Welcome to the inaugural issue of Perspectives on Politics, the new journal sponsored by the American Political Science Association (APSA) for all political scientists and others interested in academic analyses of politics. The associate editors and I are thrilled, and a bit daunted, by the challenges of putting together a journal that reaches across and outside our discipline and seeks to draw all of its members, and others, into a conversation about politics, policy, power, and the study thereof.

This article addresses three sets of questions. First, the George W. Bush administration claims that its cause and conduct in counterterror war are just. Such a claim invites moral assessment. How do normative beliefs and ethical concerns affect U.S. conduct in the counterterror war? Is the war just in cause and conduct? Second, many observers argue that warfare is “transformed.” How so? And is it possible to fight a just counterterror war in this context? Third, the transformation of war raises new questions for just war theory itself. Is the framework still useful? I argue that it is extremely difficult to fight a just counterterror war given the nature of terrorism and the realities of contemporary warfare. Yet I show that the Bush administration has made an effort to engage in a just counterterror war by meeting the criterion of self-defense and seeking to avoid noncombatant harm. Even so, current U.S. policy and practice in the counterterror war are not just. But any government would have a problem fighting a just counterterror war in the current context; indeed, the utility of just war theory itself is challenged. I discuss 12 conceptual and practical problems that arise at the intersection of just war theory and counterterror war, including the limits of self-defense, preemption, last resort, and discrimination. Despite these problems, I argue that just war theory is a useful method of inquiry into the problems of contemporary war. Our nation's cause has always been larger than our nation's defense. We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace—a peace that favors human liberty …. Building this just peace is America's opportunity, and America's duty. —George W. BushBush 2002.The Americans who conduct those operations are a tough and proud bunch. Their cause is a just one. It's to stop terrorists from killing Americans and others.—Donald H. RumsfeldRumsfeld 2001e.This is not a linear war; this is not a sequential war …. This is a different kind of conflict. This is asymmetric warfare. We have to use all the instruments of national power.—General Richard MyersMyers 2001b.

The bargaining model of war envisions the initiation, prosecution, termination, and consequences of war as part of a single bargaining process. This article focuses on the most recent works on this topic, many of which employ formal techniques, and it applies the model to the different phases of war. It also discusses the state of empirical work on the bargaining model. Finally, the article considers how the bargaining model meshes with other theories of war and international relations, including cognitive psychology, organization theory, domestic politics, and constructivism.For comments, he thanks Risa Brooks, Hein Goemans, Ted Hopf, Robert Powell, Bruce Russett, Alastair Smith, Allan Stam, and Suzanne Werner. He would like to note that any remaining errors are exclusively his own.

A comparative perspective on labor unions reveals that the best of all worlds for the workers is coordinated bargaining at thenational level and significant rank-and-file engagement at the local level. But the achievement of national and coordinated bargaining is an unrealistic goal in the foreseeable future in the United States. What American labor can do, however, is to become once again a social movement. In order for organized labor to play its critical role as a countervailing power within the American political system, there must be intensified organizing, internal democratization, increased electoral and lobbying clout, and social-movement unions willing to mobilize with others and, if necessary, on the streets.This paper was originally prepared for presentation at Theme Panel 7, “Politics of Labor,” at the 2002 meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Boston. The commentators at APSA—Glenn Adler, Ron Blackwell, Sakhela Buhlungu, and Linda Kaboolian —gave me generous and insightful feedback. So did Frances Fox Piven, Robby Stern, Victoria Murillo, Katrina Pflaumer, George Lovell, Jennifer Hochschild, Bernhard Ebbinghaus, Wolfgang Streeck, Fritz Scharpf, Bruce Ackerman, and four anonymous reviewers. I particularly want to thank my two most trusty critical readers: John Ahlquist, my research assistant, and David Olson, my long-term colleague and collaborator. I did not always take their advice but always appreciated it.Previous books include Of Rule and Revenue; Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism; and the co-authored Analytic Narratives

