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This paper examines the emergence of sociopolitics in the United States during the 1980s. The Reagan Administration's drastic budget cuts for social research prompted social scientists to engage in interest-group politics. The newest development in sociopolitics is setting priorities for research. This paper examines the intellectual and political risks of setting priorities. I conclude that sociologists must begin to discuss the objectives and strategies of funding social research, and seek ways of reducing our dependency upon federal funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs the modified Wald (MWALD) causality test to re-examine the relationship between crime and its determinants (inflation and unemployment) in the United States from 1960 to 2005. Bounds test approach is employed to investigate the existence of a long-run relationship. The empirical evidence suggests that inflation and crime rates are cointegrated with a positive relationship. Moreover, the causal link is from inflation and unemployment to crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a report on the United States Census in Schools program and its relation to biopolitics. The paper discusses the significance of the program, which aims to distribute various educational materials designed to teach students basic concepts and practice demography. It also intends to teach students that the systematic collection of census data confers the ability to influence these relationships and guide the development of the nation. Another objective of the program is to train students to appreciate their membership within the concept and to interpret themselves as participants of the nation-state.

The article comments on the enduring pluralism in the American society. Despite its mistakes, the American experimentation in pluralism has been largely a success compared to the ethnic and racial conflicts in India, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Iraq, Ceylon, and Burma. Notwithstanding its large land mass and population, the U.S. was marked by only one civil war. The durability of the social fabric may be attributed to the spirit of tolerance and liberalism which has characterized the American society.

The author discusses two ways in which political participation and civic involvement can be fostered. The first approach deals with the ways in which local communities can foster political activity, and the history of problems inherent in such an approach. The author feels that fostering political action at the local level is a more modern approach to political science. The second approach deals with ideas to foster a sense nationalism. A discussion of the history of political participation in the United States is also presented.

Nationhood has always been characterized by ambivalence in terms of the content and contours of who belongs and how. As countries throughout the world confront the vagaries of globalization, political leaders and the public are struggling to negotiate a sense of belonging that reconciles the reality of global interconnectedness with the rhetoric of national particularism. For the US, this challenge is intensified by the need to reconcile a long-standing rhetoric of civic nationhood with the persistent (albeit malleable) reality of ethno-cultural exclusion. Resulting contradictions are particularly evident in the post-9/11 policies and rhetoric of political leaders and ethnic groups. This article uses these discourses to analyze contemporary nation-shaping politics in the US. Ambivalence is pervasive on the part of government officials and marginalized ethnic groups, but in a manner that ultimately confirms rather than rejects or transcends the hegemony of nationhood as a form of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the Review of Social Economy symposium on the basic income guarantee (BIG). It argues that there are several ways in which the BIG is consistent with social economics. First, the BIG is an attempt to meet the minimum material needs of US citizens and contribute to the common good. Second, important arguments for a BIG move beyond the positive-normative dichotomy. Finally, the BIG would help individuals function as social citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay interrogates the black-white racial binary used to construct the concepts of freedom and citizenship within the U.S. It analyzes the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court use of language with a critical eye for text. Incorporating the close-reading skills developed to a great extent in English departments, cases about black and white, slave and free can be linked to the growing anti-Asian sentiment in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Never far from the justices' minds is the continuing inter-relationship between racial categories, labor, and the Constitutional rights of the Reconstruction amendments. Indentured servitude as a labor form in-between chattel slavery and free labor is discussed. The persistence of the legal classification of race and labor in the post-Civil-War afterlife of free labor ideology and its implications in the famous separate-but-equal ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson is examined. Also discussed are the unexpected and complex uses, by both the majority and dissenting opinions in the landmark Plessy ruling, of the figure of the Asiatic indentured laborer. The ways in which citizenship, as legal form and cultural concept, relies on a demand for assimilation, whose logic codes race as culture is highlighted.