The ethic in which I was trained suggested that if we were careful, if we were responsible, if we took certain precautions, if we confined politics to a carefully demarcated sector (rather like the ghetto or the West Bank) we could do science honestly and honorably. The ethical conduct of political science required discipline, self-government. The ethical conduct of political science required the evacuation of politics. or rather, that politics come into political science only as an object, never as a source of imperatives. This ethic, for which I have a lingering respect, argued that “the professor has other fields for the diffusion of his ideals” and “should not demand the right as a professor to carry the marshal’s baton of the statesman or reformer in his knapsack.”①
　　　Another, contending, ethic suggested that to seek such neutrality was to make political science a job, that we ought to be scholar activists, conscious of our political roles, and performing those roles conscientiously, in accordance with our political principles. We ought to seek to refine our political understandings and theories, develop political strategies and tactics, and pursue particular political objectives. We ought to keep the faith. We ought to serve.
　　　Problem-oriented political science is an instance of this second ethic. Spare me the recitations which seek to differentiate the “problem-oriented political scientist” from the “scholar activists.” Observe the similarities. Both believe that the vocation of the political scientist is to act in the world for the improvement of the world. Both have no small confidence that they know what a good world would look like, and that they know what the advancement of a better world requires. Both believe (in defiance of Foucault, Derrida, history, and commonsense) that their acts will follow their will, that they are able to determine the consequences of their actions, and control the uses of their work. Both move with the good will, the generous heart, the parochial judgement, and the intrusive magnanimity of the 19th century missionary.  
　　　Mindful of the history of earlier missionary efforts, I have come to distrust the scholar activist. I am sympathetic to the view that political science is too abstruse and inaccessible, too specialized, too inclined to narcissism and navel-gazing; that it too often fails to examine that power which is its avowed object, too often abdicates engagement with issues for a vacuous professionalism. Yet it is exactly because I think political scientists should look more to the operation of power, that they should speak truth to power, that I oppose the primacy of problem-oriented political science. 
　　　Political science is a discipline in history without a history; a discipline ignorant of its own genealogy and unconscious of its place in a world historical context. Recovering the history of political science, and the place of political science in history, should make us suspect the utility and the ethics of problem-oriented political science.
　　　The history of that enterprise is not one calculated to inspire confidence. Certainly, political science is, as a discipline, intimately linked to the history of efforts to find solutions to social and political problems. The history of that history supplies something of a cautionary tale. Those moments when scholars have been called, and disciplines devoted to the solving of problems, have not always (or even often) been the moments when they showed themselves best. I intend to begin by looking briefly at three of these moments: Reconstruction, colonialism and the Cold War.
　　　Reconstruction is, of course, prior to political science as a nominal field but, as Robert Vitalis has shown, it is also a crucial site for the development of the discipline, particularly for the subfield of international relations. The early twentieth century saw the conscious adaptation of models of development created for, and enacted in the American South.② Solving the problem of poverty, whether at a national or global level, was understood as a question intimately tied to race by early social scientists. The inaugural issue of the Journal of Race Development, declared that the United States “has as fundamental an interest in races of a less developed civilization as have the powers of Europe. The key to the past seventy-five years of American history is the continuing struggle to find some solution to the negro problem -a problem still unsolved.”③ This was problem-solving at its most self-conscious. This also, as Vitalis has demonstrated, placed problem solving at the very origins of the discipline. The Journal of Race Development “was renamed the Journal of International Relations in 1919. Three years later it became Foreign Affairs.”④
　　　In many respects, Reconstruction is the most heartening of the moments I will put before you. It was impelled, at least in its first or best instance, by a commitment to right wrongs done to former slaves, to integrate them legally, socially, economically, into the American nation. The government committed significant resources of land and labor to the enterprise. For a moment, African Americans entered the House, the Senate, the polity, as equals. For a moment, white and black Americans worked together to make a more perfect Union. For a moment, inequities of race and class were addressed together. There is great merit in the view Du Bois accepted, that “no approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and administration of the Freedmen’s Bureau.”⑤
　　　In chapter II of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois gives a poignant account of the ambitions, hopes, and efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau. This was an effort to address, honorably, effectively and systematically the problem of “that dark cloud that hung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns.”⑥ He reports the diverse, passionate and practical efforts of the military, the missionaries, and all the “fifty or more active organizations, which sent clothes, money, schoolbooks, and teachers southward.” He also reports the establishment of “strange little governments like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its ninety thousand black subjects,” the damage done by the failure of the Freedmen’s Bank, the hazards of “paternalism” and most of all the complex of trials, constraints and distortions that leave us with “the large legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.”⑦ Some of the defects of Reconstruction were due to the ordinary defects of men and institutions “too much faith in human nature”, “narrow-minded busybodies and thieves”, and the dilemmas and difficulties of land redistribution.⑧ Others, more fundamental in my view, are the defects of American liberalism and those of the emerging discipline of political science: an arrogant, evangelical imperialism, and an unrecognized parochialism
