Thirty years ago, innocent but enthusiastic as a brand-new reporter on a magazine that covered Congress, I wrote a story about the way committee assignments were made in the House of Representatives. The publisher liked it. “That was real political science!” he said, sounding happy but a little bemused, as if he hadn't realized we were capable of such a feat. I drew a lesson from this experience that stayed with me for years: political science is a lofty calling to which journalists can occasionally aspire if they get lucky.In 2000 he won the American Political Science Association's Carey McWilliams Award for contributions to political science by a journalist.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once argued, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” Today, politics, as conventionally understood, illustrates the unspoken danger in Moynihan's point. Politics itself reflects larger trends that point not toward success but toward social failure. Superficial sloganeering, domination by marketplace modes of thought, and bitter sectarian divisions—cultural patterns also evident in politics—made “being political” an accusation of choice in the 2002 elections. These patterns are creating a civic illness that seems both all-pervasive and ineluctable.

I recognize, as will my readers, that I'm in a fairly strange—but hopefully not untenable—position in attempting to assess the studyand teaching of politics. Having been a member of Congress, and in various positions of congressional leadership, for 16 years, and having been more recently a teacher for 10 years, I am, for this purpose, both the student and the studied, the bug and the entomologist. I do understand that it is difficult for me to view this relationship between scholar and subject in a completely objective manner; I hope to do justice to both sides of this exchange, but I recognize that I am much more likely to bring to this discussion a bug's-eye view, gazing up at the scientist as he squints through his microscope and shaking my head in wonderment as he purports to find great complexity in my most simple movements, and great simplicity in my most complex undertakings. Nonetheless, as one who occupies a position on the inner periphery of the academic circle, I am pleased to have been asked by the editors of this journal to share a few thoughts on the relationship—and on the present and potential value of the relationship—between the two distinct worlds of political science and political practice.

How can the American educational system be improved for all? What can and should be done about substandard inner-city schooling that leaves large numbers of poor and overwhelmingly minority children incapable of effective civic participation and ineligible for good jobs? These perennial issues of politics and public policy implicate fundamental principles of justice. Educational choices involve, among other things, choices about a future in which children's life chances will take shape either under the sway of inherited privilege or on the basis of equal citizenship and opportunity. In the midst of America's vast and growing inequalities of income and wealth, which continue to be associated with race, how can we clothe ourselves in comforting myths of equal opportunity if we fail to provide good schools for everyone?

On December 20, 1999, the news appeared on our computer screens at the Rutland Herald that the Vermont Supreme Court had ruled in favor of six gay and lesbian plaintiffs who had sued for the right to marry. The case was Baker v. State of Vermont, and the court's decision had immediately apparent, far-reaching political ramifications.In 2001 he won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials he wrote for the Herald on the passage of legislation establishing civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. He is also the author of 11 plays.

In my twilight years, I often think about why law is more isolationistthan other disciplines, particularly other social sciences. Why, when, as Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo noted almost a century ago, “the great tides and currents which engulf the rest of man, do not turn aside in their course, and pass the judges by,”Cardozo 1921, 168. doesn't the law draw more avidly on the experience, knowledge, analysis, and pure thought that pour out from universities, think tanks, and what Judge Richard Posner, somewhat depreciatingly, calls “public intellectuals”?

After Welfare: The Culture of Postindustrial Social Policy. By Sanford Schram. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 234 pages. $55.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.Ending Welfare as We Know It. By R. Kent Weaver. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. 482 pages. $44.95cloth, $19.95 paper.Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America's Urban Poor, 1825–2000. By Joel Schwartz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 353 pages. $39.95 cloth.From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order. By Marc Allen Eisner. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. 371 pages. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business and the Politics of Health Care in the United States. By Marie Gottschalk. Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, Cornell University Press, 2000. 288 pages. $48.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.Unwanted Claims: The Politics of Participation in the U.S. Welfare System. By Joe Soss. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 247 pages. $44.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality. By Benjamin I. Page and James Simmons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 409 pages. $29.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.His most recent book is Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. Morone's Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government won the American Political Science Association's Gladys M. Kammerer Award and was named a New York Times notable book of 1991. Morone is president of the New England Political Science Association, chairman of the editorial board of PS: Politics and Political Science, and past president of the Politics and History section of APSA. The author wishes to thank Elizabeth Bussiere, Deborah Stone, Corey Brettschneider, Kelli Auerbach, Lisa Burrell, Susan Bickford, Greg McAvoy, and Jennifer Hochschild.

Why is it so hard for relevant social science findings to ake their way into courtrooms, either at the trial level or on appeal? From the perspective of the social scientist, Patricia Wald is the ideal judge—someone who takes empirical research seriously and wants to use it when she can. But the fact that even a sympathetic judge like Judge Wald finds this to be difficult should tell us something. Legal professionals and social scientists have different cultures of facts.

Democratic theory is an exciting field today, both in its rich, textured, abundant research and in the varied courses taught at American colleges and universities. We use its subject matter as a benchmark to judge the politics of the United States as well as that of other countries. The scope of research in this subfield has expanded debates about the meanings, purposes, and reach of democracy, and it raises questions for instructors about what to teach. This essay examines material taught in undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on democratic theory. How these courses are put together reflects what instructors hope to achieve and—on a larger scale—the state of debate among scholars in the subfield.

Judge Patricia Wald identifies several impediments to judges' making greater use of social science: they lack time to find, read, and make sense of the research; the research is inaccessible to nonspecialists and fails to identify clearly the policy implications; too much exists, and only occasionally does one work stand out; and most research findings are qualified and ambiguous rather than certain. Just as the flukish order in which cases appear and the idiosyncrasies of their fact patterns shape precedent, the timing of research determines whether judges notice it. Judges are more likely to incorporate social science research into their opinions if it fulfills a pressing need and addresses an important shift in thinking. Judge Wald does not debate whether judges do or should make public policy, since she sees making policy choices as inescapable in appellate decision making.

In this essay, I assess how comparative politics is taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels and what our approach to teaching says about thestate of the subfield. What do practitioners emphasize in a comparative politics course in light of the enormous global changes of the past decade? Which topics are included and which ignored? What should be included that is now missing, even at the cost of excluding something else?

As its title implies, this book is less about race, or democracy, than about what Lawrie Balfour sees as a lack of real discussion about race in America since the civil rights era. Balfour sees in James Baldwin's criticism a “moral psychology of the color line” that explains the persistence of racial injustice and that should shatter our optimistic belief that such injustice “needs only to be exposed to right thinking in order to be overcome” (pp. 17, 135–36). The project could be called a genealogy of the American dilemma.