The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy

THE SPECTRE OF RACE

The Spectre of Race

How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy

Michael G. Hanchard

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2018 by Michael Hanchard

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to

Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Jacket design by Amanda Weiss

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-17713-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956528

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Adobe Text Pro and Gotham.

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In Memoriam:

Mark Q. Sawyer (January 10, 1972–March 26, 2017)

Que Vaya Bien, Hermano …

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy 1

1    Edward Augustus Freeman and the Dawn of Comparative Politics 19

2    Race Development, Political Development 40

3    Society and Polity, Difference and Inequality 65

4    Racial and Ethno-National Regimes in Liberal Polities 112

5    Conclusion: Reconfiguring Comparative Politics and Democracy 168

Postscript: From Athens to Charlottesville 207

Appendix 217

Notes 225

Bibliography 245

Index 257

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As is the case with most book projects, a community of disparate people helped me along the way. Several former and current students from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania provided invaluable research assistance at different stages of manuscript preparation and development. At the Johns Hopkins University, Lauren Bovard, Casey McNeill, and Katherine Bonil helped with translation, tracking down primary materials, citations, and endnotes. Special thanks goes to Karina Christiansen, primary research assistant from the project’s beginning to its completion. I am grateful for the competence, care, and companionship she provided during this process. At the University of Pennsylvania, Gabriel Salgado and Augusta Irele provided timely assistance in the final stage of manuscript preparation.

Given the range of primary sources and scholarly debates traversed in a project such as this, I am grateful for the helpful suggestions and critiques from colleagues in several disciplines. Colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University provided valuable insights and criticisms at several stages of the manuscript’s development. Special thanks to historians Todd Shephard, Gabe Paquette, Nathan Connolly, Ken Moss, and Sara Berry. Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia of Rutgers University helped me through some of the conceptual stakes in the French case and provided detailed comments on the earliest version of the manuscript. Thanks to Jane Guyer of the anthropology department for her insights into the subfield of political anthropology, and for her abundant wisdom and good humor.

Three anonymous reviewers for Princeton University Press, specialists on Britain, the United States, and classical Athens, helped me avoid several mistakes in my handling of empirics. Several workshops, speaker series, and forums provided an opportunity for feedback on the relationship between the larger claims of the book and available historical evidence. Thanks to Jennifer Brody, director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, Vaughn Rasberry, Grant Parker, and workshop participants in attendance. The Multicultural Center at the University of Santa Barbara and the Center for International Studies at UC Davis provided opportunities to present portions of the manuscript. Thanks to longtime friends and supportive colleagues, Edward Telles and Howard Winant (UCSB), and Kamal Sadiq and Cecelia Lynch (UC Davis) for the opportunity. An early version of the chapter on E.A. Freeman and comparative politics was delivered as part of the W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures in 2014 at the Hutchins Center of Harvard University. Thanks to Henry Louis Gates Jr. for the opportunity to present my work to a larger audience.

Kathleen Thelen of MIT and Robert Vitalis of the University of Pennsylvania provided generous comments on chapter 2 as well as suggestions for situating Freeman within the context of the comparative politics genealogy. Ira Katznelson provided useful suggestions for broadening my argument in early versions of chapters 2 and 3. I am thankful for a close reading by George Reid Andrews at the University of Pittsburgh, who pointed out the connections between the development of a discipline of comparative politics and the development of the discipline of history. Zita Nunes provided helpful suggestions on several drafts of the manuscript and led me to the implications of comparative methodologies in the realm of literature.

Thanks to Abdoulaye Gueye, of the University of Ottowa, for the suggestion that I incorporate some discussion of independent black political organizations and social movements in France after World War II. Stephen Small, sociologist at UC Berkeley, traveling and teaching companion in Brazil and elsewhere, helped clarify the empirics in my interpretation of France and Britain, and as a result made the comparisons across cases sharper and better delineated. Historian Tessie Liu at Northwestern University introduced me to the intense debates within France during the French Revolution about the institution of slavery and colonialism. Her comments on the chapter on difference and polity and additional references for suggested readings helped me understand the layers of complexity in the French case that I was previously unfamiliar with.

