Conceptual Claim Research Articles

Reconceptualizing Advocacy through the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Embodiment, Relationality, and Power

Abstract This article critically examines the embodied and relational politics of networked advocacy in the case of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in the United Kingdom. Moving beyond liberal framings that position WPS advocacy as an attempt to overcome gender exclusion from peace and security policymaking, this article is concerned instead with the gendered, racialized, and classed logics and hierarchies (re)produced through the practice of WPS advocacy. Toward this end, this article conceptualizes advocacy as an embodied, relational practice where WPS meanings are shaped, power is negotiated, and individuals are interpolated into subject positions. This conceptual claim is substantiated through an initial, exploratory analysis of interviews conducted with UK NGO professionals and government officials. Examining the figures of the “critical friends” and the “shouty NGOs,” I demonstrate how modes of advocating for WPS are ascribed and inscribed to certain bodies, which, in turn, reproduce power relations that affect the possibilities of the agenda. By reconceptualizing advocacy, the article contributes not only to WPS scholarship on civil society and advocacy but to wider debates within international political sociology around embodiment, relationality, and power. Additionally, it contributes empirically by highlighting how NGOs advocate for the WPS agenda.

Against ‘Hate Speech’

ABSTRACTThis article argues against the term and concept of ‘hate speech’ and in favour of using the concept and term ‘discriminatory speech’. ‘Hate speech’ is a misnomer; we should name the harmful speech in question by what it in fact does: it discriminates. The article argues for this conceptual replacement claim by identifying a number of functions the concept ‘hate speech’ has been meant to serve and by arguing that extant concepts of hate speech have not served this function well. Roughly, they do not serve the functions well because of five properties of hate speech: hate centricity, perpetrator centricity, intention centricity, emotion centricity, and individual centricity. The article then proposes a definition of discriminatory speech and argues that it fulfils the conceptual functions better.

The School of Pater: Register, Reception, and the Gay Phase

This essay argues that certain readers used Pater's work on an artistic period (the Renaissance) in order to periodize the phases of their own lives. Specifically, I suggest that they took up his “school of art” as a model for conditional group membership in a homoerotic culture. Throughout his career, Pater wrote about collectives who reinterpret the past—usually the Renaissance or Ancient Greece and Rome—in order to establish common orientations in the present. However, it is his school concept that comes closest to centering a group's self-conception in this mediation. Examining how Pater's reception realized this potential, I will make two claims. My conceptual claim is that a linguistic term, “register,” would strengthen how we study a particular function of group identity: style as a shared persona that can be put on and off in particular contexts. My historical claim is that a kind of Paterian register, in excess of Pater's personal style and occasionally in opposition to his intentions, enabled a particular sexual culture—the gay phase—at Eton and Oxford in subsequent generations.

Folk metaethics and error

ABSTRACT Philosophers have in recent years displayed an increasing interest in investigating folk metaethical beliefs using rigorous empirical methods. Taken together, these studies put significant pressure on many philosophical theories that depend on the truth of folk moral objectivism, the view that the folk see morality as objectively grounded. Frequently included among the target of criticism is Mackie’s error theory, or more specifically the conceptual claim thereof. Finding this criticism misplaced, Benjamin Fraser tries to exonerate error theory from such accusation by distinguishing different senses of objectivity. In this paper, I show why Fraser’s strategy is not successful so that the pressure empirically brought upon classical error theory is genuine. However, I also argue that even on the new picture suggested by experimental studies, the folk still entertain erroneous beliefs, which, when coupled with plausible metasemantic assumptions and further empirical support, should warrant an error theory after all, though not in its classical form.

The Impossibility of Neutrality? How Courts Engage with the Neutrality Argument

Abstract The principle of state neutrality vis-à-vis religion and belief is contested and illusive. Some scholars even label it an impossible principle. Nevertheless, the meanings and functions assigned to neutrality are often determinative of, among others, the scope of the right to manifest one’s religion in public institutions. Focusing on recent developments in Europe, this article makes two claims: one conceptual and the other doctrinal. The conceptual claim is that neutrality can be deployed either as a shield to protect freedom of religion and belief or as a sword to strike religious claims down. Given that lawmakers and policymakers in Europe are increasingly relying on the second function of neutrality, the article goes on to evaluate how the courts have responded. The doctrinal claim of the article is that courts can engage—and have engaged—with the neutrality argument in three ways: (i) through deference to other interpreters of neutrality; (ii) through substantive interpretation of the neutrality principle; and (iii) through circumvention of the neutrality argument. The article suggests that the third approach may well be preferable.

