Left-wing politics is resurgent. Self-proclaimed socialists are unexpectedly popular. Proposals like universal health care are a commonplace of Democratic campaigns. But there is not yet a clear, unifying idea behind this political shift. We propose that that idea is freedom. While the left once understood freedom as emancipation from the economy, the right spent the twentieth century neutralizing and appropriating the idea of freedom by reinventing the economy as the true site of freedom. To reclaim freedom as a value of the left, we have to begin with the daily experience of most people: the unfreedom of the workplace. The authoritarian organization of work is not just an offense against freedom; it also helps us understand how freedom requires emancipation both from the economy and within the economy, and why that emancipation requires mass struggle.

Donald Trump is one of many leaders who have come to power in recent years championing right-wing nationalisms often called populist. He has done so by advancing an “America First” vision of U.S. history, identity, and purpose that many find compelling. Liberals and progressives in America and elsewhere have failed to counter with politically resonant narratives of national identity that champion greater and more egalitarian inclusiveness. This article offers three criteria for devising such narratives: resonance, respectfulness, and reticulation. It also contends that America’s democratic traditions, its constitutional traditions aimed at achieving a more perfect union without effacing legitimate diversity, and its quest to realize the goals of the Declaration of Independence over time all provide rich resources for stories of American peoplehood that can meet these criteria and, perhaps, defeat narrower nationalist visions.

The human condition is an ineluctably temporal condition, and yet political theory has rarely and indirectly grappled with concepts, practices, and problems regarding time. Two notable recent exceptions are books by Julie L. Rose and Nichole Marie Shippen, both of which argue that free or discretionary time ought to be included in political considerations of justice. While their respective projects are valuable in themselves, their limitations also provide valuable illustrations of several fundamental problems that any political treatment of time must eventually consider. Drawing upon work on time from elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities, this essay critically examines three aspects of Rose’s and Shippen’s projects: 1) their unquestioning embrace of clock-time; 2) their neglect of phenomena of social acceleration; and 3) their attempts to secure greater individual autonomy through temporal practices that are essentially disciplinary in nature. While the “fight for (free) time” is indeed worth waging, doing so successfully requires a deliberate pluralism that acknowledges concepts and practices of time beyond the hegemony of the clock and calendar.

This article argues that ethnographic methods, or an ethnographic sensibility more broadly speaking, can go some way to addressing a thorny issue of realism in political theory. Realists are committed to taking context seriously and to offering critique, but how can they do both? Based on a reconstruction of the main lines of inquiry and arguments of Bernardo Zacka’s When the State Meets the Street, the article shows that an ethnographic sensibility is well suited to address the realist predicament because it combines two levels of interpretation. On one level, it seeks to reconstruct people’s understanding of what they are doing and who they are. On a second level, ethnography seeks to interpret the larger ideational and material power relations that affect people’s values and practices. The essay spells out how taking an ethnographic sensibility can enhance (realist) political theorists’ understanding of the nature and limits of politics in a particular context, while at the same time providing a starting point for potentially transformative criticism from within this context.

This article discusses a variety of major explanations for the intensity of recent protests in Arab states and investigates whether there is empirical support for them. We survey various political,...