　　　Reconstruction aimed, as Saidiya Hartman’s work has shown, not only at the reconstruction of the Union, nor at the reconstruction of the south, but at the reconstruction of the freed slave as well.⑨ Rather than an acknowledgment of rights, Reconstruction extended a series of instructions that would, if undertaken, make from the unpromising material of the freed slave a democratic subject. Manner, mores, morals had to be remade. They were to be modelled not on an imagined American, or African American of the future, but in the image of the white, Northern, Americans of the present. The freed slaves had to learn not only (indeed not primarily) to read, but also how to keep house, what they ought to wear, and the bodily habitus preferred by those who taught them. This was, as W.E.B. Du Bois, wrote, “the crusade of the New England school ma’am.”⑩ This instruction was well-intentioned, generously offered, and sometimes well-received, but it was assimilation at its most coercive. It established the norms and structural parameters for a new racial order, one in which the currency of freedom was the enactment of whiteness. Like the Mizrachim an Ashkenazi-dominated Israel met with Lysol spray and language lessons, these newly freed remained to be redeemed.11
　　　As DuBois famously noted, the problem of the twentieth cnetury was the problem of the color-line, a line that extended not only across the United States, but around the globe. The desire to make real the freedom and progress which appeared only as announced goals manifested itself in both the domestic and international dimensions of the question of race. As Reconstruction had sought to establish the institutions necessary for the practice of freedom and the progress of development so too did the early proponents of development and modernization theory. In each case, universalist ideals were accompanied and undermined by the easy assumption of cultural superiority Solutions to the problems of dependence and poverty presented themselves in the image of the beneficent modernizers. they not only brought the solution, they were the solution: for the standards by which progress was to be measured mirrored their understanding of themselves.12
　　　The discipline of anthropology has recognized, as political science has not, the extent of its involvement in colonial enterprises, the degree to which anthropological research produced the institutions, tools, and mentalities that impelled and facilitated colonization, and the impact of these ethical and political failures on the discipline. Other social sciences, especially in the United States, have been slower to acknowledge their implication in colonial rule. Yet in this historical moment, the effects of a disposition to -and involvement in the structures of- problem-solving show themselves in a particularly vivid and troubling form. Consider the case of political theory. I am sympathetic to the view that political theory is, as a field, too often given to what Ian Shapiro has called navel-gazing, too pre-occupied with presenting an appearance of erudition and inaccessibility, too much enamoured of arcane literatures, too prone to abstraction. The era of colonialism shows political theorists in another guise. In the government of India we find political theorists actively engaged with the world; developing solutions, as they saw it, to problems of governance, surveillance, poverty and civilizational decline. They present no good object for emulation. “As a general matter”, Uday Mehta has written “it is liberal and progressive thinkers such as Bentham, both the Mills, and Macaulay, who, notwithstanding -indeed, on account of- their reforming schemes, endorse the empire as a legitimate form of political and commercial governance; who justify and accept its largely undemocratic and nonrepresentative structure” and who develop in that enterprise repressive techniques and institutions13
　　　If the involvement of political science in the later stages of colonialism was limited by disciplinary parameters that placed “the native” beyond the discipline’s boundaries, the Cold War offered a virtually unlimited license. Funding for research was supplied, in unprecedented amounts, by the CIA, the Department of Defense, and perhaps more importantly, by myriad nominally private foundations with agendas tied to nationalist and anticommunist ideologies. The state permeated the academy. Research always reaches into the classroom, but here the reach of state and corporate interests was more direct. Many have condemned (often too easily) those scholars who joined forces with the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency in their efforts for forestall the spread of communist totalitarianism, or to profess and propound the ideals and practices of democracy. I will not rehearse the arguments against these, for they draw too heavily on persistent prejudices. Instead I invite you to consider policies more likely to appeal to our ideals and preferences, those moments on the periphery of the Cold War, more celebrated in the academy, where the state turned its strength to efforts to alter access to education. One might consider, in this regard, the still-sacrosanct GI Bill and the Reserve Officer Training Corps. I do not pretend that these are simple cases. The GI Bill countered, for some, the effects of class and race, extended the benefits of education and opened the academy to men once excluded from it. I have seen ROTC do the same. Yet the GI Bill also gave soldiers a privileged access to higher education that reflected (if it did not enhance) the subordination of women.14 The effects of this licensing of social privilege and reinforcement of gender hierarchies are still visible throughout the academy.
