When American economist/sociologist Jeremy Rifkin contended a decade and a half ago that the European Dream was “eclipsing” the American Dream, he added a warning: Agreeing with numerous other analysts, he identified a European “immigrant dilemma” which might impair the dream and even “undo” Europeanization (Rifkin 2004: 247, 250).

“Innocent lives” would be put at risk, Theresa May, then UK Home Secretary, told the House of Commons in January 2015, unless new legislation would give the security agencies “the capabilities they need” in the surveillance of email, social media, and other communications data (May 2015a). Her statement came one week after the terrorist attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, which had evoked worldwide solidarity with the attacked (“Je suis Charlie”). In the face (...) of “such threats” to the United Kingdom, May reaffirmed five months later, there was a “duty” to ensure that security services had the powers they needed “to keep us safe” (May 2015b). (shrink)

In the concluding part of Chap. 10.1007/978-981-13-5928-6_4, this book discussed sustained corporate campaigns for discrediting scientific evidence by spreading disinformation, propelled in the United States by business lobby groups’, think tanks’ and individual scholars’ deep-seated aversion against restrictions of any kind to free-market capitalism. One prominent instance the chapter referred to was planetary warming and its impact on climate change.

Maintaining or changing their ways in a fundamental, even vital sense: That is the challenge confronting a family of “Friends” (commonly referred to as Quakers) during the American Civil War in the 1956 William Wyler movie Friendly Persuasion. Starring Dorothy McGuire and Gary Cooper, the film stands out on several counts, all of which are notable, even if not all were benign.

As if palpable tendencies toward mendocracy in the United States and the United Kingdom were not enough, a World Bank inequality specialist attested to the former country that it was sliding from democracy toward “plutocracy”, for it “empower[s] the rich politically to a much greater extent than the middle class or the poor” (Milanovic 2016: 194, 199). Nota bene, this was written before Donald Trump’s cabinet assumed office.

“I stand here to plead for the study of politics in the terms of history”, Harold J. Laski affirmed in his 1926 inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Nothing in political studies, he went on to argue, was “rightly understood save as it is illustrated by the process of its development”. And he compared the uncertain future to “a harbor which ever recedes” as men advance, using readings of history as their chart in sailing to (...) that retreating port (Laski 1939: 35, 37, 38). (shrink)

During the 1980s and 1990s, a neo-liberal (actually, largely laissez-faire, or “Manchester”-liberal) discourse bent on cutting welfare expenditures and government supervision of the capitalist economy became increasingly hegemonic. Under its impact, government and market players alike pushed for the realization of recipes aimed at “slimming down” the role of states.

In her early (1958) work on the domains of man’s activities, famously entitled The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt focused on three modes of active (as contrasted with contemplative) human life: Labor, which she defined as necessary for biological survival; work, which Arendt saw as needed to create man’s collective artificial environment; and, most important to her, action—action proper, equal to human freedom and exercised as associated activity in the political, that is, the public, sphere:Such—in the highest sense—human activity is, of (...) course, most fundamentally endangered when, as Arendt had earlier analyzed in her Origins of Totalitarianism, ideologically stipulated inhuman “laws” of Nature or History are executed on mankind by total regimes, whose terror forces the subjects together by a “band of iron”, eradicating their capacity to act freely. Unrealistically, however, in Arendt’s understanding that capacity is already corrupted when economic or social questions—issues relating to the spheres of work and labor, in other words—intrude into “authentic” politics. (shrink)

Sociologist Amitai Etzioni has noted that, in assuming the role of public intellectual, a scholar may be no less immune than any other person against the temptation to emotionalize or to simplify. He or she, too, runs the danger of seeking to “ingratiate” himself or herself either to “governing elites” or to the public (Etzioni 2010: 654).

In the Toronto Star November 4, 2016, issue, the daily’s Washington Bureau Chief, Daniel Dale, published a fact-checked list of 560 false claims uttered or tweeted by Donald J. Trump during his presidential campaign in the six weeks between September 15 and October 30 of that year. Star reporter Tanya Talaga added an attempt at examining the falsehoods for patterns (Dale and Talaga 2016). According to the list, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed, for instance, that.

“A neglect of the citizen”: No less was attested to political science in its present state by 2009 Economics Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom. During an interview, she illustrated her criticism with the observation that once, while waiting at a meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), she had been asked why she was reading a book on peasants. Political science, she had been reminded, “was about presidents, parties, and Congress” (Toonen 2010: 197).

This book is the first comprehensive study to respond to the ongoing debates on political sciences’ fragmentation, doubtful relevance, and disconnect with the larger public. It explores the implications of the argument that political science ought to become more topic-driven, more relevant and more comprehensible for "lay" audiences. Consequences would include evolving a culture of public engagement, challenging tendencies toward liars’ rule, and emphasizing the role of “large” themes in academic education and research, the latter being identified as those areas (...) where severe democratic erosion is occurring – such as escalating income and wealth disparities pushing democracy towards plutocracy, ubiquitous change triggering insecurity and aggression, racist prejudice polarizing societies, and counter-terrorism strategies subverting civil liberties. Political science needs to address these pressing problems ahead of other issues by in-depth research and broadly accessible public narratives, including solution-orientated normative notions. This need provides the final justification for evolving a discipline where problems would take priority over methods and public relevance over sophisticated specialization. (shrink)

American Political Science Association (APSA) presidential addresses were once christened “barometers of yearning and hope” by SUNY political scientist John Gunnell (1993: 268). He might as well have referred to them as benchmarks of critique and appeal.