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In this article, Nicholas Xenos, former editor of Polity, shares his experiences as editor and his efforts to broaden the journal's content and readership. He explores the concept of critical theory, tracing its origins to the Frankfurt School and its focus on analyzing the present and uncovering repressed possibilities. Xenos argues that critical theory is crucial for political science and political theory, as it provides a comprehensive understanding of social and political systems. He also critiques the terms "populism" and "illiberalism," suggesting that they often reflect a liberal democratic perspective and overlook the complexities of democratic action. Additionally, Xenos examines the concept of patriotism and its relationship to nationalism, questioning the idea of civic nationalism and exploring the differences between Western and Eastern forms of nationalism. He delves into the origins of patriotism in Roman and Greek literature and reflects on his personal experiences and family history in relation to patriotism. The author emphasizes the significance of understanding the historical context of political concepts and challenges the tendency to detach political discourse from its historical foundations. [Extracted from the article]

MacKinnon perceives that sex is a product of power and that feminism requires its own political theory and practice. 2 Catharine A. MacKinnon, I Butterfly Politics: Changing the World for Women i (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Catharine A. MacKinnon, I Are Women Human? 12 Robyn Marasco and Alyson Cole, "Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Catharine A. MacKinnon about Power, Politics, and Political Science", I Polity i 55 (2023): 231-39. [Extracted from the article]

Robyn Marasco and Alyson Cole: Your work over several decades has developed a distinctive concept and analysis of politics. The critique of rape law later became the legal claim for sexual harassment and my international work against rape as a gender crime, a crime of inequality. CAM: It is gratifying to see sexual harassment starting to fulfill its potential as a core recognition of the sexualized inequality of power. [Extracted from the article]

As co-editors, we have used the Editors' Note to pause and reflect on contemporary politics. We are delighted to continue the "Classics Revisited" series with a collection of essays on Francis Fukuyama's I The End of History and the Last Man i (1992), arguably the most influential book about politics published in the last half-century. We are witnesses to the renewal of politics on the Left and the Right, as well as the rapid rise of authoritarian parties and politicians in some of the most "advanced" (to employ Fukuyama's evolutionary terminology) countries in the world. [Extracted from the article]

This issue also features four research articles, which address important topics in American political behavior, black political thought, feminist theory, queer politics, and social movements. The cover of our July issue features an image of Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro, his eyes masked by the numbers that he simply refused to see. We are thrilled to include a "Classics Revisited" symposium on Wendy Brown's I States of Injury i in this issue. [Extracted from the article]

The group has a studied critique of contemporary American government, and it has an overarching vision of what a reconstituted state might look like. I Building a New American State i turned back to the Progressive era for new insight into the prior transition, the transition between the nineteenth-century state (a "state of courts and parties") and the administrative state that would tighten its hold on American government over the ensuing decades. When we proposed that American government has become a "policy state", we meant something specific. [Extracted from the article]

6 Yann Allard-Tremblay, "The Two Row Wampum: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Democratic Autonomy", I Polity i 54 (2022): 225-49. 7 Ramon Lopez, "'My Ancient Faith': Abraham Lincoln's Response to the Jeffersonian Problem", I Polity i 54 (2022): 250-73. 8 Dünya Deniz Çakir, "Are You Still Reading Sayyid Qutb? Language makes politics and knowledge possible, but at least since Hobbes, the instability of words has also been understood as a challenge for political science. We want to thank Professor Enloe for making the time for this probing and fascinating discussion of her work and, more generally, for her ongoing efforts to define and develop a feminist orientation to the study of international politics. [Extracted from the article]

On the other hand, it is requiring serious analysis now to determine whether Legarde's and Georgian's back-to-back tenures have generated new attention among IMF economists to what feminist analysts long have shown to be the disproportionate economic hardships falling on women in IMF loan-receiving countries as a consequence of the IMF's standard austerity package of loan conditions. GEST was launched by feminist faculty at the University of Iceland and is designed for mid-level civil servants and NGO staff people from countries in the Global South. The politics of sexual harassment in each country have international dynamics (via the Olympics, transnational corporations, international treaties, transnational legal strategies, and transnational women's organizing) and, though each of these national politics is distinctive, some of the political gender dynamics are surprisingly similar. AC: B Your pioneering book, I Bananas, Beaches and Bases i , confronted International Relations (IR) scholars with one simple question - "Where are the women?". [Extracted from the article]

