Polity’s “Classics Revisited” provides a forum to reflect on whether books revered in the discipline raise questions and advance interventions that still resonate with current concerns. Sidestepping the “canon wars,” the aim has been to forge a space for a more generative reconsideration of a priori assumptions about the scope and content of what political science is, what it has and could do. Most of the “classics” featured to date required no justification or much of an introduction. Their impact within the discipline, on public discourse, and even popular culture is self-evident—their titles are instantly recognizable, and their authors have become synonymous with these texts, regardless of howmany others they have written. This “Classics Revisited” is different. Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice (hereafter W&J), like the other books Polity has selected, was certainly path-breaking. In this volume Pitkin took account of the work of political science and the unique role political theory has within and beyond it. “Political theory [speaks] to a polity in crisis,” she explained. The crisis she confronted was how to address the “modern condition” characterized by alienation
Polity的《经典再访》提供了一个论坛，反思该学科中受人尊敬的书籍是否提出了问题，并推进了仍能引起当前关注的干预措施。撇开“经典之战”不谈，其目的是创造一个空间，对政治学的范围和内容、它已经做了什么以及可以做什么的先验假设进行更具创造性的重新思考。迄今为止，大多数“经典”都不需要任何理据或大量介绍。它们在学科、公共话语甚至流行文化中的影响是不言而喻的——它们的标题很容易被识别，它们的作者已经成为这些文本的代名词，无论他们写了多少其他文本。这次的“经典再访”是不同的。汉娜·皮特金（Hanna Pitkin）的《维特根斯坦与正义》（Wittgenstein and Justice，以下简称W&J），就像Polity选择的其他书籍一样，无疑是一本开创性的书。在这本书中，皮特金考虑了政治学的工作以及政治理论在其内外的独特作用。她解释道：“政治理论（讲述）了一个处于危机中的政体。”。她面临的危机是如何应对以异化为特征的“现代条件”
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In rereading Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J) fifty years after it was first published, I am awestruck by the author’s courage in pursuing what seemed important to her, regardless of the risks entailed in that project. Her courage has been rewarding for many of us for it has opened the possibility of introducing a Wittgensteinian sensibility into political theory, asking its practitioners to learn to see—not what was hidden, but what was right before their eyes. The provocation she offeredwas not that of asking for new answers to alreadywell-known questions, say, about the origin of the state, but to ask, what were the questions that reallymattered and to whom?At the same time, there is the imperceptible force of the conventional formulations thatmanage to find a place almost inadvertently in her text when Pitkin applies some of her insights to concepts of justice, or fairness, or, for that matter, to the very notion of the political. We see that Wittgenstein’s anguish over the likely failure of philosophy to “shew the fly a way out of the fly-bottle” is not easy to assuage. These issues continue to pose formidable problems for understanding academic and public discourse on contemporary politics. In this essay I propose to show the difficulty of the task Pitkin sets herself through an analysis of a limited region of her thought, viz., what she calls “conceptual puzzlement,”where she brings some of themost incisive insights fromWittgenstein to bear on political theory. However, before I go into the substantive issues, I want to signal how important is the form of Philosophical Investigations (herewith PI) for me; the fact that Wittgenstein conceives of PI as a kind of album; and that instead of a straightforward argument, the text leads us astray through the voice of temptation
汉娜·皮特金（Hanna Pitkin）的《维特根斯坦与正义》（Wittgenstein and Justice，W&J）在首次出版50年后重读，我对作者不顾该项目带来的风险，追求对她来说似乎重要的东西的勇气感到敬畏。她的勇气对我们许多人来说都是值得的，因为它开启了将维特根斯坦式的感性引入政治理论的可能性，要求其实践者学会看到——不是隐藏的东西，而是眼前的东西。她提出的挑衅并不是对所有已知的问题提出新的答案，比如关于国家起源的问题，而是问，什么是真正重要的问题，对谁来说？与此同时，当皮特金将她的一些见解应用于正义或公平的概念，或者就这一点而言，应用于政治的概念时，传统公式的力量几乎不经意地在她的文本中找到了一席之地。我们看到，维特根斯坦对哲学可能未能“为苍蝇指明一条走出苍蝇瓶的路”的痛苦并不容易缓解。这些问题继续给理解当代政治的学术和公共话语带来巨大问题。在这篇文章中，我建议通过对皮特金思想的一个有限区域的分析，即她所说的“概念困惑”，来展示皮特金为自己设定的任务的困难，她将维特根斯坦的一些最深刻的见解带到了政治理论上。然而，在我进入实质性问题之前，我想表明哲学研究的形式对我来说是多么重要；事实上，维特根斯坦认为PI是一种专辑；文本并不是一个直截了当的论点，而是通过诱惑的声音将我们引入歧途
