This is a very smart book that comes to some very questionable conclusions. Glen Newey takes issue with contemporary liberal philosophy on two counts: Not only does it fail to address the “real world of politics,” but it actually aims at the suppression of politics. Included in the list of those guilty of suppressing politics and failing to provide “philosophical reflection on politics—at least not on politics as it is” (p. 15) are John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Brian Barry, Joseph Raz, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Will Kymlicka, Amy Gutmann, and others. Clearly, a great deal hangs on what Newey means by “politics as it is,” and I will say at the outset that I found his definition wholly unconvincing. But along the way, Newey says some very intelligent things about the leading lights of liberal political philosophy. The book has two layers. In the first, Newey takes up particular philosophical arguments embedded in various liberal theories. At this level he shows us his considerable analytic skills in carefully argued, if somewhat technical, investigations of philosophical weaknesses. So, for example, his discussion of moral internalism and its problems is very good, as is the discussion of neutralist side-constraint as an insufficient reason requirement. Anyone interested in really looking under the hood of contemporary liberal philosophy can get something out of this book. But when Newey moves to the second layer, he tries to tie all his various arguments together under one big claim: the rejection of politics claim, and this is problematic.

These two books by leading U.S. philosopher Martha Nussbaum take up the issue of women's inequality in a U.S. and international context. Both are hard-hitting, in Nussbaum's characteristic take-no-prisoners style, setting out a clear case that women endure ignominious oppression in the name of culture and religion, and that feminists and liberals alike should tolerate it no longer.

The life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi continues to be a reproach to ideologies and dispositions that produced the horrors of the twentieth century. But his complex legacy suffers from a paradox. His ideas appear to be both necessary and improbable at the same time. To many, Gandhi's thought becomes even more relevant in a context in which the vision of modernity that he critiqued so powerfully has triumphed, the violence that he stood against has become an ineliminable feature of political life, and the practice of freedom has come to be dissociated from the exercise of virtue. But the very same historical momentum that inspires the authors in this volume to turn to Gandhi also seems to make Gandhi an even more distant and unlikely figure for our times. This volume, a product of sincere and careful scholarship, is largely an effort to keep Gandhi's thought alive. It focuses on the central category of Gandhian thought, swaraj (self-rule). Anthony Parel's essay usefully distinguishes between four meanings of freedom for Gandhi: freedom as national independence, freedom as freedom from poverty, political freedom for the individual, and freedom as the capacity for self-rule or spiritual freedom. This typology will provide a helpful initial orientation to readers unfamiliar with Gandhi's thought.

Liberal multiculturalism contains a tension. It values culture as the source of individual identity and development, and seeks to accommodate cultural differences by granting the relevant groups special rights, exemptions, and, in some cases, varying degrees of autonomy. However, it also values basic individual rights that some of these groups might deny or severely curtail, especially in relation to women. Liberal multiculturalism is therefore faced with a conflict between what it takes to be two important goods, or what Ayelet Shachar calls the paradox of multicultural vulnerability. If it privileges cultural differences, it compromises and even jettisons its liberalism; if it privileges individual rights, it ceases to be multicultural. Is there a way of conceptualizing and organizing society such that both these goods can be realized? Shachar thinks there is, and devotes her thoughtful and well-argued book to outlining and defending it.

Michael J. Shapiro reflects on “the politics of the family” from the point of view of an outlook on political life inspired by “genealogy,” an approach originated by Friedrich Nietzsche and refined by Michel Foucault. Although Shapiro would not characterize it quite in these terms, that outlook is roughly as follows. Ideas about political regimes are typically governed by the values of unity, agreement, or consensus. But that is highly misleading. A consideration of how political concepts and institutions come into being (that is, a genealogy of the political, as opposed to a theorization of it) leads to a picture in which disagreement and conflict are as central as consensus and harmony. Words like “authority,” “democracy,” and “freedom” are continually redefined as people put them to different uses in changing contexts of conflict and interpretation. What they are thought to mean at any given moment will be an incomplete, contested, and on the whole incoherent echo of actual usage. Individuals, too, shape their outlooks by means of clashing and contradictory desires, norms, and perspectives. For this reason, the goals and beliefs that move any actually existing political regime (and any given individual) will typically be ill defined, ambiguous, and amenable to additional equivocation and conflict.

