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BOOK REVIEWS
Political Theory
Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multicul-
turalism. By Brian Barry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2001. 399p. $35.00.
Monique Deveaux, Williams College
Barry is well known for his hard-nosed, no-nonsense defenses
of traditional liberal principles, as evidenced in his Theories of
Justice (1989) and Justice as Impartiality (1995). Here he turns
his attention to arguments by proponents of multiculturalism
in political life, liberal and nonliberal alike. The book is
divided into three main sections: Multiculturalism and Equal
Treatment, Multiculturalism and Groups, and Multicultural-
ism, Universalism, and Egalitarianism. The central argument
does not so much unfold gradually as it is asserted at the
outset and then defended intermittently thereafter.
Barry’s task is twofold: Offer a thorough and critical
analysis of recent political theory that advocates cultural
pluralism, and defend core liberal principles and a concep-
tion of liberalism as equal justice for all against what the
author plainly sees as the misguided efforts of multicultural-
ists. Barry seeks to wrest liberal principles from the hands of
so-called liberal proponents of multiculturalism (such as Will
Kymlicka and Chandran Kukathas) as well as to show why
efforts to discredit liberalism as inadequate to the demands of
culturally plural societies are mistaken. Rather than eschew
liberal norms or reform them beyond all recognition, Barry
argues, we need to seek solutions from within liberalism.
Specifically, we need to extend equal rights and treatment to
all, and we must rectify the pervasive social and economic
disadvantages that multiculturalists wrongly impute to
groups’ distinctive cultural identities.
Barry makes no attempt to obscure his thoroughly skepti-
cal view of this literature. Indeed, he states at the outset that,
in his “naively rationalistic way, I used to believe that
multiculturalism was bound sooner or later to sink under the
weight of its intellectual weaknesses and that I would there-
fore be better employed writing about other topics” (p. 6).
Only multiculturalism’s inexplicable persistence persuaded
him to undertake the task of rebutting the arguments of
leading proponents. As befits this motivation, his central aim
is to demonstrate that much of the normative argumentation
underpinning proposals for greater accommodation of cul-
tural minorities in liberal democratic states is fundamentally
flawed. Barry also seeks to show that many if not most of the
specific proposals advanced by contemporary political theo-
rists for special rights, exemptions, and other arrangements
for cultural minorities are poorly defended and potentially
disastrous from the vantage point of politics.
Among the thinkers Barry takes on in his thorough and
highly critical survey of the literature are Bikhu Parekh,
Chandran Kukathas, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, James
Tully, and Iris Young. In his discussion of the various
arguments of these and other proponents of cultural plural-
ism, Barry brings his analytical skills to bear in exposing
vague, contradictory, and poorly argued aspects of their
work, and he employs his political savvy to speculate about
the potential effects of concrete proposals for accommodat-
ing cultural minorities. At times this strategy is remarkably
insightful, as in his exploration of the implications of the
suggestion (which he attributes to Iris Young) that liberal
cultural minorities should have disproportionate power in
shaping the public policies that apply to their own practices
(p. 303).
At other times, Barry too readily engages in sarcastic
dismissal of the works he discusses. His writing style is highly
rhetorical and often witty, but the witticisms frequently come
at the expense of authors whose arguments or political
visions are forced through Barry’s analytical grinder. Exam-
ples include Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference
(1990), which Barry discusses at length and whose central
arguments he rejects on the basis of some very persuasive
reasons. Nonetheless, punctuating his analysis are derisive
asides—Young ultimately advances a “perverse thesis about
the assimilionist impulse behind liberalism” (p. 69)—and he
twice quotes a passage from Young’s book that discusses an
idea he finds particularly absurd, namely, the notion of a
distinct women’s culture as including traditional women’s arts
and rituals deriving from witchcraft (pp. 94 and 278).
Similarly, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Barry is
merely poking fun at a central aboriginal image from James
Tully’s Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of
Diversity (1995)—the black canoe, employed by Tully as a
metaphor for his vision of constitutionalism amid diversity—
even though Barry hastens to assure readers that “there is
nothing intrinsically absurd in any of the argumentative
strategies that Tully attributes to the mythological bear” (p.
262). References to the Politically Correct Thought Police
(p. 271) and the Commissioners of Political Correctness (p.
328) abound, reinforcing Barry’s view that cultural pluralism
as a political strategy is the concoction of a handful of
posturing intellectuals who rely on dogmatism to support
their cause.
As ever, Barry’s strong suit is his talent for articulating the
essence of liberal principles and presenting persuasive (al-
though not, in my view, ultimately convincing) arguments to
support his case against self-styled liberal and postliberal
theories of multiculturalism. A key strength of the book is
Barry’s knack for demonstrating that often political theorists
who purport to amend flaws within liberal theory simply
misconstrue or fail to understand what liberal norms, princi-
ples, and conceptual distinctions actually entail. For example,
the liberal distinction between public and private has, Barry
argues, been profoundly misconstrued by critics. Urging us
back to John Stuart Mill (whom he discusses at length), Barry
persuasively argues that such a division is indispensible for
justice.
Barry also unpacks and holds up to critical scrutiny much
of the rhetoric of recent political theory that endorses
cultural pluralism, sometimes in quite useful ways. His dis-
cussion in the final chapter, “The Politics of Multicultural-
ism,” effectively demonstrates the dangers of the presump-
tion that liberal democracies should move toward a
conception of the “special interests” of ethnic and cultural
minorities, in part because such a conception obscures the
ways in which public institutions and resources (like educa-
tion) are a matter of critical concern for all citizens, regard-
less of their ethnicity.
Barry’s claims that “a politics of multiculturalism under-
mines a politics of redistribution” (p. 8) and that “pursuit of
the multiculturalist agenda makes the achievement of
broadly based egalitarian policies more difficult” by “divert-
ing political effort away from universalistic goals” (p. 325)
combine to shape a provocative and sobering thesis. The
book is, however, a bit short on solutions to the very social
and economic disadvantages and inequalities that are, Barry
claims, misattributed (by proponents of multiculturalism) to
culture and group identity. It is hoped that a follow-up book
is in the offing, in which Barry will address precisely these
problems from his trenchant liberal social justice perspective.
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4 December 2001
975
The Postmodern Marx. By Terrell Carver. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. 240p. $55.00
cloth, $19.95 paper.
Ernesto Laclau, University of Essex
Two main features of this remarkable book deserve special
mention. The first is its attempt to reflect on Marx’s texts in
the light of present social and political concerns. This is the
reason for “postmodern”in the title. The present is not seen
by Carver as organized around a unified perspective but as a
true plurality: He does not take refuge in any ready-made
coherence or in easy labels. The complexities of the present
are projected into the Marxian text—or, rather, rediscovered
in it—so that they lead to its authentic deconstruction. One
ends with the feeling that there is much more to be found in
the texts of Marx, despite their anachronisms and limitations,
than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
The second important feature is that the Marx Carver finds
at the end of his exploration is also plural. A great deal of
literature has tried to discover the “true”Marx, but we get
from Carver a fascinating unveiling of the multiplicity of the
Marxian text, of the various discursive sequences whose unity
results from contingent articulations rather than from any
underlying univocal principle. Seen from this angle, the work
of Marx appears as a sort of microcosm in which we find, in
nuce, all the potential and often contradictory trends of the
history of Marxism in the century following the founder’s
death. Being partly inside and partly outside that history,
Carver sees this multiplicity of crossroads already operating
in the founding gestures of Marx himself and gives a pene-
trating analysis of its constitutive dimensions.
In the introduction Carver states the different paradigms,
both theoretical and political, that have governed the reading
of Marx’s texts. Later, he successively analyzes the role of
metaphor in theoretical writing, the link between Marx’s
approach and the idealist philosophy immediately preceding
him, the shortcomings of the rational choice reading of his
texts, the framework of his political economy approach, his
conception of communism, the main dimensions of his
political theory and strategy, the interpretative strategies to
be found in the translations of his work, his relations with
Hegelian philosophy, and even those aspects that Marx did
not touch: women and gender.
Carver is very much aware of the main contemporary
developments in textual analysis: from rhetoric to decon-
struction in its Derridean version and from the hermeneutics
of a Gadamer or a Ricoeur to the contextualism of Quentin
Skinner and the Cambridge School. The traces of these
methodological approaches (or, rather, of these reading
practices, given that the notion of “method”would be very
much contested by some of these currents) can be found
everywhere in Carver’s book, and their employment is always
careful and rigorous. Carver has written a work that can be
considered a model of contemporary textual analysis.
Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, and
Contestations. By John S. Dryzek. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2000. 195p. $29.95.
Bob Pepperman Taylor, University of Vermont
John Dryzek identifies the “deliberative turn”in democratic
theory in the past decade and wishes to “establish what a
defensible theory of democracy would look like”(p. 2). The
fundamental features of the theory he develops are: a critical
hostility to what he takes to be liberalism’s view of democracy
as simple interest aggregation; a subsequent defense of
deliberative democracy’s educative and transformative po-
tential; and an argument for distancing deliberative democ-
racy from the state and formal voting mechanisms and
emphasizing instead the democratic importance of a plural,
politicized, and vocal civil society.
In elaborating these ideas, Dryzek hopes to reinvigorate a
radical critical theory that he fears has become too closely
allied with liberalism in the past few years. This allows him to
distinguish, on the one hand, between what he takes to be the
full critical potential of deliberative democracy and, on the
other hand, conventional liberalism, rational choice theory,
and the work of “difference”democrats. Having carved out
the terrain of his own theory, he then applies this theory to
the consideration of two interesting and important cases: the
democratic potential in international politics and the rela-
tionship between democracy and Green politics. Throughout,
he is deeply concerned with what he calls democratic “au-
thenticity,”or “the degree to which democratic control is
engaged through communication that encourages reflection
upon preferences without coercion”(p. 8).
There is much to like about and learn from this small but
densely argued volume. At the most general level, all scholars
interested in the relationship between democracy and volun-
tary organizations in civil society will find important food for
thought. Although Dryzek focuses primarily on politicized
organizations in civil society rather than the whole range of
voluntary associations (Greenpeace, say, rather than Robert
Putnam’s bowling leagues and choral societies), he makes a
strong case for thinking that many such organizations may
make their greatest contributions to democratic deliberation
by maintaining their independence from the state, by viewing
their contribution to democracy as flowing from the deliber-
ation they stimulate in the polity more generally rather than
the degree to which they either share formal political power
or aim primarily to influence the outcome of elections.
This idea allows Dryzek to offer a novel argument about
the role of an international “civil society”in promoting
transnational democracy. The model he has in mind is of
networks of organizations, perhaps like those working and
demonstrating in recent years against free trade, or the
universe of international environmental organizations. In the
course of making these arguments, Dryzek discusses social
choice theory, the recent liberal turn of critical theory (most
notably Habermas), and “difference”theory, all of which will
be welcomed by theorists in these fields as well as by those
involved with debates about “public reason”and the proper
constraints on political debate (Dryzek defends a moderately
broad understanding of these constraints).
As in most richly argued and thoughtful books, there is
much with which to quarrel. I shall mention three of the main
issues that may generate discussion. First, a strong case can
be made that Dryzek’s portrait of “liberalism”is much too
narrow and constrained. We should not forget, for example,
that one of the most important “deliberative”democrats was
John Dewey, perhaps the dominant liberal voice from the
first half of the twentieth century in the United States. It is
true that for much liberal political theory democracy is
narrowly construed as the aggregation of interests. This by no
means exhausts the liberal literature or position, however, as
works from John Stuart Mill to Amy Gutmann and Dennis
Thompson demonstrate. Nor do all liberals “fail to recog-
nize...that getting constitutions and laws right is only half
the battle”(p. 21)—one need only think of liberal feminism,
such as that developed by Susan Moller Okin, to see how
unpersuasive this claim is. Critics will suspect that Dryzek’s
liberalism comes dangerously close to being a straw man.
More generously, others may suggest that his constrained
Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY December 2001
976
view of liberalism unnecessarily restricts his access to litera-
tures and arguments that would be most useful to his own
thinking.
A second worry concerns the connection Dryzek makes
between democracy and civil society. He recognizes that
many organizations in civil society are neither internally
democratic nor representative of majority public opinion, but
he nonetheless believes some of these organizations are
democratic because they give voice to wrongly excluded
groups or interests. By making our understanding of democ-
racy “discursive rather than electoral”(p. 51), Dryzek severs
(or at least seriously weakens) the link that legitimizes
democracy through the empirical act of voting. In order to
evaluate the democratic integrity of a particular discourse or
group, he is left only with arguments about authenticity (he
holds that authenticity in deliberation requires no more than
that communication be based upon generalizable and non-
coercive positions) and the substantive degree to which
communication aims toward the liberation of legitimate
voices. Many readers will suspect that both of these argu-
ments are more complicated, difficult, and ambiguous than
Dryzek appears to believe.
A third and related concern is that although Dryzek never
holds that liberal democracy and deliberative democracy are
incompatible, he obviously emphasizes the latter and dis-
counts the former in his discussion. Although many (like
myself) will be persuaded that democracy cannot be reduced
to voting, many (like myself) will also think that Dryzek is in
danger of losing sight of the fundamental, even primary,
importance of voting and elections in any democratic system.
There are other issues, such as Dryzek’s discussion of
Green democracy, that could be the focus of an entire review.
Even though this book will raise many questions and criti-
cisms, these will reflect not Dryzek’s failure as a political
thinker but his strength as an interesting, provocative, and
serious democratic theorist.
Enduring Liberalism: American Political Thought Since the
1960s. By Robert Booth Fowler. Lawrence: University of
Kansas Press, 1999. 332p. $35.00.
Nancy S. Love, Pennsylvania State University
Has conflict replaced consensus in American political
thought since the 1960s? This is the central question of
Enduring Liberalism, and Fowler answers it with a carefully
nuanced “no.”“To grapple with contemporary interpreta-
tions...there is no substitute for understanding their prede-
cessors. For contemporary views are in constant dialogue
with them”(p. 34). He reconstructs this dialogue between the
political thought of post-1960s public intellectuals and the
general public, on the one hand, and earlier interpretations
of American values, on the other.
The first three chapters move quickly from nineteenth-
century classic analyses (de Tocqueville and Turner), to
Progressive Era conflict interpretations (Charles Beard and
Vernon Parrington), to post–World War II consensus theo-
ries (Louis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin), and then to chal-
lenges to consensus—from the Left, feminists, conservatives,
and postmoderns—during and following the 1960s. Fowler
claims these critiques have congealed around an “interpretive
orthodoxy”that “a consensus does not exist in the United
States and never has. A frequent corollary is that 1950’s
consensus advocates were political conservatives devoted to
the defense of an elitist, inegalitarian past that was not worth
preserving”(p. 36).
In the rest of the book, Fowler contests both claims and
offers his own interpretation of American political thought—
scholarly and popular—since the 1960s. Finding “no consen-
sus favoring liberalism among contemporary American intel-
lectuals,”he concludes that “diversity is alive and well in
American intellectual life, and it is more and more the
reality”(p. 61). Public opinion tells a different story, however:
“Substantial differences of opinion on basic (and liberal)
political values do not exist within the American public”(p.
62).
Fowler examines debates among public intellectuals on
three topics: the meaning of community (chap. 6), the
struggle for environmental protection (chap. 7), and the
decline of civil society (chaps. 8 and 9). His analysis is
comprehensive, ranging far beyond standard Right/Left ideo-
logical positions. For example, he discusses proponents of the
following versions of community: inclusive, national demo-
cratic, participatory democratic, small group and therapeutic,
spiritual, and traditional. Throughout the book Fowler iden-
tifies doubts about liberalism (at least, when defined as
radical individualism, individual rights, and/or market capi-
talism) shared by public intellectuals, despite their different
visions of American democracy.