My 2014–2015 sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton provided an ideal opportunity to develop this project in an extremely supportive and energizing environment. IAS faculty at the School of Social Science were generous with their time, encouragement, and rigor. Joan Scott and Danielle Allen buoyed my spirit and encouraged me to sharpen the contours of my argument with increased historical nuance of materials on the French and Haitian Revolutions, classical Athens, and the gendered dimensions of racialized dynamics. Didier Fassin provided incisive, probing suggestions and counterarguments. Sophia Rosenfeld and Jennifer Morgan, members of my 2014–2015 cohort, provided detailed suggestions on several chapters of the manuscript in addition their comments within our seminar on Egalitarianisms led by Danielle Allen. Nolan McCarty, corridor neighbor and fellow political scientist, provided generative insights and counterarguments about democracy with respect to the literatures in political science and the US case in particular.

Political theorist Demetria Kasimis’ cautionary suggestions about the complexities of slavery and citizenship in classical Athens after the Persian Wars helped me avoid errors in fact and interpretation. Jill Frank, political theorist at Cornell University, was extraordinarily generous in providing much needed contextualization in my treatment of citizenship in classical Athens. Thanks to you both for your time and expertise.

Robert Heubeck of the Gilman School in Baltimore, thanks for the inspiration. Mitch Duneier has been an extraordinarily generous friend and colleague, beginning with the suggestion that I return to Princeton University Press, my first academic publisher, and reunite with Peter Dougherty, my first editor. Eric Crahan has been an attentive, meticulous editor who, along with one of the anonymous reviewers, convinced me that my book was as much about the history of political inequality in democracy as it was a book about comparative politics.

Thanks to my immediate family, Zita Nunes, Mattias Hanchard, and Jenna Hanchard for their abiding love and support, and my extended family of Nathan Connolly, Shani Mott, and Elijah, London, and Clarke Connolly for making me part of their own.

THE SPECTRE OF RACE

Introduction

HOW DISCRIMINATION HAUNTS WESTERN DEMOCRACY

This book is principally intended for two audiences, one within the discipline of political science, and a broader audience interested in understanding the interrelationship of racism, institutions, and modern politics. One central concern is the importance of comparison as a fundamental endeavor in human deliberation. Another is the implications of comparative analysis for both scholarship and public deliberation about the capacity for people in diverse societies to convene productively and creatively in a political community. Goethe, the great German writer, once proclaimed that idiots compare, his way of contrasting in-depth assessment of a singular event to produce universal meaning with what he considered a superficial gloss on a range of disparate phenomena. Goethe’s proclamation notwithstanding, however, people across the spectrum of human intelligence necessarily engage in some form of comparison as a means to identify an object on its own and to distinguish that object from other objects.

In political science, comparative politics is the field that specializes in identifying, classifying, and distinguishing the myriad forms of political life. Many students of comparative politics trace the origins of the field to Aristotle. He, along with Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Socrates, were among the first students of politics to compare and contrast forms of political community and render judgments about them. Their conclusions had normative implications along with scholarly and analytic ones. Comparisons were also judgments that produced hierarchies of value—in determinations regarding the best form (or forms) of political community and in the distinction between political and social subjects. The ancient philosophers also had a personal stake in protecting their polity from outsiders who, if granted access to citizenship, would lessen its value for the polity’s original citizens and their descendants.

Athenian leadership recognized that democracy had to be nurtured, and it had to be protected from both exogenous and endogenous threats. Foreigners, whether through invasion or peaceful settlement, could negatively impact Athenian civic culture if they grew too powerful in economic and political life. Athens fought off several invasions by outsiders, most notably the Persian Army. Within Athens itself, metics (foreigners), along with Athenian women, were restricted from full participation in the polity. After the fifth-century Greco-Persian Wars, restrictions upon citizenship acquisition were tightened for Athenian women and foreigners. Before these wars, neither foreigners nor women held the right to vote, though they could participate in formal public rituals. After the Persian Wars, autochthony became a requirement for citizenship, even though its premise—that citizens could only be male descendants of original Athenian males who literally sprang from the soil—was entirely mythical. In this sense, the citizenship regime of Athens after the Persian Wars was a gendered, ethno-national regime, with a myth of autochthony (male descendants who were, figuratively, of the soil) as the first order criterion for political membership.

Among the ancients, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato rendered judgments about the capacity for diverse peoples to forge political communities based on their sociocultural priorities and emphases. The views of the ancients on the best form of government and polity were summoned by modern thinkers to justify the importance of culture, education, and positive political socialization in human development, but also to compare and contrast civilizations, societies, and polities and their relative capacities and potential for modern governance. David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Marx, and most famously Thomas Hobbes compared and contrasted various human communities. Hierarchy, however, was comparison’s companion, usually lurking in the background, just a few steps or sentences behind.

