American Political Science Review BOOK REVIEWS Political Theory More Than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard. By Clyde W. Barrow. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000. 289p. $39.95. Ruth O’Brien, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York Clyde Barrow’s More Than a Historian provides a fascinating intellectual history of Charles Beard, a political scientist whom he places in the “pantheon of thinkers that most scholars no longer read” (p. xvi). With 42 books, scores of coauthored books, and hundreds of articles and book reviews, Beard can be only characterized as amazingly prolific. Yet the only book that still resonates in political science and American history is An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). Barrow’s history of Beard gives us ample reason finally to read it or read it again. Barrow summarizes the argument in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution in one line: “[C]apitalistic interests had dominated the constitutional convention and, consequently, they authored a founding document that appealed ‘directly and unerringly to identical interests in the country at large’” (p. 4). Struck by this powerful argument, Barrow suggests that a whole array of populists, progressives, liberals, radicals, and socialists used it as evidence that the Constitution was drafted by, and for, American capitalists. At the same time, he shows that an almost equally impressive array of academics, from Edward Corwin and Louis Hartz to Richard Hofstadter and John Diggins, have denounced An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. More recently, Theda Skocpol “complained” that interest in the book wavers little since it represents “unquenchable proclivity in American historiography” (p. 243). Barrow’s central argument is that Beard has been woefully misread. Both scholars and the public on the Left and the Right got it wrong, Barrow suggests, by calling him a “dissembling Marxist” or a “disenchanted New Deal liberal” (p. xviii). To Barrow, Beard was influenced by three distinct yet overlapping schools of thought that carried great weight in the United States. The first is the German historical school or the philosophical tradition of Hegelians and neo-Hegelians. In an absorbing account, Barrow details how Beard selectively appropriated the ideas of neo-Hegelians like the Italian Benedetto Croce. The second is the institutional economics of the school of John R. Commons. The third influence is Marxian revisionist socialism. Yet Beard was no mere imitator. Barrow meticulously explains how Beard’s ideas of socialism differed from those of Marx. Believing that class struggle could never be resolved and that there was therefore no point in abolishing private property, Beard argued that labor could be recognized as a form of property and given the same constitutional protections that land and capital already enjoyed. Influenced by E. R. A. Seligman’s The Economic Interpretation of History (1902), Beard differed from Marx in using James Madison’s idea of class conflict. In particular, he relied on Madison’s Federalist Number Ten, which includes conflicts between those who own property and those who do not; creditors and debtors; and those battling over different kinds of property, like land or capital. Beard abandons Marx’s notion of exploitation by giving up the theory of value in favor of a concept of class struggle grounded in historical claims, which are open-ended and political. The “puzzle” for Beard, as Barrow puts it, involved explaining how the Federalists had Vol. 96, No. 4 December 2002 “wrenched political change from a seemingly insurmountable agrarian majority” (p. 48). Chapter 5 offers a cogent discussion of Beard’s ideas about a worker republic. Beginning in the 1930s, Beard became enthusiastic about a planned economy, supporting legislation like the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Far left of the New Deal, he outlined a plan for economic and political restructuring that went beyond the boundaries of welfare-liberal New Deal economic policy. Beard recommended that a highly progressive income tax structure be associated with the redistribution of public expenditures for social goods. He also thought Congress should build a National Economic Council that would write an economic program promoting the public interest by creating what he described as a national standardof-life budget. Tallying up the total goods and services necessary to maintain an official standard, this council would be different from the European welfare states, which Beard claimed encouraged dependency on doles and transfer payments. The progressive tax structure, in combination with a constitutional amendment that gave workers the same rights as the owners of property and capital, would increase worker productivity. Why bother setting the record straight by writing an intellectual history of a historian? To Barrow, Beard’s oeuvre offers students of American political development, notoriously short on theory, a “highly original metanarrative” which can provide them with “critical insights” about the crisis of the American welfare state by pointing them in the direction of a post-Marxian socialist political theory (p. xviii). Barrow even suggests that Beard set the stage for “new historicism” in American political thought. Recasting the meaning and development of political ideas in terms of relations to authorial intentions, Beard was someone who helped democratize political theory by studying not just the works of major political theories but also those that other academics consider relatively minor. By the end of the book, this reader was convinced that Barrow had rightfully resurrected Beard. Yet, like many biographers, Barrow is somewhat defensive about his subject. In taking on Beard’s critics, Barrow devotes so much attention to his academic record that he does little to explain the political, economic, and cultural reasons behind his rise as such a great public intellectual. For instance, Barrow relays how members of a New York Republican club could barely hide their contempt for Beard, but he fails to explain what made them invite him in the first place. More than a Historian would have been more engrossing had Barrow done a little new history himself, showing exactly why a radical like Beard should have had such influence for almost a century in a conservative country like the United States. The Logic of the History of Ideas. By Mark Bevir. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 350p. $60.00. History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans, and Frank Van Vree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. 320p. $42.50. The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction. By Melvin Richter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 224p. $49.95. Russell L. Hanson, Indiana University How have our conceptions of politics changed, and how have these changes altered politics and its possibilities? These are the burning questions at one of the biggest campfires in 795 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY political theory, and the answers are disputed as these three volumes show. The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction is based on five essays published by Melvin Richter between 1986 and 1995. The revised essays describe the intellectual project of Begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history of the transition to modernity in German political and social life. Richter compares this project to a related investigation of mentalités around the time of the French Revolution, and then contrasts the German and French versions of conceptual history with studies of “ideas in context” associated with J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and the so-called Cambridge School. The point of this comparison is to suggest ways in which the historiography of political and social concepts employed by English-speaking peoples might benefit from the insights, methods, and practices of Begriffsgeschichte. Begriffsgeschichte combines history, social theory, and conceptual analysis in lexicons compiled by teams of scholars. All the teams on one project employ the same investigative protocols, but the protocols vary across projects. Thus, shifts in the meaning of philosophical concepts are recorded in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, which does not attempt to link developments in philosophy with changes outside of it. Such linkages are central to other Begriffsgeschichte projects, however, and Richter devotes most of his attention to these lexicons, which he describes in considerable detail. The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (GG) focuses on dramatic changes in the language of German-speaking Europe between 1750 and 1850. A historical dictionary, the GG consists of lengthy entries showing how massive political, social, and economic changes were understood by various groups at the time, and how changes in these understandings furthered the process of modernization and made it irreversible. The entries are organized around specific concepts, and Richter includes a list of concepts treated in the GG. He also identifies entries that are particularly strong (bürgerliche Gesellschaft, civil society), or rather weak (Politik, politics). This is useful information for readers seeking entree to a work that fills eight volumes, including one devoted entirely to an index. By way of demonstrating the value of the GG for political theory, Richter summarizes the changing meanings of Herrschaft uncovered by Reinhard Kosselleck and his team. Richter then suggests that our understanding of Max Weber might be improved by situating his usage of Herrshaft in historical context. This claim involves a discussion of the adequacy of English translations of Economy and Society, and the difference between “authority” and “legitimate domination,” two common renderings of Herrschaft. Richter points to the semantic superiority of “legitimate domination,” and argues that Weber’s understanding of Herrschaft was not at all neutral or value-free. To the contrary, Weber’s use of the term signaled his position in an ongoing debate over the legitimacy of opposition to political rulers. By suggesting that domination could be legitimate, Weber undercut utopian critiques of state power, which held that consent was the sole basis of political legitimacy. French philosophes were among the utopians criticized by Weber, and so it is instructive to see how they understood the social and political world of their time. Toward that end, Richter reviews the work of Rolf Reichardt and others in the Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680–1820 (HB). Entries in this lexicon focus on “how previous conceptualizations of the political and social world were transformed, abandoned, or supplanted during the outbreak and course of the Revolution” (p. 80). These conceptualiza- 796 December 2002 tions are construed broadly; they consist of mentalités, or pervasive understandings and representations of collective life. Concepts figure in these mentalités, but they are not the focal point of analysis, which further departs from GG in stressing popular rituals and practices over elite culture. Richter includes a list of concepts treated in the HB, and he identifies Roger Chartier’s article on civilité as a leading example of Begriffsgeschichte à la française. A strength of Chartier’s work, and indeed of the HB, is the description of changes in whole networks of concepts. Thus, civilité is treated in relation to politesse (politeness), honnêteté (honor), and bienséance (decorum). This underscores the politicization of civilité during the French Revolution; what was once a social grace came to be seen as an essential republican virtue. The transformation was not accidental, since the intellectual battles of the Revolution were fought in, over, and through the terms of political discourse. The pivotal chapter of Richter’s book summarizes the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, representing the socalled Cambridge School of conceptual history. The purpose of this exercise is to show how Begriffsgeschichte and projects of the Cambridge School might inform each other. According to Richter, there are no insurmountable differences between the two approaches to conceptual history, and considerable advantages in uniting them. As he sees it, the work of Skinner and Pocock reveals the complexity of political language and its strategic resources at a given moment in time, and is therefore better at “synchronic” analysis. The German project is more systematic, treats a broader range of materials over time, and therefore offers a superior “diachronic” analysis. Put this way, the complementarities seem obvious and Richter advocates for a unified approach to conceptual history. More specifically, Richter calls for historical treatment of social and political concepts in the English language, that is, a Begriffsgeschichte for English-speaking peoples. He does not say what form this lexicon should take; it could be modeled on Kosselleck’s GG or it might resemble Reichardt’s HB. Given the differences between these projects, as well as their internal diversity, Richter’s agnosticism seems misplaced. Surely, the choice depends on which style lends itself best to a synthesis with the Cambridge School, and for that matter, which variant of the Cambridge School is most compatible with Begriffsgeschichte. For treatment of these issues, readers must look beyond this critical introduction. The anthology entitled History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives includes brief characterizations of the major approaches to conceptual history by Kosselleck, Reichardt, and Terence Ball, whose “critical conceptual history” extends the program of the Cambridge School. More or less sympathetic critiques of these approaches are offered by Hans Bödecker, Iain Hampsher-Monk, and Martin van Gelderen. Their essays confirm the existence of broad similarities between Begriffsgeschichte and Cambridge School projects, but they also identify significant differences in historiography and interpretive methods. These differences reflect Begriffsgeschichte’s preoccupation with specific concepts and their meaning, whereas the Cambridge School is more interested in idioms that, taken together, constitute political discourse. In light of these differences, readers might be skeptical about the possibility of achieving the sort of grand synthesis or fusion of interpretive horizons proposed by Melvin Richter. Beyond this, the History of Concepts makes two contributions. First, the volume expands our stock of conceptual histories. Thus, Maurizio Viroli describes the origin, meaning, and diffusion of ragione di stato, or “reason of state,” in seventeenth-century Europe. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink shows how the concept of nation, which had republican (and hence American Political Science Review potentially universal) overtones in revolutionary France, was defined in Germany in ethnic (and hence exclusionary) terms. And Willem Frijhoff traces the evolution of “cosmopolitan” discourse in the republic of letters, an intellectual association that originally transcended national boundaries in Europe. All three essays take a broad view of conceptual history, refusing to remain within the confines of a single language or culture. Instead of seeking a unified approach to conceptual history, Viroli, Lüsebrink, and Frijhoff present (or at least anticipate) comparative histories of specific concepts. The interest in comparison is further served by an emerging history of Dutch concepts discussed in this anthology. The Dutch case does not merely add another tradition to the mix of German, French, and English conceptual histories. As Hampsher-Monk notes, the Low Countries have long been a crossroads, intellectually and commercially. In that sense, Dutch provides a “linguistically open site” that is ideal for investigating the diffusion of concepts in Europe. The diffusion is evident in books and other printed materials, but also in graphical productions used within cultures and exchanged between them. This is the second contribution of History of Concepts. In keeping with current developments in literary criticism, the volume takes a broad view of what constitutes a text. Because images may be “read” and interpreted, there is no particular reason to base conceptual histories solely on the basis of books, tracts, newspapers, and legal documents. Hence, Bram Kempers explores the relation between word and image in Raphael’s Vatican Palace frescos, showing how they represent papal power and its intellectual underpinnings. Eddy de Jongh discusses “painted words” in Dutch art of the seventeenth century, arguing that an iconographic reading of genre painting is an important aspect of Begriffsgeschichte. Also in this vein is Rolf Reichardt’s brilliant interpretation of board and card games depicting the logic of events leading to the French Revolution. This is Begriffsgeschichte at its best, constructing conceptual history from materials that were themselves meant to instruct others about concepts and their relation to each other. Reichardt traces the political logic of revolution as it was understood at the time, showing how the mentalité of the ancien régime was undermined by republicans operating within the framework of Enlightenment. Anyone who doubts the value of moving beyond texts when doing conceptual history must confront Reichardt’s work. In The Logic of the History of Ideas, Mark Bevir offers a philosophical account of how the history of ideas ought to proceed in order for its claims to be valid. He outlines the logic of inquiry and forms of reasoning that justify historical interpretation, just as Carl Hempel did for scientific explanation. In that sense, Bevir provides a basis for assessing the adequacy of Begriffsgeschichte and critical conceptual history, although his argument obviously has broader implications for philosophy and the humanities. Bevir insists that the history of ideas must be conceived as the study of hermeneutic meaning, that is, the meaning of specific utterances for particular individuals. This is not as narrow as it seems, nor as precise as it sounds. The meanings in question might be conscious, subconscious, or unconscious, and the individuals for whom utterances have meaning include listeners as well as speakers, readers as well as authors. Thus, Bevir rejects interpretations that equate meaning with the intentions of those who make speeches, write books, or create images. But he also argues that contextualist and conventional accounts of meaning are incomplete insofar as they neglect the particular meanings associated with specific utterances or expressions of belief. For this reason, Bevir criticizes Pocock and Skinner for not providing philosophical accounts of meaning rich enough to sustain their historical investiga- Vol. 96, No. 4 tions of conceptual change. Given its structuralist tendencies, the same criticism might be leveled with even greater force against Begriffsgeschichte, although this brand of conceptual history is not discussed in the volume. According to Bevir, the proper interpretation of hermeneutic meaning proceeds by way of “procedural individualism,” which is to the history of ideas what methodological individualism is to economics: a starting point for analyzing the revealed preferences of individual human agents. Under procedural individualism, utterances are treated as expressions of belief, and these expressions are at least initially presumed to be sincere, conscious, and rational. If these presumptions hold, specific beliefs may be apprehended by placing them within a web of beliefs, and a web of belief may then be understood in terms of its relation to an intellectual tradition. The result is what Bevir calls “synchronic explanation,” which ostensibly preserves the sense of specific utterances or expressions while embedding them in larger configurations of meaning. For Bevir, “diachronic explanation” proceeds by revealing dilemmas, which arise when individuals accept as authoritative new meanings that pose questions for their existing web of beliefs. When existing webs of belief are modified or extended in order to accommodate new beliefs, meaning changes and history unfolds. But how can we recover meanings from the past, or rather, on what basis can we claim to have done so successfully? This is ultimately an epistemological question, and because he denies the possibility of foundational claims, Bevir concludes that historians can only defend their interpretations as being more accurate and comprehensive than others in relation to the agreed facts; as being more consistent in applying standards of evidence and reasoning; and as being more open to criticism and change. All of this has a Lakatosian ring to it, although the argument is less radical when applied to the humanities and social sciences. Synchronic and diachronic explanation are variants of the dominant form of explanation in Bevir’s conception of the history of ideas. Both presume that beliefs are sincere, conscious, and rational. When utterances or expressed beliefs are not sincere, conscious, or rational, a subsidiary form of explanation is required. Insincerity, self-deception, and irrationality occur when people express beliefs they do not hold because they think such expressions will satisfy personal needs or desires. The latter are “rogue pro attitudes,” or motives that can be invoked by historians to explain instances of deception, self-deception, or behavior that is evidently irrational. Bevir’s explanation of distorted meaning is strained and unconvincing, which is unfortunate from the standpoint of critical conceptual history. Language is the medium of politics, and the terms of political discourse are subject to dispute. The disputes are generally partisan, and frequently involve insincerity, self-deception, and irrationality. Any philosophical account of the history of ideas that fails to incorporate this dimension of political language is incomplete. An interesting question is whether Bevir’s account could be completed without modifying or abandoning procedural individualism and its interpretive presumptions. Procedural individualism may be too limiting in another respect, as well. In his contribution to the History of Concepts, Terence Ball observes that conceptual history often deals with the unintended, but nevertheless meaningful, consequences of action. Even a weakly intentionalist account of meaning will be challenged by such phenomena. In the end, political theorists may have to decide whether the history of ideas ought to be regulated by a postanalytic, postmodern account of meaning that does not, and indeed cannot, countenance extant versions of conceptual history. 797 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY Biology and Political Science. By Robert H. Blank and Samuel M. Hines, Jr. New York: Routledge, 2001. 183p. $80.00. John Strate, Wayne State University What is biopolitics? The authors are well-published scholars in this field, and their answer to this question supplied in this book should give hope to those who are disappointed with the direction and progress of political science. Many of the questions about politics that biopolitics addresses were first asked by ancient political philosophers, such as Aristotle. The field of biopolitics, however, is only 30 or 40 years old. Over that time the field has strengthened its institutional base. Of equal importance, it has produced a growing body of scholarship in such fields as political theory, comparative politics and international relations, methodology, political behavior and decision making, and public administration and public policy. Unfortunately, largely because the field is interdisciplinary, only a small portion of this scholarship has been published in the major political science journals, so that most political scientists and other social scientists are largely unaware of what this field is and what it has to offer. Biopolitics is interdisciplinary. Its foundation is the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, proposed 143 years ago by Darwin and Wallace, but substantially amended and updated since then. This theory, I would add, purports to explain the traits of every living thing on planet Earth, H. sapiens included. It has been a very successful theory—nobody has yet observed anything that has contradicted it. Thus, it deserves serious attention by political scientists who want their scholarship to contribute to what E. O. Wilson called Consilience (1998), or a joining together of the social and natural sciences. The authors critique political science for its continued reliance upon the standard social science model. This model, which largely ignores human biology, compels political scientists to search exclusively for social environmental explanations of political behavior. The problem is that this model ignores much of what is known about human behavior from various life sciences, including, among others, biological psychology, ethology, genetics, evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, pharmacology, physical anthropology, and sociobiology. The biopolitics model is an interactional model of behavior that acknowledges the importance of both the genotype and the environment. In biobehavioral biopolitics, the study of behavior proceeds at the micro level and analyzes how the central nervous systems of individuals generate behavior in particular settings. In evolutionary biopolitics, the study of behavior proceeds at the macro level and analyzes behavior and its significance for multiple levels in the hierarchy of life, including genes, individuals, populations, societies, and species. Such explanations are evolutionary in the sense that they identify the function of a behavior or how it contributed to survival and reproduction in the environments of history. The authors list significant historical developments in biopolitics. The founders of biopolitics include Roger Masters, Lynton Caldwell, Peter Corning, Glendon Schubert, Albert Somit, Steve Peterson, and the late Thomas Wiegele, to whom this book is dedicated. In 1980, Thomas Wiegele established the Center for Biopolitics at Northern Illinois University and invited a number of postdoctoral scholars, including Joseph Losco, Donna Baird, James Schubert, and the authors of this book. A landmark development in biopolitics was the establishment of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences in 1985. The association’s journal, Politics and the Life Sciences, is published semiannually. Over the 798 December 2002 years, the association has become increasingly international and interdisciplinary. The authors discuss the contributions of biopolitics to political theory. Most significant here is that biopolitical scholars seek to realign political theory so that it is based upon a scientific understanding of human nature. Although many ancient and modern political theorists speculated about man in a “state of nature,” they knew little or nothing about the actual state of nature. Anthropologists know this to be hunter-gatherer society, a form that prevailed for 99 percent of our species’ cultural history. Biopolitical scholars, using the methods of comparative zoology, identify politically relevant traits, such as social dominance hierarchies, that H. sapiens shares with those of other primates, such as the chimpanzee. Biopolitical scholars study the causes of political evolution, explaining the transition from simple hunter-gatherer societies to complex nation-states and empires. They examine why the existence of states and bureaucratic structures is problematic, given the centrifugal forces created by human nature and the “free rider” problem. They argue against the idea of inevitable progress. Historically, democracies are uncommon, appear only when numerous preconditions exist, and survive only because of the evolved human capacity for indoctrination. Biopolitical scholars have used methods borrowed from ethology and other behavioral sciences to study political elites. They have used experimental methods to study the responses of subjects to political elites based upon their appearance, their facial displays, and their speech. They have used direct observation and recording methods, including audio tape recorders, event data recorders, and field notes, to code interactions among, for example, city council members. They have drawn blood samples to analyze the relationship between leadership style and whole blood serotonin. The authors argue that as powerful as interview techniques and survey methods may be, many important things about politics will not be learned from using them. Biopolitical scholars have focused attention on complicated, salient, and controversial issues that have emerged from technological developments in the biological sciences. The authors identify 26 individually oriented biopolicy issues, mostly involving ethical issues of appropriate medical care and intervention (e.g., assisted reproduction). They identify 12-society-oriented biopolicy issues (e.g., population control), and 11 globally oriented biopolicy concerns (e.g., environmental issues, such as global warming). Existing institutions and political processes have generally done a poor job in dealing with and finding solutions to the multitude of problems linked with these issues. A number of these issues (e.g., global warming, loss of biodiversity, population growth) challenge the very notion of modernity. Can liberal, democratic capitalism and its faith in reason and economic growth be pursued on a global level without threatening the longterm survival of H. sapiens? The authors make a strong case for biopolitics. They do an excellent job surveying the field and its accomplishments. They offer a sophisticated discussion of methodological issues, including reductionism and determinism. A minor shortcoming, perhaps, is that the authors may overestimate readers’ levels of biological knowledge. For example, the book mentions the concept of inclusive fitness without defining it. Although this concept is key to understanding much of social behavior, few political scientists likely have heard of it or understand its significance in this regard. Thus, the book might have benefited from a short glossary. The book is well written and organized. It should be welcomed by political scientists and others who would like to know more about biopolitics and its accomplishments. As the authors argue, American Political Science Review biopolitics has the potential to transform the discipline of political science by providing a theoretical basis for the integration of various fields within political science and also the establishment of closer linkages with the natural sciences. Natural Law Modernized. By David Braybrooke. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. 351p. $70.00. Craig L. Carr, Portland State University Natural law theorizing, it seems, will not die, even in this socalled postmodern era. For some, apparently including David Braybrooke, this is reason to think that there is something true about natural law doctrine, and in Natural Law Modernized, he sets about to convince us of this very point. He thinks that natural law theory, once it is suitably modernized and refurbished in the fashion he recommends, has strengths that may make it preferable to alternative ethical theories, particularly utilitarianism and contractarianism. Most of the chapters that make up Natural Law Modernized have seen the light of day previously, either as published material or as presented papers, but they work well together and readers will find a consistency of argument too often lacking in such collections. Still, volumes of this sort have unavoidable drawbacks, and readers may find themselves wishing for a more thorough discussion of key issues left rather undeveloped and unrefined. The book also contains two essays by students of Braybrooke: “Ibn Khaldun Modernized,” by Michael McLendon, and “Natural Law in Classical Chinese Philosophy,” by Xiusheng Liu. Both are valuable contributions in their own right and do much to contribute to Braybrooke’s argument. Braybrooke claims at the outset that he has a twofold purpose in the book. First, he wants to demonstrate that the medieval natural law doctrine he associates with Aquinas survived into the modern era and is actually on display in such old friends as Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Hume. Thus, he is skeptical about the familiar distinction between medieval and modern natural law theory, insisting that the fundamentals of the Thomistic notion of natural law were “superseded and lost from sight” in the modern era, but that the theory itself “did not collapse” (p. 17). Second, he wants to demonstrate that natural law theory is modern “because it is current, or deserves to be” (p. 4). That is, he thinks his modernized natural law argument can withstand any objections from contemporary philosophy, including, he hastens to add, postmodernist objections. Yet this turns out to be a bit of false advertising. Braybrooke’s argument is not really designed to demonstrate that Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Hume were closet Thomists; nor does he address the kinds of objections postmodern thinkers are likely to bring against what turns out to be a fairly straightforward defense of a naturalist ethic. Instead, he collects (Braybrooke’s word) various elements of a naturalistic ethic from the modern thinkers he engages and then puts his argument in contemporary dress by placing it alongside the argument of David Copp’s (1995) Morality, Normativity, and Society. To modernize natural law, that is, to make it current, Braybrooke thinks it necessary to make it both secular and empirical, and he believes it possible to discover such a theory in Aquinas by foregrounding certain elements of Thomistic doctrine and deemphasizing or ignoring others. A secular and empirical natural law theory, it turns out, is constituted by a set of rules that serve to meet human needs and make possible the thriving of individuals and society. Since prescription is the flip side of description in naturalistic ethics, he thinks it also legitimate to say that these rules ought to be accepted Vol. 96, No. 4 and followed in order to guarantee individual and societal thriving. The rules gain empirical support by looking to basic human needs and acknowledging their obvious importance for human well-being. Since human beings require basics like food, shelter, and security, it is necessary to build a social support system capable of providing these goods, and the rules necessary for the continued success of this social enterprise are presumed by Braybrooke to qualify as natural laws. The author finds support for this, first, by comparing Locke with Aquinas and deriving from their respective views the required secular and empirical defense of rules necessary for a thriving society. He finds additional support for the empirical foundation of his argument in Rousseau, but more importantly, he looks to Rousseau in order to build a theory of the common good that supports both individual and social thriving. It is interesting to note that Braybrooke’s natural law is neither clearly teleological nor evidently deontological; he balances individual thriving against social thriving without privileging one over the other. Hobbes, again along with Aquinas, helps him generate a laundry list of rules to serve as natural laws, and the discussion of Hume presumably enables him to demonstrate that the natural laws can be considered true, thus supporting the moral realism required of natural law theory. On the bright side, the book is provocative, engaging, and challenging. Braybrooke deliberately avoids the subject of sexual morality (and the accompanying conservative polemic) that entertains many contemporary natural law enthusiasts, crafting a theory that is both current and curiously liberal. In this regard, his argument does produce the promised alternative to contemporary contractarian and utilitarian ethics, and no doubt many will welcome it as such. On the darker side, the aim of the work is ambitious, and his arguments do not always live up to their promise. Naturalistic ethics always seem rather slippery to me, and Braybrooke’s version is no exception. It seems curious to insist that the natural law is objective and holds similarly for all persons everywhere but can also vary at times depending upon the circumstances. And it seems unhelpful to insist that certain rules are necessary to facilitate individual and social thriving, but not say more either about what this means or why all persons should, after a fashion, think of thriving (and not just surviving) in similar terms. Additionally, his argument presumes a basic egalitarianism; all persons have equal standing under his natural law. This may hardly seem troubling in itself, but in a secularized natural law argument, it would be good to know why we must necessarily see things this way. One worries that perhaps Braybrooke has written his own (conventional) modern liberal egalitarian sympathies back into his natural law—a difficulty that invariably haunts natural law argument—leaving it a good deal less natural than advertised and a good deal less able to fend off contemporary objections as well. Talking Feminist Politics: Conversations on Law, Science, and the Postmodern. By Eloise A. Buker. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999. 240p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. The Future of Differences: Truth and Method in Feminist Theory. By Susan J. Hekman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999. 173p. $66.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. Alessandra Tanesini, Cardiff University There are differences between human beings, and some of these differences are, for many, a matter of identity. Some people are men, and some are white. Some people are poor, others are wealthy. These identity-constituting differences 799 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY are deeply connected with different kinds of injustices. Susan Hekman’s main contention in The Future of Differences is that a new epistemology is required if we are to acknowledge all these differences (p. 27) and, consequently, address these injustices. What Hekman fails to acknowledge is that there are many important differences between differences. Some differences are the result of economic injustices: for example, that between rich and poor. Others give rise to cultural injustices. For instance, gay people, whose identity is despised, are on the receiving end of this sort of injustice. Many differences, race and gender for instance, are a mix of the two (see Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus, 1997). This distinction is important because Hekman’s strategy of deconstruction of dichotomous identities (p. 27) seems appropriate only to those differences that are the locus of cultural injustice. When it comes to poverty, what is needed is economic redistribution. The difference between rich and poor is one we want to erase, through the transformation of the economic system, rather than deconstruct. There are two different sources to Hekman’s claim that politics focused on difference requires a new epistemology. These seem to me to be largely independent of each other, although Hekman does not present them as such. One source is her concern with the epistemological notion of the subject employed in modern epistemology. The second source concerns problems with the methodology of social sciences due to specific features of social reality. I see no reason why somebody who endorses Hekman’s approach to the first topic would be moved to agree with her on the second, and vice versa. Perhaps, the two complement each other. The first topic is familiar ground for Hekman, who has covered it elsewhere (see Gender and Knowledge, 1990). She argues that given the traditional model of the subject, women cannot fully achieve this status. They can stop being women, thereby erasing their difference from men, and become subjects. Or they can be women, and accept the status of nonsubjects. What Hekman advocates is a rejection of this framework and of the notion of subjectivity it entails (Chapter 5). For some, this approach is tantamount to overcoming epistemology, rather than developing a new one. Be that as it may, it is her discussion of this topic that leads Hekman to characterize her position as a third strategy for feminism. The second topic is developed in detail in the central chapters of this book. Here Hekman argues that respect for differences requires that we accept that there are no overarching social theories (pp. 69, 87) and no universal concepts (p. 87), although there are general categories (p. 53). She deploys Max Weber’s concept of the ideal type to develop her methodological approach. There is much that seems correct in Hekman’s theory, but I fail to see how it is generated by a respect for differences. Rather, its underlying motivation lies with the awareness that it is hopeless to search for exceptionless laws in the social sciences, and that an important aim of social critique is to illuminate the significances of social reality, rather than to describe facts. However, we can take these claims on board without accepting some of the further points that Hekman seems to derive from them. For instance, they offer no support to her claim that there is a contradiction between the view that reality is socially constituted, and that some perspectives on that reality are epistemically superior to others (p. 31). Even if reality is not independent of us, there remains a conceptual gap between how we take reality to be and how it is (in its socially constituted ways). Some perspectives are superior to others if they are less prone to error. In this context, it is significant that Hekman fails to mention a crucial feature of standpoint epistemology against which she 800 December 2002 raises this criticism, namely, that the perspectives on social reality that are epistemically privileged belong to people who are crucial to the continuation of the system that oppresses them. They have firsthand knowledge of this aspect of social reality, and that is why they are better positioned to know it. It is quite revealing that this feature of standpoint drops out of Hekman’s picture, since it is another instance in which a difference that results from economic oppression is ignored in her account. That said, some of her other criticisms of standpoint’s tendency to downplay the importance of differences among women do stand. In Talking Feminist Politics, Eloise Buker is almost exclusively concerned with feminism in the United States. More specifically, her sustained discussions of feminist jurisprudence, feminist epistemology, and postmodernism are intended to foster the development of a novel model of citizenship in the context of North American democracy. Feminist jurisprudence modifies current legal practices so as to help ordinary citizens take women’s situations into account when judging what is the just thing to do in a given situation. Feminist epistemology helps citizens become informed about the connections between science and social life. Finally, postmodernism helps one to understand that all social analyses must be contextualized. Surprisingly, Eloise Buker has very little to say explicitly about differences, since this has become a crucial topic for feminist discussions of political citizenship. What she has to say is, however, revealing. She writes: “If politics can bring together . . . outsiders . . . then politics offers ways to connect with others on the basis of a shared humanity that is inclusive. . . . Such a politics builds community on differences that are to be respected, encouraged, and appreciated” (p. 25). Buker, too, forgets that there are differences that are not to be encouraged. Further, her appeal to “a shared humanity” is problematic. The track record of political definitions of human nature and the human good is, to say the least, checkered. They have often been used to impose on some people the view of humanity held by the dominant group in society. Buker’s claim can perhaps be explained by her seeming to believe that political conflicts can always be settled to the benefit of every group in society (p. 45, n. 25) by means of an appeal to the law. I doubt that this is true. Some conflicts have no resolution. Others have just resolutions that do not benefit all involved. If a group has gained an unfair advantage over others, a just resolution requires that members of that group be worse off as a result. I find Buker’s belief in the justice of the U.S. legal system puzzling. I doubt that anybody who keeps clearly in mind the frightening statistics about the number of African American men currently in jail would put such faith in the role of the courts to achieve justice for all women, including those who are poor and those who are black. I also find Buker’s support for current institutions, and implicitly the economic system of which they are part and parcel, somewhat naive. She claims that “banks, factories . . . and churches, for example, offer organizational structures within which opportunities for citizenship exist and which function better when participants are empowered to act as citizens by taking responsibility for making the organization work better” (p. 28). Claims such as this betray a misunderstanding of the very nature of citizenship. Membership in a group could be a form of citizenship only if, at the very least, the group is constituted to protect and pursue the interests of its members. Factory workers who cannot sack their bosses, but can be sacked by them, are not members of an organization that has been instituted to protect their interests; quite the opposite. American Political Science Review Buker also links her discussion of justice in the context of jurisprudence to epistemological questions. Specifically, she addresses the issues of truth in science and of the justification of ethical claims. In her discussion of this latter topic, she endorses a morality of care, whose implementation depends on the wise judgment of citizens (p. 189). Although she is aware that the implementation of such a position is open to abuse, she seems to be optimistic about its possibilities. I doubt whether the dispossessed will feel the same way. Cultural Pluralism and Dilemmas of Justice. By Monique Deveaux. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. 205p. $35.00. Becoming Free: Autonomy and Diversity in the Liberal Polity. By Emily R. Gill. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. 292p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Susan Mendus, University of York, U.K. What does liberalism imply about our duties to minority cultures, and what do the claims of such cultures imply about the nature of liberalism? These may seem like different ways of asking roughly the same question and, in a sense, so they are. Both formulations invite us to consider the relationship between liberalism and diversity, and both do so in the specific context of group, as distinct from individual, identity. However, and as these two books demonstrate, it makes a difference which question we take as our starting point. Emily Gill begins with a question about the fundamental commitments of liberalisn, and having answered that question, she then goes on to investigate the implications for cultural membership. By contrast, Monique Deveaux begins by asking what justice requires for cultural minorities, and having answered that question, she then goes on to investigate the implications for our understanding of liberal democratic theory and practice. At first blush, Gill’s approach is the more tough-minded of the two. She writes: “(I)n a liberal polity, then, our focus should be on ensuring the existence of a context of choice maximizing the probability that cultural membership will indeed proceed from critical reflection and thus function as an expression of autonomy” (p. 7). And she goes on to insist that diversity is not valuable for its own sake, but only for the way in which it may function in individual lives as an expression of autonomy. Moreover, and intriguingly, she notes how many of those who favor special rights for minority groups do so in the name of individual choice. It is, in the end, neither culture nor community but autonomy that is of central importance. Thus, “membership in some culture is a precondition of any sort of human agency, but membership in any particular community on maturity is an expression of autonomy. My focus, then, is on the nature of the preconditions that maximize the likelihood that cultural membership will represent an expression of autonomy” (p. 88). For Deveaux, this is not the way it is—or at least, not the way it ought to be. She agrees that many of those who would protect cultural membership do so in the name of individual choice, but concludes that this is a wholly inadequate reason, not least because it may “overlook valuable aspects of cultural membership which not only do not necessarily enhance individual autonomy, but also may actually stand in tension with it” (pp. 121–22). And what this, in turn, highlights is both that autonomy-based liberalism may be restrictive in the kinds of groups it will be willing to support, and (yet more worryingly) that autonomy-based liberalism, even when it favors the protection of some groups, will do so for reasons that fail to resonate with members of those groups themselves: “[M]embers of minority groups (especially more traditional Vol. 96, No. 4 ones) by no means unanimously affirm the ideal of personal autonomy, nor do they necessarily accept it as the overriding reason for introducing special political arrangements to support their way of life” (p. 132). The argument from autonomy is a distinctively liberal argument and, as such, it will not necessarily find favor with members of minority groups themselves. In assessing these two approaches to the question of diversity, much seems to hang on which way round we ask the initial question. Are we taking liberalism (suitably defined) as the fixed point and then asking whether and to what extent it can accommodate cultural commitment, or are we taking cultural commitment as the fixed point and then asking whether and to what extent its demands can be incorporated within the liberal framework? One might think that these different approaches would result in quite distinct policy provisions: Gill’s emphasis on autonomy seems, at least prima facie, to imply a rejection of groups that are not autonomy-valuing, while Deveaux’s emphasis on the intrinsic value of cultural commitment suggests a more sympathetic response to illiberal, or nonautonomy-valuing, groups. However, these expectations are only partially fulfilled. Both writers discuss the implications of their theoretical views for practical policy, and both consider cases in which members of minority groups that place a low value on autonomy wish to remove their children from the state education system. On these, Deveaux concludes that “many traditional religious and ethnic communities that do not actively encourage or foster their members’ capacities to form and pursue independent life plans may still deserve respect and protection. As the examples of Muslim schools and the Amish opting out of mainstream education show, there are reasons to support some traditional cultural structures that sit uneasily with liberal sensibilities. At the very least, there are no good grounds for rejecting such practices in advance of extensive public deliberation with the cultural groups concerned” (pp. 135–36). Deveaux does not give an exhaustive explanation of her reasons for thinking that such groups are worthy of respect, but simply contents herself with the general reflection that insofar as they do not jeopardize or restrict their members’ capacities and opportunities to make any decisions about their own lives, they do not risk violating democratic principles. To that extent, we must suppose, they are to be permitted, and to the extent that they provide contexts for the development of a sense of identity and belonging, they are to be encouraged. What, then, of Gill? Her insistence that cultural membership should proceed from critical reflection and thus function as an expression of autonomy strongly suggests that she will have no truck with those cultural groups that reject autonomy, and no sympathy for those who wish to remove their children from state education. This conclusion would, however, be too quick. In her final chapter, Gill insists that “in spite of Rawls’s attempt to avoid education for autonomy, I do not believe that eschewing this kind of civic education is compatible with liberalism as I interpret it” (p. 219). But she immediately goes on to acknowledge that this insistence leaves untouched the central dilemma of how to offer a civic education that does not force autonomy on those who are indifferent to it or reject it altogether. In the end, therefore, she reluctantly concurs with the court decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder because “separation is not instrumental to being Amish but is intrinsic to and constitutive of what being Amish means” (p. 238). More generally, she concludes that as liberals, it behooves us to be aware of the limitations of our own moral categories and to recognize that our own emphasis on self-assessment and selfunderstanding is but one narrative among others. Moreover, this recognition is one that can enable us to develop our own autonomy, by allowing us to imagine living different ways of 801 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY life, and by promoting our ability to question, examine, and possibly revise our conceptions of the good. Despite their different starting points, and their different theoretical allegiances, Gill and Deveaux often arrive at remarkably similar conclusions, particularly where matters of practical policy are concerned, and this is both intriguing and reassuring. Taken individually, each of these books represents a significant contribution to the liberal debate over multiculturalism. Deveaux acknowledges from the outset that her approach is the result of reflection on distinctively Canadian problems, whereas Gill’s attention is focused on American cases, and often on American legal cases. Hence, perhaps, Deveaux’s concern for examining liberalism through the lens of cultural commitment, and Gill’s concern for examining cultural commitment through the lens of liberal individualism. For those who are in need of a thorough, detailed, and sensitive discussion of the varieties of modern liberalism, I wholeheartedly recommend Gill’s book. Its command of the literature is hugely impressive, and her ability to disentangle the many threads that go to make up modern liberalism is both instructive and stimulating. Hers is a book that both demands and repays careful attention by the reader, but its sheer detail can sometimes bewilder. By contrast, Deveaux’s book is more succinct and her own voice is more clearly audible, but the reader (this reader) is sometimes left wanting rather more by way of positive argument. For instance, Deveaux’s criticisms of the liberal perfectionism of Joseph Raz and Will Kymlicka are certainly telling, and she is surely right to emphasize that their appeal to individual autonomy fails to capture communities’ own views about what is important in cultural membership, but her own appeal to the value of belonging needs to be spelled out in more detail if it is to do the philosophical work required of it. To say all this, however, is simply to say that these books, like all books, have the defects of their virtues. It is important to add that in these cases, the virtues are very considerable. If, taken individually, each book represents a significant contribution to the liberal debate over multiculturalism, taken together they offer alternative, yet complementary, visions of the way in which liberalism might develop in the twentyfirst century. Put differently, the books are not merely critical but also constructive. They fire the reader’s imagination by their anticipations of a liberal polity that can genuinely do justice to minority groups. Those of us who teach in this area of the discipline could do no better than to recommend that these two books be read as companion pieces. They will not fail to spark informed debate in an area where debate is all too common, but informed debate is a rare commodity. Constitutional Self Government. By Christopher L. Eisgruber. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 260p. $45.00. Mark Tunick, Florida Atlantic University Christopher Eisgruber takes a pragmatic approach to judicial review. Most judges and scholars would decide whether a branch of government acts legitimately by asking whether its actions were authorized or prohibited by some provision in the Constitution. The common assumption is that during the constitutional convention, states agreed to give up some of their powers in order to establish a new federal government with enumerated powers, at the same time explicitly setting limits both to the federal government and to states. By turning to the terms of this agreement, Supreme Court Justices seek to answer whether Congress, the president, or the state or local government in question acted within its rights. Eisgruber regards such assumptions about state sovereignty as “mysti- 802 December 2002 cal” (p. 186). Instead, he would have us question, in deciding whether, say, Congress should be permitted to regulate the possession of guns in school zones, that this is the sort of thing a national government can “do well” (p. 186). Whether it was the intention of those who wrote or ratified the Constitution to give Congress this power is, to Eisgruber, more or less irrelevant. Eisgruber thus adds another sustained argument against originalist theories of constitutional interpretation to the considerable existing arsenal. His defense of a Supreme Court that has discretion to go beyond the original intentions of the framers or even the conventional meaning of the text is based not only on pragmatic considerations but also on a theory of “constitutional self-government.” The idea is that by virtue of the procedures used to select the Supreme Court—nomination by the president and confirmation by the Senate—the Court is best viewed as an institution whose function is to practice democracy by invoking its own best judgments regarding political issues that it is particularly well suited to address (pp. 4, 8, 40, 48). Echoing familiar defenses of judicial review, Eisgruber argues that because they have life tenure and are not likely to have higher aspirations for which they might seek political favors (pp. 58, 60), justices are more inclined than elected officials or the voting public to be guided not merely by interests but by values or moral principles (Chapter 2). While opposing originalism and theories that would have justices strictly adhere to the plain meaning of the text, which is, as many have noted, a futile task, he does not recommend that justices simply ignore the Constitution (pp. 205–6), or exercise unbridled discretion. His defense of judicial review rests on the assumption that justices are best suited to apply discrete moral principles, which he attempts to distinguish from comprehensive principles (p. 170). Justices are ill suited to apply comprehensive principles, which call for assessment of an entire system of social interaction rather than specific forms of government action (p. 171), and should therefore steer clear of such issues as redistricting or the balance of powers between states and federal government, for here the Court is beyond its competency and should leave things to be settled by other political institutions. The argument that judicial review is a means of selfgovernment hinges on the Supreme Courts being a representative institution, and Eisgruber thinks that the reason we have for thinking this is that the justices are “political appointees” (p. 64). Given the importance for his theory of our accepting the democratic pedigree of the justices, it is troubling that we do not get more in this book than a few paragraphs about how the selection process truly lets us regard the justices as representatives. Eisgruber notes that we could have selected justices through civil service exams, rather than by nomination and consent (p. 65); but if the Court was truly intended to be representative, we could have made it elected—he notes, in a footnote without comment, that some states do this for some of their judgeships (p. 228, n. 86). A detailed discussion on representation theory and the extent to which the nomination and confirmation process manifests the will of the people would seem to be crucial to the theory, but we do not find it here. If the justices were to be truly representative, why not have them consult polls in deciding cases, as Lon Fuller has Justice Handy do in his famous “The Case of the Speluncean Explorers” (1949; reprinted in Harvard Law Review 112 [1999]: 1851–75)? Eisgruber might respond that justices fulfill a special role in democracy of protecting minority rights by appealing to moral principles, and following opinion polls may disable them from fulfilling this role. But if, as Eisgruber argues, justices are no more morally insightful than the people, their advantage being only their disinterestedness (p. 62), it is hard to see why they should American Political Science Review not consult issue polls, as opposed to election results. Fuller artfully contrasts Handy’s legal philosophy with a number of alternatives. Since Eisgruber defends a controversial legal philosophy in which judges are guided by their own judgment and do not act merely as agents of lawmakers “now long dead” (p. 205), it would have been helpful had he engaged more of the literature on these alternatives. There are many examples of Eisgruber thoughtfully responding to counterarguments (see p. 67, for example) and providing fresh and stimulating positions on particular constitutional controversies (for example, his discussion of U.S. v. Lopez on pp. 198–99). But there are also a number of instances where his reasoning is less than compelling. In his discussion of whether there is a constitutional principle that would invalidate state laws restricting sexual freedom, Eisgruber rejects Justice Harry Blackmun’s suggestion that sexual liberty is vital to a person’s identity. Eisgruber does not think that “kinky sex” is any more indispensable to human flourishing than other pursuits of pleasure that the state may wish to regulate, such as, to use his example, eating raw hamburgers at home (pp. 158–59). Instead, he argues that “what matters is not that people define their identities by having sex, but that they sometimes do so by condemning other people’s sexual behavior” (p. 160). The constitutional principle he settles on is that we should be protected against regulations motivated by a desire for social prestige or domination (pp. 160–61), although he does not explain why a legislature’s motive should be determinative in deciding whether government coercion is acceptable, and he gets to this principle by making what many will regard as an implausible assumption, that pursuing intimate sexual relations is substantially no more meaningful than the pursuit of gastronomic delicacies. To take another example, Eisgruber assesses the issue of whether we should defer to state governments on the ground that they are “closer to the people.” The view he settles on is that we cannot be sure they are, and that in some ways, local and national governments are less anonymous and unaccountable than state governments. As evidence, he cites an informal survey a law professor conducted of his students that reveals that the students “know less about their state representatives than they do about national and local ones” (p. 193). He recognizes that this is an “unscientific” survey, and so he asks us then to reflect on our own attitudes toward local, state, and national politicians. (When I did this I found myself more aware of state legislators who were threatening to cut my university’s budget than of city council members). And as still further support that state legislatures may be more anonymous, he argues that “there are fifty states, and it may not be clear which state any given citizen should watch—many Americans cross state lines every day when they commute to work” (p. 194). But Americans live and work in different local jurisdictions as well, so why infer from the fact that some may live and work in multiple states that they are inattentive to state governments, and why not infer from the fact that a far larger number of people live and work in multiple local jurisdictions that more people are inattentive to local government? Eisgruber may be right that state governments are less accountable than local or national governments, but his reasoning is disappointing. As a final example, he seems to be willing to use the “necessary and proper” clause of Article I as a means to support any sort of power that it would be a good thing to have in the hands of Congress (p. 190), despite its clear stipulation that it refers only to “all foregoing powers” and other powers specifically “vested by this Constitution.” Although these arguments may not inspire confidence, there are a number of examples of sound reasoning and fair consideration of objections, especially earlier in the book. Vol. 96, No. 4 The book is uneven, but it is an interesting addition to antioriginalist theories of constitutional interpretation. Eisgruber articulates what will seem to some a radical view; but just as it would take a much longer review for me to do justice to the way Eisgruber deals with a number of complex issues, including whether his distinction between discrete and comprehensive principles is workable, it would take a much longer book that is more attentive to representation theory and legal philosophy if his view is to amount to a truly convincing theory, rather than more ammunition in a worthy battle against originalism. The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth. By Liah Greenfeld, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 541p. $45.00. Mark N. Hagopian, American International College 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. Greenfeld applies this open-ended view of history to nationalism itself. Instead of reflecting innate natural qualities as “primordialists” in theory and ethnonationalists in practice contend, nationalism itself is a constructed product of human history. In other words, it is something effected by choice, chance, and accident. However, unlike Eric Hobsbawm and (somewhat differently) Ernest Gellner, she does not see nationalism created or employed to cater to capitalism’s need for a homogeneous social organization. Quite the contrary: Nationalism most often promoted capitalism as a chief component of its own agenda. The “capitalism” of which the author speaks is influenced by the classic ideas of W. W. Rostow. This capitalism is privately owned, profit-oriented economy that features economic growth as a competitive weapon in an international framework. It is a capitalism, moreover, that emerged first and foremost in England, particularly after the Restoration, and then diffused (adopting appropriate cultural variations) to places like France, Germany, Japan, and America. The whether, why, when, and how of this diffusion of the capitalist spirit is the central concern of this book: “The sustained orientation of economic activity to growth, the characteristic ‘spirit of capitalism’ which makes modern economy modern, owes its existence to nationalism. In general this ‘spirit of capitalism’ is the economic expression of the collective competitiveness inherent in nationalism—itself a product of the members’ investment in the dignity or prestige of the nation” 803 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY (p. 473). To validate this thesis, the author devotes a chapter, each to England-Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Germany and two chapters each to Japan and America. While detailed analysis of these chapters is impossible here, certain key points likely to cause contention can be at least sketched. In general, these chapters combine political history, economic history, and the history of economic ideas to illustrate Greenfeld’s interpretation of the capitalism–nationalism nexus. In Chapter 1 on England-Great Britain, she deals with the lead-up to and aftermath of Adam Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776. She rightly stresses that there is more to Smith’s thought than tunnel-visioned apotheosis of laissez-faire. More controversial perhaps is her attempt in Chapter 2 to downplay the Netherlands in favour of England as the locus classicus of modern capitalist diffusion. Accordingly, she denies the nationalist credentials of the Dutch in early modern Europe, even during their fabled late-sixteenth-century revolt against Spanish domination. Countering among other things the old Marxist saw that the Netherlands Revolt was the premier “bourgeois,” that is, capitalist, revolution, she charges that the Dutch even later in the seventeenth and eighteenth century “did not choose to become modern” and remained so tied to a narrowly individualist economic ethos that “they were not a nation” (p. 90). Dutch historians will doubtless question this conclusion. According to the author, a major reason for English success and Dutch failure in producing a modern nationalism is religion. She finds that the Dutch were too mired in religious matters to take this road, whereas the English at least by the time of the Restoration had moved forward to a more secular and authentic national consciousness. Her whole line of reasoning reflects a general underestimate of the role of religion in the development of modern nationalism. Whatever the case with the Dutch, certainly English nationalism was a centerpiece of the era of the 1640s and 1650s (not entirely misnamed the Puritan Revolution). English nationalism was wedded to Protestantism for a long time thereafter. Chapter 3 discusses France as the “first convert” to the nationalist-capitalist convergence. Here we find that even the early and imperfect “mercantilist” capitalism, as it evolved from simple bullionism to more sophisticated notions of the balance of trade, was intimately tied to nationalistic concerns. Various French thinkers anticipated the type of “economic nationalism” that is the focus of this study. Chapter 4 looks to the roots of German nationalism among the post-Napoleonic intelligentsia. However, German nationalism under the influence of Romanticist thought develops a collectivist or organic version of nationalism that distinguishes it significantly from the more individualistic and civic nationalism of the British, French, and Americans. The culmination of various trends of thought, such as the vast literature of “Cameralism,” is found in Friedrich List’s extremely nationalistic System of National Economy (1837). The last four chapters of The Spirit of Capitalism examine the emergence of nationalistic economic thinking and public policy in Japan and America. Japanese economic development in the post-Meiji period (1868) truly reflects the conscious attempt to defend the country and “nation” against the clear and present danger of Western domination. In Japan, the connection between a nationalism stimulated by foreign contact and an ancient culture stressing the primacy of the community seems clear. It is nationalism that rather successfully has produced the synthesis of a traditional warrior ethic with the requisites of an economy of growth. The concluding two chapters on America cover such topics as the economic nationalism inherent in Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures or Henry Clay’s “American System” and the emergence of economics as an academic discipline. 804 December 2002 This is an important book. It will spark a variety of controversies. Its neoconservative orientation will antagonize those left of center. Area specialists and historians, as is their wont, will fasten onto whatever errors of omission or commission a book of such scope is bound to incur. Students of nationalism will question this or that historical or conceptual point. And yet, the very daring of its central thesis on the connections between nationalism and capitalism is to be commended. Whether it finally lays to rest Weber’s strictures on the Protestant Ethic remains to be seen. There is no doubt, however, that a book on an intriguing and important subject, featuring a flexible view of why things happen in history, and also displaying a lively sense of argument and ample documentation, is to be welcomed. It is a powerful and thought-provoking study. Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. By Sonia Kruks. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 200p. $35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. Karen Green, Monash University 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. The first essay, “Freedoms That Matter,” recaps an argument Kruks first published in the late 1980s that attempts to distance de Beauvoir from Jean-Paul Sartre. Here she suggests that de Beauvoir’s account of subjectivity owes more to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had developed an account of embodied and effectively constrained subjectivity, than to Sartre, who notoriously asserted in Being and Nothingness that the slave in chains is as free as his master. Kruks appears, in this essay, to be implicitly accepting the feminist and postmodern critique of Sartre, who has been cast as the last defender of abstract universal humanity. She defends de Beauvoir by claiming that despite her protestations to the contrary, she was not simply applying Sartre’s philosophy. Although Kruks’s reading of de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty is nuanced and initially plausible, there are problems with it. It is rather uncharitable to de Beauvoir, since it implies that she misrepresented her own views. It is also uncharitable to Sartre, since it underplays the distance he had already moved toward an account of oppression in “Anti-Semite and Jew.” In many ways, the need to read de Beauvoir in opposition to Sartre is undermined by Kruks’s own later essays, in particular the third, “The Politics of Recognition: Sartre, Fanon and Identity Politics.” In this essay she points out the neglected debt that Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins White Masks owes to Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and Jew.” Since this work, and its sequel, Wretched of the Earth, had enormous influence on black American Political Science Review and postcolonial liberation movements, Sartre’s importance as a political catalyst deserves to be recognized. As Kruks outlines, “The situation of the Jew in Sartre’s account is above all one constituted by the anti-Semite—just as that of women can be said to be constituted by the sexist, or that of people of colour by the racist” (p. 92). The first draft chapters of The Second Sex followed soon after the 1946 “Anti-Semite and Jew.” So the most economical way of understanding the theory of the subject in de Beauvoir’s essay is to see it as developing the account of concrete relations with others, found in Being and Nothingness, in a similar direction to that taken by Sartre in “Anti-Semite and Jew.” The crux of this interpretative issue seems to lie in what de Beauvoir meant by “a fall into immanence.” If we take this to imply loss of status as a conscious being (reduction to an in-itself), then her theory of the subject is clearly not Sartrean. However, if what she means is that women find themselves in a situation that encourages the attitude epitomized by Sartre as love, language, and masochism, and so treat themselves as objects, there is no reason to think that de Beauvoir has gone beyond Sartre’s account of the subject. Kruks’s second essay, “Panopticism and Shame: Foucault, Beauvoir and Feminism,” points out the debt, also noted by others, that Michel Foucault’s account of panopticism owes to de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s account of the look or the gaze. It argues that Foucault’s notion of the “interiorization” of the gaze is inconsistent with his avowed “no-subject” theory, and urges the superiority of the de Beauvoir/Merleau-Ponty account of the subject, also recently revived by Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies, 1994), according to which external social conditions effect a conscious interiority, which is nevertheless always bodily. Without some such account of the subject, the experience of oppression and urge for liberation become mysterious. The fourth essay, “Identity Politics and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance,” turns to feminist standpoint theory and argues for the superiority of the account of the practical situated subject, developed by Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason, over the description of the situated subject developed by Nancy Hartsock and Donna Haraway. In particular, Sartre gives an account of the way in which individuals are connected through various forms of praxis, and so is able to “avoid the fragmenting tendencies implicit in identity politics, as well as other forms of multipledifference feminism” (p. 127). The last two essays advocate, in different ways, a return to the phenomenology of lived experience in order to find some commonality among women and to rescue feminism, both from the silencing of those who are outside discourse and from its disintegration into a plethora of different discourses. For such are the theoretical impasses to which poststructuralism has brought us. These chapters form the center of Kruks’s own version of phenomenological existentialism, but I found them the least convincing. Her project is one of retrieval. An extremely influential philosophy, the phenomenological existentialism of de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, has been unduly neglected. This is problematic partly because many ideas that are associated with later thinkers have their origins in this philosophy, but their source is not acknowledged. And more importantly, many of the ways in that we think of the phenomenon of oppression, and the paths to liberation that then suggest themselves, are due to the writings of these theorists, yet are not subject to critical scrutiny. As a project of critical self-comprehension, a retrieval of phenomenological existentialism is important. But whether this philosophy can any longer show us the way forward is another matter. There is, of course, a great deal that could be retrieved from it. There is the early Sartrean notion of bad faith, the Vol. 96, No. 4 middle period attempt to develop an existentialist ethic and give an account of situated freedom, and the later project of a synthesis, always awkward, of Marxism and existentialism. But these are not what appeal to Kruks. It is rather “the commonalities of feminine bodily experience . . . that can inaugurate a concern for others [which] invite us to endeavor respectfully to travel to the worlds of others in fuller and more ambitious ways” (p. 175). But this is at best the threshold of a way forward. If there is one place where poststructuralism has had some success, it is in questioning any simple notion of experience. But even if we concede a shared experience, and are concerned for the fate of our sisters, this does not solve the hard question: What should we do? This question is hardest when Islamic women or Aboriginal women challenge us as Western, capitalist, and colonial. Sartre did attempt to come to terms, in his later work, with the complex structuring of relations of inequality, which can make one bourgeois and black, or patrician and female. He thought we should strive for genuine material equality, and he thought that achieving it would require a revolution. Kruks is silent on such matters, but it is here, I suspect, that both retrieval and critique is required, as we face Sartre’s promised revolution in the unexpected guise of a global Islamic uprising. Kruks’s writing is intelligent and well worth reading. Yet in proposing to retrieve existential phenomenology from its recent neglect, she fails to address its limitations. She does not, for instance, demonstrate where Claude Lévi-Srauss’s critique of Sartre’s distinction between analytic and dialectical reason broke down. So when she advocates a return to Sartre’s way of thinking, it is unclear that she is offering a more coherent outlook than the poststructuralist one that developed out of Lévi-Strauss’s critique. Joseph Schumpeter’s Two Theories of Democracy. By John Medearis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 263p. $45.00. Jeffrey C. Isaac, Indiana University 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. According to Medearis, Schumpeter had not one but two theories of democracy. The later, and more famous, theory identifies democracy with a method of electoral competition whereby political leaders are selected by those over whom they rule. Medearis argues that this theory needs to be understood as a response to an alternative, “transformational” conception of democracy that was central to much of Schumpeter’s early political writing. The “transformational” view, on Medearis’s telling, stresses “the importance of democratic beliefs and ideology” and highlights “the radicalizing, dynamic effects of movements that attempt to realize democratic values and act on democratic ideologies” (p. 4). On this view, democracy is egalitarian and expansive theory and practice not reducible to a method of leadership selection. Medearis charts Schumpeter’s encounters with this more radical, transformational conception, first in post–World 805 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY War I Austria, where he participated in public debates and discussions about the council movement, the socialization of large-scale industry, and the prospects for democratization; and later in the United States, where he observed and commented upon the industrial radicalism of the New Deal period. The best part of the book is the dialogue that Medearis establishes between Schumpeter and the seminal Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner. Here, Medearis accomplishes two important tasks: on the one hand, emphasizing the impact of the theoretical and programmatic arguments of these writers, and of Austrian Social Democracy more generally, upon Schumpeter; and on the other, foregrounding Bauer’s important and overlooked views on the topic of democracy and its various political embodiments. Medearis locates Schumpeter’s own views on these topics within the tradition of conservatism broadly understood. And he compares Schumpeter’s views with those of Max Weber, Gaetano Mosco, and Wilfredo Pareto. But he also makes clear the extent to which Schumpeter’s aversion toward radical conceptions of democracy was rooted in his own early career as an Austrian “Tory democrat” linked to the Austrian Christian Social Party. What emerges from Medearis’s account is a view of Schumpeter as a complex, transplanted, Central European scholar and public intellectual deeply engaged in the political debates of his time and place. Such a view is a far cry from the way in which Schumpeter has been received in the American academy. This contextualization of Schumpeter is an important accomplishment. But Medearis goes further, engaging Schumpeter’s texts, especially Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, in careful critical argument, and linking the limits of Schumpeter’s “elitist” conception of democracy to the residues of the transformational view that remain in his later work and that, according to Medearis, must be central to any adequate account of democracy. In developing these themes, Medearis does more than shed new light on Schumpeter. He contributes, albeit indirectly, to current debates both about the limits of public choice approaches to democratic theory and about the meanings of democracy. I highly recommend this book for what it accomplishes, for the conception of political theory that lies behind it, and simply because it is a very well written book that makes an enjoyable and informative read. It is an ambitious book, covering many aspects of Schumpeter’s intellectual biography, and shedding light on all of them. There are places, such as digressions on Schumpeter’s gendered language and on his anti-Semitic proclivities, where it loses focus. The book also suffers, in a very minor way, from a certain rhetorical slippage that occurs whenever Medearis maintains that Schumpeter “had” two antithetical theories of democracy. What Medearis in fact argues is that Schumpeter recognized two conceptions of democracy, attributed much causal power to a radical view, acknowledged its impact on events, and sought with intellectual and practical ingenuity to oppose it. It is true that Schumpeter “had” a transformational theory of democracy in the sense that he recognized the reality of this theory. But in another way, it is misleading to say that he had this theory, because to say this implies that he subscribed to this theory, and Medearis is clear that he did not, ever, identify with the transformational view. There are places in the book where greater semantic clarity about this point would have enhanced the argument. But, overall, the argument is clear, and Medearis, by delineating Schumpeter’s understanding of the transformational possibilities of democracy, has done a great service to all interested in either intellectual history or democratic theory. 806 December 2002 Political Nature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought. By John M. Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 210p. $55.00 cloth, $22.95 paper. John S. Dryzek, Australian National University 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. Though not as plentiful as environmental philosophy, environmental political theory is today growing in quantity and sophistication (as Meyer grudgingly admits). But he condemns it for being dominated by two fallacies. The first is dualism: the idea that most political theorists throughout the ages have portrayed humanity in complete isolation from nonhuman nature, such that the task for ecological political theory is to overcome this separation, and re-embed politics in ecosystems. The second is derivation: the idea that a normative model of an ecologically sound polity can be derived from a model of how nonhuman nature works. Derivation tempts those green theorists who believe that the problem with the world is its current domination by a mechanistic model of nature, which ought to be replaced by an ecological model. While Meyer chooses his targets well, these fallacies are perhaps not quite so universal among green theorists as he suggests. Meyer does discuss dualism and derivation in his contemporaries, but spends much more time on their roots in the history of political thought. Most of the book is devoted to Hobbes and Aristotle. This material is very effective. Meyer takes aim at the major interpreters of Hobbes and Aristotle who have discerned either dualism or derivation in these two thinkers, and finds such interpretations mistaken. Instead, Meyer argues, in their very different ways, both Hobbes and Aristotle share the basic idea that nature (with both nonhuman and human aspects) helps to constitute who we are as political beings, though as pre-ecological thinkers, neither could have thought in terms of ecological nature. This move, then, “allows us to place questions related to nature at the center of our political agenda” (p. 125), which is fair enough. Meyer has undoubtedly made a major contribution to the (environmental) history of political thought. But in light of the intentions with which he began, the big question is: How can these interpretations of Hobbes and Aristotle inform contemporary environmental political thinking and practice? The justification for attending to Hobbes is that his mechanistic view of nature is widely seen as underpinning the modernity that some ecological theorists want to supersede. (Aristotle, for his part, represents a teleological alternative that may be attractive to some greens.) But showing that Hobbes himself is not a simple dualist or derivationist is really not decisive, if it is the misinterpretations of him that are both dominant and consequential—and are consistent with the modernist paradigm that begins in the seventeenth century. In short, even if Meyer is right about Hobbes, it may not matter much. Another difficulty arises in that our world is separated from that of Hobbes not just by the ecological thinking that American Political Science Review begins in the twentieth century (which Meyer analyzes) but by Darwin. If, as Meyer believes, nature helps constitute humans, then surely nature as revealed by evolutionary biology has a part to play in this constitution, even if that part is contested. Moreover, if Meyer really wanted to take aim at “derivative” misuses of nature in political theory, he could have targeted (or at least mentioned) all those who over the past century and more have argued that Darwinian nature justifies their preferred political project. Unregulated capitalism, dialectical materialism, (eco-)anarchism, progressivism, liberal democracy, organic statism, and Nazism have all been justified in Darwinian terms—often to extremely important political effect. “Darwin” and “evolution” cannot be found in Meyer’s index. At the end of the book, Meyer turns to a brief discussion of the implications of his constitutive view of political nature for the theory and practice of environmental politics, especially in terms of a politics of experience and place. His view of environmental politics is expansive in seeking to escape the idea that “the environment” is just an issue area, and inclusive in the kinds of movements and viewpoints that he wants to draw into the conversation. The movements he applauds are those for environmental justice in the United States, “ecological resistance” in the Third World, and—more surprisingly—the Wise Use Movement in the western United States. He defends the latter as a movement to maintain “a dignified rural existence” (p. 151). But how can a movement that can see this existence only in terms of traditional and unsustainable (on any definition) extractive resource use be described as “environmental”? How can a movement that demands heavy taxpayer subsidy of a rugged individualist antigovernment lifestyle be described as “dignified”? It is not hard to see what sorts of political uses might be made of an environmentalism that rubbishes ecosystemic thinking and praises the Wise Use Movement. Unfortunately, Meyer does not leave himself space to mount an adequate defense, discussing each movement in around three pages. Political Nature is a landmark in the environmental history of political thought, particularly compelling in its analyses of Hobbes and Aristotle. Whether contemporary environmental thinkers should accept the lessons that Meyer draws for them is an altogether different question. He has plenty to do in terms of spelling out exactly what he has in mind for contemporary green political theory and practice, although he has demonstrated the ability to both unsettle established thinking and raise an original voice in some important debates. His real work has just begun. Taylored Citizenship: State Institutions and Subjectivity. By Char Roone Miller. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001. 224p. $66.00. Stephen Schneck, Catholic University of America 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. Vol. 96, No. 4 As Miller would have it, the key feature of Taylorizing is the engineering of fixed citizen identities to be deployed for ulterior purposes: military effectiveness, industrial productivity, consumption, social order, and so forth. Gender, race, intelligence, and other differences are engendered by the Taylorizing process for the construction of these identities. Well-known societal changes that took place in American society in conjunction with World War II take on an unsettling quality when considered through Miller’s lens. Consider, for example, the impact of the procedures of the Veterans’ Administration on the education of citizens, on the rise of suburbs, on patterns of citizen participation in politics, on race and on ethnicity, and on everything else. Who could deny that such procedures exercised a profound influence on citizen identity? Similarly, in education the period in question is associated with a number of progressive reforms, including standardized testing, the administrative use of public education for “socialization,” sexual education, vocational education, mental and physical hygiene, and civics—all of which might be perceived as moving the formation of subjectivity into the operations of public administration. “Education and military service,” Miller explains, “transformed social facts into identifications and citizens into actors.” Hence, he continues, “by the World War II period, identities were conceptually organized to support national power” (p. 171). Miller has a keen eye for discerning the techniques and processes by which societal forces, public institutions, and the state involve themselves in the formation of who we are. At one level, this is not news. A basic premise of social science is the role of societal factors in the formation of identity. Nor is it news to political philosophy, which at least since Plato’s deportation of poets has wrestled with the conundrum of citizenship and right. Is there anyone who cannot imagine that school-administered IQ tests or military boot camps do not have implications for citizenship or citizen subjectivity itself? At a different level, though, Miller’s argument really rivets attention. That widespread military experience of World War II and twentieth-century educational reform changed the nature of American citizenry is commonplace knowledge. Social scientists and historians are also aware that Tayloresque management and administrative techniques were widely adopted by reformers in the military and by educational planners, as Miller’s superb documentation of the secondary literature outlines. It may even be that such postwar social scientists as B. F. Skinner or Harold Lasswell or a philosopher like John Dewey were even able to connect the dots and recognize the role that progressive institutional reforms were playing in the transformation of the citizenry. But Miller may be the first comprehensively to problematize the process. Yet while Miller’s analysis is pathbreaking, his theoretical argument wobbles at a few points, generally in regard to difficulties with poststructuralism and Foucauldian genealogy. Miller barely raises, for example, the legitimation crisis that his analysis seems to identify. Simply put, if citizen identity is a construction of Tayloresque efforts by the state, then the legitimacy of that state is in crisis if it purports to derive its sovereignty from a free citizenry. While palpably sympathetic with such concerns, Miller cannot easily speak of such a crisis since he thinks, nodding to Foucault, that the idea of a free citizenry is problematic because the citizen is always being made, and is not born. Even “[t]he soul or human freedom is birthed in punishment and discipline,” Miller contends. And, while he would prefer that such construction of identity derive from something other than “the highly coercive non-reciprocal power of the state” (p. 174), he denies himself grounds for such preference because he rejects the idea of a 807 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY universally authentic human condition, or a human nature, or a teleological purpose for freedom in human life. If freedom and identity are always constructions of power, then the socalled legitimation crisis loses much of its urgency. We are left only to lament the hegemonic power of the state in the process, wishing instead for a multiplicity of powers, and thus grasping at the thin ontology of differance. The result is unsatisfying. The desire for liberation from relations of power hovers unrequitedly around such thinking. But always the explanation is that we must settle for less, for disturbing the relations of power a bit, for catty satires hoping to unsettle normalizations, or most idealistically for a very small dollop of autopoiesis. Miller’s otherwise fine and eye-opening book reveals the author chafing against poststructuralism’s tragic wimpiness. The adjectives that accompany his analysis of Taylorism and its effects convey a sense that such techniques of organizational management repress and deform the possibilities of an authentic human existence. Would that he dared to speak of that authenticity and the action and liberation that it begs. Regardless, Taylored Citizenship is an important book. Its potential audience should extend beyond political theory’s continentalists to include scholars in public administration, and American politics, as well as educators, historians, and organization theorists. Political theorists, in particular, should benefit from consideration of Miller’s compelling use of historical research and his documentation of actual military and educational practices. His mapping of actual policies and practices lends his thesis a compelling rhetorical weight that will surprise theorists who rely only on books and ideas. Finally, Taylored Citizenship is a book that needs to be slipped onto the desks of the many who argue for more civic virtue, more civil society, and all who would involve public processes in the crafting of citizenship. After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy. By Glen Newey. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 253p. $68.00. Simone Chambers, University of Toronto This is a very smart book that comes to some very questionable conclusions. Glen Newey takes issue with contemporary liberal philosophy on two counts: Not only does it fail to address the “real world of politics,” but it actually aims at the suppression of politics. Included in the list of those guilty of suppressing politics and failing to provide “philosophical reflection on politics—at least not on politics as it is” (p. 15) are John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Brian Barry, Joseph Raz, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Will Kymlicka, Amy Gutmann, and others. Clearly, a great deal hangs on what Newey means by “politics as it is,” and I will say at the outset that I found his definition wholly unconvincing. But along the way, Newey says some very intelligent things about the leading lights of liberal political philosophy. The book has two layers. In the first, Newey takes up particular philosophical arguments embedded in various liberal theories. At this level he shows us his considerable analytic skills in carefully argued, if somewhat technical, investigations of philosophical weaknesses. So, for example, his discussion of moral internalism and its problems is very good, as is the discussion of neutralist side-constraint as an insufficient reason requirement. Anyone interested in really looking under the hood of contemporary liberal philosophy can get something out of this book. But when Newey moves to the second layer, he tries to tie all his various arguments together under one big claim: the rejection of politics claim, and this is problematic. 808 December 2002 When Newey says that contemporary liberal philosophers reject politics, he has, of course, a particular idea of politics in mind. He starts from three “uncontroversial assumptions about politics”: 1) politics is characterized by endemic disagreement about what counts as politics; 2) politics is characterized by endemic disagreement over those things we have decided count as politics; and 3) politics essentially involves the use of power (pp. 7–8). None of the philosophers that concern Newey would disagree that all three of the things mentioned are central aspects of politics. So where is the problem? It really comes down to the third characteristic. Newey assumes but never defends what could be called a Machiavellian view of politics. Politics is down-and-dirty conflict in which power and contingency are the two most important factors, not norms and rationality. He does not say this is an aspect of politics that has not been given enough attention by contemporary liberals (a perfectly reasonable criticism to make). He says this is politics, and therefore they have nothing to say about it. Let’s call Newey’s view of politics, politics.1 The first thing to note is that his book is no more about politics1 than are Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993) Barry’s Justice as Impartiality (1995). Indeed, I will argue that it is a good deal less about politics1 as the arguments are highly abstract and are about texts that are themselves once removed from politics.1 However, as I have no problem with political philosophy being once even twice removed from politics,1 I will not pursue this line. I want to make two points. The first is that politics1 is a problematic or at least controversial view of politics. And second, even if we were to accept this narrow definition, it is not true to say that theorists like Rawls, Habermas, Barry, Raz, et al. are not interested in politics1 or wish for a world in which we have overcome politics.1 According to Newey, political philosophy should offer philosophical explanations of politics.1 We should be taking the world as it is and trying to understand and explain it. Contemporary liberalism, in contrast, is really a branch of ethics or moral philosophy. Now this is true. There is a set of mainstream liberal theory (which hardly covers all of political theory, let alone all of liberalism) that has taken an ethical turn, and we might want to lament this. Perhaps we need more would-be-Webers and fewer would-be-Kants. But this is not to say that people like Rawls and Raz are not really political philosophers because they do moral philosophy. Newey can say this only because he draws a rather pedantic disciplinary line between moral philosophy and political philosophy. This line reflects a more significant distinction between ought and is: For Newey, ethics is about ought and politics is about is, and the two apparently have very little to do with each other. This is neither the time nor place to get into the is/ought distinction. Suffice it to say that Newey’s view of the study of politics as being wholly separate from the study of ethics needs more defense than is offered; indeed, I was unable to find any defense of this view. It is treated as uncontroversial. Certainly Aristotle (someone Newey claims to admire) thought that politics was a branch of ethics. But Newey points out that Aristotle, at least, joined his ethics with sound “empirical considerations” whereas contemporary liberals do not. But Newey suggests no sound empirical considerations that should be addressed, except perhaps the consideration that the real world does not operate along perfectly moral lines. A point not lost on most political philosophers. In fact, the philosophical works cited by Newey all contain empirical considerations, claims, arguments, and observations. We might disagree with considerations or find them false or irrelevant. But to pursue this line of argument one would have to enter into a discussion about the truth or relevance of facts about human beings, and Newey never does that. American Political Science Review One empirical consideration that, like Aristotle, interests most of the people on Newey’s list is the way institutions shape and inculcate behavior and contribute to political stability. But is this really politics? Newey says no. Political design, he says, is not political. Political design might not be political in the sense that running for office is political or maneuvering oneself through a messy power struggle is political, but it is political in the sense of pertaining to the public pursuit and organization of the good life. Lets call this more Aristotelian view of politics, politics.2 It might very well be the case, as Newey implies, that we will never achieve the perfectly good life; we might always have things to fight about. Indeed, part of what it means to be human and to live in organized society is that we have things to fight over. So politics1 is always with us. And Rawls, Barry, Habermas, Raz, et al. are all intensely interested in politics.1 It is precisely because they recognize the endemic nature of conflict/power that they pursue a strategy of political design. What is the difference between politics in contemporary America and politics in Renaissance Italy? The difference is the institutional framework through which actors chase after politics.1 The study of institutions (how they are and how they ought to be) has always been a part of the study of politics. And I see no reason to exclude it now. Furthermore, one cannot get a grasp on politics1 without a firm grasp of politics2 because one needs to know the rules of the game to understand the game. Are the rules of hockey not part of the game of hockey because the rules do not smash each other against the boards, or because players break the rules, or because the rational justification for the rules are not always the factor motivating players? The rules and the reasons that we might want these rules rather than other rules (or no rules) are part of the game of hockey, just as institutions and norms (and their justifications) are part of the game of politics. And although liberal institutions are designed to constrain and circumscribe conflict, they are not designed to do away with conflict. All these thinkers can be criticized for taking certain things off the political1 agenda that we may feel should be left on that contentious agenda. That is a good criticism of liberal theory. Saying that liberalism is interested in doing away with politics because it is primarily interested in the rules that constrain and limit conflict and power is a bad criticism. Sex and Social Justice. By Martha C. Nussbaum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 488p. $45.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. By Martha C. Nussbaum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 334p. $28.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. Nancy J. Hirschmann, Cornell University These two books by leading U.S. philosopher Martha Nussbaum take up the issue of women’s inequality in a U.S. and international context. Both are hard-hitting, in Nussbaum’s characteristic take-no-prisoners style, setting out a clear case that women endure ignominious oppression in the name of culture and religion, and that feminists and liberals alike should tolerate it no longer. Sex and Social Justice is a collection of previously published essays (with the exception of one on American feminism, which includes an effective and, to my mind, accurate critique of Christina Hoff Sommers), that have been revised to various degrees, on a diversity of topics loosely relating to the issues of sex and equality. The essays range from gay rights, to prostitution, to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, to cultural relativism. Nussbaum considers feminist theory’s often hostile, and always ambiguous, relationship to liberal- Vol. 96, No. 4 ism, and particularly the ways in which liberal ideals, though so frequently excoriated by Western feminists, are of central importance to women and feminists in the developing world; the unacceptability of female genital mutilation and the failure of Western liberals and feminists alike, so concerned to respect cultural difference, to stand up for women and criticize this practice; the use of Plato in considering Colorado’s attempt to legislate against any policy or law that recognizes homosexuals and lesbians as protected categories entitled to rights; and the moral implications of the economic relations of the sex industry. The essays are all well reasoned and argued, but taken together they do not add up to much of a thesis or argument, except for a general multipronged defense of liberal human-rights values. A heavy book by empirical standards—weighing in at almost 500 pages—it covers a lot of ground but does not offer much depth. It is well written and an easy read, however—some of the essays were published in popular media outlets, such as The New Republic and the Boston Review, others in academic journals and volumes. The essays on international issues were more thought provoking and original than those on U.S. issues, in my opinion; the latter, though well written and often persuasive, covered familiar territory and did not stimulate me to think about these issues in particularly new ways. But this is a good book for those who want an introduction to, or survey of, Nussbaum’s recent thinking on popular issues. By contrast, Women and Human Development presents a controversial and powerful thesis that Nussbaum seeks to develop in a systematic way in order to capture the readers’ attention and engages them in a thoughtful dialogue. Originally delivered at the Seeley Lectures at Cambridge University, and originating in a World Institute for Development project on international development, Nussbaum’s argument is informed by the empirical experiences she had in the field. Guided by many of the same general concerns as Sex and Social Justice, Women and Human Development seeks to ask more specifically whether feminism can develop universal principles that do not contradict feminism’s commitment to difference. She argues that the phenomenon of which feminists have been so critical is not universalism per se; rather, it is a conceptualization and deployment of univeralism that is defined by and from the perspective of privilege—gender and class privilege in particular—an “obtuse universalizing” that reduces or ignores difference (p. 31). As a result, respecting “culture,” she points out, often ends up meaning respecting men’s power to subordinate women, who “lack essential support for leading lives that are fully human” (p. 4) because they are kept illiterate, poor, powerless, and subordinate. Nussbaum believes that feminists can achieve a different, and indeed more genuine, universalism “framed in terms of general human powers and their development” (p. 7) that is compatible with cultural sensitivity. The key lies in Amartya Sen’s capabilities argument, the basic notion that humans have a fundamental, perhaps even “natural,” right to a number of basic conditions of life, such as clean water, literacy, conditions for health, work, leisure, and so forth. Nussbaum initially discusses the use of a capabilities approach in several of the essays in Sex and Social Justice, developing a list of 10 “capability functions”—life, bodily health, bodily integrity, imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, and control over one’s environment—which all humans must have, and which all cultures must provide (SSJ, pp. 41–42). In Women and Human Development, she pursues this idea further. The capabilities argument is not that people have to do specific things to be free, or to constitute themselves as “fully human,” but rather that they have to have the ability and the resources to do 809 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY these things if they want to. Like Sen, Nussbaum notes the problem of adaptive preferences: People can adapt their desires, preferences, and views to a wide variety of oppressive circumstances; they can be “colonized” to want what those in power want them to want. At the same time, however, both feminism and liberalism demand that we respect agency, the ability of women to make choices. This apparent paradox can lead to self-defeating positions, such as when a victim of domestic abuse chooses to remain with her abuser. Nussbaum says that the only way to negotiate this double-edged sword is to focus on capability, not functioning: not necessarily leaving the abuser (since some women might not want to leave), but having realistic options and resources, such as economic independence and no cultural sanctions, to make leaving a real option. By focusing on capabilities, we have reduced the chance that women will make self-defeating choices, without at the same time coercing women to make the “right” choices. Women must be able to participate in defining the culture, in affecting its practices and in deciding how a culture operates and develops. Rather than reject universal discourses of human rights, Nussbaum says, feminists should take women’s lives as a legitimate foundation for a universal theory of rights. Taking women as a starting point for human rights means not simply that rights apply to women; for after all, as the past two decades of feminist critique have shown us, if such rights are defined from the perspective of male experience, applying them to women might not accomplish very much. Rather, women should be the starting point for the definition of rights: of what rights should be to, of what rights humans should have, of how these rights should be conceived and deployed (p. 34). While such an argument might seem pretty basic to Western liberals who are dedicated to free choice, within the context of the developing world, and particularly India, Nussbaum notes, this is actually asking for quite radical change. Although she acknowledges that India is incredibly diverse, and has about as much of a “national culture” as the United States, India is one of the poorest countries in the world (138 out of 175 on the Human Development Index [p. 26]), and its dire poverty, widespread illiteracy, high infant mortality rates, shortened life expectancies, poor or nonexistent public utilities, including water, and inadequate medical care, translate into particularly harsh oppression for women and children, through child marriage, dowry murders, and forced prostitution (all of which are legally prohibited, but culturally practiced). In such a context, it is difficult not to agree with her that Western arguments for cultural diversity sound suspiciously like luxuriant whinings of the privileged. Yet Sex and Social Justice suggests that her capabilities argument is even fairly radical for the West, where prostitutes and gays alike are persecuted, in different ways, and denied basic capabilities of control over their bodily integrity; and where women do not participate to the same extent as men, and the poor do not participate to the same extent as the wealthy, in defining the norms that set the parameters for choice. Nussbaum’s call for a new conception of universalism has much in its favor, for despite considerable differences in cultural practice, certain aspects of women’s oppression seem too similar around the world. A husband may beat his wife in the United States because his dinner is late, in Afghanistan because she left the house without him, but “the body that gets beaten is in a sense the same all over the world, concrete though the circumstances of domestic violence are in each society” (p. 23). As she argues, “Certain basic aspirations to human flourishing are recognizable across differences of class and context” (p. 31). Her argument that “[c]ultures are dynamic, and change is a very basic element in all of them” (p. 48) is attractive in the ways it opens up the meaning of 810 December 2002 “culture” to those, such as women, who are normally excluded. But at the same time, it produces a certain problem of nonfalsifiability: If “the ideas of every culture turn up inside every other” (p. 49), then there is no way to define or differentiate specific cultures. If cultures are changing, flexible, and ongoing, and contain so many different and even possibly conflicting traditions within them already, then just about anything can count as belonging to culture. That does not necessarily make the argument incorrect; it may be the case that globalization has actually produced “the death of culture.” But why call women’s efforts to change, circumvent, or violate cultural practice a part of culture, instead of resistance to it? Indeed, women often implicitly engage in countercultural resistance even when apparently operating within culture, such as when women’s veiling permits them to engage in paid employment. Because Nussbaum is writing about societies in which many women are extremely poor and have extremely few options, and is seeking only to establish a minimal threshhold of capability functioning, it is difficult to argue that we all would not choose, for instance, to have clean water for drinking and bathing (pp. 113–14). But at the same time, this “threshold,” while vital to basic justice, may also be too basic for an elaborate philosophical scheme of universalism. Furthermore, her argument is heavily influenced by the fact that India has a history of colonialism that may have produced a greater compatibility with Western values than other contexts, such as Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. Finally, her focus on the state and constitutionalism as the way to make sure that the 10 capabilities are provided by society seems unnecessarily limited, given that, as she notes, India already outlaws many of the cultural practices she identifies. Still, I found myself caught up in Nussbaum’s arguments, and when I taught Women and Human Development to a seminar filled with antiliberal graduate students, this book gave them a terrific challenge. It is a book that, though perhaps not always right in what it argues, is always extremely good in arguing it. Even those who strongly disagree with liberalism and are strong supporters of cultural diversity and relativism will be forced to confront the questions Nussbaum raises and to think critically about these issues. Political philosophers can ask for nothing more. Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule. Edited by Anthony J. Parel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000. 164p. $70.00 cloth, $23.95 paper. Pratap B. Mehta, Jawaharlal Nehru University The life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi continues to be a reproach to ideologies and dispositions that produced the horrors of the twentieth century. But his complex legacy suffers from a paradox. His ideas appear to be both necessary and improbable at the same time. To many, Gandhi’s thought becomes even more relevant in a context in which the vision of modernity that he critiqued so powerfully has triumphed, the violence that he stood against has become an ineliminable feature of political life, and the practice of freedom has come to be dissociated from the exercise of virtue. But the very same historical momentum that inspires the authors in this volume to turn to Gandhi also seems to make Gandhi an even more distant and unlikely figure for our times. This volume, a product of sincere and careful scholarship, is largely an effort to keep Gandhi’s thought alive. It focuses on the central category of Gandhian thought, swaraj (selfrule). Anthony Parel’s essay usefully distinguishes between four meanings of freedom for Gandhi: freedom as national independence, freedom as freedom from poverty, political American Political Science Review freedom for the individual, and freedom as the capacity for self-rule or spiritual freedom. This typology will provide a helpful initial orientation to readers unfamiliar with Gandhi’s thought. The rest of the essays concentrate largely on the fourth dimension of freedom, freedom as self-rule. Anthony Copley points out that Gandhi’s conception of freedom is far from a libertarian endorsement of people’s choices, whatever they may be. Indeed, Gandhi’s distrust of formal political institutions, his insistence on a “politics of virtue,” makes his conception of freedom rather unorthodox and more intrusive than libertarians might accept. In his characteristically thorough essay, Ronald Terchek demonstrates that he understands Gandhi’s conception of freedom in terms of autonomy, and he makes a powerful case that Gandhi provides an acute diagnosis of the various impediments to autonomy. Fred Dallmayr’s essay shows the ways in which Gandhi’s conception of freedom can help us overcome many dichotomies inherent in our current understandings of liberty. Gandhi’s conception of freedom straddles both positive and negative liberty, it provides for a personal space without retreating into a debilitating subjectivism, and it makes the idea of social cooperation a part of the conception of freedom. Judith Brown argues that while modern human rights activists have appropriated Gandhi, his philosophical allegiances make him an odd ally of human rights discourses. This is because Gandhi’s commitment to the rights of the oppressed did not spring from a commitment to an individualism that is deeply skeptical of ideas of society and humanity itself. Such a commitment underlies modern human rights discourses, while for Gandhi, such rights would have been unintelligible unless framed in the context of a moral universe that exists independently of human will. Sudarshan Kapur’s essay describes the ways in which contemporary Hindu fundamentalism has perverted Gandhian ideals into a collective narcissism. In perhaps the most challenging essay in the book, Denis Dalton gives an account of Gandhi’s originality. He argues that in the twentieth century, Gandhi alone made the relationship between ends and means the central question of politics. Almost all ideologies in the last century, including Marxism, anarchism, and even liberalism, have at various times legitimized violence, and Gandhi was alone in making violence the central challenge for political theory. This essay makes useful comparisons with a host of twentieth-century writers on the relationship between ends and means: Trotsky, Goldman, Maritan, Nehru, and so on. But it misses an opportunity to take on the standard objection to Gandhian techniques, namely, that they cannot work in the face of extensive violence. Stephen Hay’s essay reminds us of the potential of Gandhi’s conception of swaraj, his ideal of empathetic service, and his emphasis on prayer as a political technique. For readers unacquainted with Gandhian thought, this volume will provide a reliable introduction to his idea of freedom. But it adds little that is new to Gandhian scholarship, in part because most of the authors themselves have published extensively on the subject before. In particular, Parel, Terchek, Dallmayr, and Dalton have been, along with Bhikhu Parekh, responsible for establishing without doubt that Gandhi ought to be taken seriously as a political theorist. But the fact that their essays are such scrupulous renditions of Gandhi’s thought also makes them less probing interlocutors of Gandhi’s legacy than they might otherwise have been. To return to the paradox I began with, why does Gandhi seem such an improbable figure in the twentieth century? Is it because of our failings or the implausibility of his assumptions? For those interested in furthering the cause of Gandhian ideals, these remain the most challenging questions. Vol. 96, No. 4 Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women’s Rights. By Ayelet Shachar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 207p. $55.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. Bhikhu Parekh, London School of Economics Liberal multiculturalism contains a tension. It values culture as the source of individual identity and development, and seeks to accommodate cultural differences by granting the relevant groups special rights, exemptions, and, in some cases, varying degrees of autonomy. However, it also values basic individual rights that some of these groups might deny or severely curtail, especially in relation to women. Liberal multiculturalism is therefore faced with a conflict between what it takes to be two important goods, or what Ayelet Shachar calls the paradox of multicultural vulnerability. If it privileges cultural differences, it compromises and even jettisons its liberalism; if it privileges individual rights, it ceases to be multicultural. Is there a way of conceptualizing and organizing society such that both these goods can be realized? Shachar thinks there is, and devotes her thoughtful and well-argued book to outlining and defending it. Shachar argues that the tension lying at the heart of liberal multiculturalism can be resolved by revising the traditional two-dimensional political theory in two important respects. We should conceptualize political life in terms not only of the state and the individual but also of the cultural group, the third and often neglected unit of moral and social life. And we should not see the state as the sole source of legal and political authority but, rather, as sharing the latter with cultural groups. In such a view, individuals remain the center of moral concern, and are seen as having two kinds of affiliations and being subject to two kinds of authority, namely, the state and the cultural group. Their culturally significant activities are to be decided neither by the state nor by the cultural group alone but by both together. This principle of joint governance, as Shachar calls it, requires a judicious and mutually regulative division of jurisdiction between the state and the cultural group, institutionalized cooperation between the two, and the freedom of individuals to decide which of them should have jurisdiction over which of their affairs and to opt in and out of their cultural groups. Shachar suggests that such a process of accommodation is not static but transformative, leading over time to a redrawing of the boundaries between the state and the cultural group, a redefinition of their relationship, and internal changes in both. Rather than force cultural groups to make appropriate internal changes, Shachar’s strategy relies on incentives and internal pressures. She rightly argues that since different societies have different histories and traditions and face different problems, the principle of joint governance takes different forms in them. Shachar’s book addresses an important problem and is full of rich insights. Taking different human activities, she shows how the principle of joint governance would work in practice and what kind of institutional structure it would require. As she shows, many multicultural societies, including the liberal, have often felt it necessary to resort to some form of joint governance. She critically examines their experiences, highlights their tensions, and offers a more coherent way of dealing with them. Shachar’s approach is not free of difficulties. The individual does not belong to one cultural group, as she generally tends to assume, but to several. She does not say how their jurisdictions are to be divided, and their inescapable conflicts resolved. It is not entirely clear, either, how Shachar decides which matters fall within the jurisdiction of a cultural community and which ones within that of the state. Education of 811 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY children, for example, concerns both, and we need to decide whose claims are stronger and trump those of the other. Since she offers no coherent principles, much is left either to the vagaries of the political process or to the political power of a cultural community, and neither is a good basis for redressing the inequality between different groups or for contesting the state’s likely oppression of some of them. The principle of joint governance, on which Shachar heavily relies, rests on the problematic assumption that the state and cultural groups enjoy a broad equality of status. The state represents and speaks in the name of all its citizens, and its authority is consensual and publicly accountable. This is not the case with cultural groups whose “authority” is inherently vague and weak. They and the state cannot therefore be treated as equal. Furthermore, once the state is placed on a par with cultural groups, we have no means of deciding which takes precedence when the two come into conflict. We need a broader theory to help us determine and regulate their respective jurisdictions and authorities, and Shachar offers none. Her approach requires considerable philosophical work if it is to carry conviction. For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family. By Michael J. Shapiro. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 248p. $47.95 cloth, $18.95 paper. Frederick M. Dolan, University of California at Berkeley Michael J. Shapiro reflects on “the politics of the family” from the point of view of an outlook on political life inspired by “genealogy,” an approach originated by Friedrich Nietzsche and refined by Michel Foucault. Although Shapiro would not characterize it quite in these terms, that outlook is roughly as follows. Ideas about political regimes are typically governed by the values of unity, agreement, or consensus. But that is highly misleading. A consideration of how political concepts and institutions come into being (that is, a genealogy of the political, as opposed to a theorization of it) leads to a picture in which disagreement and conflict are as central as consensus and harmony. Words like “authority,” “democracy,” and “freedom” are continually redefined as people put them to different uses in changing contexts of conflict and interpretation. What they are thought to mean at any given moment will be an incomplete, contested, and on the whole incoherent echo of actual usage. Individuals, too, shape their outlooks by means of clashing and contradictory desires, norms, and perspectives. For this reason, the goals and beliefs that move any actually existing political regime (and any given individual) will typically be ill defined, ambiguous, and amenable to additional equivocation and conflict. However, our prejudice in favor of consensus makes it difficult for us to remain attuned to all this. Rather than accepting that ambiguity and conflict are normal and trying to identify areas of confusion or disagreement that are troubling for some further reason, we identify conflict per se as the problem and strive to replace it with consensus. This we do by appealing to some putatively “neutral” (hence, universally acceptable) principle. Because (pace Jürgen Habermas) no such principle exists, the consensus is invariably felt to be imperfect, imposed, and therefore unstable. If we were to lessen the intensity of our desire for unity and coherence, however, and accept the essentially conflictual and contingent character of political life, we might discover opportunities to ease the demand for conformity we make on ourselves and others. We could then assume a relationship to political life that is freer, more spontaneous, and more creative. In recent years this perspective, which was outlined in 1887 by Nietzsche in Zur Genealogie der Moral, has informed work 812 December 2002 by Foucault, William E. Connolly, Thomas L. Dumm, and Shapiro himself. Accordingly, Shapiro confronts moralizing certitudes about “family values” with the dissonances and ambiguities that feature permanently in all social life but which are plausibly regarded as on especially vivid display in the family. His aim is not to contest the moralizing view with some other judgment but to reveal the extent to which the family’s complexity demands an approach to judgment that is altogether more flexible than mere moralizing. He does not neglect classical theories of the family, such as Plato’s and Hegel’s, and he also deals with more recent commentators, such as Jacques Donzelot, Jean Elshtain, and Christopher Lasch. But most of the book is taken up by a series of comparisons constructed from an immense and colorful variety of cultural artifacts. The novels Shapiro discusses include Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Joe Gores’s 32 Cadillacs, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and even Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, among others. Films discussed include Robert Altman’s Kansas City, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (an adaptation of the Russell Banks novel), Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Elia Suileman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance, and such others as Boogie Nights, Boyz N the Hood, The Sound of Music, and Patriot Games. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, and the thirteenth-century Icelandic Njal’s Saga share these pages, as do treatments of works by Edouard Manet and Richard Wagner. Yet Shapiro’s approach is not merely eclectic; he is deeply interested in how the articulation of family life responds to the pressures exerted by the various genres in which it is expressed. The ubiquity of genre, he suggests, is an asset rather than a liability. By appropriating, reinterpreting, and rediscovering genres, each new generation enacts its conflicts with its precursor generation, invents distinctive voices, rethinks obligations and opportunities, and in general achieves transformations in our sense of what family life means. The result is a view of the family in which adjustment and contestation are the norm, and the questions are not whether but how the family is changing and how one ought to respond to its metamorphoses. Shapiro is more than convincing about how the family serves as a symbol for broad ideological conflicts. He shows in detail how saying something about the family can be an act that challenges structures of power and authority. Anticipating the objection that his rejection of “the humanist subject of consciousness” leaves him without a moral foundation, he also asserts that his writing on the family is a challenge to authority issuing from a “democratic ethos” that constitutes the locus of “the political” nowadays (p. 173). I am less certain of the latter claim. The democratic ethos that Shapiro’s work is said to sustain is, he writes, “a way of . . . being open to difference” that cultivates a hospitable attitude toward the strange and unprecedented, along lines drawn from Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben (p. 174). To speak of an ethos is to speak of a way of life rather than a political state. In our world, an ethos can realistically be imagined only as a way of life that individuals are able to choose because they enjoy the freedom from intrusive regulation that is characteristic of a liberal democratic state. So the ethos would depend on a justification for such a state, the received justification being the idea of individual autonomy or self-determination that Shapiro rejects as “the humanist subject of consciousness.” In other words, we are invited to imagine autonomous self-determiners choosing to live according to an ethos of openness to the strange and enigmatic. It is not strictly impossible, but neither is there any strong reason to look forward to it. In a modern, affluent civilization the amount and variety of opportunities for American Political Science Review fulfillment are vast, most are concerned exclusively with joining like-minded individuals in the pursuit of private interests, and there seems no reason to suppose that arrangements cobbled together in this way will gel into a democratic ethos of the kind Shapiro imagines. It is therefore unlikely that openness to difference is going to constitute the political. It is safe to say that the political will remain where it has been for a long time: in the problems surrounding the rise of the liberal democratic state. Speaking broadly, this state’s main problem concerns the way in which its success has been accompanied by extremes of wealth and poverty, corruption, waste, the moronization of culture, and the destruction of nature. Is this price worth paying, merely to sustain the notion that having the power to decide for oneself how to live is the supreme political value? Merely to sustain the feeling of moral superiority enjoyed by those whose constitution invites them to regard themselves as self-determining agents? Is it really the case that the obscenely wasteful policies of the liberal democratic state must be respected because they issue from the will of a free people? These are the questions today, they are likely to remain, and even if the democratic ethos of openness to difference were to constitute the political—if it succeeded in building organizations capable of contesting the legitimacy of the liberal democratic states—there is, unfortunately, no reason to suppose that it would be better suited to addressing such matters than any of the other perspectives on the horizon. Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do. By Cass R. Sunstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 304p. $29.95. Martin Edelman, State University of New York at Albany A venerable question has once again become a dominant issue confronting public law scholars. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, ostensibly democratic states have emerged throughout the areas formerly designated as the Second and Third Worlds. The establishment of these new regimes has invariably been accompanied by the promulgation of written constitutions. For public law scholars, this sequence has posed the question of the utility of written constitutions: What, if anything, do these documents add to nation, state, and society? In Designing Democracy, Cass R. Sunstein argues that “the central goal of a constitution is to create the preconditions for a well-functioning democratic order, one in which citizens are genuinely able to govern themselves. . . . I contend that a constitution should promote deliberative democracy, an idea that is meant to combine accountability with a high degree of reflectiveness and a general commitment to reason-giving” (pp. 6–7). This is a novel and intriguing argument. To advance his argument, Sunstein does not engage in an extensive exploration of how constitutions function in most democracies. Except for a few passing references to South Africa and Israel, he discusses only the United States. The book will be valuable to comparativists only to the extent that they buy into Sunstein’s theory of deliberative democracy and then seek, on their own, ways to adapt that theory to other nations. Nor does Sunstein offer a fully developed theory of deliberative democracy. He is content to “link the project of constitutionalism with the notion of deliberative democracy, not to elaborate that notion on its own” (p. 7). Instead, he develops his argument by a series of “case studies” about such issues as secession, impeachment, citizenship, homosexuality, and so on. Every one of these chapters is well worth reading. And while each is illustrative, no chapter fully articulates his Vol. 96, No. 4 argument. What follows, therefore, is this reader’s attempt to come to grips with Sunstein’s thesis. First, its novelty. Historically, written constitutions are the capstone of the ages-long struggle to limit arbitrary governmental action. In the immortal words of James Madison: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions” (The Federalist #51). Constitutions are, in Madison’s language, a principle auxiliary precaution. A written constitution has proven to be the most expedient way to regulate the government because it almost always addresses a number of perennial issues: How are the rulers to be selected? How are the rulers to utilize the organs of government to implement policies? How are the people in a country to inform their rulers about their interests and concerns? A constitution identifies the common objectives of the people and their rulers, the procedures that the government may use to enact and implement policies, and the human rights that the government must respect. Democracy, as a political concept, is highly supportive of a written constitution. Democracy is premised on the idea that the government is the agent of the people, and that for the people to exercise that role they must enjoy a full range of human rights. The various mechanisms and procedures of democracy are designed to ensure that government is respectful of those rights while being responsive to the needs and wants of the people. Historically, those objectives have been accomplished without a written constitution, but most democracies have found it useful to instruct and limit their governments via a written constitution. Thus, all but two— San Marino and the United Kingdom—of the 118 democracies in the United Nations have written constitutions. As Sunstein notes, the frequently hypothesized conflict between democracy and constitutionalism has not proved irreconcilable. At the conceptual level, democracy need not be confined to simple elected majoritarianism. Like other theorists, he sees a written constitution as a precommitment strategy that incorporates the citizens’ willingness to function within predetermined limits in order to protect fundamental rights. What makes Sunstein’s argument distinctive is the way he extends this precommitment argument to incorporate his theory of deliberative democracy. Thus, in the section on “Constitutions as Precommitment Strategies” (pp. 96–101), his first seven points are fairly conventional; his last point is not: “We can also see many constitutional provisions as mechanisms for ensuring discussion and deliberation oriented toward agreement about the general good rather than factionalism and self-interested bargaining” (p. 101, emphasis added). This is the intriguing, fascinating, aspect of Sunstein’s argument. Yes, we can, if we so choose, believe that the Framers of the United States Constitution hoped to establish a deliberative democracy. Yes, as he notes, “Madison saw differences and diversity as democratic strengths rather than weaknesses, if channeled through constitutional structures that would promote deliberation and lead groups to check, rather than exploit other groups” (p. 97). But that is not the same thing as saying that the American Constitution ensures deliberation. Are we to be forced to be deliberative? To avoid that issue, Sunstein argues that Supreme Courts, when interpreting a constitution, should whenever possible avoid basing their decisions on complete political theories. Rather, they should tend to utilize minimal, incomplete theories—agreed upon principles, really—that decide the 813 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY case at hand while leaving the larger issue to be resolved by the people and their elected representatives. But how likely is that to happen in the deliberative manner so warmly endorsed by Sunstein’s theory of democracy? Even the briefest comparative study would indicate that it depends more upon a nation’s political culture than its constitution. Surely there is little in the American experience to support his belief that our political culture encourages deliberation rather than self interest, whether defined as individual autonomy or economic advantage. Nor does the social science literature about the American electorate, Congress, the presidency, our political culture in general—which Sunstein systematically ignores— indicate the likelihood of a deliberative democracy emerging in the near future. So we are left with an incomplete argument for seeing the American Constitution as supporting deliberative democracy. For all my long-term support of that theory as the preferred way to interpret the Constitution (Martin Edelman, Democratic Theories and the Constitution, 1984, Chapter 11), Designing Democracy is to be valued most for the many insights that Sunstein supplies on the substantive issues he discusses. Perhaps that is enough. After all, it was Justice Holmes who recommended books on the basis of their “apercus.” The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris. By Cynthia Willett. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 241p. $46.50 cloth, $17.95 paper. Ange-Marie Hancock, Pennsylvania State University When is freedom possible? In the silence of a shared heartbeat, when desire is not consumed by the wounds of social forces, hubris, or the historical memory of such violations. According to Cynthia Willett, the locus of that desire is in the socially embedded person. She argues that crimes against the individual as a social person constitute political wounds that should be healed via emancipatory love (p. 214). Overall, this book aims to shift the foundation of moral philosophy from liberalism’s autonomous individual to the person “who expresses his or her individuality through the capacity to form libidinous relationships with others” (p. 167). Reclamation of the ancient Greek crime of hubris as a political violation of social relationships involves a pursuit of justice for marginalized groups via protection of the socially embedded individual. Ironically, quasi-biological, psychoanalytic evidence of presubjective individuals is presented as proof. Recent communicative ethics debates have pitted Jürgen Habermas against feminist theorists like Nancy Fraser and Carol Gilligan. Siding with the feminist theorists, Willett agrees that Habermas’s discourse ethic is a necessary but insufficient condition for a comprehensive view of political life (p. 47). Hidden narratives prevent the discourse ethic from satisfying questions of inequality and political alienation. The larger question is how to acknowledge differences in the structure of moral judgment (e.g., between men and women) in a way that does not privilege one structure (rational) over another (care). Habermas appeals to the rational structure, depending on psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s work, partly out of a desire to find a capacity that all individuals possess, regardless of their usage of it. Gilligan similarly argues that the ethic of care is another capacity present in all—just used predominantly (but not exclusively) by women. If both structures are in fact hardwired into humans, as most psychologists would have us believe, then are not their emergences as gendered predispositions the result of socialization and ultimately assimilable into a single model of moral judgment suitable for the pursuit of justice? 814 December 2002 Willett seems to believe so. Arguing for attention to “the forces that make us feel alive and connected,” she seeks to insert a counternarrative of justice as a universal consideration in moral discourse. This act would presumably enrich the discussion of social relationships (p. 78) so important to an ethic of care, as well as remedy group-based injustice. For Willett, our social predisposition is another necessary but insufficient condition for addressing global inequalities that cross nationstate boundaries. The question then becomes, who establishes the parameters of this universal counternarrative and the appropriate response to changing social forces? The “outsider-within” perspective, defined most clearly in Patricia Hill Collins’s (1990; 2001) Black Feminist Thought, grounds Willett’s turn to slave narratives as a useful surrogate for monolithic master narratives like race. Privileging outsiders-within requires an expanded conception of citizenship (p. 92). Left unmentioned is the required concomitant reformulation of state sovereignty, which in a context of global inequality is most risky for countries at the margins. Willett convincingly supports her assertion that a counternarrative of social justice necessitates a reconstitution of the citizen as a social person, ultimately redefining freedom. This changed definition of freedom implies different social norms and different laws (p. 180). One particular social norm is the prohibition of hubris, exemplified by racial arrogance in chapters on Beloved and Frederick Douglass. Taken from ancient Greece, hubris is “an assault on social bonds” (p. 183), capable of destroying not merely an individual victim but society as we know it. African American writers of the slave experience have translated the notion of hubris into a threedimensional vision of freedom: ideals of freedom and identity attached to the erotic, a concept of the person as a social event, and an approach to restoring freedom via rites of reconnection rather than liberalism’s stoic separation. Willett concludes that “we must work instead for the spiritual renewal of social bonds” (p. 185) with authority. These rites of reconnection are absent where Willett turns—to Herbert Marcuse’s theory of eros and freedom, partly due to the problems within Marcuse’s original vision. The minor point she makes from her laborious analysis—that motherhood and the social values produced from it point us in new directions for social transformation (p. 117)—is persuasive. Yet Marcuse leads her far away from her larger goal of inserting a social justice counternarrative. Supplementing Marcuse with the psychoanalytic theory she challenges in other chapters, she permits the paternalistic terms of his revolutionary model to proceed unquestioned. In other words, is the kind of revolution Marcuse advocated (student and intellectual led, dependent on technology) a desirable or viable goal in a twenty-first century of globalization? This Marcuse rehabilitation is ill equipped to empower “those who reside on the other side of the social divides” (p. 69). Freedom, defined as self-determination grounded in relationships with others, prioritizes the need to protect the individual from hubristic market and cultural forces. Yes, people are alienated by the “racialized distortions of social space.” In Willett’s slave narrative of choice, Beloved, freedom and ultimately empowerment are based upon one’s capacity to determine who or what you love (p. 207). Frederick Douglass’s writing further implies that self-representation is key (p. 191). Must not we empower those residents of “the other side” to choose modern, “rational” structures in addition to what seems more appealing—neo-Freudian, erotic social bonds? bell hooks’s call for “love as the practice of freedom,” along with Martin Matustik’s vision of a multidimensional dialectic (p. 103), enrich Marcuse’s notion of eros and freedom. But hooks in other arenas focuses on the American Political Science Review work of Paulo Freire as a springboard for accomplishing just what Willett seeks—bringing those who live on the margins into the center. Freire’s empowerment pedagogy contrasts directly with Marcuse’s idea of revolution, and would bring us closer to the aspect of self-determination both Willett and other theorists consider a critical component for eradicating group injustice. This largely convincing account raises important questions for democracy. If we insert hubris codes and a norm of social justice into the discourse, what additional purchase do outsiders-within gain? The question of sanction and recompense for crimes of hubris are briefly explored. Willett distinguishes between hubristic criminals and “those who carried out acts of revenge against the hubris of their oppressors” (p. 192). Contemporary acts of revolt or revolution are dizzyingly complex in an era of Rwandan genocide and September 11. Psychological processes of social judgment focus upon attribution of responsibility for an offense. We often advocate different consequences based on whether we consider the person ignorant, negligent, or having malicious intent. In the ancient world, lack of knowledge that one commits a crime of hubris does not exempt the offender from the consequence. How do we adjudicate justice when, to paraphrase Mahmood Mamdani’s evocative title, victims repeatedly become killers in Rwanda? Willett’s book sends us in new directions to answer questions with ancient origins. Socratic Citizenship. By Dana Villa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 370p. $65.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. Gerald Mara, Georgetown University The publication of Dana Villa’s Socratic Citizenship coincides accidentally with recent events that have shaken and solidified American society. Yet the issues his book addresses are directly relevant to how a democratic society confronts such challenges. Villa investigates various forms of democratic citizenship and argues for a kind of civic activity that has been dangerously obscured within modern debates about democracy. Particularly within periods of regime stress, liberalism’s good citizen who votes, pays taxes, and plays by the rules seems underequipped to meet the commitments the times require. The framework of the communitarians or the civic republicans wherein one discovers the value of “a shared commitment to something bigger than one’s self . . . [endorsing a] life of community or civic engagement” (p. x) seems more helpful. Villa’s concern is that this view of citizenship too easily enlists the community’s members in projects of collective affirmation, while ignoring the importance of a critical rationality that asks skeptical questions about the content and the moral consequences of a politics driven by a “newly rediscovered sense of political membership” (p. x). In response, he rediscovers the possibility of a form of citizenship that places “intellectual doubt at the heart of moral reflection,” demanding not commitment but conscientiousness (p. xii). It is this form of citizenship that seems most compatible with moral individualism, and thus with the basic premises of democracy. He plausibly finds the origin of this kind of citizenship in the practices of Socrates as they are portrayed within the early Platonic dialogues, Apology, Crito, and Gorgias. Villa begins with an interpretation of these dialogues, but his major concern is to reveal the fate of Socratic citizenship within modern political thought. He focuses particularly on five thinkers, J. S. Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. While all of them take “strong stands on the relevance of Socratic moral individualism to modern politics” (p. 59), they all, to different degrees, understand citizenship in ways that undercut rather Vol. 96, No. 4 than respect “the Socratic idea of philosophical, dissident citizenship” (p. 59). The interpretation of the dialogues differentiates and endorses conscientious Socratic dissidence, as compared with the assertive Periclean citizenship promoted within the remarkable funeral speech. Villa’s Socrates contests the aggressive agenda of the funeral oration, not in the name of a moral expertise that can discover the truly right way of organizing common life, but out of a more individualized criticism of common ideals guided by the moral imperative to avoid injustice (pp. 24, 58). Socrates’ commitment to this imperative is reflected both in his speeches against Polus and Callicles in the Gorgias and in his own behavior as described in the Apology. When he refused to cooperate with the Thirty Tyrants in the judicial murder of Leon of Salamis and when he declined to bring the unconstitutional indictment of the Arginusae generals before the assembly, Socrates essentially invented (p. 1) a model of philosophically dissenting citizenship that has been largely forgotten within modern political thought. For Villa, Socrates’ example has been overlooked due to a broad skepticism about “the viability of a philosophical form of citizenship under the conditions of the nation state and increasingly universal suffrage” (p. 59). It is in Mill’s work that the promise of Socratic citizenship comes closest to being fulfilled, within the praise of the activities of thought and discussion and the paean to creative individualism in On Liberty (p. 75). Yet this opportunity is lost (p. 124) when Mill’s pessimism about the capacities of the lower classes leads him to endorse political deference to elites (in Representative Government) (p. 122). After Mill, departures from Socratic citizenship become more pronounced. Though Nietzsche is committed to affirming the overman’s intellectual integrity, he ends by radicalizing this commitment into a call for the rejection of rationality in the name of the “the myth and value-creating powers of art” (p. 181). And by suggesting that the overman’s intellectual integrity is a radically individualized achievement, Nietzsche lays the foundation for the claim that philosophy and citizenship are mutually exclusive. In spite of the significant differences among Weber, Arendt, and Strauss, Villa sees this last assumption informing all of their positions (p. 129). Weber responds to the disenchanted culture of modern mass society by confining the independence and autonomy that Socrates sought to encourage among all citizens to political leaders (p. 206), who embrace political goals less from thoughtful reflection on political purposes than from devotion to a cause (p. 219). For Villa, the very different projects of Arendt and Strauss are connected in their opposition to this Weberian view of politics and power. Arendt proposes a return to the Periclean ethos of active citizenship whose connection to skeptical thought is at best ambiguous (p. 273). Strauss argues for a certain kind of philosophical politics, where the relevant form of philosophy is not Socratic dissidence but the more affirming and directive philosophy of Plato (of the later dialogues) and Aristotle. This direction cannot be the transmission of philosophic truths through political education, for the city is at bottom resistant to philosophy (p. 294). Thus, good citizenship becomes deference to opinions articulated within a habituating political culture managed by the decent (p. 294). Arendt’s Pericleanism and Strauss’s Platonism are thus counter-Socratic, for both end by supplanting independent, critical thought. This book deserves a wide, appreciative readership, both for the importance of the argument and for the depth and breadth of the interpretations that support it. Villa seems right to say that too many proposals for more engaged democratic citizenship discourage the critical distance that allows scrutiny of individual commitments and public purposes. And by calling this critical stance “Socratic,” Villa counters the 815 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY unhelpful notion that political problems and resources are segmented within “premodern,” “modern,” or “postmodern” cultural contexts. In making his case, he develops a sophisticated interpretive argument without obscuring the complexities and anomalies of the sources in question. He pursues rather than ignores texts that complicate or challenge his argument, and while the book offers a powerful and important pragmatic message (p. 309), the individual interpretations are all valuable in themselves. There are times when the effort to detect the presence of Socratic moral individualism within these modern texts may lead to exaggerations or understatements. Mill’s praise of the self-creative individual in On Liberty seems at least as Periclean as Socratic, in tone if not in content. And the Nietzsche committed to reforming culture appears (pp. 282ff) perhaps later than he should. Still, Villa’s overall readings are rich and provocative. Each of the voices heard here is distinctive, yet they all have things to say to one another. He brings both the distinctiveness and the engagements to the fore with admirable sophistication, fairness, and clarity. One might make two more general points, posed less as criticisms than as observations. First, while Villa engages a variety of modern voices, there are others who are less prominent than they might be. Tocqueville plays only a supporting part within the interpretation of Mill, and he is, in general, the conservative Tocqueville, suspicious of the majority and lamenting the demise of tradition (p. 66). But there may also be a need to make room for the critically distant Tocqueville, whose stance on emerging political innovations is far from unidimensional. The more positive (than Weber’s) sociology of Jürgen Habermas and its framing theory of communicative rationality are considered only as potential masks for widely shared prejudices (p. 180), as if participatory democracy and communitarianism were identical. One wishes to hear more from Villa on both authors. Second, this interpretation may underplay ways in which Socratic citizenship is incomplete. Without a more active form of civic involvement, Socratic citizenship may come perilously close to the self-absorbed purity of the beautiful soul (p. 55). Villa finds the benefits of Socratic citizenship in the dissemination of Socrates’ skeptical rationality across a broader spectrum of citizens (p. 56), yet this seems inadequate for political contexts where decisions need to be made and actions taken. Thus, even among Socratic apologists, some more active citizen(s) may need to become involved if Socrates’ dissolving rationality is to be politically salutary. Socrates’ commitment to disconnect himself from the injustices of the Thirty does not do Leon of Salamis much good (p. 26). Within Xenophon’s narration (Hellenica 1.7) of Socrates’ courageous refusal to bring unconstitutional charges against the Arginusae generals, it is left to the more active citizen Euryptolemus to speak assertively (though unsuccessfully) in support of Athens’s own democratic procedures. It is therefore questionable whether the Socrates of (any of) the Platonic dialogues wishes simply to reproduce his own skepticism among the Athenians he interrogates. However, any encouragement to practice politics always seems to acknowledge that active citizenship must accept as settled and salutary some of those conclusions that Socratic citizenship treats as questionable or dangerous. Even the counterPericlean funeral oration that is represented in the dialogue Menexenus asserts a spirit of Hellenic ethnic homogeneity (245 c–d) that is foreign to thoughtful criticism but perhaps necessary in politics. Critical rationality and citizenship may qualify as well as enhance each other. There may also be more of a need to address the resources and destinations of critical rationality. Absent some sense of a human good that can be damaged by political assertiveness, 816 December 2002 the dissidence of the critical citizen seems more agonistic than reflective. Conversely, the dissident citizen’s explaining why certain widely shared views court injustice may lead him or her to discover more about the human content of the just and the good. This need not be a quest for remote foundations; it may simply reflect the need to explore the bases and implications of one’s critical judgments. It seems too minimalist to identify the content of Socrates’ political rationality primarily on the basis of what he says to Crito or Callicles. Both forms of incompleteness seem acknowledged within the Platonic dialogues. Villa is reluctant to accommodate these contributions in part because he accepts as conclusive the division between the early “Socratic” (aporetic) dialogues and the later “Platonic” (dogmatic) ones (p. 2). In spite of the long-standing and well-respected scholarly tradition behind this division, its validity is not altogether obvious. The bases of these reservations are less important than the implications. If the Socrates of the Apology is continuous with the Socrates of the Republic, there may be a sense in which Socratic citizenship (understanding it and trying to practice it) can be enhanced and not destroyed by Platonic political philosophy. Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World. By John von Heyking. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. 278p. $37.50. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, Eastern Michigan University John von Heyking’s inquiry into Augustine’s politics of “longing” is a provocative contribution to the growing genre of “Augustine redux” literature written to resonate with our fin de siècle sensibilities. These valuable pearl-diving expeditions bridge scholarship and literate conversation, careful textual exegesis and political advocacy. Not surprisingly, they also illustrate the challenges of writing for multiple audiences with mixed messages. This work enters an already crowded field of recent crossover texts with Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo (2000), Gary Wills’s Saint Augustine (1999), Hannah Arendt’s Love and Saint Augustine (1996), and Jean Elshtain’s Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1995). A further trip back in time to the Cold War and the politics of “realism” turns up Herbert Deane’s The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (1963), another retrieval project written to persuade as well as inform. And this is just a very short list. Augustine’s ironic voice paired with the evident fervor of his faith, from the Sermons to The City of God, make as compelling reading today as when they were written. His legacy to worldly philosophers, particularly the political sort, continues to arouse passionate debate precisely because he is such an unexpectedly worldly saint. A dominant leitmotif running through Augustine’s classic rendition of decline is the increasing discontinuity between the de jure and the de facto, between justice administered by the institutions of both church and state and the daily experience of individuals living in communities defined, as he famously put it, by their respective “loves.” This tension is especially striking in his relentless reportage on the chasm between the founding virtues of the Roman Republic, immortalized by Cicero and Virgil, and the morally questionable loves of his late Roman, largely Christian, fellow citizens. Cleverly avoiding the pitfalls of Manichean dualism, Augustine neither fully damns the Roman state, as had Tertullian, nor fully invests it with a sacred aura, as had Eusebius. Political life for Augustine is always ambiguous. At one level, the current study also has a message in mind, targeting an audience of “Moderns,” predominantly “liberal democrats,” who are looking for a way to keep a “regime of American Political Science Review tolerance” from degenerating into a “regime of secularism” (p. 260). Augustine’s thoughts are “timely,” the author believes, because they relocate human longing for true justice and happiness on a “transcendent” plane of divine deliverance, but make “a civic attitude of gratitude” and moral suasion a crucial earthly component of a pilgrim’s progress. At a second level, however, the author presents a nuanced, historically based reconstruction of Augustine’s thoughts on public life. His exploration of the word “consul,” teasing out as many possible meanings as Augustine himself might have extracted from Roman writers and deployed in his own rhetoric, is particularly interesting (pp. 71–76). These forays into Augustine’s literary world are illuminating chapters, rich in linguistic reconstruction and based not only on The City of God but also his pastoral writings. Yet there is a third strategic argument at work. Here the audience is more specialized, confined to the schools of political thought founded by Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. Von Heyking’s agenda is to rehabilitate the saint’s reputation as a Christian virtue ethicist and move him from the periphery to the center of the “cosmion” as a philosopher of natural virtue. The dominant interpretation, inside and outside StraussianVoegelinian circles, is that Augustine is a political realist when it comes to the scope and limits of public institutions and a Christian moralist with respect to the lives of the faithful. The author quotes Leo Strauss’s lament that “there is a valid hierarchy of ends, but there are no universally valid rules of action.” Augustine “is thought to fail miserably on this score” (p. 6), the author adds, only because his “rightby-nature” ethics has not been fully appreciated, even by Strauss and Voegelin who mistakenly think Augustine “denies the world’s inner goodness.” Such dark readings open the door to modernism’s inner demons—“millenarianism, alchemy, gnosticism and revolutionary ideology” (p. 13). Augustine’s rhetorical style, which von Heyking calls “extreme” but which, ironically, others have termed surprisingly modern, defies categorization. His signature “cities” of God and man are spiritual communities animating political and religious institutions but mixing mysteriously in the workings of both. Intending his words as a spiritual seduction, Augustine entices his fifth-century readers along a path of reason until they are captured by the powerful Christian faith lurking behind it and drawn into his simultaneous defense of Christianity and of the worldly virtues the Romans were in the process of losing. However, the current study with its trinity of pursuits does not provide the reader with as satisfying a journey. The reason is that its scholarly and rhetorical agendas undercut each other to the detriment of the strongest strand of argument—the author’s careful exploration of Augustine’s understanding of civic virtue and its importance in the lives of the faithful and nonfaithful alike. The overall effect is to elevate the moral capacity of political, social, and ecclesiastical institutions as reflections of the “longing” for natural virtue on the part of the citizen-faithful as they approach the “ground of (divine) being.” Augustine’s tragic sense of the conflicting obligations of Christians in public life, and of the mixture of loves among both citizens and faithful members of the church, is not foregrounded. The family, the “city” as a moral community, Voegelin’s “cosmion” as a regime or “little world,” and actual historical entities such as Rome flow into one another without the friction that often characterized Augustine’s writing in the minor key (pp. 174–75). The thematic core of this study is the metaphor “right-bynature.” It is deployed as if it were in common usage among scholars and hence unproblematic. In fact it is neither, except among those specialists who speak the language of Straussian or Voegelinian discourse. The reader must look to footnotes (p. 4, n. 4, and p. 8, n. 12) for its source in an article Vol. 96, No. 4 by James Rhodes (“Right-by-Nature,” Journal of Politics 53 [May 1991]: 318–38). Further digging discloses the root of the idea in Aristotle’s Ethics. Many scholars might read Aristotle’s discussion of physei dikaion in Book V as referring primarily to natural “justice” and not “right” in the modern moral sense. But the author, without extended explanation, renders the phrase as “right,” making it a Platonic “natural theology to guide the city” (p. 8). Augustine, in turn, becomes a political theorist of Christianized natural theology. As such, his writings can be used to transform the idea of civic virtue into the “equivalent to the biblical concept of righteousness” (p. 8, n. 12). The operational meaning of Augustine’s idea of virtue, the author will go on to explain in the rest of the study, is always specific to local conventional mores. Yet the saint’s prudential approach remains firmly anchored to the view that human virtue in the saeculum longs to share in the “nature” of goodness reflected in the universe as God’s Creation. By so doing, the author argues, Augustine provides an antidote to “Moderns” who have fallen into “Machiavellism” and “other forms of extremism” because of their loss of faith in the moral possibilities of public life (p. 9). And yet this is also a work of careful scholarship. Von Heyking demonstrates with more textual fidelity than most Augustinian commentators that the saint mobilized every metaphor at his command, from the family to bands of robbers, to engage his readers in understanding the importance of personal morality, earthly peace, and justice. Emperors and subjects, thieves and pirates, fathers and slave masters are enjoined to establish a worldly order of obedience and rulership for the good of the governed and not just in the service of their own lust for power. The author explores the great chains of analogies summoned up by Augustine to explain to a skeptical Roman-Christian world that “order,” whether of peaceful citizenship, human “loves,” or nature, is a universally prized good as well as God’s intention. As Augustine famously notes, even bands of brigands must have an agreement among themselves about basic practices if their enterprise is to prosper. What is at stake in this study of the theology of civic virtue is the meaning of “nature.” Most of the authors cited here understand Augustine to be periodizing history, with the Fall of Adam, the birth of Christ, and the impending demise of the Roman world as nodal points. For Augustine, institutions of both church and state are not natural in the sense of “original,” but are inserted in history as part of God’s strategic plan to keep the peace among a population whose loves are decidedly mixed. As a result, tyrants and republicans rule with equal legitimacy. The author, however, places his emphasis on institutions of family, society, and politics as vehicles of moral education. On this reading, they are part of the “natural order” of sociability and personal moral enrichment that began in Eden and continues through the family to social life, to citizenship, and on to religious observance. Augustine’s dark vision of the state as the “barbed hooks of the executioner” seems more a rhetorical device than a true measure of the saint’s belief. Yet Augustine-the-Bishop was a Roman by education and sensibility, acutely aware of the different realms of public law and human society, although in his official capacity, he did Rome’s as well as the church’s work in Hippo Regius. Augustine would always settle for the great gift of peace on earth, even if that required using the Roman Empire to crack down on Christian dissidents whom he considered violent terrorists. For every Augustinian statement about an enhanced moral life possible when Christian public officials rule, most often written in the subjunctive mood, there is an equal and countervailing comment about “submission” to an absolute state that coercively enforces customary loves, whether sinful or saintly. 817 Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY No work on Augustine can omit his brilliant deconstruction of Cicero’s hopes for a moral republic. Von Heyking’s riff on this classic theme is characteristic of his project. Augustine says that “a people is a community of a rational multitude which is associated by a communal concord of the things it loves” (p. 83). To evaluate the “character of any people” requires the observational exercise of noting “what they love.” “A superior people” will be “bound together by higher things” (p. 83). Generations of scholars have marveled at the flexibility of the saint’s sliding scale, with its acknowledgment of the givenness and diversity of public life. However, the author’s reading of the interchange with Cicero is subtly different. He says that “just as one becomes godlike by imitating Christ, one’s soul is dispersed into the flux of the world when one inordinately pursues worldly goods” (p. 83). In other words, “political societies become more like the objects they love” (p. 83). To the author, Augustine is not relativizing the analysis of polities and their legitimacy but rather thinking “about elemental, existential and transcendental representation” (p. 83). Here again the author’s three conversations are carried on simultaneously, distracting attention from the careful scholarship that is the great strength of this work. One is reminded of Augustine’s observation in The Confessions, “Is justice therefore . . . changeable? . . . No, rather the times which it rules over are not identical for the very reason that they are times” (John K. Ryan, ed., 1960, p. 86). Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. By Stephen K. White. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 158p. $49.50 cloth, $15.95 paper. Morton Schoolman, State University of New York at Albany A play on the legendary statement attributed to Stalin— “When I hear the word ontology I reach for my gun”— captures the anticipated reaction of some to Stephen White’s provocative work. It would be better if these readers were slow to draw. For White demonstrates that, wittingly and unwittingly, poststructuralist, postmodernist, and other theoretical types who eschew foundationalism nevertheless commit themselves to ontologically “sustained” (prefigured) ethical and political “affirmations” (judgments, values, insights, theories). He documents their “turn” to a new form of ontological justification. “Weak ontology” produces strong political theory, an important discovery for all theorists who are also post-Stalinists. On one level, Sustaining Affirmation is a masterful comprehension of the thought of George Kateb, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and William Connolly, or, if a reader’s interest runs to the generic, of versions of liberalism, communitarianism, feminism, and poststructuralism/postmodernism. Each theorist White examines has been prolific, and often difficult, which speaks to the great value of a thorough critical work that explicates and clarifies without simplifying. At a deeper level, his purpose is to lay bare the ontological infrastructure of the aforementioned theoretical genera, the weak ontology that in different ways and to different extents animates the political theory of the four thinkers representing them, a task accomplished powerfully. Weak ontology is late modern in contrast to the modernity and premodernity of foundationalist strong ontology. Strong ontology’s claims to universality and certainty, its hostility to contingency and indeterminacy in thinking about political life, are opposed by its weak ontological counterpart, which likewise opposes the strong ontological basis of traditional liberal theory, notably its disengaged, unencumbered subject. Weak ontology’s opposition is anchored in an insistence on the essentially contestable nature of all concepts fundamental 818 December 2002 to political theory, emphatically those of self, other, and world intrinsic to thought, designed to adequately orient us ethically and politically to late modern life. Contestation is directed not only toward contending theoretical positions. It is a continuously self-reflexive movement that every political theory must build into itself to disrupt its own fundamentals, their coalescence, and the systematizing structure that coalescence produces. This “folding” or “enactment” of contestation, in White’s ontological terms, installs a mechanism for arresting theoretical tendencies toward reification, the hallmark of strong ontologies. Weak ontology conceptualizes subjectivity as “sticky”— agency is linguistically entangled, mortal, and conscious of its finitude, capable of novelty while self-identified with an ultimate source of its being to which it is attached steadfastly as it evokes its reverence and wonder. These (contestable) universals, the anatomy of weak ontology, are fleshed out in the analysis of his four theorists and come to life differently by means of their different embodiments in each theory. Each clothes these universals in various “figurations” of meaning, bearing imprints of the historical circumstances in which theory necessarily is entangled. Through universals, weak ontology creates in political theory an aesthetic-affective sensibility to the world, enabling it to think and feel the world in definite ways. As the source of political theory’s opening to the world through which its thinking and feeling absorb existence, weak ontology must be “cultivated.” Cultivation requires time and care to shape the figurations of being that finally “prefigure”—orient us cognitively and affectively—to ethical and political insights and judgments. Here I found White’s idea of political theory to be especially poignant. Political theory’s debt to weak ontology, through which images of existence are able to pass in order to play their role as prefigurations of possible ethical and political forms of life, is repaid by a beauty reflected in its openness to the world. After considering White’s readings of several theorists, it is this aesthetic quality of political theory that loomed larger than any other. Springing from weak ontology, the aesthetic becomes political theory’s lifeblood. White discovers properties of weak ontology in Kateb’s theory of “democratic individuality” that enable him to theorize social and individual existence in ways adequately prefiguring the value he accords to individual rights, individuality’s equal recognition of the other in the creation of its own identity, and constitutional democracy. Kateb’s prefiguration of ethical and political judgment falters with a conception of justice immune to the way the identity of the other is effaced in individuality’s self-creations of identity, a shortcoming, White proposes, remediated through a more robust ontological engagement with language and finitude. Underscoring the important weak ontological work that God’s absence performs in Kateb’s confrontation with problems created by thinkers on whose shoulders he stands, White also criticizes his dismissal of theism and appears to suspect him of artificially shoring up his prefigurations with compensatory ontological moves. Taylor offers White proof that theism need not entail a strong ontology and is compatible with a weak ontological model’s prefigurations of the political. Theism, for instance, does not prohibit Taylor from immersing subjectivity in the linguistic stickiness underrepresented in Kateb’s theory. It is precisely the linguistic dimension of Taylor’s weak ontology that prefigures his communitarian liberalism, with its stress on the normative good of culture for its partial constitution of identity. Whereas Taylor’s theory of language enriches his weak ontology, Butler’s weak ontological framework tends toward a certain “thinness,” owing to a linguistically overdetermined deconstruction of identity. This ontological deficit is egregious American Political Science Review where White discovers a deep ethical impulse at work in her analyses of discourse and power, a sympathy for “bodies that do not matter” connected to an idea of community where the language/power nexus would be negotiated in ways more generous to the self. This ethos of generosity wants for an adequate ontological prefiguration. Thinness surfaces again where the inertia of deconstruction creates a disposition toward viewing all identity as oppressive and to be discarded. Attention to finitude, White argues, would imbue identity with greater weight, chastening Butler’s allegiance to the human being as an “infinite becoming machine.” Connolly’s weak ontology nearly parallels White’s model of prefiguration. Particularly important is Connolly’s cultivation of the aesthetic-expressive dimension and of reverence for being, which are tied intimately to his notions of being and becoming and prefigure his ethos of critical responsiveness. White is especially interested in the way this ontologically framed ethos of critical responsiveness informs Connolly’s critique of pluralism, his idea of expanding pluralization through a micropolitics of the self, and in how political liberalism can be shored up by at least a partial accommodation of Connolly’s ethos. Critical responsiveness still proves to be inadequately prefigured. Turning to Martin Heidegger, who throughout the book has been brought in to rescue ontological-ethical/political connections, White outlines an approach for strengthening Connolly’s weak ontological prefigurations. Connolly’s weak ontology is the strongest of the four thinkers. His political theory is richer because it is richer as a weak ontology. Weak ontology raises interesting questions where it also may be problematic. The question of origins: Does White tease weak ontology out of the fabric of contemporary political theory, or does he first assemble it from elsewhere and bring it to bear critically on theory? If the former, political Vol. 96, No. 4 theories are addressing implicitly the same ontological issues, meaning that something of deep philosophical importance is going on in recent political thought. If the latter, weak ontology may be obscuring significant nonontological differences among theories. The question of sustaining weak ontology: Although its fundaments are contestable, does defending a weak ontology reproduce the paradox that plagued strong ontologies—providing a foundation for a foundation? Or if weak ontology sustains strong political theory, is it then also sustained by the strength of a theory? Justification becomes circular. The question of outing: At times, White wants a tighter connection between weak ontological figurations and the ethics and politics they prefigure. Does this tighter connection betray an underlying desire for a strong ontology? Finally: White may error in thinking Kateb a liberal; Kateb relates individuality to a purer idea of constitutional representative democracy than liberalism permits, which affects how his thought can be redescribed ontologically. The late modern democratic world may have overcome finitude in ways that lend plausibility to Butler’s concept of the self as an infinite-becoming-machine. Connolly’s amoral source for sustaining his ethics and politics is not external to life and not open to Taylor’s connection between external amoral sources and violence, as White contends. If the compatibility of Taylor’s theism and weak ontology does not affect the latter’s contestability, does weak ontology need theism at all? This question can be posed in several forms. While it is possible to review only a few arguments of this tightly woven examination of the philosophical scaffolding of contemporary political theory, it should be clear that Sustaining Affirmation is a highly original project that is brilliantly executed and leaves recent political thought looking different than in any other of our current attempts to understand it. American Politics Southern Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. By Stanley P. Berard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. 250p. $22.95. Nicol C. Rae, Florida International University The rise of partisanship in Congress has been one of the most conspicuous features of American politics during the 1990s. David Rohde’s (1991) Parties and Leaders in the PostReform House demonstrated that much of this rise in partisanship could be attributed to the convergence in congressional voting between Northern and Southern Democrats. Since the New Deal, the latter had traditionally allied with Republicans on many issues in a bipartisan conservative coalition that generally dominated both Houses of Congress and constrained liberal legislative outcomes. While Rohde and Barbara Sinclair (Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking, 1995) have emphasized how institutional rule changes in the 1970s created a much greater incentive for party loyalty among members of Congress, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which enhanced partisanship in Congress has been driven by “bottom-up” electoral imperatives. Stanley Berard’s new book on Southern Democrats in the House convincingly shows that major changes in the southern electoral environment were equally important in promoting convergence in the voting records of Northern and Southern Democrats, leading to a more partisan House overall. Utilizing a combination of survey data and roll call voting analysis, Berard shows that a variety of interrelated factors have forced Southern Democrats to respond to very different electoral constituencies in the past two decades. He also makes good use of Richard Fenno’s (Homestyle, 1978) concept of the different “primary” and “reelection” constituencies that House members have to accommodate, in order to illustrate the conflicting electoral pressures on Southern Democrats. Southern black voters are now enfranchised and constitute the Democratic voter base in southern congressional elections. At the same time, most of the most conservative white Democratic voters have moved to the Republican Party as a genuine two-party system has evolved in the South. Federal court decisions have also led to the creation of a greater number of urban districts in the South, which are less ideologically conservative and tend to favor more liberal Democrats. Underlying this southern electoral realignment, Berard’s analysis reveals, is a highly complex and fluid picture of Democratic congressional electorates in the South. With the departure of conservative whites to the GOP, both “primary” electorates and the broader “reelection” constituencies became closer ideologically to northern Democratic congressional electorates during the 1980–96 period. This was particularly evident on economic issues, but during the 1990s, there was increasing convergence between northern and southern reelection constituencies on civil rights, social/cultural issues, 819 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS and foreign policy issues as well, although southern Democratic “reelection” constituencies remained somewhat to the right of the national norm on most of these matters. The author also finds, moreover, that the urbanization of the South has created a new urban Democratic constituency of (largely upper-middle-class, professional) white liberal voters who are ideologically aligned with liberal positions nationally— particularly on the so-called “social issues” like abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights. Indeed, his analysis reveals that V. O. Key’s finding (Southern Politics, 1949) that southern white conservatism tends to rise directly in accordance with the size of the black population in a particular area, while still accurate with regard to the rural South, no longer holds up for the urban areas of the region where the opposite now appears to be the case. Berard finds that regional convergence is even more apparent with regard to “primary” electorates, and following Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson’s model of issue evolution (Issue Evolution, 1989), he expects that the broader “reelection” constituency of southern Democratic congressional voters will eventually reflect the views of party elites. The impact of core electorates and voter mobilization in this context is worthy of further study, however. Berard does not discuss the increasing role of national Democratic-supporting interest groups (gays and lesbians, teachers’ unions, trial attorneys, black organizations, feminists) in providing funds and activists for Democratic congressional candidates, but the influence of national interest and activist groups and of the national media has surely been significant in the rise of increasingly convergent party congressional campaigns and electoral constituencies. The impact of “primary” electorates on members in an age of political action committee financing and declining electoral participation was demonstrated by the 1998 House vote on the impeachment of President Clinton. Most Republicans voted to impeach Clinton in defiance of national polls because they (correctly) judged that their primary electoral constituency would be more likely than not to be in complete agreement with their actions. Similarly, all but a handful of southern white Democratic congressmen voted against impeachment, although their states and districts generally appeared to have had a low opinion of the former president’s conduct. Berard argues (pp. 158–60) that the 1990 redistricting and the creation of 13 new black-majority districts in the South ultimately had little impact on the 1994 Republican landslide in the region, which was more determined by national issues. In fact, Republican gains in 1992–94 were disproportionately in the southern states, and Republican numbers of U.S. House members increased markedly in almost all southern states while those of white Democrats went down. This was not due to the defeat of Democratic incumbents but was the creation of more open seats after redistricting and the retirement of many white Democratic incumbents, who faced the difficult prospect of running against an African American Democrat in the primary in a black-majority district or, alternatively, facing a Republican in a lily-white district almost completely bereft of the Democrats’ base voters. Redistricting in the South certainly was a crucial factor in increasing the number of Republican seats in the region in 1992–96 and maintaining a Republican majority (albeit narrow) in the House since 1994. Overall, this is a very fine and worthy piece of scholarship on an interesting and relevant topic. Berard convincingly marshals his data to make his case, and the book is lively and well written. Given that the forces driving both parties toward polarization and internal convergence are not likely to depart the political scene anytime soon, we can expect the increasing homogeneity of national Democratic and Repub- 820 December 2002 lican congressional electorates to continue over the course of the next decade. The Trouble with Government. By Derek Bok. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 493p. $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. John R. Hibbing, University of Nebraska-Lincoln When first presented with this book, I confess to harboring two strong reservations—both, as it turns out, badly misplaced. First, perhaps because the author is a widely known American who was once the president of Harvard and, therefore, spent considerable time among movers and shakers, I was prepared for a broad, rambling, and discursive book peppered with anecdotes, personal musings, name-dropping, and disconnected prescriptions for change. Second, no doubt because I have never been fond of the overarching evaluation exercises that so enthrall foundations, when I read in the introduction that this volume on government had been commissioned by three major foundations, I feared I was about to read another governmental report card accompanied by the obligatory and often vacuous justification for the grade assigned in each area. But this book is not at all superficial and self-indulgent, just as it is not at all a predictable foundation report card. Instead it is thorough, serious, and creative. The book betokens an author who has done a tremendous amount of work, who has a detailed knowledge of the relevant scholarly literature, who cares about his country, who is thoughtful, and who writes well. Though Derek Bok does come close to doing so in preliminary chapters, at no point in the book does he assign grades to any portion of government. The book is too inventive and prescriptive for that. My preconceptions were wrong and I am ashamed of myself. The Trouble with Government begins with a description, drawn heavily from Bok’s previous work, of the issues the United States government seems to have handled well and the issues it seems to have handled poorly from the 1960s to the 1990s. By Bok’s reading of the data, for example, the country has made substantial strides in such areas as research and technology, race relations, the arts, the environment, and the well-being of children as well as the elderly, but personal responsibility and crime have worsened. Bok’s focus then shifts to a comparison of progress in the United States with the progress made by other developed Western democracies, and his conclusion here is much less anodyne. Progress in the United States compares unfavorably in all areas except scientific research and a few isolated other measures. This disappointing appraisal sets the stage for the book’s central questions: why is the U.S. government not performing better and what can be done to improve its often desultory performance. Much to his credit, Bok’s answer is clear. He believes there to be three central problems with how government operates. First, the U.S. system generally and Congress specifically are parochial, overly decentralized, unaccountable, and more eager to appear to be solving problems than to be solving problems. Second, the U.S. regulatory system is based on a rigid, legalistic, adversarial model, rather than on the flexible and cooperative design that characterizes some other countries. Finally, citizens of “modest means,” particularly working people and those who would like to be working people, are not engaged in government, and therefore policies meant to assist them are inadequate or perhaps nonexistent. As a result of these problems, statutes are badly designed, regulations make citizens and businesses hopping mad, and working people and the poor fare badly and are disaffected. American Political Science Review What to do? Bok is distinctly unpersuaded by the ability of currently popular reforms to bring much improvement. He is appropriately dismissive of efforts to bring government closer to the people by having more initiatives and referenda, by creating opinion panels, or by devolution. He has only a little faith in typical efforts to reinvent governmental, especially bureaucratic, procedures. And he does not believe campaign finance reform addresses the core of the problem. Rather, Bok seeks to give more direction and unity to government by strengthening parties, by weakening such alternative power bases as congressional committee chairs and legislative rules that protect the rights of minority opinion, and by weakening the separation of powers. He even flirts with the idea of “requiring voters to choose between each party’s slate of candidates for federal office instead of allowing them to vote for a president from one party and a senator or member of Congress from the other” (p. 287). With regard to regulations, Bok wants to rely more on the marketplace, he wants to use more comparative risk assessment and cost–benefit analysis, and he wants regulators to listen more carefully to those being regulated so that a spirit of cooperation can be established and silly, unreasonable regulations will no longer be promulgated. And he thinks that citizens of modest means can be engaged by further reform of electoral law (perhaps even compulsory voting), by strengthening unions and otherwise promoting workplace democracy, and particularly by increasing people’s involvement in organizations and clubs, such as community development corporations. This is an intriguing blend of remedies in that it seeks to unify the institutions that Montesquieu and Madison separated, to restore the vivacious associational life that de Tocqueville noted 150 years ago, and to establish a more corporate and European relationship between business and government. Bok longs to combine parliamentary-style institutional change, group-based social capital, and regulatory reform: a marriage of James McGregor Burns and Robert Putnam with Ronald Reagan presiding. There is something for most everybody here. Liberals will be attracted to Bok’s desire to empower the underclass; conservatives will applaud his wish to allow the regulated more influence in the drafting of regulations; and good-government reformers will support his desire to make government simpler, more accountable, and more popular. I have my own view of these proposals, but that view is not as relevant to this review as the probability that these proposals will not achieve the outcome Bok seeks and that they are, in that sense, badly misguided. If the goal is to renew people’s faith in their government, why start by increasing the clout of the very entities they dislike the most? People despise interest groups and political parties, yet Bok calls for institutional reforms that will enhance the electoral-governing role of parties and the regulatory role of special interests. The people do not want Enron and Haliburton writing energy regulations any more than they want the Sierra Club doing so. They do not want the AFL-CIO or the National Association of Manufacturers to be given more influence. The people do not want either the Democrats or the Republicans to be given a clear path to enact change, and they do not want party leaders in Congress to be given more power than they already have. More controversially, I would maintain that the “citizens of modest means” that Bok so badly wants to involve in government would rather not be involved in government. They find it distasteful and not particularly relevant, and they have other things they would much rather do with their time. Motor-voter did not help, and making voting day a holiday would not help much either. And does anyone seriously believe that making voting mandatory would lead people to feel better about their government? Joining groups and Vol. 96, No. 4 otherwise working together undoubtedly have many good consequences, but no evidence exists that they make people more appreciative of government or more involved in it (any correlation between joining groups and political involvement is almost certainly spurious). Indeed, recent experimental work has indicated that when people provide input to a decision maker believed to be somewhat self-interested, they actually feel less influential and more frustrated than when they have no input at all. So the notion (which Bok shares with many well-intentioned reformers) that if only we could get the uninvolved to participate they would be pleased with government, would participate more in the future, and would help the government to make better decisions is both terribly inviting and terribly wrong. But agreement with the author’s prescription for improving the United States government is not necessary to make The Trouble with Government a worthwhile read. I found his evaluation of government to be much more persuasive than I thought I would, and it is difficult to argue with many features of his description of the problems. Writing actual recommendations for change is by far the most difficult part of any book on government, and so I think stimulation, not agreement, should be the standard for judging prescriptions—and I certainly found Bok’s prescriptions stimulating. I recommend this wide-ranging, learned, insightful book to all who care about U.S. government. Rational Lives: Norms and Values in Politics and Society. By Dennis Chong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 292p. $45.00 cloth, $18.00 paper. Howard Margolis, University of Chicago Dennis Chong proposes an account of how to forge a merger between rational choice and sociological explanations of the role of norms, values, and symbols in politics. The core idea is that norms and values (not just self-interest) are indeed essential for understanding political choice (as a sociologist would expect), but that norms and values have to develop. Those in place today change over time. And rational choice enters in guiding that evolution. So on this account, we could expect that norms and values in place within a community lean toward serving the interest of that community, but with a lag. Conditions change, and norms change in response to that, but not immediately. We get a sort of Bayesian view of the evolution of norms and values, where what used to make rational sense in a community is the analogue of a Bayesian prior, which holds back full adoption of what may now make sense. Both the sociological (expressive politics) and economic (rational choice politics) views are essential. Chong’s labels are “dispositions” and “incentives.” Once dispositions are in place they do not easily change. But over time they do change, in response to rational incentives. Defining what interests are, however, turns out to be troublesome, since interests are not necessarily narrowly material interests. Anyone who watches how actual human beings behave (in contrast to only calculating how game theoretic rational actors ought to behave) is very likely to agree. But this leads to analytical ambiguities. Chong’s proposal here supposes that empirical experience gradually teaches a person how changes in values and norms would improve the situation. But this seems easier to agree to with respect to norms than to values. And even for norms there is Mancur Olson’s collective action problem: Norms may make us all better off, but often an individual would be better off if everyone else complied but he or she avoided the obligation. So how do norms evolve under Chong’s model of individual choice? 821 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS Chong develops the argument over a series of chapters specifying how he takes these interactions to work, but leaving rather open his answers to the questions just noted. Nevertheless, he has interesting things to say about the elements of his argument (the links between individual choice and the dynamics of groups, defense mechanisms that slow the response to new conditions, and why to some extent they are functional.) This includes development of a formal model in Chapter 2, although use of the model turns out to be not very central to the enterprise. There are insightful case studies in the later chapters, especially of the evolution of racial norms in the South under pressure from the federal government. There is a detailed case study of the response of a Texas community on the far outskirts of Austin to the tension between the promise of economic development and the concerns of a very conservative community about the kind of people tolerated in Austin who are becoming a major force in Williamson County. Another case concerns the response of the New England fishing community of Gloucester (of “perfect storm” fame) to the appearance of the Unification Church (Moonies). All this is put effectively to work to show the strength of Chong’s view (as against a single-mindedly sociological or single-minded rational choice view). He is alert to the feedback of changing norms, not only on the costs and benefits of norms that have not (yet) changed but on how the effects are themselves valued. If you think you ought to do something, that does not guarantee that you will like to do what you now think you ought to do, but it certainly increases the prospect of tastes moving in that direction. There is not much reference to the formal modeling in the case studies—none at all, really, in the Williamson County case, which is the most detailed—but Chong returns to the modeling near the end. I did not see much that was substantial in the modeling, but there is a good deal of room for varying styles in such things. What one person finds exciting another can see as just mathematical hand waving. Formal modelers will want to think about Chong’s modeling. But those with no taste at all for such stuff can safely skim past it. Nearly everyone, I think, will get something out of the sharply observed case studies. And the basic perspective—that we will profit from careful, increasingly precise thought about how rational choice incentives and social influences interact and mutually influence each other—is surely correct. Championing Child Care. By Sally S. Cohen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 397p. $52.50 cloth, $26.00 paper. Joyce Gelb, City University of New York Sally Cohen has written an important and comprehensive analysis of child-care policy in the United States, challenging the conventional wisdom that no such federal policy exists and that child care is not a major government priority, in contrast to other democratic welfare states (e.g., the Scandinavian countries and France). The book is premised on the hypothesis that changes in political institutions and organized interests shape the outcomes of policy. To this one might add another aspect of policy change that Cohen well documents: demographic changes, including the large numbers of working mothers with young children (62% of women with children under three years of age in 1996). The numbers of children in day care quadrupled from the late 1970s to 1990 (75% of American children utilized some type of child-care arrangement by 1995), and early childhood programs for the 13.3 million children living in poverty have proliferated as well (pp. 3, 7, 11). However, 822 December 2002 as Cohen points out, if the number of working women alone determined policy outcomes, different solutions would have been arrived at years ago. The analytic framework the book employs utilizes the concepts of major public policy analysts: Baumgartner and Jones’s punctuated equilibrium, Sabatier and Smith’s advocacy coalitions, and the “new institutionalism” and “historical institutionalism.” Cohen looks to the latter’s emphasis on path dependency, stressing the difficulty of reversing long-standing patterns that negated the importance of addressing national child-care policy. In her 30-year review of child-care policies, Cohen begins with the Nixon veto in 1971 of comprehensive child-care legislation. She then guides us through less familiar eras of policy making on child care, including developments in the late 1980s that led to the passage of landmark legislation in 1990, and finally the 1996 welfare reform act and its impact on child-care policy. Her approach is to try to explain why these three critical junctures for policy occurred when they did and also to illuminate processes that sometimes led to unlikely (e.g., Republican conservative) sponsorship in a policy area normally promoted by Democrats. The book deftly connects child care with welfare reform and support for children in poverty, and it emphasizes the federal aspects of child-care policy, particularly through Title XX and more recent policies, which have provided state funding for child care. Cohen demonstrates the intricacies of policymaking on child care, documenting conflict over vouchers and clashes between advocacy groups and members of Congress from both parties. Another source of conflict has been the issue of funding child-care providers with religious affiliations. Concern over federal standards and state prerogatives also impeded legislation for a long period. It is clear from the analysis presented that the complexities of the federal system profoundly affect child-care policy, which relies on state implementation. The book is strengthened by the painstaking attention Cohen gives to the complicated implementation process after the passage of each piece of legislation; for example, she examines conflicts regarding standards, licensing, and early education (such as the Head Start program) within the context of devolution of policymaking to the states. The book provides detailed information on the littleknown policy negotiations of 1990, which led to what Cohen views as pathbreaking “breakthrough” legislation on child care in the first Bush administration as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (p. 130). The law provided particular assistance to low-income families, although the Child Care and Development Block Grant was the first federal childcare program not connected with welfare. The At Risk Child Care program marked an important and unusual congruence between the executive and congressional branches of government. Cohen emphasizes the key role of committees in the process, stressing the importance of rules changes that enhanced the participation of greater numbers of members of Congress, the support of the president, and the advocacy of the Children’s Defense Fund in explaining the policy change. She attempts to shed light on the factors that led to positive change under Republican presidents and right-wing control of Congress. The 1996 welfare reform bill (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act), with specific focus on its impact on child-care policy, is the third policy issue analyzed in depth. Among other aspects of the legislation was withdrawal of a federal guarantee for child care, as well as decreased funding for other child-care programs, though there was reauthorization of funding for many of the 1990 reforms. And, although they are less dramatic, Cohen points to initiatives during the latter part of the Clinton administration, including increased attention and support for policy dealing with after-school care American Political Science Review for children, as well as further research as child-care-related issues were redefined to broaden support. It is difficult to fully assess the child-care initiatives documented here and the progress that Cohen asserts has occurred, that “the child care development block grant has institutionalized child care within the federal government” (p. 303). A chart of the federal structure of responsibilities on this issue would clarify the nature of institutionalization. Is there a coordinated federal effort around issues of child care at present; can the view that federal policy matters be documented? Data would also help our understanding of what has been accomplished by the enactment of these policies: those who have benefited from the initiatives in child-care policy and those who have not. A comparative lens would aid in clarifying policy gains as well. For example, how do child-care initiatives compare to others in such related policy arenas as health care and the Violence Against Women Act? A particularly significant omission in the book is the absence of analysis of tax credits and deductions as major instruments of child care policy in the United States. The strength of this book may lie in documenting processes and policy outcomes, in itself a major achievement, rather than in providing full explanations for them. What factors are most responsible for the policy changes examined? More attention to the limited role of women’s groups in the policies analyzed would be welcome. In the final analysis, as Cohen suggests, the study fails to fully confirm the perspectives of those policy analysts whose frameworks she employs (p. 278). Perhaps it is necessary to look beyond these to others, exploring the notions of “incubated innovations” and “redistributive” policymaking more fully (p. 278). Cohen has done an admirable job of aggregating a record of accomplishment in a policy arena unfamiliar to many students of social policy. However, a truly comprehensive national child-care policy for the United States is still not a reality. As she suggests, the next stage may necessarily involve a focus on child care beyond welfare. Fenced Off: The Suburbanization of American Politics. By Juliet F. Gainsborough. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001. 191p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Gerry Riposa, California State University, Long Beach By the 1970s—and, some might argue, a decade earlier— America had shed its urban persona and had metamorphosed into a suburban nation. Yet in comparison with research done on cities and urban politics, little work had focused on this transition and ensuing suburban politics. Juliet Gainsborough’s work seeks to reduce this deficiency by examining the suburban movement, its motivations, and their linkage to political behavior. Thankfully moving beyond previous discussions of mortgages and work commutes, the author narrows the focus of this short monograph to how living in the suburbs affects voter choice and policy preferences by altering the decision-making calculus (p. 8). The author’s thesis is that public opinion and behavior are related to resident location. Her hypothesis is that suburban dewellers—defined here as those who live in a metro area but reside outside the boundaries of the central city—think differently about national politics and, as a consequence, vote differently (p. 4). Hence, the guiding question throughout the book: Do suburban dewellers have unique political views that are conditioned by where they live, or are their views related to individual-level characteristics that would operate the same way regardless of residence? Her data are drawn from the Congressional Research Service, 1990 Census, and the American National Election Vol. 96, No. 4 Studies 1952–1992. Using homeownership as her independent variable, the author examined relationships with party identification, support for congressional and presidential candidates, and policy preferences on government spending and welfare spending. Providing a useful literature review on the definition, development, and myths of suburbs, Gainsborough offers the following argument. The move to suburbia is not the result of some gravitational pull toward conformity, but rather a retreat to defend local boundaries. In the author’s words, “the fencing off of a community is not only a rejection of what lies outside but also a fear of losing what lies inside” (p. 17). Thus, living in suburbia shapes political behavior and generates a conservative tendency that can be demonstrated through candidate and policy preferences. As the country becomes more suburban, the likelihood that they will be represented by conservative politicians increases, and with it more conservative decisions on federal spending and less support for central cities. Simply put, she argues that place matters. The author’s findings generally support her hypothesis and argument. While suburbs are diverse, their political behavior demonstrates certain generalizable trends (p. 71). Suburban residence does relate to increased support for Republican Party candidates and opposition to government spending for service provisions for cities and welfare (pp. 68, 75). This opposition is less pronounced for social security, leading the author to conclude that if benefits are perceived as primarily middle class, government service is more acceptable. Both findings suggest a distinctive suburban political character that is not accounted for by differences in socioeconomic characteristics (p. 77). Still, the strength of the relationship, though frequent, remains small (p. 80). But are suburban voters distinctive, tending to be more conservative because of where they live, or are conservativebased populations self-selecting, tending to move to a place they perceive as appealing to conservative values? This study is unable to separate or tease out which has the greater independent effect. According to the author, it is probably a combination of both. As she puts it, “Particular kinds of people leave the city for the suburbs and once there their behavior is reinforced” (p. 77). Home ownership alone does not carry the predicted impact, but owning a residence along with others who seek to insulate themselves may generate the distinctive suburban character. Regardless, the relationship between suburban living and political behavior is evident when the author controls for socioeconomic variables and when party identification is taken into account. Her reasoning is that if preexisting political attitudes are causally related to suburban migration, then one would expect that including party identification would negate the suburban effect and it does not (p. 77). For Gainsborough, the greater point is that suburban place matters in American politics, and with unabated numbers continuing to move to the suburbs, the impact of this spatial relationship to political behavior will only become more influential. This migration—what Gainsborough calls a geographic sorting of voters along racial and economic lines— suggests that the clustering of middle-class and higher incomes in these resident communities explains the move to the political right and the ascendancy of conservative candidates and policies (p. 111). In the offing, central cities and low-income and working-class communities will be disadvantaged in the competition for federal support, particularly if Democrats move to the right in an effort to capture some portion of this rising suburban constituency. This cleavage between urban and suburban is not absolute. As suburbs become older and experience the same problems as cities, they tend to lose their distinctiveness from cities. Nevertheless, 823 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS the author concludes that this form of localism will make its presence felt for some time, unless community and common bonds are defined across city/suburbs lines (p. 139). She suggests that intergovernmental agencies should take the lead in promulgating policies to make this connection. As to what policies and strategies are best suited for creating a nexus between city and suburbs, she leaves to future research. For those interested in how spatial arrangements shape America politics, this monograph is worth the read. In a compact, accessible analysis, the author strips away some of the myths and ambiguity surrounding suburban living and its role on political behavior. For those supporting decentralization and conservative primacy in national politics, these findings will bring a measure of comfort. For those interested in a more progressive presence in national politics, this book is your wake-up call. Governance and Performance: New Perspectives. Edited by Carolyn J. Heinrich and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000. 349p. $65.00 cloth, $23.95 paper. Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research. Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., Carolyn J. Heinrich, and Carolyn J. Hill. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001. 212p. $60.00. Dianne N. Long, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Carolyn Heinrich, Laurence Lynn, and Carolyn Hill are public management and policy scholars who puzzle over the workings of government. Their efforts aim not only to add to our understanding of these workings but also to provide a template for future study. The first volume by Heinrich and Lynn is designed around a set of working papers originally introduced at a conference of government and policy scholars in May 1999 at the University of Arizona, and are oft referred to as “the Arizona papers.” The publication is the result of a research project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to study best practices in government management. The second volume authored by Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill argues for a theoretical framework to guide future research. The Heinrich and Lynn book could easily be called “workings.” It focuses on issues of organizational design in answering the questions: “What does government do?” and “What difference does it make?” The exploration of research lays out the most recent advances in theories and statistical methods. In organizational parlance, this set of observations considers government organizations as whole systems, rather than as patterns of policy behavior. The authors consider the study of governance as “regimes of laws, administrative rules, judicial rulings, and practices that constrain, prescribe, and enable government activity” (p. 3). The authors consider legislative mandates, administrative structures, and formal organizational features, such as networks. Much of the discussion concerns what can be called “the logic of governance.” This logic incorporates legislative actions and its bureaucratic responses. As a collective work, this book presents valuable insights into bureaucratic behavior and government programs, including Chicago’s schools, jobs programs, welfareto-work, legislative regulation committees, and health systems. The cases presented center on providing a theoretical and empirically based literature on government institutions. The sense of the volume is in harmony with central questions of the classical school of organizational behavior: What is the ideal organization? What is the one best way to deliver a product or service? What factors enhance outcomes? These 824 December 2002 questions have never been absent from our inquiry related to administrative theory and organizational behavior. The set of cases focuses on contemporary governments carrying out policy initiatives. Various features of today’s organizations are clearly considered by this set of well-known scholars. Melissa Roderick, Brian Jacob, and Anthony Byrk provide an analysis of student achievement data. The study finds that extra instructional time and investment in student progress are important factors to success. Heinrich and Lynn (the editors) provide a descriptive analysis of the Job Training Partnership Act. They find strong association between policies and incentives and with administrative forms that shelter programs. A number of cases deal with welfare-to-work programs. Edward T. Jennings, Jr., and Jo Ann G. Ewalt look at both topdown and interpersonal system approaches in state welfare delivery by using interviews of state administrative personnel. Lowered caseloads remain a hope in future welfare reform. Jodi Sandfort examines the effect of welfare-to-work organizations and outcomes in 82 Michigan counties. Interviews with managers and discussion of administrative data reflect a range of interventions and related outcomes. James Riccio, Howard Bloom, and Hill consider administrative records of welfare-to-work programs and survey data in sample counties in eight states. Their interest is primarily in factors that increase earnings and recipient motivation for staying on the job. Within another policy perspective, Jack H. Knott and Thomas H. Hammond consider deregulation legislative outcomes in banking, trucking, airlines, and telecommunications. They look at how legislation shapes regulatory committees and competition among policy actors. In another case study, Laurence J. O’Toole, Jr., and Kenneth J. Meier provide a narrative of a formal model of hierarchy, networks, and management arrangements. They suggest that management roles become less important as hierarchies become more defined. Patricia W. Ingraham and Amy Kneedler Donahue also consider management arrangements in their review of management uses of financial, human resources, capital, and information technology “subsystems.” The case emphasizes the importance of integration for management results. Lastly, John W. Ellwood provides a skeptical argument on modeling governance. He voices ideas raised by Herbert Simon and lays out such questions as “Who should determine policy choices when goals are unclear?” The writings clearly explain delivery of public policy from a holistic organizational approach. The unique, sometimesquirky behavior of individuals and their motivation is less important in these case studies. The writings as a whole are provocative and insightful. While they may not become predictive models of governance and performance, they provide a solid survey of what government researchers are talking about. They raise questions, propose study approaches, make tentative findings, and point the way for future researchers. The volume is a good overview of organizational design issues for those who have an interest in bureaucracy and policy, as well as for those who would embark on any study of government. Reading the first volume facilitates an understanding of the thinking behind the second volume, Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research. Here Lynn and Heinrich team up with Hill to provide a literature review of the theories, models, and methods of the social sciences applicable to public management research. The authors take on public assistance child protection, job training, drug abuse treatment, and public education while considering the challenges such programs present for the researcher. A synopsis of the first governance volume takes hold here. The American Political Science Review conversation continues to lead into considerations of the researcher. For example, they puzzle over data issues: “A central empirical problem in governance research is obtaining data that will enable investigators to explore causal relationships beyond a narrow perimeter of theoretical possibilities that leave too much out of the picture” (p. 18). Their research model has strong parallels with the market model used in economics to inform behavioral research. The core of the model considers the elements of legislative choice and political assessment together with governance. Here we see the influence of political economy, bureaucratic control, and socialized-choice paradigms. The struggles of the researcher are central to the discussion of issues. Research design is a critical piece in the book. Here the authors consider design in detail and lay out models, methods, and data sets. They provide a solid review of the literature using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. In the end, they confront the constrained environment inherent in such research. The volume is a useful review of the literature, much like the “In Search of Excellence” review of organizational behavior works. Further, it provides insights that come from practical experiences and research disappointments. Improving Governance is a valuable book for those who undertake organizational and policy research and for those desiring to do so. In the end, the authors provide a useful moral to the tales woven in the text. “Whatever the difficulties arising from divergences between the worlds of research and practice, and however effective the policy analyst or research broker is in overcoming them, the fact remains that the influence of governance research on practice depends on practitioners who appreciate its potential value. Practitioners have an influence on governance only to the extent that they comprehend the institutional contexts in which they operate and the opportunities for influence these contexts afford” (p. 176). Amen. A Two-Way Street: The Institutional Dynamics of the Modern Administrative State. By George A. Krause. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. 256p. $45.00. Larry B. Hill, University of Oklahoma George A. Krause has undertaken a statistical analysis of the relationship between the president and the Congress and the enforcement activities of two regulatory agencies: the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice for the years 1949–92. He finds that the president and the Congress often influenced each other, but neither of the political branches succeeded in dominating the bureaucracies. These findings are consistent with the interpretations of presidential-congressional-bureaucratic power of most journalists, sociologists, historians, political scientists, and public administration scholars. The findings are rank heresy, however, to one small group: the principal-agent theorists who set up shop within political science in the 1980s. They asserted that it was appropriate to apply the assumptions of organizational economics to the relationships between a political institution (the “principal”) and a bureaucracy (the “agent”). The main assumption was that the political principal could—or should—control the bureaucratic agent through “hierarchical” authority. Unfortunately, the theorists could not agree on the identity of the political principal; some said that the president was, or should be, in charge of the bureaucracy; some said Congress. When they belatedly discovered that the American system split power over the bureaucracy between the elected branches Vol. 96, No. 4 and that talk of the political principal was simplistic, some of the theorists developed a fallback position under which Congress and the president became “multiple principals.” The problem is that the concept of the president and the Congress as joint principals is an impermissible violation of the theory’s strictures, as this scenario illustrates: At the same time, two competing insurance companies (multiple principals) direct a salesperson (agent) to sell a client a single policy. No organizational economist would argue that the conditions necessary for a principal-agent relationship existed. But the principal-agent theorists in political science skillfully used their complex jargon and methodologies to deflect attention from the shortcomings of their assumptions and analyses. In recent years, however, several researchers— cited by Krause—have pinpointed those shortcomings. This book addresses the controversies spawned by the principal-agent approach. Krause’s research framework is distinctive in that he depicts the relationships among the main actors as being dynamic (they change over time) and interdependent (they constitute a system). Furthermore, bureaucracies may either be acted upon or initiate action—the “two-way street” notion of the title. When he used complex formulas to compare the outputs of the two agencies (administrative proceedings, investigations, and injunctive actions for the SEC; antitrust cases and investigations for the Antitrust Division) with the “budgetary-preference signals” coming from the president and the Congress (Office of Management and Budget requests and congressional appropriations), he found that the interrelations between the elected officials were complex: “In some instances the anticipated component of budgetary-preference signals shows that presidents may influence Congress, the latter may exert influence over the former, or they may jointly influence each other” (p. 106). Krause also found that bureaucracies reacted to the politicians’ attempts to control them with a variety of “sophisticated behaviors” that helped those bureaucracies to “shape their political environment. This is borne out by the empirical fact that the SEC and Antitrust Division each play a notable role in affecting the budgetary-preference signals received by each agency from its political principals” (p. 115). Krause’s study directly confronts the principal-agent approach, and his findings sharply contradict its assertions: “Both bureaucratic agencies investigated in this study display support for the notion that these institutions do not merely respond to democratic institutions in a Pavlovian fashion but instead actively shape their respective policy environments through their enforcement activities. In no single case is there empirical support for the conventional notion of political control over the bureaucracy that is found in principal-agent models espousing this perspective” (pp. 113–14). Those true believers who have not yet accepted that principal-agent theorizing has reached an intellectual cul de sac will find no comfort here. But, for three reasons, the importance of Krause’s findings does not shine through as clearly as it might in this book. First, Krause is often too deferential to principal-agent theorizing. For example, he repeatedly goes out of his way to find points of agreement with its prominent proponents, who are cited more often than appears appropriate. And, despite his anti–principal-agent theoretical framework, much of the analysis is conducted using principal-agent jargon. A book that uses with approval such terms as “multiple principals,” or simply “political principals,” many dozens of times bows to the influence of principal-agent theorizing, even if its research design and findings flatly contradict the theory. Second, although this is a short book—only 127 pages, exclusive of notes and appendices—it seems longer because the introductory chapters, the introduction and conclusion to the 825 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS substantive chapter, and the appendices contain much repetitive material, as does the concluding chapter. But readers must be wary of skimming passages that are mostly redundant because new material that may help clarify the difficult abstractions is sometimes interjected. The redundancies reduce the power of the book’s message. Third, the book is overlarded with jargon (not just principal-agent jargon) and with abstractions. For example, the author is enamored with “endogenous” and “exogenous,” which have a technical (and counterintuitive) meaning in terms of the statistical model, and the overuse of which may leave the reader confused. Furthermore, the style of presentation is altogether too abstract. For example, “policy innovations,” or “shocks,” or “perturbations” play an important role in the analysis. But determining exactly what is meant by the terms requires concentrated effort, and virtually all of the explanations are provided in abstract form—most clearly in the course of elaborating upon a complex equation on page 32. In the substantive chapter, we learn that the bureaucracies’ reactions to “shocks” show “sophisticated” and “strategic” behavior, which means that they exercise considerable degrees of autonomy from the president and Congress. But the lengthy discussion provides no illustration of this “sophisticated” behavior that would move us out of the realm of abstraction. Krause has made a significant contribution to our understanding of presidential-congressional-bureaucratic relationships. His major contribution is that he pounds another nail—perhaps the final one—in the coffin of principal-agent theorizing and brings us back to traditional political analysis, which understands that these relationships are highly complex and variable from one bureaucracy to another and from one policy area to another. Furthermore, he demonstrates that however important one of the political branches might be at a given time, American bureaucracies retain sufficient power resources so as to exercise significant degrees of political autonomy—but that political outcomes always are contingent. Judicial Review in State Supreme Courts: A Comparative Study. By Laura Langer. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 192p. $62.50 cloth, $20.95 paper. Donald R. Songer, University of South Carolina Interest in strategic approaches to an understanding of judicial decision making, including the implications of the separation of powers (SOP), has grown dramatically in recent years. Unfortunately, almost all the research on these SOP interactions has been limited to those involving the U.S. Supreme Court. Laura Langer’s book provides a refreshing alternative to the exclusive Supreme Court focus by examining the significance of separation of powers concerns for the exercise of judicial review by state supreme courts. Langer starts by making a convincing case for the importance of studying judicial review in state supreme courts. She demonstrates that these courts are important policymakers, tackling a number of important issue areas for which no review by the U.S. Supreme Court is possible. The basic thesis of this book is that judicial review in state supreme courts is shaped by the pursuit of political ambitions, the institutional rules and arrangements governing courts in the states, the nature of the policy adjudicated by the court, and the political context in which the courts operate. Strategic models of judicial behavior are developed to explain both agenda decisions of the courts and the decision on the merits stage. Under a strictly attitudinal model, judges would vote their personal ideological preferences without regard to the 826 December 2002 contextual and institutional features of state politics. In contrast, Langer argues that judges will be reluctant to overturn state laws in salient policy areas when other state elites hold divergent views unless there are institutional features that tend to shield the judges from the sanctions of other elites. To test these strategic models, Langer examines all constitutional challenges to state action in four issue areas decided by state supreme courts for the period 1970–93. She hypothesizes that the extent to which judges behave strategically will be directly related to the saliency of the issue under consideration. In the most ideologically salient area, campaign and election laws, the results largely fit the predictions of the strategic models. Most notably, courts are less likely to docket constitutional challenges to legislative decisions when the ideological distance between the court and other elected elites is large. However, the presence of institutional features that might protect courts, including a difficult constitutional amendment process and a judicial retention process in which judges do not need the direct support of either the governor or the legislature, increases the chances that a constitutional challenge will be docketed. In the decisions on the merits, the evidence is mixed. As predicted by the attitudinal model, the personal preferences of the judges are strongly related to their votes, while the ideological distance between the court and other elites does not have the effect predicted by strategic models. However, several institutional features that might protect judges from retaliation by other elites do increase the chance that a challenged law will be overturned. For the least salient policy area, welfare laws, agendasetting decisions are much more consistent with an attitudinal explanation. Most notably, as the ideological distance between the court and other elites increases, the probability that the court will hear a constitutional challenge increases. However, at the merits stage the results are inconclusive. Overall, this book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of courts in the American political system. The focus of most of the previous literature on the U.S. Supreme Court has made it impossible to adequately understand the role of institutional features and, consequently, has made it impossible to adequately test strategic models of judicial decision making. In general, the design of this study is more sophisticated than the design of most “tests” of either the attitudinal or strategic models of U.S. Supreme Court decision making, and as a result, its findings may suggest new insights for understanding Supreme Court behavior in a broader perspective. For example, the findings that state supreme courts under certain conditions will engage in strategic, rather than strictly attitudinal, voting raises questions about the widely assumed (e.g., see Segal and Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model, 1993) but untested theory that the factors necessary for attitudinal voting on the U.S. Supreme Court include docket control and its status as a court whose decisions are not subject to further judicial review. In contrast, the widespread finding of extensive attitudinal voting on the U.S. Supreme Court would be predicted from the findings of Langer’s study that a number of institutional features possessed by the Court all decrease the probability of strategic voting. Among those features are the presence of an intermediate appellate court, long judicial terms, the difficulty of the executive or legislative branches to affect the retention of the judges, and the difficulty of constitutional amendment. This study further enhances our understanding of the effects of separation of powers by demonstrating that the effects that vary substantially across issue areas depend on the saliency of the issue. It is unfortunate that the importance of issue saliency is absent from most studies of separation of powers effects on the U.S. Supreme Court. American Political Science Review The careful design, extensive data collection, and rigorous analysis make Langer’s study an important contribution to the understanding of strategic decision making by appellate courts. Nevertheless, some of the choices on analytical design and operationalization of variables tend to reduce the impact of what remains a fine study in spite of these limitations. Most disappointing, the manner in which the “legal” variables are operationalized makes it difficult to draw any significant conclusions on the relative impact of the legal model versus the impacts of strategic versus pure attitudinal models. The key legal variables are whether or not the court’s opinion relies on independent state grounds and on the level of scrutiny employed (see p. 52). Unfortunately, neither of these variables is independent of the decision, and thus it is inappropriate to use them to “explain” those decisions. Less troublesome, the methods sections need to more clearly define some of the variables. In particular, many readers will not be familiar with the measure of judge ideology adopted (see p. 44) and may need further assurances that the ideology of judges and the ideology of other state elites are really measured according to a common metric that makes it reasonable to compute distance scores between the two measures. Finally, while the direct effects of the independent variables in the models are interesting and theoretically important, it would have been useful to explore the interactions between judge ideology and/or ideological distance and some of the institutional variables. The Dynamics of Rules: Change in Written Organizational Codes. By James G. March, Martin Schulz, and Xueguang Zhou. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 228p. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University James March, Martin Schulz, and Xueguang Zhou address the fascinating question of how rules evolve in a complex organization with a unique data set. Stanford University was founded in the decades before the turn of the last century. The authors searched and coded a vast Stanford archive of materials on rules related to student contact, the student honor system, faculty appointment and tenure procedures, faculty governance, and finally rules related to accounting, purchasing, and other administrative functions of a university. They are able to examine questions concerning the external and internal stimulants to rule creation, change, and suspension. No other book equals this one in regard to the breadth of the questions asked and the mode of analysis. The basic approach of March and his colleagues is to examine how rules evolve over time in response to internal or external problems. They see rules as recording history and accumulating the learning that individuals in an organization acquire, including the ways to cope with repetitive problems. Because they see rules as a written residue of past efforts to regularize responses to internal and external problems, they argue that one has to do historical analysis in order to understand the problems that generated the creation or modification of the rules at an earlier period. Thus, they explore a wide diversity of external or internal factors occurring over time that are posited to affect rule origin or change. Some rules may be very useful in solving a particular problem in a specific era but become an unused residue at a later time. In other words, all organizations may have rules-in-form that are rarely used, due to the fact that the problem-set they help to solve has changed over time and no one has had their attention called to the fact that a rule is no longer necessary. Vol. 96, No. 4 Further, the authors address important questions related to organizational structure and change. They develop competing hypotheses that are analyzed with the fantastic data set they have developed. One set of competing hypotheses relates to the effects of changes in one rule on changes in other rules. Given assumptions about bounded rationality, a core question has to do with how members of a complex organization pay attention to the possibility of changing rules. The four hypotheses they develop are 1) The Contagion Hypothesis: “Changes in one rule generate attention to other rules, thus increase changes elsewhere”; 2) The Competition Hypothesis: “Changes in one rule distract attention from other rules, thus decrease changes elsewhere”; 3) The Multiplier Hypothesis: “Changes in one rule necessitate changes in others, thus increase changes elsewhere”; and 4) The Substitution Hypothesis: “Changes in one rule substitute for changes in others, thus decrease changes elsewhere” (p. 70). In addition to these four hypotheses, they address a host of others that focus on when rules are adopted, how fast they are modified, and when they are dropped. They ask whether internal sources of problems related to conflict of interest or to technical coordination are most responsible for rule changes. They also examine environmental factors, including the proportion of the university’s budget stemming from federal government sources. They use sophisticated multivariant statistics to examine their long series of event histories. Among the surprising findings of this study is that increases in federal government funding are associated with negative rates of rule revision rather than positive rates, as most organization theorists would expect (p. 187). They also find that rule change is faster in meeting diverse pressure from the technical environment (involving accounting and purchasing) than it is in meeting the political pressures that exist on all university campuses (p. 190). Their findings also challenge some of the conventional views that changes in rules are stimulated primarily by the effort to manage complexity. They find “very few size and program effects in any of our models of rule birth and rule change” (p. 170). Scholars interested in the study of institutional arrangements will find this a valuable part of their library. The methodology is one that needs to be applied to a diversity of organizations. Following an organization from its very founding is an excellent way of studying the growth of rules as a function, both of the internal coordination problems of a growing organization and the external problems that any university has faced, especially during the twentieth century. The concept of rules as “carriers of knowledge” turns out to be a powerful way of approaching the study of rules. Institutional theorists with both a rational choice and a sociological approach to organizations will find valuable aspects in this book. Chapter 1 presents a healthy skepticism about the optimality of rules and the presumption made by some that changes in rules usually result in improvements in outcomes rather than the reverse. Not surprisingly, March and colleagues adopt a strong assumption that individuals use a logic of appropriateness. They assume that individuals “act to fulfill identities, defining what is implied by a particular identity or what is expected, socially or morally, in a particular situation” (p. 6). The identities of individuals, however, are somewhat too strongly presumed to stem from rules. After the recent Enron scandal, one has a hard time accepting the following: “Rules define organizational identities and boundaries and stabilize linkages with other organizations. Accountants do what proper accountants do. Managers do what proper managers do. Each follows rules that define appropriate behavior for the role he or she plays” (p. 9). If only that were to have characterized the behavior of the accountants and managers of Enron and other 827 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS complex organizations, major financial disasters would have been avoided. With a focus on rule change rather than rule following, Chapters 2 through 8 go far beyond the restrictive assumptions of Chapter 1 to make this a truly pathbreaking book that will have a long impact on the study of rules. With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power. By Kenneth R. Mayer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 298p. $39.95. George A. Krause, University of South Carolina Given the recent events in the realm of presidential policymaking over the past decade, Kenneth R. Mayer has produced a timely book chronicling the use of executive orders that will be of considerable interest to political scientists, historians, legal scholars, and journalists alike. Existing research on the topic of executive orders has been largely addressed by constitutional legal scholars who possess little interest in emphasizing a generalizable understanding of this tool of executive authority. In recent years, a small yet growing-body of political science research has tried to obtain a social scientific– motivated portrait regarding the institutional and behavioral dimensions of executive order issuance by presidents. Mayer makes a strong case for using new institutional economics (NIE) as a “way of making sense of the wide range of executive orders issued over the years” (p. 28). The NIE theoretical approach that Mayer applies to presidential leadership takes a long-term view, compared to other works on presidential leadership, by positing “that presidents can achieve substantive (policy) results not simply by giving commands, but by creating and altering institutional structures and processes” (p. 29). This book is comprised of three distinct components. The first is a general explanatory model of executive order activity by postwar U.S. presidents. The second is the application of NIE theory to several important cases where executive orders have strengthened presidential power in executive branch administration during the twentieth century: The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 and Regulatory Review in the form of Executive Order (EO) 11821 in 1975 (requiring executive agencies to conduct price inflation impact statements on major regulations); EO 12291 in 1981 (requiring executive agencies to apply a cost–benefit analysis litmus test to determine the efficacy of proposed rules and regulations); EO 12498 in 1985 (requiring executive agencies under EO 12291 to publish an annual index of anticipated regulatory actions with the purpose of providing the Office of Management and Budget [OMB] with advance notice of new regulations that the latter could do away with if they were deemed to duplicate or conflict with existing rules); and EO 12866 in 1993 (imposing a 90-day time limit on OMB to review proposed rules, while also limiting this activity to those likely to impose more than $100 million in costs). The third component is an analysis of legal authority underlying executive orders in the areas of civil rights and foreign policy. The first component, pertaining to empirical examination of the aggregate use of executive orders by postwar U.S. presidents, is met with mixed success. The statistical model is both sophisticated and well conceived from an econometric and model specification standpoint and goes beyond existing studies based on “determinants of executive orders.” The use of distributed lag effects to capture important shocks that might affect executive order issuance is a novel refinement to the current state of empirical research on this topic. Regrettably, the empirics are not connected in any meaningful way to NIE theory, which is the central thesis to this book, but instead 828 December 2002 appear as a rather loose set of empirical generalizations with the subsequent results interpreted accordingly (see pp. 87–102). For instance, inclusion of the unified and divided government is not linked to strategic action within the context of executive order issuance in accordance with NIE theory. Relatedly, these findings appear to show mixed support for such a relationship (see Tables 3.4 and 3.5, pp. 98–100). Moreover, there is no inclusion of presidential policy preferences into the statistical model, save for dummy variables accounting for individual administrations consonant with the idiosyncratic presidency (pp. 87–94). Thus, the reader is left to wonder where presidents’ policy preferences lie in relation to other institutional actors, and its implications for presidential action in a system of separated and shared powers that is commonplace in existing research using NIE as a theoretical paradigm. The second component of this book makes some progress in our general understanding of the design and issuance of executive orders, yet falls short of reaching its full potential since it does not constitute an original theoretical contribution to the study of the presidency. Specifically, the theoretical insights imparted by the author are hardly novel for those already familiar with the literature on the institutional presidency penned by Terry Moe (and various collaborators) over the past decade and a half, for example, the view that “executive orders are an instrument of power that presidents have used to control policy, establish and maintain institutions, shape agendas, manage constituent relationships, and keep control of their political fate generally” (p. 28). This view not only is taken from Moe and Wilson (Terry M. Moe and Scott A. Wilson, “Presidents and the Politics of Structure,” Law and Contemporary Problems 57 [Winter/Spring 1994]: 1–44), as aptly noted by the author in a corresponding endnote (Chapter 1, note 128, pp. 235–36), but is also practically indistinguishable from Moe’s related NIE-motivated work on presidents’ responsive competence of the executive branch (Terry M. Moe, “The Politicized Presidency,” in John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson, eds., New Directions in American Politics, 1985), and presidential advantage over congressional institutions via unilateral action (Terry M. Moe, “The Presidency and the Bureaucracy: The Presidential Advantage,” in Michael Nelson, ed., The Presidency and the Political System, 1995; Terry M. Moe and William Howell, “The Presidential Power of Unilateral Action,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 15 [March 1999]: 132–79). While the author’s use of NIE theory to explain these case studies seems plausible, they do not add any new twists or original insights of their own that constitute a unique departure from our current theoretical understanding of the institutional presidency. Furthermore, the author’s theoretical argument could have been enhanced by explicitly considering rival explanations or hypotheses that might account for the evolution of presidential use of executive orders. For instance, the growing institutionalization of the presidency might not empower the officeholder in a monotonic fashion as implied by the author (p. 220), but instead serve as a double-edged sword that hinders presidential action as these structures develop and proliferate beyond an optimal size. Thus, executive orders are used less for discretionary policy purposes in such instances, but instead increasingly are employed for taming the institutional structures that were originally intended to provide the president with greater policymaking authority vis-à-vis other institutional actors. While the author is correct to infer that their NIE theoretical account is a valid way to examine how postwar U.S. presidents have utilized executive orders, it is by no means the only or, perhaps, even best story to account for this activity. Greater scrutiny to alternative accounts American Political Science Review would have placed the author’s theoretical argument on much stronger footing than is the case here. The final component relating to the legal basis for executive orders is this volume’s greatest strength. In both the areas of foreign policy (Chapter 5) and civil rights (Chapter 6), the author does an admirable job of bridging normative constitutional law analysis to new institutionalism. In doing so, this treatment provides an alternative explanation for the standard normative legal perspectives that is less nuanced (e.g., see Ruth P. Morgan. The President and Civil Rights Policy-Making by Executive Order, 1970; Philip J. Cooper, “By Order of the President: Administration by Executive Order and Proclamation,” Administration and Society 18 [May 1986]: 232–62) by contending that presidents purposively used executive orders to constrain the feasible set of potential policies in a manner that is more preferable to them. One specific compelling instance involves President Eisenhower’s issuance of Executive Order 10656 in 1956 that established the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, which was designed to halt Senator Mike Mansfield’s (D-MT) legislation that would establish a new centralized joint congressional oversight committee of intelligence activities (pp. 170–71). This is just one example among several in this component of the book, where issues of constitutional legality and purposive institutional action by presidents are conjoined in both a thoughtful and novel manner. Although With the Stroke of a Pen falls short of making a novel theoretical contribution to the study of the presidency, this book admirably succeeds as an important substantive contribution to understanding how and why presidents use the oft-overlooked but essential tool of executive orders as a policymaking means to wield their influence. For this reason, Mayer has written a book that should be of keen interest to anyone wishing to learn about how executive orders fit into the larger landscape of the institutional presidency. Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve: The Politics of American Monetary Policy-Making. By Irwin L. Morris. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 190p. $45.00 cloth, $22.95 paper. John Williams, University of California at Riverside Political scientists have been fascinated with the role of the Federal Reserve in making monetary policy. It has long been recognized that the Fed has a tremendous amount of power for a regulatory agency that has so much independence from political bodies. Students of comparative monetary institutions have marveled at the contrast of United States policy to that of the rest of the world, with the exception of Germany’s Bundesbank. Yet political scientists and economists continue to try to identify how politics shapes American monetary policy. Irwin Morris’s book offers a major corrective to some of the flaws of earlier efforts. Morris diverges on most extant literature on U.S. monetary policy by taking a multi-institutional approach. Most research is either executive, bureaucracy, or Congress oriented, but he explicitly analyzes the interaction of the president, the Fed, and congressional coalitions. The basic theoretical approach depends on a unidimensional assumption that Fed policy can be aligned from the left to right, from easy monetary policy to tight monetary policy. The process of the basic model is as follows. The Fed chooses a policy course, Congress decides whether to overturn this policy, the president then may veto Congress’s action, and Congress can override. I find this model interesting for what some would conclude to be an odd reason—its lack Vol. 96, No. 4 of empirical veracity. Let me explain the latter and then I will elucidate the former. Everyone knows that Congress has been a very interested observer of monetary policy, especially in the turbulent period of the 1970s stagflation. There were threats from Congress to eliminate the independence of the Fed, threats that were never implemented. Of course, Congress has enacted many policies that have affected financial markets and thus the Fed’s ability to make monetary policy. But the basic function of the Fed has remained relatively unchanged since its inception. That said, Morris’s basic model leads to keen insights. The basic model is one of hypotheticals. These hypotheticals determine the action of the Fed. That is, counterfactuals are what drive the results. If the Fed does not follow an equilibrium policy, then Congress may override it. But the Fed’s actions depend on the institutional situation involving Congress and the president. While the theoretical analysis is not particularly sophisticated in a technical sense, his willingness to address the institutional process in such an abstract way is very intriguing. And I believe it pays off in his empirical analysis. Morris’s multi-institutional model also can be used for a more traditional focus. Many conclude that a major power of the president is in the power to appoint members of the Fed. The author convincingly argues that this is not so because the Fed’s ideal point only marginally influences monetary policy direction. The evidence is convincing, and it is certainly consistent with recent trends in Fed policy. This book is rich with empirical data. Morris produces an econometric model that attempts to show how congressional policy positions influence Fed policy. He creates a “pivot” variable from ADA scores and shows that this variable influences the real Federal Funds rate when controlling for many political and economic variables. I would quibble with the specification in the econometric analysis, and the analysis has all the problems associated with a reactions function model. In addition, I would like to see more dynamics in the model, as the author is forced to use generalized least squares to deal with serial correlation in the disturbance terms. It would be nice to see a Granger causality test so that we would have more confidence, in the presence of an analysis controlling for more dynamics, that the pivot variable would still be able to predict the real Federal Funds rate. But the analysis is certainly credible, and given that it derives from the theory, is at least a good first cut. All this said, the analysis is based on a sophisticated view of monetary policy. However, it could be more sophisticated. Among monetary theorists, there are many very innovative ways in which scholars have been trying to identify monetary policy. The idea that the real Federal Funds rate is a good indicator because the Fed controls it is a bit irrelevant. The issue is that we need to uncover when rate increases are caused by policy changes and when rate increases are due to external factors. This is very difficult. So I do not fault Morris with using this measure of policy, but it would be nice if he made clear that it is, to some extent—according to whomever you talk with—faulty. Rather than fully defending the measure as he does in Chapter 6, it would be better to admit the flaws, balance the evidence, and give the results. His finding about the effect of the pivot variable is important—if submitted to more sensitivity analyses—and at least provides some validity about the choice of his dependent variable. Very useful is the analysis of the organizational characteristics of the Fed in relation to Congress and the president. The synthesis of various ideas about the institutional position of the Fed is by itself a major contribution. Morris clearly is one of the most knowledgeable scholars about the institutional position of the Fed. Indeed, it is his keen knowledge of the institution that leads him to develop a multi-institutional 829 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS approach. Because the Fed is in such a unique institutional position, his clarifications, observations, and interpretations of the organizational processes that determine Fed behavior and policy are in themselves a major contribution. In summary, this book has much to recommend it. There is a tendency among scholars to focus on a single causal explanation of policy. Morris recognized in his research that this would be a major mistake in trying to understand monetary policy in the United States. He uses rational choice theory to make predictions about policy choice, and his empirical analyses support his theoretical models. If a student came to me wanting to study the Fed, this would be the first book I would recommend reading. Constituting Workers, Protecting Women: Gender, Law, and Labor in the Progressive and New Deal Years. By Julie Novkov. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 336p. $44.50. Carol Nackenoff, Swarthmore College Trained in both law and political science, Julie Novkov has made a major contribution to an understanding of the transitions from the Progressive Era to the New Deal that will be especially important for new institutionalist scholars of the Supreme Court, for students of American political development, and for scholars of gender and politics, women’s history, and labor history. It also instructs those activists both inside and outside the legal community who turn to the courts. This is a richly theorized work that engages in a careful investigation ranging well beyond the confines of Supreme Court case law. Novkov’s data come from all reported cases in state and federal courts from 1873 to 1937 that involved legal regulation of workers in the workplace. She finds the Supreme Court’s position in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish foreshadowed by earlier rulings in state high courts. She also draws on arguments made before the Court and the arguments of advocates. One new argument Novkov makes is that West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, a pivotal case of the 1937 New Deal Court, is actually a culmination of a line of development that began even prior to Lochner, rather than a repudiation of it. Reading against the traditional portrait in which West Coast Hotel is a radical break with the past and a capitulation of the Court to the will of Congress and the President, Novkov argues that the innovation lay in the extension of the standard developed for female workers to all workers. The new framework considers the extent to which the legal community came to envision male workers “as subjects in need of protection” (p. 270) as well. By “centering the gender of regulated workers in the analysis of the legal battles” (p. 2), Novkov instructs previous analysts of this era, including Howard Gillman, whose institutionalist approach she draws upon (The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence, 1993), how the intersection of women’s history and labor history that prevailed in Lochner still helped direct the Court’s reasoning in West Coast Hotel. While Bruce Ackerman, Robert Post, Cass Sunstein, Howard Gillman, and Barry Cushman have also contributed importantly to revisioning this era, they have not, in Novkov’s view, recognized the centrality of gender in framing the debate over worker liberty and public interest. The author also draws on scholars who have recently been reweaving constitutional narratives to take account of the significant role played by other actors in the interpretive community (e.g., Ronald Kahn, “Institutional Norms and the Historical Development of Supreme Court Politics: Changing ‘Social Facts’ and Doctrinal Development,” in The Supreme Court 830 December 2002 in American Politics: New Institutionalist Interpretations, ed. Howard Gillman and Cornell Clayton, 1999; Charles Epp, “External Pressure and the Supreme Court’s Agenda,” in Supreme Court Decision-Making: New Institutionalist Approaches, ed. Cornell Clayton and Howard Gillman, 1999), engaging in a rich examination of what has been recently termed “outside-in” scholarship. Novkov’s work extends the recent body of scholarship on the role of maternalists in shaping the modern welfare state (e.g., Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 1995). The roots of modern employment law and the modern doctrine of liberty “have grown in deeply gendered ground,” she argues (p. 35). In fact, “much of the doctrinal framework for the modern interventionist state arose through battles over female workers’ proper relationships with the state” (p. 13). Novkov is centrally concerned with the questions of how doctrinal change occurs. This is a richly complex process in which judges do not monopolize control; the process extends beyond the formal boundaries of law. Attorneys and activists also help shape the discussion over doctrine; in the Progressive Era, social science research conducted within a maternalist framework played an important role. During periods of contestation, decisions leave ambiguities and lacunae in doctrine that are taken up and used by other actors involved in the process of interpretation. Investigating doctrinal change requires Novkov to engage textual analysis of cases and briefs, as well as social debate over protective legislation. The “period of negotiation,” during which courts were addressing attempts, both inside and outside the legal community, to balance and channel tensions and conflicts occasioned by the rise of a modern industrial economy and a modern regulatory state, begins with Myra Bradwell’s attempt to use the new Fourteenth Amendment to argue for substantive rights (liberty and equality). Novkov ends this period of negotiation with West Coast Hotel but continues her consideration briefly into the early 1940s. A key concept in Novkov’s analytical framework is that of “nodes of conflict.” These are contested narrative spaces, or “moments in the development of doctrine during which the various groups of actors who have access to the legal community struggle among themselves and with each other to establish their interpretations of a particular legal concept or phrase as the dominant norm” (p. 16). She organizes her book around four such nodes or periods of investigation, devoting a chapter to each of them. The first node, from 1873 to roughly 1897, is described as a period of “generalized balancing” between Fourteenth Amendment liberty and more traditional police power, where the courts did not consider statutes in specifically gendered terms. The second period, from 1898 to roughly 1910, is characterized in terms of “specific balancing” between workers’ liberties and the state’s power to regulate; judges and lawyers began to advance a separate analysis for cases involving protective legislation for women. The third node of conflict, from 1911 until 1923, represents a shift toward “labor-centered analysis,” in which women’s legislation was foregrounded and courts looked at the laborers themselves that statutes sought to protect. Doctrinal lines in litigation concentrated primarily on women’s characteristics, more than on the issues they faced as members of the working class. The final period, from Adkins (1923) through West Coast Hotel, was a period of “gendered rebalancing,” in which debate over the legitimacy of minimum wages took place in the context of a larger question over “whether the state had the legal capacity to regulate the terms and conditions of labor for all workers” (p. 183). Novkov argues that this debate featured gender rather than class. Whether or not the periodization of these debates is quite as neatly delineated as she argues, the American Political Science Review identification of areas of contestation in these four different nodes of conflict is extremely useful. If Novkov’s story is one in which New Deal workers are brought into the logic of protection developed during a struggle involving women’s labor—so that class piggybacks on gender—is there any sense in which this story is a partial victory for and vindication of the maternalist strategy? For Novkov, “some paths bear more risks of co-optation by hostile actors than others” (p. 265), and maternalism was such a path. Women’s organizations saw their political advocacy transformed into legal language, but Novkov tells a cautionary tale: “[R]eformers need to think carefully about the legal categories they create and how the next set of arguments down the road will transform these categories” (p. 265). Maternalist feminists should have been more wary of their allies; some judges and pro-regulation attorneys-general were seeking to validate statutes reinforcing traditional gender roles. Novkov yearns for a deeper rebalancing on the basis of gender than maternalists were able to achieve—one less dependent on the state’s interest in reinforcing and protecting women’s maternal roles. While one could wish for a fuller discussion of the consequences of the West Coast Hotel perspective for workers and for the relationship between work and citizenship in the New Deal era, Constituting Workers, Protecting Women is a powerful piece of scholarship. Democracy in Suburbia. By J. Eric Oliver. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 263p. $47.50 cloth, $17.95 paper. Dennis R. Judd, University of Illinois at Chicago In this pathbreaking book, J. Eric Oliver proposes to answer an ambitious and important question: Has suburbanization brought about a decline of civic engagement in America? This question is, obviously, immensely important because more than half of all Americans live in suburbs. Whatever they think and how they vote and however much they participate in the civic life of their communities has enormous consequences, not only within the suburbs but also for the nation as a whole. The question is also consequential in light of the national debate that seems to have been provoked by the recent work on social capital. As Oliver notes, Robert Putnam has blamed suburbanization for part of the alleged loss in social capital in America. The general claim that suburbs have killed community and civic engagement is hardly new, and it has recently been amplified by (among others) advocates of the new urbanism. Oliver boldly states that “such claims are without any empirical basis” (p. 2), and he takes it as his task to supply the missing evidence that might answer the question. In doing so, he has produced a remarkable book, literally the first one ever published to present definitive evidence on the crucial issue of the impact of the suburbs on American democracy. Oliver derives most of his data on political activity from the 1990 Citizen Participation Study conducted in 1989 and 1990. More than 15,000 Americans were interviewed by telephone to ascertain their voluntary and political activities and demographic characteristics, and more than 2,500 follow-up interviews were conducted to gather more detailed information. By merging data from this study with city- and metropolitanlevel census information on economic and social characteristics and data from the 1996 American National Elections Study, Oliver has constructed a unique series of data sets. By constructing contextual models employing multivariate regression analysis, he is able to bring to bear a formidable array of evidence to show that suburbia does influence civic participation. Vol. 96, No. 4 Scholars have long assumed, and asserted, that small communities promote personal connections and civic participation. Oliver’s evidence bears this out: His data show that the residents of small communities tend to contact local officials more, to attend board meetings and meetings of organizations, to vote more frequently in local elections, and to participate in informal civic activities. In general, these relationships hold even when social context varies significantly; city size matters to some degree, for example, regardless of varying education levels. Things get much more ambiguous when Oliver considers the influence of social-class segregation on civic participation. He offers convincing evidence that metropolitan areas are highly segregated between rich and poor, and that municipal boundaries tend to match up with these patterns. He shows that populations trapped within poorer municipalities tend to participate at a lower rate, a finding that will surprise no one. But he also shows, somewhat unexpectedly, that people living in homogeneous affluent suburbs also participate less. Why is this so? According to Oliver, “the exclusionary practices that help create and sustain a suburb’s affluence also limit the range of social problems and political conflicts within their borders” (p. 95). Homogeneity breeds boredom, while diversity within a governmental unit creates issues that sustain residents’ interest. This finding offers a refreshing new angle on an old debate over the merits and consequences of governmental fragmentation. Should the suburbs be organized to encourage political engagement across class and racial lines, or should they be regarded merely as a marketplace offering people the “choice” of sorting themselves out? Not only does Oliver contest the basic premise of the public choice model by pointing out that only the affluent can exercise any reasonably free market choice (a familiar argument); he also argues— from his evidence—that political fragmentation breeds an escape from politics that erodes a “sense of connection and obligation to the larger society” (p. 98). The relationships between racial segregation and civic participation appear to be more complex. Oliver’s data show that the residents of predominantly white cities tend to participate less than do people living in racially mixed places, but there are many nuances. Many racially mixed cities may be “overpoliticized” because they tend to be more crowded and more beset by a variety of social problems. This fact may encourage people to escape to more peaceful pastures. When they do so, they may be striking a bargain to give up political engagement altogether. Near the end of this book, Oliver reaches the conclusion that “America’s current arrangement of local political institutions is not conducive to maximizing the civic capacity of its communities or promoting the benefits of civic engagement for its citizens” (pp. 2–6). Rarely do they live up to Oliver’s “authentic governing principle” that “America’s municipalities and other local institutions . . . should function so as to bring together most people within a geographic vicinity to collectively solve problems related to their area” (p. 5). Nor do contemporary governance arrangements nurture what Oliver calls “civic capacity,” which he defines as “the extent to which a community’s members are engaged in both political and civic activities” (p. 6). Are these goals so important that they justify a renewed commitment to reform metropolitan governance? Or are Americans more attached to the metropolis as marketplace than as fertile ground for civic engagement? Oliver’s book allows us to bring a fresh perspective to such questions. It virtually forces the reader to step outside old debates and assumptions and examine anew the consequences of America’s preference for fragmented governmental arrangements. 831 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition. By Austin Sarat. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 314p. $29.95. Andrew Norris, The University of Pennsylvania As the United States begins fighting a war devoted not to the overthrow or liberation of a particular government but, rather, as Mr. Bush put it, to rid the world of “evildoers,” it is easy to forget that our state is also busy at home killing people in the service of a similar oversimplified moralism. Austin Sarat’s most recent book is, then, an important reminder. Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976 the country’s appetite for it has steadily increased: More than 3,600 people now sit on death row, and their numbers continue to swell. While there have been some welcome signs of a slackening in the nation’s tolerance for the killing of the mentally retarded and the innocent, the Rehnquist court has been streamlining the appeal process in an attempt, in the Chief Justice’s words, to “get on with it.” Sarat rightly protests against the ensuing compromises of the rights of those caught up in the system, a disproportionate number of whom are, as everyone knows, poor and black. He argues that routine killing by the state is not just illiberal in its corrosive effect upon the Bill of Rights but in conflict with the institutions and spirit of our democracy. Where democracy calls for a willingness to seek reconciliation and the improvement of institutions through dialogue, and hence a willingness to admit that one’s own perspective is limited and one’s own judgment fallible, capital punishment requires that we assume the mantle of infallibility, and it is sustained by a spirit of rage that it in turn nurtures. One of the strongest features of Sarat’s book is its insistence that none of this is accidental: “State killing . . . is part of a strategy of governance that makes us fearful and dependent on the illusion of state protection, that divides rather than unites, that promises simple solutions to complex problems” (p. 247). It is easier and less anxiety-producing to tell ourselves familiar comic book stories about the battle of good and evil than to get down to “the difficult, often frustrating work of understanding what in our society breeds such heinous acts of violence” (p. 14). And if we believe the stories we tell, it is hard to imagine living without the protection of a powerful and threatening state that can match the violent forces arrayed against us. For those who profit politically or financially from the present forms of that society, that is all to the better. Protego ergo obligo. Sarat’s response in this passionate and thoughtful book is to advocate what he terms “a new abolitionism,” one that would eschew appeals to the sanctity of life, the moral horror of a state killing its own citizens, or the inherent cruelty of the death penalty. Each of these approaches focuses on the victims of state killing, and in part as a result of this they have all had little success in moving the American electorate, two-thirds of whom still support the death penalty (p. 12). Given this, we are better off challenging state killing on its own terms, instead of contesting the moral values and institutions with which it is bound up. Following the lead of Justice Blackmun’s 1994 Callins v. Collins dissent and the American Bar Association’s 1997 call for a moratorium on state killing, Sarat argues that the death penalty as currently administered violates due process, undermines our central legal values and the legitimacy of the law itself, and cannot reasonably be expected to be applied in ways that do not reflect the racism prevalent in our society (pp. 253, 255–56). The admission of none of this requires one to feel sympathy with the men and women on death row. Sarat hardly limits himself to such arguments, however. His book considers state killing from a wide variety of political, moral, and analytic perspectives, and with 54 pages of notes 832 December 2002 it engages the relevant literature in political theory, public law, penology, and even narrative theory. All of this allows it to provide thoughtful considerations of topics as varied as the representation of capital trials and executions in popular culture, the attempt to make state killing (appear) painless so as to distinguish its victims from the victims of non-statesponsored killing, the contribution and self-understanding of death penalty lawyers, the role the jury plays in the legitimization of state killing in a democracy and the forces that encourage the members of juries to play that role, the manner in which the victim’s rights movement draws upon a 60s-style distrust of the government even as it turns to the government for redress, and the way in which the recent allowance of victim impact statements in the sentencing stages of capital trials blurs the lines of private revenge and public retribution upon which the validity of public justice itself is built. It is in defense of such a distinction that Sarat contests Wendy Lesser’s claim that executions ought not to be televised: Capital punishment is by definition a public matter, involving as it does the state’s response to the violation of its laws; it follows that it should take place in public. Moreover, performing executions in public will prevent us from continuing to hide from the truth of what we are doing. While Sarat is certainly right that our present hypocrisy serves us ill, not all of his readers will share his confidence in the American people here, and many will suspect that the general public would either become inured to or actually enjoy the sight of “evildoers” being killed. In the course of a discussion of the role of narrative construction and preservation in capital trials, Sarat cites Thurgood Marshall’s wise observation that “whether a punishment is cruel and unusual depends, not on whether its mere mention ‘shocks the conscience and sense of justice of the people,’ but on whether people who were fully informed as to the purposes of the penalty and its liabilities would find the penalty shocking, unjust, and unacceptable’” (pp. 182–83). Such education would, I think, be necessary for us to see what a televised execution is showing—and not showing. Sarat suggests that the debate that televised executions would provoke might be education enough (p. 208). And one might point to the secrecy within which the government has shrouded both executions and—since the Vietnam war— warfare as evidence that the state at least agrees with Sarat that the sight of our fellow citizens dying galvanizes us against the state that is killing them. But, as Sarat himself demonstrates, the state’s search for a painless form of execution has led to the widespread embrace of a technique that “shows” almost nothing. One cannot feel confident that the slight exhale of breath of a man being killed by lethal injection will have the effect that the pictures of soldiers dying in Vietnam did. However, even if this objection is well taken, it hardly compromises the value of Sarat’s book. Because if what we need is an education in the politics and injustice of capital punishment before we can (truly) see what we are doing, Sarat’s book is an important contribution to that education. Is the Fetus a Person? A Comparison of Policies Across the Fifty States. By Jean Reith Schroedel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. 