Fowler sets the intellectual debates against the backdrop of
a largely privatized American public, a bittersweet triumph of
the core liberal principle of individual freedom (chaps. 4–5).
He presents the American public as, in Alan Wolfe’s phrase,
“one nation after all,”although a nation that lacks robust
concepts of democratic citizenship or public life. Instead, a
weak consensus limits even the most conflictual policy de-
bates to “the current liberal framework”(p. 245). Fowler’s
discussion of how liberal individualism has pervaded private
life, especially family and religion, is fascinating, despite his
questionable association of privatization with 1960s-style
liberation. Racism, he argues, remains the deepest division
among American citizens and the greatest threat to national
unity.
As even this brief summary suggests, Fowler provides a
comprehensive survey of American political thought, includ-
ing an invaluable bibliography. Yet, breadth occasionally
supersedes analytical clarity. For example, the line between
public intellectuals and public opinion is less clear and less
clearly drawn than Fowler suggests. He defines the former as
“a certain kind of reflective participant in American public
life”(p. x). His discussions include Robert Bellah, Jean
Bethke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, Michael Walzer, William
Bennett, Seymour Martin Lipset, William Galston, Stephen
Macedo, and many, many others. Unfortunately, Fowler also
draws on their ideas and surveys to characterize American
public opinion. One is left wondering whether Fowler’s claim
that the American public embraces liberal values is itself an
artifact of the public intellectuals he studies.
The author’sdefinition of liberalism is also rather ambig-
uous. Fowler acknowledges that diversity exists not only
outside liberalism but also within it: “Liberalism is a complex
outlook, after all, with somewhat porous and highly contested
definitional boundaries and many internal tensions”(p. 250).
When discussing conservatism, Fowler asks: “How much
does it illuminate anything to say “They are all liberals?”Yet,
he still tends to interpret distinct intellectual positions as
variations on liberal themes (p. 123). For Fowler, most
feminisms fall within liberalism (p. 131), environmentalism
includes many liberal moments (p. 198), communitarians
belong to the liberal tradition they criticize (p. 174), and the
decline of neoconservatism is a partial victory, since its
proponents endorse the economic values of classical liberals
(p. 248). The conclusion of Fowler’s story of American
political thought is that “much intellectual criticism of liberal
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
977
institutions or even liberal ideology—often in language that
quite explicitly repudiates liberalism—amounts to much less
than it appears”(p. 247).
Early in Enduring Liberalism, Fowler cautions that “telling
a story and endorsing it have no necessary connection”(p.
23). He also maintains that “at the heart of the rebirth of
liberal thought since the 1960s has been the courage to do
liberal theory, rather than only tell its story or cautiously
reflect on the ideas of others”(p. 57). This book is best read
on both levels, as story and theory. In the conclusion, Fowler
identifies his personal politics: “part Enlightenment liberal,
part Burkean conservative, part Emersonian anarchist, and
part religious existentialist”(p. 243). This is telling. Guiding
Fowler’s story of American political thought is a desire to
keep hope for an enduring—and evolving—liberalism alive.
Of course, the question remains for whom liberalism is the
best, last hope. The story Fowler tells shows that to this
question there are no easy answers.
Negotiating Postmodernism. By Wayne Gabardi. Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 192p. $42.95
cloth, $16.95 paper.
Leslie Paul Thiele, University of Florida
This fast-paced tour of the postmodern condition will repay
readers who may not have the time for more leisurely reading
and reflection. It supplies both a useful guide to the theoret-
ical terrain and a menu of practical responses to the social,
political, and cultural challenges that postmodernism pre-
sents.
Wayne Gabardi’s thesis is that the polemics of the 1970s
and early 1980s that characterized the initial interaction
between those modernists indebted to critical theory (such as
Habermas) and those postmodernists indebted to Heidegger
and Nietzsche (such as Foucault and Derrida) have given way
to a period of “critical postmodernism,”marked by dialogue,
accommodation, and synthesis. This thesis is not wholly
original: It is discussed, or gestured at, in the works of
Stephen White (Political Theory and Postmodernism, 1991),
Richard Bernstein (The New Constellation, 1991), and others.
Yet, the continuing failure of many modernists to distinguish
between radical and evolved forms of postmodernism, dis-
missing the second on account of the excesses of the first, and
the continuing failure of many postmodernists to integrate
modern critical theory into their own intellectual enterprise
means that these ships continue to pass unseen in the night.
Consequently, the project of critical postmodernism receives
less attention than it deserves.
Of course, the distinction between radical and critical
postmodernism is somewhat contrived. It cannot be located
temporally in any precise fashion. Aspects of radical and
critical postmodernism are found in both the early and later
works of all but the most extreme postmodernists (such as
Jean Baudrillard). Still, a drift toward critical postmodernism
is apparent, and a book that systematically charts this drift is
well warranted.
Negotiating Postmodernism is part survey text, part syn-
thetic research. Gabardi adopts a “profile and critique”
approach. The first half of the book mostly provides well-
crafted review summaries of the literature along with insight-
ful, if not sustained, critiques. Spanning the intellectual world
of postmodernity in less than 100 pages is a monumental feat,
which Gabardi performs with admirable thoroughness and
clarity. One marvels at the comprehensiveness. Yet, Negoti-
ating Postmodernism provides too cursory an assessment of
the literature, pitched at too high a level, to be of much help
to those wholly unfamiliar with it. Those more at home with
postmodern thought might sift through the review section on
the basis of the promissory note that Gabardi issues in the
introduction. He will chart practical options for a democratic
politics informed by critical postmodern insights.
Gabardi makes a strong case for critical postmodernism as
a theoretical and ideological orientation that best captures
the sociocultural dynamics of late-modern times. Moving
beyond the modernist pursuit of universal principles, he
attends to the complex cultural pluralism and fragmented
market globalism of contemporary societies. Moderating
radical postmodernism, Gabardi refuses to overplay the
technological burdens and aesthetic potentials of postmod-
ern life. He is attentive to the merits of transgression in a
world of pastoral power, but he also refrains from the
dangerous embrace of anarcho-ethical alternatives. He sees
himself as a skeptical moderate. Mixing Montaigne with (the
later) Foucault, Gabardi molds a hybrid intellectual hero who
deftly, if somewhat reactively, negotiates postmodern life.
The political commitments of the postmodern moderate
are fundamentally democratic. Democracy, for Gabardi, is
essentially about citizens’struggle for freedom. Yet, freedom
today is not to be won in emancipatory revolutions. Rather, it
is to be glimpsed through the cracks of disciplinary power,
tasted briefly in performative transgressions, and shared
tentatively through efforts to forge new ethical relationships
of self and other. Gabardi calls for various forms of creative
resistance. These aestheticized acts of refusal and self-inven-
tion reveal our individual and collective capacity for freedom
within an otherwise enveloping neoliberal world of globalized
media and market relations overseen by a “techno-oligar-
chy.”
Foremost among the conditions that would allow the
exercise of such freedom is increased leisure. Leisure allows
us to take serious pleasure in the life of the mind, body, soul,
and community. It is meant to foster cultural creation and
critical engagement in civic life. We are urged not to use our
extra free time for the increased consumption of commodi-
ties and simulated experiences (e.g., television, video gaming,
Internet surfing). Apart from the pedagogical force of “lei-
sure studies”to be added to the college core curriculum,
however, we are left without much hope that people will opt
for civic agonistics and high cultural aesthetics rather than
more frequent trips to the mall. There is little reason for
optimism. Perhaps that is why Gabardi acknowledges that
those who adopt a critically postmodern approach will nec-
essarily remain peripheral in a lifeworld dominated by pro-
duction and, increasingly, by consumption.
For those who take on the challenge of critical postmod-
ernism, the goal is to fashion the social, political, economic,
and cultural conditions that allow fugitive experiences of
freedom to proliferate. Despite all the talk of collective
efforts, however, the creative resistance and self-care advo-
cated by Gabardi harbor a narcissistic quality. In this respect
Gabardi evidences Foucault’s mentorship. Although in debt
to Foucault for his genealogical perspective and strategic
overview, Gabardi also relies on Danilo Zolo (Democracy
and Complexity, 1992) for his politicocultural analysis. He
accepts Zolo’s chaste vision of postmodern life. Zolo foresees
the “Singapore model”for democracy: a prosperous, efficient
society of managed consumers living in an “antipolis.”The-
orists such as Gabardi and Zolo may point to Singapore as
the vision of things to come. But the threat, or promise, of a
Singaporean future may seem strangely out of touch, or out
of reach, to the 70% of humankind living in substandard
housing and unable to read, the 50% suffering from malnu-
trition, and the 500 million people currently experiencing the
Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY December 2001
978
horrors of war, the loneliness of imprisonment, and the agony
of torture. If there is a glaring shortcoming to Negotiating
Postmodernism, it is that abstract theorization of the most
sweeping variety takes place in the complete absence of
empirical reference, even when practical solutions are prof-
fered.
Gabardi’s encyclopaedic effort provides many succulent
bones to chew on. Yet, little is discussed in depth or justified
at length. One is tantalized but left rather hungry. For
instance, we are at a loss to learn, in light of the dilemmas of
postmodern life, why or how Gabardi’s economic and polit-
ical proposals should or could become implemented. Frankly,
I believe that most of his practical proposals are good ones.
But that only means he is, like me, a social democrat
informed by postmodern sensibilities. People with a different
ideological bent would find the author’s refusal to justify
many of his proposals rather irritating. They would be
nonplussed by Gabardi’s abrupt leap from a theoretical
amalgamation of Habermas, Heidegger, Arendt, and Fou-
cault to the practical advocacy of a negative income tax,
universal child care, and a 32-hour work week.
I am also troubled by the celebration of Foucaultian-style
transgression. The problem is that such performative action
is too easily colonized in the postmodern world. One need
only think of the performers featured on Jerry Springer and
other day-time talk shows who stimulate the public’s appetite
for transgressive spectacles. Nietzsche said that decadence
can be defined as the need for greater and greater stimulation
to achieve the same level of satisfaction. Performative trans-
gression is a facet of postmodern decadence that the media
techno-oligarchy well exploits. I would think that Foucault’s
dallying with sadomasochism bears the same danger. Bread,
circuses, and sadomasochistic gladiators—all available on
pay-per-view!
To his credit, Gabardi recognizes the capacity of the
postmodern world to colonize the most creative acts of
resistance. Its capacity to exploit efficiently (even our subver-
sive) desires and actions, to integrate minds, bodies, and
souls into what Heidegger called the Bestand or standing-
reserve, is perhaps the chief reason to fight for leisure. But
this fight might best be waged not by spending more time free
of work, but by learning how not to spend time, whether one
is engaged in work or play, theory or praxis.
Containing Nationalism. By Michael Hechter. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2000. 256p. $29.95.
Russell Hardin, New York University and Stanford University
Michael Hechter focuses on three puzzles about nationalism
(pp. 3–4). Why is it only a modern phenomenon? Why is it
more acute in some countries than in others? And can its
dark side of horrendous violence be contained? The title
suggests that his principal concern is with the last question,
but the bulk of discussion focuses on the second. One can
readily answer the first question by saying that nationalism is
strictly modern because it is about mass mobilization. Hence,
it is kin to democracy, revolution, and socialism, none of
which could arise in large countries before mobilization was
possible. The democratic revolutions in the United States
and France were about changing the locus of sovereignty
from a monarch to the people. This is not strictly Hechter’s
argument, but it is implicit in many of his claims, such as that
nationalism requires the existence of organizations that work
for the national sovereignty of their subgroup (p. 125).
This answer, of course, merely pushes the question back to
ask why mobilization began to be possible little more than
two centuries ago. A quick and probably partial answer is that
technology, communication, transportation, and aggregation
of workforces enabled mobilization as never before. A sec-
ond quick answer is that Napoleon changed modern warfare
and modern states by organizing vast armies, almost all of
them composed of conscripts or volunteers rather than
mercenaries. (The Romans, Persians, and others had mobi-
lized large armies, but Napoleon was revolutionary in his
era.) Military and factory mobilization both tended to pro-
duce people who could speak a uniform national language
and thereby de facto created modern nations. The first of
these nations were driven by territorially inclusive national-
ism, as in the cases of France and the United States. But they
provoked nationalisms that were culturally inclusive and
therefore exclusionary in other respects (pp. 91–2).
Hechter has a different historical account of the reason
nationalism arose only recently in Europe. His specific claim
is that the world of local control was displaced by the rise of
direct rule, of the intrusive state governing a large population
(p. 60). When governance was highly local, the very idea of
nationalism could not occur to or motivate anyone—it would
have no point. State formation in Europe proceeded by the
confederation of distinct solidary groups (p. 42). Later, direct
rule from the center of such confederated states broke the
connection between the nation and the governance unit.
Nationalism was therefore a response to growing state capac-
ity for direct rule. Earlier empires had generally ruled
indirectly, with governance structures and policies that varied
from one group to another throughout the diverse empire.
Hechter’s chief answer to the second question is that states
have a limited span of control and need to organize more or
less federally to manage large populations. The rise of direct
rule in large states led to opposition to the center from
culturally peripheral groups. In earlier work, Hechter argues
that a multiethnic state would be easier to govern because
each ethnic group would enforce some behaviors on its
members, who therefore would have less energy to spend on
more generally directed efforts that might challenge the state
(pp. 156–7). Clearly, there is a risk in this arrangement
because the subunit itself may organize against the state,
especially if it becomes infected with nationalist fervor. In
Yugoslavia, the federal organization of politics into ethnically
concentrated regions enabled Croatian and Serbian nation-
alism. But, Hechter supposes, the greater risk is to attempt
direct rule that reduces policies to uniformity across a diverse
population. He argues that decentralization of government to
a cultural minority may give that minority the resources to
mobilize protests. Although this may suggest that the move is
destabilizing, it may simultaneously undercut demands for
sovereignty and, therefore, nationalist fervor (p. 146).
Despite frequent concern with the possibilities for collec-
tive action, both in protest actions and in mobilizing nation-
alist groups, the argument here is almost entirely at the level
of the nation and the governing structure, not at the level of
incentives or specific individual motivations. As Hechter
notes for particular cases, leaders often have motivations of
self-interest in gaining leadership positions in a newly created
state that is congruent with some nationality, and therefore
they may work for the nationalist cause of separate govern-
ment. The motivations of others in a nationalist movement
are merely a desire for policies that differ from the larger
state to which they are subject. Hechter’s main addition to
this simple account builds on social identity theory, as in the
work of Henri Tajfel and others, who attempt to explain the
commonly spontaneous creation of exclusionary groups (pp.
99–101).
If we are to identify with a group, that group must already
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
979
be defined. Groups tend to form around characteristics that
are important to individual welfare or around mere location.
In social identity theory, individuals identify readily with
high-status groups. If they are in a low-status group, from
which they cannot exit, they will tend to revalue the group
and will identify strongly with it. Hechter argues that in many
multiethnic societies there is a cultural division of labor that
contributes in just this way to the heightening of national
identity, especially for the group that is lower in the hierarchy
of division (chap. 6). Such cultural divisions can be broken
down by the conditions of urban life, in which internal
enforcement by group members against one another is too
weak to sustain the division, which therefore must depend on
political enforcement (p. 112).
In sum, nationalism is primarily a result of the irritations of
centralized direct rule over cultural minorities who seek
autonomy, the kind of autonomy they might have had in the
earlier era of indirect rule. They may be placated by grants of
partial autonomy, as in various devolutions of governmental
authority in recent times. And, if we may read between the
lines, they are more likely to be placated if their economic
prospects are good enough to displace concern with political
status.
Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Mo-
dernity 1650 –1750. By Jonathan I. Israel. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001. 810p. $45.50.