The 2002 enactment of the first major reform of U.S. federal campaign-finance law in a quarter century featured a more substantial engagement of political scientists—through research, public advocacy, and expert testimony—than had been the case in the past. This essay reviews the evolution of research on campaign finance from the early twentieth century to the present, the intellectual tensions between the scholarly and reform communities, the conditions in the 1990s that promoted collaborationamong these groups, and the continuing disagreements over how best to manage the problems associated with money and politics—in the United States and in democracies around the world.He gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Emily Bailard, a Brookings summer intern from Yale University, and Larissa Davis. Bruce Cain, Anthony Corrado, and Trevor Potter provided valuable commentary as discussants when a version of this paper was presented at the 2002 meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston. Special thanks to Sarah Binder, Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Charles O. Jones, Sheilah Mann, Norman Ornstein, this journal's editors, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The author would like to note that he alone is responsible for whatever errors of fact and judgment remain.

Why do we have so many ethnic partisans in the world ready to die as suicide bombers? Does a rational calculus lie beneath the nationalist pride and passions? Can it be discovered if only we apply our understanding of rationality more creatively? This article seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the nationalism of resistance. It argues that a focus on dignity, self-respect, and recognition, rather than a straightforward notion of self-interest, is a better prism for understanding ethnic and nationalist behavior, although self-interest is not entirely absent as a motivation in ethnic conflict. In the process of developing this argument, a distinction once made by Max Weber—between instrumental rationality and value rationality—is recovered and refined further. No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers …. They are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them …. The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism is much concerned with death and immortality. If the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings ….—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983He received many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. He would especially like to acknowledge the criticisms and suggestions of Gabriel Almond, Benedict Anderson, Robert Bates, Morris Fiorina, Ira Katznelson, Pratap Mehta, Vibha Pingle, Ronald Rogowski, James Scott, Kenneth Shepsle, Jack Snyder, Sidney Verba, the late Myron Weiner, Elisabeth Wood, Crawford Young, and three anonymous reviewers of this journal. Needless to add, not all of them agreed, so the standard disclaimers apply.

Political-science research on social capital has burgeoned in the past few years.I must thank Shayla C. Nunnally, doctoral student in political science at Duke University, for introducing me to much of the social-capital literature in political science through the chapters of her dissertation. Robert Putnam says that the concept has been invented at least six times during the twentieth century, and its definition has been reconceived. Much current research uses Putnam's definition of social capital—“features of social organizations, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions.”Putnam 2000, 19; Putnam 1993, 167. Yet political science does not have a corner on the market of research when it comes to studying the concept. Research on social capital has been done—and is being done— in economics, geography, history, demography, sociology, African studies, African American studies, Asian studies, education, ecology, and psychology.A quick search of JSTOR and PsychInfo on the concept— restricted to each discipline's journals—reveals the wealth of research on social capital in articles published since the early 1900s. The earliest appearance of a reference to the concept in a political science journal that I was able to identify was in a 1905 article in Political Science Quarterly, “The Field of Economic Dynamics” by John Bates Clark. Clark's definition of social capital, however, was within the context of labor and the accumulation of capital. In some instances, these disciplines have used the same definition for the term as political science has; in others, that has not been the case. Despite differences in definition, how might other disciplines' research inform our assessment of the effects of social capital? Conversely, what might political science offer to other disciplines to inform their analyses?

Now many of them [economists] are writing about neighborhood get-togethers, PTAs, Bible study classes, and the like …. This is not necessarily a good thing.—Claude S. Fischer, “Bowling Alone: What's the Score?”The authors thank the participants in the Conference on Social Connectedness and Public Activism (Harvard University), where an earlier version of this article was delivered in May 2002; Jennifer Hochschild; and four anonymous reviewers for comments. They also thank NIH grant R01 AG19637. Additionally, Dora Costa thanks NIH grants AG12658 and AG10120.

