Reforming Liberalism: J. S. Mill's Use of Ancient, Religious, Liberal, and Romantic Moralities. By Robert Devigne. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 320p. $45.00.

In this scholarly book, Robert Devigne links John Stuart Mill to the aporia of the Platonic dialogues, the romantic expressivism of Kant and Coleridge, and the great tradition of British empiricism that it was Mill's purpose to reform. In so doing, Devigne introduces us to the great thinker who remains today the most direct entry point (along with Russell perhaps) into the Western tradition of philosophy for those whose native language is English. Devigne's Mill then is the “Great Mill,” the synoptic, conceptive, comprehensive Mill, the Socrates of Gower Street and Charing Cross Road, the towering genius who bestrode Victorian intellectual life like a colossus. It is thus with Nietzsche rather than with Bentham that Devigne's Mill should be classed.

Cultus Americanus: Varieties of the Liberal Tradition in American Political Culture, 1600–1865. By Brent Gilchrist. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 314p. $80.00.

In Cultus Americanus, Brent Gilchrist provides an intellectually challenging account of American political culture. In so doing, Gilchrist staunchly defends the notion of a liberal consensus in American political life. However, this is not merely a restatement of Louis Hartz's rightly famous theory. Instead, we are offered a nuanced and thoughtful analysis of how American culture delineates a “matrix” that reflects the interaction of myth, religion, and ideology. The author goes to great lengths to demarcate the differences and connections among these rich and powerful concepts. In the process, he does an admirable job articulating a fundamental liberalism that is at work in America. Thus, he offers a powerful development of the Hartz thesis and takes on those critics who see that theory as fraught with failings. Indeed, Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals (1997) and Cultus Americanus provide the materials for a high-minded debate about how American politics was shaped in the past and how our history continues to shape the present. This book will be of interest to those interested in American political history and thought, religion, and politics, as well as to theorists in general.

What's the Beef? The Contested Governance of European Food Safety. Edited by Christopher Ansell and David Vogel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 389p. $67.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.

Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. By Sheila Jasanoff. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 374p. $49.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

In 1999, a truck dumped four tons of genetically modified soybeans on the doorstep of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Operated by Greenpeace UK, the truck carried a banner that read, “Tony, don't swallow Bill's seed.” The action occurred amidst a rising chorus of voices critical of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Ultimately, the public's wholesale rejection of GMOs prompted Britain's major food retailers to remove all GMO products from their shelves and forced the British government to restructure its food safety apparatus completely.

Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy: Liberty and Power in the Early American Republic. By Mark E. Kann. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 348p. $50.00.

Mark Kann's book is an astute, lucid, and valuable contribution to the critical analysis of the history of imprisonment and, most importantly, the relationships between liberty and punishment, the persistent gulf between those classified as deserving or undeserving, and the ideological assumptions and cultural practices regarding gender, race, and class that sustain those distinctions.

Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good. By Mary M. Keys. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 270p. $70.00.

In her book, Mary M. Keys makes significant contributions to our understanding of Aquinas, Aristotle, and theories of the common good. Keys makes two fundamental, persuasive arguments: 1) Aquinas's account of the will's natural inclination to virtue (and consequent sociability) and his development of a theory of natural law are deliberate philosophical attempts to correct weaknesses in Aristotle's account of the common good; and 2) in correcting and improving upon Aristotle, Aquinas “is consciously laying new, deeper, and broader foundations for ethics and political science” (p. 111), foundations which are—or should be—of considerable value to contemporary secular (as well as Christian) political thought. Specifically, she argues that Aquinas's new foundations address a persistent difficulty with traditional common good theory: “how to elaborate a ‘unitary but complex’ account of the human good that does justice to the many worthwhile ways of life and the multiple genuine goods that people seek by nature and by choice” (p. 14).

Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggles in American Politics. By Earl and Merle Black. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. 286p. $26.00.

Earl and Merle Black have delivered another insightful book that describes contemporary politics by examining historical trends. They argue that the proper understanding of American politics—from election to policy—requires a regional analysis. In their own words: “Important geographical divisions, we believe, are at the heart of the very close national battles between Democrats and Republicans. American politics becomes much more interesting—and easier to understand—when the party battles are examined region by region” (p.xi). Their five regions are the South, Northeast, Pacific Coast, Midwest, and Mountains/Plains.

Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment. By Bryan Garsten. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 290p. $45.00.

Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion is an engaging and original work of wide appeal. Garsten analyzes the formation of an antirhetorical tradition in modern political thought, investigates its rival classical tradition of rhetoric and judgment, and explores the promise that a politics of persuasion offers contemporary democratic societies.

