Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities

Political Peoplehood

Political Peoplehood

The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities

ROGERS M. SMITH

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science and chair of the Department of Political Science and the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism at the University of Pennsylvania.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28493-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28509-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28512-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226285122.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Rogers M., 1953– author.

Political peoplehood : the roles of values, interests, and identities / Rogers M. Smith.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-28493-4 (cloth : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-28509-2 (paperback : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-28512-2 (ebook) 1. Political culture. 2. Political sociology. 3. Group identity. 4. Political psychology. I. Title.

JA75.7.S64 2015

306.2—dc23

2015000668

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To the Mighty Violet

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I : THEORIZING PEOPLEHOOD

ONE / Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics

TWO / A Theory of the Politics of People Building

THREE / Narrative Structures and the Politics of Peoplehood (with Meral Ugur Cinar)

FOUR / Personal Stories and Communal Stories in the Politics of Peoplehood

PART II : EXPLORING AMERICAN PEOPLEHOOD

FIVE / Individual Rights in American Stories of Peoplehood

SIX / Contesting Meaning and Membership in American Peoplehood

PART III : MODERATING PEOPLEHOOD

SEVEN / From Providentialism and Exceptionalism to a Politics of Moderate Peoplehood

EIGHT / The American Promiseland and Mexican Immigrants

NINE / Multiple Citizenships and the Legacies of Imperialism

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

INTRODUCTION

On Studying Stories of Political Peoplehood

My earliest memory takes place in a home from which my family moved when I was three years old. I see my mother putting heavy bags of groceries down on the kitchen table while scolding my brother, two years older, and me for fighting in the car and not helping bring in the bags. My next oldest memory comes from shortly after we moved from that house. Its basement had flooded and my father returned to help the new owner bail it out. I see myself crouched on the basement steps, wanting to help—wanting, really, just to get into that mysteriously deep water—but being told by my father to wait. I mostly complied.

At this point, these memories are probably just memories of stories I later told about my memories, rather than direct recollections. But they remain my first stories about myself, which I now recognize as ones of familial belonging, as well as of familial obligations that I was not meeting so well. My guess is that I next formed a sense of myself as a Presbyterian Christian and an American, since the memories that follow are of Sunday School and also playing World War II soldiers, and sometimes cowboys and Indians, with my brother. I know I learned early on that Americans elected their leaders. I can remember seeing Dwight D. Eisenhower in a grainy black-and-white telecast waving from a car and wondering why this bald, dull-looking old man was our president. I lived in Springfield, Illinois, the hometown of President Abraham Lincoln, and he had looked far more interesting, tall, bearded, with a stovepipe hat. By the time I was in the second grade, during the Kennedy-Nixon 1960 campaign, I knew that, like Lincoln and my parents, I was a Republican, and I watched and thought Nixon won the first debate.

Although I therefore revealed no precocious talent for political judgments, I found it hard not to attempt them. Like many of my generation, by my late teens I came to question the traditions of familial roles, religious belief, and 100 percent American patriotism in which I had been raised, and I was profoundly disillusioned as the Republicans turned away from Lincoln’s cause of civil rights. The questioning eventually led me to become a scholar of politics, and I found myself undertaking a path of inquiry that has led to this volume. Each chapter in it is a step along a still very incomplete intellectual journey that I hope to persuade some to join. But it is a journey filled with worrisome uncertainties, so it seems best here at the outset to map out the endeavor, to indicate why it is compelling, and to begin addressing the concerns that call it into doubt.

My professional tracks on this path date back more than thirty years, when I first began studying American citizenship laws. Those studies eventually led me to explore what I came to call political peoples and especially the stories of peoplehood through which, in part, such peoples are created, maintained, challenged, and changed. Admittedly, this work has been in part a continuing effort to come to terms with those stories that shaped my own early sense of my identities and responsibilities, but I soon discovered that I could learn most by exploring the narratives of many other political peoples as well.