“Social capital” is said to be strongly associated with better substantive outcomes as well as with civic and economic dimensions of equality in the United States. Robert Putnam argues in Bowling Alone that “the American states with the highest levels of social capital are precisely the states most characterized by economic and civic equality.” He adds: “[B]oth across space [i.e., states] and across time, equality and fraternity [social capital] are strongly positively correlated …. [T]he empirical evidence on recent trends is unambiguous …. Community and equality are mutually reinforcing, not mutually incompatible.”Putnam 2000, 358–63 (emphasis in original) and chapter 22 more generally; also see Rice and Sumberg 1997.He specializes in U.S. democracy and politics, especially as viewed through the analytical lenses of Latino and ethnic/minority politics, state/urban politics, and federalism. His book Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity in American Politics received the American Political Science Association's 1999 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award.

In the post–Cold War world, the last remaining superpower is almost hegemonic. Almost, but not quite. The United States cannot act entirely on its own. It needs—or thinks it needs, or pretends it needs—the support of at least a few other countries in almost anything it does. But it only needs a few, and many could serve equally well.An earlier version of this article was presented to the International Sociological Association World Congress, Brisbane, in August 2002. The author is grateful for comments, then and later, from Mattei Dogan, Christina Fong, Gerry Mackie, Claus Offe, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Dave Schmidtz, Duncan Snidal, and this journal's editors and referees

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jens Bartelson's book is a history of the futility of the attempts of Anglo-American political scientists to come to grips with the concept of the state. The evidence it provides of this futility is overwhelming, and it should make chastening reading for anyone still engaged in the enterprise. The concept of the state lies at the foundations of modern political science, but Bartelson shows that it also lies at the heart of attempts to emancipate political science from its foundations. As a result, this is a book of paradoxes: The various critiques of the state that Bartelson describes, each characteristic of some of the most assertive branches of the discipline—including pluralism, Marxism, behavioralism, and structuralism—have served only to reinforce the centrality of the state to our understanding of politics, by variously reasserting the hold of the concept over our political imaginations. The author lays out these paradoxes end to end, so that their cumulative effect is to leave the reader wondering at the doggedness of so many political scientists in persisting with the problem, and at their dogged willingness to repeat history by attempting to ignore it.

In an era of increasing economic and social globalization, has it become more intelligible to think of ourselves as citizens, not of this or that finite political community, but of the world? What would thinking and acting like a world citizen entail? And is it morally progressive to think about citizenship in global rather than national terms?

In this book, Fred R. Dallmayr again provides his characteristic meditations on the writings of other scholars, which illuminate an issue, in this case, globalization. He examines the process of globalization along two axes: “localglobal and self-other trajectories” (p. ix). The book is organized in two corresponding parts. The first proceeds thematically, including essays on globalization, cosmopolitan democracy, “Asian values” and global human rights, and fugitive democracy, culminating in Dallmayr's response to Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). In the second part, Dallmayr provides close readings of Calvin Shrag on “transversal communication,” Bernhard Waldenfels on “asymmetrical interlacing,” Jacques Derrida on “friendship,” Paul Ricoeur on “little ethics,” and Martin Heidegger on “Macht,” “Machenschaft,” and “creative praxis.” Although the two parts seem to mirror the trajectories Dallmayr identifies, he wonders in his conclusion whether their order should be reversed, placing the more personally and philosophically demanding selfother relations first. To do so might better illustrate his central thesis, “that globalization cannot properly be achieved except laterally: that is, through the cultivation of multiple selfother and cross-cultural encounters” (p. 211).

In one of the first recorded acts of its kind, the newly restored Athenian democracy of 403 B.C.E. adopted an amnesty for collaborators from the deposed oligarchic regime. Such political forgiveness was, according to Aristotle, a marvel of statesmanship, presumably allowing Athenians to recover a measure of civic unity (though not to Socrates' benefit). With the recent emergence of powerful human rights organizations, the option of amnesty has suffered from theoretical disrepute, though not practical disuse, and the terminology of forgiveness has acquired a maudlin air.