Despite the restrictions imposed upon their political participation, metics and Athenian women had a least some political rights, public duties, and responsibilities. The enslaved had none. Slavery was rationalized as a necessary institution that allowed citizens to fully participate in civic life without material constraints. Slavery, according to its proponents, made Athenian democracy practicable.

The complexities of Athenian democracy, citizenship, and civic culture require far more detail and expertise than this author can provide, and in any case, are not the focus of this book. Nevertheless, important lessons can be extracted and ultimately, abstracted, from these facts of Athenian citizenship and democratic practice before and after the Greco-Persian wars; these lessons are relevant not only for the book but for a better understanding of the relationship between the practice of democracy and political inequality in the contemporary world. Despite the absence of historical, cultural, and social continuities between the demos of classical Athens and contemporary democratic polities, there are nevertheless certain political continuities. Gender, nation ethnicity, and nationality mattered in the constitution of Athenian citizenship and voting rights. Citizenship, like democracy itself, was not static, but underwent permutations and transformations in moments of crisis, whether in the city-states of the ancient world now associated with the West or in the nation-states of the contemporary world system.

Part of my contention is that autochthony, designed to naturalize and restrict membership in the Athenian polity, became a prototypical form of differentiation intended to rationalize limitations upon citizenship or formal membership in the political community. This political mythology served to naturalize citizenship, making it inaccessible to those who could not prove that they descended from Athenian soil. Additionally, since citizenship descent was patrilineal, a woman, even one descended from autochthonous parents, could not become a citizen. Thus, a law designed to exclude male foreigners from acquiring and deploying citizenship consequentially excluded women who were actually (rather than figuratively) born in Athens. In this sense, autochthonous criteria for political membership also served as a form of immigration policy that excluded the majority of non-Athenians from citizenship after 451 BC.

In sum, although the Athenian polity was constituted by its citizens, Athenian society (to the extent it could be considered a society in any contemporary sense) contained not only citizens, but foreigners, women, and slaves (noncitizens). Given the disparity between the number of polity members and the number of social subjects, Athenian elites were faced with a series of questions with political import that resonate in the contemporary world: How should democratically empowered citizens interact with members of their society who are not citizens, namely foreigners, minorities (both women and men), and in some (not all) instances, women? How does a democratic polity (namely, relations between government and the governed that are premised upon democratic principles) exist within a society that is not founded upon democratic principles, but upon hierarchies? Must its laws, norms, and rules of exclusion be deliberated upon by the excluded, as well as those included, in the demos, for those laws to be truly democratic? In ancient Athens as well as in modern political communities of Western nation-states, groups of people were excluded from political participation through law, normative reprobation and, when necessary, coercion. The legal, juridical, and institutional empowerment of citizens has been dynamically related to limiting second class citizens or prohibiting noncitizens from access to citizenship, as well as certain key economic and political institutions. In classical Athens, no less than in contemporary nation-states founded upon democratic principles, democratic institutions and practices coexist with antidemocratic ones.

An inquiry into the history of politics—any politics—requires an understanding of the practices of human actors and the institutions they seek to forge or dismantle, not just comprehension of the ideas and concepts that inspired or revolted them. Part of this book’s mission is to represent democracy not only as a concept and ideal, but as a practice, a particular combination of norms, institutions, and actors. One of the key questions this book explores is how the practice of democracy produces—and is affected by—political inequality.

Democratic institutions and practices of classical Athens were often in tension with tyrannical, oligarchic, and imperial tendencies within its polity. Athenian democracy did not exist in a bubble, but in a larger geopolitical context with internal and external threats to its existence. Thus, democracy has not evolved in isolation, but in relation to other forms of social organization and administration that have often been fundamentally unequal, but nonetheless part of the same social ecology. The Athenian polis relied heavily upon slave labor for citizen subsistence and wealth. Territorial expansion and subjugation of non-Athenian populations (what we would now refer to as colonization), along with the threat of invasion, also influenced how democracy and, most importantly, differential citizenship regimes developed. The most robust, long-standing democratic polities in the contemporary world—France, Britain, and the United States—have been housed in societies that have profited from slave labor, empire, and colonialism.