In this work I define these political peoples broadly, as any and all human associations, groups, and communities that are commonly understood to assert that their members owe them a measure of allegiance against the demands of other associations, communities, and groups. It is the fact that these associations, groups, and communities are perceived to advance claims to governing authority in competition with others that makes them political—and the more demanding the claims, the more political the group.¹

I have argued that a wide range of human groupings may meet this definition, from religious bodies to social movements to racial and ethnic communities to urban and regional polities to economic associations to nation-states and many more. Depending on the breadth and depth of the allegiances that groups expect of their members, there can be weaker and stronger forms of political peoplehood. And I have contended that though political peoples are generally created and maintained in part by coercive force, they cannot be sustained without narratives that persuade a critical mass of supporters to give willing allegiance to those associations and their leaders. That is why stories of peoplehood are so foundational in politics and in human life more broadly (Smith 2003). It is because these stories are so fundamental that they can be found everywhere, almost always containing the same few basic general themes and structures, even as they also display astonishing variety, that I find exploring them endlessly fascinating.

My tools for investigating these stories have been primarily interpretive or qualitative, rather than quantitative. I have examined empirical questions about the political work that stories of peoplehood do in conveying senses of meaning and value, crafting coalitions, defining political goals, prescribing institutions and policies, and sustaining or failing to sustain support for political communities and their leaders, institutions, and policies in difficult times. I have also explored normative questions about how these stories should and should not be crafted in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, if they are to be both morally commendable and politically effective. More often than not, I have blended these inquiries.

For many accomplished social scientists, all this is questionable—lax in methodology, marginal in substance. Other scholars are more favorable. But the doubts are appropriate ones that I have never fully laid to rest in my own mind. This volume embodies my own current thinking, informed by others, on the questions that seem most important.

Four doubts are particularly troubling. Here I list them and give preliminary answers. The chapters that follow, often first written with other concerns in mind, have been restructured and ordered to elaborate and provide evidence for these responses. Although I cannot pretend they do so definitively, when reinforced by the works of other researchers, I believe they make a credible case for the value of these explorations.

The first troubling question is whether it makes sense to study such a broad and relatively unfamiliar phenomenon as political peoples. I do not insist that, along with nation-states, all ethnic, religious, cultural, kinship, economic, social, ideological, and territorial associations should be regarded as political peoples. But I do insist that insofar as they can be reasonably understood to demand the allegiance of their members against other groups, they must be so classified.

Few scholars today analyze human associations using this category of political peoples or ones similarly broad. Even the recent work that might appear most kindred, the sociologist John Lie’s Modern Peoplehood, focuses on a narrower conception of peoplehood (without explicitly ruling out other definitions). Although Lie sees modern peoplehood as a political creation, he believes it differs fundamentally from earlier forms of political community. It is an inclusionary and involuntary group identity whose major subcategories are what he sees as the modern ones of race, ethnicity, and nation—though Lie admits that language, religion, culture and history sometimes provide bases for modern peoplehood as well, and he concedes that all these conceptions build on precursors and continuities (Lie 2004, 1, 21–22, 78–95, 111, 119–20). Still, Lie sees modern peoplehood as very much the creation of modern large territorial states, and he thinks that because those states differ from ancient empires, city-states, and feudal orders, the sense of peoplehood they have created also differs, so much that he does not explore any commonalities among what I see as various older and newer forms of political peoplehood (Lie 2004, 42–54, 99–143).

In contrast, I reject any sharp ancient/modern dichotomy as a means of classifying the range of political peoples in human experience. Although I agree that modern states have fostered senses of peoplehood that differ in some respects from many predecessors, they also vary more greatly from each other in the common bases of identity they stress than Lie acknowledges. As his evidence shows, many modern citizens have defined their peoplehood by stressing ideological agreement on political and economic principles and minimizing their involuntary character, even as they have also invoked essentialist conceptions of race, ethnicity, and historical nationality. Those three categories have also all served as the basis of subnational and transnational challenges to states, not simply as affirmations of territorial nation-states’ legitimacy (Lie 2004, 128–32, 145–56). I have also suggested that though modern nationalist ideologies often emphasize horizontal, egalitarian, and inclusive visions of the nation, they often also include vertical elements of fixed hierarchies, privileging some racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender identities over others, with the latter still regarded as belonging to the nation (Smith 2003, 33–34). Similarly, though Lie is right to say that self-described nation-states became hegemonic globally in the twentieth century, they never ceased to coexist with other forms of political community, and they are facing rising challenges today.

