It is customary for a new editor to say a little about himself and how he plans to tackle the goals of the journal. But in the spirit of co-creation, I’d like to start this issue by extending special gratitude to the longest-running member of the editorial staff: Habib Gharib. Gharib has worked on the journal since 2001, and his attention to both grammar and content is impeccable. He has at various times been listed on our masthead as “Assistant Editor” and “Assistant Managing Editor,” but whatever the title he has edited patiently and with great skill. We are grateful for his services.
Steve Elkin has often said something like what he wrote in his last book: that political science needs to be either reinvented or reworked so that “efforts at explanation and evaluation are tied to the question of good political regimes and how they may be secured and maintained.”[i] This reworking has been the business of The Good Society since Elkin founded the Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society with Soltan and Gar Alperovitiz and started printing a newsletter in 1991.
Since that time, the journal has had a certain thematic unity: the articles we have published have focused on matters of institutional design, democratic deliberation, the history of political theory, and, perhaps obviously, political economy. But the real unity of the journal has been methodological, an intensive focus on this holistic and normative approach to political science. In his first “PEGS and Wholes” editorial in 1995, Elkin challenged the new faddish attention to deliberation, asking: “if deliberation is such a good thing what does it take to get it?” That is a theme we take up again in this issue and to which we plan to return in future. Always The Good Society has had the dual aim to analyze specific institutions and understand them in relation to regimes: to understand that the structure of the economy, the organization of the state, and the role of the citizen are not independent but interlinked questions. Elkin titled his editorials “PEGS and Wholes” to refer to this linkage, framing analysis of the institutions within the good (or good enough) regime.
I intend to preserve that stereoscopic focus, with some expansions. The discipline of political science still seems to have its attention focused elsewhere, or what’s worse, research questions are divided up in such a way that the question of the good political regime is rarely asked in its totality. Yet it is not hard to find fellow-travelers: many scholars find themselves straddling disciplinary lines in the way Elkin imagined, and we will continue to be a home for their work. In our coverage of the good regime, economy and government authority have predominated, and citizenship has often played a minor role. Yet there is good reason to believe that insofar as a regimes’ institutions fall short of those required for a good enough regime, only the regimes’ citizens, acting together, can restore it.
The Good Society has assembled plenty of evidence about which institutions citizens should seek to reform, and even some theories as to how they should go about achieving those reforms. But more than before I hope to find good work to publish in The Good Society on the education, organization, deliberation, and effective action of citizens (defined both as legal members and as informal co-creators of the institutions and regimes they inhabit.)
I believe that one of the primary obstacles to effective citizen action is the size of the problems and the mechanisms available to address them: neither small-scale deliberative and participatory activism nor mass-scale mobilization and protest are any longer effective to address the kinds of problems that plague us. We therefore welcome new work on challenges to citizen efficacy, especially challenges and opportunities presented by the administrative state, whether it be in environmental governance, financial sector rule-making, or urban land use.
We will also spend a bit more time focusing on bad regimes and the badness in our own. This issue features a book review on a new biography of Adolph Eichmann that purports to challenge Hannah Arendt’s 1963 portrait of the man in Eichmann in Jerusalem. As Roger Berkowitz reports, it mostly confirms her thesis that Eichmann was anti-Semitic and cruel, but ultimately thoughtless. Hannah Arendt said of political theory that it takes up the challenge “to think what we are doing.” Eichmann, she claimed, did not think what he was doing and so while he was guilty of enthusiastic support for genocide, this guilt was a byproduct of his thoughtlessness and failure of imagination. The corollary for Arendt was that when our own thoughtlessness fails to be genocidal it is more a matter of (moral and institutional) luck than skill or character, so “thinking what we are doing” is a general obligation.
While we may not have been unthinkingly complicit in genocide, we have inhabited a regime that incarcerates far too many of its citizens, too many of whom are black and brown and poor. We have inhabited a regime that has become dependent on a class of migrant laborers who are denied the formal rights and protections of citizenship. And we have inhabited a regime whose consumption patterns appear to be inconsistent with sustaining a good (or even good enough) climate. There is little doubt that even the good enough society is an aim to be secured rather than a status quo to be maintained, and there are many more examples like these in the political economy and institutional design of our own regimes.
