Political Science 248T



Political Science 248T Jim Mahon

Spring 2015 Schapiro 337

x2236

OH: W 10-12 and by app’t.

The USA in Comparative Perspective

Politics in the USA is often considered a thing apart, unique and incomparable. Indeed, professional political science in the US separates American politics from comparative politics, the rubric under which it studies the domestic politics of every other country in the world. This course begins from the premise that this segregation represents a big missed opportunity.

We consider the history, politics, and policies of the United States in comparison with other political entities and from a variety of viewpoints. The course is organized historically and thematically. Important topics of comparison include: the colonial experience and independence; race relations and the African diaspora; nationalism and national identity; war and state-building; American exceptionalism, religion, and foreign policy; the role of political and economic institutions; and the origins and shape of the welfare state. As the list suggests, the most common comparisons are with Latin America and Western Europe, but several of our authors look beyond these regions. The format is mainly tutorial, though the course begins with a lecture in the first full week and ends with a discussion class in the twelfth.

Requirements. Students write five 5- to 6-page papers and five 1- to 2-page responses in alternate weeks of the tutorial, followed by a 1-page essay (in E-prime, English without the verb “to be”) for the final class. The reading load is fairly heavy, 130 to 200 pages a week, depending on difficulty, but much less for the final class. There are no exams.

Grades are calculated as follows: the five longer papers, total 60 percent; the five commentaries, total 25 percent, the reflective paper for the last class, another 5 percent, and the quality of your participation during tutorial sessions, 10 percent.

Tutorial tips. Writing papers for a tutorial is a lot like writing for other courses (regular Honor Code rules apply to these and to commentaries, of course). In the syllabus I suggest possible questions or issues, on which you can focus at least some of your paper—but please do not feel constrained by these. If you focus on a different theme, just say so clearly at the beginning of your essay. Your partner and I need to have the paper by 4pm on the day before our meeting. I cannot emphasize this too much. Late papers can compromise or force the postponement of our meetings--so they will be marked down significantly.

What makes a good commentary? In this respect the work for a tutorial is most different from other courses. You might think of it as having four parts: 1) a brief and coherent restatement of the argument in your partner's paper; 2) what you thought was good about the paper; 3) how you thought it could be improved, given your understanding of the author's own assumptions or goals; and 4) how the paper was weakest, given your interpretation of the week's readings. As this implies, a week to write a commentary is not a “week off.” Also, don’t forget to bring three copies of your commentary to the meeting.

The syllabus is annotated to provide a guide to the literature and introduce the main topics.

Readings. The following books are required and available at Water Street Books:

J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World (Yale, 2006);

Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, America against the World (Henry Holt, 2006);

Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2012);

Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation (Cambridge, 1998);

Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (Houghton Mifflin, 1997);

Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? (Houghton Mifflin, 2007);

Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State (Free Press 1994; S/S pbk 2002);

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835, 1840] (Penguin, 2003).

There is also a packet of photocopied readings, to be distributed in the first full week.

Schedule

(* = in packet)

Organizational meeting (Wed., Feb. 4, 8:30pm)

Week 1 (Thurs. Feb. 12, 4:00- 5:15pm): Overview; Colonial Americas (lecture and discussion)

Kohut and Stokes, America against the World, Chapter 3.

Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, Epilogue (pp. 403-11), then Chapters 1-2, 6-7, and (skimming pp. 372-91) Chapter 12.

Stanley Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth Among New World Economies,” from How Latin America Fell Behind, Stephen Haber, ed. (Stanford, 1997).*

We read the excerpt from Kohut and Stokes in order to get a quick summary of American Exceptionalism and a sense of its current importance. We read selections from Elliott’s widely praised synthesis as well as a highly influential book chapter. Elliott seems to attribute the differences between the empires to a wide variety of causes, among them the greater indigenous population density in the Spanish domains (especially at first); other aspects of timing (less territory remained unconquered when the English arrived in the hemisphere); the presence or absence of precious metals; the universality of Catholicism vs. the sectarian nature of Puritan settlers; and the different administrative systems that resulted from the greater extent and economic importance of the Spanish realms. Engerman and Sokoloff argue instead for the importance of the different productive factor endowments—climate, soil, readily available labor—encountered by settlers from Europe, with the later divergence of institutions also traceable to these economic beginnings. I’ll lecture on how these accounts relate to other views of the contrast, using the occasion to describe major varieties of historical and social-science argument.

Week 2 (2/16- 2/20): Tocqueville (first tutorial class)

Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America [1835, 1840] see pages in Penguin edition below.

