Over the course of the last fifteen years states—along with companies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and others—have increasingly turned to markets rather than state-organized military hierarchies for security. This article puts forth hypotheses about how this marketization might affect three major literatures in international relations theory: the democratic peace, late state building, and theories of the frequency and nature of conflict. Relying on institutional logic, I argue that the marketization of security should redistribute power over the control of force. This redistribution should cause democracies to function differently—increasing the dilemmas between short-term security and long-term relations with other democracies. It should also reinforce the dilemmas pointed to by the literature on the resource curse and rentier states, thus deepening the expected difficulty of state building. Finally, as more states and non-state actors take advantage of market options for security, the oft-assumed collective monopoly of states over violence should suffer a blow. This should lead the chances for conflict to grow but also the purposes for which people and groups use violence to change. These propositions are not tested but serve as a call for further research.Deborah Avant is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University ([email protected]). The author thanks Fiona Adamson, Risa Brooks, Nora Bensahel, Alex Cooley, Rachel Epstein, Greg Gause, Jonathan Kirshner, Jack Snyder, David Lake, Jim Lebovic, and participants in the Globalization and National Security seminars at Harvard's Olin Institute, as well as participants in seminars at Georgetown University; Northwestern University; and University of Texas, Austin for comments on previous drafts.

Samuel Huntington's analysis of the “Hispanic challenge”—his claim that Mexicans are on their way to forming a separate nation within the U.S.—rests on a series of misconceptions that are not his alone. At the heart of his difficulties is a widely shared form of reasoning about racial and ethnic populations that has become increasingly problematic in the contemporary era of mass immigration: it anticipates a single, predominant outcome for group members, such as assimilation or racialized exclusion; instead, it is the diversity within groups of patterns of incorporation into American society that needs recognition today. This is all the more true of Mexican Americans because of the long history across which their immigration stretches and their presence in the Southwest and California before the arrival of European Americans.Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at The University at Albany, SUNY ([email protected]). This paper was written while the author was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He is grateful to Jennifer Hochschild for the invitation to write it for this symposium and to his colleagues at the Institute, especially Susan Eckstein and Luis Fraga, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Human rights as a collective action frame has been an important aspect of social movement mobilization around AIDS since the beginning of the pandemic 25 years ago. As an epidemic strongly associated with homosexuality and other socially marginalized behaviors, the AIDS movement in the developed world fueled and built on traditions of gay identity politics and gay rights. When the AIDS epidemic was recognized in 1981, the gay movement had already reconstituted itself as a legitimate interest group pursuing civil rights and civil liberties. Building on the preexisting organizational foundations as well as cultural capital of the gay movement as well as others, the AIDS movement was not only able to push for the protection of the civil rights of people living with AIDS, but through its engagement with the medical profession and the political establishment over access to drugs, was able to insist on a correlation between health and human rights.Krista Johnson is Assistant Professor at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta ([email protected]). Her research on HIV/AIDS in South Africa was funded in part by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation.

Women's movements are increasingly divided along lines of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. When such division obstructs cooperation, women lose their most effective advocates in the public sphere. How can movements overcome these divisions and improve their influence on policy and society? In some contexts, it seems that activists are able to overcome such divisions without denying politically salient conflicts. The transnational movement against gender violence, for example, mobilizes people not only across differences of race, class and sexuality but also across differences of language, national context, level of development, and the like. How do they do this? I argue that the movement against gender violence has achieved cooperation through the development of norms of inclusivity. Such norms include a commitment to descriptive representation, the facilitation of separate organization for disadvantaged social groups, and a commitment to building consensus with institutionalized dissent. Developing such norms is not the only possible path to cooperation, but it is an important and overlooked one. It illuminates a way of maintaining solidarity and improving policy influence without denying or sublimating the differences and conflicts among activists. Existing scholarship on social movements that attributes successful cooperation to shared interests, identities, or opportunities, is incomplete because it does not take account of relations of domination among activists who cooperate. Attending to the context of structural inequality in which social movements operate improves our understanding of social mobilization and illuminates overlooked paths to cooperation.S. Laurel Weldon is associate professor of political science at Purdue University ([email protected]). The author thanks Jane Mansbridge for her help. Thanks also to Karen Beckwith, Elisabeth Clemens, Jennifer Hochschild, Aaron Hoffman, Debra Liebowitz, and Iris Young for comments on earlier drafts. Thanks to Anne Walker and Vicki Semler for helpful conversations, and to Charlotte Bunch, Arvonne Fraser, and Jutta Joachim for helping with key details. Reviewers for Perspectives provided many valuable suggestions. Errors and shortcomings remain my responsibility.

