Charles Taylor Book Award Winner 2016: Daniel Kato, for Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State

Winner: Daniel Kato (Queen Mary University of London), for Liberalizing Lynching. Building a New Racialized State (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Daniel Kato's Liberalizing Lynching demonstrates the power of interpretative research. Kato’s study sets out to resolve a mystery. How could the practice of public lynching co-exist with liberal democracy in the U.S.? In investigating the role of the federal government, Kato not only offers a powerful understanding of this conundrum as well as the disappearance of lynching, but offers an empirically substantiated interpretation of American liberalism. This study exemplifies how interpretative methodology can shed light on major puzzles in the study of government. Kato shows that inaction on lynching did not undermine the sovereignty of the federal government. Rather, the federal government chose an active policy of weakness and the judiciary accommodated this nonintervention, creating a situation he terms “constitutional anarchy.” Kato musters an impressive arsenal of historical documents ranging from court cases to administrative files from the Civil War to the 1960s to substantiate this argument. What makes this book outstanding is how this story is unfolded and the argument developed. In resisting the standard narrative of presentation that exemplifies theory and then substantiates claims by presenting empirical material in a chronological manner, Kato instead takes us on an abductive journey characterized by an active dialogue between historical material and the development of his theoretical model of American liberalism. In short, this book will become a reference point, not only in the discussion of American politics, but as a convincing example for the abductive presentation of research.

Selection Committee:

Christian Bueger, co-chair (Cardiff University)

Robin L. Turner, co-chair (Butler University)

James Scott (Yale University)