Book Review: The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age, by Russell Muirhead

• Date: 01 April 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718805506
• Published date: 01 April 2020
• Author: David Ragazzoni
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

260 Political Theory 48(2)

Comparativists and theorists, at least, will find some morsels to relish here

but not enough to sustain a lasting contribution. The importance of the ques-

tions asked and the variety of data analyzed will guarantee Democracy for

Realists a large and attentive readership. Nonetheless, the shortcomings of

such a thoroughly vetted and widely anticipated publication can only be dis-

couraging. Perhaps theorists can make some difference, not only with inter-

preting empirical results but also with research design itself, by testing our

mettle more often in collaborative projects with nontheorists. Academic

political science might then be in better shape for understanding elections

than elections are in for serving democracy.

The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age, by Russell Muirhead. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2014, 260 pp.

Reviewed by: David Ragazzoni, Department of Political Science, Columbia University,

New York, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718805506

Partisanship as a potential source of conflict is a constitutive dimension of poli-

tics. It is engrained in the very etymology of the word itself—ta politikà shares

the same pre-Indo-European (Mycenaean) radical pt of p(t)òlis (city) and p(t)

òlemos (war)—and rooted in the history of political theory since its very begin-

ning. Plato’s Protagoras (322b) described polemikè tèchne (the art of war) as

part of politikè tèchne (the art of government), while Plato’s Laws, in a passage

that would be later revisited by Hobbes, argued that each state (pòlis) is, by

nature, in a perennial, informal condition of war (pòlemos) against all other

states (625e–626a). An intrinsically polysemic term, politics has thus always

entailed, at once, the existence and the contestation of a collective order.

Its semantic ambiguity also applies to the word party. A relatively recent

acquisition of our political language (i.e., from the seventeenth century, when its

ancestor, sect, acquired a distinctively religious meaning), party, too, suggests

both the idea of division, laceration, and incompleteness (e.g., partial, particular,

partition) and that of juncture, union, and reconciliation (e.g., participating, par-

taking, partnership). Such an ambiguity was powerfully captured by Voltaire in

his entry “Faction” for the Enclyclopédie (1756), where he described a faction

as “a seditious party” (parti) that “does not rejoin [partager] the entire State.”

These “two opposite semantic pulls”1 were, and still are, reflective of two differ-

ent visions of politics, as either pòlemos or pòlis—that is, as either the expres-

sion of disagreement, and the eruption of conflict or the pursuit of a common