Liberty Beyond Neo-Liberalism: A Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalizing Age. By Steven Slaughter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 272p. $75.00.

Mainstream accounts define globalization as two connected processes. The first is the relentless increase in the interrelation of economic actors. The second is growing recognition of the superiority of “market forces” over state intervention in the economy. Free markets are seen as “natural” forces or “iron laws” of economics that only the economically illiterate or perhaps the insane would limit. Among the many impressive contributions made by Steven Slaughter is the distinction between what he calls “globalization” and “economic globalization.” The former, he argues, is the growing interdependence of economic actors that appears to be an inherent aspect of capitalist development. The latter, however, denotes the contingent victory of free market ideology, or “neoliberalism” over other forms of liberalism. For Slaughter, economic globalization is not the inevitable victory of “natural” and efficient markets against the state. Economic globalization is a form of “governance” that involves state policy, relations between states, and norms and everyday practices. This governance was the creation of state policy and international agreements. Slaughter's argument constitutes an updating of Karl Polanyi's famous claim in The Great Transformation (2001) that nineteenth-century “lasissez-faire” economics was an invention.

The New Environmental Regulation. By Daniel J. Fiorino. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. 290p. $23.00.

The subject matter of this book is not exactly what its title suggests. The author's attention is limited to industrial pollution regulatory policy in the United States, rather than focusing on environmental regulation more broadly. And the “new” regulation it touts is not really all that new. Daniel Fiorino does not describe and analyze something that has been invented recently, say, in the last five to 10 years, nor does he propose something wholly original or novel that has never before been tried or imagined. Many of the regulatory tools that he lumps together under the label of “new” can be traced back decades, some to even before the modern federal pollution regulatory era began in 1970, and so many of them are as old as or older than much of his “old” pollution regulation. Fiorino uses the adjective “new” because it is an inherently appealing, future-oriented label whether one is selling soap, politicians, or ideas. Although “old” hints at something worn out, no longer desirable, and perhaps near death, he does not want to bury the old regulation: “Designing and implementing a new regulation does not mean that we should do away with the old one” (p. 190). By using “old” as his label of convenience, he at least sidesteps an ideological minefield by avoiding the also-loaded label “command and control,” which is often used by political critics of adversarial, directive regulation in the public interest.

The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility. By Linda C. McClain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 392p. $45.00.

Linda McClain's excellent book provides a comprehensive account of the political issues concerning families in United States public policy and a coherent perspective from which to evaluate proposals for change in these policies. Writing as a liberal feminist, McClain has an approach that will not please everyone, but since her starting point takes families seriously as political units, no serious discussant in these debates can ignore this book.

The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative. By Leslie Paul Thiele. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 334p. $80.00.

Paul Thiele asks the right question: How should we think about political judgment and, more generally, practical wisdom, understood as an intellectual faculty or virtue that is different from, or at least irreducible to, faculties of logical or scientific reasoning but that remains, nonetheless, a decidedly rational mode of thought in its own right? Such a question defines, arguably, the project of the sixth book of the Nichomachean Ethics. And Aristotle's failure to provide there a fully satisfying account of the nature of phronesis—something different from sophia on the one hand, from a merely nonrational knack on the other—establishes the problematic for virtually all subsequent approaches to judgment.

Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion. By Marlene K. Sokolon. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2006. 227p. $38.00.

The thinking about emotion has thrived over the last decade; in the most various disciplines, from neuroscience to rhetoric, philosophy to anthropology, we are in the midst of a renaissance in the study of emotion. The result has surely been a more accurate account of cognition, persuasion, and group dynamics. Political science has been a bit slower to awaken. Happily, with Aristotle for inspiration, we have more new work to digest. In this book, Marlene Sokolon continues to reflect on just what Aristotle has to contribute. Several books have already worked this area, and so Sokolon ends up reiterating parts of this literature, but the book serves as an excellent resource for surveying the politically relevant emotions discussed in the Rhetoric and for encouraging conversation between current empirical political science and political theory.

Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency. By Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 282p. $28.00.

One of the cornerstones of Woodrow Wilson's policy agenda, even before he formally sought the presidency, was transparency. To neutralize corporate misbehavior, for instance, he called for “turn[ing] the light” on corporations: “They don't like light. Turn it on so strong they can't stand it. Exposure is one of the best ways to whip them into line.” Although the authors of this superb work do not acknowledge Wilson's part in the evolutionary line of transparency policy, they do show by means of thorough and enlightening description and analysis the fruit finally borne of ideas like those Wilson espoused. Indeed, the authors tell a story of policy design that demonstrates the continuing value of careful legislative craftsmanship and policy refinement over time, based on feedback from administration and enforcement. It is a tale of effective legislative governance, particularly at the national level, that far too many American citizens, and even political leaders, believe is impossible or at least unlikely anymore.

Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. By Nadia Urbinati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 326p. $45.00.

Nadia Urbinati begins her new book, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, with the observation that while we call certain contemporary western governments “democratic,” any historical glance at their political institutions will as readily show that they were “designed to contain rather than encourage democracy” (p. 1). She takes as one “main point of reference” (p. 9) for her argument, Bernard Manin's claim in The Principles of Representative Government (1997) that the practice of contemporary democracy is still constrained by the fact that “there has been no significant change in the institutions regulating the selection of representatives and the influence of the popular will on their decisions in office” (p. 229, n. 2). For many, this view of unchanged institutions simply reflects either the more defensive observation that modern governments continue to need Schumpeterian neutralizing restrictions on participation or, conversely, the critical claim that modern democracy continues to fall short of an ideal (or perhaps idealized) Athenian standard of direct self-rule. On both of these views, Urbinati notes, representative democracy is seen as an oxymoron (p. 4). However, she quite forcefully disagrees, and what is more, she believes both the times and contemporary democratic theorizing are on her side.

Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy. By Diana C. Mutz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 184p. $60.00 cloth, $20.99 paper.

Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life. By Andrew J. Perrin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 208p. $45.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

Deliberative democracy is no longer reserved for the theorists. Empiricists now want a part of the action. With their various tools, social scientists are testing and considering both deliberative democratic institutions (e.g., juries, town hall meetings, deliberative polls, and other fora for citizen discussion) and the preconditions of context and character that theorists have proposed are necessary to make deliberative democracy work. Political scientist Diana Mutz and sociologist Andrew Perrin have written new books purporting to bring empirical work to bear on the claims of deliberative democratic theory. Both books are short and illuminating, though their postures as serious challenges to deliberative democratic theory are overstated and potentially misplaced. This failure to undermine the enterprise of deliberative democracy, however, does not prevent each from making a serious contribution to helping us understand how citizens engage in political debate and discussion among themselves in their everyday environments.

Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens. By Arlene W. Saxonhouse. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 246p. $70.00.

The subject of this book is parrhêsia, free or, as the author sometimes prefers, frank speech. Through close readings of stories by Plato and Homer, she identifies free speech with shamelessness and self-exposure, claiming that “[s]hame and free speech represent opposing points in the political order that play off one another in the construction of a stable democratic polity” (p. 8). However, the ambitions of this book go well beyond the historical account of what happened in Athens. Rather, the author argues “there is a congruence between the Athenian version of freedom of speech, of philosophy, and democracy, all exhibiting a common hostility to hierarchy and to history or the past” (p. 36).

The Transformation of Plantation Politics: Black Politics, Concentrated Poverty, and Social Capital in the Mississippi Delta. By Sharon D. Wright Austin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 247p. $65.00.

The title of Sharon Wright Austin's new book is intended to be ironic. As the author persuasively demonstrates, there has been no transformation of politics in the Mississippi Delta, and the area's wealthy white elite continues to dominate politics there. The lack of significant change is disappointing, as the Delta's poverty rate is more than three times the national average, and four counties in the area have higher infant mortality rates than some Third World countries.

