Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism. By Graham Long. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2004. 250p. $59.00.

A work that treats relativism without mentioning Nietzsche, the foundations of liberalism without mentioning Locke, and universalism without discussing any of the great philosophers from Plato to Hegel is apt to be defective. Yet Graham Long's book proves that such a work can still merit serious attention. Through his taste for rigorous arguments, his seriousness of purpose, and his knowledge of the literature written in the spirit of English analytical philosophy and academic liberalism more generally, he has succeeded in producing a book that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Ten years from now, what kinds of issues of interest to politics will dominate the agenda of the United States Supreme Court? Will a dominant approach to constitutional interpretation emerge to guide the justices in their handling of these significant cases?Keith E. Whittington is professor of politics at Princeton University and visiting professor of law at the University of Texas, Austin ([email protected]).

Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time. By William Scheuerman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 312p. $42.00.

While the political ramifications of social acceleration have preoccupied thinkers in a variety of disciplines at least since the Industrial Revolution, and contemporary works by such thinkers as Paul Virilio, David Harvey, James Der Derian, and William Connolly have highlighted various modes of speed, many in political science have been slow to pay heed. William Scheuerman's book aims to redress this lag in the discipline, taking up the theme of social acceleration from these and other authors and using it to frame a wide-ranging assessment of transformations to liberal democratic legal and political institutions.

Language Rights and Political Theory. Edited by Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 368p. $99.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Language rights and language policy are significant issues in contemporary politics and have become an important subject for political theorists today. Yet until now, there has been no major work or edited volume dealing with language rights from the standpoint of normative political theory. Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten have put together a volume of essays to remedy this situation. According to the editors of this valuable collection, linguistic diversity has emerged as a major source of controversy in a number of distinct political contexts. In their comprehensive introduction to the topic, and the volume, they identify these contexts as including at least five areas: Eastern Europe, regional languages/minority nationalisms, immigrant integration, European Union/transnational democracy, and indigenous languages/biodiversity. As political theorists in recent years have explored ideas of citizenship, nationhood, multiculturalism, and deliberative democracy, it has become increasingly evident, they say, that political theories often rest on presuppositions about people's language repertoires. It is important that these presuppositions, and their implications, be explored and subjected to critical scrutiny. The aim of this collection is to do precisely this. In the end, it is entirely successful in its ambitions. The chapters are of high quality and deal with issues that are important. Anyone presently interested in working on language rights in political theory should begin here.

Reconstructing Public Reason. By Eric MacGilvray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 266p. $45.00.

Eric MacGilvray imaginatively puts philosophical pragmatism to work on the problems of “political justification”—that is, questions about “how we decide, or ought to decide, which ends to pursue as a political community” (p. 2). Above all, he seeks to make pragmatism a part of the engagement of contemporary political theorists with a familiar, vexing question posed in its most well known form by John Rawls: “How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?” (Political Liberalism 1993, p. 4).

Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability. By R. Douglas Arnold. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 304p. $35.00.

R. Douglas Arnold sets an ambitious goal: “This book is the first large-scale study of how local media outlets cover members of Congress” (pp. 3–4). His ultimate success exemplifies how content analysis can illuminate a subject with empirical and systematic findings.

School Board Battles: The Christian Right in Local Politics. By Melissa M. Deckman. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. 240p. $39.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Although it is almost conventional wisdom that the Christian Right was born in local political controversies, often over public education, scholars have usually focused on the movement's role in national electoral politics. Melissa Deckman restores some balance with an interesting study of Christian Right activity in school board politics. Although the book provides only a good start in that endeavor, it suggests many avenues for future research.

The Perspectives editors handed me the following assignment: “Ten years from now, what will be the status of human development in sub-Saharan Africa? What will be the trajectory of the AIDS crisis; what actors—if any—can we expect to address problems of health, education, and poverty? What political changes can we anticipate, and how will these affect standards of living (and vice versa)?” The choice of language is significant. Most studies of development in Africa have focused on growth. However, here the interest is in the degree to which growth and other things, most especially the quality of government, translate into standards of living and aspects of “human development” or “capability,” typically measured by school completion rates, child malnutrition, under age-five mortality, and related indicators.Jennifer Widner is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University ([email protected]).

