Woodrow Wilson, American Political Science Association Presidential Address

The Spirit and/of Political Science Abstract: What do political scientists talk about when they talk about the spirit? The term appears in the discipline’s leading journals more frequently than more intuitive terms associated with religion, yet is conceptually opaque. This article tackles three questions. First, how do scholars use the term “spirit”? Second, what work does the concept do? Third, what is the spirit of political science? The article answers these questions through a conceptual genealogy of the term “spirit” in the publications of classical, modern, and contemporary scholars, alongside a quantitative content analysis using a novel dataset from the leading political science journals from 1906 to 2015. For classical scholars, the concept of the spirit repurposed the Christian Holy Spirit to advance Enlightenment theories about human progress. For modern and contemporary scholars, the spirit was further scrubbed of Christian connotations and inscribed with liberal idealist commitments to freedom. This article thus demonstrates that when political scientists talk about spirit, they reveal a theoretical indebtedness to the Christian concept of a transcendent and intangible force that animates, directs, and guides humans. The conclusion suggests the spirit of the discipline is a gradual striving toward local and national efforts at political salvation through ideological and institutional conversion to liberal democracy, while also identifying historical and contemporary countercurrents. “Know your people and you can lead them; study your people and you may know them. But study them, not as congeries of interests, but as a body of human souls, the least as significant as the greatest,—not as you would calculate forces, but as you would comprehend life. …The facts are precedent to all remedies; and the facts in this field are spiritually perceived.” Woodrow Wilson, American Political Science Association Presidential Address (1911) I. Introduction What do political scientists talk about when they talk about the “spirit?” The term is invoked in the titles of prominent books like Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2003 [1920]), Charles Louis Secondat de la Brède Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (1899), and, more recently, Larry Diamond’s The Spirit of Democracy (2008). It is used in public lectures, such as Hugh Heclo’s John Gaus Lecture on “The Spirit of Public Administration” (Heclo 2002). And the term is commonplace in the titles of journal articles, such as Bruce Morrison’s World Politics article on the “Restless Spirit of Innovation” (2011) and Joshua Mitchell’s article in the American Political Science Review (APSR) on the “Republican Spirit” (1992). Between 1900 and 2020, the word “spirit” appears in the APSR and other leading journals more often than other expressions associated with religion like “Christianity,” “religion,” and “faith.”1 Yet, despite the ubiquity of the term, it is unclear how the term is used in social science analysis. This conceptual muddiness is surprising given recent advances in scholarship. Political science scholarship on religion has seen a massive uptick over the past twenty years but has ignored the spirit. Likewise, recent years have seen an upsurge in sociology, history, and anthropology research on the spirit, spirits, spirituality, and spiritual care. In anthropology, the move beyond the world religions approach has led to the development of a more flexible vocabulary of transcendence to map religious practices in Asia (Fukuura 2011; Van der Veer 2013; Hoskins 2014). The growing focus on “lived religions” in both anthropology and sociology has made visible in everyday people’s lives an omnipresence of spirits and spirituality (Ammerman 2021; Bowen 2017). In parallel, the late-modern shift away from organizational membership in unions and churches alike has led to greater attention to figures that cater to 1 Using JStor for the period 1900-2020 in APSR, World Politics, Comparative Politics, The Journal of Politics, The American Journal of Political Science, and International Organization, the results are spirit (5,396), religion (5,133), faith (4,792), and Christianity (1,011). 1 transcendence seekers across denominational lines (Hoesterey 2014; Sullivan 2014). These chaplains and gurus synthesize pop psychology and religious modes of comportment to meet their followers’ spiritual (and sometimes economic, and sometimes political) needs. Political science has stood apart from this literature for reasons that are, at this point, a matter of speculation. One possible reason is that political science’s commitment to secularism as a normative project makes research on any aspect of religion, especially its fuzzy cousin spirituality, unpalatable if not professionally perilous (Philpott 2009). Another possibility is that the fuzziness of the category of “spirit” is off putting. Yet, the discipline’s analytical distance from the spirit has costs. The term “spirit” is both common and unclear. It is frequently invoked, but in ways that are highly varied. That distance makes it hard to build knowledge, or even keep in conversation with our sister disciplines. To address this