related to behavioral inquiry. And their strengths and weaknesses fall into place as reflecting properties generally associated with case study as a mode of political analysis.

The paper argues that ethical discourse is intimately involved in the research literature of social science, and especially of political science, but is relegated to a subsidiary position. It therefore shares some of the vagueness, flexibility, and potential self-contradiction of the discourse of everyday life, rather than being sharpened by rational criticism. The norms governing scientific discourse provide not only for empirical testing, but also for rational criticism in the formulation of theories; an analogous type of criticism is shared by legal discourse. Some of the norms of scientific communication may be transferred to ethics by the specification of rules for ethical argument, requiring that arguments derive from previously specified, clear and consistent “ethical hypotheses.” Within such rules, ethical systems formulated by social scientists and philosophers may be compared critically. Systems amenable to such comparison include those of welfare economics, cost-benefit analysis, and formal democratic theory. The discourse embodying this argument and criticism is particularly appropriate within the normative tradition of political science. Its possible benefits include clarity about our valuations; communication among disciplines that enlarges the perspectives of each discipline; and a more independent, self-conscious examination within the university of the criteria for policy formation.

The standard interpretation of Locke assumes symmetry between punishment by individuals in the state of nature and punishment by states in the state of nature. The standard interpretation is incorrect because in cases where the punishment is altruistic, the state is not the functional equivalent of a person, having a more restricted power to punish. The asymmetry arises from Locke's contractualism because individuals in the state of nature might reasonably refuse to give governments the power to punish altruistically. This interpretation clarifies some ongoing puzzles about Locke's theory of property where questions about coerced sacrifices to benefit others also arise. Locke's argument is vulnerable to important objections, specifically that he equivocates on the meaning of the word “body,” that he places too much emphasis on the right of self-preservation, and that he legitimates nearly unlimited appropriation by states.

Political theory has developed at important junctures by questioning its ontological foundations. Modern political thought begins by questioning the naturalness of human sociability. Instead of the civic friendship propounded by the ancients, modern liberals see friendship as belonging to a private sphere, whereas the state is an alliance among competitors. Postmodern theorists have extended the logic of competition to encompass private friendships, doing so, in part, by critiquing liberal foundations. Plato's account of friendship reveals surprising affinities with two such postmodern critiques. The Lysis explores what friendship would be like without ontological claims or with only negative foundations such as the power and enmity found in accounts of friendship as diverse as those of Foucault and Derrida. The Platonic/postmodern comparison offers a way of ensuring that foundational inquiry illuminates political theory and argues for a greater role for fundamental ontology than mainstream liberal theorists have yet conceded.

The communitarian critique of liberal individualism is presently experiencing something of a decline. One of the reasons for the failure of communitarians to make a lasting impact on liberal theory may be the historical precedents to which communitarians have turned, such as Aristotle and civic republicanism. I argue that communitarian theory may more fruitfully draw upon a model of the relation between individual and community derived from the Latin Middle Ages. This approach—communal functionalism—claims that the community is essentially composed neither of individuals nor of citizens but, rather, of functional groups or parts arranged according to their contribution to the community. I consider two variants of this framework, John of Salisbury's “physiological” version and Marsiglio of Padua's “civic” account. I close with an evaluation of the relevance—and also some of the limitations—of the communal functionalist model in relation to the requirements of contemporary communitarian theory.

By nature men are free, but left to their own devices they will inevitably enslave each other. Of all the “bipolarities” in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau none is more striking than this tension between natural freedom and the spontaneous march to inequality and oppression in which all men participate. None aroused more conflicting reactions in his own mind. If men are the sole authors of their ills, and not the mere victims of some external force, be it original sin, a malevolent nature or a hostile environment, then there is always hope for self-improvement. On the other hand, if men were alone responsible for inventing and maintaining their own social misery, they could scarcely be expected to overcome conditions they had themselves chosen to create. One could hardly hope that those who had devised and imposed their own chains, would either wish, or know how to liberate themselves. Jf there was no need for cosmic fatalism, there was every reason to despair of mankind's own social powers.

