British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory, 1500–1800. Edited by David Armitage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 338p. $90.00.

Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Edited by Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton-Bleakley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 308p. $90.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Scholars organizing conferences—and subsequently seeking to publish the ensuing conference volume—are notoriously presented with a task akin to the proverbial herding of cats: getting all their contributors to maintain some kind of focus on the conference theme(s). These two excellent collections avoid this problem in distinct ways. One way to ensure a unified focus is to build the conference around a single book; better yet, put the author's colleagues and former students on the roster and let the author himself have the last word. This amounts to an enlarged and friendly “author meets critics” panel or a narrowly drawn festschrift. While this certainly provides for a tightly focused and unified collection, it places a lot of weight on a single reed. But when the book is the two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), the author Quentin Skinner, and the list of contributors this distinguished, the results are interesting and insightful as well as tightly focused.

I appreciate Mark Graber's review of Judges and Their Audiences. The review is generous, but it is also perceptive about the book's argument and its implications. As the author, I learned from Graber's thoughtful discussion of what I did and did not do in the book.

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. By Robert Pape. New York: Random House, 2005. 352p. $25.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

Making Sense of Suicide Missions. Edited by Diego Gambetta. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 392p. $45.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror. By Mia Bloom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 280p. $24.95.

This is an interesting time to be a political scientist. The sixth anniversary of 9/11 is fast approaching. The United States continues to deal with the mammoth challenges of “nation building” in post-Taliban Afghanistan, and remains mired in what by virtually all accounts is a quagmire-like civil war in Iraq. As every issue of this journal attests, we in this rich and diverse discipline possess an array of intellectual resources for understanding current events. And if there is anything that unites us as social scientists, it is the bedrock belief that it is possible to offer deeper and more complex understandings of events than those furnished by sound bites and slogans.

How many causal paths lead to suicide terrorism? Unfortunately, too many to produce precise predictions about when and where suicide terrorism is likely to occur. Nonetheless, Mia Bloom's, Diego Gambetta's, and Robert Pape's books do an excellent job of addressing this phenomenon with sophisticated theories and empirical findings. While Pape presents a coherent, single theoretical framework for explaining suicide terrorism, Bloom and the contributors in Gambetta's book focus on a range of loosely interconnected causal explanations across individual, organizational, and societal levels. These works also have a rich historical and comparative focus across time and cases. Even so, the fundamental question is how they advance our knowledge about suicide terrorism.Karen Rasler is professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis. Edited by Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis. 2 vols. Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2003. 800p. $60.00; $40.00 Vol. 1, $40.00 Vol. 2.

The Logic of Violence in Civil War. By Stathis Kalyvas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 508p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. By Jeremy M. Weinstein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 428p. $70.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. By Elisabeth Jean Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 328p. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.

“Inside Insurgencies”? An odd title for a review of four books that deal with one of the most wide-ranging, violent, and protracted forms of contentious politics the world has known—civil wars. Should we not care more about their impact on citizens at large, their effects on national politics, and their creation of instability in the international system than on their interior lives? But think of the conflicts among communists, anarchists and others in the Spanish Republic: They inhibited the republic's capacity to resist the assaults of Franco's forces. No adequate understanding of that country's civil war could have excluded these “internal” relations.

Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Dred Scott decision, is the consensus choice as the worst decision in the Supreme Court's history. Legal scholar David Currie summarized the conventional view: Dred Scott was “bad law,” “bad policy,” and “bad judicial politics” (cited in Judges, p. 15). In this conventional view, Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion for the Court misinterpreted the Constitution, and it took the morally indefensible position of disallowing citizenship and the rights of citizens for slaves and their descendants. The decision was also a political blunder: The Court intervened in the slavery issue in an effort to resolve it and prevent war, but instead inflamed passions and made war more likely.

The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. By Linda Bosniak. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 248p. $27.95.

This book makes a distinctive contribution to an important topic in legal and political theory: what Linda Bosniak calls the “citizenship of aliens.” What rights, she asks, do and should aliens who reside within the territory of liberal democracies like the United States enjoy, even though they are not full political citizens of that territory?

I am grateful to Professor Baum for his very generous review of Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. I am also grateful that Baum in his review and his response to mine highlights the normative significance of his research on judicial audiences. Dred Scott v. Sanford may have been wrongly decided, Baum suggests, because antislavery justices, not being able to predict the actual impact of their decision, should simply have freed Dred Scott as a matter of simple justice. In fact, all five southern justices in Dred Scott v. Sanford did simple justice by their light. More important, however, Baum is now self-consciously exploring central questions of American constitutionalism.