These points call into question the preeminent title of race, ethnicity, nation to define modern peoplehood. They increase the likelihood that all the many forms of political peoplehood, past and present, can be seen as variations along a continuum, rather than as sharply distinct. If so, then it is plausible to seek to identify features of peoplehood that are common to the whole range of forms of political community and identity that humanity has created—and to discern whether by grasping these common features, we can gain insights into important empirical and normative political issues, including the sources of the many variations we also see. That is the endeavor these chapters undertake.

They begin by elaborating theoretical conceptions of the role of ideas, including stories of peoplehood, in politics generally, and in the politics of people building specifically. They also examine how different narrative structures and content themes shape policy making, especially in regard to issues of membership, and how, within the constraints and using the resources their contexts provide, leaders build support by knitting their personal stories and those of their constituents together with their communal narratives of collective identity and purpose. Several chapters explore how and why notions of rights, including both economic and political rights, as well as conceptions of race, religion, gender, and immigration have played the roles they have in American political development. Others examine normative issues of the kinds of civic discourse appropriate for constructive people building; advance arguments about the obligations of the U.S. and other wealthier, more powerful nations to those their coercive policies have affected; and consider the more general question of what forms of political community—cosmopolitan, regional, national, transnational, subnational, federated, sovereign or semi-sovereign—should be sought today. It is because exploring common features in the politics of peoplehood appears able to enrich understanding of all these topics and more that its pursuit is worthwhile.

Still, because my category of political peoples is much broader than those deployed by other analysts, it is reasonable to worry that it includes groups so different that it is misleading to analyze them as versions of the same type of thing. Given what most writers choose to examine, modern scholarship in general might be seen to endorse this concern, albeit rarely self-consciously. There are well-established literatures on nations and nationalism, ethnic groups, racial identities, religious communities, labor movements, social movements, nongovernmental organizations, cities, territorial regions, and many more entities that I claim can be political peoples. In contrast, until recently there has been little scholarly discussion of the category of peoplehood, and most works analyzing peoplehood, including my own, focus primarily on nations (e.g., Canovan 2005; Näsström 2007; Ochoa Espejo 2011). Perhaps, then, there is little to be gained and much to be lost by exploring political peoplehood defined so expansively, instead of just extending the literatures that employ more conventional categories.

This quest to explore political peoplehood rests on the conviction that the opposite is true—that we miss much when we conceptualize categories like race, ethnicity, nationhood, religion, economic class, cultural group, linguistic community, regional population, social movement, and more as fundamentally distinct entities. We especially risk failure to recognize fully how and why human beings have constructed and reconstructed those groups and categories over time. That failure can lead us to lapse into treating some of them as if they are distinctively natural or primordial, or at least as more enduring, less contested and contestable than they are in fact.²

Consider, for example, the perennial question: Who is a Jew? Is a Jew a member of a religion, an ethnicity, a nation, a race, anyone with a Jewish mother? Both those who see themselves as Jews and those who do not see themselves as Jews have given shifting answers over time, and they continue to do so (Lie 2004, 26–32). The state of Israel relies in part on the last definition, but that answer only moves the question back a generation, and some people with Jewish mothers do not think of themselves as Jewish at all. In any case, neither that response nor any other has done much to quell emotional debates within and outside Israel over who can claim Jewish identity (The Economist 2012). The different views roil the internal politics of Israel and the relationships of Israel to its neighbors and the world.

So whatever else may be involved, part of the answer to who is a Jew? must be that a Jew is today, and has often been in the past, a member of a political people: someone who can expect to experience demands on him or her made in the name of the Jewish people, and someone who may also be treated with hostility by others because of his or her perceived membership in and allegiance to that people. To be sure, we do not begin to capture all that being Jewish means to many Jews and non-Jews if we conceive of Jewish identity as simply a form of political peoplehood. But if we do not analyze the varying ways that it is and often has been a kind of political peoplehood, we miss elements of being Jewish that are vitally important.

