Book Reviews

Political Theory

POLITICAL THEORY The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. By Lawrie Balfour. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 192p. $37.50 cloth, $17.50 paper. — Andrew Sabl, University of California, Los Angeles As its title implies, this book is less about race, or democracy, than about what Lawrie Balfour sees as a lack of real discussion about race in America since the civil rights era. Balfour sees in James Baldwin’s criticism a “moral psychology of the color line” that explains the persistence of racial injustice and that should shatter our optimistic belief that such injustice “needs only to be exposed to right thinking in order to be overcome” (pp. 17, 135–36). The project could be called a genealogy of the American dilemma. Balfour takes from Baldwin a belief in “the silent workings of racial assumptions or beliefs,” especially the belief “that blacks are somehow less than fully human,” which lets Americans endorse race equality in principle while opposing “mechanisms designed to implement the principle” (pp. 8, 6, 5). To challenge this assumption we must become, Balfour argues, more conscious of history and more willing to acknowledge the reality of racial oppression and its psychic legacies. Baldwin’s role in this, as an “honest man” and “good writer,” is as a witness who “uncovers” the deep fears that lie behind silences (pp. 12 [citing Baldwin’s own aspirations], 14). Such witnessing exemplifies, Balfour claims, Judith Shklar’s effort to “give injustice its due” (p. 20; cf. pp. 66–67): to go beyond abstract theory and portray the plight of those whose condition violates our professed ideals. Chapter 2, a reading of “Many Thousands Gone,” explores the complexities of identity. Baldwin’s essay, Balfour argues, “make[s] real the weight of racial oppression without reducing African Americans to that experience of oppression” (p. 48). Particularly striking is Balfour’s account of how Baldwin uses “we”: She argues that in successively using the word to mean Americans as a whole (implicitly, mostly white), black Americans, and something more subtle and interracial, Baldwin subtly subverted “racial authenticity” and rigid identities more generally. In Chapter 3, the best chapter, Balfour uses “Notes of a Native Son” to explore how Baldwin’s descriptions of black Americans’ experience challenge our racial blindness. Baldwin writes to make racism vivid: His story, “personal but not only personal . . .

reveals not only that racial segregation is wrong but also how it is wrong”—without making “victimization beautiful or suffering virtuous” (pp. 75 [emphasis in original], 74). Through this reading, Balfour develops her own subtle, persuasive position, opposing both “deindividualizing” race portrayals that flatten personal experience and a “hyperindividualization” that blames racial problems on personal fault (pp. 78–79). Chapter 4, on social criticism, discusses how “the appeal of innocence” leads even “historically conscious” theorists to slight the full political and psychic impact of racial consciousness (p. 97). Balfour faults Michael Walzer’s criticism in particular for being less sensitive to racial evils than he thinks. While some criticize his work for being too particularistic and neglectful of abstract principles, Balfour calls Walzer “insufficiently situated in a racially saturated context” (p. 100; emphasis in original). And she questions whether Walzer’s categories of “connection” and “home” capture black Americans’ ambiguous membership in America’s identity and deep but distrustful attachment to its ideals. Two final chapters summarize Baldwin’s importance for social criticism: “Baldwin both speaks in the name of democratic principles and unsettles received understandings of those principles,” is politically committed while reminding us that causes flatten human complexity, and places justice and freedom above security and moral certainty (pp. 117, 120, 137). While Baldwin’s work lacks a political program, his writing, by “describing the spaces between principle and practice . . . lays critical groundwork for the construction of political theories that tackle the challenges of race consciousness” (p. 135). Missing from this short book are a sense of history’s complexities, a sense of Baldwin’s art, and a sense of politics. Balfour endorses Baldwin’s view that addressing the race question requires engaging above all with history—but never quite demonstrates why. A little Nietzsche (or common sense) suggests that political action requires remembering some aspects of history and forgetting others, lest the burdens of past injustice keep us from starting anew. Overemphasizing history can also entail missing progress. Balfour suggests, without quite saying explicitly, that America since the postwar era (when Baldwin wrote his greatest essays) has changed only its racial opinions—that real racial conditions have changed only slightly or superficially (pp. xii, 5, 28, 30, 35, 81–82, 132). This is one-sided. Housing and educational integration may remain elusive, police brutality common (depending on the place); Balfour rightly sees such grievances behind the

1992 Los Angeles unrest (pp. 81–82). But other things have changed. Highly intelligent and ambitious black Americans are no longer restricted to menial jobs—an injustice Baldwin mentioned as a cause of riots in “Notes of a Native Son” (cited on p. 81), and as a cause of black suicide in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952). Baldwin’s reference to how we feel “when we give our maid her wages” (cited on p. 47) hardly captures white-black relations today: Few blacks are domestic workers, few domestics are black, and most whites meet at least a few black Americans in very different contexts. And while Balfour deftly analyzes blacks’ profound sense of powerlessness, she does not discuss how the end of unpunished lynching and all-white voting lists may have affected it. Missing the changes here, or downplaying their importance, gains us no clarity. Balfour also fails to stress how Baldwin’s vocation as writer and artist affected his social criticism. She does not fully acknowledge that Baldwin’s view of freedom (which she rightly calls existential [p. 131]) was bohemian, directed against oppression—but also mediocrity, materialism, and bourgeois conformity. No political discussion or action could easily satisfy a longing for this kind of freedom. Nor is such longing, which affects mostly artists and intellectuals, a sure path to a more inclusive democracy. This brings up the book’s third omission: It leaves unbridged the gap between discussion and politics, “democracy” as ideal and actual democratic institutions and practices. Balfour defines democracy in terms of “conversation among citizens”; she argues approvingly that Baldwin’s essays resemble “love letters” that seek social transformation through intimacy; she rightly notes—but dubiously endorses— Baldwin’s quasi-transcendentalist view of democracy, under which the true “majority” consists not of average citizens but of every age’s moral heroes (pp. 1, 8, 13, 137). Such epic aspirations for democracy, themselves noble, contain the roots of contempt. They led Baldwin’s characters, mirroring his own opinions, to despise those who “did what they were supposed to do, and . . . raised their children,” to dismiss most Americans as “football players and Eagle scouts. Cowards” (Another Country 1960, pp. 130, 406). This sensitive, superbly written book teaches that social criticism must make people face their deepest fears and renounce comfort and security as selfish illusions (pp. 111, 132). It remains unclear whether criticism that pursues this much honesty furthers the racial redemption Baldwin sought—or aims too high to engage a democratic citizenry that will never be mostly heroes. www.apsanet.org 157

Book Reviews

Political Theory

The Critique of the State. By Jens Bartelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 212p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. — David Runciman, Cambridge University Jens Bartelson’s book is a history of the futility of the attempts of Anglo-American political scientists to come to grips with the concept of the state. The evidence it provides of this futility is overwhelming, and it should make chastening reading for anyone still engaged in the enterprise. The concept of the state lies at the foundations of modern political science, but Bartelson shows that it also lies at the heart of attempts to emancipate political science from its foundations. As a result, this is a book of paradoxes: The various critiques of the state that Bartelson describes, each characteristic of some of the most assertive branches of the discipline—including pluralism, Marxism, behavioralism, and structuralism—have served only to reinforce the centrality of the state to our understanding of politics, by variously reasserting the hold of the concept over our political imaginations. The author lays out these paradoxes end to end, so that their cumulative effect is to leave the reader wondering at the doggedness of so many political scientists in persisting with the problem, and at their dogged willingness to repeat history by attempting to ignore it. This is a history of political science that is also a history of the role of history in its development. It was the attempt by nineteenth-century historians like Sir John Seeley to assert the scientific character of their discipline that gave the state its early prominence in the academic study of political institutions. In a book full of ironies, many of them start here: History asserted its academic independence by redescribing itself as a branch of political science, and insisting on the universal significance of the state concept for an Englishspeaking world that had not previously noticed the lack of one. Political scientists who wished to distance themselves from history were then drawn to criticizing an idea that had now become central to the academic understanding of politics. The dilemmas that resulted were intractable: “How could one explain that the discipline had been wrestling with a ghost without declaring a fair share of its past null and void, thereby undoing much of the continuity crucial to its present identity?” (p. 99). Moreover, the ghost kept reappearing, which is why so much energy was expended on trying to see through it. Its reappearance was in part due to the symbolic authority that it exerted over the whole field of enquiry, but also in part due to the nature of the idea itself: The state is 158 March 2003

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not just the ordering concept of political science but also the concept of order, and political scientists have been understandably uncertain of how their subject could continue to exist in its absence. Bartelson unpicks the ways that various schools of thought tried to get round these problems, always reestablishing the essential circularity of the endeavor. Certain themes keep reappearing: the semantic replacement of “the state” with an alternative term (“government,” “structure,” “system”), serving an equivalent purpose; the objectification of the state, which results in the state’s renewed subjectivity (in the Marxist version, the state can only be a tool of the ruling class if it has “the relative autonomy” to serve that class’s interests); and the repeated proclamation of the death of the state, which gives the state a life of its own. But running through them all is the simple problem that we cannot free ourselves from the concept of the state by declaring it both a vapid and a narrow idea, because if it were truly empty, it would not constrain what we can do with it. If the concept of the state is both vapid and narrow, it must be because its very vapidity is what gives it its force. Stylistically, this is a rather repetitive book, but repetition is part of its point, and the style helps convey something of the futility of the enterprise it describes. But it is also a morality tale, and Bartelson is at pains to point out that we should not blame or even seek to explain away the motives of the critics of the state: “We have to judge them by Christian standards, not Freudian or Lacanian ones” (p. 185). Seeking to emancipate ourselves from the hegemony of the state concept is the human way to respond to the limits it places on our understanding, and it is simply emblematic of our human predicament that doing the right thing leads us back into the arms of the state. However, Bartelson also argues that the critique of the state is not just a natural response to the demands of the state but also a necessary response, demanded of us by the state in order to maintain its own identity. In a series of concluding remarks, he claims that “systematic disbelief in the material reality of the state is the main condition of its symbolic reality, and its symbolic presence within discourse is the main condition of its functioning as real” (p. 186). But it is not clear that either of these provocative claims have been fully substantiated by what precedes them. The history Bartelson tells certainly suggests that the state concept is tied to persistent efforts to undermine it, but this does not itself demonstrate that the state’s authority is dependent on those efforts. Indeed, Bartelson never does more than allude to the relation between the history

of the academic claims made in the name of the state concept and the history of the political claims made in the name of the state. In reading the former history, it is hard not to be struck by possible parallels with the latter, and there are undoubtedly analogies to be drawn between the cycles of affirmation and denial that bedevil both, as well as in the ambiguous nature of the democratic state’s political power. But parallel ambiguities do not constitute the causal connection that Bartelson seeks to affirm, and only a strong Hegelian reading of the history of the state can make sense of the assumption that the state’s “real function” is constituted by its ability to contain its own negation at the level of discourse. On the whole, The Critique of the State serves to diminish, rather than enhance, the claims of academic discourse to master political reality. That Bartelson should conclude it as he does is evidence of the persistence of the temptations the book so expertly describes. The Political Theory of Global Citizenship. By April Carter. New York: Routledge, 2001. 277p. $90.00. — Catherine Lu, McGill University In an era of increasing economic and social globalization, has it become more intelligible to think of ourselves as citizens, not of this or that finite political community, but of the world? What would thinking and acting like a world citizen entail? And is it morally progressive to think about citizenship in global rather than national terms? Noting that it has once again become fashionable to advance ideas of world citizenship, April Carter seeks to trace the historical evolution of the concept and outline its current manifestations in world politics, as well as explore its philosophical foundations and challenges. Divided into three parts, this ambitious book militates against coherent summarization as it engages an extraordinarily wide range of issues, ideas, and practices. The first part traces the development of cosmopolitanism as moral universalism from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to the end of the nineteenth century. The second part explores various transnational practices in the twentieth century, focusing on the development of a global civil society, issues of migration, and the European Union. The third part assesses conceptions of citizenship in political thought, and explores the compatibility of notions of global citizenship with liberal, socialist, republican, communitarian, feminist, and postmodern theoretical perspectives. The great range of issues and literatures addressed is at once the book’s strength

and weakness. While it identifies the multiple arenas, disciplines, concepts, and practices that need to be reevaluated through the lens of global citizenship, it is uneven and tends to describe the debates and issues somewhat superficially. Still, one cannot help but be impressed by the expanse of empirical and theoretical research that was required to produce The Political Theory of Global Citizenship. Carter does a thorough job of defending the notion of global citizenship against various critiques. She denies, contra theorists like Michael Walzer and David Miller, that the concept of citizenship is necessarily wedded to the concept of the nation-state. If citizenship denotes a set of moral and legal rights and responsibilities derived from membership in a political community, the concept faces two challenges. First, the development of cosmopolitan morality and its entrenchment in international law means that it is has become intelligible to talk about moral and legal entitlements and duties that are not necessarily tied to membership in a state. Second, migration, forced or voluntary, and the hetereogeneity of political communities make intelligible notions from multinational and transnational to postnational and global citizenship. Her book is most cogent in revealing the multiple layers of belonging, rights and obligations that must inform any contemporary theory of citizenship. While Carter rejects the conventional link between citizenship and the nation-state, she also challenges the posited link between global citizenship and the political project of world government. Instead, she prefers to locate global citizenship in an emergent global civil society. This is where her arguments go awry. To Carter, the typical global citizen is an activist, involved in transnational social movements, who is committed to “social justice, diversity, sustainable economic development respecting the environment, and to a peaceful world’’ (p. 98). Acting globally is not enough to make one a global citizen or member of a global civil society. For example, business elites who trot the globe making corporate deals that exploit the poor and destroy the environment are not global citizens but global oppressors. Her definition of global citizenship is thus not primarily descriptive but highly evaluative, and is ultimately predicated on a moral theory of cosmopolitanism. Although Carter does not formulate her own moral/political theory of cosmopolitanism, she understands cosmopolitan ethical commitments to stress human equality, peace or nonviolence, cultural and religious tolerance, social justice, and environmental protection. Because she conflates the status of citizenship with the duties of citizenship, it is not possible under her theory to be a global citizen

and a global oppressor. Yet if we cannot call the movers of multinational corporations a kind of global citizen, then what are they? How would the ethical and legal responsibilities derived from some conception of cosmopolitan law and morality be applied to them? Limiting the status of “global citizen” to cosmopolitan activists makes the term vulnerable to rhetorical abuse and renders it unuseful as an analytical concept. At the domestic level, those who transgress community laws or fail to perform their civic duties are not generally stripped of their status as citizens, but in many ways, it is by virtue of their citizenship that they can be held accountable for their civic failures and transgressions. We can be citizens of a morally decent state with just laws, but it is intelligible to talk about morally indecent or unjust citizens. By analogy, at the international level, identifying multinational corporations as global citizens would thus be a prerequisite to holding them accountable for transgressions of cosmopolitan morality and law. It is only because they are global citizens that they can be held accountable for being bad ones. Carter’s move to sever global bad apples from global civil society and citizenship leaves those agents in a legal and moral black hole, a comfortable place to be for those who seek to act with impunity. Ironically, her restrictive definition of a global citizen undermines her attempts to extend accountability of global agents beyond the nation-state. Most fatally, her argument makes it difficult to establish accountability through law, rather than through the uneven pressures of global social protest movements. Indeed, the problem of accountability of global social movements or nongovernmental organizations themselves is also one that eludes Carter’s book, but one that requires urgent analysis given the growing significant resources at their disposal. Despite these flaws, Carter offers a compelling and hopeful, if somewhat unwieldy, portrayal of the many possible avenues of reconciliation between moral universalism and particularism, between global and national citizenship, between being human and being a citizen. From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics. By Marcela Cristi. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001. 300p. $32.95. — J. Judd Owen, Emory University From Civil to Political Religion is a book written by a sociologist and primarily for sociologists, although its subject matter, “civil religion,” is of intrinsic interest for political

science. Although Marcela Cristi sometimes refers to elements of civil religion as “quasireligious” (pp. 49, 73, 155, 210) or even “secular” (pp. 57, 142–47, 215), she most frequently uses the term to name the use (whether by political institutions or not) of explicitly religious symbols, rituals, and beliefs for the “sacralization” of a political regime. Examples (these are mine) range from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s coronation of the British monarch to the belief that “America, God shed His grace on thee.” Civil religion is the subject of a lengthy debate among sociologists that was sparked by the work of Robert Bellah. Bellah’s theoretical approach has established the frame for the debate, and his approach, Cristi claims, is onesided and doctrinaire. She traces the doctrine underlying Bellah’s approach to Emile Durkheim’s work on the origins of religion. Religion, Durkheim speculated, arose as a necessary support for the shared beliefs and morality required by every human society. Religion may point to something superior to society, but its essential function is to serve society, from which it originates spontaneously. What sociologists tend to neglect under the influence of the Durkheimian doctrine is the conscious manipulation of religion by political leaders for political ends. Cristi finds the theoretical expositor of this sort of civil religion (to which she sometimes, as in her title, refers as “political religion”) in Rousseau, who coined the term (although not the notion of ) “civil religion” in the Social Contract. Rousseauean civil religion also comes into being for the sake of society (i.e., a particular political society). It does not, however, arise spontaneously, but is instead “imposed . . . from the top down,” as a “result of conscious political determination” (pp. 231, 232). However much Rousseau may have wished civil religion to be compatible with, and indeed make possible, the general will of the people as a whole, his notion of civil religion, Cristi says, is a ready instrument of tyranny and the oppression of some portion of society by another. Cristi does not mean to reject Durkheim’s approach in favor of Rousseau’s. Her thesis is that Durkheim and Rousseau present two useful theoretical poles for understanding civil religion, and that one will find some degree of each sort of civil religion in any given society. Part of the reason the Rousseauean view has been neglected is that the literature has been dominated by American scholars and a concern with the American case. With its constitutional disestablishment of religion, the United States would seem to have evidence in black and white that it seeks to avoid any manner of religious imposition of the Rousseauean sort. Thus, insofar as www.apsanet.org 159

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Political Theory

one does find religious support for American institutions among the people, such a civil religion would appear better explained by Durkheim’s sociological doctrine than by Rousseau’s political “top-down” doctrine. But, Cristi contends, the United States is not as free of political top-down religion as it may appear. The evidence she presents in support of this claim is sparse. Political religion, as she presents it, needs some institutional instrument for its promulgation. Where does one find such a state instrument in the United States? Cristi finds that instrument (or perhaps it is merely an example?) in the public schools, whose “role as a powerful instrument for the indoctrination of American civil religion cannot be easily dismissed” (p. 132). She does little to support this admittedly weak assertion. It is not the most persuasive example prima facie, given that most public school instructors in the United States today will not touch the topic of religion with a ten-foot pole, let alone pursue a conscious policy of religious indoctrination, civil or other. Cristi fails to consider an alternative top-down explanation, namely, the possibility that the American regime exercises a profound influence over religious opinion without a state instrument of indoctrination, or that the very fact that the American regime eschews religious indoctrination influences religious opinion willy-nilly (perhaps more nilly than willy) in a way that supports the regime. Cristi claims that American civil religion not only involves a degree of conscious political manipulation but also, perhaps for that very reason, fails to provide a consensus among the American people. Instead it (like all modern civil religions) necessarily excludes “religious or ethnic minorities” as “a result of the structural characteristics of civil religion itself, and of the pluralist nature of modern nationstates” (p. 216). This is a crucial part of the author’s thesis, but it is not well developed. The radical challenge of religious pluralism to American civil religion is not explained in light of Bellah’s contention that, as Cristi puts it, the American “common civic faith [was] born, in large measure, of the need to sustain a pluralistic culture by transcending its divergent and particularistic religious perspectives” (p. 168). She claims that in the United States “the idea of a broad universal consensus seems to be an ideal without a reality. Individualism, liberalism, and utilitarianism have, to a certain extent, diminished if not destroyed the basis of a common life and consensus” (p. 128). Yet she had earlier stated that “utilitarian individualism . . . [has] been a part of the American heritage since the dawn of the nation” (p. 53); and she later identifies “liberty, equality, individu160 March 2003

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alism, democracy and the rule of law” as “the main political values of the American creed,” or civil religion (p. 205). In Chapters 4 and 5, Cristi views civil religion from a “comparative perspective,” Chapter 5 describing Chile under Augusto Pinochet’s rule as “a specific illustration of civil religion in its Rousseauean (politicoideological) form” (p. 167) (thus revealing how little weight she gives to Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will in interpreting his teaching on civil religion). She might be thought to retreat from her main thesis when she later refers to Pinochet’s political use of religion as a “deformation and distortion” of civil religion (p. 185), thereby implying that civil religion proper is closer to Durkheim’s and Bellah’s conception after all. The example of Pinochet’s Chile marks a decidedly normative turn in the argument and leads Cristi to a broader consideration in Chapter 6 of the link between civil religion of whatever sort and nationalism (which she seems to identify with patriotism). She is clearly wary of what she calls “the religion of nationalism” (p. 209), which is “the unavoidable manifestation of civil religion itself ” (p. 213). The difficulty she raises is “how to instill in citizens a healthy love of their country . . . or a national pride . . . and to avoid the dark side of nationalism and its excesses” (p. 198). But she gives no suggestion of what a healthy patriotism (nationalism?) would look like. She mentions, without contradicting, the belief of both Durkheim and Rousseau that some sort of civil religion is necessary for political society. But she is more impressed by the dangers of civil religion than with the reasons for its necessity. Yet the question of the necessity of civil religion is extremely important and deserves a clear examination. Besides its intrinsic importance for understanding of the necessities of politics, this question might have proved useful for providing a more adequate articulation of the special puzzle of civil religion in the United States, a country one of whose basic principles is the separation of church and state. What is the significance of the thesis, which Cristi tacitly accepts, that civil religion is necessary for every political society in light of the aspirations of the Enlightenment? John Adams claimed that “the United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; it will never be pretended that any persons employed in framing the United States’ governments had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven” (John Adams, “A Defense of the Constitution of the United States of America,” in The Political Writings of John Adams, 1954, p. 118).

Is Adams wrong that an essentially natural (rational) politics is possible? Does the necessity of “sacralization” mean that serious citizens must be duped by a fiction into a stronger attachment than political society can naturally claim? If so, how could any civil religion provide the “healthy love” of country Cristi seeks? Or are there by nature difficulties in political life that would require a supernatural solution? Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy. By Fred R. Dallmayr. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. 224p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. — Nancy S. Love, Pennsylvania State University In this book, Fred R. Dallmayr again provides his characteristic meditations on the writings of other scholars, which illuminate an issue, in this case, globalization. He examines the process of globalization along two axes: “localglobal and self-other trajectories” (p. ix). The book is organized in two corresponding parts. The first proceeds thematically, including essays on globalization, cosmopolitan democracy, “Asian values” and global human rights, and fugitive democracy, culminating in Dallmayr’s response to Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). In the second part, Dallmayr provides close readings of Calvin Shrag on “transversal communication,” Bernhard Waldenfels on “asymmetrical interlacing,” Jacques Derrida on “friendship,” Paul Ricoeur on “little ethics,” and Martin Heidegger on “Macht,” “Machenschaft,” and “creative praxis.” Although the two parts seem to mirror the trajectories Dallmayr identifies, he wonders in his conclusion whether their order should be reversed, placing the more personally and philosophically demanding selfother relations first. To do so might better illustrate his central thesis, “that globalization cannot properly be achieved except laterally: that is, through the cultivation of multiple selfother and cross-cultural encounters” (p. 211). This thesis emerges most clearly in the signature essay, “Achieving Our World Democratically: A Response to Richard Rorty,” which serves as the transition—and pivot— between the two trajectories Dallmayr would illustrate. Dallmayr praises Rorty’s dual commitments to a more democratic America and a more engaged philosophy. Rorty, he notes, counters a “mood of dejection” characteristic of our “post”-oriented politics and culture with a renewed vision of America’s egalitarian promise. According to Rorty, the new Left, especially in its academic guise of cultural studies, has disengaged from practical politics and adopted

a “spectatorial approach to the problems of its country” (p. 96). In contrast, Rorty calls for a renewed “commonality” among Americans and a “reinvigorated”—left liberal and/or democratic socialist—reformist politics on a national scale. It is here that Dallmayr expresses his reservations, suggesting that Rorty’s defense of leftist agents and reformist practices risks a technocratic and ethnocentric politics. Dallmayr urges instead a more cosmopolitan democracy, dedicated to building bridges between not only old and new Left, but, more important, “theory and practice, inside and outside, private and public and also between nation-state and global community” (p. 99). Such a politics moves well beyond Rorty’s “national solidarity” and, Dallmayr suggests, back to an Aristotelian tradition of democratic friendship in which respect for difference and equality are now extended to the cosmopolis. The remaining essays in Parts I and II explore this collective and individual process, along the axes mentioned. The first set stresses international relations to reveal the ambiguity and complexity of processes of globalization. Even as Dallmayr highlights the affinities between global and modern politics, he recognizes the dangers of hegemony and the need for grassroots, bottom-up alternatives. With this recognition comes renewed attention to the diversity of local cultures and the need to create a “global civil society” that involves multiple, overlapping traditions alongside Kantian universalism (p. 44). So understood, human rights take their meaning from a dialogue across cultures, rather than abstract principles of justice. Liberal self-interested individuals, as well as postmodern decentered subjects, are potentially transformed into citizens of an ever-changing and expanding democracy. In Part II, Dallmayr explores philosophically what might be called modes and/or resources for this process of transformation at the level of the self. “Transversal unity” (Schrag) describes a universalism created through interactions between concrete, situated subjects with their diverse, multiple viewpoints. It requires a form of dialogue (Waldenfels) that is decentered, lateral, reversible, separable, and interlaced. For Dallmayr, the accompanying disjunctions and inruptions do not result in a Derridean “anchoritic community,” but instead an ethics of friendship (Ricoeur), albeit one that is vulnerable to power and manipulation (Heidegger). As this lateral process, globalization navigates a path that weaves in and out, between and through, standard categories and false dichotomies. What distinguishes Achieving Our World and Dallmayr’s work more generally is the extraordinary care with which he under-

takes the journey. Comparisons are easily drawn to Jürgen Habermas’s The Postnational Constellation (2001) and John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (1999), as well as Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, Dallmayr’s chosen catalyst and foil. Whereas Rorty overplays American patriotism, neither Habermas nor Rawls delves deeply enough into the human costs of a hegemonic liberalism or the human desires that might motivate a cosmopolitan civic culture, although both are surely aware of them. Perhaps these omissions reflect their philosophical and political commitments to a disenchanted modernity and, if recent events are any indication, an alltoo-secular liberalism. Dallmayr writes about globalization from another place, with another spirit. He tells the story of mediations as a mediator, but without compromise on principles. As he puts it, “it is impossible to ‘achieve our country’ without attempting to ‘achieve our world’” (p. x). Recognizing that this book, even more than its predecessors, is “written against the grain of current developments,” he suggests that “what seems most urgently needed in our time is tolerance, an open mind (or as the Chinese say, an open ‘heart-and-mind’), a sincere commitment to social justice, and a willingness to struggle against injustice and exploitation in nonviolent ways (following in the footsteps of the Mahatma Gandhi)” (p. 213). As globalization compresses space and time, creating a “runaway” world, Dallmayr gently, but no less urgently, calls human beings to account, to reflect and to act, accordingly. It is a call political scientists should be uniquely qualified to heed. Political Forgiveness. By P. E. Digeser. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 224p. $39.95. — Barbara Koziak, St. John’s University In one of the first recorded acts of its kind, the newly restored Athenian democracy of 403 B.C.E. adopted an amnesty for collaborators from the deposed oligarchic regime. Such political forgiveness was, according to Aristotle, a marvel of statesmanship, presumably allowing Athenians to recover a measure of civic unity (though not to Socrates’ benefit). With the recent emergence of powerful human rights organizations, the option of amnesty has suffered from theoretical disrepute, though not practical disuse, and the terminology of forgiveness has acquired a maudlin air. P. E. Digeser argues that we can rescue a “secular, performative’’ (p. 3) notion of forgiveness for politics by dropping its religious, emotional, and utopian baggage. The book notes a number of recent events that display

political forgiveness—presidential pardons, debt cancellation, official apologies—but does not claim a special urgency for its examination other than conceptual disorganization and neglect within political theory. Nor does the book trace forgiveness in political history. It is mainly an analytic examination of what might be a politically admissible notion of forgiveness, not a piece of engaged advocacy. Digeser impressively details the considerations involved in acts of political forgiveness, but ultimately misses its significance. In Digeser’s estimation, there are four main objections to the idea of political forgiveness— forgiving a crime always violates what justice requires but justice should always be satisfied; the concept of forgiveness is irremediably Christian and so sectarian; forgiveness in the political realm is connected to utopian dreams of reconciliation; and forgiveness requires a change in the forgiver’s emotions of anger or resentment and entails love, but emotions are difficult to discern and a politics based on them may be “deeply intrusive and potentially tyrannical’’ (p. 18). This last challenge he appears to consider the most threatening, and yet his stipulation to exclude talk of emotion in political forgiveness ends up as the most questionable element of his theory. In response, he argues that political forgiveness should be conceived not on the model of personal acts and feelings of forgiving, but rather on the public acts of relieving loan debts and executive pardons, acts not usually thought to involve bankers who overcome resentment and presidents who realize love (p. 20). In his conception of political forgiveness, “a party . . . convey[s] the message of forgiveness with the appropriate standing through appropriate signs or utterances’’ (p. 28), and the effect is to release debtors and transgressors from their debts (p. 33). Here the forgiver must say “I forgive’’ or “I pardon,’’ and this saying must have the actual consequence of removing the debt of punishment or fine. In other words, political forgiveness is “illocutionary.’’ Such public authoritative forgiveness requires no emotion, sentiment, or internal state on the part of either transgressor or forgiver (pp. 20–21). The point of political forgiveness is to protect values greater than justice, especially “reconciliation’’ and ultimately perhaps civic friendship. In fact, it is the main asset of the book that Digeser defends political forgiveness from the charge that it violates justice and thus must be invariably wrong. True, he reasonably considers rectificatory justice, in the sense of getting one’s due, as a more fundamental value than forgiveness; it sets the terms. Nevertheless, it does not always and everywhere www.apsanet.org 161

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override forgiveness. Since justice can never be completely achieved even in the best cases, forgiveness can act as a supplement to justice. Also, justice is potentially only one value among others, so that peace, stability, and prosperity might in particular instances be more critical than justice. In the end, political forgiveness still requires a minimal level of justice in the form of a publicly verifiable account of what is due. In general, governments can both do wrong and suffer wrong, and so can either be forgiven or forgive. But only nearly just governments can be forgiven, since when a government is fully unjust, the individual actors are responsible (p. 168). When government officials do wrong for good consequences, for example, dirty hands or tragic choices, then their acts should not be forgiven or forgotten but also should not be punished. Instead, citizens should adopt an “angle of repose’’ but not too reposed, especially during national emergencies. Imperfect procedures should be forgiven or forgotten. But surely this needs more discussion. While we may not prosecute for imperfect procedures, we may have an obligation to correct them. Imperfections in electoral procedures, say, in presidential elections and in campaign financing, surely cannot just be forgiven and forgotten. Digeser treats only one case at any length, and this one only in two main sections. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) he sees as a “many to one’’ form of political forgiveness, comparable to pardoning. The many forgiving compose the successor government; the acts forgiven are those “wrongs done to the successor government’s interest in securing the welfare interest of its citizens’’ (p. 140). This formulation is strange, especially in the context of the innovative TRC, which famously included, in separate hearings, testimony by victims and their relatives about their experience of political violence. The TRC was therefore more than an interaction between perpetrators and the state, but also included citizens. And while forgiveness by the victims was not required, it was enabled by the documentation of crimes and by the experience of public recognition of the victims’ grief and anger. The main problem with Digeser’s overall position is his excision of emotions and sentiments. While it is true that for governmental acts of forgiveness, changes of sentiments or emotion should not be required, nor should or could they be policed, the whole idea of a changed relationship between the forgiver and the forgiven relies ultimately on a changed emotional and cognitive attitude toward the former perpetrators. Here is the danger of his 162 March 2003

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using debt forgiveness as a model. Bankers and creditors forgive only when directed to by political authorities and bankruptcy laws; and they are never interested in anything like “reconciliation’’ with their unlucky debtors. Part of the problem is that Digeser understands emotions as “internal states’’ (p. 20); so attending to emotion suggests tyrannical, even totalitarian, intrusions into psychic life. Indeed, he says he prefers what he calls an “agent-based’’ politics and not a “sentiment-based politics’’ (p. 17). Now as he acknowledges, this is no more than a stipulation, one that he cannot support in the space of this book. But emotions are not just individual states but are also systems of social communication, patterned and shaped by cultural and political practices, and discourses about emotion have political effects, as the most powerful recent reconsiderations of emotion have argued. The ultimate poverty of this individualized conception shows up most when Digeser discusses the point of political forgiveness as social reconciliation. What does it mean? He distinguishes a “process’’ and a “state’’ of reconciliation, a distinction that, while promising, does not get him too far. The most he does is establish that political forgiveness is neither necessary nor sufficient for reconciliation, and that it is most likely to set citizens on a path to reconciliation, rather than to achieve reconciliation. But he coyly refrains from explaining with any certainty what reconciliation involves. Does it suggest “no more than that the civil strife has ended, the wrath of the parties has subsided, and a modus vivendi has been established’’ (p. 65), establishing trust and civility but not guaranteeing civic friendship (p. 67), or “restoration, or creation of civic friendship’’ (p. 70)? In any case, it clearly involves some emotion or emotional attitude and cannot seriously be addressed unless we are free to address sentiment and emotion in politics. Political Forgiveness is well worth grappling with, but the subject needs a more generous account. Divine Sovereignty: The Origins of Modern State Power. By Daniel Engster. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. 272p. $42.00. — Andrew R. Murphy, Valparaiso University The state has always held a sort of fascination for political theorists, despite the fact that consensus and clarity regarding some of its central elements, both historical and conceptual, have always eluded us. Daniel Engster has provided an intriguing look at each of these two problems: the historical development of modern

state theory, and the basic conceptual building blocks of state legitimacy (legislative sovereignty, executive prerogative, regulatory powers, and rationalistic rule). With an eye toward an improved understanding of how the state, and more specifically state theory, developed, Engster revisits a number of early modern French and English theorists and actors. Such an understanding, he suggests, will shed light on “the contemporary crisis of the state’’ and help us “recognize some of the necessary steps for reforming and restoring legitimacy to contemporary politics” (p. 12). For those interested in the state, its origins, development, and continuing relevance in theory and practice, Engster’s book will provide much food for thought. He considers canonical political theorists (Bodin, Filmer, Hobbes, Locke, Montaigne); lesser known—to most political theorists, at least—but no less important thinkers (Naudé, Henri de Rohan, Charron, Lipsius); and important political actors of the period (Louis XIV, Richelieu, James I of England). In doing so, Engster traces the development of an important set of ideas in two contexts over the course of two important centuries. Successive chapters consider the development of state theory in France, focusing on Montaigne (whom he intriguingly reads against Machiavelli, suggesting a “Montaignian moment” rivaling J. G. A. Pocock’s more famous formulation), Bodin, Richelieu and his circle, and Louis XIV. In doing so, Engster illuminates the work of a number of thinkers and practitioners who played an essential role in laying the foundations for the state as we know it today. The book is much stronger on the French case, where the author takes especially seriously his claim that “lesser theoreticians played a seminal role in formulating and legitimizing the principles of executive prerogative, administrative regulation, and rationalistic rule [and] many of these lesser-known works deserve attention on their own merits’’ (p. 6). In Chapter 5 on English state theory, he reverts to the “big names,’’ focusing on Hooker, James I, Filmer, Hobbes, and Locke, all in just 45 pages. The result reads more like the “great books’’ approach that Engster so carefully avoids in the first four chapters, and fails to do justice to the important differences between France and England, and thus between French and English state theory. In extending his scope to England in such a cursory way, Engster loses much of the nuance and complexity of his historical account, since he drops the views of lesser-known theorists and actors intimately involved with developing notions of state and sovereignty (one thinks of Harrington, Oliver Cromwell, Marchamont

Nedham, and Anthony Ascham, to name just a few). He is also forced to minimize some of the most distinctive features of the English theorists he does consider, in order to preserve the coherence of his overall narrative regarding the development of state theory from France to England. Hobbes, he says, “simply shifted [the immutable basis of the state] from divine right to human law’’ (p. 170). In addition, Hobbes “did not destroy or undermine prophetic authority. He merely relocated it in the ‘sovereign prophet’’’ (p. 187). Locke “simply coupled the ideas of legislative sovereignty and executive prerogative with the notion of popular consent’’ (p. 199). But there is nothing “simple” or “mere” about these three theoretical moves, as if they involved offhand changes of punctuation or syntax. Each denotes a central and important departure from the thinkers who come earlier in Engster’s account, on issues central to the basic political and philosophical commitments of their authors. Pinpointing the influence of earlier thinkers on later ones proves elusive in this account: Locke and Montesquieu, according to Engster, “borrowed their ideas of executive prerogative . . . from Richelieu and his cohorts’’ (p. 111). The textual evidence for this claim about Montesquieu seems convincing, but in the case of Locke it turns on Locke’s possession of a copy of Naudé’s Considérations philosophiques sur les coups d’etat. Locke “appears to have borrowed his notion of executive prerogative from [Naudé],” even though he “made no mention’’ of his French precursor (p. 192). Despite the promise that Chapter 5 would “show the relevance of the statist ideology discussed in earlier chapters to the AngloAmerican tradition” (p. 152), no American figure appears in the chapter. In other cases, Engster seems to equate resemblance or similarity with influence. He claims that Hobbes’s theory “can be situated directly in a line of development from the Montaignian moment” (p. 37), and that Hobbes “adopted the position of Montaigne and other sixteenth-century skeptics” (p. 180); yet Hobbes does not mention Montaigne or any other sixteenth-century skeptic in the text Engster adduces. Locke’s theory of executive prerogative “would not have been unfamiliar” to French theorists (p. 112). Hadrian Saravia, who played an important role in the development of English state theory, held views that “if not directly inspired by Bodin, at least closely resembled his ideas’’ (p. 158). But there is a great difference between being inspired by a thinker and merely holding views that look similar, especially if one is looking to establish the enduring influence of an important thinker, set of thinkers, or tradition of thought.

Given the care with which Engster explicates his primary sources, especially the French ones, it is surprising and somewhat disappointing to reach the final sentence of Chapter 5 and find the remarkable claim that “[w]ithout the foundation of divine and natural right and the goal of instituting a universal moral order, there is no good reason to organize political power around the principles of modern state theory’’ (p. 195). The six-page concluding chapter that follows has the odd effect of undermining the interpretive task of the previous five chapters. For in this concluding chapter we learn that “[it] is incumbent upon us to formulate a new political theory consistent with the presuppositions of a secular social environment’’ (p. 201, emphasis added). Now clearly Engster is right to say that executive prerogative, for example, “was originally founded upon divine right theory [and] was invented in particular circumstances for particular reasons’’ (p. 114). Also undeniable is the notion that “one cannot fully understand modern state theory without some knowledge of the theology behind it’’ (p. 196). To reach the conclusion about the need for a new theory of the state, and the obsolescence of state theory in the twenty-first century, though, one would need a far more developed discussion and defense of the interpretive, methodological, and historiographical presuppositions undergirding the author’s analysis, as well as some basic historical information. Do authorial intentions exhaust a text’s transhistorical meaning(s)? What, specifically, happened between Locke’s time and our own that leads to such a radical disjuncture in the ability of texts and theorists to speak to each other, even if in highly mediated ways? Ironically, then, it seems that only if Engster’s concluding chapter is wrong are the theoretical riches he has uncovered available to us as we struggle with the state’s role in the present and future. If his conclusion is correct, then the care with which he has explicated the arguments of these thinkers seems to have been for naught. This latter possibility is one that I continue to resist, having learned so much from the careful exegesis that he offers in the book’s first five chapters. The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan. By Kate Langdon Forhan. Hampshire, Eng.: Ashgate, 2002. 208p. $79.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. — Margaret Brabant, Butler University Kate Langdon Forhan has written an elucidating and thought-provoking book that explores the political relevance of the writings of Christine de Pizan, a fifteenth-century French

writer. She clearly establishes the purpose of the book: “My goal is to outline in a systematic and comprehensive way the political theory of Christine de Pizan, in part to address the puzzle of her thought [and] to situate her ideas within the history of political ideas in general” (p. vi). She remains true to this goal throughout the work. Forhan cogently explains why Christine de Pizan’s literary accomplishments should be appreciated beyond the disciplines of women’s studies and French literature and, in particular, why her work needs additional attention from political theorists. In doing so, she presents sufficient historical details to set a proper stage against which Christine de Pizan’s political theory may be understood, without burying the reader in minutiae and details that not only rob an academic tome of any literary vibrancy but also hinder the reader’s ability or desire to follow an author’s argument. For example, Forhan provides an excellent overview of the “mirror for princes” genre, a popular form of medieval literature that explicitly sought to impart moral, political, and spiritual lessons to medieval readers, and especially to those who wielded monarchial power. She deftly moves the reader through the development of the genre and provides numerous explanations of how it was used to influence political and public policies of the day. Similarly, Forhan offers a helpful summary of the body politic metaphor, in which she explains the potency and popularity of the image within the tradition of Western political thought. In this chapter, she also provides a succinct analysis of the manner in which Christine de Pizan both revised and augmented the metaphor. For instance, she, like other scholars of Christine de Pizan’s prolific writings, appreciates the latter’s particular skill at undermining “the tradition of misogyny in literature by her clever manipulation of it” (p. 56). There are, however, some aspects of The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan that are not as thoroughly developed as one might like. For example, the chapter on peace and just-war theory lacks the depth of analysis Forhan more aptly applies in other chapters. This unevenness likely stems from her effort to present the reader with some sense of the complexities embedded within just-war theories in order to push on to her discussion concerning what she asserts is “the single most prominent recurring theme in Christine de Pizan’s political thought . . . the importance of peace” (p. 141). On this point, Forhan does provide insight into the way in which Christine de Pizan refracts the virtue of prudence, the virtue she deemed so crucial to the maintenance of a salubrious kingdom, through her reinterpretation of the chivalric tradition. www.apsanet.org 163

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Yet Forhan draws a troubling comparison between Christine de Pizan’s notion of prudence and Machiavelli’s depiction of virtú. The analogy is problematic for at least two reasons. First, Forhan does not explore another virtue important to Christine de Pizan that bears a resemblance to prudence and is particularly useful to women trying to survive in a misogynistic, war-torn society—chastity. Second, Forhan spends insufficient time unfolding the multifarious meanings and traditions Machiavelli rolls into his concept of virtú. For Christine de Pizan, chastity is not merely biological intactness. Chastity is a form of spiritual discipline as well as bodily control, the practice of which can provide for women and men alike a place of deep autonomy from which energy may be derived to thwart the worst forms of human brutality. A chaste and prudent human being is potentially “fit for all tasks,” as Christine de Pizan suggests in her book entitled The Book of the City of Ladies. Forhan’s comparison of Christine de Pizan’s prudence to Machiavelli’s virtú is particularly troubling if one finds Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s analysis of Machiavelli’s portrayal of the ancient figure of Fortune persuasive (Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, 1984). Tracing carefully the mythical evolution of the ancient goddess Fortuna and the etymological development of the term virtus, Pitkin demonstrates how Machiavelli strips the figure of fortune of her benevolence and placability. She suggests that Machiavelli is the first writer “to use that methaphor [virtú] as a way of suggesting the sexual conquest of fortune, introducing into the realm of politics and history concerns about manliness, effeminacy, and sexual prowess (p. 144). Pitkin argues that Machiavelli leaves sufficient evidence to suggest that he felt beleaguered by a figure who represents “female power . . . in the world” (p. 165). Unlike Machiaveilli’s virtú—the sexualized struggle to forcibly control the inexorable forces he felt swirling about him—Christine de Pizan’s writings reveal a woman who lived with the reality of patriarchal power structures and yet counseled prudent behavior toward the attainment of peaceful goals. While it is not Forhan’s primary purpose to extract from Christine de Pizan’s writings lessons that might be followed by contemporary political theorists, she leaves no doubt that political theorists and citizens alike may discern pertinent lessons from the latter’s writings. Forhan argues that despite the extraordinary odds working against her—gender, single parenthood, and the vicissitudes associated with war and social upheaval—Christine de Pizan found the moral and political courage to speak out against injustice and advise those 164 March 2003

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who would listen to seek peace. Our world leaders would do well to heed such advice. Additionally, in our climate of lukewarm civic engagement, we all might try to follow Christine de Pizan’s example and become more involved citizens who care as much for the common good as for our own self-interests.

Communicative Action and Rational Choice. By Joseph Heath. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 363p. $39.95. Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas and the Problem of Communicative Freedom. By Martin Morris. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 245p. $60.50 cloth, $20.95 paper. — Peter Breiner, State University of New York at Albany The work of Jürgen Habermas seems to have a rather ambiguous relation to its origins in Frankfurt School critical theory. On the one hand, Habermas portrays his own work as vindicating the Frankfurt school’s goal of finding a location for rational autonomy against the various forces of instrumental reasoning that treat all agency from the vantage point of means– ends reasoning. On the other hand, Habermas insists that he can only vindicate that goal by divesting himself of the Frankfurt school’s preoccupation with finding a form of consciousness undistorted by reified social relations. In place of the critique of reification and false consciousness, Habermas offers us a critique of distorted communication built on academic disciplines well outside the dialectical theories of Theodor Adorno or Max Horkheimer: Specifically, he derives his theory of undistorted communication from an account of the presuppositions of speech acts derived from analytic language philosophy, and he inserts this notion into a theory of society based upon the systems theories of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. This ambiguity has spawned the most disparate commentary. One strand of interpretation seeks to assess the relation of his theory of communicative reason to the original Frankfurt school project of criticizing reified consciousness. A completely different strand of interpretation, rooted in analytic moral philosophy, seeks to draw out the implications of his theory of communicative reason for finding a procedure to produce moral agreement. The two books under review are fine exemplars of each of these directions, although this short review can hardly do justice to the quality of argument and rigor of Joseph Heath’s book. Martin Morris’s book is written very much within the discourse of Frankfurt critical

theory. It is specifically directed against those proponents of Frankfurt critical theory who identify its most advanced developments with Habermas's theory of communicative action. As is well known, Habermas explicitly sees his own critical theory of society as overcoming what he takes to be the defects of idealist philosophy and the philosophy of consciousness at the heart of Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) critiques of instrumental reason and of representation. In a bold move, Morris turns the tables on Habermas, criticizing both his theory of communication and his systems theory of society from the vantage point of Adorno’s dialectical criticism of identity and reified consciousness. In general, Morris accuses Habermas of failing to provide an adequate critique of the reification of social relations. Unlike Marx and the tradition of ideological critique transmitted to the Frankfurt School through Georg Lukács, Habermas, according to Morris, fails to find an adequate theory to criticize the reproduction of reified relations through the transformation of labor into exchange values. Habermas, furthermore, does not do a sufficient job of challenging “real abstraction’’ that flows from reification. Having abandoned the Marxian concept of “totality,’’ and thereby total critique of reification, he fails to challenge the tendency of ordinary social actors to treat exchange relations as given brute reality (pp. 88, 93). For Morris, the cause of this defect has numerous reasons, of which three are essential to his argument. First, Habermas’s systems-theoretic approach to society unnecessarily limits the criticism of reification to the invasion of instrumental and strategic action into the lifeworld of understood and validated meanings. That is, by maintaining the autonomy of the subsystems of economy, state, and administration, Habermas, according to Morris, fails to appreciate the Marxian insight that reification in the life-world is a necessary outcome of capitalist production and reproduction, that the activities of production and exchange cannot be contained within one functional system but produce and reproduce reified relations in all spheres of life. Second, Habermas wrongly finds an isomorphic relation between nature and purposive or instrumental activity mediated by power and money on the one hand, and communicative reason in the life-world. Arguing in a similar manner to Herbert Marcuse, Morris argues that technology can be liberated from its instrumental control over nature as part of a general transcendence of capitalist relations. Lastly, Habermas’s theory of intersubjective understanding through communicative reasoning stands accused of capitulating to “identity thinking.’’ Unlike Adorno, who views the belief

in reconciliation of the subject with objective circumstances as a historical fiction reproduced by capitalist relations, Habermas, on Morris’s reading, reconciles himself to these relations in his claim that autonomy and self-identity can be achieved through the pragmatics of rational agreement (pp. 130, 148). Thus, for Morris, Habermas has not overcome the need for Adorno’s famous negative dialectic—the relentless uncovering in all manifestations of social life and thought of the breach between concept and its referent, between representation and the thing represented. On the contrary, Habermas, according to Morris, fails to immunize communicative reason from instrumental and strategic activity both at the sociological and conceptual levels. Thus, Adorno’s criticism of language has not been vitiated but presents a less compromised account of Frankfurt School critical theory than that of Habermas. Morris is scrupulously fair in presenting Habermas’s theory of communicative action and criticism of the earlier Frankfurt School. However, time and again he levitates his own position above his opponent by simple assertion: We “ought’’ not foreclose on a general opposition to reification (p. 94) or “it is very important to allow such a challenge’’ (p. 86). To be sure, Morris’s intention here is to keep a space open for the style of critical theory “represented’’ by Adorno. But to make his case against Habermas, Morris needs to show analytically where Habermas’s reframing of Max Weber’s rationalization theory to include a noninstrumental sphere of communicative reason and his subsuming of Marx’s criticism of valorization of capital within his notion of the economic subsystem overlooks an entry point for the total dialectical criticism of reification that Morris wants to defend. Morris suggests such a possible analytical weakness in Habermas’s identification of instrumental purposive activity as part of an ontology of action, but he does not show where such an identification goes wrong, or more basically, how we can do without means–ends calculations as part of social, economic, and political life. It is in the defense of Adorno where this book truly makes its contribution, and here the contrast with Habermas works very nicely indeed. For Morris, Adorno’s account of “aesthetic mimesis’’ provides a way of both criticizing reification and holding open the intimation of a society beyond reification. It does this by representing the contradiction between representation and the thing represented, between concept and referent, between subjective consciousness and the phenomenal world, and thereby undermines hypostatization of the socially given as brute reality. Yet this experi-

ence occurs in what does not seem, at least to this reader, a particularly social or political moment, namely, the moment of “the mimetic shudder,’’ a sudden dislocation of the senses that comes about when a work of art undermines its own appearance of verisimilitude. Indeed, one might want to say that Adorno valorizes this experience precisely because, unlike Habermas, he sees no social or political space for an alternative to instrumentalized and reified relations. Nevertheless, on Morris’s reading, this disruptive moment in aesthetic representation upholds the possibility of a society based on nonidentity, and so it provides Morris with a critical-ethical standpoint to counterpose to Habermas’s communicative reason. At the end of the day, Morris’s book still leaves one with the sense that Adorno’s valorization of aesthetic mimesis and Habermas’s valorization of rational communication are driven by conflicting ideals of a society without reification and domination. For Adorno, aesthetic perception always holds open the possibility of a society in which identity is never fixed, in which domination is overcome but, nonetheless, there is a sense always of something left out, left over, uncomprehended: Individual expression is always in tension with social reason. It is this notion of society that is embraced by Morris—although in keeping with the desire not to produce a false identity, the lineaments of this society can be only vaguely articulated. For Habermas, the very possibility of weighing truth claims through rational discussion bespeaks a society in which conventional life is constantly subject to increasing clarification, justification, and rational agreement. Rationally justifying the conditions of social and political and economic life trumps, so to speak, a defense of the ineffable, unknowable, the nonrepresentable in subjectivity. It would seem that we are thus left with two seemingly divergent roads away from a society of reified social relations. Morris wants to leave us with more than simply a lucid choice between two almost completely disparate styles of social theory. But the question is whether he in fact does. Opening up a space within critical theory for “non-dominating mimises’’ is as far away from the discourse of Joseph Heath’s book, Communicative Action and Rational Choice, as one could imagine. Writing in the idiom of analytic moral philosophy, Heath reads Habermas as providing a powerful, devastating, and comprehensive criticism of instrumental accounts of social action and moral conduct, in particular those provided by game theory. On the positive side of the ledger, Heath reads Habermas as having provided a potential solution within

analytic moral philosophy to the nagging problem of relating moral cognition to moral agreement. However, for Heath, both Habermas’s criticism of the reduction of social action to instrumental action and his account of moral agreement based on communicative reason need a stronger analytical defense than Habermas himself provides. Heath sees his job as providing that defense—although in doing so, he reveals weaknesses in Habermas’s theory of language that will require the abandonment of some of that theorist’s most ambitious claims. In the first case, Heath supplements Habermas’s criticism of strategic action by presenting an acute and often quite brilliant account of the inadequacies of decision and game theory as a philosophy of action. In a remarkably comprehensive discussion, Heath rather cleverly shows that as soon as we introduce the simple claim that strategic actors must use linguistic means in order to communicate their interests rationally, they will be unable even to generate a concept of what would count as a maximizing strategy. Even the most sophisticated of game theoretic accounts of how meanings are generated can produce “babbling equilibriums.’’ Heath’s exhaustive account of strategic theories of rational choice buttresses Habermas’s argument about the irreducibility of communicative reasoning to strategic reasoning through what one might want to call a kind of “rebound theory.’’ Rather than follow Habermas in upholding the autonomy of noninstrumental communicative reason, Heath demonstrates that whatever theory of strategic action agents adopt, they will have to justify their arguments by appeals to conventional meanings so as to avoid failure. In short, the internal analytic difficulties of rational choice theories force strategic agents to justify their commitments according to reasoning about the validity of noninstrumental norms. Of course, this demonstration depends, as Heath resolutely acknowledges, on an account of decision theory and game theory separated from any social context—a move that may very well allow him to prove his point, but, as I shall argue momentarily, gives us reasons why Habermas might resist Heath’s analytical improvement on his critique of instrumental conduct. In the second case, Heath demonstrates that in demanding propositions be universalizable, Habermas places an unreachable, and unnecessarily stringent, standard for moral agreement in his account of communicative reasoning. In place of such a standard, Heath proposes we rely on the fact that convergence on moral matters is built into the very pragmatics of using language, given its constitutive www.apsanet.org 165