John Christian Laursen, University of California, Riverside
This book offers a major challenge to the academic political
theory establishment in the United States and United King-
dom. Instead of Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau, the important
story is Spinoza-Bayle-Diderot. If you are not teaching
Spinoza and his influence in your surveys of early modern
and Enlightenment thought, you should be.
This is an epic drama with a cast of dozens. The story
opens with Cartesianism and its spread around Europe, with
major implications for society, institutions, women, sexuality,
and more. Cartesianism is soon replaced by Spinozism, which
pushes philosophical radicalism even farther. Important fig-
ures making up a new canon include the previously obscure
Van den Enden, the Koerbagh brothers, and Lodewijk
Meyer. Benedict de Spinoza is the key figure, largely, as
Israel argues, because he systematized the radical philosophy
advanced since ancient times by less systematic figures, and
because he was both vilified and followed by so many. In a
nutshell, revelation, a providential God, freedom of the will,
and miracles are ruled out on philosophical grounds, and
immortality of the soul is denied by a theory that everything
is one substance. Politically, this implies secularization,
equality, democracy, freedom of expression, and women’s
liberation.
None of this was accepted quietly. A three-way battle for
the hearts and minds of Europe was waged among conserva-
tives, moderate Enlighteners, and radical Enlighteners. Fa-
mous names such as Locke, Newton, and Voltaire are only
moderates, in Israel’s analysis. The radicals are the Spi-
nozists, such as Adriaan Beverland, Johannes Bredenburg,
and Balthasar Bekker.
One of Israel’s purposes is to push back the accepted dates
for the important developments in early modern philosophy
and political thought from the high Enlightenment of 1750–
1800 to the early Enlightenment of 1650–1750. By 1750, it is
argued, most of the work had been done. In the shadow of
Spinozism came numerous controversies, from the brouhaha
over Bayle’s claim that atheists could be good citizens to
Bredenburg’sfight with Limborch over the proper relations
between reason and religion; from Fontenelle and Van Dale
on oracles as political frauds to Leenhof on universal philo-
sophical religion. Not only conservatives but also such mod-
erates as Locke, Leibniz, Thomasius, and Wolff fought
rear-guard battles against the growing influence of Spi-
nozism. “Whig history”is a term that means all historical
roads lead to the Whigs; here, all roads lead to Spinoza, so
this is presumably Spinozist history.
This is cosmopolitan rather than nationalist history. Defy-
ing the trend of studying the Enlightenment in a single
national context, the book sweeps back and forth across all of
literate Europe: from Ireland to Naples, from Sweden to
Portugal. A good part of the radical Enlightenment was
underground, spread by clandestine manuscripts written by
the likes of Boulainvilliers, Du Marsais, and other deists and
Spinozists, most often in French. Radical German enlighten-
ers, such as Tschirnhaus, Stosch, Lau, Schmidt, and Edel-
mann, receive renewed attention here. Vico, Radicati, and
Pietro Giannone prove that some Italians were up to date.
And Israel shows that Spinozism played a role even in Spain
and Portugal.
This reassessment is on the order of the major works of
Peter Gay, Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, and very few
others. A few years ago, Steven B. Smith (Spinoza, Liberal-
ism, and the Question of Jewish Identity, 1997) gave us a fresh
reading of Spinoza’s political theory. Israel’s book sets that
theory in context and spells out its implications for the history
of ideas over a century and more.
Repeatedly, Israel takes down the inflated reputations of
Hobbes and Locke. He cites dozens of sources from the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that claim Spinoza
raised the real issues, not the English writers. It is indeed
remarkable how long it takes for insular and nationalist
canons to be challenged. For example, in France La lettre
clandestine reached its tenth annual volume without any
significant circulation among Anglo-American political the-
orists. For those of us who have been reading a large body of
German, French, and Italian scholarship on these trends in
the last decade, it is about time that a book such as Israel’s
finally is issued by a mainstream English-language publisher.
Since prestige is so important in the diffusion of scholarship,
Israel’s position as professor of History at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton should add to the conviction
created by his arguments.
For political theorists who have little idea about what is
going on in the rest of Europe, this volume is a magnificent
opportunity to get up to date. What is at stake is the claim,
now widely recognized elsewhere, that we moderns are not
the intellectual heirs of the courtier Hobbes or the gentry
spokesman Locke but, rather, of the former Jewish lens
grinder Spinoza and his radical Dutch, German, and French
followers.
As with any wide-reaching synthesis, specialists will have
bones to pick. Denis Vairasse’sHistory of the Sevarambes is
described as a “French Spinozistic novel”and dated to 1677,
but it appeared first in English in 1675. Israel asserts several
times that Bayle was silent on freedom of the press, but what
was his famous “Clarification concerning Obscenities”
about? Israel claims that freedom of the press was always and
only a radical position, but Elie Luzac’s defense of it in 1749
was rather clearly a moderate stance.
Specialists will also want to suggest further evidence. For
example, Boureau-Deslandes’sReflections on the Death of
Free-Thinkers (1713) could have been mentioned on page
298. Something could have been made of Martı´n Martı´nez in
Spain. Israel has materials on libraries, learned journals,
Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY December 2001
980
encyclopedias, book catalogs, and other modes of diffusion of
ideas, but there is no survey of the recently growing study of
correspondence networks. The coda on Rousseau is a bit
underdeveloped; much more has been said elsewhere about
Spinoza’s reception in the period 1750–1800, and one area
for future research would be Kant’s Spinozism. But any such
matters of detail would only confirm the overall message of
this book: Major sectors of English-language political theory
and history of political thought have been missing a great
deal of what was important in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and it can be found here.
Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in Ameri-
can Self-Government. By Lucas E. Morel. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2000. 251p. $70.00 cloth, $23.95 paper.
David F. Ericson, Wichita State University
Lucas Morel presents an excellent survey of Abraham Lin-
coln’s frequent use of biblical language and allusions. Yet,
Morel fails the significance test he sets for himself (pp. 1–2):
Did Lincoln frequently use such language merely because it
was the most common vernacular of his time; the vernacular
with which his audiences would be most familiar? Or did he
also frequently use such language because he thought that
the right ordering of the relationship between religion and
politics was critical to the maintenance of a democratic
regime and that he actually had something important and
original to say about that relationship?
I agree with Morel that the latter is probably the correct
answer; he does not show that it is the correct answer. This is
far from a personal failure on his part, as he probably does
the best he can with the available evidence. The problem is
that so little evidence is available. In essence, Morel stretches
that evidence into a set of arguments that Lincoln might have
made about the proper relationship between religion and
politics. He shows considerable ingenuity in developing these
arguments, but it must be emphasized that he is the one who
has developed them, not Lincoln.
Perhaps a useful comparison is between Lincoln and
Thomas Hobbes. In both cases, scholars have engaged in
extensive speculation about their personal religious beliefs
and whether they were atheists or, at most, tepid theists. In
both cases, a lack of evidence has fueled this speculation. The
two cases appear very different, however, once we move
beyond the question of personal religious beliefs and begin to
look at their views on the relationship between religion and
politics. Much more evidence is available for Hobbes than for
Lincoln. Morel tries to analyze Lincoln’s views on the rela-
tionship between religion and politics as if Lincoln had
written something equivalent to parts III and IV of The
Leviathan. But of course he did not.
In making this comparison, my intention is not to stress the
difference between analyzing the works of a philosopher and
a statesman so much as it is to emphasize the difference
between analyzing Morel’s chosen topic and other possible
topics in Lincoln’s works. The writings and speeches of
Lincoln can bear a fairly high level of analysis on such
subjects as democracy and slavery, as has been shown by,
among others, Harry Jaffa, who is mentioned so prominently
by Morel (pp. ix, 14). They simply cannot bear the same level
of analysis on Morel’s chosen topic. There is a very good
reason that, as Morel claims (p. 11), such a book has never
been written before.
The one possible exception to Lincoln’s relative silence on
the relationship between religion and politics is his famous
Lyceum speech of 1838 (chap. 2). Yet, as Morel emphasizes,
the political religion of that speech is not really a political
religion but, rather, a civil disposition of obedience to law that
religion then might be used to foster (pp. 8–9, 14–5, 31–2).
Lincoln understands the relationship between religion and
politics in this speech quite narrowly. But Morel is also very
interested—and claims Lincoln is as well—in that relation-
ship more broadly defined to include the ways in which
politics should accommodate religion (chap. 3), in which
religion might be misused politically (chap. 4), and in which
religion teaches men the limits of politics as well as of religion
itself (chap. 5). It is on these more strictly religious topics that
Lincoln says so little and Morel says so much.
This gap is especially yawning in chapter 4, which is the
weakest of the book. (Chapter 5, which deftly but still too
expansively for my taste analyzes Lincoln’s Second Inaugural
Address, is the strongest chapter.) In chapter 4, Morel
analyzes Lincoln’s temperance address of 1842 and elabo-
rates one of the major motifs of his book: The abolitionists
were Lincoln’s exemplar for the political misuses of religion
(pp. 9–10, 26, 125–6, 140). Yet, the abolitionists were not
Lincoln’s explicit targets in this address; self-righteous tem-
perance reformers were. Furthermore, even when the aboli-
tionists were Lincoln’s explicit targets, as in his celebrated
1858 campaign debates with Stephen A. Douglas, his attacks
seem grounded much more in political expediency than in
personal disdain for either the principles or tactics of the
abolitionists. However moderate Lincoln’s own antislavery
principles and tactics may have been, they eventually coa-
lesced with those of the abolitionists (pp. 175–80). There is a
large measure of truth to Wendell Phillips’s gloss on Lin-
coln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election: “Lincoln is in
place, Garrison is in power”(“Lincoln’s Election,”in Wendell
Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 1864, p. 305; empha-
sis original).
Where does this leave us? Morel provides some very
interesting speculations about Lincoln’s views on the proper
relationship between religion and politics, but he stretches
the evidence beyond what it can bear.
Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration,
c. 1100 –1550. By Cary J. Nederman. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. 157p. $40.00
cloth, $18.95 paper.
Preston King, Birkbeck College, University of London
This book is novel, attending more to the history than to the
logic or morality of tolerance. It propounds, against the
popular grain, a significant presence for tolerance in medi-
eval Europe. Cases are made for Abelard, Marsilius, and
others as significant exponents. The result provides students
with an opportunity briskly to explore work too often ig-
nored. If this study hits methodological sandbanks, it is hoped
that will not deter others from voyaging in premodern times
and in non-European waters.
Nederman takes aim at two key notions: The doctrine of
tolerance is exclusively modern, and, more narrowly, toler-
ance is the lineal progeny of “liberalism.”He is right to target
the second, but he has invented the first. He is right to
counter the view that “the Christian Middle Ages has [sic]
nothing whatsoever to contribute to our understanding...of
tolerance”(p. 3, emphasis added). Except that only one of
four whom he “counters”arguably takes this view. A traveller
who is construed to claim “there is no water whatsoever in the
desert,”is proved wrong by the little rain that will eventually
fall. An observer who claims that no medieval writer can
“readily”be conceived to oppose tolerance, or that medieval
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
981
religious intolerance was the “norm,”is not to be translated
to mean: The Middle Ages have “nothing whatsoever”to
contribute to tolerance.
That aside, the substantive question must turn not round
whether there is any evidence for tolerance in the medieval
past but round the type, volume, and significance of that
tolerance. The author dismisses the claim by Ole Grell et al.
that “religious intolerance was the norm throughout the
Christian Middle Ages”(Ole Grell, Jonathan Israel, and
Nicholas Tyacke, eds., From Persecution to Toleration: The
Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, 1991, p. 3). Yet,
he later endorses Moore’s view that intolerance was the norm
in the Middle Ages: The “decided trend”was the “enforce-
ment of orthodox faith against a range of medieval dissent-
ers.”The “Roman Church...pursued a systematic policy of
imposing a unified set of Christian beliefs.”The “Church
took direct aim at...religious difference, heresy, Judaism,
intellectual dispute.”One may add that it is questionable how
far this intolerance “culminated in the Fourth Lateran Coun-
cil of 1215”(p. 11). After all, the Malleus Maleficarum (1486)
was the decisive, authoritative handbook—commissioned by
Rome and used all over Europe by Catholics and Protestants
alike—governing the examination, torture, and execution of
“witches.”
The author’s counterargument to assertions that support
the prevalence of medieval intolerance slips from the idea
that proponents like Grell and Tierney are simply wrong to
the idea that this intolerance “depicts only part of the
terrain”(p. 11). Nederman thus hovers between two claims.
First, intolerance was not the norm. Second, intolerance was
the norm, but not omnipresent: “Not every medieval thinker
was entirely comfortable with repression”(p. 25). It becomes
the author’s settled view that not everyone, after about 1100,
favored torture, forced conversion, and dogmatic theology,
or, after 1492, the abject enslavement of the newly encoun-
tered “Americans.”This in turn raises the question: What
sense of tolerance is being deployed to make this sort of
response relevant?
Nederman’s basic stipulation for “tolerance”is the idea of
accepting “a multiplicity of ways of life,”a diversity “of
beliefs or doctrines”(pp. 1–2). The larger the net, the bigger
the catch. If tolerance equals diversity, we are not likely to
run short of tolerance, even in the Middle Ages. Nederman
does not dispute the persistence of persecution. He says
expressly there was persecution, heaps, but that “persecution
did not halt dissent.”Theologians did not stop reading
Aristotle when the Church ordered them to (p. 15). “Heretics
flourished even in the face of inquisitorial procedures”(p.
16). “Excommunication was unlikely to carry much weight
[since] heretics were relatively unconcerned”about whether
they were killed or not. It “is simply incorrect”to assume,
because the Church made “war on heresy,”that it succeeded
in “stifling all religious dissent”(p. 17). “Careful investigation
of the historical record shows that forms of religious diversity,
at an intellectual as well as a practical level, subsisted
throughout medieval Europe”(p. 12).
Nederman plainly assumes that, by locating diversity, he
demonstrates tolerance. But, of course, diversity no more
establishes tolerance than intolerance; diversity is a formal
condition for both. When there is no notable diversity, there
is no remarkable Other to despise—or with whom to be
tolerantly reconciled. Diversity is consistent with despotism;
and the failure to extirpate difference does not demonstrate
tolerance.
The author is too little attentive to definitions and time-
frame. What is true in general is true as well for the particular
figures investigated. Consider two of the least familiar of the
writers Nederman treats. First, in the twelfth century William
of Rubruck is sent by the King of France to the Mongol court
as a missionary. His job is to win over the alien to the one true
faith. Instead, William observes an array of ethnic and
religious diversity, fully tolerated by the Great Khan, a
toleration which is “in many ways a source of frustration to
William.”Why? Because there can be no “inclination toward
conversion”where the Khan sanctions diversity (p. 57). One
may view William as tolerant because he is intelligent and
apprised of the impossibility of securing conversions. But,
unlike Nederman, one may also take the view, overall, that
William is less a significant tolerator than a supple but failed
proselytizer.
Second, Las Casas may be Nederman’s strongest case of a
significant tolerator, an exponent of racial (not ideational)
tolerance, and an interesting contrast to William. But does
Las Casas (d. 1566) really belong in this company? Nederman
slots him as a “medieval author”(p. 119), as opposed to
Bodin (d. 1596), who is assigned to “the Reformation”(p.
36). In fact, they both belong to the Reformation. Is it just to
claim that injustice has been done to “medieval writers”when
one cites, as a major exemplar of their virtues, a contempo-
rary of John Hawkins and John Calvin—and so dubiously
“medieval”?
As for Abelard and Llull, they are primarily concerned
with rational and respectful debate among Jews, Christians,
and Muslims. The emphasis is on reason rather than revela-
tion. Although rational dialogue possibly “requires that one
respect the integrity”of one’s interlocutor (p. 37), it may not.
