1869, Special ISA 2022 Episode with Peter Katzenstein and Roger Haydon

7:34PM Mar 25, 2022

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Peter Katzenstein

Roger Haydon

Keywords:

book

roger

political economy

editor

cornell

series

acquisitions editor

press

manuscripts

scholarship

editing

authors

walter

years

peter

published

field

journal

people

acquisitions

Welcome to this special ISA 2022 edition of 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. This episode we celebrate our renowned and pathbreaking series, Cornell Studies in Political Economy, which after nearly four decades will be coming to a close upon the publication of the forthcoming book, Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited edited by Luigi Burroni, Emmanuele Pavoni, and Marino Regini. Our guests today are the instrumental players behind the series, series editor Peter Katzenstein, and acquisitions editor Roger Haydon. Professor Peter Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jrl Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of the fields of international relations and comparative politics. Katzenstein's work addresses issues of political economy and security and culture and world politics. His current research interests focus on power, the politics of regions and civilizations, America's role in the world and German politics. Roger Haydon recently retired as executive editor of Cornell University Press, where he sponsored books in comparative politics, international relations, Asian and Slavic studies, security affairs, political economy, and humanitarian and human rights studies. He always looked for the unconventional and the unexpected, and sought out authors who were consumed by new ways of thinking. In this episode, Peter and Roger give us the behind the scenes history of the Cornell Studies and Political Economy series, their insights into how scholarship in the field has evolved, and their seasoned advice for emerging scholars today.

How did it all start? It started with Walter Lippincott, becoming the director of the press, the press had been a pretty sleepy outfit, I had no contact with it. But I knew that it was important for Cornell faculty, mostly in the humanities...not so much in the social sciences. Walter came, I don't know from where - full of beans, young, energetic and said, in order to wake up the press, we will do here what I've done at that other press, which is have a certain number of books published in different series, and what you'd like to do this, and I was, in year seven, I came in 1973. And I said, sure. And reflecting on why he asked me it was, I become full professor that year, which was young. I become editor of IO, at the same year, and therefore I will be on top of the field of manuscripts. And that was very smart, because one of the earliest volumes was in fact, the regime's volume, there was a second volume out, which became I think, the all time winner, I mean, in terms of sales. So it was a textbook for 20 years, right? So Walter, Walter, calculated smartly. And, and I was hungry. I mean, that was really how it started. I don't know why you picked me. The third reason is probably political economy as a field, what was in a takeoff stage. That's really something which happened from the early mid 70s on and a lot, there was a lot of interest in political economics, which had basically not existed. I mean, Hirshman, who were two or three people did political economy. But it was really rediscovered as a subject in the mid 1970s. I was part of that generation. So there was a reason why he said, this would be a good thing to do. Right. So Walter always had impeccable taste, I think, you know choosing me was a sign of impeccable taste. But he had a very good nose, very good nose as a publisher, right. And he was very practical. He said, Well, who would be on top of the field? Well, the guy who was the editor of the journal, the leading journal for this stuff. So. So that's how it all started? Why did I want to do it? So in Germany, when you're an assistant professor, your job is for the next five to seven years, to review all the books of your elders, and to be incredibly critical. This is counterintuitive, because you still need to get tenure. But that's how it is. You're supposed to be a Young Turk, who tears down the work of others, then you win, become a full professor. You hand that over to the next generation, they tear you down - I wrote one book review in the late 70s. Actually, two. One was a review essay and I said, that's something I can live with. But the book review I hate it. I hate the process of writing it and I hated it and was the only one which I wrote I think you know Because I said, why spend your time tearing things down? When, at the, at the back end, when at the front end, you could make it better. And so Walter's invitation to become an editor is satisfied that need. Okay. So okay, here I can work with books and make them better. That seemed to me a more, yeah, a more palatable way of improving scholarship. So I think that is how it started. But that had nothing to do with Roger.