Previous articleNext article FreeEditors’ NoteRigidity and AdaptationLeonard Feldman and Roger KarapinLeonard FeldmanAssociate Editor for Political Theory Search for more articles by this author and Roger KarapinEditor-in-Chief Search for more articles by this author Associate Editor for Political TheoryEditor-in-ChiefPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRigidity and adaptation, stiffness and flexibility: these are ways we characterize structures in our built environment as well as psychological dispositions. Political institutions and agents also vary along a continuum between the rigid and the adaptable—some may be stiff to the point of brittleness, while others are flexible to the point of fluidity. Somewhere between these poles may lie the right balance of structure and pliability. Machiavelli’s prince must have the flexibility to be both a lion and a fox, strong and sly. Modern political institutions that look like rigid hierarchies may contain elements of slack, such as the often extensive discretion possessed by front-line workers in bureaucracies. Other institutions adapt because they are porous, open to reshaping by external ideologies and insurgent actors.When states fail to adapt to new grievances and movements, events such as the Arab Spring may occur, as analyzed by Tansa George Massoud, John Doces, and Christopher Magee in this issue’s first article, “The Arab Spring: An Empirical Investigation.”1 Their analysis of protests in nineteen Arab League states in the 1990–2011 period concludes that protests were more intense in partial democracies with factional politics, corruption, repression, inflation, and a high use of the Internet and cell phones, and not due to a demographic youth bulge. In “State Building through Mediation: The U.S. Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group in World War II,” Gerald Berk focuses on what would appear to be a very rigidly hierarchal institution—the U.S. military in wartime—and reveals the surprising degree of creative adaptation on the ground (or rather, at sea), as soldiers and scientists experimented with ways to confront German U-Boat attacks.2 Next, Inder S. Marwah examines the flexible career of developmentalism. In “Provincializing Progress: Developmentalism and Anti-Imperialism in Colonial India,” he shows that what began as a nineteenth-century European political discourse deeply imbricated in Western imperialism was adapted by political actors and thinkers in India’s independence movement to critique British rule and facilitate political resistance to it.3Robert Sparling, in “Blocked Exchanges and the Constitution: Montesquieu on the Moral and Constitutional Limits of Markets,” argues that the solution to the problem of extending or limiting the logic of market relations should be adapted to the political regime in which exchanges occur.4 Then, Adam Hilton, in “The Politics Insurgents Make: Reconstructive Reformers in U.S. and U.K. Postwar Party Development,” traces the immediate influences and long-term legacies of reform movements within the Democratic and Labor Parties.5 Finally, in “A Case of Communicative Learning?: Rereading Habermas’s Philosophical Project through an Arendtian Lens,” Peter J. Verovšek looks at the adaptability of conceptual thought through its openness to external influence, by focusing on the various acknowledged and unacknowledged contributions of Hannah Arendt’s ideas to the development of Habermas's political theory.6 Notes 1. Tansa George Massoud, John A. Doces, and Christopher Magee, “Protests and the Arab Spring: An Empirical Investigation,” Polity 51 (2019): xxx–xx.2. Gerald Berk, “State Building through Mediation: The U.S. Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group in World War II,” Polity 51 (2019): xxx–xx.3. Inder S. Marwah, “Provincializing Progress: Developmentalism and Anti-Imperialism in Colonial India,” Polity 51 (2019): xxx–xx.4. Robert Sparling, “Blocked Exchanges and the Constitution: Montesquieu on the Moral and Constitutional Limits of Markets,” Polity 51 (2019): xxx–xx.5. Adam Hilton, “The Politics Insurgents Make: Reconstructive Reformers in U.S. and U.K. Postwar Party Development,” Polity 51 (2019): xxx–xx.6. Peter J. Verovšek, “A Case of Communicative Learning?: Rereading Habermas’s Philosophical Project through an Arendtian Lens,” Polity 51 (2019): xxx–xx. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Volume 51, Number 3July 2019Rigidity and Adaptation The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704179HistoryPublished online May 13, 2019 © 2019 Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This contribution to the symposium examines tensions holding back the development of securitization theory and proposed potential avenues to transcend and resolve them. Specifically, it argues that...

This essay concludes the symposium by considering Howard J. Wiarda’s topical scholarship on grand theory, corporatism, democratization, and development, in addition to his regional scholarship, which focused on Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian politics but also touched on every other major region of the world, including U.S. politics and foreign policy making. We seek to makes sense of the tensions in Wiarda’s work, especially between his critiques of theoretical determinism and ethnocentrism on the one hand and his continual emphasis on cultural and corporatist explanations of comparative politics, on the other. We argue that he made significant contributions to the field through his service as a public intellectual, mobilization of multiple theoretical perspectives, use of inductive methods, provocative interpretations of comparative politics throughout the world, and accessibility to students and policy makers.

This article discusses how Howard J. Wiarda’s writings on ethnocentrism in scholarship and policy making have deepened our understanding of politics in less developed countries by imploring scholars to recognize the importance of cultural context as well as their own built-in, Western-centric biases. It applies Wiarda’s critiques of ethnocentrism in theory and practice by addressing the inherent problems with development paradigms that are derived from Western experiences and anchored in the tenets of neoliberalism. It then explores these issues by examining China’s market socialism paradigm and the dynamics of civil society in sub-Saharan Africa to illustrate the point that development trajectories in the Global South do not always conform to Western experiences or expectations.