{"title":"Shelter Abolition and Housing First: Rethinking Dominant Discourses on Homeless Management","authors":"Terrance Wooten","doi":"10.1086/726389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726389","url":null,"abstract":"According to the most recent nationwide Point-in-Time Count, in January 2020 over 580,000 people in the United States reported experiencing homelessness, of which roughly 70% were individuals. Amongst the total population of reported households experiencing homelessness, around 60% were sheltered, and the rest lived in places not meant for habitation (streets, cars, parks, etc.). The percentage of individuals experiencing homelessness who were unsheltered, however, was above 50%. Individuals make up the vast majority of those who are unsheltered.Of the total number of those living in some formof shelter—emergency, transitional, or a Safe Haven—47.2% were Black or African American compared to Whites, who constituted 42.8%. Conversely, there were over twice as many unshelteredWhite people compared to Black people. Nationally, shelters are disproportionately comprised of Black orAfricanAmerican people, at similar rates as those for prisons. Given these numbers and given the broader connection between homelessness and carcerality, in part due to the criminalization of homelessness combined with the racialization of homelessness (40% of those experiencing homelessness in the U.S. are Black or African American), scholars have begun to analyze the carceral","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44950831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel","authors":"Grant Farred","doi":"10.1086/726438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726438","url":null,"abstract":"In the aftermath of the May 14, 2022, violent shooting attack by an eighteen-yearold white gunman, Payton Gendron, which killed ten black residents of Masten Park, BuffaloNY, a predominantly black neighborhood located on Buffalo’s East side, a range of responses were offered by this community. As expected, there was pain and anguish at Gendron’s brutal, ideologically driven plan to inflict as much black death as he possibly could. Driving more than two hours north to the Tops supermarket on Buffalo’s East side from his home on the outskirts of Binghamton, NY, Gendron’s motivation for the shooting was clearly laid out, specific in its intent and execution. The arithmetical logic of Gendron’s manifesto is the product of a deliberate set of racial (racist) calculations. Gendron’s logic is, as we shall see, imbricated in a notion of the biopolitical focused upon the right to choose, a right fundamental to the logic of neo-liberalism. As such, the biopolitical so delineated works to unveil a series of rights in which the ability to choose follows sequentially from the possession of capital, both racial and economic. A series of biopolitical rights that, moreover, itself derives from the protection afforded to some by the state’s sovereign violence; or, as Slavoj Žižek reminds us, by the state’s founding upon the principles of retaining unto itself an “excess” of “power.” Within the context of this symposium on abolition (of the police, principally), this essay offers an argument for expanding the targets for abolition—widening the contours of the abolition paradigm—by situating us within a discourse we might name, evocatively, a self-sublimating black fear.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43394766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Taking Account","authors":"Alyson Cole, Robyn Marasco, C. Tien","doi":"10.1086/725423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725423","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48612180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“We” Should Be An Invitation: Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice","authors":"Alyson Cole, Beverley Stone","doi":"10.1086/725366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725366","url":null,"abstract":"Polity’s “Classics Revisited” provides a forum to reflect on whether books revered in the discipline raise questions and advance interventions that still resonate with current concerns. Sidestepping the “canon wars,” the aim has been to forge a space for a more generative reconsideration of a priori assumptions about the scope and content of what political science is, what it has and could do. Most of the “classics” featured to date required no justification or much of an introduction. Their impact within the discipline, on public discourse, and even popular culture is self-evident—their titles are instantly recognizable, and their authors have become synonymous with these texts, regardless of howmany others they have written. This “Classics Revisited” is different. Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice (hereafter W&J), like the other books Polity has selected, was certainly path-breaking. In this volume Pitkin took account of the work of political science and the unique role political theory has within and beyond it. “Political theory [speaks] to a polity in crisis,” she explained. The crisis she confronted was how to address the “modern condition” characterized by alienation","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47798871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A New Style of Thinking: Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein","authors":"L. Zerilli","doi":"10.1086/725367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725367","url":null,"abstract":"“It is by no means obvious that someone interested in politics and society needs to concern himself with philosophy; nor that, in particular, he has anything to learn from an obscure, misanthropic, enigmatic philosopher like Ludwig Wittgenstein, who never wrote about such topics at all.” So begins Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J). Pitkin’s opening line spoke—and continues to speak—to the difficulty in identifying the relevance and potential significance ofWittgenstein’s work for a social science audience. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is not only lacking in direct remarks on politics or morality, it seems almost negatively predisposed towards normative commentary of any kind. His famous claim that philosophy should only describe things as they are, not produce explanatory theses about them, would seem to foreclose the very idea of creating political and social theories that take his work as their departure point. Perhaps more worrisome, writes Pitkin, is that “in trying to make his ideas accessible, lucid, and systematic, I may make their real content and significance inaccessible.” Worse than failing to succeed, the book could “betray its own cause.” Wittgenstein’s penchant for raising endless questions where Pitkin’s reader seeks answers presents a problem of authorial style that cannot be easily overcome. Interpretive projects that seek to distill his main philosophical ideas, especially for a non-philosophical audience, do so at the real risk of significant distortion.