oversight, this article undertakes content analysis and a conceptual genealogy of the use of the term “spirit” in the discipline. I used JStor to compile a novel database of all articles that used the term “spirit” in the six leading journals of political science from 1906 to 2015. That database was used for quantitative content analysis to describe trends in usage over time and assess whether the conceptual genealogy accords with a larger sample of articles. I followed up with the more in-depth conceptual genealogy of authors and articles that used the term in a theoretically substantive way. For example, an article a single reference to the “spirit of civil society” or a lone citation to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was not included. The use of the term in the title, or multiple times in the body of the article, merited inclusion in the dataset. Once I located an article that used the term in a substantive manner, I added the authors’ other prominent publications to see how the concept related to their broader research agenda. I also included classical scholarship by Weber, Montesquieu, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, since they used the term frequently and in theoretically influential ways. As a result, the genealogy consists of books and articles by scholars who frequently invoked (or continue to invoke) the spirit: Woodrow Wilson, Jesse Macy, Guido de Ruggiero, Gilbert Murray, Alfred Zimmern, Charles and Mary Beard, Lucian Pye, Samuel Huntington, Larry Diamond, and Hugh Heclo. Through these analyses, the article tackles and answers three questions. First, how do scholars use the term “spirit?” What are their explicit and implicit definitions? Montesquieu and Hegel’s conception of spirit, with its Christian connection to the 2 Holy Spirit, has been more influential than the Weberian conception of the spirit, which means “ethic” or “maxim.” This distinction matters. Scholars use the Hegelian conception of spirit to imply an organic, teleological and idealist vision of political development that is unmistakably rooted in the Holy Spirit, although with the evacuated and re-inscribed meanings developed by Montesquieu and Hegel. The paper shows that the spirit serves as a vehicle for theories of political development that imply a transcendent force driving human development. Second, analytically, what work does the concept do for scholars? For classical scholars, “spirit” draws on a concept from Christian theology, but is repurposed to advance Enlightenment theories about human development. Just as the Holy Spirit is believed to act in the world to advance God’s will, Montesquieu and Hegel’s Spirit is a transcendent, intangible force that is integral to human development. As in Christian theology, key individuals (Prophets, Saints) have agency in this unfolding story; Hegel is both author and actor in his theory. Modern and contemporary scholars, inscribe the spirit with commitments to liberalism. The liberal spirit animates, directs and guides the human community toward freedom. Like Hegel, these modern and contemporary authors are also practitioners; the language of spirit facilitates a synthesis between empirical observation and a normative commitment to advancing liberal democratic institutions and values. Third, the article applies the concept back to the discipline itself by asking: what is the spirit of political science? Out of the 108 published presidential addresses to the APSA, the term “spirit” appears in 58. It is easy to see why; such august occasions give rise to discussions of not what we do or how, but why we do political science. These are moments of disciplinary transcendence. Drawing on histories of the discipline, I suggest that political science is a diverse academic field shaped by a wide range of ideas including conservativism, Marxism, and civilizational theories, and increasingly open to ideas from outside Anglo-European political thought. While acknowledging increasing inclusiveness, I follow Huntington, Helen Milner, and Ira Katznelson in suggesting that the driving spirit of political science continues to be akin to that of the Salvation army or the YMCA, part of a larger movement striving toward local and national efforts at political salvation through conversion to liberal democracy. The conclusion of the article ends by elucidating the implications. 3 The remainder of the article is divided into four sections. The next section presents the argument. The following section presents the quantitative content analysis documenting trends over time and relative influence. The subsequent genealogy section is subdivided into examinations of the classical, modern (20th century) and contemporary (late 20th and 21st century) usage of the term “spirit.” These empirics are organized chronologically by author, with analysis of the work that “spirit” does explicitly and implicitly in each author’s writings. The conclusion illuminates the spirit of political science and implications. II. Argument The English language “spirit” has its origins in multiple languages. One is the classical Latin spīritus, defined as breath, translated in the Old Testament as ruach and in the New Testament in Greek as pneuma and borrowed into English from the French espirit.2 Another relevant origin