More generally and more radically, I submit that if we think of any identity or identity category as something that is in principle distinct from politics, we fail to grasp that identity fully. We also fail to appreciate what is at the heart of politics, and how profoundly politics relates to all human experiences. Politics is best conceived as contestation, and contestation not simply about distribution, who gets what, when, and how, but still more basically about who governs, understood as which human beings and institutions have both the actual power and the generally recognized legitimate authority to order the activities of at least some group or groups of human beings.³ Such power and authority are always attained and maintained in part by processes through which certain populations come to believe that they are a people who should be governed by certain sorts of human beings and institutions in certain ways. And reluctant as we may be to admit it, contests over which people and institutions should govern which populations, often overt, often indirect, are pervasive in human life. This reality means we must use broad categories encompassing the many groups in whose names we experience demands, both from those commonly thought to be in the groups and those outside them, if we are not to underestimate the manifold forms and influence of politics.

Many might protest that the view just stated overemphasizes the political dimensions of human life. It makes everything seem just part of politics! I agree that much in human life—our families, our faiths, our creative arts, our intellectual quests, our recreations, and more—should be seen as important in ways that cannot be grasped if we focus only on their political dimensions. Yet the inescapable reality is that politics is in fact part of everything in human life. No family, no church, no theater group, cultural association, or artisans’ guild, no scientific society, no sports league has ever been free of tensions over just who can make authoritative decisions within it and who can belong to it. And the terms and resolutions of those issues have always been shaped to some degree by what is encouraged, permitted, or prohibited in the larger political communities in which these groups reside. Consequently, the bevy of literatures on particular identities, while capturing real, significant variations, sometimes may miss the political forests we inhabit. They may not adequately recognize that though we do see ash, birch, cedar, fir, maple, oak, redwood, palm, and bamboo plants, we are nonetheless always looking at political trees, all vying with their roots, blossoms, and branches to occupy the terrains of our common lives.

The current moment is one in which such recognition should come fairly readily. For even as nation-states remain the preeminent form of political peoplehood, with power and authority to make the most sweeping demands that much of the world’s population experiences, both the power and authority of the nation-state system, as well as of particular nation-states, are being visibly transformed. Many states have ceded authority to supranational bodies such as the European Union and the World Trade Organization, and many have granted greater autonomy to subunits, such as Scotland and Catalonia, while facing pressure to grant still more (Benz and Papadopoulos 1996; Greer 2007).

To be sure, those pressures are generally strongly resisted: the heyday of the nation-state has not ended, which is why most of us who study peoplehood still end up discussing nations and nationalism most extensively. But analysts of many other groups, from the European Union to early twentieth-century Russian Mennonite communities to southwestern Mexican Americans to African American gay men to transnational labor, feminist, and environmental activists, have found it useful to analyze them as, at least in part, political peoples whose construction requires the narration of stories of peoplehood as defined here (e.g., Delanty 2005, 137; Rivera 2006; Neufeldt 2009; Petchauer, Yarhouse, and Gallien 2008; Williams 2009). When we consider the many types of groups that are now laying claim to the allegiance of those they deem their members, even against any and all nation-states, it should at a minimum be evident that all these groups are indeed political. And if scholars choose to look to see if stories of peoplehood defining and valorizing these group identities form part of the processes through which the groups are constructed, maintained, challenged, and changed, they will always find them.

Even so, should they look for them? There are many features of these groups that we might explore, including their relationships to economic resources, military weaponry, established political organizations, and governing institutions. The second difficult question is why we should study the role of what I call stories in the political processes of constructing and transforming forms of peoplehood. The endeavor can seem all too belletristic, far too focused on what people say rather than what they do. One of the following chapters, an exploration of the kinds of national narratives told by newly founded modern nation-states including Turkey, Austria, and Israel along with the United States, even urges political scientists to consider drawing on literary theory more fully than most have done.

For some scholars, this sort of research overestimates the role of storytelling and underestimates the role of reasoned arguments concerning human interests; moral, legal, and political principles; and empirical realities in shaping political life. For others, focusing on the literary structures of narratives is naive, blind to the realities that political communities have most often been forged through violent conflict, sometimes driven by harsh economic needs, sometimes by quests for wealth and power that have employed deception and treachery along with more blunt weapons. As Thomas Hobbes concluded, there is scarce a Commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified (Hobbes 1968, 722). What is the point of focusing on the fables that people tell themselves to minimize this ugly reality? Surely it makes more sense to attend to their material interests, their military resources, their strategic behavior, their institutional structures, and other more concrete factors in political life?

