Animated by an “American identity crisis,” Eldon Eisenach seeks to comprehend a “deep disjunction in political culture and values between elite national institutions and the aggregate of local cultures and values.” National elites, in particular, many in the “American university,” offer America-in-crisis “a highly abstract democratic Universalism” which “denies American nationality.” At the same time national representatives of “local cultures and values” attempt to “ground national identity and national policy in a `conservative Restoration' by bringing back to prominence and honor the value-sustaining institutions of civil society” (p. 99). Both “Universalists” and “Restorationists” fail in their respective tasks, and American identity, Eisenach argues, is threatened in the process. While “Universalism,” often couched in the “neutral” language of “juridical democracy,” is in some ways built upon the New Deal “liberal establishment,” it has, he insists, not been able to articulate policies that speak to this “older, ruling coalition” and so poses “above the battle” (pp. 102–3). Restorationists suffer from another malady. Though winning elections, they have proved incapable of establishing “national authority” and so equally incapable of reestablishing an American national identity.

This fine study purports to offer “a normative theory of nationalism.” Such a theory is needed, the author claims, because most of the literature on the ethics of secession proceeds on the mistaken assumption that the normative problem of state breakup is best addressed by applying established liberal arguments or values to the issue at hand. In fact, however, it makes little sense to derive a theory of secession in this way, rather than by considering directly the kinds of normative claims secessionists make. These are nationalist claims. We need, moreover, to recognize that well-known accounts of nationalism, such as those offered by Ernest Gellner, for whom nationalism is a political principle that holds that the political and national unit should be congruent, are inadequate—either because they include too much, or because, as in the case of Gellner (Nations and Nationalism, 1983), they associate it with a particular set of demands or principles. Nationalism, according to Margaret Moore, should be understood as “a normative argument that confers moral value on national membership, and on the past and future existence of the nation, and identifies the nation with a particular homeland or part of the globe” (p. 5). Once we have understood this, we will be in a better position to understand the key policies and demands of nationalists, including their occasional (and only occasional) demands for national self-determination, and to understand the normative limits of nationalism. And we will then be in a better position to understand the nature, and defensibility, of national self-determination, and of secession in particular.

This is a very smart book that comes to some very questionable conclusions. Glen Newey takes issue with contemporary liberal philosophy on two counts: Not only does it fail to address the “real world of politics,” but it actually aims at the suppression of politics. Included in the list of those guilty of suppressing politics and failing to provide “philosophical reflection on politics—at least not on politics as it is” (p. 15) are John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Brian Barry, Joseph Raz, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Will Kymlicka, Amy Gutmann, and others. Clearly, a great deal hangs on what Newey means by “politics as it is,” and I will say at the outset that I found his definition wholly unconvincing. But along the way, Newey says some very intelligent things about the leading lights of liberal political philosophy. The book has two layers. In the first, Newey takes up particular philosophical arguments embedded in various liberal theories. At this level he shows us his considerable analytic skills in carefully argued, if somewhat technical, investigations of philosophical weaknesses. So, for example, his discussion of moral internalism and its problems is very good, as is the discussion of neutralist side-constraint as an insufficient reason requirement. Anyone interested in really looking under the hood of contemporary liberal philosophy can get something out of this book. But when Newey moves to the second layer, he tries to tie all his various arguments together under one big claim: the rejection of politics claim, and this is problematic.

The postmodern challenge to the rationalist paradigm long regnant in American higher education has shaken the foundations of the secular academy, opening it up to a diversity of voices hitherto unheard. Under this new dispensation, Alan Wolfe observers, “Room can be made for any group, including conservative Christians” (“The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” Atlantic Monthly [October 2000]: 76). Various Christian scholars have indeed received at least a hearing—if not a welcome—in this more open atmosphere. The work of historians, such as Mark Noll and George Marsden, and philosophers, such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, has commanded national attention in secular academic circles; they have brought a distinctively Christian voice to their discipline.

The 2001 American Political Science Association meeting was alive with the Perestroika controversy. It has been more than a quarter-century since the profession last saw such ferment. If one compares the two episodes, there is strong similarity in the level of organizational activity; but when it comes to methodological issues, the differences are pronounced. The earlier period was characterized by a rich discussion; today there is comparatively little. And this relative silence has been the norm for a good number of years.

These two books by leading U.S. philosopher Martha Nussbaum take up the issue of women's inequality in a U.S. and international context. Both are hard-hitting, in Nussbaum's characteristic take-no-prisoners style, setting out a clear case that women endure ignominious oppression in the name of culture and religion, and that feminists and liberals alike should tolerate it no longer.

Until recently space was a highly suspect concept in political theory. The linguistic turn that has dominated the discipline for the past 20 years has multiple roots. Derrida's critique of pure presence, Foucault's discourse analysis, and Habermas's communicative action, in different ways, contributed to an emphasis on language over place. Recent work in geography and cultural studies, however, has begun to reserve this trend.