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“It is by no means obvious that someone interested in politics and society needs to concern himself with philosophy; nor that, in particular, he has anything to learn from an obscure, misanthropic, enigmatic philosopher like Ludwig Wittgenstein, who never wrote about such topics at all.” So begins Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J). Pitkin’s opening line spoke—and continues to speak—to the difficulty in identifying the relevance and potential significance ofWittgenstein’s work for a social science audience. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is not only lacking in direct remarks on politics or morality, it seems almost negatively predisposed towards normative commentary of any kind. His famous claim that philosophy should only describe things as they are, not produce explanatory theses about them, would seem to foreclose the very idea of creating political and social theories that take his work as their departure point. Perhaps more worrisome, writes Pitkin, is that “in trying to make his ideas accessible, lucid, and systematic, I may make their real content and significance inaccessible.” Worse than failing to succeed, the book could “betray its own cause.” Wittgenstein’s penchant for raising endless questions where Pitkin’s reader seeks answers presents a problem of authorial style that cannot be easily overcome. Interpretive projects that seek to distill his main philosophical ideas, especially for a non-philosophical audience, do so at the real risk of significant distortion.
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ittgenstein and Justice (W&J) changed the trajectory of my scholarship. I initially came across W&J while working on an empirical dissertation on legal interest groups and how the perception of their relationships with key actors altered their advocacy strategies. I could not determine whether this change was a result of those key actors’ “power” or “influence.” The interest groups literature conflates the two concepts. Influence is power, especially in Robert Dahl’s understanding of it, i.e., getting others to do things that they would not do otherwise. This cannot be right. If “influence” is just “power” why the need for two words? I did what I was trained to do—read more of the literature. As I later came to understand, the literature itself was the source of my confusion. Part of the reason for this is because of something that Colin Bird calls “scholasticism”: the tendency to privilege certain thinkers and beliefs. Bird captures the problem well: “we stand as much in the shadow as on the shoulders of these giants; the dazzling light they cast in some directions may artificially darken other areas and lend premature credence to assumptions that deserve closer scrutiny.” Dahl, Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes, and Foucault are titans in the power literature, but their understanding of power did nothing to address my concerns. Their ideas actually made the problem
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I had never heard of either Hanna Pitkin orWittgenstein and Justice until Linda Zerilli mentioned the book to me some time in the mid-2010s. Or so I thought. But then I noticed that Stanley Cavell singles the book out in the preface to his masterpiece The Claim of Reason, which I have been reading and rereading for years. There is no way I could have missed the reference every time I looked at that preface. Why didn’t I immediately rush out to read Pitkin’s book? If not in the 1990s, when I was first immersing myself in Wittgenstein and Cavell, then at least in the early 2010s when I was beginning to write Revolution of the Ordinary? I still have no answer. In one way, my failure to pick up Pitkin’s book is not surprising: I am a literary critic, not a political theorist. In another way, it’s astonishing that I somehowmanaged to avoid Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J) entirely for so many years. For now that I finally have read the book, I realize that fifty years ago Pitkin embarked on exactly the same kind of project that I took up in Revolution of the Ordinary. Her subtitle isOn the Significance of LudwigWittgenstein for Social and Political Thought. My subtitle isLiterary Studies afterWittgenstein, Austin, andCavell. Pitkin sets out to show other political theorists that ordinary language philosophy, which she understands as Wittgenstein’s late philosophy as analyzed and developed by Stanley Cavell, could have a transformative effect on her own discipline. In the same way, I begin Revolution of the Ordinary by declaring that ordinary language philosophy,
