This is the first issue of Perspectives to contain material nearly all of which began the review process under my editorship. It also is the first issue under my editorship to contain contributions to the somewhat ill-defined section called “Perspectives.” To the best of my knowledge this also is the first time a symposium has run in this section. As our Submission Guidelines state, essays that fit this genre are not meant to be full-fledged academic research papers but rather “short, sharp commentaries on a political phenomenon or policy problem; dialogues or debates to highlight methodological or substantive disagreements; or insights into or evaluation of other works of interest to political scientists.”

Today, more than 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and well over 20 million more have died since the first case was diagnosed in 1981. When we include families and loved ones in the raw demographics, HIV/AIDS has touched a population at least equal to that of the United States. This collection of essays examines the complexity of the mobilization against HIV/AIDS, from the perspective of social action on one hand and the state on the other.

On June 5, 1981, an obscure public health bulletin published by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta first reported that five young men—“all active homosexuals”—had contracted a very rare pneumonia, the cause of which was entirely unknown. The report went on to note that two of the five men had died and that the other three were very ill. These were the first five reported cases in the United States of a deadly disease soon to be known around the world as acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The public health and scientific communities have since learned that cases of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) were also emerging simultaneously in Africa, Europe, and other parts of North America, but the 1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the first scientific documentation of HIV, marked the beginning of a global public health crisis. And it did so in ways that would shape the form and content of political discourse and dissent for decades to come.Andrea Densham, Principle of Densham Consulting in Chicago, is a health policy advocate and former health policymaker ([email protected]). She has written on social movements and health policy as they relate to LGBT health, HIV, and breast cancer.

After 25 years, there is a broad though sometimes superficial awareness of state responses to HIV/AIDS in the global South, where the spread of disease is said to be fueled by inept or failed states, those so poor or whose officials are so indifferent that they lack public health services or even a minimal health care infrastructure. But this narrative ignores the failed responses among states struck in the first wave of the pandemic in the early 1980s. In the long run, generally between 1986 and 1990, the industrialized democracies where a new illness was first identified did implement comprehensive disease prevention, blood safety, and treatment and care regimes specifically targeting AIDS; in the short run, these same countries struggled over—and more often then not failed to implement—appropriate measures to stem the spread of the epidemic. And in the long run, tens of thousands contracted HIV and died.Michael J. Bosia, Assistant Professor at Saint Michael's College in Vermont, has been an activist and policymaker ([email protected]). He thanks the Fulbright fellowship program, a Blaine J. Yarrington Fellowship from Northwestern University, and Saint Michael's College for financial support.

On a beautiful tropical day, two women living thousands of miles apart enter public clinics. One walks past the neatly parked cars in the parking lot, to the front door of the newly built, well-equipped Ladymeade Reference Unit, which stands across from the largest public medical facility on the island of Barbados. Everything about this experience is neat and well-ordered, from the facilities the woman is entering, to the pill boxes bearing brand-name labels that she receives at the in-house pharmacy, to the referral system that sent her here after she delivered a baby across the street. The second woman's experience appears a bit less ordered. The clinic she enters, which sits on the outskirts of one of Brazil's slum-ridden cities, is shabby, with peeling paint and a utilitarian concrete structure. Inside, there are no shiny, manufacturer-sponsored posters to match the pills being dispensed, because these pills do not bear familiar brand-name labels. Though the pictures may appear quite different, they bear a crucial similarity—both women are living with HIV, and both are fortunate to live in countries that have committed themselves to providing universal treatment access for their HIV-positive citizens.Patricia Siplon is Associate Professor of Political Science at Saint Michael's College in Vermont ([email protected]). Jamila Headley is a student activist and member of the Student Global AIDS Campaign. She received her BA in political science from Saint Michael's College in 2006 ([email protected]). Both authors would like to thank the Provost's Office at Saint Michael's College for funding and support of this research.

Human rights as a collective action frame has been an important aspect of social movement mobilization around AIDS since the beginning of the pandemic 25 years ago. As an epidemic strongly associated with homosexuality and other socially marginalized behaviors, the AIDS movement in the developed world fueled and built on traditions of gay identity politics and gay rights. When the AIDS epidemic was recognized in 1981, the gay movement had already reconstituted itself as a legitimate interest group pursuing civil rights and civil liberties. Building on the preexisting organizational foundations as well as cultural capital of the gay movement as well as others, the AIDS movement was not only able to push for the protection of the civil rights of people living with AIDS, but through its engagement with the medical profession and the political establishment over access to drugs, was able to insist on a correlation between health and human rights.Krista Johnson is Assistant Professor at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta ([email protected]). Her research on HIV/AIDS in South Africa was funded in part by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation.

