Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

This is a superb book. Lisa Wedeen brings a complex theory of interpretation to the study of nation building in Yemen. She explores the power of performances that penetrate cultural life as they work upon bodily dispositions and valences. Peripheral Visions has several high points, including a critique of secular theories that separate national imaginaries from Islamic practices of piety; a wonderful exploration of “qat chews”—a custom through which democratic dispositions and a national imaginary are promoted through semipublic discourses; an account of how the weakness of the state can enlarge the imagination of the nation; and an engagement with the effects of global neoliberalism on discursive practices in Yemen. Each level and mode is interwoven with the others. So we gain a complex understanding of politics that is irreducible to the kind of study organized around fixed categories of analysis and “variables” that do not interpenetrate.

William E. Connolly's review of Peripheral Visions is what any author should want, a thoughtful, appreciative account of the book's merits and an invitation to push aspects of the argument further than the book currently does. One point of clarification: I did not mean to suggest that Foucault's work should be read only in terms of its emphasis on coherence and control, or that my own is intended as a blanket critique of his. My understanding of political power and resistance is beholden to Foucault's insofar as he shows how power depends on multiple points of resistance. He thus describes how existing mechanisms of social control get reproduced and yet are also vulnerable to creativity, innovation, and surprise. My point was to challenge Foucault-inspired scholars of colonialism, in particular, who tend to exaggerate the capacities of colonial administrations and to neglect not only outright challenges to colonial rule, but also the ways in which colonial rule could, at times, be irrelevant to inhabitants' political experience. The goal was to distinguish between the stated claims of colonial rulers and colonialism's actual effects. At stake is not simply a reading of Foucault, of course, but a sense of what matters politically—whether scholars emphasize the reproductive power of institutions and ideas or whether they focus on how reproduction places those very ideas and institutions at risk. I want to chart a middle course here, neither exaggerating coherence nor romanticizing resistance.

In this passionate, insightful book, William E. Connolly tracks the work of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” both source and exemplification of a destructive ethos characteristic of contemporary American political life. Born out of the elective affinity between a segment of evangelical Christianity, based on vengeful visions of the Second Coming, and the “cowboy sector of American capitalism,” defined by its “exclusionary drives and claims to special entitlement” (p. 7), this evangelical-capitalist ethos works to shore up and deepen existing inequalities. Through church sermons and Fox News Reports, in practices of consumption and investment, the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine reverberates, working to stymie political debate and deflect political responsibility for the problems this same destructive ethos creates.