Animated by an “American identity crisis,” Eldon Eisenach seeks to comprehend a “deep disjunction in political culture and values between elite national institutions and the aggregate of local cultures and values.” National elites, in particular, many in the “American university,” offer America-in-crisis “a highly abstract democratic Universalism” which “denies American nationality.” At the same time national representatives of “local cultures and values” attempt to “ground national identity and national policy in a `conservative Restoration' by bringing back to prominence and honor the value-sustaining institutions of civil society” (p. 99). Both “Universalists” and “Restorationists” fail in their respective tasks, and American identity, Eisenach argues, is threatened in the process. While “Universalism,” often couched in the “neutral” language of “juridical democracy,” is in some ways built upon the New Deal “liberal establishment,” it has, he insists, not been able to articulate policies that speak to this “older, ruling coalition” and so poses “above the battle” (pp. 102–3). Restorationists suffer from another malady. Though winning elections, they have proved incapable of establishing “national authority” and so equally incapable of reestablishing an American national identity.

The 2001 American Political Science Association meeting was alive with the Perestroika controversy. It has been more than a quarter-century since the profession last saw such ferment. If one compares the two episodes, there is strong similarity in the level of organizational activity; but when it comes to methodological issues, the differences are pronounced. The earlier period was characterized by a rich discussion; today there is comparatively little. And this relative silence has been the norm for a good number of years.

A generation ago, Sheldon Wolin evoked an image of the vocation of political theory as an alternative to the behavioral program of theory and scientific inquiry that had come to dominate political science. His call also summoned those who believed that, in the midst of the political turmoil of the 1960s, the mainstream of the discipline had become politically quiescent and, at least by its inaction, even implicated in the political crises of the time. Intellectual and ideological choices were, indeed, involved, but Wolin was implicitly also giving voice to a professional identity for a large segment of the academic subfield of political theory that had been evolving for at least three decades. His articulation of the vocation was, however, as mythical as the method of science to which much of political science had subscribed, and these hegemonic legitimating myths ultimately could neither withstand critical scrutiny nor suppress the latent differences within each.

The hope of ordering collective purposes through rational speech stretches back to the earliest historical attempts at theorizing political practice. Public reason has been a particularly prominent theme in political theory for the last decade and is central to discussions of deliberative democracy. Recent work on public reason is motivated by the belief that contemporary political procedures lack adequate norms and spaces for public engagement in intelligent, informative civic debate sensitive to deep differences in values. Fred Frohock's thought-provoking book covers much familiar ground, yet it also contributes a number of key ideas and a dose of realism to a research program now in a stage of self-criticism.

This book is part of a much larger collaborative project devoted to “Otherness, Identity, and Politics.” It explores an aspect of identity theory, about which the author makes two uncontentious claims: first, that identity is socially and politically constituted and, second, that identity politics predate 1989. By delimiting a theme in Western political thought and history that constructs the “I” and the “thou” in terms of good and evil, the book identifies and delimits a tendency to portray the Other as an enemy, evil incarnate, and dehumanized by a combination of religious and political ideas. The tradition of understanding the Self and the Other as the vehicles of good and evil is reproduced in thought, speech, and action and constitutes a continuous tradition from ancient Iranian Zoroastrianism, through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

This detailed historical study focuses on Protestant natural law theories in the early German Enlightenment (explicitly excluding the French and British sectors) and traces their influence, or fate, through Kant. Despite its title, it is more than a specialist tome devoted to an historically isolable development, and it is not merely a subsidiary, underlaborer's attempt to recount the prehistory of Kant's achievement. Rather, by tracing several important background currents through the period concerned, Hochstrasser illuminates the odd historical fact that German enlighteners at the end of this span knew or thought so little of those at its beginning. The central topics are eclecticism; the so-called “histories of morality” that were part of its self-conscious legitimation method; the rationalism-voluntarism split in early modern natural law; and the associated distinction among moral philosophy (ethics), natural (positive) law, and international law (ius gentium) that developed out of these debates.

Rousseau is known as both exalted democrat and father of totalitarianism. Steven Johnston's book demonstrates that the two interpretations cannot be separated. Johnston evaluates Rousseau's texts hoping that the “costs of Rousseau's virtuous republic, many of them hidden or muted, can be reckoned alongside its accomplishments” (p. x.). Not surprisingly, Rousseau's accomplishments are called into question. This elegantly written and forcefully argued book claims that order is the essential ingredient in Rousseau's recipe for democracy. Developing the argument via Nietzsche's tragic perspective, Johnston wonders aloud whether all attempts at democracy will collapse under the weight of their internal contradictions.