A venerable question has once again become a dominant issue confronting public law scholars. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, ostensibly democratic states have emerged throughout the areas formerly designated as the Second and Third Worlds. The establishment of these new regimes has invariably been accompanied by the promulgation of written constitutions. For public law scholars, this sequence has posed the question of the utility of written constitutions: What, if anything, do these documents add to nation, state, and society?

When is freedom possible? In the silence of a shared heartbeat, when desire is not consumed by the wounds of social forces, hubris, or the historical memory of such violations. According to Cynthia Willett, the locus of that desire is in the socially embedded person. She argues that crimes against the individual as a social person constitute political wounds that should be healed via emancipatory love (p. 214).

The publication of Dana Villa's Socratic Citizenship coincides accidentally with recent events that have shaken and solidified American society. Yet the issues his book addresses are directly relevant to how a democratic society confronts such challenges. Villa investigates various forms of democratic citizenship and argues for a kind of civic activity that has been dangerously obscured within modern debates about democracy. Particularly within periods of regime stress, liberalism's good citizen who votes, pays taxes, and plays by the rules seems underequipped to meet the commitments the times require. The framework of the communitarians or the civic republicans wherein one discovers the value of “a shared commitment to something bigger than one's self… [endorsing a] life of community or civic engagement” (p. x) seems more helpful. Villa's concern is that this view of citizenship too easily enlists the community's members in projects of collective affirmation, while ignoring the importance of a critical rationality that asks skeptical questions about the content and the moral consequences of a politics driven by a “newly rediscovered sense of political membership” (p. x). In response, he rediscovers the possibility of a form of citizenship that places “intellectual doubt at the heart of moral reflection,” demanding not commitment but conscientiousness (p. xii). It is this form of citizenship that seems most compatible with moral individualism, and thus with the basic premises of democracy. He plausibly finds the origin of this kind of citizenship in the practices of Socrates as they are portrayed within the early Platonic dialogues, Apology,Crito, and Gorgias.

John von Heyking's inquiry into Augustine's politics of “longing” is a provocative contribution to the growing genre of “Augustine redux” literature written to resonate with our fin de siècle sensibilities. These valuable pearl-diving expeditions bridge scholarship and literate conversation, careful textual exegesis and political advocacy. Not surprisingly, they also illustrate the challenges of writing for multiple audiences with mixed messages. This work enters an already crowded field of recent crossover texts with Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo (2000), Gary Wills's Saint Augustine (1999), Hannah Arendt's Love and Saint Augustine (1996), and Jean Elshtain's Augustine and theLimits of Politics (1995). A further trip back in time to the Cold War and the politics of “realism” turns up Herbert Deane's The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (1963), another retrieval project written to persuade as well as inform. And this is just a very short list.

A play on the legendary statement attributed to Stalin—“When I hear the word ontology I reach for my gun”—captures the anticipated reaction of some to Stephen White's provocative work. It would be better if these readers were slow to draw. For White demonstrates that, wittingly and unwittingly, poststructuralist, postmodernist, and other theoretical types who eschew foundationalism nevertheless commit themselves to ontologically “sustained” (prefigured) ethical and political “affirmations” (judgments, values, insights, theories). He documents their “turn” to a new form of ontological justification. “Weak ontology” produces strong political theory, an important discovery for all theorists who are also post-Stalinists.

The rise of partisanship in Congress has been one of the most conspicuous features of American politics during the 1990s. David Rohde's (1991) Parties and Leaders in the PostReform House demonstrated that much of this rise in partisanship could be attributed to the convergence in congressional voting between Northern and Southern Democrats. Since the New Deal, the latter had traditionally allied with Republicans on many issues in a bipartisan conservative coalition that generally dominated both Houses of Congress and constrained liberal legislative outcomes. While Rohde and Barbara Sinclair (Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking, 1995) have emphasized how institutional rule changes in the 1970s created a much greater incentive for party loyalty among member of Congress, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which enhanced partisanship in Congress has been driven by “bottom-up” electoral imperatives. Stanley Berard's new book on Southern Democrats in the House convincingly shows that major changes in the southern electoral environment were equally important in promoting convergence in the voting records of Northern and Southern Democrats, leading to a more partisan House overall.