The European Union and diminished state sovereignty

ABSTRACT In A Republican Europe of States, Richard Bellamy embraces neither the anti-internationalism of the sovereign statist, not the unbounded trust in international institutions of the European federalists. He proposes instead a model for the European union he calls ‘republican intergovernmentalism.’ This model seeks to preserve internal state sovereignty while arguing that mutually agreed rules for regulating external sovereignty are necessary and beneficial. I argue instead that creating a supranational structure like the European Union cannot be accomplished without a reduction in the internal sovereign authority of member states. This a potentially legitimate reduction of sovereign authority for states, but a reduction nonetheless. The most important consequence of the conceptual claim that state sovereignty is diminished is that the delegation of authority to supranational institutions which has this cost ought to be publicly discussed and negotiated at the national level in member states to avoid misunderstandings and backlash against the legitimate authority of the EU.

Performance legitimacy for realists

Performance legitimacy for realists Ben Cross School of Philosophy, Wuhan University bcro8137@alumni.sydney.edu.au 1. Introduction The term “performance legitimacy” has frequently been used over the course of the last decade or so to describe how certain East Asian governments, especially China, seek to attain political legitimacy (Guo 2006, Yang and Tang 2010, Zhu 2011, Jing et al. 2015, Yang and Zhao 2015, Ratigan 2020, Cross 2021a). A government which relies on performance legitimacy seeks to legitimate itself by means of producing policies which lead to positive material outcomes for the people: economic growth, poverty alleviation, quality infrastructure, and so on.1 The claim that good performance, so understood, can provide a pathway to legitimacy stands in contrast to the traditional understanding of legitimacy set out by Max Weber (1958, 1978: 212-245). Weber famously identifies three distinct sources of legitimacy: legal, traditional, and charismatic. Let us call these “Weberian sources of legitimacy”. All three of these sources of legitimacy are at least in principle distinct from what Weber calls a ‘sheer interest situation’ (1958: 1), in which citizens obey rulers purely because doing so is in their best material interest: ‘purely material interests and calculations of advantages as the basis of solidarity between the chief and his administrative staff result, in this as in other connexions, in a relatively unstable situation’ (1978: 213). This Weber-inspired rejection of performance legitimacy thus seems to rely on three premises: 1) Cooperation between citizens and rulers is reliably stable only when citizens are motivated by values. 2) So-called “performance legitimacy” supposes that citizens are motivated by pure expediency, rather than values. 3) “Legitimacy”, as a concept, is best understood as referring to situations in which citizens have a reliably stable motivation for cooperating with rulers. Note that the first premise of this argument is an empirical, rather than conceptual claim. If motivations not based on values could facilitate reliably stable cooperation between citizens and rulers, then the premise would be false. Presumably Weber assumes here that calculations of interest are changeable, and/or that rulers’ capacity to produce results that benefit citizens is subject to contingent factors outside of their control. However, it is important to note that empirical evidence could conceivably reveal these assumptions to be false. Weber can thus be understood as rejecting performance legitimacy on essentially empirical grounds. Even if he defines the concept of legitimacy in such a way that excludes the possibility of performance legitimacy, his decision to define the concept in this way is motivated by acceptance of the empirical claim that stable cooperation between citizen and ruler cannot be reliably sustained solely on the basis of appeals to the material interests of the former. Some scholars appear to echo this Weberian critique of performance legitimacy by arguing that, perhaps in spite of appearances, the Chinese government does not rely primarily on performance legitimacy. Instead, they argue, it draws on a mixture of traditional Confucian guardianship discourse and a narrative of continuing a revolutionary communist legacy (Tong 2011, Chu 2013, Zeng 2014). More recently, Jiwei Ci (2019) has provided a different sort of critique of performance legitimacy. Although Ci notes that there are some empirical reasons to think that the legitimacy of the Chinese government does not stem primarily from performance (2019: 18, 40-43), his main argument seems to be more general and conceptual. For Ci, the problem with performance legitimacy is not merely that it is an unreliable way of securing legitimacy, since good performance is not always easy to maintain. Rather, it is that the very idea of performance legitimacy is a ‘misnomer’ (2019: 19). Absent a Weberian source of legitimacy, ‘no amount of good performance will suffice’ (2019: 20). Ci thus appears to provide a less contingent basis for ruling out the possibility of performance legitimacy than the Weberian empirical critique. His argument may not necessarily be independent of all empirical considerations, but it does appear not to rely on one such consideration that seems to play a decisive role in Weberian rejections of performance legitimacy: that it is not always possible for governments to maintain good performance.2 Apart from the fact that it offers a different type...

