Based on original research in the SSRC’s archives, Rafael Khachaturian chronicles the rise and influence on its Committee on States and Social Structures (CSSH), including its most prominent publication, Bringing the State Back In. Both a sequel and a rejoinder to the work of the prior Committee on Comparative Politics, CSSH brought together Marxist and Weberian perspectives to examine the state’s relation to, and autonomy from, class structures. Khachaturian concludes by arguing that CSSH’s incorporation of critical New Left perspectives into professional social science had the effect of occluding the more overtly political dimensions of those critiques.
Rafael Khachaturian
Rafael Khachaturian is a lecturer in political science in the University of Pennsylvania’s Critical Writing Program. His research focusing on the relationship between state power, theories of democracy, and practices of knowledge production has been published in journals such as Political Research Quarterly, Contemporary Political Theory, and Polity. His dissertation, “Discipline, Knowledge, and Critique: Marxist Theory and the Revival of the State in American Political Science, 1968-1989,” received the 2018 Stephen E. Bronner Award from the New Political Science section of the American Political Science Association. He is currently writing a book on knowledge creation about the state in postwar US political science.