　　　One might argue that these are far from the only examples of problem-oriented political science. One might set other examples against these, or argue that political scientists performed their work critically, with an eye not only to the interests and ends of the state. I would argue, in response that however carefully the academy protects dissidents, however large the field of academic freedom it grants to researchers, political science will always serve the state and corporate interests best. It will do so because research requires money and these institutions have money in hand. The temptation to serve power will be most powerful, and most seductive, where the enemy is clear and the problem evident. Yet it is exactly at those moments that we ought most to distrust our judgement. Problem-oriented political science serves established interests best. The presence of heresy was a problem that called for inquiry, indeed, for an Inquisition. That Jerusalem remained in the hands of the Muslims was a problem that called for global cooperation. Mad cow disease is a problem. Is meat-eating a problem? The oil cartel is a problem. Are SUVs a problem?
　　　What are the problems with problem-oriented political science? It is bad for politics and bad for science. It encourages arrogance: persuading the young and uneducated (and occasionally the old and the erudite) that they can solve problems beyond their reach: that they can answer questions they do not fully understand. For those with a better sense of the depth of the problems and the profundity of the questions, it encourages quietism. Do not take up these problems, for they are, if not insoluble, beyond your reach. The foolish are encouraged, the wise disheartened. A political science preoccupied with problems suggests that the aim of study is to find answers. With these imperatives, under such conditions, it is easy for the arrogant and the uneducated to believe they have found them, and easy for those who see farther to feel undone. Quick conclusions are encouraged: study, consideration, reflection and debate are not. Science is not advanced in this economy. Politics is harmed by it.
　　　Think of the question Du Bois posed. “What does it feel like to be a problem?”15 The discourse of problem-solving places a thin veneer of abstraction over a series of material relations. Politics is shielded behind this veneer. Problem solving presents the political effects of material structures as technical problems, concealing the work of power. The discourse of problem-solving entails and enhances particular relations of power. The researcher is the subject who answers, others are made the objects of research, subjected to analyses in which they are spoken of and perhaps spoken for, but never speaking. The problem speaks to the researcher. The individual subjects who embody or enact or experience the problem are merely instances, and consequently not adequate to the problem which appears in its wholeness only in and through the analysis of the problem-solving social scientist. One might paraphrase Gayatri Spivak’s question “Can these problematic subjects speak?” and answer no, these subjects cannot speak. The imperatives of problem-solving require that they be read, and read only in one way: as a problem that must be solved.
　　　There are other troubling problems with problem-oriented political science. Weber recognized them in his essays on ethical neutrality and on the uneasily coupled vocations of politics and science. He wrote movingly of the ethical implications of the selective silencing of speech. “In view of the fact that certain value-questions which are of decisive political significance are permanently banned from university discussion, it seems to me to be only in accord with the dignity of a representative of science to be silent as well about such value-problems as he is allowed to treat.”16
　　　Subsequent thought on these matters has made these responses seem less effective than Weber had hoped. The silence of the professor did not serve, as Weber had hoped, as a wall to keep the power out, but rather as a buttress to established authority. Neither advances in the freedom of the universities, nor scholarship, has set the problems aside. On the contrary, these ethical hazards became all the more evident when we realized the fraught relation of knowledge and power. What if we attend to what we have learned from our own enquiries?
