Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going On Together. By Josiah Ober. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 296p. $29.95.

In the Philosophy of History, Hegel says that the only thing anyone ever learns from history is that no one ever learns anything from history. Josiah Ober dissents. He believes that the study of ancient Greek history provides valuable lessons for maintaining democratic polities in today's world. Athenian Legacies is comprised of 10 essays—eight published previously, lightly revised. Ober is primarily a cultural historian. He describes this field as “concerned with functional explanation: how members of a society, or subgroups within a community, negotiated a set of meanings that allowed them to continue to live in an existing community” (p. 177). This volume can be read as a follow-up (one of several) to his important 1989 work, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. That study explores the role of discourse and ideology in alleviating conflict between richer and poorer citizens in ancient Athens and so contributing to democratic stability. In this new book as well, Ober's central concern is how products of public culture contributed to the reconciling of differences in Athenian identity, thus helping the Athenians “go on together.” The essays were written for different audiences: political theorists, classicists, moral philosophers. But the collection is more unified than many such works, as most essays bear to some degree on the central idea of “going on together.”

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.

Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement. By Stephen Eric Bronner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 224p. $29.50.

Stephen Eric Bronner reclaims what he takes to be the genuine spirit of Enlightenment thought from a variety of contemporaneous and historical critics on the Left and Right, but first and foremost from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (DE) (1947). Bronner contends that many criticisms of Enlightenment thought today can be traced to what he characterizes as Horkheimer and Adorno's brilliant but ultimately inaccurate and misleading analysis. The losses involved are not only scholarly but political, Bronner argues, for progressive activists and intellectuals today can benefit from the ethical orientations and philosophical temperaments that informed Enlightenment thinkers. Reclaiming the Enlightenment is also a response to historians of political thought who have too often, in Bronner's opinion, missed the forest for the trees. While the recent historiography of Enlightenment thought has deepened and broadened our understanding of particular figures, themes, and regional variants of eighteenth-century political philosophy, he contends that the contemporary emphasis on multiple Enlightenments can have the effect of obscuring what he takes to be the fundamental ethos of Enlightenment thought.

The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. By Micheline R. Ishay. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 459p. $24.95.

Are human rights universal or culturally bounded? From what religious or philosophical premises are they derived? Do they conflict? Do they empower or instead disempower the weak and oppressed? What is their fate in an era of globalization? The key to answering these questions may lie more in historical than conceptual investigation. This is the hunch that inspires Micheline Ishay's remarkably learned and wide-ranging book. It delivers forceful conclusions, which need no belaboring by the author, since she allows them to emerge from the historical record. Among the lessons we learn are that human rights should indeed be viewed as universal; that they draw nourishment from diverse ideological sources; that their meaning has always been contested, though not primarily along cultural lines; that civil and political rights on the one hand and socioeconomic rights on the other have historically been dependent on each other; that the claim to national self-determination as a human right has often been a cover for human rights violations; and that the idea of human rights has regularly been reborn, often strengthened, after periods of tyranny and oppression.

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.

Love and Politics: Re-Interpreting Hegel. By Alice Ormiston. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 164p. $40.00

With this book, Alice Ormiston presents a compelling interpretation of Hegel's philosophy that speaks to the needs of our time. Her central argument is that love is “the continuous foundation at play in Hegel's understanding of the modern self” and the “experiential basis” of his philosophy (pp. 5–6). Hegelian love is an expansive notion that has historical grounding in early Christian mysticism. No longer readily felt in widely shared religious or civic practices, love has been all but eclipsed in the modern world. But love's knowledge is not lost. Reappearing as a moment of grace in situations of moral and political conflict, love helps us heed our conscience. Hegel's political philosophy is, we learn, a call to conscience. If we do not know what conscience requires, we become vulnerable to “the problems of our time”: alienation and social atomism—seen in poverty, weakened commitments to family and local politics, and selfish disregard for the welfare of others—and a collective inability to distinguish right and wrong that contributes to evil (pp. 115–24).

Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law. By Ken I. Kersch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 400p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

This is a fascinating book about constitutional development in the United States that questions traditional explanations for the genesis of constitutional rights. In this erudite study, Ken Kersch offers an account of the changing interpretations of constitutional rights by analyzing landmark cases in their historical context in order to show the interplay of ideological, political, and social forces that influenced them. The book provides a careful reconsideration of the jurisprudence concerning civil rights and civil liberties that effectively challenges the conventional wisdom about individual cases. Kersch's compelling analysis demonstrates that explanations for the expansion of particular rights are often more complicated than traditional constitutional works have assumed. He argues that the expansion of constitutional rights did not occur in a unilinear and unidimensional fashion (cf, e.g., pp. 132, 360). This is a brilliant interdisciplinary study that should interest scholars in many fields, including cultural studies, history, international law, law and society, and political science. This comprehensive book is rich in historical detail and full of surprises.