256p. $29.95. Alesha E. Doan, California Polytechnic State University The conceptual—and legal—division between a woman and a fetus is most recently rooted in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which established the trimester framework designed to balance a woman’s right to privacy with the state’s interest in protecting potential life. Prior to Roe, a woman and her fetus were legally viewed as having identical interests because of their biological tie. The trimester framework, American Political Science Review however, established a precedent for viewing the maternalfetal relationship as an adversarial one, where a woman and her fetus have conflicting interests. Indeed, as states demonstrate their willingness to protect fetal health—via restrictions on access to abortion—the fetus is increasingly being viewed as a separate entity that is entitled to protection and recognition as a person. The questions of when and under what conditions a fetus is a person have policy implications beyond the scope of the abortion debate. Jean Reith Schroedel’s Is the Fetus a Person? is a wellresearched book that makes a unique contribution to our understanding of reproductive policy. Schroedel examines three seemingly unrelated reproductive policies that are actually linked by the question of fetal personhood—abortion, substance abuse by pregnant women, and third-party fetal killing. While these policies are related, the political rhetoric used to discuss them, and the policy outcomes regulating each, is radically different. Exploring the inconsistencies and differences—within and across states’ policies—regarding the legal status of a fetus is the crux of this book. For example, why is the state more inclined to establish abortion policies protecting a fetus—essentially granting it greater personhood status—in the third trimester of pregnancy, but reticent to create the same protection from domestic violence? Similarly, why do states’ policy approaches to substance abuse by pregnant women vary from punitive-based policies, which view the interests of the mother and fetus separately, to treatmentbased policies where they are treated as having identical interests? To answer these questions (and many more), she provides a thorough historical account of fetal policies and, it is important to note, amasses an impressive data set examining each policy area. Schroedel begins by linking together abortion, substance abuse by pregnant women, and third-party fetal killing by providing a detailed, analytical history of fetal personhood throughout the centuries. She explores the moral and legal nexus of these three issues, highlighting significant theological shifts, that have influenced policy development over time. Relatedly, as technology has advanced, the state has accorded a fetus more legal rights and an elevated personhood status, yet the personhood status of women has remained fairly stagnant over time, providing the state with more leverage to regulate the behavior of women. She uses the historical lessons to hint at an important empirical and theoretical finding in her research: Viewing the fetal-maternal relationship as one of competing interests leads to poor policymaking for prenatal drug exposure and third-party fetal battering (women and their fetuses fundamentally have a joint interest in ending addiction or battering). In the next two chapters, Schroedel examines each policy in detail, attempting to answer the underlying question of whose rights—or personhood—matters more, a woman’s or a fetus’s. She compiles state-level data on abortion, fetal substance abuse, and third-party fetal battering policies. Unlike in other studies, the author does not simply count the number of policies in each state; rather, she creates indices, which weigh the significance of every regulation within the three policy areas. Chapters 3 and 4 conclude with a comprehensive and systematic picture of abortion, fetal substance abuse, and fetal battering policies across the United States. Schroedel begins to unravel the variance in states’ policy responses to these issues. Using rhetoric advanced by the prochoice and pro-life camps, she derives and tests several hypotheses. In particular, she examines the pro-life claim that the fetus is synonymous with “person” and should be protected at all stages of development. Logically, states that are pro-life (measured by the severity of abortion restrictions) should exhibit similar patterns in the other two policy ar- Vol. 96, No. 4 eas (drug exposure and battery). It is interesting that her analysis—which contains a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods—suggests that empirically, there is no support for this proposition. Pro-life states are not committed to promoting the well-being of the fetus beyond abortion decisions, as evidenced by their lack of comprehensive policies. “Simply, pro-life states make it difficult for women to have abortions, but they do not help these women provide for the children once born” (p. 157), the author writes. Her analysis demonstrates that women are consistently accorded a lower economic, social, and political status in pro-life states. While this is not a novel discovery, her analysis is unique in that it examines the relationship between the status of women and fetal personhood in a range of reproductive policy areas. In short, Is a Fetus a Person? has much to offer. It provides a comprehensive map of abortion, fetal drug abuse, and fetal battering policies. Schroedel painstakingly compiles a thorough data set containing all criminal laws relating to fetal personhood status and creates several empirical tests aimed at explaining the differential treatment of these reproductive policies across the 50 states. Unfortunately, the book does not provide a comprehensive theoretical framework for other scholars to apply. Schroedel discusses abortion, fetal drug abuse, and fetal battering policies as morality policies. She asserts that the morality politics framework only works as a starting point for her research because it fails to adequately account for policymaking in fetal drug abuse and fetal battering policies: “I believe its application must be extended to a broader range of political circumstances to account for status differences among the parties that harm the fetus and for the impact of cultural values” (p. 62). Extending and improving on the morality framework would indeed be a significant theoretical contribution to the field; however, this book falls short in this endeavor. Although the theoretical omission is disappointing, Schroedel delivers a wealth of information and suggests a road for future studies on reproductive policies. Is the Fetus a Person? is one of the first books to examine the policy implications and consequences of expanded definitions of fetal personhood beyond abortion policy. This book will be of interest to students of state politics, reproductive policies, and gender politics. Trading Blows: Party Competition and U.S. Trade Policy in a Globalizing Era. By James Shoch. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 388p. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Frederick Mayer, Duke University In this history of American trade politics, James Shoch argues for the centrality of political parties in the making of trade policy. His thesis, simply stated, is that parties matter, and matter a good deal more than the literature generally acknowledges. As he depicts it, the historical record is something like a heavyweight prizefight, in which the Democratic and Republican Parties, driven by constituency pressures, ideological differences, and, especially, the quest for political advantage, spar ceaselessly over trade issues. A focus on partisanship is timely, given the increasingly partisan nature of American trade politics in the last decade. Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994, both with substantial Democratic support, Congress has become increasingly divided along party lines. The almost straight party-line vote in 2001 on the (shamelessly named) “Bipartisan Trade Promotion Bill” demonstrates just how sharply divided the two 833 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS parties have become. Shoch’s book reminds us that partisanship is nothing new, and that the bipartisan consensus on trade that largely prevailed from the end of World War II is not the historical norm. Trading Blows traces trade politics from the Civil War to the present, giving considerably more attention to recent history than past. In his first chapter, Shoch sketches a “multilevel analytic framework,” on which the subsequent “analytic narrative” draws. His framework incorporates an extraordinarily wide range of theoretical constructs, among them critical realism, rational choice, new institutionalism, political economy, trade theory, public opinion, and others. The theoretical discussion is comprehensive and insightful. Ultimately, however, the book’s strength is its rich description of trade politics, particularly of the inside political maneuverings of presidents and congressional leaders as they seek to advance their political and policy interests. The interpretation is clearly informed by theory, but it is not driven by it, in that the author draws on whatever theoretical framework seems best to apply. One could quibble that at times the interpretations offer such complex explanations for phenomena that it is difficult to determine what really matters, but on the whole this is preferable to the kind of reductionism that plagues some more theoretically driven analyses. The value of Shoch’s approach is most evident in chapters on the elections of 1994 and 1996, which describe the culmination of a long process in which the Democratic and Republican Parties switched sides on trade. He shows how after Republicans captured control of Congress in 1994, the increase in union activity and campaign contributions and the simultaneous decrease in business support for Democrats altered the pattern of constituency pressures on members of Congress and led to much greater polarization on trade. Although Democrats supported GATT in 1995, there was almost no Democratic support for President Clinton’s request for new “fast track” negotiating authority in 1997, despite strong pleas from a president of their own party. Notwithstanding its many strengths, Trading Blows, by focusing so much attention on party conflict, tends at times to overstate the degree of conflict and to underplay the importance of other factors at work in trade politics and trade policymaking. For example, in his characterization of the politics of the 1980s, Shoch contests the dominant view that the high degree of consensus on trade policy that characterized the post–World War II era continued into the 1990s (see, most notably, I. M. Destler, American Trade Politics, 1995). Shoch argues that this consensus was always somewhat less than claimed and that by the 1980s, during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, there was a good deal more conflict than generally admitted. It is true, as he documents, that the growing trade deficit, particularly with Japan, led to complaints about “unfair” trade practices, that this complaint found its way into Democrat-sponsored legislation with elements of reciprocity, and that Republicans tacked to co-opt the Democratic position. But on the whole, and on the big issues, the consensus held. The United States did not raise its tariffs, it negotiated and signed a free trade agreement with Canada, and it launched the Uruguay Round of the GATT, all with broad bipartisan support. Indeed, bipartisanship largely held, despite signs of its imminent demise, for the NAFTA and GATT votes in the first two years of the Clinton administration. In part because it somewhat overstates the conflicts of the 1980s, and in part because its focus is primarily on the inside maneuverings of policymakers, Trading Blows somewhat understates the sea change in the political environment for trade that took place in the 1990s. Although it passed, NAFTA deeply politicized trade in a way that had not been 834 December 2002 seen for half a century. The political forces in the society that engaged in the NAFTA tussle, far from disbanding after the vote, stayed on the scene. Not only did the labor unions remain primed for battle, so too did the host of environmental, civic, religious, and other organizations that first surfaced in 1993. Shoch largely ignores this phenomenon, and the larger antiglobalization movement it has become. The characterization of the politics of trade in the book also misses a subtle shift in the nature of trade issues. For the most part, Trading Blows characterizes trade policy as contested along a single free trade versus protectionist dimension. For most of American history, this was the essential question. But it is certainly no longer the only policy question. For more than two decades now, the United States has had a weighted average tariff of less than 5%. To be sure, we continue to protect certain of our industries (textiles, sugar, and steel top most lists), and the degree of protection afforded them remains an issue, but for most of the economy, on the traditional issues of tariffs and quotas, the game is largely over. Many of the core issues today are not so much about free trade as about regulation: worker rights, environmental standards and enforcement, intellectual property, food safety, and the like. These issues engage different actors in society, resonate differently with public opinion, and engage political parties in different ways. Notwithstanding these minor shortcomings, Trading Blows is a fine book that largely accomplishes what it sets out to do. It demonstrates the value of close historical analysis illuminated by theory, and makes a compelling case for the importance of partisan calculation in trade politics and policy. It is an informed and insightful addition to the literature on American trade politics. Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof. By Sylvia Noble Tesh. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. 192p. $35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. Richard A. Harris, Rutgers University-Camden Uncertain Hazards is an ambitious book, in two respects. First, it tackles an important issue for political science as well as sociology and history, namely, the impact that social movements have on reshaping the societies in which they mobilize. Second, in adopting a case study approach to this issue, the author explores the development of the modern environmental movement and its purported reframing or hegemonic reversal of environmental science and risk assessment in America. In effect, this volume is two separate but related studies. Indeed, Sylvia Noble Tesh suggests as much when she notes in her acknowledgments that her “theme shifted as the book took shape” (p. xi). One of the critical insights developed by Tesh is that the environmental movement ought not be viewed as a unified or monolithic entity. By carefully organizing her analysis of environmental organizations into the “mainstream group” most familiar to students of environmental politics (e.g., Sierra Club, NRDC, National Wildlife Federation, etc.), “grassroots groups” usually formed locally around public health issues, and “grassroots support groups” that provide scientific, organizational, and political back-up to local groups, she provides a richly textured and nuanced analysis of the environmental movement. Tesh also rescues the topic on risk assessment from the sterile debate between those who hold that risk assessment is a legitimate economic/scientific basis for making policy decisions and those who would maintain that it is merely a Trojan horse for providing regulatory relief to business interests. She persuasively argues that risk assessment and, for that matter, American Political Science Review environmental science reflect an approach that environmentalism has successfully challenged by reframing not only the questions asked, but also the standards of evaluation used in policy analysis. These significant contributions notwithstanding, Uncertain Hazards does display certain limitations. Perhaps these are inevitable given the ambitious, dual assignment of analyzing both the role of social movements in society and the clash between environmentalism and science that Tesh has taken on. One of the most surprising things about this book is the paucity of references to the extensive literature on environmental politics and public interest groups. These are both well-developed fields of study, and except for works of wellknown environmental advocates, such as Rachel Carson or Barry Commoner and some newer students of environmental policy, Tesh does not take advantage of this body of work. Scholars such as Linton Caldwell and Walter Rosenbaum clearly come to mind when thinking about key environmental politics scholars, as does Samuel Hays when thinking of social/intellectual historians who have studied environmentalism. More broadly, the work of Andrew McFarland and Jeffrey Berry bears directly on the issues of public interest advocacy or influence. The danger of overlooking this scholarship is suggested by Tesh’s claim that only in recent years have we begun to move beyond Rachel Carson’s concern with carcinogenic pollutants to consider “a connection between environmental pollution and other outcomes in wildlife and nature” (p. 67). In fact, connections between pollution and asthma or endangered species have been part of environmental advocates’ stock-intrade since the early 1970s. Indeed, the same can be said of her assertion that the “first big rush of publicity singling out children as especially vulnerable to environmental toxins came in 1989” (p. 70). An examination of testimony at congressional hearings on the Clean Air Act of 1975 or the buildup to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) in the late seventies clearly shows that the special vulnerability of children and the elderly figured prominently in public debate. Moreover, the Endangered Species Act indicates that concern with wildlife has long occupied a place in environmental policy. One may also question whether Tesh’s assertion that “science is a social construct” (p. 2) is a bit overdrawn. Few would dispute her claim, developed in a chapter on environmental science, that the experience and views of scientists help to explain the questions they investigate. Nor is her exposition on the importance of Kuhnian paradigm shifts particularly controversial. However, to the extent that science, even environmental science, is a method predicated on posing falsifiable hypotheses, it is distinguished from metaphysical argument, that is, ethical or political principles. This is not to suggest that ethical or political arguments are any less legitimate in policy debate; indeed, it is arguable that they should have more standing. However, the two kinds of claims, scientific and metaphysical, should not be conflated as Tesh intimates in her examination of guiding environmental principles. Finally, the quite appropriate point that the relationship between society and social movements is a two-way street could have been connected to the substantial body of work on the Progressive Era and the New Deal, which clearly draws a connection between the labor, women’s, and agrarian reform movements on the one hand and the rise of modern liberalism on the other. This work by historians and new institutionalists buttresses Tesh’s argument and may well have shed considerable insight on her analysis. While she does draw an important contrast between classical liberalism and environmentalism, which purportedly reflects a Gramscian or new left view of the world, her work missed an opportunity to acknowledge Vol. 96, No. 4 the debt that environmentalists owe to the modern liberal political tradition. In fact, it might be interesting to contemplate the possibility that mainstream environmental groups fit into the modern liberal tradition, while grassroots and grassroots support groups do indeed fit the Gramscian tradition. This possibility would suggest an interesting dynamic within the environmental movement. Regardless of the questions raised above, Uncertain Hazards will provide all students of social movements and environmental politics with a challenging and provocative read. From Neighborhood to Nation: The Democratic Foundations of Civil Society. By Kenneth Thomson. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001. 195p. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Richard M. Flanagan, The College of Staten Island, CUNY It was New York Governor Al Smith’s famous dictum that the ills of democracy could be solved with more democracy. Many agree with him some 75 years later. The shelves of political science overflow with books lamenting the decline of intermediary institutions that once plugged the hearts and minds of citizens into government and civic life. Democracy scaled down to the town and neighborhood allows people to address problems that are experienced in the routine of everyday life. Stripped of abstraction, politics loses its mystery and the sense of alienation that accompanies it. But Americans no longer gather at the political club, the town meeting, the church, and the union hall. Citizens are plugged into television, the family, or perhaps the job, interested in private concerns. In response, pundits, professors, and politicians call for a revival of local political and civic life. President George W. Bush’s “FaithBased Initiative,” which would use federal funds to support church social service programs, can be viewed as a response to the national mood of a people adrift. While many have forwarded tiresome critiques of what ails us, Kenneth Thomson does the nitty-gritty empirical work that should mark social science’s unique contribution to this debate. Thomson, a coauthor of the award-wining book that surveyed individual attitudes in the cities, The Rebirth of Urban Democracy (1993), mines the data collected from that project, shifting the level of analysis up a level to analyze organizational forms and functions. Attention turns to neighborhood associations in four cities: Birmingham, Dayton, Portland, and St. Paul. These cities take their officially recognized neighborhood associations seriously, providing funding to make them work, and involving them in an advisory policy role. Thomson devised an innovative index to measure the strength of neighborhood associations, capturing such characteristics as staff size, meeting frequency, and attendance, as well as 18 other measures of organizational activity. Multivariate analysis leads him to the most important finding of the book: Well-organized, active neighborhood associations have an independent, positive impact on participation in local politics, holding constant for socioeconomic status. Communitybased organizing, if it is done right, pulls people out of their personal bubbles into political life. The author also developed a normative model for analyzing the success of community organizations that focuses on three measures: the participatory core, the link to the community, and the link to government policymaking. Vital neighborhood organizations are democratically run, seek out new members, and have a real impact on policy. Thompson found that for the most part, neighborhood organizations are run by a good cross section of neighborhood residents and allow 835 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS for open debate on matters of community concern. Most residents are satisfied that their neighborhood group is run fairly. The author also found that neighborhood organizations reach out to residents and involve them in the political process, including many people who would not otherwise be involved in politics. On the third element of the model, the policymaking link, the neighborhood organizations miss the mark. While they do a fine job of solving neighborhood-level problems and have the potential to tackle broader matters, they seldom do. The mind-set of the neighborhood organizations and citywide elected officials is unimaginative, leaving the beneficial effects of small-scale participatory democracy at the border of the neighborhood. Thomson suggests that this policymaking link could be improved if citizens clamored for change. There is nothing inherent in local participatory democracy that prevents the neighborhood organizations from dealing with a broader set of citywide, state, and national issues. It should also be noted that the more active neighborhood organizations were more likely to meet the requirements of the normative model, demonstrating the reparative impact of democratic action on democratic health. He argues that the more we invest in local democratic institutions like neighborhood organizations with funding support and legitimacy, the greater the return, in terms of citizen trust, efficacy, and deliberative, participatory democracy. This short work raised questions that I wished had been addressed, since Thomson has the training, knowledge, and careful eye to weigh in thoughtfully. The author does not probe the dark side of neighborhood life. Fear of the outsider is among the most effective tools of participatory politics. The commonly heard lament of “not in my back yard” and the historical practice of exclusionary housing covenants designed to keep blacks and others out suggest that it is not axiomatic that illiberal impulses will be held in check by more participatory forms. Like many communitarian social scientists, Thomson is cagey about the concrete policies new procedural reforms will create. The other matter left unaddressed is a central claim of the book and title, the idea that neighborhood associations can wrestle with national-level problems and devise national-level policies. As the author notes, the neighborhood associations in the study had little interest in or impact on citywide problems. It is difficult to see how local institutions can make the great leap into state and federal politics. The great advantage of the neighborhood associations is that they tackle bite-sized problems that residents have a tangible stake in resolving. The inherent “meat and potatoes” conservatism evident in such matters provides a simple, democratic education that might be jeopardized if the neighborhood associations wade into more abstract, ideological waters. From Neighborhood to Nation is an important contribution to the literature on participatory democracy, citizen politics, and local politics. Thomson has given political scientists important conceptual tools and empirical measures of grassroots organizations that can be replicated in future studies. Death and the Statesman: The Culture and Psychology of U.S. Leaders During War. By Joseph B. Underhill-Cady. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 256p. $39.95. Patricia Lee Sykes, American University Death and the Statesman appeared in print one month after the terrorist attacks on September 11, and the timing of its publication alone might attract a wide audience. The book deals with a significant subject of immediate interest to scholars and citizens alike—namely, what drives political leaders as they decide when and how to conduct war. Joseph UnderhillCady argues that members of the foreign policymaking elite 836 December 2002 remain preoccupied with their own mortality. He suggests how their metaphors and rituals reveal their persistent fear and high anxiety about death, and he shows how their decisions to go to war can be read to reflect this preoccupation. For the foreign policy elite, the conduct of war constitutes an “immortality project.” According to the author, “As the elite sought to overcome their physical limitations, they likewise attempted to ensure the nation’s transcendence of its mortal bounds” (p. 10). Underhill-Cady notes the genderspecific nature of foreign policymaking (p. 45). Macho men deny the inevitability of their own deaths and suppress their emotions, while they labor to ensure that the nation shall long endure. He traces the roots of their immortality projects to the Christian tradition: Man has fallen, but he can achieve salvation and thereby gain eternal life (pp. 52–55). The author renders a plausible, thought-provoking argument, although the evidence he produces could be more convincing. Underhill-Cady constructs his narrative along the following lines. Chapter 1 critiques some of the literature in international relations and focuses on the limits of rational choice reasoning. Chapter 2 presents the author’s alternative approach, which he describes as an analysis “based on political culture and the ontological concerns of foreign policy makers” (p. 10). According to the author, elite decisionmakers conduct their immortality projects at three levels—as individuals (Chapter 3), as government officials (Chapter 4), and as a nation at war (Chapter 5). Finally, the book concludes with speculation about twentieth-century changes in the conduct of war and the implications of high-tech warfare. The final chapter also includes the author’s advice to policymakers that they embrace a more feminine “acceptant discourse” (p. 154). To many readers, the author’s extensive (albeit basic) critique of rational choice reasoning and his concluding advice will seem strangely out of sync with the spirit of poststructuralism that otherwise informs his study. As a cultural study of U.S. leaders, this book falls short of its goal. The author fails to identify any metaphor or trope that might be construed as uniquely American. When he explains why his study focuses exclusively on the United States, he cites practical constraints, including “the fact that I live in the United States” (p. 6). If that were a valid reason, then no political scientist in the country would study any other nation. As a source of popular culture, the author extracts metaphors from James Bond films. As he explains, “Bond is the epitome of the unemotional, ‘civilized’ man who embodies the illusion of being able to control and overcome all contingency and opposition in the world” (p. 121). Bond is also British. Throughout the book, the author refers to Anglo-Saxon culture and Anglo-American sensibility. (For examples, see pp. 122–23.) His understanding of the foreign policy elite appears to include decision makers in other Anglo nations. In fact, if the fear of death drives decision making and if that fear is universal, then the book’s central argument would apply to all world leaders. Readers might also question why Underhill-Cady chose particular leaders as subjects for his study. He focuses on (but does not limit his analysis to) Theodore Roosevelt, his Secretary of State John Hay, Senator George Hoar, Secretary of the Navy John Long, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Lyndon B. Johnson, and George Herbert Walker Bush. The author states that he selected these subjects because he “found enough in common among them . . . to describe an evolving culture among foreign policy officials” (p. 7). He implies that he picked the people whose rhetoric and rituals suited his own narrative. He also explains, “I was interested in those campaigns in which the direct threat to the United States was relatively small, and where America might actually be seen as the aggressor, for American Political Science Review it is in those instances that justification of death in battle becomes most difficult” (p. 8). In that case, when focusing on George Herbert Walker Bush, why include the Gulf War but totally exclude “Operation Just Cause” (the U.S. invasion of Panama)? In addition to the seemingly arbitrary selection of subjects, the author’s inclination to jump back and forth between cases might leave most readers (unable to identify the Secretary of the Navy during the Spanish American War) a bit bewildered and confused by the cast of characters. Underhill-Cady’s selection of textual evidence might also leave readers unconvinced by his argument. He examines narratives, metaphors, and tropes that he extracts from their context and often takes from secondary sources. (Early in the book, he warns us, “My research consisted of reading extensively about these powerful American men who made decisions about war, and finding passages or events about them that struck me as odd or interesting” [p. 3].) On page 38, for example, the author writes that LBJ “often used the metaphors of paralysis and raging rivers in his discussion of policy,” and then he cites Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976). UnderhillCady might have followed up that statement by providing examples or illustrations of LBJ’s use of those metaphors, but instead he switches to an exploration of the words and actions of another political actor. Later in the text when he returns to LBJ, the author does include direct language, but once again, he relies on Goodwin’s text as the source. He states that following Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ described the elite as “like a bunch of cattle caught in a swamp . . . simply circling ’round and ’round,” and Johnson added, “I could not allow the tide of grief to overwhelm me” (p. 84, n. 44). A lengthier quotation in which LBJ describes the Great Society as an aging woman appears on page 111, but the author also takes this quotation from Goodwin’s book. Readers might wonder whether they are learning more about the fears and preoccupations of Doris Kearns Goodwin than those of LBJ. The highly selective nature of quotations and the author’s reliance on secondary accounts leaves readers suspecting that he has overlooked alternative narratives. In the last chapter, Underhill-Cady does discuss one alternative narrative, which those who construct immortality projects sometimes express. Occasionally, members of the elite have assumed a more passive stance, entertained selfdoubt, acknowledged their own shortcomings, and even identified with the enemy (p. 154). The author expresses the hope that the elite will assume this feminine posture more often, and he advises decision makers to become more self-aware. Even if this happens, the consequences remain unclear, as the author explicitly denies any causal link between psychological health and the outcome of decision making (p. 153). Moreover, both time and place might dash his hopes. If the presidency and the foreign policy establishment are masculine institutions—demanding strength, determination, and firm conviction—then it will be difficult for the elite working in these institutions to express their doubts and emotions or assume an acceptant stance. (Even in the chapter that deals with actors as government officials, the author fails to entertain the possibility that institutions might influence the character of elite discourse.) Furthermore, junctures in political development might determine the nature of discourse. The author observes a shift throughout the twentieth century as war becomes technologically driven, but he neglects fluctuations. Perhaps even “time” can be construed as masculine or feminine. In 2001 in the White House, Cowboys replaced the Sensitive New Age Guys. Now the message is “Wanted dead or alive,” not “I feel your pain.” The men in the current administration are unlikely to acknowledge and explore their feminine side. Vol. 96, No. 4 For all its limitations, Underhill-Cady’s study invites us to listen closely to foreign policy decision makers today. Will technology reduce the psychological and emotional costs of war, as Underhill-Cady suggests (p. 167), making it even more difficult to discuss death? Listen to Vice President Richard Cheney talk about his heart: He describes in detail the wonders of the mechanical device that keeps his heart ticking and sets its pace. Perhaps more revealing, consider how President George W. Bush recalls his recent brush with death. While sitting alone watching television, he chokes, passes out—the fate of a nation of couch potatoes? (pp. 101–2)— then awakens and recovers. Jokingly, Bush explains: “My mother always told me to chew my food carefully before I swallow.” Does he render a metaphor for how America will conduct its “New War”? Perhaps we should be alert and attentive to the metaphors and rituals this president displays. After all, he has already been reborn. The Politics of Empowerment. By Robert Weissberg. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. 272p. $50.00. William E. Nelson, Jr., The Ohio State University The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s produced strong pressure on all levels of government to give “power to the people.” This urgent demand came not only from radical activists in the streets but also from the halls of academia, where scholars churned out a massive volume of studies encompassing detailed recommendations for filling the power vacuum between authoritative public and private decision makers and disadvantaged citizens whose lack of sufficient economic and political resources condemned them to the bottom rungs of the American social order. Although most of these studies were considered positive and progressive, they were not without their detractors. The most searing critique of “bottom up” schemes for empowering the disadvantaged has come from the pen of Robert Weissberg in his book, The Politics of Empowerment. Weissberg advances the argument that the calls for selfdetermination and autonomous control by the disadvantaged are naive, unrealistic, and irretrievably flawed. It is his position that admonitions of this kind are unnecessarily radical and disruptive. They anticipate a major transformation of societal relations, and seek to radically alter the fundamental foundations of our social and political existence. They also discourage consideration of more realistic alternatives. Thus, destitute people seeking a remedy for their pauperism might be better served by learning a trade or taking classes in English literacy and mathematics than by joining a community organization and mobilizing for control over welfare bureaucracies. The main lines of Weissberg’s arguments run in the following direction. If poor people wish to achieve a higher bundle of benefits, they must earn them like everyone else. Community leaders who do not inform their constituents that the capacity on the part of government to deliver extraordinary benefits is limited are doing them a disservice; they are guilty of imparting to them unrealistic expectations that create conflict without advancing opportunities for genuine progress. Real empowerment for the poor must rest on the old-fashioned American values of obedience, duty, and respect. Political mobilization must be seen as one item on a broad and diverse menu that must be created to achieve massbased social justice in a democratic society. And poor people must understand that the mobilization process requires that they forge alliances with others and defer to the superior resources and wisdom of those who occupy higher positions on the power continuum. They must know that self-subjugation 837 Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS to overwhelming authority is not an automatic recipe for poverty and misery. They must also learn to live with low rather than high expectations, since it is well established that achieving power is not especially effective in securing economic benefits, personal happiness, or social acceptance. Those who counsel them otherwise are acting irresponsibly. In the final analysis, this society may have to face the fact that the best remedy for poverty is to help the poor accept their lot as inevitable. Clearly, we cannot continue to blame society for the inept decision making by the poor that has consigned them to their own misery. To the extent that empowerment advocates ignore the innate weaknesses in the human personality of the unfortunate, they contribute to the escalation of urban social problems and make it more difficult to devise realistic solutions to the dilemmas of the poor. In one major section of the book, Weissberg attempts an analysis of the black empowerment movement to demonstrate the major fallacies inherent in empowerment theories. He believes that the black model is an extremely important one because most black people have bought into the connection between empowerment and expanded societal benefits, and because the black empowerment movement has given birth to empowerment campaigns by other groups. Weissberg believes that one major problem with the black empowerment model is its reliance on electoral politics as a method for advancing the interest of blacks in society. This analysis, he contends, overlooks the fact that blacks are a hopeless minority in the country and can therefore exercise only a sliver of political power nationally, despite major gains in their election to public office since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The widely touted potential benefits of electoral politics are also undermined by constraints endemic in the American constitutional system. In a constitutional democracy like the one operative in the United States, the government cannot control all of the social and economic forces required to achieve the objectives of black empowerment legally. Thus, if white businesses decide to leave a city governed by a black mayor, and this decision undermines the city’s tax base, the government is in no position to command these businesses to stay or, once having left, to return. Constitutional constraints aside, Weissberg contends that a variety of other factors prevent the translation of black empowerment in theory into empowerment in fact. In this context, he points to the weak and factional nature of black politics. Black mayors have failed to build permanent organizations and are challenged by black factions that are disappointed in their seeming inability to radically transform local government, and by white factions that oppose their efforts to satisfy escalating black demands for a wide range of social and economic benefits. Black empowerment is further undermined by the black infatuation with the “cult of personality,” the yawning disconnect between mobilization and benefit delivery, growing dependence by black politicians on coalition politics as the principle avenue to elective office, and the incapacity of black mayors to satisfy public demands for the delivery of quality services by filling city bureaucracies with competent black employees. Weissberg’s The Politics of Empowerment is a political tract disguised as an academic treatise. It is one thing to argue that black politics is in internal disarray; it is quite another to argue that it has not been productive. The proof is in the pudding. Black mayors have not liberated black communities, but they have brought social and economic benefits to their constituents that would not have been available in their absence. To say that the distributional networks in major American cities have not altered is to ignore 30 years of critical development in American local politics. Both the symbols and the substance of racial politics in these cities have changed. The 838 December 2002 changes have been both external and internal to the black community. Externally, it is virtually impossible to build winning electoral coalitions in major American cities without the pivotal involvement of the black community. This fact may not always produce black control, but it does guarantee influence. It is a fundamental mistake to confuse the two conditions, as Weissberg does over and over again in his book. Internally, black political mobilization has produced a highly significant transformation in the psychological bearing of the black community. Blacks all across the country now approach the ballot box with a high degree of political and racial consciousness. This means, among other things, that they are voting instrumentally, and not at the blandishments of white-dominated political organizations. Instrumental black voting represents a sea change in black political behavior from the model of machine politics that pervaded the political landscape of many cities in the 1940s and 1950s. Weissberg’s book does not capture this shift in black perspective because it is the product of armchair speculation disconnected from the foundations of black politics in America. Weissberg refuses to acknowledge the reality of institutional racism in America. In The Politics of Empowerment, he constantly intimates that problems in the black community issue basically from weaknesses in the character traits of the black population. This blame-the-victim approach raises images of the confusing, distorted, circular arguments presented by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve (1994). It leads Weissberg to the false conclusion that political empowerment cannot significantly alter the policymaking influence of the black community, or the effective power position of citizens living in disadvantaged communities across the United States. False Alarm: Why the Greatest Threat to Social Security and Medicare is the Campaign to “Save” Them. By Joseph White. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 320p. $42.50. James R. Simmons, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Few public policy issues have drawn more popular attention, generated more media commentary, or produced more books than the national debate over the dark fate of Social Security and Medicare. In a new book, noted policy scholar Joseph White argues that the “entitlement crisis” and the future insolvency projected by so many experts, politicians, and opinion makers are myths that badly need exploding. White insists that although we should be very concerned about the viability of each of these two essential government programs, we should not be carried away by the hysteria amplified by radical reformers and saviors of every political coloration. Rather, we should attempt to formulate a clear-eyed analysis of the purposes and constraints of social insurance that will produce genuine programmatic solutions that do not radically weaken the nation’s social safety net. White’s primary goal in the pages of False Alarm is an attack on the emerging conventional wisdom that Social Security and Medicare are both entitlement monsters whose spiraling “unaffordable” costs will soon drastically undermine the economy and imperil future generations. The author wants to show that there is no social insurance crisis of the magnitude described by critics. Furthermore, most of the widely heralded “solutions” can be justified neither by the savings and alleged benefits they are likely to generate nor by ill-conceived and exaggerated predictions of budgetary meltdown. Instead, he claims, we should address the financing challenge facing Medicare and Social Security with an American Political Science Review incrementalist approach that recognizes the value primacy of these massive programs and that takes small, informed steps to make the necessary adjustments in them. The first part of False Alarm focuses on the rationale, benefits, and financing of these two programs. Its three chapters explain what Social Security and Medicare actually do in practice and attempt to explain both the significant stakes involved and the contradictory reaction of most Americans to insurance versus entitlement programs. The second part examines the various spending trends, sociodemographic factors, and political value judgments that created a friendly environment for the multiplication of all the myriad doomsday scenarios that show these two programs threatening the prospects of future generations. Next, in Chapters 8 through 10 of Part III, White reviews and rejects the major proposals for radical reform like privatization, health vouchers, means testing, eligibility requirements, and reductions in costof-living adjustments (COLAs). In the last two chapters in the book’s final part, the author defends his own detailed “responsible reform” agenda and follows up with projections for the likely effects of these reforms. White identifies Social Security and Medicare as two of the most important institutions of American life and, given demographic shifts, he expects them to be even more important in the future. Although he rejects what he sees as a conservative antientitlement hysteria, he also parts with liberal defenders of these programs since he favors substantial change in financing and benefits and does not believe that the current surpluses in the trust funds should be spent on new programs. Serious concern, he asserts, is warranted despite the absence of a crisis, and sensible adjustments should be phased in now to ensure fairness and practical administration. The schedule for this incremental reform agenda should include protecting the surpluses, increasing payroll taxes, diversifying trust fund investment, experimenting with competition or vouchers within Medicare, and adding years in the workforce to age in eligibility requirements. If these and other policy measures are adopted, he projects a positive future scenario during which time voters and their representatives will have 50 years to determine just what kind of program they want. This Century Foundation book is compelling in almost every way. The volume is well written and the author’s core propositions are well argued. Although it is intended for a popular audience, it contains all the spending estimates, actuarial tables, projections, data analysis, and comparative policy discussion that should appeal to policy experts. White takes Vol. 96, No. 4 on all challengers, and he does so with a clarity and simplicity that downplays the depth of his understanding of complex issues. While he demolishes the pundits’ gloomy predictions of generational warfare, he is more than willing to adopt some of the more modest programmatic tools and is perceptive enough to question his own values, anticipations, and insights. Along the way, the author marshals a substantial body of evidence and develops a number of arguments that I have not heard or read about before. White even provides the reader with a popular website (www.socsec.org) that offers a wide array of additional information explaining the two programs and the ways to reform them. Of course, not all readers will find this book equally valuable. Obviously, would-be saviors of Medicare and Social Security will find fault with the positions White takes, just as they will find his arguments difficult to refute. He has harsh words for the policy debate in the 2000 presidential election and the campaign planks of both candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush. The book will also disappoint anyone seeking longterm programmatic solvency guarantees or certainties about the nation’s economic future. At the same time, the author devotes little space to any discussion of radical proposals like national health insurance or the former Clinton administration’s panacea “managed competition.” Nor does White discuss nonentitlement reform or address other ways in which the federal government’s budget might be balanced without Congress’s resorting to raids on the trust funds. Unfortunately, False Alarm is unlikely to achieve its author’s most ambitious goals. I suspect that despite its careful and persuasive analysis, the book will attain only a small mass readership and that it will have only a limited impact on the national policy debate in Washington, D.C. Prophets of pending disaster and radical-change advocates often make the best-seller lists, while the works by proponents of more limited adjustments in the status quo tend to languish on the shelves. President Bush is no friend to the book’s primary message, and the president seems intent on pursuing the privatization proposals and tax cuts on which he campaigned. Some of the book’s proposals, such as safeguarding the trust fund surpluses, have already been rejected through recent government action. Clearly, good sophisticated arguments and careful analysis do not ensure good national policy. If they did, much of the author’s agenda would already be in place. So Joseph White may have to wait for the next national election, another administration, or even a severe threat to Social Security and Medicare before his book gains the audience it so thoroughly deserves. Comparative Politics The Rise of “The Rest”: Challenges to the West from LateIndustrializing Economies. By Alice H. Amsden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 416p. $35.00. Richard F. Doner, Emory University Alice Amsden is one of the founders of the “statist” or “revisionist” school of East Asian economic development. Her earlier book, Asia’s Next Giant (1989), refuted claims that growth in South Korea and other Newly Industrialized Countries was simply a function of high investment rates and correct prices, based in turn on the small-government fundamentals of stable, private property rights, macroeconomic stability, and trade liberalization. Amsden, along with others, emphasized the benefits of sector-specific state interventions distinctly at odds with neoclassical prescriptions. But Amsden’s work was distinct in several ways: She highlighted reciprocity and discipline, in which the state provided a range of rewards, such as protection in the domestic market and low-interest loans, in exchange for successful performance in areas such as exports, R&D investment and new product introduction. She portrayed late development as a process of learning, often through large, diversified business groups, rather than of invention or innovation. And she paid special attention to the shop floor, where engineers and technicians were critical toward the acquisition of project execution and design capacities. Amsden’s new book, The Rise of “The Rest”, builds on these and other themes to explain how a dozen countries— seven in Asia, four in Latin America, and one in the Middle East—“rose to the ranks of world-class competitors in 839 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS a wide range of mid-technology industries” (p. 1). The first third of the book describes superficial pre-World War II industrialization in the “rest” due to halting and haphazard implementation of the “three pronged investment necessary to compete in modern industries: in large-scale plants and up-todate equipment, in technological capacities and management teams, and in distribution” (p. 98). Despite its weaknesses, this prewar manufacturing, even under foreign ownership, generated a new cadre of engineers and managers who, Amsden argues, proved critical to postwar growth, especially where foreign ownership was weakened by decolonization. The book’s second section explores the “rest’s” postwar growth through the lens of what the author considers key components of developmental states: development banking; criteria for sectoral targeting (e.g., mature technologies, foreign exchange savings) and for continued state support (e.g., export performance, localization); selective protection; and “national firm leaders.” This section also points to two factors—income equality and labor rates—to explain why South Korea and Taiwan excelled in building indigenous technological and managerial skills (about which more later). The last section of the book traces emergence of the rest into “independents” (Taiwan, Korea, as well as India and China) and “integrationists” (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey). The former are concerned with “getting institutions right and building skills”; the latter emphasize “getting prices right and buying skills” (p. 293). Amsden argues that despite the increasing pressure for global liberalization, there remain ample opportunities through which the independents can expand indigenous technical capacities. Taking advantage of these opportunities is critical; the challenge to the rest is not deindustrialization but denationalization. The Rise of “The Rest” is thus one of the rare works on economic development that not only stresses technological learning but traces this process from the shop floor to the business group and to national policy incentives. Contesting the “accumulationist” view of East Asian success, Amsden confirms that while investment in physical and human capital has been necessary, the integrationists have demonstrated that such investments were insufficient. It is one thing for firms to accumulate sufficient capital to purchase machinery; it is quite another for them to learn about, risk operating, and master technologies new to the country (Richard R. Nelson and Howard Pack, “The Asian Miracle and Modern Growth Theory,” Economic Journal 109 [July 1999]: 416–32). But if firms are the locus of productivity gains, they are not the sole source. Indeed, Amsden’s emphasis on productivity and quality varying cross-nationally among firms in the same industry lends further support to an understanding of growth as a consequence of “entrepreneurship, innovation and learning, all encouraged by the policy regime” (Nelson and Pack, p. 418). Her account thus suggests the relevance for the developing world of national institutional frameworks, such as “production regimes” and “national innovation systems” based on varieties of capitalism in the industrialized market economies. What are the origins of such national “policy regimes”? Amsden’s answer lends support to the importance, indeed the benefits, of equality and broad coalitions. But she enriches this perspective by suggesting specific causal mechanisms: Relative income equality allowed Korea to implement the “antiegalitarian” strategy of promoting large, diversified business groups. And the acceptance of generally rising labor costs prompted both Korea and Taiwan to “start building institutions and raising finance for R&D” due to fear that they would be priced out of global markets for unskilled products, even as foreign firms refused to sell them advanced technology (p. 245). 840 December 2002 One weakness of the book is its tendency to force all the countries of the rest into an uncomfortable institutional mold. Amsden argues that “roughly from the 1950s through the mid-1980s, all countries in ‘the rest’ shared to an extraordinary degree the same set of developmental institutions, defined by a reciprocal control mechanism” (p. 281). If by reciprocal control mechanism is meant a variety of state measures to promote exports, structural change, and local value added through industrial investment, then the argument holds. But Amsden’s view of reciprocal control implies state capacity to provide support in exchange for measures of “upgrading” technological improvement and market performance (e.g., product quality specifications). Despite impressive policy statements and intentions, such mechanisms were simply not in operation in several of the rest, including Thailand, whose Board of Investment Amsden praises for its “daring-cum-bureaucratism” (p. 28). A related problem is the book’s tendency to infer institutional capacities from outcomes. It is true, for example, that Indonesian plywood exports grew significantly in part under state pressure. But to infer that such pressure reflected reciprocal control mechanisms and state monitoring capacities while passing off allegations of corruption as economists’ criticism (p. 176) misses an important part of the story. It also neglects an opportunity to integrate corruption and other political factors into the analysis. The more successful of the rest did not wipe out corruption; they instead limited, managed, and/or hived it off in ways that supported key political coalitions while not interfering with performance in key sectors (e.g., David C. Kang, “Bad Loans to Good Friends: Money Politics and the Developmental State in South Korea,” International Organization 56, no. 1 [Winter 2002]: 177–207). The problem of inferring state institutional and political capacities from economic outcomes reflects evidentiary weakness. Amsden’s account would have been strengthened significantly by going beyond correlations between government programs and industry performance to include structured analyses of links between policy and investment decisions. Such accounts are also important in order to provide a clearer picture of state capacities: The successful cases would presumably involve public-private sector interactions that provided the mechanism for information exchange, program design, policy credibility, client “buy-in,” and feedback. Otherwise, we are left with an implausible story, even in South Korea and Taiwan, of state officials as all-knowing directors, as opposed to highly motivated and politically sensitive learners. Specifying causal mechanisms would help to address the charge that statist writings have been apolitical. It would encourage scholars to explore the sources of state preferences, such as interelite conflicts, resource endowments, and external security threats. It would also encourage us to specify the institutional mechanisms—including political arrangements—through which those preferences were expressed (e.g., Gregory W. Noble, Collective Action in East Asia: How Ruling Parties Shape Industrial Policy, 1998). Amsden has made a powerful historical and cross-national case for the developmental importance of “getting institutions right and building skills.” She has shown the costs and benefits of diverse models of capitalism within specific global contexts. Exploring the politics of growth in the “rest” will help us to assess the applicability of the rest’s experiences to other developing countries. This is especially important in light of the danger that local institutional innovations— of the sort so effectively highlighted by Amsden—are being discouraged by globalization pressures. American Political Science Review Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide. By Peter Andreas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. 176p. $39.95 cloth, $15.95 paper. Frank O. Mora, Rhodes College The difficulty of policing a complex border like that between the United States and Mexico, specifically stemming the flow of illegal drugs and immigration, demonstrates, according to Peter Andreas’s insightful and pathbreaking analysis, the challenges associated with globalization, diminished sovereignty, and economic integration between developed and developing economies. In fact, as he notes, intensifying law enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border has had several unintended consequences, including enhancing the incentive and thus the flow of illegal drugs and migrants, which, in turn, create obstacles to the expansion of legal flows. Throughout the book an implicit question emerges: How do you balance the positive gains from globalization with the negative or dark side effects of free trade, that is, drug trafficking and illegal immigration? Taking the dilemma further, how can states in a global, borderless economy promote two contradictory policies simultaneously: strong prohibitionist, law-enforcement policies to enforce state sovereignty and economic neoliberalism and integration? Andreas’s political economy approach to examining state responses to the illicit consequences of globalization is an attempt to explain the sharp escalation of border policing on the U.S.-Mexico border at a time when both states, particularly since the early 1990s, have been encouraging and expanding cross-border economic flows. According to the author, “increased policing can simply be understood as a natural policy response to an increase in illegal cross-border flows and a corresponding increase in public pressure on the state to secure its borders” (p. 7). This is referred to as the reconfiguration and reinforcing of the border. The challenge is that as long as economic integration remains central to the global economy and economic growth and prosperity, the commitment to policing the border and regaining “control” is largely ceremonial, “not only a means to an end but an end in itself” (p. 11). This is the book’s most revealing argument concerning the complex and tense relationship between globalization and politics. The literature on globalization is extensive and rigorous, though often redundant. However, Andreas’s research raises a number of new and critical theoretical and policy questions that focus on the illicit effects and concomitant state responses to integration and its natural consequence— diminished sovereignty. The general public and policymakers in the United States have reacted forcefully to the problem of sovereignty by augmenting law enforcement at the border; the author suggests that such a response is counterproductive and shortsighted. Escalation of law enforcement and the emphasis on supply-side counternarcotics and immigration policies have the unintended consequence of increasing the risk and profit of illicit trafficking. This creates an image of an uncontrolled border, which, in turn, leads to greater demand for more law enforcement. As a result, border policing “has ultimately been less about achieving the stated instrumental goal of deterring illegal border crossers and more about politically crafting the image of the border and symbolically reaffirming the state’s territorial authority” (p. 85). Therefore, failed state policies are directed not at resolving the problem but at projecting an image of control and success to justify the existence of federal bureaucracies and increased budgets. Andreas utilizes the metaphor of a “game” to explain why the state pursues policies that focus on the “perfomative Vol. 96, No. 4 and audience-directed nature” of the sport and not on what makes for good, effective border management (p. viii). Border Games implicitly indicates that in the tension between restructured state-market relations, it is the market, legal and illegal, which triumphs. The state simply lacks the capacity and willingness to patrol the border so long as globalization intensifies and the objective of economic neoliberalism and free trade remains the desired aim. The author’s response to this paradox and the challenge of diminished sovereignty is to emphasize the need for enhanced levels of bilateral and regional cooperation. Border Games incorporates the comparative case of the European Union to show how by escalating law enforcement through a multilateral process of “pooling sovereignty,” it can control drug trafficking and illegal immigration without negatively affecting the goal of integrating Western Europe. The author refers to the multilateral framework of the Schengan Accords, an intergovernmental agreement to police external borders, as an example of a mechanism that could help alleviate the challenges on the U.S.-Mexico border. However, according to the evidence provided, the accord and other measures have not necessarily addressed the challenge of illegal trafficking at the border, but, in fact, have only “enabled German policymakers to pacify conflicting audiences” (p. 123). Thus, it seems that the Europeans are better at the game of symbolism, while being nearly as incapable as the United States at stemming illegal cross-border flows. This is where Andreas’s line of thinking gets a bit puzzling. What exactly is effective policing of a border, if a more multilateral approach does not necessarily stem illegal flows? Are the Europeans just better at playing the symbolic game by using a regional approach to legitimize ineffectiveness? If the border challenge is more ideological-political than physical, as the author indicates, then the border is certainly irrelevant, and any attempt at controlling for the negative side of globalization is impossible. Are there real strategies to reaffirming physical control, or is illegal activity simply a reality of globalization that states must accept? Border Games does not give a satisfactory answer to these questions, other than to emphasize image as central to the state’s reassertion of control. Andreas’s insightful and rigorous study is an important contribution to the literature on globalization and transnational illicit trade. Beyond describing the challenge of policing one of the busiest borders in the world, he alludes to the difficulty and consequences of managing the integration of developed and developing economies. The author leaves much room for further research on this issue, which promises to be increasingly important as the United States and the European Union expand integration with developing countries. The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics. By Zoltan Barany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 384p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. Ladis K. D. Kristof, Portland State University Whoever has spent some time in the Indian state of Panjab and is to some extent acquainted with the East European Gypsies must have concluded that this was their original home. But as in Europe, so also in Panjab, even at the local Chandigarh University where an international conference debated the problem, little is known and understood about Gypsy ethnopolitics or ethnoculture. European interest in the Gypsies at the university level goes back at least to the middle 841 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS of the nineteenth century, but it focused on regional languages and folklore as, for instance, can be seen in the correspondence between Bogdan P. Hasdeu (Ghijdeu), a Romanian academic, and Franz Miklosich, an Austrian philologist. The volume under review is the first ever to approach the Gypsy problem from a comparative sociopolitical and socioeconomic perspective based on systematic statistical inquiries and interviews in each of seven countries, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Regrettably, the situation of the Roma in Serbia is only occasionally mentioned, although for comparative studies it is an especially interesting case. This study begins with a brief coverage of the historical impact of the disintegration of the Ottoman and AustroHungarian Empires, followed by an in-depth discussion of the social and economic consequences for the Gypsies of the collapse of the Soviet communist regimes, under which the Gypsies were regimented (like the rest of the society) and deprived of the possibility of practicing their own traditional social and cultural way of life, but, in exchange, assured of some minimum social and economic survival and, to some extent, protected from social hostility. Now they were left floating and exposed to the aggression of the rising wave of nationalism throughout Eastern Europe. The latter impacted Western Europe by causing a relatively large migration/escape of Eastern Gypsies to the West. Demographically, this migration was not too important, but politically, it rebounded forcefully on Eastern Europe through a mobilization of critical Western public opinion and the intervention of international political bodies in defense of Gypsy interests, especially their rights guaranteed by international law. Briefly, their rights qua citizens of their home countries, above all, equality before the law, began for the first time ever to gain some meaning, largely because the several Eastern countries hoped in their turn to become equal members of the European Union. Of course, equality before the law does not necessarily guarantee the elimination of all marginality in practice (a problem emphasized by Zoltan Barany). Within the expanded European Union, both the new member states and the Gypsies are going to remain for a time marginal until, on the one hand, acceptance of sociopolitical diversity and economic practice is broadened and, on the other, the individual differences of life quality are to some extent reduced. These differences exist everywhere on the individual country level, but to varying degrees. Romania, for instance, obviously has by far the largest Gypsy minority—perhaps under one million, or perhaps three millions, possibly even four millions and growing fast (depending on who “counts”)— but given the rather laissez-faire nature of Romanians, the weight of numbers was not very important as long so one did not attach specific rights (benefits) to specific numbers (percentages). Growing nationalism notwithstanding, it is to this day quite acceptable in conversation to describe a neighbor as “Gypsy-like,” which presumes some Gypsy ancestry, or physical appearance, but does not negate his Romanianness. In Poland, it would be impossible to make such a wishywashy identification. You are either a Pole or a Gypsy, and specifically a Polish Gypsy, not one of those “dirty” Romanian Gypsy immigrants. Incidentally, the question of national identity of Gypsies is often closely tied to their (assumed) religious identity, and it is regrettable that the author devoted so little attention to this problem. In Poland, to be Polish you practically have to be a Catholic and show it on various prescribed occasions. In the Orthodox countries, where religious observance is often much more casual, the Gypsies can easily be in and out of the church without much commitment or attracting much attention, even when it comes to baptizing their children. Their 842 December 2002 participation is much more frequent, and often specifically invited, in various funeral and cemetery traditions that possibly have pagan roots; these are occasions when free food and some coins are distributed, thus adding to their attraction. New and very important is Barany’s extensive coverage of Gypsy leadership on the national level in the several countries, as well as on the international level. Some of this leadership is traditional in the sense that who gets rich becomes automatically an admired member of the community, able to dispense various favors and consequently influential and automatically a spokesman for the community, though not necessarily genuinely concerned about, or understanding, its genuine long-term interests. Far less common, indeed very rare, are those who are university educated, have not lost contact with their family and ethnic roots, and are able to converse on an equal level with representatives of international organizations and top members of national governments. Often, all too often, the very fact that they are educated, think differently, and especially lead a different life style alienates them from the community for which they should and could be valuable spokespersons. This is frequently the problem when it comes to electing members of parliaments or representatives to international bodies. Barany cites many examples of violent clashes between simple local leaders and higherlevel representatives, who are accused of being interested, for instance, in imposing some artificial uniform language on all Gypsies, as well as various goals and values that have nothing to do with the genuine problems of the Gypsy population, which struggles with only one fundamental issue, simple survival. To sum up, Barany offers us a pioneering comparative study on a subject of considerable importance to students of Eastern Europe and of relevance to all who labor in the field of comparative politics where regime change, marginality, and ethnopolitics come to the fore. Constitutions in a Nonconstitutional World: Arab Basic Laws and the Prospects for Accountable Government. By Nathan J. Brown. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 244p. $65.50 cloth, $22.95 paper. As’ad AbuKhalil, California State University, Stanislaus This work is by a serious scholar who had previously written a fine book on peasant politics in Egypt. Interest in constitutionalism in the Arab world may be dismissed as naive given the notorious reputation of the region for autocracy and dictatorships. Yet Nathan Brown insists on taking constitutional developments in the region seriously, and he meticulously covers most constitutional developments over the span of the last century. But the book could have been easily condensed into a scholarly article. In the first part of the book, for example, which stretches into page 94, he provides the reader with a blow-by-blow account of constitutional developments in select Middle East countries. It contains very few insights, and the author breaks no new grounds; the developments were previously covered in many other works (for example, Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East, 1992). The author also fails to persuade the reader as to why it is important to study constitutional developments and legislative bodies when he acknowledges that they constitute “a weak force in Arab politics to date” (p. 93), and when he stresses that Arab parliaments are left emasculated (p. 196) by a variety of absolutist and unaccountable leaders. This is not to dismiss the study of constitutionalism altogether, and Brown was right in pointing out the validity of the method (pp. 198–99). But this is where the book fails. He raises many important questions regarding the causes behind American Political Science Review constitutionalism and the actual roles of parliaments, but he does not draw the useful links and contexts in which constitutions are drafted and parliaments are created. What we are left with is an anthology of detailed constitutional references and citations that seem to be offered in a political vacuum. There are few references, if any, to regional or international developments and their impact on Arab constitutional politics. For example, the state of war with Israel has allowed several Arab governments to suspend constitutional and parliamentary life all in the name of the battle for Palestine. Furthermore, the author makes no references to Arab public opinion and Arab popular aspirations. In fact, the Arab people are missing from a book dealing with political life and struggles, as if the public does not make demands on governments even when those governments are not necessarily responsive or accountable. In addition, if the validity of the study of constitutions is even questionable in Western democracy where actual politics often deviate from constitutional designs, it is even more questionable when constitutions descend from above often for purposes of political legitimation (a concept that should have been pursued by Brown). In fact, the creation of constitutions and bodies of ostensible political representation serves as a measure of regimes’ estimation of popular opinions and aspirations. Regimes often respond to popular demands for political openness and liberalization by creating the facade of an accountable political system. Of course, the Arab peoples are not naive and often realize the emptiness of governmental gestures, which explains the limited political legitimacy that is possessed by most Arab governments. One may also strongly disagree with Brown’s contention that Arab constitutions are “rarely blatantly violated” (p. 7). It is easy to document, and human rights organizations have done just that, the extent to which Arab constitutions and political promises are routinely and blatantly violated. The Iraqi constitution, for example, states in Article 2 that “the people are the source of authority and its legitimacy,” while Article 19 guarantees the equality of all before the law. And the Libyan constitution states in Article 10 that “the creation of honorary titles and civilian ranks is prohibited,” while Article 25 of the Syrian constitution maintains that “freedom is a sacred right. The state protects the personal freedom of the citizens and safeguards their dignity and security.” Obviously, the citizens of those countries would dismiss Brown’s contention in this regard. Constitutions are only adhered to insofar as they provide political rationalizations and justifications for actions and policies of the government, and they also provide an ideological sourcebook for the political legitimacy of regimes. In talking about the Egyptian constitutional council of the nineteenth century, Brown states that “democracy was hardly an issue: the Council, though elected, was essentially a way to ensure representation primarily of the provincial notability” (p. 29). This is certainly not unique to Egypt, and may in fact apply to the founders of the U.S. Constitution. But it is customary to attribute lofty ideals and motives to founders of Western democratic institutions, while Easterners are seen as always devoid of principles and ideals besides self-interest. He also observes that independence “occasioned the writing of a constitution” (p. 61), again as if this is unique to the Arab world. His disregard of regional and international factors is most evident when he refers to the Syrian military coup of Husni Az-Za’im that ended civilian rule (p. 69) without informing the reader that it was engineered by the CIA, as we now know. The choice of the case studies is often curious: The author includes Iran (a non-Arab country), while he largely ignores Lebanon, which has had the most effective and independent parliament in the entire Arab world. It was only in Lebanon where a government was voted out of office Vol. 96, No. 4 altogether and where the top post of government is open to contestation. The second part of the book is more analytical and interesting, although some redundancies occur. The author is most knowledgeable about Egypt, and he offers interesting remarks about the role of the judiciary in Eygptian political life. But the weakest section of the book deals with Islamic constitutionalism where he traces constitutional evolution to the nineteenth century without even a passing reference to ideas of governance in Islamic political thought. The author should have considered the limitations set on political authority in Islamic political treaties (see p. 178). Further, many political thinkers sanction the overthrow of a tyrannical ruler. Islamic philosophers also justify the necessity of governance on rational grounds, and not merely on grounds of prophetic revelation as the theologians have done. In sum, the book is a disappointment and fails to provide its own raison d’être. Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran. By Daniel Brumberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 306p. $55.00 cloth, $21.00 paper. Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Syracuse University This is a book about a man who may be considered “the twentieth century’s last example of a ‘pure’ charismatic leader” (p. 5). With these words, Daniel Brumberg begins to analyze the thoughts and legacy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89), who came to power in Iran in February 1979. In his introduction, the author maintains that his study provides “an accurate, objective, yet sociologically empathetic evaluation of the very complex process of ideological change in the Islamic Republic of Iran” (p. 8). By examining a wide variety of cultural, political, psychological, and social forces operating within the Iranian political milieu, Brumberg offers an insightful account of the multifaceted nature of revolutionary charisma. Dissatisfied with both the symbolic and instrumentalist theories of charismatic rule, he maintains that “the images of authority that political actors bring to social and political conflicts are not mere rationalizations of material interests; nor are they reflections of some cultural essence” (p. 6). To capture the complex nuances and the chaotic and nonlinear traits of competing authority systems, the author adopts a historical institutionalist perspective heavily supplemented by insights from the literature on political culture. Brumberg introduces four analytical concepts to capture the nuances of charismatic authority in Iran: multiple biographies, multiple shared imaginations, dissonant institutionalization, and complex routinization. “Multiple biographies” denotes a leader’s absorption of contending concepts of authority, while “multiple shared imaginations” refers to the existence of an assortment of political visions in a given society. “Dissonant institutionalization” is the dynamic process whereby contending visions of political authority are reproduced within various state and social institutions, as well as in the political lexicon of the ruling elite. Finally, “complex routinization” applies to the prolonged, chaotic, and indeterminate process through which political struggles either obstruct or advance the transformation of revolutionary organizations and ideology. Brumberg considers dissonant institutionalization the “defining feature of the Islamic Republic” (p. 35), and asserts that thanks to its nature and effect, the system of contending authorities in Iran will endure for the foreseeable future (p. 246). The author also regards the “most enduring trait” of Iran’s revolution as the “twin valorization of a zealous 843 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS quest for utopia alongside the pragmatic struggle for political order” (p. 13). According to Brumberg, Khomeini was the embodiment par excellence of this twin valorization. Here was a magnetic leader capable of combining charismatic, traditional, and utilitarian visions of political authority (p. 80), yet one who did not have a coherent, consistent, or straightforward blueprint for revolutionary action (p. ix); a man with a stoic character who believed in the vanguard theory of revolution (p. 89), yet was concerned about the paradoxical consequences of clerical rule (p. 117); a cleric whose versatile understanding of Islam “was conditioned by notions of power, expediency, and interest” (p. 84), yet whose predilection for Islamic mysticism would often lead to contradictory pronouncements and an erratic praxis. While Reinventing Khomeini is a thought-provoking account of modern Iran’s political development, it is not without its shortcomings. This reviewer believes that Brumberg’s penchant for the charismatic theory of political authority and psychological explanations leads him to overemphasize the significance of Khomeini’s personal deprivations of youth (losing both parents) and to exaggerate the extent and weight of his charismatic prowess. Did he really manage to exude mystical charisma as early as the 1930s when he was just entering the third decade of his own life? Is it not true that in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, he had to live in the shadow of more prominent religious leaders of the time, such as Ayatollah Ha’eri-Yazdi, Ayatollah Kashani, and Ayatollah Borujerdi? If we were to discount the hero worship style of historiography prevalent in the postrevolutionary era, we would have to answer the former question negatively and the latter affirmatively. Sure enough, Khomeini was respected within the confine of religious seminaries for being a learned teacher, virtuous cleric, and courageous man, yet the fact remains that he was not the highest religious authority in the 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s, nor is there much evidence that he enjoyed a great deal of mass following during these decades. In this regard, some of Brumberg’s omissions are rather troubling. For example, he maintains that Ayatollah Khomeini became more political in his outlook during the 1940s and 1950s. However, the author does not provide any explanation as to why this charismatic cleric was conspicuously absent from politics during the tumultuous events of 1951–53 when the Iranian attempt to nationalize oil was rewarded with a CIA–inspired coup. Should one hypothesize that this is a deliberate omission since its acknowledgment could have cast a shadow of doubt over the author’s narrative? Furthermore, Brumberg ends his book with a rather controversial—and in my view erroneous—conclusion. He maintains that Iranians have a deeply imbedded and intrinsic attraction to charismatic leaders, and that modernity in Iran needs to be accommodated to the quest for a spiritual life (p. 247). As proof, he refers to how Iranian “leaders,” regardless of their position on the political spectrum, do not wish to let go of Khomeini’s legacy. Does the latter argument, however, solidly support the former? Why should the incessant opportunistic appropriations and perennial bickering about Khomeini’s legacy among the “political elite” be interpreted as a sign of the whole society’s penchant for charismatic leaders or spiritual life? Have not the existing criticisms of the political elite literature convinced us to avoid equating without question the preferences of the ruling elite with that of the masses? Are not the widening rifts within the clerical establishment, criticisms of the cult of personality, the rampant debates about democracy and civil society, and so on—all of which Brumberg himself refers to in the closing chapters of his book—enough evidence that Iranian society is moving toward greater democracy, modernity, and secular- 844 December 2002 ization? Moreover, if we were to accept that Iranians do have an intrinsic attraction to charismatic leaders and spiritual life, does not that somehow contradict—or at least diminish— the centrality Brumberg had earlier assigned to dissonant institutionalization as the defining feature of political life in contemporary Iran? Finally, mention should be made of the fact that the scarcity of primary sources used in the book and the absence of a bibliography, coupled with typographical errors—I counted some 20 examples—have somewhat blemished the value of a book that offers much food for thought. Despite these shortcomings, Reinventing Khomeini is a rewarding read for students of Third World ideologies in general and those interested in political Islam in particular. Tearing the Social Fabric: Neoliberalism, Deindustrialization and the Crisis of Governance in Zimbabwe. By Padraig Carmody. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001. 