Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought. By Michael Hanchard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 352p. $35.00.

“What does contemporary political and social theory look like when viewed from a vantage point of a black life-world?” (p. 8). Crucial though this question is—particularly at a moment when U.S. citizens are deeply divided across racial lines on a wide array of political issues—it remains largely neglected by political scientists. Michael Hanchard responds to this inattention by presenting a dazzling, learned tour of the contours of contemporary black political thought. Moving fluently from the local to the national to the hemispheric to the global and traversing disciplinary lines at the same time, Party/Politics has much to offer scholars in multiple fields, both within political science and beyond. At the risk of understating this larger contribution, this review will focus on the example it sets for the practice of political theory.