Giving Polity An International Flavor

Abstract

I was the fourth editor of Polity, serving from 1979 until 1981. After the 1980 election, recently named United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick had asked me to join her UN staff with the rank of ambassador, responsible for dealing with Third World issues. Although 1 didn't know Jeane well at the time, we accepted the assignment, the FBI came around to check on my loyalty with neighbors and colleagues, and we prepared with some trepidation to move to pre-Giuliani New York. But a few weeks later Jeane called back and said, Howard, I'm terribly sorry but I've offered more ambassadorships than I have available. And since I was not as close to her as some others on her team, mine was the offer that had to be retracted. However, she brightened, why don't you instead come to AEI [American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research] and help run the foreign policy program there. In those days AEI was more diverse and committed to the competition of ideas than it is now as a chiefly neocon institution; my position there thus came to me as a consolation prize for not getting the UN post. But since I couldn't run Polity from long distance and would be absent from New England for many years, I decided with great reluctance that I should resign the Polity editorship. My predecessors as Polity editors had been Loren Beth (1968-1971), Lewis Mainzer (1972-1975), and Peter Fliess (1975-1979). But the real founding editor and chief inspiration for Polity had been then University of Massachusetts Department of Political Science Chair William Havard. Bill was a specialist in American politics, especially Southern politics, but he also had a strong interest in political theory and British politics. Above all, Bill, who had had a lifetime association with the Journal of Politics (the JOF), was a firm believer in good writing, strong analysis, understandable prose, and elegant style. He deplored the trend toward quantitative research and, not coincidentally bad writing that he found in the American Political Science Review (ASPR). Bill, and all of us early editors, found the APSR virtually unreadable and quite worthless as a journal presumably representing the best work in Political Science. Even now I rarely read past the three-four sentence abstracts in the APSR.