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Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

Although Connolly appears to be introducing Darwin and biological history into political science, he has instead returned to the roots of the discipline, working and reworking the foundations of politics as a disciplinary locus. Biological thought underpins the history of political science, a fact too easily forgotten by contemporary practitioners.

What does it mean that humans were not the only hominin? Or, more importantly, what does it mean that other hominins held cultural, biological, and perhaps even linguistic equivalence to human beings? Drawing on mitochondrial DNA analyses, theories of deep history, and attention to the inhuman, this essay argues that such equivalence entails not only the reality of human/nonhuman genetic compatibility but the existence of politics in places and times without humans. Such a politics of non-humans would entail political and social forms playing a central role in the development of humanity. If politico-social experiences in the prehuman and non-human hominin communities actually affected behavior and practices, then the development of humanity is an effect of politics rather than a precondition for it. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

What does it mean that humans were not the only hominin? Or, more importantly, what does it mean that other hominins held cultural, biological, and perhaps even linguistic equivalence to human beings? Drawing on mitochondrial DNA analyses, theories of deep history, and attention to the inhuman, this essay argues that such equivalence entails not only the reality of human/nonhuman genetic compatibility but the existence of politics in places and times without humans. Such a politics of non-humans would entail political and social forms playing a central role in the development of humanity. If politico-social experiences in the prehuman and non-human hominin communities actually affected behavior and practices, then the development of humanity is an effect of politics rather than a precondition for it.

Western political philosophers since Plato have used the family as a model for harmonious political and social relations. Yet, far from being an uncontentious domain for shared interests and common values, the family is often the scene of intense interpersonal conflict and disagreement. In All in the Family, the political theorist Kennan Ferguson reconsiders the family, in its varied forms, as an exemplar of democratic politics and suggests how real rather than idealized family dynamics can help us to better understand and navigate political conflict. By closely observing the attachments that arise in families despite profound disagreements and incommensurabilities, Ferguson argues, we can imagine a political engagement that accommodates radical differences without sacrificing community.

AbstractThis survey's importance comes not from what it informs us about political theory as a field, but rather from the function it serves within debates over the component areas of the field of political science. Rather than answering whether political theory "belongs" within political science (an unanswerable question), the survey uses quantification of qualitative experience and data collection to consolidate political theory as a subfield. Thus success of this project relies upon and reinforces disciplinary norms, operating as a process that attempts to bring a normative political theory into existence. The rank ordering of departments, journals, and individual theorists proves appealing not only for the competitive, horse-race valuation of those people and institutions, but also for how they ultimately resist this project by showing the anti-normative heart of political theory: an important and useful survey indeed.