As for the value of Marxist feminist theory, here's one way I think about its contribution to the present conjuncture: Marxism may continue to be optional for feminist theorists, but Marxist theorists can no longer remain ignorant of feminist theory. AC & RM: B Beyond having long admired and relied on your scholarship, one of the reasons we were eager to interview you for this feature of I Polity i is because of your writing about work. b KW: I will say that I'm not surprised - I doubt many feminists were - about how the pandemic has created so much more work for women, who are being forced to add to their other two or three shifts even more work, including, for one important example, the highly skilled work of teaching their children. [Extracted from the article]

Democracy is a notoriously ambiguous concept. Political scientists typically see this ambiguity as a problem that restricts measurement and causal explanation, especially for the comparative study of democratization. Increasingly ambitious data collection efforts and sophisticated methodological approaches attempt to resolve this problem—nowhere more so than in the recent, award-winning, and highly prominent Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset. By contrast, ambiguity and contestation over what democracy actually means is key both to normative theorizing and to the capacity to re-examine and reimagine democratic practice during moments of crisis. Rather than attempting to pin down and measure democratic quality, we highlight instead the value of ambiguity to normative democratic theory and interpretive political science. We offer four reflections on V-Dem based on examples from the literature on deliberative democracy, which is the discipline's most prominent attempt to reinvent and reinvigorate democratic practice amid crisis and disaffection. Our aim is not to reignite the paradigm wars or fundamentally question the validity of projects like V-Dem, but rather to illustrate how a more plural approach might augment their theoretical and empirical contribution. We conclude by offering concrete illustrations of what this might look like in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AC: B The range of your scholarship, and the diversity of your interlocutors and your texts, is striking: Arendt, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Derrida, Rosenzweig, Winnicott, Melville, and Sophocles, to name a few, as well as I The Wizard of Oz i , I Shane i , and I Strictly Ballroom i , the films of Lars von Trier, and the Biblical story of Ruth. This is especially evident in I Democracy and the Foreigner i [4] and I Emergency Politics i .[5] Might you talk a bit about how you come to these new questions, and whether you think this sort of questioning is a distinctive role political theory brings to political science and to politics more generally? The virus was an occasion to witness the good that government can do, but unfortunately Trump, Kushner, and others saw instead opportunities for retribution against states and cities with Democratic governors and mayors. Forthcoming this spring are two books: I A Feminist Theory of Refusal i , (Harvard 2021) and a collection of her public writing, I Shellshocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump i (Fordham 2021). B Alyson Cole b is Professor of Political Science, Womens & Gender Studies, and American Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. [Extracted from the article]

The language scholars use to describe research findings has potentially enormous implications for how a science of politics develops. Consider the history of marked and unmarked terms in the American Political Science Review. Modifiers that mark reported data as spatially or temporally 'different' (versus linguistically leaving the data unmarked and thus implying that the information is universal and 'normal') reflect predominant power relations. Marking, furthermore, can contribute to future power relations. Finally, knowledge claims that are made without acute attention to the marking of data are likely to be faulty. Because the implications for a science of politics are neither politically nor analytically innocent, political scientists should reveal (rather than conceal) and foreground (rather than background) the geographic and temporal origins of their data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a commentary on the ideas raised by Patchen Markell in his book "Bound by Recognition." The author points out that Markell's book provides a commanding critique of the ontological basis on which much of the debate has rested. He notes that Markell offers a compelling critique of the discourse of recognition in its initial formulation.

The article comments on a forum about the ideas raised by Patchen Markell in his book "Bound by Recognition." The panel was organized by Antonio Y. Vazquez-Arroyo for the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Political Science Association. It is noted that Markell's ideas marked a significant and productive shift in the literature on the politics of recognition.