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role in producing social order. Heath supports this claim by demonstrating that the various theories of language Habermas employs to draw an analogy between truth claims and claims to rightness and sincerity do not support the central notion of his theory of communicative action; namely, they do not support his mapping of validity claims of truth, rightness, and sincerity to assertoric, regulative, and expressive utterances. Thus, the meaning of these three kinds of utterances is not internally tied to making good on validity claims; only the first one is. Worse yet, when Habermas later argues that rightness claims do in fact contain propositions that can be subjected to the same decomposition into simple propositions as truth claims, they turn out not to have the same propositional content (pp. 123–25). So they lack a common semantic analysis. The upshot of this is that adherence to meaningful norms—the basis for varieties of social practice we engage in—does not, as Habermas insistently maintains, depend on our commitment to accept his three validity claims if we are asked to account for our conduct. Thus, in fact, meaningful norms are the backdrop for communicative reason, rather than the other way around. In sum, Habermas’s argument that norms presume a reason based on certain presuppositions of communication proves to be inadequately supported. As so, Heath argues, the distinction between norm-conforming action and strategic action does a better job of protecting speech acts from reduction to strategic action than Habermas’s distinction between communicative and strategic action. Ironically, Heath may be analytically correct in deflating communicative reasoning based on universalizing validity claims in favor of normgoverned conduct. Yet Habermas may be politically and sociologically right to insist on maintaining the priority of communicative reason over ordinary norms and in opposition to instrumental reasoning. For Habermas’s notion of communicative reason is derived only in part from his theory of speech acts; it is also derived from his notion of rational public discussion and opinion formation as providing society with precisely what the instrumental activity of administrative institutions, market relations, and technological applications are unable to provide: namely, public agreement on legitimate goals and policies. To jettison the distinction, as Heath would recommend, would be to lose the political force of his argument, even as it may gain in analytic rigor. Might one, therefore, say that the political force of Habermas’s argument—including his criticism of the invasion of political discussion by various instrumental logics—depends on 166 March 2003

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having a less than adequate philosophy of moral agreement? Perhaps it is this odd discrepancy in Habermas’s eclectic theory of language, politics, and society that Morris’s book unintentionally detects and exploits as it cobbles together a Marxian critique of capitalism with a rather individualistic notion of aesthetic imitation. Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens. By Jon Hesk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 344p. $65.00. — Josiah Ober, Princeton University This thoughtful and wide-ranging book addresses a problem that is as salient for modern as for ancient democracies: Given that democracy is necessarily predicated on judging the worth of public speech, how can democratic decision makers, whether legislators or jurors, know when speech is truthful? The Athenian political orator Demosthenes put the issue clearly: “Where the political constitution is based on speeches, how can it be safely administered if the speeches are false?” (Demosthenes [On the False Embassy] 19.185; Hesk, p. 164). Jon Hesk shows how that question becomes sharper with the availability of ever more sophisticated techniques of persuasion. Democrats today agonize over the problem of “spin”: manipulation of the media by professionals who are cherished by politicians for their ability to persuade voters to believe that which is advantageous to their paymasters. Hesk cites a well-chosen array of modern examples, drawn primarily from British politics. In ancient Athens, a similar concern centered on techniques of persuasion associated with professional teachers of rhetoric: the socalled sophists. As he proves, the term “sophist” was no more approbative in classical Athens than “spin-doctor” is today. Hesk’s generally persuasive thesis is that as democratic Athenian political culture became ever more deeply engaged with the problem of deceptive public speech, a “rhetoric of antirhetoric” was developed by public speakers and Athenian writers. The book documents how this specialized discourse emerges within various literary genres, political and judicial practice, and cultural performance. It traces a conversation about politics and deceptive rhetoric that ranges from the speeches of Athenian litigants (e.g., Demosthenes and Aeschines), to critical historiography (Thucydides), to philosophy (especially Plato), to comedy (Aristophanes), and tragedy (notably Euripides). Hesk’s book is accessible (all Greek is translated, and the language is generally nontechnical), and it provides a useful introduction to important recent work

by classicists on Athenian political culture. His project has obvious affinities with the work, not only of other classicists but also of political theorists such as Peter Euben, Arlene Saxonhouse, and Sara Monoson. In light of Hesk’s explicit concern with modern politics and his skill at tracing a conversation across various ancient genres, it is a sad commentary on the boundaries encouraged by academic disciplinarity that he does not know the work of these or other classical political theorists. The book consists of a Prologue, five substantial chapters, and an Epilogue. Chapter 1 sets the framework by showing that democratic Athenian political ideology (as it is revealed in Athenian public speeches) was hostile to deception (especially deception of the demos), and systematically favored openness and honesty in public discourse. The Athenians often contrasted “Athenian openness” with “Spartan deceptiveness.” Yet, as Chapter 2 shows, not only was the reality more complex, but democratic Athenian writers sometimes acknowledged that the public good led Athenian leaders, like their Spartan counterparts, to employ deception—especially in military contexts. Meanwhile, Athenian writers less sympathetic to democracy and more sympathetic to Sparta (notably Xenophon) struggled to square ideals of openness and honesty with the advantages that came with the successful deception of enemies. The troubling question remained: How are the techniques of (military) deception to be insulated from the political realm? How can we be sure that those who learn how to “harm their enemies” through employing deceit will always regard their fellow citizens as “friends” against whom the sharp weapon of deception must never be deployed—especially by those with rhetorical skills? Hesk’s Prologue, citing Oliver North’s televised testimony before Congress (pp. 1–2), brings the issue home for an American readership. The “noble lie” of Plato’s Republic, a famous example of “deception for the common good,” is the starting point for Chapter 3. Hesk asks whether Karl Popper was right to characterize systematic political deception as uniquely typical of antidemocratic Greek thought. Hesk notes that there is only one passage in all of Athenian judicial oratory in which lying to the people is acknowledged as a potentially good thing: In his speech Against Leptines (20.119), Demosthenes claims that his legal opponents have falsely and villainously charged the Athenian ancestors with ingratitude “but they are unlearned because they do not see that even if the charge was completely proven, it would be more appropriate for them to deny it rather than to say it” (Hesk, p. 173). This is a long way from the systematic deception by which

Plato’s Callipolis is sustained, but Hesk suggests that Popper’s association of deceit with antidemocrats may be too strict in light of this bit of common ground between Plato and an Athenian democratic speaker. Hesk then turns to how that common ground, the notion that “lying for the common good” might be morally defensible, was addressed in Athenian drama. In Chapter 4, Hesk returns to legal oratory, to examine ways in which the “rhetoric of anti-rhetoric” afforded the skilled public speaker opportunities both to employ rhetorical commonplaces (“you Athenian jurors all know that . . .”) and to develop original rhetorical strategies challenging and subverting those commonplaces (notably Demosthenes [Against Boeotus] 40.53–54: “Whatever anyone of you does not know, let him assume that his neighbor does not know it either!”). Hesk is particularly good on the orator Aeschines’ highly original (if ultimately unsuccessful) portrayal of his opponent Demosthenes as a superliar, with a unique capacity to mimic the characteristics typical of truth-speakers (vivid detail, exact dates, names of witnesses). Chapter 5 opens with the political novel Primary Colors by “Anonymous,” noting that the play of truth and deception is especially unsettling to the novel’s reader because of its simultaneous self-presentation as “mere fiction” and as an insider’s account of the 1992 presidential campaign. This sets up an insightful reading of how Aristophanes’ comedy Acharnians employs similarly unsettling techniques of authorial perspective. This chapter clearly shows how literary analysis can enlighten problems of political theory and practice. Hesk’s book details how troubling the issue of deceptive speech is for the democratic regime, but also shows that democratic culture (e.g., drama, historiography, and political theory) provides resources whereby citizens may become more thoughtful about those problems, and so (potentially) more capable of confronting them. He rejects the postmodernist notion that the persistence of “deceptive speech as a political problem” undermines the very possibility of truth or reality—a notion exemplified for him by Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that it made no sense to think of the Gulf War as real, given the conditions under which it was reported. By contrast, in Athens “there is no sustained insistence that truth and lies do not exist . . . . [T]here is no serious recommendation that it is a waste of time . . . to understand the difference between a truth and a falsehood” (pp. 297–98). Hesk’s book reminds us of the legitimate centrality of political rhetoric to democracy, yet provides

new insight on how sophisticated rhetorical technique complicates the struggle to discover truth. He is surely right to conclude that “without that struggle, we may as well give up on democracy altogether” (p. 298). Democracy and the Foreigner. By Bonnie Honig. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 204p. $24.95. — Catherine A. Holland, University of Missouri Foundings depend upon foreigners, or more precisely, founding narratives often rely on the device of the outsider who appears as if from nowhere to bring order where previously there was none, to free a people from the unjust rule of a tyrant, and to act as lawgiver to the lawless. Democracy and the Foreigner addresses the paradoxical centrality of the foreigner to the political identity of nations and peoples. Reading classic works of political theory (Rousseau, Freud), contemporary debates about multiculturalism, liberal democracy, and immigration policy (Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith, Michael Walzer, Richard Rorty), late-modern social theory (Rene Girard, Julia Kristeva, William Connolly), biblical accounts of the origins of a chosen people (Exodus and Ruth), and twentieth-century films (The Wizard of Oz, Shane, Simply Ballroom), Bonnie Honig offers a rich and original meditation on the politics of home, migration, and democratic politics. Distancing herself from the conventional approaches of the human, social, and policy sciences, which tend to view foreigners either as a threat to the cultural and linguistic unity of the nation-state or as a much-needed fount of worldliness and diversity, Honig asks not how to address the problem or the promise of the foreigner but, rather, “What problems does foreignness solve for us? Why do nations and democracies rely on the agency of foreignness at their vulnerable moments of (re)founding, at what cost, and for what purpose?” (p. 4). The imposition of the law by one who is neither product nor member of a given political society serves a critical symbolic function within political life, Honig suggests, marking the law itself as alien to those who are subject to it and, in the case of democratic foundings, who become the (alienated) subjects of it. For Honig, democratic foundings are always (re)foundings; they gain their foundational status only post hoc, as a people claim the law as their own. The device of the foreigner offers democratic citizens a convenient, and perhaps necessary, political fiction, enabling them to externalize the source of the

violence that often attends the imposition of the law, and thus distance themselves from their own implication in it. “Democracy,” Honig writes, “is always about living with strangers under a law that is therefore alien (because it is the mongrel product of political action—often gone awry—taken with and among strangers)” (p. 39). In this respect, foreignness constitutes a critical site at which both the aspirations and the anxieties that attend democratic self-rule are managed. That said, “the supplement of foreignness” is not simply therapeutic; it “both shores up (Rousseau) and unsettles (Freud) the people or the law being founded” (p. 32). Honig’s democratic (re)founders transgress as much as they transform, taking liberties rather than waiting for them to be granted. This is not a simple endorsement of self-complacent cosmopolitanism. Democratic self-governance, Honig argues, requires a more robust form of cosmopolitanism “in which cosmopolitans risk their cosmopolitan (and nationalist) principles by engaging others in their particularities, while at the same time defending, (re)discovering and (re)articulating located universalisms such as human rights and the equal dignity of persons” (p. 67). Democratic peoples, then, must confront the inescapable political fact that democracy entails trespass as well as cooperation, and that political belonging evokes terror and betrayal as much as hope and pleasure. Beyond Honig’s incisive readings, another important contribution of this work is an interpretive style that dramatizes rather than simply advocates its radical, democratic intellectual temperament. While the progression of the chapters examines a range of ways in which foreignness figures in democratic thought, each of these chapters also pursues alternative interpretive modes and directions, setting out widely varied and frequently conflicting readings as critical political-interpretive possibilities. This pluralization of perspective is itself the sustaining force that helps to hold together, without assimilating or fragmenting, the positions that Honig lays out. Political interpretation itself, she seems to suggest, is a democratic project, with the critic occupying a political position analogous to the foreign founder: simultaneously giving to, taking from, and refiguring the political landscape. If there is a chapter in which Honig’s democratic-interpretive temper falters somewhat, it is the final, concluding chapter, in which she considers the question of genre. While the interpretations developed here are very much in keeping with the rest of the work, the mode of argumentation somewhat uncharacteristically positions one set of generic conventions, modern gothic, as clearly www.apsanet.org 167

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superior to its competitors, romance, comedy, and tragedy. This may simply be a function of developing a hitherto unmade argument for reading democracy as gothic: Perhaps a certain amount of interpretive violence attends original interpretations, just as it does political foundings. Nonetheless, one leaves the work with a sense of Honig’s having made a case about genre and interpretation that is, by comparison with the rest of her argument, only thinly developed. How might the interpretive task of the theorist be enlivened not (simply) by rereading the democratic tradition through the insights made available by modern gothic, but (also) by developing the gothic reading against and alongside competing readings generated by the techniques of other genres? Is it possible that the reductiveness that haunts modern democracy and political theory alike might be countered by employing multiple interpretive frames that challenge, enliven, and exhilarate? That these are the kinds of questions posed by Honig herself in the bulk of the book, however, far outweighs her inability to fully sustain this at the end. Democracy and the Foreigner is timely in ways that neither its author nor anyone else could have foreseen. Given the explosion of xenophobia that has accompanied the events of September 11, Honig’s book prompts readers to distance themselves from the immediacies with which questions about immigrants are so often freighted, and to think more complexly and productively about the political and conceptual work accomplished by the figure of the foreigner. More important perhaps, Democracy and the Foreigner is also a profoundly untimely book. It gently but uncompromisingly interrogates the way we read and think about democracy, about nationalism, and about cosmopolitanism. It is relentlessly thoughtful, and not simply nonreductive but antireductive. It lays out a variety of often contentious political and interpretive possibilities, and by remaining productively agnostic toward any final resolution of their internal conflicts, it dramatizes to us the value, the richness, the complexity, and the intellectual challenges posed by the foreigner within us. Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. By Engin F. Isin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 384p. $62.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. — Margaret E. Farrar, Augustana College Over the course of the past year, we have had many opportunities to reflect on the nature of citizenship. Defining and contesting citizenship is a high-stakes enterprise, and in light of the current climate, Engin F. Isin’s Being 168 March 2003

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Political is a timely intervention into these debates. It is a series of genealogies that describe citizenship as alterity in cities, chronologically spanning urban spaces from the Athenian polis through the present-day cosmopolis. Taking his methodological cue from Michel Foucault, Isin’s genealogies seek to break up the continuous narratives of citizenship imagined by the victors of history—that democratic citizenship in the United States, for example, is the direct descendant of Athenian democracy—and reveal the disparate forms that citizenship and its others have taken over time. By exposing these discontinuous narratives of citizenship, Isin demonstrates how the fiction of the unified city serves the interests of dominant groups by suppressing the agonistic character of this space. Yet the force at work here is not the logic of exclusion; as Isin writes: “The logic of exclusion assumes that the categories of strangers and outsiders, such as women, slaves, peasants, metics, immigrants, refugees, and clients, preexisted citizenship and that, once defined, it excluded them’’ (p. 3). Instead, his central claim in each of these genealogies is that the city in history functions as a “difference machine.’’ Rather than acting as a container that holds together groups marked by preexisting differences, he contends, the city is an active agent in creating those groups and differences. In keeping with Foucault’s ideas about the relational character of power, groups in the city exist only in relation to one another; otherness is not outside of but is instead a condition of citizenship (p. 49). For Isin, “being political’’ is the “moment when the naturalness of the dominant virtues is called into question and their arbitrariness revealed” (p. 275). His point of departure, then, is neither the stories told about citizenship by victorious citizens nor the voices of those excluded from that category. Rather, he describes the tactics by which all such groups are constituted; in his words, he examines the “solidaristic, agonistic, and alienating strategies and technologies’’ that together help forge, police, and transform various identities and their attendant values (p. 36). These strategies and technologies range from the symposia and the census used to fashion citizens in Athens and Rome to the rites and rituals utilized by the sansculottes to redefine the parameters of metropolitan citizenship. Isin’s command of a terrific array of secondary literature results in intricately textured portraits of cities that are not only spaces but also processes, where citizens and their others are made and unmade. The book is not without its weaknesses, however. First, Isin’s sweep through history leaves the reader wishing for more specificity

in each particular period, especially given that genealogy is the declared method. To give one example, he provocatively includes “squeegeers’’ as antithetical to the aesthetic and political space of citizenship in the cosmopolis. A recent addition to the urban landscape, a squeegeer—rather than just asking for change—will stake out busy intersections, offering to clean motorists’ windshields in exchange for money. This enterprising spirit has been a source of consternation for both suburban commuters and city planners, who want to find ways to monitor, regulate, or eliminate these activities. Isin is correct in identifying squeegeers as important and liminal figures in debates over what counts as citizenship; however, his treatment of the subject is diminished by the fact that squeegeers are included with “beggars, refugees, and hooligans” in a section that lasts only two pages. What are the “certain rules and regulations” squeegeers are encouraged to obey? How precisely have they been prompted to think of themselves as “entrepreneurs,” rather than “rights-bearing citizens” (p. 272)? This is just one of many instances where Isin could have provided rich genealogical detail and does not, with the result that this is a suggestive and yet ultimately unsatisfying analysis. Second, Isin’s focus on the contingent and relational qualities of social groups often renders the conditions of domination and subordination (a binary that he would surely reject for its static simplicity) too fluid and fleeting. In emphasizing “complex and variegated’’ rather than “rigid and dichotomous’’ cityscapes (p. 267), he downplays the (sometimes literally) concrete reifications of economic and cultural poverty in, for example, housing, welfare, and transportation policy. As a result, Being Political leaves important normative questions uncovered yet unexplored. Specifically, I was left wondering if some modes of being political are more just, or more democratic, than others, and how those modes might be encouraged in the space of the cosmopolis, which is increasingly stratified by race and income. That is, Isin never addresses the great divide between the professional architect who designs urban space and the squeegeer who attempts to wash the architect’s windshield every afternoon. Here, his analysis would have benefited from a more sustained engagement with contemporary democratic theory. Finally, Isin’s descriptions of urban centers often seem curiously detached from their surroundings. Although cities are certainly crucial spaces for the production of citizenship, what is the relationship between urban and rural citizens? Are the technologies for the production of citizenship different in places that do not fit the

description of a “cosmopolis,’’ or do urban practices automatically define the national character of citizenship? Moreover, how has the increasingly decentralized character of contemporary cities affected the production of citizenship as alterity? As urban regions look less and less like the quintessential nineteenth-century metropolis, are citizens easier or more difficult to define? Highly charged definitions of citizenship are presently at the forefront of public consciousness as they form the basis for significant policy decisions, such as the recently passed Patriot Act and the reauthorization of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) legislation. (Does citizenship require a willingness to be surveilled in the name of the greater good? Does it require heterosexual, two-parent families?) Despite the reservations expressed here, Isin’s book is a valuable resource for those interested in the complex construction of citizenship. In analyzing the city’s role in the production of alterity, Being Political helps us assess the complicated set of values, spaces, and relationships that together constitute our current understanding of what it means to be a citizen. Moral and Political Education: NOMOS LXIII. Edited by Stephen Macedo and Yael Tamir. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 484p. $55.00. — Jack Crittenden, Arizona State University I would not be surprised—indeed, I would be gratified—if some professor built a course in political philosophy around one, or several, of the books in the Nomos series, yearly collections since 1958 based on papers given at the annual meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. These collections deal with current topical themes in politics and political philosophy. The articles in the collections are reliably rigorous yet accessible, well crafted, learned, provocative, and well selected. Stephen Macedo and Yael Tamir’s collection, Moral and Political Education, is no different. I am not sure, however, how well this collection would fit, without substantial empirical supplementation, as the core for a course in political theory. Political theory differs, to my mind, from political philosophy by the amount of attention theorists give to the real world of politics. In this book, insufficient attention is given to political reality. The collection opens with Amy Gutman’s defense of her version of democratic education against those who find her version too farreaching (“parentalists”) and those who find it not far-reaching enough (cosmopolitans and patriots). Christopher Eisgruber and Michael

McConnell follow with commentaries on Gutman’s piece, although McConnell uses Gutman as a launching pad for a lengthy excursion into his own views on a publicly financed voucher program. Nancy Rosenblum offers a commentary on McConnell’s views, and Amy Gutman concludes Part I with a response to Eisgruber and McConnell. Part I works particularly well, I think, because of these commentaries and responses. There is something of a dialogue here, and it enlivens the debate over democratic education. The final section of the collection, Part IV, has a similar format, although the principal author, Lawrence Blum, does not have an opportunity to respond to his three critics: William Galston, Anita Allen, and Andrew Valls. The topic in Part IV is important and one not considered enough in discussions about moral and political education—the need for and the effects of racial integration in and through education. The middle sections of this collection are individual articles offering different perspectives on issues central to moral and political (read: liberal) education. In Part II, John Tomasi looks at some possible non-neutral consequences of liberal public education, while Peter De Marneffe argues that liberal neutrality can provide a morally adequate educational system. Harry Brighouse then argues that liberal education should be “autonomy-facilitating” to ensure that all children have an equal opportunity to live autonomous lives without necessarily having to live such lives, which would be the case if public education were “autonomypromoting.” James Dwyer concludes Part II with an argument for putting children’s interests, rather than the state’s or parents’ interests, front and center in the public education debate. Also included in Part II, and one of the most interesting articles, partly because the subject is too often overlooked, is Rob Reich’s paper on homeschooling. With a conservative estimate putting the number of homeschooled children at 1.3 million—more, as Reich tells us, than the combined number of children enrolled in schools in Wyoming, Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, Vermont, South Dakota, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Hawaii, the bottom 10 states (in order) in school enrollment (p. 278)—homeschooling makes the number of students currently on vouchers pale in comparison. Here is an area where regulation needs to be taken seriously and immediately, as Reich shows. Part III is composed of a single piece: Randall Curren’s look at the price we pay not only for treating child criminals as adults but also for substituting punishment for education. This, too, is an area not explored often enough in discussions of moral and political education.

Because several of the contributors are political theorists, one might expect or hope, as I did, that with so tempestuous an issue as moral and political education, the authors would have devoted more space to political reality, to seeing how their various theories could play out in politics. This is especially true with regard to school vouchers, a topic central in five articles (McConnell, Gutman’s Response, De Marneffe, Brighouse, Dwyer) and one on which most of the other articles touch. There are, scattered here and there, a few brushes with the empirical consequences of vouchers (Gutman, p. 176, and Brighouse, pp. 244–46, 249–50), but more than that is necessary. No author examines, for example, three sticking points in voucher proposals (though Brighouse mentions one of them). First, what happens to those students left behind in failing schools? No one suggests that any realistic voucher scheme can avoid the problem of gradual effect. In short, there will be many students left in bad schools. What will become of them? Second, who will pay for transporting students to their schools of choice, public or private? Transportation costs can be substantial and must be factored into any proposed voucher system. Third, what do we do about parents or guardians who do not know about vouchers, do not care about choices, and/or do not understand what is involved in choice programs? If we use Gutman’s example of Cambridge, Massachusetts (p. 177), where all middle schools are schools of choice, we can see a potential problem. The city government had to establish agencies to notify all parents in the city about the choices available to them; to explain to many parents, often in languages other than English, how the plan worked; and to remind parents repeatedly of deadlines and cutoff dates. Imagine the number of agencies necessary, and the cost of such agencies, in a nation of voucher schemes covering not just middle schools but elementary and high schools, public and private, as well. Contrary to Blum’s lead article in Part IV, the main educational concern of black parents and children, writes Valls (p. 466), “is not integration but quality education.” All parents want a good education for their children, usually in their neighborhood schools. That is no surprise. It is surprising, however, that the idea of “quality education” floats throughout this collection like a butterfly eluding the net. Of course, all parents want a good education, but what is it? It takes us no great distance to suggest, as Dwyer does at the end of his article, that the content of a good education can be, well, problematic (p. 343), this after he has completed an article touting quality education as the proper focus of child-centered interests. www.apsanet.org 169

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Attempts to define quality education in this collection are mostly indirect. For several contributors, quality involves critical thinking. Yet there are questions around that concept that ought to be addressed; for example, What is critical thinking? How is it taught? Does it replace content with process? Is there a danger that in teaching critical thinking and deliberation, we may teach skills necessary for democracy but neglect democratic values and moral character? (It should be noted that to contributor Brighouse, this is not a danger but the very point in teaching critical thinking. See, especially, pp. 268–69.) What is the political reality that serves as the context in which the contributors raise their questions? Education is supposed to develop students into fully functioning citizens and wellfunctioning adults. But does our democratic system require the kinds of curricular changes, say, toward critical thinking, that many of these authors demand? Perhaps if we want citizens to participate in our democratic system, we need a different kind of political education altogether. Perhaps we need an emphasis on character education, a topic underexamined in this collection, that can raise our voter turnout above 50%. Finally, would any of the proposals in this volume, if enacted, really prepare future citizens and future adults for the reality of politics in the twenty-first century? The only mention in this volume of global interdependence is Gutman’s critique of education for cosmopolitanism. With the shift from industry to information as the technological base of our economies, with all that that shift has already wrought and with all that it portends, globalization or globalism seems here to stay. While globalization is not necessarily a form of cosmopolitanism and may even run counter to it, it needs to be a central topic in any discussion of today’s moral and political education.

Love and Politics: Women Politicians and the Ethics of Care. By Fiona MacKay. London: Continuum, 2001. 242p. $90.95 cloth, 28.95 paper. Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. By Nel Noddings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 366p. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. — Wendy Sarvasy, California State University, Hayward These two books represent an evolution in the ethic of care literature by taking up the challenge of how to combine care and politics. Fiona MacKay argues that women’s full inclusion into democratic politics requires the use of 170 March 2003

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a political ethic of care to reshape the nature of representative institutions, at a variety of levels of governance, from local to transnational. Nel Noddings argues that the care ethic practiced in ideal homes should be taken into the state to redirect public policy. In developing the arguments, both stress women’s experiences of caring for others and both counterpose care and justice. Their theoretical discussions of the ethic of care cover familiar ground, with Noddings’s maternalist version and MacKay’s nonmaternalist formulation. Where both books depart from the literature is in their uncritical embrace of the state as a policymaking engine or as the site for representative institutions. While Noddings uses the ethic of care to argue for a series of compassionate public policies, ranging from housing for the homeless to education in caring, her analysis does not engage with feminist discussions of care and the welfare state. The appeal of Starting at Home is that Noddings places the raising of caring human beings at the center of a policy agenda. Love and Politics is much more compelling for political scientists, because MacKay offers a political analysis of how moments of democratization, such as Scotland’s devolution process, could advance a redefining of politics in a more woman-friendly, caring direction. The juxtaposition of the two books suggests that the success of Noddings’s humanistic vision rests on a complicated political project: the creation of a family and woman-friendly practice of democratic politics shaped by women’s equal political agency and a political ethic of care. Noddings sets out to challenge the field of political theory by reversing the order of subjects. Instead of starting with the ideal state that requires a particular type of home, she proposes to start with a vision of the ideal home that can be used as the basis for creating a caring state. She posits a developmental process that is facilitated by ideal homes. Children who are cared for will learn how to care for others and to care about others. The last concern is what ties care to a just society. The move from private caring to public or socialized caring is the crucial point of the argument. To a large extent, Noddings simply assumes that ideal privatized caring will produce adults who will embrace her liberal policy agenda. For empirical grounding, she points to the gender gap in public opinion and posits that women are more liberal because they care for bodies. Of course, there is a large number of women who are full-time caregivers but who are not liberal. Producing caring human beings is certainly a worthwhile goal, but Noddings does not provide adequate evidence to show that caring human beings care about other people’s children or about the well-being of other classes and ethnic groups.

In her model of the ideal home, Noddings allows for a variety of family formations. She also allows for a certain amount of cultural diversity. Yet her biases come through as she builds into her notion of the ideal home a potential contradiction. An ideal home provides more than care for the children; it prepares them for success in a liberal-democratic society. This standard allows her to evaluate negatively the effectiveness of different cultural practices of providing care. As Noddings argues, “in well-intentioned efforts to respect all cultures, our society often deprives children (and their families) of the knowledge they need to succeed in such societies’’ (p. 123). Also by focusing solely on care in the home, Noddings misses an opportunity to find important caring practices in other contexts. Jane Addams, someone Noddings praises for her striving to create a new cultural synthesis, argued in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) that working-class immigrant communities had a lot to teach the middle-class charity worker about caring relations. Because training for success trumps caring relations, Noddings needs to explain how her ethic of care challenges in practice, not just theoretically, individualistic, nonrelational notions of being in the world. As she envisions taking the home into the state, Noddings acknowledges that she accepts maternal coercion as a model for the state. As she declares, “in all human interactions today, from parenting to those involving the federal government, we suffer more from lack of care than from coercion’’ (p. 44). This theme marks one of her breaks with the classical liberal emphasis on individual rights. She is bothered by the right of the homeless person to sleep outdoors. She believes that coercion based on attentive love is qualitatively different from an unacceptable form of public “paternalism,’’ because “[i]t is open to negotiation, it pays attention to expressed needs even as it presses for inferred needs, and it weighs harms and goods and stands ready to back off if harms threaten to overwhelm goods’’ (p. 135). To illustrate further how private caring relations should be models for public life, Noddings argues against using a notion of justice to frame public care policies. For her, justice should come out of care and not the other way around. Because the payoff of the book comes in making the case that caring humans would produce caring policies, I find it remarkable that she does not engage with the theme of the crucial role of women’s agency outside the home. She separates the emancipation of women from the project of creating a political ethic of care. As she explains, “I have suggested

here that women’s concerns go well beyond interests in their own advancement in public life’’ (p. 301). Apparently, women’s equality in public life is a selfish endeavor, while using women’s traditions of creating caring homes is a social purpose. When she calls on us to adapt women’s caring skills to public life, Noddings ignores the caring needs of those women who might actually choose to put her political project into practice. By taking this route, Noddings puts aside the difficult problem of how to create a democratic politics of care that would place the nurturing of human life at the center. MacKay takes, as her central problem, how to adapt the ethic of care to the problem of how to get more women into elected office. She develops this theme by interconnecting scholarship on women and politics, ethic of care theory, and interviews of 53 elected women councillors in local government. Her context is Scotland in the mid-1990s, when it was open to feminist discourses because it was engaged in a democratization process that included devolution and the creation of a Scottish Parliament. Her distinct contribution is to show how a political ethic of care that draws on difference feminism is an essential complement to the European feminist emphasis on quotas or parity to achieve equal representation. MacKay begins her analysis of how to get more women into elected office by counterposing the use of quotas, as part of a justice approach, to the development of a political ethic of care that could radically reshape the practice of politics. To make her case, she points to the precarious legal status of positive action taken by political parties in Scotland to achieve equal representation by gender in the first Parliament. She notes that within a liberaldemocratic context, different versions of quotas are always suspect and lack legitimacy. Even if they produce parity, she argues, the presence of women in representative institutions is not sufficient if the entire way of doing politics is not woman or family friendly. MacKay suggests ways that a political ethic of care could be adapted to representative institutions. Her vision gains credibility because she can point to specific ways in which the characteristics of the new Scottish institutions can be understood in the political vocabulary of care. She finds “similarities between the vision of the political ethics of care with its recognition of diversity and interdependence and its dimensions of attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness; and the Scottish Parliament’s attempt to move beyond ‘power politics’ towards a problem-solving approach’’ (p. 215).

To use the ethic of care to redesign politics, MacKay points to a number of promising directions. The caregiving responsibilities of women politicians would have to be addressed. To take these needs seriously, care would have to be revalued. As one Scottish councillor puts it, “Until care work is equally valued you won’t get change in the way that politics is organized’’ (p. 182). To provoke a public discussion about the public and private politics of care, MacKay advocates incorporating categories such as “care demanders’’ and “privileged irresponsibility’’ into the political vocabulary that is used to characterize politicians. MacKay’s defense of difference feminism takes on a practical significance because of its grounding in women’s activism in the midst of a democratization process that includes the aim of equal representation of women. To achieve this aim, she shows that the possibility of a more caring social policy rests not on ignoring the agency of women in public life but on addressing the caring requirements and capabilities of women who choose to go into electoral politics. The entrance of women in equal numbers to men clearly brings into politics the practical problem of how to combine a genuine democracy with the nurturing of human lives. Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma. By Peter Mandaville. New York: Routledge, 2001. 235p. $85.00. — Akbar S. Ahmed, American University Scholars of contemporary Islam in thrall to ideas of globalization are constantly surprised at what Peter Mandaville calls “transnational Muslim politics’’ and others call “diasporic Islam’’: the assumption that a village or tribal society is now truly international. They point to the transformations taking place in society and the consequences therein. Some of the political turbulence is attributed to the rapid changes taking place in these societies. Like Mandaville, they are inclined to cite examples of individuals (like the scholar Mohammed Arkoun) who are born in one part of the traditional Muslim world (North Africa) and live and work in Europe (France, in the case of Arkoun) to show the impact of ideas across borders. While this is an important area of investigation, is it entirely a new one? Is it, as it is assumed, an entirely late-twentieth-century/ early-twenty-first-century Western phenomenon? Let us take the life of another North African scholar—that of Ibn Khaldun. Born in North Africa in the fourteenth century, he

lived and worked in Europe (Spain) and eventually settled and died in Cairo. In between, he wrote his classic account of history. And he was not alone—Al-Beruni and Ibn Battuta are just two of a long list of peripatetic scholars. Theirs was a time of globalization centuries before the word was used in the late twentieth century. The difference was that it was a time of Muslim globalization. What these scholars found was that they could travel across three continents and still be within a familiar culture, speak the same language, and identify similar and central ideas of the world. What is new in Mandaville’s argument is the speed, power, and ubiquity of technology and its dramatic effect on the transformation taking place in contemporary Muslim society. Images of book burning in Bradford in England flash across the world and can cause riots and deaths in Bombay and Islamabad (as in the case of The Satanic Verses). Ideas of community, politics, and identity are challenged in these instantly available images. Mandaville comes to his work as a result of a personal journey. He spent his childhood among Muslims in the Arab Gulf. When he moved back to the West, he was able to see the discrepancy between what he knew of Islam and what he read in the media. But he does not wish “to offer yet another rant against Western distortions and misrepresentations of Islam’’ (p. xi). Rather, he has a different purpose: “to focus instead on Islam as a lived experience. What does Islam mean today to those Muslims living under globalising conditions, particularly as minority communities in Western Europe? Furthermore, can a better understanding of Muslim politics accrue not from something called ‘Islamic studies,’ but by reading contemporary Islam through the lens of various global and transnational transformations?” And finally, he asks, “How . . . can we usefully make a link between changing configurations of political space and Muslim political discourse? To this end, I consciously avoid offering an exegesis of Islam’s canonical texts’’ (pp. xi–xii). As an anthropologist, I agree that we need to look at Muslim society in the here and now. However, as a Muslim, I know the importance of text in society. It is something that Mandaville does not ignore. Indeed, he explores the important questions that he has raised by looking at Muslims living in the West and through the lives of individuals like Arkoun. But he does not leave it there. He also looks at the activist scholars of Islam, such as Maulana Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb. He points out the interconnection between thought and action. So while Arkoun may talk of dialogue and understanding in Paris, it is www.apsanet.org 171

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Qutb’s ideas that inspire al-Jihad al-Islami who assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Most importantly, Mandaville points out the use of communication, media, and information technologies, which influence contemporary Muslim discourse. The Internet and CDROM–based communications allow Muslims globally to read and interpret Islamic knowledge for themselves. This has allowed the emergence of a new breed of Islamic intellectual who is not necessarily a traditional alim, or religious scholar. It explains why chemists and engineers as well as traditional scholars compete to speak on behalf of Islam. Mandaville’s research is focused on Britain where he spent most of his time examining Muslims. He points to several distinct Muslim groups as representing diasporic Islam. He identifies the Hizb ut-Tahrir/al-Muhajirun, a movement that originally emerged in the Middle East in the early 1950s. The group became well known on British university campuses in the early 1990s for allegedly encouraging anti-Semitic sentiment. They advocated the reestablishment of the political system of early Islam around the office of the caliph. In contrast, Mandaville describes the Tablighi Jama’at, also active in Britain. It was founded in the 1920s in India and is popular in Pakistan. This movement believes in quiet, low-key missionary work, which emphasizes harmony. This book in a sense sets the stage for September 11, 2001. All the arguments lead up to questions that need to be resolved within Muslim society in its relations with the world: Who speaks for Muslim society? Will there be conflict or clash between Islam and the West? How far will the technological developments affect traditional interpretations within Islam? Minor quibbles: Sometimes Mandaville cannot resist the temptation of using jargon and thereby losing the reader from a generally well argued and clear account. With the confidence of a painter using the broad brush, he tends to use sweeping generalizations. For example, he cannot simply dismiss the sociologist Anthony Giddens in the way he does (“The high levels of abstraction, particularly in the case of Giddens, unfortunately leave us with the impression that globalisation is something that is taking place ‘out there’’’; p. 37). Too often books on Islam fall into the category of attacking Islam and/or then being apologetic for it. In this innovative, scholarly, and yet sympathetic account we are able to understand the processes that are transforming a traditional society in times of rapid change and thereby causing unrest and anxiety. 172 March 2003

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On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left. By Randy Martin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 264p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market). By Allan Megill. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 352p. $85.00 cloth, 27.95 paper. — Paul Thomas, University of California, Berkeley Reviewing these books in tandem is like comparing chalk with cheese. Both Allan Megill and Randy Martin claim to center their arguments on Marx, but only Megill makes good on the claim. Indeed, what needs saying right off the bat is that Megill’s Karl Marx, which sheds considerable light on Marx, is by far the better book. Martin’s On Your Marx, by contrast, casts very little light on Marx (or anyone else). Calling attention, in one of his happier turns of phrase, to “the tinniness with which rightist clarions of triumph now sound” (p. 13), Martin says but does not show that “(h)istory has not erased Marx, but vindicated him” (p. xiv), and that Marx remains “indispensable as a point of reference” (p. xv). Even though this latter, far weaker claim is (presumably) one from which few readers would dissent, it does Martin very little good. Marx is not much of a “point of reference” in his own argument, which proceeds at a high level of abstraction and deals with Marx only in an incidental, perfunctory way. “Socialism,” or “the left,” always defined amorphously, is more likely as subjects of a Martin sentence than Marx turns out to be. All the same, Martin’s argument is oddly insistent: “[I]t is not that Marx was, in some ahistorical way, ahead of his times, but that, in being so fully in and of his times, he helps situate us in ours” (p. 84). But Martin does not tell us how and why Marx should so help us. Instead he attributes to Frederic Jameson the view that “(M)arxism has suffered the conflation between [sic] its identification as a philosophy, a social movement, and a historical project,” and adds with a flourish the observation that his (Martin’s) no less beloved postmodernism has “suffered” a similar “conflation” (p. 28): “Although the incessant attack on ‘all that is solid’ [Marx’s Manifesto, mistranslated] is unleashed by modernization itself, postmodernism embraces this condition as an affirmative value”; “we see in postmodernism the same circularity, fragmentation begetting fragmentation, that capital ‘sees’ in itself ” (pp. 31, 33). Martin makes much of a similarity that may be formal and fortuitous, in order to back up

his further points that socialism is “constitutive of,’’ not an “end point to” history (p. 116); that “socialism is not postcapitalist but anticapitalist” (p. 86); and that “socialism, far from being external to capitalism, is intrinsic to the material realization of the actual patterns of life that constitute capitalist society” (p. 83). Martin may here have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, and we do need to remind ourselves that today’s anticapitalist protestors do not necessarily regard Marx as a progenitor (though they should). Be all this as it may, Martin does appear to be hanging on a hook of confected similarity more weight than it can reasonably be expected to bear. In any case, even if this similarity of socialism and postmodernism is a linkage joining them, so what? Who (apart from Martin) cares? We are not told. Wage labor is a far less dated concept than Martin’s cherished alterity, aporias, optics, descensus, reinscriptions, and imaginaries bid fair to become. For all these reasons, it is a pleasure as well as a relief to turn to Alan Megill’s Karl Marx. Megill’s conclusions could be put baldly: Marx rejected politics and the market, and was wrong to have done so. These immediately make Megill’s Marx, unlike Martin’s “socialism,” postcapitalist as well as anticapitalist. All the same, one could claim, and not without justice, that there is nothing surprising or (it would seem) original about them. Many roads have been traversed to reach these same conclusions, which may therefore seem to some readers to be rather ho-hum conclusions. But such a summary procedure would be peremptory and unfair. It would also do scant justice to the considerable originality of Megill’s argument. As Marx himself said (a little awkwardly): “Truth includes not only the result but also the path to it” (quoted on p. 103). The question to ask is not whether the road leading to Megill’s conclusions has been a much-traveled one, but whether it has ever been traveled so carefully and so well. And I don’t think it has been. Otherwise put, the question to ask is not whether Megill’s gauntlet has been thrown down before, but whether Megill is the first to throw it down firmly and properly. And I think he is. While Randy Martin says things, Allan Megill shows things—this being the mark of the true scholar. Megill’s argument is one that is going to have to be confronted, and met. It provokes and challenges the reader. It also bristles with thought, or, more precisely, with thinking. Megill gets an almost alarming number of things right. He gets right Marx’s debt to Hegel in general, and to Hegel’s lesser logic in particular; he provides the best interpretation of Marx’s doctoral dissertation

this reviewer has yet encountered; he explains Marx’s Prometheanism; he reinstates “Aus James Mill” to its rightful (and important) place; he gets right Marx’s understanding of materielle Produktionskraefte in the 1859 “Preface” (as “forces of material production” that are both material and nonmaterial in character); and he even adds, as a kind of scholarly lagniappe, which puts us all in his debt, a topically organized list of Marx’s journalistic writings of the 1842–43 period. But what about Megill’s conclusions? While a short review is not the place to engage him on these, a couple of points seem in order. First, the political. That Marx rejected the bourgeois state is not at issue. That in so doing he also rejected “politics” depends on what one’s understanding of politics in general, and of revolutionary politics in particular, is to be. Marx as a revolutionary politician—and he was a revolutionary politician as well as a theorist—is insufficiently acknowledged. Second, the economic. Marx, says Megill, “was right in seeing that the market does not automatically conduce to the satisfaction of human needs. He was only wrong in his insistence on abolishing it” (p. 177). This insistence stems in turn from Marx’s discovery, contra Ricardo, J.-B. Say, and James Mill, that “the market is not, and cannot be, subsumed under laws,” and that “the nonaccordance between the fluctuations of the market and the task of economic science is an indicator of the market’s irrationality” (p. 173). Could it be that “laws,” “rationality,” and “science” are here pushed rather too closely together (or “conflated,” as Randy Martin would say)? Let’s approach this issue from a different angle. Three quotations from Megill follow, in what I take to be an ascending order: “by 1845 at the latest, [Marx] rejected philosophy for science” (p. 5); “when Marxian socialism put its political mask aside, what face is revealed? It is the face of science” (p. 120); “Marx rejected politics and the market because he found it impossible to understand politics and the market in a way that conformed to his idea of science” (p. xviii). The question that arises is whether the weight awarded to “science” in these different and far from interchangeable formulations—a weight that is on any reckoning considerable—is awarded to science by Marx or by Megill? In thinking that it is Megill, I am not suggesting that he privileges science carelessly or offhandedly. Nor am I suggesting that Megill attributes to Marx a positivist view of science, which he knows to be quite wrong (“Marx’s method is precisely not positivist: indeed in some respects it is the direct reverse of positivism” [p. 239]). But while Megill distin-

guishes the Marxian from the positivist with some care, he does not distinguish Marx from Engels (who was much closer to positivism than Marx, and whose writings contain much more about natural science than Marx’s) with anything like the same degree of care. Megill almost admits as much himself: “Marx portrays a natural science that had ‘intervened in and transformed human life through industry’ and envisaged an eventual unification of natural science and the science of man. None of this required much specific knowledge of natural science, and the early Marx certainly did not have such knowledge. The idea of natural science was sufficient” (p. 163). This suggests that Marx’s interest was more in technology than in natural science per se (although one could not say this of Engels). And while this in turn does nothing to dispose of the three quotations, it does qualify them in important ways. Toward a Theory of Immigration. By Peter C. Meilaender. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 259p. $55.00 cloth. — Andrew Valls, Morehouse College Peter Meilaender has written one of the only single-author books on the ethics of immigration policy, and perhaps the only one that defends the position that “states are entitled, within certain wide limits, to craft immigration policies as they see fit” (p. 1). Most normative work on immigration, as he notes, supports the position that states are more ethically constrained in making immigration policy, much of it arguing for an “open borders” policy. As such, his book may serve as a useful point of reference in the debate over immigration policy. Yet for a book that presents itself as a work of normative theory, there is surprisingly little normative argument here. Of the six chapters, two are almost purely descriptive (Chapter 1 on the varieties of immigration, and Chapter 4 on the immigration policies of the United States and Germany). Two others—Chapters 2 and 5—are discussions of the literature on immigration and an exploration of the implications of the work of various political theorists for immigration policy. Here, only a small portion of the discussion, the analysis of the respective positions of Joseph Carens and Michael Walzer, is really germane to Meilaender’s argument. Other parts, such as the discussion of Will Kymlicka, are engaging, but ultimately have little to do directly with immigration. Meilaender devotes only two chapters, then (3 and 6), to developing his argument for the state’s right to restrict immi-

gration, with Chapter 3 being “the theoretical heart of the book” (p. 3). The argument that Meilaender presents in Chapter 3 is suggestive, but ultimately unsatisfying. He attempts to ground the right to restrict immigration on claims of national identity. He argues that there is a wide variety of national identities, and that “the vast majority of these . . . national identities are legitimate. By calling them legitimate, I mean simply that they have a right to exist” (p. 92). This right to exist implies a right to protect the national identity from the threat posed by immigration. Hence, “[t]he first question that a people faces in these circumstances, I want to suggest, is this: Who are we” (p. 81)? From the answer to this question, according to the author, the appropriate immigration policy flows. And from the variety of answers to this question for different peoples, it follows that there will be a variety of legitimate immigration policies, some more restrictive than others. Meilaender assumes that an immigration policy that seeks to protect a legitimate national identity is itself legitimate. But, as he also realizes, this assumption is false if there are independent moral constraints on immigration policy. For example, in Chapter 6, he suggests that refugees and immediate family members of citizens are two classes of people who present strong claims to immigrate, claims that may override the nation’s claim to exclude. The question that he never directly addresses is whether there are other principled constraints on immigration policy, such that peoples with a legitimate national identity nevertheless may not protect that identity through restrictive immigration policies. For example, although he discusses the racist immigration policies employed by Australia (pp. 23–24, 53–54) and the United States (pp. 23, 106), he never says what is wrong with such policies. In addition, he never directly confronts the issue of whether the needs and desires of immigrants ought to trump the desire on the part of citizens to restrict immigration. This is the main point of contention between Meilaender and someone like Carens, who argues that liberal principles require open borders. In light of this, there is something odd in Meilaender’s presentation of his argument. At the outset, he correctly states that “at its core, immigration is one manifestation of a fundamental ethical problem: May (or perhaps must) we prefer ‘our own’ . . . to other people” (p. 3)? Yet rather than addressing this issue directly, most of his discussion presupposes a positive answer to the question. He also states, again correctly: “Logically, though, this question of preference is really prior to the question about national identity,’’ and a negative www.apsanet.org 173

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answer to the question about preferring our own “renders the whole discussion of national identity . . . simply irrelevant” (p. 96). This is correct, yet he develops his argument about national identity without first addressing the prior question of whether “we” may prefer “our own.” Even more odd than the fact the Meilaender reverses the logical order of the issues involved is the fact that he never presents an argument about the more fundamental issue at all: “Settling the question of whether or to what extent we may actively prefer our fellow citizens and the way of life we share with them would clearly be a large endeavor, requiring a book of its own, and I shall not try to accomplish that here” (p. 96). He does go on to make some suggestive remarks on this issue, but, by his own account, these do not amount to an argument for “preferring our own.” Meilaender, then, fails to directly confront the very issue at stake between his position and that of Carens, his main opponent. This is all the more surprising in light of the fact that Meilaender’s main criticism of Carens is that Carens fails to defend the liberalism on which he bases his argument. What Meilaender has demonstrated, then, is simply that in the immigration debate as elsewhere, where you end up depends upon where you begin. Carens’s egalitarian (or cosmopolitan) liberalism leads to open borders; Meilaender’s (and Walzer’s) more communitarian (or “Augustinian” [p. 5]) liberalism leads to a right to restrict immigration to protect the community. What Meilaender has not provided, however, is a convincing argument to prefer his position over that of Carens. The emphasis in the title Toward a Theory of Immigration, then, should fall squarely on the first word. As interesting as many of the discussions are, this book is perhaps best viewed as a prolegomenon to a work that will more directly confront the fundamental issues at stake in the immigration debate. Speaking Through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity. By Norma Claire Moruzzi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 205p. $39.95. — Mary Caputi, California State University, Long Beach Norma Claire Moruzzi’s recent book contributes significantly to the emergent and increasingly sophisticated literature on Hannah Arendt. Entitled Speaking Through the Mask, Moruzzi’s text filters a careful reading of Arendt through an innovative lens that combines Kristevan psychoanalysis and Joan 174 March 2003

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Rivière’s concept of social identity as masquerade. This filter, clearly hospitable to the language of performativity, works to read Arendt against herself, and to query the sharp Arendtian distinction between the categories of the social and the political—that is, between an embodied, immanent social identity and the freedom of a political life that can reach beyond such immanence. Embodied reality need not be deprived of political engagement, the author argues, but can serve as the vehicle through which private individuals enter meaningfully into the public sphere. Moruzzi counters Arendt’s hostility toward such social categories as class, race, gender, and sexual preference by developing the thematic of performativity. She does this by relying upon the mask, a creation that “provides the private ego with a stable public representation that is artificial, enabling, and salutary’’ (p. 36). Specifically, she proposes an analytic lens that welds together Kristevan abjection and Rivière’s masquerade, and in so doing is able to address those issues that often nag at Arendt’s readers: her elitism, her impatience with the civil rights movement, her unwillingness to politicize the feminine, and her insistence that compassion has no place in political life. Indeed, this innovative approach to Arendt’s dislike for social categories goes a long way in introducing cohesion into a body of literature that, at times, seems refractory to systematic analysis. In fact, Speaking Through the Mask considers such a wide array of topics pertinent to Arendt’s œuvre that one wishes more time were spent unpacking the analytic lens, rather than treating her aversion to social categories. Not that the latter does not make for interesting reading: There is much to consider in pondering Arendt’s thoughts on her rootlessness and Jewish identity, her strong identification with a salon hostess, her liaison with Martin Heidegger, and the fact that despite her often masculinist views, only her mother “took her for a man’’ (p. 58). There is much to learn about her writings on such varied topics as the Greek polis, Nazi Germany, Billy Budd, Rudyard Kipling, and the South African gold rush. Yet while Moruzzi’s ability to synthesize a smorgasbord of seemingly unrelated topics is commendable, perhaps more attention might have been given to the theoretical framework, the mask, through which she reads this assortment. It is especially the ramifications of Kristevan abjection, employed as a filter for reading Arendt, that I query. For while Moruzzi’s use of this filter on the whole is sound, certain aspects of abjection have been underplayed in order to allow it to serve the author’s needs. She correctly uses Kristevan abjection—that terrifying

foray into the preoedipal, prelinguistic lining of our socially constructed identities—as a foil to the social persona we assume. Indeed, in highlighting how powerfully the human psyche is impacted by its own lack of moorings, Julia Kristeva draws attention to the horrifying underside, the archaic memory of nonbeing, that mars all assumed identities. “Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,’’ Moruzzi writes, “Kristeva poses the dynamic of abjection as the acknowledgment that there are no pure boundaries’’ (p. 21). True. Yet if there are no pure boundaries, surely abjection on some level countervails against efforts to have the social inform the political. If abjection recalls all that remains inaccessible to speech, surely to some degree it proves refractory to the dynamics of identification necessarily given play in the public sphere. Absent this identification, it remains unclear how social categories might be engaged politically. Recall that Kristeva posits the abjection of Joycean prose as “sickly’’ and “unending,’’ for it “spreads out the abject’’ by giving voice to that which “eludes speech’’ (Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982, p. 22). Recall that she characterizes Borges’s literary project as “vertiginous,’’ for it “does not cease wandering’’ (p. 23). And if abjection invokes that which may not be captured within culture, surely its effectiveness as a political tool must be questioned. In arguing that abjection’s asocial lining of our public persona might be read solely as a vehicle for social engagement, rather than as a deterrent to the same, then, Moruzzi perhaps overlooks the more dramatic, terrifying aspects of Kristeva’s theory. For the latter has insisted that “[a]bjection preserves what existed in the archaism of the pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be’’ (italics mine) (Powers, p. 10). In fairness, however, it must be stated that the horrors of a pre-oedipal, potentially psychotic, existence unaligned with the reality principle do simultaneously encourage our investment in a saving, linguistic order. Abjection’s terrors indeed push us toward internalizing paternal prohibition. “I yearn for the Law,’’ Kristeva writes in “Stabat Mater’’ (in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader, 1986, p. 175). Moruzzi’s mask draws solely on this salutary effect: “[T]he abject is that which . . . must be rejected so that the self can establish the borders of its unified subjectivity’’ (p. 21). She privileges abjection’s tendency to align us with the Other, rather than its pull in the opposite direction. Despite these considerations surrounding Moruzzi’s construction of the mask, her project is successful overall. Rivière’s theory of the

masquerade works nicely throughout the piece, and the author’s beautifully crafted prose and intimate knowledge of Arendt’s writings keep the text consistently engaging. Above all, Speaking Through the Mask is to be commended for its originality, for the author’s theoretical lens offers a viable counter to Arendt’s dismissal of the social realm. Of course, we can never know how Arendt herself would have responded to Moruzzi’s argument. But it is certain that the latter’s insights will significantly influence the growing body of scholarship on Arendt, given how profoundly the division between social and political categories schematized her thinking. The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. By Terry Nardin. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2001. 264p. $35.00. — Steven A. Gerencser, Indiana University South Bend “Every man, I suppose, has his political opinions,” Michael Oakeshott once asserted, “but a political philosopher has something more, and more significant, than political opinions: he has an analysis of political activity, a comprehensive view of the nature of political life, and it is this . . . which is profitable for a later and different age to study” (Oakeshott, “Thomas Hobbes,” Scrutiny 4 [1935–36]: 265). Terry Nardin seems inspired by Oakeshott to take this attitude a step further, as if to say a political philosopher may have an analysis of political activity, but a philosopher has something more significant, a comprehensive view of human experience, and it is this that is profitable for a later age to study. Thus, the title of Nardin’s book, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, holds the nugget of his thesis: Michael Oakeshott was a philosopher, and it is as a philosopher, not a political theorist or a moralist or a historian of ideas, that we must first come to know him. Nardin develops this thesis by pursuing several interesting claims. First is his own variation of the position held by most of Oakeshott’s more thorough interpreters, that his political thought must be understood in some way through his philosophical commitments, an attitude exemplified in the title of the first book-length monograph on Oakeshott, W. H. Greenleaf ’s Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics (1966). Second is that Oakeshott’s philosophy should be understood not simply as a necessary background to his political thought but as an original, if too-little-heralded, contribution to twentieth-century philosophy. Third is that while politics has an important place in Oakeshott’s thought, its significance dimin-

ished almost to a vanishing point by the end of his writing life. Nardin gives the second of these claims the most attention, presenting carefully written explications of some of Oakeshott’s most difficult works. With a grounding in Oakeshott’s early work in idealist philosophy, especially in Experience and Its Modes (1933), and drawing out important similarities and connections from it to the philosophical underpinnings of On Human Conduct (1975) and other writings, Nardin works to provide a coherent picture of Michael Oakeshott, the philosopher of human experience. What makes us human, for Oakeshott, is not simply that we experience the world, but that we experience it only and always as we orient ourselves to it; that we order our experience is human, but examining and reflecting how we do so is what the philosopher undertakes. Whether expressed in the formal concept of modes or variations upon the metaphors of language, voice, conversation, and idiom, Nardin contends, woven throughout Oakeshott’s writings is his attention to the character and limitations of these orderings and expressions of experience and their relationships to one another. Nardin further suggests that this approach allows for Oakeshott to account for several significant twentieth-century philosophical alternatives, such as positivism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and pragmatism, ascertaining what they can offer to understanding. More importantly, though, Oakeshott’s perspective also reveals the limitations of each of these philosophies as they mistakenly take the limited view of one mode or idiom to be universal, as in scientific experience in the case of positivism or practical experience in the case of phenomenology and pragmatism. The advocates of each of these schools will need to judge how deeply the criticisms generated from Oakeshott via Nardin cut. Oakeshott scholars, however, will have to consider how well Nardin’s coherent picture of him can be sustained. In places, Nardin describes conspicuous changes in Oakeshott’s work, like the abandonment of the Hegelian notion of the absolute and the conception of philosophy that generates from it (p. 23); yet he also feels able to express the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott as if these were not consequential, drawing upon passages from works written decades apart and for different purposes to elicit a single picture of Oakeshott’s philosophy. Here, Nardin’s detailed textual analysis can work at odds with the broader theme he hopes it will sustain. Given the differences among interpreters of Oakeshott regarding the character and significance of such changes, more explicit engagement of this question would have been helpful.

