Constructing Boundaries

Next article FreeEditor's NoteConstructing BoundariesCyrus Ernesto ZirakzadehCyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePolitics involves the collective construction, questioning, and reconstruction of boundaries. They come in all sizes, shapes, thicknesses, and degrees of permeability. Property lines, for example, define physical space, clarify the materials with which we can mix our wills and energies, and thereby orient our labor. Legal boundaries separate acceptable behavior from what is beyond the pale, and thereby foster a sense of predictability, safety, and security as we interact with friends and strangers. Cultural edges make manageable the endless choosing among literally innumerable and often contradictory roles, principles, and visions of the good.Thus, from one point of view, boundaries are boons and blessings. We live among other humans to satisfy our physical needs, to release emotions, to gratify appetites, and to achieve social and spiritual goals. We wish not only to survive in a crude, corporeal sense, but to live well. To share existence with other humans—who have vastly different views, miseries, interests, and ambitions—collective boundaries are needed. Endlessly jostled by the choices, desires, and aspirations of those with whom we daily and occasionally interact, we crave the peace and order that boundaries provide.At the same time, boundaries are not innocently designed, nor are they harmless. As Friedrich Nietzsche reminds us in The Genealogy of Morals, legal, cultural, and moral boundaries not only make conviviality possible. They also are intended to hem in human beings and to contain their passions—in particular, to restrict the creativity and willfulness of persons with extraordinary ambitions and dreams. The often understated goal of any boundary is to make human beings less aggressive, disruptive, and cruel, by making them more circumspect, deferential, and sheep-like.It should be noted, furthermore, that property, legal, and cultural boundaries are not only designed to hold potential outlaws among us. They are created, in part, to help us define the unsociable, the sociopathic, and the barbaric. The flip side of the pacific benefits of boundaries is that we dread that which lives on the edges, and feel panic about impulses, beliefs, and peoples beyond the rim. Boundaries, although they are reassuring, also nurture specters and feed terrors about those whose practices deviate and cross.Boundaries therefore are problematic creations. They, on the one hand, are required to clear the wilderness and make settled life possible. Yet, on the other, they suppress imaginations, affections, and creative impulses and (often inadvertently but sometimes intentionally) foster alarm and unreason. Consequently, few collective decisions are as monumental as the construction of property, legal, and cultural boundaries—regardless if we are talking about reservations, gated communities, or national borders. And few decisions are as intensely and frequently debated, defended, and challenged.***This issue of Polity contains six articles that explore the origins, workings, and permeability of different types of boundaries. All the articles mix empirical observation and theoretical reflection as they examine how social practices, such as patronage, philanthropy, and public prayer, affect citizens’ loyalties and images of friend and foe.Leslie E. Anderson, in the opening article, examines the authoritarian habits that linger in contemporary Argentina. In her opinion, selective repression and the periodic distribution of favors have inhibited the development of trans-local alliances among poor people’s movements, despite simmering feelings of anger over economic suffering and ongoing material inequality. According to Anderson, city dwellers (partly because of the government’s systematic effort to divide the poor) continue to see their neighborhoods as natural political units, have not developed a larger sense of class consciousness, and tend not to see the broader political and social order as the cause of day-to-day frustrations.1 Anderson speculates that with the passage of time, parochial political outlooks can gradually be overcome. Still, she says, the development of a broader, class-wide oppositional culture in Argentina will occur only if grassroots protests continue to take place. Then, through practical experiences of political success and failure, ties of cross-neighborhood understanding and trust might be built, which might in turn overcome the long-standing patronage lines that separate nearby and equally impoverished neighborhoods.Emile Lester, meanwhile, shifts attention to the United States and reflects on the criticisms that commentators on the Left have made of President Barack Obama for being too cautious and hesitant in the pursuit of his liberal agenda. Lester counters by asserting that in the United States successful liberal presidents often interpret their charge in traditional British-conservative terms: their goal is the long-term preservation of the country as a whole. He develops his argument in part through an analysis of claims by Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. about British conservatives’ cautious approach to the use of political power to achieve social change. In Lester’s opinion, the recognition that a president can embrace a trans-partisan notion of loyalty will yield more positive assessments about presidents who sometimes veer from partisan rhetoric and policy promises proclaimed on the campaign trail.2 Like Walter Clark Wilson and William Curtis Ellis (whose essay will be described shortly), Lester contends that U.S. politicians are not moral donuts who lack an internal moral compass and who pursue whatever voters and party ideologues demand. All three authors argue that electoral calculations and party loyalties play a far smaller role in national politicians’ thinking than political scientists typically presume. They deem it wise to appreciate the deeply rooted normative outlooks of U.S. leaders that exist independently of electoral calculations and party pressures.In another study about the construction of ties across a polity, Elissa Alzate re-examines John Locke’s discussion of religious tolerance. In the course of dissecting Locke’s multi-layered argument, Alzate illuminates his hopes that religion can serve as a method to expand individuals’ understanding of self-interest and, thereby, to enrich feelings of citizenship. Locke (in Alzate’s reading) contended that sincere belief in an afterlife can emotionally compel people to contain their narrowly self-regarding impulses.3 Furthermore, he believed that the observation of fellow residents performing religious rituals