Braided together in Michael Hanchard’s The Spectre of Race are two arguments about the central place of race and racial ideology in democratic thought and practice. The first turns to the origins of the discipline of comparative politics to reveal that, despite its marginalization in contemporary iterations of the field, early comparativists at the turn of century were preoccupied with the relationship between race and political institutions. Second, Hanchard calls for recuperating race as a category of analysis in comparative politics and pursues a number of conceptually fruitful directions by which an examination of racial hierarchy can be taken up in the field. If comparison in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries buttressed the view that “homogeneity of race and community of thought and purpose” were necessary conditions for democratic institutions (Woodrow Wilson, qtd. p. 33), Hanchard argues for an agenda that considers the co-constitution of equality and racial hierarchy within democratic states (p. 71). The specter of race thus takes a double meaning in Hanchard’s account: it is a story of how the racist origins of comparative politics continue to haunt the discipline just as racial hierarchy casts a long and seemingly inescapable shadow on democratic politics.

In the first two substantive chapters, Hanchard tackles the history of the discipline beginning with Edward Augustus Freeman, who is rarely identified as a founding figure but was recognized in his own time as a pioneer in the comparative study of politics. For Freeman, comparative politics named an effort to “point out and bring together the many analogies that are to be seen between the political institutions of times and countries most remote from one another” (qtd. p. 23). Comparison allowed students of politics to emerge from “epochal and spatial boundaries” (p. 23) and instead identify universal processes (p. 21). In his search for universal tenets of modern politics, however, Freeman naturalized the nation (on his view a territorial and linguistic unit) as the object of comparison and constructed an account of a transnational “Euro-Aryan” civilization that stands at the pinnacle of political institutions. Striking in Hanchard’s reconstruction of Freeman’s comparative method are the ways that Freeman, writing at the height of European empire (his lectures on comparative politics were delivered in 1873, a decade before the 1884 Berlin Conference), both erases empire as the dominant political form of his time and simultaneously furnishes ideological justification for European imperialism. As Hanchard shows, the idea that the democratic nation-state was the normative form of modern politics and that Euro-Aryan peoples were uniquely suited to realize this form would be embraced within the emerging discipline of political science.

These disavowed origins of comparative politics, Hanchard argues, haunt the formal consolidation of the field in the mid-twentieth century. In the age of decolonization, Freeman’s identification of the nation as the unit of study was only reinforced. At the same time, new paradigms such as area studies (pp. 45–50) and concepts like “developing nations” (p. 55) and “political culture” (p. 58) displaced the race concept and offered alternative ways to describe difference in relation to political institutions. Although Freeman’s explicit racialism is nowhere to be found, Hanchard argues that concepts like culture “could serve as a form of imprisonment much in the way that the race concept did, relegating entire populations to a set of behaviors and institutional practices that would consign them to eternal mediocrity—or worse” (p. 58). For Hanchard, the spectral presence of race can be located in the presumed modularity of Western politics, which renders institutional difference as deviation (p. 8; Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, 2011, pp. 8–11). The imperial entanglements that conjoin the modular West and the deviating rest are obscured in the construction of the nation-state as a sealed unit of analysis. Thus, in seeking to understand the “source[s] of political instability” in the then-emerging postcolonial world, comparativists attended to concepts like “ethnicity, authoritarianism, corruption, and kinship” while ignoring the legacies of imperialism and the consequences of persistent international hierarchy (p. 58).

That the spectral presence–absence of race in comparative politics coincides with a disavowal of empire informs Hanchard’s staging of how the field might center the study of racial hierarchy. In a chapter focused on Britain, France, and the United States, he brings into view the imperial histories of these liberal democracies to illustrate that racial hierarchies are articulated transnationally. Eschewing a simple dyadic account of empire, Hanchard highlights how, for instance, “the racial hierarchy integral to British imperialism … influenced subsequent relations between the British government and the newly independent nation-states of the Commonwealth” (p. 129). This is, importantly, a provincializing move (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2000). It locates Euro-American and postcolonial states in the same analytical frame such that we might think of Britain and Kenya as both sites where the “co-constitution of equality and hierarchy” (p. 71) is enacted and can be theorized through a shared conceptual apparatus.

Hanchard’s apparatus can be found in his account of “racial regimes,” which he describes as “a combination of formal and informal institutions which identify, rationalize, and maintain distinctions among populations” (p. 118). The language of regimes is not incidental to his broader intervention in the field of comparative politics. It is uniquely situated to trouble the hard boundaries between democracy and authoritarianism understood as distinct and separate regime types. In dwelling on the illiberal and undemocratic institutions that recur in democratic societies, Hanchard aims to “highlight the principle of polyarchy, namely the existence of multiple forms of governance and political rule within democratic polities and societies” (p. 165).