Positing behavior as interest driven insufficiently explains why reform is difficult. This article draws on experiences with school reform to argue that ideas in the form of purposes play a part. Purposes, however, are erratic sources of motivation, sometimes generating intense commitments but often functioning in a mercurial manner. They operate in conjunction with the character and strength of supports. Purposes that are compatible in principle may nevertheless compete for time, resources, and especially attention. Because human beings are creatures of bounded rationality, any given purpose is susceptible to attention shift. Interpersonal and interorganizational networks can serve as counterweights by bolstering identity with the reform goal, providing cognitive reinforcement for it, and enhancing the credibility of a reform goal as achievable. In an assessment of the role of ideas, it is important to remember that they come in a variety of scopes and levels of abstractness. As forces in the politics of reform, ideas have a part shaped by context. The role of ideas in the local setting is quite different from their role in media-infused battles at the national level. Local arenas are frequently nonpartisan, with actors focused on immediate concerns, daily demands, and scarce resources. Because concrete actions may be more important than ideological posture, mass persuasion may be of less concern than enlistment of scattered cadres of task-specific activists.Clarence Stone is Research Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at George Washington and Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland ([email protected]). Marion Orr is Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies, Brown University ([email protected]). Donn Worgs is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of Metropolitan Studies, Towson University (dworgs@ towson.edu). The authors wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for extraordinarily helpful comments.

According to Samuel Huntington, Latin Americans are eroding our country's core Anglo-Protestant values. The values, says he, made America great, unified the country, and allowed immigrant upward mobility through assimilation and acculturation. Huntington expresses concern that immigrants from Latin America, now our main newcomers, along with their U.S.-born progeny, are creating another America, culturally and socially distinct. The reason for this, he claims, is that they settle in close proximity to one another; they retain use of their mother tongue, Spanish; and they remain, in the main, committed Catholics. These conditions purportedly are bad both for America and for the immigrants. They impede new immigrant ability to live the American Dream and, by implication, America's continued global economic preeminence.Susan Eckstein is Professor of Sociology at Boston University ([email protected]). Thanks to the Radcliffe Institute and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundations for financial support for the project on which this article draws, and to Richard Alba and Jorge Domínguez for comments on an earlier version of this essay. The author is also appreciative of the hundreds of Cuban Americans with whom she spoke who have deepened her understanding of Cuban American experiences. She has spoken with ordinary Cuban Americans who emigrated at different points in time, as well as with businessmen, politicians, clergy, leaders of diverse groups and organizations, scholars, and journalists.

AIDS first manifested itself in the early 1980s as an apparent “gay disease.” Cases soon appeared outside the industrialized west and among other communities. Given HIV's modes of transmission, sex workers, drug injectors, and those who engaged in unprotected nonmonogamous sex were at higher risk, and the political economy of the virus was such that communities on domestic as well as international margins had the highest prevalence. Governments were slow to respond seriously. In their place, segments of the gay and lesbian community united by the late 1980s to educate, protect, and care for themselves, even in countries in which cases of homosexual transmission comprise a relatively small proportion of infections. At times, governments' abdication of responsibility left those nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) less closely-scrutinized than others—most notable where associational life is generally subject to illiberal controls—leaving them relatively free to advance explicit or implicit community-building among their marginalized constituencies. Though governments and media gained interest as heterosexual transmission rates rose, both still neglected the highest-risk groups. Importantly, the perspectives, perceived constituencies, and approaches of HIV/AIDS-related NGOs may diverge sharply from those of public health authorities, with unambiguous consequences in terms of the relative empowerment, receptivity to messages, and, ultimately, behaviors of target communities.Meredith L. Weiss is a Research Fellow at East-West Center Washington ([email protected]). Preliminary research for this project was supported by a DePaul University faculty research grant.