A fuller appreciation of the legacy of the Athenian democratic polis in contemporary democratic polities requires the recognition of the polyarchic character of ancient Athens as well as the contemporary societies categorized as liberal democratic polities. Common to both is how emphasis on distinctions and variations in human collectivities were rendered politically salient. A core concern of this book is how difference, figured as race, was rendered politically salient in modern politics.

As sociologists have reminded us, race, like power, is a relational concept. A so-called race is invariably defined in distinction to other presumed races. Where racial reasoning and the practice of comparison have combined in modern politics is in the rendering of judgments about the relative merits of groups of people distinguished by race, and subsequently, through the codification of categories and the attempt at regulation of populations, especially their interactions. In essence, apartheid and other forms of segregation can be boiled down to this more abstract formulation. Comparison, judgment, codification, hierarchy, and ultimately, inequality are the keywords that help characterize the process and relationship between the race construct, politics, and institutions in modernity.

In a more dynamic understanding of the relationship between democratic and nondemocratic institutions in societies with democratic polities, we can also explore how those excluded from citizenship in both ancient and modern eras sought and in some cases demanded participation in the democratic polities around them, or alternatively, sought to create polities of their own. Political and economic exclusion is often manifested in laws, norms, and coercive sanctions that delimited or outright prohibited noncitizen populations (slaves, women, serfs, and peasants among them) from participating in formal civic life. The combination of formal and informal institutions designed to limit political participation of the excluded can be conceptualized as mechanisms or institutions of political inequality.

Most contemporary scholarship on inequality has focused on economic manifestations and disparities in life expectancy, health care, education, and stress-related diseases. Known as the social question in the 18th century in the aftermath of the French and US revolutions, the roots of social inequality are often traced to the economic sphere. While not discounting the economic and material sources of social inequality, many aspects of social inequality have political roots. Gendered disparities are perhaps the most obvious manifestations of inequality. Neither the socially constituted character of gender roles, and certainly not nature, can explain why women, across the ages and spaces, have been subordinated in economic, social, and material relations. The ability to own property and access to wealth, education, and suffrage have their origins in law and custom that have privileged males in most societies.

Political and social inequality are often dynamically related, insofar as exclusionary and inclusionary criteria for citizenship formation and participation invariably emanate from the same source: state power. Yet one of the core lessons of this book is that political inequality is not simply an epiphenomenal feature of social and economic inequality. Instead, political inequality is often the result of deliberate decisions to exclude specific groups from participation in a polity and to deny their access to the same social and economic opportunities afforded to members of dominant groups. Whether by gender, social class, ethno-nationality, religion, or other forms of distinction, the administration and management of political inequality has varied by society and regime, and it has been based upon distinct criteria depending upon the marginalized groups in question and their demands for inclusion.

Racial, gendered, religious, and ethno-national chauvinism are among the forms of evaluative differentiation which, when embedded in political institutions, provide an interpretive means for governments to codify their preferences in law, edicts, and constitutions that then regulate people and their interactions. Moreover, these forms of differentiation, functioning as informal and formal institutions, have impacted the practice of democracy in three Western polities in particular: France, Britain, and the United States. Part of my contention in this book is that such forms of political inequality are not anomalous features of certain Western polities, but rather are the modern manifestations of the combination of democracy, difference, and inequality first invented and implemented in classical Athens.

The Race Concept, Institutions, and Politics

One of the claims in this book is that the race concept became the modern equivalent of the Athenian myth of autochthony in many Western and Western-influenced nation-states. Athenian autochthony and the race concept both emphasize a mythology of origins. In the realm of modern politics, the race concept enabled political actors to project the need for homogeneity among a citizen populace, making race an organizing principle for governments and popular movements alike.

A key distinguishing feature of the race concept’s application within the nation-state system in modernity was its portability and not, as in the case of the ancient idea of autochthony, its sedentariness. Autochthony linked a specific territory to a particular set of rights. Nations, or more precisely, nationalities, were identified with a particular territory, but also by traditions, culture, and language, all portable. By the 19th century, race became a marker of portability as well as origins. An Anglo-Saxon could be an Anglo-Saxon whether they resided in Saxony or not. A Negro was a descendant from Africa, even though there is no Negroland in Africa (or anywhere else) and human species originated in Africa.

Where races were once treated as nations—the terms were often used interchangeably—through a combination of language, culture, territorial fixity (the land of …), and often associations of kinship (blood), the race concept grew detached from territory to denote populations regardless of their location in the world, with an emphasis on appearance (phenotypical and somatic traits).