When first presented with this book, I confess to harboring two strong reservations—both, as it turns out, badly misplaced. First, perhaps because the author is a widely known American who was once the president of Harvard and, therefore, spent considerable time among movers and shakers, I was prepared for a broad, rambling, and discursive book peppered with anecdotes, personal musings, name-dropping, and disconnected prescriptions for change. Second, no doubt because I have never been fond of the overarching evaluation exercises that so enthrall foundations, when I read in the introduction that this volume on government had been commissioned by three major foundations, I feared I was about to read another governmental report card accompanied by the obligatory and often vacuous justification for the grade assigned in each area.

Dennis Chong proposes an account of how to forge a merger between rational choice and sociological explanations of the role of norms, values, and symbols in politics. The core idea is that norms and values (not just self-interest) are indeed essential for understanding political choice (as a sociologist would expect), but that norms and values have to develop. Those in place today change over time. And rational choice enters in guiding that evolution.

Sally Cohen has written an important and comprehensive analysis of child-care policy in the United States, challenging the conventional wisdom that no such federal policy exists and that child care is not a major government priority, in contrast to other democratic welfare states (e.g., the Scandinavian countries and France).

By the 1970s—and, some might argue, a decade earlier—America had shed its urban persona and had metamorphosed into a suburban nation. Yet in comparison with research done on cities and urban politics, little work had focused on this transition and ensuing suburban politics. Juliet Gainsborough's work seeks to reduce this deficiency by examining the suburban movement, its motivations, and their linkage to political behavior. Thankfully moving beyond previous discussions of mortgages and work commutes, the author narrows the focus of this short monograph to how living in the suburbs affects voter choice and policy preferences by altering the decision-making calculus (p. 8).

Carolyn Heinrich, Laurence Lynn, and Carolyn Hill are public management and policy scholars who puzzle over the workings of government. Their efforts aim not only to add to our understanding of these workings but also to provide a template for future study. The first volume by Heinrich and Lynn is designed around a set of working papers originally introduced at a conference of government and policy scholars in May 1999 at the University of Arizona, and are oft referred to as “the Arizona papers.” The publication is the result of a research project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to study best practices in government management. The second volume authored by Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill argues for a theoretical framework to guide future research.

George A. Krause has undertaken a statistical analysis of the relationship between the president and the Congress and the enforcement activities of two regulatory agencies: the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice for the years 1949–92. He finds that the president and the Congress often influenced each other, but neither of the political branches succeeded in dominating the bureaucracies. These findings are consistent with the interpretations of presidential-congressional-bureaucratic power of most journalists, sociologists, historians, political scientists, and public administration scholars.

Interest in strategic approaches to an understanding of judicial decision making, including the implications of the separation of powers (SOP), has grown dramatically in recent years. Unfortunately, almost all the research on these SOP interactions has been limited to those involving the U.S. Supreme Court. Laura Langer's book provides a refreshing alternative to the exclusive Supreme Court focus by examining the significance of separation of powers concerns for the exercise of judicial review by state supreme courts.

James March, Martin Schulz, and Xueguang Zhou address the fascinating question of how rules evolve in a complex organization with a unique data set. Stanford University was founded in the decades before the turn of the last century. The authors searched and coded a vast Stanford archive of materials on rules related to student contact, the student honor system, faculty appointment and tenure procedures, faculty governance, and finally rules related to accounting, purchasing, and other administrative functions of a university. They are able to examine questions concerning the external and internal stimulants to rule creation, change, and suspension. No other book equals this one in regard to the breadth of the questions asked and the mode of analysis.

Given the recent events in the realm of presidential policymaking over the past decade, Kenneth R. Mayer has produced a timely book chronicling the use of executive orders that will be of considerable interest to political scientists, historians, legal scholars, and journalists alike. Existing research on the topic of executive orders has been largely addressed by constitutional legal scholars who possess little interest in emphasizing a generalizable understanding of this tool of executive authority. In recent years, a small yet growing-body of political science research has tried to obtain a social scientific–motivated portrait regarding the institutional and behavioral dimensions of executive order issuance by presidents. Mayer makes a strong case for using new institutional economics (NIE) as a “way of making sense of the wide range of executive orders issued over the years” (p. 28). The NIE theoretical approach that Mayer applies to presidential leadership takes a long-term view, compared to other works on presidential leadership, by positing “that presidents can achieve substantive (policy) results not simply by giving commands, but by creating and altering institutional structures and processes” (p. 29).