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Wittgenstein’s work has been mobilized in recent decades to address questions of justice and politics, and in this respect Hanna Pitkin’s 1972 book Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J) was indeed pioneering, the first to explore explicitly the political potential of reading Wittgenstein. What is striking today is how W&J remains one of the most illuminating and deep readings of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Pitkin is among those who have experienced the power of ordinary language philosophy, of the examination of the actual uses of language, in J.L. Austin’s words, “what we should say when . . .” In her preface, she evokes her “passionate love of words as such,” that is to say, of the sensitive reality of words, their aspects and appearances, “the sheer delight in tracing the individual contours of meanings.” This sensitivity to language as it is pronounced by a human voice, Pitkin evokes it as a milieu: “perhaps only someone with a multilingual and multicultural childhood like mine, out of a milieu compounded of psychoanalysis, Marxist humanism, and Jewish humor, can take towords in quite this way.” This sensibility to “the touch of words” is something she shares with Stanley Cavell. Pitkin manages to highlight the power of Wittgenstein’s simple idea that language matters: “the
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This essay focuses on Hanna Pitkin’s understanding of what was at stake for politics and theory in her book on ordinary language philosophy, Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J). It does so by contrasting her preface to the first edition, in 1972, to the preface she wrote for the second edition in 1993, both of which I then compare to Toni Morrison’s 1992 preface to Playing in the Dark. Why Morrison? Morrison’s preface is built around a 1975 novel, The Words to Say It by Maria Cardinale. Her novel exemplifies Pitkin’s claim that ordinary language philosophy and psychoanalytic practice are deeply connected, but Morrison also pushes us beyond Pitkin to consider race and what Morrison called the “word-work” of her own creative fiction-making. By focusing on the novel’s racial subtext, Morrison’s preface presses the fact of racialized social division on Pitkin’s Wittgensteinian idea that ordinary language is a home to return to. Still, Morrison invokes the idea of “shareable language,” and the transformational possibilities in the word-work of truth-telling, in ways that suggest the resonance— and potential extensions—of Pitkin’s 1993 re-imagining of politics and theory.
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In Republic 8–9, Socrates explains how the kallipolis develops into a series of flawed regimes. Each regime is said to have a corresponding soul type; these souls are described as a lineage of fathers and sons. Socrates, then, narrates not only a political story, but what is in effect a multigenerational family saga: the story of a moral decline and fall over the course of five generations, set amidst political turmoil and revolution, covering roughly a century of narrative ground from its start in tragicomedy to its end in disaster. What are the implications of this choice to convey the change from kallipolis to tyranny through such an emotionally charged narrative? As a hybrid of generic conventions, the family saga suggests Plato’s view that existing cultural models were insufficient for understanding and reacting to constitutional breakdown. I consider two accounts Socrates offers for the relationship between his family and political narratives, discussing the interpretive difficulties raised by each, and proposing that these difficulties oblige the reader to attend closely to the details of character and plot in Socrates’s story. I treat the family saga less as an explanation of constitutional breakdown than as an affective model that attempts to make such a breakdown emotionally vivid—one that is nevertheless consistent with the Republic’s strict limits on imitative poetry. Finally, I consider the kinds of political action that the family saga might motivate in the Republic’s readers, under three sets of assumptions about Plato’s attitudes toward Athenian democracy and the kallipolis.