For those who believed in a world organized by races and by implication, polygenesis, populations displayed their alleged racial characteristics wherever they appeared. They believed superior races such as the Teutonic or Aryan were predestined to rule, especially in the presence of lesser races, whether they were in Germany, England, the United States, or Africa and South America. Thus, an Italian, for example, determined through racist judgment to be of inferior stock, was doomed to either outright exclusion or circumscribed citizenship status in countries other than Italy, especially if the Italian lived among races judged to be his or her so-called racial superior.

Taken to its extreme, the belief in a world racial order articulated by the Third Reich, in its propaganda and prosecution of war domestically and internationally, constituted a threat to the very idea of a nation-state system with discrete entities composed of sovereign states, national populations, and territory. Hannah Arendt identified the threat that race-thinking posed not only for the internal composition of an individual nation-state, but of the nation-state system as a whole: Racism deliberately cut across all national boundaries, whether defined by geographical, linguistic, traditional or any other standards, and denied national-political existence as such.¹ Arendt’s conclusion about the spectre of race in Western politics urges readers to consider the relationship between race-thinking, modernity, and politics more broadly, not as a fascist anomaly but as constituting the body politic of Western nation-states.

The emergence of fascism—and the Third Reich its most virulent manifestation—is generally considered to one of the major crises in Western politics in the 20th century and a fundamental crisis of political modernity. The brutal emphasis on racial singularity in Nazi politics and society threatened the very idea of national populations created from a diversity of peoples. If not contained, the Nazis’ ruthless quest for racial homogeneity could have had disastrous consequences for minority populations the world over.

Hannah Arendt’s broader commentary on the spectre of race and racism in Europe, however, warns against treating Nazi policy as the only case of conjoining racism to state power in Europe. Other nation-states, even Allied ones, utilized state power to formulate and implement policies designed to differentiate populations according to racial and ethno-national criteria in their own societies, and in places under their territorial dominion (colonies, protectorates, or even other nation-states). Indeed, as this book will demonstrate, many Western democratic nation-states, as well as states in Latin America and Asia, devised racial and ethno-national regimes that combined selective immigration controls, literacy, birth, and wealth requirements designed to limit the access of specific groups to political life.

Upon close examination, traces of the Athenian practice of combining ethnos (naturalized political membership) with democracy (a set of institutions and practices) can be found in the laws of the most prominent democratic societies. In these societies, racial and ethno-national hierarchy provided the rationalization for the institutionalization of political inequality, based on the premise that racially and ethno-nationally divergent groups could not share the same state.

There is a dearth of comparative politics research on the role of ethno-national and racial subordination in the formation of Western polities, ideas, and practices of citizenship. There are several notable exceptions to this tendency.² These exceptional works notwithstanding, however, laypersons and specialists alike could be forgiven for assuming that the relationship between racial and ethno-national hierarchy and political institutions has never been central to the study of comparative politics. And yet, as I will demonstrate, the earliest developments in the creation of a comparative politics method in the modern era were devoted to marshaling evidence proving that racial and ethno-national hierarchy was central to modern political development and institutions.

A dust encrusted treasure chest of the field and discipline’s history begs to be dusted off by students of comparative politics. Its lid has barely been lifted since the last quarter of the 19th century, more than three generations removed from the field’s formal founding in the 1950s. Edward Augustus Freeman, Oxford historian and Euro-Aryan advocate, devised the first methodology for the comparative study of ancient and modern political institutions, in a series of 1873 lectures titled Comparative Politics.

In Freeman’s view of politics both modern and ancient, the idea of race was central to political life; to the formation of a polis, commonwealth, and institutions; and ultimately, to the conjuncture of nation and state. The power of race lay not in its biological provenance, but in commonly held beliefs and assumptions shared by groups of people who join to form political communities. Freeman’s influence is evident in the development of seminars and Ph.D. programs devoted to the study of political institutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in the scholarship and policy recommendations of Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States.

