This article develops an idea implicit in many of the writings of the late William Harrison Riker on the role in politics for “losers.” Out-of-power politicians, intent upon changing their fortunes and securing office, provide a rhythm to political life that often goes unappreciated (with media and scholarly attention primarily focused instead on those in power).

Afew years ago, I interviewed two retired men who had helped organize a huge class-action lawsuit against the Chinese government's efforts to demolish most of Beijing's old town. The men had been elected in a secret ballot by all 10,000 members of the lawsuit; they were the group's representatives in court and to the media. At the end of our talk, I asked one of the men why he was so confident that they would win the suit, which to me seemed doomed to failure.

Why do we have so many ethnic partisans in the world ready to die as suicide bombers? Does a rational calculus lie beneath the nationalist pride and passions? Can it be discovered if only we apply our understanding of rationality more creatively? This article seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the nationalism of resistance. It argues that a focus on dignity, self-respect, and recognition, rather than a straightforward notion of self-interest, is a better prism for understanding ethnic and nationalist behavior, although self-interest is not entirely absent as a motivation in ethnic conflict. In the process of developing this argument, a distinction once made by Max Weber—between instrumental rationality and value rationality—is recovered and refined further. No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers …. They are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them …. The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism is much concerned with death and immortality. If the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings ….—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983He received many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. He would especially like to acknowledge the criticisms and suggestions of Gabriel Almond, Benedict Anderson, Robert Bates, Morris Fiorina, Ira Katznelson, Pratap Mehta, Vibha Pingle, Ronald Rogowski, James Scott, Kenneth Shepsle, Jack Snyder, Sidney Verba, the late Myron Weiner, Elisabeth Wood, Crawford Young, and three anonymous reviewers of this journal. Needless to add, not all of them agreed, so the standard disclaimers apply.

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.

Few contemporary political scientists would disagree that race has been a pivotal force in American politics since this country's founding. The magnitude and scope of its impact on current political life is, however, a matter of intense debate. Political theorists have conspicuously not been at the forefront of these race-specific discussions. This is not because political theory has ignored race per se. On the contrary, contemporary political theorists increasingly include race in their descriptive and normative analyses of democratic politics. Debates about identity politics, multiculturalism, the redress of invidious discrimination, and feminist discourse on intersecting social identifications have moved from the margin to the center of political theory and typically involve at least some attention to racial difference. But these discussions have for the most part not examined racial meaning in a sustained, focused manner. While there are exceptions, political theory, as a discipline, has not given theoretical priority to American race.See, for example, Balfour 2001; Appiah and Gutmann 1996; Young 1990.

Political-science research on social capital has burgeoned in the past few years.I must thank Shayla C. Nunnally, doctoral student in political science at Duke University, for introducing me to much of the social-capital literature in political science through the chapters of her dissertation. Robert Putnam says that the concept has been invented at least six times during the twentieth century, and its definition has been reconceived. Much current research uses Putnam's definition of social capital—“features of social organizations, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions.”Putnam 2000, 19; Putnam 1993, 167. Yet political science does not have a corner on the market of research when it comes to studying the concept. Research on social capital has been done—and is being done— in economics, geography, history, demography, sociology, African studies, African American studies, Asian studies, education, ecology, and psychology.A quick search of JSTOR and PsychInfo on the concept— restricted to each discipline's journals—reveals the wealth of research on social capital in articles published since the early 1900s. The earliest appearance of a reference to the concept in a political science journal that I was able to identify was in a 1905 article in Political Science Quarterly, “The Field of Economic Dynamics” by John Bates Clark. Clark's definition of social capital, however, was within the context of labor and the accumulation of capital. In some instances, these disciplines have used the same definition for the term as political science has; in others, that has not been the case. Despite differences in definition, how might other disciplines' research inform our assessment of the effects of social capital? Conversely, what might political science offer to other disciplines to inform their analyses?

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.

Curiosities and inconsistencies in the format of U.S. election ballots go far beyond the infamous “butterfly” ballot. Ballot instructions, candidate and party listings, party symbols, and, in general, variations that result from a complex and highly decentralized election system provide ample opportunity for all but the most sophisticated voters to misunderstand, mismark, or spoil their ballots and for all voters to feel confused and frustrated. We call attention to the enormous disparity in ballot designs across the states and to individual state designs that are inconsistent and needlessly complex. We recommend changes that would promote clarity and uniformity and yet allow room for state variations in the most politically potent aspects of ballot design. We also suggest steps by which reforms might be accomplished.

Now many of them [economists] are writing about neighborhood get-togethers, PTAs, Bible study classes, and the like …. This is not necessarily a good thing.—Claude S. Fischer, “Bowling Alone: What's the Score?”The authors thank the participants in the Conference on Social Connectedness and Public Activism (Harvard University), where an earlier version of this article was delivered in May 2002; Jennifer Hochschild; and four anonymous reviewers for comments. They also thank NIH grant R01 AG19637. Additionally, Dora Costa thanks NIH grants AG12658 and AG10120.

War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. By Joshua S. Goldstein. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 523 pages. $40.00 cloth.

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.

On April 22, 1993, President Bill Clinton addressed a crowd of 10,000 people gathered for the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He reminded the audience that “this museum is not for the dead alone…. [I]t is perhaps most of all for those of us who were not there at all: to learn the lessons, to deepen our memories and our humanity, and to transmit these lessons from generation to generation.” One of the principal lessons of the Holocaust, he suggested, was that the United States and other countries should have done more to prevent it or to rescue more victims from the Nazi killing machine: Even as our fragmentary awareness of crimes grew into indisputable facts, far too little was done. Before the war even started, doors to liberty were shut. And even after the United States and the Allies attacked Germany, rail lines to the camps within miles of militarily significant targets were left undisturbed…. The evil represented in this museum is incontestable. But as we are its witness, so must we remain its adversary in the world in which we live, so we must stop the fabricators of history and the bullies as well. Left unchallenged, they would still prey upon the powerless; and we must not permit that to happen again.Bureau of Public Affairs 1993, 322.

“Social capital” is said to be strongly associated with better substantive outcomes as well as with civic and economic dimensions of equality in the United States. Robert Putnam argues in Bowling Alone that “the American states with the highest levels of social capital are precisely the states most characterized by economic and civic equality.” He adds: “[B]oth across space [i.e., states] and across time, equality and fraternity [social capital] are strongly positively correlated …. [T]he empirical evidence on recent trends is unambiguous …. Community and equality are mutually reinforcing, not mutually incompatible.”Putnam 2000, 358–63 (emphasis in original) and chapter 22 more generally; also see Rice and Sumberg 1997.He specializes in U.S. democracy and politics, especially as viewed through the analytical lenses of Latino and ethnic/minority politics, state/urban politics, and federalism. His book Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity in American Politics received the American Political Science Association's 1999 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award.

War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. By Joshua S. Goldstein. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 523 pages. $40.00 cloth.

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.

War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. By Joshua S. Goldstein. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 523 pages. $40.00 cloth.

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.

In the post–Cold War world, the last remaining superpower is almost hegemonic. Almost, but not quite. The United States cannot act entirely on its own. It needs—or thinks it needs, or pretends it needs—the support of at least a few other countries in almost anything it does. But it only needs a few, and many could serve equally well.An earlier version of this article was presented to the International Sociological Association World Congress, Brisbane, in August 2002. The author is grateful for comments, then and later, from Mattei Dogan, Christina Fong, Gerry Mackie, Claus Offe, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Dave Schmidtz, Duncan Snidal, and this journal's editors and referees