In keeping with the theme of the book, politics comes last in its considerations, viewed from the prior philosophical interpretation. Nardin introduces an insightful connection between Oakeshott’s modal approach and his attention first to individuality and then to how civility protects it. The connecting concept is difference. Humans in general differently order and express their experience in various modes, idioms, and voices, and particular human agents individuate as they differently navigate those modes, idioms, and voices. Civility and its formal expression in the rule of law are seen as the human practices most capable of incorporating this difference expressed in agency. Intriguing as this interpretation is, this section of the book, which takes up the last chapter and much of the conclusion, is the least well developed, and it provides even more stress on the picture of an Oakeshott holding a consistent, coherent philosophy. For example, a theme that Nardin returns to throughout the work is the fundamental distinction for Oakeshott between “Understanding and Doing,” as he entitles his second chapter, or theory and practice. Yet he acknowledges that Oakeshott’s political thinking can at moments combine expressions of historical theorizing, philosophical reflection, and practical concerns (p. 220). For a philosopher like Oakeshott, who holds a coherence theory of truth, acknowledgment of inconsistency, contradiction, or significant change may seem to be an especially damning charge; but a complex identity like a philosopher and his ideas will likely express difference and variation, and these can be insightful even when contradictory. This review would be remiss if it did not make special mention of Nardin’s examination of the topics in the two chapters entitled “Understanding in the Human Sciences” and “Historical Understanding,” which are the most original and instructive in The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. While others have considered Oakeshott’s philosophical approach to knowledge generally, none has provided such a sustained discussion of his understanding of how humans come to know and theorize about other human agents. Another favor that Nardin grants us all is to highlight Oakeshott’s essay “On History,” found in a brief edited volume with the same title. This collection also includes an essay entitled “The Rule of Law,” which while not enough attended to, as Nardin shows, needs to be recognized as a reprise and further development of the themes in On Human Conduct. Happily, while Nardin has highlighted the significance of the works in this collection, Liberty Press has newly reissued Oakeshott’s On History (2000). As a thinker who www.apsanet.org 175

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published his thoughts on so many topics for more than six decades, Oakeshott may have been too much of an individual to have held a philosophy that can be captured in a coherent picture. Yet if Nardin’s account cannot quite present that, it provides a challenging view to Oakeshott scholars and a thorough, clear starting place for all those interested in his ideas. Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law. By Robert C. Post, with K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Thomas C. Grey, and Riva B. Siegal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. 184p. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper. — Evan Gerstmann, Loyola Marymount University In Prejudicial Appearances, a primary essay on the nature of American antidiscrimination law by Robert Post is followed by four responsive essays. Post’s essay effectively analyzes the way that the ostensible goals of antidiscrimination law fail to gibe with the law’s actual application. According to Post, it is generally understood that the intention of antidiscrimination law is to render certain characteristics, such as gender and race, as a practical matter, invisible to those making hiring and other employment decisions. The law embraces the goal of “functional rationality.’’ Employers must not be allowed to rely irrationally upon prejudice in their decision-making process. Rather, they must, as President Clinton averred about gays and lesbians in the military, be judged by what they do and not by who they are. Post describes this as “the dominant conception’’ of antidiscrimination law. Focusing on the area of gender discrimination, Post demolishes the myth of functional rationality and the dominant conception that law’s goal is to render gender invisible. He offers an alternative “sociological’’ conception of antidiscrimination law that acknowledges that it is far beyond the law’s power to render gender invisible. Rather, the law “is understood as a social practice that acts on other social practices’’ (p. 40). Instead of rendering gender invisible, the law (created and applied by human beings who live within the same sociological context as those who are regulated by the law) becomes another player in the construction of gender’s meaning. “The sociological account does not ask whether ‘stereotypic impressions’ can be eliminated tout court, but rather how the law alters and modifies such impressions’’ (p. 40). Post cites several interesting examples to support his critique of the dominant conception. He shows that the law allows employers in some instances to require that women dress in a fem176 March 2003

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inine manner. Outside of organizations that primarily sell sex appeal, however, the law does not allow employers to require women to dress in a sexual manner. Post rightly points out that when the law allows mandatory femininity, but not mandatory sexuality, it is hardly rendering gender invisible. Instead, the law is participating in the social dialogue of what it means to be a woman—how are women expected to be different from men and how is femininity to be defined and when is it to be expected? Unfortunately, at this point the book stops short. Post says: “In this brief essay, I shall not attempt to argue for any particular set of principles that ought to guide the application of antidiscrimination law’’ (p. 41). He then quickly finishes up his essay and we are on to the four responses. This turns out to be a shame, because the responsive essays move the discussion along less effectively than a full, book-length treatment of the topic by Post himself might have done. While the essays are all well written and sympathetic to Post’s argument, none, with the partial exception of that by K. Anthony Appiah, takes the next step of addressing how or whether the law should strive to modify the racial and gender categories it falsely claims to render invisible. Also, none of the essays tackles the question of why we treat race and gender so differently. Although Post is convincing in his argument that society does not really want to be gender blind, race is a very different area. It is inconceivable that in the area of race, the law would allow different dress requirements, separate facilities, or any of the other distinctions that are allowed in the area of gender. Post presents his analysis of gender discrimination as illustrative of larger truths about American antidiscrimination law, but gender seems to be a very special category. The social sanction for an African American who “acts white’’ or an assimilated Jew who puts on WASP airs is clearly not comparable to the explosive societal reaction to a man who dresses as a woman. Such a man would have an extremely difficult time getting most jobs and, as Post points out, would not even have the protection of the laws against discrimination. There is something uniquely and incredibly powerful about gender expectations, and by failing to acknowledge this, Post presents his analysis as more universal than it actually is. The important questions about how and why the law throws its weight behind conventional expectations of feminine and masculine behavior (as long as these conventions are not overtly sexual) go unanswered. The responsive essays would have added more if they were from more genuinely diverse perspectives. An essay or two written by social

scientists would have been very helpful. Although Post calls his approach “sociological,’’ the book fails to include any essays written by a sociologist. An essay by a political scientist, a field that has grown increasingly skeptical of the importance or even possibility of the kind of doctrinal coherence Post advocates, could also have added depth to the book. All of the essays are written by scholars who appear to be primarily theorists, and the book never takes on the question of what the law might look like were Post’s theories to be put into action. The book might also have benefited from including the views of some conservative scholars who are less sympathetic to Post’s position. Justice Antonin Scalia’s book, A Matter of Interpretation (1997), which has a similar format to this book, benefited greatly from the inclusion of essays by those who vigorously opposed Scalia’s arguments. Nonetheless, the core argument of Prejudicial Appearances is important and well argued, and most readers will find arguments of interest to them in one or more of the responsive essays. While Post has left much of the heavy lifting for later, he has performed the invaluable service of shedding new light on antidiscrimination law and providing the framework for important future research. Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy and Aesthetic Individuality. By Morton Schoolman. New York: Routledge, 2001. 348p. $85.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. — Shane Gunster, Ryerson University Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alexis de Tocqueville are commonly known for their critique of liberal democracy. However, in a fascinating new study, Morton Schoolman marshals novel readings of each theorist to argue for the value of a democratic polity in creating and sustaining what he terms “aesthetic individuality,” an ethical disposition toward the other that values difference as a resource in the ongoing project of forming the self. Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic account of the “dialectic of enlightenment,” which traces the fate of reason from a prehistoric fear of the unknown to the brutal domination of modern instrumental rationality, sets the stage for Schoolman’s project. While agreeing that violence lies at the core of formal reason, he argues that a “genealogical” reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment reveals an alternative subjectivity that rejects the subordination of world to mind. In an insightful revisiting of the Sirens episode, Schoolman claims that

Odysseus’s cunning ploy to both hear the Sirens and survive expresses a tension between formal reason—the desire to understand the world in its entirety—and an aesthetic receptivity to difference that lies beyond human comprehension. Charting an analogous dialectic in The Birth of Tragedy, he invokes Nietzsche as similarly valorizing aesthetics as a means for individuality to engage with the world at the level of appearance while leaving its depths or essences inviolate. Nietzsche and Adorno are ultimately positioned as complementary theorists of aesthetic individuality. On the one hand, Adorno champions aesthetics for exposing the limits of reason by ceaselessly affirming “nonidentity”: Art forces an awareness upon human thought that it can never come to know the thing in-itself, but must instead learn to accept the fathomless diversity of being. On the other hand, Nietzsche teaches us that such an ethical disposition need not be passive, but can actively fashion an individual identity by using the surfaces of the world as a mirror for its own creative powers. The poetry of Walt Whitman is offered as an exemplary modeling of aesthetic individuality as it revels indiscriminately in the many wonders of the world, while at the same time forsaking any attempt to capture their essence or order them hierarchically on the basis of their “true” worth. Whitman’s claim that the United States represents the ideal breeding ground for developing aesthetic individuality frames a critical inquiry into de Tocqueville’s famous attack on liberal democracy for cultivating a homogeneous citizenry without differences. Through an innovative reading, Schoolman inverts de Tocqueville’s schematic by showing how the “equality of condition” of democracy actually nurtures an interest in the “small differences” of individuals (as opposed to the “large differences” of classes) as an invaluable aid in the mimetic formation of identity. Hence, democracies protect the diversity needed for aesthetic individuality to flourish. Schoolman’s interpretations are engaging, innovative, and well written, and will be of interest to scholars of these thinkers. The book’s principal arguments are developed clearly and coherently. His controversial readings, however, are bound to raise questions about the validity of his interpretations. More broadly, his failure to consider in any substantive way how the capitalist nature of contemporary democracy undermines aesthetic individuality is a significant shortcoming of the book. In particular, Schoolman’s treatment of Adorno suffers from a number of flaws. He

provides an excessively Kantian analysis of critical theory, arguing that Adorno “forces a great ontological divide between all subjects and their objects, between human beings and being in all its diversity and difference’’ (p. 135). Such a conception completely reverses Adorno’s basic philosophical objective: The divide between subject and object must be deconstructed, not affirmed. The illusion of a subject entirely distinct from the object is inevitably constitutive of an epistemology in which reason dominates all that lies without: hence, his positioning of Kant with Sade as complementary prophets of enlightenment. The error that attends the primordial formation of subjectivity lies in human forgetfulness of the nature that lies within: Horkheimer and Adorno choose Odysseus as “the prototype of bourgeois individuality” because of how his mastery of the external environment succeeds only by virtue of his willful separation from it, a Pyrrhic victory in light of the crippling disciplinary schematic this imposes upon the self. Schoolman effectively dismisses Adorno’s critique of capitalism as little more than a variant of the much broader condemnation of formal reason. Yet Adorno’s account of commodity fetishism and the reification of social relations into “second nature” raises troubling concerns about Schoolman’s own complacent invitation to “relate to the world receptively just as it appears before us’’ (p. 177). For instance, his benign claim that such adaptation proceeds via mimesis unwittingly echoes Adorno’s far more ominous discussion of how the imitative rituals of mass culture replicate the conditions of a prehistoric past in which a terrified humanity had little choice but to mimetically propitiate a nature beyond its understanding. Schoolman’s deeply conservative portrayal of Adorno’s aesthetics as endorsing a passive orientation to the world sits very uneasily with the radical dialectical thrust of Adorno’s portrayal of capitalism’s systematic evisceration of the human potential for thought, feeling, and being. Finally, while Schoolman’s engagement with de Tocqueville is provocative and well reasoned, it hardly constitutes grounds for determining “the historical possibility for an aesthetic form of individuality in late modern democratic society’’ (p. 300). In particular, de Tocqueville’s account of democracy as rooted in a general “equality of condition” is hopelessly antiquated when compared to the staggering inequalities that characterize existing capitalist democracies. Yet Schoolman unquestioningly accepts these founding assumptions as his own. Furthermore, the book fails to consider how difference and diversity within democratic

societies are routinely undermined and subordinated by the corporate media’s need for mass culture that can be cheaply produced, effectively promoted, and easily consumed, a rather peculiar absence in a work that claims Adorno as its inspiration. As theoretical discourse, Reason and Horror has much to offer, and its core principle of aesthetic individuality offers an intriguing discussion of the relevance of aesthetics to questions of ethics and politics. However, its central message that individuals accept the world at face value as an aesthetic resource for self-fashioning is simply inadequate in a time when the “reason” of democratic capitalism is consistently invoked to explain away the “horror” that rules the lives of so many. Henry Adams: The Historian as Political Theorist. By James P. Young. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. 314p. $35.00. — Joshua I. Miller, Lafayette College James Young wants political theorists to attend to Henry Adams (1838–1918), and they should. In certain ways, Adams is easy to admire. He is a splendid writer; he wrote a good deal, and nearly every sentence is perfect. He was a witty and urbane professor of history at Harvard and later he was a wry and wise Washington insider with powerful aesthetic faculties. As his America rapidly changed, he tried to master the new forms of knowledge needed to understand it. But Adams also has a creepy side; in his old age he was depressed, cynical, and virulently anti-Semitic. He thought that members of his class should run the country. In his Education, he dismisses the Populists (“nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex a machine [as American capitalism] by Southern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers . . . ” [The Education of Henry Adams, 1973 (1918), p. 344]) and finds Reconstruction and the suffragists beneath contempt. In certain moods, you can despise Adams as an upperclass WASP, whining that the United States has deteriorated to the point that, unlike his grandfather and great-grandfather, he is not the president, while immigrant Jews have gained power, and women are becoming masculine. Adams is fascinating and perhaps profound on a number of topics, including the experience of failure in a country that worships success. Adams did not believe that history was progressive, and he thought that those who interpreted Darwin as offering proof for www.apsanet.org 177

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progress were wrong. In his writings, he described the transformation of the United States from a collection of colonies devoted to God and/or money, divided by the evil of slavery, to a great industrial, technological, and capitalist power. Adams saw the need to master technology and capitalism with intelligence, morality, and representative government; he believed that the Constitution no longer provided a viable structure for that mastery. Partly in order to understand and control the emerging forces, Adams was interested in education in the broadest sense (Adams claimed that his first lesson came as an infant when he saw the color yellow; until then, he had only known the black and white of Puritan morality). Intriguingly, Adams also criticized the United States for being too manly and for giving an insufficient public (not political) place to women and sex. Adams offers theorists a lot to consider. It is easier to summarize Adams’s themes than his theses, in part because he was contradictory, but mostly because he so constantly used irony. Socrates was earnest and straightforward by comparison. It is difficult to discern what Adams believes and is therefore problematic to define his theoretical contribution. James Young knows this and devotes his beautifully written book to articulating that contribution by explicating and commenting upon Adams’s nine-volume history of the United States, many essays, two novels, and two final great books, Mont St. Michel and Chartres and The Education. Young gives prominence to The History, which along with Mont St. Michel he considers “Adams’s most perfectly realized works,’’ and does not take up The Education until the book’s second half. Some readers may not agree with this ranking and will find Young’s discussion of The Education more compelling than that of The History. Young wants to understand Adams correctly, and he has a special interest in cautioning those on the democratic Left who would dismiss Adams as reactionary, elitist, sexist, and anti-Semitic. If not claiming Adams as a leftist or even a friend of leftists, Young wants the Left to know that Adams is not as antithetical to their beliefs in community, widespread political participation, and equality as he often seems to be. Young struggles to characterize Adams properly. Adams is alternately portrayed, with numerous qualifications, as not precisely a liberal, a civic republican, a conservative, an anarchist, an advocate of laissez-faire who was influenced by Marx and Hegel, a believer in markets but opponent of big business, a supporter of the strong state, a Puritan drawn to 178 March 2003

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Aquinas and the Virgin Mary, a sexist, and a feminist. He was a radical who did not subscribe to the radical movements of his own time. He was intrigued by the Populists, but also dismissed them. He opposed Theodore Roosevelt, yet endorsed the Spanish-American War, but not the annexation of the Philippines. He criticized the highly masculine America that honored competition as the “survival of the fittest’’ and denigrated the gentle and feminine, but he did not support women’s suffrage. Adams was a complicated fellow. It is not Young’s fault that Adams is complex and contradictory. Indeed, Young frequently reminds the reader that Adams’s thought is ambivalent, elusive, nuanced, and contradictory. After struggling to label him correctly and coherently, Young says that like Walt Whitman, Adams “contains multitudes’’ (p. 229). Adams “engaged in constant dialogue with himself ’’ and never developed a consistent political theory (pp. 238, 243). I would call particular attention to Adams’s complicated positions on democracy, truth, anti-Semitism, and feminism. Young tentatively tries to claim Adams for democracy. He argues that Adams always believed in representative democracy, twice stating that he was not a “democratic misanthrope’’ (pp. 203, 242, 76, 114). Adams “offers us a kind of democratic idealism’’ (p. 30). Young argues that Adams offers some clues for a democratic revival, even if he would not believe in that revival (p. 8), but his evidence for these assertions is a bit thin. At some point in his voluminous writings, Adams complimented the conduct of the people during the War of 1812, and did not associate morality with social station (pp. 65, 114). “The Virgin’s sympathy for ordinary people and the victims of injustice and her distrust of authority might well find a sympathetic hearing on the Left,’’ Young writes, “though I certainly do not claim that this is Adams’s intended audience or that he himself should be placed on the left of the political spectrum’’ (p. 222). Young also calls Adams a “civic republican,’’ which means that he hoped for a populace devoted to the common good (pp. 45, 120). Adams would “embrace the idea of community, the stress on duty and virtue as the antithesis of corruption, but he would not be so enthusiastic about the republican theory of participatory democracy’’ (p. 232). His ideas in the end “were a none too consistent mixture of civic humanism, liberalism, and, in his case, a residual Puritanism’’ (p. 232). James Young is clearly a democrat; but I am not persuaded that Adams is even a fellow traveler. Adams’s theoretical contributions lie elsewhere. Given the difficulty in labeling Adams, perhaps it is not surprising that Young won-

ders if Adams can properly be considered a postmodernist. Adams continually searched for unity in the world, but found only chaos. Young concludes that Adams is an individualist who cultivates a unique self, not a postmodernist, “[b]ut there are ways in which Adams seems to at least flirt with postmodernism’’ (pp. 158–59). Coming before Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Adams could not really flirt with postmodernism, but Young has opened an intriguing line of thought. Like William James, Adams does not believe in fixed truth, and he especially rejected the convictions of his Puritan ancestors. Perhaps Adams is a proto-postmodernist. Young forthrightly concedes Adams’s antiSemitism, yet repeatedly insists that it is not central to his theories (pp. 2, 114). Young explains his anti-Semitism as a form of madness (“serious derangement’’; “psychic disorder’’). Young suggests that Adams should not be dismissed because of his anti-Semitism, and that is true, but as Young himself points out, Adams’s hatred of Jews is related to his association of them with the bankers that he despises (p. 185). Also, from the beginning of The Education, Adams makes it clear that he sees Jews as outsiders in America; he cannot comprehend how an Adams has fallen as low in social status and power as “Israel Cohen’’ (p. 3). Thus, it is not entirely correct to say that the anti-Semitism is unrelated to other key ideas in Adams. Young wonders whether Adams might be seen as a feminist, even if he ignored suffragists and dress reformers: “Perhaps in elevating women to an almost mystical level and in stressing motherhood, as he did, he could not see that the equality, if not the superiority, he sought for women could be furthered by granting them the suffrage’’ (p. 128). Young concedes that it was not quite feminist of Adams to identify women as irrational, even if Adams contrasts feminist irrationality favorably with the rationality of industrial capitalism (p. 156). Because Adams associated women with reproduction and thought that women belonged at home in the family, he cannot be seen as a great feminist (pp. 193, 230). Despite the fact that I ultimately think Young’s case for Adams as a friend, fellow traveler, and resource for democracy is weak, I think that every one should read Henry Adams, and any theorist who wants to explore commentary on Adams should start with Young. Young is fair: He tries to present Adams as an appealing figure, but straightforwardly addresses counterevidence and arguments. His book makes a substantial contribution to American political thought. I do not know of another assessment of Adams from the standpoint of

political theory. Young offers a seemingly complete and up-to-date bibliography on Adams. Young is particularly helpful in figuring out the machinations of the English politicians Russell, Gladstone, and Palmer during the Civil War;

Adams’s discussion of them in The Education is passionate and soaked with Machiavellian insights, but quite confusing. Ultimately, I agree with Young that democratic theorists should read Adams in order to

better understand the United States and the nature of political action, to meditate on progress and failure, and to determine the type of education that is necessary to think and act in a world that seems to be spinning out of control.

AMERICAN POLITICS

ences and partisanship; he proposes a hypothetical distribution of voters’ preferences and partisanship; if possible, he derives analytical results on the behavior of the parties given the hypothetical distribution of preferences; he simulates party strategy trajectories using computational models, again relying on the hypothetical distribution of preferences; then he simulates party stategy trajectories using a distribution derived from real data on voters’ preferences; and finally, he compares the party strategy trajectories derived from the simulations to trajectories drawn from real data on party strategies over the last several decades. One can only be impressed by two aspects of this research project. First, the project has a creative mixture of methodologies and data, bringing to bear mathematical models, computational models with simulated data and then calibrated with real data from surveys of mass publics, and data on party manifestos and expert assessments of partisan ideological positions. And second, the results from the analysis are just downright compelling. The dynamic trajectories of the parties within the computational models, and even the point predictions from some of the models on actual party positions, bear striking resemblances to the real data on party behavior summarized in the book and familiar to scholars of party politics. His models capture features of party politics that few other models from past research programs have been able to capture, such as dynamic fluctuations within ideological ranges, parties chasing each other in ideological space but at a distance, and few instances of convergence of parties on the same ideological position. In considering the set of assumptions Adams adopts, I like the trade-off he made and his approach: Because he uses computational models, he is not constrained by analytical tractability to make heroic simplifying assumptions and can analyze models with combinations of realistic assumptions. The assumptions are well justified by empirical patterns that are familiar to scholars of elections and parties. He could have taken more systematically the next step, demonstrating the robustness of the conclusions drawn from the simulations. I have some other concerns with the book. The author wishes to separate conceptually a

voter’s partisanship and his or her ideological congruence with a party. That is fine in a hypothetical situation he analyzes, yet when he simulates party behavior using real data in the calibrated computational models, he incorporates partisanship and the ideological preferences of the voters drawn from surveys, without “cleaning’’ the issue congruence from the partisanship. Certainly in data from real surveys, the two concepts are intertwined in complex ways, and it would require the appropriate statistical procedure to incorporate estimations of the basic (uncontaminated) partisanship of the electorates of these countries. Also, Adams implies throughout that his project is original because it combines spatial modeling with insights derived from behavioral research. But he overstates the case. Actually, the blending of spatial modeling and the findings from behavioral research has been going on for a long time, in both directions— so political surveys regularly include spatial scales for respondents on which to place themselves and candidates, and spatial models often include valence dimensions or biases voters have toward candidates separate from spatial distances—and with many valuable results. It is true that his research is original, just not in being among the few to combine the two approaches to studying elections and campaigns. Finally, he uses such concepts as equilibrium among parties, stasis in party positions, and stability of party competition without formally defining and contrasting these terms. Despite these shortcomings, I encourage scholars of parties and elections to pay attention to Party Competition and Responsible Party Government. Not only does Adams use some unconventional methods; he also combines methods in new ways and even pushes some of those methodologies further, such as in his simulating party strategies using voters’ preferences derived from surveys. His findings and his overall conclusions will be hard for persons in any research tradition to refute. The modeling world he creates looks a lot like the political world we live in, and so the challenge is now for those who disagree with his approach to come as close as he does in predicting the broad behavioral patterns of party competition in France, Great Britain, and the United States.

Party Competition and Responsible Party Government: A Theory of Spatial Competition Based on Insights from Behavioral Research. By James Adams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 256p. $52.50 cloth, $24.95 paper. — Ken Kollman, University of Michigan James Adams provides a compelling and innovative book on elections and political party competition in France, Great Britain, and the United States. It unites theoretical modeling and data analysis to help us understand how parties in multiparty democracies compete when citizens both are partisan and care about the issue positions of the parties. Adams’s main point of departure is that while voters in advanced democracies maintain partisan loyalties over decades, many citizens, and not only independents, vote on the basis of the issue positions of candidates and parties. Note that these two facts are not contradictory, as he discusses at length. Furthermore, spatial voting models have not been used often or successfully to understand multiparty systems where voters have these enduring partisan loyalties. Adams begins with a fairly standard spatial voting model. Parties compete over a single, ideological dimension, they can change positions to attract voters, and voters choose parties weighing both their partisan biases and the ideological distance between their ideal points and the positions of the parties. When he combines these basic assumptions with other features of party competition, he enters challenging theoretical territory. The set of assumptions used for any given chapter corresponds to the case at hand. For instance, he analyzes a spatial model with four parties competing in his first of two chapters on French elections, whereas he analyzes a spatial model with three parties competing in his chapter on British elections. After describing the basic model, Adams repeats a pattern several times in the book, first for a generic case, then for Great Britain, then for France, and finally for the United States. The pattern proceeds as follows: He uses survey data to show a correlation between issue prefer-

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Book Reviews

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Rolling the Dice with State Initiatives: Interest Group Involvement in Ballot Campaigns. By Robert M. Alexander. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. 144p. $59.95. Democratic Delusions: The Initiative Process in America. By Richard Ellis. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. 260p. $35.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. — Todd Donovan, Western Washington University Political science is slowly catching up with the initiative process. Direct citizen decision making on laws has long been a feature of many American states, particularly those in the West. Although there has been a steady increase in the number of ballot measures that have qualified since the 1960s, including measures like California’s Proposition 13 that ushered in the “tax revolt’’ of the early Reagan era, use of initiatives in the states reached a new peak in the 1990s. In that decade, there were nearly four hundred initiatives on state ballots—far more than during any other decade. Prior to the 1990s, there were few attempts at systematic assessment of the politics of initiatives. Indeed, David Magleby’s (1984) Direct Legislation remains the classic demonstration of how direct democracy offers opportunities for rich avenues of study. Direct citizen lawmaking presents us with obvious questions about how people decide when they vote on initiatives, about the prospects for voter competence, about concerns for minority rights, and about how we should value representative democracy. Although these questions may seem obvious, the answers are often somewhat complex. Yet for over a decade after Magleby’s book, very few scholarly books were published on direct democracy in the United States. With renewed use of initiatives, more scholars are now turning their attention to these questions. A number of political scientists, including Richard Ellis and Robert Alexander, have recently focused on questions of a more structural nature, including: How do initiatives affect who gets what from government? Do they make public policy more representative of mass preferences? Do they promote the concerns of narrow economic interests, or broadly based (public) interests? Do they create unique public policies? As the authors of these two volumes demonstrate, initiatives alter how interest groups might affect a state’s public policies. Ellis’s approach to direct democracy is particularly engaging. Drawing rich examples and data from the practice of direct democracy in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and California, he provides ample support for his 180 March 2003

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argument that the initiative process has become dominated by elected officials, interest group elites, and others. Ellis views the growing use of initiatives from a supplyside perspective; rather than reflecting the demands of a discontented mass public, he shows that many initiative proposals are vehicles that these actors use to promote themselves, their candidacies, or their relatively narrow issues. Although these arguments are not particularly new, perhaps no one else has done a better job of supporting them than Ellis. One of the many things that makes Ellis’s book engaging is that his critique of American direct democracy recognizes that the process remains quite popular, and that not only will it continue to shape policy but it may also play an even greater role in the future. Indeed, one of his main case studies of policymaking via the initiative is a sympathetic portrait of Helen Hill, an Oregon resident who used the initiative to rewrite that state’s laws on access to adoption records. Hill might represent the classic progressive ideal that concerned citizens can occasionally use the initiative to make policy more responsive to their (or the public’s) preferences, and then return to their private affairs. More common, from Ellis’s perspective, are measures bankrolled by well-financed economic groups and those promoted by incumbent politicians and professional initiative activists—with some activists earning their living by being able to keep a healthy number of proposals in the pipeline between election cycles. From his viewpoint, initiative activists promoting their pet policies (often antitax proposals) combine with professional signature gatherers to produce initiatives that may receive a majority of votes, yet serve as a thin reflection of the public’s true concerns. These activists—Bill Sizemore of Oregon, Tim Eyman of Washington, David Bruce of Colorado, and others—are featured here in rich detail. Ellis has conducted masterful interviews with initiative activists and with legislators that offer an entertaining description of their motives and methods. In fact, the tension between state legislators and initiative proponents is probably presented here as well as in any other work. Readers may be struck by how candid legislators are in expressing their disgust with some initiative proponents—even with those they see as ideological partners. Ellis has managed to get his subjects to be open and frank in a manner that is rarely captured by journalists or scholars. Although recognizing that there was probably never any grassroots-dominated “golden age” of the initiative (Chapter 7), Ellis nonetheless mourns the relative lack of “single-issue

political novices” (p. 118), who “spearhead an initiative in order to remedy a social injustice that has been ignored by an unresponsive political system, and, then, having triumphed over the politicians and special interests, return to the ordinary life of a citizen” (p. 116). Such citizens are out there, he notes, but they lack the resources to buy access to the process. This presents a problem: How might the process be reformed so that initiatives actually reflect citizens’ concerns? At one level, he appeals for citizens to block special interest initiatives, urging that they not sign their petitions. At another level, Ellis also considers changing the rules about the process of deliberating and voting on initiatives. He evaluates several reforms that could give elected representatives more input, and discusses reforms that would make it more difficult for initiatives to pass. These include a threshold of voter participation required for approval, supermajority vote requirements, and majorities in successive elections. Ellis does a nice job of illustrating that in the Swiss initiative process the legislature plays a greater role in the deliberation over proposals than most American state legislatures do by permitting only indirect initiatives. Recognizing, however, that the voting public will probably not approve the constitutional amendments required to alter their state’s beloved initiative process, Ellis ultimately appeals to the courts to be more aggressive in applying the singlesubject rule. Democratic Delusions is an important book for those seeking to understand debates about how democracy functions in the western United States at the start of the twenty-first century. Ellis leaves us with a portrait of direct democracy distinctly at odds with recent quantitative empirical analysis that suggests that initiatives lead states to adopt policies closer to median voter preferences. He argues, rather, that initiatives distort contemporary policy, and that they played little role in advancing the progressive agenda 90 years ago. However, Ellis is unable to distinguish between the direct effect on policy of an initiative’s passing, and the indirect effect it has via reshaping a state’s agenda. At times, the argument assumes the process has “a lack of checks on majorities” (p. 139), yet it is also said to produce policies that fail to promote the concerns of majorities. To his credit, he can make sense of this with his comprehensive assessment of initiative use in the United States. Alexander’s brief study focuses on interest group involvement on two initiatives: California’s Proposition 5 of 1998, which expanded tribal gambling, and Missouri’s Amendment 9 of 1998, which authorized a loose interpretation of what qualified as river-

boat gambling (“boats in moats”). He claims that with his findings, “a step has been taken to solve the Populist Paradox” (p. x) that Elisabeth Gerber (1999) has drawn attention to in The Populist Paradox. His read on this paradox is that interest groups “may bypass traditional methods of lobbying in order to directly make public policy” (p. 1). Specifically, he proposes to assess the types of groups involved in initiative politics, the campaign strategies these groups use, and the “impact of interest groups upon initiative campaigns” (p. 7). Neither Ellis nor Alexander gives readers a clear sense of the proportion of initiatives that appear to be written by wealthy interests seeking to advance their own industry or enhance their ability to make money. Existing literature and Ellis’s book, however, cover enough ground to make it clear that such cases are fairly rare; what are more common are wealthy patrons who sponsor initiatives on topics unrelated to their source of wealth (e.g., medical marijuana, taxes on tobacco, school choice) and corporate interests that spend vast sums to defeat initiatives they fear. Given Alexander’s questions, then, his choice of cases seems a bit odd. Although the initiatives in his study were on comparable subjects, they may be the least representative of measures that voters have ever approved. Prop. 5 and Amendment 9 represent rare cases for three reasons: The proponents had nearly unlimited resources (spending on Prop. 5 reached $90 million); the initiative was written to enhance the proponents’ ability to make money; and the initiatives actually passed. Apart from some hand waving about the virtues of case studies (pp. 41–42) and a claim of “gambling being a prototypical issue that energizes the electorate” (p. 43), there is no clear rationalization for selecting these cases to answer the questions the author proposed. Alexander spends the first three chapters of a six-chapter book prefacing his analysis with tables reproduced from other published works, reviewing literature on initiatives and interest groups, comparing demographics of the two states, and discussing the method to be used in the substantive chapters (4 and 5). The method consists mainly of sifting through media reports of the two campaigns in order to describe each one. Unlike Ellis’s work, there is little (if any) direct interviewing. This proves problematic. At several points in Chapter 4, Alexander attributes the success of Prop. 5’s proponents (tribal casinos) to their ability to “mobilize more citizens” to campaign door-to-door (pp. 71, 76). He also notes that the $66 million “Yes” campaign “illustrated characteristics of a citizen group”

(pp. 62, 77). He notes also that this citizen base, the proponents’ strategy of framing the issue, and “the unique standing of Native Americans in California . . . pushed them over the edge and won the election” (p. 76). All of this may be true, but the points are quite debatable, and readers are given no evidence to support such claims. In fact, the primary supporting reference for the “citizen” base of the campaign is a self-promotional article written by the campaign’s professional consultant. Alexander’s book should prove useful for readers who seek a summary of the context of these two campaigns, but, at the end, it may not provide much in the way of answers to the questions it began with. Democracy in Practice: Public Participation in Environmental Decisions. By Thomas C. Beierle and Jerry Cayford. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future Press, 2002. 160p. $50.00 cloth, $18.95 paper. — Christopher J. Bosso, Northeastern University Political scientists constantly debate the value of public participation in policymaking. In philosophical terms, the debate seems onesided—participation is, on balance, a good thing in a system that calls itself a democracy. In more practical terms, however, the jury is still out, probably because scholars and participants alike have long vested in public participation almost impossible hopes and dreams. Not only is it supposed to keep government honest and open; participation also is supposed to produce more informed and thus “better’’ decisions, and in the process build greater civic capacity, trust, and legitimacy. Given the degree to which these expectations go unfulfilled, it is small wonder that three decades later, we still ask: Does participation make a difference? Thomas Beierle and Jerry Cayford, scholars at the environmental policy think tank Resources for the Future, think it does. To prove it, they undertake an innovative and methodologically sophisticated meta-analysis of 239 distinct cases involving public participation in environmental disputes. Their goals, as described early on, are to understand the factors that contribute to the success or failure of participatory processes, to assess the effectiveness of respective procedures for incorporating public input, and, finally, to judge the “social value’’ of participation. Although their analysis is directed at environmental disputes, the frequently corrosive nature of such conflicts make the authors’ findings applicable to a broader array of public problems.

Beierle and Cayford first assess the case study literature to construct a conceptual framework with which to select, code, and analyze the cases. This useful framework is comprised of three broad components—context, process, and results—that in turn are broken down into a series of key attributes. The authors and their energetic research assistant then screened more than 1,800 case studies from over a 30-year period to arrive at the 239 that made up the data set, set up a coding regime to ensure requisite reliability, and then painstakingly coded the cases according to the factors derived from the framework. This endeavor alone merits attention, and graduate students in particular would do well to note the rigor and care that went into the study’s methodology. The authors next assessed the data in light of five generally expressed social goals of participation derived from the literature: the degree to which participation 1) introduced public values into the decisions, 2) improved the substantive quality of the decision, 3) resolved conflict, 4) built public trust in institutions, and 5) educated and informed the public. Of these, participation most clearly improved public understanding of environmental problems and attendant decisionmaking processes, but it did strikingly little to improve public trust in institutions. Participation incorporated at least some public values into decisions, helped to improve the substantive quality of decisions in many cases, and in some limited instances resolved conflicts among competing interests— although conflict avoidance may have been a more common outcome. Moving beyond these broad goals, the authors found that contextual variables (e.g., types of issues, level of government involved) had relatively little impact in determining the success or failure of public participation— much less than expected. However, they suggested, more work on the role of context needs to be done. On the other hand, process variables (e.g., responsiveness of the lead agency, degree of public control) mattered a great deal. It seems that creating a process that incorporates meaningful public participation in fact begets meaningful public participation. More telling, the degree to which participation affects decision making, especially during the implementation phase of policymaking, depends on the regulatory program within which it takes place. Or, as the authors conclude, even participation done well “is not a substitute for the regulatory power, political will, and money required to get things done’’ (p. 62). Government matters. www.apsanet.org 181

Book Reviews

American Politics

Learning from the past is but one part of the authors’ overall purposes. They also want to improve decision making, and they use their analysis to suggest steps by which policymakers can determine the need for public participation in a dispute, identify the goals that such participation is supposed to attain, calculate who should participate and how, and, finally, evaluate success or failure. Above all, regulators need to stop thinking about public participation as a marginal addition to a largely technical process. It is, instead, at the core of a public process that may need technical input. Their plea for such a change in emphasis says volumes about the normative and practical impacts of effective participation, not to mention the apparent intransigence of the managerial mind-set more than three decades after the call went out for “maximum feasible participation’’ in policymaking. On the stylistic side, the book flows well, and the authors wisely put most of the methodological discussions in separate appendices. The study is well constructed, and its methodology is transparent enough to be adapted by other scholars. An additional benefit is an excellent bibliography that promises to be the starting point for any number of doctoral dissertations. This book is also an excellent teaching tool, and is particularly suited for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses on environmental policy, public policy, decision making, and, even, democratic theory. It would make a nice companion study to Barry Rabe’s excellent cross-national analysis Beyond NIMBY: Hazardous Waste Siting in Canada and the United States (1994). Instructors could also pair its meta-analysis with one or more of the case studies listed in an appendix. In sum, Democracy in Practice is good social science about an important topic, presented in a highly readable manner. Scholars, whether young and not so, should take a look at this book to see how it can be done. The Politics of Globalization in the United States. By Edward S. Cohen. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001. 214p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. — Jeffrey M. Ayres, Saint Michael’s College There is no shortage of research that purports to tell us something new about globalization and its varied impacts on domestic politics and international relations today. Moreover, students mining this literature continue to find a broad spectrum of opinion on globalization, from those offering a strong state thesis that seemingly willfully ignores the many interdependent relationships states are entangled in 182 March 2003

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today, to those embracing a weak state thesis that accepts the erosion of state sovereignty as a given. Edward Cohen’s new book avoids these analytical traps, as he navigates through both popular and academic debates on globalization to produce a well-rounded and useful picture of a prosperous and hegemonic United States nonetheless increasingly agitated and divided internally over trade, immigration, and language policy at the end of the twentieth century. Cohen’s analytical framework draws from a wide spectrum of political writings, borrowing from Murray Edelman’s work on the symbolic uses of politics, to Robert Reich’s and Dani Rodrik’s political economy perspectives, to Roland Robertson’s cultural studies of globalization. Following an introductory chapter, which lays out the book’s argument, Cohen presents two conceptual chapters that draw upon this eclectic mix of research to provide an elaboration of terms, and which address questions central to current debates over globalization: Is globalization a phenomenon “new’’ to the late twentieth century; in what ways is state sovereignty being affected by globalization; what are the varied policy impacts, especially beyond material interests, of globalization; who are the winners and losers, and what sorts of societal divisions are being created by globalization in the United States today? Cohen answers these questions and illustrates these divisions and their link to the increased exposure of Americans to a more global environment through examples from recent battles over trade, immigration, and language policy in the book’s middle three chapters. For him, the increased immersion of Americans, especially since the 1970s, into this global context is not the result of unstoppable, untraceable malicious forces. Rather—and this is the crux of his argument—globalization is the result of purposeful “policy choices designed to expand the role of market institutions in American life’’ (p. 75). Moreover, rather than resulting in a loss of American sovereignty, globalization and the reordering of state-society relations in the United States that have resulted are a product of U.S. sovereignty, which “remains alive and well’’ (p. 25). For Cohen, sovereignty is comprised of more than just a state’s capacities and resources, but refers as well to the purposes and goals of a state. The policies devised over the past two decades, then, to increasingly expose more individuals and institutions in the United States to market forces and create a “competition state’’ (p. 110) have been the product of sovereign political choices. However, these political choices, he argues, have in turn undermined a shared sense of responsibility, identity, and destiny and

created an America increasingly divided over global policy issues. The early 1990s battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement is a logical choice for illustrating the economic dimension of the globalization debate in the United States. President Clinton’s struggle to convince his political allies in the Democratic Party of the trade accord’s benefits, culminating in the creation of the environmental and labor sideagreements designed to appease the more agitated in the liberal-left of this constituency, hinted at the public divisions soon to emerge between centrist “new Democrats’’ favored by the Democratic Leadership Council and increasingly disaffected groups from labor, human rights, and environmental and consumer groups who felt betrayed by Clinton’s determined push for NAFTA. Moreover, the NAFTA battle clearly helped mobilize what later became known as the “Seattle coalition’’ of civil society groups, with Clinton’s failed attempts to have fast-track (now known as trade-promotion) authority renewed by a rebellious Congress concurrent with the eventual embarrassing collapse of World Trade Organization talks in Seattle in the midst of a sea of thousands of angry anti-WTO protestors. Astute observers of the globalization debate are by now well versed in these battles, and Cohen usefully drives his analysis beyond debates over the distribution of material benefits in an era of continental free trade, to what he argues are just as important symbolic and cultural dimensions of globalization’s divisive impact on the American polity. The continued influx of immigrants into the United States, as well as the accompanying rise of educational, welfare, and voting policy adjustments for non-English speakers, has driven a powerful symbolic wedge into a country increasingly confused over the requisites of membership and citizenship in the American political community (p. 119). Yet, again, for Cohen, these social conflicts are not due—as some involved in anti–free trade, anti-immigrant, and English-language-only movements might contend—to an erosion of American state sovereignty. Rather, the political backlash against the more liberal trade and immigration policies of the past two decades is linked to the conscious decision by influential business and policy interests to redirect American power toward the enhancement of competitive market forces. Cohen’s argument that both the capacities and purposes of U.S. sovereignty over the past two decades have been reworked in favor of market imperatives, thus encouraging the latest round of globalized trade, information flows, and migration, is a persuasive one. However, this writer is less sanguine than is Cohen about

the condition of popular sovereignty in the United States, or that there has not been “any significant diminution of American sovereignty as a result of this agreement [NAFTA] or the WTO’’ (p. 113). It is notable that there is no discussion of the increasingly controversial investment protections in Chapter 11 of NAFTA. NAFTA’s Chapter 11 was seemingly designed to protect investors from the threat of expropriation or nationalization. Yet corporations have increasingly used these protections to sue NAFTA-member governments in secret tribunals if regulations or government decisions are interpreted to negatively affect investment opportunities. The result has been a growing list of so-called investor-to-state cases that involve challenges to state or federal regulations, and which have raised concerns about the constraints being placed upon democratic governance in the United States by these new trade and investment accords. Moreover, while Cohen can be forgiven for not anticipating the stock-market bubble and the numerous examples of corporate corruption that have captured the headlines of late, his insistence that the United States has entered the twenty-first century “with the most competitive economy in a global system organized around the virtues of market competition and efficiency’’ (p. 77) now rings a little hollow. Crony capitalism, it turns out, is not a concept foreign to U.S. corporate boardrooms. Those market-friendly policies, which Cohen argues helped to propel the United States to its preeminent globally competitive position, were of course cheered on with help from an infusion of record amounts of bubble-assisted campaign money during the 1990s, a perversity that has clearly helped to promote political disaffection across the country. Nonetheless, Cohen is to be applauded for developing a more multifaceted study of globalization that promises continued analytical relevance as divisive policy debates continue to unfold. The razor-thin congressional renewal of trade-promotion authority for President Bush only sets up what promises to be bruising trade battles over passage of the Free Trade Area of the Americas and the WTO Doha round. Moreover, in the post–September 11 environment, concerns over border security and immigration control have again become more salient. Debates, then, over the meaning of identity and membership in the American political community will remain with us for the foreseeable future, and Cohen’s multidimensional analysis in The Politics of Globalization in the United States provides guidance for understanding the roots and contemporary significance of this political turbulence.

Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century. By Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. 328p. $35.00 cloth, $15.95 paper. — David Lowery, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Place Matters provides a deep, nuanced, and comprehensive summary of the new regionalist perspective on urban governance. Ably authored by a trio of accomplished students of urban politics, the book’s thesis (p. 21) is that “where we live has a powerful effect on the choices we have and our capacity to achieve a high quality life.’’ That is, the often complex and fragmented jurisdictional arrangements of many American metropolises both exacerbate the social and economic ills that can be associated with urban life and delimit the range of opportunities available to all of their citizens for addressing these problems. This theme, of course, is not new. Indeed, the last two decades have seen a slow but steady emergence of the new regionalist perspective as a counterbalance to the now dominant public-choice emphasis on the virtues of jurisdictional fragmentation. Previously, the regionalist perspective was perhaps best reflected in David Rusk’s Cities Without Suburbs (1993) or Anthony Downs’s New Visions for Metropolitan America (1994). But neither of these books fully integrated the ideas of the new regionalist perspective into the broader range of theories about urban politics. Place Matters does so in a thorough and readily accessible manner. The book’s theses are prosecuted in eight chapters. The first two chapters, respectively, outline the central social and economic crises facing urban America and tally their costs. This review emphasizes especially the complementary nature of the costs of concentrated poverty imposed on citizens of the urban core and the burdens of sprawl weighing on those living on the periphery of metropolitan areas. Chapter 3 then provides a cogent review of the history of urban policy in the United States, demonstrating how contemporary metropolitan institutional arrangements are more than an accident or a simple aggregation of individual choices. Indeed, federal urban policy is found to be deeply complicit in getting us to where we are today. Chapter 4 considers the very limited range of policy options now available to cities for addressing the twin problems of concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, given current institutional arrangements. In the last three chapters, the authors assess the regionalist alternative. Chapter 6 examines the history of regionalist solutions to metropolitan policy

problems, while Chapter 7 outlines and evaluates a range of incremental steps that should be undertaken to implement regional governance of metropolitan areas and, thereby, regional solutions to metropolitan problems. In the last and perhaps most interesting chapter, the authors directly challenge the widely prevailing pessimism about the prospects of building a political coalition capable of implementing regionalist solutions. They argue that a close examination of President’s Clinton’s success in building an electoral coalition crossing the urban core and suburbs, while rarely used by Clinton to address urban problems per se, demonstrates well the potential of a new urban politics based on a regionalist metropolitan vision. Place Matters has a number of important strengths. First, and unlike prior works emphasizing regionalist themes, it provides a solid context within which to assess critically the evolution of urban policy problems and their solutions. Its cogent reviews of the history of federal urban policy and the pace of demographic change in America are especially useful. Authors Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom also introduce a comparative context by occasionally contrasting American cases with their counterparts in Europe and Canada. Second, without overwhelming the text, the full panoply of theories employed by urban scholars—regime theory, the city-suburb dependence hypothesis, the growth machine model, and the Tiebout model—are linked to regionalist themes. Just as usefully, the exceptionally thorough notes provide a solid guide for students to pursue the scholarly literature on these topics. Third, without being preachy, the book couches its analysis in a strong normative concern about the role of government in providing economic and social opportunities for its citizens and venues for exercising democratic citizenship. Finally, the authors provide us a nicely written, seamless text, one that continually weaves in short examples of individuals illustrating well how urban politics really matters for real people. While I very much enjoyed reading Place Matters, I also wish that it had spent a bit more time on two issues. First, the intellectual case of metropolitan fragmentation is given relatively short shrift in the authors’ efforts to outline the regionalist perspective. The public choice perspective, while discussed, remains something of a caricature. But the regionalist and public choice perspectives are best understood when contrasted with each other. And second, while the authors note the recent success—after decades of failure—of efforts to consolidate the City of Louisville and Jefferson County (misidentified at one point as www.apsanet.org 183

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American Politics

Richmond County), Kentucky, they do not fully explore the case. This is unfortunate given their claims about the potential for developing a regionalist political coalition. The Kentucky case provides a superb example of constructing such a coalition in the face of many obstacles. A more detailed examination of it would have strengthened their optimistic assessment of the future of regionalism. Still, Place Matters will make an excellent addition to advanced undergraduate and introductory graduate courses on urban politics, especially if paired with one of the many available books exploring the public choice case for metropolitan institutional fragmentation. It is highly accessible without sacrificing theory or ready reference to the scholarly literature. It is also a relative inexpensive work, one that will provide students and faculty considerable bang for their buck. Delegating Powers: A TransactionCost Approach to Policymaking under Separate Powers. By David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 336p. $55.00 cloth, $21.00 paper. — Daniel P. Carpenter, Harvard University For decades, the delegation problem has stoked theoretically rigorous, empirically taxing work in institutional political science. The central achievement of David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran’s book is to posit clearly a trade-off between delegating internally and delegating externally. The authors compare delegation to the “make-or-buy’’ decision of the firm in industrial organization theory. It is the congressional “floor’’ (its median voter) that delegates, with the choice of handing policymaking to its committee system (internal) or to the executive branch (external). Either “agent” is capable of specifying statutory details or of learning about policy’s probable consequences in a way that would be too costly for the floor to undertake. Yet neither has preferences identical to those of the floor, and so each confronts Congress with a classic “hold-up” problem. This simple and alluring idea has farreaching implications. One of the most salient concerns political control of the bureaucracy. Delegating Powers is one of the first transaction-cost analyses to suggest that in delegation, Congress cannot have its cake and eat it, too. If Congress loads down a bureaucrat with a) statutory specification and b) administrative procedures, then both a) and b) must be specified by a committee. That is, the restraint of the executive itself compels delegation with its concomitant agency 184 March 2003

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losses. When (plausibly) the preferences of the specifying committee diverge from the floor’s, procedural control is much less compelling. By showing that delegation is genuine, and that procedural control carries its own costs, the authors masterfully refute legislative dominance scholarship. Another kudo deserved by Epstein and O’Halloran concerns empirical measurement. They create a measure of delegation that aggregates, for each of 257 important legislative measures passed in the post–World War II period, the number of planks that delegate, divides this sum by the number of planks, and then subtracts from the resulting “delegation ratio’’ a weighted aggregate of the number of constraints placed upon delegation. Their measure is simple and intuitive, and it has the advantage of comparing delegation across policy domains. From tests using this measure, they generate some nontrivial results supporting their theory: 1) legislative delegation is less common under divided government (pp. 129–40); 2) legislators are less likely to vote for delegation when the president is of the opposite party (pp. 142–50); 3) delegation to the executive induces Congress to structure oversight committees as “contrary outliers’’ that compensate for the divergence of the executive from the floor by skewing the other way (pp. 167, 171–77); and 4) these outliers emerge more frequently under divided than unified government (pp. 177–82). Despite these triumphs, noteworthy liabilities accrue to Epstein and O’Halloran’s analysis. First, the static foundations of their model remove the most important transaction-cost considerations from view, namely, the asset value of agencies and Williamsonian “firstmover’’ advantages. A rational legislator will condition present delegation decisions upon the results of past choices, and will anticipate the necessity for future delegation to any agency he or she creates. Suppose a new policy area— where circumstances change repeatedly— emerges, requiring repeated delegation. If Congress delegates authority to a nuclear power commission, for example, it will create new capacities in that agency that will undoubtedly condition future delegation. When nuclear regulation issues emerge again, Congress will be less likely to delegate new nuclear regulatory authority to a newborn agency or a legislative committee. Agencies to which authority is delegated the “first time” will, by the logic of transaction costs, be more likely to receive it again when new policy in the area is created. This point is neither academic nor a mere modeling extension. As Epstein and O’Halloran’s data show, the vast majority of delegations since 1947—fully 759 of 961 (p. 158)—go to existing agencies, not to agen-

cies created de novo. About four in five acts of delegation, then, give authority to agencies whose personnel, structure, and behavioral history are at least somewhat known by Congress. The authors grant passing mention to this crucial fact. The recipients of delegation in their model are characterized only by preferences, not at all by “historical’’ characteristics, such as their observed ability, their observed propensity to defect from the floor median, or their experience with the policy. Empirically, it would be worthwhile to replicate Epstein and O’Halloran’s statistical analyses with controls for whether the policy in question has been delegated to the executive before. Then the authors’ regressions would ask not “did Congress delegate Policy X to the executive?” but, rather, “Did Congress delegate Policy X at time t to the executive, given that it also did so (or did not) at some time t-k?” Attention to the dynamics of delegation would also generate different explanations for the authors’ qualitative inferences. In a seemingly counterintuitive finding, they observe higher delegation ratios for agriculture policy, long assumed the cozy home of distributive politics and congressional dominance. They explain this pattern by reference to the need for presidential assent to enhance an otherwise unstable logrolling coalition on the floor (pp. 220–22). A far better explanation would point to the long history of congressional delegation to the U.S. Department of Agriculture before World War II, including the Meat Inspection Act of 1885 and the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. When it came time to delegate highly complex policymaking to the USDA in the New Deal, as Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol have noted, Franklin Roosevelt and congressional Democrats saw the USDA as the efficient home of commodity price supports. The second problem is that Epstein and O’Halloran’s model is not truly strategic. Neither presidents nor agencies wait idly by as Congress decides whether or not they shall receive new authority. In some cases—witness the Food and Drug Administration and tobacco, or President Clinton and fast-track trade negotiating authority—the executive branch actively seeks to gain new powers that Congress might otherwise be unwilling to grant it. In other cases, as James Q. Wilson has observed, agencies wish to avoid new tasks. In both the agriculture and fast-track negotiation cases, the authors point to presidential lobbying as instrumental to the final outcome. But neither presidential bargaining nor bureaucratic lobbying— both of which are empirical regularities—plays a role in their theory. Third, Epstein and O’Halloran ignore those situations in which discretion is taken

away from the executive (a transaction-cost perspective would not). This artificial unidirectionality of delegation generates some faulty inferences. The most notable comes when they note that the delegation ratio has been declining over time (Figure 5.9), and infer that claims of a runaway bureaucracy are “mythical”: “the amount of discretionary authority given to the executive has declined since 1947” (p. 117). Yet the authors have shown only that the rate of increase of executive discretion has slowed. Since they do not observe delegation taken away, and since authority delegated in one Congress is not returned at the end of the session, they cannot claim that the total amount of bureaucratic discretion has subsided. Put mathematically, the authors make inferences about the “cumulative distribution function” of delegation (which is strictly increasing if removed delegation is unobserved) when they observe only its “density.” There are other pleasures and other faults, but Delegating Powers clearly hews its way into a complex question and makes valuable progress. Further advances will occur when scholars, inspired by transaction-cost considerations or by other theories, look at how the history of delegation conditions its present. The Electorate, the Campaign, and the Office: A Unified Approach to Senate and House Elections. By Paul Gronke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 216p. $39.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. — Wendy J. Schiller, Brown University It is important at the outset to counter any skeptic’s expectation that Paul Gronke is trying to prove that all House races and Senate races are created equal. It is to his credit that he does not try to substantiate such a sweeping generalization. Rather, he very convincingly demonstrates that there is considerable overlap between House and Senate races in terms of competitiveness, intensity, campaign message effectiveness, quality of challengers, and level of voter information. Resisting the urge to engage in hyperbole, let me say that this is a very good book. Gronke states his clear and decisive case early in the book. He cautions congressional and election scholars against comparing the “average’’ Senate race to the “average’’ House race. Senate races occur in states with population sizes that range from a million people to more than 30 million people. A Senate race that occurs in Delaware is bound to have far more in common with a House district race than it does with a Senate campaign in a state as large as Texas. Gronke argues that by lump-

ing all Senate races into one category and taking the average, we hide the variation in Senate races that would show greater similarity to House campaigns. For example, in Chapter 3, he counters one of the most commonly accepted claims that states are inherently more diverse than House districts. But in fact, it is by using a composite scale of diversity (e.g., Sullivan) that one might draw such a conclusion. Gronke chooses to use simple demographic data as separate indicators of diversity and clearly shows that some House districts are much more diverse than some states are. He does a very good job of demonstrating that it is not the de facto size of a state that makes Senate races more expensive or more competitive. Instead, such factors as concentration or dispersion of population, partisan distribution, and the number of media outlets all contribute to a competitive or noncompetitive campaign environment. In Chapters 4 and 5, Gronke analyzes what he calls the “setting’’ for campaigns and tests his theory of a three-stage process that is the same for House and Senate campaigns. In brief, he argues that campaign intensity is a function of the choices of candidates to run for office, and those choices depend on the characteristics of the district or state, including partisan distribution, the overall strength of an incumbent, and the cost of advertising as a function of overall campaign spending. He argues that one reason that Senate races are more competitive is because the partisan distribution in most states is much more balanced than in most House districts, which are purposely delineated to favor one party or the other. If House districts were drawn to ensure partisan competition, then we might see a much higher number of competitive House races. In Chapter 5, Gronke looks at the dynamics of campaigns, particularly what draws strong challengers and why Senate candidates spend more money than House candidates do. By his own admission, the results presented in this chapter do not fully support his contention about the similarity of House and Senate campaigns. A greater number of Senate races draw strong challengers than do House races, and in almost all cases, Senate candidates spend more money than House candidates. But he emphasizes his finding that individuals who consider running for a House or Senate office evaluate a similar set of political and district factors, even if the factors themselves vary. In Chapter 6, Gronke uses the National Election Study and the Senate Election Study data on levels of voter information to show that voters do not hold fundamentally different expectations of senators, and that the

actual type of knowledge that voters display about House and Senate candidates is similar in content. He finds this reassuring in that it shores up his theory that the voter essentially judges the “offices’’ in similar ways. The only flaw here is that he sets up a bit of a straw man test for the content of open-ended “like’’ evaluations. He proposes that voters should mention more foreign policy issues for senators than for House members, and that House members should be recognized more often for constituent and district service, whereas senators should be recognized more for their policy stands. It has been some time since that dichotomy actually operated in the House and Senate; members in both chambers now seek to make careers based on a wide range of issues. Gronke is determined to remove the “institutional’’ effects of the House and Senate from the equation that determines the competitiveness of a campaign. He relies heavily on the measurement of challenger quality and campaign intensity; first he predicts the likelihood of a strong challenger in a House and Senate race, and then he uses campaign intensity in a later section to predict levels of voter awareness. This works very well for open seat races, and he is quite convincing in his argument that the elements of House and Senate campaigns for open seats are very similar indeed. His model faces more scrutiny when it is applied to races with incumbents. A key missing element is a discussion of the effects of the length of term of office on the establishment of a secure electoral base. House members have shorter terms of office, and less individual power, but are typically buffered by a smaller geographic territory and favorable partisan distribution. Senators have a longer term of office, and much greater individual power, but they face a larger geographic district, a more competitive partisan distribution, and a second senator against whom they compete for attention. In other words, the House and Senate offer different prior conditions that lead up to a campaign cycle. Gronke does a good job of measuring some of these conditions, but he omits the impact of a House or Senate member’s institutional behavior on his or her reputation. A strategic challenger enters a race he or she thinks can be won, which necessarily requires the perception that the incumbent is vulnerable. Using seniority as the only individual measure of vulnerability seems to me to be insufficient. Future researchers might consider adding measures of visibility for House and Senate members, perhaps using newspaper coverage in a given two year cycle, as well as legislative record to assess incumbent strength prior to the actual campaign season. www.apsanet.org 185

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Along these lines, there is too little discussion of the type of campaigns that House and Senate candidates run. I agree with Gronke that by the time the campaign gets in full swing in the summer prior to an election, there are more similarities between House and Senate races than there are differences. The objective measures that he uses are convincing, but it also might be the case that the content of a Senate campaign is quite different from that of a House campaign. Senate candidates could engage in different activities, emphasize policy over local concerns, or run heavily on their prior elective experience, for example, as a governor. Take a situation where a House member runs for the Senate, either challenging an incumbent or in an open-seat race. Does that House member run an identical campaign to that previously run for the House, or is the campaign modified? If we knew which House members succeeded in their quests for the Senate and which ones failed, we might be able to better separate the district-characteristic and partisan-distribution effects of House and Senate seats from the actual campaign effects. For reference, two books, Challengers, Competition, and Reelection (1994) by Jonathan Krasno, and The Spectacle of U.S. Senate Campaigns (1999) by Kim Fridkin Kahn and Patrick Kenney, provide illustrative examples of campaign content, and along with Gronke’s book, they give a comprehensive picture of the dynamics of House and Senate campaigns. The importance of Gronke’s research extends well beyond understanding congressional campaigns. It also provides a very good electoral rationale for the rise in intrachamber coordination within each of the major political parties. Current scholars of Congress are demonstrating that House and Senate party leaders work hard to coordinate their legislative agendas, across chambers, to emphasize their party’s policy agenda. The Electorate, the Campaign, and the Office brings us closer to understanding what party leaders may already know: House and Senate campaigns are decided in a similar fashion, and on many of the same dimensions. What Is It About Government That Americans Dislike? Edited by John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 296p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper. — Jane Junn, Rutgers University This edited volume begins with the premise that the American public’s dislike of government is a problem; there is too much negative 186 March 2003

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sentiment about government. The editors pose a number of questions, among them how to fashion reforms in order to create a “style of government that would make the people happy” (p. 1). Consistent with their important new work on “stealth democracy,” John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that this unhappiness is not the result of policy outcomes at odds with citizen preferences, but is instead rooted in the rancorous public process of political sausage making. They take issue with the notion that more voice through deliberation should lead to greater approval of government, and suggest instead that people would feel a lot better if democratic processes minimized the influence of special interests and maximized representation of a “public interest, [that] by its very nature, is concerned with the welfare of all salt-of-the-earth Americans” (p. 249). The volume contains 14 valuable articles that highlight the significance of the study of public attitudes about government performance, and taken together, raise many fascinating questions. To varying degrees, the individual chapters are consistent with Hibbing and Theiss-Morse’s proposition that public dislike of government is rooted in the means rather than the ends of democracy in America. Indeed, their proposition rejecting the importance of the substance of political outcomes as the cause for the negative affect rests on the strong assumption that such a public interest can and does exist. [Even if a seemingly uncontested collective outcome were present, it cannot it be assumed that it is necessarily desirable, particularly if the political process systematically advantages some Americans, salt-of-theearth or otherwise.] A second assumption worth scrutinizing is the notion that a polity with a lot of positive affect toward leaders and institutions is good, for the position begs the question: How much affect, and good for what and for whom? One need only consider the unprecedented public support of the U.S. president in particular and of institutions of government in general in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Bush administration’s subsequent use of this backing to ensure swift passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, as a reminder of the power of high levels of public support. The law has substantial influence on the process or means of democracy, and has been opposed by groups on both ends of the political spectrum for its constriction of rights and civil liberties. Further, the strategic use of the characterization of public support of the government as patriotic versus disapproval as “un-American” has both the imperative and chilling effect of silencing productive dissent.

Just as caution must be taken to refrain from blindly assuming more deliberation is better, pause should also prevent one from reflexively seeking more public support for government without considering for what ends it is sought. Discerning how political actions create negative affect toward the government may indeed be very useful for “taking steps to limit activities that cast government in a bad light” (p. 153), particularly for those interested in covering processes that result in bad ends. Apart from more extensive consideration of what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse call the “so what” question (p. 206), the strength of the research in the volume lies in the effort to specify the attitudes that constitute negative affect toward the government, and the analysis of the patterns and determinants of those opinions. The set of attitudes is indeed large, encompassing trust, approval, legitimacy, competence, confidence, dislike, mood, faith, satisfaction, popularity, and happiness. The chapter by Diana Owen and Jack Dennis in the fourth part of the volume is useful for the suggestions regarding measurement of public dissatisfaction, and Tom Tyler’s contribution in this section examines the relationship between government disapproval and compliance behavior. This material is preceded by three parts, the first containing four articles analyzing patterns of public disapproval of government over time, with articles by Jack Citrin and Samantha Luks documenting trends over time in the trust questions from the American National Election Study, a longitudinal analysis by John Alford that points to the significance of external threat for public approval of government, Stephen Earl Bennett’s article examining the modern heyday of public regard for government during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and a chapter by Virginia Chanley, Thomas Rudolph, and Wendy Rahn on the impact of trusting attitudes on policy positions. The second part of the volume attempts to disaggregate government, and analyzes differences in the public’s dislike for various institutions of U.S. government. In particular, Lilliard Richardson, David Houston, and Chris Sissie Hadjiharalambous find that while the president is evaluated primarily as a function of party loyalties, assessments of political actors in the courts are not influenced by either partisanship or concerns about economic performance. Jeffrey Bernstein’s piece looks at the relationship between approval for Congress and the president, and the two chapters by Eric Uslaner, and Marc Hetherington and John Nugent compare public attitudes toward government at the state and federal levels. Finally, the third section of the book addresses the question of the extent to which behaviors of

members of Congress encourage negative affect in the public. Articles by Amy Fried and Douglas Harris, and David Brady and Sean Theriault suggest that the public’s dislike of government is fueled by negative rhetoric and strategic behavior propagated by members of Congress. Finally, Carolyn Funk’s chapter examines the consequences that different forms of debate—cordial or acrimonious— have on public attitudes. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse foreground each part of What Is It About Government that Americans Dislike? with helpful summaries of each of the articles, and conclude with a brief chapter integrating the findings of the individual chapters. This collection of original research on public attitudes about government performance is well organized and thought provoking. It is well worth reading, and should spur additional research on this important topic. Politics and Banking: Ideas, Public Policy, and the Creation of Financial Institutions. By Susan Hoffmann. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 320p. $42.00. — Larry Schweikart, University of Dayton Offering a political scientist’s view of the evolution of banking regulation in the United States, Susan Hoffmann approaches the creation of banks, savings and loans, and credit unions from the perspective of “public philosophies’’ about money, banking, and credit. She devotes a chapter to the early debates between Jefferson and Hamilton over the desirability of corporations over all, as well as banks specifically, then analyzes the First and Second Banks of the United States (BUS) with a chapter each. The development of vibrant state banking systems, followed by the imposition of a new national banking system in the Civil War, receives attention in its own chapter, as does the Federal Reserve Bank. She then concludes with a chapter each on the Savings and Loans (S&Ls) and building and loans, and the credit union system. Hoffmann’s stated purpose of addressing a weakness, as she sees it, in the discussions of banking—namely, pointing out “how political the banking process is’’—may be news to political scientists, but historians and economists have squabbled about this for decades. The first serious pitfall the author encounters in trying to explain “public philosophies’’ of banking is to assume that either Hamilton or Jefferson spoke for many more people than themselves. There were as many different interpretations of what banks should be, how they should operate, and who should own them that any attempt to construct a

Hamiltonian–Jeffersonian struggle is problematic. Hoffmann also seriously misreads both men when it comes to their concepts of corporations and, especially, banks. Both were well aware that the primary purpose of any “national bank’’ (such as the First BUS) was to provide credit to the nation, not to engage in either stabilizing or stimulating the economy or providing the country with a circulating medium. Those were completely secondary concerns, and as such did not dominate the financial agendas of either man. Economist Charles Calormiris, for example, makes this clear in his concise entry on Hamilton in The Encyclopedia of Business History and Biography. Likewise, Jefferson’s view of corporations is overly oriented toward his notions of an “agrarian republic,’’ without noting that the Sage of Monticello was famously contradictory: He helped found a long-lasting republic, yet argued that all governments should be torn down every generation. His thoughts on banking were no less complicated. Some of these weaknesses stem from the fact that Hoffmann accepts those parts of Hamilton and Jefferson that suit her and discards others as not what he intended (see, e.g., p. 25, where she claims that “constructing the economy’’ was the central purpose of the BUS, not providing credit to the government, despite all evidence to the contrary). Later, she states that “Hamilton had smuggled his national bank in through a back door, focusing attention on its public functions,’’ (p. 47) implying that the “public functions’’ were serving the commercial economy, rather than lending the new government funds. And he didn’t “smuggle’’ in anything: Jefferson not only agreed to the Bank, but in a well-known bargain, received the relocation of the U.S. capital to Virginia in return. Despite an abundance of footnotes, at times one gets the sense Hoffmann still does not understand how these institutions worked. For example, the BUS never had a monopoly, but only a monopoly over certain privileges, such as interstate banking and holding the U.S. government’s deposits. Likewise, I do not know of a single economic historian who accepts that the BUS “was large enough to be an effective regulator’’ (p. 41). Quite the contrary, all the economic time-series evidence shows that the BUS lacked either the capital or the penetration to even begin to regulate the U.S. economy. Her unfamiliarity with, say, Naomi Lamoreaux’s work on New England (or Lynne Pierson Doti’s work with me on the structures in the American West) lead her into a mesh of errors. For example, Lamoreaux convincingly showed that early banking institutions in New England existed only for the benefit of the stockholders through “insider

lending,’’ and that this was viewed as neither undesirable nor unethical in any way. Hoffmann’s discussions of the Jacksonian developments assume that William Gouge was the main source of “public philosophies,’’ missing the dozens of different views on money that shaped both Jackson and the early Whigs. Not surprisingly, the main source of Hoffman’s material for these chapters—Robert Remini—also made these errors in his wellknown biographies of “Old Hickory.’’ But that hardly makes it accurate. The reliance on, say, Remini, for example, illustrates a serious problem. Hoffmann’s sources are badly dated, and lack virtually any of the new research on banks and credit functions in the last 30 years. She lacks any citations of Charles Calomiris (on virtually everything related to banking), A. Rolnick and W. Weber (on the free-banking era), Naomi Lamoreaux (on New England banking structures), Edwin Perkins and me (on the Second BUS), Hugh Rockoff (on free banks), Peter Temin (on both the Jacksonian era and the Great Depression), Richard Timberlake (on Jackson), and Eugene White (on the rise of bank regulation in the late nineteenth century). There is no mention of Eugene White, whose Regulation and Reform of the American Banking System (1983) is not only a (by-now) classic, but which addressed the very public policy issues Hoffmann seeks to explore. How one can ignore Timberlake’s Origins of Central Banking in the United States (1978) on this, or Temin’s decisive revisions of Robert Remini’s outdated work, is mystifying. In most cases, Hoffmann does not have an appreciation for how the gold standard shaped banking, and how competitive notes in the antebellum period and the Federal Reserve after 1913 were to be disciplined by the metal. Her discussions of the “real bills’’ doctrine in the interim period is accurate, but also devoid of any sense of who (other than Nelson Aldrich) actually contributed to making these policies. One also gets the impression that there was a consistent line of banking-policy thought running from Hamilton to William Gouge to Nelson Aldrich to Herbert Hoover to Marriner Eccles. Yet in no sense do even two of these individuals fit the “progressive’’ mold that Hoffmann raises as a model for regulation. Indeed, some “hard money’’ Jacksonians, after the Civil War, were in the forefront of the inflationist/Greenbacker movement. Ironically, Hoffmann seems to miss the political implications of these ebbs and flows, a rather stunning oversight for a political scientist. Hoover receives an inordinate amount of attention, yet there is virtually no discussion of the “public policy’’ role of the Fed in causing the Depression. There is a good analysis of the New www.apsanet.org 187

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Deal banking laws, but without the necessary assessment of the overall impact of the New Deal on expanding federal power, thus (through its government creditor role) endowing the Fed with even more control over the U.S. economy. Finally, there is also missing throughout a sense of policy options missed—an analysis of why, for example, the free bank–state bank system that worked extremely well by employing a competition in money from 1836 to 1861 was not revived. Why was the single reform that most economists agree would have solved the nation’s “elasticity’’ needs (and possibly staved off the Great Depression)— interstate branch banking—never adopted? Unfortunately, those answers will not be found in Politics and Banking. Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology. Edited by James H. Kuklinski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 534p. $75.00. — Dana Ward, Pitzer College James Kuklinski has assembled a remarkably valuable set of articles addressing the general question of citizens’ political competence and political decision making. This book is the tenth installment in the distinguished series “Cambridge Studies in Political Psychology and Public Opinion.’’ Divided into four sections covering affect, cognition, perception, and values, the book is organized much like panel sessions at a professional meeting. Kuklinski provides an extended introduction to each section, and three articles by some of our most talented researchers form the core of each section, followed by invited commentary critiquing those articles. Absent from the collection is a summary chapter, which could have gone a considerable distance toward providing a general model of public opinion formation and functioning, but if you are looking for the most innovative, cutting-edge articles on how citizens make sense of politics, there would be no better place to begin than this work. Well over half a century ago, Jean Piaget noted that cognition and affect are two sides of the same coin. While researchers initially needed to isolate one from the other for purposes of analysis, ultimately the goal of psychology was to understand how the two systems function in tandem, along with memory and perception. As specialization within psychology increased, we deepened our understanding of affect, cognition, memory, and perception, but lost sight almost entirely of how these systems interact as a whole. Indeed, some psychologists even argue that cognition and affect are unrelated systems. Needless to say, in political science 188 March 2003

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and economics, a focus on cold cognition became almost an obsession obscuring any considerations other than rational calculation. Over the past decade or so, in an attempt to account for puzzles in political behavior, political psychologists have begun work that has brought the ultimate goal Piaget set for psychology into sight once more. The chapters on affect and cognition in Citizens and Politics are major advances toward a more holistic account of public opinion formation and functioning. David O. Sears’s summary of “The Role of Affect in Symbolic Politics’’ is a primer on one of the most important challenges to the rational actor model over the past two decades, and is written lucidly enough to be accessible simultaneously to undergraduates, laypersons, and professional analysts of public opinion. George E. Marcus and Michael B. MacKuen present an equally robust and readable account of Jeffery Gray’s theory of emotionality and personality, demonstrating the theory’s usefulness for understanding when voters are likely to rely on learned habits and when they are more likely to break their reliance on habituated partisanship and shift attention to new information, possibly leading to different electoral choices. In the section’s third article, Roger D. Masters presents a model of emotional and cognitive responses to leaders based on recent advances in neuroscience, they have revealed a modular structure to the mind in which specific functional processes operate much like a distributed computing system, with the emotional centers of the brain (the amygdala and hippocampus) acting to integrate the various processes. Masters’s approach presents affect and cognition as tightly linked and interdependent systems and is thus a major step toward a holistic understanding of attitude formation. Although his chapter is a bit less accessible than the previous two chapters and accepts as settled what is anything but settled—that is, hard-wired gender differences in cognitive and emotional functioning (e.g., Carol Gilligan is cited, but her assertion that men and women have different moral orientations has been resoundingly disproven)— Masters provides a far more sophisticated understanding of viewers’ responses to national political leaders than we have had to date. The articles in the cognition section depart from traditional survey methods by adopting more experimental twists. One chapter focuses on voters’ responses to leaders’ explanations of their behavior, and two focus on the way in which memory influences cognitive processes. Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk employ an award-winning simulation method (Lau received the International Society of Political Psychology Friedman Award for the best paper

at the 1998 annual meeting) to assess how voters choose preferred candidates. Adding memory to their voter decision-making model, they find that during multicandidate primary election simulations, subjects employ different evaluation strategies than in two-candidate general election simulations. Kathleen M. McGraw’s contribution to the volume analyzes leaders’ attempts to persuade and explain behavior by means of a multistage persuasion model demonstrating that accounts have a systematic influence on attributions of responsibility and character. Charles S. Taber, Milton Lodge, and Jill Glathar assess the role of memory-based and “on-line’’ evaluations of candidates and produce a model of motivated political judgment that goes a long way toward understanding how citizens pass judgment on their leaders. Together these three chapters provide a much deeper understanding of candidate evaluation than does previous research. The third section on attitudes and perception continues the debate over the nature of beliefs in mass publics, but also adds an important new emphasis, voters’ perceptions of fact. Jennifer L. Hochschild is concerned not so much with what people know as with what people “know’’ that just is not so. She shows that misperceptions of social facts, such as the relative size of our ethnic and racial groupings, can have profound consequences for how citizens evaluate public policies. Paul Sniderman, Philip E. Tetlock, and Laurel Elms provide a devastating critique of John Zaller’s research reported in an earlier volume in the Cambridge series, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. These authors find that contrary to Zaller’s ambivalence thesis, attitudes are robust when situational and predispositional factors are taken into account. In perhaps the most innovative chapter in the book, Gregory Andrade Diamond develops a “Latitude-Theory Model of Citizen Attitudes,’’ based on much earlier work by Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland. Rather than an attitude’s being conceptualized as a specific point along an agree–disagree continuum, Diamond suggests that attitudes are actually composed of three different “latitudes’’: the latitude of acceptance, the latitude of noncommitment, and the latitude of rejection. Election swings can be accounted for by expanding or contracting latitudes of noncommitment or rejection, not by the conversion of believers into nonbelievers or vice versa. Citizens thus have a negative effect on elites by rejecting or constraining available policy options. The final section on political values contains two chapters with very important new discoveries, but the third chapter and the commentaries only detract from this otherwise significant contribution to political psychology.

Stanley Feldman and Marco Steenbergen ask: “If Americans are so suspicious of the welfare state and its philosophical underpinnings, why do so many champion its policies?’’ (p. 367). Their answer is that in addition to egalitarianism, economic individualism, and limited government, a strong humanitarian sentiment forms the core of the American political and social creed. While Feldman and Steenbergen add a dimension to our understanding of belief systems, Gregory B. Markus performs a bit of division. Using a forced-choice survey method, Markus identifies three distinct aspects of individualism and concludes that there are far fewer rugged individualists than heretofore believed, but that there is a strong desire for autonomy that supports government interventions, which enhance personal control. Laura Stoker’s contribution is an illconceived study of value “judgments’’ in which judgment is mysteriously missing from the analysis. She assumes that justifications of values can be inferred by the content of values. Her focus is on what people believe, rather than on why they believe it, or more specifically, she assumes that if people believe x, it must be justified by y. The folly of such an approach can easily be seen if we compare the responses of an Eskimo and Arab man to a guest sleeping with their wife. While opposite values will be expressed, the underlying principle may well be the same, that is, the wife is viewed as a possession to be shared or hoarded as the owner sees fit. In contrast, two Communists might share the same values, but one might adhere to the labor theory of value based upon an analysis of surplus value, while the other subscribes to the theory because his father taught him to respect Marx. In sum, without asking subjects to actually justify their values, we have no way of knowing what that justification may be. Strength in Numbers?: The Political Mobilization of Racial and Ethnic Minorities. By Jan E. Leighley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 216p. $49.50 cloth, $17.95 paper. — Dianne M. Pinderhughes, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Jan Leighley’s examination of racial and ethnic minority mobilization is an important contribution toward understanding issues the American polity faces as its population becomes increasingly diverse. She points to the rapid shift in population composition in a number of states in which whites will no longer be the majority, and she considers the political implications of these changes for democratic institutions, for the groups which

are part of this changing electorate and for the political science literature which has based its theoretical findings on research on Anglos. Leighley explores the mobilization of groups, how American political institutions have responded to and how they mobilize racial and ethnic groups, and she reviews several different types of literatures’ analyses of political participation and mobilization as she offers a rational choice interpretation of the subject. This is a complex book, which helps increase our understanding of the variety of issues, methodological, conceptual, and measurement based, which scholars must address in order to broaden knowledge in this area. Leighley takes on the task of a careful review, comparison, and integration of the various literatures that have analyzed racial and ethnic political participation, including those based on historical and analytic case studies of racial and ethnic political participation, and on survey research of individuals drawn from specific racial and ethnic groups. She then compares the findings in these studies with assumptions based in rational choice models of voter turnout and collective action. She readily acknowledges that since “collective action is fairly common” (p. 7), some consideration of extra individual factors is required. The author examines three types of contextual influences that reduce costs and/or increase benefits: elite mobilization (efforts by elites to engage political activity), relational goods (incentives enjoyed by members of groups), and racial and ethnic context (the composition of the individual’s context, which she interprets as the size of the group). She then uses her assumptions to model mobilization of racial and ethnic groups by political elites, using several data sets, and to compare her findings with previous literature. The data sets are two national surveys and two Texas-based surveys. She uses the American National Election Study from 1956 through 1996, and the Citizen Participation Study conducted by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995), which oversampled black and Latino political activists on their participation skills, to which Leighley added political empowerment evidence. She also used her own Texas Minority Survey (conducted with Vedlitz, 1999), a public-opinion telephone survey that also oversampled African Americans, Mexican Americans and Asian Americans. Finally she draws upon the Texas County Party Chairs Survey; this telephone survey queried Texas Democratic and Republican party officials about their efforts at mobilizing voters. Leighley’s comparison of different approaches toward understanding racial and ethnic mobilization is an enjoyable innovation for

rational choice analysis, one which allows for a clearer understanding of the strengths and limits of the different literatures, and there are important ones that frame and limit the significance of some of the author’s findings. She has clearly broadened the assumptions of rational choice since she explores the importance of group-based variables, framed in terms of contextual variables. Since she is using a rational choice theoretical framework, she tends to limit her exploration for understanding the meaning of context more than she should. For example, she treats the political dynamics under examination as if they were largely a twentiethcentury, even a late-twentieth-century, phenomenon. Her discussion of the political and institutional issues associated with African Americans refers primarily to the very recent past and to segregation, but never to slavery and its powerful impact on American political history, society, and institutions, including those of Texas (p. 127). Similarly, Latinos experienced a complex range of forces, including the Mexican-American War and the subsequent expropriation of land by Anglos. It is, of course, highly problematic to define the impact of these forces quantitatively, but they shape American society even in contemporary politics. Taking note of them is an important way of acknowledging some of the limitations of data analysis, whether in surveys or in models of white, African American, and Latino participation and mobilization. A variety of conceptual issues also affect the analyses. First, while acknowledging Latino diversity, Leighley tends to de-emphasize the complexity of the Latino population, perhaps because of her use of Texas-based surveys. She might have addressed this by using data from the Latino National Political Surveys, which distinguished Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Mexican Americans, in her own analysis. Race is also somewhat problematic since she does not address the issue of racial differences among Latinos. That issue, framed by the U.S. Census as “Latinos may be of any race,” is also an important underlying distinction in the way in which Latinos tend to see the world, and it may in time begin to have an impact on race-based American politics. Second, she defines “mobilization” as public officials reaching out to racial and ethnic groups, and she assumes it occurs. Within the racial and ethnic literature, most studies emphasize the work of racial and ethnic civic-mobilizing institutions at encouraging participation. This literature finds little mobilization of racial and ethnic groups by party or elected officials. Finally, the author’s definitions of contextual variables are, because of their rational choice framework, overly narrowly defined. Relational goods, www.apsanet.org 189

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drawn from Carole Uhlaner, are oriented toward the organizational and institutional networks of racial and ethnic groups. Leighley fails to recognize the differences that inhere in these spaces: “[b]ecause involvement in civic institutions [i.e., workplace, church, and voluntary associations] is not necessarily structured by race’’ (p. 104). There are significant and complex differences in how groups attach to and are involved in institutions. There are also important issues with the data sets Leighley employs. A number of other surveys might also have been incorporated, as comparisons. The National Election Study has long been debated as an appropriate source of data on the opinions of racial and ethnic groups. Data from Patricia Gurin, Shirley Hatchett, and James Jackson’s National Black Election Studies (Hope and Independence, 1989), and Michael Dawson’s National Black Politics Study (Behind the Mule, 1994), and Rodolfo de la Garza et al.’s Latino National Political Survey (Latino Voices, 1993) might have been used. The Survey of Texas Party Chairs was an intriguing study on efforts at mobilizing various racial and ethnic groups. Leighley assumes they responded accurately. Her survey instrument confirms that they were asked to give information on their racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic background, but there is no discussion of the results in the text. Since she verifies survey respondents’ reports of how they are contacted with county party officials’ reports of their efforts to mobilize, it is vital to know more about their demographic and ideological characteristics. Strength in Numbers? offers important and provocative findings, and it emphasizes contextual factors in understanding racial and ethnic political participation and mobilization. Leighley’s innovative work is a welcome exploration of the subject matter across differing methodologies. The long-term political implications of her findings that racial and ethnic groups, including Anglos, are more likely to respond positively to mobilization when they reside in homogeneous environments will generate further debate and rich discussions in which a variety of scholars will want to participate. The Making of Asian America Through Political Participation. By Pei-te Lien. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. 293p. $69.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. — Wendy K. Tam Cho, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The field of Asian American politics is not uncharted terrain in American politics research, but it is certainly underexplored. The 190 March 2003

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relative lack of scholarly attention, however, is likely to change, since Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the United States and have occupied this position for the last several decades. They thus comprise a large potential electoral base, which is largely uncultivated. Although much of the literature on the topic is written from the vantage point of electoral politics, Asian American politics does not actually fit well into this paradigm. Instead, Asian American politics is multifaceted and is, moreover, complicated by a multiethnic base. The Making of Asian America Through Political Participation is a much-welcomed addition to the Asian American politics literature (and the minority politics literature) in that it takes the multifaceted and multiethnic dimensions of Asian American politics seriously. The basis from which this book is written is refreshing and revealing. Throughout the text, Pei-te Lien highlights the relationship that Asian Americans have with other groups and documents the contiguity and change in their status over time. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the historical struggles that have shaped the Asian American group. The main thesis is that Asian Americans were politically active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because they needed to battle the racial antagonism that greeted them upon their arrival in the United States. To change the repressive system, they often worked though complex networks of community organizations. They actively fought against mob violence and utilized the legal system extensively, filing thousands of court cases. In short, Asian Americans were not passive recipients as many sources often are wont to portray them. Instead, the roots of Asian American activism stretch far back in American history. Chapter 2 shifts from the historical focus to a review of some of the contemporary struggles that Asian Americans face, and the political means by which they engage them. Lien provides an overview of the Asian American movement in the 1960s that complemented the civil rights struggles of other minority groups. She ties this movement to post-1960 movements in order to demonstrate that the activist spirit is alive and well. Indeed, we can see that Asian Americans are still stepping up to fight against anti-immigrant and antiminority sentiments today through the struggles that have led to the appointment of Bill Lann Lee and the formation of the 80-20 Initiative. In both of these specific incidences, pan-ethnic organizations have emerged in response to internal community and external political forces. In continuing the historical tradition, then, Asian Americans are still pursing activism through elite-based

tactics, such as litigation, campaign donations, and lobbying. Chapter 3 examines traditional electoral politics. A particularly nice feature of this chapter is Lien’s tracing of a little-known history of Asian American candidates at the local and state level. Her qualitative analysis here clearly demonstrates that Asian Americans have been active candidates as well. Indeed, in recent times, there have been more than 1,200 elected and appointed Asian American officials. She further compares the Hawaiian case, where the political success of Asian Americans is unmatched, to the mainland case. Although participation on the mainland is still restricted and lopsided (both with respect to geography and ethnicity), she documents the great strides that have been made. Chapter 4 discusses the historical relationship between Asian Americans and other groups, making use of public opinion polls that oversample minority groups and focus on racial attitudes. She notes that Asian Americans occupy a middle position between whites and other ethnic minorities. This separation and the high-profile examples of such racial tensions as the Rodney King riots produce obvious barriers. Nonetheless, some cooperative relationships have been formed, and this formation is dependent upon the political context and the issue areas. Chapter 5 looks at the all-important question of pan-ethnicity. This is perhaps the greatest barrier of all to the emergence of a viable Asian American entity. Lien delineates the challenges that have been created by both historical and contemporary events. She then examines public opinion polls to gain some insight into these obvious barriers to a common identity within the umbrella group. She uncovers gaps in voter registration, groupbased participation, and vote choice. Nevertheless, some patterns emerge. For instance, Asian American groups generally support Democrats and liberal issue positions. In addition, when external forces mobilize the group, glimpses of a common identity shine through. Her evidence demonstrates that when and if they are mobilized and the context is ripe, the barriers are not insurmountable. Chapter 6 examines the role of gender. She reviews the history again and notes how historical circumstances have shaped gender and family roles. Historically, because of antiimmigration legislation, the Asian American community was primarily a bachelor society. Families did not develop until well past the mid-twentieth century. She shows that now, Asian American women are relatively prosperous, comparatively speaking, because of the opportunities that have been afforded them

after the lifting of immigration restrictions and due to their own abilities as well. This book is very strong on a number of points. The focus is broad, both with respect to the time period examined and the topics that are explored. It is rich in methodological approaches and sources, spanning both sophisticated multivariate analyses and insightful qualitative analyses. The author’s deep knowledge of her subject is beyond doubt. Although one might complain of a lack of a comparative focus, in the realm of Asian American studies this book is not insular. Indeed, Chapter 6 incorporates a fascinating comparative focus in its discussion of the gender gap. Overall, then, this book is a most impressive effort: a must read for anyone interested in Asian American politics, and an important contribution to the minority politics literature more generally. The National Environmental Policy Act: Judicial Misconstruction, Legislative Indifference, and Executive Neglect. By Matthew J. Lindstrom and Zachary A. Smith. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. 224p. $34.95. — Robert H. Nelson, University of Maryland The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law on New Year’s Day, 1970. It was a fitting beginning for a decade that produced more environmental legislation than any previous decade in American history. After 1980, environmental law became ensnarled in the partisanship of Washington. The last major environmental law was the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. NEPA has followed a similar course. In the 1970s, it helped to bring about far-reaching changes in the planning and management practices of many federal agencies. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the usefulness of NEPA stalled. The courts became less supportive, and federal agencies adopted defensive tactics to neutralize the impact of the law on their operations. Today, the requirements of NEPA—in particular, to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for major federal actions— have become mainly a bureaucratic obstacle to be overcome, generating large volumes of paperwork but having a modest impact on the actions of federal agencies. In their history of NEPA, Matthew Lindstrom and Zachary Smith greatly lament this fate. They argue that NEPA had the potential for a revolutionary improvement in the quality of federal decision making. The prime culprit in their minds is the Supreme Court. The courts initially gave strong backing

to NEPA, but then an increasingly conservative Supreme Court undercut the law. The greatest blow was the Court’s limiting of NEPA to procedural considerations. According to this cramped interpretation—as Lindstrom and Smith see it—NEPA is now unable to prevent even the most environmentally destructive of federal actions, as long as the negative environmental impacts are fully disclosed in advance. Lindstrom and Smith argue that, to the contrary, NEPA contains strong substantive requirements. As they state, “NEPA legislates values. . . . NEPA is unconventional in its purpose and design, which seek to reorganize the federal government’s values and actions not through budgetary diversions or strict standards but by providing a set of goals and values for all agencies’’ (p. 8). NEPA, as they contend, represented “a political device to guide Americans toward sustainable ecological paradigms,’’ guided by “the act’s holistic purpose and vision’’ (p. 10). Unfortunately, the authors fail to address seriously the powerful arguments that can be made against their views. If NEPA were given the wide substantive role that they envision, it would seem that the courts would be in a position of constant second-guessing of federal agencies. It would not only overwhelm the administrative capacity of the courts but also collapse the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. As it is, NEPA did represent a large court challenge to executive authority. By declaring an EIS to be procedurally “inadequate,’’ federal courts have delayed a long list of federal projects. In a number of cases, this delay has resulted in the cancellation of the project. Even the more aggressive federal judges recognized, however, that judicial power has its limits and that they should couch any court’s substantive views in language—however fictional in many cases—of an exclusive procedural concern. NEPA passed the Congress with little objection; most members, in fact, had little idea of the implications of the law. This reflected to a degree a conscious strategy on the part of the environmental proponents. As Lindstrom and Smith acknowledge, there was insufficient political support for a “frontal challenge to the missions of existing agencies’’ (p. 124) in the service of the environment. An approach more likely to be successful would be to enact a vague law and then leave it to the courts to require the necessary changes in agency practices. To a surprising extent, this strategy worked—for a time at least. Environmental advocates, in fact, faced a dilemma. They lacked the democratic support in the 1960s to prevail in their agenda. Yet if

they had bypassed normal democratic processes, their actions would have lacked full social legitimacy. If the Supreme Court eventually did act to limit the influence of NEPA, it reflected in part an unwillingness to impose a revolution in administrative practice without a clearer statement of such an intent from the Congress. NEPA is ultimately a planning law; as Lindstrom and Smith declare, the law is intended to provide “a mechanism for more rational planning regarding the environment’’ (p. 126). It was part of a general effort in the 1960s and 1970s to require more and better planning by federal agencies. The National Forest Management Act of 1976 and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, for example, mandate that the basic management of the public lands must be based on formal land-use plans. As implemented by the agencies, the land-use plans would also serve as the impact statements required by NEPA. Yet Lindstrom and Smith do not provide any discussion of planning theory and how NEPA might be integrated into a wider vision of an overall planning process. The book simply seems to assume that if “politics’’ does not interfere, the experts will be able to obtain the necessary information and provide objective answers. Implicitly, the authors offer yet another version of “scientific management,’’ an idea that dates back to the progressive era early in the twentieth century. This vision, however, has been widely rejected in political science and public administration circles over the past 50 years. Public decision making, as is now generally understood, frequently involves basic conflicts of social values that cannot be resolved by scientific methods. If NEPA is limited to a procedural role, it can serve to inform the participants in a democratic process. If it is to have a substantive role backed by the courts, as Lindstrom and Smith advocate, the effect would instead be to supersede the democratic process. An intense wish for a more rational world spawned many forms of utopian thought in the twentieth century. Socialist planners early in the century sought the “comprehensive’’ economic planning of society. In their naïveté, they believed that planning simply required the development of a comprehensive set of prescriptions and then the administrative systems to implement the prescriptions directly. Because of many unfortunate experiences in the real world, such idealistic visions of comprehensive planning had been widely abandoned by the 1960s. Old ideas do not die easily, however. The advocates of NEPA, such as Lynton Caldwell, created a new language and a new set of metaphors—“holistic’’ planning, for www.apsanet.org 191

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example, rather than comprehensive planning—for much the same set of old dreams. In any event, the new planning requirements of the 1970s—the product in large part of environmental advocacy—were as much a failure as their predecessors earlier in the twentieth century. On the public lands, they have yielded today an almost total state of gridlock that is widely lamented by observers of all political stripes. If NEPA failed to achieve the revolution in government planning and administration sought by Lindstrom and Smith, it did give environmental advocates many new “handles’’ that they exploited successfully to challenge federal agencies. In the real world, NEPA was a major success for its time. But it has become tired and stale by now. Unfortunately, there is little in this book to guide us to a new and better way of integrating environmental considerations with other social concerns in government planning and decision making. The book does, nevertheless, contain useful information about the legislative history and the environmental aspirations that led to the enactment of one of the most important environmental laws of the twentieth century. Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace. By Ruth O’Brien. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 256p. $50.00 cloth, $19.00 paper. — Thomas F. Burke, Wellesley College and UC-Berkeley The field of disability studies is growing in size, sophistication, and sweep, with its own research association and a few interdisciplinary programs scattered around the country. As with its predecessors and to some extent models, black studies and womens’ studies, disability studies is partly concerned with taking the perspective of a previously marginalized subject seriously. But besides uncovering what has been ignored, researchers in disability studies, perhaps even more than their colleagues in ethnic and gender studies, must confront and recast what has been studied before: whole fields of research that have developed particular ways of seeing people with disabilities. Ruth O’Brien’s Crippled Justice performs this task with imagination and theoretical sophistication. Based on interviews, archival research, and secondary sources, the book examines the rise of the discipline of vocational rehabilitation in post–World War II America, and the challenge posed to this discipline’s way of seeing people with disabilities by the emergence of the 192 March 2003

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disability rights movement in the 1970s, a challenge that continues to this day. Chapters 1 and 2 offer a fascinating genealogy of the rehabilitation field, tracing its intellectual roots, the strategies of its creators and promoters, and the successful campaign to establish vocational rehabilitation as a major government program. Chapter 3 examines an ill-fated effort to extend the rehabilitation paradigm to the problems of poor people. Chapter 4 describes the beginnings of the disability rights movement, which reversed the basic premise of rehabilitation, that people with disabilities had to be taught to fit in to society: It was society itself, disability advocates argued, that had to change its prejudicial attitudes toward the disabled. The final two chapters and an afterword summarize the long line of court decisions based on the major disability rights statutes, Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). O’Brien argues that these laws have been narrowed and thus “crippled’’ by federal judges still in the grips of the older vocational rehabilitation model of disability. O’Brien’s history of vocational rehabilitation, which occupies the first half of the book, highlights the influence of psychoanalysis, gestalt psychology, and theories of personality on the emerging discipline. Until World War II, medical rehabilitation was largely separated from vocational training and was dominated by orthopedists who treated their patients as a collection of medical problems (pp. 38–41). Howard Rusk and Henry Kessler, the progenitors of rehabilitation, argued that rather than focusing on the disabled person’s injuries, rehabilitation clinicians must support the “whole man’’ in order to integrate him into society. The key to integration, they argued, was to build a healthy personality that could cope with the loss of one’s capabilities. Borrowing from psychoanalytic theories of disability advanced by William Menninger, Rusk and Kessler believed that the “people with disabilities suffered from emotional adjustments more ‘crippling’ than their physical handicaps’’ and so had to be counseled out of their anger (p. 60). Thus, the goal of rehabilitation professionals was “normalization,’’ the attempt to refashion people with disabilities into average Americans, with psychological counseling a key component. The enactment of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which barred entities receiving federal funds from discriminating against people with disabilities, presented a challenge to the hegemony of vocational rehabilitation in disability employment policy. The law catalyzed the disability rights movement, which reconceived disability unemployment as a matter of social discrimination, rather than individual

adjustment. Employers, disability rights activists contend, must change their prejudicial ideas about the capabilities of people with disabilities and provide “reasonable accommodation’’ to allow them to flourish in the workplace. In theory, Section 504 and the ADA, which extended the ban on discrimination to most private employers, mandated these changes, but as O’Brien describes, federal courts have created formidable barriers to those seeking to enforce disability rights. Chief among these barriers is the necessity to prove that one is impaired enough to be counted as “disabled’’ by the law. Federal courts have decided that people with such maladies as arthritis, asthmatic bronchitis, epilepsy, and even cerebral palsy are not disabled and, hence, not entitled to sue under the ADA (pp. 179, 211–13). But ADA plaintiffs can also lose if they are considered too impaired to be productive employees. Indeed, in a recent Supreme Court case, a woman with carpal tunnel syndrome who was fired as a result of her impairments was nonetheless ruled nondisabled under the ADA. Perhaps most problematic for ADA plaintiffs are two Supreme Court decisions holding that the use of mitigating measures (eyeglasses in one case, medication in another) can make an impaired person nondisabled, a ruling that potentially makes every treatable disease a nondisability. Thus, in their ADA jurisprudence, federal judges have turned the logic of rehabilitation on its head: They look for ways in which individuals can mitigate their impairments, not in order to help them but to declare them nondisabled. As O’Brien suggests, in ruling this way, the judges are both reflecting and reinforcing the view that to be disabled is to be helpless and “un-whole’’ (pp. 207–09). O’Brien’s review of disability rights law is generally persuasive. But in building her argument that the disability rights movement has been thwarted at every turn, she sometimes overstates her case and in so doing inadvertently downplays the caginess demonstrated by disability activists, who have leveraged seemingly weak political resources into substantial policy gains. For example, she claims that a key 1970s federal court decision holding unconstitutional the exclusion of children with disabilities from public education, a great victory, became a defeat when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision (p. 111). In fact, the decision, which was far from a clear resolution of the constitutional issue, was never overturned, and was used rather cannily by disability rights supporters to build support for the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act, a federal law that guarantees all disabled children a “free, appropriate’’ education (R. Shep Melnick, Between the Lines, 1994, pp. 146–59). More troublesome is O’Brien’s

statement that the ADA provides no “private right of action or punitive damages’’ but is enforced instead by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) (p. 172). In fact, disability rights supporters wisely made a deal with the first Bush Administration that ties ADA employment remedies to those in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the main federal antidiscrimination law: Individuals using either statute must first file a complaint with the EEOC, but if dissatisfied with the EEOC’s handling of the claim can commence a private lawsuit in federal court. After making the deal on remedies, disability rights supporters then worked with civil rights groups to enact the 1991 Civil Rights Act, which for the first time provided punitive and “pain and suffering’’ damages for both Civil Rights Act and ADA lawsuits. Thus, the story of ADA remedies does not fit O’Brien’s despairing narrative. (See Thomas F. Burke, “On the Rights Track: The Americans with Disabilities Act,’’ in Pietro Nivola, ed., Comparative Disadvantages? Social Regulations and the Global Economy, 1997, pp. 263–68.) The deeper problem with O’Brien’s theme of “rights crippled’’ is that it posits the ADA as a unique case, and thus leads her away from thinking carefully about the extent to which the story of disability rights compares to experiences with other rights laws. She complains, for example, that the text of the ADA leaves great discretion to federal judges, giving lower courts the freedom to interpret the ADA in diverse and problematic ways (p. 168). But these are features of all rights laws, not just the ADA. Similarly, she makes much of the fact that the ADA requires plaintiffs to prove they are qualified for a job, but as she acknowledges, this is a common requirement in civil rights litigation—the only difference is that the requirement is explicitly stated in the text of the ADA, which is much more detailed than that of other civil rights laws. Her analysis would have been strengthened by an engagement with critical scholarship on the implementation of other civil rights laws and on rights politics more generally. Within disability studies, for example, scholars have critically examined the basic assumptions of the disability rights model. (See Jerome E. Bickenbach, “Disability Human Rights, Law and Policy,’’ in Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman, and Michael Bury, eds., Handbook of Disability Studies, 2001; and Richard Scotch and Kay Schriner, “Disability as Human Variation: Implications for Policy,’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 549 (1997): 148–59.) O’Brien’s strategy, by contrast, is to imply an “uncrippled’’ version of disability rights that is unproblemati-

cally liberating for people with disabilities. One wishes that she had extended to disability rights the same critical, complex genealogical treatment she gives to rehabilitation. That said, O’Brien’s book is packed with cogent and original observations about both rehabilitation and disability rights and thus makes a useful contribution to an emerging field. Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education. By Rob Reich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 272p. $60.00 cloth, $21.00 paper. — Stephen L. Esquith, Michigan State University The nineteenth-century, Protestant-led common school movement against Catholic schools, the campaign against foreign language instruction in public schools, and other xenophobic efforts to “Americanize” public education in the early twentieth century provide the historical background for Rob Reich’s discussion of contemporary multicultural education in the United States. His goal is to construct a liberal theory of multicultural education that hangs together philosophically and makes practical sense in a pluralistic society whose professed liberal democratic principles are belied by this history of nativism and discrimination. Reich’s discursive strategy is to examine the weaknesses of liberal theory from the perspective of multiculturalism, to subject multiculturalism to a liberal critique, and to draw from these negative arguments a positive conception of liberal multiculturalism that respects the interests of parents, students, and the liberal state. Rather than driving liberalism and multiculturalism further apart, he hopes to show how they share a common concern for “minimalist autonomy,” understood as “a person’s ability to reflect independently and critically upon basic commitments, values, desires, and beliefs, be they chosen or unchosen, and to enjoy a range of meaningful life options from which to choose, upon which to act, and around which to orient and pursue one’s life projects” (p. 92). A liberal multicultural education, he claims, is the best way to cultivate this ability for critical self-reflection and participation. Reich agrees with Will Kymlicka and William Galston that the professed liberal ideal of neutrality is untenable. The political virtues and conception of reasonableness that John Rawls, for example, believes is required by political liberalism cannot be understood or justified apart from a more comprehensive ethical conception of the person and of social cooperation (p. 50). Civic education in gener-

al must attend to this interplay between political life and nonpublic commitments and capacities. A liberal multicultural education in particular is good for citizens because it simultaneously prepares them to participate in a diverse political society and construct a moral identity of their own. Then, Reich turns the tables on the dominant multicultural political theories. As a description of liberal democratic societies like the United States, multiculturalism is more or less accurate, Reich believes. Although this is important, it is not his primary concern (p. 11). As a normative concept, it has been used to advocate for a variety of social, educational, and political reforms, some of which Reich approves of, but not for the reasons that multiculturalist political theorists have offered. Reich rehearses many of the standard liberal objections to these theories, such as their dangerous tolerance of “internal restrictions” on individual members of protected groups and the inadequacy of a right to exit from these groups, especially for children (pp. 66–68). However, his most important objection to existing multicultural theories is that they rest upon fixed and parochial conceptions of cultural identity. Despite their differences, he argues that Joseph Raz, Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal, Chandran Kukathas, and even Kymlicka make this mistake. For example, Kymlicka believes autonomy depends upon membership in a single “societal culture.” Reich responds that the “value and importance of autonomy lies in enabling not only choice within culture, but also choice beyond one’s culture” (p. 76). Only when individuals can negotiate these cultural boundaries and reflect critically on their own wants and desires, Reich argues (with help from Martha Nussbaum and Charles Taylor), will they be able to make a life for themselves and participate in liberal democratic politics. In other words, a liberal multicultural education must enable students to interpret cultural similarities and differences in their own creative way (p. 186). Liberal theories of civic education traditionally have revolved tightly around the problem of instructing future citizens to value autonomy—their own and others—in a morally and politically responsible way. Two questions have dominated the field: How many years of schooling should a state require, and how much say should parents have over school curricula? One strength of Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education is that Reich takes the interests of children as citizens just as seriously as he takes the interests of parents and the state as guardians: “[T]he goal is to enable children to decide who they want to become and to be www.apsanet.org 193

