China's contemporary political economy is among the most exciting and demanding frontiers of research in comparative politics. The country's sheer size and internal diversity offer a natural laboratory for examining topics at multiple levels and units of analysis, and in varied regional environments. China's salience in the international media and business community also presents scholars with the added opportunity (and even responsibility) for clarifying popular misconceptions through original empirical research. An abundance of research possibilities is accompanied by a ready audience of nonacademic consumers.

I want to thank Justin Crowe for his thorough and generous review of my book. I wish our paths had crossed when I was still at the revision stage of the manuscript. I could have used his fresh perspective to strengthen the book's message to a wider audience.

John Hibbing's paper prompts me to outline three points: (1) Cognitive psychology and neuroscience are developing a new picture of human beings' cognitive functioning, broadly understood. One startling implication is that we often understand ourselves much less well than we are inclined to think. (2) It is seriously mistaken to think that reading the output of an fMRI experiment is as easy and clear as interpreting a realistic picture. Among other things, various interpretations of an output may be equally acceptable. (3) Neuroscience can, and has been, used to support widespread prejudices, such as the intellectual inferiority of the female mind. Major researchers have given in to the temptation to see their older views in the new sciences of the mind. The second and third points may well lead us to think that incorporating the insights from the new fields involves us in genuinely interdisciplinary research. At the very least, we cannot count on skimming through an admired text to find out what is right. But serious research that spans different disciplines can be immensely rewarding.

Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure. By Stefan Hedlund. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 324p. $95.00, cloth, $35.99 paper.

In recent decades the study of social phenomena has been characterized by the increasing specialization of academic subdisciplines. At the same time, social science has had great difficulty in accounting for instances of systemic failure that challenge the artificial typologies often promoted by specialized scholarship. Increasing theoretical sophistication thus arguably has come at the expense of grasping the particular and unique nature of historical events. In Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science, Stefan Hedlund examines the postcommunist Russian encounter with capitalism and the global financial crisis as examples of unprecedented events that challenged social scientists' assumptions about the causes of human behavior and the functioning of social and political institutions. In this symposium a group of political scientists have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on what systemic failure can tell us about social science theorizing.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Let me begin by thanking editor Jeff Isaac for inspiring and bringing to fruition this exchange. Securing the participation of nine academics and then cajoling us to meet deadlines and follow instructions is a remarkable accomplishment and I can only hope the finished product approaches his hopes for the enterprise. I would also like to thank the eight scholars who provided commentaries on my target essay. I am truly fortunate that such an all-star cast was willing to spend time pondering the role of neurobiology and politics. They assisted me in better understanding my own positions, and who can ask for more than that? I do not have the space here to offer the point-by-point response that their comments deserve, so I will instead concentrate on the two concerns that were raised most frequently: first, whether biological approaches can answer the kinds of questions political scientists should be asking, and second, whether, regardless of their value in answering questions, applying biological techniques to social behaviors leads to normatively unpalatable conclusions. Before addressing these two important matters, however, it is worth a moment to mention several areas of agreement.

Justin Crowe has written an accessible, thorough, and compelling history of the institutional development of the US Supreme Court and the federal judiciary it sits atop, from their inconspicuous inception in February 1790 to their current status as, perhaps, the most powerful judiciary in the world.

Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure. By Stefan Hedlund. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 324p. $95.00, cloth, $35.99 paper.

In recent decades the study of social phenomena has been characterized by the increasing specialization of academic subdisciplines. At the same time, social science has had great difficulty in accounting for instances of systemic failure that challenge the artificial typologies often promoted by specialized scholarship. Increasing theoretical sophistication thus arguably has come at the expense of grasping the particular and unique nature of historical events. In Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science, Stefan Hedlund examines the postcommunist Russian encounter with capitalism and the global financial crisis as examples of unprecedented events that challenged social scientists' assumptions about the causes of human behavior and the functioning of social and political institutions. In this symposium a group of political scientists have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on what systemic failure can tell us about social science theorizing.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

This is quite a book. Its sheer heft is daunting, its central claim bold and sweeping, its data relentless. While the planet goes “cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,” Steven Pinker argues, the human species has been progressing. We have reduced the fear of violent death for an ever-greater proportion of the population across the centuries. Pinker argues that every sort of violence has declined, from interpersonal cruelty to interstate war, beginning toward the end of the medieval period and extending to today. He then identifies the causes of decline so that we can know what can extend the trend into the future. This will allow us, as he puts it, to “obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right” (p. xxvi).

I thank Maria Popova for her generous, thoughtful, and constructive review of my book and am delighted to hear that despite my exclusively American focus, she finds much of import in my work for scholars of comparative judicial politics. In fact, her breakdown of the potentially generalizable theoretical insights to be drawn from my book was as edifying as it was gratifying. Needless to say, had I been aware of the ways in which some of the empirical phenomena I seek to explain in the American case have since been effectively replicated in, or speak to the circumstances of, other polities, I would have made a deliberate attempt to highlight that fact.

History holds important insights for political scientists concerned with contemporary international development issues. Michael E. Latham and Nick Cullather's recent historical accounts of US foreign policy toward developing countries provide excellent examples of the significance of understanding the past in order to interpret the present. Both books highlight the ways in which strategic concerns of the US government during the Cold War shaped its international aid policies.

Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure. By Stefan Hedlund. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 324p. $95.00, cloth, $35.99 paper.

In recent decades the study of social phenomena has been characterized by the increasing specialization of academic subdisciplines. At the same time, social science has had great difficulty in accounting for instances of systemic failure that challenge the artificial typologies often promoted by specialized scholarship. Increasing theoretical sophistication thus arguably has come at the expense of grasping the particular and unique nature of historical events. In Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science, Stefan Hedlund examines the postcommunist Russian encounter with capitalism and the global financial crisis as examples of unprecedented events that challenged social scientists' assumptions about the causes of human behavior and the functioning of social and political institutions. In this symposium a group of political scientists have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on what systemic failure can tell us about social science theorizing.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

One does not have to look far to see that much of what has been written over the past 10 years reveals a decade filled with US foreign policy missteps, miscues, and failures. Popular books such as Thomas Ricks's Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), Jane Mayer's The Dark Side (2008), George Packer's Assassins' Gate (2005), and Bob Woodward's series on “Bush's wars” captured our attention and gave us a first cut on the history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the “global war on terror.” These riveting accounts provided rich, descriptive insights and exposed the wide range of ideological and bureaucratic feuding, the breakdown—and often deliberate circumventing—of institutional procedures and organizational practices, and the ad hoc and often chaotic process of policy selection. Embedded throughout these narratives is a broader theme that depicts the past decade as an extraordinary period of American foreign policy excess and a dramatic departure from the past.

In his strongly argued, thoroughly researched, and well written study, Reinoud Leenders tells a fascinating story about elite competition over resources in postwar politics. What is most intriguing in this particular book on Lebanon is not the complexity of the political order agreed to in 1989 but the unforeseen consequences of the initially praised new formula of power sharing as trust building. Counterintuitively, a fairer representation of distinct groups turns out to have harmed the public interest through a series of failures to ensure a transparent process of policymaking. Leenders offers a detailed account of the price Lebanon had to pay for the accommodation of social conflict, that is, institutional gridlocks and widespread misuse of state resources by politicians. The lessons implied in Spoils of Truce gain special importance now, when in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, constitutional engineers and practitioners engage in the building of new political institutions in many Middle Eastern and North African countries.