240p. $67.95. African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999. By Nicolas Van De Walle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 304p. $59.95 cloth, $19.95, paper. Michael F. Lofchie, UCLA Sub-Saharan Africa continues to underperform the world’s developing regions, remaining a region of pronounced economic stagnation at correspondingly frightful human and social costs. Exactly why this is so has been the subject of extensive debate both among academics and within the policy community. Since most sub-Saharan African countries have been implementing neoliberal economic reforms, there has been particularly heated discussion about whether or not these policies have helped to improve the economic environment. Much of the literature on this topic has been ideological. There is a highly visible left-right spectrum that divides those who favor market-friendly economic reforms from those who oppose them. The former believe that, at the very worst, structural adjustment has helped arrest and even turn around a process of precipitous economic decline. Advocates of this view argue that even 2% economic growth is a dramatic improvement over −3%. On the other side are those who see liberal economic reforms as worsening an already bad situation. Those on this side of the ideological divide believe that neoliberal economic measures have contributed to deindustrialization and, thereby, worsened the continent’s pandemic political and social crises. It is unlikely that either of the two groups will be able to persuade the other, but of the two books reviewed here, Nicolas Van De Walle’s deserves to be read by all scholars interested in serious discussion of the issue. For although his work could be roughly categorized as center-right in its orientation, that is, pro-reform, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis shows a careful scholar’s painstaking and thoughtful reflection about all sides of this issue, including the deeply perplexing question of why liberal economic measures have fallen so far short of early hopes and expectations. Padraig Carmody’s book on Zimbabwe occupies the ideological left, making a straightforward argument that Zimbabwe’s efforts at neoliberal reform are the root cause of its economic woes, including deindustrialization and a badly torn social fabric. The viewpoint is not original, nor will his presentation of it appeal to those who would seek a more nuanced treatment. Africa can test the mettle of even the most resolute social scientists, for the region’s socioeconomic data is fundamentally untrustworthy, woefully incomplete, and frequently American Political Science Review contradictory. Even such seemingly basic questions as whether countries that have undertaken to liberalize their economies have enjoyed higher growth rates than those that have not seem to defy empirical resolution. Nevertheless, some scholars exhibit the patience to sort through the truly encyclopedic literature on economic performance, hoping to tease out a plausible understanding of the elusive connection between policy reform and economic growth. Van De Walle’s work has this merit and provides a useful road map of a jumbled and bewildering economic world. By contrast, Carmody’s book on Zimbabwe fills in an alltoo-familiar template and will largely satisfy only those who have already decided that market-based economic reforms and the institutions that advocate them are at the root of Africa’s economic woes. His core argument is that the liberal economic reforms urged on Zimbabwe by the International Lending Institutions (ILIs) have caused a collapse of the country’s textile, clothing, and footwear industries. Carmody does not consider the obvious alternative viewpoint. Proponents of economic reform might welcome the collapse of industries that “developed” in the first place only because they were sheltered within a cocoon of protectionism, and that survived only on the basis of costly subsidies that represented a major drain on scarce economic resources. In this alternate perspective, the deindustrialization of loss-producing enterprises is best viewed as a necessary first step toward setting the stage for a more sustainable pattern of industrial growth. African Economies is more impressive on several criteria. First, it presents a painstaking and highly accessible review of much of the political economy literature on Africa. It is also valuable for its willingness to extract a measure of explanatory merit from various analytic positions. Several of the authors Van De Walle cites will be pleased to find their views strengthened by the clarity with which he restates them. By avoiding the sort of simple “blame the markets” approach that pervades Carmody’s work, Van De Walle also convinces us that Africa’s problem is infinitely complex and therefore not amenable to any single-factor interpretation. His basic conclusion—that the principal fault lies in the nature of the African political process—is neither startling nor surprising. But the care, detail, and sensitivity to others’ research with which he develops this position provide more than sufficient reason that his book should be read in its own right as an important contribution to our understanding of Africa’s economic plight. Van De Walle acknowledges that market-friendly economic reforms have largely failed Africa, but he sees the reason for this in the underlying character of the African political process. African political systems are based on neopatrimonial forms of authority that provide corrupt political leaders with the strategic flexibility to evade the reform process or manipulate it to political advantage. Briefly, neopatrimonial forms of authority are highly personal and almost always feudal in nature, and thinly but only partially veiled within a burka of modernity. He argues that neopatrimonial governments cause economic failure because they subvert economic resources to the private and wasteful use of political leaders whose overriding goal is the maintenance of political power. Such governments are also highly prone to rapidly metastasizing corruption: Public expenditures in particular are calculated on the basis of their contribution to the maintenance of power, rather than the opportunity to address real social needs. The epicenter of the neo-patrimonial idea is that modern institutional arrangements, such as functionally organized bureaucracies and formally representative patterns of authority, are merely outward trappings that disguise a very differ- Vol. 96, No. 4 ent inner reality. That reality consists of all pervasive dyadic (patron-client) relationships that subvert the purpose of the public realm by permitting its most powerful figures to appropriate public and private resources for their personal use. This essential idea has appeared in a number of different forms, including, for example, Richard Joseph’s (Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic, 1987) classic use of the term “prebendal” to describe the way in which Nigerian political leaders systematically pillaged the public treasury to maintain themselves in positions of power and wealth. The secret to longevity of neopatrimonial systems is their remarkable flexibility. Neopatrimonial forms of authority have adapted themselves readily to the parliamentary institutions imposed by departing colonial powers, to pressures for structural economic change from the international lending institutions, to more recent pressures for democratization by the bilateral donor community, and even to pressures for a more participatory political environment by Africa’s renascent civil society. Van De Walle’s analysis is particularly illuminating when he shows how well the neopatrimonial political format has lent itself to the prebendal use of foreign public assistance. Joel Barkan once observed that certain of Africa’s political leaders have become singularly adept at aiming for a C+ on the donors’ democracy scale: just enough democratization to satisfy donor conditions for economic assistance, not enough to loosen their real hold on political power. Much the same could be said of the way Africa’s neopatrimonial governments handle foreign economic assistance. The operative strategy is to accept just enough liberalization to satisfy the permissive scrutiny of multi- and bilateral organizations that wish to avoid political confrontation, while avoiding farreaching changes that would jeopardize the patron-client networks that support corrupt regimes in power. By adroit maneuvering, neopatrimonial governments subvert the intended purposes of foreign economic resources, squandering donor wealth on projects that are politically intentioned, not developmental. This analysis is subject to one criticism. The exact connection between neopatrimonial authority and poor economic performance is underexplained. For in the last analysis, the notion of neopatrimonial authority has only limited utility. Its primary validity is descriptive, not explanatory. What the concept of neopatrimonialism provides is a highly generalized, broad-brush portrait of the nature of political authority throughout much of modern Africa. Who could deny Africa’s seemingly all-pervasive reality of patron-client ties, corrosive corruption, and power-driven politics? Or that the realworld power structures of African regimes have only the most fleeting connection with its formal institutional framework of modern bureaucracy and representative structures? As an explanatory idea, however, neopatrimonial authority has certain weaknesses. It cannot, for example, explain differences over time in economic performance within countries, nor can it explain the rather striking variance in economic performance across countries. This results in an argument that, while outwardly compelling, does not sustain close inspection. Van De Walle is convinced of the following logic. Neopatrimonial authority is ubiquitous in Africa. So is poor economic performance. Therefore, the former causes the latter. To make this argument stick, however, he would need to go much further and address a host of presently unanswered questions. Are there governments in Africa that exhibit other forms of authority? If so, how have these performed? If, on the other hand, all of Africa’s governments are neopatrimonial, then how can we explain why they vary so greatly in economic performance? 845 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS Some examples may help illustrate this weakness. During the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast and Kenya were sometimes referred to as Africa’s economic “miracles” to describe their highly positive growth performance. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, both economies began to stagnate. Did both suddenly become more neopatrimonial? If so, how and why? If not, what was their form of authority while their economies were performing well? Similarly, during the 1980s and 1990s, Ghana and Tanzania began to perform measurably better than they had during the previous two decades. Did they become less neopatrimonial? The challenging intellectual task is not to establish the presence of neopatrimonialism throughout Africa. Elements of this political pattern can undoubtedly be found everywhere, including this country. The more challenging project is to explain why African countries vary so greatly in how well they do, both over time and in contrast to one another. Is there room for differing developmental subcategories within the neopatrimonial rubric? There is great awkwardness in raising these issues. For elsewhere in his work, Van De Walle has been an intellectual leader among the tiny number of Africanist political scientists seeking to bring rigorous quantitative methods into this field. African Economies might have benefited from that approach. Even so, the book is well worth reading because of its sensitive and thoughtful effort to wrestle with dauntingly difficult questions. For those who would venture into this literature, Van de De Walle’s road map provides a useful guide through a particularly conflicted literary domain. Like the very best road maps, it is especially valuable at the beginning of the journey. Less so at the end, where unanswered questions remain. The Breakdown of Class Politics: A Debate on PostIndustrial Stratification. Edited by Terry Nichols Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 352 p. $18.95. Jytte Klausen, Brandeis University This book is a collection of essays from a 1996 conference that brought together a number of political sociologists to discuss an article from 1991 by the coorganizers, Terry Nichols Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset, originally published in International Sociology. They argued that the collapse of blue-collar industries and other changes in occupational and income structures associated with postindustrial social stratification had lead to a breakdown of class politics. Two years later, the journal published a rebuttal by Mike Hout, Clem Brooks, and Jeff Manza that class conflict remained important but that the political parties ignored it. The two articles and a 1993 response by Clark and Lipset are republished here together with a series of response papers written for the 1996 conference. Hout et al. criticized Clark and Lipset for failing to distinguish between class as a social phenomenon and the political representation of class. “Class interests may remain latent in the political arena,” they wrote, “but this does not mean that they do not exist” (p. 64). The debate over the breakdown of class politics is mostly about theory and interpretation, as nobody disputes the facts. Paul Nieuwbeerta clears the ground by addressing a controversy over the most commonly used measurement of class voting, the Alford Index, which has been criticized for being too sensitive to shifts in occupational structure. Comparing different measurements, Nieuwbeerta finds that all show an increase in class cohesion in voting patterns in 20 advanced industrial countries from 1945 to the 1960s, a beginning decline in the 1970s, and ubiquitous decline in the 1980s. 846 December 2002 Responding to Hout et al., Clark, Lipset, and Michael Rempel elaborate their “decline” thesis. Class still exists, they agree, but the experience of class is less rigid and stratification patterns have changed. Using the Alford Index, they show that class voting fell to below 20 index points in the 1980s in Great Britain, Germany, and France, reaching a level of (lacking) articulation of class comparable to that of the United States. (Although class cohesion also declined in Sweden, it did not drop as low.) A more recent chapter by Lipset lists the “Third Way” electoral victories—from Britain’s Tony Blair to Germany’s Gerhardt Schröder, New Zealand’s David Lange to Australia’s Bob Hawke, including even France’s Lionel Jospin—as further evidence for the “decline of class politics” thesis. Lipset also points to the intuitive evidence that a numerically diminished working class has lost political clout, compared to that of the 1950s or the 1960s. Employment in nonmanual occupations has risen to nearly 60% and declined in manufacturing to about 16% in the United States. In other countries, a similar shift has taken place, even if manufacturing employment still stands at a slightly higher percentage of all employment. John H. Goldthorpe argues that both sides in the debate are “flogging a dead horse.” The importance of class voting was exaggerated already in the 1960s by political sociologists, because the primacy-of-class thesis implied an incorrect dichotomy between attracting working-class voters and voters from other classes (p. 108). Goldthorpe’s view is that there has been no consistent long-term change to the association between class and voting since class de-alignment was first pronounced in 1959, after the British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats “modernized” their party programs. The evidence for class de-alignment is scant, Goldthorpe claims, but it appears that a realignment is in process, with skilled workers moving to the right and lower levels of nonmanual voters moving left (p. 114). He concludes, somewhat mysteriously, that all we have is “trendless fluctuation.” That is also David L. Weakliem’s conclusion, although the data presented in the chapter show an unambiguous decline in the importance of class as a primary source of political attitudes among voters born before or after 1935 (p. 211). Dick Houtman provides an interesting analysis of education as a source of social liberalism, and he contrasts it with social-economic exposure (without education) as a source of economic liberalism but social conservatism (p. 183). He does not elaborate on the importance of his findings for left politics, but it seems obvious that he has identified an important tradeoff faced by left parties, who risk offending working-class cultural conservatism when they embrace social liberalism. Critics may be right that the decline thesis fails to provide an interpretative theory for the causal link between social stratification patterns and changes in party appeals, but from a practical point of view, how can one argue that the political salience of class has not diminished? Herman L. Boschken does so by arguing that public policy institutions are inherently biased in favor of the “upper middle class,” a group that he curiously refers to as the “UMC genre,” apparently unique to U.S. society, and “defined by modern and postmodern institutions” (p. 228). His hypothesis is that the more the UMC genre is represented in the target populations of an agency, the better the agency performs. He measures bias— which he calls “outcome skewness” [sic]—by means of index measures based on performance data from 42 urban transit systems published by the U.S. Department of Transportation. He concludes that “an anonymous UMC matters in skewing outcomes,” but also that he could not “more precisely infer the power of the upper middle class” (p. 243). The jargon and methodology fail to obscure a simplistic elite theory. American Political Science Review In the final chapter, Clark argues that we have a New Political Culture (NPC). He proposes (in algebra) that voting is a function of party programs, occupation, demographics, and political attitudes, but provides no estimates for the value of each variable in his equation. The evidence is drawn from content analysis of party program changes over several decades in some 30 countries. Clark and his collaborators found a near-simultaneous erasure of issues of particular interest to labor beginning in the early 1980s by both left- and rightwing parties. The chapter also draws upon another research project investigating municipal policy choices with respect to the trade-off between fiscal austerity and social services. The connection to the New Political Culture thesis is tenuous, particularly as austerity measures often aim to preserve social programs. Ultimately, it is the lack of attention to some of the most obvious causes of Third Way politics that frustrates the reader. The Third Way politics of the 1990s aimed to encapsulate a new left coalition capable of holding onto power for extended periods, by bringing middle-class voters and women voters, along with an old but much transformed working-class constituency, together on a defense of the welfare state. The “pink-collar” revolution was less about class than about gender, and to that extent the “class still matters” folks have a point. Female service-sector workers are still workers. The encapsulation of middle-class voters and women voters as part of the Third Way political bloc required policy initiatives and party reforms that sidelined blue-collar and manual labor. It is a pity that neither side debating in this book bridged the gap between sociology and party appeals by theorizing the connection among occupational change, interests and identities, and electoral strategies. Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America. By Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. 544p. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Still Fighting: The Nicaraguan Women’s Movement, 1977– 2000. By Katherine Isbester. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. 272p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Leslie Anderson, University of Florida The titles of these books point both to their common concern and to the difference between them. Still Fighting underscores the extent to which Latin American women (in this case, Nicaraguans) are still struggling, from a disadvantaged position, to achieve recognition of their own personal value and identity, as well as a better social, political, and economic position. Empowering Women underscores, instead, the extent to which women’s struggle is about achieving power in the form of legal title to land. The former stresses gender identity while the latter emphasizes personal empowerment. The first accentuates setbacks experienced and the work still to be done; the latter highlights accomplishments while acknowledging that much work remains. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon locate their work within gender studies in Chapter 1, stating their orientation toward redistribution rather than recognition (p. 9). Although Katherine Isbester does not refer to gender studies, her work is about the struggle for identity and the role it plays in strengthening a social movement. Both volumes share a common theme: The outward political experience of a nation or region, either with regard to democratization, land reform, or titling, is not necessarily the experience of women within the situation. Where a nation has democratized, women have been included in democratic participation to a much lesser degree than men. Where land has Vol. 96, No. 4 been redistributed, men have benefited far more than women. Where peasant landowners have received title, the majority of recipients are male. The extent to which both volumes illustrate the difference in gender stories underscores the degree to which studies of political reform need to attend to the difference in the way reforms affect the genders. Changes that look positive may only be positive for men. Accordingly, if the goal of reform is a more just society, close attention to the experience of women within revolution, democratization, and agrarian reform is in order. To assume that political progress has equally benefited all members of society is to ignore and perpetuate the extent to which positive changes may only have helped men. Deere and Leon’s book, Empowering Women, is an extensively researched volume on the land ownership rights of Latin American women. Reaching across the continent and over history, the book offers admirable scope and extensive detail on the changes in women’s land ownership. It begins by examining this ownership in colonial times, and then describes changes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapters include a review of land reform under the Alliance for Progress and with neoliberalism. Each chapter outlines the limits to reforms with regard to female land ownership. The attention to detail and historic comparison reveal surprising findings. For example, the legal codification of property that came from Europe in the colonial period left women and women’s property less protected in the New World nations that inherited English common law than they were in nations that inherited the Spanish legal system. Additionally, Chapters 7 and 8 illustrate that the indigeneous, pre-Spanish legal system accorded more protection to women’s property rights than previously understood. In regions where indigenous land rights have affected property ownership, women are more likely to own land than they are where indigenous influences have been eliminated. One irony of changes in land ownership laws is the outcome of neoliberal reforms. With its emphasis on individual liberty, neoliberalism has sometimes enhanced the economic position of women by increasing their land ownership to its highest level ever. As the book reaches the end of the twentieth century, it concludes that real progress has been made on the continent. Various reforms combined with revolutions and other pressures for change have made laws more gender neutral. Where these are enforced, women’s property ownership has increased. Nonetheless, much work remains and the book concludes with a sense of urgency because landtitling programs are underway virtually everywhere in Latin America. Insofar as gender-neutral laws can be utilized, the legal and economic position of women will improve. Regrettably, the book does not address the extent to which changes in property ownership have improved the life situation of Latin women. Deere and Leon say that such questions are beyond the scope of the volume. The omission, however, limits the inferences we can make about the relationship between property rights and women’s empowerment. Similarly, the book’s failure to place its findings within a sytematic theoretical framework, and the decision instead to concentrate on detailed legal history, constrains any generalizations about women’s empowerment in other places and times. Such limitations, however, should not overshadow the book’s great scholarly accomplishments. Empowering Women is a monumental study of the legal history of women’s property rights in Latin America, with utility to legal scholars and historians, as well as to political scientists and women’s studies. In contrast to the Deere and Leon book, Isbester’s Still Fighting is a detailed study of the women’s movement in one 847 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS nation: Nicaragua. Grounding her work in the social movements literature, Isbester uses resource mobilization (RM) theory to consider both the accomplishments and the limitations of different movements and subgroups of women in Nicaragua over two decades. She considers women’s position in the revolutionary insurrection, throughout the Sandinista years, and under the Chamorro regime. Where the women’s movement or subsections of it succeeded, withered, or failed entirely, she shows how resource mobilization theory helps explain those outcomes. Although Isbester never summarizes her theoretical position, the thrust of it eventually emerges. Ultimately she is dissatisfied with RM theory, stessing instead the contribution of identity theory in understanding social movements. Resource mobilization theory considers the material goods available to a social movement and explains success or failure within this materialist conception. Yet it fails to account for the perception of what a “good” actually is (p. 13), an evaluation that may well be related to participants’ identities. For example, whereas oppression is often a disadvantage to a social movement, when combined with a struggle for identity that itself defies oppression, it can be an asset. This reality is captured by identity theory but not by RM theory. Isbester illustrates how an emphasis upon women’s identity, including a demand that society recognize that identity in a positive way, enhances movement strength. Isbester does scholarship on Nicaragua a great service in separating the “Sandinista story,” essentially a male story, from the experience of women within the Sandinista revolution. A movement that was supposed to be liberating and reformist was more so for men than for women. Yet one wonders if the picture painted is too dark and the responsibility for limitations imbalanced. Progress on women’s issues did emerge under Sandinismo, and Violeta Chamorro’s traditionalism did soften during her government. If Isbester had placed Nicaragua in comparative context or examined the Aleman years, the difficulties she describes might appear relative. In Deere and Leon’s continental study, Nicaragua is often one of the more progressive cases. More importantly, however, and omitted from Isbester’s account, is the responsibility of Nicaraguan women themselves for their predicament. Women provided majority support for Chamorro’s election, while men tilted slightly toward Daniel Ortega. And women voted for both Arnoldo Aleman and Enrique Bolanos more strongly than did men. Isbester overlooks women’s support for candidates antithetical to their interests. While she is correct that Sandinismo could have done and could do more, Nicaraguan women have supported governments that have done far less. Although Isbester’s consideration of the women’s movement within social movement theory is one of the strongest aspects of her book, grounding her work in gender theory as well would have allowed her to recognize women’s own responsibility. The role of the state and the limits of organization, both of which she addressed, are only part of the explanation for women’s restricted progress in Nicaragua. The other part lies with the limits and contradictions of the women themselves and of their demands. Sonia Alvarez’s distinction between “feminine” and “feminist” goals (Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics, 1990) illustrates that women may constrain their own progress toward liberation by the traditional nature of their demands. If Nicaraguan women’s claims are more feminine than feminist, leading them to support a traditional female candidate, then that position can still improve women’s lives. But it will also restrict long-term progress toward women’s liberation, a constraint that is only partly the responsibility 848 December 2002 of the government and parties. Ironically, the strength of Isbester’s work—her emphasis upon identity within social movement theory—is also its weakness. While identity theory enhances RM theory, the stress upon recognition instead of redistribution, identity instead of empowerment, leaves women’s demands constrained and their responsibility for those constraints unrecognized. Nevertheless, Isbester deserves credit for her extensive research and data collection in a nation where both are extremely difficult. She has also shown considerable courage in her willingness to criticize the Sandinistas. Her work demonstrates that the revolution did not produce gender equality, while the Chamorro regime may well have slowed progress forward. The question of why that is the case still remains to be fully explained. In sum, these volumes make substantial contributions to our understanding of political development in Latin America and of the fate of women within progress. The shortcomings of the volumes in no way undermine the contributions they make but, rather, point toward new avenues of research and additional theoretical considerations of the findings they offer. Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993. By Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 296p. $22.95. Framing Democracy: Civil Society and Civic Movements in Eastern Europe. By John K. Glenn, III. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 289p. $45.00. Creating a Democratic Civil Society in Eastern Germany: The Case of the Citizen Movements and Alliance 90. By Christiane Olivo. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 293p. $55.00. Andrei S. Markovits, University of Michigan A decade after the epochal events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, we have come to see them not as quasi miracles the way we did then but almost as prosaic way stations in the ever-present process of societal change. To be sure, there has been a stream of often pathbreaking scholarship in the fields of comparative politics and political sociology, with a special emphasis on social movements, civil society, the transition from authoritarian to democratic societies, and the complex consolidation of the latter that has rightly contributed to the demystification of these events. Yet, as citizens as well as scholars, we still remain so riveted by what happened in those few years in East Central Europe that the point of diminishing returns potentially afflicting additional research and writing on the subject remains distant. All three books under review here do both things brilliantly: They demystify and explain with intellectual acuity and scholarly rigor, but—precisely by doing so—they also show what an amazing, indeed unique, time this was. The three books share a few important features. They concentrate on the same geographic area. Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik focus on Poland, though in an explicit, if subordinate, comparison with Slovakia, Hungary, and East Germany. John Glenn’s book, the most overtly comparative of the three under review, analyzes Poland and what then was still Czechoslovakia. And Christiane Olivo features the former East Germany. While Olivo and Glenn concentrate their analyses on what could be called the transition processes narrowly construed—that is, the key events and rapid changes of 1989 and 1990 proper—Ekiert and Kubik are more interested in the aftermath of these events, thus the years 1989 to 1993. Lastly, all three studies are deeply steeped in the extensive literature in comparative politics, political American Political Science Review theory, and political sociology that—in good part, though not exclusively—emerged precisely as an attempt to place these amazing events into a proper theoretical framework and to use them as important empirical cases to expand already existing theories. In particular, all three books give much space to erudite discussions of the vast literature on civil society in which East Central Europe has arguably played the most important geographic and conceptual catalyst. They do the same for the so-called new social movements, where the literature of the 1970s and 1980s that focused almost exclusively on Western Europe and North America received a most welcome theoretical infusion in the 1990s by having to incorporate the events in East Central Europe of the late 1980s and early 1990s. All three books show their authors’ fine command of the “transition” and “consolidation” literatures, which—again featuring the events in East Central Europe under consideration—have arrived at important theoretical insights by comparing the changes wrought in that part of the world to ones in Latin America roughly at the same time and to those in southern Europe circa a decade earlier. Ekiert and Kubik pursue a simple question in their study: What is the role of protest in the consolidation of a new democracy? The book at hand is merely the Polish part of a large cross-national study that presumably will at some point yield similar monographs on East Germany (which the authors classify together with Poland as being a fast reformer) and Hungary, as well as Slovakia, which Ekiert and Kubik classify as slow reformers. The authors explicitly write the story of what they call “non-elite actors constituting civil society” (p. 12). In what to me was arguably the most informative part of their book, they present two introductory chapters in which they anchor their subsequent detailed study in its proper historical context. It is via the fine narrative of these two chapters that we truly come to understand what the authors rightly call “Polish exceptionalism,” meaning a rich tradition of protest and dissent that became an integral part of Polish politics and society from 1956 until 1989, and which was so woefully absent in virtually all other socialist countries of East Central Europe. While East Germany and Czechoslovakia—the two other cases in the books under review—did in fact experience unrest of their own (1953 in the former, 1968 in the latter), neither had anything near the string of crises that mobilized thousands, even millions, of Poles in 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980/81, to mention the most salient events of protest. To their immense credit, Ekiert and Kubik offer a persuasive picture of what could be called a failed de-Stalinization, in the sense that the ruling institutions of the state and the Communist Party simply could never recoup the authority and power that they had before Stalin’s death. According to the authors, these two pillars of the communist establishment basically spent the next three decades futilely fumbling for a proper mixture of repression and concession that was inherently doomed because it could never fulfill the rulers’ needs nor the people’s wants. With this excellent background, it comes as little surprise that, in a sense, we actually read the story of a continuity—that of the Polish exception—instead of that of a massive change that we fully expected, given the enormity of the shifts in 1989/1990. This is not to say that there did not occur an immense increase in the quantity as well as the audacity of protest politics after 1989. Ekiert and Kubik demonstrate in their immensely data-rich study how Poles came to embrace protest as an integral part of their quotidian politics in the early 1990s. Indeed, using some comparative data with the other three countries of the larger study, it is clear that Poles were much more active protesters between 1989 and 1993 than East Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks, in that order. But even this bevy of protests on every imaginable level of society and for—as Vol. 96, No. 4 well as against—virtually all possible causes still puts Poland in the medium range of protest politics in a list of advanced industrial democracies, and well behind the peak periods of the latter, which they experienced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ekiert and Kubik conclude their study with a sober assessment of protest politics as an integral aspect of functioning democracies and remind us once again how a deep understanding of any ancien regime’s intricacies is indispensable for the proper assessment of any new order. It is here that Glenn’s work is by far the most daring of the three, yet ultimately fails to fulfill his own immensely ambitious goals. In a genuinely comparative work, Glenn sets out to explain how the changes in Poland and Czechoslovakia occurred, and—of equal importance—what rendered them so different from each other. Anchoring his work in the literature on social movements, political bargaining, and opportunity structures, Glenn makes the powerful argument that the eventual outcomes of these two “revolutions” owed at least as much to the former framework and actual demise of what he calls “Leninist regimes” as they did to what the “revolutionaries”—a broad-based 10 million–member trade union in Poland and a tiny minority of intellectuals and actors in Czechoslovakia—attained during the heady days of 1989. But unlike Ekiert and Kubik, who also invoke events of the ancien regime to buttress their case of the present, Glenn does so too meekly and unsystematically. For Glenn’s argument to be really persuasive, he would have had to dwell at least as much on details of these Leninist regimes as he did with such distinction on the actors in the Polish and Czechoslovak events. What were these Leninist regimes? How did they operate? How, if at all, were they different in Poland and Czechoslovakia? What happened to their major carriers once they were confronted by what clearly amounted to the most fundamental challenges to their political existence, possibly their very lives, as was the case in Hungary in 1956? Why did they not resist? Especially in the Czechoslovak case, which Glenn correctly characterizes as witnessing the Leninist regime completely ensconced in power until the middle of November 1989, why did the Leninist regime not choose the Tienanmen Square option? With this side of the story never told, the book falls victim to its own immensely laudable ambition. Lastly, Glenn’s jargon-laden language rendered the reading of his intellectually exciting project unnecessarily cumbersome. While less central to Olivo’s project than to Glenn’s, she, too, fails to address why the East German regime did not pull the trigger at the Leipzig demonstration on October 9, 1989, thus foregoing a “Chinese solution” for which the state was fully prepared and equipped. Unlike in Poland where the Leninist regime was gradually hollowed out after 1956, as Ekiert and Kubik show, in East Germany and Czechoslovakia it remained strong to the very last minute, simply opting to implode in a most precipitous way. One thing is quite clear: The citizen movements that are the focus of Olivo’s study most certainly represented no threat to this regime at all and would have been easily defeated had the international system not changed so rapidly on account of the Gorbachev-led reforms in the Soviet Union. Her book on the East German citizen movements and opposition is the finest that I have read on this topic. It tells the story with rigor, and her analysis is based on meticulous research. And still, I am discomforted by the essential thrust of her argument that is nothing short of a paean to deliberative or participatory democracy that Olivo sees as superior in form and content to the lifeless proceduralism of liberal democracy. I concur. Where we part company is her glorifying description of the East German citizens’ movements, which Olivo extols as agents of precisely such a “real” democracy and whose importance she overestimates 849 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS massively, particularly when she spends a substantial part of the last segment of her book trying to convince the reader that these movements’ significance continues in today’s eastern states of a united Germany. Like most enthusiastic advocates of deliberative democracy, Olivo, too, assumes that the participants in it and its very nature must always be emancipatory, liberating, egalitarian—simply congruent with the author’s laudable moral preferences. Above all, there is always the explicit assumption that something about these movements renders them “authentic,” as opposed to the implied and alleged inauthenticity of form-obsessed liberal democracies. There is an underlying tenor throughout the book that had the West Germans not “taken over” the unification process and thus East Germany, these authentic and democratic citizens movements would have dominated East Germany and made it into the most—perhaps only—democratic society in Europe (perhaps the world). Alas, as we now know about East Germany during the 1980s when Olivo correctly locates the nascence of these enlightened movements, far more typical for that society’s counterhegemonic challenges than these democratic social movements were the growing racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia that engulfed much of East German civil society. And way beyond the East German case, there is simply neither a conceptual nor an empirical guarantee that deliberative democracy will always favor the “good guys” and exclude racists, bigots, and enemies of the very democracy that Olivo (and I) extol. By having been perhaps a tad more detached in her normative sympathies vis-à-vis these commendable citizen movements, Olivo could have shed more conceptual light on the relationship between these uniquely intense manifestations of democratic politics and systemic instability and transition. Could it be that these kinds of democratic arrangements are particular to precisely such periods studied by Olivo? Might it be that the normalcy of quotidian politics somehow remains inimical to such highly involved and exacting expressions of democratic participation? Gauging from the Ekiert and Kubik book, there is some evidence in this direction since in the Polish case, the Citizens’ Committees—roughly the Polish equivalents to Olivo’s East German protagonists—became the first casualties of the emerging political parties. Japan’s Economic Dilemma: The Institutional Origins of Prosperity and Stagnation. By Bai Gao. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 328p. $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Takaaki Suzuki, Ohio University The once-formidable Japanese economy has fallen upon hard times. After posting a roughly double-digit rate of real annual growth from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, and generally outperforming the economies of other advanced industrial democracies during the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese economy suffered a prolonged period of stagnation throughout most of the 1990s. Given this dramatic reversal, Bai Gao sets about the ambitious task not only of explaining why the Japanese economy has soured, but of providing a broad institutional framework that underscores the common factors behind the high growth period, the bubble economy of the 1980s, and the collapse of the bubble in the 1990s. To achieve this task, Gao applies what he terms “the logic of reverse reasoning”; he takes the rise and collapse of the bubble economy as the “starting point for theoretical reasoning,” examining the institutional mechanisms that purportedly produced it. He then works backward in time to reexamine how these institutional mechanisms operated during the high-growth era, 850 December 2002 and to identify the “environmental changes” that account for the reasons these institutional mechanisms produced such varied outcomes over time (pp. 6–7). Following a brief introduction in Chapter 1, Gao presents in Chapter 2 his main theoretical arguments. The key independent variable that emerges from his analysis is the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. According to Gao, the breakdown of Bretton Woods triggered two “structural shifts”: a shift from trade and production to finance as the predominant mode of economic expansion and exchange, and a shift from an emphasis on social protection to one that accords greater primacy to the market (pp. 22–29). After identifying these two shifts as the crucial “environmental changes” that altered the basic setting upon which the Japanese economy functioned, he then proceeds to locate two key types of domestic institutions that filtered these changes to produce radically different economic results. The first involves the institutional configuration of Japanese corporate governance. In Gao’s estimation, coordination and control are “two intrinsically conflicting tasks of corporate governance,” and the Japanese case represents one that has placed, since the 1950s, a heavy emphasis on the coordination of contractual exchange among separate companies at the expense of corporate control and management (pp. 30–33). The second entails the institutions and mechanisms that safeguard social stability. Here, too, he sees an apparent trade-off between social stability and economic efficiency, and he generously places Japan alongside European countries in its commitment to social stability, as measured in terms of its ability to maintain “total employment” and income equality at the household level (pp. 40–43). In Gao’s analysis, these two domestic institutions were optimally situated to produce and sustain high economic growth during the Bretton Woods era, when exchange rates were fixed and trade and production remained the dominant mode of economic expansion and exchange. The former provided unlimited capital to Japanese manufacturers for production and trade, while the latter fostered the political stability necessary to stay the course. However, with the collapse of Bretton Woods and the two “structural shifts” that emerged in its wake, Gao argues, these two domestic institutions became more a liability than an asset, producing speculative investments in real estate and the stock market while protecting inefficient sectors of the economy. After the bubble was created, it was simply a matter of time, according to Gao, before it would burst to produce the economic stagnation witnessed in the 1990s (p. 243). In support of such claims, the empirical core of the book examines in detail the evolution and performance of these two types of institutions in chronological order. Japan’s Economic Dilemma is a fascinating book, and there is much to be gained from studying its theoretical arguments and historical approach. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this book is its effort to identify and integrate long-term structural shifts in the global economy with an analysis of domestic-level institutions, and to do so by incorporating key insights from a wide range of disciplines. In just his analysis of the global economy alone, Gao draws heavily on the work of the historical sociologist Giovanni Arrighi (The Long Twentieth Century, 1994), the economic models of Robert Mundell and Robert Triffin, and the hegemonic stability literature in the study of international relations. Though laudable, however, Gao’s effort to combine these different insights into a single framework would have been more persuasive had he provided a more detailed analysis of how these separate insights are tangibly linked together. Unfortunately, the theory chapter devotes fewer than six pages of text to this part of his analysis. This is somewhat understandable; the book’s main focus is on tracing the transformation of the two types of American Political Science Review domestic institutions from the high growth period to the bubble economy. However, since the global shifts that the author identifies are the key independent variables that trigger this transformative process, which in turn allegedly produce the different economic results he ultimately seeks to explain, a greater elaboration of the causal mechanisms behind these global shifts would have clarified some ambiguities in his analysis. To give an example, Gao repeatedly asserts that the “Mundell-Flemming trilemma” was the key factor that produced the speculative bubble (pp. 14, 38, 54, 153, 171, 245), but it is not entirely clear from his analysis why this is so. The basic insight of the Mundell-Flemming model is that a country can only achieve two of the following three objectives: a fixed exchange rate, monetary autonomy, and capital mobility. With the collapse of the fixed exchange-rate regime, monetary autonomy could presumably be maintained even with the liberalization of capital in the post-Bretton Woods era, especially in the case of Japan, given the large size of its economy, its persistent current account surplus, and the large pool of domestic savings. Gao even seems to recognize this point when he argues that there were, in fact, two bubbles in the post–Bretton Woods era (one in the early 1970s, the other in the late 1980s), and that both were caused by combining an expansionary monetary policy with an expansionary fiscal policy (pp. 154–157). But then, in a somewhat puzzling turn, he remarks later in the same chapter that the “bubble did not appear” in the 1970s case because “the Bank of Japan kept raising interest rates” (p. 182). Putting aside the question of how one reconciles these two propositions, or whether indeed Japan adopted an expansionary fiscal policy in the late 1980s (a point refuted by Yukio Noguchi, “Budget Policymaking in Japan,” in Samuel Kernell, ed., Parallel Politics: Economic Policymaking in Japan and the United States, 1991, p. 139), the reader is left wondering how the bubble economy can be traced to the Mundell-Flemming trilemma. Indeed, Gao’s own remarks suggest that the Japanese government simply made bad, but avoidable, macroeconomic policy decisions. This last point raises the broader question of where political institutions and political agency fit into Gao’s analysis. The two key types of domestic institutions that are the main focus of the book reside primarily in the Japanese corporate sector, and they are posited as “dilemmas” or “two pairs of intrinsic contradictions in capitalist economies” (p. 265). Gao provides persuasive theoretical reasons why they embody these contradictions and gives ample empirical evidence to prove his point. But missing in this analytic framework is the relationship and potential contradiction between a democratic polity and a capitalist economy, or between politics and markets more generally. Also missing are the domestic political factors that account for specific macroeconomic policy decisions. Accordingly, while his institutional “dilemmas” serve to reveal important economic trade-offs within the corporate sector, his analytic framework does not adequately explain the variations in Japanese macroeconomic policy decisions that are crucial to his argument about Japan’s economic performance. Indeed, one wonders whether the economic stagnation of the 1990s would have been as deep and prolonged had the Hashimoto administration not killed the economic recovery underway by adopting a contractionary fiscal policy in 1996. These problems aside, Japan’s Economic Dilemma makes a significant contribution to the comparative literature on Japanese political economy. Whether one agrees with its arguments and assessments or not, its theoretically innovative and historically grounded study of the private sector institutions that manage corporate governance and social stability adds an important, and often neglected, dimension to our Vol. 96, No. 4 understanding of the challenges that confront the Japanese economy. Local Partnerships and Social Exclusion in the European Union: New Forms of Local Social Governance? Edited by Mike Geddes and John Benington. London: Routledge, 2001. 254p. $90.00 Duane Swank, Marquette University This book, the product of collaboration by an international team of European social scientists, focuses on the emergence and operation of local partnerships to combat social exclusion in European Union nations. This timely study is built on case analysis of samples of local partnerships in 10 EU nations; seven are given chapter-length treatment in the book. The central goals of the authors are to explain the cross-national diversity in frequency and form of local partnerships and their successes and failures in addressing poverty and social exclusion. In two introductory chapters, the editors synthesize a substantial amount of relatively well-known material about the “new poverty” and social exclusion. Social exclusion is rooted squarely in the process of postindustrial transformation of European societies. Post-OPEC macroeconomic performance problems, de-industrialization, internationalization, and associated sociocultural changes and fiscal pressures on developed welfare states have contributed to general rises in poverty and structural unemployment; more fundamentally, they have contributed to difficulties of access to fulltime employment, health, housing, education and training, social services, and the political process for increasing numbers of citizens. Young as well as older workers, the disabled, women, migrants, and racial and ethnic minorities are more likely than other social aggregates to be socially excluded from full participation in economic, social, and political life. Moreover, these socially excluded populations are typically geographically concentrated in de-industrialized urban areas, ethnic ghettos, spatially isolated public housing projects, and some rural areas. In the view of the authors, the institutional strategy of local partnership is, in theory, particularly well suited to address spatially concentrated poverty and social exclusion in an era of retrenchment and restructuring of national welfare states. Local partnerships consist of collaborative efforts among the public sector, employers and labor unions, voluntary groups, and community organizations to coordinate, implement, and, occasionally, formulate policies to ameliorate poverty and joblessness, as well as promote social and political inclusion. Partnerships are horizontal in that local associations typically anchor the network of collaborative relationships. However, partnerships are also vertical in that networks of international, national, regional, and local governments (and occasionally private market and voluntary associations) simultaneously participate in, and often lead, local collective action. In fact, local partnership has been most centrally promoted by the European Union, especially in implementation of EU Structural Funds and EU Poverty 3 programs. From the perspective of proponents, local partnerships may foster experimentation and innovation in social policy content and delivery; they may also prove far more flexible and adaptable in combating the multifaceted problems attendant on contemporary (spatially concentrated) social exclusion than extant welfare state structures. In addition, they may harness, and coordinate application of, a variety of nongovernmental resources and, thus, supplement fiscally constrained public budgets. Moreover, partnerships may foster participatory and associative democracy and, thus, potentially lesson 851 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS the legitimacy problems of the democratic state in postindustrial capitalism. The volume offers relatively extensive evidence on the disparate records of local partnerships in seven countries. Mikko Kautto and Matti Heikkilä assess the very limited development of local partnerships in the context of a centralized, universalistic, and social democratic welfare state, Finland. Patrick Le Galès and Patricia Loncle-Moriceau provide a similar analysis of France, where the dirigiste system, weak private market and voluntary associations, and few precedents contributed to the irregular and limited development of local partnerships. For Germany, Karl Birkhölzer and Günther Lorenz also highlight a modest development of local partnerships. Here, with the exception of the social corporatist Alliance for Jobs, partnerships have been principally championed by voluntary organizations and only weakly supported by Land and EU resources. Fernanda Rodrigues and Stephen R. Stoer’s case study of Portugal and Jordi Estivill’s analysis of partnerships in Spain offer similar assessments of the ways in which economic and political structures and policy legacies have shaped and limited local partnership development on the Iberian peninsula. On the other hand, Jim Walsh’s analysis of the Irish case, and to a lesser extent Mike Geddes’s case study of partnerships in Britain, demonstrate that local partnerships have emerged in significant numbers and achieved modest successes in some contexts. The Irish case is most notable. In the context of a national social corporatist strategy to manage economic restructuring, the national government sponsored roughly a hundred partnerships among local governments, the social partners, and community associations to target long-term unemployment, poverty, and social exclusion. The case studies and comparative analyses generate two major conclusions. First, despite the growth of poverty and exclusion and EU pressures and incentives to pursue the partnership strategy, the degree and form of development of local partnerships have been fundamentally shaped by national welfare state structures, overarching configurations of national political institutions and culture, and recent policy legacies. Second, the rhetoric surrounding the potential benefits of the partnership strategy, especially at the EU level, far exceeded the reality of actual development and accomplishments. In fact, the volume’s authors point out that despite discrete examples of moderate success, the paucity of policy evaluations and data collection by the partnerships themselves make it very difficult to gauge partnership impacts on poverty, unemployment, and social exclusion. Overall, the volume makes several contributions to contemporary welfare state studies. First, the book offers the most extensive documentation and analysis of local partnerships to date; it simultaneously provides a useful synoptic treatment of social exclusion in Europe. Second, it contributes to the large literature on EU policymaking by concretely depicting the complex dynamics of contemporary intergovernmental relationships and multilevel politics in antipoverty policy. Finally, the volume generates a variety of evidence for the debate on the degree to which contemporary welfare state change is dominated by path dependency, neoliberal convergence, or more hybrid reform trajectories of welfare state pluralism. In the area of local partnerships, the weight of the evidence suggests that while significant policy innovation is possible (as the Irish case demonstrates), welfare states remain heavily path dependent in spite of the significant challenges posed by the new poverty and social exclusion. Despite these contributions, the book is weakened by three sets of problems. First, other than a conceptual discussion of social exclusion and partnership, the editors do not pro- 852 December 2002 vide a theoretical framework to systematically orient the case studies and comparative analysis. The book would have been much stronger had the authors more explicitly grounded the study in the contemporary literature on welfare state change, and organized the case studies around a core set of hypotheses on how features of welfare state regimes, national political institutions, and extant distributions of political power should shape the development and success of local partnerships. Second, the design of the study could have been improved. Ten countries were chosen for study on the grounds that they are arguably representative of the political, economic, and social diversity of Europe (and seven of these are highlighted in the book). The authors proceeded by collecting data on six to eight partnerships per country and by intensive analysis of three of these. However, the sample seems heavily weighted to southern Europe with Portugal and Spain (and Greece) included, while only Finland among the Nordic systems was selected. Moreover, the authors admit that the samples of partnerships for general or intensive analysis were not selected randomly. The upshot of these considerations is, of course, that the reader must wonder about the degree of distortion (e.g., from nonrandom samples) present in the case study and comparative conclusions. Finally, both the comparative and case study analyses lack rigor. Other than one summary table of the frequency of partnership participation by type of actor, little in the way of systematic evidence from the individual partnership studies is presented. In addition, widely used EU and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data on poverty, long-term unemployment, features of social exclusion, and national welfare programs are notably underutilized throughout the volume. In sum, an orienting theoretical framework and substantially more rigor in design and execution of the study would have led to a much better book. With these qualifications in mind, the book can still be recommended to students and scholars of European political economy, public policy, and politics. It is appropriate for both upper division undergraduate and graduate courses. Presidents, Parliaments, and Policy. Edited by Stephan Haggard and Mathew D. McCubbins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 376p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. Scott Mainwaring, University of Notre Dame The core message of this book comes through clearly in every chapter: Formal political institutions affect economic policymaking and—less directly—policy results. The book advances thinking about how institutions affect policymaking, especially about how political institutions affect the stability (or resoluteness) and adaptability (or decisiveness) of policy. The book brings together a superb group of collaborators. Many of them had previously made major contributions to the analysis of political institutions; others had done so on political economy. Here they work at the intersection of these two fields. Chapters 2 and 3 lay out the basic theoretical framework of the book, and for this reason I single them out for most attention. Chapter 2, “The Institutional Determinants of Economic Policy-Making” by Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins, lays out an institutionalist approach to political economy in broad and bold terms. The authors begin with a distinction between the legal separation of power and a separation of purpose, which means that a multiplicity of actors with different preferences, rather than an essentially unitary actor with virtually similar preferences, controls some points of power within the state. They note two key democratic American Political Science Review tradeoffs: first, between the capacity of state leaders to undertake sweeping policy change (“decisiveness”) and policy stability (“resoluteness”); and second, between public- and private-regardedness of policy. They argue that how democracies tackle both trade-offs depends on the incentives created by political institutions. Other things being equal, one would expect greater policy stability and less capacity to undertake policy change when there are many veto players and when actors have a greater separation of purpose. The separation of purpose, in turn, depends on incentives to cultivate a personal vote, the electoral rules that affect the number of parties, and party factionalization. Although this chapter does an excellent job of presenting big-picture hypotheses about the effects of institutions on economic policymaking, initially Cox and McCubbins claim too much for institutionalist arguments. They do not substantiate their sweeping statement that “the diversity of economic policies is rooted in the diversity of democratic institutions in each country” (p. 21). Different ideas about the economic policies that are most effective, differences in economic objectives, and the preferences of top-level policymakers (the president, his/her ministers, and the heads of the Central Bank and a few other powerful economic policymaking agencies) also have a significant impact on the diversity of policies pursued. The distribution of power in different societies also affects policymaking; institutions do not function in a vacuum, but rather in the context of societies in which structural factors are important. Other works by Cox and McCubbins acknowledge these points, but some of their claims in this chapter do not. Even if institutions fully determined the extent to which policy is decisive or resolute and public- or private-regarding, some institutions that are not in their analysis have a major impact on decisiveness. For example, other things being equal, the existence of an independent Central Bank bolsters policy resoluteness. The efficacy of the legal system affects whether policy is public- or private-regarding; with an ineffectual legal system, there are no sanctions against even patently corrupt private-regarding policies. Finally, they neglect presidents’ constitutional powers, which, as Matthew Shugart and Stephan Haggard argue in Chapter 3, influence policy decisiveness. The rest of the book presents less-sweeping claims about the impact of institutions on economic policymaking. In their excellent chapter, Shugart and Haggard focus on the tradeoff between policy decisiveness and resoluteness. They analyze how formal political institutions shape this trade-off in presidential systems, focusing on presidents’ constitutional powers, electoral cycles, party-centered versus candidatecentered electoral rules, and the congruence of or divergence between the president’s and congressional electoral constituencies. By analyzing presidents’ constitutional powers, Shugart and Haggard include the institutional capacity of the executive to push change forward in addition to the institutional capacity of veto players to thwart it. They should include federalism in their list of factors that affect the “separation of purpose” because it allows a multiplicity of actors with different preferences to control policy and resources at the subnational level, frequently with important consequences for the resoluteness of policy at the national level. Case studies about the impact of political institutions on budgetary policy (Chapters 4 to 6) and regulatory policy (Chapters 7 to 9) follow the two theoretical overviews. The authors all fruitfully view institutions as a package, rather than examining the effects of specific institutions in isolation. A few of the case studies stick closely to the initial theoretical focus on how formal political institutions affect the resoluteness of economic policymaking. Others (for example, Vol. 96, No. 4 Mark Jones’s fine chapter on how political institutions shape Argentina’s budget policy) do not focus as tightly on this issue. Rather than pointing to a few institutions to explain economic policymaking across national cases, the case studies indicate that many different institutions have an impact. Although this book advances the institutionalist agenda, the editors wisely acknowledge that it leaves open many questions. Perhaps foremost among them is the importance of institutions as opposed to other factors in explaining policy resoluteness—a thorny question about which cumulative knowledge is still limited. Ultimately, social scientists will need to test more rigorously the deductive hypotheses about the effects of institutions that the two theoretical chapters so compellingly chart. It is not clear how important institutional factors are, compared to such other factors as the commitment of the top-level economic policymaking elite to maintain or change policy. Institutions constrain and shape outcomes, but top leaders’ preferences and abilities are also important. The book also leaves open the question of how formal institutions interact with structural factors in shaping economy policymaking. Reforming Parliamentary Committees: Israel in Comparative Perspective. By Reuvan Y. Hazan. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. 216p. $50.00. Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, Williams College This book is the result of a five-year research project that had as its goal the reform of the committee system in the Israeli Knesset. It had the full support of the leadership and members of that legislative body, and was conducted under the sponsorship of an important Israeli think tank, the Israel Democracy Institute. In undertaking this investigation, Reuvan Y. Hazan quickly discovered an additional reason for devoting so much time to this subject—the challenge of addressing “a flagrant deficiency in the political science literature” (p. 2), the dearth of comparative literature on parliamentary reform of committees. In the end, however, it is the original impetus behind the book that is most strongly represented in the author’s contributions to the scholarly literature. Thus, he is at his best when discussing reform possibilities in the context of recent structural changes that have occurred in the larger political system of Israel. While Hazan’s comparative findings and analysis provide some useful perspective on proposals for reform, the somewhat perfunctory quality of these explorations prevents them from illuminating as much of the problem as one might have hoped. Hazan begins his study with a summary of the purposes and functions of parliamentary committees that reduces to the two familiar categories of legislation and oversight, both of which are critical for achieving democratic accountability. He then introduces the comparative examples, chosen in each instance for their distinctive functions and structures, and for their relevance to the Israeli case. They are the British House of Commons, the German Bundestag, the Italian camera dei Deputati, and the Dutch Tweede Kamer. Each of the four chapters devoted to these studies considers several criteria, which serve as the “conceptual apparatus” that structures the argument and recommendations of the book. These criteria are concerned with the political environment affecting committees, their basic arrangements and procedures, methods of recruitment, leadership styles, and resources. The presentation of all of this material proceeds within the space of 33 pages, a detail noteworthy only for being suggestive of the rather sketchy analysis emerging from this section’s comparative excursion. 853 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS It is certainly worthwhile to identify the distinctive features of these countries’ political environments—for example, the lack of a written constitution in Britain, the ups and downs of Dutch consociationalism—but for there to be appreciable comparative dividends from this sort of research investment, more engagement with the political cultural underpinnings of law, parties, elections, and the like is required. If the functioning of a committee system is, as the author contends, critical in delivering on the promise of democratic accountability, then descriptions of the political environment need to penetrate more deeply into the underlying matrix of ideas that support extant institutional arrangements. For instance, Hazan mentions the lack of a written constitution in Britain as a contributing factor to explain the absence of any checks and balances on executive dominance of parliamentary sovereignty. But without reflection on the background to this anomalous constitutional tradition, it is not only difficult to determine why the lack of one (a written constitution) is related to the absence of the other (oversight); it is also impossible to establish with any confidence what implications follow for Israel, where the similarity in constitutional circumstance obscures a fundamentally different explanation for the political/constitutional environment. When Hazan turns specifically to the Israeli political context, the results are better. While some of his recommendations for reform seem painfully obvious—for example, that committees should be filled with members who know something about the issues within their jurisdiction—the author’s placement of the committee issue within the larger debate in Israel over the shape of the electoral system yields some quite interesting insights. Indeed, the author’s analysis of the various phases of Israeli political development in the context of the general worldwide phenomenon of executive dominance of the legislative branch effectively clarifies the main issues on the agenda of committee reform in ways that inform beyond the immediate case at hand. In general, “[t]he goal of committee reform has . . . been to reverse the radical imbalance that has been created over time” (p. 78). Hazan’s account of the various structural permutations of recent Israeli politics illustrates some of the limits and possibilities bound up in this effort. In the early 1990s, several important reforms were implemented, the most important of which were the direct election of the prime minister, primaries for the selection of party candidates, and additions to the Basic Laws that led to an enhanced role for the judiciary in the enforcement of rights. The most innovative of these changes—direct election—was found wanting and has already been cancelled. But the uncertainty surrounding the question of whether the system had been transformed from a parliamentary to a presidential regime provides an analytic opportunity for fruitful comparative inquiry. It is in the context of these competing models, rather than in the somewhat formulaic application of crossparliamentary political variables, that one comes fully to appreciate the role of committees in establishing a democratic counterweight to the ascendance of executive power in constitutional polities. Hazan’s analysis could have benefited from greater attention to the available scholarly literature, in particular the pathbreaking work of Richard Fenno (Congressmen in Committees, 1973). It could also have profited from a more grounded and vivid presentation of the political environment, in which the reader might have come to know some of the actors prominent in the narrative of political reform that is otherwise ably presented. Reforming Parliamentary Committees has much to offer the student of the legislative process, but it only begins to remedy the political science deficiency that is projected in its ambitions. 854 December 2002 A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System. By Juliet Johnson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. 244p. $29.95. Gerald M. Easter, Boston College For the field of Russian comparative politics, the collapse of Soviet communism abruptly shifted attention from commissars and commanders to businessmen and bankers. Since the mid-1990s, it has become increasingly evident that a small cohort of newly rich financiers was influencing the course of Russia’s transition. Yet it was not always clear in what ways and to what extent these upstart tycoons were acting as political players. With this book, the field at last has an authoritative, systematic rendering of the banking sector. Juliet Johnson chronicles the good, the bad, and the ugly of Russia’s big bankers during the postcommunist regime’s formative decade. By means of the banking case study, Johnson seeks to contribute to the larger theoretical debate on political and economic institution building, which continues to enliven post-communist studies. On this issue, she takes to task the advocates of the neoliberal-inspired “trickle down” approach, who, she contends, wrongly presumed that resetting macrolevel incentive structures would spontaneously give rise to Western-like institutions (pp. 21–23). Instead, Johnson argues that this reform strategy was flawed from the outset, given the inheritance of communism’s command economy. “Institutional legacies are important,” she maintains, “because they structure the initial power relations among the actors” (p. 20). The analysis is consistent with the conceptual premises of a “weak state,” as opposed to a “grabbing state.” It was the inability of existing institutions to readily adapt to the transition environment that created the opportunity for big bankers and the state to become intertwined in a way that ultimately led to crony capitalism, instead of a market economy. Moreover, crony capitalism, once entrenched, thwarted the further development of Russia’s nascent democratic institutions during these fateful early years. The theoretical assertions are based on the empirical findings of a single case study on the Russian banking sector from the initial reforms of 1987 to the financial crash of 1998. Comparison to other cases is limited to brief asides. The research focuses mainly on the big bankers in Moscow, although it also entails extended side glances at regional bankers in two Russian provinces, where the author conducted fieldwork. While some of the contextual material and anecdotes are by now quite familiar to specialists, the systematic focus on the banking sector makes for an original case study. The case is constructed largely from the Russian press, including previously untapped regional and specialist sources, and personal interviews with a number of well-placed banking officials. The evidence is presented in a well-organized and nicely written narrative, which leaves little doubt as to the author’s opinion on things. The case study is especially good in its coverage of the unintended breakup of the Soviet banking system, the vexing role of the Russian Central Bank in economic reform, the mutually attractive benefits that first brought together the state and big bankers, and the desperate circumstances that later sundered their relationship. To what extent does the case study support the theoretical claims? One main assertion is that unappreciated institutional legacies and inappropriate policy choices combined to produce undesired and distorted outcomes. The narrative provides ample anecdotal evidence to support this contention. For example, Johnson cites the case of the newly created Russian Central Bank, which Western advisors insisted must have institutional autonomy to insulate it from political pressures. In practice, however, the autonomous central bank American Political Science Review fueled inflation by generously issuing investment credits to unreformed enterprises, to the frustration of the Russian government and befuddlement of Western economists (pp. 69–73). The central bank’s unexpected Soviet-like largesse demonstrates that outcomes are not determined by formal arrangements per se, but by the personal dispositions and informal ties of actors. Another key assertion concerned the botched handling of fiscal policy that led to the 1998 ruble crash. “The ultimate cause,” Johnson argues, “lay in the evolving relationship between the Russian state and the banking system” (p. 217). Certainly, there is no disputing that the government and the bankers had ensnared themselves in a short-term credit trap. But how does one reckon this development with other factors? The financial debacle can easily be explained with alternative “ultimate causes,” such as the lack of elite consensus among the major political parties, the government’s exchange rate policy, or the price of a barrel of oil. The research design, however, does not provide for an examination of alternative explanations. Finally, the study claims that Russia’s big bankers undermined the development of democratic institutions by forming patronage ties to politicians, penetrating the policymaking process, and disregarding the nascent middle class. While the study’s introduction laid out several criteria to indicate how bankers may affect democracy, it was not obvious how these distinctions should be applied. When is a banker who finances an election campaign a democracy-supporting “interest group” and not a democracy-usurping “patron”? Johnson is convincing on how not to build democracy, but is less persuasive on a better approach. Her assertion that democracy requires property rights, impartial administration, and political accountability (p. 232) identifies institutional features associated with democracy, but begs the question of how to construct them. In conclusion, Johnson maintains, “[w]e in the West have been slow to grasp Russia’s status as a late developer” (p. 232). That may or may not be so, but democracy is hardly a trait commonly ascribed to late-developing states. The book should enjoy a wide readership. The nontechnical prose and clearly presented argument makes this complex subject accessible to upper-level undergraduates. The book is probably better suited for graduate students learning their way around the maze of postcommunist Russian politics. For Russian specialists, the book provides a tidy packaging of the messy issues involving big bankers, the state, and economic reform. General comparativists likewise should profit from the richly detailed case study of commercial bankers and the state. Overall, the book is a noteworthy contribution to the study of the political economy of the postcommunist transitions. Institutions and Innovation: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy—France and Germany, 1870–1939. By Marcus Kreuzer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 224p. $52.50 Alice H. Cooper, University of Mississippi As its title indicates, this book explores the links between institutions and innovation—specifically, between electoral systems and parties’ capacity to innovate. The latter, in turn, is considered a crucial determinant of democratic performance because it shapes parties’ capacity in times of economic crisis to offer policy prescriptions sufficiently attractive to limit voter defection to nondemocratic alternatives. Marcus Kreuzer investigates these relationships by looking at France and Germany from 1870 to 1939. During the 1870– Vol. 96, No. 4 1918 period, Third Republic France and imperial Germany had the same electoral law, the double-ballot system (singlemember districts and two-round elections with runoffs in the second round). During this period, the parties’ main challenge was to adapt their campaign techniques and platforms to the advent of mass politics. Parties in both countries were “reluctant entrepreneurs” in this regard. For ideological reasons, for example, socialist and conservative parties were divided in both countries over whether to innovate, as new campaign techniques and platforms would violate traditional tenets. The important point, as Kreuzer argues, is that French and German socialist parties were more similar to each other than either were to the conservative or liberal parties of their respective countries, and vice versa. Under similar institutional configurations (electoral systems), French and German parties all behaved similarly, with the main differences between parties being ideologically driven. After World War I, in contrast, French parties became more similar to one another than to their German counterparts, and vice versa. French socialist, liberal, and conservative parties were all relatively adept at modernizing their party organizations and responding to economic crises, whereas German socialist, liberal, and conservative parties failed on both counts. Why? France maintained its single-member-district two-ballot electoral system, whereas Germany’s Weimar Republic introduced a system of virtually pure proportional representation (PR). Electoral institutions in the two countries differed dramatically from 1919 on, and these systems created dramatically differing incentives for innovation by parties as well. Electoral mechanisms strongly influence candidate selection processes and levels of career uncertainty, campaign finance requirements, and levels of strategic voting. Thus, Germany’s high district magnitude and vote-pooling mechanisms centralized the candidate recruitment process, reducing career uncertainty for individual politicians but destroying their autonomy from party leaders, and thus their opportunities for innovation. Large districts and frequent elections increased electioneering costs for German candidates and increased their dependence on financial benefactors—the party leadership and economic interests that contributed to party coffers. Finally, Germany’s PR system eliminated incentives for strategic voting, so that political actors in turn had little incentive to adapt to shifts in voter preferences. In contrast, the effects of the French electoral system were to decentralize candidate recruitment and raise career uncertainty, keep campaign costs relatively modest, and encourage strategic voting in the second round. All three of these effects promoted innovation in policy platform and campaign strategy by French politicians, while discouraging them in the German case. These relationships are not merely of theoretical interest, argues Kreuzer, but they also had huge implications for democratic performance in France and Germany. Both countries faced rampant inflation after World War I, horrendous industrial unemployment after 1929, and agricultural depression. Electoral mechanisms encouraged French mainstream party politicians to innovate sufficiently to keep voters’ loyalties and discourage defections to the extreme right or left. In contrast, mainstream German politicians lacked such incentives, and their parties lost voters in droves to the upstart communist and Nazi parties. The rest, as the saying goes, was history. In this elegantly argued and very well written book, Kreuzer roots himself explicitly in rational-choice institutionalism, and he uses it to explain the historical differences between French and German interwar democratic performance. To complement the rational-choice institutionalism, 855 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS he argues that historical contingency and contextual factors interact with institutions and limit their effects. Rearranging his empirical material into national, cross-party comparisons (holding institutions constant so as to observe the impact of contextual factors), he finds that “history matters since neither did all French parties retain their level of support nor did all German parties lose votes at the same rate” (p. 159). Moreover, while the effects of strategic voting and career uncertainty were relatively consistent across the various parties in both France and Germany, the effects of electioneering costs varied, depending on the logistical endowments of parties; Germany’s liberal parties suffered much more than other parties. So, concludes Kreuzer, “the influence of historical contingency varies with different institutions” (p. 161). These are welcome insights, but even for a concluding chapter they are developed somewhat sketchily. As for democratic performance, Kreuzer joins the fight against the various theories of German “exceptionalism,” which account for National Socialism in terms of such longpast events as failed democratic revolutions. Instead, he sides with those who argue that German development was not so very exceptional, and he points to the effects of contemporary, Weimar-era (electoral) institutions to account for the failure of democracy there. Thus, while he bases his argument largely on structural factors (as opposed to relying simply on historical contingencies like the Versailles Treaty or the Great Depression), these structural factors are contemporary, rather than rooted in the distant past. These insights also have considerable appeal. Although Kreuzer’s argument seems persuasive in terms of explaining the differences in party and democratic performance in France and Germany, questions arise as to the generalizability of the argument. In my view, the book would have been considerably strengthened by a chapter which (briefly!) tested his argument in at least several more cases. To this reader’s “naked eye,” it is not immediately clear why, in the 1930s, the Swedish Social Democrats were able to innovate (by adopting Keynesianism) despite their system of proportional representation, whereas the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) failed to adopt (proto-)Keynesianism before 1933 because of (in Kreuzer’s view) the incentive structure embedded in their similar (though not identical) PR system. Similarly, in the 1930s, the British Labour party failed to adopt Keynesianism despite their single-member-district system, which presumably shared many incentives with the very French system that enabled French socialists, according to Kreuzer, to adopt Keynesianism. (Although it lacks the French system’s second ballot, the incentive structure of the British system is surely closer to the French system than to PR, given the single-member districts in each). An answer to such questions might require a more detailed exploration of the relationship between institutions and historical contingency than that presented in Kreuzer’s elegant treatise. One place to start would be with intraparty politics; recent literature points to its importance for successful adaptation to changing competitive environments. For example, Herbert Kitschelt’s (1994) The Transformation of European Social Democracy relates the innovative capacity of social democratic/socialist parties in the 1980s to their internal organizational structures and distribution of power. Both Kitschelt and Frank Wilson, in “The Sources of Party Change” (in Kay Lawson, ed., How Political Parties Work, 1994), point out the impact of particularly effective leaders. Finally, Sheri Berman (“The Life of the Party,” Comparative Politics, 30, no. 1 [1997]: 101–23) points to the importance of historically rooted ideological flexibility; the Swedish Social Democrats’ practice in forging crossclass coalitions (with farmers in the 1930s and middle-class 856 December 2002 groups in the 1950s) was replicated in the party’s undercutting of the Swedish Greens by coopting postmaterialist themes in the 1980s. To push Kreuzer’s line of research further, it would be quite fascinating to investigate in greater depth whether or how electoral systems contribute to any of these conditions, particularly to parties’ internal organization. One would also want to know more about how parties in PR systems do in fact manage to adapt over time, given Kreuzer’s argument that PR systems contain disincentives for innovation. State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810– 1900. By Fernando López-Alves. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 295p. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. Lawrence Boudon, Library of Congress One of the most vexing questions posed over time by political scientists is: Why do democratic polities develop in some countries, but not in others? In his seminal work Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1986), still read today by most students of comparative politics, Barrington Moore strove to answer that question by examining the historical process in which commercial agriculture emerged in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China. In his book, Fernando López-Alves takes the framework that Moore provided and applies it to three countries in Latin America whose trajectories in the nineteenth century led to different polities and experiences with democracy—Argentina, Colombia, and Uruguay (he also makes brief reference to Paraguay and Venezuela as so-called control cases). While conceding the need for “further testing” (p. 220), he arrives at conclusions that differ significantly from Moore’s, even though he does not attempt to dismiss that earlier work. Relying on historical data (and the comments of historians), López-Alvez argues eloquently how, rather than the conversion to commercial agriculture, it was conflict and the actors involved therein that shaped the polities of these countries. It mattered whether the state–making was carried out primarily by political parties (Colombia and Argentina) or by national armies (Argentina and Paraguay). The type of conflict—not the frequency—also mattered: “[T]he degree to which regime outcomes turned out more democratic or authoritarian [is] partially explained by whether the locus of the revolutionary wars was supported by the city or by the countryside” (p. 37). In Argentina, the military efforts were associated with urban elites, whereas in both Colombia and Uruguay, they involved rural-based caudillos. Another important factor was the way in which the rural poor were mobilized: “The fourth and final claim is that the mode of incorporation of the rural poor into war and politics substantially shaped institutions and the type of resulting regime” (p. 44). In Colombia and Uruguay, the mobilization occurred via the political parties, resulting in weaker states but more inclusive polities. Uruguay was the most democratic due to the fact that there, the elites had less fear of rural uprisings than in Colombia. In Argentina (and Paraguay), incorporation was via the army, resulting in stronger states and restrictive polities. The other case examined, Venezuela, experienced mobilization by caudillo armies, also resulting in a more restrictive polity. In this qualitative work, López-Alvez cleverly utilizes both the method of agreement, when comparing Argentina and Uruguay, and the method of difference, when comparing Uruguay and Colombia. The first pair share many similarities, making a comparison possible. The second pair have little in common, except for the mostly democratic outcomes. As he shows us, however, the conflicts in Uruguay and Argentina American Political Science Review differed. In Uruguay, wars were fought between followers of the urban-based Colorados and the more rural-based Blancos over control of the state. In Argentina, on the other hand, the wars were either against invaders or other countries, or were waged far from Buenos Aires, where a military developed that impeded, the author claims, the development of parties. In the first chapter of the book, not only does López-Alves justify his research by reiterating some of the classic arguments on state building (i.e., Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States [1990]; Barrington Moore, Social Origins . . . [1986]; Ruth B. Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena [1991]; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power [1993]; and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne H. Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy [1992]), but he also makes clear why many of those works fall short in explaining the different outcomes of the state-building process in Latin America. He argues cogently that the key period for state building was not the late 1800s and early 1900s, as much of the existing scholarship posits, but the period from independence to the late 1800s, before most of the new countries had made the transition to commercial agriculture. By the end of the chapter, his argument is neatly laid out in a flow chart depicting the independent and intervening variables, a table comparing the five cases and their outcomes, and a single statement summing everything up: “In agrarian postcolonial societies, types of war and the type and scope of mobilization of the rural poor during state formation shaped institutions, civil-military relations, and regime outcomes” (p. 46). The statement is italicized in the book for added emphasis. In the next four chapters, López-Alves proceeds to flesh out his argument by looking at each case in some detail, starting with Uruguay. Here, he underscores the sharp geographical divisions and the centrality of the two parties in state building. However, he also notes that it was the Colorado Party, under the enlightened leadership of José Batlle y Ordoñez, that crafted the most inclusive polity of the three major cases. The Colorados more firmly controlled the army, and the lack of a cohesive conservative opposition allowed Batlle to carry out social reforms. On the contrary, in Colombia, an alliance between the powerful Catholic Church and the Conservative Party resulted in a lack of reforms and a more restrictive polity, even though party mobilization was central there as well. In Argentina, he gives ample credit to Juan Manuel de Rosas, but notes also that Buenos Aires remained largely unscathed by the various wars, allowing for a stronger state to develop. Finally, he briefly examines Paraguay and Venezuela, both of which tend to confirm his findings, even though in the latter case, rural mobilization was different from the four other cases. The book is a must read for anyone interested in the evolution of the state in Latin America, and it complements— rather than supplants—some of the works previously mentioned. If there is any criticism of the book, it is that the conclusions are much too brief. The argument is restated too quickly, leaving the reader feeling somehow empty and not totally convinced. It would be indeed interesting to take the theories developed therein and apply them to the rest of Latin America, to see if they hold up elsewhere. How would they apply to Mexico, for instance? Mexico’s wars were fought mostly against invaders, and peasants were mobilized by the army, at least in the 1800s; a party system did not develop. However, does the fact that the peasantry then rose up in revolution in 1910 suggest a new path, or a different outcome? And Mexico then evolved into a single-party dominant system that was largely restrictive. At a glance, then, it would appear to fit in with López-Alves’s model, but the revolution is not fully explained. And what about other countries that ex- Vol. 96, No. 4 perienced revolutions—Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua? Are these separate outcomes that need to be explained? In the final analysis, I see this work as an admirable start and a valuable contribution to our understanding of Latin American politics. Northern Ireland and the Divided World: The Northern Ireland Conflict and the Good Friday Agreement in Comparative Perspective. Edited by John McGarry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 374p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. David E. Schmitt, Northeastern University John McGarry and a distinguished group of comparativists have produced a volume important not only for scholars interested in the study of Northern Ireland but also for those concerned with ethnic conflict and nationalism generally. Although its success is certainly not assured, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a consociational (power-sharing) settlement of the Northern Ireland conflict with international confederal dimensions, has sparked much interest by scholars and practitioners concerned with other ethnonational conflicts. The agreement was achieved with considerable pressure and support from international actors. The international community has played an increasingly important part in the resolution, management, and containment of ethnonational conflict, and the success or failure of the Good Friday Agreement may hold important lessons for international efforts elsewhere. From both a theoretical and practical perspective, this is a fine edited volume with internal coherence and useful contributions. An introductory chapter by McGarry argues for the importance of comparative analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict. He documents the many instances in which politicians and partisans have used comparisons in advancing their cause, and he summarizes the various theoretical approaches to the analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict. Part I presents five chapters dealing with theoretical and general issues. Rupert Taylor argues that a social transformation approach through group contacts, such as integrated schools, is the best solution for Northern Ireland’s difficulties. From Rupert’s perspective, consociationalism entrenches ethnic animosities. In an insightful analysis of the 1998 agreement, Brendan O’Leary emphasizes the need for a consociational and confederal settlement in such circumstances as the Northern Ireland conflict. He argues that one significant flaw in the agreement is the British Parliament’s capacity to override its provisions, as it did in temporarily suspending the Northern Irish Assembly in the year 2000. O’Leary also takes issue with Arend Lijphart’s work on the optimal electoral mechanisms within consociational frameworks. In a substantive chapter John McGarry also supports consociationalism as necessary for settlement, disagreeing with the criticism that power sharing entrenches ethnic identities and prevents the development of inclusive civic identities. He notes, for example, that the agreement has provisions requiring cross-community cooperation (e.g., consent by both unionist and nationalist members of the Assembly for election of the first and deputy first ministers). In a sophisticated critique of the agreement, Donald Horowitz argues that stark consociationalism is rare and risky in severely divided societies because, among other things, it can penalize moderate parties. As he has done in seminal earlier work, Horowitz advocates an incentives approach, consistent with majoritarian principles, that encourages moderation and crosscommunity elite cooperation and that prevents domination by ethnic majorities. Feargal Cochrane analyses the growth in the importance of peace-conflict resolution organizations 857 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS in the peace process. These organizations frequently arose with the goal of alleviating particular symptoms of the conflict and are diverse in their ideological objectives. In addition to promoting the inclusivist goals of moderate political elites in Northern Ireland, Cochrane notes that they also constituted an alternative path for people committed to paramilitary activity. Part II presents seven case studies that compare Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, Canada, Lebanon, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine. This section also has useful chapters on “Lessons from Europe” by Anthony Alcock and a comparative analysis by Adrian Guelke of Ireland’s status as an island. Alcock, who served on the Ulster Unionist Party team during negotiations on the Good Friday Agreement, maintains that its acceptability to mainstream unionists resulted partly from the fact that the cross-border aspects of the agreement were consistent with patterns in the European Union. Among other important issues was the renunciation by the Republic of Ireland of its constitutional territorial claim to Northern Ireland. Guelke argues that the international community supports the territorial integrity of islands and is sympathetic with the Good Friday Agreement partly because of its cross-border provisions, such as the NorthSouth Ministerial Council. He offers insightful comparisons with the conflicts in Sri Lanka, Cyprus, and other islands. Michael Keating’s chapter on the Basque Country notes that both primordialist and modernist analyses of the Northern Ireland and Basque Country are inadequate for explaining nationalism in these settings. Instead, a focus on political factors and the evolution of social forces provides more insight. Keating argues that identity in both cases is continually being made and remade. S. J. R. Noel’s chapter on Canada focuses on the nineteenth-century consociational bargain developed in secret by Canadian elites themselves without significant outside interference. The fact that the Northern Ireland accord was not developed by the Northern Irish elites themselves augurs poorly, in Noel’s view, for a successful longterm outcome. The major obstacle to the success of the Good Friday Agreement has been the decommissioning of weapons by paramilitary organizations, particularly the Provisional Irish Republic Army (IRA). Kirsten Schulze’s chapter compares the contentious nature of this issue in Northern Ireland with the successful and relatively quick decommissioning in Lebanon. Among the reasons examined for Lebanon’s success was an explicit statement in the Ta’if Accord for a quick surrender of weapons, with harsh sanctions for violations. Also important were provisions for the reintegration of paramilitaries into the army and police. The chapter comparing Northern Ireland to South Africa by Padraig O’Malley is particularly strong in its guidelines for successful negotiation of settlements. In his discussion of the key similarities and differences between the two conflict and settlement processes is the argument that the actions of the African National Congress constituted a just war, while the violence committed by the IRA did not. Sammy Smooha’s chapter compares partition in Israel/Palestine and Ireland, with a focus on partition as a mode of conflict regulation. He argues that partition is inevitable in the Israeli/Palestinian case, i.e., Palestine will become an independent state. By contrast, partition will probably weaken in Ireland, with the border becoming less relevant over time. Scholars will inevitably disagree with some of the diverse perspectives and interpretations in this book, but all of the chapters are well done, with some representing significant contributions to the field. John McGarry and his colleagues have produced an important and interesting volume. 858 December 2002 Rational Choice and British Politics: An Analysis of Rhetoric and Manipulation from Peel to Blair. By Iain McLean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 256p. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Terrence Casey, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology In Rational Choice and British Politics, Iain McLean applies William Riker’s concept of “heresthetics” to British political history. In contrast to rhetoric (the art of persuasion), heresthetics is “the art and science of political manipulation” (p. 10). Rather than trying to convince others of one’s position, heresthetics is about transforming the question and altering political dimensions so as to change the rational calculus of key actors and manufacture a supportive coalition. McLean employs the device of “analytical narratives” (historical analysis informed by rational choice methodology) to explore critical junctures in British political development, including the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Second Reform Act, the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, and the political and economic revolution of Margaret Thatcher. He also explores broader political movements, including the realignment of Victorian political parties and the attempts by Joseph Chamberlain and Enoch Powell to connect race and empire into winning coalitions. How might a heresthetically informed narrative run? Take the repeal of the Corn Laws under Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. Why would Conservatives in the Commons and the landed gentry in the House of Lords repeal a law directly benefiting them? Peel transformed the issue by linking it to the Irish famine, thus garnering almost all of the opposition Whigs to support him and only needing a segment of the Tories for passage in the Commons. (The rest voted for protection.) Peel then convinced the Duke of Wellington, leader of the Lords, that defeat would bring down the government. Seeing the issue not as tariffs but support for the queen’s government, Wellington sank his energies into getting repeal passed in the Lords. By altering the question, Peel manufactured a winning coalition where there previously was none. Overall, McLean’s research is excellent, his writing is polished and witty, and his cases are well selected to cover some of the truly fascinating moments of British politics. But his ambition is to provide more complete accounts than rival explanations and use them to build theoretical generalizations (p. 17). Unfortunately, ambition exceeds result. His cases are well-tread historical ground, and so the rationale for revisiting them is to gain new insights through the lens of rational choice: “[A]n analytical narrative in the rational choice tradition adds some points to the why” (p. 191). Does he provide better answers to the “why questions”? Take his account of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Lloyd George was determined that negotiations not break down over Ulster, where the British position was weakest, and thus maneuvered the Irish delegation toward questions of the status of a free Irish state within the empire. But the Irish delegation was divided. The swing vote was Robert Barton, sent by Eamon De Valera to gain complete separation from the crown. The final treaty in fact granted dominion status to the Irish Free State. So why did Barton sign? The traditional view (as noted by McLean on p. 191) was that with the threat of renewed war looming, he cracked under the pressure after others agreed to sign. In McLean’s narrative, Barton cracked because it became a “sequential signature game” with Barton as the last player. If he failed to sign, he would be solely responsible for war. The difference between the two interpretations is rather fine grained. The plots of some of McLean’s narratives also turn on rather selective or peculiar evidence. The Tories backed American Political Science Review Disraeli on extending the franchise because they “seem to have responded to the thrill of the chase” (p. 70). Joseph Chamberlain’s imperial preference plan failed largely because he did not control an economic ministry (p. 127), discounting that Chamberlain’s Conservative Unionists lost in 1906 (43.4% to the Liberals’ 49.4%) on a campaign fought on free trade. For the Thatcher premiership, “the inescapable conclusion is that Mrs. Thatcher made people feel better because she won the Falklands war, not because of anything she or her government did for the economy” (p. 212). This ignores the economic recovery after 1982 and support for her government’s actions to control labor unions. McLean’s narratives moreover fail to answer the most important why questions: Why did the key players adopt a particular set of preferences? Why did Wellington place service to the queen over a policy with which he disagreed? Why would the Lords reject Lloyd George’s “people’s budget” knowing that it might lead to their emasculation as an institution? Why did Michael Collins prefer dominion status over no agreement, while Eamon De Valera opted for the opposite, leading to the Irish Civil War? Why would Margaret Thatcher chant “there is no alternative” when common wisdom suggested it would lead to electoral disaster? Answering such questions would inherently raise issues of interests and ideology rather than strategic manipulation, concepts that McLean has difficulty capturing in his particular analytical net. In his defense, rational choice explores political interaction among actors with a given set of preferences, not preference formation. Doing so allows assumptions and hypotheses to be deductively and logically connected, facilitating theory construction. So all might be forgiven if shortcomings in historical narrative were offset by theoretical gains. Regrettably, the integrity of McLean’s theoretical framework does not hold throughout. His chosen herestheticians do not connect goals and strategy consistently across time. Some are cynically focused on electoral advantage (Disraeli), while others undertake quixotic crusades regardless of result (Enoch Powell). He does not provide any assumptions or arguments relating to when, where, and why heresthetics is employed, or the conditions under which it is likely to succeed (other than for case-specific reasons). Even within his cases, it is difficult to tell when interest or ideology or personality are at work, rather than heresthetics. Nor can one easily distinguish rhetoric from heresthetics in practice. McLean poses Thatcher as a (reluctant) heresthetician, but the quintessential “conviction politician” could just as easily be classed as a master rhetorician. As these choices become increasingly arbitrary, the clarity of the concept suffers, eroding the rationale for a formalized interpretation of these events. Riker’s The Art of Political Manipulation (1986), of which this book is clearly a progeny, was written as a manual for politicians as much as a theoretical text. Rational Choice and British Politics would be a useful read for Tony Blair. From a scholarly perspective, there are some novel and interesting parts to McLean’s work, such as his analysis of parliamentary interest and ideology under Peel, or on the impact of Enoch Powell on the Conservative vote in 1970 and 1974. As a coherent theoretical approach, however, the work is lacking. Strategic manipulation is a useful addition to our analytical toolbox, but heresthetics does not appear to be as useful a tool as McLean implies. In terms of the general appeal of this work, those already converted to the theoretical utility of rational choice will find a clever and well-constructed application of these ideas. Those not already converted to this research tradition are unlikely to have their opinions swayed. Vol. 96, No. 4 Out of the Red: Building Capitalism and Democracy in Postcommunist Europe. By Mitchell A. Orenstein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 184p. $54.50 cloth, $22.95 paper. Ellen Comisso, University of California, San Diego Nowadays, it is easy to forget just how pessimistic observers were in 1990 about the possibility of simultaneously introducing capitalism and competitive politics to the ex-socialist states of Eastern Europe. Often, debates seemed to hinge simply on which would subvert which, that is, whether the economic shocks of reform would destabilize democratic governments or whether populist appeals to the losers of economic adjustment would derail economic reform. That popularly elected government and systemic economic change could mutually reinforce each other seemed, at the time, to describe a fool’s paradise. Yet now that the dust has begun to settle, this appears to have been exactly what happened. Mitchell Orenstein’s new volume, a careful and astute comparison of the interplay between economic and political change in Poland and the Czech Republic after 1989, explores why this was the case. Orenstein argues persuasively that the alternation of parties in power made possible by electoral competition was a critical condition of sustainable reform. Rather than producing either economic or political instability, regular changes of ruling coalitions prevented leaders from outrunning or ignoring their constituencies, while allowing unpopular measures to be corrected and refined once their consequences—both social and economic—became known. Thus, he suggests, the Czech economy stumbled badly in the late 1990s precisely because it was the only country in the region in which incumbents were reelected. Filled with confidence as a result, the liberal coalition of Vaclav Klaus became overly dedicated to its voucher privatization program and antiregulatory platform, dismissing problems with enterprise governance and securities transactions as simply the predictable laments of the opposition, until finally, the Czech banking system began to implode. It was only in 1998 that a minority social democratic government took office and began to enact the measures to regulate banking and financial markets that its predecessor had steadfastly rejected. In Poland, political cohesion dissipated more rapidly. There, the political fallout from the radical “shock therapy” measures of 1990 not only forced early Solidarity governments to introduce modifications but finally brought a “left” coalition to power in 1993. Privatization subsequently moved more slowly and with greater attention to the constituencies affected by it, yet economic growth continued on the robust path that began in the early years of the decade. And even as the Right returned to power in 1997, it came back more willing to deal politically with the opposition, especially since much of the recalcitrance came from its own ranks. Orenstein thus concludes that the key to sustainable reform in a democratic political order is a party system characterized by cohesion-oriented and market-oriented competitors that can alternate in power without leading to polarization. It is quite an unobjectionable thesis, but given that both of his cases are generally included in the “success” stories of the transition, it is not entirely clear that the evidence offers an appropriate test of the thesis. That is, while we may well approve of some governments more than others, it is not clear that the economy in either country performed significantly better than the other. Even with “cohesion-oriented” governments, unemployment in Poland was and is far higher than in the Czech Republic. Polish economic growth, once the valley of the transition was crossed, was more robust than that in the Czech Republic, but once one bears in mind the far greater 859 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS depth of the initial downturn and the far more disastrous state of the Polish economy in 1989, it becomes clear that the 1990s marked a recovery simply to the GDP levels reached under socialism in both countries—with a smaller and more productive labor force, a wider assortment of consumer goods, and greater inequality and unemployment. In any case, Orenstein’s volume is notable for its very informative analysis of political and economic change in highly turbulent times. It shows nicely that there is no single path to capitalism and that the ability to correct policy mistakes is at least as important as being able to select a strategy in the first place. The tale is told well, and the volume is well worth reading. Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe. By Roger D. Petersen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 338p. $59.95. Jan Kubik, Rutgers University The most challenging task in today’s comparative politics is crafting a fruitful combination of a general theory of political behavior with a nontrivial and sufficiently rich portrayal of that behavior’s social, cultural, and historical context. At the same time, a consensus is emerging that holism is out, individualism is in, and the discipline’s intellectual effort should be primarily focused on the reconstruction of the rules (mechanisms) governing the strategizing behavior of individuals in various social and cultural contexts. Macro-historicalstructural explanations are largely out of favor. Given this intellectual climate, the premium is placed on studies that employ rational choice/game theoretical framework and test its applicability and limitations in the study of non-Western political systems. Such tests of applicability inevitably involve a confrontation between slim and parsimonious gametheoretic models and detail-rich ethnographic or historical reconstructions. Sometimes such confrontations end up in fruitless, mutual acrimony; recently, however, they have led to many instances of cross-fertilization and productive revisions of both sides’ analytical assumptions. The tremendous merits of such cross-fertilization are amply represented in Roger D. Petersen’s Resistance and Rebellion, one of the best works in the emerging new genre that seeks to combine formal theory and detailed ethnographic portrayal. The theory Petersen employs should be very attractive to comparativists. He approaches the problem of resistance and rebellion with an Olsonian dilemma in mind (Why should they rebel at all?) and shows that there are several mechanisms that account for people’s move from passive acceptance of oppression to resistance and rebellion (or active collaboration). Those mechanisms range from rational calculation (instrumental rationality) to nonrational, psychological (for example, resentment formation or the tyranny of sunk costs) to social (community-based norms of reciprocity or types of community) to cultural ([non]existence of relevant focal points). Building on the earlier works that analyze the tipping process (for example, Kuran Schelling, Dennis Chong), Petersen offers a more complex analysis of this process by demonstrating how it is influenced by such sociological variables as the community type or the distribution of normative orientations (linked to the membership in specific subgroups, each espousing a separate set of norms). Thus, he contributes to the welcome and long-overdue rehabilitation of sociology in the study of strategic behavior in political science (prominently signaled in the award-winning James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin’s “Explaining Interethnic Cooperation,” APSR 90 [December 1996]: 715–35). 860 December 2002 The theoretically most elaborate part of the book (Chapter 2) is focused on a detailed and rigorous though quite accessible, modeling of the sociological mechanisms and group features that help to explain why individuals in certain communities (at certain times) tend to rebel against oppressors while others, embedded in different communities, tend to remain passive or collaborate. Petersen’s model opens a way for a rigorous analysis of such attributes of the community as 1) the initial distribution preferences and constraints concerning the risk of rebellion; 2) the types of norms (of honor or family obligation, for example) that define the types of subgroups; and 3) the distribution of those subgroups within the larger community. This part of his work is indebted to network analysis. Two important innovations should be singled out in Petersen’s analysis of the dynamics of mobilization (or movement formation). First, he divides this process into two stages: a) from passivity to resistance and b) from resistance to rebellion. Then, he considers separately the problem of rebellion’s sustainability. For each stage or problem he identifies a different set of mechanisms and shows how they mutually reinforce each other, propelling the process forward (to rebellion) or “backward” (to collaboration). Second, he relies on the concept of role—a useful though somewhat forgotten tool—to make sure that his strategizing individuals are not unnecessarily atomized and that the changing social contexts of their actions are analytically captured. What is particularly attractive about the author’s theorizing is his focus on identifying causal mechanisms (not universal causal regularities or covering laws) that 1) logically resemble the once-prized middle-range generalizations (Robert Merton) and 2) can be grouped together according to the level or domain of reality in which they operate (individual rationality, individual habits, emotional attachments, community’s structure or community’s culture, and so on). Once the model is detailed, the book moves on to the presentation of ethnographic evidence. The empirical material comes primarily from Lithuania and its people’s resistance and rebellions against the Soviet and Nazi occupiers. The most detailed and ethnographically rich Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the first Soviet occupation (1940–41). It is here that Petersen demonstrates the true power of his analytical apparatus. He is rightly careful to note that his empirical work in no way constitutes “an adequate test of the theory” (p. 133), but he is justified in claiming that his theoretical scaffolding is very useful in both illuminating the mechanisms of rebellion and explaining different levels of resistance and mobilization in various communities. Chapter 5 deals with the controversial issue of “Lithuanian collaboration” with the Nazis (1941–44). Using his model and methods, Petersen shows that the claims of both extremes (all/most Lithuanians were collaborators versus all/most Lithuanians were anti-Nazi resistance fighters) are false. He provides evidence that most Lithuanians remained rather passive and uninvolved, and—more importantly—he demonstrates theoretically why it had to be so. Chapters 6 and 7 serve to test the approach in new settings that include post–World War II Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Montenegro during the war is also briefly discussed. Chapter 8 focuses on the perestroika period and provides further tests for various mechanisms identified and analyzed earlier. The cases include Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, and Lithuania. Chapter 9 provides a fascinating though somewhat cursory attempt to address the puzzle of the “first actors.” While an analysis of cascading mechanisms explains how people overcome various thresholds and join rebellious groups, it obviously does not say much about the leaders or “fanatics” who American Political Science Review decide to rebel without any “safety in numbers.” Petersen admits that a single theory accounting for a first actor’s actions is going to be complex and multilayered. His own contribution to such a theory is still preliminary and sketchy, but he offers several extremely promising insights and analytical clues, most of which prod us to refocus our theoretical lenses on cultural mechanisms (for example, the formation and usage of such cultural schemas as “martyrdom”). Such an ambitious and theoretically innovative work obviously has its lacunae. Briefly, here are three. First, given the theoretical ambitions of Petersen’s analysis and the impressive scope of his references, it is striking that he does not often cite the voluminous literature on protest, social movements, and revolutions that has been developed by the likes of Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, and many others (e.g., see Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, 1996). This literature deals with many similar issues, and it would be interesting to see how Petersen sees the relationship between, say, his concept of focal points and their concept of framing. Second, although Petersen is very effective in moving beyond the unconvincing parsimony of explanations based on instrumental rationality by complementing them primarily with sociological mechanisms, his underdeveloped theorizing of cultural mechanisms comes as a surprise. It is a surprise because those mechanisms play a central role in his analysis; and, more generally, it seems that their significance is on a par with the sociological mechanisms he construes so aptly. Third, the power of his analysis resides in his careful theorizing and empirical reconstruction of mechanisms of resistance and rebellion on a microscale, in small communities. Therefore, the analysis of some of his comparative cases, approached at a more general level and without the empirical depth of his Lithuanian case, is less convincing; it is simply difficult to determine if his analysis holds or not. Those are, however, minor squabbles; Resistance and Rebellion is an immensely rewarding and inspiring work. Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives. Edited by David Pion-Berlin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 352p. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper. Ariel C. Armony, Colby College As David Pion-Berlin explains in his Introduction, this collection of essays seeks to link the field of Latin American civil-military studies to major theoretical approaches in mainstream political science. Accordingly, the contributors draw from the rationalist, structuralist, and culturalist approaches in an effort to break what the editor of this book views as a long-standing isolation of Latin Americanists in general, and the region’s civil-military specialists in particular, “from the major intellectual traditions, currents, and debates in political science and in the field of comparative politics” (p. 16). Therefore, the stated purpose of this volume is to reexamine civil-military relations in Latin America, taking into account major contextual changes (the wave of democratization in the region, the transition to free market economies, the end of the Cold War) and the potential contribution of mainstream analytical perspectives to new insights into this important theme in Latin American politics. Pion-Berlin has assembled an impressive group of scholars for this project. The high quality of the chapters results in a fine collection. I am highlighting the book’s achievements as well as the challenges it poses for future research with a look at five of the nine chapters. Vol. 96, No. 4 Wendy Hunter’s contribution offers an analytical exercise on the virtues and limits of rational choice models to explain the decline of military influence in Brazil. This exercise is a gem. Concepts are clearly defined and placed in the context of relevant debates in the discipline. The treatment of the Brazilian case, with a look at other Latin American countries, though necessarily brief, provides an excellent background to the conceptual discussion. More important, Hunter incisively dissects the rational choice approach as applied to the research question, showing how a failure to incorporate structure and culture may dampen the usefulness of this approach. The chapter by J. Samuel Fitch addresses two critical questions in the study of civil-military relations in Latin America and, I would say, new democracies in general. First is the need to define standards against which the democratization of civil-military relations can be evaluated, especially if the final goal is to develop cross-national comparative work on this subject. Fitch’s contribution in this respect is important, though it would have been useful to place it in the context of recent challenges to teleological notions of democratic development modeled on the paradigmatic case of well-established democracies—in plain terms, arguments in favor of measuring new democracies by their positive attributes rather than by what they lack. Second, Fitch focuses on the methodological problems of studying civil-military relations in Latin America. He gives careful consideration to such issues as selection bias and the connection between theory and empirical methods of research. This analysis serves the book’s goal of closing the gap between area studies and mainstream political science, though much of Fitch’s methodological discussion will sound repetitive to scholars familiar with recent debates on quantitative and qualitative methods in the field of comparative politics. In his chapter on Argentina, Pion-Berlin untangles, from an institutional perspective, an interesting paradox: Why has the Argentine military remained subordinate to civilian authorities notwithstanding a weak and ill-prepared defense ministry? In search for an explanation, Pion-Berlin analyzes institutional differences in the Argentine state, concluding that “the institutional strengths of the Ministries of Economics and Foreign Relations and the Congress have been used to offset the weaknesses in the Ministry of Defense” (p. 147). In doing so, he shows how, in a democratic setting, the new rules of the game may allow policymakers operating within “strong” institutions with no formal authority over the armed forces to influence, effectively, the nature of the military’s leverage and mission. Beyond the specific paradox addressed in the chapter, Pion-Berlin’s analysis is a fine contribution to an understanding of how processes of democratization are often defined by the outcome of complex interactions among state institutions endowed with different power capacities. Felipe Agüero’s comparative chapter examines the evolving patterns of civil-military relations following the collapse of authoritarian regimes in southern Europe and South America. His thesis is that variations in civil-military relations resulted, primarily, from differences in the “founding conditions” of the new democracies, namely, “the way the military exit took place, the main features of the transition, and the early institutional arrangements that gave shape to the new postauthoritarian order” (p. 197). Bounded by specific historical-institutional conditions, Agüero explains, military and civilian actors engage in strategic interactions whose outcome would be largely determined by the opportunities and constraints defined, for each group, by the equation “access plus resources.” This is a sound framework for understanding, from a comparative perspective, different outcomes in the process of achieving civilian control over the military. 861 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS In the final chapter, Brian Loveman presents an overview of the historical legacies that frame today’s civil-military relations in Latin America. While there is nothing inherently innovative in this analytical perspective, the inclusion of a historical chapter keeps the editor’s effort to reduce the gap between area studies and mainstream political science from resulting in a negation of the past in understanding Latin American civil-military relations. As Loveman explains in his study, “a complex set of enduring. . . collective expectations, beliefs, social memories, and institutionalized patterns of behavior” serves as a “subtext” of contemporary patterns of civil-military relations in the region (pp. 246, 264). One of Loveman’s most interesting claims is that the authoritarian practices that permeate the political and social spheres of most of the region’s democracies today cannot be attributed solely to the military regimes that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Military rule activated and intensified deeply embedded, long-standing institutional, political, and cultural trends in the region. Among the few weaknesses of the book, let me mention two. The first is editorial, specifically, the unnecessary pattern by which each contributor makes an explicit reference to the editor’s Introduction in the concluding section of his/her chapter. This seems to be an attempt to show the reader that all the parts fit nicely into the whole, but, in general, these comments seem artificially imposed and do not add to the cohesion of the volume, which stands by itself. The second comment is more substantive: Why do only a few of the chapters succeed in integrating the different analytical perspectives? As Hunter shows in her chapter, a particular perspective (e.g., rational choice) may have more explanatory power than other approaches to solve certain conundrums, but that does not mean that it can stand alone, disengaged from more comprehensive explanations (e.g., those which incorporate structural and cultural variables as well). In this sense, I think that Hunter’s piece could have provided a useful blueprint for more elaboration in some of the other studies. This book is a major contribution to the literature on civilmilitary relations and, in general, democratization in Latin America. It is of great value for both area specialists and comparativists. Hopefully, this volume will stimulate more collaboration among scholars working on civil-military relations in different regions, leading to a new set of studies solidly grounded in theory and broadly comparative in scope. Welfare Capitalism in Southeast Asia: Social Security, Health and Education Policies. By M. Ramesh with Mukul G. Asher. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 217p. $65.00. Social Welfare Development in East Asia. By Kwong-leung Tang. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 214p. $65.00 cloth. Stephan Haggard, University of California, San Diego The debate about the history and future of the welfare state is gradually expanding beyond the advanced industrial countries to encompass the middle-income developing countries and the formerly socialist economies of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. This debate is particularly interesting in Asia. The newly industrializing countries in that region have had great success in increasing incomes, reducing poverty, and maintaining an equitable distribution of income. At the same time, the countries in the region are highly “globalized”—a factor often associated with increased economic insecurity—and until the 1980s were for the most part ruled by labor-repressive authoritarian regimes. By traditional measures of effort, they also appear to have surprisingly shallow public commitment to social welfare. 862 December 2002 The emerging explanation for these apparent anomalies combines economic and political components. The region’s rapid growth was labor absorbing, and as a result was accompanied by rapid expansion of employment, steadily rising real wages, and high household savings rates. Not only did such growth provide a sound basis for private and familial social insurance, it also deflected more extensive demands for government intervention. The political side of the story is a confirming mirror image of the expansion of the European welfare state. Ruled by pro-business authoritarian governments, with no left parties and with labor movements on a tight leash, these countries had little political space for welfare state politics. Where governments did devise social policies, they reflected the interests of narrow constituencies (such as the military and civil service) and favored a “regulatory” approach to welfare provision in which employers and employees, rather than the state, bore the brunt of financing welfare commitments. (The most important recent statement of this model is Roger Goodman, Gordon White, and Kwon Huk-ju, eds., The East Asian Welfare Model, 1998, and particularly the outstanding comparative essay by Kwon.) Outside of periodic political crises, when welfare commitments would expand, it took the transition to democratic rule in the 1980s and 1990s and the financial crises of 1997–98 to generate new demands for social insurance. These two new comparative books confirm the broad outlines of this consensus, provide important amendments, but also underline that there is still much analytic and empirical work to be done on Asian social policy. M. Ramesh focuses on the five major Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore—and in contrast to Kwong-Leung Tang, organizes his very systematic empirical material by policy area: social security, health, and education. His purpose is a dual one that sometimes pulls at the fabric of the book; he seeks not only to explain social policy outcomes but also to evaluate them. But as a result, his assessment of policy outcomes is richer than Tang’s, which tends to be more critical. Ramesh’s focus on discrete policy areas also allows him to make an important empirical observation that needs to structure future research. While Southeast Asian countries do indeed have relatively limited commitments to social insurance, such as unemployment insurance and pensions, their commitments to basic health care and particularly education were early and comparatively expansive. Tang’s book shows that the same is true of the Northeast Asian cases as well. Ramesh argues that the provision of basic social services was a function of governments’ developmental orientation. This functional line of thinking is a well-developed one in the literature on the East Asian newly industrializing countries. Just as there was an elective affinity between exportled growth strategies and labor control, so basic education and health contributed to the promotion of labor-intensive manufacturing. Yet there is little evidence provided to support this claim. Educational choices predated the relevant development policy choices, the expansion of the educational franchise appears to follow from political demands associated with decolonization, and important anomalies exist, such as Thailand, where educational attainment is surprisingly modest. Despite the often cited fact that East Asia’s educational attainment was a crucial component of its success, we still have surprisingly little monographic research on the politics of education policy and reform. Why precisely did East Asia get it right? And where does the relatively paltry public commitment to health insurance fit into this picture? In the core theoretical chapter on “The Political Economy of Social Policies”—which comes oddly at the end rather than the beginning of the book—Ramesh takes on political American Political Science Review issues more frontally. He argues that the expansion and maintenance of social welfare spending comes in response to calculations of political survival. The nature of these challenges varies from case to case, and Ramesh’s argumentation is somewhat post hoc. Rather than identifying political challenges ex ante and testing for their effects, he examines periods of program expansion and relates them to a variety of different political challenges, which range from revolutionary movements, to labor mobilization and electoral politics. Nonetheless, the spirit of Ramesh’s argument is exactly right: to look at the political dynamics behind welfare commitments. Tang’s analysis is organized by country, and it covers the “first wave” of Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs): Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Like Ramesh’s volume, it draws well on the work of local scholars, including extensive citation to the Chinese language literature. Like Ramesh, Tang also begins with a fairly exhaustive review of the full range of theories on the welfare state. Unlike Ramesh, however, Tang is more sharply focused on making a theoretical statement. Unfortunately, the nature of that statement is less well articulated than it might have been and at times marks a step backward from the more nuanced political account that Ramesh is working toward. Tang identifies himself with the developmental state literature. In its sophisticated variants, this literature focused attention on three key features of East Asian political economy: “strong” authoritarian systems that enjoyed substantial political autonomy; relatively competent and meritocratic bureaucracies that played an important role in policy formulation; and an interventionist approach to industrial policy that supported export-oriented manufacturing. Tang notes that the first of these characteristics is clearly an important factor in understanding East Asian social policy. For example, it provides the basis for comparing Hong Kong’s pro-business colonial government with the other newly industrializing countries, and it is clearly important in explaining the limited social commitments in the four cases. Yet even in these sophisticated variants, the developmental state literature ran into trouble explaining what it was, precisely, that motivated state elites to act. Chalmers Johnson (MITI and the Japanese Miracle, 1982), was more honest than others in recognizing the problem and turned to ideology for a solution. Others, particularly Bruce Cumings (“The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy,” in Fred Deyo ed., The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism, 1987) and Jung-eun Woo (Race to the Swift: State and Finance in Korean Industrialization, 1991) looked to international politics and the nature of alliance commitments. But the developmental state literature often spiraled into tautology: Developmental states pursued development, and moreover, were successful in doing so! At times, Tang’s account veers in this direction. All four countries are treated as developmental states, but the precise dimensions of the state that are germane for explaining policy—political autonomy, the bureaucracy, industrial strategy—are not clearly articulated. Rather, Tang opts for characterizations that emphasize broad political tasks and resultant policy outcomes. Singapore is a “capital investment state” [sic] that is preoccupied with nation building and in which the People’s Action Party ideology plays a central role. Taiwan is a social insurance state that is driven by its competition with the mainland and fundamental survival concerns. Korea is an authoritarian-developmental state, and so on. Distinctions are not drawn between major political epochs, so clearly democratic governments are treated as developmental states no different than their predecessors. At times, this gives rise to quite fundamental confusions, as when Vol. 96, No. 4 Tang refers to the Kim Young-sam government in Korea as presiding over a “developmental-military” state (p. 110). The overall thrust of the argument is sometimes lost among a host of competing and sometimes contradictory causal factors, from the bread and butter of the European welfare state literature, such as the role of labor and the existence (or absence in this case) of social democratic parties, to Confucianism, to development strategies, to purely idiosyncratic factors. Both of these books push the debate along, and the Ramesh study in particular provides an introduction to social policy in the region that manages to be succinct yet detailed at the same time. Tang’s book also provides a good overview of his cases. Both need to be read by anyone working on the topic. But our approach to these questions needs to get back to some methodological basics. First, there is some confusion in both books about what is really being explained. What are the stylized facts? Is it the relative paucity of social commitments in Asia, the variation across policy areas, changes over time? Some of these questions may require interregional comparisons, for example, to Latin America or Central Europe. Important differences exist across countries in the region as well, despite the ongoing search for a unifying model. In some cases, we have to go back quite far in order to find the origins of those differences. In Singapore and Malaysia, for example, the origins of both the central provident fund model and public health care can be traced to the British, while the Philippine welfare system is imitative of the United States. The effects of both democratization and economic crises, to which the region was subjected in 1997–98, provide opportunities to link this literature both with other regions and with the debate on globalization. Despite the progress engendered in these two works, there is clearly a lot of room for intellectual arbitrage between the ongoing work on the welfare state in Europe and what is emerging in developing countries. The Politics of Daycare in Britain. By Vicky Randall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 232p. $65.00. Greg McCarthy, University of Adelaide This illuminating account of child day-care policies and practice in Britain casts a dark shadow over equality in that country. Through the exploration of the simple question of why the public provision of child care has been so meager in Britain, Vicky Randall presents a compelling account not just of policy failure but of a general disinterest in child care as an equal opportunity issue. For her, there are intrinsic flaws in British society that have hindered the provision and funding of public child care in that country. The reason for this systemic inequality is to be found, principally, in the British brand of liberalism, combined with the country’s institutional structures, both of which have operated from the premise that child care is a private concern. To explore her hypothesis, Randall uses a combination of feminist insights and neoinstitutionalist thought to explore the peculiarity of the British approach to child care. In regard to feminism, Randall applies Bob Connell’s notion of a “gender regime” to explore how issues relevant to women are lowly placed in the policy hierarchy (R. W. Connell, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics,” Theory and Society 19 [1990]: 507–44). She uses this method to investigate the British state, which she depicts as embodying assumptions and practices that militated against child-care reform. When child care did appear on the policy agenda, it was always made subordinate to other policy concerns, with the underlying assumption being that it was a family matter. Even the marked expansion of day nurseries and child care during World War II 863 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS was quickly abandoned at the onset of peace, if for no other reason than to quell the desire of mothers to supplement their income (p. 45). Randall notes that what was remarkable about the 1950s and 1960s, despite rising demand for public child care by mothers, was a notable lack of recognition of child care as a policy issue by any government. The cause of this blindness was, in no small part, due to the absence of child-care advocates, even from the feminist movement. Rather, child care became an issue for mothers to negotiate themselves through such means as child minders, day care, play groups, nannies, or the various nursery arrangements. Randall argues that this lacuna is a symptom of the form of liberalism dominant in Britain, which unquestioningly excludes mothers from its notions of individual choice. She ties this philosophical weakness to the character of the British state, arguing that what was notable about the British public sector was its disinterest in child care. The public provision of child care, in its multiple forms, was divided between two basic institutions; for the “under threes,” it was the Department of Health, and for the “over threes,” it was the Department of Education. Both institutions competed to capture the preschool agenda but did very little with it, once it was under their control. For Randall, this was not just a case of non–decision making spread over two decades but also an articulation of a patriarchal ideology, which remained unchallenged whether Conservatives or Labour were in power. When child-care problems did arise on the political agenda, these institutions shifted the onus onto one another or to some other body (often local government), which was ill resourced to deal with the issue. In a quite ingenious manner, Randall then notes that in each of the moves between governments, there is a certain tragicomedy about the politics of child care in Britain. For instance, in the mid-1970s just when child care was finding political voice and agency through the women’s movement, trade unions, and the Left of the Labour Party, it was swept aside by Thatcher’s neoliberal agenda. The Thatcher revolution with its pro-family focus and rhetoric of small government stifled the demand for public child care. Under a wide-ranging assault, the women’s movement went on the defensive, resisting government attacks on equal opportunity, the right to choose, and other inspirational political issues, but at the expense of child-care reform. Moreover, the childcare lobby groups were fragmented and divided in their response to the government’s contradictory agenda. Ironically, the Thatcher revolution proved positive for child care in that it destabilized Whitehall’s staid incrementalism. As a consequence, the child-care agenda became more open to change from both inside and outside the bureaucracy. Under John Major, this open agenda took a particular, if not borrowed, form. Following the United States, the issue of child care was linked to the supposed moral problem of lone mothers and the need for employment programs to break their economic dependency on welfare. To suppress the alleged appeal of social security benefits, single mothers were encouraged (pressured) to use child care as a means by which they could enter the workforce. Notwithstanding the ideological premise on which this moral anxiety was built, it did at least raise the economic link between motherhood and choice. It was this link that Tony Blair made part of his 1997 election manifesto, where child care was given a high priority as a part of his program for modernizing the British welfare state (p. 188). Nevertheless, Randall is somewhat skeptical of the Blair reforms, which she sees as big on rhetoric but short on substance. To reinforce the argument that Britain was a laggard nation in regard to child care, Randall presents a cross-country comparison of child-care policies, in which she compares 864 December 2002 Britain against Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Sweden, West Germany, and France. The comparison is conducted at a variety of levels, including an examination of the dominant ideologies of the respective countries and the provisions of child care and primary education, to the place of women in society, and to the overall policy agendas and institutions of the countries under examination. Randall concludes that the best explanation for the differences in child-care provisions is to be found in the linkages among philosophy, policy legacies, and institutional frameworks. Although this book is a tour de force, it is important to note a few minor quibbles about its methodology and approach. While the analysis is aware of discourse theory, it is remiss that Michael Foucault’s perspective on discourse is not discussed, as it would have reinforced the book’s arguments on institutional impediments to change. Similarly, while the historic account is replete with cultural references, these are not related to any cultural theory per se. Such an awareness would have assisted in the explanation of the dominance of the male breadwinner model in Britain and of the attraction of feminists to media-grabbing issues, rather than motherhood and child care. Finally, the cross-country analysis contained some minor errors; it was Bob (not Bill) Hawke who led the Australian Labor (not Labour) party in 1983, and who oversaw the expansion of child-care funding, which in the end came at the expense of the community-based childcare sector. In sum, this book is an outstanding achievement, dealing with a much-neglected subject, revealing how the provision of child care offers an exemplary case study not just of institutional and governmental politics but also of the detrimental affects of the combination of liberalism and patriarchy. Last but not least, the analysis is an adroit critique of public policy theory, with Randall taking to task traditional institutional analysis, network and community theory, and various policy typology models, showing how all fail to explain the peculiarity of child-care policy in Britain. The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. By Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001. 768p. $55.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Darrell Slider, University of South Florida The fate of Russia’s economic and political reforms is the subject of this interpretative history of the last years of the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin period, The book provides a useful, if controversial, introduction to the events of this crucial period in Russian political development, from 1990 to 1999. Special attention is given to the events surrounding important turning points in Russian history; there are particularly detailed treatments of the August 1991 coup, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin’s forcible disbanding of the parliament in October 1993. In the end, though, the large number of events the authors seek to analyze is a liability because it tends to detract from and dilute the main argument. That argument is centered on the critical decisions made in 1991–92 about economic reform and its accompanying political strategy. Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski offer an insightful analysis of the choice of reform strategy and the impact this had on subsequent developments. The consequences are not in dispute: hyperinflation in the early years, a depression-like decline in Russian output, the impoverishment of the nascent Soviet middle class, the appearance of big-business “oligarchs” and mafia groupings, the rise to economic dominance of the communist-era nomenklatura, rampant corruption, popular disenchantment with politics and American Political Science Review a decline in civic activism, and a breakdown of the socialsupport mechanisms that had been one of the strengths of the Soviet system. The blame for this turn of events is placed primarily on Yeltsin and his chief political and economic advisers. Western leaders, the International Monetary Fund, and particularly Western economists are also accused of encouraging Russian leaders to follow an inhumane set of policies. The overall reform strategy, generally in line with what has come to be known as the Washington Consensus or “shock therapy,” emphasized monetarist approaches, price deregulation, rapid privatization of industry, and the end of government-provided subsidies and social safety nets. One of the most important contributions of the book is its explication of the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that produced the reform strategy. Especially useful are the insights on the various protoparties and political movements that struggled to establish a political foothold in the chaotic developments of the period. Reddaway and Glinski coin the term “market bolshevism” to describe the political mindset of the winners—the political figures such as Anatoly Chubais who implemented shock therapy—a disregard for public opinion and a manipulative approach that manufactured mass support only when absolutely necessary, as during Yeltsin’s bid for reelection in 1996. This is a book that provides an overabundance of detail, and almost no evidence relevant to its main thesis is overlooked. Some of the evidence that contradicts the thesis is perhaps dismissed too readily, however. The authors view the period of shock therapy as having lasted seven years, rejecting arguments by reform defenders that the Yeltsin government quickly backtracked and that compromises made because of political weakness undermined the foundations of many of the reforms. Instead, Reddaway and Glinski present this “seesaw” approach as the intended strategy. Further, a number of phenomena—such as the rise of criminal mafias—that were presumably unanticipated consequences of the policy choices made are presented as if they were part and parcel of the reformers’ strategy. The authors present alternative paths as real options, although they seem beyond what was possible in Russia at the end of the 1980s, beginning of the 1990s. Popular discontent— a “grassroots anti-nomenklatura upsurge” (p. 253)—that supposedly could have been mobilized into a movement in support of another kind of reform did not appear to have the kind of usable potential that the authors suggest. In order to tap this presumed source of support, the authors argue that Yeltsin should have relied more on the nascent democratic movement. In particular, they favor the nationaldemocratic wing, such political figures as Sergei Baburin and Oleg Rumiantsev. In the early 1990s, these figures were marginalized politically, and they joined the opposition that conspired to seize power in October 1993. Reddaway and Glinski also side with opposition economists such as Sergei Glaziev, who has long advocated an economic strategy based on government support of key industries and strong social programs for the victims of reforms. There is an unfortunate tendency in some of the analysis to relay as evidence conjecture and conspiracy theories that figure so prominently in the Russian media. For example, the shortages of consumer goods in the late Soviet period are viewed not as evidence of the collapse of the previous system but as a pressure tactic by wholesale traders to wrest control from the state over this sector. In discussing the events of October 1993, when the anti-Yeltsin opposition in parliament launched a violent attempt to seize the mayor’s office, television facilities, and other centers of power, the authors use speculative and dubious accounts to suggest that the violence Vol. 96, No. 4 was deliberately facilitated by Yeltsin’s security forces. The goal was to justify the later use of tanks against the parliament in support of Yeltsin’s ultimate purpose, “the destruction of Russia’s parliamentarism for the sake of increasing his personal power” (p. 429). The authors find it plausible that the 1999 incursion by Chechen rebels in Dagestan was provoked by the Russian security forces (headed at the time by Vladimir Putin) in order to provide an excuse to start a new war in Chechnya. Overall, though, despite its weaknesses and occasional lapses, Reddaway and Glinski’s account provides an extraordinary wealth of information on the twists and turns of Russian politics during this formative period. Democracy in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management. By Benjamin Reilly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 232p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. Shaheen Mozaffar, Bridgewater State College Benjamin Reilly makes an important contribution to the debate on the appropriate institutional design of electoral systems for mitigating conflict and sustaining democracy in ethnically plural societies. The dominant position in this debate posits the importance of proportional representation (PR) systems. An alternative position, less widely accepted largely because of an ostensible absence of empirical examples, posits the importance of majoritarian preferential systems that encourage cross-ethnic vote pooling. Reilly extends this debate by drawing on heretofore unknown or understudied cases to examine the operation of both majoritarian (the alternative vote or AV and the supplementary vote or SV) and proportional (single-transferable vote or STV) preferential systems in different social contexts and in different elections (legislative and presidential). The book’s central argument is that, unlike the elite-based PR systems, preferential systems privilege the decisions of voters as the source of cross-ethnic vote swapping, forcing otherwise rational candidates to forgo ethnic outbidding in favor of seeking votes across ethnic cleavages. The argument turns on the notion of “centripetalism,” which, for Reilly, refers to a “normative theory of institutional design” that seeks to 1) create electoral incentives for politicians to campaign for votes across ethnic cleavages, 2) establish arenas of bargaining for ethnic elites to transfer the lessons from electoral bargains to other political issues, and 3) foster centrist and aggregative multiethnic political parties instead of extremist and exclusively ethnic ones (p. 11). Eschewing systematic theory testing, Reilly uses this normative theory as a loose framework to evaluate the performance of preferential systems in all cases (except Malta) that are known to have utilized them. Bracketing the case studies are an informative overview of the development of preferential voting systems from their origins in attempts in the nineteenth century to overcome the intrinsic weaknesses of majority runoff elections (Chapter 2) and a useful discussion of the technical variations in the institutional designs of such systems that also highlights the unexpected consequences of minor technical modifications in institutional design (Chapter 7). The book’s initial focus on Australia is useful, and not only because it has developed and refined all variants of preferential systems in national and subnational elections for almost a century. As an ethnically diverse but not an ethnically divided society (p. 25), it also serves as a controlled case for illustrating the advantages of preferential systems in achieving the three centripetal objectives. The fascinating case of Papua 865 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS New Guinea provides the clearest and strongest support for AV. One of the world’s most ethnically fragmented societies, Papua New Guinea used AV in three elections between 1964 and 1972 to mitigate conflicts through cross-ethnic vote swapping negotiated by candidates who campaigned together among each other’s ethnic groups, seeking second-preference votes on the correct calculation that rational voters would give their first preference to candidates from their own ethnic groups. The adoption of “first past the post” (FPTP) after independence in 1975 reinforced the advantage of AV, as the new FPTP system created severe cross-ethnic coordination problems, encouraging the entry of large numbers of candidates, with corresponding decline in winning vote ratios and increase in election-induced ethnic violence. The 1998 assembly election in Northern Ireland, held under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, provides the clearest and strongest support for STV. In that election, STV helped, through vote transfers, to neutralize extremist sectarian parties and elect pro-agreement, centrist parties from each side of the otherwise deeply divided ethnic cleavages. Fiji and Sri Lanka, however, provide weak support for the claimed effectiveness of preferential designs. In Fiji, where indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians have roughly equal population ratios but are otherwise ethnically, economically, and politically divided, the use of a partially engineered AV system in one parliamentary election produced limited preelectoral cross-ethnic vote-swapping agreements among erstwhile “monoethnic” parties. But the election results undercut even these limited agreements. In Sri Lanka, the use of SV in four presidential elections between 1982 and 1999 failed to counteract the overwhelming Sinhalese population advantage (74%) over Tamils (18%) and Muslims (7%), leading always to the election of Sinhalese candidates by an absolute majority of first-preference votes. A number of factors related to contextual variations and technical modifications in institutional design are adduced in an ad hoc manner to account for these differences between institutional expectations and electoral outcomes. Beyond these major cases, the book also contains brief, informative discussions of the failed attempts to adopt AV in the United Kingdom, the one-time use of STV in Estonia’s transitional election in 1990, the potential advantage of AV in the election of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s tripartite presidency (an option that was considered but not implemented for the presidential elections there in October 2002), and the use of various preferential systems in several subnational elections in the United States and Canada. The book does not systematically account for the mixed results from the major cases, exposing the analytical weakness of the “electoral engineering” approach. For instance, perhaps the most important insight of the book, which is found only in the last few pages (pp. 185–192), concerns the significance of two aspects of ethnic group demographics— fragmentation and concentration—in mediating the expected impact of preferential designs. With respect to fragmentation, ethnically heterogeneous districts are considered to be “the single most important demographic precondition for centripetal strategies to work effectively” (p. 185). Group concentration, on the other hand, creates ethnically homogeneous electoral districts, rendering the use of vote pooling highly problematic. Reilly wisely uses these demographic variations to caution against a cookie-cutter approach to electoral engineering. Curiously, however, he does not systematically examine the implications of these variations in the case studies, even though ethnically heterogeneous districts are commonplace in Papua New Guinea and ethnically concentrated districts presumably exist in Northern Ireland, the two cases that pro- 866 December 2002 vide unambiguous support for preferential systems. Also left unexamined is the failure of AV to produce the expected results in Fiji, where the ethnic group demographic (dispersion and geographic intermixing) is also considered favorable for the effectiveness of the design (p. 187). Examination of these issues requires a more rigorous analytical approach than allowed by the normative electoral engineering approach. It especially requires the use of quantitative techniques such as regression analysis to clarify the independent, additive, and interactive effects of institutional design and context on electoral outcomes. The two approaches, however, are not mutually exclusive. Quantitative analysis provides the systematic knowledge and understanding of the relative effects of institution and context that are necessary for realizing the prescriptive aspirations of the electoral engineering approach. Reilly’s book, therefore, does not close the debate on the appropriate institutional design of electoral systems for managing ethnic conflicts. But its coherent and convincing arguments in favor of preferential systems, and especially its coverage of heretofore unfamiliar and understudied cases that have employed them, advance and enrich it. Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa: Father, Family, Food. By Michael G. Schatzberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 292p. $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. Robert Fatton, Jr., University of Virginia Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa is an insightful, refreshing, and original book that refines and expands our understanding of the so-called “politics of the belly.” A phrase made famous by Jean Francois Bayart (The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, 1993), the politics of the belly is the phenomenon of “eating” the fruits of power. The extent to which officeholders monopolize or share these fruits with the larger community has, however, significant consequences for their legitimacy. As Michael Schatzberg suggests, a “moral matrix of legitimate governance” (p. 35) embedded in familial and paternal metaphors shapes these belly politics. In turn, he argues that the moral matrix is rooted in four major premises. The first and second are related to the image of the ruler as a “fatherchief,” who has the obligation, on the one hand, to nurture and nourish his “family,” and on the other hand, to punish his “children” when necessary and pardon them when they truly repent. The third premise concerns the status of women in society; while they are not considered equal to men, rulers should, nonetheless, respect their role as “counselors and advisers.” The fourth premise “holds that permanent power is illegitimate and that political fathers . . . have to let their children grow up, mature, take on ever-increasing responsibilities in the conduct of their own affairs, and eventually succeed them in power” (p. 192). Governments that respect these four moral premises are not necessarily democratic, but they enjoy legitimacy and thus will endure; neither the ballot nor the bullet is likely to overthrow them. When the “father-chief” “eats” within limits and guarantees his “family” access to food, while both knowing that his power is not eternal and listening to his “wives” and “daughters,” he will win popular support. To that extent, Africans will be satisfied with a regime that responds to their own norms of accountability and legitimacy. These norms correspond to what Schatzberg calls “thinkability.” Thinkability is not simply “that which is politically thinkable” but is also, in Schatzberg’s eyes, legitimacy itself. Moreover, the author contends, legitimacy can be apprehended through an exhaustive study of the “mainstream political discourse” (p. 32). Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa seeks to uncover this discourse by systematically examining daily state newspapers, American Political Science Review weekly magazines, primary documents, presidential speeches, and church and political documents of eight African nations—Senegal, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Congo/Zaire, Kenya, and Tanzania. In Schatzberg’s view, this exploration leads to an understanding of what is and is not thinkable in Middle Africa; it provides the area’s moral matrix of governance. In this sense, the book revives the neglected study of the role of ideas and language in the making and unmaking of regimes. It reemphasizes the significance of political culture as a lens that can illuminate the social landscape. While the author argues for the specificity of historical circumstances and their decisive impact on the formation of moral matrixes, he does not claim that Middle Africa is unique. In fact, Schatzberg contends that all societies have moral matrixes, but the substance and significance of their constituent elements vary depending on their respective histories. So, for instance, the metaphors of the ruler as “father” and society as a “family” are widespread in both industrial and developing nations. What differs, however, is their ideological pervasiveness; in other words, what is thinkable in one place may not be thinkable in another. Thus, people operate under diverse sorts of hegemonies and explain their world with distinct logics. As the author puts it: “Depending on time, place, and context, it is quite conceivable that some societies will share certain premises of a matrix while not sharing others” (p. 32). Moreover, Middle Africans use their own specific means of understanding and shaping their existential conditions. Like any other people, they avail themselves of multiple methods to influence events and ultimately believe in different and indeed contradictory modes of causality. Depending on circumstances and objectives, they may resort to modern “rational” science while simultaneously appealing to the powers of the occult and sorcery. Middle Africans are certainly not the only ones making use of these multiple and often inconsistent forms of explaining and shaping social reality. As Schatzberg points out correctly: “Reliance on alternative understandings of causality may be quite universal” (p. 205). After all, under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, astrology played a decisive role in the day-to-day running of the White House (p. 116). Thus, Schatzberg is fully cognizant that certain basic political phenomena transcend place and time, but he warns us against assuming the universality of basic Western theoretical concepts. While one can compare and generalize, it is crucial to elucidate that which is historically specific. The conventional assumptions of American political scientists about the separation of church and state, and state and civil society, simply do not hold in Middle Africa. There, the parameters of politics derived from the Western experience are only partially, if at all, duplicated. According to Schatzberg, it becomes exceedingly difficult to draw neat analytical boundaries around politics, religion, sport, and labor because Middle Africa’s governability is rooted in the ubiquity of paternal and familial forms. This book is therefore a formidable challenge to the prevailing conventional wisdom; it shows the limits of current and dominant paradigms on democratization and civil society. It reestablishes the centrality and primacy of legitimacy as the critical “first step” in the establishment of any accountable regime. “Democratic” constitutions may be codified, elections may be free and fair, but they do not suffice; they are empty shells without the substance of legitimacy. Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa is thus a major point of departure. One may wonder, however, whether Schatzberg’s dependence on the “mainstream political discourse” to define “thinkability” and indeed legitimacy does not silence the hidden voices of subaltern groups and classes. Vol. 96, No. 4 In other words, Schatzberg’s moral matrix privileges what James C. Scott (Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 1990) has termed the “public transcript,” that is, the common wisdom of rulers and dominant classes, and neglects the “hidden transcript” of the victims of power. A full understanding of the moral matrix of governance requires, therefore, a systematic study of “infrapolitics,” the rather opaque and “unobtrusive realm of political struggle.” Schatzberg has written an important volume that will become indispensable to understanding contemporary African politics. While one may quibble with the author over particular interpretations, there is little doubt that this is a major book. Rich in detail, subtle in its investigation, and broad ranging in its theoretical and comparative scope, the book addresses challenging questions and provides provocative answers. It is essential reading for any serious student of comparative politics. The Outsider: Prejudice and Politics in Italy. By Paul M. Sniderman, Pierangelo Peri, Rui J. P. de Figueiredo, Jr., and Thomas Piazza. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 218p. $29.95. Harlan Koff, Duke University The Outsider is a study of prejudicial attitudes toward migrants in Italy. The book contributes to the study of public reactions to non-European Union immigration because it statistically analyzes opinions that are usually addressed descriptively. Moreover, the work correctly studies the interaction between individual and social responses to migration. However, the overall contribution of this book to the comparative literature on xenophobia in Europe is limited by serious theoretical and methodological flaws. The authors of The Outsider begin with two research questions: 1) Does race hold distinctive status in marking others as outsiders? and 2) What is the relationship between the psychological roots of prejudice and group competition for resources? In order to carry out these tasks, a telephone survey, including 4,558 interviews, was conducted to ascertain opinions regarding non-EU nationals as well as the NorthSouth divide, which is a major characteristic of the Italian political culture. This latter aspect of the survey was utilized as a means for comparing group categorization in Italy and formulating a general theory of prejudice. The authors constructed this survey on the incorrect assumption (which they admit) that race is the fundamental element of prejudice. They expected to find that “All, because they are immigrants, will bear the burden of intolerance, but those who are black, by virtue of being black, must bear a heavier burden still” (p. 15). This notion has been refuted in the recent literature on xenophobia in Europe (e.g., see Michel Wieviorka, The Arenas of Racism, 1995). The authors show that intolerance to immigrants is prevalent within mainstream Italian society. Statistical analysis illustrates a reluctance to make positive remarks about migrants and a readiness to make negative ones. However, even though many of those interviewed demonstrated a willingness to criticize immigrants, the number of participants who agreed that migrants are “by nature inferior” was limited to 15%. The authors accurately argue that the interpretation of this result is open to discussion due to contemporary institutional and normative contexts. Nonetheless, it does show that classical discussions of racial superiority are not the most significant basis of prejudicial attitudes within Italian society. This refutes the study’s initial hypothesis. The authors also questioned participants on their views regarding distinct racial categories, defined as “North African,” “Central 867 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS African,” and “East European.” Their tables, which compare responses based on descriptive statistics and factor analysis, clearly indicate that race does not affect intolerance. In fact, the group most harshly judged in the survey was the East European category. This confirms the results of numerous qualitative studies that have stated that Albanians and Gypsies are the most ostracized ethnic groups in Italy. Another strength of this study is the proposed definition of prejudice. According to the authors, “Definitions are tools. In gauging their value, the crucial question to ask is not about their validity but their utility” (p. 19). They base their definition of prejudice on the concept of consistency: “The more consistently one attributes negative characteristics, or alternatively, declines to attribute positive characteristics to a group, the more prejudiced he or she is” (p. 25). This definition allows the authors to create a scale of prejudice and evaluate whether intolerance is a mainstream or marginal value in Italy. The authors also examine the roots of Italian intolerance through what they call “the Two Flavors approach.” This combines both the inherent psychological roots of prejudice, which are proposed in normative studies, and the rational roots of conflict based on material competition (e.g., see Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 1985, for descriptions of both approaches). While statistical tests do not completely validate the Two Flavors approach, the authors correctly argue that research on prejudice should not be marked by a clash of these competing perspectives. By attempting to reconcile them, the authors open an interesting avenue for future research on the relationship of these factors. Despite these strengths, there are numerous concerns that detract from the book’s overall contribution to the study of intolerance. The first regards analysis of the Italian case. Even though the authors correctly identify regional differences as a fundamental trait of Italian political culture, they utilize the state as the unit of analysis. Recent studies of public reactions to migration in Italy have shown significant variance between attitudes in the North, Center, and South (e.g, see Fondazione Nord-Est, Immigrazione e cittadinanza in Europa, in Migrazioni: Scenari per il XXI secolo, 2000, and Censis, Le Paure degli Italiani, 2001). Given socioeconomic and cultural divergences that exist at the regional level, this variance is fundamental to understanding the relationship between normative and rational roots of intolerance. In addition, the ability to generalize the results of this research project is limited because Italy is hardly a critical case among European countries. It does satisfy the two conditions presented by the authors regarding the study of intolerance: the significant presence of prejudicial attitudes and at least one radical right party. However, given the declared objective of analyzing the role of race in the formation of prejudicial attitudes in contemporary Europe, the choice of Italy does not seem logical. Unlike France, Britain, Spain, Belgium, and so on, colonialism was never a major factor in the formation of public attitudes regarding immigrants. This element of historical development must be considered because it is so closely linked to psychological notions of racial superiority. In this sense, Italy is an outlier rather than a typical case. Finally, the authors analyze the impact of intolerance on contemporary Italian party politics. They correctly argue that migration has become a salient issue that has contributed to the success of right-wing parties. The discussion of public attitudes and institutions, though, remains incomplete. There is no mention of mechanisms that fundamentally impact the formation of public views regarding migrant groups. Parties do not merely reflect intolerant positions; they also contribute to their formation. Moreover, many scholars have studied 868 December 2002 the negative coverage that most Italian newspapers give to migration issues. Such mechanisms (e.g., media) need to be discussed in any study of public responses to migration. For these reasons, The Outsider addresses many questions regarding the nature of European prejudice and intolerance, but the answers it provides are incomplete. Environmental Leadership in Developing Countries: Transnational Relations and Biodiversity Policy in Costa Rica and Bolivia. By Paul F. Steinberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 280p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Pamela Stricker, California State University, San Marcos Much of the literature on environmental policymaking in the Global South focuses on the role of transnational linkages, wherein ideas regarding environmental management are transplanted by intergovernmental organizations and nongovernmental organizations in the North to governments in the South. The perception that environmental management concepts are primarily transferred in this way stems in part from the resonance that Ronald Inglehart’s work on postmaterialist societies and environmental activism has had on the field, as well as a paucity of studies examining the dynamics of the domestic political players in the creation of natural resource management policies in the South. Paul Steinberg’s work, Environmental Leadership in Developing Countries, addresses this particular puzzle and takes on the too-oft accepted notion that domestic policy entrepreneurs play a small supporting role at best in bringing about environmental policies in the Global South. Using a most different comparative case study based on participant interviews, archival research, and content analysis of leading Costa Rican and Bolivian newspapers, Steinberg reveals the efforts of such domestic players in the development of policy cultures around environmental ideas that impact the creation of conservation policies. He introduces the concept of bilateral activists to describe how activists seamlessly transcend borders and settings, moving freely between national and international meetings, speaking multiple languages, relying on knowledge of policy-making processes and international assistance programs, and possessing the talent to create and nurture professional, political, and financial relationships with potential allies abroad. These bilateral activists emerge at the intersection of John Kingdon’s policy entrepreneurs and Peter Haas’s epistemic communities working within E. E. Schattschneider’s ideational context, armed with the political savvy to leap over domestic political landmines and in through windows of opportunity. As the responsibility for solving domestic environmental problems falls largely within the realm of the nation-state, Steinberg’s work directly takes on the premise that given the often crushing weight of poverty and foreign debt, most nations of the Global South opt to utilize the natural resource base in order to attempt to provide for their population’s needs, as well as to create goods for sale in the global market, rather than engage in debates over environmental conservation. Steinberg draws upon polls conducted by Riley Dunlap and Gallup (1993) as well as Lewis Harris, which demonstrate that peoples from the Global South have high levels of concern about the environment, to situate his argument on the two cases. Further, when compared with per capita levels of GNP, environmental concern is ranked higher by peoples from poor countries than those in industrialized nations in 8 of 11 measures (p. 37). This finding was repeated in another poll (Kidd and Lee, 1997), which found that peoples in poorer countries were also more willing to pay American Political Science Review (via income or increased taxes) to prevent pollution than were their compatriots in the more affluent industrialized world (p. 40). From these findings, Steinberg delves into the content analysis on both nations to establish whether this ideational component shaped the policy culture within which these bilateral activists could work. Both Costa Rican and Bolivians citizens first embraced what he terms “proto-environmental” attitudes in response to questions of national sovereignty as opposed to foreign control of the nation’s natural resource base (p. 105). To make his point on the efficaciousness of bilateral activists, Steinberg takes the reader through four aspects of domestic resources: political learning, agenda setting resources, networks of social influence, and process expertise. He succeeds quite nicely by demonstrating in the Costa Rican case that government officials set the environmental policy agenda that in turn spurred a groundswell of green sentiment from the populace. In the Bolivian case, we see the policy come about in a different order; environmental nongovernmental organizations set the environmental agenda, defining issues and setting forth priorities, which later would be addressed by government. In the process, however, some activists, such as Bolivian naturalist Noel Kempff, lost their lives fighting to preserve the natural world. But not all activists were included in the dialogue in Bolivia. Indigenous peoples, typically marginalized by political and economic elites, were left out of initial environmental protection debates; later, common ground was forged by environmental activists and the indigenous peoples when the latter began linking self-determination arguments to environmental concerns (pp. 115–16). Steinberg’s discussion of the development of Thomas Lovejoy’s debt-for-nature swaps in Bolivia is another reason this text is quite useful for comparative environmental policy seminars. While details of Costa Rica’s environmental history are generally more widely known, the chapter is still quite fresh with segments on former President José Marı́a Figueres’s announcement that sustainable development would guide his environmental policy and on the complicated stories of national park development. The only shortcoming in the text is a small unanswered question. Steinberg says he chose his cases on the basis of temporal variability on policy outcomes (within the mostdifferent-systems approach), yet he does not fully explain why the outcome—policy changes—occurred in a different order. Perhaps it is linked to features within the different systems, but he does not say so. Yet despite that small shortcoming, which arguably is a difficult question to answer, the final outcome was quite similar and the results do show that in both cases, bilateral activists play an exceedingly (and in the literature, quite overlooked) significant role. Further, he has done a wonderful job of reconstructing how these policy cultures developed in the nations and how these policy activists were able to foster the creation of such policies. In doing so, he makes an important contribution to the literature in comparative environmental policymaking. The text also analyzes environmental policy successes (in contrast to failures), which have been understudied in both comparative politics and comparative policymaking. Through this work, Steinberg has clearly laid to rest the somewhat condescending notion that only policy entrepreneurs from the environmentally privileged North can “help” nations of the Global South to protect their natural resource base and demonstrated that poverty does not necessarily cloud one’s desire to preserve the natural world. Vol. 96, No. 4 Abortion Politics, Women’s Movements and the Democratic State: A Comparative Study of State Feminism. Edited by Dorothy McBride Stetson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 380p. $72.