“Women's Work” as Political Art: Weaving and Dialectical Politics in Homer, Aristophanes, and Plato. By Lisa Pace Vetter. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 190p. $60.00.

Metaphors are a staple of the practice of political theory. Socrates' “individual writ large,” Machiavelli's “Fortuna is a woman,” Hobbes's “leviathan”: These and scores of others speak to the power of metaphorical language in the theorist's arsenal. Lisa Pace Vetter's “women's work” focuses on the metaphor of weaving, a craft associated with the female working at her loom by the hearth. Vetter explores this metaphor in four texts: the Odyssey, Lysistrata, Statesman, and Phaedo. She finds in the metaphor a “dialectical foundationalism” that mediates between subjectivity and objectivity, reason and emotion, action and deliberation (p. 7). Weaving incorporates complexity, creating a new whole without destroying the particularities that comprise it. This form of weaving she values, but it appears only in the Socrates speech in the Phaedo and the construction of Plato's dialogue.

The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility. By David Vogel. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 2005. 222p. $28.95.

Is there a “market for virtue”? If so, what can it do, and what can it not do to improve our world? In his incisive new book, David Vogel takes aim at these questions and the now-fashionable claim that there is a business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR). He concludes that there is no business case that can be generalized to all firms per se, but there is a political case for broadening what we mean by that much-used term.

Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. By Robert B. Westbrook. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 272p. $29.95.

In this ambitious collection, Robert Westbrook aims to recover, from philosophical pragmatism, insight—and hope—regarding the promise of democracy. Following on his John Dewey and American Philosophy (1991), Dewey is surely his main man. Part One, “Pragmatism Old,” offers critical discussions of Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James. Part Two, “Pragmatism New,” treats recent writers who have identified themselves with pragmatism, including Hilary Putnam, Cheryl Misak, Cornel West, and Richard Posner. Richard Rorty is surely the main character in these accounts.

In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Collected essays by Bernard Williams, edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 196p. $29.95.

As the editor reminds us, until the early eighties Bernard Williams's very strong reputation was primarily as a moral philosopher (albeit he also contributed valuable work in epistemology). It was clear, however, that his views had important implications for politics and political theory (no more so than in the superb essay “The Idea of Equality,” the one earlier essay reprinted in this collection). And beginning in the eighties, perhaps influenced by his friendship with Isaiah Berlin and the influence of the latter upon his thinking, Williams focused his thinking increasingly both on quite practical politics and on major issues in political theory. His interest in moral questions never waned, but his reflections concerning them almost always made connections to political and/or political theoretical issues.

Political Exclusion and Domination: Nomos XLVI. Edited by Melissa S. Williams and Stephen Macedo. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 400p. $55.00.

This book is a collection of 14 essays dedicated to John Rawls, and all of them fit perfectly with the overriding concern with justice that lies at the core of Rawlsian theory. My review concentrates on some of these essays.

Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles. By Lisa García Bedolla. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 278p. $21.95.

In 1994, Lisa García Bedolla wondered about the impact on Latino political attitudes and activity of Latino participation in the campaign on Proposition 187. Would the young people who participated be more likely to be politically engaged later on? Would their involvement change their feelings of identity and efficacy? These questions drove her study of the political engagement of Latino immigrants and their children, which she conducted by comparing the political attitudes and behavior of Latinos involved in the campaign in two areas of Los Angeles County: East Los Angeles and Montebello, a working-class and middle-class majority Latino area, respectively.

The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America. Edited by Xavier de Souza Briggs. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2005. 353p. $29.95.

The Social Medicine Reader: Health Policy, Markets, and Medicine. 2d ed. Edited by Jonathan Oberlander, Larry R. Churchill, Susan E. Estroff, Gail E. Henderson, Nancy M. P. King, and Ronald P. Strauss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 288p. $22.95.

These two books, each in its own way, provide much-needed resources for thinking about how public policies should change to address the latest developments associated with the enduring problem of unequal access to basic resources in U.S. society, including housing and health care. In recent years, unequal access to affordable and decent housing and uneven access to affordable and decent health care both have taken on new features posing new challenges for participants in the public policymaking process. The Geography of Opportunity, edited by Xavier de Souza Briggs, brings together a set of richly detailed essays that look at the housing disparity problem from the increasingly popular perspective of regionalism; and The Social Medicine Reader, edited by Jonathan Oberlander and colleagues, offers an equally informative group of essays that range more widely to address a variety of issues concerning the changed landscape of health care in the United States today. Both books are likely to prove to be critical resources for energizing renewed efforts to make policy less exclusionary in each area.