Distributive Justice and Disability: Utilitarianism Against Egalitarianism. By Mark S. Stein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 316p. $50.00.

In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls viewed the interests and concerns of people with disabilities as beyond the pale of justice, at best requiring that ad hoc or “special” measures be added onto policies designed for “normal” people. Happily, these days theorists of distributive justice treat disability not as an outlier but as a litmus test of theoretical adequacy. In his superb book, Mark Stein follows this path, but with the specific purpose of pitting utilitarianism against egalitarianism. It is when these competing theories deal with disability, he argues, that we notice how much they diverge, and more to the point, how and why it is that utilitarianism is superior.

Devolution and Black State Legislators. By Tyson King-Meadows and Thomas F. Schaller. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. 302p. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

It has been nearly a half century since the Civil Rights era, and there are today hundreds of black state legislators in the United States. Until now, however, no comprehensive examination of their contemporary legislative influence has been conducted. The need for such a study is clear, and Tyson King-Meadows and Thomas Schaller's research—part of the SUNY Series in African American Studies—is rooted in an interesting set of political trends. Since the Reagan Revolution of the early 1980s and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, devolution (or new federalism) has pushed much power and many resources (though some would argue not enough resources) to the states. At the same time, since the early 1980s the number of black state legislators has increased substantially. The authors want to know whether these two trends have resulted in greater real (as opposed to symbolic or descriptive) representation of African American interests in state policy. They suggest that the answer generally is that it has not.

Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique. By Lisa H. Schwartzman. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006. 224p. $45.00.

In this book, Schwartzman argues that liberalism's methodological individualism and its neutrality through abstraction from social contexts and relations of power render it a questionable approach for those who would challenge the oppression of women or, by extension, of other traditionally subordinated groups. She instead advocates a feminist methodology based on ways that individuals are often embedded in a social context characterized by power and domination. She would not have us jettison concepts such as rights, equality, liberty, and autonomy, but would have us reformulate them by attending to perspectives and contexts that help us to avoid the pitfalls of liberalism.

Natural Law Liberalism. By Christopher Wolfe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 268p. $75.00 cloth.

Although natural law theory and liberal political philosophy signify two realms of thought typically regarded as at loggerheads, Christopher Wolfe's provocatively titled book not only argues for their theoretical compatibility but also sets forth a new synthesis intended to furnish the basis for an inclusive American public philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Notwithstanding the fact that modern liberalism fought its way into historical existence as a radical alternative to political excesses sanctioned by traditional versions of natural law theory, Wolfe maintains that the political character of this initial confrontation has given rise to unnecessarily narrow and antagonistic understandings of the relationship between them. Natural law and modern liberalism are in fact products of two richly varied and complex intellectual traditions. By disentangling the essential features of natural law theory from the historical circumstances within which it developed, and by setting out the full array of political philosophies that constitute the tradition of liberalism, Wolfe advances a serious and thoughtful account of the way in which the objective moral principles of natural law can and ought to be reconciled with modern liberalism's distinctive commitments to liberty and equality. By challenging the underlying premises of contemporary debate about the proper relationship between religion and politics, he opens a new and constructive path for future dialogue among often polarized and combative participants.

White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. By Kevin M. Kruse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 352p. $35.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The South is a region of many myths, and Kevin Kruse takes on one of the most durable of them: Atlanta as the “city too busy to hate.” Kruse finds that Atlanta, like many other southern and northern cities in the postwar era, was a city in which “race and residence stood at the forefront of [Atlanta's] racial politics” (p. 42). He traces the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Mayor William Hartsfield's biracial, elite-controlled regime to manage the struggle between whites and blacks over urban space. White flight, the decades-long movement of whites to the Atlanta suburbs, was not only the result of this struggle over space; it was also the source of a new form of southern white conservatism based on whites' resentful exit from the urban South. For political scientists, this book is a reminder of the “long civil rights movement,” that began in the 1940s, before the Brown decision, and extended throughout the 1970s. At the local level, the Civil Rights movement was a struggle over politics that earlier political scientists would be quick to understand and appreciate: a struggle over who gets what, when, where, and how. By taking an in-depth yet rigorous look at southern politics that goes beyond the limitations of National Election Study data or roll-call votes, the book provides valuable historical context to recent works on the transformation of southern politics.

