Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law. By Gianni Vattimo. Edited by Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 160p. $25.50 cloth, $18.00 paper.

Gianni Vattimo is an Italian social democratic politician, a newspaper columnist, a philosopher, a strong advocate of an integrated Europe … and a proud nihilist. Richard Rorty, who supplies the laudatory foreword to Nihilism and Emancipation, characterizes Vattimo as espousing an intellectual outlook that goes by the (oxymoronic) descriptor of “commonsense Heideggerianism” (p. ix). This is a nonfoundational grasp of the world as postmetaphysical, with Nietzsche celebrated as a watershed event in our historical (self-) understanding. Commonsense Heideggerians take their cues from the master's writings after Being and Time, while tuning down (or tuning out) the echoes of metaphysics that remain in Heidegger after his turn (Kehre) away from fundamental ontology.

The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory. By Diego A. von Vacano. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 230p. $60.00 cloth, $29.95, paper.

This book is admirable for its large ambitions. Diego A. von Vacano seeks to imitate Machiavelli's own imitation of great men, designed to launch the imitator above and beyond the object of his imitation. His proximate goal is indeed identical to the one he attributes to both Machiavelli and Nietzsche: “to break the Manichean mold of morality in their respective cultures” (p. 7; cf. pp. 182–83). To do so in his own culture, he aims “to construct an aesthetic political theory that can have … applicability” beyond the thinkers (again, Machiavelli and Nietzsche) from whom it is purportedly derived (p. 5).

A Gift of the Spirit: Reading The Souls of Black Folk. By Eugene Victor Wolfenstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. 192p. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

It has been a long time coming, but political theorists (at least a few) are finally paying attention to The Souls of Black Folk, described by Eugene Victor Wolfenstein as “one of the masterworks in the African-American/American literary canon” (p. 1). Published in 1903, Souls includes nine previously published articles among its 14 chapters. This accounts for the prevailing tendency to view the text as a compilation or collection of discrete pieces, and the related inclination to focus on specific parts and themes rather than the whole. Hence, W. E. B. Du Bois is widely credited (rightly) for the concept of double-consciousness, but such appropriation tends to pluck the singular treasure from its setting. And this constitutive setting, the text conceived as “an intricate and coherent narrative, indeed as an organic whole and even at times as a living presence” (p. 2), is what Wolfenstein proposes to reconstruct.

The Macropolitics of Congress. Edited by E. Scott Adler and John S. Lapinski. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 288p. $47.50 cloth, $21.95 paper.

In this edited volume, 18 scholars provide new insight into congressional policymaking and the role of Congress in the separation-of-powers system. Taken together, the 11 chapters advance theories of congressional policymaking, analyze links between representation and policymaking, employ impressive new data sets, use a historical as well as contemporary lens to evaluate policymaking and institutional shifts, and, perhaps most significantly, demonstrate that there are many innovative ways to study policy outputs as a dependent variable.

Answering the Call of the Court: How Justices and Litigants Set the Supreme Court Agenda. By Vanessa A. Baird. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. 240p. $45.00.

Strategic Selection: Presidential Nomination of Supreme Court Justices from Herbert Hoover Through George W. Bush. By Christine L. Nemacheck. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. 192p. $35.00.

Running for Judge: The Rising Political, Financial, and Legal Stakes of Judicial Elections. Edited by Matthew J. Streb. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 272p. $45.00.

These three books on the judicial system address how the law evolves. While there is little direct overlap in the coverage of the books, they all discuss the development of the law from different perspectives. They amply illustrate how political considerations become incorporated in the legal decisions of courts.