The allure of the word “science” in a discipline named “political science” persists. John Hibbing's article, “Ten Misconceptions Concerning Neurobiology and Politics,” can be read as the latest incarnation of long-standing efforts in the discipline to realize ontological ideals of universality and truth. As an intersectionality theorist who is not a scholar of neuropolitics, I am struck by the extent to which Hibbing's breathless defense of neuropolitics seems rooted as much in an aesthetic fascination with science and its methods of “scrutiny, criticism, and replication (p. 475)” as in the actual political understanding that neuropolitical scholarship can in fact deliver.

Is the scientific allure of neuropolitics a Siren, calling Hibbing and his fellow neuropolitics Argonauts to their destruction as they seek to “identify the cognitive and physiological signatures of political predispositions?” Perhaps not. Ironically, Hibbing's claim that neuropolitics research represents a paradigm shift (p. 475) suggested to me that this approach might occupy a similar disciplinary location as intersectionality theory, the study of the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of difference in politics and policy. I say ironic because reviewers have accused intersectionality theorists of what in some ways are the precise opposites of the misconceptions neuropolitics scholars find themselves facing. For example, while neuropolitics scholars face the charge that “political culture is too idiosyncratic to succumb to biology” (p. 480), intersectionality scholars grapple with whether pursuit of generalizable findings are normatively contradictory to the intersectional intellectual project.Footnote ² As Hibbing contends that neuropolitics has been unfairly reduced to genetics (p. 476), so too has intersectionality theory been incorrectly reduced to identity politics. I thus read Hibbing's article with a certain amount of empathy for neuropolitics' position in the discipline, and the clear struggle that some of its acolytes face in producing a pipeline of researchers to pursue new contributions in this area.

That said, I found Hibbing's advocacy for neuropolitics curious for its silences as much as its articulations. My comments are thus organized around two main themes, which may provide fruitful opportunities for neuropolitics scholars to reflect upon precisely what they think the discipline has to learn from their work, and as importantly, what are the limits of this work.

My first concern can be stated in a simple question: What does neuropolitics tell us about one of the central elements of our discipline—POWER? Even granting the individual unit of analysis in most neuropolitics work, I found the lack of mention of power in Hibbing's essay to be most curious. To wit, much work in political psychology has attended to the role of political efficacy—the personal perception of one's own power over basic elements of political life—as a fundamental building block of what becomes political participation, collective action, susceptibility to manipulation or abuses of power by others, and a wealth of other interesting questions long plumbed by political scientists around the world. Is neuropolitics simply unable to talk about power much beyond what Stanley Milgram and later Phillip Zimbardo taught us about susceptibility to authority and coercion? While Hibbing offers a brief discussion of the difference between liberals' and conservatives' comfort with a variety of conditions, I found the absence of any discussion of power alarming in two ways.

First, Hibbing repeatedly uses the term “movement” to describe the neuropolitics community of scholars, and compares neuropolitics to another “movement,” rational choice theory in order to assuage concerns that traditional political science could be replaced by neuropolitics (pp. 483–484). If we think about the definition of a movement, power is the central commodity at stake. Charles Tilly states this outright in his definition of a social movement: “A social movement is a sustained series of interactions between power holders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking formal representation, in the course of which those persons make publicly visible demands for changes in the distribution or exercise of power, and back those demands with public demonstrations of support”.Footnote ³

Thus the use of the word “movement,” and his memory of the early days of the rational choice theory “movement” makes Hibbing's reluctance to provide any discussion of power quite noticeable. Perhaps the reason why this omission stands out to me is because power is a central concern of intersectionality theory.Footnote ⁴ Intersectionality's focus on the dynamic, multi-level, and multi-categorical enactments of power are critical to understanding several key questions of political science, including failures of interest group representation,Footnote ⁵ the use of intersectional frames by social movements,Footnote ⁶ and how activists themselves think about their places in their communities and world.Footnote ⁷

In addition to the use of the term “movement,” Hibbing suggests that neuropolitics also represents a “paradigm shift,” a usage that is similarly absent any consideration of power. Thomas Kuhn's classic articulation of paradigm shifts suggested that such transitions involve hitting the reset button for what constitutes the universe of applicable and legitimate questions within a field of study,Footnote ⁸ actions which minimally require assertions of some power. Here too, intersectionality theory is a useful case in point. For beyond answering traditional questions of politics, intersectionality changes the first-order question, shifting how we conceptualize power to answer questions left unanswered by traditional approaches to the study of politics.Footnote ⁹ For example, an intersectional approach conceptualizes the political questions surrounding marriage equality far differently than traditional approaches that analyze the fight for equal marriage rights as a zero-sum game. It is for those reasons that several scholars consider intersectionality an approach to conducting research—in other words, as a paradigm. In the same way, rational choice theorists' representation of their subfield as a paradigm shift and, concomitantly, a shift in power, has been detailed by others,Footnote ¹⁰ and sparked an alternative movement in political science, the Perestroika movement, a loose collection of political scientists who took issue with much of the way the political science paradigm delimited epistemological and methodological boundaries, including but not limited to those in the rational choice theory “movement.” While neither has won this power struggle outright, both have been unabashed in their pursuit and exercise of power to win the soul of political science. Where does neuropolitics fit into these political science paradigm wars? And does it possess the same self-awareness of the role of power in social life inside and outside of the academy that has marked these other “movements?”

