Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community. By Keally D. McBride. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. 192p. $45.00.

The concept of community weighs heavily in the history of social and political theory but even more so in the collective imagination. The idea and varying visions of community traverse concepts of identity, public sphere, and state in theoretical discourses. Community also insinuates itself into discussions and decision making at the most practical level. Keally D. McBride's book offers a creative and probing exploration of how community has been imagined by theorists and how imagined communities inform practice. It does not claim to be a comprehensive synthesis of competing views, but rather succeeds as a provocative set of thematically linked, exploratory essays. While McBride acknowledges at the outset the importance of the analytic task of delineating the various conceptualizations of community, her project makes its contribution by explicating how visions of the political imagination of different eras inform the imagination of community. She shows how the resulting set of ideals and images creates and constrains real-world political possibilities. Throughout, she offers subtle judgments and useful provocations and, in the end, this book emerges as an important resource for everyone who values the possibilities of community, but wishes to remain critical of the concept's many traps and seductions.