AIDS first manifested itself in the early 1980s as an apparent “gay disease.” Cases soon appeared outside the industrialized west and among other communities. Given HIV's modes of transmission, sex workers, drug injectors, and those who engaged in unprotected nonmonogamous sex were at higher risk, and the political economy of the virus was such that communities on domestic as well as international margins had the highest prevalence. Governments were slow to respond seriously. In their place, segments of the gay and lesbian community united by the late 1980s to educate, protect, and care for themselves, even in countries in which cases of homosexual transmission comprise a relatively small proportion of infections. At times, governments' abdication of responsibility left those nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) less closely-scrutinized than others—most notable where associational life is generally subject to illiberal controls—leaving them relatively free to advance explicit or implicit community-building among their marginalized constituencies. Though governments and media gained interest as heterosexual transmission rates rose, both still neglected the highest-risk groups. Importantly, the perspectives, perceived constituencies, and approaches of HIV/AIDS-related NGOs may diverge sharply from those of public health authorities, with unambiguous consequences in terms of the relative empowerment, receptivity to messages, and, ultimately, behaviors of target communities.Meredith L. Weiss is a Research Fellow at East-West Center Washington ([email protected]). Preliminary research for this project was supported by a DePaul University faculty research grant.

Enlargement of the European Union (EU) is infusing renewed religious vitality into European political and social life through the influential role that religion plays in many of the states that have recently joined or are seeking to join the EU as full-fledged members. This vitality is, in turn, fortifying the role of religion in European politics in two closely related ways. In the first place, the close ties between religious tradition and national identity that new member-states and candidate-states are introducing to the EU hold the very real potential of reviving political recognition of the Christian, and specifically Catholic, roots of European integration. Western Europe may be said to have preserved Christianity only as glimmering embers that are not able to generate much heat, on their own. But when fanned, in very different ways, by Catholic Poland, Orthodox Serbia, or Islamic Turkey, those embers are much more likely to flicker back into flames. Second, the greater attention to religious difference that this renewed vitality implies could itself ignite political reactions and conflicts that are likely to impede the process of “Europeanization.” Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam are transnational religious traditions that each have their own understanding of European identity, European unity, and even of European modernity. These religious understandings and definitions, animated politically in complex ways in places like Warsaw, Belgrade, and Ankara, may not be consistent with how these concepts are defined and understood in, say, Paris, Berlin, or Brussels. As these religious traditions, and the national communities partly defined by them, are drawn more deeply into the project of European integration through enlargement, religion will also get drawn more deeply into European public life. Put another way, religion, widely presumed to have been consigned to the political margins in Europe, is now poised to play an important role in one of the most central political processes of contemporary European life.Timothy A. Byrnes is Professor of Political Science at Colgate University ([email protected]). His books include Transnational Catholicism in Postcommunist Europe, and Catholic Bishops in American Politics. Peter J. Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University ([email protected]). His current research centers on issues of regionalism as well as soft power in world politics. This paper draws on the arguments that we are developing in greater detail in the two framing chapters in Byrnes and Katzenstein (2006). We would like to thank all the participants in the Mellon-Sawyer seminar “Towards a Transitional and Transcultural Europe” where these ideas took their initial shape, as well as the participants at a workshop at Colgate University in April 2004. Robert Keohane, John Meyer, Vjekoslav Perica, Sabrina Petra Ramet, Sidney Tarrow, and Scott Thomas also offered insightful comments that helped us greatly in drafting this paper, as did two anonymous reviewers of this journal. The remaining weaknesses are due to our stubbornness in not following the good advice we received.

As scholarly interest in the concept of identity continues to grow, social identities are proving to be crucially important for understanding contemporary life. Despite—or perhaps because of—the sprawl of different treatments of identity in the social sciences, the concept has remained too analytically loose to be as useful a tool as the literature's early promise had suggested. We propose to solve this longstanding problem by developing the analytical rigor and methodological imagination that will make identity a more useful variable for the social sciences. This article offers more precision by defining collective identity as a social category that varies along two dimensions—content and contestation. Content describes the meaning of a collective identity. The content of social identities may take the form of four non-mutually-exclusive types: constitutive norms; social purposes; relational comparisons with other social categories; and cognitive models. Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a group over the content of the shared category. Our conceptualization thus enables collective identities to be compared according to the agreement and disagreement about their meanings by the members of the group. The final section of the article looks at the methodology of identity scholarship. Addressing the wide array of methodological options on identity—including discourse analysis, surveys, and content analysis, as well as promising newer methods like experiments, agent-based modeling, and cognitive mapping—we hope to provide the kind of brush clearing that will enable the field to move forward methodologically as well.Rawi Abdelal is Associate Professor, Harvard Business School ([email protected]). Yoshiko M. Herrera is Associate Professor, Government Department, Harvard University ([email protected]). Alastair Iain Johnston is Professor, Government Department, Harvard University ([email protected]). Rose McDermott is Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of California at Santa Barbara ([email protected]). Research for the paper was made possible by the generous support of the Weatherhead Initiative of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. We are grateful to those who commented on earlier versions of this paper: Peter Burke, Lars-Erik Cederman, Jeff Checkel,Michael Dawson, James Fearon, David Frank, Erin Jenne, Michael Jones-Correa, Cynthia Kaplan, Peter Katzenstein, Herb Kelman, Paul Kowert, David Laitin, Daniel Posner, Paul Sniderman, Werner Sollors, Jeff Strabone, Philip Stone, Ronald Suny, Charles Tilly, Mary Waters, and three anonymous reviewers. We would also like to thank participants of the 2004 Identity as a Variable conference, including Henry Brady, Kanchan Chandra, Jack Citrin, Neta Crawford, Jennifer Hochschild, Jacques Hymans, Ted Hopf, Cynthia Kaplan, Ulrich Krotz, Taeku Lee, Will Lowe, Jason Lyall, Kimberly Neuendorf, Roger Petersen, Kevin Quinn, David Rousseau, Rogers Smith, Donald Sylvan, Kim Williams, and Michael Young, for comments on this version.

