Woodrow Wilson's APSA Presidential Address Genealogy

IV. Genealogy This section is organized chronologically to demonstrate how references to spirit have been used by prominent theorists over time, and to show the continued influence of liberal Protestantism and the recurring reconceptualization of a seemingly archaic term. Classical Conceptions of the Spirit Charles Louis Secondat de la Brède Montesquieu, one of the most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment, sought in his work to explain the origins and purpose of government. Montesquieu was both a theorist and a practitioner of politics. The title of his masterwork, The Spirit of Laws (1748), was a reference to the book’s two goals. The first goal was to explain the origins of a people’s spirit, akin to the people’s “nature.” He said that a people’s spirit is a product of the climate of each country, the quality of its soil, the occupation of the indigenous population, religion, manners, wealth, population size, commerce, and custom (Montesquieu 1899, 6). Contemporary synonyms include the “essence” or “disposition” of a people. The book’s second goal was to explain the spirit of laws, which here is akin to “purpose.” The purpose of law was to both reflect the popular spirit and, in democracies, gently steer society against despotism and toward freedom. Such steering was never revolutionary; “Better is it to say that the government most conformable to nature is that which best agrees with the humor and disposition of the people in whose favor it is established” (Montesquieu 1899, 6). Yet, the laws should do more than reflect the spirit of the people. The laws should push, gently, in the direction of liberty by countering forces in nature that bolster despotism, such as inequality. The political theorist Ana J. Samuel notes, “This is the ultimate purpose of understanding the spirit of the laws, to learn how to heighten the role that these other orders of law play in human life, so as to promote freedom” (2009, 318). Montesquieu’s popular spirit (disposition) was picked up by Hegel, whose “Volksgeist” is the spirit of the nation upon self-consciousness. Hegel was a German idealist known for his teleological account of history, which later shaped Karl Marx’s more materialist account. Due to the centrality of consciousness to Hegel’s work, “Geist” is sometimes translated as “consciousness.” Unlike Montesquieu, Hegel made explicit the term’s origins in the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost because he was convinced that the religious conception was passé: “Spirit has now got beyond the substantial life it formerly led in the element of thought, that is beyond the immediacy of faith, beyond the satisfaction and security of the certainty that consciousness then had, of its reconciliation with the essential being, and of that being’s presence both within and without” (Hegel 1977a[1807], 4). Hegel instead enriched the concept with the human experience. Just as children become conscious through maturation, so too humans are maturing so that with time, the collective will achieve consciousness. Collective self-consciousness is the ends to which history is a guide: “For Hegel, history is in fact the story of our gradual achievement of self-consciousness, which is simultaneously the realization of our freedom, our capacity for self-determination. With this achievement, which truly occurs in the modern period, human spirit is fully realized” (Magee 2011, 227). Unlike Montesquieu, Hegel was not speaking of spirit as a metaphysical force; he used the term figuratively to refer to the collective consciousness coming into being. This was most clear in his compound usage: national spirit (Volksgeist), world spirit (Weltgeist), spirit of the times (Zeitgeist), absolute spirit (der absolut Geist), subjective spirit (der subjektive Geist), objective spirit (der objektif Geist). The first three terms merit exploration since they become influential. The Volksgeist (national spirit) is the self-conscious nation: “The ethical life of the actual national spirit rests partly on the immediate trust of the individuals in their nation as a whole, partly on the direct share which all, regardless of differences of class, take in the decisions and actions of the government. In the union which, to begin with, is not a permanent arrangement but only for the purpose of a common action, that freedom of participation by each and all is, for the time being, put on one side” (Hegel 1977a, 439-440). The national spirit mediates the universal spirit as a stage of its development. The Weltgeist (world spirit) is an all-embracing, historical consciousness that is selfrealizing through the work of philosophers. “The great form of the world spirit that has come to cognizance of itself in these philosophies, is the principle of the North, and from the religious point of view, of Protestantism” (Hegel 1977b [57]). Here, the world spirit is humanity and its consciousness. When Hegel looked at history, he could see the inner logic of the self-realization of the world spirit: “…the history of the world is a rational process, the rational and necessary evolution of the world spirit. This spirit [is] the substance of history; its nature is always one and the same; and it discloses this nature in the existence of the world” (Walsh 1984, 30). Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) is popularly associated with Hegel despite not being his usage. Each period and its spirit are part of the process of humanity’s coming into consciousness. Individuals are expressions of that place in history although there are figures like Napoleon whose projects coincide with the aims of spirit. Like Montesquieu’s, Hegel’s spirit is a transcendent force integral to human development. Hegel’s spirit is the engine of that development, explicitly indebted to the Christian Holy Spirit. Hegel is again author and actor in his theory, in the world but not of the world. Max Weber’s usage departed sharply from Hegel and Montesquieu’s. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920) argued that the dual Calvinist ethics of hard work and thriftiness created the cultural conditions for the emergence of middle-class capitalism. The Calvinist conception of predestination taught the emergent bourgeoisie that the pursuit of wealth is a duty. According to the doctrine of predestination, there is no way of knowing whether one is chosen, so one must work hard to increase one’s chance of getting into heaven. Other puritan Protestant sects likewise combined this impulse to accumulation with a frugal life-style, developing pots of capital that were continually reinvested. The capitalist spirit was thus born of the moral energy of the entrepreneur. Weber used “spirit” as a synonym for ethic, and pointed to an essay by Benjamin Franklin urging the reader toward thriftiness and the accumulation of capital as an “ethically coloured maxim for the conduct of life” (Weber 1920, 17). Weber didn’t envision spirit as a transcendent force as in Hegel and Montesquieu. Nor did Weber see himself as central to his story. With important exceptions (Huntington, Macy), subsequent conceptions of the spirit followed Hegel and Montesquieu, and it is only in the late 1970s that the Weberian usage gained influence. Modern Conceptions of the Spirit Modern scholars—those writing in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century prior to WWII— inherited their predecessors’ legacies. The spirit was implicitly conceptualized as a transcendent force, and Hegel’s teleology was common. Subtler but enduring was the author as actor, bridging empirical and normative research. The writings of Wilson, Macy, Murray, Zimmern, and the Beards demonstrate these themes. Woodrow Wilson was the son, grandson, and nephew of Presbyterian preachers, born in 1856 in the manse of the First Presbyterian Church of Staunton, Virginia. Wilson was president of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910 and president of the APSA (1909 to 1910). Wilson devoted his scholarly career to the study of public administration, and was part of the progressive movement whose scholarship, teaching, and political practice were oriented toward gradual political reform in the service of democracy. Wilson was also closely tied to the Christian internationalist movements of the period and spoke repeatedly to the Salvation Army and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) (Menchik 2021). The first recorded use of the term “spirit” by Wilson is from his time as a law student at the University of Virginia, when he participated in a debate on the question: “Is the Roman Catholic element in the United States a menace to American Institutions?” Wilson took the negative position on the grounds that while the “Romish Church” did indeed seek to dominate Anglo-Saxon people, “The priestly polity had gained no permanent foothold in Northern Germany, and had been pre-dominant as a political power in England whither the sturdy races of North Germany had migrated, only until the breaking away of the feudal system and the full growth of the national spirit” (Wilson 1880, 645). Wilson here followed Hegel’s “national spirit” (Volksgeist). Wilson similarly drew on Montesquieu in his seminal 1885 treatise “The Modern Democratic State,” explaining that American democracy is sustained by the national spirit: “there is a law greater than it which cannot be changed,—a law which makes the Constitution possible, without which the Constitution would be but a dead letter; a law which is the supreme rule of the national life. This is that law written on our hearts which makes us conscious of our oneness as a single personality in the great company of nations; conscious of a common interest, a common vocation, and a common destiny:— not only a “spirit of ‘76,” but a spirit for all time” (Wilson 1885, 69). That national spirit originated in the American Revolution and continued to shape national life (“descendants either in blood or spirit”) (Wilson 1907, 250). In political office, Wilson used language nearly identical to Montesquieu’s: “A law cannot work until it expresses the spirit of the community for which it is enacted. And, if you try to enact into law what expresses only the spirit of a small coterie or of a small minority, you know, or at any rate you ought to know beforehand, that it is not going to work” (Wilson 1916, 416; see p. 11 above). Wilson channeled Montesquieu in describing the popular spirit as moving toward liberty: “…we strive to show in our life as a nation what liberty and the inspirations of an emancipated spirit may do for men and for societies, for individuals, for states, and for mankind” (Wilson 1914, 424). The spirit was the soul of America, emblematic of the possibilities that derive from liberty. Wilson was prone to using the language of the spirit to welcome newcomers to the American body politic. In a speech to new immigrants he noted: “You have said, ‘We are going to America, not only to earn a living, not only to seek the things which it was more difficult to obtain where we were born, but to help forward the great enterprises of the human spirit—to let men know that everywhere in the world there are men who will cross strange oceans and go where a speech is spoken which is alien to them, if they can but satisfy their quest for what their spirits crave; knowing that, whatever the speech, there is but one longing and utterance of the human heart, and that is for liberty and justice.’ And, while you bring all countries with you, you come with a purpose of leaving all other countries behind you-bringing what is best of their spirit, but not looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended to leave behind in them. … We cannot exempt you from work; we cannot exempt you from the strife and the heartbreaking burden of the struggle of the day—that is common to mankind everywhere. We cannot exempt you from the loads that you must carry. We can only make them light by the spirit in which they are carried, because that is the spirit of hope, it is the spirit of liberty, it is the spirit of justice.” (Wilson 1915a, 147-150). Those immigrants became converted to be a part of “bone and sinew and spirit of America itself” (Wilson 1915b, 5). To Wilson, its spirit made America exceptional: “America was intended to be a spirit among the nations of the world, and it is the purpose of conferences like this to find out the best way to introduce the newcomers to this spirit, and by that very interest in them to enhance and purify in ourselves the thing that ought to make America great and, not only ought to make her great, but ought to make her exhibit a spirit