(Cannot firm enemies join in rational debate, as in court-
rooms and boardrooms?) For John of Salisbury, “mortals can
know very little”(p. 50). But this makes him more a fallibilist
than a true skeptic; what he does not doubt is the existence of
God and related notions. Marsilius opposes crusading and
denies the church authority to excommunicate. Yet, Cathol-
icism is for him the one true faith, and “heretics and other
infidels...are to be shunned”(p. 79). The best case for
medieval religious tolerance may be Nicholas of Cusa, who
seeks respect for divergent faiths. Even he assumes rational
argument in the end will reveal the superiority of Christianity
over all other faiths (p. 88). There is little in any of these men
to match the audacity of Bodin’sColloquium Heptaplomeres
(c. 1593).
The author’s task would have been more challenging under
a tighter, apter stipulation. For example, if we read “toler-
ance”as “accepting or putting up with items (behaviors) to
which we object (disapprove),”then there are three conse-
quences. First, no agent can tolerate everything. For Ato
tolerate ximplies (i) Ahas the power not to tolerate x, plus
(ii) Ais intolerant of whatever undermines x, given (iii) that
A qua tolerator is to be conceived as having the capacity to
resist such undermining, else s/he cannot (properly) be said
to tolerate. Second, we should expect to find cases of
tolerance, both as thought and practice, in any era or region,
including medieval Christendom, given a reasonably exten-
sive body of evidence. It is not conceivable that any people or
epoch should altogether exclude the possibility of some
actors sometimes putting up with behaviors or beliefs to
which they object. Thus, the residual questions that historians
must answer relate to type, volume, and significance of
tolerance. Third, formulated as above, one does not think to
derive tolerance exclusively from “liberalism,”any more than
from “socialism,”“anarchism,”“Christianity,”or “Islam”
(consistent with the position taken by Nederman).
Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY December 2001
982
The Play of Reason: From the Modern to the Postmodern. By
Linda Nicholson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1999. 179p. $47.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.
Eloise A. Buker, Denison University
The book is composed of nine essays; all but one have
appeared in earlier publications. They have a timeless qual-
ity, however, and even readers familiar with them may find a
rereading productive, especially in the context of examining
them as a body of work.
Section I, which has five essays, examines “Modernity and
the Problem of History.”Combining a solid reading of
political theory from the seventeenth century to postmodern
times, Nicholson traces the development of such key con-
cepts as the family, “race,”gender, sex, and the body to show
how history has shaped the kind of politics we imagine
possible. The first essay, and possibly the least insightful,
offers a critical review of the analyses of moral development
by both Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. The next
examines Marxism and draws on Mary O’Brien and Iris
Young to illuminate how Marxism can be adapted to examine
women’s subordination by reframing the categories of anal-
ysis to include child rearing and sexual relationships. Nichol-
son explores the key concepts of consumerism, family, kin-
ship, production, and reproduction and goes beyond dual
systems theory. She argues that both moral development
theory and Marxist theory fall short in their ability to develop
significant cross-cultural analyses.
The third essay examines the ways in which feminist theory
has problematized the private/public distinction. Reflecting
on the work of Young and Rosalind Petchesky, Nicholson
examines how the personal is political to reveal how the
economy and state organize family relationships. She ex-
plains how liberal theory created a public arena composed of
male household heads that wholly excluded women. Main-
taining the value of a private/public distinction, Nicholson
sees the changes in this boundary as a political process and
not simply a historical fact.
In the fourth essay, “Interpreting ‘Gender,’” Nicholson
questions the distinction between sex and gender by showing
how these concepts are mutually constitutive. She argues that
radical feminists like Janice Raymond as well as feminists like
Gayle Rubin retain a kind of “biological foundationalism”
that has some of the political problems present in biological
determinism. She suggests reframing the concept of “wom-
an”as a complex term that can serve a coalition politics based
on women’s differences.
The final essay in Section I is a historical review of how
modernity constructs the family. After demonstrating that
the so-called nuclear family is a myth emphasized in the
1950s and 1960s, Nicholson argues that understanding fami-
lies as living arrangements rather than as kinship networks
permits feminists to undo the distinction between the tradi-
tional family and the alternative family. She maintains that
families provide social insurance and that the variety of
family obligations suggested by cross-cultural analyses
offers a broader understanding of family. The argument is
persuasive, but she fails to show how this offers new ways of
viewing the family as a political institution that shapes public
life.
Section II, composed of four essays, examines “Postmod-
ernism and the Problem of Connection.”The first essay,
published in 1988 and coauthored by Nancy Fraser, is
philosophically dated. It was important in initiating dialogue
about postmodernism among feminists, but the issues raised
have been more elaborately developed in subsequent works,
including an important book Nicholson edited, Feminism/
Postmodernism (1990). For example, postmoderns have be-
come much more articulate about the way in which politics is
a part of their analysis; so the point that postmodernism lacks
social criticism and is therefore politically “anemic”no longer
holds (p. 100). Furthermore, this essay skirts the central
epistemological concerns raised by postmoderns, although
Nicholson does address some of these in “Bringing It All
Back Home.”In this essay, the one not previously published,
she argues for a context-dependent understanding of reason
based on pragmatism. She deals with the problem of relativ-
ism and shows the importance of social theory that acknowl-
edges the limits of history and culture. In the conclusion of
this essay, however, she compares philosophy to religion and
suggests that “salvation does not coexist well with diversity”
(p. 128). This seems to be an unnecessarily limited view of
salvation, whether it is constituted by either a religious or a
philosophical discourse.
The third essay in Section II offers a lucid argument about
the limits of Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition but
acknowledges the strength of his critique of liberalism. The
final essay takes on the issue of emotion in public spaces and
argues for a balance between emotion and reason as the basis
for politics. Emphasizing the work of Freud, Nicholson
maintains that the psyche needs to be taken into account as
a factor in public life. She does not draw on either Jane Flax’s
work in the psychoanalytical or Judith Butler’s work on the
psyche, The Psychic Life of Power (1997). Nicholson’s work is
part of the same conversation, and it might have been useful
to draw these thinkers into the discussion (pp. 156–61).
“Bringing It All Back Home”comes closest to fulfilling the
promise of the title, “the play of reason,”but Nicholson does
not discuss “play,”and one wonders how this title emerged
and what it means to her. Placing these essays in the context
of her current thinking would have underscored her point
about the importance of paying attention to context and
would have offered a view of how she understands the
connections and disconnections in these earlier essays.
These important essays would serve well to introduce
graduate students to some key issues in political theory that
emerged in the United States from 1980 to 1999. The
historical insights are especially relevant for those engaged in
the history of modern political thought and its connection
to postmodern concerns. Because the language of the text
draws from the work of key philosophers rather than
offering concrete examples, the book may not be useful
for undergraduates. Scholars unfamiliar with postmodern
political theory will find this a lucid introduction to some
of the central issues. Certainly, political theorists will
want to have this volume, as it offers ready access to the
important contributions Linda Nicholson has made to polit-
ical theory.
The Values Connection. By A. James Reichley. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. 304p. $35.00.
Michael P. Federici, Mercyhurst College
The connection between morality and politics is the core of
political theory. The founders of political philosophy, Plato
and Aristotle, demonstrated the indissoluble nexus between
the life of the soul and the life of politics. Political theory was
engendered as a response to the spiritual and political decline
of Athens. Plato and Aristotle diagnosed the spiritual cor-
ruption of Athens and provided a prescriptive response to it.
Since then, political theorists and social scientists have tried
to determine to what extent ethical behavior and moral
principles matter to political and social order. Whereas the
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
983
ancient and Judeo-Christian tradition recognized the moral
foundations of politics, modern thinkers such as Machiavelli
and Hobbes depreciated the importance of transcendent
moral values to the formation of a just political and social
order. With some exceptions, modern political theory has
attempted to transform the foundations of politics. Rather
than a transcendent foundation for political order, modern
thinkers have founded politics on self-interest, power, liberty,
and natural rights.
A. James Reichley sides with the ancient and Judeo-
Christian tradition in the debate about moral values and
politics. He is primarily concerned with determining which
moral values are necessary for a free society. He identifies ten
essential values for the creation and maintenance of a free
society: the unique value and significance of each human life,
the rule of law, continuity between individuals and the
historical human community, moral equality, social justice,
popular sovereignty/majority rule in a constitutional frame-
work, tolerance of different behaviors and beliefs, honor,
compassion for the troubled and needy, and moral realism. A
free society is impossible unless these values are accepted as
moral ideals. He also explains why six particular “isms”(e.g.,
egoism, collectivism, monism, absolutism, ecstasism, civil/
secular humanism) are destructive to a free society. In short,
they fail to balance order and liberty. They either represent
excessive individual freedom or excessive state authority.
Moreover, they do not balance individual rights and social
responsibility.
The bulk of the book is expository. It describes the six
inimical ideologies in a textbook or encyclopedic fashion and
sketches their theoretical development. Whereas these ideo-
logical systems are insufficient, Reichley determines that
“transcendent idealism,”because it embodies the ten essen-
tial values, is the appropriate moral foundation for a free
society. Transcendent idealism is the “source for moral
regeneration and guidance in the twenty-first century”(p.
173). It is a value system primarily shaped by the classical and
Judeo-Christian cultural tradition, although its characteris-
tics can be identified in the traditions of Buddhism, Confu-
cianism, and other non-Western cultures. It accepts the
existence of original sin and consequently the fallibility of
human institutions. Because human institutions are fallible,
individuals need freedom to question and challenge them.
The efficacy of transcendent idealism stems, in part, from
its continuity with constitutional democracy. Reichley be-
lieves that constitutionalism evolves from Judeo-Christian
insights that form the foundation for free societies, such as
the unique and equal value of each human life and the rule
of law. He associates a wide range of thinkers and artists with
transcendent idealism, including the Hebrew prophets, So-
phocles, Aeschylus, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin,
Rembrandt, Locke, John Adams, Jefferson, Jane Austen,
Matisse, and Walker Percy. Explicitly excluded from the list
are Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Rorty, and
Rawls. The compatibility of ideas represented by Reichley’s
list of transcendent idealists is not self-evident. He fails to
address important differences between such thinkers as Aqui-
nas and Locke on property or Locke/Jefferson and Madison
on representation. A broad net is cast in defining transcen-
dent idealism that obscures important theoretical differences
between specific thinkers.
Reichley’s argument hinges on his definitions of key con-
cepts. What he means by “transcendent”or “justice”matters
more than the categories (e.g., transcendent idealism) used
to construct his argument. At first glance Reichley, a senior
fellow at the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University
and former Brookings Institution fellow, appears to be
making a conservative argument, that is, liberty and justice
would be more secure in America if genuine religion and the
Judeo-Christian tradition exerted more cultural influence.
He is concerned that mainstream religion in America is on
the decline and being replaced by secular (civil) humanism.
Without connections to religious institutions, Americans will
lose a sense of and commitment to the values that keep a free
society vibrant. He rejects the moral relativism of the post-
modern Left and subscribes to a theory of moral values that
recognizes the transcendent as the necessary ordering force
for a free society. He argues that transcendent idealism “finds
no route to either freedom or justice that does not pass
ultimately through reverence for God’s grace and love”(p.
175).
Arguments like this are common in recent scholarship. The
idea that the transcendent is the source of existential, polit-
ical, and social order is central to the works of such seminal
scholars as Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Irving Babbitt (to
name a few), and their followers. The argument for a
restoration of genuine religion in American culture has been
made by Richard John Neuhaus, James Davison Hunter,
William Bennett, and a host of neoconservatives. The argu-
ment for a restoration of genuine spirituality as the cultural
impetus for a renewal of the American political tradition is
commonly found in such journals as First Things, Commen-
tary, Modern Age, and Humanitas. A growing and diverse
body of scholarship argues in one way or another that a free
society depends on attunement to transcendent reality. Upon
review of this literature, however, it becomes apparent that
what each author means by moral universality and terms like
“transcendent”varies significantly. Placing Reichley’s con-
ception of universality in one of the variegated schools of
thought that argue for a restoration of the classical and
Judeo-Christian tradition is not clear-cut. In most instances,
however, his argument can be classified as neoconservative as
opposed to paleoconservative.
Although Reichley covers significant historical and theo-
retical material, ultimately his argument is based on social
science studies and surveys; he does not make a philosophical
argument. An example of his reliance on social science is his
use of Guenter Lewy’s work to demonstrate an inverse
relationship between religious activity and criminal behavior.
He recognizes that the social, cultural, and political benefits
of Judeo-Christian values to a free society are due to its
insights about the nature of reality. But the book neither
searches for spiritual insight and growth nor provides a
conception of the ethical life.
Reichley tries to convince readers that transcendent ideal-
ism is responsible for the formation and maintenance of free
societies, but he treats transcendence in a rather abstract way.
He is vague about the philosophical basis for ethical respon-
sibility. His argument is justified by social pragmatism. The
values of transcendent idealism are best because social
science data verify lower rates of crime, divorce, illegitimate
births, abortion, and other social maladies among those who
accept those values. It does not occur to Reichley that
spiritual insights can actually undermine social and political
order.
With these reservations aside, The Values Connection does
address an important problem. It provides a good survey of
the classical and Judeo-Christian tradition and uses it to
discuss a pressing contemporary problem. Those interested
in the contemporary relevance of old ideas and traditions will
find Reichley’s book useful.
Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY December 2001
984
Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith: Religious
Accommodation in Pluralist Democracies. Edited by
Nancy L. Rosenblum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2000. 438p. $72.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship.
By Jeff Spinner-Halev. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000. 246p. $36.50.
Robert K. Fullinwider, University of Maryland
These two books—one a collection of essays and the other a
sustained treatise—dwell on the problems posed for liberal
theory and democratic practice by religious commitment.
Both supply a rich menu of arguments and insights.
Let us start with a central dispute. Michael McConnell, in
his contribution to Obligations, insists that the terms of
Supreme Court jurisprudence and the norms of liberal
political/legal culture treat Americans with strong religious
convictions as second-class citizens. Religiously based argu-
ments are unwelcome in the public square, and religious
believers must bend their practices to fit the law, not the
other way round. These sentiments echo a common com-
plaint that liberal “secularism”has achieved de facto “estab-
lishment”in American law, public institutions, and elite
culture. In place of the privatizing imperatives of that estab-
lishment, McConnell offers an alternative vision, one of
“religious pluralism”: All citizens are free to make, accept, or
reject public arguments without limitation (p. 104), and the
law bends to accommodate believers’needs, imposing “the
least possible violence”on their religious life (p. 103).
McConnell comes under attack in Obligations from two
directions. On the one side, Graham Walker derides his
pluralism as just another form of liberalism, subject to the
same complaints McConnell makes against the secularist
version. What is needed, in Walker’s view, is something
altogether different from liberalism, namely, some form of
open constitutional establishment of church. Such an estab-
lishment would be more honest for being above-board and,
properly limited, should prove more supportive of real
religious diversity than the prevailing covert secularist estab-
lishment (pp. 117–21).
From a different direction, Amy Gutmann takes issue with
McConnell’s one-sided treatment of religious freedom and
argues instead for “two-way protection.”Separation of
church and state (not separation of religion and politics) is
necessary to protect the church from state interference, to be
sure, but equally, she claims, to protect citizen and state from
inappropriate political aggrandizement by the church. Fur-
thermore, proper separation “denies religious, anti-religious,
and nonreligious citizens alike a general right—based on
conscientious objection—to disobey laws that serve legiti-
mate public purposes”(p. 143, emphasis original). The state
can grant exemptions in cases in which doing so does not
create “runaway precedents”that subvert legitimate public
law (p. 144), but except in special cases, those in which
nonreligious parallels do not exist, exemptions based on
conscientious scruples should be extended to the religious
and nonreligious alike, writes Gutmann.