Amid the resurgence of party spirit in the U.S., partisanship retains its bad name. Often branded an expression of inherited prejudice, narrow interest, or dogmatic commitment, it seems at odds with good citizenship. In what form, if any, is partisanship something admirable? This question has been neglected by political theorists, whose ideals of democracy, justice, and citizen virtue rarely depict the proper place of partisanship. I offer an account of the ethics of partisanship that shows how party spirit is defensible, even admirable—and how it is troubling, even pathological.Russell Muirhead is Associate Professor in the Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin ([email protected]). I would like to thank Sam Beer, Sharon Krause, Joseph Lambert, Glyn Morgan, Nancy Rosenblum, Mark Somos, Dennis Thompson, Jeremy Waldron, and the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful written comments on drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the participants of the Yale Political Theory workshop for their comments.

Prior to the 1970s, political science for the most part happily ignored questions of production, exchange, consumption, and investment. The new prominence of Marxist and neo-Marxist scholarship in that decade as well as the transformation of many institutions, trends and premises of the post-World War II order (including the collapse of Bretton Woods, the rise of OPEC and Third World liberation movements, the advent of détente, and the first global recession since the Great Depression) ushered many innovative themes and methodologies into our discipline. Political economy was the most direct result of both these trends, taking its place as one of the first of a wave of “inter-” or “multidisciplinary” fields of study.Darel E. Paul is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, Williamstown, MA ([email protected]). He is the author of Rescaling International Political Economy: Subnational States and the Regulation of the Global Political Economy (Routledge, 2005) as well as of several articles on cities in the contemporary global political economy.

Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. By Donald Alexander Downs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $28.99 cloth, $19.99 paper.

Donald Downs's Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus is an important book. Like his earlier books, it integrates political theory, jurisprudence, and policy analysis to address a matter of contemporary concern. In this case, the matter at hand is directly relevant to all scholars and teachers who work in the contemporary American university. Since this includes most political scientists, it seemed like a good idea to open the pages of the Perspectives Book Reviews to a range of perspectives on the book. I have thus sought out a “balanced” cast of distinguished commentators, in the hope that the juxtaposition of different reviews will help to promote serious discussion of academic freedom issues of concern to all of us. Some of these issues are juridical, and regard the ways in which universities, academic departments, and perhaps even professional associations are called upon to codify “diversity” considerations and balance these with other considerations, including “academic excellence” but also civil liberty and robust debate. Some of them are principally ethical, and regard the habits of mind most conducive to intellectual inquiry and liberal education. These issues are complicated and controversial. In featuring the Downs volume and the three reviews that follow, I sought to stimulate intelligent discussion about them within the political science profession. It is my intention to organize similar discussions of other important books in future issues.

Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. By Donald Alexander Downs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $28.99 cloth, $19.99 paper.

The stated themes of Donald Downs's book are ones with which most readers of this journal will be sympathetic: Intellectual freedom is the most important commodity academics have; it is under siege on a variety of fronts; some of these fronts might appear innocent but are often only the thin edge of the wedge; and faculty must recognize these threats and organize themselves to resist. This is a timely reminder, for there are many threats to academic freedom facing us today: Campus Watch, which has posted online the dossiers of professors who supposedly sympathize with Islamic terrorists and encourages students to “inform” on their professors for alleged anti-American sentiments; David Horowitz's so-called academic bill of rights, which targets professors who supposedly display that favorite shibboleth of the right wing, “liberal bias”; the Patriot Act; and government surveillance and wiretapping. Moreover, the strength of these efforts to suppress speech is frightening: Well funded, but not very thoughtful, they often hijack the truth in vitriolic hatred of academics.

Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. By Donald Alexander Downs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $28.99 cloth, $19.99 paper.