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able to participate as informed citizens in a democratic diverse state” (p. 140). He asserts that young students have a “proto-right to selfgovernance” (p. 158) that justifies a liberal multicultural education and that is not automatically overridden by legitimate state interests or parental authority. This “trilogy of interests” is the foundation of his “bridging” theory of liberal multiculturalism. The bridge does not extend as far as Reich would like, however. Not only does he believe that a liberal multicultural education may foster a harmonious “fusion” of intellectual horizons; it “makes possible the cosmopolitization of one’s identity” (p. 187). To achieve this goal, he needs a more complex analysis of conflicting interests than his account of the “trilogy of interests” underlying the policy problem of home schooling. The “hermeneutic pedagogy” (p. 186) Reich recommends must be informed by an assessment of the deep conflicts of interest over such issues as sustainable growth, environmental protection, and human rights. If students are to receive a cosmopolitan multicultural education, whether from their parents at home or in the public schools, then they will have to be taught how to discuss political issues like these and why reasonable people disagree so vehemently over them. These are not policy problems. They are political in the sense that they raise fundamental questions about membership, participation, and equality in democratic political institutions. One pedagogical technique Reich suggests is community service learning (p. 221). However, such projects as volunteering at soup kitchens and tutoring at-risk students in afterschool programs are not likely to spark a searching dialogue on the terms of political membership. Something more is needed. Consider the citizenship class that is offered to Hmong refugees in St. Paul, Minnesota, through the Jane Addams School for Democracy and the University of Minnesota (). In this setting, college students help refugees and immigrants prepare for the United States citizenship tests. Discussions in this class about what it means to be a citizen occasionally prompt the kind of self-reflection and mutual respect cosmopolitan multiculturalism requires. Immigrants, refugees, their more assimilated young adult children, and university students sometimes find themselves in unfamiliar territory, reliving difficult past decisions they have not discussed together before. Not all students are mature enough for this kind of democratic experiment, but similar collaborative projects involving college and secondary school students may prepare them for future dialogues on divisive political issues. 194 March 2003

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More attention to these issues, rather than to vouchers and charter schools, would have made Reich’s case for a cosmopolitan civic education more compelling. From Identity to Politics: The Lesbian and Gay Movements in the United States. By Craig A. Rimmerman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. 248p. $69.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. — Ellen D. B. Riggle, University of Kentucky Although the cover design of the book emphasizes the (perceived) phrase “identity politics,’’ the true title of the text broadly documents the journey of the lesbian and gay movements through two important components represented by this phrase. The journey from struggles for social sexual identity to struggles for social political rights within the liberal democratic tradition marks a maturation of the movements. While there have been many works dealing with the former (sexual identity), this book is a timely assessment of the current strategies used by a decentralized movement in an attempt to gain equal political rights. In brief, it documents and evaluates the progress and potential of the lesbian and gay movements as social-political forces for change. In recognizing this maturation of the movements, Craig Rimmerman evaluates their successes in operating within the current political structure and questions whether the newer emphasis on being a political movement is a good idea, given the goals of the lesbian and gay movements. While acknowledging gains in political rights, or at least some victories, for gay men and lesbians over the past four decades, he also presents evidence of the continuing second-class citizen status of lesbians and gay men in the United States. He compares and evaluates the gains and present status of gay men and lesbians as a function of the liberationist and assimilationist philosophies and strategies employed over the history of the movements. The central question regarding their strategies and goals is: What are the limits of liberal democracy? Rimmerman evaluates the movements as fundamentally social, but with aspirations of being political. The broad summary history is framed by attention to the internal, resourcemobilization and external, political-process frameworks for examining social movements. Three chapters specifically offer brief guided histories of the interaction of the lesbian and gay movements with electoral politics and interest groups (Chapter 2), with the judicial system and legal rights (Chapter 3), and as outsiders engaging in unconventional politics to

influence political and nonpolitical institutions (Chapter 4). There is also a chapter on the interaction of the lesbian and gay movements with the Christian Right, an examination of the actions and responses of each to the other over the past three-plus decades. This structure allows the book to be comprehensive in its examination of diverse strategies employed by widely different groups within the decentralized lesbian and gay movements. None of the examinations is in depth; this is not necessary, as there are already several excellent books that give in-depth treatment to the different political arenas and groups. The strength of this broad-based approach is that it brings together evidence of actions by disparate groups and events in order to demonstrate that the movements have progressed, yet still face struggles and limits within the current political system. Rimmerman concludes that identity politics itself is too narrow a framework to effect change; groups within the movements that strive and settle for access to political power, the so-called seat at the table, instead of seeking positive policy outcomes are not using their resources wisely. To achieve positive policy outcomes more consistently, he argues for the effectiveness of building coalitions to engage in what he calls “radical democratic politics’’ (p. 156). Coalitions, he argues, would transform the cultural and political underpinnings of the current system, which maintain inequalities based on identity, whether that identity is based on sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, social and economic status, gender, or another culturally assigned status. This book is a contemporary of Shane Phelan’s (2001) Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship; it is a focused companion to Mark Blasius’s (2001) anthology Sexual Identity, Queer Politics. It is useful to political scientists because it employs known, common frameworks for the evaluation of social movements and gives unflinching, unsentimental criticism of the movements in analytical form. Nonetheless, the book refuses to “de-gay’’ its subject by treating it as an uncontextualized object. In this vein, the book would benefit from an extended discussion of the types of coalition building that need to be pursued by the lesbian and gay movements in order to effect the type of cultural, social, and political change that would achieve the movements’ goal of equal rights. The last chapter contains several suggestions for common goals with other groups and discusses some of the barriers to building coalitions around these goals. The chapter also includes a short case study of the grassroots coalition, Basic Rights Oregon, to illustrate the

argument. While grassroots organizations are idiosyncratic, they are the necessary link between the prescription and the desired change. An extended discussion of how all of the groups involved in the mentioned issues, for example, the environment, would benefit from coalitions would link this discussion to other more theoretical discussions of culturally enforced inequalities. This book assigns itself a tough challenge— reflecting on the ongoing lesbian and gay movements, their successes, and their remaining challenges. It does an admirable job of creating a compelling argument for why there will always be limits to success for the movements within the present political framework; while failure per se is not guaranteed, progress will be painfully slow and may never be fully realized. Thus, Rimmerman’s call for a broader, more radical agenda for change in order to achieve full equality is a logical conclusion. It is to be hoped that this author and others will continue to envision strategies for achieving this more perfect union. Partners and Rivals: Representation in U.S. Senate Delegations. By Wendy J. Schiller. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 199p. $49.50 cloth, $18.95 paper. — Ross K. Baker, Rutgers University Within the past five years, the scholarly literature on the U.S. Senate has been immeasurably enriched by the appearance of a half-dozen books that are noteworthy, not merely for the quality of the research involved but for the perspective they share. Directing their attention to different features of the institution, all emphasize what is truly distinctive about the Senate. In spite of powerful evidence that the hardedged partisanship that has long been a feature of the House has made strong inroads in the Senate, and in the face of evidence provided by Barbara Sinclair’s Unorthodox Lawmaking (1997) and others that Senate leadership, at least in the postcommittee phase of legislation, has gotten more muscular in the manner of party leaders in the House, the two chambers are in no danger of becoming indistinguishable one from the other anytime soon. The same year in which Sinclair’s book was published, Sarah Binder and Steven Smith gave us the definitive reappraisal of that most distinctive of all Senate institutions, the filibuster, and tracked its evolution from a seldom-used device to a phenomenon so commonplace that majority leaders routinely file cloture petitions with any bill with even the mildest scent of controversy. The year 1999 saw the publication of Frances E. Lee and

Bruce I. Oppenheimer’s Sizing Up the Senate, a study imaginative in conception and skillful in execution that examined the effect of constituency size on the behavior of senators. One might have assumed that somehow senators from sparsely populated Western states and densely peopled Eastern states were different, but Lee and Oppenheimer persuasively codified that hunch with empirical rigor. In that tradition of studies that focus on what makes the Senate distinct, we now have Wendy J. Schiller’s Partners and Rivals: Representation in U.S. Senate Delegations. Schiller combines gold-standard methods with a perceptive eye to examine the complex relationships that exist between senators who represent the same state. The author astutely conceives of her study as an examination of a two-member constituency, thereby assuming that one senator’s actions will, in some way, have an impact on the other. Those who might imagine that U.S. senators are so sovereign and individualistic that they have only the most glancing relationship to their same-state colleague are in for a surprise, because even when the two senators cannot even abide each other, their actions are profoundly affected by the existence of what amounts to a conjoined constitutional twin. It is the very indistinguishability of the two same-state senators in terms of their formal powers and the congruent boundaries of their constituencies that prompts the electoral imperative that they try to differentiate themselves. It is this elaborate and purposeful process that Wendy Schiller describes and analyzes so effectively. Understanding why this desire to differentiate is so critical for senators, the author begins with the simple but essential observation that every state has a senior senator and a junior senator. Somebody has gotten there first, and the latecomer must, in some politically useful manner, adapt to that fact. If the two senators happen to be of the same party, the problem for the junior partner is compounded because even if the later-arriving senator coveted the same committee assignments as the senior colleague, Senate rules generally forbid two members from the same state and party from service on the same committee. This institutional rule, while problematic on its face for the junior senator, actually contributes materially to the quest for differentiation. Schiller’s inquest into the dynamics of same-state senator relationships delves into such essential areas as bill cosponsorship and the extent to which the two collaborate on legislation, and it discovers, not surprisingly given her overall theme of the imperative of differentiation, that their bills and amendments rarely

overlap. There are, of course, areas of legislative action in which efforts at differentiation would be counterproductive, especially for senators from the same state, and that is roll-call voting. Indeed, especially on issues affecting their jointly held constituency, there is notable convergence, but Schiller is emphatic in pointing out the limitations of reliance on roll-call voting data for purposes of gauging differentiation and for evaluating the quality of the representation that senators provide. She echoes Richard Hall’s observation in Participation in Congress (1996) that studies that focus on the activity on which legislators spend the least amount of time (casting recorded floor votes) presents us with an incomplete picture of the legislative process. Schiller’s writ runs more broadly than producing findings on the maneuvering of senators to attain the maximum degree of perceived separation from their same-state colleagues. She provides, in her final chapter, some broad observations on the quality of dual representation and concludes that senators pursuing their impulse to differentiate themselves in the minds of voters provide a better and more complete form of representation than if both were focused on the same narrowly drawn list of interests and public constituencies. Rather than cancel each other out, same state senators from opposite parties tap into vastly different sources of support, champion diverse causes, and draw resources from distinctive collections of contributors. Whatever the partisan configuration of a state’s Senate delegation, the very fact that there is one senator looking over the shoulders of another senator is a fairly effective check against senatorial sloth. If dual representation did nothing else, it would keep both parties on their toes. In her use of a variety of methodologies and by interweaving those findings derived from statistical operations with interview materials, Wendy Schiller has produced a book that is satisfying substantively and also a pleasure to read. Given what she set out to do, she has accomplished it in grand style. I doubt that there are many in our profession who could have done it better. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890–1990. By Cheryl Shanks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 400p. $59.50. — Peter Skerry, Claremont McKenna College and The Brookings Institution As its title suggests, this study argues that U.S. immigration policy has been fundamentally shaped by national sovereignty. In so doing, www.apsanet.org 195

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Cheryl Shanks usefully reminds us that immigration is one of those policy domains—like foreign policy—that is inescapably and fundamentally regime shaping. At the same time, she seeks to demonstrate that “to preserve or enhance sovereignty is a policy choice” (p. 2), albeit one whose determinants change over time. Indeed, the bulk of this work is an historical analysis of the Congressional Record, scrutinizing how U.S. sovereignty has been conceived of differently over the last century and how this has influenced immigration policy. This effort leads Shanks to the provocative conclusion that “immigration policy has become more restrictive as trade policy has become less protectionist” (p. 253); more specifically, that as we have become less concerned with racial and ideological admission criteria, we have become more concerned with total numbers of immigrants and their “quality,” in terms of human capital. For Shanks, the point is that the tension between maintaining sovereignty and fostering involvement in an open and dynamic world economy is central to understanding contemporary immigration policy. What follows from Shanks’s framework is the intriguing argument that U.S. immigration policy is driven not by the structural dynamics of international relations nor by the interplay of domestic interests. What does shape immigration policy are values. Shanks understands that values may not be significant in many policy areas, but as she puts it: “For immigration policy, values trump interests every time” (p. 8). Shanks goes on to emphasize that when values play such a central role in policymaking, the usual interest-group dynamics do not obtain. Drawing on the work of Giandomenico Majone, she highlights how values have drawn immigration policymaking into a deliberative process in which political actors must explain, interpret, and justify their actions in reference to commonly held conceptions of the public interest. Such dynamics are then highly unpredictable, because a given value, once invoked, can be used as a resource by all political actors. This in turn suggests (which Shanks does not emphasize) that such values-oriented policymaking exhibits considerable autonomy. Pushing ahead with this intriguing analysis, Shanks argues that immigration policy has not been greatly driven by public opinion. Indeed, she agrees with Edwin Harwood that in this domain, public opinion follows policy, and to the extent that it pays attention, the public focuses on numbers of immigrants more than on their characteristics. Even more emphatically, Shanks argues that unemployment explains little about shifts in 196 March 2003

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immigration policy: “No evidence supports the hypothesis that unemployment affects immigration policy” (p. 236). She points out, for example, that during the 1920s, immigration restriction was implemented while the economy boomed. At the same time, she presents some compelling reasons, despite her own argument, that politicians continue to act as if such economic concerns drive immigration policy. Shanks does acknowledge that domestic economic fluctuations do influence the apprehension of illegal immigrants. But for reasons she never adequately explains, such enforcement efforts are not within the purview of her conception of immigration policy. Similarly frustrating is her unexplained exclusion of illegal immigration from her analysis, all the more troubling since our historically high levels of illegal immigration and subsequent amnesties weaken her contention that our policy has grown “more restrictive.” Shanks applies her framework to four different episodes of immigration policy change over the last century: the 1920s Quota Acts, the 1950s McCarran-Walter Act, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, and the reform legislation of 1986 and 1990. In chapters devoted to each of these, she lays out a detailed analysis whose force is unfortunately undercut by her excessive reliance on numerous quotations for which the sources are completely unattributed in the text and buried in the footnotes. Still more problematic is that Shanks pushes her argument about values too far. As she asserts: “In each era, immigration policy became ‘really about’ a value seen to be newly primary. Through argument, one value emerged as central to the public interest, and immigration policy was redesigned to support it” (p. 13). Thus, in her analysis of the 1986 and 1990 legislation, Shanks argues that economic competitiveness, especially with Japan and Germany, dominated the discourse and shaped the outcome: “When Japan became a threat in the 1980s, Americans construed the struggle as economic, so immigrants were excluded for economic reasons” (p. 266). Yet this is simply not the case. Economic competitiveness was only one—and arguably the least important—of many considerations on the table during the decade-long 1980s debate over immigration. To be sure, economic concerns were cited, and in 1990 there was some movement toward a more skills-based immigration policy. But the basic outlines of the preexisting immigration policy regime were hardly changed: We continued (and continue) to receive huge influxes of predominantly unskilled immigrants for whom the rationale is family unification, not international economic

competitiveness. Moreover, all this is driven very much by domestic political interests. At the same time, a strong argument can be made that public anxiety with illegal immigration, an aspect of national sovereignty that Shanks curiously neglects, drove the debate leading up to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Once again, her neglect of illegal immigration is a problem. So, too, more generally is her explicit focus on formal immigration policies, excluding enforcement efforts, and not on actual numbers of immigrants admitted. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty is a difficult and demanding book whose genuine theoretical insights, unfortunately, do not bear as much fruit as promised on account of the narrow, formalistic treatment afforded them here.

Vicious Cycle: Presidential Decision Making in the American Political Economy. By Constantine J. Spiliotes. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. 232p. $39.95. — Glen S. Krutz, The University of Oklahoma Of all the major issues on the American policy agenda, the media and the public arguably assign the most responsibility to presidents for the condition of the economy. It is entirely another question whether or not presidents can, in meaningful ways, directly affect markets in a system of separated institutions sharing power, and with the presence of a powerful and independent decision-making body (the Federal Reserve Board). Yet given the responsibility (blame or credit) assigned to presidents for the macroeconomy, it is important for scholars to understand their activities and efforts on the economy. In this latest book from the emerging presidency series edited by James Pfiffner, Constantine Spiliotes dives into this vital matter by developing and testing a theoretical framework of presidential decision making on the economy. In particular, the author seeks to explain the trade-offs that presidents accept in pursuit of partisan and electoral goals, while also endeavoring to oversee the American economy. Spiliotes argues that a president’s ability to respond to such political incentives is significantly affected by the institutional responsibility each one faces as a political executive. In other words, he casts his theoretical net to include the pull of a president’s party and the sometimes countervailing pull of the nation at large in the context of improving the macroeconomy. Further, the extent to which a president

responds to these pulls is affected by the institutional structure inherited by that particular president. The book proceeds in two parts. In Part I, comprising Chapters 1 to 3, Spiliotes develops a theoretical framework of presidential decision making on the macroeconomy and builds an accompanying empirical model of it. Chapter 1 is a thorough literature review of the various perspectives on presidential economic decision making. The author highlights the inconsistencies in existing work and makes a strong case that a president’s response to partisan and electoral forces is conditional. This conditionality is the window through which the author offers a new take on the process by utilizing the notion of institutional responsibility as an intervening factor. Presidents are constrained in their decision making by the given structure and norms of behavior they assume upon entering office. In Chapter 2, the most interesting in the book and especially vital to his case, Spiliotes traces the evolution of this institutional responsibility in the first half of the twentieth century. During this period, the presidency evolved from an institution with little interest in tinkering with the economy to one with regular and sustained leadership of it. Competing explanations of this development are presented. Chapter 3 constructs and tests an empirical model of presidential decision making designed to capture trade-offs in partisanship and institutional responsibility. Spiliotes uses archival sources to code a dependent variable of presidents’ decisions on the macroeconomy and independent variables tapping into key concepts from the literature. The multivariate test lends support for the notion of institutional responsibility. Part II of the book, comprising Chapters 4 to 7, further tests the theoretical framework by means of four qualitative case studies. The cases involve four different presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan) and offer variation across different factors: temporal, partisan, electoral, and institutional. Chapters 4 and 5 assess the extent to which the presidents responded to partisan forces or the pull of institutional responsibility in making economic decisions. More evidence is presented for the author’s notion of institutional responsibility. Chapter 6 tests the hypothesis (and conventional wisdom) that presidents manipulate the economy during election years in order to get reelected. Spiliotes writes on pages 142–43: “The case studies . . . suggest that a purely stimulative electoral incentive does not operate systematically on presidential decision making in the American political

economy in years with incumbent presidents seeking reelection. . . . Presidential decision making is clearly mediated by the presence of a president’s institutional responsibility and the concomitant need for stabilization during an election year.’’ In Chapter 7, the author concludes that a shift has occurred from partisan accountability to institutional responsibility. Moreover, this change was caused in part by a transformation in the American presidency. The book is strong in two respects. First, Spiliotes is to be commended for bridging presidential studies and political economy. Beginning with a thorough and integrative literature review, he is relentless in pursuing an open dialogue between these two groups of scholars. He employs analyses traditional to each group (rigorous case studies and econometric modeling) and discusses each in language that is reachable by the other. Second, to test the theoretical framework, which is built by merging theoretical literatures, Spiliotes executes a solid research design that is methodologically pluralistic. He employs multivariate, quantitative analysis together with qualitative case studies. These various tests yield important and interesting findings. For example, the author finds that presidents have more incentive—not less, as suggested by Alberto Alesina and Howard Rosenthal (Partisan Politics, Divided Government, and the Economy, 1995)—to behave in a partisan manner during periods of divided government than during unified government. Had Spiliotes gone the journal route instead, this finding alone could likely have yielded a major article in a visible outlet. While the book is strong in some ways, there are significant weaknesses. The main shortcoming is that the author uses dense and unclear language to express his theory, definitions, and arguments. In order to clearly understand some of the points, readers—even well-read American politics scholars—will have to reread many sections or refer back to them after examples of the construct have been given. It’s all there; it just takes some work on the part of the reader to piece it together. A graphical representation of the theory would have brought some clarity to the ideas and arguments advanced by the author. A second shortcoming pertains specifically to Chapter 2. Spiliotes fails to make a persuasive case for his alternative explanation of the development of presidential responsibility on economic matters because he does not directly seek to undermine or explain away the various rival hypotheses. Despite these shortcomings, scholars of the presidency, political economy, and American

political development will find this book of value. It is appropriate for adoption in graduate seminars in these areas (and perhaps is reachable for advanced undergraduates). In the final analysis, Spiliotes should be commended for moving forward the scholarly literature on presidential decision making and political economy. Race and Place: Race Relations in an American City. By Susan Welch, Lee Sigelman, Timothy Bledsoe, and Michael Combs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 224p. $55.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. — Kenny J. Whitby, University of South Carolina Much has been written about racial residential segregation in American society and its effect on race relations and the quality of life for African Americans (e.g., see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid, 1993). While residential segregation remains a prominent and disturbing feature of urban America, there are signs of increasing residential integration. In light of this growing trend, Race and Place addresses the key question: How does residential context affect the attitudes and perceptions of both blacks and whites about race? The answer, according to Susan Welch, Lee Sigelman, Timothy Bledsoe, and Michael Combs, depends to a large extent on racial patterns of neighborhoods. The study of race and residence has not, to date, accounted for the myriad ways that neighborhood context affects racial attitudes. This well-written book is an impressive work that will help fill the void. Its detailed analysis is sure to be of enormous interest to every serious student of racial and urban politics. The analysis by Welch and associates flows from a long tradition of research devoted to understanding the effect of context on racial attitudes. The authors are well-known contributors to the study of racial and urban politics who have done extensive work on residential context, racial attitudes, and social interaction. The distinguishing attribute of this book is the depth to which the authors examine the relationship between neighborhood setting and race. To carry out their investigation, they conducted a 1992 survey of black and white residents in metropolitan Detroit. On the one hand, one can argue that the survey is limited in scope and should have been extended beyond the boundaries of the Detroit area; on the other hand, because of its degree of “hypersegregation,’’ its large black and white populations, its racially mixed suburban enclaves, and the fact that racial attitudes have been regularly surveyed in the area since the late 1960s (the www.apsanet.org 197

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University of Michigan’s Detroit Area Survey), metropolitan Detroit makes a suitable research site for studying neighborhood racial attitudes and perceptions. This short volume is organized into eight chapters with two appendices describing the contents and items from the 1992 Detroit survey. Each chapter begins by providing background information and ends with clear summaries of the authors’ main points and their main research findings. Their findings are presented in tables and figures that are relatively easy to interpret. The reader, especially those who are unfamiliar with this topic, will be impressed with the literature review. The introductory chapter lays out the authors’ theoretical expectations. Careful attention should be given to Table 1.1 (p. 12) and Table 1.2 (p. 14) because they provide valuable information on the racial characteristics of six types of neighborhoods to be examined in later chapters. The main theoretical hypothesis stated in the introductory chapter is that “blacks and whites who live in mixed-race communities will be more tolerant of those of the other race’’ than blacks and whites who reside in other neighborhood settings (p. 5). It becomes clear early on that the overall objective of the study is to specify the conditions under which residential proximity can promote social interaction among racial groups and thereby improve America’s interracial relations. In Chapter 2, the authors provide descriptive information on changing racial attitudes among Detroit area respondents. The analysis is based on a comparison of racial attitudes between their own 1992 survey and the Detroit Area Survey of 1968. The reader may be surprised to find that during the period, blacks and whites remained some distance apart in their attitudes and perceptions of residential segregation. The findings, however, are consistent with the labeling of Detroit as a hypersegregated metropolitan area. Though interesting, there are limits to what one can say about changes in racial attitudes with only two time points of reference. To their credit, the authors acknowledge this limitation and are careful to avoid overstating the significance of their findings. The heart of the analysis can be found in the middle chapters. Multivariate analysis is used to assess the effect of neighborhood racial context, along with other social and demographic indicators, on casual contact and close interracial friendship (Chapter 3), on perceptions of racial discrimination (Chapter 4), on the psychology of race, that is, racial solidarity (Chapters 5 and 6), and on blacks’ and whites’ attitudes about urban issues (Chapter 7). In general, the findings support their expectations that physical propinquity promotes greater 198 March 2003

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social interaction in racially mixed neighborhoods than in communities that are predominantly black or predominantly white. The findings are not always consistent with theoretical expectation, which serves to illustrate the complexity of studying the nexus between race and residence. In Chapter 3, for example, Welch and colleagues found that the effect of neighborhood context on casual contact and close interracial friendship is much less predictable for blacks than for whites. The connection between theory and analysis is most evident in Chapters 5 and 6 where the authors examine the effect of neighborhood context on black racial solidarity and on white racial prejudice. The analysis is based on three distinct hypotheses (social density, social salience, and identity supremacy). There is no space here to go into detail on the substance of each hypothesis. Suffice it to say, the hypotheses fit nicely into the theoretical argument that residential context can promote, exacerbate, or have no effect on intraracial attitudes and perceptions. It would have been useful to the reader if the hypotheses had been used in other chapters to posit relationships between variables. One possible concern with the analysis is causality. Does neighborhood setting affect racial attitudes? Or do racial attitudes affect where one chooses to live? Only the former question is addressed in this book. It would have been interesting to know if their index of racial solidarity (see p. 99 for measurement) affects casual interracial contact and/or close interracial friendship. Despite the causality issue, the analysis is consistently well presented and persuasive. The findings in Race and Place are based on one metropolitan area. Thus, there are some concerns about generalizability. Even so, the authors have made a valuable contribution by demonstrating that neighborhood racial integration has positive effects in one of the more segregated metropolitan cities in America. Their study will provide a solid foundation for further analysis in more multiethnic communities such as Los Angeles, in cities such as Chicago where enclaves of white ethnic groups reside, and in communities located in the once legally segregated South. Welfare Policymaking in the States: The Devil in Devolution. By Pamela Winston. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002. 352p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. — Christopher Howard, College of William & Mary The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA) of 1996 has been

widely hailed as one of the most important pieces of legislation in recent U.S. history. Among its many provisions, the act transformed Aid to Families with Dependent Children from a budgetary entitlement to a block grant, imposed lifetime limits on benefits, and gave state governments more flexibility in designing welfare programs. Some scholars, notably Kent Weaver, have analyzed the process of enacting PRWOA at the national level. Other scholars have cited the act as further evidence that women, racial minorities, and the poor are treated particularly badly by public policy. In recent years, probably the single largest category of studies has attempted to measure the impact of PRWOA on welfare caseloads and poverty rates. One of the chief contributions of Pamela Winston’s book is that it strikes off in a new direction. She compares the political process at the national and state levels and, in particular, the extent to which poor families in the 1990s were represented in legislative debates over welfare reform. By giving states more responsibility, have we made it harder for the poor to influence the direction of policies that have a significant impact on their lives? This is an important and underresearched question. As the author recognizes, James Madison, V. O. Key, E. E. Schattschneider, Grant McConnell, and others have raised serious doubts about the ability of smaller jurisdictions to care for the disadvantaged. Empirical research on this question, however, has lagged somewhat behind the theorizing. Few studies have welldeveloped comparisons between different levels of government. The heart of the book consists of two parts. Part I summarizes welfare policymaking at the national level, with particular attention to developments in the 1990s. Readers familiar with Kent Weaver’s (2000) Ending Welfare As We Know It will find little new in this section of the book. Its chief virtue lies in summarizing concisely the key legislative milestones and in identifying the key interest groups and elected officials. It also helps to establish a baseline for comparison. The real contribution of the book lies in Part II, in which the author offers case studies of welfare policymaking in Maryland, Texas, and North Dakota. These states were chosen to maximize variation in size, demographics, fiscal capacity, benefit levels, political culture, party control, institutional capacity, and media coverage of the issue. The selection of case studies is both a strength and a weakness of the book. On the positive side, the states chosen are not simply those with large welfare populations (e.g., California, New York), or those that have already been examined in depth

(e.g., Wisconsin). Winston is thus able to illustrate a wide range of outcomes and add to most readers’ factual knowledge. Unfortunately, the three states differ on so many dimensions that the author’s explanations for any particular policy choice tend to be overdetermined. Maryland’s relative generosity, for example, is attributed to an active interestgroup community, considerable expertise among legislators and bureaucrats, Democratic party strength, political power of African Americans, and general affluence. With good reason the author uses verbs like “explore” and “examine” more than “explain.’’ In each case study, the author tries to assess the presence of interest groups in policy debates. The main method is to identify all welfare-related legislative hearings between 1995 and 1997, note which groups testified and how often, place each group into one of about nine categories, and then add the number of appearances for each category. Little attempt is made to track interest-group lobbying of individual legislators and the governor, or efforts to use the media to sway public opinion. One of the main findings was

that the number and range of voices was greater at the national level than in the states. The lack of representation of Indian tribes in North Dakota and of poor people generally in Texas was particularly notable. On the other hand, it also appears that groups advocating on behalf of the poor comprised a larger share of all groups testifying and of all testimony in Maryland and Texas than in Washington, DC (see Table 7-3), a trend that runs counter to expectations and is not addressed in the book. The more difficult question is, so what? Can we make a strong connection between who spoke at legislative hearings and what policies states adopted? The less punitive policies in Maryland might have reflected the greater involvement by interest groups—or a half-dozen other factors mentioned in the book. Making a strong case that Interest Group A influenced Policy X is hard work, and past studies of this problem are conspicuously absent from the book. The author relies fairly heavily on local media accounts and interviews with participants to establish influence, yet most of those interviewed are not named and

their credibility is hard to establish. One might also question whether interest groups are the best way to gauge how well the poor are represented in policy debates. Considering how much has been written about the influence of individual politicians on U.S. social policy, motivated to make good policy or to establish their place in the history books, I would like to have seen greater attention to governors and key legislators in each state. These officials are accountable to the poor in ways that most interest groups are not, since the vast majority of these groups lack local roots or a large membership of poor families. Nevertheless, I have a strong preference for studies that ask the right questions but fall short in delivering a compelling answer over studies that prove conclusively some trivial matter. Welfare Policymaking in the States clearly belongs in the first category. It is well written and informative, and raises a number of interesting empirical and normative issues. It should stimulate a considerable amount of future research into the politics of welfare reform.

COMPARATIVE POLITICS

strong material incentives militated in favor of continued close economic relationships among these states. Yet one group, the Baltic states, acted against their immediate material interests by strongly reorienting themselves toward Europe and breaking key economic ties with Russia. A second group of states, most notably Belarus and Kazakhstan, scoffed at this imprudence and acted to reforge and strengthen their economic ties with Russia. Yet another group, exemplified by Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, adopted highly inconsistent and ambiguous policies in this regard. To shed light on this phenomenon, Abdelal closely analyzes the roots of the divergent trade and monetary policies among three of these states, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. In doing so, he argues that differences in the content and contestation of these states’ national identities led them to interpret similar material circumstances in different ways, with some having viewed continuing economic dependence on Russia as a security threat while others saw it as a mutually beneficial exchange. Lithuania, in particular, was imbued with a sense of “national purpose” that led it to redirect its foreign economic policy toward Europe, despite the short-term economic costs such a policy entailed. As such, the independent variable in this study is the collective identity of a society. Foreign economic policies will differ among

postimperial states not because of power politics or material circumstances but because of contingent historical and institutional factors that cause nations to define themselves (and their “others”) in particular ways. Abdelal argues that such nationalism can give social purpose to foreign economic policy, engender societal acceptance of economic sacrifice, lengthen time horizons, and specify a direction for foreign economic policy. This “directionality,” in turn, can be both geographical and ideological. Imbued with a sense of national purpose, a former subject state such as Lithuania embraced Western Europe and capitalism as everything that its disliked “other,” Soviet Russia, was not. Abdelal does not claim that this Nationalist approach is generalizable to all times and all places. Instead, he argues that national identities matter most in the foreign economic policymaking of postimperial states. He bolsters this contention through a deft extension of his analysis to explain foreign economic policies in interwar Eastern Europe, postcolonial Indonesia, and French West Africa. On the basis of these wide-ranging comparisons, he concludes that “the Nationalist perspective provides the best theoretical interpretation of the political economy of postimperial international relations in the twentieth century” (p. 152). He also offers the key policy insight that not all economic nationalisms are

National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective. By Rawi Abdelal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 240p. $39.95. — Juliet Johnson, Loyola University Chicago This is an unabashedly theoretical book motivated by a recent empirical puzzle. To wit, why did certain post-Soviet states strongly reorient their trade and monetary relations away from Russia after 1991, while others either clearly chose not to do so or engaged in heated yet ultimately indecisive political debates about the “proper” direction for their foreign economic policies? Rawi Abdelal provides a provocative answer to this question: “What societies want depends upon who they think they are” (p. 1). His book effectively challenges dominant realist and liberal theories of international political economy, and promotes a new “Nationalist” theoretical perspective to better explain the foreign economic policies of postimperial states. Abdelal observes that at the time of the Soviet collapse, all of the 14 smaller successor states depended heavily on Russia economically, with tightly integrated trade, energy, and monetary relations. After the political breakup,

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necessarily destructive or autarchic. Rather, this depends upon the content and directionality of national identity. This book’s primary contribution is theoretical. As Abdelal rightly admits, it is not empirically surprising that national identities played a central role in determining the foreign economic policies of the Soviet successor states. However, international political economy lacked the theoretical tools with which to explain this development. To fill this gap, he extends constructivist theory by conceptually splitting it into two approaches, “institutionalist” and “nationalist.” Both deal with the social construction of preferences, but on different terms. While the institutional version focuses on the role of international norms and institutions in forging state identities, the Nationalist perspective concentrates on the role of national identity in determining foreign economic policy. In short, the first approach is outsidein, while the second is inside-out. Abdelal’s analysis does seem overly defensive at times, as it repeatedly points out the distinctions between his Nationalist perspective and realism, liberalism, traditional constructivism, and Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” argument. This is understandable, though, as the book’s main goal is to carve out new theoretical space. The author’s theoretical analysis reveals a solid understanding of the scholarly literatures on both international political economy and nationalism, and usefully blurs the increasingly artificial subdisciplinary distinction between international relations and comparative politics. In doing so, he persuasively demonstrates the importance of studying the specific domestic contexts in which foreign economic policies are made. Overall, this book represents a strong and persuasive critique of the “grand theorizing” prevalent in international relations scholarship, arguing that the usefulness of any individual theory depends upon the specific research question asked. Moreover, although he does not dismiss rationalist approaches as a whole, his work serves as a caution to those who would derive preferences solely from material circumstances. Abdelal’s book explicitly focuses on postimperial, reactionary economic nationalisms, and as such does not seek to explain foreign economic policies in former imperial core states, such as Russia or France, or in states well past the classical imperial experience. But by limiting his reach to postcolonial states, he has written himself into a temporal corner. Now that the last territorial empire, the Soviet Union, has dissolved, what further relevance will the Nationalist perspective 200 March 2003

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have? I would suggest three possible extensions of this approach. First, it is clearly relevant to the orientation of postimperial security policies as well. Using the Nationalist perspective, one can quite accurately predict many post-Soviet states’ attitudes toward joining NATO (oriented toward the West) or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) collective security agreement (oriented toward Russia). Second, the current static theory could be developed dynamically to incorporate the ways in which postimperial national identity changes over time, and to explain how these changes subsequently affect foreign economic policies. Finally, the Nationalist perspective could be applied toward analyses of “indirect imperialism” as well. Import substitution and the rise of dependency theory, the current backlash against economic globalization, and Third World critiques of the International Monetary Fund all arguably have some roots in nationalist sentiment. Nor is the role of nationalism in foreign economic policy limited to the developing world, as Britain’s “Euroskepticism” demonstrates. In sum, Abdelal’s Nationalist perspective gives an exciting and important new twist to constructivist theory that deserves to be further explored and expanded. I highly recommend it to international relations scholars, comparativists, and policymakers alike. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil: Interests, Identities, and Institutions in Comparative Politics. By Barry Ames. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 352p. $59.50. — Wendy Hunter, University of Texas-Austin Students of Brazil, of various disciplinary and theoretical persuasions, have long sought to explain the seeming inability of the country’s political leadership to transcend patronage politics and develop coherent policies suitable for transforming the country’s enormous potential into sustained economic growth and greater social equity. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil, by Barry Ames, is the most recent major work in this tradition. Grounded in rational choice principles, the book’s core argument is that political institutions—namely, open-list proportional representation in districts of high magnitude, coupled with federalism and the executive’s long-standing reliance on patronage and pork—are at the heart of Brazil’s governability problems. The proliferation of veto players, the continued weakness of political parties, legislative obstructionism, and corruption are among the most pernicious effects of the system.

Ames advances a sophisticated analysis that usefully and convincingly systematizes the opportunities and constraints facing Brazilian politicians, and measures with precision the extent to which the incentives of the system bear upon politicians’ behavior. The book simultaneously sheds light on how deleterious the present system is for good governance and suggests how resistant it will be to reform, even by the best-intended and capable public servants. Few analyses map out with such clarity how political institutions influence the kinds of candidates who enter politics, their campaign strategies, and behavior in office. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil is a work of rare accomplishment. Ames’s unique contribution rests in the singularly ambitious empirical investigation he conducts of political behavior across different Brazilian states and time periods in order to test expectations derived from theory. The sheer wealth of data collected and analyzed is remarkable. Few analysts of Ames’s stature and seniority have done fieldwork as thorough and comprehensive as that conducted for this volume. While many of the findings accord with existing, almost stereotypic notions of political behavior in Brazil, others are counterintuitive. One such example is the striking presence of pork barrel politics found in the most developed areas of the country, such as southern Brazil, where concentrations of educated and affluent voters reside. The empirical findings presented in the book do not always fit what general theories about strategic behavior would predict. Ames invokes demographic variables, chance historical events, and even the particular political cultures of different Brazilian states to explain these gaps, admitting that “in Latin America rational choice models will need broadening before they can explain real political outcomes’’ (p. 108). Although one is sometimes left to wonder whether general principles about strategic behavior rightfully remain the essential framework of analysis, Ames’s honesty is to be applauded. So is his profound knowledge of Brazil, which positions him well to deal with deviations from the norm and even leads him to question whether reelection—the very premise of most studies that take the strategic calculations of politicians as a point of departure—is the primary motive of most Brazilian politicians. Ames’s almost anthropological grasp of his subject matter, formed over a career of conversations with bureaucrats and politicians and reflected in the many anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book, forms a vital complement to the quantitative dimension of the analysis. Chapter 4, entitled “History

Matters: The Interaction of Social Structure and Political Events,’’ best showcases the full range of Ames’s knowledge about Brazil and his impressive ability to integrate quantitative and qualitative analysis. In this respect, The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil should stand as a model of integration in current debates over the merits of uncovering universal laws versus probing the unique characteristics of individual countries and their political systems. Those who analyze electoral rules and political institutions from a comparative perspective may be particularly interested in reading the conclusion, in which Ames points to arrangements in other countries as possible examples for Brazil to emulate or avoid. Unfortunately, however, this search for ways out of Brazil’s deadlock offers no easy remedies. The book is not light reading. While much of what makes it difficult is precisely the source of the book’s strength—Ames’s insistence on a comprehensive explanation of Brazil’s dysfunctional political system that is theoretically informed, subject to empirical testing, and able to capture complexities—some of the difficulty is not intrinsic to the ambitious nature of the enterprise. More could be done to keep the readers’ attention focused on the specific outcome to be explained in each chapter, as well as to unify the broader argument across the individual chapters. The narrowness of certain indicators as proxies for given concepts is a source of some question. For example, Ames relies on some of the standard indexes of party competitiveness (e.g., number of effective parties, number of candidates per seat) to judge how oligarchic a state’s politics are. Because the state of Ceara’s low degree of competitiveness (as measured by such indicators) did not change with the much-celebrated administrations of Governors Tasso Jereissati and Ciro Gomes, he concludes that in a sense, a “more progressive oligarchy’’ replaced the prior colonels (p. 129). Indeed, it is valuable and interesting to know that these indexes have not changed, yet whether such a far-reaching interpretation is warranted on these grounds alone is less clear. It is certainly plausible that opposition politicians are daunted at the prospect of running against a political group so widely credited with successful governance, or that a more open and pluralistic mode of governing now exists despite the dominance of the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democratic Party). These quibbles are minor, however, and pale in comparison to the book’s great merits. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil is a major contribution by a very talented scholar. It is essential reading for any student of Brazilian

politics and highly recommended for analysts of comparative political institutions as well. Russian Politics: Challenges of Democratization. Edited by Zoltan Barany and Robert G. Moser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 260p. $55.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. — Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University Academic writing about the democratic transition in Russia remains heavily politicized, as was writing about the Soviet Union. Authors line themselves up as critics and defenders of the reform project of the incumbent leader— Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and now Vladimir Putin. It is a great advantage of the volume under review that it retains an objective stance and manages to avoid these polemical debates. The authors are disappointed by the political condition of Russia ten years after independence, but they do not embark on a search for the guilty. In his introduction, Robert Moser explains that the goal is to view Russian experience through the lens of comparative analysis. He concludes that Russia’s flawed democratization should be attributed not so much to initial conditions but to the political elite’s failure to build stronger institutions. The book is pitched at the level of an advanced undergraduate reader, and it does a good job of introducing students to the best current research on the Russian political transition. (I am assigning the book to my students this semester.) Although each chapter includes a couple of pages discussing the rise of Putin, the book was published too soon to evaluate Putin’s actions once in office. Michael McFaul’s long chapter on electoral trends captures the recurring patterns of a decade of voting: a combination of a weak and volatile party system alongside fairly stable blocs of voters, for and against reform. The former element is most visible in Duma elections, but the latter shows through in presidential races. McFaul’s model, which basically gives Yeltsin’s democratic system a passing grade, hinges on his analysis of the 1996 presidential election as the key event in democratic consolidation. Skeptics, the present author included, would argue that the choice in 1996 between reform and communism was an artifact created by Yeltsin’s public relations men, and served to subvert rather than embody the democratic process. This has given rise to a “managed democracy’’ in which elections were not allowed to threaten Yeltsin’s rule: a system that has been smoothly taken over by Putin.

In an argument that seems to exculpate Yeltsin, McFaul writes: “Only after Yeltsin defeated his opponents through violence in October 1993 did his government have the capacity to pursue unilaterally policies that they considered necessary for ensuring capitalism’s irreversibility’’ (p. 29). This is questionable, since the key liberalization and privatization programs had been carried out by then. McFaul’s approach is challenged in Stephen Fish’s concluding chapter, where he examines Russia in the light of democratic theory and finds it wanting. Fish attributes the “accountability deficit’’ to Yeltsin’s “superpresidentialist’’ system of rule. But in Chapter 2, on the role of the legislature, Moser challenges the “super-president’’ sobriquet. He argues that in practice, the parliament wielded more influence than talk of super-presidentialism suggests—as exemplified by the Duma’s ability to win the appointment of Yevgenny Primakov as prime minister after the August 1998 financial crisis. However, one suspects that a systematic balance sheet of the policy impact of the executive and legislative branches, respectively, during the Yeltsin era would come down overwhelmingly in favor of the presidency. In Chapter 3, Kathryn Stoner-Weiss provides a thoughtful review of center-periphery relations. She sees the expansion of power in the hands of regional governors as the result of the chaotic erosion of federal state capacity, rather than the result of strategic bargaining between Moscow and the regions. In Chapter 4, Yoshiko Herrera provides a clear summary and critique of the economic reform program. She judges the economic reforms rather harshly, blaming the government for unleashing the market without first building up a set of regulatory institutions. However, this begs a host of counterfactual questions—where would these good institutions come from, and who would have put them in place? What were the realistic alternatives to shock therapy? Although Herrera attributes the economic depression, corruption, and poverty on ill-conceived economic reform, one can also attribute these ills to the collapse of the Soviet economic system that preceded the desperate reforms of 1992. Chapter 5 by Zoltan Barany addresses the oft-neglected topic of civil-military relations. He perhaps understates the extent to which the army was a pillar of the Yeltsin regime. (And just why did they back Yeltsin in 1991 and 1993?) Barany adopts the framework of a shift from a “politicized’’ to “professional’’ military, but it is not clear that this really fits the www.apsanet.org 201

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Russian case. “Depoliticization’’ (i.e., dismantling communist controls) had the effect of leaving the military to their own devices— meddling in wars from Moldova to Tajikistan, refusing to reform, and so on. Surely Chechnya should have been a centerpiece of this chapter, but the conflict is only mentioned in passing (pp. 197–99). Focusing on institutions, rather than policies or political actors, is appealing, in that it enables comparison with other countries. But given the institutional confusion and fluidity that has bedeviled Russia, there is a sense that one is comparing “model’’ with “muddle.’’ The weakness of state institutions is a recurring theme, but none of the contributions (except for the regions chapter) examines the process of policy implementation per se. The institutionalist orientation leads to a strangely bloodless account, in which the political process is stripped of agency. While many books overpersonalize the drama of Russian politics, one comes away from this volume without a real sense of who the main players were. There is little discussion of the motivation and sources of power of individuals like Yeltsin and Anatoly Chubais, and such important collective actors as the oligarchs, the mafia, the media, the workers, and so on are left out of the analysis. Both structure and agency are required for a rounded political analysis, especially when institutions are in turmoil. The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis. Edited by John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 288p. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. — Colin Crouch, European University Institute This is a book with two separate purposes: to demonstrate the scope and diversity of institutional analysis, and to account for the rise of, and limitations to the rise of, neoliberalism as a politico-economic phenomenon. The authors therefore have both a methodological and a substantive aim. There is no reason that a book should not have two purposes in this way, and, especially given the firm editorial hand of John Campbell and Ove Pedersen, this particular exercise succeeds. But the whole remains less than the sum of its parts. Inevitably one or the other component becomes the dominant one, and in this case, it is the display of both the diversity of and capacity for convergence within institutional analysis. The work is unable to serve as a thoroughgoing analysis and critique of neoliberalism, because this becomes an object of study from the varying perspectives of 202 March 2003

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the 13 contributors, rather than being built into a coherent, developing thesis. This would probably have required a single author or small group of authors, rather than the editors-pluscontributors format. Institutional analysis is, however, confronted cumulatively, because the internal organization of the book is based around different approaches to such analysis, rather than around different aspects of neoliberalism. The primary value of the whole therefore lies in its account of the state of this particular art; readers mainly concerned with the substantive study of neoliberalism will look more to individual chapters than the overall work. Four forms of institutional analysis are identified, and these become the four component parts of the book, with two chapters each: rational choice individualism (represented by Jack Knight, and Edgar Kiser and Aaron Matthew Laing); historical institutionalism (Bruce Western, and Bruce Carruthers, Sarah Babb, and Terence Halliday); organizational institutionalism (David Strang and Ellen Bradburn, and Campbell); and discursive institutionalism (Colin Hay, and Peter Kjaer and Pedersen). Fortunately, the individual authors do not stay in their designated boxes, and one frequently has to glance back at the contents page to remember which type of institutionalism one is supposed to be sampling. Indeed, one of the editors´ main conclusions is that a convergence is in process among the different forms of institutional analysis. But the book remains a reminder that in the social sciences, American academic life increasingly resembles the French, where scholars identify with a particular groupuscule and then go forth to wage war on others. (The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis is, in fact, an American-Danish collaboration, but the former intellectual tradition dominates the overall approach, though not the individual studies.) A few years ago we were content to identify institutionalism, or neoinstitutionalism. Will the next evolutionary stage be one of further fragmentation, so that by 2005 we shall have books on, for example, three different forms of historical institutionalism, or will the convergence the editors identify bring us back to a single product? One is thus led to inquire into the mechanisms that produce this approach to intellectual work: Why should anyone want to carry the standard of a particular subdivision of an analytical tradition, when eclecticism will bring a more rounded account? There can be two answers: one highly cynical, one less so. The former points to the increasingly competitive market for citation index scores, itself motivat-

ed by the search for better chairs and higher salaries. If one can be the first to label (in the right journals, of course) a particular subsubbranch of study, then one stands a good chance of being cited whenever that particular product is referred to. For those unable to win the labeling game in this way, the second-best strategy is to become tied to an existing label, so that one might rise out of anonymity by being included in textbook lists of contributors to particular schools. This is the process that creates the artificial distinctions between schools and subschools against which the contributors to this volume frequently and creditably rebel. A less cynical motive is to try to construct coherent and parsimonious paradigms, since these generate bodies of theory to which one can contribute in a cumulative way. This, after all, is what economics has done, and this has helped it to become the undisputed queen of the social sciences. But economics has paid a heavy price for its exclusion from consideration of so many variables relevant to economic behavior that do not fit its paradigm— exclusions that in fact provide the vast neglected spaces into which institutional analysts have swarmed. To apply institutional analysis itself to what has been going on within economics, the dominance of a single, one-sided paradigm has been facilitated by its conquest of major real-world institutions that have the capacity to reward and to exclude. Neoclassical economics has become a regime, with sanctions at its disposal. The other social sciences lack this external institutional apparatus, and therefore lack means of imposing disincentives to what is otherwise an overwhelming temptation for entrepreneurial intellectual spirits: to find the excluded variables, the neglected perspectives of any particular paradigm. And so, as fast as some researchers erect a particular adjectival form of any -ism within political science or sociology, some creative spirit will pop up to show how the new variety can be fruitfully combined with another, previously thought to be its rival. The contributors to this book are all such creative spirits, and that is what makes the volume thoroughly worthwhile. We learn a good deal of substance about neoliberalism on the way, but here I can just pick out one point, which fits my other theme in an ironic way: We discover that neoliberalism, too, has subcategories! Since it is a political practice rather than a form of academic study, identification of its internal divisions serves a valuable analytical purpose and not just a process of intellectual product differentiation. This is where the Danish contributions, in particular, make their point. At first sight,

recent Danish policy developments seem part and parcel of the post-Keynesian economic policy orthodoxy that has come to dominate most of the world since the 1970s. However, as a number of contributors show, there are several crucial differences. Other authors, too, working on aspects of the subject that have nothing to do with Denmark, make fundamentally similar points and further hack away at the apparent monolith. A worthy alternative title for this book might well have been “Neoliberalism Deconstructed: Institutional Analysis Reunited.” States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. By Mounira M. Charrad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 388p. $50.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. — Shiva Balaghi, New York University The politics of gender relations, as a critical element in the construction of and resistance to power in the Age of Empire, has been the focus of a range of interdisciplinary scholarship on the Middle East, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Colonial officials such as Lord Cromer (in Egypt) and Lord Curzon (in India) often relied on discussions of the subjugated status of “native” women to articulate the moral imperative of the colonizer’s “civilizing mission.” Meanwhile, the intersection of gender and power was a key element in the formation of anticolonial nationalist movements and in the process of state building throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mounira M. Charrad’s book makes a significant contribution to this growing body of literature. Charrad seeks to understand the ways that state formation was influenced by and in turn shaped particular perspectives on women’s status in society. She contends that in the Islamic world in general and in the Maghrib in particular, “women’s rights as defined in family law are the crux of the matter” (p. 5). Her central argument is that “the process of state formation, especially the pattern of integration of tribes or tribal kin groupings in each nationstate, has been critical in shaping the state and its family law policy” (p. 2). In order to make this point, she reviews the histories of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia from the precolonial period through the 1970s. In so doing, she shows similarities and differences in the system of central authority before colonization, in the strategies of colonial rule, and in the process of state building following independence in all three states. All the while, she focuses on two interrelated factors: the rela-

tionship of tribes to central authority and the articulation of family law as a way to mediate gender relationships. In the first part of the book, Charrad examines the common heritage of the Maghrib. State formation in all three countries took shape within kin-based societies, which emphasized patrilineal kinship ties: “Politics involved a tension between central authority attempting to expand its control over large territories and tribal grouping struggling to escape it” (p. 83). Furthermore, all three societies share a Sunni Islamic heritage, within which the Maliki school of Islamic law has predominated. The author analyzes Maliki Islamic family law, arguing that “the thrust of Islamic law in general is to permit the control of women by their male relatives and to preserve the cohesiveness of patrilineages” (p. 31). In the following section, Charrad explores the historical differences in the three Maghribi states in the precolonial and colonial eras. Again, she argues, the process of centralization was related to the nature of tribal structures and the status of women in a key period of North African history. She finds that Tunisia experienced a greater degree of state centralization coupled with a weakening political role for tribes. In Algeria, on the other hand, tribes remained powerful while the state was quite weak. In Morocco, the tribes were in “a constant state of tension with the center” (p. 103). These political differences were reflected in the legal sphere as well. While Tunisia had a more homogenous legal system based on Islamic law, customary law mingled with Islamic law in Algeria and Morocco. As Charrad argues, the three Maghribi nations also underwent different colonial experiences, which affected both tribal structures and family law. In a final section of the book, Charrad shows that calls for changes in family law were heard throughout the Maghrib beginning in the 1930s, but that the different histories of each country resulted in divergent approaches to family law after independence. In Morocco, the new state was formed through a coalition between the monarchy and the tribes. The approach to family law in that state, then, was to protect tribal order that was critical to the maintenance of the monarchy. Throughout the colonial period and in the early stages of independence, there were calls for changes in family law by some nationalists. Charrad’s study would have been enriched by a more detailed discussion of the period in which the nature of family law was debated among the various factions involved in the nationalist struggle in Morocco. An analysis of the role of the press in

shaping the gendered dimensions of the nationalist discourse, for example, would have been of great interest. In the final analysis, she argues that the alliance between the monarchy and the tribes ensured a more conservative outcome. Family law was codified in 1957–58 in a manner that remained faithful to Maliki Islamic law and did not fundamentally change the status of women. Following a long war of independence in Algeria, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) produced the Charte Nationale, in which it articulated “the necessity to improve women’s legal conditions” (p. 187). But, Charrad asserts, the FLN’s position on women’s rights was an ambivalent one, since the desire for reform and the importance of Islamic law were both seen as central to the formation of a new nation-state. Algerian women had been important to the nationalist cause and notions of gender equality were part of the socialist political discourse following independence in 1962. However, an organized women’s movement that asserted gender equality as a central feature of the new state failed to materialize; activist women still saw the nationalist struggle as overriding women’s liberation (p. 187–89). Between 1962 and 1984, the issue of family law became a contested factor in the larger competition for power among various political factions in Algeria. Finally, in 1984 the government issued the Algerian Family Code. By putting in place this conservative legal code, “the Algerian state catered to the social and political forces with a vested interest in the preservation of the extended patrilineal kinship structure sanctioned by Islamic family law” (p. 200). By contrast, in Tunisia, the state viewed reforms as a means to unify the country through institution building. In 1956, shortly after independence, “the state promulgated a sweeping family law reform” (p. 215). Charrad argues that the Tunisian Code of Personal Status was set forth by the urban elite who came to power after independence as part of a larger strategy to emancipate “Tunisian society from the effect of colonialism and archaic forms of social organization” (p. 220). In other words, in Habib Bourguiba’s approach to nation building, gender became a marker of modernity. Changes in Tunisian women’s legal status were a top-down stateinitiated reform. Charrad’s ambitious study sets forth a comparative framework for understanding the relationship between state formation, the struggle for power, and women’s rights in the Maghrib. Ultimately, the relationship between the state and “kin-based solidarities” affected the nature of family law reforms, which she argues set the www.apsanet.org 203

