Jens Bartelson's book is a history of the futility of the attempts of Anglo-American political scientists to come to grips with the concept of the state. The evidence it provides of this futility is overwhelming, and it should make chastening reading for anyone still engaged in the enterprise. The concept of the state lies at the foundations of modern political science, but Bartelson shows that it also lies at the heart of attempts to emancipate political science from its foundations. As a result, this is a book of paradoxes: The various critiques of the state that Bartelson describes, each characteristic of some of the most assertive branches of the discipline—including pluralism, Marxism, behavioralism, and structuralism—have served only to reinforce the centrality of the state to our understanding of politics, by variously reasserting the hold of the concept over our political imaginations. The author lays out these paradoxes end to end, so that their cumulative effect is to leave the reader wondering at the doggedness of so many political scientists in persisting with the problem, and at their dogged willingness to repeat history by attempting to ignore it.

In an era of increasing economic and social globalization, has it become more intelligible to think of ourselves as citizens, not of this or that finite political community, but of the world? What would thinking and acting like a world citizen entail? And is it morally progressive to think about citizenship in global rather than national terms?

In this book, Fred R. Dallmayr again provides his characteristic meditations on the writings of other scholars, which illuminate an issue, in this case, globalization. He examines the process of globalization along two axes: “localglobal and self-other trajectories” (p. ix). The book is organized in two corresponding parts. The first proceeds thematically, including essays on globalization, cosmopolitan democracy, “Asian values” and global human rights, and fugitive democracy, culminating in Dallmayr's response to Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). In the second part, Dallmayr provides close readings of Calvin Shrag on “transversal communication,” Bernhard Waldenfels on “asymmetrical interlacing,” Jacques Derrida on “friendship,” Paul Ricoeur on “little ethics,” and Martin Heidegger on “Macht,” “Machenschaft,” and “creative praxis.” Although the two parts seem to mirror the trajectories Dallmayr identifies, he wonders in his conclusion whether their order should be reversed, placing the more personally and philosophically demanding selfother relations first. To do so might better illustrate his central thesis, “that globalization cannot properly be achieved except laterally: that is, through the cultivation of multiple selfother and cross-cultural encounters” (p. 211).

In one of the first recorded acts of its kind, the newly restored Athenian democracy of 403 B.C.E. adopted an amnesty for collaborators from the deposed oligarchic regime. Such political forgiveness was, according to Aristotle, a marvel of statesmanship, presumably allowing Athenians to recover a measure of civic unity (though not to Socrates' benefit). With the recent emergence of powerful human rights organizations, the option of amnesty has suffered from theoretical disrepute, though not practical disuse, and the terminology of forgiveness has acquired a maudlin air.

The state has always held a sort of fascination for political theorists, despite the fact that consensus and clarity regarding some of its central elements, both historical and conceptual, have always eluded us. Daniel Engster has provided an intriguing look at each of these two problems: the historical development of modern state theory, and the basic conceptual building blocks of state legitimacy (legislative sovereignty, executive prerogative, regulatory powers, and rationalistic rule). With an eye toward an improved understanding of how the state, and more specifically state theory, developed, Engster revisits a number of early modern French and English theorists and actors. Such an understanding, he suggests, will shed light on “the contemporary crisis of the state” and help us “recognize some of the necessary steps for reforming and restoring legitimacy to contemporary politics” (p. 12).

Kate Langdon Forhan has written an elucidating and thought-provoking book that explores the political relevance of the writings of Christine de Pizan, a fifteenth-century French writer. She clearly establishes the purpose of the book: “My goal is to outline in a systematic and comprehensive way the political theory of Christine de Pizan, in part to address the puzzle of her thought [and] to situate her ideas within the history of political ideas in general” (p. vi). She remains true to this goal throughout the work. Forhan cogently explains why Christine de Pizan's literary accomplishments should be appreciated beyond the disciplines of women's studies and French literature and, in particular, why her work needs additional attention from political theorists. In doing so, she presents sufficient historical details to set a proper stage against which Christine de Pizan's political theory may be understood, without burying the reader in minutiae and details that not only rob an academic tome of any literary vibrancy but also hinder the reader's ability or desire to follow an author's argument.

The work of Jürgen Habermas seems to have a rather ambiguous relation to its origins in Frankfurt School critical theory. On the one hand, Habermas portrays his own work as vindicating the Frankfurt school's goal of finding a location for rational autonomy against the various forces of instrumental reasoning that treat all agency from the vantage point of means– ends reasoning. On the other hand, Habermas insists that he can only vindicate that goal by divesting himself of the Frankfurt school's preoccupation with finding a form of consciousness undistorted by reified social relations. In place of the critique of reification and false consciousness, Habermas offers us a critique of distorted communication built on academic disciplines well outside the dialectical theories of Theodor Adorno or Max Horkheimer: Specifically, he derives his theory of undistorted communication from an account of the presuppositions of speech acts derived from analytic language philosophy, and he inserts this notion into a theory of society based upon the systems theories of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. This ambiguity has spawned the most disparate commentary. One strand of interpretation seeks to assess the relation of his theory of communicative reason to the original Frankfurt school project of criticizing reified consciousness. A completely different strand of interpretation, rooted in analytic moral philosophy, seeks to draw out the implications of his theory of communicative reason for finding a procedure to produce moral agreement. The two books under review are fine exemplars of each of these directions, although this short review can hardly do justice to the quality of argument and rigor of Joseph Heath's book.