Electing Justice: Fixing the Supreme Court Nominating Process. By Richard Davis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 211p. $28.00.

Richard Davis could not have produced his examination of the Supreme Court nominating process at a better time. The book was released just prior to the announced retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist—the first vacancies on the Supreme Court in 11 years.

Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. By Tom De Luca and John Buell. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 228p. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

This is a book that looks toward achieving a democracy without demons—a more inclusive, respectful, egalitarian, participatory, and just political covenant—by examining the current proliferation of demonizing rhetoric in the United States as indicative of a dangerous and divisive moral paradox. America's moral paradox, according to Tom De Luca and John Buell, is a deeply rooted dilemma of two fundamentalisms—social “Puritanism” versus material “hedonism”—that must be negotiated with care if we are to avoid projecting hidden fears and forbidden desires onto “despised others” (pp. 48–49). Each pole of the paradox exists in every American, but when one pole begins to dominate, the desire to displace anxiety onto others begins to swell.

Congress and the Constitution. Edited by Neal Devins and Kieth E. Whittington. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 320p. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.

For years, students of American government have been taught a highly compartmentalized version of our democratic system where legislative actors “make” law, actors in the executive branch “enforce” law, and judges in the judicial branch “interpret” law. Under this overly simplistic framework, the Supreme Court is often characterized as citizens' exclusive protection from myopic lawmakers who would flout the dictates of the Constitution to achieve their short-term policy goals and/or enhance their own authority. The collection of essays in Congress and the Constitution, edited by Neal Devins and Keith E. Whittington, presents a challenge to this conventional wisdom.

Redistricting in the New Millenium. Edited by Peter F. Galderisi. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 368p. $90.00 cloth.

Gatekeepers to the Franchise: Shaping Election Administration in New York. By Ronald Hayduk. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. 282p. $35.00.

“The first instinct of power is the retention of power.” The words are Justice Antonin Scalia's, but the core insight is one long acknowledged by commentators and advocates across the ideological spectrum. These two books examine the manifestations of this instinct, one on the drawing of district lines and the other on the running of elections. If neither book furnishes a definitive answer to the question of how power's first instinct can be harnessed to promote a better democracy, that is mainly a function of the intransigence and complexity of the problems they so successfully illuminate.

Speak No Evil: The Triumph of Hate Speech Regulation. By Jon B. Gould. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 241p. $19.00.

Beginning in the later 1980s, universities and colleges across the land adopted speech codes prohibiting expression that disparages individuals or groups based on their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. Because freedom of speech is central to the historic mission of higher education, the new “progressive” form of censorship encountered resistance, especially when it began to be misapplied to viewpoints that merely transgressed from reigning campus orthodoxies.

Strategic Behavior and Policy Choice on the U.S. Supreme Court. By Thomas H. Hammond, Chris W. Bonneau, and Reginald S. Sheehan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 299p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This book will almost certainly be a “must read” in classes on judicial politics and in seminars on American political institutions. The authors intentionally developed a very simple model, and so the book is accessible to, and appropriate for, undergraduates as well as graduate students without much formal-theoretic training. Despite the model's simplicity, the substantive topics that the authors engage with the model make it useful for graduate seminars, if only as a jumping-off point for motivating empirical tests or as a foil for the development of more sophisticated models.

The Greening of Pentagon Brownfields: Using Environmental Discourse to Redevelop Former Military Bases. By Kenneth N. Hansen. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. 164p. $60.00.

In this book, Kenneth Hansen has produced an interesting assessment of how states and localities have increased their institutional capacities to deal with the unanticipated consequences of federal downsizing and pollution at military bases in the 1990s. Hansen uses survey data from 44 of the 115 military installations that were recommended for closure or realignment by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) between 1988 and 1995, as well as several case studies of military bases, to support his core proposition—that environmental factors are among the key intervening variables in the base redevelopment process. The topics discussed are especially timely, given the highly publicized and contentious battle over base closings this past year.

Power, Knowledge, and Politics: Policy Analysis in the States. By John A. Hird. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 256p. $49.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

This is a book that needed to be written. It is the first systematic study of U. S. nonpartisan state-legislative policy research organizations. John Hird describes these policy institutions that inform policymakers in the 50 states, probes the uses of policy research in political decisions, and examines their relationship to the political culture of which they are a part. The inquiry makes a significant contribution to what is already known about state-level policy analysis and decision making. It fills a gap in the literature for those considering the relationship between the information needs of legislators and the policy research provided to them. The focus is on knowledge utilization at the institutional level in general, rather than with specific reports on issues.