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parameters for women’s rights. Thus, States and Women’s Rights makes important contributions to the larger body of literature that examines the question of gender and power in the colonial-nationalist struggle. In some ways, however, she may be limited by the conceptual framework of her study. She equates women’s rights with family law, thus seeing agency and power only when they are deployed in the struggle to control and define the structure of the family through the state’s legal system. In this narrative, the triumph of Islamic law inevitably means a defeat for women’s rights. A greater engagement with recent studies, such as the work of Ziba Mir-Hosseini, that examine Islamic law as a somewhat more porous system in which both theory and praxis are contested and in which women find room for maneuverability would have enriched Charrad’s discussion. And anthropological analyses of women’s agencies in tribal societies, such as the work of Lila Abu Lughod, would suggest that the posited rigidity of a patrilineal system may indeed leave space for women’s voice and agency in ways that are not readily apparent in studies focused on the state. Still, Charrad’s important analysis should be of great interest to scholars of gender studies, nationalism, and state formation. The book offers a multilayered and complex analysis that shows the importance of such factors as gender relations and tribalism in the process of state building throughout the Maghrib; its conclusions are all the more compelling because of its comparative and historical perspectives. Gradual Economic Reform in Latin America: The Costa Rican Experience. By Mary A. Clark. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 198p. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. — Alfred G. Cuzán, The University of West Florida The central proposition advanced in this book is that incremental reform along neoliberal lines works. In Costa Rica, a slow-paced program of macroeconomic stabilization, fiscal cutbacks, economic deregulation, tax incentives for exporters, cessation of agricultural subsidies, and selected privatizations yielded “generally positive results” (p. 105). The economy recovered rapidly from the 1980s crisis and poverty rates fell back to precrisis levels, while the country’s democratic stability was never in danger. Mary Clark chose to study Costa Rica’s neoliberal reforms for several reasons. It is Latin America’s oldest welfare-state democracy, historically a favorite of international donors 204 March 2003

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and lenders. But, more recently, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank “find Costa Rica to be one of the most difficult Latin American countries in which to work” (p. 1). In the 1980s, the country’s import-substitution model having been exhausted and the state’s venture as an industrialist having turned out to be a costly mistake, the economy was “in desperate straits” (p. 44). In the throes of a “balance of payments crisis, rising inflation, and pressure on the colón,” Costa Rica was among the first to default on its international debts. In 1982, “the economy was in a nose-dive, hitting rock bottom in the same year” (p. 45). Yet the country’s decentralized governmental structure affords multiple veto points to well-organized interests, making it impossible to administer the “shock therapy” favored by many international economists. Nevertheless, Clark claims that the very slowness of the country’s policy process is a plus. Although acknowledging the opportunity costs of procrastination and the danger of succumbing to reform fatigue, she concludes that slow-paced reforms, compromise among contending interests, and compensation for losers, if “slow, messy, and expensive” (p. 138), constitute a more viable political combination than shock therapy. Costa Rican gradualism worked best with what are called easy or “first-stage” reforms. These included reducing tariffs, granting tax exemptions to exporters of nontraditional products and the tourist industry, doing away with agricultural subsidies, allowing private banks to compete with state banks, and dismantling an inefficient, corrupt, and unpopular public industrial corporation. These measures were easy to implement because either they were amenable to execution by presidential decree or, although they created losers, the reforms spawned a host of new enterprises that soaked up rural unemployment and organized themselves politically, lobbying for the preservation and extension of neoliberal policies. Even at this stage, however, it took leadership, funding, and technical assistance from abroad to get the policy ball rolling in the “right” direction. But when it came to more difficult “secondstage reforms,” gradualism made only minimal progress. State monopolies and social services bureaucracies have not been able to keep up with demand or technology, and hence are a drag on the economy. But their performance has not been altogether bad. Enjoying a certain amount of public support, they are able to fend off encroachments on their turf with tactics ranging from managerial foot dragging to strikes and even violence (as in the case of a

stevedore union in the Caribbean port of Limón). The most that reformers have been able to accomplish at the second stage is the promotion of “slow demonopolization” or “creeping privatization,” wherein private firms gain small footholds and niches, which, Clark projects, will in time result in their being “awarded equal status with public entities,” as happened with the banks (p. 101). This book is well written and, when it comes to describing neoliberal policies and explaining why reformers were stalled at the second stage, persuasive. Where it falls short is in evaluating the content of secondstage neoliberal policies and, what is the other side of the coin, the performance of Costa Rican state agencies in the fields of energy, telecommunications, casualty insurance, ports and other public works, and healthrelated services. Clark avers that “by the 1990s, secondstage reforms could no longer by avoided [sic]” (p. 68), which implies an objective problematic condition requiring an urgent remedy. This was true even in the case of the national healthcare system, “clearly the crown jewel of Costa Rica’s welfare state” (p. 88). It is overcentralized and bureaucratic, riddled with inefficiencies, and hobbled by obsolete managerial and accounting systems, and it treats patients in a highly impersonal, assembly-line fashion. Understandably, “the middle and upper classes” are “using disposable income to purchase better quality clinical consultations, lab tests, and out-patient procedures from private sources” (p. 95). Yet those who would benefit the most from private suppliers, “especially the young and the poor who rely disproportionately on state services,” are “disperse,” “divided by class, geography, and other factors,” and relatively satisfied with the system’s performance (perhaps, although Clark does not say so, for lack of experience with alternatives, because of low expectations, or because, the service being nominally “free,” beggars can’t be choosers). Facing a situation in which opponents to reform are well informed and organized but potential beneficiaries are mired in “collective action problems,” politicians “run great risks” if they attempt to do more than tinker with the system (pp. 101–2). Nevertheless, Clark is rather philosophical about the failure to overhaul the welfare state or break up state monopolies or quasi-monopolies. In her concluding comments, she observes that along with their counterparts in Brazil and Uruguay, Costa Rican reformers “may not be traveling to the same destination as those pursuing rapid and deep liberalization; perhaps they have a better one in mind,” a “‘third way’

or ‘middle road’ to reform, acknowledging the shortfalls in old statist models but seeking greater responsibility for the public sector than pure neoliberalism allows” (p. 146). What the specifics of this elusive alternative to neoliberalism may be Clark leaves unsaid. This reader, at least, was left with the impression that she has yet to decide whether or not the current state of Costa Rica’s medical system, public utilities, and infrastructure cry out for market solutions. If they do not, then the reformers’ lack of success in these areas has been a blessing in disguise. But if they do, then gradualism, and the political structures that give rise to it, will have to be reconsidered. Political Institutions: Democracy and Social Choice. By Josep M. Colomer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 266p. $45.00. — John M. Carey, Washington University in St. Louis Josep M. Colomer’s new book is a happy marriage of social choice theory with comparative politics. The book serves simultaneously as a primer to social choice and its empirical applications, as a theory of the evolution of political institutions, and as a normative argument in favor of inclusive, complex, and nonmajoritarian decision rules in democracies. On all these counts, Political Institutions is well worth reading, and including on syllabi. Colomer states the normative argument at the outset: “[D]emocratic regimes organized in simple institutional frameworks foster the concentration of power . . . [and] satisfaction of relatively small groups. . . . In contrast, pluralistic institutions produce multiple winners, inducing multiparty cooperation . . . and consensual policies that can satisfy large groups’ interests on a great number of issues” (p. 2). The subsequent strategy of the book is as follows. Colomer reviews the fundamental social choice results relating to elections and voting, focusing on the potential for unstable and indeterminate outcomes under simple majority rule. Then he outlines a conceptual framework for the application of theory to the analysis of how real-world political institutions operate and how they develop. The central questions, addressed in sequential chapters, are “Who can vote?”; “How are votes counted?”; and “What is voted for?” On the first question, Colomer pairs a discussion of the implications of simple versus complex electorates with an historical review of debates over the extension of suffrage. On the second, he outlines the rationales and implications of single-winner versus multiple-

winner, and majority versus supermajority decision rules, then illustrates with discussions of electoral systems and rules of legislative procedure in various contexts. On the third, he offers a theory of constitutional design that hinges on whether power is concentrated or divided—either among institutions at the national level (horizontally) or between national and subnational units (vertically). He illustrates with discussions of how authority is distributed in various regimes, and how this distribution either facilitates or impedes the translation of voter preferences into representation and public policy. Each of these chapters is organized around some basic theoretical claims, explained in nontechnical language, then followed with extensive empirical application and discussion. In the conclusion, Colomer provides a brief overview of the establishment of democracies worldwide since the late nineteenth century, arguing that trends in both regime survival and in constitutional design indicate that pluralistic, consensus-encouraging institutions will flourish, while those that encourage concentration of power fade. The normative case for consensus democracy is familiar from the work of Arend Lijphart, most recently in Patterns of Democracy (1999), and although Colomer’s evolutionary argument for its prevalence is suggestive, this is not the central contribution of Political Institutions. The book has a number of strengths. One is the author’s knack for supplying historical material that illustrates the relevance of social choice theory to the study of political institutions. In this sense, Colomer’s book follows in the tradition of William H. Riker’s Liberalism Against Populism (1982), although Political Institutions is empirically richer, and much more accessible to a nontechnical audience. A second, and related, contribution is Colomer’s use of social choice theory to provide an historically and philosophically coherent account of the development of rules for making collective decisions in political institutions, democratic or otherwise. For example, Colomer associates unanimity rules with the premise that decision procedures should aim to discover a single will—for example, divine providence—that governs collective choice. Moves to relax the unanimity requirement, then, are motivated either by a philosophical shift toward identifying the social good with the aggregation of individual preferences, or by the unwillingness to endure the bargaining costs associated with unanimity requirements, or some combination of these. Colomer’s account of how rules for electing Roman Catholic popes developed through the Middle

Ages is excellent in this regard. His discussions of the development of suffrage and voting rules in medieval European city states, the colonies of the Americas and their successor republics, and nineteenth- and tweentiethcentury European states are similarly absorbing and on point. No review consisting only of praise can be credible, of course, and so I will offer a few criticisms, purely in the interest of promoting this book. One is that the author’s various arguments in favor of consensual institutions amount to arguments for supermajority, or concurrent majority, requirements for decisionmaking. Yet one of the author’s points in the initial theoretical primer is that the desirability of more inclusive decision rules depends on how distasteful is the current policy. That is, unless the status quo is universally abhorred, requirements for greater inclusiveness can “allow mediocrity to endure” (p. 73). This point is underplayed throughout much of the book in discussions of the moderating influence of consensual rules on policy outcomes. A second limitation is the lack of systematic tests of many claims regarding the relationships between rules, policy outputs, and social satisfaction. One example: Colomer posits a chain of reasoning by which the existence of a greater number of elected offices means that fewer policy issues will correspond to each office, such that election results associated with each will be more stable and predictable, thus producing greater social utility (p. 142). Another example: Control by one party over the national government and most subnational governments promotes the centralization of power in the national government (p. 151). These hypotheses, as with many others throughout the book, are derived from basic theoretical principles clearly and plausibly. Nevertheless, they are big claims, to which one can imagine reasonable counterhypotheses. Those who place greater emphasis than Colomer on the costs of bargaining among institutions, for example, would likely be skeptical that there is a straightforward correspondence between the multiplication of offices and the ability of institutions to satisfy their constituents. Colomer does not elaborate alternative hypotheses nor, for the most part, test his own systematically, relying instead on illustrative empirical examples. He does this so well, however, with such a keen sense for how the basic intuitions from social choice theory map onto real-world politics, that Political Institutions should become a staple of reading lists on positive political theory and comparative politics. www.apsanet.org 205

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Transforming Europe: Europeanization and Domestic Change. Edited by Maria Green Cowles, James Caporaso, and Thomas Risse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 272p. $52.50 cloth, $19.95 paper. The Europeanisation of National Administrations: Patterns of Institutional Change and Persistence. By Christoph Knill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 258p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper. — Michael Baun, Valdosta State University Early studies of European integration presumed either the erosion and gradual disappearance of the nation-state (neofunctionalism) or its persistence and continued capacity to shape the integration process (intergovernmentalism). In both cases, the focus was on the supranational (European) level. For neofunctionalists, institutions and processes at the European level would eventually supplant those at the national level in importance, while for intergovernmentalists, the supranational level was the arena of bargaining and deal making between relatively coherent and self-interested states. The directional flow of activity and influence was from the national to the supranational, with national bureaucratic and nongovernmental actors shifting their interests and loyalties to the European level, or domestic actors seeking to shape national bargaining goals and strategies in the European arena. More recent trends in European Union studies have seen the theoretical focus shift away from the historical process of integration per se and toward the development of new and distinctive forms of governance within the EU, as well as a renewed focus on the nation-state and how it is shaped by the processes of European integration and governance, or “Europeanization.’’ In this effort to “bring the nation-state back in’’ to the field of EU studies, the institutions of the state are not assumed to be either disappearing or unchanging, but instead malleable to different degrees under the pressure of external forces for adaptation and change. Under these conditions, a new wave of comparative scholarship has sought to determine the extent to which institutional structures in various EU member states have converged, or possibly even diverged, in response to the common pressures of membership in an increasingly integrated polity. The two books under review belong to this emerging field of Europeanization studies, and both make an important contribution to it. Transforming Europe is a compilation of case 206 March 2003

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studies, most examining the impact of specific policy decisions at the EU level (gender equality, telecommunications, Economic and Monetary Union, environmental policy, etc.) on the domestic institutional structures of selected member states. Exceptions to this policy-oriented focus are the chapter on “Europeanization and Territorial Institutional Change’’ (Tanja A. Börzel), which examines changing patterns of interaction between central (national) and regional governments in Germany and Spain, and those by Jeffrey T. Checkel and Thomas Risse, which, respectively, examine the impact of Europeanization on citizenship norms and perceptions of national collective identity. The collected case studies are framed by introductory and concluding chapters written by the editors that clearly establish the theoretical and analytical framework for the study and draw out some general conclusions from the empirical chapters. The overall approach is a uniform and disciplined one, reflecting the book’s development through a series of workshops involving the individual authors over a period of several years. The authors in Transforming Europe adopt a three-step approach for examining the specific empirical cases: First, the Europeanization process relevant to the specific case is identified. Second, the “goodness of fit’’ between EU policy requirements and national institutions and practices is examined, to determine the extent of “adaptational pressures’’ on domestic structures. And third, the domestic institutional factors and actors facilitating or impeding change are analyzed, with five main mediating factors identified (multiple veto points, mediating formal institutions, political and organizational cultures, differential empowerment of actors, and learning). Following this approach, the book’s editors conclude that there is only limited evidence in the cases studied of structural convergence across member states, with much persistence of nationally specific arrangements and even some divergence. Much the same conclusion is reached by Christoph Knill in The Europeanisation of National Administrations, which is essentially an extended and more detailed treatment of his chapter in Transforming Europe on the application of EU environmental policies in Germany and Britain. Utilizing a cross-policy (five different pieces of EU environmental legislation) and cross-country approach, Knill finds a similar mixed pattern of convergence, persistence, and divergence in administrative structures and styles in response to Europeanization. The key to explaining domestic change, he argues, is the extent to which EU policies challenge core national administrative traditions. If

adaptation to EU norms can take place within established traditions, then it is likely to happen, although the resort to an agency-based perspective focusing on the interests and strategies of domestic actors is necessary to explain how and why. If EU policy prescriptions clash with core administrative traditions, however, then change is less likely to occur, although Knill leaves open the possibility for the adaptation of macro-level administrative arrangements in countries with a high reform capacity, as demonstrated by Britain in his study. Knill takes issue with Maria Green Cowles and Risse in their concluding chapter of Transforming Europe, however, when it comes to the theoretical explanation of domestic institutional change. While Cowles and Risse identify adaptive pressure stemming from the “misfit’’ between European policies and national institutional structures as the necessary condition for domestic change, Knill argues for a more differentiated perspective that gives greater weight to agency-based, as opposed to institution-based, approaches for explaining change. Which is appropriate, he argues, depends on the specific mechanism of Europeanization at work in a particular policy case, whether the explicit prescription of an institutional model for domestic compliance or, less directly, the alteration of domestic opportunity structures or of the beliefs and expectations of domestic actors. According to Knill, “The institution-based concept of adaptive pressure can hardly be applied in order to account for different patterns of administrative change in cases where European policies prescribe no concrete model for institutional compliance’’ (p. 227), but instead rely on less direct means of exerting pressure for change. With their common stress on limited convergence and the diversity of national responses to adaptational pressures, both books make the important point that there is no single “European model’’ for EU member states to converge on. Not only are the domestic institutional arrangements and interest structures that mediate these pressures different, but the extent and nature of adaptational pressures also vary according to specific policy areas and situations. The findings of these books thus seem to cast doubt on the expectations of previous scholarship (e.g., Peter Katzenstein, ed. Tamed Power, 1997; Simon Bulmer and William Paterson, The Federal Republic of Germany and the European Community, 1987) that such a model existed, and was exemplified by the more decentralized and “semisovereign’’ governmental system of the Federal Republic of Germany. According to this widely held view, the German model of dispersed and diffusely

exercised power conferred certain advantages for surviving and thriving within the emerging EU multilevel polity, and other member states would find themselves under strong adaptive and competitive pressures to conform to it. However, both books examine cases in which the degree of misfit between German structures and EU policy requirements was initially quite high, as well as cases in which German administrative structures and practices imposed problems for successful adaptation. Both books are also similarly vulnerable to criticism of their conceptualization and understanding of the key variable of Europeanization. In both, the focus is overwhelmingly on formal EU policy decisions and prescriptions as the origin of Europeanization pressure (although Knill does distinguish between the different mechanisms by which Europeanization pressure can be brought to bear). This conceptualization of the term ignores other possible ways in which Europeanization can occur, with consequences for domestic institutions and politics, for instance, through the interaction of national and supranational actors within the EU context, and through the resulting diffusion of ideas and processes of mutual learning. Through such “constructivist’’ means, and not simply the pressure of formal policy decisions and requirements, the interests and perspectives of governmental and nongovernmental actors can be transformed, with implications for domestic institutions and structures. To be fair, the impact of Europeanization processes emanating from sources other than formal policy decisions or norms are considered by some of the authors in Transforming Europe, especially in the chapter by Risse on the evolution of national collective identities, and Knill is willing to consider the “weaker’’ forms of adaptive pressure exerted by EU policies through their impact on the beliefs and expectations of domestic actors. But by and large, the conceptual understanding of Europeanization that is utilized in both books is a rather formalistic, policy-oriented one. It is also a fairly static one. In both books, the process of Europeanization flows only one way, from the supranational to the national or domestic level. This ignores the reality that Europeanizing norms and decisions themselves often originate at the national level and are then transposed into EU policy decisions. As Knill suggests in his book’s discussion of EU environmental legislation, for instance, the adaptational pressures on domestic administrative structures vary in accordance with the capacity of national governments to assert their own preferences at the EU level. When able to do so, national governments obviously reduce

their own adaptational needs and shift the burden of adaptive compliance onto others in specific policy areas. Thus, Europeanization can be the diffusion of national norms and preferences in particular instances; but it is definitely not just a one-way street. However, as Cowles and Risse note, “Europeanization itself is a relatively recent phenomenon and continues to evolve’’ (p. 234). The same could be said of our understanding and use of this concept. Launching into Cyberspace: Internet Development and Politics in Five World Regions. By Marcus Franda. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2002. 280p. $59.95 cloth, $22.00 paper. — Jason Paul Abbott, Nottingham Trent University Launching into Cyberspace provides a comparative analysis of the impact of the Internet on international relations. Focusing on five large and diverse regions of the world: Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia (India and China), Marcus Franda demonstrates that any analysis of the impact of the Internet has to take into account that the process of the integration and diffusion of information communication technologies (ICTs) varies enormously, not just from one region to the next but often from country to country. Consequently, the political scientist should be wary of drawing generalized conclusions about the impact of the Internet globally. Indeed, in many ways Franda’s account of its impact provides a healthy degree of skepticism to many of the more technologically deterministic and “libertarian” accounts of the impact of ICTs. His account demonstrates that in nearly all of the countries examined, far from “withering away,” the state has played a decisive role either in creating a conducive environment for the Internet to develop or, conversely, in retarding its development by adopting regulations to administer and control access. The case studies presented in this book, which forms part of a larger three-volume comparative study, are its greatest strength. The analysis of the development and impact of the Internet in the many countries of these diverse regions clearly demonstrates that it has varied according to the specific constellation of historical, political, and socioeconomic forces. Consequently, Franda convincingly establishes that a broader “understanding of the relationship between the Internet and international relations will require familiarity with these differences’’ (p. 3). While this book is not directly about the socalled digital divide, it nevertheless reveals how skewed the development of the Internet has

been. The stark nature of this divide, especially in such regions as Africa and Central Asia, is important in supporting another of Franda’s claims, namely, that the “thickness” of globalization has also been overstated. Drawing on the work of Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, he argues that globalization is ultimately a measure of the thickness of global linkages. Yet when we examine the density of transnational interdependence, it often is thinner than many analysts claim. In the case of the Internet, for example, “in more than eighty of the ninety-six countries, less than 2 percent of the population had access to the Internet. . . . In more than two-thirds . . . far less than 1 percent had access’’ (p. 227). Among the reasons cited for the “thinness” of Internet penetration and development, Franda highlights the lack of adequate telecommunications and Internetrelated infrastructures; government-run telecommunications monopolies; a limited desire for reform by certain governments (especially in the Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union); the lack of skills, resources, and awareness to use the Internet (with notable exceptions in such countries as India, Bulgaria, and Romania); and the fear of the impact of the free flow of information on security (e.g., Russia and China) and religious/cultural values (especially Saudi Arabia and Iran). While Franda is skeptical about the overall impact of the Internet, the picture that he paints is not all bleak. In his chapter on Central and Eastern Europe he highlights how several states have made great progress in modernizing their telecommunications infrastructures and attracting foreign investment into the Internet sector. Such states include the Baltic States (especially Estonia), the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia. However, Franda argues that the principal impetus behind this progress has not come from internal forces but instead from “the desire of national leaderships to join the European Union, which has developed admission guidelines that include a central role for IT and the Internet’’ (p. 152). He also highlights the potential of such states as Hungary, Romania, and India. While the case of the software industry of Bangalore is well known, he reveals that Romania, Hungary, and to a lesser extent Bulgaria have attracted foreign companies because of the large number of scientific and engineering personnel available at comparatively low wages. Romania, for example, “has twice the number of computer science graduates per capita as the United States and seven times the rate in India’’ (p. 165). In terms of critique, the book adopts a rather unsophisticated Realist interpretation of international relations that largely downplays www.apsanet.org 207

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the more dynamic potential of the Internet. It rejects both the idealism of liberal internationalist visions of a future world order and those that argue that we are witnessing the emergence of new forms of regional and global governance. Instead, the state is regarded as being central not only to the international system but also to the development of the Internet both nationally and internationally. A problem here is the distinction between intent and capability. Indeed, at several points throughout the book, the author himself recognizes that while many governments are trying to control the Internet, their desire to do so often exceeds their ability. Nevertheless, if the Internet is to be “controlled” and “managed’’ internationally, then it will be the nascent international regime that will do so. However, while each chapter discusses the contribution (or lack of it) of states to this regime, it gets no specific coverage in the book except for a few pages in the first chapter and the conclusion. Perhaps this will come in the later volumes of this study, but given the emphasis on regime theory, it is surprising that this book did not include a chapter in its own right on this regime. While some attention is given to the efforts of individuals, groups, and businesses within respective countries, ultimately the success or failure of the Internet is down to the role of the state. However, more emphasis could be made on the role of other actors in the development of the Internet, such as “virtual communities” and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In the case of the former, emphasis is made in several chapters on the role of diasporas in the development of the Internet (e.g., in Slovakia, India, Hungary, and the Middle East), while for the latter, the chapters on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe provide detail on the role played by NGOs in the development of basic Internet infrastructures, especially the role of George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Overall however, this is a well-written and thoroughly researched book, which fills the gap in the comparative analysis of the impact of the Internet on international relations. I look forward to reading the future volumes in the broader study that the author is producing. Unmaking the Japanese Miracle: Macroeconomic Politics 1985–2000. By William W. Grimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 288p. $39.95. — Ronald Dore, London School of Economics For a blow-by-blow historical narrative of the evolution of Japanese monetary and fiscal policy from the Plaza agreement to the point at 208 March 2003

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which the American recession was beginning to nip Japanese recovery in the bud, this book would be hard to beat. It is a lucid, cogent account, based on a wealth of documentary and interview sources—albeit sometimes with a bit too much reliance on hindsight-rich analysis and self-justifying memoirs, rather than press reports of the policy arguments as they were presented at the time. The highlights of that narrative are, of course, the two great “mistakes” as everyone now agrees they were: doing nothing to choke off the asset price bubble in 1988, and the premature burst of fiscal prudence that choked off the nascent recovery in 1997. Grimes’s explanation of the former (p. 141) seems plausible; everyone was just too happy—and history had not then taught the lesson that is being understood only now as it happens again in America, that debt-deflationary recessions induced by asset-price bubble bursts can be much worse than recessions caused by correction of price inflation. As for 1997, he gives a comprehensive account of the background to Hashimoto’s fiscal reform drive. If anything is left out, it is the not insignificant factor of image politics. As Koizumi’s “no gain without pain” line once again shows, in this masochistic postConfucian society, austerity can actually be popular. The last of the four core narrative chapters is devoted to the structural changes of the second half of the decade—independence for the Bank of Japan, and the “dismemberment” of the Ministry of Finance with the creation of the Financial Supervisory Agency. The complex background—international models, real regulatory problems, and populist bureaucracy bashing, which for various reasons became concentrated on the Ministry of Finance—is well explained. The narrative is preceded by three chapters dealing respectively—Grimes himself talks about macroeconomic policy as a game, after all—with the chessboard (organizational conflict), the chessmen (the institutional actors), and the ploys and strategies of the game (macroeconomic policy tools). The trouble is that macroeconomic policy isn’t just a game. It is about managers’ investment plans and people’s livelihoods; it is about the fate of Japan Inc., being an international good neighbor and keeping dangerously powerful Americans sweet; it is about the responsibility of the present to future generations; it is about adherence to monetarist or Keynesian theories about how economies work; it is about ideological choices: market versus state, equality and cooperation versus freedom and competition. Grimes’s hard-nosed, rational-choice methodology as he sets it out (e.g., on p. 14)—policy as games

played between organizations whose behavior is a product of the structured pursuit of power and prestige by the individuals within them— strips out all passion, ideology, and theory, much as a prisoners’ dilemma payoff schedule strips out the hates and friendships and principled convictions of actual prisoners. Fortunately, in the narrative chapters he uses a less restricted causal framework, allowing for the effect of personal resentments, the diabolo ex machina interventions of politicians like Ozawa, and the laid-back ineffectualness of a Miyazawa. But in the analysis sections with which each chapter concludes, he reverts to his chosen frame. Ministry of Finance officials become the grudging turf defenders singlemindedly devoted to fiscal consolidation because (p. 20) it is the way their ministry can enhance its power and autonomy. Two consequences follow from this. First, Grimes does not distinguish between issues of day-to-day or month-to-month macroeconomic management designed to boost or slow down economic activity—which are largely matters of technical judgement—and on the other hand, long-term issues involving values and ideology, such as the desirability or otherwise of a shift from direct to indirect taxation, whether financial institutions should be privatized, or the optimal size of the tax take in the economy. All issues get jumbled together as game ploys. Secondly, with the focus on institutional jockeying over policy, scant attention gets paid to the actual macroeconomy. The bureaucrats I know have both a keen intellectual curiosity about, and—dare I say it—a public-spirited concern with, the evolution of the economic structure and shifts in comparative advantage, the responses of consumers and investors to policy, the multiplier effects of fiscal stimuli, and so on, not just with bureaucratic turf. The “Japanese miracle” of the title was a microeconomic, economic-institutional miracle, not a miracle of bureaucratic power. The book is billed as a Hamlet, but with all the spotlights on Horatio rather than the prince—the Ministry of Finance rather than the economy. Also missing from Grimes’s Hamlet are the Rosencrantz of the U.S. Treasury and the Gildenstern of the foreign, overwhelmingly American, financial community in Tokyo. American pressures in formal negotiations— Plaza, Louvre, the Structural Impediments Initiative, and so on—are well described, but of informal pressures from the U.S. Treasury— what a Jim Baker or a Larry Summers may or may not have said on the phone: the subject of much rumor and press comment—he refrains from speculating. A propos one of Grimes’s chief puzzles—why the bubble-creating low interest rate of 1988–89 was allowed to

continue “at least a year beyond the point at which it was economically justifiable” (p. 136)—surely, for all its paranoid tone, it was worth reporting, if only to refute, the explanation offered by Kikkawa’s populist bestseller Losing the Monetary War (Kikkawa Mototada, Manee Haisen, 1998). Supine obedience to America’s wishes, contrasting with Germany’s greater independence, says Kikkawa; it was all about ensuring an adequate transpacific flow of Japanese funds to cover the American deficits, and help the elder Bush to get elected. As for the foreign financial community, two questions occur to me as worth exploring: How far were the announcement effects of successive stimulus packages blunted by the rubbishing they received from the analysts and chief economists of the American banks and brokerage houses, relayed to the Japanese via the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal? And how much were the structural reforms of the last few years—those described in Chapter 7, plus all the pension reforms and changes in fund management arrangements—prefigured by urgent memoranda from the Finance Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo? The European Commission and the Integration of Europe: Images of Governance. By Liesbet Hooghe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 280p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper. — Jon Pierre, University of Gothenburg, Sweden The European Commission is the powerhouse of the European Union. While its role in some respects does not look too different from most national bureaucracies—the formulation and implementation of policy—it is a much more powerful and influential administration than its national counterparts. The Commission acts with extraordinary autonomy from elected officials; if the Commission is stronger than national bureaucracies, the European Parliament is one of the weaker elected assemblies in Europe. Furthermore, the Commission has extensive rights (“a constitutional obligation’’; p. 6) to initiate legislative processes, something that tends to tilt the politicobureaucratic playing field in its favor. It is interesting, however, that we know very little about the people inside the Commission. Most analyses of the EU structures have been policy oriented, portraying the Commission as a unitary actor. Liesbet Hooghe’s approach is the opposite; by studying preference formation on different issues among senior Commission officials, she seeks to generate a broader understanding of gover-

nance in the EU. She investigates such preference formation among top officials in the EU on four dimensions: surpranationalism vs. intergovernmentalism; a neoliberal model of capitalism vs. a model of regulated capitalism; a “principal’’ type vs. an “agent’’ type of Commission; and a consociational vs. a Weberian model of EU bureaucracy. The four dimensions capture the most salient issues in the EU. The tension between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism remains a defining feature of EU politics. Supranationalism as an institutional ideology accords greater influence to EU institutions vis-à-vis member states and thus relates directly to the overarching issue of the pace and objectives of integration. Economic policy is also a salient dimension of the Union; a neoliberal economic policy was predominant for a long period until the Amsterdam Treaty of 1999 signaled a growing support for a more regulatory regime embedded in a broader agenda of social change. Similarly, the Commission’s power and autonomy in relation to elected officials and the European Parliament reflect the long-established predominance of the Commission in European governance that has become increasingly contested over the past several years. The fourth dimension, finally, refers to the issue of the extent to which the Commission should be consociational with strict adherence to national representation, or whether Weberian and meritocratic ideals should characterize the bureaucracy. Hooghe wants to know to what extent the EU top officials’ views on these issues are determined by socialization or utility maximization. Socialization in the present context is defined as the outcome of experiences outside (and prior to) the Commission, such as previous experience in national administration, political parties, and so on. Utility maximization, on the other hand, is based on assessments of how changes in institutions or policy affect the individual in terms of career options, influence, promotion, pay, and similar factors. She argues that this distinction can be sustained, theoretically and empirically: “Utility maximization presumes that top officials are guided by tangible, immediate career benefits, whereas socialization implies that top officials’ preferences reflect intangible, long-standing dispositions that were internalized through participation in groups or institutions over time. This way, the two basic logics are unambiguously distinct” (p. 22). Hooghe’s analysis draws on 137 interviews with top officials and a study questionnaire given to each interviewee that yielded a 77% response rate. (She sought to interview all 204

top officials but only 137, equal to 67%, granted her access.) Hooghe’s main argument is that analyses that portray the Commission as a unitary actor fail to acknowledge and account for the heterogeneity of the Commission. The unitary actor assumption rests on two requirements, both of which are missing in the Commission context: a high degree of “a priori preference convergence’’ (p. 198) and an advanced institutional capacity for the resolution or management of conflict. If to these observations we add the simple facts that the Commission with its 4,000 staff—reflecting different national and administrative cultures and traditions—is divided into 24 directorates plus a SecretariatGeneral and relates to 15 member states, we soon understand that the assumption that this is a unitary actor is an analytical construct. If anything, the Commission is the archetype of a multiorganization. The analysis also shows that top officials’ preferences are reflective of both socialization and utility maximization. On the four dimensions, two—supranationalism/intergovernmentalism and neoliberal/regulated capitalism—preferences are explained predominantly by socialization variables. Preferences on one dimension, consociationalism/Weberianism, are primarily explained by utility maximization variables, while the fourth dimension, “principal/agent,” presents a mixed result. By now, it should be obvious to the reader that this book offers a highly intriguing and illuminating account of the Commission. Hooghe accompanies her quantitative analysis with an elegant theoretical argument, as well as extracts from her interviews that add context and provide a broader understanding of the top officials’ Weltanschauung and perception of issues. That having been said, a couple of questions should have been addressed more clearly. One such question refers to the validity of some of the data. While the top officials she studies deal with political issues and make political decisions, they are not elected officials and they appear to be very much aware of the duality of their office. She quotes an official as saying (apropos left-right ideological orientation): “We all have our own ideals of course, but we do not always put them on the table” (p. 88). Indeed, 30% of the interviewees maintain that personal preferences should not interfere with their job as a civil servant (p. 88). Put slightly differently, the book does not say very much about the extent to which individual preferences are translated into behavior. The Weberian ideal–type civil servants are not devoid of personal beliefs and opinions, but the institutional and regulatory framework within which their offices are embedded www.apsanet.org 209

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ensures that professional behavior is not affected. Since a large number of top EU officials come from Weberian administrative systems, it is not always clear what the attitudinal data tell us about the actual behavior of the officials. Similarly, the book could have devoted more attention to the process through which individual preferences are aggregated into institutional behavior. These are minor points that should not overshadow the fact that Hooghe’s book offers an excellent scholarly analysis of the Commission staff. It will be difficult to overlook her findings in future research on the EU Commission. Altering Party Systems: Strategic Behavior and the Emergence of New Political Parties in Western Democracies. By Simon Hug. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 216p. $47.50. — Amie Kreppel, University of Florida The questions of when and why new political parties decide to form and contest elections in established democracies are not new, but they have grown in importance over the last two decades. The rise of postmaterialist and nationalist parties across Western Europe has led to an increased focus on the causal factors involved in the formation and electoral success of new parties. In this new book, Simon Hug attempts to move beyond existing studies to create generalizable hypotheses capable of predicting when we should expect these phenomena to occur. It is innovative both in terms of its approach, which is explicitly game-theoretic, and in its goal to move toward a truly generalizable theory of new party formation (and, to some degree, success). Although there are some theoretical as well as empirical weaknesses in the work, Hug has made a laudable effort in his attempts to move the analysis of new party development beyond the bulk of existing descriptive case or class studies. The central goal of the book is to demonstrate that new party formation is fundamentally a strategic interaction between “potential” new parties and existing parties. Both the introduction and the first historical or descriptive chapter are engaged in demonstrating the nature of this strategic interaction, which is the same regardless of the class of new party (environmental or nationalist), the institutional constraints, and historical period. In Chapter 2, Hug takes us through the formation of three new parties (the Greens in the Netherlands in the 1980s, the National Socialist German Workers Party [NSDAP] in Weimar Germany, and the British Social Democratic Party in 210 March 2003

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1981) by describing the political and institutional environment in which each new party was initially created. The selection of these very different parties is used to demonstrate that in each case, despite the historical and institutional variations, the underlying strategic interactions are the same and should therefore be incorporated in a generalized theory of new party formation. In Chapter 3, Hug develops this interaction more formally into a simplified “game” between two actors: the potential new party and a single established party. In this game, the potential new party makes demands and the existing party must decide how to respond to them. Essential in Hug’s approach is the emphasis on the behavior of the existing party, which must decide whether or not to incorporate the demands of the potential party into its policy agenda. Essentially, the established party must make a cost–benefit analysis based on its beliefs about the strength of the potential party and the costs of fulfilling its demands. Demands can be high or low, and potential parties may be strong or weak. While the established party is assumed to have perfect information about the costs of the demands, it has only incomplete information about the strength of the potential party, which, on the other hand, is assumed to know both its own strength and the cost of its demands. It must decide whether to make highcost or low-cost demands on the basis of what it thinks are the chances that those demands will be met by the established party. The model necessarily simplifies the true situation as all first-stage models must, but these simplifications deserve more attention than is given to them in the text. In particular, Hug implicitly makes the assumption that the potential parties are interested in specific policy outcomes alone and that these are outcomes that can be achieved by the established parties through the normal policy process. This ignores the existence of antisystem parties that do not want simple policy changes but changes in the system as a whole (an aspect of the German NSDAP that is largely ignored in Chapter 2). While it is certainly possible to constrain the theory to only those potential parties wishing to work within the existing political system or making politically acceptable demands, this should be done explicitly. Hug also asserts that potential parties would always prefer simply to have their demands met without forming a party (see, in particular, Figure 3.2 and Assumption 1, p. 47). This assumes that policy demands are always more important than participation in the governing process. He states that “if the established party accepts the demand the game ends and no new party appears on the electoral scene” (p. 45), an

assumption that merits some discussion, even in a simplified game. An additional aspect of the game that causes some confusion is the inclusion of an additional dimension to the cost–benefit calculus of the established party. Weak potential parties are divided into two distinct categories, credible versus noncredible, largely on the basis of the institutional costs of party formation and the expected benefits to the potential party in terms of electoral success (despite its being weak). The problem with this addition is that it tends to lead Hug into contradictions and, in some cases, tautological reasoning. The assumption has already been made that the established parties do not know if they are dealing with a strong or weak party, and yet Hug claims (p. 55) that the established party “knows whether a weak new party is credible” and that “the established party can condition its decisions on the credibility of the weak new parties.” But this assumes that the established party knows it is dealing with a weak party to begin with. When discussing the implication of formation (institutional) costs, Hugs states in Implication 2 (p. 57) that “if the weak potential new party is a credible challenger, higher costs of forming a party decrease the likelihood of new parties emerging. If the weak type is not a credible challenger, changes in the costs of forming a new party do not alter the likelihood of new parties emerging.” But remember that the “cost” of new party formation is what makes a weak party credible or not credible to begin with, and so the implication is, in effect, tautological. The significance of this dilemma is increased because it is carried through the empirical analysis in Chapter 5, in particular, on pages 99 to 104 and 113 to 115. The empirical work of the book is found in Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5, in essence, tests the predictions of the theoretical model of new party formation, and Chapter 6 makes some tentative forays into predicting the electoral success of the new parties. Once again here the work is essentially sound and quite informative, but there are some assumptions and choices that reduce the strength of the findings. One is the decision to rely primarily on secondary sources for all of the data collected. In some cases, this is understandable because of the difficulty of the data collection involved or the immutability of the information (national laws on the number of signatures required to gain access to electoral ballot). In other cases (economic indicators), the reliance on the data of others is less understandable as this often leads to the use of older data or data that is not well matched with the electoral cycle being analyzed.

The data analysis itself is quite thorough and does lend significant (albeit at times mixed) support for the underlying thesis of the book. This is important because despite some weaknesses, Hug does achieve his primary goal of demonstrating that the emergence of new parties in Western democracies can be understood from a game theoretical perspective and that this approach supports the development of generalizable theories about the process as a whole. By promoting a theoretical, as opposed to descriptive, approach to analyzing new party formation, the book makes a substantial contribution to the new parties literature and points the way forward for future scholars. Imitation and Politics: Redesigning Modern Germany. By Wade Jacoby. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 240p. $42.50 cloth, $17.95 paper. — Helga A. Welsh, Wake Forest University Wade Jacoby’s scholarly study successfully marries theory to a detailed, specialized knowledge about the history, political culture, and politics of Germany. German specialists will find plenty of insights, but Jacoby’s theoretical framework—parsimonious yet central in its limitation to two crucial variables— stands out. It will stimulate all those interested in the transfer of institutions and, more generally, the transfer of democratic capitalism. For example, the decade-old transitions in Central and Eastern Europe have been referred to as “negotiated’’ and “imitative revolutions,’’ but often the implications of such pronouncements are assumed but not explored. Jacoby’s study supplies important answers to questions about the conditions that are most likely to render institutional transfer effective—in Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. Efficiency and/or justice, according to Jacoby (p. 31), drive imitation, but strategies for accomplishing these goals differ, ranging from “wholesale and piecemeal transfer’’ and “exact transfer and the functional equivalent approach’’ to “continuous interaction and single-moment transfer’’ (p. 34). The author clearly distinguishes imitation from complementary approaches, such as diffusion. He emphasizes that institutional transfer is not automatic but the outcome of choice and political struggle. It contains elements of surprise; therefore, outcomes are unpredictable and unintended consequences frequent. Germany is the main stage, observed after World War II and after unification in 1990, and the cases are institutions of industrial relations (i.e., trade unions and business organiza-

tions) and secondary education, including vocational training. In other words, Jacoby focuses on a narrowly defined set of institutions with policy relevance, rather than looking at such constitutional features as executivelegislative relations or federalism. He asserts that whereas the adoption of industrial relations along lines imported from the Allies after World War II was effective, similar attempts to refurbish secondary education failed. In comparison, the export of the West German system of industrial relations to eastern Germany faced severe obstacles, not the least due to very different labor market conditions, whereas secondary-education institutions were more readily accepted, although the jury is still out. For institutional transfer to be effective, Jacoby says, two conditions have to be met: First, institutional transfer has to be supported by active segments of civil society, and, second, flexibility in adapting institutions to foreign settings is essential. When civil society is insufficiently organized or opposed to imitation, or if imitation is mostly a matter of elite choice, then institutional transfer faces resistance. Similarly, the politics of imitation faces higher obstacles when exact transfer is intended. A functional-equivalency approach, with its built-in elasticity, is preferable. Jacoby suggests three measures for judging the effectiveness of transferred institutions: legality, performance, and persistence. Thus, effectiveness is closely tied to legal and societal acceptance, success in promoting efficiency or justice, and longevity (p. 12). The Western Allies never attempted the exact transfer of their institutions, whereas the process of German unification was based on the assumption that West German organizations could be transplanted with minimum adaptation to the East. Even in the face of resistance, transplanted western German elites clung to familiar patterns. The federalist nature of German politics showcases cooperation— for example, in the fiscal equalization policies—but also conflict, since the distribution of funds is largely from the West to the East. West German blueprints encountered eastern German reality. Jacoby is quite skeptical that flexibility, on the basis of “democracy in practice,’’ has been part of West German strategy. “To put it metaphorically,’’ he writes, “although the East Germans were allowed to order their own meal, the menu was limited, substitutions were not welcome, and the chefs were easily insulted if the specials were ignored’’ (p. 189). Not surprisingly, Jacoby’s ambitious project not only answers but raises questions. How much societal support and flexibility are necessary to assure effectiveness? If one is missing,

can the other compensate for it? What happens if, as author points out, “there is . . . little organized civil society to exploit whatever flexibility does exist’’ (p. 14), as is the case with vocational training in eastern Germany? What is the relationship between institutional and policy transfer? In the case of industrial relations, the functional-equivalency approach may have been effective—and the major difference seems to lie in the initial ambitions of those who initiated the transfers. What difference does it make whose foreign model is imitated and who is responsible for the transfer? What is the difference between a transfer mostly intended to create a functioning and democratic entity and one that also aimed at a functioning, national entity, as in the case of unification? Jacoby acknowledges that the risks of “unwarranted ‘feedback effects’’’ were much higher in the second case. Finally, how important is the symbolic reframing of issues, for example, avoidance of accusations about Americanization after World War II or colonization after 1990? Jacoby suggests a new theoretical framework, and it rekindles the debate about German unification strategies. His highly readable account contributes to our understanding of political change in settings that range from voluntary to imposed institutional transfer. The book deserves a wide readership among historians and political scientists, and invites them to test its findings in locales that vary in time and space—as Jacoby himself suggests in his brief excursions to Central and Eastern Europe and Meiji Japan. Reforming the State: Fiscal and Welfare Reform in Post-Socialist Countries. Edited by Janos Kornai, Stephan Haggard, and Robert R. Kaufman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 300p. $69.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. — Randall Newnham, Penn State University This edited volume, assembled by Kornai and his colleagues, addresses a vital topic in the study of postcommunist societies. Now that the “heroic phase’’ of rapid political and economic change is over, it seems clear that a long road remains ahead—a slow slog of step-bystep reforms through each sector of government and society in an effort to create a modern state. How should this process take place? Leaders and analysts alike desperately need a road map. In some ways, this volume seems to be well positioned to provide such a map. The roster of editors is quite promising. Janos Kornai, Robert Kaufman, and Stephan Haggard are www.apsanet.org 211

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well-known and experienced scholars. They represent the best of the Eastern and Western social science traditions. Too often studies of the transitional societies of the former East bloc have been written from a one-sided perspective. Western authors may be well versed in theory, yet they often lack a truly detailed understanding of the nature of the region. This can lead to seriously flawed analyses—à la Jeffrey Sachs. Conversely, Eastern authors may stress the “unique’’ problems of their societies, without adequate understanding of broader theoretical and comparative perspectives. This study seemed to have the potential of blending the local expertise of Kornai and his colleagues with the insights of an author such as Haggard, whose works (such as Pathways from the Periphery, 1990) suggest a broader context. Indeed, a number of the book’s case study chapters are quite interesting and valuable. Vladimir Gimpelson, for example, provides a detailed study of the politics of labor market adjustment in Russia. His explanation for the phenomenon of wage arrears as a form of hidden unemployment is fascinating. Vito Tanzi compares the efforts of Russia and Georgia to reform their tax systems, concluding that Georgia has been more successful. The Georgian case is an interesting one, and one that has not been well studied in the literature. In his chapter, Kornai presents an innovative model for reforming the Hungarian health-care system. And finally, Assar Lindbeck’s chapter, which seeks to draw lessons for the “post-socialist’’ countries from the experiences of Sweden, is also a refreshing change of pace. Given frequent calls for a Swedish-style “third way’’ in the region, it is striking how rarely the perspective of Swedish authors has been seen in previous studies of the reform process. However, this volume falls short in several ways, and thus, while providing many useful insights, it is not the definitive “road map’’ to state reform that analysts and policymakers have sought. The first problem is with geographical coverage. The book contains eight case studies of reform. Half are focused on Hungary. Two touch on Russia, two on Poland, and one on Georgia. This is hardly a comprehensive survey of the postcommunist area, which contains some 25 states. Whole regions are missing— the Balkans, the Baltic states, Central Asia, the Ukraine, and Belarus—as well as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, important comparative cases to Hungary and Poland. The political and economic context of reform differs greatly across these states. It would certainly be difficult to cover all 25 countries in one volume, but it should have been possible to pick some that would better represent each important 212 March 2003