Imagine for a moment, that we—we in this liberal democracy—want to design the basic institutions of our economic and political interactions so that they are just. In order that just institutions be designed fairly, we will not be allowed to reason from our own particular circumstances. We are not to know our own race or religion, our own material resources, or even our own personal abilities and whether these abilities are valued by our society. Imagine that once this “veil of ignorance” about ourselves is lifted, we might discover that we are the person least advantaged by racist social norms or least advantaged by the relative value that our society places on skills (for example, that we have the skills of a seamstress, not of a professional basketball player). In this view of the bases for an agreement about first principles of justice, the things that we think of as “ours”—our innate skills and those we develop through education and commitment—do not entitle us to the benefits of deploying them in our political economy. Instead, our personal endowments and the value that society puts on them are morally arbitrary. From the moral view of this “original position”, choosing the principles used to guide the distribution of the benefits that accrue from exercising these should be a political decision that we make together. Yet, imagining that we might be a seamstress, a basketball player, or unemployable, each of us reasons the same way.Brooke Ackerly is Assistant Professor at Vandervilt University ([email protected]). She is the author of Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (2000). Special thanks to W. James Booth, to the participants in the Vanderbilt interdisciplinary theory seminar Mark Brandon, John Goldberg, Steve Hetcher, Bob Talisse, and John Weymark and to Talisse, John Geer, and the anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics.

As the United States begins the twenty-first century, it remains the world's leading immigration country. In 2000 (the latest year for which migration data are available on a global basis) the United States was home to almost 35 million legal and unauthorized migrants, or 2.7 times as many as any other country. Although other nations have higher proportions of foreign-born residents (e.g., nearly 25 percent in Australia and 20 percent in Canada), the globally dominant position of the United States in regard to numbers of new immigrants reinforces its self-image as a “nation of immigrants,” as does the fact that immigration is generally seen as contributing to the country's economic and demographic strength. However, over the past three decades, more and more new arrivals with non-European origins have come to the country (more than four-fifths are Latino and Asian), many with very low levels of education and illegal status at entry. These changes have fueled public concerns and led to heated debates over whether U.S. admissions and settlement-related policies ought to be modified.Frank D. Bean is Professor of Sociology ([email protected]), Susan K. Brown is Assistant Professor of Sociology ([email protected]),and Rubén G. Rumbaut is Professor of Sociology at University of California, Irvine ([email protected]). Some of the research results reported in this paper come from a research project entitled “Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles” and supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.

Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy. By Mark R. Warren; Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life. By Harry C. Boyte; Going Public. By Michael Gecan; and Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice. By Edward T. Chambers with Michael A. Cowan.

These are not easy times for democracy. In the face of multinational corporations, an increasingly corrupt and deceitful political system, mega-media conglomerates, and militaristic televangelists, it is easy to understand how some radical democrats succumb to a politics of the bullhorn. The objective of such politics is to hone the correct line and strategize ways to project it clearly, loudly, and righteously into the public arena. Yet the success of politics thus framed has been marginal in recent decades, and its democratic credentials questionable—if by democratic we mean a politics that engages a manifold people in the difficult reciprocities of active critical judgment, organizing, action toward common goods, more egalitarian distributions, and deepening acknowledgments of plural modes of being. Most Americans are Teflon to it.Romand Coles is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University ([email protected]). The author wishes to acknowledge helpful comments and criticisms from Susan Bickford, Kimberley Curtis, Jeffrey Isaac, Sanford Schram, and anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics. Romand Coles is the author of Self/Power/Other: Political Theory and Dialogical Ethics, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas, and most recently Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy.

