Spatial diagrams of politics could and should be iconic for political science in much the same way as supply-and-demand curves are in economics. Many fundamental problems of political science can be connected with them, and many different concepts—such as ideological constraint, cross-pressures, framing, agenda-setting, political competition, voting systems, and party systems, to name just a few—can be illuminated through spatial diagrams. Spatial diagrams raise questions and provide insights. They suggest political maneuvers, possible realignments, and political problems. They provide us with revealing images that aid memory and facilitate analysis. They are a powerful way to think about politics, and we could not do better than to feature them in our textbooks, to use them in our research, and to exhibit them as our brand—as our distinctive way of thinking about how the world works

From time to time, a region of the world captures the attention of social scientists because people there achieve some important human value to an extent greater than the rest of us have managed to do. In the 1970s, the Scandinavian and Northern European social democracies earned the world's envy for their remarkable accomplishments in equality, solidarity, and welfare. Accordingly, many social scientists sought to understand the political and economic keys to their success.

In his compelling piece, “Living in a Promiseland? Mexican Immigration and American Obligations,” Rogers Smith argues that the greater the degree to which the U.S. has coercively constituted the identities of non-citizens in ways that have made having certain relationships to America fundamental to their capacities to lead free and meaningful lives, the greater the obligations the U.S. has to facilitate those relationships. Over the last hundred years, many rural communities in Mexico have been constituted more by U.S. immigration policy and the labor demands of U.S. employers than by similar policies and economic factors in Mexico. According to Smith, this means that Mexicans may be owed “special access” to American residency and citizenship, ahead of the residents of countries less affected by U.S. policies, and in ways that should justify leniency toward undocumented Mexican immigrants.

Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power. By Clement Fatovic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 368p. $55.00.

Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. By Bonnie Honig. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 218p. $26.95.

States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies. By Nomi Claire Lazar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 190p. $80.00.

In the wake of 9/11, many political scientists and theorists in the United States of America turned their attention to the topic of emergencies. That required them to confront a fundamental question: Are emergencies to be studied as important in their own right, as altogether exceptional events that threaten the very existence of a society in unforeseeable ways? Or are they important, not because they are radically distinct from the normal situation of politics, but because they bring to the surface otherwise implicit aspects of normal politics?

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. By James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 464p. $35.00.

The book under discussion is James C. Scott's latest contribution to the study of agrarian politics, culture, and society, and to the ways that marginalized communities evade or resist projects of state authority. The book offers a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia, a 2.5 million–kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. It offers a kind of “area study.” It also builds on Scott's earlier work on “hidden transcripts” of subaltern groups and on “seeing like a state.” The book raises many important theoretical questions about research methods and social inquiry, the relationship between political science and anthropology, the nature of states, and of modernity more generally. The book is also deeply relevant to problems of “state-building” and “failed states” in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. As Scott writes, “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes it an anarchist history” (p. x).

In this symposium, I have invited a number of prominent political and social scientists to comment on the book, its historical narrative, and its broader theoretical implications for thinking about power, state failure, state-building, and foreign policy. How does the book shed light on the limits of states and the modes of resistance to state authority? Are there limits, theoretical and normative, to this “anarchist” understanding of governance and the “art of being governed”?

—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

The provocative question raised by Rogers Smith's “Living in a Promiseland? Mexican Immigration and American Obligations” is whether the tortured history of U.S.-Mexican relations and the racialized context of Mexican immigrant reception can best be ameliorated through targeted immigration policies that would create added opportunities for Mexican migrants relative to others. I argue that the current, more universally-principled system of U.S. immigration policy, supplemented by an inclusive legalization program, can better serve the needs of potential Mexican migrants and Mexican immigrants resident in the United States. Also, I am more skeptical than Smith is about the depths of Mexico's commitment to seeking binational strategies to address the needs of its émigrés abroad.

Evan Lieberman's Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to Aids proceeds from a simple question of great importance to millions of people: “Why have some governments responded to AIDS more quickly and more broadly than others?” In answering this question, Lieberman employs a range of methods and engages a range of scholarly literatures dealing with health policy, comparative public policy, and ethnic politics. Because the book addresses “big” issues and bridges conventional divides in political science, we have invited a number of colleagues working broadly in comparative politics to comment on it.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Recent events across the globe make clear the complexities of the politics of “democratization” and the importance of developing nuanced and compelling understandings of these complexities. In Eurasia, “Color Revolutions” have given way to democratic disappointments and “authoritarian regimes.” In north Africa, an unanticipated upsurge of democratic movements has felled autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt, but the political outcomes of these “transitions” are very much in doubt. Contemporary political science has developed an elaborate vocabulary for understanding such processes. And this vocabulary owes a great deal to a small group of scholars—Juan Linz, Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, Alfred Stepan and Adam Przeworksi—who helped to lay the theoretical foundations of our current understanding of politics around the globe.