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subgrouping of states. The strong focus on Hungary and a few other states limits the volume’s applicability to other cases. Additionally, the topical coverage is also too limited. For example, given the limited number of chapters, it would have been preferable not to have any overlap among the topics. Yet the work has two partially overlapping chapters on pension reform in Poland and Hungary (by Joan Nelson and Jerzy Hausner) and two focusing largely on Hungarian fiscal policy (by Bela Griskovits and Haggard et al.). While these chapters are well written and interesting, and each does have something new to contribute, it might have been better to focus on more diverse topics. Finally, the volume suffers from the lack of an overall theoretical perspective. This is a problem seen in many edited volumes. To cope with the natural centrifugal tendencies of a book with so many contributors, it is helpful to impose a set of common methods—or at least a set of common questions. This volume has been less ambitious; as Kornai puts it in his introduction (p. xiii): “[T]he group’s work has not produced a set of strictly argued theoretical propositions. It would be more accurate to call the material before the reader a set of carefully expressed conjectures.’’ With 10 years of postcommunist data and experience to draw on, it could be argued that it is time to move beyond conjecture, however interesting. While this volume does provide a more definitive social science perspective in some places—as, for example, in the Introduction by Haggard and Kaufman and at the end of their chapter with Matthew Shugart—more would have been helpful. An overall concluding chapter, for example, might have been useful in helping to integrate the case studies and strengthen the volume’s theoretical content. Despite these shortcomings, however, the work is still quite valuable in many ways, especially for its detailed case studies. Markets and Moral Regulation: Cultural Change in the European Union. By Paulette Kurzer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 222p. $55.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. — Imelda Maher, Australian National University An important contribution to the emerging literature on Europeanization, this book explores the extent to which there is cultural convergence in the European Union. It focuses on four case studies: alcohol policies in Finland and Sweden, “recreational” drug policy in the Netherlands, and abortion policy in Ireland. Paulette Kurzer concludes that there has been

very moderate cultural convergence in relation to these sensitive policies, although EU membership is merely one dimension of change, with the EU becoming part of the tool kit of those advocating change by providing a discourse around which discussion that may lead to change can emerge. Kurzer locates the book within the literature on globalization and national identity or culture. She examines the formation of national identity and institutions emblematic of the national traits of a country through an exploration of socially sensitive policies, discussing how norms cope with pressures arising out of European governance and policies. She initially suggests that constructivism and sociological institutionalism are useful analytical frames but, having explored each of the case studies, ultimately rejects a constructivist account because it cannot explain the recent changes she identifies. More significantly, she finds that constructivism points to policy learning by professional elites at the supranational and international level leading to adaptation, yet what emerges in all four case studies is that elites (experts and policymakers) were less likely to be seduced by dominant European policies in these areas. In fact, what the case studies show is that adaptation is slow because national elites see the new modes of thinking as repugnant to state national identity—a variation on the “goodness of fit” argument. In her concluding chapter, she suggests that an institutionalist analysis better explains the very gradual change in these politically sensitive national policies. Bargaining at the European level designed to protect national values and moral norms (such as the Maastricht protocol on Irish abortion), did not reckon on the cumulative consequences of the free movement provisions and the consequent increase in the circulation of people so that they could procure alcohol, avail themselves of a less restrictive drug regime, or have an abortion by exercising their free movement rights. Because of the complex interdependencies created by the Single Market, national governments no longer retain tight control over these specific policies, creating a discursive space within which the Single Market and the Union more generally provide an alternative policy view forged at a domestic level by the previously relatively silent dissenters from the status quo. This dissent—like the position of the elites who advocated these policies—could also be framed in the language of national identity, but one that sees the state as part of Europe. All the studies point to a bottom-up push for change where the Single Market positively affected domestic actors’ interests. In effect, the actions of citizens in traveling to avail

themselves of goods or services in other states undermined the argument of identity and culture that underpinned the relevant policies by showing that it was not correct to claim that the Finns, Swedes, Dutch, or Irish were fundamentally different from other European nationals and that these policy norms were an expression of difference, when so many citizens were willing and able to thwart the policy objective by exercising their travel rights. Institutional change thus occurred when organized interests took advantage of the tension between proclaimed morality standards and citizen behavior. The approach to each case study is historical, with an examination of the role played by institutions and the impact of the Single Market on the policies. Three studies— Finnish and Swedish alcohol policy and Irish abortion policy—are concerned with restrictions of individual rights in the interest of a public good defined in terms of national identity and culture. The fourth case study—recreational drug policy in the Netherlands—is different in that it advocates greater individual liberty and less restrictive policies than those found elsewhere in Europe. The Dutch study highlights the effectiveness of Dutch negotiators at keeping drug policy a largely domestic issue despite opposition, in particular by the French government, to Dutch policy. This is in contrast to the failure of the other governments examined to limit the impact of the free movement provisions on their policies—although Kurzer correctly points out that that impact is largely indirect, save where the policy is in direct conflict with an explicit Single Market rule, for example, public monopolies rules in relation to the alcohol monopolies in Sweden and Finland. Kurzer chose these policy areas because they reflect “national character.” She notes (p. 173) that these terms have to be used with great care as they lend themselves to “cheesy’’ stereotyping. It would have been helpful to have this point highlighted before the case studies themselves where such national characteristics and their influence on policy formation are discussed. This book provides a succinct analytical frame with interesting quantitative material provided in chart form throughout and an admirably clear account of the sometimes complex litigation involved. There is scope for a more exhaustive study, like K. Alter’s work on the European Court (Establishing the Supremacy of European Law, 2001) or D. J. Gerber’s exploration of competition policy (Law and Competition Policy in Twentieth Century Europe, 1998). Such a study would involve extensive in-depth qualitative interviews with national officials involved in both

national policy and European negotiations, as well as those interest groups that exploited and moved the debate as a result of the circulation of people. This would greatly enrich the case studies and underpin the extent to which national identity—a slippery concept at the best of times—is embedded or not, within these polices. This approach would also, for example in the abortion study, highlight such issues as the decline in the influence of the Irish Roman Catholic Church on issues of sexual morality following the child sex and physical abuse scandals involving clergy in the last decade; the dubious basis for granting standing in court to antiabortion interest groups; and the role of law as an instrument of change or as a tool for extending the status quo. In short, Kurzer provides a thought-provoking starting point for further exploration of the nature of Europeanization. The overall conclusion of Markets and Moral Regulation—that change has been modest and that there is unlikely to be drastic change in the future—disguises the complex and extremely useful discussion of how the question of policy fit is relevant to policy change but not decisive and of how the Union can be used as a tool for moving forward national policy debates without necessarily leading to Europeanization. Money Rules: The New Politics of Finance in Britain and Japan. By Henry Laurence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 240p. $29.95. — Jonathan Aronson, University of Southern California Henry Laurence compares the pathways to and consequences of financial reform in Britain and Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. In each instance, reform was pushed on the government by a new international financial reality and by the heavy pressure the governments were under to pull their ailing economies out of the economic doldrums. Laurence’s main theoretical attention centers on the Japanese case; the British case is dealt with in less detail and is used mainly to provide comparison. As a former London-based fund manager for a Japanese bank, Laurence had firsthand experience with many of the events he describes. His academic training provided him with the necessary theoretical tools to analyze the cases and put them in context. Laurence’s main argument in this wellcrafted first book is that the “recent history of financial reform in Britain and Japan suggests that internationalization and economic interdependence will result in regulatory reforms that will systematically favor the actors holding the

most-mobile economic assets’’ (p. 191). If this thesis is correct, then this finding challenges, at least for recent Japanese experience, George “Stigler’s argument that producer groups will be the beneficiaries of regulatory politics’’ (p. 196). Laurence holds that the growing internationalization of finance after about 1975, as characterized by greater openness to foreign lenders and borrowers, increased the political influence of both large corporate borrowers and large institutional investors in four ways: 1) Internationalization allowed some large private players to escape domestic regulations and operate under new rules abroad. 2) Internationalization allowed foreign players the possibility of entry into Britain and Japan, increasing their potential influence on the regulatory process. 3) Regulators acted to reassert their authority when they recognized that internationalization had allowed firms to more easily evade or escape their oversight. 4) As they internationalized and invested abroad, the regulatory preferences of large Japanese and British actors evolved. They began to lobby their national regulators to adopt new priorities and policies. The British and Japanese case studies trace the progress of financial liberalization and increased competition promoted by the governments in both countries as measured by market access, price controls, product diversity, and cross-product competition. In both Britain and Japan, the move to liberalization was accompanied by the introduction of stronger standards for supervisory oversight to protect investors and their property rights. Regulators realized, sometimes with a lag, that market liberalization also required increased vigilance. Both countries introduced greater transparency and disclosure requirements and tightened the policing of professional standards related to fraud prevention and conflicts of interest. Although his conclusions are draped in cautious language and might have benefited from greater elaboration in the succinct final chapter, Laurence holds firm views about key scholarly debates centered on Japanese financial policy. On Japanese financial politics he is sympathetic with, though more strongly convinced than, Frances McCall Rosenbluth that progress toward British and Japanese financial convergence is proceeding steadily. He strongly dissents from Steven Vogel’s argument that the Japanese financial arena remains distinct and uniquely Japanese. At the same time, he associates himself with Ulrike Schaede’s position that Japanese bureaucratic change is real, but that the power of the bureaucrats is eroding more slowly than financial journalists contend. Laurence suggests that domestic www.apsanet.org 213

Book Reviews

Comparative Politics

politics was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for launching the major financial reforms undertaken in Japan. He doubts that many key Japanese financial reforms were accelerated by U.S. threat or coercion or that Japanese leaders and bureaucrats were suddenly converted by the wisdom of the American approach. Instead, Laurence suggests that in both countries, the success of the U.S. model coupled with the onward creep of internationalization persuaded first Britain and then Japan to liberalize. Finally, Laurence concludes that the Stigler-Peltzman model of regulatory capture worked much better before 1980 than after. Throughout this thin volume, the stories are crisp and detailed and the tone is measured and sure-handed. The only moment that Laurence seems tempted to let loose is when he relishes recounting the spectacle of financial scandals that rocked Britain and Japan from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. The British scandals (Guinness, Barlow Clowes, Blue Arrow, Maxwell, BCCI, and Barings, pp. 91–95) forced British regulators to redouble their efforts to protect consumers after the Big Bang of 1986. A seemingly endless series of Japanese scandals (Recruit Cosmos, the losscompensation scandals, Nomura and Inagawakai, Tobashi, the price-keeping operation, the Jusen bailout, the Moody’s incident, the Daiwa-U.S. case, and the Sumitomo Corporation London case, pp. 148–54 and 169–73) that preceded Japan’s broad-ranging “Biggu Ban’’ in November 1996 so undermined the credibility of the once unassailable Ministry of Finance (MOF) and raised such tension between it and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that MOF could no longer delay and deflect major liberalization. Laurence chips away at the idea that Japan remains a unique state with an all-powerful bureaucracy. The author is well aware that there are important differences between the paths of British and Japanese financial liberalization. The reforms were far broader in Japan than in Britain because there was further to go and more to be done. The Japanese reforms were introduced more gradually from 1996 to 2001 than in Britain, but London brokers and the London Stock Exchange were warned that overnight change was coming three years before it took effect. More significantly, the British public and financial community welcomed the Big Bang, while the Japanese public and financial institutions accepted reform reluctantly and only because they saw no viable alternative. Despite these differences, Laurence makes a convincing case that Britain, Japan, and the United States are moving toward convergence and not taking different roads. Japan 214 March 2003

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“has been subject to the global pressures for institutional convergence. Japan is different, but it is not unique’’ (p. 200). Even the Ministry of Finance has been forced to surrender some of its power in an internationalized financial environment populated by giant, international, nonstate actors. Local Governance in Britain. By Robert Leach and Janie Percy-Smith. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 263p. $69.95. — R. A. W. Rhodes, University of Newcastle, U.K. For some, governance is a weasel word, meaning all things to everyone, but to others it stands for a shift in public management from service delivery using bureaucracy and markets to steering networks of public, private, and voluntary organizations. Robert Leach and Janie Percy-Smith document this shift to network management among British local authorities. Traditionally in Britain, local government has been viewed positively, while the netherworld of other local bodies is deemed “illegitimate.’’ Leach and Percy-Smith want to make “local governance’’ respectable while confronting the practical problems posed by the emerging new system. They start with a survey of the relevant theories, covering such topics as the New Right’s free market ideas, public choice theory, and policy networks, as well as the shift to the “Third Way’’ with election of the Labour government in 1997. They provide a rapid run through the theories, and the main aim is not to engage in detailed theoretical debate but to explain the various concepts used in describing recent changes in the subnational government of the U.K. Chapter 3 provides a brief history of local government in Britain in the twentieth century, covering such obvious topics as the various structural reorganizations and the financial reforms of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Consistent with their argument that there is now a plurality of service delivery organizations in the locality, the authors cover not only local government but also changes in the National Health Service (NHS) and the role of both the private and voluntary sectors. Chapter 4 examines community leadership. Local governance poses the problem of how to coordinate the multiplicity of local actors. Leach and Percy-Smith argue that the elected local authority is best placed to play this leadership role. However, its role cannot be limited to delivering services. It must speak for the community as a whole, accepting that there are other important players in the locality and drawing them together by creating a shared vision

through the community plan. To do so, the local authority must develop its ability to create and manage formal and informal networks. The next step is to examine the present-day health of local democracy. They find it wanting against the yardsticks of accountability, representation, participation, and responsiveness. Obviously, elected local authorities fare better than nonelected local bodies, but there is great scope for improvement for both types of organization. And if local government is to be modernized, Leach and Percy-Smith argue for a change in the culture of local authorities. They also want to see a shift in the meaning of local democracy to encompass “associative democracy’’ with its active citizens and participation open to all sections of the community. Chapter 6 looks at the ability of local governance to deliver services by examining the resources at the disposal of local bodies. The relevant resources include land, personnel, and finance and less tangible resources such as legitimacy and social capital. The authors identify several problems: the complexity of local government finance, the lack of accountability of appointed public agencies, and the influence that local communities are allowed to wield over the use of scarce resources. Public-sector management reform remains ubiquitous. It is inevitable that the book should run through the conventional nostrums that dominate thinking about service delivery in the public sector. Leach and Percy-Smith describe recent trends in market competition, contracting, quality management, customerfocused services, and performance measurement. It is a familiar litany. They also summarize the changes introduced by the New Labour government after 1997, which do not reject but build on earlier Thatcher-inspired reforms. It is mildly ironic that after two decades of change, the authors can still write: “It remains to be seen how they [local authorities] will respond to such challenges’’ (p. 185). Chapter 8 examines “wicked issues,’’ such as urban regeneration, social exclusion, and crime. They need cross agency, collaborative working but, as important, they need new ways of policymaking. The new ways include joined-up government, a focus on outcomes, evidencebased policymaking, and engagement with communities. Leach and Percy-Smith are not optimistic. Multiplying reforms simply compounds the problem of integration. There is a dearth of good practice to share. There is an inadequate research base for evidence-based policymaking. There are also the ever-present difficulties of “defining problems, assessing interventions and measuring outcomes’’ (p. 209). Chapter 9 broadens the canvas to look at governance above and below local government.

Policy no longer emerges from the interactions of central and local government. Modern government is segmented and multileveled. What devolution to Scotland and Wales, the pressure for regions in England, devolution to institutions such as schools and hospital trusts, and membership in the European Union all suggest is a trend to greater complexity and more problems for local communities in influencing and setting priorities. Moreover, the drive for joined-up government contains the danger of centralization as the government stresses central, not horizontal, coordination. Finally, in Chapter 10, Leach and PercySmith explore the future agenda of local governance as it confronts new technology, globalization, EU enlargement, and the erosion of its resources and powers. They continue to stress that diversity and multiplicity are here to stay. So, local authorities must devise new ways of working by embracing Third Way management with its affinity for networks and partnership rather than hierarchy or markets. They recognize that there are many obstacles to successful reform: lack of agreement on the problem and policy objectives, departmental barriers, and political pressure for short-term results. But they believe in the potentialities of local autonomy and in the need to reengage the public. The best book on British local government remains D. Wilson and C. Game, Local Government in the United Kingdom (1998), but Leach and Percy-Smith provide a useful addition to the literature. The book’s greatest merit is the distinctive emphasis on local governance. It also provides an up-to-date review of the relevant theories and applies them to local governance with many concrete illustrations. In short, it is an interpretative supplementary text. Its defects are that it provides expositions and illustrations of various ideas, rather than subjecting them to critical scrutiny. It also displays a too-easy acceptance of the modernizing agenda of the New Labour government. Although the authors note various problems, they remain essentially sympathetic to New Labour’s project when the root problem with present-day policy is the distrust of local authorities. Network management and partnerships need trust and shared, negotiated aims. In practice, exercises in joined-up working, such as action zones, are predicated on local actors’ agreement with central objectives. The modernizing government agenda for local authorities has a centralizing heart. The reader needs to wear skeptical spectacles when assessing both theory and the reform agenda. Nonetheless, all serious students of British government will read it because it is a distinctive summary of recent trends in local governance.

Iberian Trade Unionism: Democratization under the Impact of the European Union. By José Magone. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001. 335p. $49.95. — Katrina Burgess, Syracuse University In this book, José Magone addresses the important yet neglected topic of trade unionism in the European Union. He examines two related dynamics: 1) the role of interest groups, and specifically trade unions, in shaping European integration; and 2) the impact of multilevel governance structures on trade unions, particularly in Portugal and Spain. The first part of the book analyzes the concept and reality of multilevel governance in the EU. The second part analyzes the evolution of national systems of interest intermediation and trade union strategies in Portugal and Spain in light of democratization and European integration. The third part assesses the subnational and transnational polices of the Iberian trade union confederations. Magone begins by linking the construction of regional trading blocs and major changes in interest group intermediation to a transformation of the modern world system. He then turns to the evolution of European integration, focusing on the shift from rigid to flexible institutions; the problems caused by the incomplete development of regimes, knowledge, identity, and democracy; and the growing role of interest groups in European institution building and policymaking. Here, he devotes a chapter to Social Europe, which he characterizes as “a paradigm of development based on sustainable growth and socioeconomic cohesion’’ (p. 54). After presenting the basic contours of Social Europe, he examines the role of trade unions in an emerging “social dialogue’’ that is taking place across subnational, national, and supranational levels of negotiation. He focuses on two institutional innovations: 1) the Economic and Social Committee (ESC) and its national counterparts, and 2) the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). While acknowledging the potential for these institutions to facilitate multilevel governance and the construction of Social Europe, Magone notes their continued lack of decisionmaking power and the persistence of “mismatching interfaces’’ among the different levels of governance. He attributes the latter problem partly to “the different traditions of social and employment policies across the European Union’’ (p. 64) and, more broadly, to the different systems of interest intermediation and regulation that persist in Europe. He concludes this section of the book with a detailed analysis of these systems, showing their different his-

torical trajectories while suggesting that they are all moving toward greater flexibility and decentralization. In the second part of the book, Magone turns to the cases of Portugal and Spain. In each case, he describes the system of interest intermediation that emerged after the transition to democracy in the 1970s and the changing strategies of the country’s main trade unions. Regarding the system of interest intermediation, he devotes significant attention to the formation of national and subnational ESCs, suggesting that they are critical to the construction of a multilevel institutional setting. Regarding trade union strategies, he notes a shift from rigid, party-affiliated approaches aimed at national policies to more flexible, autonomous approaches aimed at multiple levels of governance. He finds that Spanish unions have been more successful in making this transition, partly as a result of stable funding based on state subsidies, but he is hopeful that Portuguese unions are on the same path. Magone devotes the third part of the book to a closer look at the subnational and transnational policies of Portuguese and Spanish unions. He finds that trade unions in both countries are strongly supportive of integration and have begun to take advantage of opportunities to collaborate both below and above the nation-state. At the subnational level, he describes the emergence of Interregional Trade Unions Committees (ITUCs) to facilitate cross-border cooperation on such issues as migration, employment, and border development. At the transnational level, he discusses the participation of Iberian trade unions in the ETUC and the European ESC. Overall, he finds that both labor movements have been favorably influenced by the new structure of opportunities created by European integration, arguing that they have eased the change “from ideological, class-bound trade unionism to pragmatic, all-classes trade unionism’’ (p. 308). By the same token, he believes that the future of European integration, and particularly Social Europe, will be positively affected by the increasingly active and institutionalized participation of the trade unions. As is evident, this book covers important and interesting ground. Its greatest contribution is empirical: It provides a wealth of information on multilevel governance structures in the EU, particularly Social Europe, and a valuable overview of the evolution of trade unionism in Portugal and Spain since democratization. Unfortunately, the book suffers from two serious flaws. The most regrettable one, which is largely the fault of the publisher, is very poor editing. The writing is often dense, confusing, and redundant, and the text has an inexcusable www.apsanet.org 215

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number of typographical and grammatical errors, particularly in the first part. As a result, the book can be a chore to read, which is a shame given its useful content. The second flaw is less pervasive but more substantive. Magone does not make a sufficiently clear distinction between his theoretical and methodological claims and his empirical analysis. For example, he writes that “the move from a mere institutionalist to a constructionist-phenomenological theory of European integration—which integrates the whole thoughtfulness of the changing nature of reification processes—seems to be a more adequate approach to understand the present process’’ (pp. 32–34). He bases this claim on the finding that “the European integration process has become constructionist because it clearly is recreating a new socio-political reality through the device of new institutions’’ (p. 32, italics mine). Besides being confusing, these statements represent, at best, ad hoc theorizing based on empirical changes. He makes similarly confusing claims with regard to an “actorcentered approach to European integration’’ (p. 37), which he calls voluntarism. After citing the growing number of Euro-associations shaping policy formulation as evidence of voluntarism, he asserts that “voluntarism may lead to further integration of a myriad of actors at the subnational, national, and supranational level’’ (p. 38, italics mine). Once again, he appears to be confusing a methodological approach with an empirical claim. In general, he would have been better served by sticking to the book’s strength of providing a detailed analysis of an important subject. In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation from 1945 to the Present. By Gerassimos Moschonas. New York: Verso, 2001. 320p. $70.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. — Sheri Berman, New York University For students of social democracy, the big debate of the contemporary era concerns change: Has the Left been transformed in fundamental ways over the past decades, and if so, how and why? Gerassimos Moschonas’s new book attempts to give a definitive answer to at least the first of these questions by marshaling an impressive amount of evidence in a wide range of areas relevant to the development of social democracy. As the book title indicates, he falls firmly into the camp of those who believe that the Left has indeed undergone a “great transformation.’’ As he puts it: “[A]ccording to the central hypothesis of this book . . . we are witnessing a recasting of the 216 March 2003

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European social democracies . . . [it is] the end of a political and social cycle” (p. 6). But Moschonas understands that such a claim alone is both commonplace and unhelpful; a real contribution to the debate requires clearly delineating what social democracy was and what it has become, and as anyone who knows the literature on social democracy can attest, this is easier said than done. To tackle this surprisingly difficult task Moschonas therefore sets out to precisely document the nature and extent of the changes social democracy has undergone during the postwar era, and here is where the book will be most helpful to scholars of the Left and European politics more generally. The book is comprehensive and well organized thematically and provides an excellent review of the secondary literature tracking the development of social democracy. The book begins with a discussion of the myriad ways in which social democracy has been defined, and Moschanos draws primarily upon two of these traditions in particular when constructing his own tale of social democracy’s transformation. In his view, in its “classic’’ form, social democracy was defined both by its championing of a distinctive political, economic, and social project and by the support and representation of the working (or lower) classes. The bulk of the book then proceeds to analyze the evolution of social democracy’s organization, electorate, and program, and in each of these areas, Moschonas argues that fundamental changes have occurred. Beginning with party organization, he notes that social democratic parties were the first modern parties— they aimed at mobilizing and socializing the masses and therefore developed complex and sophisticated internal organizations, large membership bases, and a wide range of affiliated organizations. However, during the past decades, all of these characteristics have faded away. Social democratic parties have become more leadership oriented, with experts and specialists rather than memberships setting policy. The social democratic milieu has become a thing of the past, and the movement’s socialization and mobilization capacities have declined accordingly; membership has dropped dramatically. The consequence of all this has been that the “social democratic organization conceived as a ‘community of solidarity’ no longer exists.’’ Social democratic parties have lost the organizational capability as well as the ambition “to fulfill a function that was traditionally theirs: ‘the creation and preservation of collective identities’” (p. 146). With regard to social democracy’s electorate, here too dramatic changes have occurred. Moschonas argues that up through the 1960s, social democratic parties were par-

ties of the working class; in particular, the most successful social democratic parties were those that mobilized the working class best. However, beginning in the 1970s, a decline in working-class support set in at the same time that white-collar workers, and public sector employees in particular, began to switch their sympathies to social democracy. The consequence has been a reshaping of social democracy’s support base: For the first time in their histories, social democratic parties have become truly “interclassist.’’ Furthermore, Moschonas argues that as a result of “the salaried middle strata’s massive entry into the organization,’’ this group has replaced the working class as the movement’s “ruling social category” (p. 225). A critical consequence of social democracy’s new social profile is that the movement currently finds itself with a much less stable electoral base than it had in the past, since voting is now the result less of class or tradition than of “instrumental’’ calculations. Finally, Moschonas finds that social democracy’s program has undergone a critical transformation. During the early postwar decades, social democracy was defined by its championing of things like corporatism and Keynesianism, stances that allowed the party to reconcile efficiency and equality. In particular, corporatism served to validate the role of trade unions and to bend public policy to interests of wage labor, while at the same time promoting social stability and wage moderation. Keynesianism, meanwhile, justified an active state and allowed social democrats to argue that it was possible to further working-class and general interests at the same time. However, over the past decades, social democrats largely abandoned these policies and have more or less begun to toe the neoliberal line. Particularly critical, according to the author, is that social democracy has “for the first time elevated the market and devalued the utility of the economically active state.’’ It has thus made “a decisive ideological leap’’ and abandoned its position as the champion of “social capitalism’’ (pp. 293, 292). The result is that there no longer exists any “coherent, specifically social democratic project” (p. 294). In short, Moschonas makes a powerful case that on the basis of all the critical criteria he identifies, social democracy has indeed undergone a “great transformation.’’ By extensively laying out the nature and extent of this transformation, In the Name of Social Democracy nicely complements other broad surveys of the movement, such as Donald Sassoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism (1996), as well as narrower but more in-depth treatments of particular aspects of social democracy’s development, such as Stefano Bartolini’s The Political

Mobilization of the Left (2000) or Tom Notermans’s Money, Markets and the State (2000). However, critical questions relating to both the history and future of social democracy remain. For example, while Moschonas does an excellent job of documenting social democracy’s change, there is no way of knowing how these changes compare to the changes that have occurred in other parties and movements: If we examined the electorates, organizations, and programs of Christian Democratic parties over the past decades, would they show comparable levels of change? If so, then what we are perhaps facing is a general transformation of European polities, rather than a specifically social democratic phenomenon. Similarly, we need to know more about why social democracy has changed in the ways it has. Is the movement’s transformation the necessary result of a reshaping of society and economy over the past decades, or the consequence of conscious choices on the part of leaders and activists? Finally, are the changes that have occurred permanent or cyclical? After 1945 extreme Left and extreme Right parties were forced to accommodate to social democracy’s agenda; now the situation seems to be the reverse, with social democracy battered by the forces of the new Left and the new Right. Will there be a shift back to social democratic hegemony or are we really in a new political era? Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Edited by Simona Piattoni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 256p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. — Sebastián Royo, Suffolk University This volume traces the origins of clientelism, defined as “the trade of votes and other types of partisan support in exchange for public decisions with divisible benefits’’ (p. 4), in eight European countries: England, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden, from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. It has two main goals: to identify the incentives that make clientelism feasible or unacceptable, and to challenge the view recently advanced by Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work, 1993) that polities can be nicely divided between clientelist polities (i.e., those in which particular interests are promoted) and civic polities (i.e., those in which particular interests are expressed as part of the general interest). The authors start from the assumption that clientelism is not a structural feature that results from certain cultural traits or political

development deficiencies, but rather a strategy for the acquisition and maintenance of power (for the patrons) and for the protection of interests (for the clients). They develop an economistic approach that views patron-client relations as voluntary exchange relations that depend on the relative powers of the parties and the contextual circumstances affecting demand and supply. They take as their point of departure the thesis introduced by Martin Shefter (Political Parties and the State, 1994), according to which the entrenchment of clientelism is determined by the relative timing of bureaucratization and democratization. The authors argue that while Shefter’s supply-based thesis helps to explain why some countries such as Sweden avoided clientelism and others used it (e.g., Italy, Greece, and Spain), it does not explain adequately developments in other countries in which for a substantive period of time parties flirted with clientelism (e.g., England, France, and the Netherlands). Hence, they focus on two sets of circumstances that influence the choice to use clientelistic strategies. On the “supply side’’ they examine the institutional circumstances that may induce party leaders to use clientelism as a strategy to attract voters: an independent bureaucracy, the ideals and objectives of politicians, and the dominant ideas and expectations about the sources of legitimate power. On the “demand side’’ they analyze the circumstances that make citizens accept or reject clientelism: their level of empowerment, cognitive capabilities, and organizational capacity. In order to account for different outcomes (among all the countries examined, only Sweden rejected clientelism altogether), the authors stress the need to examine the autonomous choices of individual and collective actors. By comparing the strategies of political leaders of different countries at different historical junctures, they demonstrate that even under identical institutional circumstances, political leaders can make different choices that affect the contextual circumstances and, hence, the adoption and consolidation of clientelism. In Italy, supply created and strengthened clientelism, while in France, supply weakened it. The main conclusion of the book is that, the “urgency of the situation’’ at the time of mass political mobilization largely determined the strategy of the ruling political elites to adopt or reject clientelism. However, the authors argue that clientelism is a dynamic phenomenon that can be affected by changes in the supply and demand sides. Indeed, once a system is in place, its costs and benefits mediated by social and economic transformations may contribute to modify it (e.g., in Iceland).

Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation makes several important contributions to the literature. First, by treating clientelism as another form of interest representation, the authors succeed in rescuing the concept of clientelism and making it into an acceptable term for the political science discourse. In addition, this volume shatters structural explanations of clientelism based on cultural or developmentalist explanations and introduces an open-ended view of clientelism as a strategy, while rejecting its inevitability and pathological nature. While political scientists have generally regarded clientelism as a function of social fragmentation and cultural backwardness, and the result of organizational and cultural weaknesses of the state administration, this volume shows that particularistic distribution of material benefits to voters is not exclusive of less advanced contexts and that even so-called civic-polities promote particularistic interests at the expense of the general interest. This approach helps to account for the adaptation of clientelism to different countries and political systems, regardless of culture and the level of political development. Moreover, by examining the experiences with clientelism of northern European countries, such as Iceland, this volume debunks the myth according to which clientelism is a phenomenon typical of certain geographical areas, that is, the Latin countries. Furthermore, the authors disallow a deterministic approach and stress the need to explain why certain modes of interest representation become possible. Although they acknowledge that the strategic choices of politicians and voters are constrained by the institutional and structural context in which they operate, they demonstrate that these actors are capable of choices and can change contextual circumstances. They emphasize the contextual circumstances in which actors chose their strategies and use demand and supply side contextual circumstances to account for outcomes. This is a powerful approach to explain differences and avoid institutional or cultural determinism. At the same time, the authors challenge the pathological nature of clientelism that results from the advancement of particular interests and the selective access to collective goods, and examine its costs and benefits. While they recognize that clientelism may generate economic and political externalities that may accumulate over time with devastating effects and degenerate into outright corruption (i.e., Italy), they also stress the benefits of this system, which can be useful as a party-building strategy, particularly for new parties, and can help aggregate interests at different levels. www.apsanet.org 217

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Finally, in a context of increasing globalization and European integration (marked by the absence of ideological mobilization, emphasis of particularistic interests, and the decline in social cleavages and collective identities) that is rendering national institutions relatively powerless and shaking citizens’ faith in their governments and the traditional political actors, the authors stress that clientelism may function as a counterbalance to unyielding and blocked institutional channels, and constitute a valuable source of social integration. Many readers may be surprised by the treatment of clientelism as a system of interest representation. The literature on interest representation has argued that the higher the level at which particular interests are aggregated, the more likely it is that compromise will be attained. Other scholars, however (i.e., Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, 1971), have contended that collective action problems are more likely to be solved when there are selective benefits attached to membership in a group, or when the group is small. Hence, clientelism can be considered a rational system of interest representation. The book, however, is not rooted in this literature. To strengthen that argument, the volume would have benefited from a more inclusive and theoretically oriented approach that integrated more extensively the vast literature on interest representation. Nonetheless, this is an outstanding contribution to the literature on clientelism and paves the way for future scholars to build on this superb contribution in order to study clientelism as another form of interest representation, and to extend this analysis to other areas (e.g., Latin America) with a similar cultural heritage and social structure, in which countries share similar historical processes of state building and political mobilization. It will prove to be a lasting addition to the field. Sikh Ethnonationalism and the Political Economy of Punjab. By Shinder Purewal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 227p. $29.95. — Mike Enskat, University of Heidelberg The reader of this book wonders whether Shinder Purewal chose the title with a view to appropriately reflect his analytical approach, or simply because categories such as “ethnicity’’ and “ethnonationalism” reflect a mainstream paradigm in the social sciences of the 1980s and 1990s. Purewal has chosen the concept of “Sikh ethnonationalism’’ in the title of the book only to reject what the reviewer feels are its most basic assumptions and, instead, privi218 March 2003

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leged a rather traditional Marxian politicaleconomy approach that relies heavily on class as the fundamental analytical and explanatory category. From this perspective, ethnicity is merely a resource for the dominant class to mobilize the masses for its own narrow economic and political interest. Therefore, “The Political Economy of Punjab” is much more fitting for the author’s main argument. The highly developed field of Punjab (or Sikh) studies is very familiar with socioeconomic interpretations of the separatist movement that peaked during the 1980s and reached a symbolic height with the partial destruction of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by the Indian security forces and the subsequent assassination of the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984. A vast body of literature, much of it produced by the large and intellectually active Punjabi diaspora, elaborates upon the intrinsic relationship between the changes in patterns of agricultural production as a consequence of the Green Revolution and the resulting distortions in the traditional power equilibrium—a process that resulted in one of the most severe challenges to the authority of the multiethnic postcolonial Indian state. Purewal draws the reader’s attention to the shortcomings of those established socioeconomic explanations for the political crises in Punjab. First, they tend to concentrate on the contradictions in the economic interest of upper-caste Sikh farmers, mainly from the Jat community, and the urban petty bourgeoisie of Punjab, which was mainly made up of Hindu traders. He argues that the Green Revolution and the industrialization of agricultural production vertically divided each of these two groups by producing new classes of landless agricultural laborers (mainly Sikhs) and small and poor urban traders (mainly Hindus), thereby substantially strengthening class cleavages in the socioeconomic structure of Punjab society. In consequence, “the economic conflict was between capitalist farmers and the petty urban bourgeoisie, not between Jat Sikhs and Hindu Khatris’’ (trading caste) (p. 14). In the context of this interpretation, Purewal reasons that this new antagonism between these two dominant groups lies at the heart of the “Punjab problem,” and that despite temporary coalitions formed by those competing interest groups against any challenge from below, it was—to use his terminology—the Kulaks who were most successful in using an effective mix of political, religious, economic, and historical resources to defend their political power position and to extract a maximum of material resources from the state through various forms of subsidies.

The book offers a comprehensive narrative of Punjab from the emergence of Sikhism in the sixteenth century to today’s complexities of India’s coalition politics both at the center and in the federal state of Punjab. Throughout the study, Purewal successfully maintains his analytical perspective. He does so with a high degree of efficiency: 170 pages of main text that include an impressive number of relevant footnotes and an introductory chapter that outlines the analytical framework. While the book provides a well-structured and highly focused analysis, a bit more space could have been devoted to contemporary developments and to the conclusion. Although Purewal puts forward as an explanation for the waning Punjab subnationalism the (momentary?) triumph of the Kulak over the local (and national) bourgeoisie, as well as the forceful repression of separatist groups by the central government in the late 1980s, the dynamics behind these processes often remain the reader’s guesswork. As the author, according to the Preface, would like to see his work as a case study in the larger field of ethnonationalism, it would also have been important to learn whether he assigns some general validity to his casespecific findings. The effective combination of economic, political, historical, and cultural analysis makes the study an interesting read and a notable intervention in the well-developed discourse among regional specialists and, at the same time, an illustrative but case-specific introduction to the democratic dynamics of Indian politics and to the abilities of the dominant political actors to make use of all political resources available, be it history, religion, or, ultimately, ethnic identity. Somewhat ironically, this strength of the study also reflects a certain problematic aspect of the central argument. The manipulative power of the economically and culturally dominant groups, which is at the heart of Purewal’s explanatory factors, deprive the subaltern classes of any political agency of their own. An important strand of discourse on pre- and postcolonial Indian politics has, thus, largely been ignored. The political and electoral institutionalization of political interest of India’s lower classes and its significance for the power game in Punjab politics play a very marginal role in the author’s analysis. This deficiency brings to light a more fundamental problem in Purewal’s approach. There is no systematic attempt to understand how the introduction of a democratic polity in the twentieth century impacted on the socioeconomic fundamentals of Punjab. However, he does not aim at a neoinstitutional explanation and, as mentioned, successfully develops a Marxist interpretation instead.

The referencing and bibliographic work is very systematic; the vast number of references to local and, thus, less familiar material adds substantial value to the study. At the same time, the reviewer was surprised that some of the main authors on India’s political economy, such as Pranab Bardhan or Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph, have not been given any recognition. To sum up, Sikh Ethnonationalism and the Political Economy of Punjab offers a valuable contribution to the lively debate on the pros and cons of India’s political development model in general, and provides an interesting discussion on Punjab’s political history in particular. By translating various indigenous cultural concepts into Marxian terms of analysis, Purewal makes the subject accessible to the non-area expert. The fact that such an application of Western concepts of political discourse to non-Western societies neglects the possible emergence of new non-Western paradigms in the field of comparative politics, however, remains a larger epistemological dilemma with which political scientists have to continue to struggle. From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party. By Shelley Rigger. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001. 232p. $49.95. — Andrew J. Nathan, Columbia University Until recently, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was a newly fledged opposition group trying to find its place in the turbulent process of Taiwan’s democratization. But in March 2000, the DPP’s candidate, Chen Shuibian, won the presidency, and in December 2001, the DPP replaced the former ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), as the largest party in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan. This dramatic rise to power and the party’s current policies and future evolution are greatly illuminated by Shelley Rigger’s up-close account of the DPP’s history, organization, policies, and personnel. Rigger’s central puzzle is how the DPP not only hangs together but prospers, given that it is made up of factions that lack a common ideology and disagree on most policy issues. Her answer is that internal democratic processes allow the factions to broker disagreements among themselves, allocate nominations, and find compromises on policy questions. The factions have enough common history in the pro-democracy movement, and a sufficiently compelling common commitment to Taiwanese identity, to keep them together in the face of the common foe, the KMT. “By institutionalizing factionalism,” she says, “the

DPP has domesticated it” (p. 71). The KMT, by contrast, has split and resplit under the pressures of democratic transition because its Leninist-style internal processes leave no alternative but exit for politicians whose ambitions or policy preferences are not given priority by the party center. The same openness that Rigger adduces to explain the DPP’s success also, in a sense, explains the success of her book. She was able to obtain frank and full information on party personalities, factions, and controversies both from published sources and from interviews. DPP politicians high and low welcomed her inquiries, and she repaid their openness with an energetic spirit of inquiry. As an example of her access and industry, she includes an appendix that gives insightful, succinct pen portraits of “rising stars in the young generation” of the DPP, reflecting a level of judgment and detail that requires real field expertise to obtain. The book provides a sure-footed, lucid account of the complex personalities and factions that came together in 1986 to form the DPP. It describes the distinctive Taiwanese legislative electoral system, a multimember district system with a single nontransferable vote modeled on the former Japanese system. This kind of election system exacerbates parties’ fissiparous tendencies, because candidates in a district have to run against other candidates from the same party. But it also provides a way for a sufficiently flexible party to balance the interests of different factions by offering multiple nomination opportunities in each district. For Rigger, to a considerable extent it is the difference between more democratic and more centralized candidate selection processes that explains why the DPP has been able to hang together while the KMT has continued to split. The author gives a clear account of voter behavior, which is relatively little cued by classbased policy issues like government spending, welfare, or taxation, or by environmental issues, partly because the parties try to fudge the differences among them on these questions. She traces evolving public opinion toward the DPP on the basis of survey and electoral data from Taiwan sources. She is lucid on the evolution of DPP party organization and on intraparty decision making. She gives insightful accounts of why the DPP lost the presidential election of 1996 and why it won in 2000. The book came out before the 2001 Legislative Yuan elections, but provides a good basis for analyzing the party’s strong performance that year. On the confusing issue of what the DPP actually stands for—is it pro–Taiwan independence or not?—Rigger argues that the party’s 1996 abandonment of a formal pro-

independence stance represented a real change of policy rather than a tactical public relations shift. As she acknowledges, however, the party’s new policy language emphasized Taiwan’s already existing sovereignty, and it campaigned around symbols of Taiwanese national identity. It therefore requires Talmudic skill to discern the difference between the old position and the new. Agree or disagree, her tracing of the intraparty debate over this issue is the clearest and most detailed available in English. The book makes little use of the substantial English language literature that is available on Taiwan’s democratization and elections, or of the broader literatures on democratic transitions, political party organization, or electoral behavior, and does not attempt to show how the case of the DPP adds to cumulative knowledge in these areas. Nor does it try to make its topic accessible to readers who do not already know quite a bit about Taiwan. Apparently, it is intended as a source of data and insight for China/Taiwan specialists. As such it succeeds admirably, providing much new and valuable information and insight. An irritant is Rigger’s cavalier attitude toward romanization—the spelling of Chinese names in the Western alphabet. She uses a mix of three styles: the Wade-Giles system that used to be standard in the study of China and Taiwan, the pinyin system that is now standard for the study of mainland China, and the idiosyncratic spellings preferred by some of the people she is writing about. The mix of styles is confusing, and in both of the first two types she makes mistakes. As a result, only a reader who already knows the names or terms in question can be sure what they are. Ethnopolitics in Ecuador: Indigenous Rights and the Strengthening of Democracy. By Melina Selverston-Scher. Miami: North-South Center Press, 2001. 152p. $35.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. — Shannan L. Mattiace, Allegheny College The 1980s may have been a “lost decade” for Latin America as a whole, but it certainly was not for Indian movements across the continent. During the 1980s, regional and national-level Indian organizations grew in number and strength. Indians launched political movements (and in some cases political parties) during the 1990s in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and, perhaps most impressively, Ecuador. In June of 1990, Ecuador was paralyzed for days as Indians across the country blocked highways, occupied local government offices, organized land invasions, and marched on the capital, Quito—thousands strong. www.apsanet.org 219

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Melina Selverston-Scher’s new book focuses on the use of culture—in this case, Indian identity—as a basis for political mobilization in Ecuador. On the basis of interviews with Indian leaders at local, regional, and national levels, as well as with government officials, Selverston-Scher argues that Indian mobilization has pressured the Ecuadorian state to open channels for popular participation where few existed in the past. Indian mobilization is good for democracy, SelverstonScher claims, because it illustrates that movements based on cultural diversity and pluralism do not have to be violent but can advance democratic values. In this book, the author’s central concern is the connection between indigenous political mobilization and democracy. The claims she makes concerning this relationship are considerable. In the book’s last chapter, SelverstonScher argues that indigenous participation at the local level was on the increase in the regions she studied and that “clientelistic practices have begun to be replaced by representation in decision-making offices” (p. 123). She goes on to say that the benefits of this increased participation are not limited to Indian communities but extend to the rest of the country as well: “In promoting political participation for their constituents, ethnic organizations can create openings for the participation of all of civil society” (p. 123). Selverston-Scher’s optimism about the democratic effects of Indian mobilization is based on a definition of democracy limited to participation—not formal political participation, such as voting, but on informal participation, such as marches and public protests. The Ecuadorian Indian movement is not unique in its use of public mobilization and protest, although, of all Indian movements in Latin America, it may employ these strategies most effectively. The author is on firm ground when she describes the historical origins and political development of the Ecuadorian Indian movement over the last 30 years in chapters on “Indigenous-State Relations in Ecuador” (Chapter 3), “The 1990 Indigenous Uprising” (Chapter 4), and “The Politics of Identity Reconstruction” (Chapter 5). In Chapter 3, she examines governmental policies that influenced Indian organization, focusing specifically on land reform and bilingual education. In Chapter 4, she extends this analysis of statemovement interaction to include the relationship between Indian organizations and civil society. In Chapter 5, she discusses how indigenous class-based organizations of the 1970s and 1980s gave way to identity-based organizations in the 1990s. This historical descriptive material, however, cannot support the book’s 220 March 2003

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larger claims that ethnic or cultural mobilization leads to democracy, and it ultimately fails to convince that democratic norms are being created in Ecuador as a result. Selverston-Scher makes two main arguments related to Indian mobilization in Ecuador: that it has changed Indians’ political behavior (thus strengthening democratic norms) and that it has put significant pressure on the state. Because the Ecuadorian state is weak and aspires to be homogeneous (even though, as she notes, a homogeneous nationstate has not been consolidated in Ecuador), it is threatened by Indian mobilization and demands, particularly the concept of a plurinational state (p. 51). Indians’ political mobilization, she argues, “can shatter the myth of a homogeneous nation-state” (p. 18). This may well be true, but more information about the concrete policy changes that have been enacted in Ecuador concerning Indian rights and the role of Indian mobilization (relative to other factors) in effecting these changes is needed. Other authors writing about Indian mobilization in Latin America have presented additional conditions to explain policy changes in the area of Indian rights and cultural politics. Donna Lee Van Cott, for instance, has recently argued that legislative changes concerning Indian rights occur either in moments of constitutional crisis or in the context of armed uprising (“Explaining Ethnic Autonomy Regimes in Latin America,” Studies in Comparative International Development 35, no. 4 [2001]: 30–58). In the 1990s, several Latin American nations, including Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia, and Venezuela, made constitutional changes to reflect their nations’ multicultural composition. In these countries, some level of Indian organization and mobilization is also present. The intensity and strength of this mobilization, however, varies greatly. The Mexican case may be instructive here. In 1992, President Carlos Salinas pushed Congress to amend Article 4 of the Mexican constitution to state that Mexico was a multicultural polity. During the same year Article 27 was also amended, allowing ejido, or communal land, to be bought and sold on the private market. If we view the changes to Article 4 as a result of Indian mobilization (which existed prior to the 1992 quincentenary countercelebrations), we divert our attention away from the ways in which the Mexican state uses cultural politics to achieve very different ends from those of Indian organizations. My point is a simple one: When Latin American states engage in cultural politics that appear to advance ethnic/cultural pluralism, we must be careful in attributing those changes to popular mobilization.

While Selverston-Scher is correct in saying that there has been a shift from class to cultural politics in Latin America, it is less certain whether we can read that shift as an unequivocal victory for Indian organizations. All that said, Selverston-Scher has written a highly readable book that serves as an introduction to contemporary Indian politics in Ecuador. It also counterbalances the literature on democratization in political science that deemphasizes popular mobilization in favor of institutional analysis. In Ethnopolitics in Ecuador, Selverston-Scher has provided us with a view of Ecuadorian politics from the ground up. Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. By Michael Peter Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. 232p. $31.95. — Jefferey M. Sellers, University of Southern California At crucial turning points in the history of U.S. political science, urban politics has moved to the center of the discipline. In the early 1900s, comparative studies of local government and administration contributed to the emergence of professional political science. In the postwar era, studies of community power played a critical role in the behaviorialist revolution. In recent years, the rethinking of national boundaries and institutions has presented new opportunities for studies of politics at the local level to contribute to reformulated approaches to state-society relations in general. This extended theoretical essay, though addressed to “urban studies’’ rather than to political scientists as such, offers glimpses of how such a reformulation might look. Michael Peter Smith starts with a critique of several literatures that have analyzed the economic, social, and cultural transformations linked to globalization from the standpoint of cities. The targets will be more familiar names to those versed in the sociological, anthropological, and geographical literatures concerned with urban politics, but students of comparative politics and international relations will recognize many of the arguments. Taking issue with urban geographers like David Harvey, Smith criticizes them for neglect of the role that national policies play in transnational processes, as well as of the cultural and social dimensions that can make globalization a source of mobilization on the part of local communities and disadvantaged groups. The critique carries special force as an argument against the growing body of work devoted to “global cities’’ (p. 48–71). According to such authors as Saskia Sassen and John

Friedmann, a few global command centers of international financial and corporate activities are replacing national states as centers of power. Smith takes these authors to task not only for their neglect of both national states and local agency, but also for a posture that takes for granted the consequences of neoliberal deregulatory policies. Theorists who have stressed social, cultural, and religious movements as elements of globalization, like Manuel Castells or Benjamin Barber, suffer from different shortcomings. For Smith, these authors have too often romanticized disadvantaged and contentious groups as locally oriented reactions to global capital. The geographers and sociologists of the “Los Angeles School,’’ who have treated that city as a model of globalized economic and cultural influences, also “take the political out of political economy and treat the cultural as entirely derivative of epochal economic transformation’’ (p. 73). The critiques culminate in a sweeping alternative vision that Smith calls “transnational urbanism’’ (p. 165–183). At the most general level, this approach entails what students of comparative politics and international relations might recognize as a multilevel approach to the political economy of cities. Between the local and the global, Smith contends, are national and other intermediate elites, policies, and institutions that need to be taken into account. At the same time, he insists that global and other forces are what the businesses, immigrants, activists, and others within cities make of them. Neither businesses nor immigrant minorities fit neatly into local or transnational or even economic and ethnic categories. Transnational networks of grassroots activism are as much a part of contemporary globalization as the forces and claims of global capitalism. In his most concrete exposition of how this transnational approach would shift the focus of urban studies, Smith sketches a “reimagining [of ] Los Angeles from the ground up’’ (p. 72–98). In place of the global command center proclaimed by the Los Angeles School and others, he portrays an economically dependent city whose business elites struggled over the 1980s and 1990s to revive the downtown economy. At the same time, new immigrant workers and entrepreneurs from Latin America and Asia have contributed new transnational sources of economic dynamism. For other subfields of political science as well as for the urban experts Smith explicitly addresses, the question at the core of this book poses a potentially far–reaching challenge. If he is correct, then not only must domestic and international politics be considered inextricable, but research on transnational phenomena

needs to be reconceived. Domestic political phenomena in the United States or any other country need to be reconceptualized in terms of networks, markets, or other connections that transcend national boundaries. International markets, social movements, immigrant networks, and policy exchanges among states must be considered in terms of relations between localities as well as between countries. Neither nation–states and their boundaries nor localities alone can serve to define cases for research. As both a sophisticated critique of existing literatures in a number of urban disciplines and a theoretical provocation to those working in this area, the argument generally succeeds. To bring off the larger project of “locating globalization’’ would require a much fuller treatment than Smith offers. His call for more attention to the sources and dynamics of globalization “from below’’ (p. 146) points in directions that should prove constructive for numerous disciplines concerned with the subject. To pursue these new avenues requires a shift toward greater scrutiny of transnational influences within communities and among individuals. For most social scientists concerned with globalization beyond its urban dimensions, however, Smith’s injunction to pay more attention to the national politics of neoliberalism will have all the resonance of a pronouncement that the earth is round. The project he advocates ultimately requires ways to test national influences with those at local and other levels. To enable rigorous testing, the rather simple research designs Smith proposes—basing case selection on different transnational networks in the same city, network practices across space, or localizations of the neoliberal project (p. 176–182)— are likely to require greater elaboration. In contrast with the expansive theoretical ambitions expressed at points in the book, the specific focus of Smith’s account often remains highly selective. Nowhere does he address why transnationalism should be urban, rather than extend into suburbs or agricultural areas enmeshed in global markets. He has much more to say about transnational networks among immigrant groups than about, say, the effects of globalization on policy innovations or on nonethnic markets for provision of goods and services. His account also draws far more on U.S. examples, and in particular on U.S. cities with the largest immigrant populations, than on cities in Europe, Asia, or the developing world. These shortcomings are partly a product of the book’s theoretical aspirations. The arguments Smith makes resonate well beyond urban studies. Future transnational research in numerous fields will undoubtedly have to grapple with the issues his book raises.