Attending to the ways that racial regimes are embedded within democratic politics requires, according to Hanchard, a view of race as a modality of political inequality, which “is not simply an epiphenomenal feature of social and economic inequality” (p. 6). Hanchard’s efforts to disaggregate political identity from political economy and culture mirror Mahmood Mamdani’s interventions in the study of African politics, which he applauds in the conclusion (p. 200; Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, 2002). For both Hanchard and Mamdani, to resist the determinism of the economy and culture is to make visible the processes of politicization that give race meaning. It is also to allow for an imagining of alternative political configurations that might transform this meaning. In thinking with Hanchard and Mamdani, three questions emerge.

First, how might we conceptualize the relationship between race as a political identity and the economy without reducing the former to the latter? In the story Hanchard tells, part of the way that political inequality appears in democratic contexts from ancient Athens to the Americas is through institutions of slavery. In these contexts, the democratic question of “who would rule” was posed in relation to and against that of “who would labor” (p. 80). As a result, during the nineteenth-century age of emancipation, the demands to expand the category of citizenship were also demands for economic redistribution. This is not to reduce racial hierarchy solely to a question of economic inequality but instead to ask how we think the two together.

Second, what is the relationship between race and other forms of identity, especially ethnicity? I highlight ethnicity specifically because the field of comparative politics has largely sidelined the concept of race while taking up ethnicity as a politically salient modality of difference. For Hanchard, ethnicity appears at times as one of the ways race lives on in comparative politics under a different sign. At other moments, Hanchard lists ethnicity and race along with other forms of political difference that are mobilized to engender democratic exclusion. But it might be worth thinking of these two categories as related but distinct forms of political identity. For Mamdani, race and ethnicity emerge out of the bifurcated colonial state where the native/non-native distinction underwrites a racially organized civil society, whereas the disaggregation of the category of native in the institution of indirect rule generates ethnic identities (Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, 1996; Mamdani 2002). Though the specific institutional conditions that gave rise to these two modes of political identity in colonial Africa might not be generalizable to the Euro-American contexts at the center of The Spectre of Race, we might follow Mamdani’s lead to ask what distinguishes race from other politically salient forms of identity.

Third and finally, we can further develop this question by considering the ways race is embedded in distinctively modern forms of democratic politics. As I have intimated earlier, Hanchard offers a long historical arc of the entanglements between political hierarchy and democracy. Following the lead of Jill Frank (“Citizens, Slaves, and Foreigners: Aristotle on Human Nature,” American Political Science Review 98 (1), 2004), Demetra Kasimis (The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy, 2018), and others who have explored the ways in which ancient Greek thought stages a series of democratic dilemmas around the exclusion of slaves and migrants, Hanchard highlights the enduring ways in which the ethnos and ethos of democracy have been intertwined. For Hanchard, “the race concept became the modern equivalent of the Athenian myth of autochthony in many Western and Western-influenced nation states” (p. 6). At the same time, he resists “a transhistorical (ahistorical) definition of racial difference” (p. 66) and traces the origins of the race concept to the seventeenth century. In addition to specifying the modernity of the race concept, how might we think about the distinctive ways political inequality is organized under modern democracy? What difference does the transformation of democracy—from a practice of direct popular rule to a principle of political legitimacy where the people have a limited role of authorization by election—make to our understanding of the relationship between the ethos and ethnos of democracy? How do institutions like elections with a universal franchise, political parties, and majoritarianism generate new forms of mobilization and politicization that transform the relationship between difference and democracy? In posing these questions, I do not mean to limit race to an instrumental or functional role in electoral politics. Rather, I am interested more broadly in how attending to the specifically modern modes of democratic politics opens new avenues for posing the relationship between democracy and racial hierarchy.

That these questions push in different directions—attempting to think through the relationship between political identity and political economy, trying to clarify the distinctiveness of race as a political identity, and considering the specific ways modern democracies activate and mobilize race—is only a testament to the generativity of Hanchard’s book. Here, as in his earlier work, he not only pushes against the boundaries of comparative politics but also imaginatively draws on the subfields of political theory and race, ethnicity, and politics, as well as on the disciplines of anthropology and sociology. The result is an ambitious, expansive book. By exposing the deep entanglements between democracy and racial hierarchy, it recasts the contemporary dilemma of democratic politics anew.