unlike any other nation in the world” (Wilson 1916, 415). Wilson thus demonstrates the endurance of the transcendent concept of the spirit that originated in the Christian Holy Spirit. As both scholar and policy practitioner, Wilson is also emblematic of how the language of spirit provided a bridge across the discipline’s empirical/normative division. Decades later, his view of America’s exceptional spirit would influence the Beards and Huntington. Like Wilson, Macy was president of the APSA (1915 to 1916) and a politician affiliated with the progressive movement. His APSA presidential address on the “Scientific Spirit in Politics” makes explicit the goals of the discipline and the centrality of the concept of the spirit to it (1917). Macy used the term “spirit” in two related ways. The first was synonymous with an “approach” toward scientific experimentation to improve the functioning of government: “A parallel thus appears between two fields of science—one dealing with oxygen, hydrogen, and gravitation; the other with cities, states, and numerous other political and social institutions. Both furnish occasion for the exercise of the same spirit and method” (Macy 1917, 3). The scientific spirit in politics meant each citizen should observe and participate in institutions to work toward their improvement. The second way Macy used the term was to link modern scientific truth with political truth. Macy believed the Christian spirit underlay both scientific truth and political truth and thus linked the two. Scientific truth came into being through laboratory experimentation; political truth came into being through experimentation with forms of government: “There could be no science worthy of the name until generations of martyrs to the cause of truth and righteousness had weakened the forces of tyranny. Science and democracy have come into the modern world at the same time. They are mutually related as cause and effect” (Macy 1917, 6-7). This linkage makes explicit the second meaning of spirit: “The modern scientific spirit is simply the Christian spirit realized in a limited field of experience” (Macy 1917, 7). The Christian spirit is the impulse toward truth. The Christian spirit in politics is opposition to tyranny and the installation of truth in government, advancing progress through experimentation. Here, too, we see an early example of the spirit leading in the direction of liberal democracy. Indeed, a few years later, the Italian scholar and politician Guido de Ruggiero’s influential text, The History of European Liberalism laid out a transcendent conception of the liberal spirit (1959[1927]). De Ruggiero defined liberty as unfettered development and selfexpression, which then were embodied by society and the state and understood, developed, deepened, and spread through spiritual means. De Ruggiero argued that religious liberty born from the Protestant Reformation in turn birthed political liberty. Such emancipation arose not from institutions but from conversion to a consciousness of the liberal spirit: “Liberty is consciousness of oneself, of one’s own infinite spiritual value; and the same recognition in the case of other people follows naturally from this immediate revelation. …This is the true development of liberalism, and the soul of whatever other development it may have” (de Ruggiero 1959, 13-14). Like Hegel, de Ruggiero conceptualized the spirit as an intangible force that moved society toward progress. Individuals have equal access to this spirit; it is labor, not class, race, education, nor religious station that enables salvation: “Liberalism is conscious that the formation of human individualities is the work of freedom. No demand of the higher life can be effectually made, unless it is made spontaneously by the spirit; no progress will be enduringly achieved, unless it is a conscious development from within. To raise to our own level those who are living a lower life, we cannot either by grace or by force excuse them from the labour and pains that are the price of human progress, or from the necessity of traversing step by step the distance which divided them from us. This freedom is therefore no privilege, but rather a task which the spirit imposes as the price of the benefits it confers: no one can obtain them freely; any one can obtain them by application, toil, and sacrifice” (de Ruggiero 1959, 358-359). de Ruggiero’s idealism implied a belief in the eventuality of liberalism’s triumph: “But further, the liberation of the natural world, and of the passive elements in human nature, by the energy of spirit, is very far from complete; it might be described as barely begun. It has been hitherto the privilege of a few, who have completed within themselves, intensively, the entire process of human emancipation; extensively considered, much remains to be done, since the majority of human beings are very far from having achieved a genuinely human level of existence, and a share in the gifts and burdens of a free spiritual life” (de Ruggiero 1959, 358-359). De Ruggiero here points to a missionary aspect of liberal idealism that mirrors the goals of Christian missionaries and Huntington’s characterization of political science (below). The saving power of the liberal spirit meant that de Ruggiero believed it would move society writ large: “All the various forms of political Society, arising and developing in the nineteenth century, have been the creatures of liberty. Without freedom of speech, of the press, and of association, neither democracy, nor Socialism, nor nationalism, nor any of their infinite varieties, could have arisen. Their luxuriant growth is a living proof of the power of human freedom to propagate and expand through its products, to create a rich variety of forms, institutions, and attitudes, to intensify the rhythm of historical life. But at the same time, it is also a proof of the lofty impartiality with which the Liberal spirit distributes its gifts, to the enrichment even of those who spurn and deny them” (de Ruggiero 1959, 437). In sum, de Ruggiero’s writing demonstrates the influence of Hegel on his conception of the spirit, including the Christian conception and agency of the spirit. Echoing Wilson and Macy and anticipating Murray and Zimmern, he endowed the spirit with commitments to liberalism. Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern were prominent English scholars and collaborators who wrote on international relations in the interwar period. In an incisive book, Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire, Jeanne Morefield argues that Murray and Zimmern sought to redeem the liberal project in the interwar period by appealing to a Hegelian spirit of the individual that would make the world, “as interdependent in its spiritual relations just as it is in its economic relations” (Morefield 2005, 15). Liberalism to Zimmern was a political religion: “To liberalism spiritual forces are the centre of life; and the supreme aim is the application of moral and spiritual principles both to politics and to industry” (Zimmern 1918, xx). Even liberal political institutions did not guarantee freedom in the absence of an organized social and collective belief in freedom: “But nations cannot achieve true freedom through diplomacy or even through war. They must win it for themselves in the region of the spirit” (Murray 1918, 70). At a time when the future of liberalism was in doubt, Zimmern gestured to his eschatological belief in a transcendent, intangible force propelling liberalism: “No thinking man can live through such a time as this and preserve his faith unless he is sustained by the belief that the clash of States which is darkening our generation is not a mere blind collision of forces, but has spiritual bearings which affect each individual living soul born or to be born in the world” (Zimmern 1918, 170). Like the previous authors, they envisioned the spirit as a transcendent and intangible force that provided the engine for human progress. Likewise, their enactment of their politics bridged the empirical/normative distinction of political science. Charles Beard was a historian, political scientist, and president of the APSA from 1926 to 1927. To Beard, the spirit was an attitude that drove social behavior toward civic democracy. Beard’s scholarship similarly promoted self-described Christian ideals of stewardship, association, and collectivism. In a speech to the American Historical Society, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” Beard echoed Hegel in critiquing historiography that was materialist, as well as Marxist or objective. Beard argued that the historian’s job was to see the hand of God at work in the world: Does the world move, and if so, in what direction? If he [the historian] believes that the world does not move, the historian must offer the pessimism of chaos to the inquiring spirit of mankind. If it does move, does it move backward toward some old arrangement, let us say, of 1928, 1896, 1815, 1789, or 1295?4 Or does it move forward to some other arrangement which can be only dimly divined—a capitalist dictatorship, a proletarian dictatorship or a collectivist democracy? The last of these is my own guess founded on a study of long trends and on a faith in the indomitable spirit of mankind (Beard 1934, 228). Beard used the term “spirit” to transpose a religious belief in human progress onto historical narrative, suggesting that historians frame their work within the narrative of development driven 4 Years of major institutional change in Europe or the US. by a providential hand. The end of that speech featured a letter from Signor Benedetto Croce, an Italian philosopher influenced by Hegel and central to de Ruggiero’s work. Croce likewise imbued in historiography an ethical imperative to center liberal virtues as the ends and means to which history is oriented. His approach to history, like Hegel’s and Beard’s, was a missionary approach in contrast to materialist (Marxist) or ethnic (nationalist) approaches which centered class and nation as the narrative; Beard critiqued historians who would attempt objective research. More apt was to use history, following Hegel, to show the hand of providence: “History was ‘the way of God in the world’” (Beard 1935, 77). The final modern usage was in Charles and Mary Beard’s most prominent work on American civilization, which used the Hegelian spirit as a metric to evaluate other authors. The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States was not well received (1942). It was lambasted in the American Economic Review, APSR and American Sociological Review for its use of select and unrepresentative material, and for a xenophobia in critiquing British ideas about individualism which were “alien” to the American spirit. The Beards’ desire to hold up American civilization as exceptional and independent drew from Wilson’s similar usage, and was intended to show American history converging toward cultural autonomy. Once again, the language of spirit enabled the authors to transcend the normative/empirical distinction of the social sciences; the Beards were American civilizationalists, evaluating historical figures based on their own normative preferences. The similarities with Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? will become clear below. Contemporary Conceptions of the Spirit References to the spirit peak in the post-war period, with clear echoes of the classical and modern periods. Focusing on Pye, Huntington, Diamond and Heclo, this section documents the enduring legacy of Hegel and Montesquieu as well as the Christian influence on the discipline and the utility of the term “spirit” for scholar-practitioners. Lucian Pye’s The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study of the Authority Crisis in Political Development (1992[1968]) is known for its oft-cited quip that “As a collectivity, China is not just a normal nation-state; it is a civilization trying to squeeze itself into a modern state” (1992, ix). Pye viewed Chinese politics as a function of a civilizational culture or “national character” rooted in hierarchy, elitism, and conformity, encountering a modern world rooted in equality, mass participation, and diversity. That encounter tension created conflict, with the result being the endurance of traditional political culture: “…[I]n spite of the far-reaching effects of social and political change, the spirit of the modern Chinese political culture has remained close to that of the traditional political culture” (1992, 49). Pye thus conceptualized the spirit as a national character akin to Montesquieu’s popular spirit. So, too, Pye gave the spirit agency, following Hegel and in anticipation