Professors Schauer and McAdams both seek a more or less sweepingly general theory of why we obey the law. But we should split, not lump. There are different reasons different actors in different social settings obey different laws–not only, but not least, out of regard for democratic decision making.

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.

Time for a true confession: I'm skeptical of predictions in social and political life. Talk of causal generalizations and Hempel's covering laws strikes me as science fiction and fantasy in drag; talk of the unfolding of the immanent logic of modernity makes me dyspeptic. I usually think that structural considerations are context, not cause, and that weird combinations of stray contingencies explain what happens. Worse, now I'm called on to predict how political theorists will be discussing democracy ten years hence. Images of herding cats and Brownian motion come to mind. Nonetheless, duty calls. I dust off my crystal ball and discover it has three channels.Don Herzog teaches law and political theory at the University of Michigan (dherzog@umich.edu).

“Our public sphere, which should have displayed and preserved the grandeur and beauty of our civic ideals and moral excellences, is instead inane and vacuous when it is not utterly mean, ugly, or indecent” (p. 4). Troubled by the tawdry nonsense circulating in the public sphere—and she wrote before learned enquiries into whether the President's genitals had any distinguishing characteristics—Rochelle Gurstein turns to history to understand how we arrived at such a sorry destination. Hers is a tale of decline: The Victorians “we moderns” so routinely deride for their Puritanical repressiveness understood full well that certain things have to remain private, even shameful, in order to retain their sacred value-and in order to protect a public sphere worth having.