Patriotism and Other Mistakes. By George Kateb. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 464p. $35.00.

Readers of George Kateb's previous work will recognize the author's familiar voice in this collection of papers from the last 17 years or so. By turns earnest (“I know that I preach,” [p. 12]) and cavalier (“I know I am being arbitrary,” [p. 125]), Kateb is intent on plumbing the pernicious irrationalities that seduce us away from his favored stance, democratic individuality. His approach is literary, freewheeling, elliptical. Theorists fond of analytic philosophy will be impatient with how blurry and peremptory his claims can sound. Still, his is an instructive sensibility.

Decision Making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. By Frank B. Cross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. 288p. $22.95.

Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History. By Keith E. Whittington. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 320p. $35.00.

Much research aimed at explaining decision making on the courts has often been narrowly focused on either the law or judicial preferences as the primary or even sole factor in determining outcomes on our nation's courts. Frank Cross's and Keith Whittington's new analyses of the judiciary contribute to a growing body of literature that seeks to connect these two explanations, and to add an equally important third focus: the institutional arrangement of the separation of powers system. These efforts further illuminate our understanding of the judiciary and its decisions. Although the subject matter of these two books is quite different, essential to both is the authors' consideration of the courts as they shape and are shaped by the other institutions and institutional actors in our complex political system.

Musical Democracy. By Nancy S. Love. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 168p. $50.00.

On the first page of her book, Nancy Love asks, “how might musical practices further our understanding of democratic politics?” This is a permutation of the vast question of culture and politics investigated with regularity since the Sophists (“court music” in Egypt, Persia, and China suggest it is even older). In Musical Democracy, focus on the aural/oral excludes comparable topics concerning representation, iconography, idolatry, and so on. This moves the inquiry away from critical perspectives of modern philosophical aesthetics (from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten to Walter Benjamin). The author makes instead a not unprecedented but important turn to rhetoric.

Politics as Religion. By Emilio Gentile. Translated by George Staunton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 194p. $39.50.

The projected secularization of the world—or the suggestion that religion should have as little as possible to do with economic, social, and political life in industrial societies—is not happening. First, the traditional faiths have shown a surprising vitality in reclaiming their respective space in the secular, public square. It is evident that faith movements cannot always be caged in pejorative stereotypes; secularization is not a linear process, and religious beliefs continue to shape ordinary people's lives and to have a say in public affairs. The increasing politicization of religion in many parts of the world has brought with it the challenge to engage Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as essential allies in the modern struggle for human rights, social justice, and enlightened thought. Second, the importance of religion in modern democracy and mass politics can be gleaned in an ex adverso kind of way: Even when rejecting the mission of religion to give meaning to human existence, many politicians have found it useful to appropriate for themselves the trappings of religious symbols and rituals. This sacralization of politics has sought to interpret and to define human existence by subordinating the destiny of individuals and the collectivity to a supreme entity, liberal democracy, or totalitarianism.

Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women. By Lori Jo Marso. New York: Routledge, 2006. 240p. $ 95.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This elegant book explores the memoirs, private correspondence, and other self-revelatory writings of prominent feminist thinkers with a view to disclosing their struggles to live feminist lives while contending with conventional gender norms. The socially constructed standards of proper femininity that encumbered these women are what the author terms “the demands of femininity.” According to Lori Jo Marso, the demands of femininity vary “in terms of race, class and historical and cultural location” (p. 30), but notwithstanding their malleable content, these normative representations constitute constraints to which all women are subject under patriarchal conditions.

The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America. By Ben A. Minteer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 272p. $28.00.

Accounts of the history of American environmental thought typically characterize it as riven by a divide between a utilitarian preoccupation with “use” and a more romantic focus on “preservation.” Many contemporary environmental philosophers have fixated upon a similar debate between “anthropocentrism” and “ecocentrism.”

The Trouble with Passion: Political Theory Beyond the Reign of Reason. By Cheryl Hall. New York: Routledge, 2005. 192p. $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

This book argues for passion in politics: not just calm passions, that is, sentiments or interests, but “enthusiasm” and “explicit appreciation of and commitment to something valued” (pp. 12, 7). Liberal theory, Hall argues, is wrong to regard political passions as inherently suspect, intolerant, and “opposed to both reason and justice” (p. 3). Passion in politics is inescapable, for passion and reason are not opposed but interpenetrating aspects of human thought and motivation. Beyond this, however, some passions are politically salutary: They inspire worthy political actions, especially movements for social change.