I wonder whether neuropolitics truly represents as much of a paradigm shift as its adherents claim. Having withstood numerous critiques for my own assertions that intersectionality is a paradigm, I make this critique as a fellow “paradigm warrior,” to use Tarrow's turn of phrase. Potentially new paradigms are often locked out of what constitutes “real political science” by exercises of boundary-drawing power—many mentioned by Hibbing—by graduate advisors, anonymous peer reviewers for publication as well as for tenure and promotion, and other forms of disciplinary authority too numerous to mention. If Hibbing believes that neuropolitical work constitutes a paradigm shift, it is curious that he devotes so much energy to attacking environmental determinism as a “far bigger threat to the social sciences than biological determinism” (p. 478) and so little energy explaining precisely how neuropolitics answers questions that can't be answered using the “normal” political science paradigm that most in our field pursue. Perhaps Hibbing has reason to be frustrated by the way many colleagues dismissively respond to neuropolitical research. But if the goal is to persuade skeptical colleagues, then I would suggest that a less defensive approach that seriously engages specific interlocutors on specific important questions of politics, would make more sense. Absent such argumentation, Hibbing's piece reads more like yet another rhapsody about the scientific benefits of new techniques than it does like a novel approach to understanding fundamental questions of politics.

Here perhaps Hibbing and his colleagues would do better to play their own music louder than that of the “science is beautiful” Siren which many in the field are accustomed to hearing, particularly when misconception #5 sets out to draw a normative distinction between “bedrock dilemmas” and “issues-of-the-day” (p. 480). By what implicit normative standard are we ranking bedrock dilemmas over issues of the day? Would those who are concerned with security following 9/11 or following drone strikes be dealing with a bedrock dilemma or an issue of the day? Certainly there is a wealth of concern with the nature of the scientific process itself, as Hibbing suggests (p. 478). While I agree that the slippery slope argument does not do much to convince us to exclude neuropolitics from our intellectual landscape, an engagement with post-positivist critiques might have been worthwhile in order to facilitate a judgment as to whether neuropolitics represents a paradigm shift indeed. In short, neuropolitical scholars will need to undertake more careful argument if they are to convince non-partisans that this approach illuminates bedrock dilemmas of politics in ways that are superior to more conventional sociological approaches to politics.

And this leads me to my second problem with Hibbing's piece, the very distinction between bedrock dilemmas and issues of the day. To be blunt, humans are not simply biological beings, but biological beings embedded in historico-political contexts. In other words, do we not think of “the foreigner” differently in the post-war United States than did denizens of ancient Greece partly because we have lived through the Holocaust and the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge? I mean this as a real, not a rhetorical question. If we know, as I believe we do, that neural pathways become stronger with repeated experience/practice, as the London taxi driver example (p. 476) suggests, then how do we account for the role that repeated experiential exposure to extremely salient discriminatory situations such as traffic stops, war crimes, or even employment discrimination might play in rendering us not simply biological beings, but beings embedded in distinctive political contexts such as contemporary Syria, India, or the United States? And if we are embedded in such distinctive historical contexts, is it not the role of political science to explain them? When scholars invoke biology to explain supposedly “bedrock” features of being human, do they not risk diverting attention from historically specific structures of power, thus reproducing these very structures?

Such questions are not idle, and may in fact point to a complementary relationship between neuropolitics and intersectionality theory as paradigms, where intersectionality theory provides a normative scaffolding for attention to power and justice that emerges from a serious engagement with how research findings of this ilk have been manipulated and used in the past to organize and unjustly distribute power on the basis of race/ethnicity, gender, class, caste, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, religion, and national status. How can neuropolitics assist us in explaining such outcomes without rendering such concerns invisible?

Intersectionality theory is useful in this domain precisely because it changes the first-order question and varies epistemologically from many other approaches to history, politics, and collective action. Standard political science approaches emphasize the additive logic of multiple categories, thus implying that it is solely the count of marginalized identity memberships that matters, reinforcing a zero-sum approach—that your gain must mean my concomitant loss—to conceptualize questions of social justice. Intersectionality theory, on the other hand, challenges a binary construction of “oppressed” and “oppressor,” because the more complicated story of persons, groups, and structures being embedded in differential locations is more accurately the case.Footnote ¹¹ Theorists who agree that it is a paradigm make this case routinely, particularly engaging with both the more epistemological questions of how historical context matters not simply as a matter of background noise (that is, something to be controlled for) but as a shaper of how people interact with their institutions and collectively that cannot be ignored. They further debate vigorously the normative obligations of doing such research.Footnote ¹²

For this reason I propose that the normative critique of neuropolitics goes deeper than Hibbing accounts for in this article. Referring to neuropolitics as a nascent movement reminds me that eugenics was a biology and politics movement, as was scientific racism more generally. Here I am less concerned with an ideological bias in one direction or another, as Hibbing's discussion of Misconceptions #6 and #7 considers, and more with the idea that neuropolitics, as Hibbing presents it here, is hyperindividualist; decontextualized; and strangely oblivious to a history of biology and politics movements featuring a litany of the most horrific policy ramifications. The concern, in other words, isn't that neuropolitics has no policy implications, but that it contributes to a world where biology and politics do have serious policy implications for those with less power than the policy makers.

What was Oppenheimer's ethical responsibility once his Manhattan Project team created the first atomic bomb? If we are to consider neuropolitics an emerging paradigm in political science, what responsibility do neuropolitics scholars have to pursue, like Oppenheimer in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a use of their findings that does not contribute to further destruction? Should Hibbing and his neuropolitics movement conclusively demonstrate a way to genetically select only straight fetuses (to take another of his examples to a logical extreme), what is their responsibility not simply as members of the neuropolitics movement, but as political scientists who study the workings of politics? How will we trust that the choices they make following the studies they produce (which I take as given will be conducted to the best of their ability) will follow in Oppenheimer's steps and not the Siren call of science's aesthetic beauty? This question of scientific ethics, as part and parcel of the pursuit of scientific truth, is a question that confronts all of us as scholars. I look forward to learning more about how scholars of neuropolitics answer it.