Addressing historic injustice involves a struggle against absence. This article reflects on the foundations of that challenge, on absence and justice. I ask what it means to address the absent victims of deadly injustice given the distance of time and death that separates us from them. This topic embraces a wide swath of events of interest to students of politics. Some are as recent as the Rwandan genocide; others are by now historical: the Holocaust or slavery in antebellum America. All have in common that they and their victims are distant from us, a separation that makes doing them justice deeply perplexing. In response, I sketch an argument that the absent victims of injustice are not nullities but retain a status, a presence as claimants on justice that defines our efforts to address the wrongs done them.

This article proposes a conception of freedom understood as practices. Based on Michel Foucault's work on the ethics of the self, I develop a conception of freedom that exceeds liberation and distinguishes between genuine practices of freedom and practices of the self that are unreflective responses to systems of government. I develop and illustrate this conception through an engagement with the recent French ban on full veils in public spaces and the ethnographic literature on European Muslim revival movements. I reconstruct how Muslim women relate to alternative discourses through specific practices of the self. These practices reveal that French Muslim women actively contest discourses of secularism and liberation that construct them as inherently passive and in need of tutelage. The conception I develop sheds light on some shortcomings of Philip Pettit's notion of freedom as nondomination. I argue that the proposed account is useful to, first, criticize the centrality of the opposition between arbitrary and nonarbitrary power in the definition of freedom. Second, I show that the predominant engagement with the external dimension of freedom in Pettit makes it difficult to capture the particular subjective practices that make up freedom and its development in the presence of power and/or attempts at domination.

Violence is a common phenomenon in developing polities which has received little attention. Clearly a Peronist riot in Buenos Aires, a land invasion in Lima, and a massacre in rural Colombia are all different. Yet we have no typology which relates types of violence to stages or patterns of economic or social development. We know little of the causes, incidence or functions of different forms of violence. This article is an effort to understand one type of violence which can occur in societies in transition.

Violence in Colombia has traditionally accompanied transfers of power at the national level. This can account for its outbreak in 1946, when the Conservative Party replaced the Liberals. It cannot account for the intensity or duration of rural violence for two decades. This article focuses primarily on the violence from 1946 to 1953, and explains its intensification and duration as the defense of a traditional sacred order against secular modernizing tendencies undermining that order. We shall discuss violence since 1953 in the concluding section.

In this brief note it is demonstrated that if all the conditions for the existence of a competitive equilibrium are satisfied, then simple majority voting to determine the distribution of goods may be less efficient than a price system.

The argument here may be somewhat cryptic for those not familiar with the work of Anthony Downs. A considerably more discursive presentation of the background material is given in “A Two Party System, General Equilibrium and the Voters' Paradox.” The tax and public goods aspect of the voting problem have been discussed elsewhere in “Notes on the Taxonomy of Problems Concerning Public Goods.” The result presented here, nevertheless, stands by itself, hence is presented in this brief form.

The political system is modeled at its simplest. We assume the existence of two players called “political parties.” The goal of each player is to win an election by as large a vote as possible. A strategy for each player is to name a policy that it will carry out if it is elected. A policy is any point in the set of feasible distributions of final product. It follows immediately that, although any policy may be considered as a strategy, any non-Pareto optimal policies are dominated by some policy that is optimal. A discussion of the reasons for modeling a party in this simple manner is given in detail elsewhere. It is assumed that all voters are passive or “mechanistic,” i.e., they do not form groups but merely vote individually, selecting optimally between the two policies offered.

Many students of citizen participation claim that one solution to the problem of political inequality in liberal democracies lies in the establishment of direct participatory channels in decentralized socioeconomic and political institutions similar to those found in Yugoslavia. Others argue that the availability of participatory channels in the workplace leads to the domination of these channels by a technocratic elite. Still other students of participation in Yugoslavia claim that participatory channels are dominated by the political elite, the League of Communists.

In this paper, we examine this set of conflicting hypotheses by using data which come from an extensive survey of participatory activities in four Yugoslav republics. Our findings are consistent with the interpretation that workers' councils open channels for a more technocratically oriented participation. When it comes to other kinds of activity, affiliation with the League is more important than socioeconomic or professional status in determining who participates. But because League members come disproportionately from upper-status groups, there is not a marked difference in the extent to which membership in workers' councils and participation in other kinds of activity are biased in favor of the advantaged segments of Yugoslav society. In each case, but for different reasons, it is the upper-status citizen who is likely to be active.