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. By James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 464p. $35.00.

The book under discussion is James C. Scott's latest contribution to the study of agrarian politics, culture, and society, and to the ways that marginalized communities evade or resist projects of state authority. The book offers a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia, a 2.5 million–kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. It offers a kind of “area study.” It also builds on Scott's earlier work on “hidden transcripts” of subaltern groups and on “seeing like a state.” The book raises many important theoretical questions about research methods and social inquiry, the relationship between political science and anthropology, the nature of states, and of modernity more generally. The book is also deeply relevant to problems of “state-building” and “failed states” in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. As Scott writes, “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes it an anarchist history” (p. x).

In this symposium, I have invited a number of prominent political and social scientists to comment on the book, its historical narrative, and its broader theoretical implications for thinking about power, state failure, state-building, and foreign policy. How does the book shed light on the limits of states and the modes of resistance to state authority? Are there limits, theoretical and normative, to this “anarchist” understanding of governance and the “art of being governed”?

—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Evan Lieberman's Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to Aids proceeds from a simple question of great importance to millions of people: “Why have some governments responded to AIDS more quickly and more broadly than others?” In answering this question, Lieberman employs a range of methods and engages a range of scholarly literatures dealing with health policy, comparative public policy, and ethnic politics. Because the book addresses “big” issues and bridges conventional divides in political science, we have invited a number of colleagues working broadly in comparative politics to comment on it.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

In 1997, I found myself newly arrived at Oxford University. I was taking a detour from my path to do research in West Africa thanks to a fellowship that funded a year of ancillary training before my fieldwork. Though studying anthropology, I was at St. Antony's College, where Paul Collier's Center for the Study of African Economies is located, and was in the same entering cohort as Collier's now-famous student Dambisa Moyo (assuming I would not be able to remember her first name, she offered, “it sounds kind of like ‘pizza’”).

My thanks to Rafael Alarcón, Edwina Barvosa, and Louis DeSipio for their thoughtful responses to my essay, and to Perspectives on Politics for occasioning this discussion. The respondents each highlight crucial challenges for my argument—but their essays also suggest how I might address those challenges more adequately. I will review the contributions of each writer and sketch the lessons I draw from them in turn.

Political scientists have long rejected the old law and politics dichotomy and recognize instead that law and court decisions are inherently political in numerous ways. Still, courts are not the same as executive and legislative institutions, and law is not simply a synonym for politics or policy. Law and courts are distinct and yet connected to political processes and policy outcomes in complex and nuanced ways. The question for law and courts scholars, then, is how and why do political actors (with seemingly increasing frequency) turn to law and the judiciary to influence public policy, and what are the impacts of infusing law and courts into the US political process? The three recent books under review help to answer these questions.

Evan Lieberman's Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to Aids proceeds from a simple question of great importance to millions of people: “Why have some governments responded to AIDS more quickly and more broadly than others?” In answering this question, Lieberman employs a range of methods and engages a range of scholarly literatures dealing with health policy, comparative public policy, and ethnic politics. Because the book addresses “big” issues and bridges conventional divides in political science, we have invited a number of colleagues working broadly in comparative politics to comment on it.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

The uncertain political status of America's millions of undocumented immigrants and their children has exposed deep and ongoing disagreement about how US citizenship should be accorded to foreign-born persons. I identify the principle of jus temporis, a law of measured calendrical time, that has worked in concert with jus soli and consent to construct citizenship law since the nation's founding. Jus temporis translates measured durations of time such as “time in residence” or “time worked” into entitlement to rights and status. It creates temporal algorithms in which measured calendrical time plus additional variables (e.g., physical presence, education, or behavior) equals consent to citizenship. I explore recent scholarly references to temporal principles and trace the history of how jus temporis was invoked by the nation's first Supreme Court jurisprudence on citizenship and the first Congressional debates about immigration and naturalization. Scholarly convergence on the principle of jus temporis as well as its originalist pedigree imbue this principle with the potential to resolve contemporary disagreements about the rights and status of foreign-born persons in the US.

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. By James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 464p. $35.00.

The book under discussion is James C. Scott's latest contribution to the study of agrarian politics, culture, and society, and to the ways that marginalized communities evade or resist projects of state authority. The book offers a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia, a 2.5 million–kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. It offers a kind of “area study.” It also builds on Scott's earlier work on “hidden transcripts” of subaltern groups and on “seeing like a state.” The book raises many important theoretical questions about research methods and social inquiry, the relationship between political science and anthropology, the nature of states, and of modernity more generally. The book is also deeply relevant to problems of “state-building” and “failed states” in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. As Scott writes, “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes it an anarchist history” (p. x).

