The issue of Perspectives that you hold in your hands (or that you perhaps are perusing online) is the product of complex behind-the-scenes editorial and production processes. In this sense Perspectives is like other journals where, in particular, much of the editorial process properly takes place out of sight. This opacity is inherent in the anonymous review process that every manuscript we publish undergoes. That said, there are aspects of the editorial process here that have created understandable frustration among a subset of the authors who have submitted manuscripts for consideration. For some of our contributors our editorial process has been too slow and I have been insufficiently responsive to concerns expressed by some of those who have been frustrated by that pace. Two contributing factors provide relevant background here.

Humanitarian and human rights movements have gained influence as impartial ethical responses to injustice and suffering, yet their claims to impartiality are commonly dismissed as misleading, naïve, or counterproductive. To date, little attention has been paid to the very different ways human rights and humanitarian movements have conceptualized impartiality in relation to distinct and conflicting activist goals.Bronwyn Leebaw is Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC Riverside ([email protected]). The author is grateful to Hanna Pitkin, Lisa Disch, John Cioffi, Mark Reinhardt, Jennifer Hochschild, and three insightful anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. In developing ideas for this article, she also benefited from conversations with Helen Kinsella, Mark Drumbl, Chandra Sriram, Eric Stover, Harvey Weinstein, Lon Troyer, Kateri Carmola, David Pion-Berlin, Chris Laursen, John Medearis, Juliann Allison, Victor Peskin, Ruti Teitel, Targol Mesbah, Helen Lennon, Tom Reifer, Dean Mathiowetz, and the graduate students at UC Riverside.

In the last round of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at the Taba Conference (January 2001), Israeli negotiators went where no Israeli officials went before: they considered the right of return of Palestinian refugees, and a quasi-statement that acknowledges the Palestinian tragedy and Israel's share of historical responsibility. This paper argues that at least in part this shift in the negotiations' framework can be traced back to the public debate instigated by the work of Israeli New Historians.Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ([email protected]). She thanks Boaz Atzili, Naomi Chazan, Orit Gal, Eran Kaplan, Daniel Levy, Ran Levy, Gil Merom, Clair Moon, Melissa Nobles, Jeremy Pressman, Stephen Van Evera, Amos Zehavi, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments and suggestions. She also thanks Kezia Avieli-Tabibyan from the Center of Educational Technology (MATAH, Israel) for her valuable assistance with Israeli history textbooks.

The article develops an approach to the study of modular political phenomena (action based in significant part on emulation of the prior successful example of others), focusing on the trade-offs between the influence of example, structural facilitation, and institutional constraints. The approach is illustrated through the example of the spread of democratic revolution in the post-communist region during the 2000–2006 period, with significant comparisons to the diffusion of separatist nationalism in the Soviet Union during the glasnost' era.Mark R. Beissinger is Professor of Politics, Princeton University ([email protected]). The author is grateful to the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the opportunity to pursue research for this essay. He would also like to thank Nancy Bermeo, Valerie Bunce, Atul Kohli, Jon Pevehouse, Grigore Pop-Eleches, Edward Schatz, Jack Snyder, Al Stepan, Joshua Tucker, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier version of this article.

A new conventional wisdom characterizes the comparative study of electoral politics. Social cleavages, once a stabilizing factor of electoral behavior in Western Europe, are on the wane. Voting decisions have become individualized and old social cleavages have been superseded by new value-related cleavages. This article challenges that view as an exaggeration.Martin Elff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Mannheim, Germany ([email protected]). The author wishes to thank William Maloney, Anthony Mughan, Betty Haire Weyerer, Thomas Gschwend, Jan van Deth, Sigrid Roßteutscher, Simone Abendschön, Daniel Stegmüller, and especially Jennifer Hochschildt and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

Due to the amplified importance of forging an intimate connection with the American public, modern presidents must adjust their political personalities and leadership. To combat allegations of elitism, recent Republican presidents have adopted anti-intellectualism as a conservative form of populism. Anti-intellectualism is defined as disparagement of the complexity associated with intellectual pursuits, and a rejection of the elitism and self-aware attitude of distinction that is commonly associated with intellectual life. This article focuses on the benefits and costs of anti-intellectualism as a strategic response to the plebiscitary demands of contemporary presidential politics.Colleen J. Shogan is a member of the Affiliate Research Faculty at George Mason University ([email protected]). She is a full-time employee of the United States Senate, and the author of The Moral Rhetoric of American Presidents (Texas A&M Press, 2006). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Miller Center of Public Affairs Colloquia Series on Politics and History and Notre Dame's Program in American Democracy Speaker Series. She would like to thank Sidney Milkis, Brian Balogh, Jennifer Hochschild, Peri Arnold, Bruce Miroff, Eileen Hunt-Botting, Christina Wolbrecht, David Adesnik, and several anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and institutional support.