The title of this essay might strike some people as odd. Rawls a revolutionary? Could one ever imagine the careful, gentle, and eminently sensible figure of John Rawls manning a barricade? The very strangeness of this image illustrates the uneasy connection between equality and politics in his work. Rawls's egalitarian vision would take nothing short of a revolution to bring about, and Rawls was anything but a revolutionary.Simone Chambers is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto ([email protected]). Special thanks go to Robert Amdur for his helpful, careful, and as usual, accurate criticisms of an earlier draft. She would also like to thank Steven E. White for his research, the many reviewers at Perspectives on Politics for their comments, and Joe Carens, Duncan Ivison, and Jeff Kopstein for all the equality talk.

Enlargement of the European Union (EU) is infusing renewed religious vitality into European political and social life through the influential role that religion plays in many of the states that have recently joined or are seeking to join the EU as full-fledged members. This vitality is, in turn, fortifying the role of religion in European politics in two closely related ways. In the first place, the close ties between religious tradition and national identity that new member-states and candidate-states are introducing to the EU hold the very real potential of reviving political recognition of the Christian, and specifically Catholic, roots of European integration. Western Europe may be said to have preserved Christianity only as glimmering embers that are not able to generate much heat, on their own. But when fanned, in very different ways, by Catholic Poland, Orthodox Serbia, or Islamic Turkey, those embers are much more likely to flicker back into flames. Second, the greater attention to religious difference that this renewed vitality implies could itself ignite political reactions and conflicts that are likely to impede the process of “Europeanization.” Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam are transnational religious traditions that each have their own understanding of European identity, European unity, and even of European modernity. These religious understandings and definitions, animated politically in complex ways in places like Warsaw, Belgrade, and Ankara, may not be consistent with how these concepts are defined and understood in, say, Paris, Berlin, or Brussels. As these religious traditions, and the national communities partly defined by them, are drawn more deeply into the project of European integration through enlargement, religion will also get drawn more deeply into European public life. Put another way, religion, widely presumed to have been consigned to the political margins in Europe, is now poised to play an important role in one of the most central political processes of contemporary European life.Timothy A. Byrnes is Professor of Political Science at Colgate University ([email protected]). His books include Transnational Catholicism in Postcommunist Europe, and Catholic Bishops in American Politics. Peter J. Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University ([email protected]). His current research centers on issues of regionalism as well as soft power in world politics. This paper draws on the arguments that we are developing in greater detail in the two framing chapters in Byrnes and Katzenstein (2006). We would like to thank all the participants in the Mellon-Sawyer seminar “Towards a Transitional and Transcultural Europe” where these ideas took their initial shape, as well as the participants at a workshop at Colgate University in April 2004. Robert Keohane, John Meyer, Vjekoslav Perica, Sabrina Petra Ramet, Sidney Tarrow, and Scott Thomas also offered insightful comments that helped us greatly in drafting this paper, as did two anonymous reviewers of this journal. The remaining weaknesses are due to our stubbornness in not following the good advice we received.

Sex Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2002. Edited by Nicholas Bamforth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 320p. $27.50.

A collection of revised versions of lectures given in 2002 on the general topics of gender, sexuality, and human rights (with two additional commissioned pieces), this volume is in some ways what one would expect: a loosely connected group of essays most (but not all) of which discuss the relationship of gender and (other-than-normative) sexuality to human rights. As the cover photograph—of two men in dress clothes embracing, perhaps in the aftermath of a gay commitment ceremony—suggests, one unifying theme of the work is whether lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people's claim to be treated by society, the law, and the state with the same respect and protection as are heterosexual couples is, in fact, a human rights claim. However, readers who might be led by the packaging to expect the work as a whole to center on that consideration will be disappointed.

Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. By Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 262 pages. $55.00 cloth

Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser's recent book, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe, exemplifies the recent incursion of economists into the domains of political science and sociology. In thinking about welfare states, economists have traditionally been interested in their effects on the distribution of income and, above all, their implications for efficiency and growth. Alesina and Glaeser instead set out to explain why “Americans are much less willing to redistribute from the rich to the poor than Europeans” (2) or, in other words, why the American welfare state is so small by comparison to European welfare states. This, then, is a book about American exceptionalism in the realm of social policy, but Alesina and Glaeser's discussion also addresses the general problem of accounting for cross-national variation in the public provision of social welfare. Their project is to provide an account of the exceptional nature of the American welfare state that is consistent with and sheds light on differences among other welfare states as well. This makes for an audacious book that deserves critical scrutiny.Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Politics at Princeton University ([email protected]). This essay was written while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. I am most grateful to the foundation for its support. For comments on previous drafts, I am grateful to Ira Katznelson, Mary O'Sullivan, and Kenneth Sokoloff.

The theory of justice that John Rawls spent his life developing and refining contains dozens of ideas that each have spurred major scholarly debate. One of these is that the subject of justice is the basic structure of society. In his major works Rawls gives slightly different formulations to the concept of basic structure, but the core idea remains the same. Early in A Theory of Justice Rawls proposes to offer “a conception of justice as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed.” Political Liberalism devotes an entire chapter to explicating what it means to say that the basic structure is the subject of justice. There Rawls defines basic structure “as the way in which major social institutions fit together into one system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties and shape the division of advantages that arise through social cooperation”. More recently, Rawls reiterates the notion of the basic structure in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement:Iris Marion Young is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago ([email protected]). Among books she has published is Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2000. Global Challenges: On War, Self-Determination and Global Justice is forthcoming from Polity Press in 2006.

As scholarly interest in the concept of identity continues to grow, social identities are proving to be crucially important for understanding contemporary life. Despite—or perhaps because of—the sprawl of different treatments of identity in the social sciences, the concept has remained too analytically loose to be as useful a tool as the literature's early promise had suggested. We propose to solve this longstanding problem by developing the analytical rigor and methodological imagination that will make identity a more useful variable for the social sciences. This article offers more precision by defining collective identity as a social category that varies along two dimensions—content and contestation. Content describes the meaning of a collective identity. The content of social identities may take the form of four non-mutually-exclusive types: constitutive norms; social purposes; relational comparisons with other social categories; and cognitive models. Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a group over the content of the shared category. Our conceptualization thus enables collective identities to be compared according to the agreement and disagreement about their meanings by the members of the group. The final section of the article looks at the methodology of identity scholarship. Addressing the wide array of methodological options on identity—including discourse analysis, surveys, and content analysis, as well as promising newer methods like experiments, agent-based modeling, and cognitive mapping—we hope to provide the kind of brush clearing that will enable the field to move forward methodologically as well.Rawi Abdelal is Associate Professor, Harvard Business School ([email protected]). Yoshiko M. Herrera is Associate Professor, Government Department, Harvard University ([email protected]). Alastair Iain Johnston is Professor, Government Department, Harvard University ([email protected]). Rose McDermott is Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of California at Santa Barbara ([email protected]). Research for the paper was made possible by the generous support of the Weatherhead Initiative of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. We are grateful to those who commented on earlier versions of this paper: Peter Burke, Lars-Erik Cederman, Jeff Checkel,Michael Dawson, James Fearon, David Frank, Erin Jenne, Michael Jones-Correa, Cynthia Kaplan, Peter Katzenstein, Herb Kelman, Paul Kowert, David Laitin, Daniel Posner, Paul Sniderman, Werner Sollors, Jeff Strabone, Philip Stone, Ronald Suny, Charles Tilly, Mary Waters, and three anonymous reviewers. We would also like to thank participants of the 2004 Identity as a Variable conference, including Henry Brady, Kanchan Chandra, Jack Citrin, Neta Crawford, Jennifer Hochschild, Jacques Hymans, Ted Hopf, Cynthia Kaplan, Ulrich Krotz, Taeku Lee, Will Lowe, Jason Lyall, Kimberly Neuendorf, Roger Petersen, Kevin Quinn, David Rousseau, Rogers Smith, Donald Sylvan, Kim Williams, and Michael Young, for comments on this version.

Democracy's Literature: Politics and Fiction in America. Edited by Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Romance. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 248p. $80 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Political Philosophy Comes to Rick's: Casablanca and American Civic Culture. Edited by James F. Pontuso. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 208p. $65.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Democracy's Literature is the most recent foray by political philosophers to save literature from itself, or at least to save good books from Departments of English. At the same time, as coeditor Joseph Romance suggests in the conclusion to his own essay, such an undertaking throws a lifeline to narrow-minded political scientists, urging them—if I may paraphrase Flannery O'Connor—to meet political perplexities with an examination of conscience rather than an examination of statistics. And it is this political examination of conscience that literature will often facilitate.

All the News That's Fit to Sell. By James Hamilton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 264 pages. $37.95 cloth. $18.95 paper.

Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age. By Matthew Baum. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 291 pages. $39.95 cloth. $19.95 paper.

The way we think about news should be changed by two recent books: James Hamilton's All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News and Matthew Baum's Soft News Goes to War. Both present surprising findings that challenge conventional wisdom. And, read together, they presage a new line of research into how entrepreneurial politicians, all over the world, are changing politics through their responses to changing media.Samuel L Popkin is Professor of Political Science at University of California, San Diego ([email protected]). This essay was inspired by Elizabeth Eisenstein's pioneering research on the effects of the printing press and Ithiel Pool's analyses of the discrepancies between the expected and actual effect of new communications technologies from the printing press through the digital revolution. It was written during a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am indebted to Gerald Gamm, Delynn Kaufman, Gary Jacobson, Arthur Lupia, Samuel Kernell, Michael Schudson and Bob Kaiser for their comments.

Amid the resurgence of party spirit in the U.S., partisanship retains its bad name. Often branded an expression of inherited prejudice, narrow interest, or dogmatic commitment, it seems at odds with good citizenship. In what form, if any, is partisanship something admirable? This question has been neglected by political theorists, whose ideals of democracy, justice, and citizen virtue rarely depict the proper place of partisanship. I offer an account of the ethics of partisanship that shows how party spirit is defensible, even admirable—and how it is troubling, even pathological.Russell Muirhead is Associate Professor in the Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin ([email protected]). I would like to thank Sam Beer, Sharon Krause, Joseph Lambert, Glyn Morgan, Nancy Rosenblum, Mark Somos, Dennis Thompson, Jeremy Waldron, and the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful written comments on drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the participants of the Yale Political Theory workshop for their comments.

How political is Rawls's political liberalism? By calling his theory “political liberalism,” he means something, as he says, “quite different … from what the reader is likely to suppose.” In particular, he distances his theory from the hurly-burly of electoral contests and the deal-making of legislative log-rolling. By “political”, Rawls mainly intends to contrast his theory with those that rely on metaphysical foundations. But Rawls's theory is political in at least one ordinary sense: it is not meant to be only a theory. He does not intend to offer the kind of utopian account that stands across an unbridgeable gap from the sentiments, opinions, and institutions of everyday politics. On the contrary, as a “realistic utopia” his theory is a blueprint for a building that can in fact be built. What part does politics play in this picture? How much distance does Rawls put between political liberalism and “what the reader is likely to suppose”? Does politics as it is normally understood both popularly and in much democratic theory recede into the far distance? Does it disappear altogether?Russell Muirhead is Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University ([email protected]); Nancy L Rosenblum is Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University ([email protected]). The authors would like to thank Corey Brettschneider and Erin Kelly for helpful comments.