　　　All science is political. All science is conducted in language, or, more precisely, in languages. These languages are collective and conventional. Their content conveys contemporary preferences, prejudices, norms, standards and assumptions. Their structure carries, less visibly, more constitutively, and finally inevitably, the conventions of the group to whom it belongs. There are things we cannot say, and things we must say, if we are to be understood. This is politics. There are things we cannot do and things we must do if we are to be understood as scientific, as logical, as sane. These imperatives maintain the parameters of the political. But politics is not confined to this fundamental level.
　　　Science comprises institutions and discourses. We have studied institutions. We have learned that institutions call identities and interests into being. The presence of funding for particular projects, the absence of funding for others will ensure that in some (if not in many) cases, individuals will undertake research projects not because they think these are the most important, but because these are the projects that can be accomplished, or even because these are the projects that bring the greatest rewards. The power of the state is evident here, but that of private funding is no less to be deprecated. As Weber recognized, such a system “gives the advantage to those with large sums of money and to groups which are already in power.”17
Academics are arguably moved less by financial incentives than by intellectual passion and the ambition for recognition. These motives also operate within institutions. Reputation, honor, recognition are also parceled out within institutions, and it is within universities that intellectual passions are (for most of us) most easily pursued.
　　　 Foucault has shown how institutions can call not only categories but subjects into being. We are all familiar with Foucault’s account of how the study of sexuality created new identities, new subjects, new pathologies and new crimes. Knowledge worked as a form of power, productive power, that brought into being the invert, the fetishist, the sexual deviant. Foucault’s very extensive historical researches give us compelling reasons, historical and theoretical, for distrusting a problem-oriented political science. Efforts to solve the problem of punitive cruelty and recidivism issued in new institutions, new cruelties, new tactics, new subjects, new criminals and new problems: the prison, the panopticon, tactics of surveillance, delinquents and delinquency.18 Efforts to solve the problems of deviant sexualities created them: proliferating categories of deviance and pathology, identifying deviant and pathological subjects and developing modes of treatment, categories of transgression, criminality and punishment. Whether one came to it through Foucault or by another means, the recognition that in solving problems institutions proliferate them is not new to us. Why ignore it?
　　　Problem oriented political science doesn’t simply solve problems: it makes them. If political scientists choose to solve problems they will be wise to leave some of their colleagues in reserve to solve the problems they create.
　　　Problem-oriented political science is prey not only to the effects of institutions, but to the effects of practice, persons and particularity. Science is practiced by people who have political convictions, political principles, political objects, political strategies. Science is practiced in particular situations, particular nations, in the context of particular events. The particular products of science; ideas, inventions, insights, measures, techniques, theories, taxonomies, have particular political utilities, particular uses and salience in particular times, with regard to particular political events.
　　　If we turn away from a problem oriented political science, what do we turn to? If our disciplines, our institutions, our languages, our colleagues and ourselves are imbricated with established structures of power, how are we to escape or amend them? If the ends and ideals, the immediate objects and the fantastic aspirations of politics are not to guide our work, what is?  First we must cease the pretense that we can work outside politics. If we continue to act as if objectivity and methodological neutrality were possible we are not acting ethically but acting the ethical: performing a fictional character. This seems to indicate a curious, shamanic faith in Baudrillard’s description of the simulacrum: “the map that precedes the territory”. By this formula, acting as if we were ethical produces a performance that may bring its anticipated referent into being. I would argue, however that this is not simulation but dissimulation. Both Franklin and Machiavelli, those very rational actors, thought the askesis of virtue was an expensive, if ascetic, luxury. For less effort one might have the advantages of reputation and retain the flexibility, the room for maneuver, that ethical elasticity could offer. For those reluctant to resolve this ethical problem but evading it, recognition of our political character and effects would seem to be necessary at the outset.
　　　We can no longer rely on Weber’s guidance in the essays “Politics as a Vocation” and Science as a Vocation.” We have learned that science is political, and that politics opens itself to inquiry. For us, the imperatives of politics and science are fused. We are neither politicians nor scientists, but scholars impelled by the uneasily coupled imperatives of politics and science. What is political science as a vocation? How do we learn to learn for power? How do we learn to learn against power? Where do we seek guidance on how to study science, on how to learn? Where are we to find ethical guidance on where and when and how to serve power, and when to oppose it? Where are we to find the guidance necessary to navigate a science now visible as politics?
