Taking Account

Abstract

OurEditors’Note typically speaks to one or more of the many political controversies unfolding as we are writing, an effort to keep Polity timely, even if the production schedule adheres to a different sort of temporality. This issue’s tagline and theme of “taking account” works rather well for framing Trump’s indictment and the lack of political accountability on gun violence, climate change, reproductive justice, and police violence, for example. But rather than looking outward, as is our usual perspective, we decided for this Editors’ Note to turn inward and take a preliminary account of Polity itself under our co-editorship. This issuemarks themidpoint in our five-year term as co-editors of Polity, having now published ten issues of the journal. We thought it might be an appropriate moment, therefore, to considerwhat we have observed so far andwhat we aim to accomplish during the second half of our term. Fittingly, this issue also includes other sorts of accountings—a “Classics Revisited” symposium engaging a text that took political scientists to account for having only described what is rather than envisioning what might be done, a midterm election forecasting postmortem, and an “Ask a Political Scientist” with a scholar who demands that the discipline question its own assumptions about how politics works and where to study it. Likewise, each of the research articles offers an interpretive account of classic texts by Plato,Machiavelli, and Rousseau, respectively, and the debates they inspire. Serving as co-editors of Polity, which has been in print since 1968, publishing some of the finest scholarship in the field, is a genuine honor. In our editorial roles we have sought to build upon and expand the journal’s reach, reputation, and impact. We have aimed to fill the pages of Polity with innovative scholarship in the discipline from a range of voices, approaches, and perspectives. Indeed, one change we proposed in our bid to become editors was to increase the diversity of authors.