This fine study purports to offer “a normative theory of nationalism.” Such a theory is needed, the author claims, because most of the literature on the ethics of secession proceeds on the mistaken assumption that the normative problem of state breakup is best addressed by applying established liberal arguments or values to the issue at hand. In fact, however, it makes little sense to derive a theory of secession in this way, rather than by considering directly the kinds of normative claims secessionists make. These are nationalist claims. We need, moreover, to recognize that well-known accounts of nationalism, such as those offered by Ernest Gellner, for whom nationalism is a political principle that holds that the political and national unit should be congruent, are inadequate—either because they include too much, or because, as in the case of Gellner (Nations and Nationalism, 1983), they associate it with a particular set of demands or principles. Nationalism, according to Margaret Moore, should be understood as “a normative argument that confers moral value on national membership, and on the past and future existence of the nation, and identifies the nation with a particular homeland or part of the globe” (p. 5). Once we have understood this, we will be in a better position to understand the key policies and demands of nationalists, including their occasional (and only occasional) demands for national self-determination, and to understand the normative limits of nationalism. And we will then be in a better position to understand the nature, and defensibility, of national self-determination, and of secession in particular.

Political theorists interested in liberalism often fall into one of two quite different camps. There are those (call them the “analytic” school) who engage in arguments designed to justify or criticize various accounts of justice, legitimacy, and the like, and on the other hand, there are those (call them the “historical” school) who aim at providing a rich historical account of the processes through which such concepts developed in the modern age. Rawls and Dworkin as opposed to Pocock and Skinner, if you will. In my view, the most interesting and ultimately fruitful work in political theory is done by those who practice a mixture of the two approaches. Two prime examples would be Jeremy Waldron and Charles Taylor. Andrew Murphy's first book is a highly interesting and very promising exemplar of this mixed approach. I have no doubt but that “pure” historians will question the novelty of his account of arguments over toleration in the seventeenth century, or that “pure” analysts will question the relevance of that account to the more analytical positions with regard to the contemporary concerns he stakes out in the latter portion of the book. But I found it to be one of the great strengths of his book that he does try to look at contemporary issues with an eye toward the historical context out of which they emerged. I found my own understanding of contemporary normative arguments about toleration, religious freedom, and liberal public reason enriched and deepened by a reading of Murphy's clear and lively account of the seventeenth-century arguments.

The main themes of this book are prefigured in Gianfranco Poggi's two significant earlier works on the rise and character of the modern state: The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction, 1978, and The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects, 1990, (especially in the first chapter of the latter). In connection with his discussion of state formation, Poggi put forward the view that political power is one particular form of social power and is distinguished from other types of social power by its control of the means of violence. In the current work, Poggi undertakes the considerable task of explicating power in its various forms. He abstracts the concept of power from the historical context of his previous works and, with characteristic lucidity, details the various forms of social power and their interrelations.

Widely known for the challenges he poses for the excesses of “me-first” individualism loosely associated with contemporary Western liberalism, Joseph Raz has grown accustomed to plumbing its depths for signs of humanity and goodness. His new book approaches the twin problem of pursuing universal values while acknowledging particularistic cultures, through a window opened in Engaging Reason (1999), where he unpacks the complexity of a “value-reason nexus” to conclude that valuable options are often pursued for incommensurate reasons. In what sense, he now asks, can this “nexus” be said to be universal? At the heart of this project lies an attempt to extend his earlier analysis of value in two related directions: toward human attachments, where Raz must show that particular engagements with value need not fly in the face of universality, and toward an abstract approach to universal respect, which nevertheless remains part and parcel of our contingent attachments.

Mary Lyndon Shanley's Making Babies, Making Families bravely wades into the difficult ethical questions of accommodating new reproductive technologies and diverse family arrangements within the framework of existing and possible liberal legal principles. The book grapples with definitions of parenthood and parental rights in the contexts of adoption, unwed fatherhood, gamete transfer, surrogate motherhood, and multiple parenting within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Shanley mines these situations in order to derive some workable ethical and legal guidelines for the state's exercise of its regulatory capacities with respect to families. In doing so, she reveals the tensions and possibilities inherent in the state's role in defining families at a moment when many perceive traditional family structures as collapsing, for better or for worse.

