One does not have to be a natural scientist or a science writer to appreciate the possible benefits of biotechnology for the developing countries, but one cannot be a social scientist without being apprehensive about the costs and unforeseen consequences these almost miraculous advances may entail. In the past few decades, it has become obvious that development or modernization is much more complex and harder to achieve than was often supposed when decolonization inspired hope that economic growth could be achieved rapidly, and that with it would come social as well as material progress. In most, though not all, of the developing countries, sustained and balanced economic growth has so far not been attained, for reasons that include inability to control population growth, poor climate and soil conditions, inadequate energy resources, and—no less important—the difficulty of transforming and adapting traditional cultural values and social structures. These deeply entrenched social conditions often frustrate efforts of reform, whether they are aimed at increasing average per capita income or at assuring fair distribution of the benefits of economic growth.

Since the onset of the Cold War, and particularly after both superpowers began to amass large arsenals of nuclear weapons, military planners in the East and West have encouraged efforts to develop defenses against nuclear attacks. Both sides have made effective use of “passive” defenses, such as the hardening and dispersal of weapons systems likely to be the prime targets of a preemptive strike and the provision of shelters for command authorities and vital communications centers. Both sides have also tried, but with far less success, to develop “active” defenses, but against the varied and daunting challenge of modern strategic systems, all such efforts so far have been largely in vain, even though they have been undertaken at considerable expense and with great technical sophistication. The main reason is that every advance in active defense has been offset by compensatory improvements in offensive forces.

Alexis de Tocqueville is not easily characterized as either a liberal or a conservative. In this respect he resembles Edmund Burke. Both may be best understood as “liberal conservatives”—figures who straddled both camps. On a number of specific dimensions, including their attitudes toward aristocracy, colonialism, property, rationalism, the tyranny of the majority, pluralism, and the meaning of history, they are remarkably similar. Their thinking foreshadows the rapprochement between liberals and conservatives in the latter half of the twentieth century reflected in the prominence of right-of-center parties and leaders and in the work of such political thinkers as Raymond Aron and Michael Oakeshott.

Continuing philosophic doubt concerning the moral foundations of human rights threatens to undermine the growing belief in liberal democracy. This doubt has its roots in the reaction against the Enlightenment and is evident even in John Rawls's retreat from the apparent universalism of his theory of justice. There are good grounds, however, for regarding the traditional Western belief in moral and political autonomy as a sound basis for human rights and liberal democracy.

Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference. By Davina Cooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 246p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

In the Encyclopedia (1751–65), the Chevalier de Jaucourt observed that while “natural equality” is the moral foundation of liberty, “absolute equality” in society is a “chimera” of fanatic minds. In the social state, he explained, distinctions and subordinations are necessary, including those attached to “differences of condition.” Later, as the old order yielded to democracy, Tocqueville discerned an inexorable tendency toward the leveling of those very differences. Would it end, he wondered, in a new Caesaristic despotism in which an atomized populace, deprived of the protection of intermediate powers, is enslaved by an all-powerful ruler? In modern societies considered free, the march toward equality of conditions has stopped well short of this dead end. But how does the modern conception of equality square with ways of living that challenge prevailing social norms? That is the subject of this inquiry, which, somewhat ironically, aims to restate from a leftist perspective the case put by the Chevalier de Jaucourt for accepting some such differences.