Reforming Liberalism: J. S. Mill's Use of Ancient, Religious, Liberal, and Romantic Moralities. By Robert Devigne. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 320p. $45.00.

In this scholarly book, Robert Devigne links John Stuart Mill to the aporia of the Platonic dialogues, the romantic expressivism of Kant and Coleridge, and the great tradition of British empiricism that it was Mill's purpose to reform. In so doing, Devigne introduces us to the great thinker who remains today the most direct entry point (along with Russell perhaps) into the Western tradition of philosophy for those whose native language is English. Devigne's Mill then is the “Great Mill,” the synoptic, conceptive, comprehensive Mill, the Socrates of Gower Street and Charing Cross Road, the towering genius who bestrode Victorian intellectual life like a colossus. It is thus with Nietzsche rather than with Bentham that Devigne's Mill should be classed.

Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment. By Bryan Garsten. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 290p. $45.00.

Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion is an engaging and original work of wide appeal. Garsten analyzes the formation of an antirhetorical tradition in modern political thought, investigates its rival classical tradition of rhetoric and judgment, and explores the promise that a politics of persuasion offers contemporary democratic societies.

Politics as Religion. By Emilio Gentile. Translated by George Staunton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 194p. $39.50.

The projected secularization of the world—or the suggestion that religion should have as little as possible to do with economic, social, and political life in industrial societies—is not happening. First, the traditional faiths have shown a surprising vitality in reclaiming their respective space in the secular, public square. It is evident that faith movements cannot always be caged in pejorative stereotypes; secularization is not a linear process, and religious beliefs continue to shape ordinary people's lives and to have a say in public affairs. The increasing politicization of religion in many parts of the world has brought with it the challenge to engage Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as essential allies in the modern struggle for human rights, social justice, and enlightened thought. Second, the importance of religion in modern democracy and mass politics can be gleaned in an ex adverso kind of way: Even when rejecting the mission of religion to give meaning to human existence, many politicians have found it useful to appropriate for themselves the trappings of religious symbols and rituals. This sacralization of politics has sought to interpret and to define human existence by subordinating the destiny of individuals and the collectivity to a supreme entity, liberal democracy, or totalitarianism.

The Trouble with Passion: Political Theory Beyond the Reign of Reason. By Cheryl Hall. New York: Routledge, 2005. 192p. $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

This book argues for passion in politics: not just calm passions, that is, sentiments or interests, but “enthusiasm” and “explicit appreciation of and commitment to something valued” (pp. 12, 7). Liberal theory, Hall argues, is wrong to regard political passions as inherently suspect, intolerant, and “opposed to both reason and justice” (p. 3). Passion in politics is inescapable, for passion and reason are not opposed but interpenetrating aspects of human thought and motivation. Beyond this, however, some passions are politically salutary: They inspire worthy political actions, especially movements for social change.

Writing the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Pragmatism and Historical Inquiry. By Jonathan B. Isacoff. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 216p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Jonathan Isacoff argues that American political scientists, and in particular international relations researchers, should be much more self-critical about their historiography. Political science, he claims, is afflicted by a stubborn “positivism” that leads case-study, qualitative researchers (like Kenneth Waltz) and large-n, quantitative researchers (like J. David Singer) alike to treat historical data as if they are value-free and unchanging. This historiography blinds researchers to the normative and theoretical biases of their theories—especially a bias toward system-structural explanations for international conflict—by screening out data that contradict those theories. Moreover, subsequent revisions to the historical record undermine their findings, leaving research that is empirically disengaged and irrelevant to political experience.

The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility. By Linda C. McClain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 392p. $45.00.

Linda McClain's excellent book provides a comprehensive account of the political issues concerning families in United States public policy and a coherent perspective from which to evaluate proposals for change in these policies. Writing as a liberal feminist, McClain has an approach that will not please everyone, but since her starting point takes families seriously as political units, no serious discussant in these debates can ignore this book.

Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy. By Diana C. Mutz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 184p. $60.00 cloth, $20.99 paper.

Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life. By Andrew J. Perrin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 208p. $45.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

Deliberative democracy is no longer reserved for the theorists. Empiricists now want a part of the action. With their various tools, social scientists are testing and considering both deliberative democratic institutions (e.g., juries, town hall meetings, deliberative polls, and other fora for citizen discussion) and the preconditions of context and character that theorists have proposed are necessary to make deliberative democracy work. Political scientist Diana Mutz and sociologist Andrew Perrin have written new books purporting to bring empirical work to bear on the claims of deliberative democratic theory. Both books are short and illuminating, though their postures as serious challenges to deliberative democratic theory are overstated and potentially misplaced. This failure to undermine the enterprise of deliberative democracy, however, does not prevent each from making a serious contribution to helping us understand how citizens engage in political debate and discussion among themselves in their everyday environments.

Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens. By Arlene W. Saxonhouse. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 246p. $70.00.

The subject of this book is parrhêsia, free or, as the author sometimes prefers, frank speech. Through close readings of stories by Plato and Homer, she identifies free speech with shamelessness and self-exposure, claiming that “[s]hame and free speech represent opposing points in the political order that play off one another in the construction of a stable democratic polity” (p. 8). However, the ambitions of this book go well beyond the historical account of what happened in Athens. Rather, the author argues “there is a congruence between the Athenian version of freedom of speech, of philosophy, and democracy, all exhibiting a common hostility to hierarchy and to history or the past” (p. 36).

Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique. By Lisa H. Schwartzman. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006. 224p. $45.00.

In this book, Schwartzman argues that liberalism's methodological individualism and its neutrality through abstraction from social contexts and relations of power render it a questionable approach for those who would challenge the oppression of women or, by extension, of other traditionally subordinated groups. She instead advocates a feminist methodology based on ways that individuals are often embedded in a social context characterized by power and domination. She would not have us jettison concepts such as rights, equality, liberty, and autonomy, but would have us reformulate them by attending to perspectives and contexts that help us to avoid the pitfalls of liberalism.

The Liberal Conscience: Politics and Principle in a World of Religious Pluralism. By Lucas Swaine. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 240p. $35.00.

In this book, Lucas Swaine argues that modern liberalism has failed in its efforts to provide adequate justification of liberalism's political legitimacy to religious adherents. This may seem a surprising contention, given the vast literature that attempts to do precisely this, reaching easily as far back as John Rawl's Political Liberalism if not to the constitutive works of Hobbes and Locke. In particular, according to Swaine, contemporary liberalism has failed because it does not offer arguments that can appeal to religious believers, preferring instead a standard of “reasonableness” that cannot assail the faith commitments of religious believers.

Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? By Philip E. Tetlock. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 352p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

This is a wonderful and important book. Philip Tetlock is a political psychologist who has a knack for innovative research projects (e.g., his earlier work on how people cope with trade-offs in politics). In this book, he addresses a question that would scare away more timid souls: How well do experts predict political and economic events?

The Disorder of Political Inquiry. By Keith Topper. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 336p. $45.00.

The conceit framing Keith Topper's fine and necessary book is that the state of social science methods has grown so disordered it has even come to public attention, first when the journal Social Text unwittingly published Alan Sokal's parody of poststructuralist jargon and the now defunct Lingua Franca exposed the hoax, and then when the so-called Perestroika movement emerged to challenge dominant approaches in political science. Because the first instance attacked the perceived consequences of epistemic relativism in the social sciences generally and the latter the rigor mortis resulting from an allegedly hegemonic notion of scientific rigor in its discipline in particular, Topper's conceit allows him to play the role of Odysseus steering through the straits, lashed to his hermeneutic mast while shunning the Manichean siren songs of scientific monism to the one side and empty pluralism on the other, and heading for more open, ecumenical waters. It also enables him to claim that all this tacking to and fro has a public, political import. Indeed, he asserts that his primary concern in this book is “with a set of contemporary questions about the ways in which particular methodological commitments enable or constrain one's capacity to identify and act upon opaque power relations that sustain forms of domination” (p. 12).

The U.S. Women's Movement in Global Perspective. Edited by Lee Ann Banaszak. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 288p. $72.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

This pathbreaking edited volume combines a classic article with 10 original essays to present a comparative examination of the women's movement. As the title indicates, analyses largely revolve around the U.S. case, with comparison carried out over time or in relation to cases in other countries. In bringing together this group of prominent and emerging scholars of women's movements to place the United States in international perspective, this volume works to fill a large gap in the literature.

Common Ground: Committee Politics in the U.S. House of Representatives. By John Baughman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 272p. $50.00.