Nancy Rosenblum further explores this last issue by con-
sidering a piece of important legislation, Title VII of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, which gives “preferential treatment”to
religious associations by letting them discriminate in their
employment practices (p. 172). The Supreme Court, in
Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos (1987), construed
this exemption broadly to allow a religious organization to
condition employment on a religious test no matter how
remote the employment from any actual religious function.
Although Rosenblum is keen to protect the autonomy of
private associations from demands for “convergence”—de-
mands that their internal organization and norms mirror and
support the larger public values of democracy, equality, and
nondiscrimination—she sees the Amos rule as too generous.
Religious associations ought to show some nexus between job
and religious function before they are allowed to fire a
jobholder on religious grounds (p. 181). Among the reasons
against handing them such a blank check is the serious threat
posed to the religious freedom of individuals adversely
affected by discrimination (pp. 183–6).
Jeff Spinner-Halev, in Surviving Diversity, takes as his point
of departure multiculturalist arguments for valuing and sup-
porting cultural diversity. Both liberal and “nonliberal”forms
of these arguments actually narrow the room for diversity, he
contends (the principal targets here are the views of Joseph
Raz, Will Kymlicka, Nancy Fraser, and Iris Young). These
arguments are especially impervious to the “difference”
constituted by conservative religious belief. As an antidote,
Spinner-Halev offers a more religion-friendly account of
liberalism. The liberal state, he contends, should prove a
commodious place for those religious communities that
organize themselves around ideas of obedience to authority
and submission to revealed truth rather than around ideas of
autonomy, individualism, and self-discovery. The liberal state
can leave such communities to their own ways because a
healthy liberal “mainstream”culture provides an “exit”op-
tion. Giving this option substance, however, may require
some intervention by the state (pp. 49, 63, 73ff).
A liberal society should do more than tolerate the reli-
gious. It should take steps to include them in the public
square and make efforts, in schools and in law, to exempt
them from requirements of which they conscientiously disap-
prove of (pp. 107, 136–9). Like Gutmann, Spinner-Halev
favors extending accommodations and exemptions, where
warranted, to all, not just the religious, who are burdened in
conscience by public law or policy (p. 207ff).
This brief survey does not begin to do justice to the depth,
subtlety, complexity, and power of the works under review.
They belong on the bookshelf of anyone intellectually en-
gaged by the recent renewal of interest in church-state issues.
(Add to that shelf, as well, Brian Barry’s new book, Culture
and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism,
2001, whose extensive treatment of accommodation and
lengthy reflections on the same court cases discussed by
Spinner-Halev and the essayists in Obligations make it a
forceful and provocative companion.)
These two books show that the broad terms of liberalism
do not dictate particular settlements of the religious question.
History and circumstance must be given their due, and the
“inescapability of judgment”(Rosenblum’s phrase, p. 189)
means there are no formal or mechanical solutions to the
problems at the heart of church-state relations. A great virtue
of Obligations is three rich essays whose focus lies outside the
United States. Gary Jacobsohn, Yael Tamir, and Martha
Nussbaum ask us to consider religious freedom in the context
of contemporary India and Israel. Even if we begin with
broadly liberal values, the circumstances in these two coun-
tries may lead us nevertheless to favor legal restrictions on
religious speech and to countenance forms of religious
establishment. Indeed, in Western European countries with
histories far different from that of the United States, we may
find religious establishments conducive to liberty, as Graham
Walker hopes (see Nussbaum, p. 361).
Walker puts forward a provocative, self-styled nonliberal
ideal of a “mixed constitution”that establishes a church but
protects religious liberties. But if a constitution genuinely
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
985
protects religious liberties, is it not a liberal one? Moreover,
must not the “mixed constitution”ideal attune itself to
historical realities just as liberal separationism must? The
secularist who insists that the Lutheran establishment in
Sweden must go shows no less imagination than the Walk-
erite who thinks separation of church and state can be
cleared off the decks in the United States and replaced by a
religious establishment. Still, as an ideal to toy with intellec-
tually, what is it about the “mixed constitution”that ought to
attract the reader to it (besides its openness)? According to
Walker, “unlike liberalism, it sanctions truth-seeking...; it
does not insist that truth-seekers can never find any truth
deserving public validation”(p. 121).
This contrast, whether accurate or not, forces some inter-
esting issues onto the table. First, there are questions for
critics of the “secular establishment,”like Michael McCon-
nell and Stephen Carter, who would measure U.S. policy by
whether it hinders or supports religious pluralism. Why
should a particular religious believer, committed to a set of
specific theological truths, find religious pluralism in any way
attractive? That is, why should he welcome the spread of
religious error and theological confusion? What can an
orthodox Catholic, say, find attractive about a constitutional
order that facilitates the spread of Mormonism, Santerı´a,
Baha´’ı´, the Unification Church, Scientology, the Gospel of
Wealth, mushy New Age “spiritualities,”and the theologi-
cally anemic but media-savvy nondenominational “Christian”
ministries mushrooming everywhere?
Second, there is a question for Walker. If seeking the truth
and having it publicly validated is important, can the mixed
constitution be indifferent to which church is established?
Otherwise, to meet his ideal it would be sufficient for
secularism to come out of the closet, divest itself of the garbs
of neutrality, announce its own truth, and openly luxuriate in
its already existing establishment in the United States.
Third, is liberalism really indifferent to seeking and pub-
licly validating the truth? If so, what accounts for the
abundance of public research universities that populate this
continent, and the reams of government reports, administra-
tive rules, and legislation that put the public stamp of
approval on some views over others? Liberalism is hardly
hostile to the truth, although it does dance a fine line about
some truths. If we cannot live together as a people under
certain descriptions (e.g., “God is one substance, not three”),
we had better not stake our constitutional order on them.
Still, each of us is committed to the truth or falsity of these
descriptions, so must we not find our public order diminished
in some way if it cannot acknowledge vital truths? Or is there
a higher level truth we might all share that makes such an
order morally valuable even as it allows—from our various
perspectives—error to rub shoulders on equal terms with
truth? If the reader is tired of watching John Rawls’s
high-wire act on these matters, she might look, then, at
another very different, yet surprisingly congruent, piece of
acrobatic artistry, Dignitatis Humanae (Holy See, 1965).
Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self, and Transcendence.
By Adam B. Seligman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2000. 141p. $27.95.
John R. Hall, University of California, Davis
Who will read Adam Seligman’s important new book, and
what will they make of it? The answers to these questions
may reflect the very issue that Modernity’s Wager examines,
modern individualism and its discontents. Seligman writes
with great thoughtfulness and erudition, at the borderlands
of social theory, political philosophy, theology, and the
history of religion, and he constructs a theoretical lingua
franca to draw these disparate discourses into conversation
with one another. Yet, he takes the substantial intellectual
risk that his argument will not receive due consideration from
the very audiences whose attention to it would most advance
public discussion: rational choice theorists, Enlightenment
liberals, and postmodern relativists, all of whom, in different
ways, will question his claim for the importance of external
sacred authority. In the end, Seligman proposes skeptical
toleration as the most promising basis for restoring a couplet
of transcendent authority and authentic (“constitutive”) self-
hood that has been lost under conditions of modernity. Yet,
for his proposal to gain a hearing will require more than
toleration skeptical of its own verities: It will depend upon
readers’willingness to engage ideas far outside—and alien
to—their own frames of reference. They will find the effort
worthwhile.
Modernity’s wager, as Seligman describes it, is a bet that
the autonomous individual of liberal thought can be main-
tained on the basis of a transcendental philosophy of natural
rights, without recourse to transcendent sacred authority, and
that the internalized moral selfhood of this autonomous
individual, and collectivities of such individuals, will be
sufficient for an organization of the social that will not
succumb to totalitarianism of either a Jacobean or funda-
mentalist persuasion. This wager is a risky one, in Seligman’s
view, because the moral calculus of liberalism’s autonomous
individual cannot be assured in the absence of a well-defined
connection of the self to authority that has an external, sacred
basis. The wager of modernity stands to lose both the
individual self as a fully moral being (rather than merely a
utility maximizer) and the possibility of a communal social
order that has any moral basis to it beyond what Durkheim
called the precontractual principles necessary to maintain a
world in which contracts among free individuals undergird
social life. The wager, Seligman maintains, morally impover-
ishes both individuals and the modern social order, and it
leads to a paradoxical “politics of recognition,”but in the
absence of any moral basis for community that would provide
an “authoritative basis of value”on which to base recognition
(p. 120). More important, it leaves modernity open to
dangerous reversals that potentially threaten the very indi-
vidual freedoms that liberalism is meant to protect.
In the end, Modernity’s Wager must reconcile external
sacred authority with the contemporary realities of religious
pluralism. To do so, Seligman makes his own wager with the
sacred. Recognizing that sacred authority has itself often
been used in coercive ways (in effect acknowledging a certain
importance of internal freedom of religious conscience that
he otherwise declaims as a threat to sacred authority),
Seligman shifts from affirming the formal necessity of sacred
authority to embracing a particular content of sacred author-
ity that might offer a workable resolution to modernity’s
dilemma. This resolution requires modern liberals and hu-
manists to take matters of religion seriously, rather than
dismiss all religion as fundamentalist and regressive. (Indeed,
as Seligman observes, the resurgence in religious faith of
many different types creates facts on the ground that cannot
be ignored.) The moral failure of modern individualism,
combined with authoritarian and fundamentalist threats,
requires proponents of both reason and of faith to act with
greater humility and skepticism concerning their own author-
itative claims. “What is demanded, then, is a midpoint
between nihilism and postmodern relativism, on the one
hand, and absolutist claims of both faith and reason, on the
other”(p. 129).
Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY December 2001
986
The overall argument is developed on multiple and inter-
locked fronts. In chapter 1, Seligman contends that the social
sciences—from rational choice theory to Durkheim, from
Hobbes to the symbolic interactionists—belie a (perhaps
inescapable) modernist bias in their impoverished concep-
tions of the self and in their divorce of social order from a
theory of community. A richer conception of the self as a
moral evaluator rather than simply a utility maximizer can
only be achieved on the basis of a transcendent sacred
authority (chap. 2). This authority not only substitutes judg-
ments about the deeds that fulfill or fail to fulfill moral
intentions in the face of Fortune but also produces commu-
nity via ritual. By these two developments authority makes
possible the symbolic linkage among persons that sustains
individual moral effort and collective sentiments of shame
and pride, sentiments that reinforce the individual’s connec-
tion with transcendent moral authority (chap. 3). But a
theological and intellectual history is held to demonstrate
that the particular trajectory of modern individualism out of
the Reformation eclipses external authority and community
(chap. 4), and this leads to the challenge of sketching a
preliminary alternative consolidation of moral individualism
and sacred authority by way of humility, skepticism, and
toleration (chap. 5).
This deeply and thoughtfully argued book can easily be
read as a jeremiad about the “specialists without spirit,
sensualists without heart”(in both life and utilitarian theo-
ries) that Max Weber anticipated as the end cultural product
of modernity. Seligman follows in a venerable if highly varied
tradition of scholars who seek to reckon the fate of commu-
nity and the prospects of faith, scholars such as Robert
Nisbet, Peter Berger, Robert Bellah and his associates, and
Robert Wuthnow. Like the best of jeremiads, this one rises
above mere nostalgia. Seligman seeks a way out. Readers
may disagree with him, and even when they share his
conclusions, they may doubt the paths of reasoning by which
he reaches them. Yet, arguments and doubts will not under-
mine the significance of this book. Seligman’s achievement is
to consider the prospects of individualism and the transcen-
dent sacred through a deep reading of social theory and a
charting of theological history over the longue dure´e. He is
thereby able to articulate the sources of modern liberalism’s
crisis in a particularly incisive way.
The challenge that now faces Seligman, and us, is to
explore the potential for skeptical toleration (and mutual
engagement) of faith and reason. Whether even a fuller
explication of this project will offer a way to revive transcen-
dent sacred authority seems to me doubtful. But perhaps the
effort itself is more important than achieving its goal. Indeed,
the nature of toleration suggests that the goal is unreachable.
If we are to have a world with one contradiction, this may be
the one worth having.
NOMOS XLII: Designing Democratic Institutions. Edited by
Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo. New York: New York
University Press, 2000. 331p. $50.00.
Matthew Festenstein, University of Sheffield
In keeping with the tradition of this distinguished series, the
editors have assembled a team of very fine scholars, repre-
senting a range of perspectives from across the discipline and
beyond, to explore an important and current aspect of
political theory. In the introduction, the editors locate the
impulse to think about institutional design against the back-
ground of cynicism and disgruntlement about the trajectories
of the newer democracies, as the euphoria surrounding
democratic revolutions of the last decade in Europe, Latin
America, South Africa, and elsewhere recedes. Yet, there is
no “transitology”here (apart from a rude remark from
Philippe Schmitter, p. 244), and neither the problems nor the
examples picked out by the contributors are peculiarly the
property of this wave of democratization. These recent
experiences of constitution- (and institution-) building have
undoubtedly sharpened the sense that the implementation of
democratic values is not merely a straightforward task of
“engineering”; other experiences loom larger here, such as
worries about campaign finance in the United States, new
forms of nationalism, the growth of global and regional forms
of governance, and postwar decolonization. Of course the
question of institutional design, democratic and otherwise, is
very much part of canonical political thought from The Laws
onward.
The essays in the first part explore some familiar anxieties
about the quality of democratic deliberation and decision.
Ian Ayres makes an ingenious case for anonymity in political
campaign finance in the United States, which is rebutted by
Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin. John Ferejohn discusses
the difficulties of institutionalizing deliberation in sociologi-
cally plural polities. Philip Pettit is also concerned with the
quality of democratic decision making and offers a fresh and
very helpful statement of his republican thesis that democ-
racy, when understood as aiming at the articulation of
common interests, needs not only to create openings for the
expression of interests but also to institute devices to chal-
lenge putative expressions of the common interest.
The contributions in the next two parts range more widely.
Iris Marion Young builds on a critique of liberal nationalism,
as found in the work of David Miller and others, in order to
reconcile the emphasis on group identity that has been such
a central feature of her own philosophy with an institutional
cosmopolitanism. Since the concept of a nation presupposes
that of a sovereign state, she argues, nationality cannot be
used as a criterion by which to justify a group’s claim to
statehood. Furthermore, the very principle of state sover-
eignty lacks legitimacy, and we should create a system of
global governance that both supersedes the nation-state and,
intriguingly, devolves powers to “self-determining peoples.”
Russell Hardin acerbically argues that this last move
reproduces the difficulties with nationalism, which errone-
ously ascribes interests to groups and is itself a fundamentally
“corrupt”ideology: “Liberal nationalism is too good to be
true, and ordinary nationalism is too true to be good”(p.
206). Robert Post argues that Young misconceives sover-
eignty, which should not be understood as a state’s capacity
for discretionary action but as the authorizing source of
collective agency. Transnational institutions do not threaten
sovereignty in this sense but may constitute its legitimate
embodiment. This is appropriately followed by a contribution
from Philippe C. Schmitter on how to remedy the democratic
deficit in that sui generis institution, the European Union.
Critics of rationalism in politics may wonder if the schemes
for the design of democratic institutions are not in any case at
the mercy of relatively intractable social forces. The third
part of the book consists of a pithy and pessimistic account by
Donald L. Horowitz of the prospects for successful constitu-
tional design in ethnically divided societies, with responses
from Brooke Ackerly and Philippe Van Parijs. Horowitz
offers an excellent summary of his criticisms of the consocia-
tional model of ethnic accommodation as well as a summary
of his case for constitutions that attempt to lure votes across
ethnic boundaries, in effect trying to give an institutional
boost to the development of Lipset’s cross-cutting cleavages.
But this is framed by a pessimistic argument that deep
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
987
division militates against the acceptance of any “centripetal”
constitutional package; indeed, “substantial compromise on a
plan to facilitate interethnic compromise decreases the like-
lihood of interethnic compromise in the operation of the plan
once adopted”(p. 272).