　　　The work that gives the most daunting caveats also gives some reassurance to those who believe that science can act in and for politics. The recognition that power and knowledge are fused: that power breeds knowledge, that knowledge brings power, serves power, does not come alone.19 Power incites its own resistance. The knowledge derived from and allied to that power incites the acquisition of critical and dissident knowledge. Systems of research developed to advance one research agenda will suggest others competitive with, and perhaps opposed to, the first. Power/knowledge thus produces not only knowledge from power, and knowledge that serves power, but also knowledge that undermines power, knowledge against power, and fissures within power.
　　　What we have learned then, (I learned it from Foucault and Ibn Khaldun) is that power incites resistance, and that structures fall impelled by that which serves as the engine of their expansion.
　　　We cannot be too much reassured by this recognition. This set of effects is as inevitable as the first, but it is not quite equal to it. Look first at the knowledge that comes from power. This is the expected knowledge sought by institutions: by the state, by corporations, by foundations and universities. Much, indeed, most, critical and dissident knowledge remains within these institutions, constrained within their normative parameters, governed by the standards of the disciplinary regimes (scientific and political) in which it is produced. Even the knowledge that emerges to question these regimes remains under their sway, dependent on their validation for advancement, reputation, recognition, employment.20 Critical and resistant knowledge that places itself outside the normative parameters of these disciplinary regimes (that dispenses with the standards it challenges, rather than adhering to them while challenging them) will be rejected not only by those who adhere to those standards but also by most of those who question, challenge and reject them. It will also, of course, find itself without funding, without employment, and with only stigmatized venues for its dissemination.
　　　This condition does not a particularly happy one for power or knowledge, politics or scholarship, but it has its advantages. One might argue that this tends to produce a situation of politically, if not scientifically, salutary slow reform. Gradually, yet inevitably, structures produce the conditions for their own correction. Change is slow, conducted largely within existing institutions, through established methods and in accordance with extant norms and standards. Reform is gradual, disruption is slight. For scholars, scarcity might produce, of necessity, a commendable independence of mind, fortitude, and perhaps a higher degree of solidarity among scholars more than usually obliged to rely upon one another.21 **
　　　
　　　This question has several dimensions. The question of what is good for the individual comprises questions of prosperity and questions of ethics. The question of what is good for the regime comprises questions of the ethics and the prosperity of the polity and questions of the increase and the ethics of our knowledge.
　　　In a famous essay aimed at people, like myself, who read the work of Lacan, Derrida, Irigaray and Cixous, Habermas contrasted two enterprises that he saw as fundamentally at odds: problem-solving and world-disclosure. Habermas sees problem-solving as the aim of philosophy (a perception that may surprise many readers of philosophy in general and many readers of Habermas in particular.) World-disclosure was the province of the literary: not only literature, but those he called “literary theorists” and sought to exclude from the province of philosophy.22
　　　This might be taken simply as a low moment in the work of a eminent theorist, the employment of a petty and all too familiar strategy: exclusion by fiat. We have all heard “that’s not political science” used as an excommunicatory anathema meant to send enemies into exile, protect positions of privilege, and diminish the competition. In this instance the self-serving exclusionary binary has surprisingly revelatory effects. First it will reminds us how much would be lost if we turned from world-disclosure to problem-solving. Would we be obliged to forego problems that admitted of no answer? Would we be obliged to silence the old questions: what is being? what is thinking? what is justice?
　　　I might argue, for those of you still committed to problem-solving, that world-disclosure may be of some assistance in solving certain problems that living in the world presents. For feminists, the world disclosures of Beauvoir and Friedan, Butler and bell hooks, made politics possible. As a woman -not as a feminist, but simply as a woman living under circumstances that are occasionally hostile- I have found more of use to me in Lacan than in all the problem-oriented efforts of the “Women in Politics” section. The world Fanon and Memmi disclosed in the psychology of coloniser and colonised, the world Said disclosed in Orientalism, the world subaltern studies disclosed, have enabled entire peoples to begin to resolve problems that have plagued them for centuries.