Political theorists interested in liberalism often fall into one of two quite different camps. There are those (call them the “analytic” school) who engage in arguments designed to justify or criticize various accounts of justice, legitimacy, and the like, and on the other hand, there are those (call them the “historical” school) who aim at providing a rich historical account of the processes through which such concepts developed in the modern age. Rawls and Dworkin as opposed to Pocock and Skinner, if you will. In my view, the most interesting and ultimately fruitful work in political theory is done by those who practice a mixture of the two approaches. Two prime examples would be Jeremy Waldron and Charles Taylor. Andrew Murphy's first book is a highly interesting and very promising exemplar of this mixed approach. I have no doubt but that “pure” historians will question the novelty of his account of arguments over toleration in the seventeenth century, or that “pure” analysts will question the relevance of that account to the more analytical positions with regard to the contemporary concerns he stakes out in the latter portion of the book. But I found it to be one of the great strengths of his book that he does try to look at contemporary issues with an eye toward the historical context out of which they emerged. I found my own understanding of contemporary normative arguments about toleration, religious freedom, and liberal public reason enriched and deepened by a reading of Murphy's clear and lively account of the seventeenth-century arguments.

The main themes of this book are prefigured in Gianfranco Poggi's two significant earlier works on the rise and character of the modern state: The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction, 1978, and The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects, 1990, (especially in the first chapter of the latter). In connection with his discussion of state formation, Poggi put forward the view that political power is one particular form of social power and is distinguished from other types of social power by its control of the means of violence. In the current work, Poggi undertakes the considerable task of explicating power in its various forms. He abstracts the concept of power from the historical context of his previous works and, with characteristic lucidity, details the various forms of social power and their interrelations.

What can Marx and Marxian theory teach us about environmental problems and their possible solutions? One view is: not much, except about how not to think about the natural world and human beings' place in it. Marx himself sometimes spoke in the hubristic nineteenth-century idiom of the coming human “mastery” or “conquest” or “pacification” of nature, and most self-described Marxists have assumed that human happiness and social harmony go hand in hand with the human domination of nature. This interpretation of Marxian theory, when put into practice, has produced ecologically disastrous results of the sort described in depressing detail in Judith Shapiro's (2000) Mao's War Against Nature. But there is another way to read Marx that leads to altogether different conclusions, as we see in the work of Alfred Schmidt (The Concept of Nature in Marx, 1971), Howard Parsons (Marx and Engels on Ecology, 1977), Reiner Grundmann (Marxism and Ecology, 1991), and now in Jonathan Hughes's Ecology and Historical Materialism.

The life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi continues to be a reproach to ideologies and dispositions that produced the horrors of the twentieth century. But his complex legacy suffers from a paradox. His ideas appear to be both necessary and improbable at the same time. To many, Gandhi's thought becomes even more relevant in a context in which the vision of modernity that he critiqued so powerfully has triumphed, the violence that he stood against has become an ineliminable feature of political life, and the practice of freedom has come to be dissociated from the exercise of virtue. But the very same historical momentum that inspires the authors in this volume to turn to Gandhi also seems to make Gandhi an even more distant and unlikely figure for our times. This volume, a product of sincere and careful scholarship, is largely an effort to keep Gandhi's thought alive. It focuses on the central category of Gandhian thought, swaraj (self-rule). Anthony Parel's essay usefully distinguishes between four meanings of freedom for Gandhi: freedom as national independence, freedom as freedom from poverty, political freedom for the individual, and freedom as the capacity for self-rule or spiritual freedom. This typology will provide a helpful initial orientation to readers unfamiliar with Gandhi's thought.

A generation ago, Sheldon Wolin evoked an image of the vocation of political theory as an alternative to the behavioral program of theory and scientific inquiry that had come to dominate political science. His call also summoned those who believed that, in the midst of the political turmoil of the 1960s, the mainstream of the discipline had become politically quiescent and, at least by its inaction, even implicated in the political crises of the time. Intellectual and ideological choices were, indeed, involved, but Wolin was implicitly also giving voice to a professional identity for a large segment of the academic subfield of political theory that had been evolving for at least three decades. His articulation of the vocation was, however, as mythical as the method of science to which much of political science had subscribed, and these hegemonic legitimating myths ultimately could neither withstand critical scrutiny nor suppress the latent differences within each.

Liberal multiculturalism contains a tension. It values culture as the source of individual identity and development, and seeks to accommodate cultural differences by granting the relevant groups special rights, exemptions, and, in some cases, varying degrees of autonomy. However, it also values basic individual rights that some of these groups might deny or severely curtail, especially in relation to women. Liberal multiculturalism is therefore faced with a conflict between what it takes to be two important goods, or what Ayelet Shachar calls the paradox of multicultural vulnerability. If it privileges cultural differences, it compromises and even jettisons its liberalism; if it privileges individual rights, it ceases to be multicultural. Is there a way of conceptualizing and organizing society such that both these goods can be realized? Shachar thinks there is, and devotes her thoughtful and well-argued book to outlining and defending it.