{"title":"Plato the Novelist: The Family Saga in Republic 8–9","authors":"Robert Goodman","doi":"10.1086/725238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725238","url":null,"abstract":"In Republic 8–9, Socrates explains how the kallipolis develops into a series of flawed regimes. Each regime is said to have a corresponding soul type; these souls are described as a lineage of fathers and sons. Socrates, then, narrates not only a political story, but what is in effect a multigenerational family saga: the story of a moral decline and fall over the course of five generations, set amidst political turmoil and revolution, covering roughly a century of narrative ground from its start in tragicomedy to its end in disaster. What are the implications of this choice to convey the change from kallipolis to tyranny through such an emotionally charged narrative? As a hybrid of generic conventions, the family saga suggests Plato’s view that existing cultural models were insufficient for understanding and reacting to constitutional breakdown. I consider two accounts Socrates offers for the relationship between his family and political narratives, discussing the interpretive difficulties raised by each, and proposing that these difficulties oblige the reader to attend closely to the details of character and plot in Socrates’s story. I treat the family saga less as an explanation of constitutional breakdown than as an affective model that attempts to make such a breakdown emotionally vivid—one that is nevertheless consistent with the Republic’s strict limits on imitative poetry. Finally, I consider the kinds of political action that the family saga might motivate in the Republic’s readers, under three sets of assumptions about Plato’s attitudes toward Athenian democracy and the kallipolis.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"55 1","pages":"519 - 543"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42083563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
By the final weeks of the 2022 election campaign, there was a clear consensus among pundits and political analysts that Democrats were likely to experience a shellacking in the midterm elections, especially in the House of Representatives. Republican leaders and strategists were confident that a “red wave” or even a “red tsunami” was approaching. Even more objective observers such as Chuck Todd and Mark Murray of NBC News believed that a number of indicators were clearly pointing toward large GOP gains in the House, the most prominent being President Biden’s poor approval rating, which had been stuck in the low-forties for months. While many political observers expected Joe Biden’s poor approval rating to result in big Republican gains in the 2022 election, historically, presidential approval has not been a very accurate predictor of midterm seat swing. For the nineteen midterm elections between 1946 and 2018, the correlation of net presidential approval (approval-disapproval) with House seat swing was a rather modest .66 while the correlation with Senate seat swing was a very weak .36. Presidential approval explained only 44% of the variation in House seat swing and only 13% of the variation in Senate seat swing. One indicator that has been shown to produce more accurate forecasts of both House and Senate seat swing than presidential approval is the generic ballot—a question in which voters are asked which party they plan to vote for without providing names of individual House or Senate candidates. By combining the results of generic ballot polling with the number of House or Senate seats that the president’s
{"title":"The Generic Ballot Model and the 2022 Midterm Election","authors":"A. Abramowitz","doi":"10.1086/725239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725239","url":null,"abstract":"By the final weeks of the 2022 election campaign, there was a clear consensus among pundits and political analysts that Democrats were likely to experience a shellacking in the midterm elections, especially in the House of Representatives. Republican leaders and strategists were confident that a “red wave” or even a “red tsunami” was approaching. Even more objective observers such as Chuck Todd and Mark Murray of NBC News believed that a number of indicators were clearly pointing toward large GOP gains in the House, the most prominent being President Biden’s poor approval rating, which had been stuck in the low-forties for months. While many political observers expected Joe Biden’s poor approval rating to result in big Republican gains in the 2022 election, historically, presidential approval has not been a very accurate predictor of midterm seat swing. For the nineteen midterm elections between 1946 and 2018, the correlation of net presidential approval (approval-disapproval) with House seat swing was a rather modest .66 while the correlation with Senate seat swing was a very weak .36. Presidential approval explained only 44% of the variation in House seat swing and only 13% of the variation in Senate seat swing. One indicator that has been shown to produce more accurate forecasts of both House and Senate seat swing than presidential approval is the generic ballot—a question in which voters are asked which party they plan to vote for without providing names of individual House or Senate candidates. By combining the results of generic ballot polling with the number of House or Senate seats that the president’s","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":"121 ","pages":"633 - 637"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41283716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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