In this symposium, I have invited a number of prominent political and social scientists to comment on the book, its historical narrative, and its broader theoretical implications for thinking about power, state failure, state-building, and foreign policy. How does the book shed light on the limits of states and the modes of resistance to state authority? Are there limits, theoretical and normative, to this “anarchist” understanding of governance and the “art of being governed”?

—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

The election of Michelle Bachelet as president of Chile in January 2006 was heralded in the world press as an advancement of women's rights in Chile. Not only did Bachelet's election increase women's representation at the highest levels, but it also raised expectations that Chile would adopt more women-friendly policies as well. Although focused on the years between the democratic transition and the election of Bachelet, Liesl Haas's Feminist Policymaking in Chile speaks volumes to the questions of how and why such representation makes a difference. Although the women's movement and feminist policymaking in Chile have been well mined by gender scholars, Haas provides a different perspective, both in terms of time frame and of theoretical argument. The book is notable for its extensive documentation of the legislative process, church activism, and feminist policymaking in Chile in the posttransition era. This rich description will make it valuable to gender scholars wishing to understand the Chilean case and to Latin Americanists wishing to understand more about gender politics in Chile. But my particular interest, and my focus in this review, concerns what the book tells us about the reasons that feminist policies get adopted in a particular place at a particular point in time.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist. By Jon Elster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 212p. $80.00 cloth, $22.99 paper.

Alexis de Tocqueville is surely one of the most widely cited, discussed, and celebrated political theorists in the world. Jon Elster's book, Alexis de Tocqueville: the First Social Scientist proceeds from a provocative premise: that Tocqueville's major works were lacking in “system” and were “hugely incoherent,” and that Tocqeuville himself “was not a major political thinker” (xi). Elster argues that instead Tocqueville ought to be viewed as a penetrating historical sociologist and an exemplary social scientist who might well be considered the first true social scientist. Elster's argument is important for at least two reasons: first, because it offers a striking and challenging reading of Tocqueville; and second, because it expands on Elster's own contributions in the philosophy of social science, and develops interesting understandings of “causal mechanisms,” methodological individualism, and social explanation more generally. As Elster writes in his Introduction, “the main task of this book is to argue for the relevance of Tocqueville for social science in the twenty-first century (p. 5).” The purpose of this Perspectives symposium is to assess Elster's argument in broad terms. What are the strengths and limits of Elster's reading of Tocqueville? How ought we to assess Elster's understanding of Tocqueville's deficiencies as a “political theorist?” What is the relevance of Tocqueville for contemporary social science? And, most importantly, what are the challenges and possible trajectories facing social science in the twenty-first century, and to what extent does Elster's essay point us in the right direction?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Ever since 1954, when a unanimous Supreme Court declared that education is “a right that must be made available to all on equal terms,” Americans have been debating the meaning of educational equality, how it might be attained, and through what instrumentalities of government. Brown v. Board of Education was arguably the most important Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century, not only because it ended legal segregation in schools but also for incorporating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as a tool to promote racial equality in other aspects of American life. Brown also thrust the federal courts deeply into primary and secondary education and opened the door to further federal intervention in a sphere of government that historically belonged to the states and localities. Debates over federalism, separation of powers, policy alternatives, and the role of government in promoting educational and social equality remain very much alive today as the Obama administration puts forth its education agenda, states struggle with its demands, and Congress reconsiders the contours of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. By James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 464p. $35.00.

The book under discussion is James C. Scott's latest contribution to the study of agrarian politics, culture, and society, and to the ways that marginalized communities evade or resist projects of state authority. The book offers a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia, a 2.5 million–kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. It offers a kind of “area study.” It also builds on Scott's earlier work on “hidden transcripts” of subaltern groups and on “seeing like a state.” The book raises many important theoretical questions about research methods and social inquiry, the relationship between political science and anthropology, the nature of states, and of modernity more generally. The book is also deeply relevant to problems of “state-building” and “failed states” in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. As Scott writes, “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes it an anarchist history” (p. x).

In this symposium, I have invited a number of prominent political and social scientists to comment on the book, its historical narrative, and its broader theoretical implications for thinking about power, state failure, state-building, and foreign policy. How does the book shed light on the limits of states and the modes of resistance to state authority? Are there limits, theoretical and normative, to this “anarchist” understanding of governance and the “art of being governed”?

—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor