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.

Body/Politics is a well-researched book that brings together a significant range of topics to explicate the connections between changes occurring with the biological body and within body politics. The theoretical structure of the book is Marxist/feminist with heavy reliance on critical theory for Thomas Shevory's legal analysis in some of the chapters. According to the author, the central thesis of the book is that “the process of technological change will be creatively destructive, opening new avenues for equality, diversity, self-expression, resistance to hierarchy and control, while also offering new means for domination, exploitation, oppression, and dehumanization” (p. 3). He thus rejects the more extreme stances of the “technoprogressives” who see nothing but good and the “technophobes” who see nothing but bad coming from these developments. He argues quite convincingly that the historical processes we face through these technological changes are dialectical and thus subject to human political intervention. In other words, if we so choose, we do have the capacity to shape technologies, though it is far from clear that we now actually have the will to do so.

The edited volume Politics, Philosophy, Writing attempts to contribute to the reinterpretation of Plato's dialogues by clarifying some issues they addressed. In each chapter the author attempts to expand on specific mystical, poetic, or political themes in individual dialogues that have not previously received enough treatment. For example, Leon Craig elaborates on the politic elements of Plato's Meno, a dialogue usually considered a primarily epistemological work. This reinterpretation of Plato tries to overcome some of the recent misuse of Plato by modern and postmodern thinkers that has resulted in Plato being reduced to “a footnote in the works of other philosophers” (p. 1). The authors of Politics, Philosophy, Writing succeed in raising some interesting issues in the dialogues and refuting several prevalent misconceptions as they detail Plato's attention to caring for souls.

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?

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.

Interpreting the entire body of work of a political theorist as prolific as James Madison is a dicey matter. Perhaps more than any other American of his intellectual stature, James Madison can be viewed as shifting ideological positions throughout his long and active life. Reputable scholars such as Marvin Meyers (1973), in his Introduction to The Mind of the Founder, Ralph Ketcham (1971), in James Madison: A Biography, and Douglas Jaenicke's (“Madison vs Madison: The Party Essays v. The Federalist Papers”), in Maidment and Zvesper's (1989) Reflections on the Constitution, have argued with some effectiveness that it is difficult to garner a consistent set of philosophical positions throughout Madison's life. Other scholars, however, such as Lance Banning (1995), in The Sacred Fire of Liberty, Drew McCoy (1980), in The Elusive Republic, and Richard Matthews (1995), in If Men Were Angels, make a case for a more consistent Madison who, although altering positions on specifics, remained remarkably dedicated to a set of core philosophical positions.

Like Socrates, Thomas Smith's Aristotle practices philosophy as a way of life. The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's protreptic and therapeutic introduction to this way of life. It is not a didactic treatise but a teaching that aims at the improvement of its readers' souls. It therefore begins from reputable opinions (endoxa) and employs dialectical arguments—not the best arguments simply, but the best available for improving the lives of Aristotle's audience.

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).

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).

Rarely does a political science book undertake the simultaneous task of contributing to both scholarship and activism. This edited volume explores the theory and practice of social movements, examining “success” stories, such as the struggle for women's suffrage in the United States, as well as “failures,” embodied in this case by an ill-conceived attempt to carry out a charity program in early 1990s Russia. This lens on the lived realities of activism makes it an instructive and unusual book. The volume also discusses how feminist theory and practices influence social movements and power relations. The explicit intention of the editors is to contribute to theory-building, as well as to help design more effective activism. To that end, the contributors include social change activists as well as academics, several of whom combine both identities.

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.

These books have similar aims and are written from a similar perspective. There are, however, important differences in content, emphasis, and form. Norma Thompson explicitly seeks to show that the Western intellectual tradition is not misogynist. One reason that it is not, she urges, is that it is not univocal. Within the tradition one can find several very different views of the character and relation of men and women. Introducing the volume he edited, Eduardo Velasquez states, “This collection of essays does not purport to give an answer to the question of what are ‘nature’ and ‘woman,’ at least not in an immediate, definitive sense. Rather, the comprehensive aim here is to reopen questions as to the ‘nature of nature,’ the ‘nature of woman’ with consideration given to the consequences of pairing some understanding of ‘nature’ with that of ‘woman’” (p. xi). A collection of essays necessarily contains a variety of voices.

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).

It is a testimony to his greatness as an author that Tocqueville has emerged in a new light with each of the more significant events of the twentieth century: the New Deal, the Cold War, the Post-War years. In the last decade, in particular, American scholars of all political persuasions have seen in Tocqueville a point of departure for their consideration of the rudiments of robust democracy and the associational life it seems to require. Democracy perhaps being the only genuine alternative for the future, American scholars have tried to learn from Tocqueville what might be necessary to make it thrive, in places where the political alternatives have been exhausted and the rhetoric, but not yet the substance, of democracy now prevails. In a race to establish democracy before the rhetoric of democracy becomes a hollow caricature, Tocqueville studies have had an urgency about them that the study of other canonical figures in the history of modern political thought—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc—simply have not. We shall see, of course, whether the Post-War years were merely a hiatus and whether we more properly live in an Inter-War period, perhaps in perpetuity. We shall see, as well, whether the recent military confrontations in Afghanistan are able to be contained under the category of politics rather than of religion. Whatever the future holds, however, we can be sure that the writings of Tocqueville will not be exhausted by the events whose outlines we cannot yet foresee. Tocqueville had a great deal to say about war and, most readers may be surprised to discover, a few very interesting and provocative things to say about Islam as well. But these matters, as I say, must wait for the future.

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.

In a book published almost a decade ago, Ronald Beiner complained that contemporary liberalism suffers for its neglect of the Big Questions traditionally addressed by political philosophy. Preoccupied with narrowly conceived and highly formal questions of (procedural) justice, liberalism had no advice to give about how one should live. (See Ronald Beiner, What's the Matter with Liberalism, 1992.) John Tomasi's provocative new book takes this complaint seriously and attempts to remedy the defect in contemporary liberalism by moving it “beyond justice” to address the normative concerns of persons earnestly striving to lead good and worthwhile lives.

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.

This is an excellent collection of essays about the political thought of Hannah Arendt. Its editor, Dana Villa, has assembled a first-rate group of scholars, many of whom are already well known for their contributions to Arendt studies. The volume is distinguished by the high quality of its contributions and by the effort of so many of its contributors to go beyond standard lines of exegesis to raise interesting questions and to press the boundaries of Arendt commentary. Arendt's work has received a great deal of attention from political theorists in recent years. The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt makes clear the richness of her thinking, the range of her concerns, and the ability of her writings to inspire creative commentary and constructive political theory.

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.

Puerto Rico has often fallen between the cracks of the subfloor that undergirds not only the study of American politics but also the field of political science in general. Although it has certain nation state-like properties, the fact that it is not a nation state de jure means that those who study international and inter-American relations have given it little attention. This also holds true for Latin American comparativists, who treat it as one of the many small and nonindependent territories that dot the Caribbean. If it had been incorporated into the federal structure of the United States, it would be studied by those within the field of American government who focus on comparative state politics. But its special status as a semiautonomous commonwealth prevents this from happening.