No for me, let me jump in for a little bit, okay. For me, I had moved to Ithaca in 1978, and spent a couple of years with short term contract writing jobs and freelance editing jobs of various kinds. Peter in, I think, in 1979, had done a monograph on Switzerland, which was to be published in the Western Societies Papers, which was, it was actually a fairly substantial piece of work. And he wanted an editor to work through it before it saw the light of day. And I got that job and worked through it and found out lots of things about Switzerland I'd never known before, from a very low baseline, I should add mistakes. Well, there were a few of those, but it was the Swiss stuff that I was interested in. And I've since learned more because my sister is married to a Swiss national and lives near Fribourg. So I worked through that. And then I went back to writing scripts for Teach Yourself Better English books for the education department for a while. And then in 1980, Peter brought the journal, it was Bob Kohane, who was editing it previously. Right? Right, he brought he brought it to Cornell and needed a managing editor. And despite the fact that he'd already seen my dubious talents down on paper, decided to hire me as the managing editor for the journal. And I did that for five years. And during that time, I continued I could I did some freelance work for the press did more and more of it as the years went by. And then in 85, with one year's notice, Peter decided to hand on the journal to to Steve Krasner. And Stanford's a very nice place. But editing, as you may have noticed, doesn't pay particularly well. And we were already Margaret and I were already pretty much committed to living in Ithaca. So I applied for a job as a manuscript editor at the press. And you could see the twinkle in Walter's eye, because he thought, I here I have Katzenstein as the editor of the journal, and a rising star, a well known scholar already, and if I can take him, and then I can also offer the preview, the former managing editor of I O, as the person who will handle the manuscript through the press, I have a better package to sell as far as potential authors are concerned. So much to the dismay of the managing editor at the time, a marvelous woman named Marilyn Sayle, who didn't think very much of the quality of journal editing. He, I think, forced her to hire me as a as a manuscript editor. And I started to work not only on political economy manuscripts, but also on whatever else needed to be prepared for the typesetter. This was a time where manuscript evidence has actually edited manuscripts, which was a long time ago. And then, pretty soon after I had joined the press, which would have been in late 1985. Walter applied for and got the directorship of Princeton University Press, but he was going to stay at Cornell for I can't remember maybe three months, maybe more than that. And he decided at that point that he would stand back from the acquisitions part of his job, in part because Cornell and Princeton were competing over a couple of manuscripts at that time. And I was asked to take over the acquisitions part of the political economy series, at a time when there were actually two competitive works in play between Cornell and other presses. One was Jeanne Laux and Maureen Molot's book about the political economy of contemporary Canada, which was actually we were up against a Canadian and publisher, I can't remember which one it was. But Toronto, it was University of Toronto press. Okay. But I do remember that the Jeanne, later on showed me the comments that she'd received from the academic editor at the University of Toronto press, which stopped in mid sentence, which was the point at which he had heard that, that they had decided to sign with Cornell. And the other was Dick Samuels. Dick Samuels was at MIT, he'd already published one book on on contemporary Japan with Princeton. And the second book was called The Business of the Japanese State. It's a really attractive project. And I asked him what he wanted. And he told me, and I said, Yes. And I managed to get him to sign the contract with the press. It's the beginning of a long and very satisfying relationship that involved altogether five, or maybe six books over a period of 30 years. So there I was the first two books that I approached as an acquisitions editor, success on both of them both in in live competition, so I thought, this is dead easy. Walk up, why is there so much fuss about this job, piece of cake. And I soon find out found out why there was so much fuss about this stuff. I mean, it wasn't exactly confectionery. But it was a good beginning. And it was good enough that as the press restaffed, with, with water having departed and other people taking over the various series that he'd started, I continue to work with Peter as acquisitions editor on just on the political economy series for about five years. And then I left the manuscript editing part behind and became a full-time acquisitions editor.