Ackerly responds that neither ethnic cleavage nor institu-
tional design is as important as Horowitz makes out. In
particular, she argues (with reference to Nigeria and Malay-
sia), economic inequality and the immense temptations of
corruption are more significant. Van Parijs makes the case
that, when the conditions are right (as in the Netherlands and
Belgium), a pragmatic mixture of different schemes for ethnic
compromise can work. In a rejoinder, Horowitz refuses to
take solace. The ceteris paribus conditions put forth by Van
Parijs in the case of Belgium are just an appropriate set of
cross-cutting, nonethnic cleavages that compensate for the
feebleness of institutional measures; when these do not exist,
as in Northern Ireland, the institutional measures are pre-
carious. (The recent general election results from that prov-
ince, it should be said, bear out Horowitz’s pessimism about
the dynamics of implementing constitutional accommoda-
tions.) This is a very illuminating exchange, with (like several
contributions to this volume) classical resonance.
Designing Democratic Institutions is a rich and diverse
volume. It should be of interest not only to political theorists
but also to readers who skip to the reviews on American
politics, international relations, or comparative politics. It
inevitably offers what Brennan and Hamlin call a piecemeal
rather than a synoptic view of its subject, which is vast, and
any short statement about democratic institutions is bound to
raise a host of vulnerable causal claims and contestable moral
assumptions. But this book offers an excellent survey of some
current concerns, should encourage concrete thinking from
political theorists, and is strongly recommended.
Thomas Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory. By
Gabriella Slomp. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. 194p.
$65.00.
Ted H. Miller, University of Alabama
All too often, Thomas Hobbes thought, we are undone by our
pride. He used reason, cajoled, and even threatened his
audiences to persuade them to accept this sad fact and to
accomplish the still harder task of bringing them to swallow
the strong political medicine he deemed necessary for cor-
recting our condition. Hobbes himself, however, was not
immune from the disease of pride. He noted our inability to
acknowledge that others might be wiser than ourselves, but
he sardonically recommended we take this inability as evi-
dence of the equality of human wits: “For there is not
ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of anything
than that every man is contented with his share”(Leviathan,
ed., Edwin Curley, 1994, p. 75). The problem, of course, is
that we demand of others that they see us in the same light as
we see ourselves. Readers only vaguely familiar with his
mathematical squabbles are aware that Hobbes felt he failed
to receive due recognition for his talents from Britain’s
mathematical authorities. He protested that these same
authorities were all too satisfied with a deficient share of wit.
According to Hobbes, we are the inheritors of a mathemat-
ical tradition that went mad shortly after it rejected his
contribution.
Gabriella Slomp suggests that Hobbes’s views on glory
changed between the earlier statements of his political doc-
trine (Elements of Law and De Cive) and the later (Leviathan
and De Homine). According to Slomp, the earlier Hobbes
made vainglory (a person’sinflated estimation of self-worth)
the root cause of man’s pleasures: Our various passions are
rooted in the satisfaction we derive from seeing ourselves
honored. By the time he wrote Leviathan and De Homine (a
work rightly emphasized in this analysis), Hobbes no longer
gave vainglory all the credit. It emerges as one passionate
motivation among many. Glory-related passions remain, but
admiration of novelty, compassion, and love are given new
emphasis (p. 91). Hobbes also offers greater acknowledgment
that some individuals are not driven by vainglory. This is
concomitant with another change. Hobbes’s subject, in
Slomp’s view, becomes more malleable and educable, al-
though this claim in chapters 7 and 9 and in the conclusion is
a bit muddied by other elements of the argument. Slomp
suggests that Hobbes may have shifted his views on vainglory
to better match the experiences of readers so that they might
be educated by the Leviathan; she also recognizes that the
nonglory seeking individuals were always a part of Hobbes’s
world view (pp. 88–90, 145). Slomp further acknowledges
that Hobbes does not require all individuals in the state of
nature to be vainglorious. Rational actors know that some are
so inclined, and this is enough to transform the state of
nature into a state of war we would wish to escape.
This is a very wide-ranging book, not always unified by a
larger argument or restricted to the topic suggested in its
title. It often reads like disparate pieces cobbled together.
Slomp begins by defining herself (overzealously) against
Cambridge School interpretation, but she nevertheless sus-
tains a largely textualist and analytic treatment by drawing
heavily upon sources one might expect to find in a Cambridge
School interpretation. Most notably she draws upon Hob-
bes’s correspondence (particularly Leibniz’s observations)
and his unpublished (until 1976) arguments against the
scholar and author of De Mundo, Thomas White. The
arguments against White are nearly the exclusive source for
citations to Hobbes’s writings in Slomp’s sprawling last
chapter and are used extensively throughout.
The use of neglected sources should be welcome, but one
might have hoped for some thoughts from the author con-
cerning the standing of the work on White as a contribution
to an interpretation of Hobbes’s contemporaneously pub-
lished philosophy and a discussion of White’s book. Since one
of the most provocative pieces on Hobbes’s views on honor
and glory was written by the historian Keith Thomas (in
Hobbes Studies, ed. K. Brown, 1965), who linked Hobbes with
reform-minded aristocrats anxious to check the excesses of
their contemporaries, the decision to forgo a historical
treatment has its costs. Thomas’s claims are not addressed,
although some of the older omnibus targets (such as
MacPherson) are singled out for attention. In spite of
Slomp’s great emphasis on “political geometry,”no attempt
is made to approach Hobbes’s extensive writings on geome-
try.
The book is divided into two parts. In Part 1, major efforts
are devoted to illustrating the centrality of Hobbes’s concerns
over glory. Slomp traces the connections between his view of
its dangers and Thucydides’treatment of the subject in
History of the Peloponnesian War (a work Hobbes translated
early in his publishing career) and illustrates the above-
mentioned shift. On the way to Thucydides, comparisons are
drawn between Hobbes’s views on glory and other well-
known sources, including Aristotle’s“honor,”Biblical pride,
and Bacon’sEssays. Slomp shows parallels between Thucy-
dides’vainglorious peoples and Hobbes’s vainglorious indi-
viduals, but she finds an ultimate divergence: Hobbes is more
optimistic about the prospects for using fear to reunite
Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY December 2001
988
societies torn apart by the children of pride. Part 1 also
includes a criticism of Carole Pateman’s reading of Hobbes.
In Part 2, Slomp begins a more analytic or choice-theoretic
treatment. Game theoretic approaches to Hobbes by Gau-
thier, Hampton, and Kavka are criticized, but so is the
criticism of such approaches by Patrick Neal. Combining
what she takes to be the best from both camps, Slomp
redescribes the situation of rational actors in the state of
nature: They are not involved in a prisoner’s dilemma but are
locked in an insolvable game of chicken (Who will veer off
the road first?). Slomp’s“Chicken with Spices”leaves players
paralyzed between the demands of vainglory and the “incom-
mensurably negative value of death.”
This is followed by a chapter entitled “Hobbes’s Impossi-
bility Theorem.”The reference is to Arrow’s theorem by the
same name, although Slomp’s proof, unlike Arrow, involves
the strategic interaction of game players. “In a state of
unrestricted liberty (UL), for men who regard death as the
greatest evil that might occur to them (S) and know that other
people, too, are concerned about their survival but might be
glory-seeking (G), it is rational (R) to decide to kill, which
decision, because of the equal dangerousness and vulnerability
of men, is against reason (non R)”(p. 147, emphasis original).
The only way out is to introduce, ex machina, the all-powerful
sovereign (nullifying the condition of unrestricted liberty).
Moreover, it is Slomp’s innovation to suggest that rational
actors living in the state of nature are themselves incapable of
resolving the problem. As such, one must stand back from the
conflict, in the calm of an already peaceful society where one
is able to realize the need for such as sovereign. With this
assertion, Slomp joins a growing crowd of Hobbes scholars
who argue that the works are best seen as directed toward the
minds of persons already within societies, rather than as
advice for those living in the state of nature.
Slomp’s game-theoretic treatments are constructed from at
least one opportunistic reading of Hobbes’s work. The as-
sumption of “equal dangerousness”is drawn, in part, from
Hobbes’s claim that we are all equals primarily because we
are capable of killing one another. In Slomp’s formulation,
however, equality in physical conflict must always conclude
with both parties destroying one another (p. 137). Life in the
state of nature may be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short, but is it so short that we must assume every physical
conflict between every two individuals always results in the
death of both? The very idea that some persons seek glory
through the subordination of others suggests that Hobbes
knows that some individuals walk away the victor from
physical conflict, even when the other side resists. Slomp
hypothesizes that the state of war in the state of nature may
be nothing more than a “war of minds”(p. 146), but that does
not solve the problem for her game participants, who must
mull the possibility of something more immediately treach-
erous. Such a fighter’s life may not last long in comparison
with Hobbes’s own, but contra Slomp, it surely need not end
as soon as a potentially equal opponent puts up a fight.
The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the
Literary Works. Edited by Vickie B. Sullivan. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2000. 246p. $40.00 cloth, $18.00
paper.
Markus Fischer, Georgetown University
In addition to his well-known political tracts, Machiavelli
composed a variety of comedies, poems, and familiar letters.
Literary scholars have studied these works for some time and,
more recently, applied their craft to his political writings as
well (e.g., Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn, eds.,
Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, 1993); in their
view, Machiavelli took politics to consist of rhetoric and
wrote accordingly. The present volume constitutes an impor-
tant rejoinder to this endeavor, insofar as its more significant
essays assume that Machiavelli was a political philosopher
and that his literary creations apply his political theory to the
private sphere.
More explicitly, the theme that holds this collection to-
gether is the question of whether Machiavelli’s literary effort
tends more to comedy or tragedy. According to Arlene
Saxonhouse, comedy breaks down traditional boundaries in
order to open the distinct and peculiar to the common and to
show the fluidity of all forms (pp. 57–8). Thus, Machiavelli’s
literary works are comic because they reveal the private life
of respectable men and women to be a game for sexual
gratification, wealth, and reputation, with success going to
the clever—those who know how to assume the most effective
speech and guise.
Mandragola, for instance, is a play that celebrates the fraud
by which Callimaco exploits the aged Messer Nicia’s desire
for sons in order to bed his young wife Lucrezia, whose
morals are corrupted by her ambitious mother and a church-
man who takes the biblical story of Lot’s rape by his
daughters to imply that good effects excuse evil means, in
evident reflection of Machiavelli’s infamous advice to
princes. Moreover, the fact that Lucrezia is so pleased with
Callimaco’s embrace that she makes him her lover and gets
her grateful husband to offer him a room in their house
suggests that a new order, useful and satisfying to all parties,
can be constructed by letting go of moral scruples, just as
Machiavelli’s republic maintains internal stability by aban-
doning the classical idea of a community of virtue and joining
nobles and commoners in the mutually rewarding pursuit of
glory and empire by external conquest.
According to Harvey Mansfield, Mandragola portrays the
moral failing of Lucrezia as the failing of Christian morality
in coming to terms with the wicked deeds that many good
outcomes in practice require (p. 22). Intriguingly, Mansfield
raises the further possibility that Messer Nicia allowed him-
self to be cuckolded in order to gain respectability as the
progenitor of a family, in imitation of Junius Brutus, who
played crazy and used the rape of the Roman Lucretia to gain
glory as the founder of the Roman republic (p. 28). In the
words of Robert Faulkner, Machiavelli replaced classical
comedy, which drew ethical lessons from the laughable, with
a utilitarian rhetoric that constructs associations for the
mutual satisfaction of desire—be they households or modern
societies (pp. 53, 56).
The absence of ethical seriousness from Machiavelli’s
literary œuvre also disqualifies it as tragedy in the classical
sense, as Faulkner further suggests (p. 35). Tragedy signified
to the ancient Greeks that the hero’sunflinching pursuit of
one good inevitably negated another, owing to the fundamen-
tal incoherence of reality. In the Renaissance, however, the
tragic merely meant that great success was characteristically
followed by abject defeat, due to man’s subjection to the
whims of Fortune, as Ronald Martinez avers (pp. 110–1).
Accordingly, the ruin of once glorious Italy by the French and
Spanish invasions constituted a tragedy, and recounting it in
grave and poetic terms, as Machiavelli did, made the writer a
tragedian (pp. 102–3, 116–9). But Martinez’s more significant
contribution consists of interpreting Machiavelli’s comedies
as parodies of tragic episodes from antiquity, which, in turn,
suggests Italy’s calamitous decline. In particular, whereas the
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
989
tale of the Roman Lucretia—who committed suicide after
being compelled by Sextus Tarquinius to yield her body,
which prompted the outraged Romans to overthrow the
Tarquins and establish a great republic—qualifies as tragedy,
the story of the Italian Lucrezia amounts merely to comedy
(pp. 105–7). In other words, the tragedy of Italy consists of no
longer being capable of the tragic catharsis that alone could
renew its body politic.
According to Michael Harvey, a similar mingling of comic
and tragic strains is evident from Machiavelli’s poem L’Asino,
a tale of a man’s descent into the forest of Circe. Usually, we
take Machiavelli’s view of sexuality as one in which men of
virtu` subdue women by fraud and force, as expressed in his
famous metaphor of the prince who conquers Fortune by
beating and striking her down. In L’Asino, however, the
hero’svirtu`—in particular that of his sexual organ—shrinks
before the terrifying power of Circe, revealing the anguish
felt by men who must forever prove their manliness in a
solitary and agonistic world (p. 133). Even more uncharac-
teristically, Machiavelli responds to this vulnerability with a
tale in which the hero regains his virtu` through the loving
embrace of a kind and understanding woman, which offers a
rare glimpse of a world of mutuality and friendship (p. 129).
Here, Harvey adds an important nuance to our understand-
ing of Machiavelli’s psychology.
Susan Meld Shell rounds off this political interpretation of
Machiavelli’s literary works by drawing out their propositions
on language. Accordingly, linguistic boundaries are shaped
by political forces, as conquerors impose their tongues on the
provinces they settle (pp. 83, 98). Language itself operates by
the principles of politics as understood by Machiavelli. Ac-
tion words are more “powerful”than articles and nouns (p.
83). Native tongues need to dominate imported words to
remain beautiful (p. 87). Italy’s common language does not
consist of the abstract universals imagined by Dante but of
the impure mix of concrete particulars used by the Italians
(pp. 86–7). And the value of an idiom depends not on its
aptness for expressing the worthiest things but on its practical
effectiveness—hence comedy’s use of coarse speech to in-
struct the many in useful things (p. 92).
The contributions by Mansfield, Faulkner, Saxonhouse,
Shell, Martinez, and Harvey make this book highly com-
mendable to those seeking to fathom the literary form of
Machiavelli’s thought. This form consists of both comedy and
tragedy, shorn of their traditional moral lessons. As comedy,
it reveals the noble to be a mere appearance of the vulgar and
applauds the clever manipulation of appearances. As tragedy,
it glorifies men who do battle with Fortune even though she
will eventually ruin both them and their orders. In the final
analysis, Machiavellian comedy and tragedy are but two
expressions—light and grave—of a reality devoid of purpo-
sive, ethical order. Moreover, the literary form may have
lured Machiavelli into giving voice to a dread that this
worshipper of manly action would otherwise not admit: that
a world of endless strife and contingency is a cause for
despair, rather than celebration.
Democracy and Association. By Mark E. Warren. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 265p. $55.00 cloth.
$17.95 paper.