Happiness, unhappiness, and depression are not the usual foci of political science or economics, but Robert Lane demonstrates their importance. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies is a worthy companion to and extension of Lane's earlier work, especially The Market Experience (1991). Lane employs psychology, genetics, evolutionary theory, and medical research to convince economists and democratic theorists that biological and psychological research can enrich their often unrealistic assumptions about well-being and behavior. He argues that in affluent societies there is growing unhappiness, growing depression, and declining marginal utility of income to produce happiness. These are accompanied by mistrust and increasing political negativity, which further undermine happiness. The dominant Western image of individualism ignores that people often do not know what makes them happy, which undermines prevailing market and democratic premises (p. 284).

Jacob Levy argues that the multiculturalism of fear is meant to supplement, not displace, the multiculturalism of rights. Running against many recent celebrations of ethnic identity, Levy is wary of the effects that ethnic (which includes national) identity can have. Too often ethnic politics are cruel and conflictual. Levy is skeptical that a world where everyone's ethnic identity is politically recognized can be peaceful and harmonious. Yet neither can we simply wish ethnic identity away. While cultural identities are socially constructed, they are very much part of our world and so they must be dealt with. “The multiculturalism of fear,” Levy writes, “does see ethnic communities as morally important and distinctive, not because of what they provide for individuals, but because of what they risk doing to common social and political life” (p. 33).

Communitarianism has long suffered from vagueness: what is community? What about it, if anything, is necessary or good? What are the boundaries of morally relevant communities? Often those who attend to the claims of community tender these questions with too little rigor. Not so Andrew Mason. His new book has three main purposes: to map the meaning of community, to assess the claims of political community in relation to communities below the level of the state, and to evaluate the claims of political communities with respect to the global community. In addition to a number of rigorous and thoughtful clarifications and a comprehensive overview of recent debates between liberalism and its critics, the book offers arguments of its own which are often more bold than its judicious manner suggests. It deserves careful attention by all who have attempted to sort through the tensions between liberalism and community.

Jamie Mayerfeld has written a wise and morally sensitive book that he hopes will compel readers to take seriously their “prima facie duty to relieve suffering” (p. 9). Insofar as “attention to suffering has been a casualty of a long series of attacks on hedonistic utilitarianism” (p. 3), Mayerfeld offers a thorough account of the nature of suffering and argues for the view that its badness imposes a universal prima facie duty for people to try to avoid suffering. Since the purpose of moral inquiry is “to identify wrong kinds of behavior so that we can avoid them” (p. 7), Mayerfeld, not himself a utilitarian, follows a catholic approach and skillfully draws upon arguments from utilitarians, deontologists, Aristotelians, hedonists, psychologists, and philosophers to support his moral intuitions.

Justice and Punishment begins promisingly. Matt Matravers notes that the question—“Why and by what right, do some people punish others?”—is “not a new question. The problem of punishment is one of the most enduring in political theory” (p. 1). But over the years, punishment theory has been separated from moral and political philosophy more generally. The upshot is that both punishment theory and moral and political philosophy have suffered. To put things right, Matravers avers, any adequate theory of punishment “must be rooted in a broader moral theory, and that broader moral theory will be … constructivist” (p. 1). It is the task of his book to explore why and how this is so.

David McNally styles this book as beginning in a polemic and ending in a “materialist approach to language” much indebted to the German critic Walter Benjamin. The charge is that “postmodernist theory, whether it calls itself poststructuralism, deconstruction or post-Marxism, is constituted by a radical attempt to banish the real human body—the sensate, biocultural, laboring body—from the sphere of language and social life” (p. 1). By treating language as an abstraction, McNally argues, postmodernism constitutes a form of idealism. More than that, it succumbs to and perpetuates the fetishism of commodities disclosed by Marx insofar as it treats the products of human laboring bodies as entities independently of them. Clearly irritated by the claims to radicalism made by those he labels postmodern, McNally thinks he has found their Achilles' heel: “The extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse, is the ‘other’ of the new idealism, the entity it seeks to efface in order to bestow absolute sovereignty on language. To acknowledge the centrality of the sensate body to language and society is thus to threaten the whole edifice of postmodernist theory” (p. 2).

From the title one might expect a sequel of sorts to the author's highly regarded On Nationality (1995). The volume is both less and more than that, although mostly more. David Miller has long been critical of the Anglo-American liberal approach to political theory and has advanced his criticism along a number of fronts. To oversimplify, Miller is not a liberal, he is a civic republican; he is not a universalist liberal, he is a nationalist; he is not a liberal democratic, he is a deliberative democrat; he is not an economic liberal, he is a social democrat.

