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The problem of social order is the question of what holds complex and diverse societies together. Today, this question has become increasingly urgent in the world. Yet our ability to ask and answer the question in a helpful way is constrained by the intellectual legacy through which the question has been handed down to us. In this impressive, erudite study, Henrik Enroth describes and analyzes how the problem of social order has shaped concept formation, theory, and normative arguments in political science. The book covers a broad range of influential thinkers and theories throughout the history of political science, from the early twentieth century onwards. Social order has long been a presupposition for inquiry in political science; now we face the challenge of turning it into an object of inquiry.

AbstractThis article is a critique of the notion of post-truth. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the epistemological crisis suggested by the notion of post-truth is epiphenomenal to a more general crisis of authority, a crisis that is poorly understood in the literature. I also argue that revisiting Arendt's account of authority can help us elucidate the vexed dynamics of authority in modern society, as well as the dynamics behind its current crisis. The post-truth situation is a loss of authority that is political before it presents as epistemological. Effectively addressing this situation, I conclude, is a much more challenging and complex proposition than what is suggested in the literature on post-truth.

According to a popular but controversial view in contemporary party research, political parties increasingly put a premium on governing within the institutions of the state rather than on representation of interests and identities in society. This critique has been phrased most uncompromisingly in Richard Katz and Peter Mair's theory of the cartel party, according to which the cartel party governs but does not represent, and thus fails to do what we expect of parties in a modern democracy. This article is an analysis and critique of this presupposition, which has largely escaped the attention of commentators. The idea that the cartel party governs but does not represent rests on an untenable view of political representation. As I argue, the normative problem with the cartel party is not so much that this type of party does not represent, as to decide when and how it does or does not represent.

As Michel Foucault and others have shown, from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, Western political discourse has perpetuated an art of governing aimed at societies and populations. This article argues that this modern art of governing is now coming undone, in the name of governance. The discourse on governance is taking us from an art of governing premised on producing policy for a society or a population to an art of governing premised on solving problems with no necessary reference to any kind of society or population. Tracing the evolution of that discourse, the article argues that existing social and political theory has failed to make sense of this shift. It concludes that in order to access and assess the new art of governing on its own terms we need a sociological imagination that stretches beyond societies and a political imaginary without the presupposition of collectivities.

A manifesto for the good political science raises some fundamental questions. What makes the manifesto as a genre? Are there any essential difference between a political manifesto in the conventional sense and a scientific manifesto? The function fills texts of this kind in an academic discipline? No matter what we think of functional explanations in general, I would in this context to say that we can get the answer to the first two questions through the last. An etymological meaning of the word "manifesto" can be helpful. Manifesto is that which is obvious, and to manifest something that is obvious there. But this opens up once an ambiguity: this means that what is revealed in a manifesto is something that is already evident outside the manifesto, or vice versa, something that is made manifest by Manifesto, by manifesting? Adapted from the source document.