The three books under review reflect a radically altered agenda in social science, affected by the attacks of September 11, 2001, in which international terrorism in general and suicide missions in particular are “hot” topics. But because (sadly) new cases are recorded daily, the analyses in these books must be considered exploratory.Eli Berman is professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego. David D. Laitin is James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

Terms of Inquiry: On the Theory and Practice of Political Science. By James W. Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 296p. $45.00 cloth, 19.95 paper.

Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. By William H. Sewell, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 376p. $70.00 cloth, $29.00 paper.

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others. Edited by George Steinmetz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 632p. $94.95 cloth, $25.95 paper.

Heated controversies about the theory and practice of social inquiry seem to come in waves. In political science, one such wave arrived with the advent and aftermath of the so-called behavioral revolution. Roughly a quarter century later, in October 2000, the self-named Perestroika rebellion inspired another wave of intense interest in the proper conduct of political inquiry. Unlike the earlier wave, the Perestroika movement failed initially to generate much compelling discussion of methodological issues. To be sure, it elicited numerous expressions of discontent with the hegemonic influence of rational choice theory and quantitative methods, as well as vocal demands for greater methodological pluralism, problem-driven research, and political “relevance.” In addition, the proponents of Perestroika raised serious questions about the institutional structures and intellectual orthodoxies that have organized academic political inquiry in the United States over the past few decades. Yet these expressions of discontent and demands for reform were rarely accompanied by creative thought about the nature of political inquiry or compelling visions of alternatives to the present hegemony. Consequently, those scholars who hoped that the Perestroika revolt might rejuvenate the increasingly moribund literature on methodologies of political inquiry were sorely disappointed. Instead of providing powerfully articulated defenses of or alternatives to the methodological axioms of our age, the Perestroika controversy all too often issued in amorphous proposals and empty platitudes.

Psychology and the Natural Law of Reparation. By C. Fred Alford. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 182p. $70.00.

What is evil, why do people do it, and what might restrict or remedy its harms? C. Fred Alford's answers here derive from Melaine Klein's ideas about the psychic lives of infants. Unfortunately, even for a reader sympathetic to psychoanalytic approaches, his argument is unpersuasive. Alford orchestrates interactions among his favorite intellectual objects. In addition to Klein, these include St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Maritain, Wilfred Bion, D. W. Winnicott, John Milton (Paradise Lost) and Sophocles (Antigone). However, to an external other, often the salience of his objects or their congruence appears more a function of Alford's attachment to them than to their logical cogency. Furthermore, despite his attempts to reconcile their disparities, his simultaneous use of conflicting discourses of “natural” and “narrative” render the epistemological and ethical status of his “natural law” of reparation ambiguous. His treatment of the political as merely a larger-scale version of the psychic obviates unique qualities of and important differences between these spheres.

Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Edited by Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 270p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

African American Environmental Thought: Foundations. By Kimberly K. Smith. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. 264p. $29.95.

Irrespective of what some students of political theory might claim, transformations within the discipline—especially in terms of concept formation and substantive foci—are oftentimes closely related to developments within real-world political discourses and practices. One notable example, of course, is the way in which the feminist movement in the 1960s brought about not only important transformations in our understanding of the history of political thought (e.g., in terms of the troubling position of many canonical theorists on the “private” status of women), but also new ways to reconceptualize politics today. With the “ecological challenge” confronting the world today, it is no wonder that there is now a new subfield within the discipline of political theory (in the United States, at least, it goes under the name of “environmental political theory”), one that is involved in a major rethinking of the history of political thought, not to mention the deconstruction and reconstruction of important political traditions and concepts to meet these challenges.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 released a barrage of public rhetoric characterizing the 19 Muslim hijackers as evil fanatics “in love with death” and animated by a “hatred of freedom.” A spate of scholarship, op-ed articles, and policy papers devoted to anatomizing the “problems with Islam”—a propensity for violence and authoritarianism, an archaic conflation of religious and political domains, the pent-up rage of Muslims “left behind” by modernity—soon flooded airwaves, newspapers, and bookstores, in many cases recycling arguments several decades and even centuries old. Counterclaims about the inherently peaceful and tolerant essence of Islam quickly followed, and a very peculiar American public debate about Islamic authenticity was born.Roxanne L. Euben is the Jane Bishop '51 Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. The author is grateful to Lawrie Balfour, Michael Munger, and Keith Topper for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. By Leora Batnitzky. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 304p. $80.00.