Should the Coercion Thesis really be defended as a conceptual claim?

Kenneth Himma’s Coercion and the Nature of Law offers a forceful response to the claim that coercion is an ancillary, rather than a conceptually necessary, property of law. It matters for Himma that the Coercion Thesis is defended as a conceptual claim, although his metaphysics purports to be a “modest” conceptual analysis in Frank Jackson’s sense. In this comment I have no argument against the Coercion Thesis, and I grant that Himma provides a successful reply to the skepticism about coercion that permeates the jurisprudence of H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz. Nonetheless, I believe that this thesis cannot be defended with the methodology that Himma suggests. I challenge Himma’s interpretation of Jackson (which claims that it requires one to start with lexical meanings and “canons” of ordinary language) and argue that his argument for the coercive character of international law only works because it is based on a pragmatic argument about empirical features of social practices. After explaining this objection, I hold that other methodologies, like Dworkin’s interpretivism (if interpreted as endorsing an inferentialist theory of meaning), can provide a more plausible account of the coercive character of law.

Atomic Event Concepts in Perception, Action, and Belief

AbstractEvent concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess such concepts and that they play an important role in our cognitive lives. The argument for the empirical claim has the form of an inference to the best explanation and is aimed at those who are already willing to attribute concepts and beliefs to infants and nonhuman animals. Many animals and prelinguistic infants seem capable of re-identifying event-types in the world, and they seem to store information about things happening at particular times and places. My account offers a plausible model of how such organisms are able to do this without attributing linguistically structured mental states to them. And although language allows adults to form linguistically structured mental representations of the world, there is no good reason to think that such structured representations necessarily replace the unstructured ones. There is also no good reason for a philosopher who is willing to explain the behavior of an organism by appealing to atomic concepts of individuals or kinds to not use a similar form of explanation when explaining the organism's capacity to recognize events.We can form empirical concepts of individuals, kinds, properties, event-types, and states of affairs, among other things, and I assume that such concepts function like what François Recanati calls ‘mental files’ or what Ruth Millikan calls ‘substance concepts’ (Recanati 2012; Millikan 1999, 2000, 2017). To possess such a concept one must have a reliable capacity to re-identify the object in question, but this capacity of re-identification does not fix the reference of the concept. Such concepts allow us to collect and utilize useful information about things that we re-encounter in our environment. We can distinguish between aperception-action systemand aperception-belief system, and I will argue that empirical concepts, including atomic event concepts, can play a role in both systems. The perception-action system involves the application of concepts in the service of (often skilled) action. We can think of the concept as a mental file containing motor-plans that can be activated once the individual recognizes that they are in a certain situation. In this way, recognizing something (whether an object or an event) as a token of a type, plays a role in guiding immediate action. The perception-belief system, in contrast, allows for the formation of beliefs that can play a role in deliberation and planning and in the formation of expectations. I distinguish between two particular types of belief which I callwhere-beliefsandwhen-beliefs, and I argue that we can model the formation of such perceptual beliefs in nonlinguistic animals and human infants in terms of the formation of a link between an empirical concept and a position on a cognitive map. According to the account offered, seemingly complex beliefs, such as a baby's belief that Daddy changed her diaper in the kitchen earlier, will not be linguistically structured. If we think that prelinguistic infants possess such concepts and are able to form such beliefs, it is likely that adults do too. The ability to form such beliefs does not require the capacity for public language, and we can model them in nonlinguistic terms; thus, we have no good reason to think of such beliefs as propositional attitudes. Of course, we can use sentences to refer to such beliefs, and thus it is possible to think of such beliefs as somehow relations to propositions. But it is not clear to me what is gained by this as we have a perfectly good way to think about the structure of such beliefs that does not involve any appeal to language.

