Clarissa Rile Hayward's book begins with the provocative claim that focusing on the relationship between the powerful and the powerless is not the best way to study power. Traditional theories of power have concentrated on the question of what it means for A to have power over B. By seeking to discern who possesses it and how their possession diminishes the freedom of others, researchers have tended to put a face on power. In contrast, Hayward “de-faces” power by arguing that it need not entail a relationship between A's and B's but can be understood entirely in terms of how the field of action of both the powerful and the powerless is defined.

In this book Liah Greenfeld tackles the problem that preoccupied Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). Like many others, she disputes Weber's claim that modern capitalism emerged uniquely in Northwest Europe because of the attitudes and behavior promoted by Protestant Christianity, especially in its Calvinist variety: The “worldly asceticism” and peculiar form of economic rationality involved spawned an economic system that eventually helped change the world. Critical of this precise argument, Greenfeld is in the Weberian camp in centering the problem where he did and in stressing the differences between modern capitalism and age-old commercial profit making found virtually in all civilizations. Similarly sound is Weber's methodological posture that sees culture, that is, ideas, ideals, and values dramatically influencing the emergence, growth, and durability of economic systems. Those who, like the whole Marxist tradition, maintain that underlying “structural” factors such as technology and environment are the prime movers of history have succumbed to untenable deterministic philosophies. History and social structures, unlike the works of simple nature, are constructed by human agency, which itself is often provided by outstanding thinkers and doers.

Drucilla Cornell has two goals: Pinpoint equal freedom as the core of sexual equality and make the case for the equal rights of gays and lesbians. Interwoven within these themes is a case for sexual freedom itself, for men and women. With erudite references to a wide multidisciplinary swath of literature, she succeeds in hammering home these concerns and in demanding that the sociolegal order reform its policies affecting sexuality, reproduction, and definitions of family. In these respects, this is a valuable study of how the United States specifically and other societies referentially fall short of what Christine Littleton calls making sex “cost free.” Cornell's book, which in the subjects and issues it analyzes covers very familiar territory, is intriguing for a very different reason. It is one of a very few works in radical feminist thought that is fundamentally about employing the tenets of classical liberalism, if not libertarianism, in the service of progressive social change. In contrast with the paradigms of modal feminism, which address social structures and connectedness, and which are concerned predominantly with equality, this work unabashedly focuses on the individual and stresses the freedom of each as a sexual being.

Of particular interest in the proliferating scholarship on Hannah Arendt is how her thought has recently attracted sympathetic attention in areas of theoretical inquiry once considered problematic for her. So, for example, the Graecophile Arendt, previously dismissed by many feminist thinkers for failing to take adequate account of the machismo and misogyny of ancient Greek culture, has inspired a volume of sympathetic feminist readings of her work (Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, 1995). Respectful reconsiderations of the Eichmann controversy at symposia and in a recently published volume (Steven E. Aschheim's Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, 2001) signal that the shadow once cast on Arendt's theoretical and personal integrity as an investigator of the nature and significance of modern Jewish identity has largely been lifted. To these efforts to engage sympathetically what were once considered the most problematic elements of Arendt's thought can be added Kimberly Curtis's highly interesting and rewarding book.

This thoughtful and innovative book seeks to locate the polarities between which the Western intellectual and political traditions move in terms of a struggle within Odysseus's soul between endless departures and explorations and burstings of limits and “homeward returns” to family and polity that register his awareness of the perdurability of limits. In the end, Odysseus identifies (however ambivalently) with those limits, and his struggles and resolutions as recounted by Homer help to establish a framework in terms of which Deneen locates and evaluates the debate between Martha Nussbaum and her critics concerning the attractions and deficiencies of cosmopolitanism as both an ethical and a political program and set of values.

With respect to markets, the twentieth century closed with a great deal more ebullience than it opened. Not that 1900 was a watershed in antimarket thinking—that was still to come. No, the contrast between fins de siecle is striking because whatever criticisms markets had to endure during the final century of the millennium seemed to have all but vanished by its close.

