Democracy Defended, Gerry Mackie, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. xvi, 483.

Democracy Defended is a sustained assault on an influential figure in contemporary political science: William Riker, oft-cited founder of the “positive political theory” approach, the emperors of which may or may not be far more shabbily dressed than they care to admit. Mackie's effort is impressive, and will delight those who are already suspicious of Riker's “Rochester School,” but the book deserves serious engagement by those working within this analytic tradition. In the same spirit as Donald Green and Ian Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), Mackie calls attention to a glaring gap between an elegant theory and the world it purports to explain—supposing, of course, that rational choice is best understood as an explanatory approach rather than a normative enterprise (it could be both).