A Critique of the Neurodiversity View

AbstractThe neurodiversity view makes both a conceptual and a political claim. Conceptually, the neurodiversity view holds that certain neurocognitive differences currently classified as disorders—autism, most notably—are best understood as forms of diversity. Politically, it holds that, rather than being medicalized and ‘treated’, neurodiversity ought to be respected in the way other human differences—such as differences in race and sexual orientation—are respected. In this article, I challenge the arguments given in support of neurodiversity’s conceptual claim, while defending its political aims of respect, inclusion, and accommodation. Although neurodiversity provides a compelling challenge to the status quo, I conclude that its most prominent arguments fall short of establishing that autism is not a disorder. As I go on to argue, however, the fact that autism is a disorder does not entail that medicalization is the only course. My view is ultimately that social change and medical intervention need not be considered mutually exclusive.

Organising spirit

ABSTRACT The article reports on a philosophical inquiry of the social organisation of spirit in the village Bywater. The main conceptual claim is that the case shows us spirit as a recursive common. Spirit is both an effect of and a condition for social organisation. We contribute to rethinking the relation between resource and practice in commons and in alternative organisation. Methodologically, the inquiry is grounded in a cultural mapping of the cultural in/tangibles producing the spirit of the community. We read these cultural in/tangibles through a philosophical lens and re-enter them as elements of spirit. We conclude that spirit/commoning acts as organising of, for, and with community needs while remaining undecidably explicit and implicit, formal and informal. By conceptualising spirit as resource and commons, this paper contributes to the study of alternative organisation.

To ‘see’ is to break an entanglement: Quantum measurement, trauma and security

This article seeks to explore the quantum notion that to ‘see’ an entanglement is to break it in the context of an ‘experiment’ regarding the ongoing impact of traumatic political memory on the present. The analysis is a product of collaboration over the past four years between the two authors, one a scholar of international relations, the other a therapeutic practitioner with training in medical physics. Our focus is the conceptual claim that ‘seeing’ breaks an entanglement rather than the experiment itself. The first section explores a broad contrast between classical and quantum measurement, asking what this might mean at the macroscopic level. The second section categorizes Wendt’s claim about language as a form of expressive measurement and explores the relationship to discourse analysis. The third section explores the broad contours of our experiment and the role of a somewhat different form of non-linear expressive measurement. In the final section, we elaborate the relationship between redemptive measurement and breaking an entanglement, which involves a form of ‘seeing’ that witnesses to unacknowledged past trauma.

Why Epistemic Reductionism Won\u2019t Save the Moral Error Theorist

Moral error theorists often respond to the epistemic companions in guilt strategy by adopting the Disparity Response: reject the putative parity between moral and epistemic reasons and claim that though the former are irreducibly normative, the latter aren’t. I argue such a response fails. Expanding on Das’ Australas J Philos 95(1):58–69, (2017) work I present a master argument against Disparity Responses: the arguments moral error theorists use to advance their conceptual claim apply in the epistemic domain also. This prohibits the error theorist from adopting epistemic reductionism. I use Jonas Olson’s work as exemplary of moral error theory. I demonstrate that Olson’s (2014) argument that the rhetorical authority of moral claims is best explained by the error theorist’s conceptual claim applies equally in the epistemic case. Olson (2018) attempts to avoid this by claiming that epistemic claims are reducible to claims about whether our doxastic attitudes live up to their functions. There are two problems with Olson’s (2018) argument. Firstly, functional reasons are a species of a common genus – standards reasons – and since Olson’s authority argument against moral reductionism applies to standards reasons, it applies to functional reasons. Secondly, Olson’s (2018) claim that we cannot also cast moral reasons as functional is under-supported. I suggest that there is plausible evidence that we can and undermine his arguments against this claim. I do not argue that the epistemic companions in guilt strategy demonstrates the falsity of moral error theory. Rather, I argue that the Disparity Response to the epistemic companions in guilt strategy fails.

The autonomy of the EU legal order

The European Union (EU) cannot make a plausible claim to sovereignty under international law. However, what the EU can do and what it also does is, is to act as if it were sovereign and claim certain rights that are considered core elements of state sovereignty. This article argues that the Court of Justice’s (ECJ) conception of the EU legal order as autonomous provides the EU with a core element of state sovereignty: jurisdictional sovereignty. Autonomy construed by the ECJ is best understood in conceptual legal and absolute terms. It is meant to shield the ECJ’s conceptual legal claims from interference. Legal autonomy as construed by the ECJ is not relative as many authors have claimed. It cannot come about in an incremental or relative manner. It cannot be based on arguments relating to the status of a self-contained regime of international law that gradually distances itself from the general rules of international law. It is a conceptual claim giving birth to the assumption of apriority that can only be made in categorical terms. In this way it is similar to sovereignty. The article first sets out how the autonomy of the EU legal order is best understood. It examines the ECJ’s case law in light of legal theoretical considerations and relates it to the separation thesis of Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law. It then explains that autonomy is of such relevance to the EU legal order because the aprioristic character of EU law remains essentially contested. This relevance indirectly explains why the Court so cautiously protects the autonomy of the EU legal order. Finally, the article examines the Court’s reasoning in Opinion 1/17 in light of the identified absolute conception of autonomy.

