U.S. government leaders have long considered Latin America their proverbial backyard and have recurrently intervened in the region. In earlier periods of U.S. imperialism, U.S. government leaders justified such intervention with reference to allegedly scientific racial hierarchies, which placed White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) at the top of this artificial hierarchy. In more recent episodes of U.S. imperialism leading into the twenty-first century, however, U.S. leaders have publicly used the language of democracy and human rights to justify intervention. In the instance of contemporary Venezuela, while U.S leaders indeed use the language of human rights and democracy, they also draw on racist tropes of Latin Americans to justify their intervention. Through interviews with U.S. foreign policymakers and analysis of U.S. government documents, I find that U.S. leaders depict former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez as an irrational, uncivilized, and beastly leader, who manipulates ideas of racial inequality to maintain power. In addition, U.S. leaders understand him as manipulating an uncritical mass of Venezuelans who cannot think for themselves. U.S. leaders believe it thus their duty to intervene in order to promote democracy and show Venezuelans their true political-economic interests. I connect these dynamics with a history of U.S. intervention into the region and a history of racist and imperial thinking that continues to shape the logic of U.S. foreign policymaking into the present.

In this article, Mughal understandings of their own past are reconstructed from the standpoint of Mughal paramountcy in around 1700. That was the moment of the empire's greatest territorial reach, when it knew no peer nor threat. To reconstruct contemporary understandings of how this situation came about, histories of the Mughal empire composed by governing officials of the time are analysed using a novel approach rooted in a particular distinction between constants and contingencies. These understandings allow us to recapture the political sociology of empire as apprehended by the Mughal elites. The article's findings are of value for two reasons. Narrowly construed, they help fill a lacuna in mainstream views on Mughal historiography, traditionally dominated by Akbar and his reign, and imbued with the logic of decline (and of its corollary, the transition to colonialism). More broadly, because of the weight accorded to knowledge of the past in the formation of Mughal ruling elites, the findings provide fresh insights into the cognitive framework within which these elites operated at a moment recognized as highly significant then, and in retrospect.

Despite its predictive power, there is substantial debate about the attitudes measured by the racial resentment scale (RRS) and the relative weight of each. One group contends that the RRS is a valid measure of racial animus, foregrounding a basic psychological acrimony; some foreground social concerns about group status hierarchies; and yet others assert that the RRS is an invalid measure of racial enmity, instead primarily tapping non-racial principles and politics. We use a multimethod approach to address these debates, mapping the frames of reference respondents use in explaining their RRS answers. We find that the RRS fundamentally measures racial concerns and minimally taps non-racial politics. Although RRS responses reflect psychological acrimony, this orientation is substantially outweighed by social concerns about relative group position. Moreover, RRS responses substantially reflect beliefs about the relevance of race in the contemporary US and the sources of racial inequality, and values about individualism and fairness. We discuss how one of the most potent measures of present-day racial prejudice is rightly understood, and the implications for theory and research at the intersection of race and politics.

How does the European Court of Justice (ECJ) firmly maintain a now 45-year-old consistent integrationist jurisprudence when exerting virtually no control over the recruitment of its members (a selection left to national governments)? Rather than considering such judicial consistency over time as a ‘given’, the paper questions the social fabric of judicial preferences. On the basis of a variety of commemorative materials produced within the Court (Festschriften, tributes, eulogies, and jubilees) and never studied so far, the paper stresses the manner in which these rituals are home to social processes of aggregation (into one unique judicial family), demarcation (from the political realm), and self-identification (to roles of so-called ‘founding father’, ‘current spokesmen’, or ‘would-be judges’), thereby enabling transnational role transmission within international courts such as the ECJ.

There has been a well-documented ‘cultural turn’ in social theory. This takes two forms: the ‘epistemological’ case in which culture is seen as universally constitutive of social relations and identities; and the ‘historical’ case in which culture is seen as playing an unprecedented role in constituting social relations and identities in contemporary society. In this paper I take it that both cases overlap in studies of contemporary society and that the stronger case is justified. I argue that a model of cultural politics is necessary to fully develop the impetus of the ‘cultural turn’ away from structural determinism, and that relations between the state and society should no longer be taken as the central focus of political sociology. I propose that the understanding of politics developed by Foucault in his later work on power and domination can provide the basis of a ‘cultural turn’ in political sociology. Finally, I offer some suggestions about how those working in the field of political sociology are already beginning to develop the theme of cultural politics – albeit without naming it as such – and how this might be extended.