Cultus Americanus: Varieties of the Liberal Tradition in American Political Culture, 1600–1865. By Brent Gilchrist. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 314p. $80.00.

In Cultus Americanus, Brent Gilchrist provides an intellectually challenging account of American political culture. In so doing, Gilchrist staunchly defends the notion of a liberal consensus in American political life. However, this is not merely a restatement of Louis Hartz's rightly famous theory. Instead, we are offered a nuanced and thoughtful analysis of how American culture delineates a “matrix” that reflects the interaction of myth, religion, and ideology. The author goes to great lengths to demarcate the differences and connections among these rich and powerful concepts. In the process, he does an admirable job articulating a fundamental liberalism that is at work in America. Thus, he offers a powerful development of the Hartz thesis and takes on those critics who see that theory as fraught with failings. Indeed, Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals (1997) and Cultus Americanus provide the materials for a high-minded debate about how American politics was shaped in the past and how our history continues to shape the present. This book will be of interest to those interested in American political history and thought, religion, and politics, as well as to theorists in general.

Patriotism and Other Mistakes. By George Kateb. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 464p. $35.00.

Readers of George Kateb's previous work will recognize the author's familiar voice in this collection of papers from the last 17 years or so. By turns earnest (“I know that I preach,” [p. 12]) and cavalier (“I know I am being arbitrary,” [p. 125]), Kateb is intent on plumbing the pernicious irrationalities that seduce us away from his favored stance, democratic individuality. His approach is literary, freewheeling, elliptical. Theorists fond of analytic philosophy will be impatient with how blurry and peremptory his claims can sound. Still, his is an instructive sensibility.

Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women. By Lori Jo Marso. New York: Routledge, 2006. 240p. $ 95.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This elegant book explores the memoirs, private correspondence, and other self-revelatory writings of prominent feminist thinkers with a view to disclosing their struggles to live feminist lives while contending with conventional gender norms. The socially constructed standards of proper femininity that encumbered these women are what the author terms “the demands of femininity.” According to Lori Jo Marso, the demands of femininity vary “in terms of race, class and historical and cultural location” (p. 30), but notwithstanding their malleable content, these normative representations constitute constraints to which all women are subject under patriarchal conditions.

The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America. By Ben A. Minteer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 272p. $28.00.

Accounts of the history of American environmental thought typically characterize it as riven by a divide between a utilitarian preoccupation with “use” and a more romantic focus on “preservation.” Many contemporary environmental philosophers have fixated upon a similar debate between “anthropocentrism” and “ecocentrism.”

Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy. By Thomas Pangle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 200p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. By Steven B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 268p. $32.50 cloth, $18.00 paper.

The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. By Catherine and Michael Zuckert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 320p. $32.50.

I think that the biggest obstacle standing in the way of non-Straussians who wish to approach the work of Leo Strauss and render justice to his quite remarkable achievement is comprised of his followers and disciples, especially those who claim to derive their inspiration from him for their intellectual work in public policy or their active involvement in its administration. Almost all of them are unmistakably conservative, indeed, sometimes reactionary; typically hawkish and empire-minded in foreign affairs; and generally disposed to discipline the waywardness of the masses. I must emphasize that the obstacle I have in mind is not posed by Straussians who work in political theory; from them, non-Straussians will often learn or at least gain the benefits of a bracing encounter. The talent of Strauss is not polemical, despite his numerous comments on his times. We non-Straussians should minimize these comments so that we may separate Strauss from his sympathizers who figure in public life, whether in office or behind the scenes or in the public press. To be sure, thinkers bear some responsibility for what their devoted activist admirers make of them. But Strauss is vastly more than his topicality; and his value will survive the accidents of politics that have permitted a few to write about public affairs and act in public life under his direct or indirect tutelage.

The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative. By Leslie Paul Thiele. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 334p. $80.00.

Paul Thiele asks the right question: How should we think about political judgment and, more generally, practical wisdom, understood as an intellectual faculty or virtue that is different from, or at least irreducible to, faculties of logical or scientific reasoning but that remains, nonetheless, a decidedly rational mode of thought in its own right? Such a question defines, arguably, the project of the sixth book of the Nichomachean Ethics. And Aristotle's failure to provide there a fully satisfying account of the nature of phronesis—something different from sophia on the one hand, from a merely nonrational knack on the other—establishes the problematic for virtually all subsequent approaches to judgment.

Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. By Nadia Urbinati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 326p. $45.00.