A handful of scholars have devoted attention in recent years to the dynamics of standing committee jurisdictions in the U.S. Congress. This is an important focus because congressional rules and procedures give committees a central role in the legislative process and because the increasingly complex policy environment of recent decades has made clear demarcations of subject matter jurisdiction more difficult. How Congress resolves overlapping committee jurisdictions can affect both the deliberative quality and the substantive outcomes of policymaking. This is an important point of departure for reading John Baughman's new book.

Madison's Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution. By Anthony M. Bertelli and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 240p. $60.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure. By Arjen Boin, Paul 't Hart, Eric Stern, and Bengt Sundelius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 182p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

No undergraduate public administration course would be complete without at least a perfunctory attempt to summarize the never-ending debate about what public administration is. From Woodrow Wilson to “scientific management” to the Brownlow Committee to the Willowbrook Conference and beyond, the position papers and studies pile up; yet the debate (which often seems more like a monologue) continues. Students find this debate unsatisfying, and it is easy to see why. For a craft that prides itself above all on its relevance to practical affairs (as Woodrow Wilson put it, administration is “government in action”), the arguments that students are most often exposed to have the arid scholasticism of medieval disputes about angels dancing on pins. If public administration is so practical, students must be thinking, why cannot its theorists just cut to the chase and tell us how to do it? Or even what it is?

Mayors and Schools: Minority Voices and Democratic Tensions in Urban Education. By Stefanie Chambers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. 240p. $64.50 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Schools In: Federalism and the National Education Agenda. By Paul Manna. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006. 222p. $26.95.

Interest in the politics of American cities and states has been steadily increasing in recent years, as scholars have rediscovered the importance of studying issues of governance at subnational levels. Recent research has illustrated that the American federal system is both more interconnected than many Washington-centric accounts would lead one to believe and more complicated insofar as the politics of states and local governments do not perfectly reflect national political processes. These two books represent efforts by emerging scholars to leverage the advantages of studying state and local politics in order to address major questions about political institutions in the United States and to make the case for greater incorporation of state and local elements into mainstream accounts of political change.

After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation. By Charles T. Clotfelter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 216p. $55.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Those who live or have lived in metropolitan areas that faced court-ordered desegregation of the schools in the latter part of the twentieth century have likely heard a common theory about the connection of those efforts to the state of the relevant city. It goes something like this: Once federal courts ordered city schools to desegregate, many white city dwellers either fled to the suburbs for protection or plucked their kids from city schools and enrolled them in private ones. Under the first scenario, the end of neighborhood schools negatively affected the city, as families in once-vital neighborhoods abandoned desegregating city schools they perceived as problematic for their children's education for virtually lily-white suburban schools thought to be of a higher quality. Under the second scenario, white parents remained in the city of their birth but undermined desegregation efforts by transferring their children to private schools (which were mostly Catholic in the Northeast and Midwest and mostly newly opened in the South). In the end, long-frustrated federal judges and civil rights leaders ultimately succeeded in increasing the levels of interaction between white and black children, but their efforts had significant side effects for those cities as well.

To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance. By Richard J. Ellis. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. 312p. $29.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.

This is an intelligent book about the strange story of American patriotism. Strange because America is much more of an “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson's evocative concept, than most Western European states. Also strange because, as Richard Ellis points out, it has been so contested over the years.

Disability Rights and the American Social Safety Net. By Jennifer L. Erkulwater. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 272p. $42.50.

Political scientists who study the American welfare state tend to focus on a small number of social programs. Social Security and “welfare” (now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) are probably the best known. Typically, the goal is to show how much one or two factors—for example, public opinion, institutional design, policy elites, race, gender—influence these programs. This book is different. It focuses on two programs for the disabled, Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which are studied less often. And it tries to account for a wide range of influences on their development. The book is a genuine addition to our understanding of U.S. social policy and a fine example of how to create a rich explanation of policy change.

Activism Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America. By Dana R. Fisher. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 168p. $24.95 cloth.

The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. By T. V. Reed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 362p. $74.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

These two new books bring welcome perspectives to the study of social movements in America. Reed considers the art of collective action: in terms of both the creative repertoire of activists responding to evolving social and political contexts and the cultural arts that are invoked by and associated with social movements. Fisher's book, meanwhile, sheds light on a second dimension of collective action: the nationwide grassroots canvassing organizations that collect donations and [ostensibly] inform concerned citizens about progressive issues. At first glance, the two books seem to be speaking to aspects of mobilization that are worlds apart. However, their differences help to bring a fuller understanding of the operational field in which social movements are sustained or wither.