America's Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception. By Wayne E. Baker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 328p. $18.95.

Wayne Baker's America's Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception offers a recent addition to a growing literature in political science that examines the perception and, perhaps, reality of the polarization of American politics around cultural and moral issues. In this book, Baker sets out to provide an empirical examination of three aspects of America's perceived crisis of values. The first of these is the trend hypothesis: In recent decades, America has experienced a significant decline in its commitment to traditional moral values. The second is the comparison hypothesis: Moral values in the United States have declined relative to most other nations. Third and finally is the distribution hypothesis: Americans have become increasingly polarized in their commitment to traditional moral values.

When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security. By Edwin Amenta. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 352p. $35.00.

Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America. By Frances Fox Piven. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 200p. $21.95 cloth.

Do movements matter? In particular, can they extract policy concessions from state actors? And if so, how? These questions have been the focus in recent years of a burgeoning and exciting literature. For Frances Fox Piven, the answer to the question “Do movements matter?” is an emphatic yes. Indeed, she argues that the principal surges in egalitarian social change in American history can be traced directly or indirectly to the intervention of disruptive protest movements. For Edwin Amenta, the answer is also yes, but in a more qualified fashion. Together, these two works are brimming with insights regarding how movement impact might be understood.

The Moral Rhetoric of American Presidents. By Colleen J. Shogan. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. 230p. $45.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

This work offers a relevant, theoretically rich discussion of rhetorical strategies pursued by presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush. Colleen Shogan's accomplishment is striking not only because it is the rare presidential study that accounts for all the nation's chief executives but also because it exists at the intersection of two important, and in some respects competing, theories of presidential power, Stephen Skowronek's (1993) The Politics Presidents Make and Jeffrey Tulis's (1987) The Rhetorical Presidency. Like Skowronek, Shogan recovers the premodern presidencies, which are too often ignored, and links them to their successors by focusing on comparable political environments. This allows for fascinating and surprising conclusions across eras. Like Tulis, she focuses on rhetoric as a strategic tool that, on the one hand, can help presidents overcome constitutional limitations but, on the other hand, can raise public expectations beyond reasonable bounds. Also like Tulis, she finds Woodrow Wilson to be an important transitional figure, albeit in a more limited way. Far from introducing moralizing to presidential rhetoric, Shogan demonstrates that Wilson was the first to engage heavily in moralizing without reference to a specific policy goal, a tactic continued by Wilson's successors.

The Liberal Conscience: Politics and Principle in a World of Religious Pluralism. By Lucas Swaine. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 240p. $35.00.

In this book, Lucas Swaine argues that modern liberalism has failed in its efforts to provide adequate justification of liberalism's political legitimacy to religious adherents. This may seem a surprising contention, given the vast literature that attempts to do precisely this, reaching easily as far back as John Rawl's Political Liberalism if not to the constitutive works of Hobbes and Locke. In particular, according to Swaine, contemporary liberalism has failed because it does not offer arguments that can appeal to religious believers, preferring instead a standard of “reasonableness” that cannot assail the faith commitments of religious believers.

Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after Catastrophic Events. By Thomas A. Birkland. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006. 240p. $44.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Lessons of Disaster is a natural follow-up to the author's previous book, After Disaster (1997), which examined the extent to which disasters and accidents influence policy agendas within relevant domains. Lessons of Disaster is built on this previous work but focuses specifically on whether or not disasters, as focusing events, induce policy learning. The author differentiates between simple policy change and actual policy learning by defining learning as a process by which policy actors incorporate new information and insights revealed by a disaster and purposefully apply it to the design of more appropriate or effective policies.