is from the Proto-Germanic Geist, which also connotes “ghost.” The verb form of “spirit” in the Oxford English Dictionary has only one entry germane to the discipline: “To make (the blood, a liquor) of a more active or lively character” (OED 2019b). This usage is uncommon in political science, and when it does appear, is more stylistic than theoretical, such as the adjectival reference to “spirited” elections in Taiwan (Chu and Diamond 1999, 808, 812 and see below). The noun form has four main definitions with twenty-two sub-entries. The relevant ones include: 1) The animating or vital principle in man (and animals); that which gives life to the physical organism, in contrast to its purely material elements; the breath of life. 2) a. the Spirit of God (Holy Spirit), the active essence or essential power of the Deity, conceived as a creative, animating, or inspiring influence. 3) The immaterial intelligent or sentient element or part of a person, frequently in implied or expressed contrast to the body. (OED 2019a). As we will see, these are the common meanings in the discipline. Specifically, for classical scholars, the concept of the spirit repurposed the symbol of the Christian Holy Spirit to advance Enlightenment theories about human progress. Montesquieu argued that the spirit was an animating force steering the public and the state. The popular spirit produced public preferences for forms of government, while the law’s spirit reflected the popular spirit and, in democracies, gently steered society against despotism and toward freedom. To 2 While there are scholars who trace the lineage of the New Testament conception of the Holy Spirit to the Stoics’ “divine spirit,” this is a minority view (Aurelius 1964, 25). 4 Hegel, the Spirit (Geist) was collective consciousness coming into being over time. Hegel’s Spirit was the engine and ends of that progression. Hegel’s teleology was explicitly indebted to the Christian Holy Spirit, a transcendent, intangible force that animated, directed, and guided human progress. For modern and contemporary scholars, the spirit was further scrubbed of Christian connotations and inscribed with liberal idealist commitments to freedom. Woodrow Wilson, one of the early presidents of the APSA as well as a famous policy practitioner, argued that democracy was made possible by an organic connection between the national spirit (Volksgeist) and the state. The spirit of America was timeless in form and content, and emblematic of the possibilities that derived from liberty. Another APSA president, Jesse Macy, wrote that the Christian spirit was the impulse toward honesty, truth, and openness. The political spirit consisted of opposition to tyranny, the installation of that truth in democratic form. Macy likewise used the concept of spirit to bridge scholarship and practice: “Until the men of science make good their spirit and method in the citadel of contentious politics they remain in the infantile or kindergarten stage of development” (Macy 1917, 8). More recent political administration scholars, most notably a recipient of APSA’s John Gaus lifetime achievement award Hugh Heclo, have argued that the spirit provided the field’s animating presupposition: “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). Heclo’s writings exemplify this article’s argument: the term “spirit” helps us to map the Protestant influence on political science, provides a bridge between empirical research and normative preferences, and serves as a vehicle to explain not what political scientists do, but why. In a slightly different vein, de Ruggiero, Murray, Zimmern, the Beards, and Diamond rebaptized the concept as the “liberal spirit.” de Ruggiero’s conception of the liberal spirit originated in the Protestant Reformation; religious liberty birthed political liberty, and the emancipation of the individual spirit born of the Reformation gave rise to the emancipation of the individual spirit in politics. Liberation was born not of institutions but from conversion. Likewise, Murray and Zimmern’s reformulation of the Christian spirit envisioned the liberal spirit as a transcendent and intangible force that like Hegel’s provides the engine and endpoint for human progress. Charles and Mary Beard also used the spirit to transpose a religious belief in human progress onto historical narrative. Drawing on ideas from Signor Benedetto Croce, an 5 Italian philosopher heavily influenced by Hegel and other German idealists, the Beards imbued in historiography an ethical imperative to center liberal virtues as the ends and means to which history was oriented. Finally, Diamond’s liberal spirit also had clear origins in Montesquieu, possessing agency and concrete qualities such as being dead, alive, disillusioned, strong or weak, strengthened or eroded. Its motive is the gradual, universal installation of democratic institutions. In sum, when political scientists talk about spirit, they reveal a theoretical indebtedness to the Christian concept of a Holy Spirit, a transcendent and intangible force that animates, directs, and guides humans. Montesquieu, Hegel, Wilson, Macy, the Beards, and Heclo acknowledged and celebrated this heritage even while repurposing the concept. Murray, Zimmern, de Ruggiero, and Diamond masked that indebtedness