The Impact of Women in Congress. By Debra L. Dodson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 295p. $95.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This book provides an important contribution to the emerging literature on the impact of women legislators, particularly women in Congress. Following in the tradition of Sue Thomas (How Women Legislate, 1994), Cindy Simon Rosenthal (Women Transforming Congress, 2002), and Michelle Swers (The Difference Women Make, 2002), Debra Dodson explores the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women. Using a modified garbage can model (Michael Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olson, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” Administrative Science Quarterly 17 [1972]: 1–25) as her theoretical framework (p 32–33), Dodson argues that this relationship will be probabilistic rather than deterministic. Her study asks the question: What factors mediate the relationship between the presence of more women in Congress and enactment of policies supporting women's issues?

The Logic of Democracy: Reconciling Equality, Deliberation, and Minority Protection. By Anthony McGann. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 256p. $65.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Deliberation, Social Choice, and Absolutist Democracy. By David van Mill. New York: Routledge, 2006. 200p. $110.00.

Social choice theory examines group decision making from axiomatic and mathematical perspectives. It often produces results that have troubling implications for democracy. Consider Kenneth Arrow's general possibility theorem (see Social Choice and Individual Values, [1951] 1963). It shows that no social welfare function can simultaneously satisfy several apparently reasonable postulates involving rationality and ethical norms. When this theorem is applied to the study of politics, it challenges the legitimacy of all collective decision-making procedures. No voting system can guarantee rational social preference orderings through ethical means when there are more than two voters and more than two alternatives in the choice set. Majority rule, for example, has been subject to criticism because it cannot ensure rational outcomes. Rationality, in this case, is defined in terms of transitivity. When majority rule fails to produce transitive collective preference orderings—a condition that is commonly called cycling—the outcomes may be interpreted as arbitrary or incoherent.

Writing the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Pragmatism and Historical Inquiry. By Jonathan B. Isacoff. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 216p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Jonathan Isacoff argues that American political scientists, and in particular international relations researchers, should be much more self-critical about their historiography. Political science, he claims, is afflicted by a stubborn “positivism” that leads case-study, qualitative researchers (like Kenneth Waltz) and large-n, quantitative researchers (like J. David Singer) alike to treat historical data as if they are value-free and unchanging. This historiography blinds researchers to the normative and theoretical biases of their theories—especially a bias toward system-structural explanations for international conflict—by screening out data that contradict those theories. Moreover, subsequent revisions to the historical record undermine their findings, leaving research that is empirically disengaged and irrelevant to political experience.

Republicans and the Black Vote. By Michael K. Fauntroy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007. 180p. $49.95.

Race, Republicans, and the Return of the Party of Lincoln. By Tasha S. Philpot. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 211p. $65.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

These two books examine important themes in one of the more dynamic aspects of American party coalitions: the complex relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party. Michael Fauntroy examines broadly the relationship's ebb and flow, emphasizing the policy, political, and rhetorical elements of the party's conflicted orientations toward the black electorate. Tasha Philpot develops a general theory of changes in party images, testing it in light of recent GOP efforts to appear more racially diverse.

Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy. By Thomas Pangle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 200p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. By Steven B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 268p. $32.50 cloth, $18.00 paper.

The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. By Catherine and Michael Zuckert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 320p. $32.50.

I think that the biggest obstacle standing in the way of non-Straussians who wish to approach the work of Leo Strauss and render justice to his quite remarkable achievement is comprised of his followers and disciples, especially those who claim to derive their inspiration from him for their intellectual work in public policy or their active involvement in its administration. Almost all of them are unmistakably conservative, indeed, sometimes reactionary; typically hawkish and empire-minded in foreign affairs; and generally disposed to discipline the waywardness of the masses. I must emphasize that the obstacle I have in mind is not posed by Straussians who work in political theory; from them, non-Straussians will often learn or at least gain the benefits of a bracing encounter. The talent of Strauss is not polemical, despite his numerous comments on his times. We non-Straussians should minimize these comments so that we may separate Strauss from his sympathizers who figure in public life, whether in office or behind the scenes or in the public press. To be sure, thinkers bear some responsibility for what their devoted activist admirers make of them. But Strauss is vastly more than his topicality; and his value will survive the accidents of politics that have permitted a few to write about public affairs and act in public life under his direct or indirect tutelage.

Reflexive Democracy: Political Equality and the Welfare State. By Kevin Olson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 288p. $35.00.

Recent work on the welfare state has largely focused on the role of welfare programs in state economies—their redistributive functions and their role in managing incentives for work. Reflexive Democracy marks a much-needed shift in focus, offering an analysis and then a reconstruction of the relationship between welfare programs and citizen participation.