On the Function of Science: an Overview of 30 Years of Publications on Metacontingency

How effective has the concept of metacontingency been in providing explanations about cultural practices during the 30 years (1986–2016) since Glenn’s first publication on the subject? One of the main characteristics of behavior analysis epistemology is in the role attributed to science itself: to promote effective action. Effectiveness, in this case, is evaluated by the increase in probability of contacting reinforcing consequences in our interactions with the world (bio-, psycho- or social-) as a function of the knowledge produced by scientific practices. In other words, scientific effectiveness is related to the use of science in solving human problems. Guided by this premise, the aim of this article is to discuss the effectiveness of the metacontingency in explaining social processes (cultural practices) and in promoting effective action (i.e., solving human problems). An analysis of 148 articles on the metacontingency published between January 1986 and April 2017 in 16 peer-reviewed journals and 3 databases was conducted. Articles were categorized into four domains - theoretical, interpretative, experimental, and applied. The frequency with which the articles were distributed among domains, journals, and research centers is presented; as well as considerations regarding conceptual, experimental, and applied issues found in the reviewed literature. The results suggest that the very definition of the metacontingency is still an open question, that the experimental data do not necessarily support the major conceptual claim related to the metacontingency (i.e., that we are dealing with a new selective process that requires a proper unit of analysis), and that no applied work in which the metacontingency was necessary has been conducted to date. These results question the utility of metacontingency as well as the necessity of a new unit of analysis (beyond the contingency) to study cultural practices.

Mediating the role of work engagement between personal resources (self-efficacy, the big five model) and nurses’ job performance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of work engagement (vigor and dedication) between personal resources (self-efficacy and Big Five model) and job performance (task and contextual) rated by supervisor.Design/methodology/approachA sample of 364 nurses and their supervisors was used. Structural equation modeling with Amos-17 was used to obtain model fit with path significance of work engagement as mediator between personal resources and job performance.FindingsThe results found support for the proposed conceptual claim and confirm that work engagement with the two-factor model (vigor and dedication) mediates the relationship between personal resources (self-efficacy and Big five model) and with multidimensional construct of job performance (task and contextual performance) rated by the supervisor.Originality/valuePast researches have never tested the two-factor model of work engagement (vigor and dedication) as mediating variable between personal resources (self-efficacy and big five model) and job performance rated by the supervisor.

Condoning the Use of Force: The UN Security Council as Interpreter of the Jus ad Bellum

Monica Hakimi's article probes the legal significance of an interesting phenomenon: the UN Security Council condoning the use of force, as opposed to authorizing it. She offers an innovative perspective on this little-studied dimension of how the Council contributes to the development of jus ad bellum. While I applaud much in the article, I question her characterization of what the Council is condoning in the cases she reviews. She claims these are “fact-specific decisions,” whereas I argue that the Council is endorsing controversial interpretations of the law on the use of force. This disagreement does not detract from Hakimi's observations about the policy implications of the practice, or about the Council's role as a site for deliberation and argumentation about the content of international law. But it does cast doubt on her conceptual claim that there are two distinct “regulatory forms,” which together provide the content of jus ad bellum, one particularistic and procedural, the other general and substantive. All legal claims and justifications entail the application of general standards to particular facts, either explicitly or implicitly. Most of her case studies can be explained in those terms. Thus, while the Council's practice of condoning the use of force is important to understand, the “conventional account” she derides provides a more persuasive and parsimonious explanation of that phenomenon.

Conceptual competence injustice

This paper identifies the phenomenon of conceptual competence injustice, a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when a marginalized epistemic agent makes a conceptual claim and is illegitimately regarded as having failed to grasp one or more of the concepts expressed in her testimony. The notion of a conceptual claim is given a deflationary account that is coextensive with the class of a priori knowable claims. This study reveals a form of oppression that severely hinders marginalized epistemic agents who seek to create or communicate conceptual knowledge. Conceptual competence injustice is compared and contrasted with three other forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and contributory injustice. The final section investigates a number of damaging effects that conceptual competence injustice has on marginalized persons pursuing a career in academic philosophy.