An initial answer is that many, many people, from current governmental leaders to candidates for office to dissident organizers to corporate publicists to journalists, priests, historians, poets, novelists, folk singers, barbers, cab drivers, and more, all devote much labor and care to crafting and telling stories of peoplehood, often doing so over and over—so it is reasonable to ask why they act this way. The deeper answer is that all persons’ senses of their personhood—of their identities, interests, values, and aspirations—are constituted in large part by their absorption of and reflection on the stories of their peoplehood that form part of their socialization. We think and feel ourselves to be formed by religions, nations, kinship groups, ethnicities, cultures, political movements, social classes, regions, and other identities whose significance we have had narrated to us in many ways from early in life. We define our goals and decide on our actions in light of the identities we find most compelling. Since this is true of all persons, the institutions, practices, and policies that people go on to create, sustain, or modify are also constituted in part by ideas expressed in the stories of peoplehood they have embraced. It is in fact impossible to make much sense of how and why people act, or their collective institutions and practices, without understanding the themes of those stories. It is attempts to explain human actions and political life without attending to such stories that are unscientific, nonempirical, naive.

But how should we attend to them? That is the third difficult question that explorers of stories of peoplehood must face. Presumably scholars should do so in the most intellectually rigorous ways possible. For many, rigor counsels against analyzing political arguments as stories that rely on emotional appeals, mythical elements, or premises about human history and human nature taken on faith. Instead, believing that most actors are basically rational or at least that more rational actions will prevail over time, we should seek to determine the rational interests and strategies that political accounts express, and assess the reasonableness of the empirical and normative premises on which they rest—analyzing and critiquing political discourses more as logical treatises, or as rational strategic tools, than as constitutive stories.

For many purposes, it is indeed wise to consider what interests and whose interests are served by stories of peoplehood, how they are served, and whether the stories embody empirical and normative claims that are rationally defensible. Those questions will be raised about virtually all the stories discussed in these pages. It is vital to recognize, however, that because the formation of senses of common identities and interests is essential to the building of human groups and the institutions and ways of life they generate, even the most determinedly rational political arguments always have the implicit, and usually the explicit, form of an emotionally compelling constitutive narrative of the past, present, and future, with some claims advanced as matters of faith. Political advocates say: here is who you are, and who you can be. Here is your past and present situation; here is what the results will be if you do or do not accept this form of political membership, these institutions and policies, these leaders. Here are the grand things that will happen if you do. Political arguments can and should be analyzed for elements other than the stories of peoplehood they implicitly or explicitly convey—but those stories must be analyzed if we are to understand how and why persons come to think they have the interests, values, affiliations, and obligations they seek to fulfill.

For twenty-first-century social scientists, the question of how we should attend to stories of peoplehood has another, more technical variant. Scholars seeking to be rigorous may ask whether these studies can legitimately be wholly qualitative, without engagement in some of the forms of quantitative content analysis and other quantitative instruments that have become more prevalent in modern social science tool kits (e.g., Hopkins and King, 2010). I do not oppose such methods. To the contrary, I believe the logic of interpretation always requires us to examine texts systematically, and sometimes to produce explicit and replicable estimates of the quantitative prevalence of the ideas and themes attributed to them, if we are to defend claims for their political significance. One chapter here, focusing on the providentialist stories of American peoplehood told by President George W. Bush, draws on quantitative analyses of speeches conducted for me by research assistants, which proved to correlate closely with results later published by other scholars.

I do not accept, however, that the use of content analysis software or other forms of quantification ever permits analysts to evade reliance on qualitative interpretive judgments—or that such quantification is always necessary to reach well-founded results in empirical inquiries, much less normative ones. As Justin Grimmer and Brandon Stewart have argued in a careful survey of automated content analysis systems, those methods must rely on incorrect, highly simplified models of language, and so they can only augment and amplify, they cannot replace careful and close reading of texts (2013, 2, 5). As they note, sometimes quantification can even obscure rather than assist the interpretive judgments that are always fundamental to the intellectual endeavors that quantification is meant to serve (4). We necessarily engage in qualitative interpretation when we decide on appropriate categories for coding texts and when we decide how particular parts of the texts should be coded, and even if we use statistically generated categories, we still do so when we decide what the results mean. Those interpretive judgments are often controversial, requiring arguments as to why they are preferable to alternatives. Sometimes our coding produces quantitative results that are incoherent in ways that tell us we should reconsider our categories. At other times, however, once we have made the case for certain interpretive categorizations through discussion of particular texts, the prevalence of the most prominent categories of ideas and themes has often been so well established that there is little value added by more precise counting. Intellectual historians, for example, have long used political speeches, judicial opinions, literary texts, pamphlets, and more to identify frequently contested keywords in American politics, to use Daniel Rodgers’s term (Rodgers 1987). Quantification of the use of terms may provide confirmation or help to analyze further issues, but often it will only affirm those core claims.

