Democracy’s History of Inegalitarianism: Symposium on Michael Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2018

• Published date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720901869
• Date: 01 June 2020
• Subject Matter: Review Symposium

901869PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720901869Political TheoryReview Symposium
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Review Symposium
Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(3) 357 –377
Democracy’s History
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Symposium on Michael
Hanchard, The Spectre of
Race: How Discrimination
Haunts Western
Democracy, Princeton
University Press, 2018
Robert Gooding-Williams, David Theo Goldberg,
Juliet Hooker, and Michael G. Hanchard
Michael Hanchard and Martin Delany
Robert Gooding-Williams
Columbia University
For Michael Hanchard, the spectre of race haunts western democracy. But
unlike the spectre of communism to which Karl Marx famously alludes, the
spectre of race is a ghost that has gone unacknowledged, at least by contem-
porary students of political science and of comparative politics in particular.
A principal point of Hanchard’s book is to persuade fellow comparativists to
recognize the apparition they have disavowed and to modify their inquiries
accordingly. To that end, he defends three theses:
1. That historically, from the Greek polis to the present day, the practice
of democracy, in most instances, “has combined inclusionary and
exclusionary regimes and value judgments regarding the prospect of
citizenship for differentiated populations” (14).
2. That properly to understand the situations of racialized and other pop-
ulations excluded from the prospect of citizenship, it is helpful to con-
sider those populations in comparative perspective.

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Political Theory 48(3)
3. That, therefore, political scientists should expand the “problem-
space” presently characteristic of the subfield of comparative politics.
I borrow the concept of a “problem-space”—the idea of an ensemble
of “questions that seem worth asking and the kinds of answers that
seem worth having”—from David Scott.1 Hanchard never invokes
Scott’s concept, but it is apt for my purposes, for it enables me to
restate Hanchard’s third thesis as the proposition that recognizing that
western democracy has typically been haunted by ethnonational and
racial hierarchies should lead comparativists to widen the horizon of
the questions and answers—the problem space—that orients their
inquiries.
An important part of Hanchard’s book—mainly chapters 1 and 2—is the
tale he tells of the history of the discipline of comparative politics, extending
from the writings of Edward Augustus Freeman and Woodrow Wilson
through the scholarship of Charles Merriam and Gabriel Almond, to the pres-
ent day. On Hanchard’s view, the upshot of this history is the “contemporary
iteration” of comparative politics, which is “the most neglectful of the lega-
cies of colonialism, racism, and imperialism within Western nation-states,
and their combined implications for how students of racial politics examine
racial and ethno-national regimes” (17). This neglect, he suggests, involves a
failure to recognize that “the racial and ethno-national regimes inherent not
only in colonialism, but in the politics of the metropole, were not anomalous
to political modernity, but one of political modernity’s constitutive institu-
tional components” (64).2
Hanchard ties his discussion of Freeman and, implicitly, his larger argu-
ment, to “the forms of comparative political analysis most often attributed to
. . . Aristotle and Socrates for the ancients, [and] Montesquieu and Rousseau
for the moderns” (35). Curiously, however, he neglects to connect his argu-
ment to thinkers belonging to what I have elsewhere described as the Afro-
modern tradition of political thought. Considering Hanchard’s book in the
perspective of that tradition expands and strengthens his argument, I argue,
for comparativists’ neglect of the issues Hanchard highlights is part of a
larger pattern within political science and political theory that similarly
neglects much of Afro-modern political thought. Put otherwise, the questions
and answers that comparative politics marginalizes in treating racial and eth-
nonational regimes as anomalies of political modernity centrally define the
problem space that has engaged and shaped the thought of any number of
academically marginalized Afro-modern political thinkers, if not the writings
of Montesquieu or Rousseau.