it's interesting, there's a backstory, which I didn't know about the inside of the press. Here's the inside story, which big story which Roger doesn't know. Cornell had, at the time in which I was looking for an associate editor for I O. had just gone through modern human resource management revolution, which meant hiring union busting officials out of Detroit, they had made, you know, a bankrupt industry lean and mean, and canals. That's what we want. They couldn't really do this with existing contracts, but they sure could do it with new hires. Okay. And Roger, I couldn't get Roger on board. I said, No, he's going to come with a decent package. And that was an enormous amount of fighting. And it delayed the appointment for about half a year. But no, I'm a persistent dog. And I had the team behind me if I wanted to, but I didn't use it. Right. So eventually, that package came together. And then Roger, no, of course, there was a competitive editing, I interview two other people, no, but the work you've done on the series manuscript convinced me that is a really good editor. Plus, he's fun. Plus, he knows it's well organized. If you have an associate editor who's incompetent as an editor, you did. Okay. And so this was an enormously important appointment for me, I spent a lot of time making it work. And then I had clear sailing. I mean, Roger, just think about the annual report. This is a pain in the back. And Roger did all of it, you know, and all the careful editing other manuscripts. And of course, he built up a reputation. I mean, that time we got what, 150 manuscripts or 200- 250 a year. You know, he built up a reputation right there with about 500 authors by the time he stepped into the Cornell University Press job. And it was clear to me that, you know, that needed a little massaging. So I told Roger, you should leave early in 1985, so that you're not unemployed again, right? I mean, he wasn't a very marginal position when he came in the late 70s. It was very difficult. So that's interesting. Yeah.

Well, thank you, thank you for the effort. I didn't know

it was pure self interest. It was pure self interest, but it was the enlarged self. Right. I knew that my interest in your interest in this were really parallel and had to work while they were thereafter because you clearly invested so much time and effort that I would have really had to do badly in order to lose the job.

That's fascinating history. Thank you for sharing that and time in history is what you're mentioning with the series 148 books published 131 Different authors and editors 25 Plus Awards, the amount sold 373,000 books. How did you see the trajectory of the series go? I mean, how did the, how did the field change from the 80s? To the present?

How did the series change? Well one way is it moved like the scholarship, from Europe to Asia. We became a preeminent publisher of Japanese political economy as Japan was supposed to own the world, they would hire some American soldiers, but basically the software and the soft power all in Tokyo. That was sort of the image of the 1980s until the mid late 1990s. And then it branched out from there to other parts of Asia. And then of course, in the last 10-15 years. China, right. So there was in terms of a way from a Eurocentric worldview, to more of an Asian one, but we did not, I mean, Roger was very, very clear said there are certain kinds of reasons we will not do Latin America, for example, he says, that's really much better done by Pittsburgh, you know, and Africa. So we were concentrating our regional focus. And the other one was analytical, you know, this started off as a new field, which I would call broadly institutional state became a big issue and how to theorize the state, state and economy, you know, institutions to argument or Marxist argument, right. That was the first 20-25 years. Then came rational choice and rationalism. And I got off the train and I was much more interested in economics, sociology. So the things which we tended to favor in the last 20 years were more sociological in their orientation. Those were the two broad themes, basically, Roger, you think that's right?

Yeah, I think that's right. Of course, for every exclusion. There are exceptions. And so for Latin America, we did Kat Sikkink's, first book, for example. And on Africa that we didn't do very much within the series, we did do Mort Jerven's book Poor Numbers, which did very well and quite influential, and also got him on on a do not talk to lists for various various African bigwigs and people at the United Nations as well for a while. But, yeah, that sounds right, we probably did a little bit less on Europe. As the years went by, and the China stuff, at least at the beginning of the 2000s, we tended to leave alone, in part because there was this enormous rush of academic publishers trying to find stuff to publish about China. And so Routledge and Cambridge and two or three other presses had had books specifically devoted to China and Chinese politics. And it seems seem not a great idea to be focusing one's attention very strongly on China at a time when there was over publishing of that particular country, however important that country might be. We did start to do more work on China over the last decade, decade plus in particular Yuen Yuen Ang's book, which is a tremendous piece of work and was very successful. But But that I think, is something that actually that you brought in Peter, right, that you have the first contact with us.

