"For quite a while," Peter Berkowitz notes, "leading aca- demic liberals and their best-known critics formed an unwit- ting alliance, promulgating the view that liberal political theory" ignores the whole subject of virtue and cultivation (p. 170). If that view is correct, this neglect not only would spawn "fatal theoretical lacunae" (p. 4) but also would raise serious doubts about liberalism's capacity to sustain the "qualities of mind and character" (p. 172) required for "the operation and maintenance" of "free and democratic institutions" (p. 6). In recent years, however, a new generation of liberals have challenged this widely held view. Thinkers such as William Galston and Stephen Macedo acknowledge that liberal re- gimes depend "upon a specific set of virtues," which "they do not automatically produce" (pp. 27­8). Their work points toward the "dependence" of liberal societies on "extraliberal and nongovernmental sources of virtue" (p. 28), such as "the family, religion and the array of associations in civil society" (p. 6). Simultaneously, they insist that "limited government is not the same as neutral government" (p. 173), and they affirm "that the liberal state, within bounds, ought to pursue liberal purposes" and, thus, "may, within limits, foster virtues" that serve these purposes (p. xii).

Too often edited volumes are a farrago of barely related essays that amount to the academic equivalent of the prover- bial camel: a horse built by committee. Lowell S. Gustafson is to be commended for compiling a coherent collection of essays that are united not only by their common conviction that Thucydides' great work does indeed possess a "theory of international relations" but also by their common desire to contrast this theory with current trends in the discipline. According to the contributors, Thucydides is not the father of "realism" or its variants because his understanding of inter- national politics is essentially moral: Every approach to international politics that studies power to the neglect of justice, necessity to the neglect of freedom, will prove to be an inadequate tool with which to understand the political deeds of human beings. However much we may be impinged upon by necessity, we remain fundamentally free, and how- ever much we may seek brute power, we nonetheless also strive to be just.

Although there is a lot of it about, environmental philosophy has so far had little influence on the world of environmental politics and policy, avers de-Shalit in this fine contribution to ecological political theory. In this assessment he is quite right. As someone who believes there should be a role in public discourse for the philosopher, de-Shalit seeks to provide a remedy for this deficiency. Why should the rest of us care?

In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, the Electoral College, for the first time in a long while, did not smoothly and seamlessly select the popular vote winner. This phenomenon did not figure in the immediate controversy over the election, but it may yet have an effect, and part of that effect may be long-overdue attention to the rules for aggregating individual votes into a group decision. Those who design institutions for group decision making, or who study such institutions, may be reminded that aggregation procedures can fail to reflect important principles, even principles as simple and funda- mental as one person, one vote.

Readers of Don Herzog's earlier volumes, Happy Slaves (1989) and Without Foundations (1985), will know that they should expect a bracing time when they open his books. They will not be disappointed. This is, without a doubt, a book buoyant in tone and in content. It marks a new departure in the author's manner of writing, displays a wide historical learning, and shows a striking lack of cant in its attitude toward political thought.

Integrity is a shifty, furtive concept. Philosophers have had a hard time defining the idea because it raises a couple of recurrent perplexities. First, consider former Speaker Jim Wright's remark that "integrity is . . . the state or quality of being complete, undivided, [and] unbroken," or the Oxford English Dictionary connotation of an "unbroken state" of "material wholeness." The problem is that integrity, so understood, seems to leave no room for the possibility of individuals whose lives display any kind of self-critical revi- sion, changes in course, or discontinuities over historical time, or for those who compartmentalize, differentiate, and assume conflicting roles across social space; in other words, for all of us. We need, as Amelie Rorty has written ("Integ- rity: Political, not Psychological," in Alan Montefiore and David Vines, eds., Integrity in the Public and Private Domains, 1999), a far better account as to how and where "integration and integrity . . . coincide".

Sara Monoson challenges the common view of Plato as a strong opponent of democracy. Although she acknowledges his severe criticisms of democracy, she argues that his re- sponse to Athenian democracy shows ambivalence rather than complete hostility. Not only does Plato offer some qualified endorsements of democratic politics, she contends, but also he presents the practice of the philosophic life as rooted in Athenian democratic culture. Karl Popper's cri- tique of Plato as a proto-totalitarian enemy of the "open society" is not as influential as it once was, but the assump- tion that Plato and Platonic philosophy are incompatible with democracy persists. Monoson wants to overturn that view and thus convince modern democratic readers that they may have something to learn from Plato.

This volume offers, as its blurb asserts, "substantive discus- sions of the key issues facing Jeffersonian scholars." Begin- ning with Michael Zuckert's by now familiar argument that Jefferson's thought is best understood as resting in a Lockean natural rights framework, other able scholars more or less take issue with this analysis by appealing both to Jefferson's own writings and to the works of major interpreters of the political thought of the founding era. The result is a serious reconsideration of Jefferson's thought that takes up most of the key themes raised by Louis Hartz and Bernard Bailyn forty or more years ago over the place of the liberal tradition in American thought. Veteran expositors of Jefferson's thought in a more civic republican and Christian way, Jean Yarbrough and Garrett Ward Sheldon, take issue with Zuck- ert's Lockean, natural rights emphasis, upholding instead the influences of Aristotelian, Kamesian, and Christian thought on Jefferson. Though one cannot deny the strong Lockean strand in Jefferson's thought, Yarbrough and Sheldon argue persuasively for the strong presence of the other dimensions as well. Zuckert's effort in his "Response" to claim that this mixes without resolving conflicting philosophies, and thus, if Yarbrough and Sheldon are right, leaves Jefferson hopelessly inconsistent, misses Jefferson's brilliant blending of these outlooks, all obviously present in his writings, into what might be called a Jeffersonian republicanism.

In a sense, these two books, bearing almost identical titles, could not be more different. Patten's work is a narrowly focused study of those passages in Hegel (primarily in the Philosophy of Right) that deal explicitly and pointedly with the idea of freedom. He proposes a "civic humanist" interpreta- tion of Hegelian freedom. Such an interpretation is designed to make sense of what Patten calls the "Sittlichkeit thesis," according to which ethical norms are composed of, or otherwise reducible to, duties and virtues embodied in the central institutions of modern social life. Franco's work is much broader in scope. It offers a commentary on the entirety of the Philosophy of Right and argues, plausibly enough, that Hegel's political philosophy is fundamentally a philosophy of freedom. It briefly situates that philosophy in the context of Hegel's immediate predecessors (Rousseau, Kant, Fichte) and reviews Hegel's own intellectual develop- ment, but its main goal is to show how Hegelian arguments about abstract right, morality, and ethical life constitute an account of what it means to be free.

What is the role of political theory in a world of partisan politics? Various approaches to this long-standing problem are raised in this stimulating collection of essays. Arlene Saxonhouse begins the volume by usefully reminding us of Plato's metaphor of the ship in book 6 of the Republic, in which self-interested sailors fight over the boat's direction "while the one who knows how to guide the boat, who can read the stars, stands aft staring upward and is considered useless" (p. 19). Similarly in the Assembly, self-interested rhetoricians may sway the crowd, without any concern for the pursuit of truth.