Untimely Politics.

Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. By Randy E. Barnett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 360p. $32.50.

Libertarianism Without Inequality. By Michael Otsuka. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 168p. $39.95.

According to Randy Barnett in Restoring the Lost Constitution, “the original meaning of the entire Constitution … is much more libertarian than the one selectively enforced by the Supreme Court” (p. 356). This is because, Barnett argues, the way that the Constitution has been interpreted by the Court over the past seventy years, that is, from the beginning of the New Deal on, has eviscerated a number of clauses and amendments that were expressly designed to limit the power of both federal and state government to interfere with the basic liberties or “natural rights” retained by the people. His ambitious goal is to restore these amendments and clauses to their original meaning through an exhaustive exploration of that meaning.

The first Monday in October marks a ritual that has become as sacred in the United States as circumcision is in Judaism or sainthood and sacrament in Catholicism, as hajj is for Islam or the singing of “God Save the Queen” in Britain. First Monday in October is also the title of a popular 1981 Hollywood film starring Jill Clayburgh and Walter Matthau, in which the first woman appointed to the Court, a staunch conservative, spars with the Court's reigning liberal. Through several vapid comedic encounters they develop affection and collegial respect for each other.Susan S. Silbey thanks Tom Burke, Keith Bybee, Howard Gillman, Doug Goodman, and Jessica Silbey for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires.

Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought. By Ingrid Creppell. New York: Routledge, 2003. 212p. $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Sensual Philosophy: Toleration, Skepticism, and Montaigne's Politics of Self. By Alan Levine. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001. 336p. $80.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Toleration has once again become a central focus of liberal theories of justice. In recent years, many liberal theorists have put aside foundational arguments about autonomy and equality in order to explore directly how individuals with diverse identities and beliefs can live together peacefully. Early modern proponents of liberalism were similarly animated by concerns about identity and difference, originally developing the modern concept of toleration amidst the conflicts of the European wars of religion. In the works under review here, Ingrid Creppell and Alan Levine admirably plumb the insights of these authors in order to propose more fruitful ways for conceptualizing toleration in our own times.

Are school desegregation proponents more likely to succeed in local political arenas in the South than in federal courtrooms? To raise that question on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education may seem absurd. Had local politics in the South been receptive to desegregation efforts, there would presumably have been scant need for the litigation leading to that landmark case. However, the legal environment, national political climate, and political situation in southern school districts have changed considerably in fifty years—in ways that make the question relevant. Today, we suggest, the answer may frequently be yes.Stephen Samuel Smith is the author of Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte. Karen M. Kedrowski is author of Media Entrepreneurs and the Media Enterprise in the U.S. Congress. Joseph M. Ellis is interested in Soviet and post-Soviet politics. The authors thank Manning B. Shaw III for skilled research assistance; Ted Arrington, William Crotty, Anita Earls, Ken Meier, Jennifer Hochschild, and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments; and the Spencer Foundation and the Winthrop University Research Council for grants to Smith. The authors bear sole responsibility for any errors.

Trauma and the Memory of Politics. By Jenny Edkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 265p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

This is an important and innovative book. In it, Jenny Edkins explores the relationship between violence, the traumatic effects of violence, and the foundation and perpetuation of sovereign power. Using historical and field research, Edkins examines sites and practices that commemorate famines, wars, genocides, and terrorist attacks. She describes the evolution of the Cenotaph in Great Britain and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC; Dachau and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the place of the “camp” (concentration camps at midcentury; refugee camps at the millennium) in political discourse. While many of these sites seek to contain and appropriate traumatic experience for the purposes of reproducing sovereign power, she contends, the testimony made possible in part through them has radical potential for helping us to contest nationalism and to rethink our relationship to the state.

Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality.

In the March 2004 Perspectives on Politics Gabriel Almond, Kristen Renwick Monroe, and Michael Neblo discuss what made the Chicago Political Science Department of the 1920s great. I believe that my distinguished friend and erstwhile colleague, Gabriel Almond, set this important discussion off on a misleading note by talking about a Chicago school of politics, thus inducing an unconvincing discussion of what the leading figures of the department supposedly had in common. The character of the university and the innovative work of its leaders did indeed make the department great. But collective greatness does not in itself constitute a school.In addition to his work in political science, Morton A. Kaplan has published in philosophy.