In 1960, E.E. Schattschneider noted that every change in the scope of political conflict has a bias; political conflicts that are localized tend to be highly restrictive, while nationalizing conflicts can draw in previously excluded groups. In contrast to this conventional wisdom, this paper suggests that the question of which venues are open to which interests is an empirical one.Lisa L. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University ([email protected]). The author would like to thank Frank Baumgartner, Regina Lawrence, Beth Leech, Michael McCann, and Marie Gottschalk, as well as the three anonymous reviewers, for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts.

Political science is a prolific profession. So much so that it is impossible for us to assign for review all the interesting books being written and published by our colleagues. The long-standing American Political Science Association convention for organizing the book reviews is by subfield. We have done nothing to interfere with this convention, which no doubt serves important functions. However, there are surely other ways to order or connect books, ways that perhaps have more intellectual warrant than the standard categories, which lack any real thematic content. So, prodded by my persistent assistants, we inaugurated an Editor's Comment to highlight some interesting themes among the books currently under review.

Race and the Making of American Liberalism. By Carol A. Horton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 312 p. $39.95.

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. By Ira Katznelson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. 256 p. $25.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

What a Might Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality. By Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos, and Marshall Ganz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 310 p. $27.95.

The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. By Richard M. Valelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 348 p. $58.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. By Aristide R. Zolberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 672 p. $39.95.

Fair reviews of this work will highlight its seminal contributions to the study of judicial behavior. In remarkably accessible prose, Lawrence Baum demonstrates that existing models of judicial behavior fail to account for the human factor in judging. Judges, Baum points out, are as interested in being liked and maintaining their self-esteem as other human beings. Judges and their Audiences then details the numerous ways in which judicial needs for approval from various audiences may influence judicial practice. While modest in tone, the work sets out a research agenda likely to inspire the next generation of judicial behaviorists.

I appreciate Mark Graber's review of Judges and Their Audiences. The review is generous, but it is also perceptive about the book's argument and its implications. As the author, I learned from Graber's thoughtful discussion of what I did and did not do in the book.

Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Dred Scott decision, is the consensus choice as the worst decision in the Supreme Court's history. Legal scholar David Currie summarized the conventional view: Dred Scott was “bad law,” “bad policy,” and “bad judicial politics” (cited in Judges, p. 15). In this conventional view, Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion for the Court misinterpreted the Constitution, and it took the morally indefensible position of disallowing citizenship and the rights of citizens for slaves and their descendants. The decision was also a political blunder: The Court intervened in the slavery issue in an effort to resolve it and prevent war, but instead inflamed passions and made war more likely.

I am grateful to Professor Baum for his very generous review of Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. I am also grateful that Baum in his review and his response to mine highlights the normative significance of his research on judicial audiences. Dred Scott v. Sanford may have been wrongly decided, Baum suggests, because antislavery justices, not being able to predict the actual impact of their decision, should simply have freed Dred Scott as a matter of simple justice. In fact, all five southern justices in Dred Scott v. Sanford did simple justice by their light. More important, however, Baum is now self-consciously exploring central questions of American constitutionalism.

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. By Leora Batnitzky. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 304p. $80.00.

In recent years, Leo Strauss has achieved a posthumous success de scandal as the (purported) philosophical architect of neoconservatism. Strauss's works have been scrutinized by detractors and partisans to determine whether he bears responsibility for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Amidst the clamor, however, more measured assessments are starting to emerge. Today, the most provocative appraisals of his work come from scholars in Jewish studies, as Leora Batnitzky's fascinating book attests. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, Batnitzky seeks to establish Strauss's contribution to modern Jewish thought, but her argument for his importance as a Jewish thinker also reframes the vexed question of his legacy for American politics. She offers a nonpolemical, non-Straussian defense of Leo Strauss. In many ways, her portrait of Strauss as a philosophical skeptic and political moderate resonates with that of Steven B. Smith, in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (2006). However, Batnitzky departs from Smith (and, indeed, from most readers of Strauss) when she hails Strauss as the most ardent philosophical defender of Jewish revelation in the modern period.

Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice. By W. James Booth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 264p. $42.50.