A capitalist market system of social exchange is justified primarily because it protects individual freedom. This system, its advocates claim, achieves the complex task of production and distribution through a process of voluntary exchanges; coordination is effectively achieved without coercion. I argue that this claim is largely unwarranted. The negative concept of freedom that underlies voluntary choice (the absence of interference by others) is unable to differentiate between instances of freedom and unfreedom. As a result, it is not possible to determine whether exchanges are voluntary or coerced. A more adequate conception of free choice (as the relevant capacities and conditions for deliberate decisions and actions) suggests that a capitalist market broadly and systematically denies the possibility of voluntary agreements. This general failure to protect individuals' freedom is examined in relation to the acquisition of property, the transfer of property, and the process of production.

Each German federal election since 1949 has resulted in a reduction in the number of parties securing representation in the Bundestag. While this trend continued in 1961, there is evidence that the party system is becoming stabilized, making it unlikely that any of the present parties will disappear in the near future. This article examines the 1961 election and its significance for the German party system.

The major outlines of the present German party system became apparent as early as 1946, when party activities were resumed on a zonal basis. The principal parties then in the field were the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Union, and the Free Democratic Party. The last two of these were known differently in different sections of West Germany, but today, with very few exceptions, the designation for each group is the same throughout the Federal Republic.

Fearful of a committee appointed by the House of Commons to investigate the current tendencies towards atheism and profaneness, Hobbes in 1666 burned some of his private papers. The Great Plague and the Great Fire of London had just occurred. While many Englishmen were prone to blame the fire on those whom they considered the “treacherous Catholics,” they tended to regard the plague as obviously an act of God. The House of Commons shared this widespread attitude and, desirous of ridding the country of the causes of the divine displeasure, named several persons whose wickedness might be the occasion of the display of God's wrath against the English people. The House included Hobbes in the list and specifically mentioned his Leviathan. Moreover, some bishops of the Church of England, at about the same time, suggested that it might be well to burn Hobbes as a heretic. Nothing came of the parliamentary investigation; indeed, the investigation seems not to have been begun. And no fires were lighted except that in which Hobbes saw fit, as has been said, to burn some of his private papers.

It is interesting to conjecture, however, what the name of Hobbes would mean in the history of ideas if his works had happened all to perish in 1666 and we, then, had to judge him through the literature which his works provoked. The word provoked may here be used advisedly. For an amazing number of hostile writings against Hobbes were printed during his life-time and immediately after his death.

What are the origins of the ethnic landscapes in contemporary states? Drawing on a preregistered research design, we test the influence of dual socioeconomic revolutions that spread throughout Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—export agriculture and print technologies. We argue these changes transformed ethnicity via their effects on politicization and boundary-making. Print technologies strengthened imagined communities, leading to more salient—yet porous—ethnic identities. Cash crop endowments increased groups’ mobilizational potential but with more exclusionary boundaries to control agricultural rents. Using historical data on cash crops and African language publications, we find that groups exposed to these historical forces are more likely to be politically relevant in the postindependence period, and their members report more salient ethnic identities. We observe heterogenous effects on boundary-making as measured by interethnic marriage; relative to cash crops, printing fostered greater openness to assimilate linguistically related outsiders. Our findings illuminate not only the historical sources of ethnic politicization but also mechanisms shaping boundary formation.

This essay reconstructs an important but forgotten dream of twentieth-century political thought: universal suffrage as decolonization. The dream emerged from efforts by Black Atlantic radicals to conscript universal suffrage into wider movements for racial self-expression and cultural revolution. Its proponents believed a mass franchise could enunciate the voice of colonial peoples inside imperial institutions and transform the global order. Recuperating this insurrectionary conception of the ballot reveals how radicals plotted universal suffrage and decolonization as a single historical process. It also places decolonization’s fate in a surprising light: it may have been the century’s greatest act of disenfranchisement. As dependent territories became nation-states, they lost their voice in metropolitan assemblies whose affairs affected them long after independence.