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Sheila Shaver, University of New South Wales This book deals with the politics of abortion and abortion law reform as they have developed in 11 countries of Western Europe and North America during the period of the women’s movement’s second wave. The stories that are told vary a good deal, even among countries apparently similar in religious composition, political tradition, and legal culture. They include the early and comparatively uncontroversial move to allow abortion on grounds of the mother’s physical or mental health in Great Britain, more radical reform in the Netherlands making early abortion available on demand, and the continuing division in Ireland where judicial affirmation of a woman’s right to travel outside the country must be counted a win. It is an interesting and worthwhile book for this alone. The primary focus of the book is not, however, on abortion per se but on the political forces and relations shaping abortion law reform. Dorothy McBride Stetson and her colleagues are interested in the contribution of “state feminism”— women’s policy units established within the state—to the achievement of the women’s movement goals, and the conditions under which feminists working “inside” the state can have greatest effect. Abortion serves here as empirical material for a systematic exercise in theory construction and hypothesis testing. The book is a formidable achievement in these terms. It is empirically detailed, methodologically rigorous, and fruitful in informing social movement theory. The study is part of a larger project, in which Stetson’s Comparative State Feminism (edited with Amy Mazur, 1995), focusing on equal opportunity policy, was the first installment. It is to be one of three studies of women’s policy areas, the others focusing on job training (State Feminism, Women’s Movements, and Job Training Policy in the Global Economy, Amy Mazur, ed., 2001) and on prostitution and traffic in women. As such, the 11 country studies making up the present volume have been conducted on a standardized template framed for the purposes of the overarching theoretical inquiry. The countries included in the project represent most of Western Europe, though unfortunately not Scandinavia or Finland, and North America; their representation of advanced industrial democracies is weakened by not including Japan or Australasia. The first chapter sets out the framework structuring the national studies and defines variables that are used. The comparative strategy underlying the research design relies less on the comparison of countries than on political issues and decisions, with the author of each national study selecting three specific debates as representative of the political decision-making arenas and decisive events in the history of abortion politics over the period. This temporal element gives the research a longitudinal dimension, enabling it to track the succession of political events and the rise and waning of women’s movements in each country. As a result, there are 32 “debates” in national sequences of three (only two were included in the case of Spain). For each debate, authors discuss and classify the characteristics of the women’s movement and its impact, women’s policy agencies, the framing of the debate, policy outcomes, and the characteristics of the policy environment. The final chapter addresses the meaning and character of these debates in terms of five hypotheses: 1) that women’s movements have been successful both in influencing the content of policy and in gaining participation in policymaking processes; 2) that these movements have been more 869 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS successful where women’s policy agencies have acted as insiders in the policymaking process; 3) that the resources and institutional capacity available to women’s policy agencies matter for their ability to link women’s movements and policymakers; 4) that the characteristics of the women’s movement and policy environments matter; and 5) that equally effective linkages between women’s movements and state responses will not be made in the absence of women’s policy agencies. The evidence is more conclusive on some points than others. Generally, it is suggested that women’s movements were successful in more instances than not, with that success growing as the abortion issue itself continued in debate. Such success was greater where women’s policy agencies had been able to act as an insider in the policymaking process, and was lesser in those cases where agencies had only a symbolic presence. In general, women’s policy agencies tended to be remote from power and low in resources. The nature of their mandate appears to matter more directly than resources in their capacity to confer insider status on women’s movement forces. The most important aspect of the women’s movement in gaining insider status was its closeness to left-wing parties and the political strength of those parties. The unity of the women’s movement and the priority it gave to the abortion issue were also very important. Except in closed policy environments, women’s policy agencies do appear to be necessary to the movement’s success in influencing the content of policy and gaining participation in policymaking processes. These findings are of considerable interest and significance. I was disappointed, then, that the book does not do more to situate and develop them in the social movement and policy literatures. The inquiry itself is not situated by means of a literature review, and its findings are not put in context with respect to social movement theory or the findings of other empirical studies. As a result, the book reports the conduct and findings of a rigorous empirical study, but treats the implications of this inquiry for its own and related fields as self-evident. The tight focus of the book leaves little room for exploring a range of other issues about abortion access and the politics of abortion law reform. A number of such issues are threaded through its pages and the national political histories they contain. One of these is the gap between formal access to abortion and the effectiveness of access in the face of economic, institutional, and other barriers. The 11 country accounts show considerable variety in the accessibility of abortion services and the institutional route a woman must follow to secure them. Medical gatekeeping is more important in some countries than others, and has been a central point at issue in women’s movement struggles throughout the period of abortion law reform. (Paradoxically, it was also doctors, many of them male, who pioneered the establishment of free-standing abortion clinics and broke the power of medical control institutionalized in hospital settings.) Similarly, the effective accessibility of abortion depends a good deal on the nature of a nation’s health-care system and its coverage of the costs. For women in Ireland, and also in much of the nonmetropolitan United States, the cost of travel is a significant extra burden. The gap between a civil right to abortion in the sense of legal entitlement to abortion in approved circumstances and a social right to abortion independent of income is a political as much as a personal issue. Another recent comparative study of abortion politics (Julia S. O’Connor, Ann Shola Orloff, and Sheila Shaver, States, Markets, Families, 1999) showed that social rights to abortion are weaker in the United States and Canada, where first-trimester abortion has had judicial recognition as a right of the woman and where there are strong movements in opposition to it in the legislatures, than 870 December 2002 in Britain and Australia where it has been routinized as a form of medical care under the protection of medical professional interests. Similarly, the tight structure of the book makes it difficult to see connections among the politics of abortion reform in different countries. There is, for example, little opportunity to see the impact of an event such as the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade on abortion politics in other countries. Equally, it is unclear whether the European Union provided a vehicle for European policy agencies to work together, or to promote policy borrowing from one country to another. These are small complaints in a book that is a fine research achievement. The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison. Edited by Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 304p. $45.00 cloth. Richard Deeg, Temple University Motivated originally by a concern for the future of the German and Japanese economic models, the authors in this volume actually probe the origins and evolution of these two varieties of nonliberal capitalism. German and Japanese capitalism is nonliberal in that the economies of these countries are more socially and politically regulated than are their Anglo-American counterparts. Markets are also more “embedded” to the degree that economic transactions are also constrained to serve noneconomic objectives, such as social cohesion, or are supported by noneconomic social ties. Embeddedness, it is argued, creates higher levels of “committed labor” and “patient capital” and thus a long-term focus (and cooperation based on loyalty and trust) in economic relations among actors. One of the more intriguing findings of the volume is that formally, very different institutions generate functionally equivalent outcomes and systemic logics across the two cases. The similar national paths of Germany and Japan are traced to a common starting condition in the late nineteenth century: In both, industrialization preceded democratization, and each had fairly strong and autonomous state elites who sought to build a market order while preserving social stability by granting social (in lieu of political) rights to selected groups. However, influenced by different cultures and institutional legacies, the two nations diverged in how these groups were incorporated into the emerging socioeconomic order. In Germany, they were typically brought in via corporatist arrangements between associations and the state. Japan, on the other hand, drew on the cultural idea of ie (family-like community) and the large firm became the key organizational locus of the modern political economy. The contribution by Gerhard Lehmbruch explores the origins, evolution, and impact of the ideas that shaped each capitalism. He argues that in societies there are competing discourses and that usually one is hegemonic. This, in turn, supports the formation of institutions that follow its logic. Interestingly, he argues that in the midnineteenth century, German and Meiji elites—the latter influenced by the thinking of the former—were quite enamored with liberalism. Yet in both nations, a nonliberal discourse became hegemonic in the late nineteenth century. Subsequent crises presented challenges to this discourse, but it survived through adaptation. Like Lehmbruch, Philip Manow sees the beliefs and actions of bureaucratic elites as crucial to the process of welfare state formation. Both nations developed nonliberal welfare regimes by first extending social rights to the skilled and employed (male) workers. They differed in that Germany American Political Science Review developed a corporatist pattern in which functional groups (unions and employer associations) came to play key roles in administering welfare state policies. Different conditions in Japan led the state to foster the internalization of the welfare regime within large firms. In a final argument, Manow stands the conventional view on its head by arguing that the nonliberal welfare regimes actually facilitated the emergence of labor relations regimes based on trust-based, long-term production (rather than the other way around). Gregory Jackson explores the corporate governance regime of each nation and finds them functionally similar in that both command long-term commitment from providers of capital and labor. They achieve this through a combination of a closed ownership structure of large firms and a bankbased financial system—which precludes a market for corporate control and thus makes long-term commitments by management and capital possible—and a regime of ‘industrial citizenship’ that makes participation of labor in management possible. Jackson uses the idea of coevolution to explain how the two subsystems—property rights and industrial relations—gradually came to “fit together” to form these distinctive corporate governance regimes. Sigurt Vitols analyzes the bank-based financial systems. Contrary to the common perception, he argues that both nations had liberal banking regimes before the 1930s. It was only in their responses to the banking crises of the late 1920s and early 1930s that these nations turned toward more interventionism and favored banks over equity markets in order to use the former to serve their respective national policy goals. The postwar preeminence of banks was furthered by the relatively higher income equality and absence of private pension systems in Germany and Japan, which meant that savings flowed to a much greater degree into the banking system than into the market. The final contribution by Kathleen Thelen and Ikuo Kume analyzes how each nation found a different way to overcome the endemic collective-action problem of skill formation; that is, if left to markets alone, employers will underinvest in worker skills because worker mobility means that they cannot capture sufficient returns. The German solution came to be based on “solidarism” in which occupational groups that cut across firms were linked to the state. The collective-action problem was overcome because all firms bear the costs of training in an open external labor market. Japan’s solution was “segmentalist,” relying on social cohesion within the firm and creating internal labor markets through lifetime employment and related mechanisms. One of the more interesting general findings of the volume is that decisions and events in the early phase of industrialization, while very important, did not definitively set these two nations on their nonliberal paths. For all of the authors, many of the key features of the postwar German and Japanese models are traced to the 1930s and the rationalization measures taken under strongly authoritarian regimes. These regimes were effective at overcoming the endemic friction between traditionalist particularism and modern universalism (and reconciling incompatible sectoral regimes) that beset them prior to this time in what Wolfgang Streeck, in his introductory chapter, calls the first synthesis (p. 29). The second synthesis came after the war and undid the first one by finding ways to integrate full democracy, free markets, and independent trade unions while still retaining a strong nonliberal character. Although I do not dispute this characterization, it bears a certain risk in that one could too easily be left with the impression that the midnineteenth to midtwentieth century was a (very) long period of continuous institutional disequilibrium, while the last half century has constituted (at least until recently) a strong equilibrium. Such a perception Vol. 96, No. 4 would run counter to the intent of the authors. For, as is clear in a brief but penetrating exposition by Streeck (pp. 25–38), the authors actually avoid the holism that plagues much of the national varieties of capitalism literature: For these authors, internal contradictions between institutional subsystems are endemic and one of the key motors of institutional change. To the book’s credit, all of the authors invoke ideas, power, sequencing, and timing in explaining institutional formation and change. They also rely on a broad conception of path dependency to explain patterns of change; this, however, strikes me as a missed opportunity to break new theoretical ground by building more explicitly upon some of the more recent thinking in path dependency theory. Nonetheless, the book constitutes an exemplary and skillful application of historical institutional analysis by master practitioners. For this reason alone it is well worth reading. It is all the more deserving of attention because it also provides us with a unique and highly insightful comparative analysis of two leading national economies and suggests why they, despite tremendous success over a long period of time, may now be moving from nonliberal to liberal capitalism. The Ramparts of Nations: Institutions and Immigration Policies in France and the United States. By Jeffrey M. Togman. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001. 176p. $49.00. Leah Haus, Vassar College Faced with similar economic circumstances, France and the United States adopted different immigration policies at various times in the twentieth century. Jeffrey Togman asks why. To account for this variation in public policy outcome, he points to the different structure of political institutions in the two countries. Two examples of cases when the United States and France adopted quite different immigration policy measures are the period of economic prosperity in the 1950s and the beginnings of hard times in the early 1970s. In the former period, the United States enacted the restrictionist and discriminatory McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. This act largely retained the national-origins quota system that had been introduced in the early 1920s, and it remained in place until 1965 when it was replaced by more liberal measures. By contrast to the restrictionist McCarran-Walter Act, France instituted a liberal policy in the 1950s. When hard times began in the early 1970s, France adopted restrictionist measures that mandated a stop to legal labor immigration. Despite calls for increasing restrictionism from certain societal groups, the United States government did not enact major new immigration policy laws in the 1970s. To explain these variations in public policy outcome, Togman sits with those scholars who stress the need to go beyond cultural and economic variables. For example, those who point to cultural traditions to explain a country’s immigration policy fail to account for the sharp changes in American immigration policy during the course of the twentieth century. Togman draws instead on insights from the broader comparative political economy literature that discusses the role of state institutional structure to explain variations in government policy in the face of similar economic circumstances. He shows that insights from this broader literature can be fruitfully applied to the issue area of immigration policy. Togman convincingly demonstrates that political institutions played an important role in shaping immigration policies in the United States and France. He shows that the fractured nature of the American state left multiple points of access for a broad range of interest groups to advocate, or 871 Book Reviews: COMPARATIVE POLITICS block policy proposals. As a result, Togman argues, any potential link between economic conditions and immigration policy outcome was broken in the U.S. case, rendering the policy outcome highly unpredictable. Sometimes policy moved in the direction of restrictionism, and at other times in the direction of openness. He then shows that the unitary and relatively autonomous nature of the French state allowed officials to broach immigration policy in a technocratic manner and to uphold a link between economic circumstances and immigration policy, adopting liberal measures in the postwar period of prosperity and restrictionist measures when hard times set in. To illustrate the role of institutions, he provides a historical narrative of changes in American immigration policy during the twentieth century and of French immigration policy since World War II. Togman covers some policy shifts that are in the direction of greater restrictionism and others that move to greater openness. In discussing both, he brings an important balance to the scholarship on immigration policy by reminding us that the political institutional structures of “liberal democracies” have led to the adoption of restrictionist measures, not just liberal measures, at various times in the twentieth century; and that these institutions have allowed restrictive forces, not just pro-immigration business, to organize effectively. The book begins to address the question of why there are sometimes movements in the direction of restrictionism and why at other times there are movements in the direction of openness, or variations in policy outcome over time. He shows that France’s unitary state structure enabled the government to adopt a technocratic approach that allowed economic circumstances to influence the direction of immigration policy. In contrast, Togman argues, in the United States it is difficult to know when “pro-immigration or anti-immigration coalitions will carry the day, or when coalitions will shift” (p. 19). The author leaves no guidelines for understanding the direction of policy change in the fractured American state over time throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, as he notes, there have been recent changes in French political institutions in the direction of the more fractured institutional structure that exists in the United States. This leaves us with few guidelines for understanding the direction of immigration policy changes in France as well. Togman could go further in considering alternative possible explanations for variations in American immigration policy over time, and counter them if he wishes to argue that there are no guidelines. For example, one might suggest to him that heightened concerns with national-security circumstances help us to understand the direction of immigration policy change, or variations over time. The restrictionist legislation of the early twentieth century came during or shortly after World War I and the “Red Scare” (beginning with the literacy test for immigrants that was enacted in 1917, and then intensifying with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which also came in a year when unemployment hit 11%). The restrictionist McCarran-Walter Act came at the height of the Cold War. And, most recently, although not yet enacted, the discussions over the adoption of a new amnesty program that figured prominently in the summer of 2001 disappeared from the agenda after September 11. By contrast, movements in the direction of openness came at times when there was no particularly heightened concern with nationalsecurity circumstances. The book would likewise be strengthened by including a preliminary discussion of a broader range of countries in order to broach more thoroughly the question of variations across country, and to give some guidelines for conducting future research to explore further the importance of political institutional structure. There were other advanced industri- 872 December 2002 alized countries, such as Switzerland, that adopted policies fairly similar to those in France, encouraging immigration in the postwar period of prosperity, and imposing restrictive measures when hard times set in. But they did not share the same institutional structure as France. A thorough assessment of the ways in which political institutions shape immigration policies would benefit from some initial discussion of these other cases. The Ramparts of Nations is a succinct and clearly articulated book that will be of benefit to those readers interested in immigration policy. Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America. By Mark Ungar. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001. 273p. $55.00. Pilar Domingo, Queen Mary, University of London Elusive Reform is an important and welcome addition to the still underdeveloped area of political science analysis of judicial institutions in Latin America. Few volumes to date have undertaken such an in-depth study of the complex issue of rule of law and its problematic construction in fragile democratic systems in the region. The book analyzes the experience of rule of law reform in Argentina and Venezuela, with some comparative reference to other Latin American countries. Drawing on the transitions literature, the author seeks to address a number of challenges that new democracies face, with particular regard for the issues of legal accountability of public office, mechanisms of rights protection and independent adjudication, and access to justice—all critical elements of rule of law. To its merit, the book goes beyond the more policy-oriented approaches to the study of judicial reform processes, and takes on board a more ambitious discussion of the complex relationship between rule of law, state formation, and democratic consolidation in Latin America. With different political trajectories, the two case studies present contrasting examples of the range of factors that motivate rule of law reform, on the one hand, and facilitate or hinder the effectiveness of these reforms, on the other. In Venezuela, reform in recent decades was prompted by a desire to improve executive responsiveness and judicial access; in Argentina, following a history of violence and authoritarianism, judicial reform was expressed in a concern with limiting executive dominance and improving judicial accountability. Two running themes of the book are brought together as an explicative framework from which to assess the weaknesses of rule of law: the issues of executive domination—seen as either too repressive or too unresponsive—and judicial disarray—understood as the whole gamut of problems within the different judicial agencies, ranging from corruption, delay, bureaucratic obstacles, and insufficient resources to political obstacles. In an analysis of the different levels at which the judicial function operates, Mark Ungar seeks to disentangle the complex web of factors that affect the workings of the legal processes and rights-protection mechanisms. As he rightly point out, this has implications for the prospects of building regime legitimacy and facilitating democratic consolidation. The book begins with a historical review of the process of state formation in Latin America, in which rule of law lagged behind other political and state priorities, while centralist trends, personalism, and a recurrent recourse to coercive strategies by embattled executive branches prevailed as the route by which to build a sense of national cohesion. Although the historical analysis adds somewhat to existing historiography on the development of rule of law in the region, of greater interest are the author’s observations on the contemporary relationship between democratization, the state, American Political Science Review and the rule of law. These are developed particularly in the early chapters. Here the multilayered analysis of the judicial function and its workings throughout the state bureaucracy— not only within judicial institutions—is rich with insight regarding the complexities of law enforcement and the many opportunities available to thwart rule-of-law enhancement. As Ungar rightly points out, law enforcement is not only a matter for judicial institutions; it takes place throughout the state at different levels of the public administration, within both the executive and legislative branches. Following from this, he identifies two types of necessary reforms: administrative reforms aimed at improving state agencies’ functioning so that they better uphold the law in their daily actions; and accountability measures that monitor the degree to which these agencies adequately protect constitutional rights and make justice accessible. From this analysis, the author raises interesting questions about the timing of reform initiatives, and he follows the process through from the political moment of passage of reform to the range of institutional and attitudinal problems that obstruct the implementation phase, and ultimately undermine the effectiveness of well-intentioned reforms. Critical political moments in which the balance of political and social forces is restructured, for instance during a regime transition, may indeed open up opportunities for reform. New democratic governments may seek electoral approval through reforms that combat corruption, illegality, and rights abuses. But despite appearances of change and renovation, continuities from the past within state bureaucratic structures obstruct the implementation of reforms that are perceived as threatening to a variety of vested interests. This combines with a legacy of nondemocratic attitudes and codes of practice that diminish the effectiveness of reforms. Ultimately, despite these obstacles, Ungar suggests that piecemeal reform initiatives can establish pockets of improvement in rule of law, and encourage law-abiding practices within the lawenforcement bodies and other state agencies that may eventually redirect old attitudes that fostered corruption and lack of accountability. While Ungar’s dialogue with transition theory is commendable, and suggestive questions are raised, ultimately the book falls short of developing a clear theoretical proposition regarding the place of rule of law in the recent democratic processes. The theoretical concerns introduced at the beginning of the book are not fully developed in the later, more empirical chapters. Instead, the later discussion of specific aspects of rule of law at times falls into the more prescriptive trappings of other judicial reform studies. Nonetheless, the case studies are important in themselves. Chapters 3 to 7 focus on specific areas of the judicial function. Notably, much attention is given to the criminal justice system, with particular emphasis on the workings of the police, viewed by the author as being especially illustrative of the state’s capacity and degree of commitment to abide by constitutional principles. Other key areas are the issues of judicial independence, the recent experience with judicial councils and defensorı́as del pueblo (human rights ombudsman), judicial access, and community justice. The chapters are based on thorough and extensive research, and do in large measure build up an integrated picture of the ways in which rule of law operates in the two case studies, the advances that have been achieved, and the areas where resistance to reform still persist. Moreover, the contextual and political analysis— so often lacking in judicial reform studies—is insightful and highly suggestive of the complexities of reform processes. The book is an important addition to the study of rule of law in the region and will be a key text for students and scholars of judicial politics in Latin America. Its major contributions lie, Vol. 96, No. 4 firstly, in prompting further theoretical probings into the role of rule of law and justice mechanisms in democratic processes. Secondly, it develops a suggestive analytical framework that unpacks the complex elements that constitute rule of law. And finally, the book is an insightful study of two telling experiences of judicial reform in the region. Basic Income on the Agenda: Policy Objectives and Political Chances. Edited by Robert van der Veen and Loek Groot. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001. 290p. $32.00. Robert Henry Cox, University of Oklahoma This book tells the story of a dog that did not bark. Since the 1980s, a number of European scholars have advocated a system of income support that would eliminate the stigma attached to most forms of poverty assistance and would be simple, easy, and cheap to implement. Their idea, which has various forms, is to provide all citizens a guaranteed level of support that would have no strings attached. Organized as the Basic Income European Network (BIEN), these scholars have met regularly to discuss the subject of basic income and have endeavored to make their research useful to policymaking by promoting their group’s ideas in their home countries. The problem is that after more than a decade of activity, the group cannot claim any major success. To the contrary, many countries have striven to make unemployment and social assistance more conditional by attaching work requirements or lowering thresholds of eligibility. Basic Income on the Agenda is a chronicle of these efforts. Based on the papers presented at the seventh annual meeting of the BIEN scholars, held in 1998, the volume suffers the predictable unevenness of a conference proceeding. Some contributions are shrill and polemic. One contribution is missing its bibliography (p. 154). The volume’s content is divided into two parts. The first part consists of general essays, some conceptual, some polemical in tone. Taken together, the essays of the first part provide a rich picture of what the debate over basic income is and why the members of the BIEN network are so passionate about it as a policy solution. For those unfamiliar with the debate, the editors offer a sound overview that outlines various forms of basic income proposals, ranging from negative income tax to tax credits to “citizens’ wage” schemes. These essays also demonstrate that there is no party line within the group of scholars who study and advocate for basic income. One by Phillipe van Parijs, the intellectual majordomo of the movement, compares the likely effects of basic income with the earned income tax credit and reductions of social security contributions. His conclusion is that even a partial basic income is superior to the other two if the policy objective is to maximize the “real freedom of the worst off” (p. 80). Other contributions to the first part of the volume analyze such themes as the likely egalitarian effects of basic income, its consequences for gender relations, or its merits compared to workfare schemes. All of this has a rather speculative character. Perhaps the most grounded essay comes from Fritz Scharpf who, considering the question of whether the European Union could provide a vehicle for pressuring countries to adopt basic income, concludes that he is doubtful of basic income’s political viability and dubious of its normative soundness (p. 155). The second part of the book is a survey of countries where basic income proposals have been under discussion. Here the stories of failure outnumber the successes, and for reasons that support Scharpf’s skepticism. Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany are countries where basic income 873 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS December 2002 proposals have failed to get off the ground. In these countries, basic income proposals have been rejected even by the social democratic Left, which sees a duty to work as a prerequisite for social solidarity. In Ireland, a plan to create an income tax credit is gaining support, while basic income has withered. France appears to have acquired a basic income scheme as an unintended consequence of a scheme originally designed to reintegrate people into the workforce. Its Revenu Minimum d’Insertion (RMI), adopted in 1988, was intended to combine income assistance with reintegration into the workforce. In the face of high unemployment, however, French officials dropped the return-to-work requirements of the RMI program, leaving behind only the income assistance program. In Belgium, a political party called VIVANT was created by a business entrepreneur to promote a basic income program. After gaining some attention in 1999, the party, like all singleissue movements, proved to be a one-election phenomenon. Among the Belgian mainstream, there is no support for basic income. Finland appears to be the only country where real basic income has any political support, but even here it is the small, left-wing parties that have embraced the idea. Among the political mainstream it continues to be dismissed, and there is no real proposal under consideration. Indeed, one could say that the success of the idea in that country is a direct consequence of an embarrassment of riches. With high economic growth and low unemployment, providing unconditional assistance to the poor is less controversial, and therefore the advocates of basic income have been afforded a wider audience. As this volume indicates, basic income has been a noble ideal, but its political impact has been minimal. For anyone interested in the history of this idea, the second part of the volume provides a nice summary of social policy discussions in many European countries. These contributions are valuable descriptions of the life and death of a policy idea. The first part of the volume is less useful, owing to the uneven quality of the contributions. And most of the contributions in the first part are too speculative or polemical to have much lasting value. As the debate over the future of Europe’s welfare states progresses, the issue of basic income is likely to remain a peripheral topic with a dedicated, if ineffective, following. International Politics provisions; 3) member-state courts were enforcing these rules, that is, treating their own countries’ laws as void on the grounds of conflict with Euro-level law; and 4) member-state governments by and large (although not without some prominent exceptions) were going along with this system. Moravscik’s book treats the EC/EU as a remarkably impressive example of international integration and attempts to understand it by a close examination of the motivations of domestic political actors who pushed for and/or accepted an increasingly tight union. Mattli’s book uses a comparative approach, comparing EU development with the evolution of other customs unions in Europe. Goldstein’s, too, uses a comparative approach, offering a historical institutionalist analysis of four modern, voluntarily federated unions, some with a dominant judiciary and some without. Karen Alter, too, in this book has produced a comparative, historical institutionalist account of the ECJ’s self-transformation into what she terms “a Constitutional Court for Europe, able to practice judicial review of European law and national law” (p. 225). Unlike the other explanatory efforts, this one zeroes in on judicial politics. What it compares is the reactions of the French judiciary and the German judiciary, and of the political (i.e., electorally accountable) branches of their respective governments to the various union-building decisions of the ECJ, and to each other’s reactions. The way that it is historically institutionalist is that it examines the operation and changes over time of both incentives and constraints on political (including judicial) actors that the politico-legal institutions of each country and of the EC/EU establish. Her first chapter sets up the riddle: How did this result emerge from a treaty whose authors and ratifiers did not either spell out or intend this higher law judicial review system? She breaks this down into three core questions: “Why did national courts accept a role enforcing European law supremacy? Why did national governments [by which she means the political branches] accept the ECJ’s supremacy doctrine and national court enforcement of European law supremacy? How did the transformation of the European legal system contribute to the emergence of an international rule of law in Europe?” (p. 27). Her answers fill more than two hundred pages, and a brief summary cannot do them justice. Establishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe. By Karen J. Alter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 284p. $60.00. Leslie Friedman Goldstein, University of Delaware Before 1990, American political and even legal scholarship paid little attention to the mystery and the marvel of the role played by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in constituting the European Community (EC; now European Union, or EU) as something very like a transnational, federated state with its own higher law constitution and supremacy of union-level law, enforceable and enforced against memberstate (i.e., member-country) laws or constitutional provisions to the contrary. Legal scholars Eric Stein and Joseph Weiler and political scientist Mary Volcansek (with a comparative judicial politics approach) had produced sustained bodies of scholarship on the subject, and Stuart Scheingold had offered a book on it back in 1971 (which took an international relations approach), but not much else was available for the curious American academic. The decade of the 1990s changed this picture. Now a generation of young scholars and some more recently engaged established scholars have taken up the challenge of attempting to understand this remarkable, and in many ways unprecedented, phenomenon. With this book, Karen Alter adds to the corpus of recent volumes (Andrew Moravscik, The Choice for Europe, 1998; Walter Mattli, The Logic of Regional Integration, 1999; Leslie Friedman Goldstein, Constituting Federal Sovereignty, 2001) that attempt to explain the remarkable transformation of the European Economic Community (EEC) within the space of 12 years from a group of six countries loosely bound by a treaty aiming to eliminate tariff barriers into what was in legal terms a quasi-state arranged like a federation. Within this community, 1) the Treaty of Rome functioned as a supremelaw-of-the-land constitution, rendering void any memberstate (i.e., nation-state) laws or constitutional provisions to the contrary, including ones adopted later than the treaty; 2) EC regulations and directives—in other words, EC-level law—adopted under the authority of the Treaty of Rome also were supreme over member-state laws or constitutional 874 American Political Science Review She focuses on France and Germany and conducted several dozen interviews of high-level players, scholars, and journalists, scoured the secondary literature and read the relevant cases. Party politics sometimes mattered; individual judges sometimes mattered; the fact that the ECJ’s innovation gave judicial review power to many judges and constricted the judicial review power of certain high courts sometimes mattered; national legal traditions sometimes mattered. And it mattered a lot that—as is always the case with judicial review relying on documents that require unanimity or even a supramajority for alteration—the power to interpret (the Treaty of Rome or Euro-level law) gave tremendous power to the interpreter (the ECJ); in order to overcome an interpretation, one has to secure unanimous or near-unanimous agreement on an alternative. She concludes that the long-term interaction of resistance-acquiescence among the various institutions is best characterized as a process of negotiation (pp. 44–45). Prodigious research underlies this book; the analytic account of the French and German cases is rich, nuanced, detailed, and carefully contextualized. She engages the arguments of other scholars in impressive ways. She has unearthed an example of member-state resistance to the ECJ that was omitted from other accounts: In 1966 the administrative court in Frankfurt flatly declared invalid a European regulation, in effect rejecting the supremacy doctrine (p. 76). (The Constitutional Court implicitly reversed this ruling a year later [p. 78].) She also mentions a report in an unpublished paper that in 1976, the French parliament gave itself power to nullify European law (p. 152), but this may be spurious, since it is omitted from published accounts by scholars such as Hjalte Rasmussen (On Law and Policy in the European Court of Justice, 1986) and M.-F. Buffet-Tchakoloff (La France Devant La Cour de Justice des Communautés Européennes, 1985). Perhaps in a research effort this massive and this detailed, it is inevitable that one finds an occasional error: She asserts that John Marshall did not exercise the power of judicial review in the case of Marbury v. Madison (which is famous precisely because Marshall did exercise the power there, declaring a federal law unconstitutional); and she gives as the date of the French parliament’s legislated defiance of the Euratom Treaty of 1978 (again relying on her unpublished source, J.-P. Jacqué) when Buffet-Tchakaloff’s book (p. 366) dates it at 1980 (the proposal having been tabled in 1978). At a more substantial level, one can disagree with some of her arguments. (In particular, she seems not to have reflected as much as one would like on what “democratic accountability” would mean in a federated system, and on its desirable relationship to judicial independence and the protection of fundamental rights, [see pp. 207–8]). And one can even disagree with her rhetoric: She insists throughout on describing ECJ law as “international law” when most scholars use the term “transnational” or “supranational” to connote that this legal regime is so tightly integrated that a new term is needed for it. Nonetheless, for now, this book stands as the definitive account of the judicial politics that indeed produced “the making of an international rule of law in Europe.” The Frontiers of the European Union. By Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 235p. $65.00. Erik Jones, University of Nottingham The “borderless world” is an early twenty-first century cliche, particularly in Europe. Overlapping processes of globalization and regional integration have done much over the past decades to alter the political and economic nature of geographic boundaries. As a result, the tendency is to anticipate Vol. 96, No. 4 a fundamental deterritorialization of politics and economics. However tempting, it would nevertheless be hazardous to rush to judgment. Through a series of overlapping case studies—essays, really—Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort demonstrate that frontiers remain important both within the European Union (EU) and without. Politics and economics continue to be rooted in geography despite the transformations of the late twentieth century. This is true not only in practical terms but also in relation to individual and group identities. As the authors suggest, “there remains in Europe a highly developed sense of territoriality” (p. 11). Such arguments may find few converts among the statistically inclined. Rather than measure the flows of activity across borders, Anderson and Bort have relied on interviews with an odd assortment of individuals having some direct linkage with the management of geographic boundaries. Police officials, local councillors, civic administrators, and other interested parties form the backdrop against which the authors reflect upon developments both in the world and in our understanding of it. In turn, the insights they derive are organized into surveys of general theory and specific problems, French borders, European borders, and the changing boundaries between Europe’s East and West. At times the overlap between these essays becomes slightly repetitive—as when the authors recount the push of migrants across the Swiss-German border in near-identical language on pages 102 and 126. The authors also tend to throw in allusions or concepts that interested readers may find unfamiliar—such as the distinction between boundaries and frontiers as implied by the Roman word limes. Nevertheless, Anderson and Bort make a persuasive argument that is usefully documented and selectively detailed. Their discussion of European efforts to encourage the development of transfrontier cooperation (pp. 45–74), for example, sheds welcome light on the context, design, and implementation of a raft of different programs—each of which serves as an umbrella for an even more diverse collection of specific projects. Given this sea of variety, the authors can be forgiven a somewhat anecdotal approach. Readers are expected to have confidence in the authors as they “attempt at a general political assessment” (p. 10), and yet the authors provide sufficient basis for believing that such confidence is warranted. Anderson and Bort also raise a number of points that seem obvious upon reflection, though counterintuitive at first glance. Foremost among these is that the spread of Englishlanguage learning may have the effect of strengthening rather than lessening national divisions (pp. 51–54). Alsatians and Saarlanders no longer make the effort to learn German or French, at least not in numbers comparable to those before World War II. Moreover, the same is true in virtually all bilingual border regions—such as French-Italian, French-Spanish, Italian-German, and so forth. Even populations in plurilingual countries such as Belgium show more interest in learning English than in learning the languages of their compatriots. Hence, the authors suggest that “language frontiers” are resistant to the fast pace of economic change and will develop “only as a consequence of long-term social processes” (p. 54). As if linguistic divisions were not enough of a problem, Anderson and Bort suggest that cross-border cooperation may itself give rise to conflict (p. 73). As diverse groups engage in collective action across political boundaries, it is only natural that they should scrutinize the distribution of costs and benefits. And where collective action is unsupported by collective identity (or common purpose), the likelihood that different groups will object to differences in distributive outcomes cannot be discounted. They suggest that this is where central authorities have a role to play, bolstered where possible by the European Union. Given the structure of the argument, 875 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS however, it is unclear what that role should be (at least in general terms) or why central authorities would choose to play it. Along a similar vein, Anderson and Bort posit a contrast between the western expansion of the United States and the eastern enlargement of the European Union (p. 143). This contrast is at the same time self-evident and yet worthy of repetition. The American pioneers of the nineteenth century sought to bring an untamed wilderness into the ambit of “civilization.” The European enlargement negotiators of the twenty-first century must contend with existing states that— whatever their current difficulties—are unlikely to discard their values and cultures. Enlargement is about collective action and not manifest destiny. Hence, it is also potentially a source of cross-border conflict. Moreover, should enlargement succeed, it will have the effect of pushing the borders of the European Union outward toward an even more unstable East—heightening the vulnerability of the union as a whole and shunting much of the responsibility for shielding the union onto its new entrants. Indeed, given the structure of the enlargement process, much of these expansion effects have already begun to take place. Borders remain important, geography matters, and territoriality runs deep. This is hardly an idealistic conclusion, and neither it is likely to prove popular. Still, it is realistic. And it leaves considerable scope for change nonetheless. For while Anderson and Bort succeed in documenting the resilience of territorial politics, they also provide substantial evidence of the will of policymakers at all levels to make the most of cross-border cooperation. Implicit in the evidence provided by the authors is a strong persistence to improve upon a politics and an economics that are (and are likely to remain) geographically structured. As a result, geographic boundaries will remain important, even as the nature of that importance continues to evolve. Whether internal or external, the frontiers of the European Union are not static. And more than anything else, it is the adaptive nature of these frontiers that explains their continuing relevance to economic and political life in Europe. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. By Elazar Barkan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 456p. $18.95. Waldemar Hanasz, University of Pennsylvania It seems timely and appropriate that the twentieth century— the century of the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipelago, the Killing Fields, the Cultural Revolution, and the “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans and Rwanda—ended with a wave of growing interest in healing past injustices. Human rights organizations and international commissions investigate violations of human rights. International tribunals judge political leaders, warlords, and their soldiers. Historians, political scientists, and legal theorists study the implications of such crimes and punishments. While most recent studies concentrate on the tortuous procedure of putting perpetrators on trial—Martha Minow’s Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (1998), Howard Ball’s Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide: The Twentieth Century Experience (1999), and Gary Jonathan Bass’s Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (2000)— Elazar Barkan’s book outlines the worldwide trend of victim restitution for past sufferings. By analyzing some cases in which wrongdoers or their descendants have embraced guilt and responsibility, Barkan is able to explore “how various national and ethnic identities change as a result of in- 876 December 2002 teractions between rival groups and the attempts of groups to redress through negotiation painful historical injustices” (pp. x–xi). According to the author, these interactions between offenders and victims not only solve local problems but also generate a novel system of global morality. The book is divided into two parts, each presenting a number of cases. The first part covers some of the consequences of World War II: West Germany’s reparations for the Holocaust, the U.S. governments handling of the internment of Japanese Americans, the case of the Japanese army’s sex slaves, the story of Jewish accounts and Nazi gold in Swiss banks, and some complex debates about restitution in East Central Europe. The second part deals with the residues of colonialism, especially the cases of indigenous groups in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The demand for reparation for American slavery is also discussed. Barkan’s presentation of these cases is comprehensive and interdisciplinary. His knowledge of local cultures, history, sociology, and international law meets the book’s high demands. Although there is no doubt that he welcomes the whole process of restitution, his evaluations of the complicated cases are quite well balanced. The fact that some perpetrators or their descendants are pressed to admit their guilt and express apologies is not entirely new. What is new is the voluntary willingness of the past offenders to enter into negotiations with their victims and to meet some of their demands, including the demands for material compensation. Restitution agreements are reached without coercion and third-party engagement. The process of negotiation, Barkan argues, redefines the historical identity of offenders and victims alike. Of course, both sides want to achieve different goals. Past offenders want to end accusations and to defend their status quo, while victims want their harms to be acknowledged and, if possible, restitution. In each case, the ideas of moral responsibility and justice are redefined, too. Barkan argues that the restitution cases illustrate a new framework of global morality—he calls it “a neo-Enlightenment morality”—based on negotiation and voluntary agreement between antagonistic groups. The idea of fairness is rooted in the culture of each rival group and the historical context of particular conflict. The neoEnlightenment morality recognizes that global justice depends on multicultural negotiations. Again, the demand that social groups act morally is not entirely new; what is new is the demand that antagonistic groups respect the cultural principles of their opponents. Moreover, the dialogue of rival groups upgrades the traditional framework of rights. As such, according to Barkan, this morality goes beyond the principles of liberalism. First, it includes not only individual rights but also group rights. Second, it articulates “a relation between universal values and local customs as fundamental rights” (p. 329). Third, it can validate the particular goals as legitimate values and rights. That continuous interplay of universal principles and practical patterns constitutes a new universe of moral and political values. However, Barkan’s assumption that the liberal tradition needs to be reformed because individual rights neglect group identities and group interests is rather unconvincing. It is by no means clear why classical liberal principles would need such reform. After all, individual rights easily explain why it is wrong to execute innocent civilians in concentration camps, imprison them in internment camps, force them to become sex slaves, or confiscate their estates and banking accounts. In most cases, individual rights can also cogently legitimize restitution claims. In fact, trying to explain these injustices in group terms is, in a sense, a step back, because it returns to the discriminatory language of past perpetrators. The victims of the Holocaust American Political Science Review or the ethnic cleansing deserve redress for their suffering as human individuals, not only as Jews or Muslims. Locke, Kant, J. S. Mill, and other fathers of liberalism lived in a world filled with group privileges and viewed the moral philosophy of individual rights as a significant advancement. It is a fundamental principle of liberal philosophy that each individual is free to decide to which religious or political groups to belong. Consequently, the public institutions and policies of contemporary liberal democracies—concerning security, health, education, and so on—apply to all citizens as individual human beings, regardless of their group identity. Despite an impressive eloquence of its descriptive part, Barkan’s book does not prove that a return to the world of group rights would be an improvement today. It is to be hoped that legal theorists and philosophers will continue discussing the importance of group rights. Moral Victories: How Activists Provoke Multilateral Action. By Susan Burgerman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 186p. $29.95. Ann Marie Clark, Purdue University A lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to demonstrating that transnational activists “matter” in explaining international outcomes. Having paid those dues, it can be argued that scholars of transnational activity can safely shift from a documentary focus to a more profound inquiry concerning how, why, and to what extent nonstate actors matter. On the other hand, to understand the work of transnational activists for the international implementation of moral and legal standards—not a completely new area of inquiry, but a burgeoning one—still requires a considerable amount of empirical documentation of exactly what that work entails. Only time-intensive, border-hopping research provides the names, dates, and actors’ words, deeds, and intentions that comprise whatever political activity there is to be theorized about. Thus, both empirical documentation and theorizing about transnational and multilateral processes are demanding, and interdependent, scholarly necessities. In her book Moral Victories: How Activists Provoke Multilateral Action, Susan Burgerman presents finely articulated empirical research that is a welcome contribution to the literature on human rights in multilateral political processes. The centerpiece, and in my view the strong point, of Burgerman’s nicely written and relatively brief book is the case study research. Through interviews, primary documents, and secondary sources, she chronicles the development and implementation of United Nations-negotiated peace settlements through the UN Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) and the UN Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA). ONUSAL, deployed in 1991, was the first such agreement to incorporate human rights monitoring into its peace-building component. MINUGUA, deployed in 1994, did so as well. These cases are inherently important in that they represent, as Burgerman notes, early examples of “the latest, most interventionist stage in the implementation of human rights norms” (p. 21). The book stands firmly on its merits as a balanced study of the development of the two Central American peace processes in their complex domestic and international contexts (which included human rights activism). She maintains, as the title suggests, that activists were very important in making sure that human rights considerations for both countries stayed on the international agenda. She relies on the transnational advocacy network concept, originated by Kathryn Sikkink and elaborated by Margaret Keck and Sikkink in Activists Beyond Borders (1998), to characterize that role. While highlighting the visibility of human rights advocates in her cases, Vol. 96, No. 4 Burgerman’s study does not plow new theoretical ground in this area; instead, it carries the transnational advocacy concept to a new institutional context, as one explanatory factor among others. I mention this because the book’s subtitle seems to suggest a more sustained elaboration on the causal role of transnational human rights advocacy in relation to multilateral action. El Salvador and Guatemala experienced decades-long civil wars between government-backed forces and armed guerrillas. After a brief history of each conflict, the case studies open at the beginning of the 1980s, a time of severe human rights violations in both Central American countries. This was also a period of significant growth for the transnational human rights advocacy network, that is, the network made up of domestic and international human rights activists, officials pursuing a human rights agenda within the foreign policy arms of some governments, and the agents of international organizations’ human rights mechanisms. Both conflicts were fueled in large part by Cold War concerns and externally supplied armed forces. In El Salvador, the fight reached what Burgerman calls a “hurting stalemate” before the parties could be coaxed to the table after the withdrawal of U.S. support for the government in 1989. In Guatemala, the guerrillas never were strong enough to claim a military stalemate, but neither did the government enjoy overwhelming material support from the United States after the 1970s. Still, reputational incentives in a post–Cold War international context finally resulted in a “tenuous” agreement to negotiate a peace in Guatemala, although the negotiations themselves spanned six years (see pp. 102–3). Burgerman analyzes ONUSAL and MINUGUA to determine the most important factors behind the incorporation of “human rights enforcement” in the agreements. (For the author, enforcement refers to binding and interventionary, but not necessarily military, action on the part of the international community [pp. 18–19]). As appropriate for a study of two cases with similar outcomes (in which human rights standards were, in the end, incorporated into the agreements), Burgerman posits five necessary but not sufficient conditions that determine the profile of human rights in the countries’ UN-backed peace processes. These factors work together to “determine the extent to which the international community” will employ “sanctioning mechanisms of the human rights regime” against a state with human rights violations (p. 5). They are 1) the existence and legitimacy of international human rights norms, which have become increasingly institutionalized; 2) lack of interference by a major power with overriding political or economic interests in the country, which can inhibit human rights enforcement; 3) activism by the transnational human rights network, which puts pressure on the target state; 4) a domestic political elite that comes to believe that its reputation or that of its country is on the line if human rights violations continue, and which can control its domestic military counterparts; and 5) a domestic human rights network, which can maintain links with its transnational counterpart (pp. 4–5). These factors have strong roots in the international relations and comparative literature on the politics of human rights. Burgerman applies them in a new domain, by examining multilateral human rights enforcement decisions by the international community, and her findings are corroborative in the new context. On the subject of human rights activism, this research illustrates the role transnational advocacy networks have played on the stage of UN peace processes. Given that transnational advocacy networks by definition are made up of many different kinds of actors, a further direction for theoretical work may be to specify, both theoretically and practically, the differing causal impacts of different 877 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS members of the network. This is something she should consider pursuing further, based on the elements that comprise her promising set of necessary conditions for human rights enforcement. A commitment to enforcement raises the stakes of multilateral action significantly, and Burgerman’s study suggests that to muster collective action on human rights requires a special set of conditions that are complex but that possess a general profile applicable to other cases. She herself does so briefly with a limited study of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in her final chapter, and briefer discussions of a few other cases. Her conclusion that network pressure is necessary for the international community’s enforcement of human rights principles is strengthened by comparison with the UNTAC process, implemented in the early 1990s. Among other problems her discussion outlines, UNTAC received less attention from the human rights network, resulting in a less prominent place for human rights in the agreement. In the conclusion, the author also presents a well-informed discussion of her study’s policy implications for the design of future operations. Burgerman’s Moral Victories is a solid and very readable contribution to the literature on attempts to implement the international human rights regime. The book would be suitable for an upper-division undergraduate or graduate course on international organization, comparative Latin American politics, or human rights, and is to be recommended as a study of human rights in UN peace processes. Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory. Edited by Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy M. Shaw. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 242p. $65.00. Clement E. Adibe, DePaul University and The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory, edited by Kevin Dunn and Timothy Shaw, offers a timely reflection on the content and nuance of international relations theory in an era of “the new inequality” (Craig Murphy, “Political Consequences of the New Inequality,” International Studies Quarterly 45 [September 2001]: 347–56). The central question posed by the authors is: How international is international relations theory? In the authors’ view, not very much. As a consequence, their objective in the volume is “to replace the dominant/dominating denotative reading of the IR text with a more pluralist connotative reading” (p. 8; my emphasis). Drawing on African experiences in the discipline of international relations, all 13 chapters of this engaging volume take aim at various manifestations of the Eurocentricity and “provincialism” of international relations theory then and now. Very early in the volume, Dunn sets the stage for a deliberate and systematic engagement with the discipline for its relegation of Africa to the footnote of international relations theory (p. 4). For the past decade, the marginalization of Africa in world affairs has been the staple of comparative politics. But as the essays in this volume show, Africa has not fared better in international relations theory and analyses either. The reason, according to Dunn (Chapter 4), may be too nuanced to constitute a bona fide analytical variable for the parsimonious inclinations of much of contemporary international relations theory. Consider, for instance, the pervasive assumption of savagery—that “Africans were just being Africans”—that echoed in sections of the international media and policymaking constituency in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (p. 4; and Philip Gouvrevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories 878 December 2002 from Rwanda, 1998). Not surprisingly, such glaring insensitivity in policymaking and in scholarship to the plight of Africans has raised questions about the continuing centrality of race in international politics (Chapter 8). This volume is, however, much more than an oversized catalogue of the misrepresentations and disrespect of Africa in the discipline of international relations, although it would appear to be doing precisely that at first glance. Indeed, it offers a rich and insightful discussion of the two poles of international politics: power and powerlessness. If the former has been overemphasized in international relations from the classical to the modern era, the relative neglect of the latter should be of concern to modern-day theorists who must formulate universal theories of international politics. Herein lies the strength of this volume as a bold attempt to “demonstrate the centrality of the experience of the [African] continent to every theoretical approach to IR” (p. ix). In this regard, Siba Grovogui’s excellent comparative analysis of the “problem” of sovereignty and quasi statehood in Africa (Chapter 3) and John F. Clark’s compelling attempts to apply realist and neorealist traditions to Africa’s post– Cold War international relations (Chapter 6) merit a closer reading. Unlike Dunn (Chapters 1 and 4) and Assis Malaquias (Chapter 2), who argue willy-nilly that Africa is sui generis, Grovogui and Clark contend that the content and outline of Africa’s international relations are not nearly as different from those of Europe and other parts of the world as had been widely and erroneously assumed. Take, for example, the notion of the artificiality of the boundaries of African states, which has been discussed ad nauseam by innumerable works on the state in Africa. In dismissing this as a “special” attribute of the African state, Grovogui argues quite pointedly that “Belgium and Switzerland display the same ‘artificial’ features as their contemporary African counterpart, the Congo” but have enjoyed a much better fate than the latter (p. 31). Obviously, then, a causal analysis of Africa’s international relations must seek other variables and move beyond what he calls “the oft-repeated but unfounded allegory of privation—that is, of an Africa chronically engulfed in chaos owing to inherent antagonism of opposing ‘tribes’ or the obsessive pursuit by domestic groups of their own selfinterest, unrestrained by state or civil institutions” (p. 41). Grovogui’s timely thesis, therefore, is that, contrary to all appearances and misconceptions, the responses of African states to the varied domestic and external contingencies that they face are remarkably rational, and that the observable “tensions between state and civil society in relation to post-colonial governance” are indeed necessary, even if unfortunate (p. 41). Clark advances the discussion of the purpose of state behavior in Africa by applying realist insights to the conflicts that have engulfed several African regions since the end of the Cold War. Using the notion of “regime security” as an analytical tool, he seeks to “understand why African state leaders have frequently intervened in one another’s affairs, and why they have just as frequently refrained from doing so” (p. 94). His finding, which could easily have been predicted by the classical theorists of international relations, is at variance with those contemporary observers who attribute the behavior of African states simply to primordial instincts. According to Clark: “For the most part, African rulers understood that intervention in neighboring states would evoke counterintervention, usually through support of insurgencies. Thus the principled statements of mutual respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity [of states] made in Addis Ababa in 1963 [by the Organization of African Unity] and ritualistically repeated thereafter reflected not only devotion to an ideal, American Political Science Review but also the best insurance of regime security” (p. 97). What we see, then, are two sources of rationality of the African state: first, the self-interest of age-old realpolitik, and, second, the altruism of modern-day constructivism. If we can now move beyond those seemingly omnipresent images of African exceptionalism and savagery, which were successfully reinforced by Robert Kaplan (“The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly [February, 1994]: 45–76), it is possible to see in this volume new opportunities for enriching international relations theory in several respects, such as Janis van der Westhuizen’s examination of South Africa’s marketing power as the other “Rainbow Nation” (aside from the United States) as a means of attracting tourists and foreign investors (Chapter 5); the problem of sanctioning “rogue states” (Chapter 9); the enigma of the Westphalian system (Chapter 10); the coalescence of “modernists” and “antimodernists” to protect the environment in southern Africa (Chapter 11); the impact of U.S. foreign policy on stability in southern Africa (Chapter 12); and the trend toward “new regionalism” in Africa as a response to security and developmental challenges (Chapter 13). It is difficult for a diverse collection of essays, such as those contained in this volume, to measure up to the unenviable expectation of the editors to “replace the dominant . . . reading of the IR text” with another, obviously theirs. This volume does not come anywhere close to meeting that objective. What it does achieve, however, is raise a question that has been made even more important by the events of September 11, 2001, and that is whether the world is getting closer, as proponents of globalization would have us all believe, or growing farther apart, as “the clash of civilizations” thesis suggests. Either way, this volume is best seen as a call for a truly international theory of international relations and, for that reason, deserves the attention of scholars and practitioners alike. The Phantom Defense: America’s Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion. By Craig Eisendrath, Melvin A. Goodman, and Gerald E. Marsh. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. 216p. $24.95. Ballistic Missile Defense and the Future of American Security: Agendas, Perceptions, Technology, and Policy. By Roger Handberg. Praeger, 2001. 264p. $62.00. Rockets’ Red Glare: Missile Defenses and the Future of World Politics. Edited by James J. Wirtz and Jeffrey A. Larsen. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001. 368p. $28.50. David Goldfischer, University of Denver As Michael O’Hanlon concludes in his excellent contribution to Rockets’ Red Glare: “We should . . . get used to the debate over ballistic missile defenses. It has been around a long time, and no final resolution is imminent” (p. 132). In one sense, a review of these three recent books makes clear that many analysts had grown a bit too used to positioning themselves in terms of the 1972 ABM Treaty. Preoccupied with arguments over whether the treaty should be preserved, modified, or rewritten in light of a changing strategic and technological context, no one seemed to have anticipated that President George W. Bush would simply withdraw from it, invoking Article XV’s provision that either party could withdraw if “extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this Treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests.” Even many strategic defense supporters who deemed the treaty obsolete (as Robert Joseph persuasively maintains in his contribution to Rockets’ Red Glare) generally believed that it should only—and would only—be scrapped if negotiations over U.S.proposed changes broke down. (“The Bush Administration,” surmises O’Hanlon, “will surely try very hard to amend it Vol. 96, No. 4 before going to such an extreme”) (p. 112). In the event, the president’s team disavowed even the word “negotiation,” saying they were willing only to “consult” the Russians regarding the treaty’s impending demise. While the sudden arrival of the post–ABM Treaty era, coupled with the new light thrown by 9/11 on the entire subject of homeland security, leaves all three of the books under review sounding slightly anachronistic, the central arguments advanced by the authors retain their relevance. The reason, as Roger Handberg notes in Ballistic Missile Defense and the Future of American Security, in summing up the historical record of four decades of debate over national missile defense (NMD), is “the fragile nature of any NMD deployment decision” (p. 182). After all, four previous American presidents committed themselves to some version of NMD (Lyndon Johnson to “Sentinel,” Richard Nixon to “Safeguard,” Ronald Reagan to the “Strategic Defense Initiative,” and George H. W. Bush to “Global Protection Against Limited Strikes”), only to have some mixture of domestic and international politics, along with daunting technological hurdles, result in the decision’s being reversed or deferred. For those who wish to acquire a detailed understanding of the domestic political obstacles confronting deployment, Handberg’s book provides a detailed and insightful commentary. The missile defense lobby, he shows, has had to contend with more than just the community of dedicated opponents of NMD. Pursuit of deployment has repeatedly been stymied by a defense establishment wary of seeing funds diverted from existing missions, members of Congress who are similarly worried about the fiscal health of their cherished domestic policies, and a defense industry ambivalent about a program with such an uncertain future. Moreover, the slow pace of technological progress, combined with the opportunity provided by the budget process to revisit decisions annually, has until now provided ample time for economic downturns or diminishing external threats to take the steam out of efforts to deploy a defense. Handberg divides the principle antagonists across four decades of debate over missile defense into “Wilsonians,” who believe that deploying an NMD will increase the danger of war, and “believers,” who are relentlessly committed to the pursuit of a U.S. national advantage. (His third group, the “pragmatists,” will be discussed shortly.) These ideological perspectives, Handberg argues, drive the competing technical assessments that have attended a succession of prospective defensive systems. Those who believe in NMD for other reasons simply regard setbacks like test failures as temporary hurdles on the road to inevitable success (unless the “Wilsonians” successfully impede technical progress). Those who oppose defenses as fundamentally dangerous, by contrast, will predictably declare whatever technology is under consideration as either hopelessly flawed or easily overcome with cheap countermeasures. Handberg characterizes both groups as under the sway of the same belief in a “technological imperative”: Opponents “fear its success,” even as supporters “push for that outcome.” That observation is questionable. To the extent that opponents are motivated by a belief in a technological imperative, it is that the nuclear revolution, embodied in the offensive arsenals constructed by the Cold War superpowers (most dramatically in the form of long-range ballistic missiles), made defense in its traditional sense forever obsolete. NMD “believers,” by contrast, assume that the offense–defense balance remains largely subject to human will. For those who have come to regard mutual assured destruction (MAD) as inescapable, episodic outbreaks of technological optimism about ballistic missile defenses must be countered by scathing critiques of prospective defensive technologies, coupled 879 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS to the more general admonition that security requires the regulation of armaments and the peaceful settlement of disputes. That rationale for mutual “offense-only” deterrence animates a very large literature that dates back to the dawn of the missile age, to which The Phantom Defense is the latest substantial contribution. As in many such efforts to sway the attentive public, one encounters in this well-written book an occasional tension between assertions that defenses are bad because they are fundamentally unworkable, and, alternatively, that they are bad because they might seem effective enough to tempt a future American leader into launching war against another nuclear power. Each of those positions can slide into polemical overkill, as when we are told, without supporting documentation, that “an overwhelming majority of scientists and engineers who have considered national missile defense have deemed it a fantasy” (p. xviii). Or: “Since a national missile defense could never be tested in battlefield conditions, any shortcomings would not become apparent until it was too late” (p. 147). That tendency to assert that defenses are both obviously unworkable and supremely dangerous is particularly unfortunate in a volume that also includes some strong, eloquently conveyed arguments against U.S. deployment of an NMD. Thus, Chapter 4 effectively depicts the great distance that the states now known as the “axis of evil” must travel before they can hope to deliver mass-destruction weapons to American territory via missiles, and Chapters 5 and 6 convincingly poke holes in some of the optimistic technical claims emanating from the strategic defense lobby (some of which they document as blatant misrepresentations). In short, the NMD lobby has probably both exaggerated the near-term missile threat from “rogue states” and greatly understated the technical challenge of coping with offensive countermeasures. The reader is left uninformed, however, of plausible responses to those concerns, just as the authors fail to address ways in which defensive deployments might not result in a world of arms racing, major power hostilities, and growing likelihood of nuclear war. While it is true, as James Wirtz notes in his introduction to Rockets’ Red Glare, that “those involved in political advocacy feel no compulsion to explain the downside of their policies to their audience” (p. 6), it is also true that engaging serious counterarguments can ultimately be more persuasive than belittling or ignoring them. The Phantom Defense was produced by the Washingtonbased Center for International Policy, which promotes a foreign policy “based on democracy, social justice and human rights” (p. 183). Their association of those hugely important goals with a fairly sweeping pacifism (as when they assert that “[d]iplomatic solutions to major problems will not be reached as long as the United States resorts to the military instrument,” p. 155) is likely to have more limited appeal in the aftermath of 9/11. Of course, opposition to U.S. unilateralism in nuclear policy need not rely on such broader condemnations of the use of force, nor does a willingness to consider ballistic missile defense necessarily mean a wholesale rejection of nuclear arms control, let alone diplomacy in general. Between the group Handberg labels “the believers” (who indeed sometimes seem to fit the bellicose stereotype depicted by the authors of The Phantom Defense) and the antidefense “Wilsonians,” there is indeed an important, probably growing middle group. Handberg approvingly calls them the “pragmatists,” that is, those who are always willing to “reweigh their choices in light of changing international circumstances and technology issues” (p. 157). This middle group, which holds the balance of power in domestic po- 880 December 2002 litical battles over NMD, has been shifting toward support for deployment, Handberg notes, over the past five years. Accounting for that shift has been both increased concern over hostile states acquiring missiles of increasing range and a general belief that missile defense technology appears to be making significant advances. The Wirtz and Larsen book, for the most part, is representative of that pragmatist camp. Most of the contributors endorse what is probably the mainstream view among experts: that while the Russians and Chinese can probably develop affordable and effective countermeasures to prospective U.S. ballistic missile defenses, the next several years may well bring us to the point that NMD deployment merits serious consideration. Astutely anticipating the general direction of policy, Wirtz and Jeffrey Larsen directed their contributors (noted experts drawn from universities, think tanks, and the government) to assume that the United States will deploy missile defenses, and to judge the consequences of three basic policy options: limited defense in a cooperative setting, enhanced defenses that might undercut cooperation, and unlimited defenses unconstrained by treaty. Although the contributors did not uniformly engage each scenario, the editors clearly succeeded in generating the sort of detailed inquiry that can help move the debate forward. The first three chapters do a fair job of acquainting nonexpert readers with the origins and evolution of events bearing on the adoption and subsequent challenges to the ABM Treaty, followed by three chapters that look at the political, strategic, and arms-control implications of alternative defensive architectures. (As noted, the chapter by O’Hanlon stands out, although all are worth reading). The third and strongest section of the book deals with regional responses, with separate chapters devoted to China, Russia, South Asia, and U.S. allies. The China chapter, by Bradley Roberts, is particularly good, dramatizing both the intensity of China’s desire to avoid coercion by the United States and the types of steps China can take to undercut any benefits from a unilateral move toward NMD (none worse than returning to its “old ways” of assisting other states in their programs of unconventional weapons and missile delivery systems). The inclusion of a chapter on South Asia, by Timothy D. Hoyt, is obviously timely, and it usefully lays out the contagion effects throughout the region should China counter U.S. defenses with a stepped up nuclear buildup. Those predisposed to embrace the Bush administration commitment to NMD should read this section carefully; they may well conclude, as Larsen points out in the conclusion, that the United States must go much further than it has to date in addressing the concerns of allies and potential adversaries (i.e., Russia and China). Does that mean giving up on defense entirely? Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Rockets’ Red Glare is its evidence that the pragmatic center is beginning to contemplate a policy direction that transcends the sterile four-decades-old debate between the “believers” and the “Wilsonians.” Several of the contributions, most strongly the one on Russia by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Goldgeier, pay serious attention to the desirability of moving toward an arms-control regime that engineers a transition from today’s nuclear world of total offense dominance to one of mutual defense emphasis. While the “road to a cooperative transition is long,” they note, it is “in both countries’ interest that they begin the journey” (p. 228). If 9/11 is to have a long-term impact on the debate over missile defense, one may hope that it strengthens prevailing views on the need for major power cooperation, even if it has also tragically demonstrated the need for homeland defense. Rockets’ Red Glare helps prepare the groundwork for efforts to reconcile those objectives. American Political Science Review Global Limits: Immanuel Kant, International Relations, and a Critique of World Politics. By Mark F. N. Franke. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 265p. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. David A. Welch, University of Toronto It’s not every day that you find a book that argues for its own irrelevance. This is not, of course, how Mark Franke characterizes his project in Global Limits—but it is the upshot, and he is admirably candid in putting together the individual pieces of the argument pointing to it. Noting a recent upsurge in interest in Kant, Franke sets out to demonstrate that Kant does not, in fact, have “a theory” of international relations (IR), and that most modern scholars who invoke him either misunderstand or misappropriate him. Whatever Kant has to say about the subject, Franke insists, must be understood in the context of his broader philosophical project, and not merely with isolated reference to those few works to which IR scholars are usually attracted—most notably, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795). Franke stresses the critical nature of that larger project, but argues that “in engaging questions of international politics, Kant ultimately fails to meet his own standards of critique” (p. 195). At the end of the day, Kant is dogmatic and conservative: He takes the sovereign territorial state for granted; he mistakes parochial philosophical commitments for universal truths (particularly in his ethics, and especially in his conceptions of autonomy and moral personality); and he lacks the imagination to see that the parameters of international politics are constructed and constantly renegotiated. Franke suggests that if we were to take Kant seriously, pushing his critical project to its logical conclusion, we would embrace a radical critical position reminiscent of Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker. “In taking up a critique of world politics,” Franke writes, “the only appropriate response to world politics is to always place the effects of worlding into doubt. The disciplinary guide for a critique of world politics could only be one that allowed the critic to place any claim to the world into doubt to begin with” (p. 192). Thus, Franke maintains, Kant does not speak to modern IR theory; he cannot speak to modern IR theory; and, properly straightened out, he would refuse to speak to modern IR theory. As Franke puts it, “To consider in earnest Kantian theory and the debt that studies of international politics have to it is to ultimately deny the practicability of attention to international politics from the start” (p. 23). If Franke is right, one might well ask: Why bother? As far as international relations is concerned, Kant is beside the point. And insofar as Kant has a point, international relations does not. There is simply nothing to say. The book is a performative contradiction. Fortunately, Franke does not succeed in being irrelevant. Any scholar of international politics interested in Kant will want to reflect on what Franke has to say—for there is more than enough merit in some of the individual moves of his argument to warrant our close attention, and just enough error in his conclusions to save us from his skepticism. Franke is quite right to insist that we put Kant’s treatment of international politics in the broader context of his thought as a whole, and one of the book’s great merits is the superb effort it makes to do so (drawing heavily not only upon the originals, but also upon an impressively thorough and thoughtful survey of important commentators). Franke is particularly interested in reading Kant’s relatively short discussions of international relations in the light of the Critique of Judgment, and for this he makes an intriguing and provocative case in Chapter 3. Not everyone will find this compelling; I myself Vol. 96, No. 4 find the Critique of Practical Reason and the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals more helpful. But disagreements of this kind fall well within the range of normal interpretive debate. Franke is also right to insist that Kant does not have a theory of international politics, if by the term we mean (as Franke usually does) a social scientific theory that we might test in the quest for valid empirical generalizations. We are not obliged, however, to embrace Franke’s curiously anachronistic stance on the relationship between Kant and modern IR scholarship. Franke wants us to reject a “democratic peace” reading of Kant on the ground that Kant did not subscribe to the ontology, epistemology, or methodology undergirding democratic peace research. Fair enough. Kant was no modern social scientist. But Franke also wants us to reject the very possibility of this kind of research because of what Kant ought to have said, in his view, on the subject of international politics. To this we are entitled to ask: Why should we? Can we not take inspiration from Kant without subscribing to his philosophical system as a whole, or to Franke’s rereading thereof? Must we go All The Way With Immanuel K.? More importantly, Franke has run wild with that part of Kant’s critical project that requires us to question the presuppositions of our understanding of the world, and has neglected that aspect of it that was designed to enable us to know the world. Kant’s main philosophical project was to reconcile faith and reason; it was not intended to demonstrate the impossibility of both. “[W]hile reason can never refuse to submit to criticism,” Kant writes in the Critique of Pure Reason, “it does not always have cause to fear it” (A739/B767). Like Aristotle, Kant was aware that to say anything at all about the world, one has to take some aspects of it for granted. For Kant, these are phenomena, and he invites us to ask what we must believe about things-in-themselves in order to make sense of them. In contrast, Franke exhorts us merely always to question. It is plain that Franke thinks this a worthwhile activity, and this is why he would deny my suggestion that his book is irrelevant by design. But his success in failing to be irrelevant does not lie here—for asking questions is pointless unless one believes in the possibility of answers. The European Union in International Politics: Baptism by Fire. By Roy H. Ginsberg. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 256p. $79.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. Carolyn Marie Dudek, Hofstra University Since the Cold War, the United States as well as other countries have struggled with the “new world order.” Further integration of the European Union, mostly in economic and political ways, has given it recognition as an actor within the international arena. During the crisis that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the international community witnessed the EU’s failure to bring a speedy end to the genocide and violence in the region. The EU’s inability and lack of efficacy in the situation tarnished its image and prompted it to begin working toward the creation of a European Common Foreign and Defense Identity. More recent events of September 11, as well as increased violence between Israel and the Palestinians, once again beg the question: What is the role of an integrated Europe? As the United States takes on its war against terrorism, it looks to its closest allies in Europe to be supportive and to help in the endeavor. Actions or opinions from individual member states, however, seem to gain more public attention in the United States than those from the EU as a single entity acting in the global arena. 881 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS Roy Ginsberg’s book sheds light on the seemingly elusive role of the EU in foreign policy. The author provides a rich qualitative empirical analysis of its role in international relations, with a close examination of the EU’s part in Yugoslavia, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and the Union’s influence upon the United States. What is truly unique and laudable about this study is the author’s nonrealist perspective on the impact of EU foreign policy. At the outset of the book, he establishes that it is inappropriate to judge the EU with the same criteria as nation-states, rightly pointing out, “The EU and the nation-state are not governmental equals” (p. 5). In addition, Ginsberg does not claim to be assessing the failure or success of EU Common Foreign and Security Policy, but rather examining if the Union had an impact on global politics. Ginsberg provides several examples of the EU’s participation in or influencing upon international events, covering a broad range of world regions. Although this provides a fascinating litany, it lacks a logical ordering and ranking in importance. Perhaps this is less the fault of the author than due to the complexity and difficulty of the topic he is addressing. To examine whether the EU has had an impact on international politics, Ginsberg constructs a conceptual model and evaluative structure that is then applied to the three specific cases mentioned above. The model focuses on the relationship between foreign policy inputs and outputs. He explains that EU outputs have created a feedback mechanism for the formulation and decision-making process of foreign policy. The empirical portion of the book is rich, dense, and ambitious. The author covers the turmoil in the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East with attention to historical details. In the case of Yugoslavia, Ginsberg provides a nontraditional interpretation of the EU’s role. Most discussions regarding the impact of the EU in the Yugoslavian crisis concern its failure to implement a successful foreign policy (e.g., cited in Ginsberg, Philip Gordon, “Europe’s Uncommon Foreign Policy,” International Security 11, no. 3 [Winter]: 27–74). Ginsberg, however, suggests that given the resources it had, the EU did have a significant impact. For instance, if we look at humanitarian aid efforts or the influence the EU had upon the new republics, it is clear that it did play a significant but often overlooked role. Coverage of the EU’s impact in the Middle East was an even clearer case study than that of the former Yugoslavia. Ginsberg’s third case study deals with how the EU has influenced the United States. This chapter has less depth than the other case studies due to the breadth of the topic at hand. One minor criticism of the chapter is that no distinction is made between the EU’s influence over U.S. domestic policy (e.g., the death penalty) and its influence over U.S. foreign policy, which seem to be very different issues. At the conclusion of each chapter, the author provides an extensive table of each issue or input that was examined in each case study. He provides an impressive number of issues/inputs for each case study, and from this empirical research constructs his findings. Although Ginsberg provides many examples of EU involvement or lack thereof, he does not qualitatively distinguish the importance of one event over another. If the EU had a significant impact on a significant event, it should hold greater weight than its impact on a less important event. Overall, this is a well-researched book of impressive quality. The theoretical framework is well thought out and appropriately addresses the role of the EU. I would highly recommend this book for its historical and empirical strength and its relevance to current world events. Roy Ginsberg has taken on a very important and complex issue in his book and he rises to the occasion. 882 December 2002 Foreign Policy Decision-Making in Nigeria. By Ufot B. Inamete. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2001. 