Volume I: Author’s Introduction; Part I, Chap. 2; in Chap. 8, sections with headings beginning “High Standing,” “What Distinguishes,” and “Why the Federal”; Part II, Chap. 4; in Chap. 5, sections on “Public Expenses,” “Corruption and Vices,” “The Power,” and “The Manner”; in Chap. 6, sections on “Public Spirit,” “Respect for,” and “Activity Reigning”; in Chap. 7, sections on “Tyranny,” “The Effects,” and “The Power;” in Chap. 8, sections on “The Attitude” and “The Jury”; in Chap. 9, middle sections from “The Influence” through “Main Causes,” plus “Laws Contribute”; in Chap. 10, opening section plus short excerpt in paragraphs beginning with “The native races” and ending with “Whatever the defects,” footnote 19, and the end of the section on native Americans, from “In their petition,” the section on “The Position of the Black Race,” and the final section (“A Few Reflections”); last two pages of the Conclusion.

Volume II: Part I, Chap. 2, plus the note on Islam on the fourth page of Chap. 5; Part II, Chaps. 2-4 and Chap. 14; Part III, Chap. 9, Chap. 12; Part IV, Chaps. 3 and Chap. 6.

Pages in the 2003 Penguin edition: 11-26, 36-56, 175-77, 182-85, 191-200, 219-27, 243-47, 257-59, 262-69, 274-77, 280-87, 292-300, 307-22, 335-52, 357-62, 370-76, 384-85, 390n19, 395-426, 470-78, 484-85, 498-503, 513, 587-95, 626-29, 684-86, 696-700, 781-83, and 803-809.

The most celebrated and widely quoted of all foreigners’ reflections on the USA, Tocqueville’s work broke ground in comparative history and sociology while adding a healthy dose of political philosophy. We read the most famous passages as well as those places where his comparisons with France, Britain, and Spanish America are most explicit.

Possible questions: What parts of Tocqueville do you find most helpful in thinking about contemporary politics? Least helpful? What might our appreciation (or not) of his reflections say about “insider” knowledge versus that of “outsiders”?

Week 3 (2/23- 2/27): Other Foreign Views of the USA, Historical and Contemporary

José Martí, “A Glance at the North American’s Soul Today” (1/ 1886), from Luis Baralt, ed., Martí on the U.S.A. (Southern Illinois Univ., 1966), and “The Truth about the United States” (3/ 1894), from Philip Foner, ed., Inside the Monster (Monthly Review Press, 1975).*

Max Weber, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” [1904], from Gerth and Mills, eds., From Max Weber (1946), pp. 303-13 (skim 313-19) and 319-22.*

Harold Laski, excerpts from The American Democracy [1948], in Stephen Brooks, editor and annotator, America through Foreign Eyes (Oxford, 2002).*

K.A.B. Jones-Quartey, “From Ghana,” from Franz Joseph, ed., As Others See Us: The United States through Foreign Eyes (Princeton Univ. Press, 1959).*

“Gongwang,” “The American Family” and

Xiao Qian, “Some Judgments about America,” both from David Arkush and Leo Lee, eds. and trans., Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Univ. California, 1989).*

Sayyid al-Qutb, “The America that I Have Seen,” from The Scale of Human Values (1951), and

Karima Kamal, “An Egyptian Girl in America” (1983), both in Kamal Abdel-Malek, ed., America in an Arab Mirror (St. Martin’s, 2000).*

Kohut and Stokes, America against the World, skim Chap. 1, read Chap. 2.

Following up on Tocqueville, here are a wide variety of impressions of the US by foreign observers, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth.

José Martí, a Cuban in exile, worked as a journalist to support himself while also writing poetry, drama, and longer fiction. He led the main party advocating Cuban independence in the 1880’s and 1890’s, before returning to lead the fight personally in 1895 and dying five weeks later in a minor skirmish with the Spanish forces. As you can see, he became more skeptical about the US and its role in Latin America as he grew older. The article by Weber (the most influential German sociologist and one of the authors of the Weimar Constitution) can be considered a companion to his longer and better-known essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Sayyid al-Qutb is widely considered the grandfather of radical Islamism among Sunni Muslims, and you can see a bit of this here in his reactions to the USA.

Possible questions: Is Tocqueville confirmed by later observers? Or, are themes of Kohut and Stokes anticipated or “explained” by these authors? Do we see any evolution in what impresses visitors most about the USA, or are they pretty much the same things all along?

Week 4 (3/2- 3/6): Born Liberal?