Nadia Urbinati begins her new book, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, with the observation that while we call certain contemporary western governments “democratic,” any historical glance at their political institutions will as readily show that they were “designed to contain rather than encourage democracy” (p. 1). She takes as one “main point of reference” (p. 9) for her argument, Bernard Manin's claim in The Principles of Representative Government (1997) that the practice of contemporary democracy is still constrained by the fact that “there has been no significant change in the institutions regulating the selection of representatives and the influence of the popular will on their decisions in office” (p. 229, n. 2). For many, this view of unchanged institutions simply reflects either the more defensive observation that modern governments continue to need Schumpeterian neutralizing restrictions on participation or, conversely, the critical claim that modern democracy continues to fall short of an ideal (or perhaps idealized) Athenian standard of direct self-rule. On both of these views, Urbinati notes, representative democracy is seen as an oxymoron (p. 4). However, she quite forcefully disagrees, and what is more, she believes both the times and contemporary democratic theorizing are on her side.

The Transformation of Plantation Politics: Black Politics, Concentrated Poverty, and Social Capital in the Mississippi Delta. By Sharon D. Wright Austin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 247p. $65.00.

The title of Sharon Wright Austin's new book is intended to be ironic. As the author persuasively demonstrates, there has been no transformation of politics in the Mississippi Delta, and the area's wealthy white elite continues to dominate politics there. The lack of significant change is disappointing, as the Delta's poverty rate is more than three times the national average, and four counties in the area have higher infant mortality rates than some Third World countries.

America's Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception. By Wayne E. Baker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 328p. $18.95.

Wayne Baker's America's Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception offers a recent addition to a growing literature in political science that examines the perception and, perhaps, reality of the polarization of American politics around cultural and moral issues. In this book, Baker sets out to provide an empirical examination of three aspects of America's perceived crisis of values. The first of these is the trend hypothesis: In recent decades, America has experienced a significant decline in its commitment to traditional moral values. The second is the comparison hypothesis: Moral values in the United States have declined relative to most other nations. Third and finally is the distribution hypothesis: Americans have become increasingly polarized in their commitment to traditional moral values.

Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after Catastrophic Events. By Thomas A. Birkland. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006. 240p. $44.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Lessons of Disaster is a natural follow-up to the author's previous book, After Disaster (1997), which examined the extent to which disasters and accidents influence policy agendas within relevant domains. Lessons of Disaster is built on this previous work but focuses specifically on whether or not disasters, as focusing events, induce policy learning. The author differentiates between simple policy change and actual policy learning by defining learning as a process by which policy actors incorporate new information and insights revealed by a disaster and purposefully apply it to the design of more appropriate or effective policies.

Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream By Janice Fine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 316p. $49.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

The notion that immigrants need institutions of support as they try to make it in the U.S. economy is certainly nothing new. At the turn of the century, Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement, beginning in Chicago with Hull House, made it their mission to provide the types of support that would ease immigrants' transition into American life. Janice Fine's Worker Centers is essentially a primer for activists on the role of worker centers as institutions designed to provide support to low-wage workers, especially immigrant workers in metropolitan areas. Defining worker centers as community-based mediating institutions that provide support to low-wage workers, Fine considers the effectiveness of these centers in improving the lives of low-wage workers. She also raises an even larger question: Just what institutional mechanisms are necessary for integrating low-wage immigrants into American civil society so that they can derive the benefits of ongoing economic representation and political action?

Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America. By Kristin A. Goss. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 304p. $29.95.

If popular political movements attract the attention of a wide range of political scientists, this is the case, to no small degree, because they seem to bridge an impossible chasm. They seem to bridge—or at least to begin to build a bridge between—on the one hand, the lofty aspirations of democrats who invoke a language of government “by the people,” and on the other, the reality of modern democracies in which elites govern, while citizens judge their performances. When people vote, they affirm—or they reject—the leaders who make and enforce collective decisions. When people participate in popular movements, by contrast, they act in public to articulate and press claims about collective norms. When ordinary citizens participate in mass political movements, that is to say, they act collectively to exercise political power.

Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States. By Ron Hayduk. New York: Routledge, 2006. 264p. $24.95 paper, $95.00 cloth.

The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in an Age of Terror. By Stanley A. Renshon. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 298p. $26.95 cloth.

Immigration is a powerful narrative in the history of the United States, at times evoking optimism and at other times providing fodder to foment xenophobia. These two books, authored by a pair of New York City–based scholars, share a common vantage point in the experience of the most racially and ethnically diverse city of immigrants in the United States. At the same time, the books are a study in contrasts, a neat fit to both ends of the spectrum between hope and fear. One is concerned with enhancing freedom and the other with maintaining order. One advocates expansion of political expression in the form of the franchise, the other recommends constraint. One looks to our nation's history—to our sometimes ignominious past of exclusion, as well as to expansive practices allowing noncitizen voting—and highlights inclusionary lessons to draw, and the other looks to the future and sees danger in a post-9/11 world of organized terror. Although distinctive in many ways, both books are passionately written, and one is compelled to read on whether cheering in agreement or taking umbrage, for the arguments will resonate regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum.

Creating Gender: The Sexual Politics of Welfare Policy. By Cathy Marie Johnson, Georgia Duerst-Lahti, and Noelle H. Norton. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. 261p. $55.00.