313p. $48.50. Michael Anda, University of Arkansas at Little Rock This elaborate study analyzes the Nigerian foreign policy decision-making structures and processes from 1960 (when Nigeria became an independent country) until 1999. Using Graham Allison’s conceptual models of decision making (the rational-actor model, the organizational process model, and the bureaucratic politics model), Ufot Inamete examines how foreign policy decision making during the Balewa, Ironsi, Gowon, Muhammed/Obasanjo, Shagari, Buhari, Babangida, Shonekan, Abacha, Abubakar, and Obasanjo governments manifested both changes and continuities (p. 289). Importantly, theory from Allison’s model is well integrated with the substantive and analytical portions of the book, and, thus, it goes beyond the theory of a strong-leader approach in Third World countries to demonstrate that developing countries do have organizational structures that deal with foreign policies. From the Balewa to the Obasanjo government, foreign policy decision-making dynamics mostly reflected the rational-actor model. In the areas of the economic and cultural components of foreign policy, where the Federal Ministry of External Affairs had to work with other ministries and agencies, some tendencies of the bureaucratic politics model of foreign policy decision making often cropped up. However, this model was often superseded by the rationalactor model of decision making in the final phases of foreign policy. In the aspects of political, security, cultural, and economic components of foreign relations that dealt with routine and mundane activities, the foreign policy decision-making dynamics mostly reflected the organizational process model, since the ministries or agencies involved often simply followed the standard operating procedures of decision making used in such ministries or agencies (p. 292). The foreign policy decision-making system in Nigeria is complex and Inamete’s research shows that various organs, ministries, and agencies were involved in all its facets. This study shows that such federal ministries as those for external affairs, trade, and information are deeply involved in the shaping of the country’s foreign relations (p. 289). The external affairs ministry remained at the hub of decision making in terms of the political dimensions of the country’s foreign policy. During the Balewa government, the office of the prime minister handled much of the foreign policy formulation rather than the Federal Ministry of External Affairs. The Supreme Military Council and the Supreme Military Headquarters managed a significant portion of the formulation activities that the Federal Ministry of External Affairs dealt with during the Muhammed/Obasanjo government. In the current Obasanjo government, the presidency is active in some foreign policy formulation (p. 290). As this study shows, certain national leadership bodies played important roles as foreign policy decision-making coordinating structures. In cases of vital and sensitive foreign policy issues, the final decisions were made by these bodies: for example, the decision of Nigeria to recognize the Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government (during the Muhammed/Obasanjo government), the decision to nationalize the British Petroleum Company in Nigeria (during the Muhammed/Obasanjo government), the decision to boycott the 1986 Edinburgh Commonwealth of Nations Games (during the Babangida government), and the decision to lay the foundations for the formation of the African Petroleum Producers’ Association (during the Babangida government). American Political Science Review Since the formation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Federal Ministry of National Planning has had primary charge of Nigeria’s relations with this regional body. Thus, this ministry is responsible for one of the most important foreign policy goals of Nigeria—the economic integration of the West African subregion, with the attendant increase in Nigeria’s economic and, in recent times, military role in this subregion. The Federal Ministry of External Affairs plays a subsidiary role in terms of handling ECOWAS affairs. This means that the Federal Ministry of National Planning is primarily in charge of Nigeria’s multilateral international relations in the West African subregion, with the Federal Ministry of External Affairs handling bilateral international relations. State governments sometimes get involved in helping to shape the country’s foreign relations, especially the leaders of states that share some of their borders with a foreign country. They assist the relevant federal organs, ministries, and agencies in managing or minimizing border conflicts and promoting economic and cultural contacts with bordering countries. Significantly, the cultural heritage that some of the border states share with neighboring countries also prompts them to promote cultural and economic links (p. 293). Yet, the author argues that Nigeria’s repeated mediatory involvements in Chad have been dictated “by the imperatives of national security rather than any pan-African ideals” (p. 92). From the Balewa to the Obasanjo government, the various components of foreign policy are shown to have manifested themselves differently. The Balewa government emphasized the political components. The Ironsi and later the Shonekan governments were very brief and also had very unstable domestic political systems. The Gowon government, during the civil war, gave much attention to the security components of foreign policy due to the need for arms to handle the conflict. After the war, attention was devoted to the economic components of foreign policy because that government led and championed the creation of ECOWAS and also because petroleum export revenues were increasing greatly. The Muhammed/Obasanjo government had a more assertive foreign policy profile and a stronger role in Africa—thus focusing more on the political components of foreign policy. During the Shagari government, all the salient components of foreign policy were handled in a mostly routine way since a nonassertive foreign policy posture was in place. The Buhari government’s strong stand on the problem of undocumented aliens from neighboring countries, its general determination to stop the smuggling of goods through its borders, and its desire to extradite former politicians to Nigeria to face corruption charges led to an emphasis on the security dimension of foreign policy. However, during the Babangida government, the economic facet was formally adopted as the primary focus of the country’s foreign policy. Nigeria’s very active, elaborate, and expansive role in Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as in the United Nations peacekeeping missions in various parts of the world, meant that the security aspect of foreign policy was also very important during the Babangida government. The emphasis on economic and security facets of foreign policy continued during the Abacha, Abubakar, and Obasanjo governments. The book is very detailed about the Muhammed/Obasanjo government. As noted earlier, the regime formally placed Africa as the centerpiece of Nigeria’s foreign policy. Many succeeding governments have continued to see Africa in this way. Nigeria’s foreign missions in Africa, in terms of both staffing and material resources, have been strengthened. The salient dimensions of Nigeria’s foreign relations have focused on Africa. Despite Babangida’s emphasis on the economic Vol. 96, No. 4 facet of foreign policy, Nigeria’s economy took a turn for the worse during his era; the Nigerian economy (especially the currency) was greatly devalued during his regime. Was the international political economy largely to blame for this? This well-written book builds upon existing scholarship and is highly recommended. The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States. By Robert Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 464p. $29.25. Cecelia Lynch, University of California, Irvine Robert Jackson’s recent book The Global Covenant is a work in the tradition of the international society school that extends the perspective of that school to today’s world events and theoretical debates. Jackson’s argument has several important components: that we live in a society of states that operates according to particular norms having significant ethical implications for the conduct of world politics; that this society of states can be distinguished from both the amoral perspective of the (neo)realists and the universalism of cosmopolitans; that this world must be examined primarily through the words and actions of statespeople, its primary articulators; that this world is distinguished by values of antipaternalism, normative pluralism, and the observance of sovereign rights of nonintervention and self-determination; and that recent crises (e.g., the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.) demonstrate more the continued durability of this world (which has existed roughly since Westphalia) than its decline or demise. Taken together, the components of Jackson’s thesis form a strong argument that draws on previous work, including primarily that of Hedley Bull, whose name is synonymous with the international society school, but also from Michael Oakeshott in theory and Terry Nardin in law. Jackson, however, employs the insights from these bodies of scholarship to develop his own thesis regarding the form, normative and ethical implications, and durability of the “global covenant.” This thesis also draws on his own previous work on Africa. It is certainly a thesis that holds considerable power and therefore must be treated seriously. It is also a thesis that remains problematic, and Jackson’s assessment of its critics is generally inadequate. The global covenant, for Jackson, is both an empirical fact and something to be valued normatively. It is based on the concept of formal, de jure sovereignty in international law: that is, the notion that states respect each other’s territorial integrity and political independence and thus refrain from any threat or use of force that violates another’s sovereign boundaries. The global covenant, as such, also reduces “unnecessary political confrontation based on value conflict” (p. 182) over such issues as religion and ideology, and is therefore to be valued as contributing to international order and peace. The concept of the global covenant is based, for Jackson, on understanding international politics as a human activity and a type of human relations. Focusing on the human and rejecting the idea that international relations are determined by mechanical forces distinguishes his conception (and the international society school in general) from many forms of realism, particularly neorealism. On the other hand, Jackson insists that his conceptualization of world politics differs significantly from other powerful conceptualizations articulated by critical theorists and constructivists. While his critiques of these bodies of theory are not very satisfying (for example, he often charges poststructuralists of various kinds with making “category mistakes,” but does not sufficiently account for the 883 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS partiality of his own categories), he spends more time in differentiating his conceptualization from critical cosmopolitans such as Richard Falk. Here, Jackson employs the concept of the global covenant to take issue with the activism of contemporary humanitarian interventionists (among whom Falk is not easily placed). Jackson raises critical issues for debates about intervention, the export of democracy, and what is commonly called humanitarian action today. Jackson argues that there is no basis in the global covenant for these types of intervention. For example, despite the existence of what he and others call “failed states,” usually in Africa, that is, states that exist in name only but “cannot or will not safeguard minimal civil conditions for their populations” (p. 296), there is nothing that justifies intervention on the part of humanitarians or democracies to put things right. This is a powerful Kantian argument, one that many of those who disagree with Jackson on other grounds would strongly support. However, in making this argument, Jackson attempts to elide much of what actually goes on in world politics. Jackson wants to focus on the “human,” rather than the mechanical, and explicitly states that his liberal view of the global covenant precludes cosmopolitan universalism with regard to the type of values that should be practiced within states. Thus, he distinguishes between societas and universitas. The former is a juridical conceptualization of the relations between states, whereas the latter, for Jackson, is “sociological” and cannot, therefore, be addressed within the confines of the global covenant. While it is fine from this point of view (as well as many others) to criticize value-based universalism, Jackson does not sufficiently acknowledge that in promoting the global covenant as both empirical fact and worthy of normative support, he, too, is engaging in a type of universalism that can easily be questioned. Moreover, he does not escape from either ideological or sociological preconceptions. His conceptualization, while powerful and in many ways useful, promotes one layer of sociological understanding—that long promoted by diplomats and more recently by many international relations theorists—over others. It also reveals a worldview based, despite his own partial criticism of it, on what we might call colonial and/or paternalistic understandings of power politics. For example, the Persian Gulf War, which he justifies in a manner more thoughtful than most, can also be criticized from an international society perspective on paternalistic grounds. It is interesting, moreover, that Jackson strongly adheres to a notion of security that limits it to the idea of individual and state “safety.” While this is certainly an important aspect of security, adhering to it as the only definition that counts is a matter of contention, one easily challenged by both postcolonial and feminist theorists. How, for example, can we say that the threat of war looms larger for most people in sub-Saharan Africa than the threat of bodily harm from AIDS? Yet the latter is excluded from Jackson’s limited conceptualization of security. In including the AIDS crisis or economic devastation in our understandings of security, one does not, as Jackson would have it, engage in “muddled thinking.” Rather, to include such issues is merely to acknowledge that, as Jackson argues later in support of his conceptualization of the global covenant, people conceptualize the world differently and hold differing values and virtues preeminent. Following from this, the conception of security most important to some people in the First World or to (male) elites is surely not that which is critical for many others, including Third World women and/or those ravaged by AIDS, hunger, or environmental catastrophe. Jackson’s antipaternalist stance, based on classical political philosophy, would do well to incorporate the critically important insights of contemporary feminist international relations scholarship in this regard, namely, that the 884 December 2002 global covenant is itself a gendered construction that benefits some and ignores or marginalizes others. Such a recognition is necessary for any fully realized notion of value pluralism in our world. Jackson makes an important argument with many thoughtful implications for world politics today. But his central thesis still provides us with only one view of international politics, which is and will continue to be contested, both theoretically and substantively. Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure. By Bruce D. Jones. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001. 200p. $49.95. Barbara F. Walter, University of California, San Diego By almost all indicators, Rwanda’s civil war should have ended in a successful negotiated settlement. Both the Tutsi rebels and the Rwandan government had agreed to participate in negotiations brokered by a team of Tanzanian mediators whom most people considered highly skilled. The two parties to the negotiations were able to reach and sign a detailed peace settlement that guaranteed both parties representation in the legislature and a set percentage of slots in the military. And the United Nations offered to “guarantee” the security of the two sides during the implementation period. Almost all factors purported to lead to a peaceful solution were present at the time the Arusha accords were signed in 1994. Rwanda’s civil war, however, did not end peacefully. Instead, a peace process that seemingly had all the elements of success ended in one of the most rapid genocides in recorded history. Bruce Jones attempts to explain this puzzle in his wellresearched book on the subject. Why did the Rwandan peace process fail despite the efforts of so many international and regional actors? And what can the international community learn from this failure? Existing explanations for the failed peace process and subsequent genocide tend to fall into two camps. Journalists have tended to view the posttreaty genocide as a continuation of the decades-long ethnic feud between the minority Tutsis, who had enjoyed a privileged position in society during German and Belgian colonial rule, and majority Hutus, who dominated government at the time of the peace in negotiations. The New York Times (Donatella Lorch, “UN in Rwanda Says It Is Powerless to Halt the Violence,” 15 April 1994, sec. A3), for example, described the genocide as “centuries-old tribal hatred,” while USA Today (Marilyn Greene, “Two U.S. Envoys Dispatched to Rwanda,” 3 May 1994, sec. A5) portrayed the killings as “long-smoldering tribal hatred boiled over.” Academics, on the other hand, have tended to place blame on a flawed peace process that gave key segments of the government few incentives to implement the deal (see Rene Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, 1994). Uneven treaty terms imposed on the Rwandan government by outside states not only gave Hutu elites few incentives to implement their side of the bargain, but also created a deeply disaffected but heavily armed minority group, the Akazu, with no stake in the successful implementation of the accords. Jones, however, correctly points out that the Akazu’s first victims were not Tutsis but politicians, journalists, and civil rights activists who supported a democratic transition, many of whom were Hutus. Ethnic hatreds and fear, therefore, cannot fully account for the outbreak of violence. Jones also argues against those explanations that place the blame solely on the terms of the Arusha accords that favored the Tutsi rebels. President Juvenal Habyarimana certainly faced considerable outside pressure to reform his government and negotiate with the rebels, but Jones points out that “at several points American Political Science Review the external delegations, or observers, actually tried to limit the concessions made in Arusha,” fearing that government concessions were too generous and could create a backlash (p. 91). Instead, Jones convincingly argues that peacemaking in Rwanda failed due to a combination of four factors: the unwillingness of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) to offer the incumbent regime more attractive terms; the lack of a coherent and consistent plan on the part of regional and international actors to help implement the accords; the lack of a coherent strategy by outsiders to manage “spoiler” groups; and a lack of will by the major powers to become and remain involved once the genocide was under way. Most of the blame, therefore, is placed squarely on third-party peacemaking efforts. To substantiate his argument, Jones offers a detailed account of the entire peacemaking process, and this is his greatest contribution to the growing literature on the Rwanda tragedy. Numerous accounts exist of the Rwandan genocide, but only Jones uncovers and recounts the details of the negotiations themselves. He begins with the opening set of peace talks, describing the delegations to the talks, the observers, and the mediator. He then moves through the issues discussed at each of the negotiations, the agenda, the timetable, and the key stumbling blocks on which the negotiations stalled. Scholars interested in conflict resolution and in understanding the causal process by which a conflict moves from war to peace will find no better descriptive account of a settlement process than Jones’s account of the process held in Arusha. What is the main lesson drawn? Rwanda, according to Jones, is not a tale that illustrates the need for early intervention by outside parties. Rather, it is a cautionary tale about the potentially disastrous consequences of peacemaking done poorly. In the case of Rwanda, peacemaking failed because those involved in the process, especially the United Nations, failed to understand that rebuilding a state in the aftermath of civil war requires a difficult choice. Either peace treaties must incorporate potential spoilers into any new government, or third parties must be willing to actively contain them. If spoilers are neither included nor contained, as was the case in Rwanda, disastrous consequences are likely. Taken together, Jones’s careful analysis of the peace process, his collection of information surrounding these negotiations, and his final conclusions will be a must-read for scholars interested in the dynamics of bargaining in war resolution, and for policymakers interested in designing more effective strategies for conflict management. Money and Power in Europe: The Political Economy of European Monetary Cooperation. By Matthias Kaelberer. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 254p. $49.50. Peter Henning Loedel, West Chester University The puzzle of European monetary cooperation—namely, why sovereign nation-states would relinquish monetary autonomy in return for some measure of exchange rate stability—has produced a growing body of highly informed and theoretically strong works on European integration. Matthais Kaelberer’s account fits nicely into this mold. The author argues convincingly that European monetary cooperation—especially Germany’s leading contribution to the European Monetary Union (EMU)—is the result of a structural conflict of interest between weak and strong currency countries over the rules of monetary cooperation. In laying out his “structural” argument, Kaelberer’s analysis, as he notes in his own words, “complements rather than substi- Vol. 96, No. 4 tutes for other explanations of European monetary cooperation” (p. 6). In making this claim, his work will not settle the extremely lively theoretical debate on European integration, and European monetary cooperation more specifically. However, it is an important contribution to the literature and fills in some of the theoretical void involving concepts of “leadership” and “asymmetry” of power that help explain European integration. Kaelberer’s work is developed clearly and concisely and his analysis unfolds systematically. The author wastes no time in developing his thesis. He argues that the “relative bargaining power of both weak and strong currency countries has shaped an enduring patter of negotiations over the rules of exchange rate cooperation in Europe” (p. 1). Bluntly stated, strong currency countries—Germany in particular—bring to bear their structural power in the process of European monetary negotiations. Germany, for example, maintains influence over the bargaining agenda, is more successful in getting what it wants during negotiations, and strongly shapes the final outcomes of the negotiation. These conclusions are neither new nor surprising, but the framework that the author employs to account for Germany’s structural power is illuminating and well worth the read. Furthermore, the argument highlights why, in particular, Germany would sacrifice some measure of monetary sovereignty in return for exchange rate stability (other works in this area include Karl Kaltenthaler’s Germany and the Politics of Europe’s Money, 1998). What accounts for Germany’s structural power? It is not, as many might suspect, the Bundesbank’s authority in Germany and Europe (e.g., Dorothee Heisenberg, The Mark of the Bundesbank, 1999). Rather, Kaelberer focuses on two critical explanatory factors contributing to Germany’s structural power. First, Germany’s historically strong balance of payments position, which provides it greater freedom or “choice” (p. 2) in terms of macroeconomic adjustment, allows it opportunities that weak currency countries with negative balance of payment positions do not have. Second, Germany’s leadership in providing a “standard setter” (p. 3) for monetary negotiations helped to focus the negotiations on a set of rules generally in line with German policy-based preferences. European monetary cooperation would ultimately be determined by the interplay of these two factors—Germany’s bargaining leverage and German policy-based leadership. Chapters 2 and 3 develop the core of Kaelberer’s argument. The author is careful to fully operationalize and define his key concepts and variables. While these two chapters require some extra time to push through all the ins and outs of his analysis, his attention to detail and his own recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of his approach add to the credibility of his theoretical framework. He demonstrates a strong command of the minutiae of macroeconomic adjustment policies, balance of payments politics, and international cooperation. He is well versed in the literature on all of these subjects and provides adequate documentation and bibliographic support for his arguments. Chapter 2 lays out in great detail the “structural logic” of Germany’s strong currency status and the bargaining advantage that such leverage provides in terms of negotiations. Bottom line: Germany maintained a strong ability to maintain macroeconomic autonomy and to externalize the costs of macroeconomic adjustment required to bring Europe’s currencies closer together. Chapter 3 tackles the slippery notion of leadership. Germany’s leadership, for example, is not resource based. In fact, Kaelberer is insistent that German leadership should not be analyzed in terms of hegemonic stability theory. Rather, Germany’s leadership is policy based— setting the focal point for European monetary negotiations on the basis of specific policies. Furthermore, the focal point 885 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS would have to coincide with Germany’s insistence that any cooperation not encroach upon domestic priorities. The rest of the book is divided into four chapters that examine five major attempts to achieve greater bargaining exchange-rate cooperation. The cases include the Action Program of 1962 (Chapter 4), the Werner Report and the operation of the Snake (Chapter 5), the European Monetary System (Chapter 6), and the politics of European Monetary Union (Chapter 7). The chapters are uniformly well written and developed, and Kaelberer has a firm understanding of the historical details of each round of bargaining. Much of this material has been examined before, and those familiar with the cases will not find much new material here—other than in the notable way the author applies his theoretical framework. Moreover, while his contention that his work is the “first book” (p. 3) that analyzes the history of European monetary cooperation from the 1960s to the 1990s is a bit overstated (see Kenneth Dyson, Elusive Union: The Process of Economic and Monetary Union in Europe, 1994), the historical analyses do provide a convincing account of the ongoing patterns of European exchange-rate cooperation based on German structural power and Germany’s policybased leadership. Most notable is Chapter 4’s analysis of the Action Program, which sheds new light on the early efforts at European monetary cooperation. The weakest link in Kaelberer’s analysis is his concept of leadership. For example, he notes that Germany’s leadership position “of monetary strength . . . derives largely from its balance-of-payments position. In other words, its monetary power is not so much resource based as policy based” (p. 56). Yet one could argue that the generally large German balanceof-payments surpluses are indeed resource based. This resource provided the Germans with the leverage (power) over their European partners. Is that not a form of hegemony? In short, Kaelberer’s analysis of German leadership will not settle the debate over German hegemony in Europe. In fact, it may provoke some heated responses. Finally, the implication of some of the analysis—most clearly set forth in Chapter 2 (pp. 22–26)—that Germany maintained great freedom or “choice” in terms of macroeconomic adjustment underestimates the powerful political constraints imposed on German policymakers. With such constraints coming from the Bundesbank, from domestic and partisan interests, and from European and global actors (the United States in particular), German government officials were constantly under pressure to make concessions on macroeconomic adjustment. While Kaelberer duly notes these concessions, his account only highlights the limits of German “choice.” These points should not distract from this important contribution to the ongoing debates on European integration and monetary cooperation. The book is highly recommended for all those interested in understanding the process of European integration and international relations theory more broadly. Most importantly, students and scholars of Germany’s interests and power will find much to dissect and debate. Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War. By Stuart J. Kaufman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 262p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Chaim Kaufmann, Lehigh University Stuart Kaufman’s Modern Hatreds is a serious, original contribution on a highly policy relevant question, which is strengthened by his scrupulous case study design and deep regional expertise. Kaufman asks: when do intercommunal rivalries escalate to large-scale ethnic wars? His answer integrates a 886 December 2002 number of existing strands of explanation around the central idea that myths, or as he calls them, ethnic symbols, are the root cause of ethnic violence. His core claim is that “people make political choices based on emotion and in response to symbols” (p. 29). Ethnic wars results from the lethal combination of two particularly noxious types of myths: myths justifying the political domination of specific territory, and myths of past atrocities by others that lead to widespread fears of genocide. The realities behind these myths are far less important than that they are pervasive “in each group’s mainstream history texts written before the conflict began” (p. 30). Thus, Kaufman draws on both of the existing mainstream approaches to explaining the proximate causes of ethnic wars—elite manipulation (mainly constructivist) models and structuralist (a.k.a. realist) explanations. Constructivist explanations operate top-down, explaining large-scale ethnic violence as a side effect of identity manipulation efforts by political entrepreneurs whose main goal is usually simply to retain power. The best example is V. P. Gagnon’s “Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia” (International Security 19 [1994/95]: 130–66). Gagnon explains that in the late 1980s, Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian Communist Party defused a growing crisis of regime legitimacy by wrapping themselves in Serbian nationalism, blaming all Serbia’s problems on exploitation by other Yugoslav nationalities. This identity manipulation effort successfully preserved Milosevic’s authority but at the same time set the conditions for the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and eventually Kosovo. Structuralist explanations, by contrast, operate bottom-up. As Barry Posen explains in “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict” (Survival 35 [spring 1993]: 27–47), neither particularly bad prior histories of intergroup hostility nor malicious manipulation by elites are either necessary or sufficient to cause serious ethnic violence. Whenever communal groups can no longer trust the state to protect them against possible intergroup violence, all groups must mobilize for self-defense. Often, however, the best measures for group defense necessarily also threaten others. The most common, recruitment of ethnically based militias and the hypernationalist rhetoric that often accompanies this—are easily observed by other groups and quite rightly perceived by them as threatening. This “security dilemma” is most severe when relatively low military-technical sophistication forces both sides to rely on mass armies, and when patterns of settlement of the rival groups are deeply intermixed, making it impossible for either side to define defensible enclaves without first engaging in offensive ethnic cleansing against others. Posen argues that the decline in central authority in Yugoslavia following Tito’s death created conditions that led to the Croatian and Bosnian wars in exactly this way. Kaufman’s explanations operate both top-down or bottomup, sometimes focusing on prior mass attachment to dangerous symbolic beliefs, and sometimes on elite manipulation in the immediate prewar crisis. Although he recognizes absence of a central authority to suppress violence as an important enabling factor, he argues that intergroup security dilemmas are principally the results of symbolic myths and fears, not independent causes of escalation (see diagrams, p. 35). Thus, his main intellectual target is Posen. The main thrust of his six case studies—Nagorno-Karabakh, the Abkhazian and South Ossetian Wars in Georgia, the 1991–92 civil war in Moldova, and the Croatian and Macedonian secessions from Yugoslavia—is to show that in all six, the strength (or weakness) of symbolically generated hatreds and fears was sufficient to explain the outcomes but that structural conditions were neither necessary nor sufficient. American Political Science Review The case study work is excellent: well-organized, detailed, honest, and methodologically sophisticated. On three of the cases—Armenia, Moldova, and Georgia—Kaufman is himself one of the leading English-speaking scholars. The cases studied are a near universe of the southwestern fringe of the collapsing socialist camp in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Sticking to the period of socialist collapse strengthens the design, allowing Kaufman to hold more or less constant such possible perturbing variables as major cultural differences and prior institutional strength, avoiding the necessity to get into fullscale debates with authors like Samuel P. Huntington about “civilizations” or Jack Snyder and Karen Ballentine about democratization. Kaufman is careful to ensure the comparability of the sets of questions asked of each of the cases, and to focus on the theoretically important issues. In sum, he has set up a nice level playing field for two midlevel theories of ethnic war: his own symbolic politics theory versus structurally based security dilemma explanations. However, one of the contenders—Kaufman’s—remains essentially unfalsifiable because the core independent variable—ethnic symbols—is not well defined. Kaufman does not set operational limits on what sorts of beliefs or facts should qualify as the sorts of symbols that should be expected to cause ethnic conflict. For instance, in some instances, grievances that he calls symbolic actually appear to be quite real material grievances, such as ethnic preference in awarding better jobs. In other words, he establishes no clear analytic boundary between “symbol” and “structure,” making it impossible to carry out crucial tests that could falsify his theory. As a result, in the end Kaufman loses his own argument. Near the end of each case he quite rightly devotes a section to asking: “Could this war have been avoided? What would it have taken to prevent it?” If either symbolic politics or elite identity manipulation were behind the outbreak of a given war, then it should be possible to identify particular decisions by particular leaders that, if they had chosen differently, would have prevented escalation of the conflict. Of his six cases, Kaufman can credibly claim one and effectively surrenders two others, while three remain indeterminate. He is convincing that the war in Moldova was fully avoidable, although this was by far the smallest. In two other cases, he is compelled to admit that structural conditions made war unavoidable. The Nagorno-Karabakh war was driven by the insecurity of the isolated Armenian minority, which was so severe that no plausible level of reassurance could have satisfied them (pp. 76–78), while in the South Ossetian case, initially relatively mild chauvinist pressures, mainly from the Georgian side, were enough to set off an uncontrollable multiround spiral of escalating mutual fear and mutual mobilization (p. 125). The last three cases are indeterminate. Macedonia’s secession was threatened by neither a security dilemma nor especially dangerous myths. The Abkhazian story is too complex to be called decisively in favor of either theory, while scholars have long contested the Yugoslav cases; Kaufman claims that war erupted only because key leaders intentionally started it in March 1991 (p. 191), but he provides no new evidence to sway the balance of the existing debate. The greatest need now is for genuine crucial tests, of two types. First are cases in which anarchy, geography, and the other structural conditions pointed to by Posen were unusually bad, but in the absence of particularly bitter prior conflict history the supply of manipulable bad symbols was low. An example of a hard case for this condition would be the ArabIsraeli conflict, whose conflict history and associated myths were relatively mild before 1929 or even 1947. Second are cases with long conflict histories that provided ample supplies of bad myths, but where largely separated communities Vol. 96, No. 4 faced only weak security dilemmas. A hard case of this type might be Cyprus since 1974, which has been tense but almost completely peaceful. Undoubtedly, several good Ph.D. dissertations will be built in part on Kaufman’s book. The Real and the Ideal: Essays on International Relations in Honor of Richard H. Ullman. Edited by Anthony Lake and David Ochmanek. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 320p. $45.00. Miriam Fendius Elman, Arizona State University This collection of essays celebrates more than four decades of international relations research by the distinguished scholar and practitioner Richard H. Ullman. The book demonstrates the dilemma faced by the organizers of a Festschrift for a prolific author with wide-ranging interests: Should the chapters focus on, and collectively do justice to, one topic alone; or should the book take a wide-ranging approach that is more representative of the broad spectrum of subjects analyzed by the honoree? The editors of this volume have some success in following both routes simultaneously, albeit with some necessary trade-offs. Written primarily by Ullman’s former students at Princeton University who have gone on to make their own considerable contributions to the field, it is unsurprising that that the chapters are substantively rich and thoroughly researched. Most of the essays focus on the theme of human rights and intervention: Does international anarchy rule out the possibility for ethical behavior? What lessons are to be learned from recent U.S. policy in Kosovo and Somalia? How can the United States improve its track record in humanitarian intervention? This focus appropriately reflects Ullman’s extensive writings on U.S. foreign policy in the Third World. Particularly noteworthy was a controversial article that challenged the Carter administration to bring down Idi Amin’s regime by boycotting Ugandan coffee—even if doing so ultimately meant violating state sovereignty and GATT rules (Richard Ullman, “Human Rights and Economic Power: The United States versus Idi Amin,” Foreign Affairs 56 [April 1978]: 529– 42). Building on Ullman’s work in this area, 9 of the volume’s 13 chapters assess humanitarian intervention and, more generally, the use of force in defense of interests that go beyond traditional definitions of national security. Following the editors’ helpful overview of Ullman’s work (Chapter 1), the first three chapters of the volume, in addition to Chapter 9, focus on the philosophical underpinnings of an intervention strategy. Each does a good job of demonstrating how a foreign policy resting on both the rule of law and the necessities of power might be constructed. For example, inspired by Ullman’s insistence that the United States could do both “good (promoting values)” and “well (promoting interests)” in its foreign policy (p. 35), David C. Gompert convincingly argues (Chapter 2) that the way we think about intervention is slowly but surely moving into line with Ullman’s insistence that intervention is required when foreign governments pass the “boundaries of decency” in their treatment of their own citizens (pp. 15, 45). According to Gompert, illegitimate regimes—states that have not secured the respect and allegiance of their people—can no longer bank on “shield[ing] barbarism” (p. 38) behind the principle of sovereignty, which “depends on lawfulness, not only in a state’s behavior but also in the basis for its existence” (p. 39). Michael W. Doyle’s (Chapter 3) essay, which also examines the trade-offs between ethical and pragmatic considerations in international intervention, is a gem. Doyle argues that “international anarchy does not make ethical behavior impossible” (p. 52), but it does provide the “grounds for 887 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS cautious modesty” (p. 54) in the way that we practice it. As he correctly notes, humanitarian intervention involves making controversial judgment calls because it is plagued by both moral diversity and uncertainty: “It is hard enough to understand what is happening in Boston, New York, London, or Chicago; do we know what to approve or condemn in Eritrea?” (p. 54). Chapters 4 to 8 offer assessments of recent U.S. efforts to apply power on behalf of humanitarian goals. I. M. (Mac) Destler (Chapter 5) presents new polling data suggesting that the American public supports “sensible” international engagements “to right grievous wrongs,” provided that there is a reasonable likelihood of success (p. 87). Thomas G. Weiss (Chapter 6) shows how humanitarian values have influenced the definition of U.S. national interests in recent years. Eliminating ethnic cleansing, for example, is no longer considered a human rights policy that neglects national interests but a policy that is a vital interest (p. 102). Michael O’Hanlon (Chapter 7) revisits Kosovo and Rwanda and suggests steps that the United States and other NATO members might take to restructure their militaries in order to improve their capacity to prevent genocide. Finally, David Callahan (Chapter 8) offers a comprehensive analysis of the sources for ethnic violence in Kosovo in the 1990s and the belated U.S. military response. The final four chapters in the volume move away from the focus on U.S. intervention abroad and examine the NATO alliance, U.S.-European relations, Germany’s foreign policy in the 1990s, and the future of security competition in East Asia. The compromise between depth of analysis and breadth of coverage means that these four chapters sit somewhat uneasily with the earlier part of the book. That being said, since each of these essays is of such high quality, it would have been a pity to exclude them in the name of thematic integration. Ronald R. Krebs (Chapter 10) examines alliance politics, suggesting that rather than promoting cooperation and a collective identity, alliances such as NATO foster conflict among their members. Krebs does a superb job of critiquing the constructivist reading of alliances, but since his essay is also critical of the liberal perspective, it stands in stark contrast to the essays that proceed it. Additionally, while the earlier chapters are more concerned with U.S policymaking and the controversial empirical cases to hand, Krebs’s chapter is given over to theory development. Similarly, the chapters by John S. Duffield, Thomas Banchoff, and David B. H. Denoon (Chapters 11 to 13) tease out the foreign policy predictions of alternative perspectives—realism, constructivism, and liberalism—at the cost of deflecting attention away from the volume’s earlier guiding theme of human rights and intervention. In addition, Denoon’s game theoretical approach to alignments in East Asia juxtaposes with the main methodological thrust of the volume. The most striking lacuna in an otherwise excellent book is the authors’ reticence to engage Leslie H. Gelb’s commitment in the Foreword to elucidate Ullman’s “commonsense” liberalism (p. ix). This is unfortunate because such a discussion would have dovetailed nicely with contemporary controversies in the international relations subfield. Despite the proliferation of liberal theorizing in recent years, there is still no consensus on how to delineate the research program’s core elements. Some scholars contend that only arguments about state-society relations are liberal, and that claims about international institutions and ideas are best left to different programmatic areas (Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization 51 [Autumn 1997]: 513–53). Reiterating and popularizing Ullman’s understanding of liberalism would have provided an important opportu- 888 December 2002 nity to weigh in on the debate, and in particular the direction that liberal theory has taken. Agency and Ethics: The Politics of Military Intervention. By Anthony F. Lang, Jr. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 256p. $65.50 cloth, $21.95 paper. Richard W. Mansbach, Iowa State University Anthony F. Lang’s Agency and Ethics is an effort to reinterpret international intervention from a normative perspective, normative in this instance referring to activities that construct identities and provide policy guidance. Although he describes himself as a “realist” (p. 3), Lang sets out to explain the outcome of military intervention in terms of the interaction between the normative dimension and the “political,” which he defines as the competitive elements in a situation. He argues that states intervene in one another’s affairs owing to what they believe are the norms that define their role(s) in international politics, and he shows how norms produce conflict as well as cooperation. In the cases that follow, Lang focuses on three norms—liberalism, colonialism, and humanitarianism: The first focuses on democracy, individual rights, and national self-determination; the second on responsibility for politically and economically less developed societies; and the third on assisting those in need. He ascribes the failure of intervention to normative disagreement among both friends and adversaries within and between participating countries, and he uses what Alexander George calls a “focused comparison” of cases to illustrate his claim. Like increasing numbers of contemporary international relations scholars, Lang is reacting to what he believes is neorealism’s distortion of the “classical” realism typically associated with E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau, in which facts and values remain intermingled. He also rejects the structural determinism that is closely associated with neorealism. Instead, Lang argues persuasively that state agency is dominant in international politics as viewed through the prism of intervention. In constructing his argument regarding norms, he makes use of those he refers to as “positive constructivists,” “legal constructivists,” and “ethicists” (p. 5). Lang’s position regarding agency is based largely on his provocative reading of Hannah Arendt, especially her book (1958) The Human Condition. From Arendt, he derives his definition of politics and the relationship between action and self-definition. More importantly, Lang views Arendt’s argument as more centrally normative than ontological. Although Lang’s tilt toward agency is desirable and defensible, the aggregation principle he uses to determine state agency is less so. Here he turns to Morgenthau for assistance, especially the contentious claim that the state as a collective actor only exists at times of military or diplomatic action. Since the cleavages and conflicts within states are every bit as common in those moments (as his cases make clear), Lang’s argument is less convincing here. In contemporary international politics and eroding state sovereignty, it has become increasingly questionable whether or not there is a “national purpose” (p. 18) and, if so, whether or not any diplomat can represent it. In fairness, he does admit that his readers may conclude that he is a realist after all (p. 21). In addition, his debt to constructivism is unmistakable. Following his riveting introductory chapter, Lang turns to three twentieth-century cases of failed military interventions—the American, British, and French incursions into Bolshevik Russia at the end of World War I; the British and French (and Israeli) occupation of the Suez Canal zone in 1956; and the United Nations and United States intervention in Somalia in 1992–93. All are fascinating cases, American Political Science Review but the selection criteria that the author uses are not entirely convincing. It is hard to see why the fact that they are from different time periods in the same century justifies their selection. In addition, it is hard to believe that military intervention has never achieved its objectives. It would assist the reader if the author shared with his readers the cases that were considered and rejected. And if there are any successful interventions, it might be more instructive to examine them and compare them to the failures (as Alexander George did in his Coercive Diplomacy, 1995) in order to determine which features were most crucial in determining failure. In the relatively brief space available, the author does a good job in describing the cases he has selected, though little is added to what we already knew about them. Nevertheless, Lang’s explanations of the outcomes of the cases are much more satisfying when the element of normative misunderstanding and collision, especially among allies and domestic agencies or political parties, are integrated in them. Power distribution alone hardly suffices to explain the failure in Russia in 1917 and 1918 or the rapid withdrawal from Somalia in 1993. And Lang’s discussion of normative clashes among the French and British, as well as between them and the Americans, adds importantly to an understanding of how three allies brought about a disaster for the Western alliance. What the analyses also need, however, are discussions of why other explanations such as partisan and interagency conflict are not sufficient on their own. Perhaps the major contribution of this book is its thoughtful and logical evaluation and explanation of why and how state norms, self-identities, and agency are critical to explaining the outcome of military intervention, with its implication for foreign policy more broadly. In particular, Lang’s contention that gaps between normative visions are as great a source of conflict as gaps between narrowly defined interests makes this volume worth reading. One need not agree about the particulars to recognize the nature of this contribution in moving us away from sterile power-based explanations. I suspect that we shall see other analyses of this sort in the near future. In particular, I would hope to see follow-up efforts to refine Lang’s work and to broaden it to other areas of international politics. Alliance Politics, Kosovo, and NATO’s War: Allied Force or Forced Allies? Edited by Pierre Martin and Mark R. Brawley. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 246p. $49.95. Anand Menon, European Research Institute, University of Birmingham, U.K. The obvious advantage of edited collections, such as this interesting book, is that they allow a range of authors with a huge cumulative breath of knowledge about a subject to cover virtually all aspects of it. This they certainly do in Alliance Politics, Kosovo, and NATO’s War, examining the way in which both NATO as a whole and its most important members reacted to and handled the Kosovo crisis of 2000. What comes over most clearly from reading the collection is a paradox: The various NATO members reacted in different ways to the crisis in the Balkans, with stances ranging from unease in the case of Italy and the Czech Republic, to wholehearted support and “hawkishness” on the part of the British. Yet NATO remained relatively cohesive throughout, and the allies managed to carry out the air strikes and force Milosevic’s exit from Kosovo without any serious fissures developing within the alliance. A second major theme to emerge from the book is the oversimplicity of many accounts that view NATO either as a badly Vol. 96, No. 4 disguised form of American hegemony or as a European sleight of hand intended to tie the Americans to the Old Continent and to security threats that do not really concern them (see the chapter by Charles Kupchan). In reality, while acting under a variety of different pressures—both external and internal—neither were the various allies dragged into a conflict against their will by Washington, nor did they trap the Americans into a conflict in which they had no interest. A complex and subtle combination of perceptions of national interest, domestic pressures, and human rights concerns conspired to induce each state to participate in the NATO operation of its own free will. Three of the chapters are particularly rewarding. Alan Henrikson provides a fascinating insight into the arguments surrounding the issue of the legitimacy of NATO’s intervention in the Balkans—a subject often overlooked in the more politico-military accounts of the conflict that tend to predominate. Neil Macfarlane considers the challenges that exist to Euro-Atlantic security and argues provocatively that the very lack of these might represent a problem for Europe’s security institutions. Underlining the paradoxes and uncertainty of the environment facing the allies (pp. 38–39) he concludes that “the absence of imminent “threats” may weaken the cohesion and diminish members’ investment in Alliance structures. This will. . . draw into question its reputation and its associated dampening effect on potential. . . processes of conflict on the margins. In this respect, one of the more compelling challenges to European security may be the absence of compelling challenges to European security. The weakening of the Alliance, in turn, may produce the threats that the Alliance could be useful in addressing.” Finally, Louise Richardson provides a clear, analytical account of British policies toward the conflict. Rather than adopting—as, unfortunately, some of the contributors do— a purely descriptive, narrative approach, she sets forward a compelling explanation of why it was that the Blair government, or more precisely Tony Blair, put himself at the forefront of those desiring resolute military action in Kosovo. Comparing various competing explanations, she argues convincingly that one crucial element of any explanation must be quite simply that the British prime minster thought intervening was the right thing to do. A problem inherent in putting together such a book is that of a lack of overall coherence and fidelity to the themes outlined by the editors. The volume fails to live up to its promise to make a contribution to theoretical debates about alliances. Stephen Walt’s chapter is interesting, but it represents little more than a literature review. This would be fine if the theoretical issues he raises were addressed relatively systematically in the subsequent chapters. Yet fleeting references to constructivism and institutionalism take the place of a sustained debate concerning the theoretical implications of the crisis. Perhaps it is more an indictment of the state of the discipline than of the contributors themselves that even with such interesting stories to tell, they felt the need to make token genuflections toward theory. Be this as it may, the book would have been stronger had the theory either not figured at all or been dealt with more systematically throughout. Finally, for a book that deals with NATO’s first explicit involvement in an armed conflict, there was surprisingly little discussion of NATO itself. The chapter entitled “The Atlantic Alliance and the Kosovo Crisis” is in fact about NATO’s newest and prospective members, rather than a discussion of NATO per se. What makes this particularly strange is the fact that in both Walt’s chapter and thereafter, institutionalist approaches are mentioned as potential ways of explaining the development of the conflict. Yet the defining feature of 889 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS many institutionalist approaches is that they focus attention on the nature and functioning of institutions. In a book such as this, it would have been helpful to see a chapter devoted to asking and answering questions such as: Did NATO represent a dependent or independent variable during the conflict? To what extent did the NATO bureaucracy use the conflict as a means of self-legitimation (a point raised fleetingly in the introduction [p. 7, n. 3] but then ignored)? Did the Americans dominate decision making within NATO during the conflict? In this respect, more discussion of the spat between Generals Wesley Clark and Michael Jackson over whether to send troops to the Pristina airport would have been helpful. This would have been a better collection had it addressed such issues. Yet it would be churlish to end on such a negative note. The book is an enjoyable and informed one that raises many of the major issues connected with NATO’s first war. Anyone interested in the Kosovo conflict, and more particularly the West’s reaction to the crisis, should certainly read it. Foreign Policy and the Utopian Imagination. By Susan M. Matarese. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 164p. $28.95. H. W. Brands, Texas A&M University The last decade of the nineteenth century was a traumatic time for many Americans. The federal constitution was a hundred years old, and it no longer fit the nation so neatly as it once had. A new class of economic warlords, commonly called robber barons, made a mockery of some hallowed democratic principles; from behind the walls of their well-defended monopolies they laughed at notions that business should serve the public. “The public be damned!” jeered William Vanderbilt. Meanwhile, millions of immigrants flooded American shores; to many of the native born (or merely earlier arrived), the newcomers appeared an alien horde that would drive down wages, depress the standard of living, and change the character of America even as they were already changing its face. In the West, the frontier was disappearing—in fact, had already disappeared, in the statistical judgment of the director of the 1890 census—depriving the country of the demographic and psychic safety valve that had long bled off the worst of American discontent. As if all this were not enough, the 1890s witnessed the worst depression in American history to that point, closing hundreds of banks and factories and throwing hundreds of thousands of breadwinners out of work and onto the streets and highways. One response to all this bad news, as Susan M. Matarese demonstrates, was an outpouring of utopian literature. A later generation would consider self-help a private project; the last generation of the nineteenth century adopted a communitarian approach, contending that personal happiness would follow a reorganization of the national life. Some of the road maps to redemption were stunning commercial and popular successes: Edward Bellamy’s 1888 dream of a socialist paradise, Looking Backward, sold millions and spawned scores of Bellamy clubs devoted to promoting the peaceful revolution their author-founder described. Other works found smaller niches. Gustavus Pope’s 1894 Journey to Mars posited the discovery of a red-planet civilization modeled on the best of American values (and some suboptimal ones as well; the Martians, like Americans since Francis Scott Key, struggled with the “Star-Spangled Banner”). Matarese has performed a valuable service in surveying the literature of the once-and-future America. She has tracked down titles long forgotten (understandably, in many cases) 890 December 2002 and identified themes that ran through the genre. Introversionism was one: The utopianists argued that the answer to American woes lay within America itself, and paid little attention to the world beyond American shores. American uniqueness was a second theme: America had little to learn from the rest of the world. Related to American uniqueness was a third theme: an abiding sense of American moral superiority. Americans had the moral capacity to lift themselves above the rest of humanity, and in doing so to set an example for the rest of humanity. It is when Matarese goes beyond her survey of the utopian literature to attempt a reconstruction of the worldview underpinning American foreign policy at the beginning of the twentieth century that she runs into trouble. Her taxonomy of American thinking on foreign policy is plausible enough. She identifies in her literature three conceptual models for an American role in the world: the United States as moral exemplar, as active crusader, and as benevolent superpower. But when she taxes the utopians for unrealism regarding the true state of the world and for believing that America was “somehow exempted from the ordinary relationships that burden and limit the choices of other nations” (p. 40), the reader is tempted to remind the author that these were, after all, utopian novels. The whole point was to ignore reality and create an alternate universe. More problematic is Matarese’s failure to identify a link between what the utopians wrote and what the policymakers did. To be sure, establishing connections of this sort is one of the most difficult tasks of any historian or political scientist. Matarese places her own work in the literature on national images, citing such other authors as Nathan Leites, Alexander George, and Michael Brecher. Yet although these scholars encounter similar problems, the best of their work demonstrates—through the writings and speeches of their subjects—that the policymakers subscribed to the national images the authors identify. In Matarese’s case, there is scant effort to show that policymakers actually held the views proffered by the utopian writers. She argues that the utopian views were in the air and intimates that since policymakers breathed that air, they shared the views. Maybe they did. But it is worth remembering that for all the popularity of the utopian genre, most of its authors were considered crackpots. To claim a connection between the utopians and the policymakers is much like saying that American foreign policy today reflects the attitudes of the television series “X-Files.” Doubtless there are “X-Files” fans in the State Department and perhaps even in the White House, but there are better explanations for the current condition of American foreign policy. Matarese fills out her slim book with chapters on the sources of the American national image and on the possible relevance of the utopian literature of the 1890s for the post–Cold War era. On the whole, she provides a welcome overview of the work of some of the big thinkers of American history and diplomacy. Graduate students and nonspecialists will find her notes illuminating, and her appendix of utopian titles will cause many readers to wonder what in the world the authors were writing about, and perhaps to track down those titles themselves. The International Politics of East Africa. By Robert Pinkney. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. 242p. $74.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. Claude Welch, State University of New York at Buffalo Robert Pinkney, a respected British Africanist, takes on an ambitious task: examining the interaction of three Anglophone states (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) with the American Political Science Review international community since independence, but primarily since the end of the Cold War opened up new avenues for mutual influence. I stress the adjective mutual, for Pinkney is careful in delineating how and with what degrees of latitude these countries have been able to deal with international financial institutions (IFIs), the European Union, the United States (to a far lesser extent than the EU), and others. As expressed on pages 2–3: “But the realities of power, or lack of it, meant that the room for manoeuvre of African states was severely constrained by the demands of Western governments, supranational bodies and global capital. . . . While African governments might have moved in the direction of economic and political liberalisation anyway, especially in view of the failure of the alternatives, Western pressure left them with little choice.” The International Politics of East Africa has its greatest value, in my estimation, in its portrayal of how the regimes of Presidents Daniel Arap Moi (Kenya), Yoweri Museveni (Uganda) and Ali Hassan Mwinyi (Tanzania) softened these external pressures with a variety of strategies. These ranged across a wide gamut of stalling, partial implementation, tactical concessions, and unfulfilled promises, discussed in detail in Chapters 6 to 8, each devoted to one of the three states. In terms of organization, the book is divided into four sections. Part I takes on the difficult task of situating East Africa on the world stage during the past decade, a period of major transformation (the end of the Cold War and of apartheid) with immense significance for the region. Pinkney explores East Africa relative to the global political environment, the world of economic ideas, and interaction with Western governments and institutions. Part II, which constitutes the most interesting section, first explores state, society, and external influences, then examines the three states individually. Parts III and IV are relatively brief, examining the search for regional stability and integration, including the newborn East African Co-operation, and wrapping up. According to Pinkney, East Africa’s changing international environment is affected by three factors, none of which will surprise Africanists and readers of the APSR: globalization, the political and economic decline of Africa, and the ending of the Cold War. Each of these significantly reduced the leverage that Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania enjoyed relative to external pressures and, conversely, significantly increased the leverage of the international (read, Western) community. However, the minuets of powers that were danced followed subtle choreographies of their own. All three governments had distinctive power bases, and each was important to the outside world in different ways. Although economic initiatives may have passed largely from African governments to Western governments and IFIs, they could dictate only within limits. Africa and the West are symbiotic based on resources of the former and order in the latter. In essence, the three East African states, like their counterparts elsewhere on the continent, are seeking marginal adjustments rather than fundamental transformations. Perhaps the most ambitious part of The International Politics of East Africa involves state-society interactions. Pinkney contrasts two models (p. 93): the postindependence model, characterized by centralized government, bureaucratic domination, clientelism, military influence or domination, and material values in a collectivist setting; and the post–Cold War model characterized by governance, elements of new public management, external tutelage, increased armed insurgency, and entrepreneurship, self-help, and postmaterialism. The next 90 or so pages focus on the implications of the post–Cold War model. Obviously, drawing generalizations is hazardous, and the author is wise to concentrate on three Vol. 96, No. 4 states (at least until postindependence dynamics drove them apart) that shared a common colonial master, a common currency and possessed rudiments of an economic community. However, the economic and political contexts of the three differed dramatically, as explored in Chapters 6 through 8. Pinkney contrasts these five elements of change with five equally important elements of continuity: limited democracy beyond elections; survival of elites as a primary political goal; civil society with limited economic and political resources; ethnic conflict or threats of it; and continued and possibly increased dependence of both state and society on the West. Finally, in setting forth his model, he looks at changes (real or projected) and external attitudes. One of the most important is external aid being tied to retrenchment and increasingly to specific economic and administrative reforms. What specifically has happened in the three states? For Tanzania, Pinkney concludes, “if the Western powers set the limits to what Tanzania could do, the nature of the Tanzanian state, society and political culture all helped to determine the extent to which it was feasible or expedient to follow policies which accorded broadly with Western wishes” (p. 138). Kenya experienced reluctant but significant transformation through external pressure. Uganda showed that, if a country sets its economy right, Western governments will not be unduly concerned with the extent of democratization or internal politics generally. But, in the last resort, he concludes, explanations of Western attitudes may hinge largely on the personalities of Presidents Moi and Museveni. There is less a crude trade-off between economic liberalization and maintenance of a noparty state than a series of adjustments. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a significant change in the extent to which the West has deferred to African opinion and the extent to which African governments have felt it prudent or worthwhile to pursue policy objectives in different lands. There is far less willingness on the part of the West to intervene militarily. Its aid has been reduced. Well-documented creative tension has existed between the Western pressure for economic liberalization, democratization and more competent, accountable governments, and African governments’ desire to attract aid and retain as much autonomy as possible as well as preserve their power bases. The International Politics of East Africa takes on a formidable task, and caries it out well. Sanctions Beyond Borders: Multinational Corporations and U.S. Economic Statecraft. By Kenneth A. Rodman. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001. 288p. $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper. Scott Pegg, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis The 1990s saw a resurgence in demand for economic sanctions. The United States imposed extraterritorial sanctions on Cuba through the Helms-Burton Law and on Iran and Libya through the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. Environmental and human rights activists also sought, albeit with limited success, to impose sanctions against the military regimes in Burma and Nigeria. Kenneth Rodman’s timely and provocative work Sanctions Beyond Borders tries to explain an interesting paradox here: Why, after the spectacular failure of the Reagan administration’s 1982 attempt to impose extraterritorial sanctions on a pipeline project designed to bring natural gas from the Soviet Union to Western Europe, did such sanctions enjoy renewed popularity in the 1990s? The failure of the pipeline sanctions had, after all, “generated a scholarly and policy consensus that such measures do not work” (p. 231). 891 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS The academic consensus here is derived primarily from two different bodies of international relations theory. First, advocates of the growth of transnational relations or globalization argued that increasing economic interdependence and the globalization of production meant that multinational corporations were increasingly independent “stateless” actors who would no longer acquiesce to home-country government control of their business operations. Second, hegemonic decline theorists argued that the United States could no longer secure multilateral support for sanctions because its declining economic preponderance meant that its allies were increasingly unlikely to follow U.S. leadership here. Though coming at the issue from different vantage points, both perspectives agreed that the United States would be increasingly constrained in its use of sanctions. Rodman tests these theories against evidence from the early days of the Cold War through to the late 1990s. His basic conclusion (pp. 14–16, 231, 237) is that the sanctions case-study evidence presents fundamental problems for both globalization and hegemonic decline theories and that U.S. domestic political variables offer more and better explanatory power than either of these theories. The transnational relations or globalization literature is, for Rodman, correct that “economic interdependence renders extraterritorial sanctions both ineffective and costly” (p. 15). It grossly overstates, however, the independence of multinational corporations from their home-country governments in the area of economic sanctions. He points out that the foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations voluntarily complied with sanctions against Libya (pp. 109–14) and Iran (pp. 121–26), even though these sanctions did not include an extraterritorial component and hence technically did not apply to them. Domestic political variables similarly deterred corporations from challenging extraterritorial sanctions applied against Cuba (pp. 114–21). Rodman concludes that multinational corporations have been “more reluctant to use their global networks to escape home state sanctions regulations than they have been in relocating to minimize tax liabilities or shift production to more favorable business climates” (p. 15). The hegemonic decline argument correlates well with the observable pattern of a decline in the use of sanctions by the U.S. government from the 1950s to the 1970s, yet Rodman argues that its explanatory power here is minimal. Hegemonic decline theorists ignore the fundamental reluctance of the United States to impose sanctions during the height of its hegemony in the 1950s, and they underestimate its continued ability to influence corporate behavior today, even though its share of world GNP is now much lower. The relative decline in the use of sanctions in the 1970s and their resurgence in the 1990s can instead, Rodman argues, best be explained by changes in U.S. domestic politics (pp. 14–16). During the era of détente, domestic hostility to communism declined, enabling corporations to do business with socialist countries with less fear of political or consumer reprisals. The increased salience of social activists, ethnic lobbies, and a Congress less deferential to allied sensibilities than it was during the Cold War similarly offer better explanations for the return of sanctions in the 1990s. The state centricity of Rodman’s argument provides a necessary correction to the more exaggerated claims of transformation and state decline made by some globalization theorists. At times, however, he does perhaps downplay the role of nonstate actors more than he should. He argues that a fundamental difference between nongovernmental organizations (NGO) and states is that the former can only provide inducements for corporations to behave in certain ways whereas the latter can exercise commands (p. 223). While he is technically correct, evidence from large multinationals like 892 December 2002 De Beers, Nike, and Shell clearly illustrates that NGO inducements are having substantive effects here. Beyond this, the shifts in domestic political sentiment, which carry much of the explanatory weight in his argument, indicate the possibilities for change and progress. Along these lines, Rodman emphasizes the importance of state policy changes in explaining the increased efficacy of sanctions against the apartheid South African regime in the late 1980s (p. 224). He is correct, but he minimizes the importance of activists and public opinion in prompting those state policy changes in the first place. Rodman convincingly presents a standard liberal politicaleconomy argument against extraterritorial sanctions and the damage they cause, but he does not offer any alternatives to just doing business as usual with whatever human rights violator, tinpot dictator, or racist regime happens to be in power at the moment. The book ends by stating that “extraterritorial sanctions will pose credible risks to business ties between pariah states and any multinationals actively involved in the United States” (p. 244). Somehow, the implied alternative of pursuing only the lowest common denominator policies that multilateral consensus will support also seems less than satisfactory. One is reminded here of E. H. Carr’s (1939) argument in The Twenty Years’ Crisis that consistent realism breaks down because it fails to provide any ground for purposive or meaningful action. That said, Sanctions Beyond Borders is arguably the single best introduction to the topic available today. It is comprehensively researched, theoretically sophisticated, rich in empirical detail, and well written. Aside from those scholars interested in sanctions specifically, the book should also appeal to those investigating domestic–international linkages, methodologists interested in testing theories against case studies, Cold War historians, and teachers of U.S. foreign policy looking for interesting case study material to integrate into their courses. Manipulating the Market: Understanding Economic Sanctions, Institutional Change and the Political Unity of White Rhodesia. By David M. Rowe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 256p. $52.50. A. Cooper Drury, University of Missouri One of the big questions concerning economic sanctions is why they so often fail. A widely accepted answer to this question argues that economic sanctions increase the political solidarity within the target nation because the targeted public rallies behind its leader in the face of external pressure (Johann Galtung, “On the Effects of International Economic Sanctions, with Examples from the Case of Rhodesia,” World Politics 19 [1967]: 378–416). David M. Rowe calls this explanation into question and shows that the unity behind the white regime in Rhodesia was politically constructed by the government and not a spontaneous rally effect generated by nationalism or racial unity. In Manipulating the Market, Rowe modifies open market theory to increase the importance of the government’s ability to influence how external economic shocks, such as economic sanctions, affect domestic actors in order to increase their political power. He argues that shocks (economic sanctions) create collective action problems for firms that are concerned with the distribution of the sanction’s costs and benefits. For example, a sanction can cause a price war between exporting firms competing for the few remaining foreign buyers who are willing to bust the sanctions; such a price war could potentially destroy most or all of the domestic producers. As a consequence, firms have an incentive to request the government to solve these collective action problems through institutions American Political Science Review that control the domestic market and subsequently affect the nation’s purchasing ability. Rowe shows that once the government has been given the power to manage these markets, it can control any opposition to its rule that might come from the domestic firms. As evidence, Rowe analyzes the comprehensive economic sanctions led by Great Britain against Rhodesia. The sanctions were aimed at compelling Rhodesia to accept eventual majoritarian rule. Even though the sanctions had devastating effects on parts of the economy, Ian Smith’s regime faced no organized opposition to its white rule policy and Universal Declaration of Independence. Rowe shows that this lack of opposition and therefore silent support for the regime was not a consequence of national or racial unity, but instead politically constructed by co-opting firms through 1) threats of retaliation, 2) new institutions that created a dependency on the government and conflicts of interest between the different businesses, and 3) disparity benefits for the different markets. Using case studies of the tobacco, commerce, and oil industries, Rowe shows how in these cases, the government used the markets for each good to control the different industries. In many instances, the evidence is based on source material only recently made available. Rowe uncovers a wealth of information about the British goals and impressions of the sanctions, including a threat of countersanctions from South Africa. Of course, there are limitations to this study, as there are with all research. Most weighty is the question of generalizability. Rowe’s theory of how economic sanctions affect the target’s economy may hold to all levels of sanctions, but the incentives for governmental intervention in the market and subsequent government control of the markets probably apply only to comprehensive, or at least severe, economic sanctions. The argument asserts that a large disruption in the target’s market leads firms to seek governmental intervention. However, if the sanctions do not have such a large impact on a given market, then no such incentive is created. Only the near cessation of inelastic goods to the target will lead to such an incentive. Thus, Rowe’s argument holds primarily for cases such as Iraq and Yugoslavia, but less so for many cases such as the U.S. sanctions against Colombia for drug trafficking or against India and Pakistan for nuclear proliferation. A second limitation in the study is the assumption that the target regime has the ability to manipulate the market. While a safe assumption in many cases, very weak governments may not be able to control the market to their benefit. Considering the number of weak states bordering on failure, the theory may be limited in scope. Additionally, many democracies do not have the authority to take the actions that the Smith regime took to protect itself, further narrowing the study’s scope. These limitations are far from acute. The study provides a very useful understanding of how economic sanctions affect a target, and how the target may react. In addition to better understanding of economic sanctions, Manipulating the Market also provides a good example of strong qualitative research. Although case studies of sanctions are not new to the literature, Rowe provides strong evidence for a theory that, while not completely generalizable, can be applied to many other sanction cases. Rowe also makes an excellent case for the importance of politics when considering economic outcomes. Consider the tobacco farmers giving their considerable political power to the government in hopes that they would be protected from the sanctions impact, only to have the regime use that power to destroy the farmer’s market and political clout. Clearly, the power wielded by the regime is crucial to an understanding of both the economic and political outcomes of the sanctions. Vol. 96, No. 4 Competing for Capital: Europe and North America in a Global Era. By Kenneth P. Thomas. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000. 333p. $65.00. Alison M. S. Watson, University of St. Andrews Much has been written over the years about the impact of increasing levels of capital mobility both on national governments and on the international economic system as a whole. Owners of capital can now “shop” among a variety of economies for the investment climate that suits their needs most—lower inflation, better interest rates, less restrictive labor policies, and so on. In this sense, the increase in capital mobility over the last few decades has meant that investors (particularly large investors) are no longer restricted to searching for investment opportunities in their domestic economy. Thus, domestic economic policy must increasingly accommodate the needs of the international marketplace. Competing for Capital sets out to examine what, in the voluminous literature on capital mobility, has been a previously neglected area: the process of competition for investment. The aim of such an analysis, Kenneth P. Thomas argues, is to advise on ways in which the impact of such high levels of international capital mobility can be controlled. Overall, the text provides a detailed, and timely, examination of the market for investment. The analysis begins with the assertion that government and corporate actors occupy an asymmetric position in the market for investment. Such asymmetry arises for a number of reasons. First, not only is capital highly mobile, but that mobility has also increased throughout the course of the last century, particularly in the period since World War II. Second, it is “generally easier for capital than governments to organize, and capital often need not even organize collectively” (p. 27). Finally, and importantly, firms have very good information about governments, but the information that governments have regarding firms is much less reliable. Such information asymmetry is particularly significant when governments are contemplating their bid for a specific investment project because they are unsure about when exactly the next investment opportunity will come along. From this basic position, Competing for Capital introduces what the author terms the “rising-n-person prisoners” dilemma (RNPD) model of investment attraction in Chapter 2. This model anticipates that under situations of increasing capital mobility, governments will find it increasingly difficult to avoid the use of location subsidies to attract investment. Likewise, the increasing mobility of capital also suggests that the negotiating power of mobile investors will increase, compared to that of states. These are important points, but could have been made more accessible to the reader. In particular, although the North American automobile industry is put forward as a pertinent example, much more could have been made of different types of industry and different examples of this model in operation. From here, the author describes, in turn, the way in which the European Union controls state aid (in Chapter 3), and how this state aid regime has been developed (Chapter 4). These two chapters provide in many ways the clearest analysis. Given the fact that European policymakers have long realized that offering a subsidy in one country can result in unemployment in others, policies for restraining state aid (such as tax breaks) to firms have been in place since the Treaty of Rome. Moreover, such policies of control are a significant element in EU competition policy as a whole, particularly since the inception of the Single European Act. What is particularly important here is the discussion of regional aid. As the author himself acknowledges, in a significant way the regulations that control regional aid are the pivotal element 893 Book Reviews: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS in EU state-aid control because they identify the maximum amount of assistance that can be granted to a firm within the Union. Although some discussion is made here of enlargement and regional problems, it would have been interesting to see some discussion of possible future Central and Eastern European enlargement. This is particularly the case given the fact that there may be considerable regional difficulties involved in their accession, and also given that the EU has already seen major capital investments by firms in these areas. From this discussion of Europe, Competing for Capital goes on to contrast EU state-aid policies with North American ones, noting that for North America there is “virtually no policy to address the competition for investment” (p. 148). Thomas argues that such a situation is indicative of the RNPD model, and of the number of levels of authority in the U.S. system in particular. In the latter, the actors include those at state level, as well as numerous county and municipal administrations, all of whom are involved in the process of attracting firm investment. Hence, for any specific investment project, increased capital mobility has also increased the number of suitable investment sites that are pursuing it. After returning once more to the European case and specifically to the European Commission’s role, the author argues that two theoretical conclusions in particular can be drawn. First, predictions regarding the likelihood of successful cooperation cannot simply be derived “from the potential availability of third-party enforcement of agreements, as one might surmise that federal North American governments are capable of providing” (p. 250). Second, efforts to control investment activity must be extensive. If they are not, states will avoid them by taking part in activities that have similar effects but are outside of the existing regulatory regime. From these conclusions arise a number of policy recommendations that Thomas puts forward well. First is that there should be a periodic collection of data on federal and subfederal subsidies. Second is that relocation subsidies should be banned. Finally, he argues for the efficacy of banning, ideally at the national level, local government use of investment incentives. This book is an interesting one, is well researched, has some intriguing conclusions, and could indeed provide interesting policy recommendations in the face of increasing capital mobility. One major criticism, however, is that it is not as structured and well organized as it could have been. This detracts from the force of the arguments and could have been easily remedied in the editorial process. In addition, and perhaps related to the former point, it is not always evident who this book is most clearly aimed at. Nevertheless, for those readers willing to deal with a somewhat confused structure, Competing for Capital can provide original insights into the impact of international capital mobility on domestic policies and the competition for investment. Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post–Cold War Era. By J. Ann Tickner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 262p. $45.00 cloth, $17.50 paper. Sandra Whitworth, York University J. Ann Tickner’s Gendering World Politics revisits—in the best sense of the term—many of the same themes she explored in her pathbreaking 1992 book, Gender in International Relations. The current volume comes almost a decade after that first book appeared—a decade during which both the field of international relations and the subfield of feminist IR have seen dramatic change and, especially in the case of the latter, exponential growth. Gendering World Politics 894 December 2002 brings us up to date on the current state of debates within IR and provides a thoroughgoing and sophisticated introduction to what is now a very sizable feminist IR literature. Perhaps the most important contribution of this book, however, is that it allows Tickner to move forward an agenda she has been exploring for a number of years now, to encourage “conversations” between mainstream and feminist IR, and, in particular, to ask why authentic conversations, despite a decade of both turmoil and growth, have not been more forthcoming. As she writes in the Preface, “I have spent much of this time trying to understand why the intellectual gulf between different IR approaches is so wide and why conversations between proponents of these various approaches can be so difficult” (p. x). Tickner’s answer to that question provides the other theme around which much of the book is organized: With bases in very different metatheoretical traditions (one positivist and the other postpositivist), mainstream and feminist IR scholars construct knowledge differently. They pose different types of questions and they answer those questions in fundamentally different types of ways. While one focuses on how scientific a research methodology might be, the other raises concerns about inclusivity and the way in which the very posing of questions sets up boundaries for what counts as knowledge. Feminism’s contribution to IR, Tickner points out, has been to ask different types of questions: “Listening to voices not previously recognized in the discipline has allowed IR feminists to see different worlds, ask new questions and begin to build the kind of practical knowledge necessary to construct more democratic theories and practices” (p. 147). Operating with such different premises makes conversations between traditional and feminist IR scholars, at best, difficult. But not impossible. Judging from the way the book is organized—and in keeping with her desire to initiate conversations—Tickner’s first intended audience is likely the IR student or scholar looking for an introduction to the feminist IR literature. She begins with an overview chapter of feminist theories, but the substantive part of the book comprises three chapters that review what she describes as some of the traditional topics in IR: “War, Peace, and Security,” “The Global Economy,” and “Democratization, the State and the Global Order.” Within each, Tickner explores the way in which conventional sets of questions were posed around these themes, the challenges that emerged within IR from the 1970s onward, and the contributions that feminists have made to each of these sets of literatures. By covering the “state of the field” around each of three issue areas, she grounds the discussion (and grounds it very comprehensively) within IR. Her review is a very good one, which is to be recommended to both newcomers and advanced students and scholars of IR. Having established the familiar ground, Tickner then moves to the varieties of feminist analysis that exist around each particular issue. This is where I was prepared to be disappointed—having staked her claim so clearly within IR, I fully expected that the feminist literature would receive short shrift or necessarily be presented in an overly simplified manner. But indeed, Tickner manages to convey both the breadth and the subtleties of feminist contributions in IR, and does so with a number of goals in mind: first, to show the extent to which there is enormous debate among feminists (it is to be hoped that having read this and other feminist work, no IR scholar can again talk about the feminist view as if there were only one); and second, to demonstrate the ways in which the feminist IR literature is sometimes similar to other critical approaches within IR, but also how the feminist literature is often quite unique. For example, and briefly, while many critics of mainstream IR have pointed to the ways in which the modern state can American Political Science Review no longer (if it ever did) provide security to its citizens, it is usually feminists who point to the ways in which prevailing norms of militarized citizenship, and militarized masculinity, contribute to many women’s insecurity, whether or not those women’s states are actually at peace or at war. Much as Tickner hopes to establish more, and more extensive, conversations among traditional and feminist IR scholars, she does not water down what she sees as the ultimate implications for IR of feminist analyses. As she writes in her conclusion, “feminist perspectives on IR take us on paths that venture far from the conventional discipline” (p. 125). IR, as Tickner would have it, will not be the same if its more traditional practitioners take feminism seriously. Nor should Vol. 96, No. 4 it be. It will focus on the “real world” issues of wartime rape, of trafficking, of the gender-biased impacts of structural adjustment policies, and of women’s representation in international institutions, to name only a few, as much as it has previously focused on states, militaries, global finance, and international institutions. Tickner both begins and ends Gendering World Politics with a reminder that the formal field of IR was established by academics and practitioners who sought a more peaceful and just world. Continuing that important tradition will be possible, as Tickner notes, only by paying attention to feminist and other previously excluded voices, those who are drawing our attention to the real-world complexities of global politics in a new century. 895