Film, painting, disease, nationalism, mass media, literature, family values, capital punishment, music lyrics, theater, UFOs, the Statue of Liberty, and Appalachian hollers are some of the cultural texts subject to political analysis in this impressive volume of sixteen essays. Neither are these cultural sites presumed to be transparent nor are their investments fully known. They are problematized, pluralized, specified, and contextualized in terms of such political categories as liberalism, communitarianism, privacy, civility, nationhood, citizenship, community, the will, responsibility, the common, revolution, public sphere(s), and the political itself (p. 19). This approach, which Jodi Dean terms an “interface” between cultural studies and political theory, captures how cultural forms such as film and literature cannot be decoupled from their political moorings, just as a political concept like citizenship is always embedded with cultural meanings.

Just over 50 years ago, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, an essay on the situation of women written from the point of view of an existentialist ethic. Her essay had an enormous impact and spawned influential descendants, most of which rode roughshod over the essay's existentialist and phenomenological background. De Beauvoir's great success in The Second Sex was to have described the experience of becoming a woman in such a way as to allow many women to theorize their situation, and she spurred a generation to attempt to change it. Effectively, however, her insights became absorbed into the liberal feminist tradition, and with the rise of poststructuralism, have been criticized for their abstract individualism, commitment to a discredited Enlightenment notion of the subject, and participation in a logocentric philosophy of the Same. Sonia Kruks attempts, in this series of linked essays, to defend de Beauvoir and the tradition to which she belonged from being so quickly dismissed. She sets out the perspective of existential phenomenology and argues for its superiority to the poststructuralist philosophy that has become influential during the last 30 years.

These 14 essays range as far and wide as the sprawling title of this collection implies. The papers originated at a 1999 interdisciplinary conference at Berry College on politics, religion, and community. Most of the authors teach at Southern colleges. They come not only from political science and government departments but also from philosophy, English, sociology, religion, and theology departments. Twelve of the 14 are male. On first glance the collection might appear to be “traditional.” Indeed, many of the essays, e.g., Daniel Mahoney's treatment of Solzhenitsyn on “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” explicitly raise religious themes and questions.

Joseph Schumpeter's “elitist” theory of democracy has been the subject of much discussion in political theory. It is commonly considered to have been seminal for the “empirical” approaches to democracy that emerged in American political science after World War II. In this excellent book, John Medearis presents an impressive, careful, and relatively comprehensive account of Schumpeter's writings on the topic of democracy. He argues that Schumpeter has been widely misunderstood, and the richness of his thinking has been wrongly reduced to the chapters of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) in which the “elitist” theory is developed.

Tocqueville observed, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” Moreover, he continued, “Freedom of opinion does not exist in America.” With the United States committed to a war (not to be called a crusade) against terrorism, these words from Tocqueville seem apt. If indeed the world changed on 11 September 2001, perhaps it became Manichean. Good versus evil, civilization versus barbarism, modernity versus medievalism, freedom versus fundamentalism, us versus them: These are the terms of political discourse. In the new order, you are either with the United States and the World or you are against it. Time to decide. War abhors ambiguity.

Exploring the ordinary is a reasonable and fun way to get through the day. Thomas Dumm takes the exploration along a cart path toward democratic politics, dramatizing the intersections and reciprocal influences of everyday life and political events and the forces of conformity and normalcy that shackle the ordinary. The working technique is juxtaposition, the kind of display that one finds in the store windows of, well, ordinary life in towns and cities. The pantheon of familiar figures and texts includes Emerson, Thoreau, Nixon, Disney, alien depictions, Lowi, Wolin, Cavell, the King's Two Bodies, Baudrillard, and many more, all offered as showcase for the book's main claim that the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic imagination.

Nature is political, John Meyer argues, because it constitutes people and so their politics; moreover, interpretations of nature can only be controversial and so contested. Meyer is an environmentalist who believes that contemporary theoretical thinking about politics and the environment is mostly mistaken. Environmental philosophy, in particular, is criticized as involving wasted effort because it emphasizes justifications for intrinsic value in nature. This emphasis implies that the political challenge is one of convincing enough people to adopt some ecologically benign worldview. But as Meyer rightly points out, most people already evidence a vague commitment to environmental values, and so the real question is how to activate such commitments.