In “Writing the Arab-Israeli Conflict” (Perspectives on Politics 3:1), Jonathan B. Isacoff does a great service by bringing together the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the study of international relations (IR). All too often, political scientists shy away from the ongoing conflict and the heat such work could generate on campus. At the same time, Isacoff's application of his multiple-schools model reveals some limitations with respect to political scientists' use of history generally and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular. In this essay, I note four areas where his argument merits further scrutiny.Jeremy Pressman is assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut ([email protected]). He is currently writing about how allies stop each other from going to war. His writings on the Arab-Israeli conflict include Point of No Return: The Deadly Struggle for Middle East Peace (with Geoffrey Kemp). The author thanks Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, two anonymous reviewers, and the editorial staff ofPerspectives on Politics for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. By Richard Franklin Bensel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 320p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

Richard Bensel has written a fascinating book on a timely subject, the nature of polling places in the United States at the juncture between the second and third party systems. His cogent description of how balloting actually took place raises provocative questions about the interpretation of nineteenth-century elections, the development of modern democracy, and the dilemmas inherent in electoral institutions.

For Better or Worse: How Political Consultants Are Changing Elections in the United States. By David A. Dulio. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 289p. $71.50 cloth, $23.95 paper.

This analysis addresses two important developments in American political campaigns: the increase in the presence of political consultants and their effect on campaigns. In pursuing this analysis, David Dulio focuses on the central questions of whether consultants are changing the nature of campaigns and whether their presence has displaced the role of political parties. The analysis draws heavily on a survey conducted in 1999 among 505 political consultants by American University staff.

Just Work. By Russell Muirhead. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 224p. $24.95.

“Once at the center of political and social theory,” writes Russell Muirhead, “work now stands at the margins” (p. 13). A simple observation, but an astute one. While the constitution of “identity” has become a focal point for contemporary political theorists, few go beyond discussions of cultural affiliation. Yet most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at some form of work. That our relationship with our productive activity was a crucial component of our identity was a key theme of Marx's writings, while Hegel, among others, noted how our need to work also shaped our social maturity. Why, then, do we now spend so little effort at thinking about whether our work is well suited for us or not? And how ought one go about evaluating the justice of “work” in the first place?

Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America. By Adam J. Berinsky. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 224p. $35.00.

Polls, Adam Berinsky warns, are flawed. The source of this flaw is what he labels “exclusion bias,” defined as “the exclusion of the preferences of the sometimes sizable portion of the public who say they ‘don't know’ where they stand on the issues of the day” (p. 2).

Polls and Politics: The Dilemmas of Democracy. Edited by Michael A. Genovese and Matthew A. Streb. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 192p. $54.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Reading a book that germinated from conferences is a bit like eating at a recommended restaurant in an unfamiliar city. Tasting untried food [for thought] is heightened by the novelty of the locale. Chapters serve as courses; some are better than others, and in the end, one often is pleased by the experience, even if the parts of the experience were in need of refinement. Polls and Politics emanates from a 2002 Loyola Marymount University conference on the topic. The book unites leading scholars in the field, as they examine questions about the role of polls in American democracy, and it is entertaining, provocative, and at times flawed. The flaws, however, are not in a particular author's argument, but rather in what is omitted in the collected volume. It highlights the dilemmas associated with public opinion polling in the twenty-first century, but does little to aid the authors in seeking ways of measuring or mitigating those flaws.

The comparative study of women's movements is developing within the political science subfield of women and politics, largely by drawing on concepts and findings from several disciplines. From political science it borrows theories of the state, political development, democracy, and democratization. Sociology offers insights on social movements and the gendered nature of societies. Women's studies scholarship enables us to understand systematic gendered arrangements of power and privilege, including those fragmented or reinforced by class, race, sexuality, and ethnicity. The subfield of women and politics contributes both feminist theoretical insights and scholarship on elected women, female leaders, and women's policy preferences; these contributions inform comparative research on women's movements.Karen Beckwith is a professor of political science at the College of Wooster ([email protected]). She is coeditor, with Lee Ann Banaszak and Dieter Rucht, of Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State and author of American Women and Political Participation. Beckwith is the founding editor, with Lisa Baldez, of Politics & Gender, the journal of the Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association. The author thanks Jeff Lantis and Kent Kille for extensive comments on earlier versions of this article.