Thus while we continue to value the kind of political theory that aims to think the present moment, to understand how we have found ourselves in this place, we hope to expand “what are we doing?” to include the question of civic studies: “what shall we do together?” This opens up strategic considerations and alternative aims in a way that was always nascent in the effort to secure and maintain good political regimes. But it also frames future research around the limits and opportunities for citizens to reconstruct the regime’s constitution directly. I want to put contributors on the lookout for spaces and examples of collaboration among active citizens that reach beyond the limited scale of local citizenship.
Some Procedural Changes of Note
Two Departures from the Symposium Model: Historically, The Good Society has solicited and published thematically-linked symposia. The beauty of this model is the depth of inquiry that scholars can produce when they are engaged together from the start in attacking a single theme from multiple perspectives. As much as possible, we plan to preserve this model; but we also plan to expand on it. Starting this issue, we will begin announcing our themes in advance and soliciting papers broadly. We will also begin publishing standalone papers and book reviews, as well as symposia from prior issues.
Calls for Papers: Over the next year we’ll be publishing symposia on a diverse set of themes: formal political theory, militaries and democracy, and deliberation in non-democratic regimes. We invite contributions to these symposia, especially from young scholars. We promise to give prompt peer reviews (within the limits of our reviewers’ generosity and competence.) The quickest way to access these calls for papers is through our new website (goodsocietyjournal.org) and our Facebook page (The Good Society.)
A General Call for Standalone Papers: Starting this year, we will be experimenting with the publication of standalone papers. One way to think about these papers is as responses to prior symposia: if you missed the publication deadline for our symposium on “Mass Incarceration and Democratic Theory,” for instance, we would still like a chance to publish your response essay or your article on similar themes. Another way to think about this standing call for papers is through the lens of our enduring preoccupations: in this issue, you will find the first publication of a document we call “The Framing Statement,” written by a group of scholars as they began planning the Summer Institute for Civic Studies that now meets annually at Tufts. You may also consider it a general call for papers, symposia, reviews, and practical reflections.
Triannual Publication: The Good Society has sometimes been published biannually and sometimes triannually. Starting in 2016, it will be published triannually again, thanks to our new partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
Endnotes, In-Text Citation, and Abstracts: We’ve traditionally eschewed the clutter of in-text citation, along with that harbinger of indexing and impact factors, the abstract. But no longer. We now welcome in-text citations and require abstracts.
PEGS and The Good Society: Since 1995, the proper title of the journal has been “The Good Society: Journal of the Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society.” That’s quite a mouthful! So in private we call the journal “The Good Society,” a name we share with a German denim clothing brand and books by Walter Lippmann, Robert Bellah (and his coauthors), and John Kenneth Galbraith. PEGS generally refers to the Committee and its work: the edited volumes, our panels at the APSA and other conferences, etc.
Biases, Heuristics, and Democracy
This issue features a symposium on “Biases, Heuristics and Democracy.” The current cross-pollination between cognitive psychology, experimental philosophy, and political science has been a very fruitful one for researchers, but we worry that it has overemphasized the basic skepticism in political theory about the competence of democratic polities. So we commissioned these papers to take up the newest version of Plato’s challenge that the demos is not wise enough to rule.
Perhaps the best and most appealing expression of this view comes from Cass Sunstein, who has gathered the research on democratic deliberation and epistemic considerations for public policy in such a way as to make a preference for democratic decision-making look unpalatable.[ii] Yet as Michael Wagner and his co-authors show, citizens need to use their cultural identities as a part of their reflection and deliberation, and these identities can both help and hamper comprehension. Heuristics, then, are not simply biased short-cuts, but lenses through which we see and frame the world: there is no non-heuristic cognition. In the spirit of operationalizing the problem, John Gastil offers concrete suggestions from his research on the Oregon Citizens Initiative Review for institutional changes that can increase voter information without succumbing to bias. With a theorist’s perspective, Hélène Landemore adds insights from her own recent book to this defense, arguing that the existence of biases actually militates in favor of inclusion and broad-based decision-making rather than exclusion. And Jamie Kelly takes issue with Sunstein’s libertarian paternalism, not from the perspective of libertarian concerns for autonomy, but rather from the perspective of the common welfare.
[i] Stephen L. Elkin, Reconstructing the Commercial Republic: Constitutional Design after Madison (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006), 3.
[ii] Cass R. Sunstein, Republic. Com 2.0 (Princeton University Press, 2009); Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization,” Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2002): 175–95; Cass R. Sunstein, “Moral Heuristics,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, no. 4 (2005): 531–41; Cass R. Sunstein, Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