Body/Politics is a well-researched book that brings together a significant range of topics to explicate the connections between changes occurring with the biological body and within body politics. The theoretical structure of the book is Marxist/feminist with heavy reliance on critical theory for Thomas Shevory's legal analysis in some of the chapters. According to the author, the central thesis of the book is that “the process of technological change will be creatively destructive, opening new avenues for equality, diversity, self-expression, resistance to hierarchy and control, while also offering new means for domination, exploitation, oppression, and dehumanization” (p. 3). He thus rejects the more extreme stances of the “technoprogressives” who see nothing but good and the “technophobes” who see nothing but bad coming from these developments. He argues quite convincingly that the historical processes we face through these technological changes are dialectical and thus subject to human political intervention. In other words, if we so choose, we do have the capacity to shape technologies, though it is far from clear that we now actually have the will to do so.

Like Socrates, Thomas Smith's Aristotle practices philosophy as a way of life. The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's protreptic and therapeutic introduction to this way of life. It is not a didactic treatise but a teaching that aims at the improvement of its readers' souls. It therefore begins from reputable opinions (endoxa) and employs dialectical arguments—not the best arguments simply, but the best available for improving the lives of Aristotle's audience.

These books have similar aims and are written from a similar perspective. There are, however, important differences in content, emphasis, and form. Norma Thompson explicitly seeks to show that the Western intellectual tradition is not misogynist. One reason that it is not, she urges, is that it is not univocal. Within the tradition one can find several very different views of the character and relation of men and women. Introducing the volume he edited, Eduardo Velasquez states, “This collection of essays does not purport to give an answer to the question of what are ‘nature’ and ‘woman,’ at least not in an immediate, definitive sense. Rather, the comprehensive aim here is to reopen questions as to the ‘nature of nature,’ the ‘nature of woman’ with consideration given to the consequences of pairing some understanding of ‘nature’ with that of ‘woman’” (p. xi). A collection of essays necessarily contains a variety of voices.

In a book published almost a decade ago, Ronald Beiner complained that contemporary liberalism suffers for its neglect of the Big Questions traditionally addressed by political philosophy. Preoccupied with narrowly conceived and highly formal questions of (procedural) justice, liberalism had no advice to give about how one should live. (See Ronald Beiner, What's the Matter with Liberalism, 1992.) John Tomasi's provocative new book takes this complaint seriously and attempts to remedy the defect in contemporary liberalism by moving it “beyond justice” to address the normative concerns of persons earnestly striving to lead good and worthwhile lives.

This is an excellent collection of essays about the political thought of Hannah Arendt. Its editor, Dana Villa, has assembled a first-rate group of scholars, many of whom are already well known for their contributions to Arendt studies. The volume is distinguished by the high quality of its contributions and by the effort of so many of its contributors to go beyond standard lines of exegesis to raise interesting questions and to press the boundaries of Arendt commentary. Arendt's work has received a great deal of attention from political theorists in recent years. The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt makes clear the richness of her thinking, the range of her concerns, and the ability of her writings to inspire creative commentary and constructive political theory.

Not only is the practice of a genuinely Platonic political art compatible with a commitment to democracy, but, according to John Wallach's ambitious book, it furnishes a needed critical resource that can help tap the unfulfilled potential of democracy at the present time. Wallach's unconventional thesis emerges from his critical historicism, a method that attempts to carve a mean between the relatively ahistorical readings of Popper, Strauss, Arendt, Derrida, and Rorty (among others) and the radically historicist readings more typical of classicists and ancient historians (pp. 21–23). Whereas the latter tend to subordinate Plato to the historical and political forces of his time, the widely disparate interpretations of the former cohort view him as either “authoritarian” or radically “self-mocking.” In either case, Plato is portrayed as an antagonist to the freedom and equality of democratic life. To release the Platonic political art from the grip of these influential but debilitating interpretations, Wallach seeks to navigate between the ahistorical elevation of theory (logos) and the historicist subordination of theory to practice (ergon), focusing instead on the dissonance of the logos/ergon relation itself.

The waves of immigrants arriving in the United States over the last 20 years, largely from Latin America and Asia, have settled in a few states—mainly California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey—and in big cities in those states. Like the migration of African Americans to northern cities in the twentieth century and the suburbanization of whites, this demographic transformation is remaking urban politics. Black and Multiracial Politics in America, a collection of original essays, addresses the implications of this change for “the practice and process of black and multiracial politics in American society” (p. xiii). The authors seek to forge a new link between the study of black and the study of multiracial politics.

For more than a generation, as the authors rightly point out, the impact of organized labor on electoral politics has been neglected in scholarly literature. Indeed, only a tiny minority of social scientists explicitly focuses on organized labor in the United States. Although the impact of the social movements of the 1960s appeared to heighten awareness of the importance of class, race, and gender, class and its organized expression, the union movement, has received less attention, while studies of race and gender have flourished.

Superintending Democracy is a very fine collection of articles about the role of the judicial branch and our electoral system. It is an especially timely book in view of the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore. However, the book does not focus on that one decision. Rather, the articles run the gamut and cover all the times the courts and electoral politics intertwine.

This book argues that the transition from the New Deal to a mobilized wartime economy during World War II restored corporate hegemony in collaboration with a state apparatus dominated by military elites. The purported losers in this transition were New Deal reformers committed to a planned economy and an extensive social welfare state, and groups like labor and small business whose interests were represented by reform elites. Organized chronologically, Waddell's account traces the development of the military-industrial complex from the War Industries Board in World War I to what Waddell asserts is a neocorporatist pattern of governance that had become established by the late 1940s and early 1950s. For the intervening years, he devotes attention to the trade association movement of the 1920s, the National Recovery Administration in the early 1930s, the New Deal turn to Keynesian economics, Harry Truman and the Marshall Plan, and the National Security Act of 1947; but the book focuses on the three periods associated with mobilization for World War II. These three periods are prewar mobilization from September, 1939 to December, 1941; the institutionalization of wartime mobilization from early 1942 through early 1943; and the battles over postwar reconversion that began in 1943 and continued into the immediate postwar era.

For years, congressional elections were ignored or treated as fairly straightforward and predictable. The Democrats controlled the House. Incumbents nearly always won. Voters chose the candidate who would deliver the local goods. The magnitude of the Republican victory in the 1994 midterms set politicians, journalists, and scholars on a search to find an explanation that would place the election in the proper context. Was 1994 an outlier or the beginning of a new era? This volume places the 1990s in the context of the past 40 years of House elections and provides a solid foundation for gauging whether 1994 was the culmination of long-term trends or a dramatic break with the past.

This book aims to explain why funding levels for breast cancer research suddenly achieved extensive media coverage, as well as both attention and action from Congress and the White House, in the period between 1990 and 1993. Maureen Hogan Casamayou's answer : the effective mobilization of legions of angry women and their allies by entrepreneurial leaders in a new breast cancer coalition. She tells the story of how these women came together, charted strategy, and succeeded in expanding federal funding.

Mention Richard Cortner's name and political scientists think of “stories” of court cases well and thoroughly told. Cortner's latest effort is another superb contribution to this line of work. In this work he focuses on the two cases in which the constitutionality of Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA) was tested—the Heart of Atlanta Motel case and the “Ollie's Barbeque” case.

One recent approach to the study of public policy has been policy design. And one component of this is the concept of target populations. Perhaps the strongest case for the importance of target populations as a focus for research has been advanced in the work of Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram. They have argued that target populations help to shape the construction of public policies. If target populations are politically weak and have negative constructions (for instance, drug users and drug dealers), then policies will tend to be harsh and punitive—penalties rather than benefits. In part, this serves political purposes, since one would get “political points” for being harsh with those who have little power and are perceived as “bad” people. In the process, bad policy may result, since the construction of target populations and policies aimed at them may have little to do with actually solving complex social problems.

This account of the development of Walt Disney World in Florida is an engaging contribution to the growing literature on tourism and urban politics. The many pleasures of reading this book include learning that Disney World was initially slated for St. Louis, that Henry Kissinger declared that Epcot would enhance world peace more than this shuttle diplomacy, that Disney prepared a proposal for a HUD planning grant for Disney World, and that even Walt Disney thought that Disneyland Anaheim was tacky. Foglesong meticulously details more than three decades of negotiations among the Walt Disney corporate conglomerate, the city of Orlando, and Orange and Osceola counties in Florida over the location and development of Walt Disney World and its spinoff theme parks. Not surprisingly, the Mouse wins most of the battles.