Rogers M. Smith: Stories We Tell Ourselves

Abstract: We tell stories, about ourselves and others, to ourselves and others. The stories help us answer such questions as who we are as a people and what we hold to be valuable. They do the political work of holding the country together, or tearing it apart, of building up political coalitions and inspiring them to action. Rogers M. Smith has long been interested in such stories. He has, perhaps, listened to them more carefully than most, and as a result has found new insights into what kind of people we Americans are and has laid bare how we have struggled over our ideals and aspirations. Smith works at the intersection of American politics, public law, and political theory. Across a range of both theoretical and substantive works, he has argued that ideas matter in politics. Empirical scholars of politics have long emphasized the primacy of material interests in driving political behavior. Ideas can be all too easily dismissed as interesting in the seminar room but epiphenomenal in the meeting hall. But, Smith argues, ideas are not merely philosophically interesting. They shape how we understand our interests and how we conceive of our identities. We misunderstand political development if we cannot account for how the realm of ideas shapes our social and political reality. Smith was a leading figure in linking the study of law, courts, and the Constitution in political science to the emerging field of American political development. Although that research often highlighted the study of historical politics, Smith was among those who emphasized that the point of studying politics and history was not merely to understand the past but to understand how the past helps form the present and how the dynamics of politics work over time. Enduring social structures, including ideological constructs and traditions, channel daily politics, and politics encompasses not only how individuals make choices within those institutional arrangements but also how they struggle to overcome or reinforce those inheritances. His particular substantive interests have become all too relevant to our current political moment. Smith has been fascinated by the construction of political identity, including perhaps the most fundamental legal identity of citizenship. The meaning and boundaries of American citizenship have been points of political contestation for as long as there has been a country. While liberal values have often been central to those debates, racial politics have been a persistent feature as well. Not just an unfortunate sideshow, arguments about race have been an integral element of the American political tradition. The recurrent dream of a postracial America has been repeatedly dashed by darker forces that insist that race is constitutive of America. We have not told one story about ourselves. We have told many, and those stories fit uneasily alongside one another. Smith was born in South Carolina but soon moved with his family to Springfield, Illinois. His traditionally Southern Democratic family had drifted into the pro-business Republican Party of Dwight Eisenhower. Hailing from a politically engaged clan, Smith developed an early interest in politics and spent his high school years climbing the ranks of the Illinois Teen-Age Republican Federation, but by the end of the 1960s he had soured on the political culture of Illinois and of the post-Barry Goldwater GOP. Politically rudderless, he was attracted by the emphasis on big questions in political philosophy at James Madison College at Michigan State University and enrolled there in 1971. At Michigan State, he was exposed to such dedicated instructors as Richard Zinman, Ken Waltzer, and Peter Lyman. He discovered a passion for political 2018–2019 APSA President