W. James Booth has written a profound book about memory in relation to identity and justice in politics. On the one hand, he analyzes the central place of memory in the constitution of identity: A sense of continuity over time, the basis and sign of personal or collective identity, depends on memory. On the other hand, he explores the central place of memory in doing justice: Justice requires “a subject of attribution” who can take responsibility or be held accountable for conduct over time, who also can remember injury and demand redress. But investment in the past and memory of injustice, Booth shows, also run against the grain of core elements in democratic life. Partly, emphasis on the constitutive weight of the past seems in tension with democratic norms deriving identity from will or consent, not inheritance or descent. Partly, any “thick” collective identity, forged by a particularizing past, seems in tension with democratic aspirations to universality, and with the globalizing reality of pluralized and hybridized attachment. Moreover, efforts to redress past injustices seem impossible to separate from resentment, binding people to the past and its wounds. Booth's book is important, then, because it eloquently explores the necessity and value—but also the costs and dangers—of memory and identity in politics, especially around the issue of justice. The book is profound because it evocatively dramatizes tensions it does not resolve.

Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. By Wendy Brown. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 282p. $29.95.

Globalization, population migration, multiculturalism, identity politics, 9/11, and the war on terror—if one thinks of tolerance as an art for reconciling differences, then the need for it would seem to be greater than ever. However, tolerance, as T. M. Scanlon argues (The Difficulty of Tolerance, 2003), is never easy. At the very least, it means acknowledging that other people whom I dislike are entitled to the same legal protections as I am and should be equally free to decide how to live their lives. Asking me to avert my eyes or look away from those beliefs and ways of life that I find repugnant may mean that tolerance comes close to being an “impossible virtue” (Bernard Williams, “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?” in David Heyd, ed., Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, 1996), but the alternative—intolerance—seems a nonstarter. So for many of us the choice between tolerance and intolerance seems easy. Indeed, many liberals assume that tolerance is a defining feature of any decent society.

To Restore American Democracy: Political Education and the Modern University. Edited by Robert E. Calvert. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 288p. $75.00 cloth, $28.95 paper.

Power to the People: Teaching Political Philosophy in Skeptical Times. By Avner de-Shalit. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 224p. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The authors of these two books are concerned with a similar question, namely, how can scholars support their students in becoming engaged citizens? Political theorists and philosophers often wrestle with this question as a personal and professional quandary. Many researchers, particularly those whose scholarship is concerned with political questions, wonder to what extent their ideas relate to political reality in a practical way. Can ideas influence, even alter, the processes or norms of behavior in the actual political domain? If what we do is political theory or philosophy, what is political about it? Both books reviewed here grapple with these questions in the context of teaching in higher education institutions.

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. By Daniel Carey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 276p. $85.00.

Daniel Carey rehabilitates a dispute among John Locke, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson “focused on the problem of diversity and the question of whether any moral consistency could be located in mankind” (p. 1). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in distinct ways respond to Locke's attack on innateness, the idea that “God had implanted ideas or predispositions in the soul which guided the moral actions and beliefs of mankind” (p. 51). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson do so by evoking a “Stoic conception which saw nature as a fund of normative ideas, predispositions, or prolepses that embraced benevolence, sociability, disinterested affection, and the divine, explaining our attachments to friend, family, and nation” (p. 200).

Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship. By Susan D. Collins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 206p. $70.00.

Plato and the Virtue of Courage. By Linda R. Rabieh. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 224p. $45.00.

Why do we need books about courage and civic virtue, written by ancient philosophers in an idiom so difficult for moderns such as ourselves to understand? How could such books be relevant in post–9/11 days? The whole world saw civic courage right before their eyes in the aftermath of the Twin Towers' attack. The last thing one would think Americans needed today is instruction in what constitutes courage or civic virtue more generally. Yet Americans would be decidedly wrong in thinking so skeptically. The books under review demonstrate why.

Reconstructing the Commercial Republic: Constitutional Design after Madison. By Stephen L. Elkin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 416p. $35.00.

In this engaging book, Stephen L. Elkin offers an account of the politics necessary to realize the nation's aspirations for an American commercial republic, in which economic inequality is dramatically reduced, citizens engage in meaningful (and surprisingly powerful) local government, and both they and their representatives deliberate to promote the good of all. The starting point for Elkin's analysis is a familiar list of what ails America: growing economic inequality, declining “civic and political involvement,” economic insecurity particularly among the middle class, as well as weakening family structure. He argues that we will never resolve these problems until we first have a “compelling and comprehensive theory of republican political constitution” (p. 2). Although no clear explanation is given for what it means to have such a theory, Elkin implies that such a theory would be based on the interrelation of the economic and political order.