Mandates and Democracies: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America. By Susan C. Stokes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 226p. $55.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. Public Support for Market Reforms in New Democracies. Edited by Susan C. Stokes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 232p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. — Kurt Weyland, University of Texas at Austin The wave of market reforms that swept across the world during the last two decades stunned most observers. It came as a particular surprise that even fragile democracies would implement painful neoliberal programs. Why did presidents enact drastic, risky measures that could easily trigger opposition and protest, thus endangering their political survival? How did the people respond to this bitter medicine? And how did democracy fare? Did its quality suffer because presidents autocratically imposed unpopular reforms? Or did political leaders manage to obtain popular support for their neoliberal programs through democratic mechanisms? General answers to these important questions continue to be sparse. Many “models’’ have been proposed, but they have rarely been substantiated systematically with empirical evidence. And while studies of individual countries and issues abound, broadly comparative analyses have been rare since the pathbreaking works by Stephan Haggard, Robert Kaufman, and Joan Nelson from the first half of the 1990s. Susan Stokes’s two books help to fill this important gap by analyzing presidential decisions to enact market reforms, by proposing and testing a novel scheme for interpreting the popular response to these draconian programs, and by evaluating the relationship of chief executives and common citizens in light of theories of representation. Mandates and Democracy focuses on an aspect of market reform that is particularly problematic for democratic theory, namely, the enactment of “neoliberalism by surprise’’ in several Latin American countries: Politicians who had campaigned with nonneoliberal slogans dramatically shifted their stance after winning the election and imposed orthodox shock programs upon taking office. In betraying their electoral mandates, did these leaders—especially Argentina’s Carlos Menem, Peru’s Alberto Fujimori, and Venezuela’s Carlos Andrés Pérez—act out of selfish motives and fail to represent the citizenry’s interests? Contrary to these widespread suspicions, Stokes advances a more nuanced and sophisticated interpretation. Applying models designed www.apsanet.org 221

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by Joseph Harrington, she argues that citizens are often uncertain about the likely outcomes of their preferred policies and therefore modify their preferences as evidence of actual policy results becomes available. This malleability of popular preferences provided room for maneuvering to political leaders, whose access to technical expertise led them to anticipate that the non-neoliberal policies initially preferred by the populace would have disastrous results; by contrast, neoliberal measures that were more costly in the short run and therefore unpalatable to the citizenry were likely to yield much more beneficial outcomes—and this better performance would induce many people to endorse the chief executive’s policy course in the next election. Given credibility problems, political leaders could not convince the citizenry of the superiority of neoliberal policies ex ante, and undertaking this effort would have endangered their electoral prospects. Therefore, well-intentioned leaders dissimulated, promising in the campaign to execute the non-neoliberal policies initially preferred by voters; but after winning, they embraced market reform and trusted that superior economic performance would vindicate this policy switch. While disregarding expressed popular preferences, these leaders actually sought to advance the voters’ best interests and thus acted as true representatives. Stokes sets the stage for this model by analyzing electoral campaigns and economic policy approaches in Chapter 2; then she explicates the model and tests its central implications in Chapter 3 and examines the popular response to market reform in Chapter 5, finding considerable yet not unqualified empirical support. Public Support for Market Reforms complements this novel analysis by probing the reasons for the surprisingly strong popular approval of costly neoliberal programs in a wide range of nations. In predicting that the transitional losses caused by market reforms would trigger opposition, simple economic voting arguments cannot account for this endorsement. In an innovative introduction, Stokes therefore outlines alternative interpretive schemes with which many people assessed orthodox shock programs. In particular, an intertemporal frame can lead citizens to accept short-term pain in the hope of long-term gain; and an exonerative or antidotal frame can make people blame the preceding government for current problems and accept the bitter pill of market reform. The remaining chapters test through competent statistical analysis how citizens framed different economic problems and evaluated governments’ economic policies in Spain ( José María Maravall and Adam Przeworski), East Germany (Christopher 222 March 2003

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Anderson and Yuliya Tverdova), Poland (Przeworski), Mexico ( Jorge Buendía), Peru (Stokes), and Argentina (Fabián Echegaray and Carlos Elordi). The findings are mixed as people applied an intertemporal frame to wage and GDP growth while responding to rising unemployment as simple economic voting arguments predict; results for inflation differ by country (pp. 25–27, 62–64, 92–99, 114–15, 123–25, 156–57, 172, 204–5). The two volumes advance scholarly understanding of market reforms and their political ramifications in important ways. Above all, Stokes goes decisively beyond the simple assumptions embodied in many theories, ranging from economic-structural arguments with their single-minded emphasis on material interests to conventional rational-choice models that use straightforward self-interests as their starting point. By contrast, the two books convincingly demonstrate the importance of beliefs, which deeply shape the definition of actors’ preferences and give rise to complex schemes for interpreting experience. In this way, Stokes and her contributors paint a much more realistic image of political decision making. Actors do not simply execute “given’’ interests, but have to cope with considerable uncertainty, even concerning their own preferences. Therefore, there is room for framing and even manipulation, and calculations of likely costs and benefits are complex. By taking the malleability of citizen preferences seriously, Stokes also develops a much more nuanced and convincing interpretation of the meaning of neoliberal policy switches for democratic representation. Diverging from the undifferentiated condemnation of these betrayals of campaign promises as “undemocratic,’’ she shows that political leaders may well act in the best interest of the citizenry by unexpectedly embracing policies that they regard as significantly more promising than the measures initially preferred by voters. Her emphasis on retrospective electoral accountability in Chapters 3 and 5 and on the need for political leaders to educate the citizenry in Chapter 6 usefully distinguishes her interpretation from problematic “false consciousness’’ arguments. Thus, Stokes makes an important contribution by bringing the normative concerns of political theory to bear on issues of comparative politics. Stokes and her contributors advance their arguments in a systematic and theoretically sophisticated fashion and marshal an impressive amount of empirical evidence. The statistical investigations, especially central in Public Support for Market Reforms, are skillful, and Stokes analyzes the evidence produced by her field research in a subtle and careful way. She also uses interesting insights from formal mod-

els to guide her empirical analysis. Last but not least, she does justice to competing interpretations, acknowledging their contributions yet showing their limitations (e.g., pp. 52–53, 76–77, 89). Yet despite their many strengths, the two books also have some limitations. Above all, they are stronger in interpretation and testing than in causal explanation. For instance, while analyzing the reasons for candidates’ choice of campaign programs in Chapter 2, Mandates and Democracy lacks a strong general explanation of its main subject, policy switches to neoliberalism (pp. 43–45, 97–98). All winning candidates faced pressures from “markets’’—the causal factor stressed in the case studies; why did some give in, whereas others resisted? The sparseness of a causal explanation is even more obvious in Public Support for Market Reforms. The mixed statistical findings, which vary considerably by issue and country, call for a systematic theoretical exploration of the conditions under which people apply each frame. But Stokes barely addresses this question (pp. 18–19); a conclusion that could have tackled this important task is missing. The empirical analysis also has some problems. In particular, the binary classification of campaign appeals and governmental policies applied in Mandates and Democracy disregards many important distinctions (for instance, between radical market reformer Menem and moderate market consolidator Patricio Aylwin of Chile), while aggrandizing other differences (for instance, between the campaign programs of Pérez and Bolivia’s Víctor Paz Estenssoro, both of whom provided “some hints . . . that [they] would pursue austerity policies and liberal reforms,’’ p. 113, n. 3; on Pérez, see pp. 54, 74). In general, the sample of cases is quite diverse (including, e.g., election and reelection campaigns); the assumption of causal homogeneity that underlies statistical analysis is therefore questionable. By glossing over substantial differences among neoliberal programs (e.g., between Fujimori’s shock program and the gradual market reforms pursued by Brazil’s Fernando Henrique Cardoso), binary classification also mars some of Stokes’s qualitative interpretations and evaluations. While under the constraints facing Latin America in the late 1980s, neoliberalism may have been superior to a non-neoliberal approach, but that does not necessarily mean that the radical market reforms pursued in Argentina and Peru were the best possible option for turning the economy around and for representing voter interests. As Argentina’s collapse suggests, a more cautious neoliberal program (as enacted in Brazil) may have been preferable. By failing to consider the variety of market reform programs,

Stokes appears to endorse the specific policy course pursued by her protagonists as the only reasonable choice—a problematic conclusion. Despite these quibbles, the two volumes significantly advance the study of market reforms. In particular, they push the door wide open for researchers to analyze the origins of presidents’ and citizens’ beliefs and the conditions under which different interpretive frames are adopted. Through her impressive contributions and the research agenda she outlines (see Mandates and Democracy, pp. 190–96), Stokes leads scholars toward the analysis of crucial cognitive and ideational phenomena and thus breaks new ground for comparative politics. Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria. By Rotimi T. Suberu. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001. 247p. $14.95. — Julius O. Ihonvbere, The Ford Foundation This well written volume could not have come at a better time. At no time has the issue of political structure and/or restructuring been more contentious in Nigeria’s political history. This study is a courageous effort at isolating and discussing the issues that shape Nigerian politics: federalism, revenue sharing or allocation, population, local governance, and state creation. Rotimi Suberu admits that the Nigerian federation is “hypercentralized,” thus negating the basic principles of federalism. He notes quite correctly that this is both a product of Nigeria’s historical experiences and the character of postcolonial politics, but more importantly, the legacy of decades of military dictatorship with its commandist style of rule. This political reality, according to the author, is further complicated by several fault lines in Nigerian politics and society: the North-South divide, Christian-Muslim antagonism, ethnic suspicions and conflicts, majority-minority ethnic calculations, oil and nonoil state struggles, and a political elite that has found it rather challenging to build a national project. In the first chapter, Suberu lays out the structure and character of Nigerian federalism, emphasizing the numerous challenges and opportunities that have been largely mismanaged by the political elite. Among other culprits that have precipitated this rather unstable and contentious situation, he identifies “inappropriate regimes” and “ill-motivated ethnic elites” (p. 12). Chapter 2 is a detailed and refreshing discussion of the evolution of Nigerian federalism, through the various civilian republics and military eras to the current situation under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. Ironically, Suberu

commends the “first phase of military rule” for “the transformation of the impossible and combustible regional federation of the First Republic into a more institutionally balanced multistate federal structure” (pp. 45–46). Of course, this is a dubious position that appears to legitimate military intervention and the containment of democratic possibilities and options. If the achievement of the military was that commendable, why did it collapse in the second republic, and why has it continued to fail to stand the test of time? In Chapter 3, the author takes on the very controversial revenue allocation (he seems to prefer “revenue sharing”) issue, again providing a detailed discussion with new data, especially on pre-independence revenue politics. He takes on the various criteria used in federal allocation of revenue to the states and local governments and the work of the revenue commissions. Unfortunately, he shies away from any radical conclusions or prescriptions, and one wonders why this is so. Chapter 4 examines the politics of state creation and noncreation with insights into the advantages and limitations of state proliferation. Suberu points out that state creation has not broken the cohesion of the three major ethnic groups in national politics. Noting that pressures for more states would continue, he calls for “some structural or fundamental means” to “discourage the process” (p. 110). Unfortunately, we do not get any outline on what such “structural” and “fundamental means” could be. In the fifth chapter, Suberu looks at the so-called federal character principle and concludes that it has not met its declared goal of promoting “national integration” and that its “politics have proved to be extremely divisive in regional, ethnic, and religious terms” (p. 138). Chapter 6 examines the census politics, and while improvements were noted in certain efforts, the author notes that there is continuity in “the relentless sectional perceptions of the census as an instrument of communal socioeconomic and political advantage” (p. 167). The final chapter is where Suberu attempts to give his own prescriptions on “reforming” the Nigerian federal structure. He argues that prolonged military rule may not be to blame for the Nigerian predicament; rather, “the problem may lie in a monolithic, statist, and centrist political economy that would require several years and rigorous and broad-based decentralized economic development to overcome” (p. 171). He provides several interesting interpretations and solutions to the major issues discussed in the book and calls for devolution of powers and responsibilities (p. 177); a downward adjustment of federal share of revenues and “more taxing powers to the state

and localities” (p. 177); “restraining the enormous powers of the presidency” (p. 189); and a more “consciously and consistently ethnically flexible or mixed solutions” to the quest for territorial restructuring (p. 195). He advocates a popular approach to constitution making (p. 202) and opposes ethnic federalism (p. 195). Suberu concludes that “all things considered, a federal solution seems to remain the most feasible, peaceable, and acceptable, although by no means inevitable, option for Nigeria” (p. 204). Without doubt, Suberu has done an excellent job: The book is clearly written, devoid of jargon, readable, and focused. One must point out, though, that there are two major worries. First, ordinary peoples’ voices are clearly absent. Top politicians like Philip Asiodu and Alex Ekweme are quoted. But we do not know what the civil society groups, students, women, the youth, trade unions, and community associations are saying. Yet these are the groups that have continued to make radical and critical demands on the system. Their voices and demands would only grow louder with the democratic dispensation. It is not fair to assume what they think or want. We want to hear them speak for themselves. The other issue is that the author tries too hard to avoid the class question. Nowhere in the volume is a class perspective considered. One gets the impression that the 120 million Nigerians whose political interests have been activated by military disengagement from power since 1999 are organized only as ethnic groups or at best in states and localities. It is as if they do not operate, network, and act in class terms, even if this is mediated by other primordial considerations. This limitation means that the book gives only a one-sided picture of the Nigerian reality and the forces, coalitions, and interests that shape that reality. I have no hesitation in recommending this book to students of Nigerian and African politics. It would no doubt generate interesting debates amongst “Nigerianists” within and beyond Nigeria and encourage further research into some of the issues that Suberu has raised. Japan Between Asia and the West: Economic Power and Strategic Balance. By Ming Wan. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. 240p. $62.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. — Jonathan R. Strand, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Japan’s rapid ascent from economic decimation and military occupation to the world’s www.apsanet.org 223

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second largest economy is often described as miraculous. So stupendous was the growth of Japan’s economy during the 1960s and 1970s that by the 1980s, numerous books had been published with hubristic titles about Japan’s position vis-à-vis the United States in the world political economy, such as Japan as Number One and Japan in the Passing Lane. Japan is lauded for its economic prowess and often touted as a model of development to be emulated by other countries. Its economic position in international affairs, however, is not matched with commensurate political influence. This is due in part to Article 9 in the “MacArthur’’ Constitution in which Japan declared it would forgo offensive military capabilities. Moreover, an avuncular military relationship with the United States allowed Japan to free ride on American grand strategy during the Cold War. This strategy was a linchpin of the Yoshida doctrine and is still the foundation of Japan’s security policy in the post–Cold War era. The dichotomy between Japan’s economic position and its political position in international affairs has led to a myriad of catchphrases regarding Japan’s foreign policy. It is referred to negatively as engaging in “checkbook diplomacy,’’ that Japan is a “bank with a flag,’’ that Japan has “power without purpose,’’ or that Japan is merely “buying power.’’ Ming Wan explores the paradoxes of Japanese economic and political power in its attempts to simultaneously pursue its national interests globally and regionally in East Asia. Wan’s book is a noteworthy contribution to the literature on Japan’s foreign policy and on U.S.-Japan relations. He documents Japan’s relations with the United States and with East Asian countries, focusing on Japan’s exercise of economic power. He finds that Japan is more often a supporter of American interests, although not always as strong an ally as the United States expects. In short, Japan seeks to minimize the cost of its strategic partnership with the United States. Wan surveys U.S.-Japan relations since the American occupation in Chapter 2. He traces American efforts to get Japan to spend more on defense and to employ economic sanctions in situations favored by the United States. The bilateral relationship is characterized by Japan’s response to American demands regarding burden sharing: choosing economic versus defense strategies that are generally less expensive both materially and politically. Wan argues that Japan’s sizable foreign aid program is in part a response to American pressure for Japan to engage in greater burden sharing. Even though the United States is by all measures the senior partner, Japan has been able to pursue its own 224 March 2003

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national interests within the U.S.-Japan security arrangement. The story told by Wan is of a Japan that engages in numerous tactics to mollify American demands and acquiesces to outside pressure, that is, gaiatsu, only when it is largely coterminous with Japan’s self-interest. In Chapter 3, Wan explores Japan’s relations with East Asia countries. In particular, he examines Japan’s efforts to serve as a regional leader, efforts that are viewed warily by many in East Asia in light of Japan’s imperialism earlier in the twentieth century. He explains that Japan’s leadership is welcome primarily in economic and financial issues, not security issues. The author focuses on Japan’s official development assistance (ODA) and its reluctance to impose economic sanctions. He paints a picture of a Japan that is eager to prove it is a great power, while reluctant to move out of the security shadow of the United States. On several occasions, Japan did challenge the United States but failed to realize its goal of establishing itself as a regional leader. For example, Wan describes how Japan, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, proposed a regional monetary fund, an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF), which would exclude the United States and not follow strict neoliberal economic orthodoxy. The United States, some East Asian states, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) itself opposed and quickly rejected this regional alternative to the IMF. Wan suggests that this was an embarrassing failure to Japan’s leadership efforts in East Asia. But the author does not answer a basic question: Why did Japan propose the AMF in the first place? A large part of the answer is found in Chapter 4, where the author surveys Japan’s efforts to increase its role in the IMF, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank (ADB). Japan initiated a series of diplomatic efforts in the early 1980s to achieve a number two ranking in terms of voting weight in the IMF and World Bank and to have its development strategy recognized as a legitimate path for developing countries to undertake. The former goal was mainly about Japan’s percentages of votes in the IMF and World Bank. Japan found itself in the early 1980s the second largest economy in the world but the fifth in terms of its voting weight in both the Fund and Bank. Part of the problem for Japan was that the U.K. Germany, and France resisted Japan’s rise in influence. Although Japan achieved number two ranking in the Fund and Bank during the 1980s, this quantitative increase in relative influence did not necessarily result in a concurrent augmentation of Japan’s qualitative influence over IMF and World Bank policymaking. The latter goal meant that Japan had to confront neoclassical economic orthodoxy

prevalent at the Fund and Bank. Wan documents how Japan’s efforts, manifest in projects such as the famed East Asian “miracle’’ report, largely failed. In short, Japan had limited success turning its newfound voting weight into tangible influence over policy. Wan does not recognize that part of the motivation for its AMF proposals grew out of Japan’s frustration and dissatisfaction with the IMF. More generally, throughout this text, the author does not fully link events, problems, and issues across chapters. He attempts to bring together the chapters in his conclusion but is only partially successful. Furthermore, little of his research on Japanese relations with the IMF, World Bank, and ABD cites investigations of how influence is apportioned in these institutions and how decision-making rules impact policy outcomes. On the ADB in particular, Wan relies too heavily on his 1995 article, “Japan and the Asian Development Bank” (Pacific Affairs 68 [Winter 1995]: 509–28.), with only minor updating of data. Even with these weaknesses, Japan Between Asia and the West should be required reading for students of Japan’s relations with the United States and East Asia. His work is not the definitive answer, but nevertheless is a valuable account that moves the discussion beyond basic catchphrases. Protest, Policy, and the Problem of Violence Against Women: A CrossNational Comparison. By S. Laurel Weldon. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. 288p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. — Leela Fernandes, Rutgers University In recent decades, women’s movements have mobilized in a range of contexts in order to press for international and national governmental responses to violence against women. Despite the scope of such activity in the public realm, there has been relatively little scholarly analysis of cross-national variations in governmental responses to the problem of violence against women. Laurel Weldon’s study is an important response to this scholarly gap in both the fields of policy studies and of women and politics. In a comparative study of 36 democratic political systems, Weldon seeks to explain why some governments are more responsive than others to the problem of violence against women. Responsiveness, in her approach, is defined as specific governmental policy action, including legal reform, the provision of financial resources such as for women’s crisis centers, and the provision of various governmental programs. She draws on a combination of quanti-

tative and qualitative methodologies to substantiate her arguments. She uses multiple regression analysis to evaluate competing explanatory factors of variations in government policy responses. In addition, she draws on qualitative analyses of individual cases of policy formation to supplant her findings, with a particular emphasis on Australia and Canada, the two most responsive countries. Weldon argues that two variables can explain variations in governmental responses toward violence against women. First, she finds that the existence of strong, autonomous women’s movements are a necessary condition for the designation of violence against women as a public issue that requires a policy response. She demonstrates that a range of informal social-movement activity, including cultural production, protest politics, and everyday politics, in addition to more conventional formal political activities, represents a key variable in shaping policy responses in democratic political systems. Her findings confirm existing research that has demonstrated the influence women’s movements have had on policy responses in comparative contexts (e.g., see Mary Katzenstein and Carol Mueller, eds., The Women’s Movements of the United States and Western Europe, 1987). However, Weldon argues that while autonomous movements are a necessary condition for gaining governmental responsiveness to the issue of violence against women, they do not constitute a sufficient condition. On the contrary (and here is the second variable), it is the interactive effect between women’s movements and state institutions designed specifically to improve the status of women that can explain variations in policy responses. In many ways, feminist scholarship has already demonstrated through indepth case studies that gender issues can be addressed effectively through a combination of political activity both inside and outside the state (e.g., see Sonia Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil, 1990). The significance of Weldon’s study is thus less in its conclusions that movements and institutions shape policy than in the systematic way in which she is able to demonstrate the explanatory significance of this interaction between women’s movements and political institutions in a large-scale comparative study. In addition, an important aspect of Weldon’s analysis is her finding that it is the structure of political institutions, rather than the numbers of women represented in elected office, that improves governmental responses to violence against women. Her study demonstrates that there is no relationship between the proportion of women in the legislature and policy responses to violence against women. Weldon

does not dismiss the significance of individual women as political actors, but rather cautions against a “fallacy of aggregation’’ (89), which assumes that the actions of individual legislators can be added up to predict legislative outcomes. There are two conceptual questions that rise to the surface in Weldon’s study. The first pertains to the question of “responsiveness’’ and her conceptual distinction between policy responsiveness and policy effectiveness. She is careful to develop a measure of responsiveness that is not purely symbolic but that involves measurable governmental action, such as legal reform and the provision of financial resources. However, by excluding implementation from her conceptual definition of governmental action, she may be overestimating both the level of responsiveness and the impact of women’s movements and women’s policy agencies. For instance, in the case of India, to take just one of the countries in Weldon’s sample, implementation of such policies has been uneven at best, despite the existence of strong, independent women’s organizations and the existence of institutions focused specifically on the status of women. A second conceptual question arising from the study is one that addresses structural inequalities (such as race and class) among women. One of the interesting findings is that in the most responsive countries, Canada and Australia, government responsiveness toward groups of women marginalized in terms of race and ethnicity improves when marginalized women’s groups organize independently from existing women’s movements. However, despite such findings and acknowledgments of women’s differences, Weldon retains a notion of women as a unitary structural group. This produces some paradoxes in her argument. For instance, she argues that women’s interests are not adequately addressed when they are handled by multiple, distinctive policy agencies, rather than separate “women’s policy agencies.” As she puts it: “This creates the administrative challenge of coordinating women’s policies and programs, which, as a result, often end up as low priority for all agencies concerned’’ (p. 121). Yet in her discussions of Aboriginal and minority women in Australia and Canada, she does not extend such an argument to a discussion of the administrative challenges for coordination between separate bureaucratic agencies designed to promote Aboriginal issues and women’s issues. She suggests instead that “[p]erhaps such agencies give minority women multiple points of access and thus improve their access to the state’’ (p. 162). Such assumptions do not address recent research, which has argued that intersecting structures such as race,

gender, and class fundamentally shape both women’s structural locations and the ability of policies to respond to women’s interests (e.g., see Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,’’ in Martha Fineman and Roxanne Mykitiuk, In the Public Nature of Private Violence, 1994). The emergence of the paradigm of intersectionality has posed much deeper challenges to the question of assessing and explaining policy responsiveness to such issues as violence against women, which are not addressed in Weldon’s analysis. Despite such conceptual limitations, Weldon’s study fills an important gap in the fields of policy studies and women and politics. The book will be of use to a wide range of scholars, policymakers and activists interested in a broad comparative perspective on the problem of violence against women. A Comparative Political Economy of Tunisia and Morocco: On the Outside of Europe Looking In. By Gregory White. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 252p. $62.50 cloth, $20.95 paper. — John P. Entelis, Fordham University The search for a fuller understanding of how development and democracy interact in Third World countries continues to interest analysts and policymakers alike, especially when applied to the Arab world—the region least predisposed to either development or democracy. Competing political economy and political culture theories have been advanced to explain the pervasive absence of democratic politics in a context of alternative socioeconomic performances ranging from advanced to backward. Tunisia and Morocco, former French-colonized Arab-Muslim states located in northern Africa, serve as middle-income countries whose politics are undemocratic but whose social and economic performance has been moderately successful. Rather than limiting himself to either of these alternative theoretical approaches, Gregory White locates his analysis at the intersection of the external international political economy and the internal domestic economy and society. By elaborating these case studies within the framework of the European Union and its impact on peripheral middle-income actors, he advances both our understanding of state-society relations in transitional polities and the interaction that takes place between such polities and the powerful global forces that configurate and constrain their domestic policy choices. This book is organized into six chapters, which are collapsed into three distinct parts: theoretical framework, the international www.apsanet.org 225

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realm and Maghribi political economy, and state-in-society and state-in-the-internationaleconomy. The first two chapters provide succinct theoretical overviews and political economy profiles of the two countries. Positioning his study within the broader comparative political economy literature, the author carefully reviews competing arguments, ranging from class analyses to world systems theories to the new international division of labor approaches, and finds them wanting. He provides, instead, a more culturally nuanced, historically located interpretation that integrates domestic variables with international ones viewed through the empirical prism of the state. Avoiding the common tendency to (over)stress the cultural characteristics of Arab-Islamic societies, White turns to the state as the pivotal intermediary actor that serves to mediate the tensions created by the uneven interaction of international and domestic political economy forces. Ultimately, as his case studies so convincingly demonstrate, both Morocco and Tunisia have failed to establish and maintain dynamic progress in their social and economic growth because they have depended on a strategy of extroverted industrial development, one that relies excessively on a few industries directed at the European Union. Pushed by a liberal capitalist project emanating from above, both countries have judiciously followed International Monetary Fund and World Bank demands for structural adjustments and greater openings to the global economy. Such policies have increased their extroversion and reliance on the EU and, therefore, “amplified their vulnerability to changes emanating from Europe’’ (p. 3). The core-periphery dependency, so well elaborated in other Third World settings, finds its manifestation in the late-twentieth-century Maghrib, with the negative consequences so long associated with such dependency.

The book’s core sections are found in Part II, providing a detailed historical and analytical accounting of the different pathways undertaken by Tunisian and Moroccan elites to meet the challenge of open-door or infitah policies. In particular, White details the interactive way in which Tunisia’s shift in the 1970s from a statecentered strategy to one of economic liberalism and extroversion was the result not simply of external pressures but also the way in which domestic actors responded to global challenges and mobilized their self-interests. The experiences of the rural sector, petty bourgeoisie, commercial/industrial class, labor, religious authorities, women, and state elites are each analyzed in turn. One unintended consequence of this dynamic has been the way in which the state’s autonomy to position itself to take advantage of its proximity to Europe has been circumscribed by the growing strength of the business class opposed to certain aspects of infitah policies. Such a situation complicates the otherwise single-directed causal explanation associated with a simplified dependency model. Morocco’s experience with extroversion and economic liberalism is compared with that of Tunisia with similar consequences, although the pathways are somewhat different. As a larger, poorer, and more heterogeneous society, Morocco has found it more difficult than Tunisia to overcome structural as well as political constraints in its development. In both cases, however, the infitah strategy has resulted in regional imbalances, urban migration, environmental degradation, and rural decline. In combination, these have engendered new social and political frustrations, which increasingly find their expression in militant Islamist politics. This latter theme could have been explored in much greater detail by the author since its expression is increasingly found both in the home countries and in Europe where large

numbers of North Africans live and work. How nonrepresentative state elites pursue socioeconomic policies in a context of a capitalist dependency on Europe, which catalyze into a political opposition expressed in the form of Islamist radicalism including political terrorism, cries out for investigation if not explanation. Possibly the author’s initial theoretical and empirical focuses were originally narrow, leaving little room for elaborating the more political dimensions of socioeconomic discontent. Yet, in his concluding paragraph, the author does provide the connecting political link that could serve as a basis for a future study by himself or others. In any case, it correctly summarizes the ultimate social and political failures of open-door policies that are unlinked to democratic politics and its core values of representativeness, accountability, and law. White writes that the “winners” in Tunisia’s and Morocco’s political economies are “a thin segment of affluent elites with intricate ties to their own governments, society, and, most importantly, the international arena. The bulk of Maghribi citizens, however, are excluded from their economic and political systems, and they remain exasperated with, and alienated from, their societies. Only with their political and economic inclusion will genuine change occur” (p. 171). This, then, is a valuable book providing insight into comparative political economy operating on a global level but having determinative consequences for state and society. It is also a fine pedagogical primer for those seeking to understand Arab political dynamics taking place at Europe’s doorstep and in the shadow of its economic might, cultural influence, and political power. How this interaction ultimately works itself out will have longterm consequences, intended or otherwise, both for North Africa and Europe, if not the world.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

are important for those of us studying international politics. It is also self-evident that words have various connotations and meanings. This was always true for the term “terrorist’’ for example—one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Since September 11, many of us have been asking questions about the meaning of various terms and concepts, such as a “war on terrorism.’’ This book helps elucidate some of the issues one needs to wrestle with in answering such questions. In that sense it is very useful. It gives the reader valuable insights into some of the choices concerning ways to think about how words are used both in academic endeavors

and in politics. It provides some examples of different tools one might employ to study the ways in which words get used, another valuable contribution. However, to an extent, the promises offered are not delivered in a sufficiently strong way. It is self-evident that words take on different meanings in different contexts; it is also self-evident that words matter. The questions left largely unanswered have to do with connecting these issues with broader inquiries in the field. Several of the chapters do tie together such connections. The chapter with Laura Brunell on gender and rhetoric in the Gulf War debate is quite good, for instance. It illustrates

Meanings of War and Peace. By Francis A. Beer. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. 256p. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. — Mark R. Brawley, McGill University This book left me a bit frustrated. It was as if I had gone to a nice restaurant, reviewed an extensive menu that left my mouth watering, but only got to taste a couple of items. As its title declares, this is a book about the different meanings the words “war’’ and “peace’’ can have. We take for granted that the meanings 226 March 2003

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the connections between gender and rhetoric, which in turn shaped the nature of debate, consequently affecting how decisions were made. At the same time, this chapter and several others were very self-contained. This could be a blessing for someone choosing sections to assign in courses. Having chosen to put together the book in this manner, Beer also left some lines of argument unfulfilled, however. For instance, the chapters in Part II focus on rhetoric in the congressional debates concerning the Gulf War. It would have been interesting to see if the same members of Congress used similar rhetoric in later debates concerning intervention in the Balkans in later years. Do Democrats and Republicans think about war and death differently? Or is there gamesmanship going on, involving relations between the White House and Congress? I would have enjoyed seeing those sorts of questions dealt with more directly. There were a couple of comparisons between examples that rubbed me the wrong way, although this may be a personal opinion. They do highlight how unique wars (and therefore peace) can be. For example, there is the assertion (p. 147) that “hundreds of thousands’’ of Iraqis died in Operation Desert Storm, and a parallel is drawn between the bombing of Baghdad and the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. There seems to be little agreement on how many Iraqis were killed in the fighting for Kuwait, but very few estimates run as high as several hundred thousand. To compare the destruction of Dresden with coalition bombing of Baghdad seems a stretch. One can deplore the loss of even one civilian life without having to make such comparisons. Meanings of War and Peace is a good guide for those of use who wish to learn more about the importance of the use of language and rhetoric in international politics. This book underscores the potential utility of these approaches, but it might have been able to go beyond that to illustrate more firmly why more of us need to pay closer attention to these techniques. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. By Thomas Borstelmann. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 416p. $35.00. — Benjamin O. Fordham, State University of New York at Albany The Cold War and the Color Line is a fairminded account of the interaction between Cold War foreign policy and race relations in

the United States. Thomas Borstelmann’s narrative follows the parallel struggles for civil rights within the United States and against colonialism and white supremacist regimes abroad. The central thesis of the book is that these processes influenced each other. Changing American race relations affected the way the United States fought the Cold War and responded to the end of European colonial rule, while the Cold War influenced the domestic civil rights movement in various ways. Although Borstelmann acknowledges that racial considerations had relatively little impact on U.S. strategic priorities after 1945, he makes a convincing case that racial discrimination and violence at home were a continuing source of embarrassment to the United States abroad. In addition to international attention to the civil rights movement in the United States and the violence of the white supremacist reaction to it, Borstelmann recounts many incidents of discrimination against nonwhite diplomats from newly independent countries. Events like these undermined American efforts to recruit nonwhite allies during the Cold War. He concludes that “there was no greater weakness for the United States in waging the Cold War than inequality and discrimination’’ (268). Race also influenced Cold War foreign policy through the unexamined (and unreconstructed) beliefs and prejudices of American foreign policymakers, nearly all of whom were white. Borstelmann shows that many of the most important American policy makers of the Cold War, including Dean Acheson, George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower, among others, held disturbingly racist attitudes. Indeed, these attitudes were apparently normal and prevalent among foreign policymakers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when many new African and Asian states became independent. Not surprisingly, these decision makers generally sided with European colonial powers and white supremacist regimes in southern Africa. Although Borstelmann is careful to note the efforts of some American policymakers to improve relations with these newly independent countries, most were oblivious to the interests of these emerging states. As a result, American relations with many of them were quite rocky throughout this period. At the same time, Borstelmann points out that the ongoing Cold War influenced the domestic struggle for racial equality in the United States. The fact that presidents worried about international perceptions of American race relations gave civil rights leaders leverage. Such incidents as the violence surrounding attempts to integrate high

schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, were sufficient to elicit a response even from a relatively indifferent administration (p. 102–4). The Cold War also gave added ideological weight to the civil rights movement’s demands for legal equality. On the other hand, the author is not blind to the fact that white supremacists were sometimes able to use Cold War anticommunism to attack civil rights leaders and justify repressive action against them. Nevertheless, the overall effect of the Cold War on the civil rights movement is generally positive in his account. Although the book is a general overview of race and the Cold War, its central concerns are African American civil rights and U.S. relations with African states during the 1945–68 period. Borstelmann discusses racism against Asians, Native Americans, and Jews, but most of the book focuses on African Americans. Similarly, although it includes a chapter reviewing the role of race in American foreign policy before 1945, and briefly discusses recent presidential administrations, its main focus is on the period between the end of World War II and 1968, after which, “the story of how these two themes intersected retreated from center stage in American politics’’ (p. 222). The parallels between presidential responses to the domestic African American civil rights movement and colonialism and white supremacy in Africa are especially striking during these years, and they support Borstelmann’s overall argument that policymakers confronted essentially the same racial issue both at home and abroad. The book reveals a recurring pattern that sometimes undermines Borstelmann’s assessments of particular presidents. Even though some were more sympathetic than others to both the domestic civil rights movement and the international struggle against colonialism and white supremacy, none placed these concerns ahead of the Cold War preoccupation with Soviet influence. Even Jimmy Carter, who explicitly sought to stress human rights concerns and deemphasize the Cold War, was ultimately unable to sustain this set of priorities. Borstelmann spends quite a bit of time discussing the racial attitudes of various presidents. However, in spite of their differing personal views, all converged on a strikingly similar set of policy choices that put Cold War security concerns—even rather dubious ones—ahead of human rights, opposition to racism, and other values associated with progressive race relations. He does a good job demonstrating why presidents who were relatively indifferent to racial concerns, such as Eisenhower, were unable to completely ignore these issues at home. Unfortunately, the reason www.apsanet.org 227

Book Reviews

International Relations

the Cold War consistently trumped these other concerns in the foreign policy arena is less clear in his account. Overall, The Cold War and the Color Line makes a useful contribution to the literature on the politics of American foreign policy and race relations. It makes a convincing case that domestic racial issues influenced Cold War foreign policy, and vice versa. Peace Enforcement: The United Nations Experience in Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia. By Jane Boulden. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. 176p. $62.00. — Ryan C. Hendrickson, Eastern Illinois University Since the Cold War’s end, the United Nations Security Council has become a more active and controversial player in international politics. Its perceived mandate in peace and security affairs had expanded considerably since the UN’s creation in 1945. As its operational scope grows, so too has its detractors, who note its failures in the early 1990s, especially in Somalia and Bosnia. Jane Boulden’s book comes at an important time in world politics as the United Nations begins the process of addressing Afghanistan’s evolution toward democracy and stability, and as major operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Middle East and elsewhere persist. Boulden’s focus is UN “peace enforcement,’’ or by her definition, military missions that fall between traditional peacekeeping and full-fledged enforcement operations. The cases she examines all entailed “sustained military operations’’ that were carried out by the United Nations (p. 5). The cases that fit her definition include the UN’s experience in Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia. Her focus is the Security Council’s record, and how closely use-of-force resolutions were implemented. Each case is divided into four sections, including a historical summary of the conflict, the actual mandate given by the Security Council, analysis of the implementation of each mandate, and a final section in each chapter on the lessons learned and other “issues’’ generated by each case. She includes an introductory chapter on the history of the United Nations Charter and its evolution into peacekeeping. The book’s greatest virtue is the meticulous chronicling of the Security Council’s decisions for each deployment. No other similar text exists that focuses exclusively on use-of-force decisions, making the book an excellent reference source. Moreover, in each chapter, the author goes beyond the Security Council mandates and discusses the specific rules of 228 March 2003

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engagement for the troops deployed in each mission. This aspect of political-military studies is often overlooked by political scientists. Such logistical factors merit examination because they may be instrumental in influencing the political dynamics of the operation, and provide a more complete understanding of the constraints under which UN troops work. The author’s conclusions are also well supported. All missions suffered from “chronic undersupport’’ and from serious commandand-control problems (p. 130). Boulden’s recall of the United Nations experience in Somalia offers an especially poignant demonstration of this argument, as the Clinton administration and the UN mission on the ground were often operating completely apart from each other. As this mission progressed, the gulf between the United States and the United Nations grew, culminating in political disaster and 18 American casualties in Mogadishu in early October 1993. Had better communication existed, she concludes, perhaps this tragedy could have been avoided. Another commonality she notes is that despite calls for additional support for the peace enforcers in each case, these pleas were rejected in the deployments’ early phases. Through her analysis of Security Counicl resolutions, she also finds that upon originally taking action, the United Nations dealt primarily with the consequences of the conflict, rather than the causes of the violence. In each case the “suffering’’ was addressed, but a genuine commitment to resolve the conflict was absent. The author focuses almost exclusively on the Security Council’s mandate and then the implementation of the various use-of-force resolutions. The “Security Council’’ is the principal unit of analysis. Such an approach is both the strength and limitation of the study; she notes that she does not “tell the full story of the operations examined’’ (p. 5). Due to the complexity of each operation, and the large time frames considered in Congo and Bosnia especially, telling the full story is obviously not possible when seeking to draw broader generalizations and comparisons. She chooses to rely largely on documents from the United Nations and actual Security Council decisions. In this respect, there is no comparable book. In her chapter on Somalia, she includes an analysis of Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s interpretation of these resolutions, which differed markedly from those of the major powers on the Security Council. This discussion provides much insight on the refusal to grant him a second term as Secretary General.

At the same time, Boulden notes the importance of the United States in both of the post–Cold War operations she examines, and provides some attention to the Clinton administration’s policy approach in Somalia and Bosnia (pp. 73, 111). Yet for those seeking broader treatment of the positions of the Security Council’s members, supplemental references will be needed. For those interested in Bosnia, for example, Ivo H. Daalder’s (1999) Getting to Dayton examines the profound differences among senior policymakers at the White House and the many factors involved in reshaping American foreign policy toward the United Nations and Bosnia, including French President Jacques Chirac’s role in calling for American leadership in 1995. In this respect, Daalder’s study offers a more complete explanation of the Security Council’s evolution on Bosnia. Some analysts of the United Nations may also quibble with her definition of “peaceenforcement’’ operations, asking why UN operations in Cambodia, and perhaps Sierra Leone, are not treated. Such a distinction likely revolves around the author’s definition of a “sustained’’ military operation. Nevertheless, this book will be useful for policymakers and students. A concluding chapter provides a host of policy proposals, as well as recognition that UN operations can bring positive and negative results. Partial military commitments to political crises do little to advance the cause of peace, and damage the UN’s credibility in the process. The Effects of Violence on Peace Processes. Edited by John Darby. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2001. 144p. $19.95. — David N. Gibbs, University of Arizona Despite optimistic expectations to the contrary, the post–Cold War era has generated a considerable degree of violent conflict. These conflicts have caused substantial human suffering and destabilization for the inhabitants of affected regions. The continent of Africa has been especially prone to political strife. Selected countries in other areas of the world, such as Afghanistan, Colombia, and the former Yugoslavia, have also been affected. And even relatively prosperous countries, such as the United States are not insulated from the effects of Third World instability—as the events of September 11 have dramatically demonstrated. Naturally enough, the world community has sought ways to settle these conflicts through negotiated settlements, often supervised by “impartial” external

authorities like the United Nations. And there has been a growing interest among academics in these efforts at external third-party mediation. The Effects of Violence on Peace Processes is another in a series of studies that address the issue of third-party mediation. The main theme of the book is that in any mediation effort, a formal settlement does not necessarily mark the end of the conflict. The underlying social tensions that triggered the conflict in the first place still remain, even after an agreement; these latent tensions can cause renewed violence which, in turn, can undermine the agreement and restart the conflict. Accordingly, mediators must be mindful of the dangers of recrudescent violence and undertake measures to prevent it. A series of general chapters, authored by the editor, John Darby, comprise half the book; these are by far the most useful parts. There are also several case studies of conflict mediation, written by separate authors, with chapters on Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Israel-Palestine, and South Africa. The case studies are somewhat superficial: Several contain little information that goes beyond what one might find in the New York Times. They are poorly integrated with the more analytical chapters and add little to the overall volume. The analytical chapters by Darby are clearly the main contribution, and these offer useful insights for both professional mediators and academics. The key issue for Darby is not simply achieving an initial agreement but making the agreement last, in order to permanently settle the conflict. And he offers the sobering observation that in the large majority of cases, negotiated settlements tend to fall apart: “Of the thirty-eight formal peace accords signed between January 1988 and December 1998, thirty-one failed to last more than three years” (p. 8). The return to violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the apparent failure of the Oslo Accords offer yet additional reminders that settlements can and do fall apart. The book analyzes ways to prevent such failures and offers many small insights. A special strength of this book is the recognition that in any conflict, none of the parties can be treated as a cohesive whole. Any militia force, for example, contains a variety of different factions with diverse interests; the same is true for governments. Darby identifies several categories of players: First, there are the Dealers, who are willing to compromise certain of their goals in the interest of achieving a compromise settlement. Second, the Zealots stick rigidly to their core demands and are, accordingly, resistant to set-

tlement. The Opportunists may shift their loyalty between the first two groups, adjusting their position as circumstances change. Finally, there are the Mavericks “who once committed violence for the cause but who now carry out unauthorized crimes for personal gain” (p. 49), and these often degenerate into criminal gangs. Mediators must win over the Dealers and the Opportunists, on both sides of a conflict, and maintain their loyalty to the peace process, despite the various challenges that will inevitably test the viability of that process. At the same time, the mediators must seek to isolate the Zealots and the Mavericks. Darby offers sensible suggestions for achieving these objectives. Where governments are major parties to conflicts, he recommends that the security and police forces be reconstituted and depoliticized. The police force, it is hoped, will form the basis for an impartial and fair policing of the initial cease-fire agreement. The regular army, in contrast, should be reduced in size and restricted in function. Alternative employment must be found for military and police personnel who are dismissed in order to ensure that these do not present a new threat to stability. More generally, the security forces must undertake symbolic changes in order to advertise their new and impartial role. In general, Darby emphasizes the importance of “confidence building measures,” whereby both sides make concessions to establish mutual trust, and to lay the basis for a long-term resolution. The main drawback to this volume is its unambitious nature. This is basically a “how to” manual for prospective diplomats involved in conflict resolution. However, it fails to consider conflict resolution in a broader context. Certain key assumptions are never considered in detail: For example, it is assumed that external mediators can be relied upon to act impartially, without biases toward one side or the other, or any selfish interests of their own. It is also assumed that the “Zealots” who resist compromise agreements are unreasonable and are the main villains in civil conflicts. Darby fails to consider that the Zealots may at least in some cases have good reasons for resisting compromise; their need for justice instead of peace may be well reasoned and sound. There is no a priori reason to assume that compromise is always and in every case the best outcome. This possibility is again unexamined, reflecting the narrowly technocratic approach that undergirds—and limits—the analysis. The historical context in which mediation takes place, and how it has been influenced by larger world events, is unexamined.

Overall, The Effects of Violence on Peace Processes is a useful if unspectacular contribution to the growing literature on international conflict resolution. Limits of Law, Prerogatives of Power: Interventionism After Kosovo. By Michael J. Glennon. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 250p. $49.95. — Anthony Clark Arend, Georgetown University Michael Glennon’s recent work is the best book written on international law and the use of force in the past 40 years. While this may seem to be a bold statement, I make it for three reasons. First, Glennon’s conception of international law that forms the basis of his analysis reflects an accurate understanding of the nature of the international system and the realities of international relations. Second, his analytical method reveals the dynamics of how states constitute rules of international law. Third, he offers a realistic conclusion about the current, woeful status of the law, but provides hope for future improvements. Let me say a word about each of these points. Far too many international legal scholars portray international law as a set of rules that seems to bear no resemblance to the world of international relations that most political scientists would recognize. International legal rules appear to exist on a different plane, far removed from the harsh world of state behavior. As a consequence, it is often hard for political scientists to take international lawyers seriously. The law seems to be the Platonic Form that has no relationship to what “really goes on.” Glennon, however, offers a very different picture. His book begins with the assumption that international legal rules are created through the behavior of states. This creation takes place in two primary ways. First, states create international law through the conclusion of formal, written agreements—treaties. Second, they constitute law through practice that comes to be regarded as the law—what is called customary international law. But just as law is created through this process of custom, so too can the law be uncreated or recreated through this process of state practice. And herein lies Glennon’s insight. In exploring international law dealing with the use of force, virtually all international legal scholars begin with Article 2, paragraph 4 of the United Nations Charter. Article 2(4) provides: “All Members [of the United Nations] shall refrain in their international relations from the threat of use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of www.apsanet.org 229

Book Reviews

International Relations

any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” To most, this treaty provision constitutes a general prohibition of the use of force. These “legalists,” as Glennon calls them, have thus spent most of the past 50 years seeking to interpret this law in light of state practice and other rules of international law. In their interpretive exercises, however, they have held fast to the core conclusion that Article 2(4) is still good law, that it still reflects the controlling rule. Glennon, however, insists that Article 2(4) must be subjected to the ultimate test of any rule of international law—state practice. If state practice is so at variance with a treaty provision, then that provision can no longer be considered to be the law. In essence, states through their practice have chosen to reject that law. It is with this understanding of the constitutive process of international legal rules that Glennon then performs an empirical analysis of state practice. Now it should be noted at the outset that “empirical” is not intended to indicate “quantitative.” Rather, it means an exploration of numerous cases where force was used in the international system and an evaluation of how the international community responded to such uses of force. Glennon examines both interstate and intrastate uses of force. His conclusion is that it is no longer clear that the system of law intended to be established by the United Nations Charter regime is, in reality, the law. On the one hand, the Charter exists in writing; it has not been formally altered. States continue to solemnly pronounce it to be the law. Yet, on the other hand, the practice of states—exemplified by the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo campaign—reveals a very different set of rules of the game. There are, as he terms them, two parallel universes of law—the universe of the Charter and the universe of geopolitical reality. The author, however, does not end his discussion with this finding. Instead, he goes beyond his conclusion about the state of contemporary international law to suggest a possible future. For Glennon, the hope to build up a new legal paradigm lies not in a “topdown” approach that would be initiated by a formal change in the United Nations Charter or by Security Council action, but rather in a “bottom-up” approach. This bottom-up approach would begin with regional organizations, like NATO. It was through a costbenefit analysis—not through obedience to the Charter—that NATO decided to intervene in Yugoslavia. While the precise calculations are no doubt complex and will ultimately remain unknown, it seems likely that 230 March 2003

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NATO leaders weighed human rights and security concerns against the principle of nonintervention and a variety of potentially negative political consequences. In the end, they decided to act. Glennon implies that this same type of cost-benefit calculation by regional organizations in the future could lead to the development of a new legal paradigm relating to the use of force. As regional organizations make decisions in the future, new rules could emerge that will ultimately construct an approach to intervention that, unlike the Charter regime, will have true support from the international community. Of course, only time will indicate what direction the law will take, but his suggestions seem to offer much more than any effort to pretend that the law of the Charter is alive and well and living in the real world. In sum, I believe that Limits of Law, Prerogatives of Power is a book that should be read by both international legal scholars and international relations theorists. It is exceptionally well written, thoroughly documented, and provocative. International lawyers may not like Glennon’s conclusions about the fate of the Charter framework, but if law is to mean anything, they would wisely head his counsel. Conversely, political scientists will be comforted by his “realism,” but they will also be challenged by his appreciation of the importance of law, even in a world of geopolitics. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. By Joshua S. Goldstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 496p. $39.95. — Terrell A. Northrup, Syracuse University Joshua Goldstein has authored an exhaustive and insightful book on the major ways in which gender and war influence each other. This lengthy, thoroughly researched, and clearly argued work should have broad appeal for scholars of war and international relations, as well as of gender, across several disciplines and theoretical predilections. Why is it, the book asks, that although manifestations of both war and gender show great diversity, there is one constant: Gender roles in the context of war vary almost not at all across cultures and across time. Fighters are almost exclusively men, with the “near-total exclusion” of women from combat. Notably, this constant holds in spite of two significant facts. First, neither men nor women have a natural predilection for killing; societies in general must work hard to convince any of their members to kill, whether male or female. Second, women who do manage to participate

in war seem to function on a par with men. If neither women nor men want to kill, and there are many of both sexes who are equipped to do so, why is combat almost wholly the domain of men? Goldstein offers this puzzle as an organizing theme. The book presents twenty possible explanations, which are organized into four major categories: the biology of gender, gender differences in group dynamics, the cultural construction of masculinity, and the cultural construction of dominance/subordination relations between men and women. Goldstein derives these hypotheses primarily from feminist theory. Although he provides a concise description of major feminist approaches, it is somewhat disappointing that he infrequently returns to those ideas later in the book. He is careful, however, to state that his work is not theoretical, but is intended as “a dossier of evidence,” a survey of relevant empirical evidence (p. 58). Having concluded from the evidence that females’ participation in war as individual combatants, in groups, and as leaders can be as effective as men’s, he considers biological differences between the sexes at the individual and group levels. His comprehensive review suggests that where there are differences on characteristics relevant to differential war capability (e.g., size and strength, ability to work in hierarchies), they are in the direction of favoring men but are quite weak. An important finding is that for many measures, the bell curves of men and women have large zones of overlap, and so a small but nontrivial number of women should be found as combatants. Two chapters deal with the cultural construction of gender, the first focusing on masculinity (“tough men”) and femininity (“tender women”), the second on men’s domination (sexual and economic) of women. Goldstein finds the strongest explanations here, particularly in the socialization of males for war (toughness, suppression of emotion) and of females for supporting men’s war roles. He concludes overall that the best explanation for gendered war roles is the combination of 1) small but significant biological differences in average size, strength, and rough-and-tumble play, and 2) the socialization of men for war, paired with the tendency to demonize the enemy through feminization as a marker of dominance. This book makes a significant contribution to the political and larger social science literature on war and international relations, in many ways providing a bridge between mainstream and feminist IR theory and research. The review of the research literature, painstakingly covering several disciplines, is remarkably thorough, as evidenced by his analysis, as well

as by the exhaustive list of references and author and subject indexes. Goldstein’s analysis is incisive, clearly argued, and concise. His consideration of feminist approaches is thoughtful, and he concludes that the evidence he cites supports feminist theorists’ efforts to “problematize masculinity” (p. 407). Although the author is clear that this is not primarily a theoretical work, there are many places where the reader’s appetite is whetted for more discussion and analysis. The only weakness of the author’s almost ruthless attention to the presentation of evidence is that on occasion questionable claims appear as fact. There are not many such instances, but some are significant. One example is Goldstein’s statement that “men must take actions, undergo ordeals, or pass tests in order to become men” (p. 264), while “womanhood comes more naturally and does not require passing tests” (p. 265). This is clearly arguable. Several feminist political theorists have addressed the danger underlying this notion of the apparent “naturalness” of femininity and its use for oppressing women, holding them to the private sphere (e.g., see Susan Moller Okin, Gender, Justice and the Family, 1991, and Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 1989). One might make the case that some of the more obvious “ordeals” women undergo or are threatened with are physical abuse and rape, which help to construct women as vulnerable, weak, and in need of protection. Less violent ordeals, such as discrimination in the workplace, contribute in fact to women’s economic vulnerability. One only needs to walk down the “girls” aisle in any toy store for evidence of the shaping of the qualities attributed to and demanded for womanhood—mandates for domesticity, submissiveness, sexual availability, and so on. Goldstein’s contention that boys and men are forced into “artificial manhood” (p. 265) to “be all they can be” is a strong one and central to the book. Girls and women are no less forced into an artificial gender identity, and one might argue that in the process they are trained to “be less than they can be.” That said, one of the strengths of War and Gender is that it invites many lively debates, which have the potential for bringing forward scholarly investigations of war and political conflict. Goldstein presents a cogent argument that the majority of mainstream social science research and theory (the province largely of male scholars) has focused on war without attending to gender. Scholarship that has attended to gender in the context of war has been engaged in primarily by (women) feminists, who have addressed women’s roles and, to a lesser extent, the social construction of

gender. The book’s analysis fills a gap, focusing on the role of gender in war, and primarily the role of men and masculinity. In sum, Goldstein convincingly concludes that, given the evidence for an interaction between war and gender, scholars of political conflict should pay attention to gender, and gender scholars should pay attention to war. A somewhat remarkable claim, one well worth further attention, is that war can be seen as a cause of gender. If one accepts that many (if not most) societies, to a greater or lesser extent, spend resources (both soft and hard) on war preparation, in light of Goldstein’s evidence it is not at all ludicrous to consider that gendered social roles might be “used” to construct potential combatants. Legalization and World Politics. Edited by Judith L. Goldstein, Miles Kahler, Robert O. Keohane, and Anne-Marie Slaughter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. 319p. $24.95. — Jutta Brunnée, University of Toronto In this volume, several prominent international relations and international law (IL) scholars propose a framework through which to examine the proliferation of international legal institutions. They hope to chart common conceptual ground for IL and IR scholarship in order to examine the role of international law in international affairs. Kenneth W. Abbott et al. define legalization as aiming to provide “identifiable dimensions of variation whose effects on international behavior can be empirically explored” (p. 19). It revolves around three characteristics that international institutions may or may not display. “Obligation” means that states are “legally bound by a rule of commitment in the sense that their behavior thereunder is subject to scrutiny under the general rules, procedures and discourse of international law, and often of domestic law” (p. 17). “Precision” is a feature of rules that “unambiguously define the conduct they require, authorize or proscribe” (p. 17). “Delegation” provides third parties with “authority to implement, interpret and apply the rules; to resolve disputes; and (possibly) make further rules” (p. 17). Each characteristic can vary independently. Legalization “encompasses a multidimensional continuum” (p. 17), ranging from full legalization, to harder or softer forms of legalization (with different degrees and combinations of obligation, precision, and delegation), to complete absence of legalization. For the framers of the volume, international law and politics exist in a reciprocal relationship, with one impacting on the other. In suggesting that institutions mediate this rela-

tionship, the legalization project declares its theoretical provenance: Legalization is a particular form of institutionalization. The introduction by Judith Goldstein et al. emphasizes, however, that the project’s intent is “neither to praise nor to bury legalization, but to analyze its dimensions, its sources, and its current and prospective effects” (p. 15). The volume compiles contributions that begin this analytical work. Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal examine harder and softer legal arrangements and the differing costs and benefits they produce. Robert O. Keohane, Andrew Moravcsik, and Anne-Marie Slaughter focus on “delegation,” notably, the implications of various interstate and transnational third-party dispute resolution models. The other contributions explore legalization in different settings. Three regional case studies focus on legalization in the European Union (Karen J. Alter); the North American Free Trade Agreement (Frederick M. Abbott); and in Asia-Pacific regional institutions (Miles Kahler). Three issue-oriented case studies examine the role of legalization in international monetary affairs (Beth A. Simmons); the interaction between legalization, trade liberalization, and domestic politics (Judith Goldstein and Lisa L. Martin); and the impact of legalization on human rights law and practice in Latin America (Ellen L. Lutz and Kathryn Sikkink). To map out common conceptual ground on a topic notorious for deep theoretical divisions between and within the disciplines of IR and IL is daunting, to say the least. Legalization and World Politics deserves praise for the effort to chart a possible course for interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration. Yet, readers in both disciplines should be alert to the fact that the conceptual bridges built in Legalization have the potential to extend and to narrow, to guide and to mislead, to focus and to obscure the undertaking. As the framers themselves stress, legalization is not international law. IR and IL scholars must pay close attention to this fact and its implications, lest they risk talking past one another, undermining the important bridge–building goal of the legalization project. IR theorists should note that the concept of legalization casts a particular image of international law. The focus is on structural manifestations of law: textual expressions of greater or lesser obligation, more or less precision; institutions that apply international law in more or less formal ways. Thus, for all its emphasis on the potential value of diverse forms of legalization, the project’s vision of international law is a narrow one. And although the framers’ declared goal is to decouple international law and enforcement, some of the volume’s contributions seem to conflate obligation and www.apsanet.org 231