Yeah, I mean, I think the first principle is the book had to be really good. Yeah, but it really fit or not was, was not so important. So we would publish outside of these mega trends, right. And I think the astonishing number of awards is a reflection of that overarching attitude, and Rodan I never disagreed on what's a good book? I mean, that's really astonishing. Over 35 to 40 years, you'd expect you know, there will be no one or two memorable fights. We never fought. Our intellectual tastes were very much aligned. Right?

Yeah.I don't remember any big fights. I was less keen on edited volumes. There was did a few too many of those, but, but they were ways of planting flags in new areas, both geographical and thematic. But yeah, it sounds banal, but my job always to find the best books that I could and then make them better. And that's something I think we agreed about even though I didn't know anything about politics. I had no sort of academic background in the discipline at all. Five years that I oh really did provide me with something of an education as far as that's concerned.

The issue of edited volumes as into This thing this really did become I mean, Roger and I think other presses to sit there too many of them. And as we work with a junior cohort in the 1980s, these people became senior. When you become senior, you don't write your own books and you know, you tend to enforce. So they would come back with edit the volumes. And we would gently say, well, not now. Okay, try somebody else. And that became often actually the true for the trade presses like Routledge. And Rena. So and that explains, in part, I think, well, the total number of volumes in the last 10 years published under the imprint of the series, declined somewhat. We were we went for things which were harder to find really outstanding books. And Yuen Yuen Ang's book on China is a field defining book. It's it's a dissertation. But it's cited every place. She's winning prizes, every place. Her follow on work is superb. It became clear defining it was probably the most successful book we've done in the last 10 years, you know, so?

Yeah, yeah, that's that sounds right.

With decades of wisdom that you have, with the series and the your work together, do you have any advice for emerging scholars?

Well, I do actually, and I won't hold back. I gave a big fancy lecture last year. And the thing, and it was the lecture was followed by a give and take, because my very good friend and the best man at my wedding, David Laitin got the same price the following year. So they bunch them together. And then we had a back and forth. And so there was the last question posed by the by the host of the skitter Foundation? And I said, Yes, I do. Because I've observed that young authors in the last 1015 years I interesting drawn to the craft model of scholarship, they collaborate with large numbers of authors 3456, not not just one. Everybody specializes on something, data analysis, you know, qualitative research, the programming, you know, the typesetting, whatever, right. And thereby they crank out six to 12 articles a year. It shifts the it shifts how you spend your time, and thereby the requirements for getting tenure have shifted towards publishing more. Now, has this person been productive? has only written two articles last year, that's not productive. Right? Nevermind, maybe there were two single-authored articles - it takes a year to write a good single authored article and get it published at least a year. It's an enormous amount of work, getting through these elite journals, right. But what it avoids this mass production system is fear. Everybody specializes in something small, and they are no longer afraid. And I don't think you produce good scholarship without being afraid that you feel like the whole damn thing could collapse on you. And I still live with it fear whenever I do a book, I'm right in the middle of it right now, is this going to work? I have no clue. And if you don't have that, I don't think you will really be creative. So you become an industrious tailor, there was a wonderful title of a book, Professor Russet: Industrial Tailor to a Naked Emperor. Here, the emperor is not naked, but he's not well dressed. But industriousness does not go for me with scholarship, a certain amount for this, you know, and there's a certain amount of blogging now and public discourse which used to exist. But if the core of your scholarship is not driven by saying, the idea which I have might not pan out, you're missing, you're missing an incredibly important aspect of generating knowledge. In the natural sciences, they are driven by that fear. It's very expensive to create the experiments, and they really don't know whether it's going to work to talk to physicists or biologists. They're full of that existential fear here and the social science becomes more like this humanities, you know, I can spin the story, and I get a publication out and the fear recedes. And I think that's a loss. And, of course, they don't want to write books. They don't want to read books, and they want to write books. Writing a book is a very brilliant to Nicodemus, it takes too much time. That's it, yeah. takes five to 10 years. You know, therefore, you write two or three at the same time, every four or five years, maybe you succeed and something comes up. That's no longer how they read, write and research. It's not the time perspective they have. So I think this scholarship, you know, I think books will eventually be left for dinosaurs to feed on. So I see in the social sciences, and economics now you, you co published three papers with your dissertation supervisor, and you get a PhD. Whenever you have to publish a single article by themselves, they never know what it's like to be afraid. And that's, that's a model in political science touring now, not the only model, but it is ongoing. And that worries me a great deal about for the next generation that they're missing something essential. By having an incentive matrix, which they cannot resist, I totally feel for them, which is misaligned with what scholarship ought to be in part about not wholly but in part. Anyway, that reaction, which I gave, I got probably 30 responses by email. I didn't understand your lecture whatever, the lecture was unimportant. There was really as Wow, that talked to me. These were all older, older authors, all people above 50. So I don't think it's just my reaction.

