“I think good thoughts, whilst others write good words” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 85). Such is the life of a journal editor, as well as that of a love-sick poetical genius. I can at least hope that the good words written by others and published in this issue of Perspectives on Politics will last—if not quite as long as Shakespeare's sonnets, then well into the future.

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What should count as knowledge in political science? We have tried here to show that subjectivity is valid and useful, that firstperson accounts of experience—‘telling what I know,” narratives of and by the self, partial and contingent truths, and self-asother ethnography—contribute to knowledge. The move to subjective knowledge does not require the abandonment of objectivity. Self-consciousness and reflexivity simply make it possible to render the familiar unfamiliar, to gain a certain detachment, to achieve “objective subjectivity.” Subjective knowledge helps to explain identity and category formation and the politics of recognition. Accessibility to the politics of those taken to be outside the public sphere, those whose behavior is not easily observed or counted by objective political science—colonized persons, subalterns, and marginalized minorities—depends on their ability to articulate their identities, purposes, and interests. Such forms of identity politics have become of increasing interest to political scientists concerned with subaltern agency, multiculturalism, and ethnic conflict and peace.

This article questions the centrality of interest-based explanation in political science. Through an examination of the “turn to ideas” undertaken in the past decade by rationalist and nonrationalist scholars in both comparative politics and international relations, it seeks to make three points. First, interests are far from the unproblematic and ever-ready explanatory instruments we assume them to be. Second, the ideational turn of historical institutionalism and constructivist international relations theory marks a substantive theoretical shift in the field precisely because it problematizes notions of action that take interest as given. Third, such scholarship emerged from, and in reaction to, the inherent limits of rationalist treatments of interests and ideas. That it did so suggests that progress in the discipline may be more dialectic—rather than linear or paradigmatic—than we realize.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once argued, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” Today, politics, as conventionally understood, illustrates the unspoken danger in Moynihan's point. Politics itself reflects larger trends that point not toward success but toward social failure. Superficial sloganeering, domination by marketplace modes of thought, and bitter sectarian divisions—cultural patterns also evident in politics—made “being political” an accusation of choice in the 2002 elections. These patterns are creating a civic illness that seems both all-pervasive and ineluctable.

How can the American educational system be improved for all? What can and should be done about substandard inner-city schooling that leaves large numbers of poor and overwhelmingly minority children incapable of effective civic participation and ineligible for good jobs? These perennial issues of politics and public policy implicate fundamental principles of justice. Educational choices involve, among other things, choices about a future in which children's life chances will take shape either under the sway of inherited privilege or on the basis of equal citizenship and opportunity. In the midst of America's vast and growing inequalities of income and wealth, which continue to be associated with race, how can we clothe ourselves in comforting myths of equal opportunity if we fail to provide good schools for everyone?