Abstract
Michael Hanchard’s The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy is as important for the questions it raises as for the answers it divines. Chief among those questions is one about the relationship between democracy as a set of practices and ideas about how to distinguish among people by race. It is a vexing one because it pits our ideological and normative assumptions against some stark facts: democracies have consistently excluded or discriminated against people by origins. Hanchard’s writing is refreshing for thinking about these phenomena in relation to each other while recognizing the conceptual elusiveness of democracy, equality, and race.
Hanchard maps where comparative politics has been and calls for a rethinking of the relationship between racism and democracy in view of cutting-edge scholarship on race, colonialism, and imperialism—ideological and analytic constructs that have been absent from comparative politics frameworks (and arguably are still rarely considered in other social sciences). For instance, institutions of slavery and colonialism are seldom examined in conjunction with those of democracy.
The Spectre of Race begins by tracing the genealogy of this disciplinary subfield to E. A. Freeman, Herbert Baxter Adams, and Woodrow Wilson (Chapter 1). Of the three, Freeman is the least known and studied, but he prefigures cross-spatial and temporal comparisons and methodological innovations in comparative politics. Hanchard shows how foundational figures in comparative politics can make analytic contributions while lacking reflexivity about racialist assumptions (Freeman moved away from scientific racism in the early twentieth century, but not from racialist thinking).
Chapter Two examines the move in comparative politics from concepts of race to ones of culture, its contextual motivations, and its consequences.
Chapter Three is a pivotal chapter that reviews “the idea of difference as a form of political distinction in democratic polities” dating to classical Athens. In a useful discussion, Hanchard tackles the daunting task of reviewing the relationship between slavery and democracy not only in Athens but also in the Americas (especially in Haiti, Guyana, Latin America, and the United States). His treatment of Haiti as the “scourge of the [presumptively and aspirationally white] nation-state system” demonstrates how intricately interwoven were the political economy, racist ideology, and notions of who is capable of practicing democracy.
This ambitious chapter also challenges Robert Dahl’s concept of “polyarchy,” uncovering key assumptions (institutionalized population variation and the putative exceptionality of Athens and the United States as polyarchies). One is left wondering about the utility of the Dahlian scheme, given these assumptions, and about alternative ways of conceptualizing democracy (more on this in Chapter 5).
In a section entitled “why be so hard on democracy,” Hanchard engages objections that other forms of political rule have tolerated or promoted inequality to a greater extent and longer than democracy. In this reader’s view, the author is too deferential to these criticisms. Empirics and details matter here. Since the nineteenth century, inequality and discrimination have been part and parcel of democratic polities even as elites made grand rhetorical claims of equity. In the domain of immigration and nationality law, for example, democratic and populist regimes consistently discriminated against prospective immigrants and citizens by race and did so for longer periods of time than illiberal regimes (see FitzGerald and Cook-Martin 2014). All the while political elites made claims of equity toward all. Although data referenced in the Appendix to this chapter is not systematically linked to these arguments, they clearly show why scholars may be “hard” on democracy.
Chapter Four shows how Britain, France, and the United States devised ethnic regimes to determine political membership within their respective liberal democratic polities, thus creating and maintaining political inequalities. Hanchard lucidly outlines key conceptual implications of his analysis in a way that invites readers to challenge conventional assumptions. In particular, he warns against neat correlations between state policies and regime types.
Chapter Five makes a methodological case for a history and genealogy of comparative politics attuned to the role of slavery and colonialism. More broadly, Hanchard argues for the continued relevance of interpretive approaches to make sense of something as complex as regimes of political community and difference. The author illustrates how disciplinary gaps—for instance, the scarcity of comparative scholarship on slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—can be rooted in an aversion to complex phenomena that are difficult to quantify for formal analyses.
The postscript to the book is no less important than the formal scholarly chapters because it reveals that questions about democracy and racism are more pressing than ever, and that we can benefit from understanding their mutual historical constitution.
The Spectre of Race is bold. It is asking political science—and other social sciences—to rethink analytical frameworks that ignore the critical role of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism in shaping and constituting democracy as a set of practices. It is the rare political science tome that engages logics of difference and their overlap with politics, and therefore it is a worthwhile interlocutor for scholars interested in this relationship. In this reader’s view, it shifts the conversation to a consideration of what logics of difference do for political practices that claim equality as a guiding principle.
The Spectre of Race raises good questions that challenge limiting methodological commitments to techniques and approaches that avoid complexity and imprecise conceptualizations in comparative politics. It would be a useful text in graduate research methods courses as well as courses on race and politics. Graduate students will learn from it as a template for intellectual inquiry and debate. Scholars of politics and its overlaps with ethnoracial regimes of difference will find a generative intellectual sparring partner.
Hanchard raises critical points about the very nature of that which we call “race” and the practices associated with democracy. That in itself moves the conversation forward on this complex and opaque relationship. Could the author have pushed further? One may agree that an interpretive approach may yield more insight than large N and presentist studies, but what are the specifics? Will we rethink the conceptual status of race as one among several logics of difference deployed in the task of determining who belongs to the demos and who to society? How do these practices play out at different levels of state organization? Given the shortcomings of Dahlian theories of democracy, what are productive alternatives?
Yet the very fact that readers can raise these questions attests to how this book advances the conversation. Hanchard reminds us of the importance of disciplinary history, the potential costs of ahistoric and mechanistic methodological conventions, of scholarly implication in the very phenomena we study, and of the persistent and constitutive contradictions of democracy. The Spectre of Race is a fitting tribute to Mark Q. Sawyer, to whom it is dedicated. It is an erudite and generative book whose questions will haunt its serious readers well after they have put it back on the shelf.