Louis Hartz, Chap. 1, first part of Chap. 3, and first part of Chap. 4 (pp. 3-23, 49-58, and 69-82) from Hartz, ed., The Founding of New Societies (HBW, 1964).*

Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (1963, 1979; Transaction Books 2003), Chap. 1.*

Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (Norton, 1996), Chap. 1 and last few pages of the conclusion (pp. 31-52 and 288-92).*

Sven Steinmo, “American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Culture or Institutions?” in Dodd and Jilson, eds., The Dynamics of American Politics (Westview, 1996).*

By the early 20th century people came to compare the US with European states as examples of rich, powerful, industrial countries. A few questions arose almost immediately: why was there no socialism (or very little, anyway) in the USA? Why was it “conservative” to be liberal (in the classical freedom-loving sense of the word, not the current US sense of social democrat) here? Our authors for this week can be seen as accounting in different ways for how the USA came to be a stable “bourgeois,” liberal, middle-class-minded country.

Hartz emphasized ideas and culture. He did so first in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) and later in this edited work, which generalized his argument to other transplanted European social and ideological “fragments” around the world. Occasionally we hear Hartz responding to Charles Beard, whose influential 1913 book, The Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, argued the role of economic interests--especially creditors who believed that expanded Federal power would help them get paid back--in shaping the 1787 Constitution. (Hartz throws a lot of names around, so in your packet I’ve copied the index so you can look up in Wikipedia any you don’t know.)

Lipset’s 1963 book represented the first important effort to understand the United States in terms of what we would consider contemporary political science. In the chapter we read he compares the USA in its early years to the then-newly independent developing countries, setting out the critical political tasks required to create and sustain a new basis of authority—forming a national identity, fomenting economic growth, and attaining legitimacy. In his much later book, he navigates back into the waters of the “liberal tradition” or “American Creed,” but in a more empirical way than did Hartz, examining how the USA is in fact still unusual.

Steinmo attempts to refute those who point to a durable liberal ideology, tradition, or creed by pointing instead to the origins and functioning of institutions, mainly the 1787 Constitution. He also initiates the discussion of social policy we continue next week.

Possible questions: Does Steinmo’s argument effectively answer Hartz and Lipset? How might the other authors respond?

Week 5 (3/9- 3/13): Welfare States, or Not

Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding, Poor Kids in a Rich Country (Russell Sage, 2003), Chaps. 1-3.*

Gøsta Esping-Andersen, “Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism,” from Pierson and Castles, eds., The Welfare State Reader (Polity, 2006), pp. 160-74.*

Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe (Oxford, 2004), Chaps. 1 and 6 (pp. 1-13, 133-81).*

Jonas Pontusson, “The American Welfare State in Comparative Perspective” [review of Alesina and Glaeser], Perspectives on Politics 4:2 (June 2006).*

Here we consider more recent observations on the old question of US domestic policy distinctiveness. Rainwater and Smeeding give a descriptive account of what might be the most important area of difference, child welfare policies. Esping-Andersen’s typology has been massively influential: although it is a bit academic, you will find it hard to read any recent thing on the subject that does not cite it. The Alesina and Glaeser book, with its spotlight on ethnic diversity, has been very controversial, especially among longtime students of welfare states who took umbrage at the economists’ relatively simplistic approach to the subject.

Possible questions: For a country seemingly focused on youth, is it surprising that US policy does so much worse by children than policy in other countries? Thinking not only of Pontusson’s review but also the other two works excerpted here, do you find the Alesina and Glaeser argument convincing? (How is Hawaii different from Mississippi?)

Week 6 (3/16- 3/20): War and the State in the USA

Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State, Prologue, Chap. 1; selections from Chap. 4; plus all of Chaps. 5, 7, and Epilogue (pp. xiii-xx, 1-22; 105-13, 137-40, and 145-47; 149-93 and 243-304).

Aaron O’Connell, “The Permanent Militarization of America,” NY Times, 11/4/12.*

John DiIulio, “The Rise and Fall of the US Government” (Review of Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay), Washington Monthly, Jan./Feb. 2015.*

Porter puts the USA into the context of European state formation, tapping a rich literature (the key American figure here is Charles Tilly) about how war shaped states. This line of thought about the development of modern states has become much more influential in recent years. It represents the mirror image of the realist or realpolitik school of international relations: in a world of insecurity, states adapt and evolve to maximize power—reorganizing, extracting more revenue, propagating new national identities and loyalties—on pain of extinction. For Porter, given the social history of the USA, war has played an even bigger part in creating national identity and shaping the state.

The more recent readings follow on Porter’s twofold theme, one from each side. O’Connell describes the position of the military in culture and politics while DiIulio, known as an early neoliberal and the first person in charge of expanding “faith-based” social policy under George W. Bush, finds Fukuyama a useful vehicle for describing the fraying of the American state.