Religion and politics is a burgeoning subfield. Liberalism–communitarian literature now includes attention to religious communities. Theorists of civil society recognize that religious organizations implement a considerable range of policies. Since pluralism entails the presence of multiple voices in public conversation, theorists debate how a liberal society should treat religious voices. Theorists within religious traditions debate the bearing of faith on political action and the extent to which churches should cooperate with state institutions.

Widely known for the challenges he poses for the excesses of “me-first” individualism loosely associated with contemporary Western liberalism, Joseph Raz has grown accustomed to plumbing its depths for signs of humanity and goodness. His new book approaches the twin problem of pursuing universal values while acknowledging particularistic cultures, through a window opened in Engaging Reason (1999), where he unpacks the complexity of a “value-reason nexus” to conclude that valuable options are often pursued for incommensurate reasons. In what sense, he now asks, can this “nexus” be said to be universal? At the heart of this project lies an attempt to extend his earlier analysis of value in two related directions: toward human attachments, where Raz must show that particular engagements with value need not fly in the face of universality, and toward an abstract approach to universal respect, which nevertheless remains part and parcel of our contingent attachments.

The hope of ordering collective purposes through rational speech stretches back to the earliest historical attempts at theorizing political practice. Public reason has been a particularly prominent theme in political theory for the last decade and is central to discussions of deliberative democracy. Recent work on public reason is motivated by the belief that contemporary political procedures lack adequate norms and spaces for public engagement in intelligent, informative civic debate sensitive to deep differences in values. Fred Frohock's thought-provoking book covers much familiar ground, yet it also contributes a number of key ideas and a dose of realism to a research program now in a stage of self-criticism.

Michael J. Shapiro reflects on “the politics of the family” from the point of view of an outlook on political life inspired by “genealogy,” an approach originated by Friedrich Nietzsche and refined by Michel Foucault. Although Shapiro would not characterize it quite in these terms, that outlook is roughly as follows. Ideas about political regimes are typically governed by the values of unity, agreement, or consensus. But that is highly misleading. A consideration of how political concepts and institutions come into being (that is, a genealogy of the political, as opposed to a theorization of it) leads to a picture in which disagreement and conflict are as central as consensus and harmony. Words like “authority,” “democracy,” and “freedom” are continually redefined as people put them to different uses in changing contexts of conflict and interpretation. What they are thought to mean at any given moment will be an incomplete, contested, and on the whole incoherent echo of actual usage. Individuals, too, shape their outlooks by means of clashing and contradictory desires, norms, and perspectives. For this reason, the goals and beliefs that move any actually existing political regime (and any given individual) will typically be ill defined, ambiguous, and amenable to additional equivocation and conflict.

Mary Lyndon Shanley's Making Babies, Making Families bravely wades into the difficult ethical questions of accommodating new reproductive technologies and diverse family arrangements within the framework of existing and possible liberal legal principles. The book grapples with definitions of parenthood and parental rights in the contexts of adoption, unwed fatherhood, gamete transfer, surrogate motherhood, and multiple parenting within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Shanley mines these situations in order to derive some workable ethical and legal guidelines for the state's exercise of its regulatory capacities with respect to families. In doing so, she reveals the tensions and possibilities inherent in the state's role in defining families at a moment when many perceive traditional family structures as collapsing, for better or for worse.

Mahdi's book marks a watershed in scholarship on medieval political philosophy. For the specialist, chapter 5, on the Book of Religion, alone would be worth the price of the book as a whole. The same could be said for the most synoptic chapter, chapter 7. For the more general reader and, especially, the teacher of political philosophy, the introductory section of the book will prove to be an indispensable resource. Introductions to medieval Islamic philosophy have appeared in great profusion in recent years. Part One of this book constitutes the best introduction to medieval Islamic political philosophy and may do the same for Islamic philosophy as a whole. Until now, no one has explained sufficiently why the first truly great efflorescence of philosophy within the Islamic world should be so deeply political. The peculiar character of this founding of medieval Islamic (political) philosophy has much to do with the relative inattention to Alfarabi in Western scholarship, despite his towering role in medieval Islamic and Jewish thought. With this book, we have reason to hope that Alfarabi will begin to garner the attention he deserves.

This book is part of a much larger collaborative project devoted to “Otherness, Identity, and Politics.” It explores an aspect of identity theory, about which the author makes two uncontentious claims: first, that identity is socially and politically constituted and, second, that identity politics predate 1989. By delimiting a theme in Western political thought and history that constructs the “I” and the “thou” in terms of good and evil, the book identifies and delimits a tendency to portray the Other as an enemy, evil incarnate, and dehumanized by a combination of religious and political ideas. The tradition of understanding the Self and the Other as the vehicles of good and evil is reproduced in thought, speech, and action and constitutes a continuous tradition from ancient Iranian Zoroastrianism, through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.