The relationship between economic redistribution and democracy has experienced a profound political shift in the past two decades, which we are only now beginning to analyze with any perspicacity or insight. This conceptual shift has consisted primarily in the ability of the administrations of Thatcher and Reagan, among others, to convince even the less well-off to support policies that seemed to widen the income gap, with the promise of securing greater absolute gains for all. Social reformers, who for the previous century had viewed democratic procedures and institutions as means of achieving a wider redistribution of wealth, were clearly flummoxed.

This very remarkable and most timely book differs from others on Solzhenitsyn by highlighting his “critique of ideology” and his “recovery of the ‘natural world’” (p. 3). Ideology, for Solzhenitsyn, is the name for the lie characteristic of the twentieth century: Human beings, through historical transformation, can end suffering and so make virtue or the distinction between good and evil superfluous. The state and God can wither away because we will no longer be political and spiritual beings. We know that ideology could not change human nature or what Daniel Mahoney calls “the ontological structure of the world,” but it could magnify human evil to genuinely monstrous dimensions. Solzhenitsyn's contention that communist ideology was responsible for the murder of tens of millions has become much less controversial in recent years. The Black Book of Communism, Mahoney shows, provides abundant evidence for what Solzhenitsyn already knew.

If I had to talk about this book to my students, I would begin by describing its cover. The image of the upside down Capitol with the cupola hanging over the key word of the title (Cunning) invites the reader to peruse this fascinating and melancholic book as a species of inverted Hegelianism. This is a book about regret. It regrets what seems out of reach—politics as “something … uniquely courageous, direct, and even potentially effective in its assault on the misery and injustice of the great bulk of collective human life” (pp. ix–x). Its perspective is realistic but contains a glimmer of hope. Dunn's realism is ateleological and open to a moderate voluntarism; it conveys a disillusioned pessimism along with the belief that our politics can be less corrupt and cynical. Hope counterbalances the inexorable fatalism of reason. Its source is acceptance of the limits of human rationality, an endogenous fact unamendable to History's infallibility. Hope is the daughter of judgmental fallibility, the hunch that there is “room for maneuver” (pp. 347–8).

Few political scientists would recognize the name Frederick Winslow Taylor. Yet by Char Roone Miller's analysis, Taylor's early-twentieth-century “scientific” reforms in management and administrative practices play out in a ubiquitous and subtle process that shapes citizenship in modern America. The application of Taylor-inspired techniques to the reform of the military in the mid-twentieth century and their curiously parallel application in educational reforms receive Miller's closest attention. Much in the spirit of Michel Foucault's (1975) Discipline and Punish, Miller is concerned with demonstrating that ostensibly progressive efforts at efficient organization effectively routinize the production of consciousness, desire, and even the body.

The Free and Open Press is an exceptionally satisfying first book. Robert W. T. Martin revitalizes a debate over the status of press rights in eighteenth-century America that had grown tiresome over the past 20 years. Challenging Leonard Levy, his critics, and the ongoing republic/liberalism divide in American political thought, Martin's work offers an interpretation of free speech thought that explains why early Americans sometimes fought for and sometimes fought against press rights. Though Martin claims too much for his thesis at times, all scholars of American political thought and constitutional development should read his book.

This is a brave, important book that identifies and responds to the black holes between scholarly discourses and across genres to explain why and how Mary Wollstonecraft's texts should be recognized as “interrupting the fraternal conversation of political thought” (p. 42) among the men she herself described as “canonized forefathers.” Reading carefully through selections from Wollstonecraft's writings—letters, educational treatises, novels, the Vindications—Wendy Gunther-Canada elucidates the continuum of Wollstonecraft's radical political theory about gender differences. Rebel Writer traces Wollstonecraft's transformation from “arguably the eighteenth century's most rebellious female reader [to] its most revolutionary feminist author,” as she contested the portrayal of women in Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke, Fordyce, and Gregory, struggling to devise a feminism characterized by “the powerful confrontations between woman and the word, between literature and philosophy” (p. 16).

As their scholarship indicates, Henry Edmondson and Tim Spiekerman share two basic assumptions: There exist certain enduring issues of politics, such as the nature of social justice and the legitimacy of power, and authors of fiction, drama, and poetry who write with knowledge and sensitivity about the human condition often will have something significant to say about them.