Breaking with Athens: Alfarabi as Founder. By Christopher A. Colmo. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 210p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The thesis of this book is novel and provocative. Christopher Colmo argues that Alfarabi breaks with Plato and Aristotle. In other words, contrary to Leo Strauss and others (among whom I count myself), Alfarabi is not, among other things, a useful guide to the recovery of a forgotten Plato and Aristotle. At his most ambitious, Colmo insinuates that Alfarabi offers a third path between the metaphysically grounded politics of the ancients and the moderns' excessive reliance on philosophic concepts such as human rights (p. 168). This third way is often referred to as the “autonomy of politics” from theory. Although Colmo is tentative about it, like all claims to a third way, it offers the utopian hope of escaping all of the pitfalls of the other two.

A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. By Jennifer Pitts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 392p. $39.50.

This book is a brilliantly successful attempt to account for the apparent transition from the fierce, bitter assault on the idea of empire by the writers of the second half of the eighteenth century—from Montesquieu and Adam Smith to Benjamin Constant—to the often self-congratulatory, high-minded endorsement of a new kind of imperial mission less than half a century later, here associated most clearly with the writings of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. To have identified this shift in the first place is not the least of Jennifer Pitts's merits. Much of the modern, postcolonial historiography of this period has assumed, generally without much argument, that it was the “Enlightenment” that provided the ideological inspiration for the evolution of the nineteenth-century European empires. True, Pitts has been greatly assisted by two previous works, Sankar Muthu's Enlightenment against Empire (2003) and Uday Mehta's Liberalism and Empire (1999), but although these have done much to establish the existence of an antiimperial Enlightenment, neither has anything much to say about the transformation in European imperial policy, and in European political theory, that followed the end of the French Revolution.

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.

Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community. By Keally D. McBride. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. 192p. $45.00.

The concept of community weighs heavily in the history of social and political theory but even more so in the collective imagination. The idea and varying visions of community traverse concepts of identity, public sphere, and state in theoretical discourses. Community also insinuates itself into discussions and decision making at the most practical level. Keally D. McBride's book offers a creative and probing exploration of how community has been imagined by theorists and how imagined communities inform practice. It does not claim to be a comprehensive synthesis of competing views, but rather succeeds as a provocative set of thematically linked, exploratory essays. While McBride acknowledges at the outset the importance of the analytic task of delineating the various conceptualizations of community, her project makes its contribution by explicating how visions of the political imagination of different eras inform the imagination of community. She shows how the resulting set of ideals and images creates and constrains real-world political possibilities. Throughout, she offers subtle judgments and useful provocations and, in the end, this book emerges as an important resource for everyone who values the possibilities of community, but wishes to remain critical of the concept's many traps and seductions.

Peace Talks—Who Will Listen? By Fred Dallmayr. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 288p. $40.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

In this book, Fred Dallmayr tries to discover what intellectual resources are available for peacemaking today, in a world that he believes to be fundamentally violent. To do so, he scans the world's philosophic and religious traditions to find their arguments on behalf of peace. He takes as his starting point Erasmus, whose The Complaint of Peace of 1517 begins with a personification of Peace: Querela pacis, “Peace talks.” Dallmayr's book starts with an analysis of what Erasmus said about how to make peace, then goes on to survey other such arguments and practices in the world's philosophical and spiritual traditions. The work is remarkably wide-ranging, as it examines in some depth figures as varied as Aristotle, Confucius, Grotius, Kant, Gandhi, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martha Nussbaum.

Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science. Edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 608p. $35.00.

Critics have berated the Perestroika movement since it erupted in 2000 for engaging in academic politics before improving the tools available for apprehending the political world. But the guiding thread of any group's thinking generally arises out of its common activities, as Karl Mannheim pointed out. So it is no surprise that Perestroika, as a movement of disaffected political scientists, would coalesce first as an attempt to storm the discipline's citadels in the name of “methodological pluralism.” Some years later, however, we are in a better position to assess the principles implicated in the movement and its slogan, a judgment now enabled by the publication of Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe.

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.”

Freedom Reclaimed: Rediscovering the American Vision. By John E. Schwarz. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 264p. $30.00.

In his book, John Schwarz develops a conception of freedom different from, and more expansive than, the one most common today. His crucial distinction echoes that of Isaiah Berlin's (1969) Four Essays on Liberty: Negative freedom (which Schwarz calls “free-market freedom”) involves the absence of formal restrictions on personal conduct, particularly those coming from government, whereas positive freedom (“genuine freedom,” in Schwarz's words) requires that society be organized such that people can and do attain a decent standard of living through their own efforts. Schwarz differs from Berlin, however, in seeing positive freedom not as a concept easily twisted for totalitarian ends but rather as the highest form of freedom. Emphasizing only negative freedom means ignoring the bonds that connect citizens to one another, leading to an individualistic, morally bankrupt notion that says we are all in this—alone.