Hannah Arendt's so-called nostalgia for the Greek polis stands at the core of most readings of her work, especially in debates between proponents of her concept of action as agonistic and interpreters of this concept as associational or communicative. Many feminist theorists, participatory democrats, and liberals share an aversion to Arendt's philhellenism and criticize her machismo, her apparent neglect of Athenian injustice, and her “republicanism,” with its potential for endangering individual autonomy. Similarly, Arendt's emphasis on the political relevance of stories and her self-acknowledged storytelling have also given rise to extensive interpretations. Arendt scholars, in line with many contemporary political theorists, reject the totalizing and universalizing power of theory and argue that human plurality is better expressed in stories than in abstract homogeneous theory. According to them, by exemplifying or illuminating general intuitions and propositions, storytelling concretizes the understanding of politics. They suggest that stories allow the political thinker to be critical and situated. Moreover, stories take into account forgotten parts of history, or forgotten parts of the political sphere, often denied in theories that cannot accept difference and contingency.

Sciabarra's book attempts to conjoin dialectics with libertarianism to produce total freedom. He is led to this seemingly odd conjunction by a concatenation of concerns. He sees dialectics as the logic or method most attentive to contexts and libertarianism as a radical political ideology of freedom. He sees the opportunity to free dialectics of its totalitarian (including Marxist) overtones and libertarianism of its apparent irrelevance, which is the more galling now that once-popular Marxism has failed as radical social theory. He wishes to combine his own academic appreciation of the dialectical elements of Marx's method with his long-standing love of libertarian ideas. Primarily, he hopes to expand libertarian thought from a narrow concentration on economic self-interest and the state as repressive to a broader concern with the cultural, social, and historical preconditions of freedom, and he sees dialectics, with its emphasis on contexts, dynamism, and relations, as a method that can be appropriated by libertarians to realize these broader concerns and to propound a comprehensive and radical social theory. No longer need libertarian thought be seen as atomic individualism struggling for freedom against state violence; building on dialectical thinking shorn of its Marxist content, libertarians can embrace whole individuals living in rich social environments that can carry out, without violence, the social powers that the state has illegitimately appropriated.

Writing on the outskirts of Hollywood, where my college campus episodically turns into a set location for the filming of West Wing or, most recently, Pearl Harbor, I have picked up a few pointers about the biz just by keeping my ears perked. “Talk to me, babe! Luv ya. My agent will get back to you on that. What's my motivation?” And so on. Clichés and formulas do matter, however, in such a large-scale collaborative enterprise because often they provide the underlying rules of the game. The first rule of screenwriting, any insider knows, is that you must hook your reader on page one. If you do not grab your audience right from the start, even before the opening credits roll, the rest of the spec script will surely get tossed, and the movie will never get made.

Mark Smith has written a dense, challenging, and provocative analysis of three contrasting approaches to power and how they are shaped by different philosophies of social science. This is not a book for the theoretically faint-hearted or meta-theoretically challenged. Indeed, those who pick it up expecting to find a simple guide to recent state theory will be badly disappointed. For it does not provide a survey or critique of state theory as such. Nor does it provide a new theory based on self-evident assumptions about the nature of the state and politics. Instead its author offers a sustained meta-theoretical commentary on the intellectual conditions of possibility of serious engagement with the state and state power from a broader, societal perspective. Smith attempts this because he discerns a crisis in the taken-for-grantedness of the typical objects of inquiry of such disciplines as economics, politics, and sociology. He claims that their respective objects are increasingly seen as complex, uncertain, and contested spaces and that these disciplines themselves have become disoriented. Inter alia, this requires a rethinking of the state as an analytical object. In pursuing this meta-theoretical project, Smith draws heavily on the “critical realist” position (initially known as “transcendental realism” or “critical naturalism”) of the British-based philosopher of science, Roy Bhaskar. Thus his analysis begins with some crucial distinctions among empiricism, idealism, and realism and explores their different ontological, epistemological, methodological, and substantive implications for the analysis of social relations. It then addresses the philosophical and theoretical development of three very different theorists of power, who are taken as interesting if not wholly representative exemplars of empiricism, idealism, and a mixture of idealism and realism, respectively. Smith concludes with some of his own meta-theoretical comments on state theory.

Of the many endeavors in the last three decades to restate the central aspirations of liberalism, this important work is one of the most balanced, nuanced, and cogent. Part of its success lies in its willingness to stretch the boundaries of what we call liberalism, but in doing so, Spragens only brings liberal theory into better alignment with intuitions and sensibilities underlying liberal practice.

Jacqueline Stevens grapples with the meanings of political society and affiliation and how we think about what constitutes family, nation, ethnicity, and race. How do we come to know ourselves and others through these political artifices and naturalized identities? Her project is to trouble our complacencies and make visible the arbitrary practices that produce the inclusions and exclusions of the “state-nation” (p. 43). She examines democratic, communitarian, and liberal theories of political society and finds little attention there to the problem of membership and the ways groups are constituted. Birth, the family, ethnicity, and national origin are undertheorized or considered to derive from natural, ancestral ties. Stevens addresses these inadequacies, and superbly reveals the centrality of birth and kinship practices to political societies.