In recent years, Leo Strauss has achieved a posthumous success de scandal as the (purported) philosophical architect of neoconservatism. Strauss's works have been scrutinized by detractors and partisans to determine whether he bears responsibility for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Amidst the clamor, however, more measured assessments are starting to emerge. Today, the most provocative appraisals of his work come from scholars in Jewish studies, as Leora Batnitzky's fascinating book attests. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, Batnitzky seeks to establish Strauss's contribution to modern Jewish thought, but her argument for his importance as a Jewish thinker also reframes the vexed question of his legacy for American politics. She offers a nonpolemical, non-Straussian defense of Leo Strauss. In many ways, her portrait of Strauss as a philosophical skeptic and political moderate resonates with that of Steven B. Smith, in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (2006). However, Batnitzky departs from Smith (and, indeed, from most readers of Strauss) when she hails Strauss as the most ardent philosophical defender of Jewish revelation in the modern period.

Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship. By Michael D. Chan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. 248p. $44.95.

In the terms of the debate over the relative liberalism and republicanism of the American founders, Alexander Hamilton's advocacy of manufacturing, public credit, and a national bank would seem to classify him as characteristically modern and liberal. Hamilton's unswerving dedication to an energetic and powerful central government oriented toward financial stability and military security contrasts with classical republican concerns about individual virtue, the nature of good lives, and the problem of individual and institutional corruption. As much by its neglect of classical topics like civic education as by its new treatment of perennial political subjects, the new political science he announced in The Federalist and elsewhere broke with the ideals of the good republic held by the ancients.

Securing Constitutional Democracy: The Case of Autonomy. By James E. Fleming. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. 272p. $45.00.

James Fleming's excellent book offers a compelling interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as protecting not only the political liberties required for democratic citizenship but also the substantive liberties of the person, commonly referred to as privacy or autonomy rights. Fleming advances his theory both through engagement with the views of other legal scholars and through detailed analysis of the opinions filed in various U.S. Supreme Court cases, most notably several recent ones concerning the rights of homosexuals, with considerable attention also paid to cases concerning abortion or discrimination on grounds of race or sex. Fans of Justice Antonin Scalia will find much in this book with which to disagree.

The books under review reveal considerable agreement about suicide bombers. Yet there is a significant gap between the scholarly consensus they embody and widespread perceptions about the subject. We learn, for example, that suicide missions are as old as the hills. We learn that there is no particular link between the propensity to engage in suicide attacks or other forms of extreme terrorism and religious belief—let alone belief in Islamic fundamentalism. We learn that Sri Lanka's secular Marxist Tamil Tigers have been responsible for more suicide attacks than any other group in recent decades. We learn that even within Islamist groups like Hezbollah, the majority of suicide attackers have not been religious at all, and that some of the religious ones have been Christian rather than Islamist. And we learn that suicide attackers are of both sexes and of various ages, incomes, and education levels.Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University and Henry R. Luce Director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice. By W. James Booth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 264p. $42.50.

W. James Booth has written a profound book about memory in relation to identity and justice in politics. On the one hand, he analyzes the central place of memory in the constitution of identity: A sense of continuity over time, the basis and sign of personal or collective identity, depends on memory. On the other hand, he explores the central place of memory in doing justice: Justice requires “a subject of attribution” who can take responsibility or be held accountable for conduct over time, who also can remember injury and demand redress. But investment in the past and memory of injustice, Booth shows, also run against the grain of core elements in democratic life. Partly, emphasis on the constitutive weight of the past seems in tension with democratic norms deriving identity from will or consent, not inheritance or descent. Partly, any “thick” collective identity, forged by a particularizing past, seems in tension with democratic aspirations to universality, and with the globalizing reality of pluralized and hybridized attachment. Moreover, efforts to redress past injustices seem impossible to separate from resentment, binding people to the past and its wounds. Booth's book is important, then, because it eloquently explores the necessity and value—but also the costs and dangers—of memory and identity in politics, especially around the issue of justice. The book is profound because it evocatively dramatizes tensions it does not resolve.

Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. By Joshua Foa Dienstag. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 314p. $35.00.

This stimulating book has two aims, one descriptive and one normative. Its first goal is to provide an “appraisal” of pessimism and recover it “as an important tradition in the history of political thought” alongside more familiar -isms. Its second goal is to offer an “endorsement” of this neglected tradition and “reanimate” it by presenting its “appeal” in such a way as to “recreate it” in us (pp. ix, xii–xiii, 265, 271).