Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science. Edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 608p. $35.00.

Critics have berated the Perestroika movement since it erupted in 2000 for engaging in academic politics before improving the tools available for apprehending the political world. But the guiding thread of any group's thinking generally arises out of its common activities, as Karl Mannheim pointed out. So it is no surprise that Perestroika, as a movement of disaffected political scientists, would coalesce first as an attempt to storm the discipline's citadels in the name of “methodological pluralism.” Some years later, however, we are in a better position to assess the principles implicated in the movement and its slogan, a judgment now enabled by the publication of Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe.

Deliberative democrats are committed both to inclusion and to barring coercion in public discourse. Their commitment to democratic inclusion should make them sympathetic to the challenges faced by social movements. An adequate sociology of contentious public discourse, however, shows that social movements must often act coercively in order to be included. For example, they must often alter the terrain of conflict, create a crisis, pressure interlocutors to argue consistently, or compel other parties to enter social arenas of contention that they have avoided. Democratic theorists who are committed to inclusion should approve of such coercion. Under the actual circumstances movements face, there is a tension between non-coercion and democratic inclusion. This tension demonstrates the need for a democratic standard and a mode of democratic social analysis beyond those that deliberative theory offers.

Joseph Schumpeter's elite conception of democracy has inspired many political scientists to use the tools of equilibrium analysis to model democracy. But Schumpeter devoted much of his career as an economist to critiquing and transcending the limitations of equilibrium models. In particular, he became convinced that the equilibrium models of neoclassical economics could not adequately capture innovation as a dynamic force at the heart of capitalism. A new use of Schumpeter's critique shows that equilibrium models of democracy are similarly limited in their ability to capture the innovative creation and deployment of democratic ideologies as a source of political dynamism.

Joseph Schumpeter is known to American political scientists as the originator of an elite conception of democracy as a political “method,” a conception found in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). But I show in this paper that in Schumpeter's study of the development of liberal capitalist societies, he also treated democracy as a socially transformative historical tendency, one of several that he thought were propelling such societies toward a form of “democratic” socialism. Schumpeter regarded the politics of labor and the reorientation of state policy in the New Deal era as evidence of these tendencies—especially of a tendency toward the democratic reconstruction of workplace hierarchy, which he deplored. In his later work, Schumpeter sketched the outlines of a “democratic” socialist society in which the most harmful of these tendencies, in his estimation, would be curbed.