Creating Gender compels us to “make ordinary the analysis of gender in policymaking” (p. 228). As such, the authors “take up the question of how gender is created when policy is made” (p. 11) using an intimate and in-depth exploratory analysis of welfare policy in the United States to make their case. Their analysis is based on a “compound gender ideology framework” (p. 228), an original construction of the three authors designed to unravel and reveal gender ideology in the policymaking arena—specifically, the “adoption and implementation of the PRWORA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act)—welfare reform” (p. 11).

No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2005. By Patrick J. McGuinn. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. 320p. $40.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is an attempt by the federal government to regulate educational policy in the 50 states. By imposing on states a set of standards, benchmarks of yearly progress, and imposing sanctions on failing schools, the U.S. Department of Education has made a significant step from being more than a federal bully pulpit and a perch for fading politicians to a genuine ministry of education. This is ironic because the U.S. Constitution reserves to the states educational policy, except when it comes to enforcing civil rights. The strong bipartisan support for NCLB is a political, policy, and constitutional sea change in American history. How—and more importantly, why—did this happen?

Routing the Opposition: Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy. Edited by David S. Meyer, Valerie Jenness, and Helen Ingram. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 360p. $70.50 cloth, $23.50 paper.

Most social scientists cling to a progressive image of history, in which one group after another organizes for various rights and interests, pursues them in a number of arenas until—often after much struggle and bloodshed—they gain the legal recognitions and influence on policies they seek. The circle of rights and recognition slowly and inexorably expands outward. Scholars of social movements, in particular, are committed to the idea that the protestors they study have a broad impact and play a key role in history. Their faith in this idea often outpaces the evidence and makes the proposition difficult to test.

Ivory Towers and Nationalist Minds: Universities, Leadership, and the Development of the American State. By Mark R. Nemec. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 312p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The end of the Civil War ushered a new era in American state-building as the government sought to reshape the structure and identity of politics, group formation, and individual identity. During this period, nongovernmental agencies became central to disseminating and legitimating state authority. Although universities have been recognized as influential agencies, Mark R. Nemec argues that prior works overlooked the process by which they gained this influence. In Ivory Towers and Nationalist Minds, Nemec illuminates the rise of American universities as active partners and independent agents of state building from 1862 to 1920. Universities provided services to national development through promoting democratic ideals, industrial competitiveness, and intellectual vanguardism. Primarily through the “institutional entrepreneurship” of university presidents, American universities rapidly expanded their role and influence in society. Rather than the government, it was the university leaders who took the leading role to define what their universities would become.

The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don't Get. By Benjamin I. Page with Marshall M. Bouton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 336p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

In the November 2006 midterm elections, voters swept Republicans out of power in what was widely interpreted as a rebuke of the Bush administration's Iraq policies. In subsequent polls, nearly two-thirds of the public opposed President George W. Bush's postelection proposal for a “surge” in the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. Undeterred, the president declared on January 14, 2007, “I've made my decision and we're going forward,” and his press secretary, Tony Snow, said on January 9, “The president will not shape policy according to public opinion.” How can a U.S. president sustain a deeply unpopular foreign policy, seemingly uninfluenced by electoral setbacks or popular disapproval? Should the president be more responsive to public preferences? In an important and ambitious new book, Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton bring to bear an impressive array of survey data in order to answer these and other questions central to the study of public opinion and U.S. foreign policy.

Afro-Caribbean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation: Ethnicity, Exception, or Exit. By Reuel R. Rogers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 318p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

How is the process of political incorporation of immigrants and minorities in the United States changing amid the arrival in recent decades of unprecedented numbers of nonwhite new immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean? In this probing case study of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in New York City, Reuel R. Rogers draws on extensive field interviews with elites and immigrants, study of census data and voting statistics, and analysis of historical episodes, and he argues that contemporary immigrant political incorporation resembles neither a pluralist model based on earlier European-origin ethnic experience nor a minority model based on earlier African American migrant experience. Rather, race continues to shape the process as Afro-Caribbean newcomers confront issues of discrimination and exclusion in America. Because Afro-Caribbeans are rooted in a cognitive frame shaped by their status as immigrants and by their ethnic ties and home country attachments, they navigate politics differently from African Americans.

The Race to 270: The Electoral College and the Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004. By Daron R. Shaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 216p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Part political memoir, part political science, this is a valuable book on presidential elections that should be read by consultants and academics alike. Drawing on his experience as a Bush strategist and a political science professor at the University of Texas, Daron Shaw argues that these two audiences could learn a great deal about what interests them by paying more careful attention to each other. This theme is woven throughout Shaw's consideration of Electoral College strategies, execution of those strategies, and their effect on American electorates. Though he has clear political predilections that may make Democratic readers occasionally bristle, his rigorous examination of the best data on presidential campaigns available to date keeps him squarely in the realm of political science. The end result is a book that provides irreplaceable insight on how campaigns might better function, on the subjects that political scientists could do a better job of exploring, and on the potential future of elections research.