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Review Symposium
359
To illustrate this last point, I turn briefly to the writings of Martin Delany
(1812–1885), an Afro-modern political theorist who is frequently described
as “the father of black nationalism.”
“Conditions of Many Classes of Europe Considered” is the title of chapter
1 of Delany’s 1852 magnum opus, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and
Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852). In it, Delany
writes,
That there have been in all ages and in all countries, in every quarter of the
habitable globe, especially among those nations laying the greatest claim to
civilization and enlightenment, classes of people who have been deprived of
equal privileges, political, religious and social, cannot be denied, and that this
deprivation on the part of the ruling classes is cruel and unjust, is also equally
true . . .
In past ages there were many such classes, as the Israelites in Egypt, the
Gladiators in Rome, and similar classes in Greece; and in the present age, the
Gipsies in Italy and Greece, the Cossacs in Russia and Turkey, the Sclaves and
Croats in the Germanic States, and the Welsh and Irish among the British, to
say nothing of various other classes among other nations.
That there have in all ages, in almost every nation, existed a nation within a
nation—a people who although forming a part and parcel of the population, yet
were from force of circumstances, known by the peculiar position they
occupied, forming in fact, by the deprivation of political equality with others,
no part, and if any, but a restricted part of the body politic of such nations, is
also true (emphasis mine).
Chapter 2 of Delany’s magnum opus is entitled, “Comparative Condition of
the Colored People of the United States,” and in it, he writes,
The United States, untrue to her trust and unfaithful to her professed principles
of republican equality, has also pursued a policy of political degradation to a
large portion of her native born countrymen, and that class is the Colored
People. Denied an equality not only of political but of natural rights, in common
with the rest of our fellow citizens, there is no species of degradation to which
we are not subject.
Reduced to abject slavery is not enough, the very thought of which should
awaken every sensibility of our common nature; but those of their descendants
who are freemen even in the non-slaveholding States, occupy the very same
position politically, religiously, civilly and socially, (with but few exceptions,)
as the bondman occupies in the slave States.

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Political Theory 48(3)
In those States, the bondman is disfranchised, and for the most part so are we.
He is denied all civil, religious, and social privileges, except such as he gets by
mere sufferance, and so are we. They have no part nor lot in the government of
the country, neither have we.
What the unfortunate classes are in Europe, such are we in the United States,
which is folly to deny, insanity not to understand, blindness not to see, and
surely now full time that our eyes were opened to these startling truths, which
for ages have stared us full in the face (emphasis mine).
Here, I have taken a moment to quote Delany at length because I am struck
by the close affinity between his thinking and Hanchard’s. More exactly, and
to the point, I want to suggest that Delany, in 1852, already endorses each of
Hanchard’s first and second theses.
Anticipating the first thesis, he affirms that political modernity—for
Delany, those nations laying the greatest claim to civilization and enlighten-
ment (including, presumably, nominally democratic nations)—has always
included peoples (nations within larger nations) that have been deprived of
equal political standing with other peoples inhabiting those larger nations.
Anticipating the second thesis, he affirms that to understand properly the situ-
ation of a politically excluded people—at least in the case of the colored
people of the United States—it is helpful to consider their condition in com-
parative perspective.
By considering Hanchard in the perspective of Delany, and by suggesting
that Delany anticipates Hanchard, I mean to justify the claim that The Spectre
of Race can fruitfully be read as taking up and engaging a problem space that
has oriented Afro-modern political thought from Delany through W. E. B. Du
Bois and Ida Wells to C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Angela Davis, even
as it has been ignored by Hanchard’s comparative politics colleagues, past
and present. A question central to that problem space has been: what kind of
politics should blacks conduct to counter racist and ethnonational regimes
that, in practice, deny them citizenship, or, to borrow a word from Delany,
“degrade” their standing as citizens? Hanchard declines directly to answer
this question, though in his book’s postscript, “From Athens to Charlottesville,”
he suggests that the wish “to eclipse the need for politics” underlies both the
ethnonationalist’s desire to establish homogeneous political communities and
the liberal pundit’s desire to establish democracy through the...