Nancy L. Rosenblum, Harvard University
Mark Warren joins the lively discussion on voluntary associ-
ation with a circumscribed purpose: to identify the specifi-
cally democratic effects of associations in the United States
and to create a typology of groups. His goal requires him to
perform two preliminary tasks. First, he distinguishes the
effects of association from a group’s formal purposes and
members’intentions; associations formed for a variety of
goods may have democratic effects. Second, he sets his
project apart from work concerned with the broader moral or
socially integrative effects of association, ranging from diffuse
social capital to individual virtues, as well as from theories of
association that focus on political devolution and subsidiary
forms of self-government. It should be said that, as in most of
this literature, the political conditions that shape the ecology
of associations are eclipsed, and the focus is on the one-way
effects of association on political life.
What counts as a “democratic effect,”how we value it, and
what forms of association contribute to democracy all de-
pend, of course, on underlying democratic theory. Warren
adopts a moderate version of Habermas’s spheres, distin-
guishing among government, market, and “life-world,”which
includes the social structures that support “public spheres”of
opinion formation. Consensual associational relations based
on neither power nor money can be found in every sphere,
but the organizational form, voluntary association, which is
based on social attachments and normative resources and is
intrinsically communicative, dominates civil society. This
framework allows the author to set aside government and
business. (And with them the workplace, which is a conten-
tious point, Warren recognizes, since work is arguably the
venue that affords most adults the experience of collective
action and deliberation under conditions of ethnic and racial
heterogeneity.)
The Habermasian framework also emphasizes social dif-
ferentiation, the “migration”of collective action beyond
states and markets, and the multiplication of politically
relevant arenas. This underscores Warren’s argument that
democracy depends on a number of different and indepen-
dent associational functions that need to be carefully disag-
gregated; the key is associations’“contributions”to democ-
racy in the plural. The Habermasian framework puts a
premium on associations that connect individual life-worlds
to public spaces, encourage collective judgments, and create
the networks of communication that comprise “public
spheres.”That said, the usefulness of Warren’s typology does
not depend on subscribing to Habermas’s conceptualization
of spheres of collective action, and the author does not
employ “public reasoning”or “deliberation”as philosophical
terms of art.
Very briefly, Warren identifies three categories of demo-
cratic effects. One set constitutes “public spheres”of demo-
cratic judgment. Another is personal developmental effects: a
sense of efficacy, political skills such as negotiation and
coalition-building, civic virtues, and capacities for delibera-
tion, among others. The third category is effects that under-
write democratic institutions, including representation, legit-
imation, or resistance. Against this background Warren
works out a typology of associations based on a number of
identifiable factors that tend to produce one or more of these
democratic effects.
The principal point flowing from this typology is that
trade-offs among democratic effects are inevitable. For ex-
ample, associations that put a premium on the absence of
internal conflict are unlikely to develop members’political
skills. Associations from which exit is costless are unlikely to
experience pressures from members for “voice”and are
“lethal to critical skills.”Warren challenges facile assump-
tions about voluntary associations as sites of unrestricted
dialogue. Associations that foster deliberative capacities are
less likely to develop the strong consistent public positions
necessary for advocacy and other vital contributions to
Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY December 2001
990
dialogue in the public sphere. The intimate social context of
associations such as universities makes it more difficult for
them to address issues of race and gender as compared to
market-oriented firms, for whom resolving these issues is
instrumental to impersonal goals. One last example: Associ-
ations committed to providing the good of “identity”have a
low capacity for cooperation and coordination.
The rewards of system are apparent here; Warren’s typol-
ogy illuminates the terrain of associations in the United
States and the limitations of much that is written about it.
The costs emerge if we look for substantive insight into the
democratic effects of specific associations. Political parties
are arguably the most important intermediate democratic
association, and Warren types them as vested groups ori-
ented toward “the medium of coercive state power,”indeed,
as “arms of state power.”This characterization holds for
parties in government but does not point up the face of
parties as voluntary associations. Their unique role in accom-
modating interests, framing issues, altering the parameters of
discussion in conjunction with other groups, setting agendas,
and shaping public opinion (to say nothing of their distinctive
part in political representation) is given short shrift in this
and probably in any typology. Moreover, political parties
function both as associations and as forums for other groups.
So long as “public sphere”is defined as “institutionally
unbound”and without powers of collective action, our un-
derstanding of parties will be truncated.
Unquestionably, Warren’s democratic categories and asso-
ciational types will help structure and guide the work of
political theorists and social scientists. His categories are
exhaustive but not so detailed as to overwhelm the bounds of
useful typology. At the same time, the grain of generalization
is not overly coarse, and the result is a nuanced map of the
associational terrain. The author’s constructive spirit and
attention to the real world of groups are apparent through-
out. And Warren’s quiet insistence that against the onslaught
of legalism, bureaucracy, and markets associations alone
preserve voluntary, social forms of collective action gives this
excellent work its moral grounding.
American Politics
In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the U.S. Federal
Executive. By Joel D. Aberbach and Bert A. Rockman.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. 230p.
$42.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.
Karen M. Hult, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University
The legitimacy and the capacity of an administrative state are
not easy to demonstrate or justify in the United States, where
administration emerged from and is enmeshed in a political
system animated by separated powers, checks and balances,
individual rights, and skepticism about government. Aber-
bach and Rockman focus on the “turmoil and controversy”
that have swirled around the U.S. national executive branch
since 1970, and they sketch the contours of and explore the
reasons for the ongoing debate. At issue, they claim, is both
a“quiet crisis,”which reflects the allegedly deteriorating
quality and morale of federal career executives, and a “noisy
crisis,”which involves the uncertain responsiveness of civil
servants to the demands of elected officials. More recently,
and amid ongoing criticism, the federal government has
belatedly joined many states and localities, as well as other
countries, in an effort to “reinvent”government. Aberbach
and Rockman find scant empirical evidence of either “crisis”
or of reinvention-induced declines in careerist morale. More-
over, they contend, much of the persistent concern about the
capacity, accountability, and responsiveness of federal ad-
ministration is better understood as disagreement about the
proper scope and activities of government.
The empirical core of In the Web of Politics is the analysis
of findings from structured interviews with senior careerists
and subcabinet-level political appointees in domestic policy
agencies during the Nixon (1970), Reagan (1986–87), and
first Bush (1991–92) administrations. The three cross-sec-
tions permit the authors to examine the extent and nature of
change in the backgrounds, attitudes, work experience, and
perspectives of these officials across three Republican presi-
dencies as well as before and after the emergence of the
Senior Executive Service, which was created by the 1978 Civil
Service Reform Act. Aberbach and Rockman also use the
interview data as well as other documentary evidence and
material from Office of Personnel Management (OPM)
surveys to explore the empirical bases for claims about the
representativeness, responsiveness, quality, morale, and
adaptability of the federal executive.
The quiet crisis (a term the authors adopt from the 1990
report of the National Commission on the Public Service,
popularly called the Volcker Commission) revolves around
the ability of the career service to attract and retain qualified
individuals and the morale of those officials. Of ultimate
concern is the effect of personnel quality and morale on
government performance. Aberbach and Rockman find little
evidence of a clear drop in competence. Despite the admitted
limitations of the indicators of “quality”in their survey
(primarily, number and kind of advanced degrees, and the
prestige of undergraduate and graduate degree-granting in-
stitutions), many may find the favorable comparison between
senior governmental and top for-profit sector officials surpris-
ing and, perhaps, comforting. At the same time, there has
been “a modest overall drop in morale and a more dramatic
drop-off in the intensity of [job] satisfaction”among ca-
reerists (p. 82). This decline, along with the persistent
“guildlike features”(p. 75) of the career service (such as
promotion from within, careers within single agencies), may
contain warnings about the longer term adaptability of the
federal executive to increasingly complex and volatile policy
environments.
Far noisier is the purported crisis of unresponsiveness.
Both Nixon and Reagan entered office assuming that they
confronted a mostly hostile executive branch. Twenty-five
years ago, Aberbach and Rockman observed (“Clashing
Beliefs within the Executive Branch,”American Political
Science Review 70 [June 1976]: 456–78) that Nixon probably
was correct: Most of the civil servants they interviewed in
1970 reported being both Democrats and “liberal.”Nixon’s
response, of course, soon came to be labeled the “adminis-
trative presidency,”as he experimented with strategic place-
ment of loyal appointees, reorganization, and impoundment
to try to boost bureaucratic responsiveness. Reagan brought
many of his predecessor’s objectives to fruition. The admin-
istration placed Republicans in top career positions, espe-
cially in “controversial”departments, such as Health and
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
991
Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and
Education (pp. 107–8). Consistent with a more systematic
and centralized personnel process, political appointees were
more likely to be Republican and more conservative than
they had been in the Nixon era.
Despite George H.W. Bush’s less ideological posture, he
also strove to shape congressional influence on the executive
through, for example, the use of signing statements (p. 38).
Meanwhile, senior careerists during the Reagan and Bush
years reported having fewer contacts with Congress, interest
groups, and the public as well as somewhat less perceived
influence (p. 115). Whether the three presidents’efforts to
boost responsiveness, the growing conservative “Zeitgeist”
(p. 169), or the decreasing attractiveness of federal govern-
ment service to Democrats and liberals was most responsible
for these shifts is impossible to tell from the Aberbach and
Rockman data. Nonetheless, overall, the executive has been
notably “responsive to a changing political environment
and...instruments are in place to promote responsiveness”
(p. 127).
The relatively small number of executives Aberbach and
Rockman were able to interview (never more than 228, in
1986–87) militate against much fine-grained analysis of
similarities and differences among the agencies sampled.
Even so, some further disaggregation by agency mission or
primary unit task (e.g., regulation versus grant oversight)
would have been useful. More important, it is not fully clear
how far the findings can be generalized. Robert Durant, for
instance, calls into question the responsiveness of federal
officials who work outside Washington (The Administrative
Presidency Revisited, 1992). Similarly, those employed in
national security or foreign policy departments (such as the
Central Intelligence Agency or the departments of State and
Defense) or units (e.g., the international trade division in the
Department of Commerce) may have quite different profiles
from those in more “domestic”agencies.
Aberbach and Rockman conclude by examining the some-
what different issues of responsiveness that emerged from
efforts in the Clinton era to “reinvent”government. This
time, the demands of “customers”rather than elected offi-
cials (or their appointed agents) were to be heeded. In the
Web of Politics pays special attention to the National Perfor-
mance Review (NPR) and the Government Performance and
Results Act, and it capably surveys a broad range of praise
and criticism the initiatives have elicited. Most helpful per-
haps is the volume’s placement of reinvention efforts in the
context of the broader new public management movement,
which has been influential in such countries as Australia, New
Zealand, and Great Britain. Still, the tendency of many new
public management (and reinvention) advocates to rely on an
idealized “business model”rather than actual business prac-
tice in their analyses might have been noted. Just as earlier
efforts to “reform”U.S. national administration spotlighted
value conflicts, so, too, Aberbach and Rockman contend, has
reinvention. Not only is NPR ambiguous about accountability
relationships, but also issues of political responsiveness—“to
which principals in a system of separated and divided powers
are bureaucratic agents to respond?”—remain “unresolved
and contentious”(p. 157).
In the Web of Politics synthesizes important findings on the
senior federal executive with other studies of the challenges
of governing in the United States and other advanced
industrialized countries. The work crystallizes the key nor-
mative and analytical dimensions of efforts at administrative
redesign and oversight, and it underscores the profoundly
political foundations of such initiatives. Throughout, the
authors’reflections on continuities and changes in the U.S.
(domestic) executive are nuanced, insightful, and firmly
anchored empirically.
Aberbach and Rockman make a persuasive case that
reformers’persistent focus on “management improvement”
is likely to have “at best marginal effects”on executive branch
capacity (p. 176). “If the U.S. system produces complexity,
contradiction, bloated or inefficient programs, and unusually
high degrees of restriction on managerial latitude, that is
primarily the product of politicians”(p. 188). Whether and
how that system copes in an era of shrinking federal govern-
ment employment, expanding shadow government, more
complex and challenging tasks, and continuing public de-
mands is a central concern of governance in the twenty-first
century.
Campaign Reform: Insights and Evidence. Edited by Larry
M. Bartels and Lynn Vavreck. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2000. 259p. $69.50 cloth, $25.95 paper.
Paul Gronke, Reed College
Actors, evidence, and standards are the three watchwords of
this volume on campaign reform edited by Bartels and
Vavreck. Campaign reform is unlikely (and very possibly
unnecessary) unless some shared understanding of each
watchword is reached among politicians and policymakers,
academic observers, and journalists.
The book is an outgrowth of a Pew-funded task force on
campaign reform and contains seven articles along with the
task force report. Topics range from the content of cam-
paigns (particularly the consequences of negative advertis-
ing), to the nature of media coverage, to voter reactions
(learning, turnout, declines in diffuse system support). All
authors keep a primary eye on applying political science
theories and evidence to practical questions of campaign
reform. Does negative campaigning benefit candidates?
Should media outlets provide “free time”to competing
candidates and conduct “ad watches”? Can campaigns be
conducted in such a way so as to reinvigorate, rather than
depress, public interest, information, and enthusiasm about
politics? Each article can be read as standing alone (perhaps
too much so; see below), but each revisits the issues of actors,
evidence, and standards.
Public commentary on campaign reform typically focuses
on candidates and their financial statements, but this volume
identifies two other actors to consider: journalists and the
citizenry. Marion Just and her coauthors, for example, show
how the objective of candidates (win office) in many ways
runs counter to those of the news media (gain viewers, curry
influence). Larry Bartels and Lynn Vavreck, in separate
articles, note that the desire of voters for easily accessible
information, interesting campaigns, and distinctive policy
positions can run contrary to the aims of candidates, who may
be interested in maximizing votes, blurring distinctions, and
otherwise wooing the median voter.
An even larger set of actors could be included. Vavreck
speculates how campaigns in general affect the legitimacy of
democratic leadership more generally, and Buchanan worries
that campaigns may reduce civic engagement by the nonvot-
ing public. Any campaign reform must address the complex
interaction of multiple actors, all involved to various degrees
in political campaigns.
Another notable contribution in this volume is the careful
consideration and presentation of high-quality social scien-
tific evidence. Multiple authors (Bartels, Geer, Vavreck, and
Shaw), using separate data sets and different techniques,
show that negative advertising has anything but a negative
Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS December 2001
992
effect. The verdict is far more mixed. Similarly, although we
tend to blame candidates for negative campaigns, the evi-
dence in this volume is consistent and relatively overwhelm-
ing: Journalists are far more blameworthy for highlighting
attack ads, fostering cynicism, and generally accentuating the
negatives (see especially the contribution by Just et al.). This
theme runs through many of the essays. The careful use of
evidence is what one would expect from these scholars and is
a refreshing antidote to emotional commentary on this issue.
Also, the presentations are accessible to a wide range of
audiences.
Finally and most important, many of the authors agree that
the strong reformist movement of the past few decades lacks
a clear set of standards. What is wrong with the current
political climate? What would constitute successful campaign
reform? These are deceptively simple questions, but the devil
is in the details.
For example, is it more important that voters become
highly informed (see Bartels, Geer, and Vavreck), or is a
greater concern the corrosive effect of campaigns on public
attitudes about the political system (see Buchanan)? Nega-
tive ads seem to help voters discriminate among competing
candidates (Geer, Bartels) but also reduce faith in govern-
ment (Buchanan). Journalists are well positioned to inform
the public about misstatements by candidates, but in doing so
they may publicize the very negative ads that the “ad watch”
is meant to expose (Jamieson and Waldman).
Bartels and Vavreck do a fine job of highlighting conflict-
ing standards. By far the best and most thought-provoking
treatment of the various and competing standards for cam-
paign reform, however, is found in the task force recommen-
dations. This chapter should be required reading for any
course on campaigns and elections, and it is a useful blue-
print for both reformers and scholars.
What is missing in the volume? Most important, it lacks
both a historical and political science context. Many of the
media and voter trends noted in the book first appeared in
the 1960s, accelerated into the 1970s, and flattened out
thereafter. This was a time when many large-scale changes
occurred in American politics, including the rise of candi-
date-centered elections. Perhaps all we are observing is a
maturation in candidate-centered elections. If so, reforms are
virtually impossible without completely changing the political
system.