James Madison: The Theory and Practice of Republican Government. Edited by Samuel Kernell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 400p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This collection of essays illustrates both the problems and possibilities of turning to James Madison for illumination as if he were a contemporary political scientist. Conceived in a conference to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Madison's birth, this volume is written by public choice theorists, the latest group of political scientists who claim to be Madison's heirs. In particular, the authors explore his understanding of the relationship of institutional design to policy outcomes and his insights into the use of interests and incentives to influence the behavior of politicians, groups, and ordinary citizens. They also examine his observations about free-riding, collective action, the delegation of authority from citizens to representatives, and the problems of “agency” responsibility and loss that result from delegation. Yet another goal of these authors is to explore the intellectual sources and experiences that led to Madison's keen insights into some of the basic concepts that have become central to public choice theory.

Elusive Togetherness: Church Group's Trying to Bridge America's Divisions. By Paul Lichterman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 331p. $65.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity. By Robert Wuthnow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 391p. $29.95.

Robert Wuthnow's latest book is a wide-ranging and insightful study into how Americans are responding to dramatic increases in religious and cultural diversity. Wuthnow gives particular attention here to the ways in which Christians are addressing (or ignoring) the growing populations of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other followers of non-Western religions in America. His aim is not only to understand the current terms by which American Christians are negotiating an increasingly complex and diverse religious setting but also to pointedly ask how pluralistic Americans are willing to be. The answers that are revealed throughout this book, drawing from hundreds of in-depth interviews and a large cross-national survey, offer plenty of room for deep worry as well as guarded optimism. Moving beyond these caged responses, Wuthnow pulls together the ambivalent stands of America's present attitudes toward religious differences and offers suggestive ideas about how Americans might begin to move beyond their currently shallow responses to diversity and embrace a more active, self-conscious form of pluralism, what he calls “reflective pluralism” (p. 289).

Healthy, Wealthy and Fair. Edited by James Morone and Lawrence Jacobs. New York: Oxford University Press, 382p. $29.95.

The result of the United States system for providing health insurance and care is that some citizens receive an abundance of high-quality care while others receive care that is poor, hard to come by, or both. This state of affairs does not fairly reflect public opinion; when surveyed, the majority of citizens express support for the idea that access to care is a right of citizenship. In a nation in which public policies relate strongly to public opinions, the failure to solve the health insurance problem is puzzling. Some analysts describe the health policy problem as economic: Health insurance products, the nature of health care as a good, and the hegemonic roles of providers and payers combine to produce the distribution of health benefits that now exists. The editors and contributors in this volume reject that view and describe health inequality as a political problem solvable with political solutions.

Women with a Mission: Religion, Gender, and the Politics of Women Clergy. By Laura R. Olson, Sue E. S. Crawford, and Melissa M. Deckman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. 190p. $37.50.

This book explores the role of women clergy in mainline Protestant churches and the rabbinate. It is based largely on 54 in-depth interviews conducted in 1998 in four U.S. cities (Indianapolis, Omaha, Milwaukee, and Washington, DC), but also includes considerable material from a much larger national survey of clergy. The authors are most interested in the “political” role of their subjects and in how their gender affects this role. They themselves define “politics” very broadly, as “actions taken to influence collective decision-making processes concerning resource distribution or the development and enforcement of shared values” (p. 14). But they do not impose this definition on their subjects. Instead, the clergywomen are asked about the issues and concerns that motivate them, what kinds of activities they consider most appropriate or helpful to address those concerns, and what their own involvement has been in such activities. In both the interviews and the national survey, around a third of the women indicated that gender “in some way” limited her ability to participate in politics. Three-quarters of the interviewees volunteered gender as a factor (either an asset or a liability) for political activity, or as a reason why particular issues were especially salient to them. But few mentioned either their denomination or its women's caucuses as a factor linking their gender with political involvement.

The Politics of Public Health in the United States. By Kent Patel and Mark E. Rushefsky. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. 346p. $84.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

“It is clear,” write the authors, “that the public health system in the U.S. has suffered from political neglect in the last 50 years or so, and the revitalization of the U.S. public health system will necessitate confronting many of the challenges facing it in the twenty-first century” (p. 7). Kent Patel and Mark Rushefsky's survey of the politics of American public health argues that our system emphasizes curative treatment of existing illnesses at the expense of activities aimed at preventing them. Although the United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, public health activities account for only about 2% to 3% of such expenditures. The low priority given public health, they argue, accounts for America's poor performance relative to other industrialized countries on measures of life expectancy and infant mortality.