reassured individuals that private contracts and promises will be kept. Thus, even though Locke opposed enforcement of society-wide agreement on religious tenets, he believed that religious modes of thinking channeled emotions in politically healthy ways. Through public declarations of religious faith and private fears and hopes about eternal damnation and bliss, public borders could be built and maintained.4Emma Saunders-Hastings looks at the views of another seminal liberal political theorist, John Stuart Mill, and at his negative caricatures of female philanthropists. It is her contention that Mill’s derogatory descriptions of women who participate in philanthropic organizations contain insights about how a seemingly benign public-service activity can promote distance between classes as well as reinforce women’s acceptance of hierarchy between sexes. Mill interpreted acts of noblesse oblige as rituals that placed two sets of powerless people—women and the poor—in a hierarchical relationship. The relationship encouraged deference on the part of the recipient of the gift, increased awareness of social distance between the middle-class reformer and the working-poor family, and accustomed the gift-giver to the reasonableness of subordination. In all these ways, thought Mill, charity instead of broadening cultural boundaries and making society more tolerant and accepting reinforced notions of difference, separation, and inequality. In Mill’s opinion, charity is an asymmetrical power relation. It fosters unnecessary distrust, suspicions, and feelings of superiority and inferiority among people who should view and treat each other more respectfully and less arrogantly.5But do people ever naturally defy narrow boundaries? In a study that employs quantitative data and statistical methods, Walter Clark Wilson and William Curtis Ellis argue that some politicians in the U.S. Congress tend to see themselves as guardians of a diaspora, and not simply as obedient servants of party leaders and district constituencies. Wilson and Ellis support their thesis by comparing the behavior of African American members of Congress and the behavior of non-African American members with regard to legislation and committee hearings related to Africa. The authors find that African American legislators are much more prone to discuss the needs and interests found on the continent of Africa, and to support legislation that addresses those interests and needs, than are other members of Congress. At the end of the article, Wilson and Ellis conjecture that surrogate representation is not unique to African American legislators. Drawing on anecdotes about Jewish and Latino/a members of Congress, they hypothesize that many non-African American legislators also act as surrogate representatives for trans-national interests. If this is true, they argue, then conventional images of representation, which stress straightforward lines of accountability between legislators and voters, need to be reconsidered.The issue closes with an article that offers a sympathetic criticism of a proposal for increasing methodological pluralism. Edward Gimbel notes that one of the goals of the Perestroika movement during the early twenty-first century was to relate scholarship more closely to contemporary political problems and to make political science less disconnected from actual political practice. This aspiration has contributed to the popularity of a new approach to methodology, often called phronesis. According to Gimbel, self-described advocates of phronesis refuse to see a single set of methodological moves as appropriate to all research topics. Instead, they encourage researchers to develop facility with a wide range of analytic methods (advanced statistical methods, case-study analysis, paired comparison, ethnographic field work and so on). Then, whenever the world poses a political question that needs to be answered, the researcher will be able to pick from her “methodological tool box” the observational approach (or mixture of approaches) most appropriate for answering that question.Gimbel argues that the post-Perestroika understanding of phronesis, by challenging the cult of quantitative methods that dominates some corners of political science, provides a valuable service. The understanding, nonetheless, is morally anemic compared with alternative understandings of phronesis—for example, formulations by Aristotle and, more recently, Hans-Georg Gadamer. According to these alternative understandings, the world does not automatically toss out self-evident “problems” to morally indifferent political scientists. They are involved in the definition of problems, because scholars are inescapable affected by (and therefore wish to shape) the political reality that they study. Therefore, according to the older understanding of phronesis, a political scientist ought to be cognizant of the type(s) of political order that she wants and the type(s) that she opposes. Translated into the theme of this issue, critical reflections on one’s current boundaries should always inform the choice of research methods. Notes 1. For another case study on how patronage occludes class consciousness in Latin American cities, see Kelly Bay-Meyer, “Do Ortega’s Citizen Power Councils Empower the Poor in Nicaragua? Benefits and Costs of Local Democracy,” Polity 45 (July 2013): 393–421.2. Polity has published several articles that reflect on the record of President Obama and on alternative ways to assess it. See, for example, the symposium organized by Evelyn Simien, “The Obama Presidency: Public Opinion, Policy Outcomes, and Rhetorical Failure”, in Polity 45 (January 2013): 82–168.3. Readers seeking additional research on Locke’s opposition to excessively narrow understandings of interest are invited to read Susan P. Liebell, “The Text and Context of ‘Enough and as Good’: John Locke as the Foundation of an Environmental Liberalism,” Polity 43 (January 2011): 210–41.4. For further reflections on the ways religious observations might either enhance or undermine liberal politics, see Dylan Weller, “Godless Patriots: Towards a New American Civil Religion,” Polity 45 (July 2013): 372–92.5. For an additional discussion of the possible anti-democratic consequences of philanthropy, see Nora Hanagan, “Democratizing Responsibility: Jane Addams’s Pragmatist Ethics,” Polity 45 (July 2013): 347–71. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Volume 46, Number 2April 2014Constructing Boundaries The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.7 Views: 69Total views on this site Copyright © 2014, Northeastern Political Science AssociationPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article

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