The Abolition of White Democracy. By Joel Olson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 248p. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Joel Olson's book is a provocative argument for the elimination of white power in the United States. He argues that whiteness is, unlike blackness, not an identity but an illegitimate source of political privilege. Whites have constructed U.S. democracy around conceptions of freedom, equality, and citizenship that shore up their political privilege in a fundamentally bipolar racial system. This racial system admits immigrants and other persons of color only by consistently and ever more surreptitiously subordinating blacks and furthering white empowerment. Olson directs his argument against the assumption that white racism lurks in the application of liberal principles, and not in the principles themselves. He argues that a prejudicial politics is built into U.S. democracy and concludes that ridding the system of racial politics requires altering our basic principles.

Mlada Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

Neta Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies; Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

The four books under review here offer insightful and penetrating analyses of the role of such factors as legitimacy, ideas, norms, culture, and identities in world politics. Martha Finnemore's The Purpose of Intervention demonstrates that great powers intervene in small states for reasons significantly different from those in the past. Neta Crawford's Argument and Change in World Politics chronicles arguments for and against Western imperialism over the past five centuries and contends that those arguments helped bring about the birth, long life, and death of Western formal empires. Mlada Bukovansky's Legitimacy and Power Politics examines the social, economic, and political forces at work in the American and French revolutions; she asserts that those events wrought changes in prevailing notions of what makes a state legitimate. Ted Hopf's Social Construction of International Politics analyzes discourses in Moscow in 1955 and 1999 and maintains that these discourses are an important cause of Soviet or Russian foreign policy attitudes in the two periods.David Dessler is an associate professor at the College of William & Mary ([email protected]). John Owen is an associate professor at the University of Virginia ([email protected]). The authors thank Jeffrey Legro, Jack Snyder, Michael Tierney, David Waldner, Joshua Yates, two anonymous reviewers, and Greg McAvoy for comments on previous versions of this article. John Owen presented an earlier version to the research seminar at the Centre for International Relations at the University of British Columbia, and the authors also thank those who participated in that seminar, especially Mikulas Fabry and Richard Price. All errors are the sole responsibilities of the authors.

Empowering the White House: Governance under Nixon, Ford, and Carter. By Karen M. Hult and Charles E. Walcott. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. 264p. $40.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

This is the sequel to the authors' previous study, Governing the White House, which examined White House organization and process in the Hoover through Johnson administrations. Drawing on scores of White House documents from the presidential libraries, Karen Hult and Charles Walcott assess the development of the chief of staff and staff secretariat positions, as well as several other institutional components of the White House, such as the Office of Public Liaison, the White House Counsel's office, the Office of Communications, the Office of Congressional Relations, and the Office of Speechwriting and Research.

Expressive Politics: Issue Strategies of Congressional Challengers. By Robert G. Boatright. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. 280p. $44.95.

In an era in which fewer and fewer congressional elections are competitive, why do candidates emerge at all to challenge entrenched incumbents who typically preside over very safe districts? In this book, Robert Boatright provides us with an explanation for this phenomenon. Not all challengers think they have a chance at beating the incumbent; in fact, most are quite aware that they will almost certainly lose and lose big in the general election. Furthermore, because these candidates are not running to win the election, they tend to run different campaigns, many of which are focused on highlighting certain issues and expressing certain political points of view. This is what the author means by “expressive politics.”

Eric Voegelin's Dialogue with the Postmoderns: Searching for Foundations. Edited by Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 200p. $37.50.

This book is a collection of five essays placed between an introduction and an epilogue that are helpful in pulling such an eclectic group together. The epilogue includes material not covered in the essays that points the reader to possible ways in which the Voegelin-postmodern connection can be developed. An index is helpful in locating the various postmodern thinkers and ideas spread throughout the essays. The editors' intent is to offer an invitation to scholars interested in either Eric Voegelin or postmodernism to explore the common ground shared by a major twentieth-century political theorist and a fashionable school of thought. The implication is that Voegelin's work will be more widely considered if postmoderns see its merits, and likewise, postmodernism will benefit from Voegelin's rejection of modernity without abandoning ethical foundations. The primary postmodern thinkers discussed in the essays include Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Husserl, and Jan Patočka.