The title reflects the background premise of this recent work: restoring free speech and liberty on campus. Free speech has been threatened on campus but it can be restored. That is the message that Donald Downs wants to convey. He is a professor of political science and law at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and an unabashed champion of free speech. He cites John Stuart Mill with respect, and he is something that has become less common on American campuses, an old-fashioned liberal. Nearly a quarter of the book, in fact, is a personal memoir of Downs' success, at Wisconsin, in persuading the faculty senate to repeal its overly restrictive speech code.

Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. By Donald Alexander Downs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $28.99 cloth, $19.99 paper.

Rarely have I read a book with whose core thesis I so fully agree but which nonetheless so sets my teeth gnashing. I begin with the agreement, which is more important, and return later to the gnashing.

Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution: Harmonizing Earth with Heaven. By Barbara Allen. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 400p. $80.00 cloth, $25.95 paper.

This book is a remarkably original effort to develop a fresh understanding and appreciation of Tocqueville's “new science of politics.” The covenant or “federal” theology of the New England Puritans is Barbara Allen's point of departure, and she strongly reminds readers that it also served as the point of departure for Tocqueville's analysis of America, in particular, and of democratic society, in general. Allen argues that Tocqueville's new political science is essentially a prescription for a democratic society in which political culture reflects the beliefs, values, and behaviors of covenantal religion. Her thesis is that Tocqueville's vision of a healthy democratic society is fundamentally a portrait of a society grounded in the Protestant covenant tradition.

The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. By Bruce Baum. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 352p. $45.00.

Ethics Along the Color Line. By Anna Stubblefield. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 216 p. $16.95.

There is a tendency in political science to see identities as given and fixed. They are placed in equations and used to predict things, but the content of those identities and our normative understanding of them remain a mystery. For that reason, Ethics Along the Color Line and The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity are essential books both for political theorists and those working in other fields of political science. Both add analytical rigor to our use of race as social scientists and implore us to keep in mind normative questions as we explore the contours and meanings of race as a sociopolitical construct.

Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family. By Eileen Hunt Botting. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 258p. $65.00.

This book reminds us of the importance of theorizing the family/state relationship. Eileen Hunt Botting argues that while Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke proposed different versions of a patriarchal structuring of the family in contrast to Mary Wollstonecraft's egalitarian version, the three eighteenth-century theorists shared a view of the function of the family as providing the relational and moral foundations for the state. To relate as a father, husband, son, wife, sister, or daughter was to learn how to sympathize, and to work for a common purpose, both of which were absolutely necessary for developing patriotic feelings and civic virtue. The significance of the book goes beyond taking us back to the Enlightenment origins of the notion of the family as an agent of political socialization. It raises crucial questions about Wollstonecraft's status as a canonical democratic theorist; it also suggests fascinating implications for how political theory could make a contribution to our contemporary conversations on gay families, religion and the family, and the clash of civilizations and the family.

The Economy of Esteem: An Essay on Civil and Political Society. By Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 339p. $59.50 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Much of social science has been devoted to the analysis of different mechanisms for social steering. The most well-known are the “invisible hand” market and the “iron hand” state. In many studies, these systems of coordination have been put forward as the only two that are available, and we have seen endless amounts of energy going into the pros and cons for each in different areas. In this book, two renowned scholars, one an economist (Geoffrey Brennan) and the other a political philosopher (Philip Pettit), put forward a third mechanism that they argue has largely been neglected, namely, esteem. The central idea is that while people are motivated by material benefits and by the incentives given by laws and regulations, they are also motivated by the opinions other people hold of them. In addition to material rewards, we also want other people we care about to think well of us. The authors argue that this esteem mechanism has largely been overlooked in modern neoclassical economics but that it was a major part of earlier economics, not least in Adam Smith's “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” which was published in 1759, 13 years before “The Wealth of Nations.”

Sufficient Reason: Volitional Pragmatism and the Meaning of Economic Institutions. By Daniel W. Bromley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 256p. $35.00.

The purposes of this book are twofold: first, to call into question what the author takes to be the dominant economic approach to explaining institutional change—and thus public policy outcomes—and second, to offer an alternative explanatory approach rooted in what the author calls “volitional pragmatism.” According to the dominant view, institutional change can (or should) be explained “endogenously” in terms of the utility-maximizing choices of individuals: “In the received story, institutions change—machinelike—when it is efficient for them to change. And if they do not change, then it is efficient that they not change” (p. 214). When, contrary to theoretical expectations, institutions change or fail to change in a way that economists take to be inefficient, then this is said to be the result of collective (political) interference with and distortion of otherwise efficient individual choices. Such interference is explained by appealing to the irrationality or ignorance of political actors (Daniel Bromley calls this the “dimwit conjecture,” p. 124) or, perhaps more commonly, by the fact that the political process has been captured by “special interests.”