Racial regimes, comparative politics, and the problem of judgment

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis review essay examines the practice of judgment that characterized the subfield of comparative politics from its origins in openly racist ideas of the capacity for self-rule through to its twentieth-century behavioralist and positivist iterations. Though continually faced with new political phenomena that called into question its inherited criteria of judgment, comparative politics tended to practice determinative rather than reflective judgment, that is, to subsume the particulars of other cultures under known rules. Further, the essay examines the racialized conception of self-rule described by Michael Hanchard as embedded in a larger problem of Western political thinking: the flight from action into rule and tendency to think of politics wholly in terms of ruling and being ruled.