And sometimes the reporting of quantified results leaves opaque much of the interpretive reasoning involved in determining categories, making coding decisions, and expounding the significance of the results. Focusing on the numbers can distract attention from the interpretive judgments underlying them that are doing crucial work. Again, these circumstances do not mean that quantitative methods are inappropriate for explorations of peoplehood. But the inescapable dependence of quantitative analysis on interpretive reasoning does mean that qualitative interpretations of the sorts elaborated here should be seen as making necessary contributions to rigorous scholarship.

Still, many political scientists fear that scholarship that features interpretive judgments can easily fall into mere articulation of a scholar’s normative preferences for how we should see the world, especially if the scholarship explicitly combines empirical and normative concerns, as many of the following chapters do. The fourth and perhaps hardest question is whether it is wise to study stories of peoplehood in ways that blend empirical and normative arguments.

Perhaps ironically, it is in this regard that the approach of this book most closely resembles conventional behavioral social science. Traditionally people have come to normative views in many ways: through reading texts they regard as divine revelations, through acceptance of binding customary norms, through mystical experiences, through as purely abstract reasoning as human minds can achieve, or through arguments that norms are empirically discernible in nature, among others. Conventional positivistic conceptions of social science hold, however, that none of these means has produced results that are testable in ways that permit us to affirm that they represent discoveries of what is objectively just or unjust, morally good or evil. At most, we can ascertain empirically what normative beliefs people have; we can assess their logic and evaluate their descriptive and causal claims about the world; and we can estimate the likely consequences of acting on those beliefs.

The blending of the empirical and normative that appears in some of the ensuing chapters, especially in part III, does not represent a starkly different view. It is motivated by the conviction that all the normative arguments found in our collective lives are intertwined with stories of political peoplehood in that they imply that we ought to inhabit certain sorts of communities that recognize certain sorts of authorities. When we are told that we should be guided by the Torah, the Koran, or the New Testament; by the Declaration of Independence or the Communist Manifesto; by Plato’s Republic, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, or Rawls’s Theory of Justice; or by national histories and literatures, patriotic anthems, and epic poetry, we are always being told that we should live in some kinds of political communities and not others, and so that certain forms of political peoplehood are appropriate for us, and not others.

To say that all normative arguments operate in human collective life as elements in political stories of peoplehood is not to say that all such arguments are fictions. In principle, some of these stories may be entirely true, some wholly false. In practice, all the stories are likely to contain some elements that are true, some elements that are false, and some elements that we may not be able to judge definitively as true or false, right or wrong—now or perhaps ever. The stories’ presentations of normative goals and standards are likely to have this last character. This normative uncertainty is a feature of political life, indeed human life, that many find disturbing, but it cannot be escaped. Even so, we are likely to be able to understand more and make better judgments by analyzing those stories, including their normative elements, in terms of their internal logic, their descriptive and causal claims about our world, and the observable consequences when people and peoples seek to live by them. And we will see that the fact that political stories of peoplehood in practice usually have fictitious elements is far more due to their being political than their being stories.

The controversial step taken here—all the more controversial because these stories are political—is that after identifying stories of peoplehood that exist empirically in certain contexts, particularly the modern United States, I sometimes go on to explain which ones I find most persuasive and why, and what their normative implications are for current political issues and practices. One way to challenge those arguments is simply to dispute my reasons for judging the stories to be broadly persuasive and the implications I draw from them. But a more fundamental challenge contends, in a version of the hoary fact/value distinction, that just because a story happens to exist in our empirical world, and some of its claims appear to be empirically true, does not mean there is any logical basis for using it to ground normative contentions.

