Politics at Whitman College

Publications Include Books:

Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton University Press; 2005)

DESCRIPTION: This book explores an enduring tension within liberal theory between many liberals' professed commitment to universal equality and their historic support for the politics of hierarchy and empire. It does this by examining the work of two influential inter-war liberals and internationalists, Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern. It maintains that on both the domestic and international levels, this tension is best understood as frequently arising from the same, liberal reformist political aim; that of fashioning a socially conscious liberalism that ultimately reifies pre-liberal notions of organic community and paternalistic order. The book questions conventional analyses of interwar thought by resurrecting the work of Murray and Zimmern and by linking their liberal internationalisms with the ossified notion of sovereignty that continues to trouble international politics to this day. It also links their political theories to the tradition of British idealism in a way that significantly extends the influence of this school of thought. The book concludes that Zimmern and Murray’s drift toward conservative and imperialist understandings of international order were the result of a more general difficulty still faced by liberals today: how to adequately define community in liberal terms without sacrificing these terms themselves. Moreover, it suggests that Murray and Zimmern’s work ought to provide a cautionary historical example for the cadre of post-September 11th “new imperialists” who believe it possible to combine a liberal commitment to equality with an American Empire.

Articles:

Book Review: Michael Ignatieff, “The Lesser Evil,” Perspectives on Politics, Sept. 2005.

“States are Not People: Unsettling Sovereignty, Rediscovering Democracy,” forthcoming, Political Research Quarterly, December, 2005.

"Hegelian Organicism, British New Liberalism, and the Return of the Family State," History of Political Thought, Spring 2002

"'A Liberal In A Muddle": Alfred Zimmern on Nationality and Commonwealth." In Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations, eds. David Long and Brian C. Schmidt (SUNY Press, 2004.) [See in SUNY Spring Catalog, http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61050 ]

"From Margin to Mainstream: Religious Schools v. Children's Rights by James G. Dwyer (Cornell UP, 1998)." Education Review, September 1998. Co-author, Paul Apostolidis. On-line at http://www.ed.asu.edu/edrev/reviews/rev34.htm.