Browsing the book exhibit room at any major political science conference these days, one notices what seems to be a bonanza of new edited volumes that examine political psychology as a discipline within political science or provide a variety of research essays aimed at introducing the reader to the subfield. Although psychology has always been an important component of political analysis, the prevalence of these books suggests a growing, or renewed, interest among political scientists in using insights from social and cognitive psychology to understand political phenomena—an interest that spurs these scholarly attempts to demarcate the conceptual and methodological structure of political psychology as a subfield. As Wendy Rahn, John Sullivan, and Thomas Rudolph have noted, this interest has emerged over the years partly in response to the rise of rational choice theory in political science. Regardless of the specific topic at hand, political psychology research often challenges the assumptions of rational choice models and adds nuance to the insights of rational choice theory. It offers rigorous empirical demonstrations of how systematic and predictable psychological processes affect whether traditional assumptions of rationality do or do not hold and, conversely, how the structure of political institutions affects psychological processes. These empirical critiques and modifications of rational choice theory make political psychology a compelling line of inquiry to scholars from a variety of methodological and substantive backgrounds.Deborah J. Schildkraut thanks Jennifer Hochschild, the staff at Perspectives on Politics, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous assistance.

Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy. By Cynthia Estlund. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 240p. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Writing from New York in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville described “a society formed of all the nations of the world”—peoples of different languages, beliefs, and opinions forming a society without roots, memory, common ideas, or, indeed, a national character. What held such a polity together? “Interest. That is the secret” (Alexis de Tocqueville, “To Ernest de Chabrol 9 June 1831” in Roger Boesche, Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, 1985. p. 38). Such observations and their author's subsequent hypotheses linking self-interest to the Americans' “science of association” figure centrally in recent studies of “social capital” and “strong democracy.” Cynthia Estlund contributes to the literature on communal ties, civic life, and self-government by considering the broad political effects of relationships formed in the not-so-voluntary arena of the American workplace. “Interest” that can initially amount to little more than a shared requirement to “get the job done,” the “working together” thesis maintains, may develop into shared understandings when activities undertaken in common cultivate and enlarge participants' common ground.

Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism.

Platonic Noise.

Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism. By Benjamin Gregg. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 210p. $54.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Arguing in the tradition of pragmatists, such as John Dewey and Charles Peirce, Benjamin Gregg proposes that sociotheoretic critique, legal judgment, and public policy should find “criteria of critical judgment this side of universal validity” (p. 8). By this he means that while norms are always relative to particular interpretative traditions, which, in turn, are necessarily open-textured and indeterminate, normative indeterminacy does not preclude the possibility of singular norms that adjudicate between different local traditions (p. 86). Contra postmodernists (and certain adherents of Critical Legal Studies), Gregg rejects the claim that the indeterminacy of norms correlates with the loss of autonomy, on the one hand, and universality, on the other (pp. 78–82).

Deliberation Day. By Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 288p. $30.00.

Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government. By Ethan J. Leib. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 156p. $27.50.

Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy. By Henry S. Richardson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 328p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Compelling theories of politics invite us to see the world differently. But once we see political life in different terms, what will we be moved to do? Redesign our political institutions? Or revise our reasons for supporting those that currently exist? As the authors of the three books reviewed here illustrate, those who have taken up deliberative theories of democracy are moved to engage in profoundly different kinds of projects, marked either by redesign or revision. Bruce Ackerman, James Fishkin, and Ethan Leib believe their commitments to theories of deliberative democracy require them to focus on drafting extensive plans for institutional redesign. By contrast, Henry Richardson, while endorsing institutional reforms, ranging from changing electoral law to opening administrative rule making to greater citizen participation (pp. 200–202, 219–22), devotes the majority of his book to showing how the ideals of his theory of deliberative democracy can make better and more complete sense of political life as it is. The deep contrast between how these authors understand what one ought to do with a commitment to deliberative democracy prompts us to consider whether they are simply committed to different things or are striking out on different paths from substantially similar starting points instead.