Possible questions: What do you think of Porter’s war-based explanation for nationalism? Welfare states? How would Steinmo or Alesina/ Glaeser respond on the latter? Do the O’Connell and Fukyama/ DiIulio readings confirm or contradict Porter’s ideas?

SPRING BREAK

Week 7 (4/6- 4/10): Race and History

Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation, middle sections of the introduction; last, comparative sections of Chaps. 2 and 3; all Chap. 4 plus “Implications”; introduction to Part Two; Chap. 6; short section on “Comparative Racial Domination” and introduction to Part Three; and Chaps. 9, 10, Overview, and Conclusion (pp. 6-23, 43-46, 62-79, 81-83, 120-57, 178-93, and 217-77).

Marx has a state-centered perspective that is similar in some ways to that of Porter. He emphasizes the use of racial exclusion as part of projects of national unity in South Africa (uniting Boers and British after the Boer War) and the US (uniting northern and southern whites after the Civil War and Reconstruction). Brazil, with greater elite unity, presents a contrast. He also argues that these differing elite projects then determined the nature of popular protest by nonwhites in each country.

Possible questions: Marx spends quite a few pages at the beginning knocking down other explanations for the differences among these cases, especially those positing a distinctive path of Brazil. Do you buy his argument? Has it been borne out it the years since the book’s publication (1998), in your judgment? Does he help us understand recent race relations in the USA?

Week 8 (4/13- 4/17): Crime and Punishment

James Q. Whitman, Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe (Oxford, 2003), Introduction.*

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2011), Introduction and Chapter 5.*

William J. Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Harvard, 2011), Introduction, Chapter 1, first part of Chapter 2 (to p. 50), pp. 61-62, 155-57, and Chapter 9.*

Kevin Drum, “America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead,” Mother Jones, 1/3/13.*

Chris Hedges, “The Prison State of America,” TruthDig, 12/28/14.*

Erick Eckholm, “In a Safer Age, U.S. Rethinks ‘Tough on Crime’,” NY Times 1/13/15.*

Since about 1970 the United States has diverged markedly from other countries (especially rich ones in Europe and Asia) in an important respect: its extraordinarily high incarceration rate. Along with the prominent role for the private sector in the US criminal justice system, from bail bondsmen to for-profit prisons, this difference has provoked increasing comment and a wave of good scholarship. This is a sample of some of the best (or the best I could find!), beginning with Whitman’s comparative work. Alexander’s book has been popular and influential almost since its publication—we sample the places where she states the argument as well as its most important qualifications. Stuntz was a professor at Harvard Law (he died soon after this book was finished). His work compares periods in US history while presenting useful data for the evaluation of differing explanations. Drum’s article is the most influential single work promoting the hypothesis that lead (Pb) is the major explanation for the rise and decline of crime rates in the last hundred years. Hedges spotlights the connections of interest binding the prison- (or better, the criminal-justice-) industrial complex. Eckholm gives a recent overview.

Possible questions: So what accounts for the unusually high US incarceration rate? Is it possible to reconcile the accounts presented by the three main authors? If not, which is most persuasive and why? How do explanations of the 20th-century crime spike imply different approaches to incarceration? How does the US criminal justice system fit with the view that our most distinctive cultural trait is a love of freedom?

Week 9 (4/20- 4/24): Foreign Policy and Exceptionalism

Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, Introduction (pp. 1-12), first and last parts of Chap. 1 (pp. 15-21 and 37-38), first parts of Chaps. 2-4 (pp. 39-49, 57-59, and 76-82); first and last parts of Chap. 5 (pp. 101-07 and 118-21), Chapters 6-8 and the Conclusion (pp. 122- 222).

Kohut and Stokes, Chap. 4; skim Chap. 8.

This is a concise summary of US diplomatic history from a conservative author, written before the 9/11 attacks and the dramatic foreign-policy adventures that followed. It’s a fair bet that its “crusader state” label would not be used today, given that “crusader” has been radical Islamists’ favorite epithet for their enemies in the West. (A call for a “crusade” slipped out of George W. Bush’s mouth in one of his first post-9/11 speeches but was never repeated in presidential discourse.) For us, the book is a useful corrective to seeing too much of US foreign policy through the lens of recent events.

Possible questions: What does McDougall mean by “crusader state”? What factors have tended to strengthen or weaken this tendency in US foreign policy? What does this imply for the future? Why does it seem that most people today who call themselves “conservatives” disagree with McDougall?