For Freeman and his interlocutors, the race concept—alternating between historical and biological definitions—was central to understanding the development of political institutions and their variations. Freeman, like the Johns Hopkins University historian Herbert Baxter Adams, believed that presumed racial origin and nationality were fundamental factors in assessing group prospects for the development of a modern political community and ultimately, the modern state. Race, then, was a key variable in understanding political modernity, the capacity for self-rule, and institutional developments among the world’s populations. Racial homogeneity was considered central to political development and democracy. As comparativists, Freeman, Baxter Adams, and other members of the Teutonic or Euro-Aryan school believed that racial difference enabled students of comparative politics to identify correlations, if not draw inferences, between populations and their political development.

The first formal seminar at a US research institution devoted to what was then referred to as historical and political science, founded and taught by Johns Hopkins University professor Herbert Baxter Adams, combined an emphasis on the development of research methodologies for the examination of political and social institutions, with an empirical focus on the administration and management of subordinate, often servile, populations. The Teutonist explanation of differences in the capacity of distinct populations to produce democratic political communities and institutions can be understood as a midway point between biologically determinist arguments and culture-based explanations of distinctions among the political cultures of the modern world.

Up to now, there is no disciplinary or field account of these developments in the study of comparative politics on the cusp of the 19th and 20th century. Among several objectives in this book is to connect comparative politics’ preprofessional past to the official narrative of its formation and subsequent development. Common to the 19th century and mid–20th century discussions about comparative politics was a core preoccupation: how could distinct peoples with varying capacities for self-governance participate in the same polity? A cursory examination of political events in the second decade of the 21st century will reveal to the interested observer that this question is a recurrent one, on the minds of state and nonstate actors throughout the West and other parts of the world.

Three Iterations of a Comparative Politics Discipline

This book provides the first assessment of comparative methodologies for the study of politics that encompasses the neglected period of 19th century innovation. With a broader, more historically sensitive view of comparative politics as method and field, this study has three identifiable moments or iterations of a comparative politics discipline: the late 19th century, the mid–20th century, and the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries. As will be detailed across several chapters, comparative politics’ preprofessional past has continued relevance for the study of comparative politics. In all three eras, nationalism, ethnicity, xenophobia, migration, and the rights of minority groups figured prominently in world politics, if not so prominently on the research agendas of leading practitioners of the field.

The book’s chapters account for the three iterations of comparative politics across these epochs. The first iteration in the development of a method for the comparative study of politics was part of a broader movement among linguists and students of comparative literature, anthropology, and the natural sciences in the late 19th century, which explored the possibilities for cross-spatial and cross-temporal comparison. By the late 19th century, scholars across the social sciences and humanities began devising and deploying what were then considered more scientific approaches to the study of human phenomena across space and time. In this prehistorical era, students of comparative politics were not motivated by professional dictates; comparativists could not be members of a profession (political science) that did not yet exist. Research questions (however spurious) drove methods, not the other way around. Perceived crises and problems, whether in the study of language, a people, a bureaucracy, law or set of norms, prompted the development of comparative studies. In this sense, a discipline of comparative politics predated the field of comparative politics, as well as the profession of political science.

The second iteration in the history of comparative politics is the inaugural moment of formal recognition and legitimation of the field of comparative politics within the discipline of political science. Comparativists in political science appropriated concepts, methods, and scholarly literature from history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology as the basis for a seemingly new field of concentration. The Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Committee on Comparative Politics was founded in 1955 at a moment when political scientists had direct experience with world war, the subsequent Cold War, and the rise of nationalism in the areas of the world that were once under Western colonial domination. Along with social scientists from other disciplines, the committee became a pivotal cross-disciplinary research nucleus known as the politics of the developing areas. The SSRC initiative was important not only for its legitimation of a new field, but in its material support for affiliated research initiatives and the institutionalization of core thematic interests in civic foundations and governmental agencies. Governmental agencies would prove critical in the funding of regional specialization (area studies) and language training for social scientists of the era who were interested in conducting research in the so-called developing areas. During this epoch, statecraft overlapped significantly with scholarly trends.

Political scientists like Sidney Verba and Gabriel Almond recognized the need for new concepts and approaches to explain political phenomena that were unrecognizable to them in under-studied parts of the world, and the need to rid political science and comparative politics in particular of Eurocentric and Anglo-American biases. By the mid–20th century, race all but disappeared as a key theme in the study of comparative politics, despite the fact that presumed racial or ethno-national distinction was acknowledged as a key organizing principle for politics by several prominent political scientists well into the first two decades of the 20th century. Although traces of racial reasoning found their way into some cultural explanations of political behavior in both anthropology and political science, biological and essentialist understandings of race were largely absent