Bad News for Moral Error Theorists: There Is No Master Argument Against Companions in Guilt Strategies

ABSTRACTA ‘companions in guilt’ (CG) strategy against moral error theory aims to show that the latter proves too much: if sound, it supports an implausible error-theoretic conclusion in other areas such as epistemic or practical reasoning. Christopher Cowie [2016] has recently produced what he claims is a ‘master argument’ against all such strategies. The essence of his argument is that CG arguments cannot work because they are afflicted by internal incoherence or inconsistency. I argue, first, that Cowie's master argument does not succeed. Beyond this, I argue that there is no good reason to think that any such argument—one that purports to identify an internal incoherence in CG arguments—can succeed. Second, I argue that the main substantive area of disagreement between error theorists and CG theorists essentially concerns the conceptual profile of epistemic reasons—specifically, whether they are strongly categorical—not the ontological question of whether such reasons exist (in some form or other). I then develop an argument in favour of the CG theorist's position by considering the moral error theorist's arguments in support of the conceptual claim that moral reasons are strongly categorical. These include, notably, criticisms made by Joyce [2011] and Olson [2014] of Finlay's [2008] ‘end relational’ view of morality, according to which moral reasons are relative to some end or standard, hence not strongly categorical. Examining these criticisms, I argue that, based on what moral error theorists have said regarding the conceptual profile of moral reasons, there is a strong case to be made that moral reasons are strongly categorical (hence, according to the moral error theorist, ontologically problematic) if and only if epistemic reasons are.

Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment by Michael Javen Fortner

BLACK SILENT MAJORITY: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and Politics of Punishment. By Michael Javen Fortner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2015.Black Silent Majority proffers an alternative explanation for emergence of mass incarceration in post-Civil Rights era. Refuting consensus of origins of mass incarceration, most popularly averred by legal scholar Michelle Alexander, that backlash against black freedom movement spurred mass incarceration, Fortner locates agency of black New Yorkers in passage of 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws, asserting, basically, that black-on-black rather than a reformulated supremacy, explains rise of carceral state.Between 1940s and early 1970s, black majority, at first a quiescent, unorganized group of working-and-middle class black New Yorkers, mobilized a citywide movement in Harlem against heroin-related crimes and for enforcement of punitive legislation. Fortner argues that with conservative turn in national politics in late 1960s and punitive frame that black majority ushered into policy arena Governor Nelson Rockefeller embraced demands of black majority and sponsored punitive laws to authenticate his conservative credentials.Fortner centers movement for safety and punitive legislation around activism of Reverend Oberia D. Dempsey-the pistol-toting pastor of Upper Park Avenue Baptist Church-and other black leaders, such as Roy Wilkins, of National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Dempsey, Wilkins, and others spoke of visceral fear that black New Yorkers experienced at hands of their neighbors. Fortner here convincingly highlights longstanding conditions of intraracial crime and violence within black America, then and now.Though he powerfully calls attention to Harlemites' fears of, and demands for, protection from intraracial crime, Fortner's conceptual formulation of black majority reduces complexity and diversity of black activism to punishment. According to Fortner, since Harlemites discovered a measure of social mobility in 1950s, their concern with white gaze, waned. Consequently, the violence in their communities forced them to prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality(9). Yet despite notable progress and because of deindustrialization and employer and union racism black New Yorkers' job security was invariably vulnerable.Fortner's historical and conceptual claim that black punitive politics emerged in 1950s is misleading. Since early twentieth century, as historians Khalil G. Muhammad, Nathan D. B. Connolly, and others have shown, blacks had rarely been silent about eradicating intra-racial black crime. Blacks employed anti-crime politics not only to fight crime but also to make demands for inclusion of black police officers, demonstrate their commitment to law and order, and to stave off violence from police officers. Thus, if they were not silent, did black politics shift from a struggle for civil rights, as Fortner avers, to advocating punishment in postwar New York City?Although Fortner's use of media polls provides a measurement of public opinion at a given moment, he neither unpacks data nor places it within its historical context. For example, using a poll in late 1973 from New York Times, Fortner notes that 71 percent of black respondents favored life sentences without parole for pushers, but he provides neither its sample size nor its racial breakdown (99). Does number of blacks interviewed adequately represent political diversity of city's large black population, which by late 1960s was more than half of a million people? …