The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy

by Michael George Hanchard

As right-wing nationalism and authoritarian populism gain momentum across the world, liberals, and even some conservatives, worry that democratic principles are under threat. In The Spectre of Race, Michael Hanchard argues that the current rise in xenophobia and racist rhetoric is nothing new and that exclusionary policies have always been central to democratic practices since their beginnings in classical times. Contending that democracy has never been for all people, Hanchard discusses how marginalization is reinforced in modern politics, and why these contradictions need to be fully examined if the dynamics of democracy are to be truly understood.

Hanchard identifies continuities of discriminatory citizenship from classical Athens to the present and looks at how democratic institutions have promoted undemocratic ideas and practices. The longest-standing modern democracies--France, Britain, and the United States—profited from slave labor, empire, and colonialism, much like their Athenian predecessor. Hanchard follows these patterns through the Enlightenment and to the states and political thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he examines how early political scientists, including Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries, devised what Hanchard has characterized as "racial regimes" to maintain the political and economic privileges of dominant groups at the expense of subordinated ones. Exploring how democracies reconcile political inequality and equality, Hanchard debates the thorny question of the conditions under which democracies have created and maintained barriers to political membership.

Showing the ways that race, gender, nationality, and other criteria have determined a person's status in political life, The Spectre ofRace offers important historical context for how democracy generates political difference and inequality.

Genres: Race, Nonfiction, Political Science, Politics, History

280 pages, Hardcover

Published April 24, 2018

Reviews

[John David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Michael Hanchard’s “The Spectre of Race” (2018) was recently discounted on the Princeton University Press website for a song. Its argument walks a close line to a lot of the topics that I’ve been interested in for years – politics, discrimination, power structures, and how they are perpetuated within the confines of democratic norms and practices. I bought the book with the intention of adding it to my list of reading material for African-American History Month and possibly even inviting Professor Hanchard, a professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, onto my Youtube channel to discuss his book. Given the two-star review, that would have been perhaps an overly uncomfortable interview.

I realize that being a Princeton University publication, I – a thoroughgoing amateur and neophyte in every subject I’m interested in – am perhaps not the target audience for this text. Nevertheless, this book does seem, superficially at least, to be targeted to a popular, intelligent audience even if that audience isn’t a fully academic one. Unfortunately, the first third of the book consists of a protracted analysis of the ways in which the field of comparative politics has changed since its birth in the late nineteenth century. To make things even more awkward, Hanchard does little in the second two-thirds of the book to tie any of this 150-year history into his overarching argument. It just stands there as a stolid eighty pages of theoretical concerns about comparative politics, oddly and disconcertingly cut off from the rest of the book, which is an otherwise very pragmatic and rubber-meets-the-road discussion of how hierarchies, problems of ethno-nationalism, and slavery can persist even in the presence of democracies where we like to think of people as fundamentally equal. Hanchard goes on to discuss similar cases of ethno-national inequality in American slavery, the Caribbean world, and Western Europe detailing the precise ways in which state power has often divided populations along the important lines of citizenship, education, and race. At every turn, Hanchard argues that “legal, juridical, and institutional empowerment of citizens has been dynamically related to limiting second-class citizens or prohibiting noncitizens from access to citizenship.”

One of the cases that Hanchard takes up to see how inequalities and hierarchies persist in democracies is the changing nature of citizenship in ancient Athens. During the Persian wars, Athens decided that being a native-born Athenian (known as “autochthony”) was necessary for citizenship. Foreign residents, women, and even many males were denied citizenship. This idea of using politically manipulative tools to “engineer” people out of their citizenship would become an increasingly popular phenomenon in Western democracies. Not only one’s ability to be a citizen, but their abilities to own property, vote, and gain an education were perpetuated by acts of reprobation, coercion, and even statutory law. The choice of ancient Athens seems anachronistic to say the least, doesn’t it? I fully realize how we casually refer to Athens as the “birthplace of modern democracy,” but it’s far from what I think of when I think of modern, liberal, republican (i.e., advanced) democracy. Nevertheless, his points about the ability of state power to draw arbitrary lines of inclusion and exclusion for the purposes of creating disparate classes amongst a population are well-taken and appreciated.

There are a few interesting lessons that Hanchard’s book reinforces. For example, it makes explicit that ideas of citizenship, enfranchisement, education, and other aspects of being a member of a democracy are sometimes little more than arbitrary, with the express purpose of the state to draw political lines of inclusion and exclusion as it deems necessary to meet its political ends. As Hanchard writes, “Our contemporary moment is that population homogeneity, like the category of foreigner and citizen, is a political artifact.” Other compelling questions Hanchard’s work poses: “Is it mere coincidence that the most enduring democracies … are the polities that have benefited the most from the transatlantic slave trade? Did slavery, specifically racial slavery, provide the necessary material largesse to make democracy possible?” Fascinating and humbling questions both.

Unfortunately, Hanchard’s unengaging, hay-dry academic writing combined with the completely unnecessary disquisition on the development of comparative politics that opens the book makes for a clunky, uneven reading experience with more disappointments than rewards. I would have to think there are better books on the subject out there, even if my lack of familiarity means that I’m not ready to immediately suggest any that come to mind.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hanchard charts the relationship between modern nation-states and democracy and how these two categories were built on categories of race. He shows how ideas of democracy were dependent on ideas and ideals of race and racism.

"Part of this book's mission is to represent democracy not only as a concept and ideal, but as a practice, a particular combination of norms, institutions, and actors. One of the key questions this book explores is how the practice of democracy produces-and is affected by-political inequality." 4

"A core concern of this book is how difference, figured as race, was rendered political salient in modern politics. As sociologists have reminded us, race, like power, is a relational concept." 5

"Among the most significant changes in the organization of knowledge in the 19th century was the invention of the comparative method." 20

"Regardless of subject matter, the student employing a comparative method was compelled to consider the philological, specifically epistemological implications of their objects of inquiry." 21

"The 19th century language of race, like the language of empire in the same period, helped provide the ideological elaboration for imperial administration as well as the belief that each race or people required their own state." 25