I agree that whenever we go on to make normative arguments premised on judging certain stories as most worthy of our acceptance, those arguments logically must be understood to take only conditional form; if we deem these stories and their normative implications authoritative, then some sorts of practices, policies, and institutions should be seen as commendable, others unworthy. But how can it make sense to take such normative steps, however conditionally and corrigibly?

The answer these arguments presume is that human beings simply have no way to engage in normative judgments other than to embrace stories with normative elements that they find intellectually and emotionally compelling, and then to work out their implications for the decisions they confront. Hence to say we should never seek to move from reflection on the stories we find empirically present in the world, from which we form our identities, our senses of value and purpose, and our broader conceptions of the world and how it works, to normative judgments, is to say that we should not do what we in fact do and what we inescapably have to do if we are ever to make normative judgments. It would be a peculiar empiricism that argued against the possibility or desirability of people doing what we continually observe them doing and what they must do. We certainly can and should critique the content and claims of particular stories and the normative arguments that are built upon them as faulty or, at best, less than certain. But it is quixotic to insist that studying those stories empirically is an enterprise that is in principle unrelated to making normative arguments and judgments. One of our most reliable empirical observations is that those relationships pervasively exist. As economist Arjo Klamer has written, To say anything about the world, we must characterize it but, because we cannot literally know the nature of the natural and social worlds, we resort, more than we are often aware, to constitutive metaphors and stories. Even economists tell stories through mathematical models that communicate which economists are the good guys and which the bad ones, and they may indicate what kind of action is called for . . . in the realm of policy (Klamer 2004, 259–61).

But as that point indicates, a second concern remains: we may taint the accuracy of our empirical characterizations of stories of peoplehood and other political phenomena if we conduct them with an eye to their normative implications, especially on topics we find personally significant. This is indeed a danger we should guard against vigorously. But how best to do so? I am skeptical that the answer is to engage in ruthless internal repression of our own normative reflections and preferences and to seek to examine political developments and issues we care about greatly as if we did not care about them at all. I doubt that we are psychologically capable of pulling it off, and I doubt that we do a service to our readers by writing as if we have pulled it off. I think it far more realistic, far more intellectually honest, and therefore far better methodologically, more rigorous in seeking to grasp and convey what is true as fully as we can, to acknowledge that certain normative concerns and commitments lead us to regard the empirical phenomena we study as significant, and to make clear just how and why we think they are significant. We are much more likely to guard against being misled by our normative concerns and preferences, and we are much less likely to mislead readers, if we make these inescapable dimensions of our thinking apparent, instead of purporting to have somehow heroically exorcised our dangerous normative demons from our minds when we did our empirical work. When it comes to the normative dimensions of our thinking, we can hide but we cannot run. And how can it be good scientific method to try to hide what we are doing from our readers and from ourselves?

These answers to the legitimate doubts about the value of studying stories of peoplehood are elaborated in the ensuing chapters, enabling readers to think further about whether they are persuasive. Some of the chapters draw on previously published papers. Some are new. All the older papers have been revised and combined to feature their answers to the questions just reviewed, to incorporate subsequent thoughts on their topics, and to reduce repetitions. Most have also been modified to include insights from other authors who have joined and strengthened the endeavor of exploring stories of peoplehood. Chapter 3, which compares the narratives of new modern nations, adapts a paper written with Meral Ugur Cinar, whose scholarship persuaded me of the value of calling on literary theory to analyze stories of peoplehood.

The four chapters in part I develop a theoretical account, with examples along the way, for understanding the political roles that stories of peoplehood do in fact play in the real world of politics, supporting the claim that their study must be part of any adequate empirical understanding of politics. Chapter 1 sketches a framework for understanding how all politics works, one that highlights the place of ideas and discourses, including stories of peoplehood, in those processes. Chapter 2 provides a theoretical elaboration of the politics of peoplehood, and specifically the roles of stories of peoplehood, within this general approach to politics. Chapter 3, again, considers how this political theory might be strengthened by literary theories of narrative structures. Chapter 4 examines one dimension of how individuals’ personal stories are related to the communal stories of their political communities, arguing that the tension in democratic theory and politics over whether leaders should provide descriptive or substantive representation can be eased by certain ways of linking the personal stories of aspiring leaders and their potential constituents to each other, and to the leaders’ communal stories of collective peoplehood. Modern American presidential campaign biographies serve to