　　　Yet like W.E.B. Du Bois, faced with a problem-solving rival in Booker T. Washington, I am not content to let the argument rest on claims of utility alone.23 I am not prepared to trade Plato for policy statements, Wittgenstein for the Wilson Center, no, not Bhabha for the Brookings Institution, not even with thirty pieces of silver thrown in.
　　　This is, after all, tantamount to betrayal: a betrayal of earlier, more daring, and more dangerous commitments. To abandon the open fields and wild speculation for what? Forced labor? Are we all to be harnessed to the plow of problem-solving? Is each political scientist to be chained to an oar in the ship of state? Must we all do what some of us think best?
　　　The call for a problem-solving political science is after all, exactly that, an effort to enlist all political scientists in a common ethic, if not a common effort. In this we see the all-too-imperial desire for a rule, a single standard that can measure all, a maxim that applies in every case.
　　　This is an errant enterprise. There is more than one ethical life. There may be more than we presently recognize. Endorsement of this view does not require endorsement of an all-embracing relativism. On the contrary, it is a recognition built into the most intransigent and intolerant of religions. The priest and the father of a family, the mother and the mother superior, live ethical lives guided by radically different rules and imperatives.
　　　We (by which I mean “we scholars” though, as we shall see, not all scholars will come within this “we”) are accustomed, in practice, to this ethical diversity. We belong to a more expansive world, with more demanding imperatives for inclusion. Scholars are often said to live apart, “in an ivory tower” isolated from the world. This is not so. Scholars live in more worlds than most people. We live in the ordinary world of commerce and media, of grocery stores and banks, day care centers, elementary schools, and gyms. We live in the world of the academy, and move, albeit on the periphery, in the worlds of our students. We live in other worlds as well: in the worlds of those we study. We know more lives and lifeworlds, in reading and in experience. Our worlds are large, and we know they differ from one another. Within these worlds we see different ethics made real.
　　　These not all consonant with one another. They cannot be held to the same rule. There are radical, and sometimes dangerous differences in the practice of these ethics. There are be those who testify to their faith, like some of my old colleagues, shocking students with stories of their conversions or how God spoke to them, or the certainty of their condemnations and their prescriptions of living. There are more secular preachers, whom some have called sanctimonious, who believe they know that good and what will bring us to it. There are activists and partisans, always persuading, recruiting new troops and sending them out into the field. There are, rarely and beautifully, the cool ascetics of scholarship, whose politics one never knows, who lay before you elegant and dispassionate accounts in which even the most diligent exegete can find no trace of partisan politics. There are the critics, the skeptics, the questioners, the determined agnostics of scholarship who live in a world foreign to them, and never fully find their feet there, though they swim well. Many have argued that we need all of these, not perhaps because of any value they have in themselves, but because more grows in this fertile matrix. My university said “Crescat scientia, vita excolatur”. One might also say let lives grow, that knowledge may be enriched. The alternative is that which Weber rightly rejected. If we say, there can be no scholarship in the class room, no expressions of political passion, no advocacy, then we say there can be “no Marxists and no Manchesterites”, and soon after, no Marx.24  
　　　This approach is not without dangers. There are those who, if they succeed, will see (insofar as they can) that there are none unlike themselves, that the broad world that nourished them is folded away. If the Christians win, we will have a Christian academy. If Martha Nussbaum succeeds we will cease our reading of Judith Butler. They are a hazard, these zealots. I will shelter them although they wish me gone, not because I like them or I wish their projects well. I am obliged to shelter them because I am a democrat and a scholar.
　　　Democracy requires that we encompass the possibility (even the enactment) of our own annihilation. Democracy requires that at some moments, and in some respects always, one will cease to be. One will be not only ruled and over-ruled, but made absent. One must not only live with others, one must accept -in principle and quite often in practice- the sacrifice of one’s own imperatives to theirs.25 One must accept, even submit to those others whose ethics and imperatives one finds alien. This is a duty for democrats, it is a drive and a desire for scholars. Science is impelled by the drive to know the alien, the desire to comprehend the other.
　　　A miscegenate, polyglot world is the world most consistent with the fundamental impulse and the ordinary practice of scholarship. All should be studied, all should be available for study. This is the world most consistent with the work of teaching, where knowledge grows best when error gets a hearing. This is the world most consistent with research: in the desire for the other, the alien, the unknown. This is, I think, the most fertile, the most productive world. And, as al Farabi said of the democratic city: this is the most beautiful.
