Searching for references to Niccolò Machiavelli in the voluminous writings of James Madison is not an especially rewarding exercise. There are precisely three of them, if we are to believe the available indexes, and all are mere notes, acknowledging the authority of the great Florentine but in no way suggesting that he exerted any lasting influence on Madison. Machiavelli first shows up in Madison's adolescent “commonplace” book, where the young Virginian dutifully recorded the opinion of the Cardinal de Retz that most of Machiavelli's readers did not understand him and that others took him “to be a great Politician for no other reason but for having been Wicked” (PJM 1:13). Machiavelli next appears years later, as one of many distinguished writers whose works Madison recommended to the Continental Congress for purchase in 1783 (PJM 6:84). Finally, among the notes that Madison prepared during the controversy over the Bank of the United States in the early 1790s, we find “Machiavel” declaring that the Bank of St. George at Genoa would gradually gain possession of that commercial republic (PJM 13:365). That is the sum of it – hardly the makings of a distinctive Machiavellian interpretation of Madison.

Evidence of direct influence aside, however, there are certain obvious affinities between the two thinkers. Madison is perhaps the outstanding representative in the founding generation of that species of realism and prudence that Machiavelli so signally introduced into political philosophy.

Iraq seems to have returned to relative stability for the moment. The militia of Moqtada al-Sadr has withdrawn from cities in the south. The power play by the radical cleric did not herald the broad Shiite uprising that many feared, and that was played up by the American press. But his mini-putsch gave the U.S. a glimpse at the abyss in Iraq.

Since the conclusion of the war, the Bush administration has shown a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations. The post-war looting was explained away as the natural and understandable exuberance of a newly-liberated people. (Now some Coalition officials suggest that a crackdown would have sped the reconstruction.) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied the obvious reality of a guerrilla resistance and compared it to urban street crime in the United States. Every piece of good news has been hailed as turning the corner, even as the insurgency has remained stubbornly strong.

It is easy now to pick at what seem to have been errors in the occupation. There probably weren't enough troops. The administration probably wasn't determined enough to get international help, even on its own terms – although this would have had to happen in an environment poisoned by U.N. fecklessness and French bad faith in the run-up to the war. The administration clearly wasn't ready for the magnitude of the task that rebuilding and occupying Iraq would present.

This volume is not a history of the war in Iraq, nor is it a systematic exploration of the issues raised by the war. It contains no government documents or presidential pronouncements, and there is not a single public official among its contributors. Though a diverse collection of opinion pieces and journal articles, it does not pretend to cover the full range of views on the American effort to overthrow and replace the regime of Saddam Hussein. It is a sampling taken exclusively from writers who belong, by self-identification or by the character of their arguments, to the political right. It is partial, partisan, incomplete – and yet it represents what is perhaps the most interesting and consequential foreign-policy discussion now going on in the United States.

This is true, in the first instance, because the levers of American foreign policy are in the hands of a Republican administration whose outlook has been shaped decisively by certain currents of conservative thought. George W. Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq did not spring directly from the pages of the Weekly Standard, Commentary, or the Wall Street Journal, but the influence of these and like-minded publications on the actions and rhetoric of the administration is unmistakable. The Bush Doctrine, with its combination of military assertiveness and democratic idealism, may have been declared in the wake of 9/11, but the intellectual groundwork for it was laid years before by the editors, pundits, academics, and think-tank denizens who call themselves – and are now widely recognized as – neoconservatives.

Researchers in a diverse variety of fields often need to know about individual-level behavior and are not able to collect it directly. In these situations, where survey research or other means of individual-level data collection are infeasible, ecological inference is the best and often the only hope of making progress. Ecological inference is the process of extracting clues about individual behavior from information reported at the group or aggregate level.

For example, sociologists and historians try to learn who voted for the Nazi party in Weimar Germany, where thoughts of survey research are seven decades too late. Marketing researchers study the effects of advertising on the purchasing behavior of individuals, where only zip-code-level purchasing and demographic information are available. Political scientists and politicians study precinct-level electoral data and U.S. Census demographic data to learn about the success of candidate appeals with different voter groups in numerous small areal units where surveys have been infeasible (for cost or confidentiality reasons). To determine whether the U.S. Voting Rights Act can be applied in redistricting cases, expert witnesses, attorneys, judges, and government officials must infer whether African Americans and other minority groups vote differently from whites, even though the secret ballot hinders the process and surveys in racially polarized contexts are known to be of little value.