while embracing a similarly idealist, organic, teleological conception of the liberal spirit. Huntington celebrated the discipline’s Protestant heritage and its co-constitution with American national identity to describe the spirit of political science: advancing a gradual, ideological and institutional conversion to liberal democracy. III. Content Analysis Drawing on a novel dataset of all uses of the term “spirit” in the leading political science journals from 1906 to 2015, this section describes the results of the quantitative content analysis.3 During that period the term “spirit” was used in 5,344 documents in the APSR, World Politics, Comparative Politics, The Journal of Politics, the American Journal of Political Science, and International Organization. That count includes the stem word “spirit,” was well as the adjectives “spiritual” and “spirited,” and the nouns “spiritedness” and “spirituality.” Figure 1 shows usage over time, with a massive uptick in the 1940s, peaking in the period from 19501980, and decreasing but remaining common to the present. 3 The dataset is available at https://constellate.org/dataset/d565d55c-ad2d-f121-7475841b37039183/. This article uses the period from 1906 to 2015 because paywalls make the most recent years unavailable for full text download. 6 Figure 1: “Spirit” in Political Science Journals (1906-2015), Inclusive 7 Applying more stringent criteria for inclusion in the dataset, I removed ephemera documents (front matter, back matter, volume information, etc.) to show only substantively meaningful usage. See Figure 2 for largely similar trends: increasing usage from 1940 to 1950, peaking in the period from 1950-1980, then lower but steady usage to the present. Both figures demonstrate the enduring use of a seemingly archaic term. That said, political science journals have published a greater number of documents over time. As a percentage of the total, documents using the term “spirit” have declined over time with peaks in the 1900s (73%) and the 1940s (28%), steady usage in the period from 1940 to 1970s (16% to 28%), and lower usage in the past few decades (5% to 7%). Figure 3 shows the percent of documents using the term “spirit” relative to total documents, thus confirming enduring usage but also decreasing frequency since the 1940s. 8 Figure 2: “Spirit” in Political Science Journals (1906-2015), Exclusive 9 Figure 3: Frequency of “Spirit” Documents to all Documents in Political Science Journals 10 I then categorized the bi-grams from the dataset to map the most influential conception of “spirit.” Bi-grams are sequences of two strings of characters interrupted by a space such as spirit + democracy, after stop words (e.g. “of,” “the”) are removed. The resultant dataset included 6,914 total bi-grams. I sorted the bi-grams into categories for each author, using their most characteristic usage; the category to capture Weber’s conception included, for example, spirit + capitalism, ethic + spirit, and entrepreneur + spirit (see Section IV for more detailed usage by each author). Montesquieu’s conception included spirit + law, spirit + constitution, and spirit + letter, as examples of references to the law. I also created a category of uni-grams and bi-grams related to religion (spiritual, spirituality, holy + spirit) to assess how often the term is used as a synonym for faith. Of these, spiritual was the most common, with around 90% of uses referring to Christianity. Another 10% or so referred to Chinese spirituality, Indian spirituality, or Islamic spirituality. This was helpful because the quantitative data confirmed that the spirit is sometimes used as a synonym for religion, but that represents only a fraction (19%) of usage. Finally, I created a miscellaneous category for uni-grams and bi-grams that lacked theoretically clear relation to specific authors, such as kindred + spirit, spirited + discussion, and military + spirit. I also included in the miscellaneous category any bi-grams that could be associated with multiple authors, such as cooperative + spirit, which could be associated with Diamond, Montesquieu, or others. The result was 1,664 miscellaneous uses. I ultimately categorized all bi-grams with a count of 15 of more, as well as bi-grams that occurred less than 15 times but were highly relevant to a certain author’s characteristic usage. In total, I categorized 5,060 out of a total of 6,914 bi-grams, or 73%. Figure 4 excludes the miscellaneous and religious categories and shows that indeed, the most common usage follows Montesquieu’s conception of the spirit, then Macy, Hegel, Weber and others. 11 Figure 4: Use of “Spirit” by Author Conception in Political Science Journals (1906-2015) The final quantitative analysis focused on change over time by author. Figure 5 shows frequency of usage by the top four authors. While Montesquieu’s conception is the most common overall, Macy was briefly dominant in the 1910s, and Weber’s conception became more influential in the 1980s as scholars pushed back against materialist approaches to politics and reasserted the importance of the state. To dig in further, the next section explains what these influential authors talk about when they talk about the spirit. 12 Figure 5: Frequency of Conception of “Spirit” by Author Over Time (1906-2015) 13