　　　On the surface it looks like an embroidered garment full of colored figures and
　　　dyes. Everybody loves it and loves to reside in it, because there is no human wish
　　　 or desire that this city does not satisfy. The nations emigrate to it and reside there
　　　 and it grows beyond measure. People of every race multiply in it, and this by all
　　　kinds of copulations and marriages, resulting in children of extremely varied
　　　dispositions, with extremely varied education and upbringing. Consequently this
　　　city develops into many cities, distinct yet intertwined, with the parts of each
　　　scattered throughout the parts of the others. Strangers cannot be distinguished
　　　from the residents. All kinds of wishes and ways of life are to be found in it...the
　　　bigger, the more civilized, the more populated, the more productive, and the more
　　　perfect it is, the more prevalent and the greater are the good and the evil it possesses.26

But it is in this city alone that knowledge and virtue may appear. The risks are too good to pass up.

①Max Weber, “The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality” in Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: The Free Press 1949), 5. The ethic I was taught did not, however, do justice to Weber’s nuanced understanding of the demands of politics and scholarship, most notably his appreciation of passionate scholarly advocacy.
②Robert Vitalis, “Crossing Exceptionalism’s Frontiers to Discover America’s Kingdom” Arab Studies Journal 6, Spring 1998, 21. See also Michael O. West, “The Tuskegee Model of Development in Africa,” Diplomatic History 16, Summer 1992, 371-388.
③Journal of Race Development 1, 1910, quoted in Robert Vitalis and Marton Markovits, “The Lost World of Development Theory in the United States: 1865-1930", unpublished manuscript, February 2002, 6.
④Ibid. See also Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1972), 414.
⑤W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Modern Library 1996), 24-25.
⑥Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 19.
⑦Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 19, 37, 42.
⑧Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 24, 30, 26.
⑨Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002). While I find Reconstruction the most poignant instance of this errant evangelism, examples can be found in virtually every moment (and at every ideological site) of American politics and science. Jane Addams and the settlement movement, the planned communities of Lowell and Pullman, and the labor-saving practices of Taylor and Ford are impelled by the same imperatives of universal improvement.
⑩W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 27.
11As this suggests, these enterprises of redemptive assimilation are not peculiar to the United States.
12See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1989), especially chapters 4-6, Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venzuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997), Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995)
13Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999), 2. We are now in the midst of another imperial moment, exacting an increasingly burdensome corvee in expressions of allegiance, and offering an extravagant recompense for willing clients. With the example of Bentham and the Mills before us, the unlovely spectacle of political theorists willing to solve the problem of Islam may be less surprising.
14Gretchen Ritter, “Social Identity and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order: Some Lessons from the 1940s” paper delivered at APSA, August 2002.
15W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 3-4. One might also ask Vijay Prakash’s question “What does it feel like to be a solution?” Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2001).
16Max Weber, “The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality” in Methodolology of the Social Sciences, 8, italics Weber’s.
17Max Weber, “The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality” in Methodology of the Social Sciences, 7 n.1.
18Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon 1973),
19The most immediate reference is to Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon 1980) One could also look to Foucault’s Archaelogy of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon 1972)
20 One might describe this position using a term coined for a larger position with similar claims and temptations: “the dominated fraction of the dominant class.” Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)
21A simple reading of Ibn Khaldun might seem to endorse this line of thought, where scarcity leads to and that scholarly solidarity which is the equivalent of asabiyya. Ibn Khaldun observes, however, that scholarship -and politics- flourish most not under conditions of scarcity but where established control permits expansion. Ibn Khaldun Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
22Jurgen Habermas “Excursus on Levelling the Genre Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity , trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1993), 185-210.
23Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 83.
24Here Weber rejects the position of his “honored master,” Schmoller, in Methodology of the Social Sciences, 7. For my part, I am indebted to Arthur Bochner, whose critique of claims of political infallibility directed the conclusion of this paper.
25Anne Norton, “Evening Land” in Democracy and Vision, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William Connolly, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001)
26Abu Nasr al Farabi, the Political Regime, trans. Fauzi Najjar, in Medieval Political Philosophy, Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi eds. (New York: Free Press 1963), 51. This is, of course, the best of the ignorant cities, but ignorance is the condition of philosophy.