How Patriotic Is the Patriot Act? Freedom Versus Security in the Age of Terrorism. By Amitai Etzioni. New York: Routledge, 2004. 224p. $26.00.

From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations. By Amitai Etzioni. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 272p. $29.95.

In How Patriotic Is the Patriot Act? Amitai Etzioni analyzes the United States response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, from the perspective of “responsive” or “new” communitarianism. New communitarianism, according to the author, can be distinguished from authoritarian communitarianism because it seeks a balance between freedom and security or social order (pp. 3–4). According to Etzioni, during the 1960s and 1970s, America “overcorrected” for forms of authoritarian government, such as racial segregation or J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation. As a result, the country experienced “excessive individualism” and “moral anomie.” With what he considers to have been an overemphasis on individual rights, certain policies, such as the possibility of a quarantine in the face of bioterrorism or highly communicable disease, have been “stigmatized” as being “beyond the pale” of reasonable discussion (pp. 87–89). By noting, for example, that the United States has allowed for quarantines at earlier junctures in its history and that a quarantine could be set up on a vacation island, he is clearly trying to rehabilitate the quarantine as a policy option. But this is just one policy among many that are emerging post–September 11 in the United States that are correcting the balance between liberty and security, for Etzioni. That is, he understands policies such as the USA Patriot Act, US VISIT (U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indication Technology program), CAPPS II (a proposed measure to update the current Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System (CAPPS) airline security program that was subsequently killed in the summer of 2004 because of its burden on civil liberties), national identification cards, and various biometric and facial recognition technologies to be relocating a balance between freedom and security that was apparently lost in the 1960s and 1970s.

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.”

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. By Tommie Shelby. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 336p. $27.95.

The intellectual and strategic moorings of contemporary black political solidarity are increasingly unstable. As the political memory of the race-specific Civil Rights movement fades further into history, intraracial differences that have always existed, such as gender, religion, sexuality, multiracial identification, immigration, region, cultural affiliation, political ideology, and generation, are being highlighted by race scholars from a variety of fields as reasons for rethinking race-based political cohesion. Tommie Shelby acknowledges all of these internal pressures, but sees the widening gap between poor and more affluent blacks as the intraracial fissure that most threatens political cohesion among today's African Americans. From this sociological premise, Shelby sets out to articulate a “progressive,” philosophically sound basis for black political organization that appeals both to the class interests of poor and working-class blacks and to those of middle- and upper-class blacks. By “progressive,” Shelby means a recognition that basic social injustices linger, and can and should be corrected through state intervention and/or collective political action. Remedies for current racial inequalities cannot be found in a “conservative” return to a former era of ostensibly better social organization.

On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory. By Brian Z. Tamanaha. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 188p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Brian Z. Tamanaha reminds us that the rule of law is a near-universal yet little-understood ideal. His book presents a brief and clear introductory history and analysis that defends the coherence and value of the rule of law and that gives a sense of its global reach, limitations, and prospects. Tamanaha wisely argues that what is called the rule of law is actually a family of doctrines. Crucial to it, on his view, are three “themes” (p. 114): government limited by law, formal legality (which “entails public, prospective rules with the qualities of generality, equality of application, and certainty” [p. 119]), and a distinction between the rule of law and the “rule of man” (p. 122). The theoretical core of the book deftly explicates Friedrich Hayek's defenses and Roberto Unger's criticisms of legal liberalism as a prelude to discussing the challenges of indeterminacy and surveying a range of thinner to thicker formal and substantive conceptions of the rule of law. Tamanaha analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each of these conceptions. These analyses are intelligent and fair-minded; his own position is veiled, but suggests support for a relatively thin substantive and relatively thick formal conception (involving basic individual rights within a formally democratic legal order), friendly to Hayek and not too bothered by the acknowledged indeterminacy of legal rules.

The Practice of Liberal Pluralism. By William A. Galston. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 216p. $65.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

This book seeks to defend the idea of value pluralism set out in William Galston's earlier Liberal Pluralism (2002) against the various criticisms to which it has been subjected, and to explain the ways that this kind of pluralism can be given practical political application. The first of these tasks is efficiently done (in the final section), and as well as offering Galston the chance to modify some previous overstatements of his position (for example, to tone down his criticism of the idea of personal autonomy), the book provides a useful summary of the current state of various philosophical controversies surrounding the politics of liberalism. However the real interest lies in his attempt to make pluralism a practical political doctrine in its own right. Here, his success is mixed. His argument is most persuasive when he is criticizing excessively “monistic” or, as he calls them, “totalist” conceptions of liberal politics. The problem is that these criticisms often appear unobjectionable precisely because they are only weakly connected to a distinctively pluralist alternative.