“Totalitarianism” is a powerful word rich in historical associations and rebounding in current political usage. The four books under review reflect both the term's range of usage and the enduring fascination with the phenomena it described. Totalitarianism's initial terminological siblings, “nazism” and “communism,” are applied chiefly to the original historical subjects that generated them. A close political cousin, “fascism,” long ago escaped its close ideological family and is applied to everything from brutal police to road hogs. In contrast, “totalitarianism,” formerly confined to a narrow political as opposed to a cultural context, is suddenly in play. In recent issues of the New York Times, David Brooks excoriates Iraqi proponents of “totalitarian theocracy” (5/16/2004); President Bush deplores the terrorists’ “totalitarian ideology” (5/29/05), and Condoleezza Rice abhors Iran as a “totalitarian state” (5/29/2005). A Central Asian despot is characterized as a “fragile totalitarian” in a feature by David E. Sangler (5/29/2005), and the group of army officers (the Military Council for Justice and Democracy) that overthrew President Maouya Sidi Ahmed Taya in Mauritania in August 2005 defend their decision “to put an end to the totalitarian practices of the deposed regime.” Totalitarianism is back, but what does it mean?

Careful inspection of state-created institutions and of interactions that surround them may explain many ambiguous details about domestic politics in the Arab world. Advancing this broad message in Structuring Conflict in the Arab World, Ellen Lust-Okar provides analytical tools and case studies that explain the abilities of incumbent elites to use different structures and rules to control their opponents. She tackles gaps in available research affiliated with the conventional wisdom that has failed to explain the absence of unrest in countries experiencing prolonged economic crises or to clarify the strengthening of regimes in countries promoting political liberalization and inclusion of reformist oppositions. This work uses a formal model of politics to study “how state created institutions shape government-opposition relations” (20). It also reviews literatures ranging from modernization, the Third Wave, liberalization, and rational choice theories to the politics of protest and theories of social revolution. To build on earlier models and point to new directions in research on government-opposition relations, Lust-Okar uses Robert Dahl's classic work and diagram of the paths to polyarchy (37).

America's Miracle Man in Vietnam presents a prime example of the controversial new cultural trend in U.S. diplomatic history. On the surface, the author's depiction of the process whereby Ngo Dinh Diem became America's candidate to head the new country of South Vietnam is familiar (see, for instance, George Herring, America's Longest War, Temple University Press, 1986, 50–69). Echoing others, Jacobs argues that the U.S. promotion of Diem ultimately led to severe setbacks in Southeast Asia. So blatant were Diem's flaws, Jacobs insists, virtually any prescient observer could have predicted his unsuitability to lead nascent South Vietnam. Diem had no political base, was “undeniably an autocrat,” and appeared to be an eccentric loner by virtually all accounts (38). Once in office, Diem predictably launched his “reign of terror and error,” alienating legions of his countrymen and strengthening his opposition, which emerged officially as the National Liberation Front in 1960 (17).

Augusto Pinochet's unexpected 1998 London arrest provided a rare opportunity for a trial of a former head of state outside his own country for crimes committed while in office. The drama and visibility of the arrest and subsequent trial also prompted a wave of scholarly research on the case and its consequences. Among a crowded field, Naomi Roht-Arriaza's book stands out for doing much more than simply recounting the Pinochet story or discussing its significance for international law. Her meticulously researched book goes beyond a simple focus on the Pinochet case per se, to artfully weave together the series of interactions that helped the case possibly transform transnational global justice. In the process, she provides insights for students of law, democratization, human rights, and international relations.

Legal philosophy as a discipline, was, at best, a marginal topic of philosophical inquiry before H. L. A. Hart turned his attention to it. It may be said of Hart that no philosopher after Hart's work in the philosophy of law could ever reasonably regard legal philosophy as marginal again. Before Hart, legal positivism had, of course, its important advocates, but Hart's The Concept of Law showed that its earlier proponents had been wedded either to a command theory of law that was clearly indefensible (Hobbes, Bentham, and Austin) or a conception of norms that was inadequately defended (Kelsen, Hagerstrom, Alf Ross). In the place of the foundational concepts of command or norm, Hart rigorously defended a sociologically informed account of the operation of legal systems (marked by certain indicia of observance and acceptance) and an illuminating distinction between primary and secondary rules that explained important distinctions in law, for example, between the criminal and civil law and the constitutional law establishing the scope and limits of the competence of officials. On this basis, Hart offered an account of law as a subset of social rules, marked by its monopoly of coercive power over a well-defined territory and the finality of its authority over matters involving the scope and limits of such power. Since truth claims about law are made on the basis of ascertaining such rules, determined by observance and acceptance, such claims in law truthfully can be and are made without knowing whether such rules are substantively just according to a philosophically defensible theory of justice. For this reason, Hart argued that legal positivism is the better philosophy of law, since law can be known without knowing its justice, and positivism makes clear the responsibility of independent ethical criticism of law's sometime amorality and immorality. No one after Hart wrote about these matters, would ever think of law in the same way, and the case for legal positivism, as a philosophy of law, had been placed on an altogether sounder philosophical basis.