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43588293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hanna Pitkin on Conceptual Puzzlement","authors":"V. Das","doi":"10.1086/725249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725249","url":null,"abstract":"In rereading Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J) fifty years after it was first published, I am awestruck by the author’s courage in pursuing what seemed important to her, regardless of the risks entailed in that project. Her courage has been rewarding for many of us for it has opened the possibility of introducing a Wittgensteinian sensibility into political theory, asking its practitioners to learn to see—not what was hidden, but what was right before their eyes. The provocation she offeredwas not that of asking for new answers to alreadywell-known questions, say, about the origin of the state, but to ask, what were the questions that reallymattered and to whom?At the same time, there is the imperceptible force of the conventional formulations thatmanage to find a place almost inadvertently in her text when Pitkin applies some of her insights to concepts of justice, or fairness, or, for that matter, to the very notion of the political. We see that Wittgenstein’s anguish over the likely failure of philosophy to “shew the fly a way out of the fly-bottle” is not easy to assuage. These issues continue to pose formidable problems for understanding academic and public discourse on contemporary politics. In this essay I propose to show the difficulty of the task Pitkin sets herself through an analysis of a limited region of her thought, viz., what she calls “conceptual puzzlement,”where she brings some of themost incisive insights fromWittgenstein to bear on political theory. However, before I go into the substantive issues, I want to signal how important is the form of Philosophical Investigations (herewith PI) for me; the fact that Wittgenstein conceives of PI as a kind of album; and that instead of a straightforward argument, the text leads us astray through the voice of temptation","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42496872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wittgenstein and Justice as Method","authors":"P. Snell","doi":"10.1086/725256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725256","url":null,"abstract":"ittgenstein and Justice (W&J) changed the trajectory of my scholarship. I initially came across W&J while working on an empirical dissertation on legal interest groups and how the perception of their relationships with key actors altered their advocacy strategies. I could not determine whether this change was a result of those key actors’ “power” or “influence.” The interest groups literature conflates the two concepts. Influence is power, especially in Robert Dahl’s understanding of it, i.e., getting others to do things that they would not do otherwise. This cannot be right. If “influence” is just “power” why the need for two words? I did what I was trained to do—read more of the literature. As I later came to understand, the literature itself was the source of my confusion. Part of the reason for this is because of something that Colin Bird calls “scholasticism”: the tendency to privilege certain thinkers and beliefs. Bird captures the problem well: “we stand as much in the shadow as on the shoulders of these giants; the dazzling light they cast in some directions may artificially darken other areas and lend premature credence to assumptions that deserve closer scrutiny.” Dahl, Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes, and Foucault are titans in the power literature, but their understanding of power did nothing to address my concerns. Their ideas actually made the problem","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43967017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Acknowledging Hanna Pitkin: A Belated Discovery of a Kindred Spirit","authors":"T. Moi","doi":"10.1086/725254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725254","url":null,"abstract":"I had never heard of either Hanna Pitkin orWittgenstein and Justice until Linda Zerilli mentioned the book to me some time in the mid-2010s. Or so I thought. But then I noticed that Stanley Cavell singles the book out in the preface to his masterpiece The Claim of Reason, which I have been reading and rereading for years. There is no way I could have missed the reference every time I looked at that preface. Why didn’t I immediately rush out to read Pitkin’s book? If not in the 1990s, when I was first immersing myself in Wittgenstein and Cavell, then at least in the early 2010s when I was beginning to write Revolution of the Ordinary? I still have no answer. In one way, my failure to pick up Pitkin’s book is not surprising: I am a literary critic, not a political theorist. In another way, it’s astonishing that I somehowmanaged to avoid Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J) entirely for so many years. For now that I finally have read the book, I realize that fifty years ago Pitkin embarked on exactly the same kind of project that I took up in Revolution of the Ordinary. Her subtitle isOn the Significance of LudwigWittgenstein for Social and Political Thought. My subtitle isLiterary Studies afterWittgenstein, Austin, andCavell. Pitkin sets out to show other political theorists that ordinary language philosophy, which she understands as Wittgenstein’s late philosophy as analyzed and developed by Stanley Cavell, could have a transformative effect on her own discipline. In the same way, I begin Revolution of the Ordinary by declaring that ordinary language philosophy,","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41575772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Different Voices: Pitkin and Cavell on Wittgenstein’s Political Relevance","authors":"S. Laugier","doi":"10.1086/725325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725325","url":null,"abstract":"Wittgenstein’s work has been mobilized in recent decades to address questions of justice and politics, and in this respect Hanna Pitkin’s 1972 book Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J) was indeed pioneering, the first to explore explicitly the political potential of reading Wittgenstein. What is striking today is how W&J remains one of the most illuminating and deep readings of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Pitkin is among those who have experienced the power of ordinary language philosophy, of the examination of the actual uses of language, in J.L. Austin’s words, “what we should say when . . .” In her preface, she evokes her “passionate love of words as such,” that is to say, of the sensitive reality of words, their aspects and appearances, “the sheer delight in tracing the individual contours of meanings.” This sensitivity to language as it is pronounced by a human voice, Pitkin evokes it as a milieu: “perhaps only someone with a multilingual and multicultural childhood like mine, out of a milieu compounded of psychoanalysis, Marxist humanism, and Jewish humor, can take towords in quite this way.” This sensibility to “the touch of words” is something she shares with Stanley Cavell. Pitkin manages to highlight the power of Wittgenstein’s simple idea that language matters: “the","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45719518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}