Week 10 (4/27- 5/1): The Nature of American Nationalism

Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong, Introduction, Chap. 1, two sections of Chap. 2 (“Restoring Innocence” and “Wolfish Wilsonians”), two sections of Chap. 3 (“Nativism…” and “Southern Defeat…”), first two sections and last section of Chap. 4, first half of Chap. 6 (up to “A Tragic Imperative”), and Conclusion.

Kohut and Stokes, Chap. 5.

Keith Ablow, “It’s Time for an ‘American Jihad’,” Fox , 10/28/14.*

Lieven’s book begins with the puzzle of US foreign policy under G.W. Bush, but it immediately turns to comparative history (Chap. 1) and a regional-historical examination of US political culture and identity. The work might be seen as the kind of culture-oriented explanation to which Steinmo (explicitly) objected, but it might also be the case that in foreign policy, where executive initiative is more important than in domestic policy, institutions are less powerful as an explanation. The Kohut and Stokes chapter adds some public-opinion data from the early 00’s and the squib from Ablow is a recent example of something Lieven would have found interesting.

Note: when Lieven refers to civic nationalism, he means a doctrine that uses beliefs or values as a basis for membership in the nation (the American Creed as open to all races and walks of life); he opposes it to ethnic nationalism, the traditional variety of central Europe and East Asia, closer to the original meaning of “nationalism,” which takes blood and phenotype as tests of belonging. (The distinction is fairly old but was popularized in the 1990’s by Michael Ignatieff in Blood and Belonging.) He finds both at work in the nationalism of the current American right.

Possible questions: Do you agree with this rather critical portrait of American nationalism? What might Porter say about it? How does Lieven differ from McDougall on the origins of the “crusader” current in US foreign policy? What might Ablow have to say to Lieven?

Week 11 (5/4- 5/8): The Long View: Comparing Empires (last tutorial class)

Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (Penguin, 2004), Introduction (pp. 1-26 only), Chap. 6, and middle sections of Conclusion (290-98).*

Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? (Mariner, 2007), Prologue, Chaps. 1 and 3, and Epilogue.

Fareed Zakaria, excerpt from The Post-American World, Release 2.0 (2011).*

Niall Ferguson (along with Robert Kagan) has been perhaps the leading scholar advocating a frankly imperial role for the United States. Here we read a summary of his argument and a kind of cost-benefit analysis of the US intervention in Iraq that repeatedly draws explicit parallels with British activities there. (His positive assessment of the British Empire in Empire, published a year earlier, laid the groundwork for this part of Colossus.) The second reading has a much different tone—glib, funny, and keen to point out the more distressing parallels between the contemporary US and another empire of the past. We close with a brief excerpt in which Zakaria tries to cast US predominance in a different light.

Possible questions: So, are we Britain or Rome? Or both, or neither? Seriously, which are for you the most instructive historical parallels between the contemporary US and these two historical cases? Do successful and prosperous republics have to turn into empires? Or are we kidding ourselves, overstating our importance, with these imperial comparisons?

Week 12 (Thurs., May 14, 4:00- 5:15pm): Forever Exceptional? (discussion)

“The Desolate Wilderness”…“And the Fair Land,” annual Thanksgiving editorial, Wall Street Journal.*

Kohut and Stokes, America against the World, review Chap. 4, read Chap. 10 and Conclusion.

Peter Beinart, “The End of American Exceptionalism,” and

Peter Berkowitz, “Exceptionalism Doesn’t Work That Way,” National Journal, 2/1/14.*

Clive Crook, “Reported Death of American Exceptionalism is False,” 2/10/14.*

Stephen Walt, “American Exceptionalism: A Realist View,” Foreign Policy 12/6/10.*

Rosa Brooks, “Winthrop’s Warning,” Foreign Policy, 17 March 2014.*

“20 Key Findings about CIA Interrogations,” Washington Post, 9 Dec. 2014, at:

In the last week we read lighter fare, expressly focused on a question raised in several of our earlier readings: will the US stay self-consciously and demonstrably “exceptional”? After an important statement of exceptionalism, repeated annually by the most influential daily page of US conservative opinion, we look at public opinion trends in Kohut and Stokes. The exchange in National Journal is followed by a further reaction by an immigrant from Britain. Walt throws cold water on the whole discussion while Brooks reminds us that the locus classicus of exceptionalism, John Winthrop’s sermon on the Arabella, ended with a strong warning. We end with a summary of the Senate’s own summary of a CIA document on its interrogation program. It describes the routine use of torture that was apparently ineffective.

So is the USA exceptional? Or does it not matter whether the objective indicators of exceptionalism diminish, as long as Americans feel exceptional? What do Walt and Brooks (and the torture memos) add to the exchange between Beinart and Berkowitz?

(Bring your essay--one page in E’, English without the verb “to be”—to class.)

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