of Diamond: “Although powerful and persistent, Chinese culture seems to lose its essential spirit when consciously defended” (55). Like the Beards’ final work, the book received a hostile reception in the major journals due to its essentialist account of Chinese culture, problematic assumptions, and lack of coherent research methods or data. In that respect, Pye’s book marked the disciplinary end of overtly essentialist Hegelian accounts of political development, even while similar assumptions persist. Samuel Huntington was a giant of the discipline. His work on political order, deterrence, democratization, and religion and international affairs was path breaking; it was his writings on the latter two topics where his use of the term “spirit” emerged, primarily in discussions of faith (1975, 2004a, 2004b) and democracy (Huntington 2001, 9). Here, however, I want jump to the question of the spirit of political science, connecting Huntington to Wilson and Macy through his 1987 presidential address to the APSA in which he addressed the question endemic to such occasions: why political science exists. He said that most political scientists want to advance the values of justice, well-being, order, equity, liberty, democracy, responsible government, security, tolerance, and peace: “The impetus to do good in the sense of promoting political reform is, I would argue, embedded in our profession” (Huntington 1988, 4). Huntington traced the roots of this inclination to the progressive movement, led by names that should now be familiar: Macy, Wilson, as well as Lawrence Lowell, Frank Goodnow, and Albert Bushnell Hart. He went on to argue that political science developed first and foremost in the US because “the US was the first and fullest democracy in the modern world” (Huntington 1988, 6). Discounting British, Roman, or Greek predecessors, as well as the disenfranchisement of African-Americans for much of U.S. history, Huntington argued that democracy and political science developed together: “The emergence of democracy encourages the development of political science, and the development of political science can and has in small ways contributed to the emergence and stabilization of democracy” (1988, 7). Political science should continue in that spirit abroad, in a manner modeled on missionaries: The Salvation Army has a motto, ‘Save the world, one soul at a time.’ Political Science has helped, can help, and should help save the world by generating understanding of political processes, by illuminating the feasibility and consequences of alternative governmental arrangements, and by enhancing appreciation of the potentialities and the limits of political engineering. The most fundamental lesson in the study of politics, however, is that there are no shortcuts to political salvation. If the world is to saved and stable democratic institutions created, it will be done through incremental political reform undertaken by moderate, realistic men and women in the spirit of one-soul-at-a-time. That is the sobering yet hopeful message of our discipline (Huntington 1987, 9). Huntington here makes clear the connection argued earlier: American political science is entangled with liberal Protestantism. Huntington’s support for mainline Protestantism became sharper in Who We Are (2004b), which argued that America is a Protestant nation: “American was created as a Protestant society just as and for some of the same reasons Pakistan and Israel were created as Muslim and Jewish Societies in the twentieth century” (2004b, 63). Huntington was being less descriptive than prescriptive; his vision was intertwined with the marching orders of the Salvation Army and motivated by individual and national efforts at salvation. Before concluding with Heclo and Diamond, it is worth adding an aside on Huntington. What is remarkable is that Huntington was not a liberal idealist like de Ruggiero. He was known for his realist view of political development (Huntington 1968), his pessimism about spreading Western values and support for civilizational theories of human development (Huntington 1993), and his opposition to Hispanic immigration to the U.S. (Huntington 2004b). But, like Wilson, Beard, and Macy, Huntington viewed the US as an exceptional and a unique force for good in the world. The unique spirit of America is Protestant, and the spirit of political science is Protestant; to Huntington, it could not have been otherwise. Larry Diamond is a political sociologist known for his work on democracy and especially for being the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy (JOD), published with support from and in collaboration with the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In other words, Diamond is a scholar and practitioner. Among his contemporaries, Diamond is the most frequent user of the term “spirit.” In a 1984 article for Foreign Affairs on a military coup in Nigeria, Diamond wrote: “Many early reactions in the West have portrayed the coupmakers as a bunch of power-hungry soldiers, with no appreciation for democracy, eager to dip their hands into the nation's coffers. This is a gross misreading of the coup. .... Its motivating spirit has been popular and redemptive, not authoritarian” (1984, 905). Here, “spirit” is a synonym for “goal”: redemption for the nation (Volksgeist).5 In a 1999 article by Diamond with Yun-han Chu, the authors use “spirit” to connote vibrant electoral competition where political parties are backed by mass mobilization and political participation, instead of by patronage via party bosses and factions: “Even if one argues that in Taiwan's electoral context vote buying is not perceived as bribery, it undermines progress toward the consolidation and deepening of democracy. Because it is not only against the law, and thus inconsistent with a culture of respect for law, vote buying also contradicts the spirit of democracy (in which voters are free to choose based on their public policy preferences and political party identities)” (Chu and Diamond 1999, 822). Here the usage connotes the ethical value—representation of public preferences—that should guide voting in liberal democracies. The Spirit of Democracy provides the best data for explaining what Diamond talks about when he talks about the spirit. The text opens with quotes from Gandhi: “The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.” “The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of the heart” (2008, [i]). Here Diamond is gesturing to non-Western support for liberal democratic values, as well as to a transcendent ethical commitment to liberal democracy. The goal of the book is to answer “yes” to the question “Can the whole world become democratic?” Elsewhere Diamond has made explicit his support for the global spread of liberalism (Diamond et. al., 2006, 222). Here Diamond critiques the US government policy of supporting “our” dictators in Latin America. “But the democratic and idealist impulse in the American national spirit—that we must stand for something in the world, and that something must involve our core founding faith in freedom—could not be extinguished” (Diamond 2008, 2). Diamond suggests the American national spirit is faith in human freedom. Diamond points to his experience observing the democracy movement in Portugal: “[T]he future of democracy is not simply driven by abstract historical and structural forces. It is a consequence of struggle, strategy, ingenuity, vision, courage, conviction, compromise, and choices by human actors—of politics in the best sense of the word. This is what I mean by the democratic spirit. In the end, the democrats won in Portugal, in part because of the tenacity, courage and skill of democrats like Mario Soarer, leader of the Socialist Party, who would later 5 In hindsight, it was in fact a military coup that initiated a significant crackdown on civil liberties, the press, and trade unions over the next two years until the military removed the military head of state. become prime minister and then president, and in part because of the heavy investment Western democracies made in support of the democratic peace. That international solidarity to advance freedom was the harbinger of a much greater effort to come and the manifestation of another dimension of the democratic spirit” (Diamond 2008, 4-5). Diamond argues against structural approaches to explaining democratic transitions. Instead, in the first use of the term “spirit,” he argues that agentive individuals, acting collectively, enact democracy through struggle toward freedom. While he does not reference Hegel, Diamond’s conception is beholden to the Volksgeist, a people struggling together to bring into being their collective consciousness. In the second use, spirit is international solidarity between democrats, Hegel’s Weltgeist, bringing democrats together across time and space to act collectively. Similarly, Diamond argues that the spirit is a factor that will determine whether democracy blooms or withers (his metaphor): “In other words, for democracies to endure, their leaders and citizens must internalize the spirit of democracy. If many new and unstable democracies do not last, the challenge before us will not be extending the democratic tide but instead managing the implosion of democracy, what Samuel Huntington would call the third reverse wave. It is a basic principle of any military or geopolitical campaign that at some point an advancing force or cause must consolidate its gains before it conquers more territory than it can possibly hold” (Diamond 2008, 294). Here the spirit is moving humanity forward as part of a geopolitical campaign, but sometimes haltingly, in line with Hegel’s teleology. The spirit is a transcendent force doing battle with the enemies of freedom; Diamond does not specify why democracy’s conquest sometimes stalls, but one can imagine a sinister transcendent force at play. A third usage is overtly Hegelian: “The 1980s and ‘90s exposed the spirit of democracy in a third sense. During the two decades, democracy became a zeitgeist, literally (from the German) ‘the spirit of the time’” (Diamond 2008, 6). Likewise, after describing the downfalls of Marcos and the people power movement, Diamond notes, “The spirit of democracy was spreading to East Asia” (Diamond 2008, 44). In the mid-1990s it became clear to Diamond that since sixty percent of the world’s countries had become democracies, the rest of the world could, too, and he urged, “we have to identify the historical and structural obstacles to democracy around the world and the conditions not only for getting to democracy but for sustaining it and making it work” (Diamond 2008, 6). Here’s where Diamond switches from scholar to activist. He, the NED, and the JOD are inside “the global struggle for democracy.” There are moments in the text when Diamond uses the term to indicate a spirit with agency akin to the Holy Spirit: “The democratic spirit survived in Nigerian society, but it was sorely disillusioned, and it lacked a democratic state and political class to give it room to grow” (Diamond 2008, 74). Likewise, “These surveys seem to indicate a weakness in the democratic spirit in the former Communist bloc” (Diamond 2008, 193). And: “Moreover, the spirit of democracy survives in Africa despite the most brutal efforts to crush it” (Diamond 2008, 258). In Bangladesh, “the spirit of democracy has been badly eroded by the blood feud between the two major parties...” (Diamond 2008, 227). To Diamond, the spirit can be dead, alive, disillusioned, strong or weak, strengthened or eroded. Hugh Heclo was a prominent scholar of public administration who, like Wilson, Macy, Beard, and Huntington, also wrote about the importance of Christianity to democracy. His 2002 John Gaus speech “The Spirit of Public Administration” is the most conceptually explicit writing of any in the dataset. Heclo begins with a more overtly Christian conception of the Spirit than anyone since Hegel: “In the end, I suppose each one of us, in our heart of hearts, knows that it does make sense to talk of there really being a “spirit” of something or someone. A beloved friend or family member is not just a checklist of personal traits. There’s more there than what you might write out as a personality profile. There is the living quality of their personhood. And when that person finally leaves you, what you grieve having lost is not a characteristic or collection of characteristics. What you miss is the animating truth of who that person was, the essential spirit of Being that no longer lives in that dead body” (Heclo 2002, 689 italics authors). The spirit of a person is their soul. Heclo goes on to say that “Spirit expresses a