Nice. Yeah. What he said. That, that sounds right. It's certainly true that political science, I think has, has looked on economics ever more fully as a model to be followed over the last 30 years or so. And, and given the success of economics in studying subject matter, that seems to me to be undesirable in itself, even though they do come up with some very nice theories and some very attractive methods. There's that same existential fear, of course, for acquisitions as with the added free songs that that acquisitions editors actually don't have tenure. And so the the testing out is not a matter of a large number of people collaborating rather, it's one person who has sponsored this or that book, and look, here are the sales numbers, and what are we going to do about this. So although they are very different kinds of fears, they do articulate together in a fairly, fairly obvious way. And I was always very fortunate to that. That with Peter, and also with a couple of other series episodes with David Laitin, on the Wilder House series with Bob Art, and Bob Jervis, on the security affairs series, and much more recently, with Eric Helleiner and Jon Kirschner on the money series, I worked with individuals whose tastes I trusted. They knew what they were doing, even if I didn't know what they were doing. And if they told me that a particular work was really top right, then I would do whatever I could in order to get the damn thing published. Usually, with success, there'll be one or two failures, but I don't think there were many as far as the political economy series was concerned. I mean, with regard to actually getting the thing into production and getting an actual book out of it. I'm, I'm glad I'm retired, because I do very much recognize the pattern that Peter's describing, as far as, as far as more recent scholarship is concerned, in in quite a few different areas. And, and I suspect that that being an acquisitions editor really is no fun. It's certainly not as much fun as I had when I was first starting out. Of course, that may just be sort of Golden Age nostalgia. But nevertheless, it's um, it's a new sociology as far as academic production is concerned, and one that I don't find particularly attractive.

Although, and on the theme of fun, I mean, I think, you know, academia is a is a professional, where you can have fun. And Roger and I had fun. And that's why it lasted so long. And, you know, this this little, which, you know, administration drives me crazy. I can't do I mean, I'm a reasonable administrator, but it's not something I like to do. Right. This was fun. Playing with ideas, how could they be better, you know, and I didn't have to worry about the bottom line. That was Rogers problem, you know, so. So I enjoyed this. Totally. I enjoyed working with Roger getting to know him. We had fun. It was a wonderful experience. really enriching. Thank you, Roger.

It was for me as well. And I'm, I'm always grateful that you put up with me for so long, but thank you for that.

Thank you both for sharing your time, your stories, the history behind the series, your experiences, and also the insights and wisdom that you can share to future scholars. So I want to congratulate both of you on a very successful series, the Cornell Studies and Political Economy. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Jonathan.

Appreciate the invitation and thanks for hosting this.

That was Peter Katzenstein, Cornell professor and series editor of Cornell Studies in Political Economy, and Roger Haydon, former executive editor of Cornell University Press, and acquisitions editor for the series. You can find all of the books in the series at our website, Cornell press cornell.edu. And you can use the promo code 09EXP40. To save 40% off of all of them. Thank you for listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast