The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought. By Jesse Goldhammer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 218p. $45.00.

The problem of how to found a political regime is one of the oldest and most vexed in the history of Western thought. The founding act has often been drenched in blood because certain forms of violence actually help to foster political foundation. This is the illiberal starting point of Jesse Goldhammer's study of the French discourse on sacrificial violence, a theme that he rightly describes as “anathema to mainstream political theory” (p. x), which tends to divert its glance from what it sees as unseemly anachronisms like this. Undaunted, Goldhammer bravely plunges in, turning to 1790s France and the theorizing about sacrifice that it spawned for insight into the violence that he claims is “necessary for political beginnings” (p. 1). While the French revolutionaries engaged in “sacrificial practices and interpretations” such as the beheading of Louis XVI, they never actually developed a theory of sacrifice. That was the contribution of notorious postrevolutionary writers, such as Joseph de Maistre, Georges Sorel, and Georges Bataille, who well understood that violent sacrifice “facilitates the process of conferring moral legitimacy to political power and setting boundaries for political identity” (p. 192).

Prior to the 1970s, political science for the most part happily ignored questions of production, exchange, consumption, and investment. The new prominence of Marxist and neo-Marxist scholarship in that decade as well as the transformation of many institutions, trends and premises of the post-World War II order (including the collapse of Bretton Woods, the rise of OPEC and Third World liberation movements, the advent of détente, and the first global recession since the Great Depression) ushered many innovative themes and methodologies into our discipline. Political economy was the most direct result of both these trends, taking its place as one of the first of a wave of “inter-” or “multidisciplinary” fields of study.Darel E. Paul is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, Williamstown, MA ([email protected]). He is the author of Rescaling International Political Economy: Subnational States and the Regulation of the Global Political Economy (Routledge, 2005) as well as of several articles on cities in the contemporary global political economy.

We live in “one world.” The globe is an ecological whole, sufficiently connected that it is now possible to envision climate changes and catastrophes that affect the entire planet. The world's economy is increasingly becoming interconnected. Human beings recognize a common humanity, including a body of human rights. But we are not the “single nation state” hypothesized by the South Commission. We are divided into many peoples, governed by the slightly more than the 191 states recognized by the United Nations as members. But the existence of many peoples does not answer the normative questions implicit in the South Commission's warning. Should we be trying to govern the one world as if we were one people—and take on the task of building a single stable world order, bridging the divides between the much better-off top fifth and much less well-off bottom four-fifths? Or, should the one world be governed as if it were two sets of peoples, one set free and the other not? Or, should a third order shape the world, one that encompasses many peoples who develop the rules, agreements and accommodations that are needed to keep those peoples at peace where possible and promote mutually advantageous cooperation, while taking those measures that address the emergencies and extremes to which all decent states would concur?

What has the discipline that calls itself “political science” to do with literary studies, anthropology, the philosophy of language, structural linguistics, or hermeneutics? With postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cultural studies, and other such pursuits? Anne Norton's 95 Theses raises these questions at the nexus of “Politics, Culture, and Method.” Asked to consider this work both generally and with an eye to its potential impact on the discipline of political science, the subfield of political theory and disciplinary or subfield divisions, I find myself caught between the terms of the invitation and the implosion of those terms for which the Theses offer no small spark. Curiously though, its most incendiary aspects appear not in Norton's own measured prose, but rather on its dust jacket. The back cover, for example, dubs it “an attack on the social science establishment,” while an inner flap applauds Norton as a “political scientist” who has launched “a polemic against the orthodoxy of her own field.” There, too, strident phrasing names the polemical target: “the antiquated and stultifying models in the textbooks on method, in courses on methodology, championed by the self-appointed gatekeepers of a narrow and parochial political science.” Norton, we're told, “opens the gates to more new practices, new principles, new questions, more methods, and more demanding ethical and scientific criteria.”Kirstie M. McClure is Associate Professor of Political Science and English at University of California, Los Angeles ([email protected]).

Democracy and America's War on Terror. By Robert L. Ivie. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. 276p. $38.75 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In the Name of Terrorism: Presidents on Political Violence in the Post–World War II Era. By Carol K. Winkler. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 260p. $65.00.

Two recent books on the relation between the rhetoric of political discourse and American democratic politics explore the ways that language can shape political outcomes. Political culture has been a woolly subject for political scientists, specifically because explanatory models of political culture tend to oppose the more predominant institutional models of explanation. But both books convincingly make the claim that political culture can and is shaped by the rhetoric of political elites and that this has a deep impact on the ways in which political phenomena are interpreted and understood in a collective sense. Both analyze political discourse and seek to show how it impacts, shapes, and can even predict certain outcomes in political life.

Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. By Donald Alexander Downs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $28.99 cloth, $19.99 paper.

Donald Downs's Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus is an important book. Like his earlier books, it integrates political theory, jurisprudence, and policy analysis to address a matter of contemporary concern. In this case, the matter at hand is directly relevant to all scholars and teachers who work in the contemporary American university. Since this includes most political scientists, it seemed like a good idea to open the pages of the Perspectives Book Reviews to a range of perspectives on the book. I have thus sought out a “balanced” cast of distinguished commentators, in the hope that the juxtaposition of different reviews will help to promote serious discussion of academic freedom issues of concern to all of us. Some of these issues are juridical, and regard the ways in which universities, academic departments, and perhaps even professional associations are called upon to codify “diversity” considerations and balance these with other considerations, including “academic excellence” but also civil liberty and robust debate. Some of them are principally ethical, and regard the habits of mind most conducive to intellectual inquiry and liberal education. These issues are complicated and controversial. In featuring the Downs volume and the three reviews that follow, I sought to stimulate intelligent discussion about them within the political science profession. It is my intention to organize similar discussions of other important books in future issues.

John Rawls is the towering figure of academic liberalism. A gentle, dignified, self-effacing man, he taught philosophy at Harvard for more than thirty years and from his commanding position exerted a decisive influence on his profession. Through his scholarship and teaching he played a major role in establishing the now-dominant understanding of liberalism in the academy and, more generally, of the method and purpose of the philosophical study of politics.Peter Berkowitz teaches at George Mason University School of Law and is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution ([email protected]). He is the editor of the companion volumes Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover Institution Press 2004) and Varieties of Progressivism in America (Hoover Institution Press 2004).This essay weaves together (and in places corrects) the argument of “John Rawls and the Liberal Faith,” in The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 60–69, and “The Academic Liberal,” in The Weekly Standard, Dec. 16, 2002.

In 95 Theses Anne Norton picks a fight with conventional political science. She asks conventional political science to use different measures (indeed, conceptualize what we do as something other than “measuring”), use different methods, and ask different questions. Some may read this as a threat to an entire way of life. I read it as an intriguing and exciting challenge.Katherine Cramer Walsh is Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison ([email protected]). She is the author of Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life (University of Chicago, 2004) and A Practical Politics of Difference: Race, Community and Dialogue in Civic Life (University of Chicago, forthcoming). Special thanks to Joe Soss for extensive feedback and conversations on this essay.

Scientific Values and Civic Virtues. Edited by Noretta Koertge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 256p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This interesting collection of essays is dedicated to the proposition that the values essential for the functioning, indeed even the existence, of a scientific community are by and large the very values necessary for the sustenance and optimal functioning of a democratic society. To this end, the book is divided into three sections: The first is devoted to explicating the values entailed in any real scientific community and to exploring the historical nexus between the development of civil society and science; the second to illustrating the role of these values in science through a number of case studies; and the third to the examination and critique of contemporary anti- or pseudoscientific cultural movements as threats not only to science but to civil society itself.

Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. By Donald Alexander Downs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $28.99 cloth, $19.99 paper.

The stated themes of Donald Downs's book are ones with which most readers of this journal will be sympathetic: Intellectual freedom is the most important commodity academics have; it is under siege on a variety of fronts; some of these fronts might appear innocent but are often only the thin edge of the wedge; and faculty must recognize these threats and organize themselves to resist. This is a timely reminder, for there are many threats to academic freedom facing us today: Campus Watch, which has posted online the dossiers of professors who supposedly sympathize with Islamic terrorists and encourages students to “inform” on their professors for alleged anti-American sentiments; David Horowitz's so-called academic bill of rights, which targets professors who supposedly display that favorite shibboleth of the right wing, “liberal bias”; the Patriot Act; and government surveillance and wiretapping. Moreover, the strength of these efforts to suppress speech is frightening: Well funded, but not very thoughtful, they often hijack the truth in vitriolic hatred of academics.

Rethinking Freedom: Why Freedom Has Lost Its Meaning and What Can Be Done to Save It. By C. Fred Alford. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 192p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society. By Isaac D. Balbus. New York: Other Press, 2005. 264p. $25.00.

Psychoanalysis has suffered rough treatment in American mass media in recent decades. Dubious sweeping neurological claims have displaced what are regarded as dubious “talking cure” claims. This cultural trend is reflected in the reflex-like skepticism with which especially under-50 scholars behold the works of Sigmund Freud and his schismatic followers. Political scientists rarely bother with psychoanalysis or tend at best to exhibit a “Freud for Beginners' grasp of the enterprise, which is, after all, an exploration, and canny effort at explanation, of our “inner world” and of the rule of unconscious elements over our intentions and best-laid plans. Inasmuch as the study of the unwieldy “inner self” militates against rational modeling, it is little wonder that psychoanalysis has fallen out of favor since Harold Lasswell's heyday. Indeed, psychoanalysts offer some intriguing comments about underlying motives that drive those of us who pursue rationalist models as adequate depictions of reality, but we need not tarry there.

Beissinger, Mark R. and Crawford Young, eds. Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002).

Herbst, Jeffrey. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Luong, Pauline Jones. Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post Soviet Central Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Reno, William. Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1998).

Rotberg, Robert I., ed. State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

Rotberg, Robert I., ed. When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).John R. Heilbrunn is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in International Political Economy of Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. Heilbrunn has publications on democracy in Africa, corruption in France, and is currently writing a book analyzing institutional change among Africa's petroleum economies. The author gratefully acknowledges helpful comments from Vincent Foucher, Phil Keefer, Nic van de Walle, and the anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics.

Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. By Donald Alexander Downs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $28.99 cloth, $19.99 paper.

The title reflects the background premise of this recent work: restoring free speech and liberty on campus. Free speech has been threatened on campus but it can be restored. That is the message that Donald Downs wants to convey. He is a professor of political science and law at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and an unabashed champion of free speech. He cites John Stuart Mill with respect, and he is something that has become less common on American campuses, an old-fashioned liberal. Nearly a quarter of the book, in fact, is a personal memoir of Downs' success, at Wisconsin, in persuading the faculty senate to repeal its overly restrictive speech code.

Democratic Faith. By Patrick J. Deneen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 440p. $45.00.

Contemporary democratic theory has been flourishing. Recent liberal, communitarian, republican, deliberative, agonistic, pluralist, postmodern, cosmopolitan, cyberspace, and realist models and theories abound. Patrick Deneen's book is a significant contribution to this genre and original in its critical focus on those democratic theories that “insist upon the possibility of democratic transformation” and advance “a conception of human beings as both infinitely malleable and ameliorable” (p. 4).

Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein. Edited by Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 400p. $80.00 cloth, $32.00 paper.

This festschrift for Richard J. Bernstein succeeds in celebrating his career, not only through the editors' insightful introduction and the excellent biographical essay by Judith Friedlander but also through 13 significant essays and an excerpt from Shoshana Yovel's novel that speaks with keen philosophical insight on radical evil. As the editors say, one of the distinctive contributions of Bernstein to philosophy is a view of social critique that encompasses normative as well as empirical and interpretive dimensions and that employs a form of pragmatic reason both dialogical in nature and political in its implications (p. xiii). The contributors draw upon Bernstein's approach to salvage what Jerome Kohn, in his fine essay based on Kant's Critique of Judgment, understands to be a “common world” that is “fit for human habitation” (pp. 270–74). The latter is the location for self-creation and for the freedom that sustains it. Nonetheless, self-creation is threatened by the totalitarian mind, which is intent upon using its freedom to destroy all freedom. As a counter, the essays in this volume embrace what the editors refer to as Bernstein's “Deweyan view of philosophy as the self-reflection of democratic society” and thereby make self-creation the centerpiece of human flourishing (p. viii).

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. By Bruno Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 320p. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

“What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!” Bruno Latour begins The Politics Of Nature with this provocative statement (p. 1). What follows is a creative reconceptualization of the relationship among nature, science, and politics with profound implications for the future of ecological change, traditional right/left ideologies, and modern political processes, including globalization.

Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. By Donald Alexander Downs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $28.99 cloth, $19.99 paper.

Rarely have I read a book with whose core thesis I so fully agree but which nonetheless so sets my teeth gnashing. I begin with the agreement, which is more important, and return later to the gnashing.

Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond. By Andrew Biro. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. 270p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Andrew Biro's dense argument for a “denaturalized ecological politics” should have wide appeal. At one level, it should make political theorists generally—whether or not they consider themselves “ecological theorists”—reflect more systematically on how concepts of nature structure the ideas of canonical thinkers. Political ecology is too often treated like a specialty shop in the theory emporium, a boutique that one enters or not according to the inclinations of taste. In fact, its insights recast the central concerns of political theory broadly conceived. Just as feminists have uncovered how gendered concepts are woven throughout the entire fabric of political discourse, so ecological political theorists demonstrate how nature in multiple guises (wildness, savagery, emotional connectedness, fecundity, scarcity, etc.) subtly inflects the meaning of notions of rights, justice, and human well-being. In this regard, Biro's perceptive analyses of Rousseau and Marx—like John Meyer's reading of Aristotle and Hobbes in Political Nature (2001)—add heft to a growing literature that, in the name of environmental concern, wrings new meaning from familiar theorists.

Protestantism and the American Founding. Edited by Thomas S. Engeman and Michael P. Zuckert. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 296p. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Thomas Engeman and Michael Zuckert's unique collection of essays and commentaries, most written specifically for this volume, offer competing interpretations of the relationship between the “spirit of liberty” and the “spirit of religion,” as Tocqueville would put it, in the American Founding. The collection begins with a long essay by Zuckert that sets the terms of discussion of the book to which many of the contributors respond, and it concludes with a response by Zuckert to each of his critics.

Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. By Jonathan Marks. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 200p. $65.00.

Many of us feel we know Rousseau, perhaps better than we do any other modern political thinker. For this we have Rousseau himself to thank; his Confessions, though often opaque and perplexing, still give us a vivid sense of the person who wrote them—ardent, dramatic, petulant, grandiose. Anyone who has read Rousseau's own account of his life will surely be puzzled by the cool, muted tones Jonathan Marks uses to portray him: Marks's Rousseau is a sober, measured thinker who tempers his most radical ideas with a sharp awareness of human limitations. This portrait, so deliberately drawn, looks the way it does for several reasons.