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With the renaissance of political realism has come an insistence that the study of politics be historically located. While many political realists trace their conception of historical inquiry to Thucydides, this article shows how Herodotus can offer a more realist approach to political phenomena. Herodotus crafts a self-conscious form of historical inquiry that foregrounds the actual activity of the historian as intersubjective, reflective, and particular. Herodotus thus models a historical investigation that shows its own limits while demanding the evaluation of its readers, offering a way to address criticisms of political realism’s singular and unacknowledged historical narratives. Moreover, Herodotus’s Histories exemplify a disposition toward open inquiry among others—what Herodotus calls wonder—that can invigorate responsive curiosity as part of the project of historical understanding essential to both political realism and contemporary democracies.

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Urgent alarms now warn of the erosion of democratic norms and the decline of democratic institutions. These antidemocratic trends have prompted some democratic theorists to reject the seeming inevitability of democratic forms of government and instead to consider democracy as a fugitive phenomenon. Fugitive democracy, as we argue below, is a theory composed of two parts. First, it includes a robust, normative ideal of democracy and, second, a clear-eyed vision of the historical defeats and generic difficulties attendant to that ideal. This article considers how democratic theorists might respond to the challenges posed by fugitive democracy and the implications of such an understanding for future research in democratic theory.

Theories of citizenship have relied both explicitly and implicitly on the concept of “standing.” This article challenges “standing” as a metaphor of citizenship by contrasting it with that of “injury.” Examining Claudia Rankine’s Citizen elucidates a poetics of citizenship that both calls attention to what prevents many black citizens in the United States from standing and provides a basis for alternative practices of citizenship. Refusing a politics of ressentiment often tied to identification of social injury, Citizen prefigures a transformed citizenship of tarrying, listening, and transformative interruption of the racialized status quo.