claim about ultimate things, about the underlying rightness of what a thing is” (Heclo 2002, 689). He then uses “spirit” in the Weberian sense of an ethic or maxim: “When a vocation is truly heard and accepted, we might say that it is the spirit of the thing that is doing the calling and stirring an answering spirit, deep calling to deep” (Heclo 2002, 689). But quickly Heclo switches back to the Christian Holy Spirit: “In the West’s Christian tradition, (the only one known to American public administration), such teaching is recorded in the gospel of John. There Jesus says, ‘It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh profits nothing’ (citing John 6: 63). …On the level we are dealing with here, it is saying that spirit bestows an animating quality while material concerns can do nothing more than rearrange what is already there” (Heclo 2002, 690). Heclo’s spirit is the Holy Spirit that provides the animating presupposition for the discipline. “The spirit lifts it up from beneath, so to speak. And that is not something grasped and appreciated with a purely analytic eye or dissecting hand” (Heclo 2002, 690). Once again, Heclo smashes the line between empirics and normative values: “The wall of separation between fact and value is a half-truth pretending to be the whole truth of the matter, and so at its heart it is a lie” (Heclo 2002, 691). In doing so he draws parallels to the spirit: “The spirit does not split the difference between idealism and realism but unites them into one realm. It is both unconditional and incarnate, the universal in living particulars. Gazing neither up or down, right or left, its face is set forward like a flint toward a central moral ideal that is a reality meant for real people” (Heclo 2002, 691). Heclo is arguing against the fact/value distinction, since objectivity is important for assessing evidence but does not sustain motivation. Heclo uses an analogy to firefighters and doctors; both are objective and impartial in evaluating the facts, but not in distinguishing health and illness, or burning and not burning. He critiques rational choice and postmodernism specifically because they are valueless, focused instead on success/failure. His critique of rational choice then goes deeper. In response to an imagined objection to his idealist vision, Heclo argues: The brief answer is that while the real public administrator is certainly different from the ideal public administrator, that in itself is no logical reason for overlooking the reality at the root of the ideal. The longer answer involves pausing and listening to what is [sic] actually lies behind the question. When the so-called realist asks this question, it is actually a demand that spirit should be something less than spirit, which is to say, less than something that is both unconditional in its claim and incarnate in its expression. It amounts to demanding either that the unconditional should be banished to a realm of meaningless abstraction, or that the incarnate should have free rein to use its conditional circumstances as the ruling standard. Either way, it amounts to the demand to kill the spirit. And as it is written, blaspheming the spirit is the one unforgivable sin. But the spirit is not killed. Either it animates or it grieves and goes missing. Either it bestows its gift or it leaves behind the dead body of a person, an institution, or a discipline—a spiritless body that profits nothing (Heclo 2002, 694). Here Heclo makes complete the move from secularized theology back to theology. “Blaspheming the spirit” is a reference to a Christian view on sin, where there are some eternal or unforgivable sins which will not be forgiven by god, such as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Heclo is saying that the “so-called” realist critique of normative virtues as animating public administration is blasphemy and will kill the discipline. Yet, Heclo’s overarching argument is not about blasphemy. Heclo wants to identify the spirit (animating presupposition) of public administration. He contemplates many options: impartiality, efficiency, non-partisanship, rationality, public service, and fiduciary responsibility. He settles on stewardship: “This means a calling to take care for the wellbeing of the public household” (Heclo 2002, 692). In identifying stewardship as the spirit of public administration, his argument may appear Weberian, but that misses Heclo’s broader thrust: “Stewardship of the king’s household is certainly not identical with stewardship in a modern democratic society. However the spirit changes by becoming a more complete realization of what it is—not by an evolution of new species or dialectic of contradictions, but by an unfolding of inner possibilities. In other words, change in the spirit of public administration resembles what Cardinal Newman ([1845] 1986) called “the development of doctrine” (Heclo 2002, 694). This is Hegel once again: Spirit is an intangible force that unfolds through history with the coming together of collective consciousness. To summarize, Heclo argues that the ideal of stewardship, which emerged from liberal Protestants in the progressive movement, drives and sustains the field of public administration.. This is a constant even amid changing theories of rational choice, postmodernism, or shifting labels from public administration to bureaucracy. This is the soul of the discipline. This normative commitment is sustained through the deeper development of doctrine (inner possibilities), and the teaching of this virtue. Conversely, those realists who prefer to study public administration as it is (rather than as it ought to be) are committing blasphemy. Heclo is not being metaphorical: the spirit is the soul of the discipline; its denunciation kills the body. V. Conclusion: The Spirit of Political Science “The spirit of liberalism will arouse itself” (Wilson 1917). What is the geist of political science, the animating presupposition driving the discipline? The answer is most clear in Huntington’s presidential address, 75 years after Wilson’s: “If the world is to saved and stable democratic institutions created, it will be done through incremental political reform undertaken by moderate, realistic men and women in the spirit of one-soul-at-atime” (Huntington 1987, 9). The answer can likewise be heard from APSA president (19551956) Harold Lasswell’s call for his colleagues to be “policy scientists of democracy,” dispassionately studying human behavior in the service of liberal democracy (Katznelson 2003, 126). Liberal democracy provides both the motivation and ends to which the discipline strives. This motivation is not new. Seidelman and Harpham’s history of the discipline focuses on the tight connection between the liberal state, liberal political theory, and political science: “Liberal theory as well as liberal practice rested upon the loyal and careful description of the state of affairs and documentation of explanations to the fullest extent possible” (1985, ix). Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner situate the discipline’s origins in liberal Protestantism. “Late nineteenth and early-twentieth century U.S. studies of the state went hand in hand with a concern to tame state power by liberal values and practices, including consent, toleration, representation, and individual rights” (Katznelson and Milner 2002, 8). They use Wilson’s 1887 essay on public administration as a quintessential example: “Characterized by a focus on formal institutions, public administration, and law, the core of the country’s new political science was infused with an emphasis on the elements of political liberalism articulated by Wilson… American political science began as a quest to understand and secure liberal regimes against competitors, such as monarchies and illiberal empires” (Katznelson and Milner 2002, 9-10). Katznelson and Milner go on to trace these normative concerns through the subfields and over time. Similarly, Katznelson has demonstrated that the social scientists of the post-WWII period—Lasswell, Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Charles Lindblom, and Karl Polyani—sought to create a field of study with a similar normative commitment. They re-invented a “realistic and proficient political science in an extended sense of the term that, at once, was institutional and historical, normative and behavioral” (Katznelson 2003, 16). Contemporary practitioners will recognize that these concerns continue to motivate large portions of the field. Political science— or at least the portion of the discipline represented here—is entangled with liberalism’s missionary project. The implications are multiple. One is celebratory; at a time of rampant misinformation, democratic decline, authoritarian populism, and a global climate crisis, political scientists are ready to respond with both objective study and a normative grounding in durable values. Indeed, contemporary scholars like Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky and have sought to make the case for democracy anew (2018). Others are revisiting the values of the Enlightenment—reason, tolerance, representation, freedom—while avoiding its blind spots: imperialism, racism, and the rights of the non-human. Yet there is another implication, too. Political science’s entanglement with the advance of liberalism means that it shares the practices and pathologies of other missionary ventures: difficulty respecting other visions for social, political and economic order; a desire to spread particularistic values to all cultures; blindness to injustice within one’s own tradition. There is a burgeoning literature on exactly these pathologies. Robert Vitalis, for example, has written an eloquent book on the racism endemic to the field of International Relations (2015). Jessica Blatt’s book Race and the Making of American Political Science positions racist assumptions at the heart of the discipline’s origins (2018). Katznelson argues that the discipline’s commitments render it difficult to see structures that constrain agency and reproduce systems of domination such as economic inequality, political inequality, racism, secularism, and imperialism, which is why he draws from the socialist tradition (Katznelson 1996). Nonetheless, there are counter-trends to those blinders. Paula D McClain’s APSA presidential address lambasted the discipline’s racist origins to celebrate and uplift scholarship on race, ethnicity and politics (McClain 2021). The 2020 notes from the incoming APSR editorial team celebrated work pushing disciplinary conventions and boundaries (APSR 2020). The program for the most recent APSA annual meeting featured prominent mini-conferences on Indigenous Politics and Comparative Political Theory, subjects that were marginal only twenty years ago. The growing diversity of the discipline brings in perspectives that are pushing against the traditional boundaries. There are historical counter-trends, too. While the use of the term “spirit” is common in the fields of public administration, religion and politics, and democratization, it is noticeably absent from scholarship on political economy, gender, identity, and foreign policy. So too there have long been other political traditions in the discipline: Marxist, realist, and civilizational theories have pushed back against the liberal spirit. Huntington’s clairvoyance as to the discipline’s spirit came from his own normative commitment to American exceptionalism and skepticism that liberal values or institutions would take root in non-Anglo-Protestant cultures (Huntington 2004b). Changing the spirit of political science may not be possible. Path dependency is a powerful force in institutions and especially in hierarchical ones like the academy. Given that most prominent scholars of political science are themselves normatively committed to liberalism, and that there is no serious ideological competitor to liberalism, it is unlikely that appeals to gaps in knowledge will persuade scholars to expunge their normative commitments. Instead, scholars might more often acknowledge the discipline’s normative commitments and work, like Katznelson, to peek beyond our blinders by explicitly drawing on other bodies of thought. Saba Mahmood, likewise, suggests that in engaging with those outside the liberal tradition, we “hold open the possibility that we may come to ask of politics a whole series of questions that seemed settled when we first embarked upon the inquiry” (Mahmood 2005, 39). After all, while such missionary projects are often bedeviled by polemic and cultural erasure, they may also expand knowledge and understanding through the act of exploration and engagement with the other.