With respect to political science, a few authors note the
conflict between the desire for voters to discriminate among
candidates and the pressure for candidates to blur differences
and master the art of ambiguity. More attention could have
been given to models of candidate behavior, especially
Downsian convergence and how it relates to campaign re-
form.
An introductory chapter could have provided a larger
context. A unified bibliography might have been desirable,
since many authors cite the same works, although the current
arrangement allows teachers to use a single article or a few in
class. The index could be more extensive. These weaknesses
indicate a light hand by the editors but are not serious flaws.
Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan
Era. Edited by Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher. Wash-
ington, DC: CQ Press, 2000. 226p. $36.95 cloth, $24.95
paper.
Michael L. Mezey, DePaul University
In introductory American politics courses, when we get to the
section on political parties, we often contrast the American
parties with their more disciplined European counterparts.
Under a European model, copartisans unite behind a coher-
ent set of party principles and policy proposals that they
present to the electorate, and party leaders in both the
executive and the legislature exercise significant authority. In
the following class, we then explain why such a system does
not obtain in the United States: A federal system produces
decentralized party organizations rooted in states and local-
ities; single-member districts; the electoral connection and
the localism that comes with it; the committee and seniority
systems in Congress; the power of individual U.S. senators;
and the constitutional system of separate institutions sharing
power.
As often happens, the conventional wisdom that we teach
our students is modified by events. In this instance, beginning
in the mid-1970s and continuing apace through the end of the
century, the political parties in Congress came to take on
some of the traits of the unified political parties typical of
European parliamentary systems. At least that is what is
suggested by rules changes giving more power to congres-
sional party leaders and by rising party unity scores on
roll-call votes.
The seven excellent essays in Polarized Politics are all
directed at the central question of the causes and conse-
quences of the increasing level of party unity in Congress and
its implications for presidential-congressional relations, espe-
cially in the context of divided government.
Gary Jacobson shows that voters increasingly connect their
party identification with their own ideology. As John Aldrich
and David Rohde demonstrate, this is reflected in Congress,
where a growing ideological consensus within both parties
has created the conditions for institutional reforms that
facilitate party government. Tim Groeling and Sam Kernell
argue that, despite these changes, American political parties
remain limited in their ability to communicate a consistent
message through their rhetoric. This in turn limits their
capacity to deliver on their policy commitments. They con-
clude that increasing party coherence has been achieved
primarily through negative commentary about the opposition
rather than through a positive enunciation of the party’s
positions. This point is reinforced by Kathleen Hall Jamieson
and Erika Falk, who document an increase in the level of
incivility among members of Congress that coincides with
increased partisanship. This incivility reached its peak in the
104th Congress, when the atmosphere was somewhat remi-
niscent of the more rough and tumble environment of the
nineteenth century.
The implications of all this for presidential-congressional
relations are a bit ambiguous. George Edwards and Andrew
Barrett demonstrate that presidents can get their proposals
on the congressional agenda, but final passage is largely
determined by whether their party controls Congress. This is
nothing new; the size of the president’s majority in Congress
has always been the best predictor of presidential success.
What may be clearer is that in the current era of more intense
partisanship, the majority itself, rather than its size, may be
the key determinant.
Turning to divided government, Barbara Sinclair shows
that such an environment does not preclude presidential
success. In the six years of divided government during the
Clinton administration, however, the tactics used by the
president and by a more empowered set of congressional
leaders changed to reflect the higher level of partisanship. In
particular, the level of hostility between the two camps, as
demonstrated in the Jamieson-Falk chapter, suggests the
hard-ball turn that American politics took during that period.
In a concluding essay, the editors point out that the more
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
993
homogeneous parties one finds in Congress today are the
result of fewer cross-pressured members. This in turn is the
result of more homogeneous congressional districts and the
party realignment in the South since the advent of voting
rights for African Americans. Endorsing the theory of “con-
ditional party government”developed by Aldrich and Rohde,
Bond and Fleisher conclude that the current situation may be
subject to change if the condition of more homogeneous
preferences within the party majority changes. But the higher
level of partisanship in Congress has not reduced the respon-
siveness of legislators to their constituents, or eliminated
party mavericks who can swing the outcome of a close vote,
or produced gridlock, even in situations of divided govern-
ment. Although the interchanges may be nastier and the
policymaking process more difficult, policy decisions are
nonetheless reached.
As is the case with many studies of this sort, the Senate is
not seriously considered in most of the pieces, and this is a
serious omission as we seek to understand the implications of
changes in partisanship for congressional-presidential rela-
tions. Left unanswered, as well, is how much of the decline in
civility and the intensified partisanship is attributable to the
personalities involved. Certainly, the visceral hatred of Bill
Clinton that the Republican leadership displayed had as
much to do with his personal characteristics as with his
essentially centrist ideology.
Anthologies are always chancy, but this one is a must read.
The chapters are of high quality, present original data and
original arguments, and fit together nicely. As a whole, they
demonstrate that changes in partisanship and party organi-
zation do matter in Congress, at least in the House, and they
provide an important counterpoint to theories that tend to
minimize the role of party in favor of an exclusive focus on
individual legislators and their preferences.
Advancing Public Management: New Developments in The-
ory, Methods, and Practice. Edited by Jeffrey L. Brudney,
Laurence J. O’Toole, Jr., and Hal G. Rainey. Washington,
DC, Georgetown University Press, 2000. 320p. $65.00.
William Eric Davis, University of California, Riverside
What is the role of public managers, and do they matter?
How should we study public management? Which strategies
for reform and innovation hold potential for improving the
success of public agencies? Which frameworks hold the most
potential for advancing the field of public management?
These four questions represent the organization and themes
of the book reviewed here.
If addressed competently, each question can advance
public management’s ability to deliver on promises, improve
service, and better satisfy public demands. More important,
we will know whether success is being achieved in those
respects. The book’s greatest strength lies in its diversity of
approaches, methods, and frameworks. The opening chapters
are devoted to the role of managers and illustrate the
difficulties of measuring the effect of management. The most
appealing aspect of Part I is that it seeks a greatly expanded
definition of management, which for many years was simply
considered something that managers did. This created con-
ceptual and empirical difficulties. Part I also supports the
notion that there can be no single recipe for management
success. Much depends upon the external and internal con-
texts.
Laurence O’Toole sees a need for a broader but workable
definition of management. For a broad definition to be
workable, we must assume that a manager “does something”
that gives an indication of the limits of organizational struc-
ture and the limits of employees. Following up on that, Anne
Khademian asserts in chapter 3 that cultures tend to be
deeply ingrained and difficult to shape, which limits the effect
of management. Her suggestion is to acknowledge even more
directly that culture is part of an organization’s institution,
which implies that neoinstitutionalist literature may hold the
best promise for future advances. Her chapter reflects the
somewhat pessimistic assertion that culture does not so much
represent a management tool as offer a way to understand the
institutional context. That is, the culture will suggest whether
there is a possibility for organizational governance or change.
Thomas Hammond and Jack Knott use spatial theory to
specify the conditions under which public agency managers
can move policy in their preferred direction. Spatial theory
requires simplifying assumptions that open it to attack for
being unrealistic, thus impractical. Nonetheless, the goal of
Hammond and Knott is to show the conditions under which
an independent regulatory agency head can have influence in
one or two policy dimensions, given the ideal preference
positions of, respectively, the House, Senate, and president.
Using their version of McKelvey’s“chaos theorem,”(Richard
D. McKelvey, “Intransitivities in Multidimensional Voting
Models and Some Implications for Agenda Control,”Journal
of Economic Theory 12 [1976]: 472–82), they do a good job of
illustrating how agency heads, under certain narrow condi-
tions, can achieve policy change closer to their preferred
ideal point. They outline the environmental conditions and
the particular individual skills that allow such an effect. An
agent must be smart enough to know the size, shape, and
location of the unbeatable “core”of policy space as well as
when it is advantageous to preempt the House, Senate, or
president by taking initiative. S/he must be an effective
persuader and know how to frame issues to maximize policy
advantage. In sum (although the authors do not put it this
way), the agency head must know how to manipulate.
Hammond and Knott present a purely formal theory, so
they do not indicate the proportion of managers who meet
the specified assumptions or do the things they list as
important to success. Thus, they do not (and do not seek to)
offer a definitive answer regarding whether managers matter.
They simply note when the potential exists. Furthermore,
since the manager in their example heads an independent
regulatory commission with rulemaking power, s/he can act
almost unilaterally and force the House, Senate, and presi-
dent to meet the specified assumptions and seek to persuade
the agency head, rather than vice versa. Perhaps a more
dynamic model is needed that incorporates the actions and
reactions of all four major participants plus some component
to represent the limitations on the agency head imposed by
other endogenous and exogenous factors (culture, structure,
and so on).
Part II is devoted to methodological issues and addresses
how we should study public management. Often in statistical
analysis we run the models, report the results, and walk away
from the project without closer inspection of outliers. The
chapter by Kenneth Meier, Jeff Gill, and George Waller
asserts that traditional statistical techniques do not serve
scholars of public management very well because they are
interested in high and poor performers, rather than the
“typical”case identified by traditional ordinary least-squares
regression. They advocate the use of substantively weighted
least squares (SWLS), which weights each case according to
substantive performance. High-performing school districts
were identified with a studentized residual selection criterion.
Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS December 2001
994
For subsequent analysis they were weighted more heavily
than typical and poor performers. The authors similarly
identified “failures”and analyzed them separately after also
weighting them according to performance.
The point of the Meier et al. project was to remove average
performers from the analyses entirely. A comparison be-
tween the two groups showed that high-performing districts
in each category (high optimizers versus failures) were able
to get better performance from various resources (increases
in state aid, higher teacher salaries and instruction funds)
than other districts. This chapter is certainly worth the
attention of public management scholars. It might be inter-
esting, however, to run the models (after applying their
selection criterion) and weight each case by its standardized
residual, rather than the somewhat arbitrary levels they
chose. Nonetheless, their contribution supports the book’s
theme that there can be no single recipe for improving
success.
Chapter 7 represents an interesting qualitative strategy for
learning about “street-level”workers in public agencies.
Steven Maynard-Moody and Suzanne Leland asked line
bureaucrats to tell stories about fairness, working with cli-
ents, and life in the agency. The chapter would have been
improved if subjects had been asked to tell a story about
when they exercised judgment and it led to success, to tell a
story about a personal exercise in judgment that led to
failure, and to state their beliefs about why. This not only
would examine more directly decisions and discretion but
also would allow better theorizing about factors that contrib-
ute to success. Nonetheless, this omission does not detract
from their major premise concerning the utility of stories as
a learning tool.
Part III concerns strategies for reform and innovation that
hold potential for improving the success of public agencies. It
rejects the conventional lay wisdom that public agencies are
resistant to change but notes many obstacles to it. The major
task for the authors is to make sure change is reasoned.
Eugene McGregor offers a new vocabulary and three heuris-
tic devices. He asserts that a common language and concep-
tualization will improve the odds of bringing about desired
change. His chapter is written more for the practical manager
than the scholar, but both will find useful items. The other
chapters in Part III offer their own frameworks for identifying
obstacles to innovation and avenues for change. They mostly
agree that the obstacles are formidable. One theme that
appears in various places is the importance of culture, which
is ignored by managers at the risk/cost of failure.
Part IV emphasizes general frameworks and is the stron-
gest section theoretically. The focus is on frameworks that
hold the most potential for advancing knowledge and prac-
tice. The chapter by Patricia Ingraham and Amy Kneedler is
partly a summary of the literature, but it also offers a “perfor-
mance model”for describing the key relationships and systems
in public agency management. They take us inside the famous,
or perhaps infamous, “black box”of public management in an
attempt to understand what takes place within.
How competently does the book address the four organiz-
ing questions? The question about the role of a public
manager and whether managers matter is never really an-
swered. Instead, we learn that managers have the potential to
have an effect, notwithstanding certain types of limitations.
The contributors do not directly attempt to define that effect,
although they intuitively assert that managers matter, but the
section is really geared toward explaining why stronger
answers have not yet been provided. Since that question is
vastly more difficult and complex than the other three, the
authors are to be forgiven for emphasizing the “role”of
managers over whether they matter. The other parts of the
book come closer to providing answers to their respective
questions.
Veto Bargaining: Presidents and the Politics of Negative
Power. By Charles M. Cameron. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000. 292p. $59.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.
Charles Tien, Hunter College, CUNY
Veto Bargaining is an important book and a pleasure to read.
It is important because it takes us a long way in understand-
ing presidential veto politics. The power of the veto is a
foundation of the checks-and-balances system and the sepa-
ration of powers, and it is surprising that so few data have
been collected on it. This book is a pleasure to read because
it provides a framework for understanding the many absorb-
ing veto cases it includes. For example, Cameron shows that
congressional uncertainty about the president’s acceptable
policy preferences can help the president wrest policy con-
cessions from Congress. This helps us understand why Tru-
man vetoed Republican tax cuts three times during the 80th
Congress. By the time legislators found the right package to
attract an override majority, the Truman vetoes had forced
Congress to concede 15% off the cut for the wealthiest
Americans.
Cameron frames veto bargaining within the context of
separation of powers, which summons institutional battles
over policy especially during divided government. The main
tool at the disposal of presidents during these battles with
Congress is the veto. Cameron points out that presidents
have been ready and willing to use this tool when government
is divided and when the legislative stakes are high. More
important, he shows that the veto has been a very effective
factor in bargaining with Congress. Its use or threat has
allowed presidents to wrestle policy concessions from Con-
gress.
Theoretical work argues that veto power is limited and
asymmetric: It allows presidents to get less out of Congress
than what Congress wants to give but no more than what
Congress wants to give. Cameron builds on earlier models
and introduces uncertainty (about the policy preferences of
the president and about the pivotal member of Congress
whose vote can override a veto) into the veto bargaining
game. The result is the view that veto power is “much more
consequential than is commonly believed”(p. 26).
There is much to like about the book. The rational choice
models are grounded in real-world politics. The research is
more than a series of mathematical exercises and increases
our understanding of veto bargaining. The applied rational
choice models provide new intuition about veto politics
between Congress and the president. Furthermore, Camer-
on’s book should quiet critics who argue that empirical
testing of the rational choice models is inadequate. The
models developed in chapter 4 are thoroughly tested empir-
ically in chapter 6, with original data, and in chapters 8 and 9,
with many succinct case studies.
The amount of original data collected for this book is
impressive and informative. Cameron compiled event histo-
ries of 434 vetoes from 1945 to 1992. These reveal that most
vetoes occur during divided government (71%); very few
appropriations bills are vetoed (8%, or 34 total); and a
significant number of vetoes occur in chains (41%), that is,
either Congress passes another version of the bill, or the
president vetoes the bill more than once. Cameron also
classifies all bills passed between 1945 and 1994 into one of
four categories according to their significance. From these
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
995
classifications we learn that (1) the majority of vetoes occur
over minor bills (56%); (2) vetoes of landmark and important
legislation usually occur in veto chains (65%); and (3) most
vetoes of minor legislation are final (70%), that is, there are
no other bills or vetoes regarding the matter.
The book is quite comprehensive in its coverage, but there
is no mention of the line-item veto. Every president since
Jimmy Carter has asked for the authority to single out items
for veto on spending bills after signing the other parts of the
bill. Congress gave this power to the president in 1996, but in
1998 the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in Clinton
v. City of New York. The issue is important, as 43 of the 50
governors have line-item veto power.
All students of the presidency and Congress should read
this book. The importance of the findings and the breadth of
the original data collected and interpreted alone make it
worth reading. This should be required reading in graduate
courses on the presidency and on legislative behavior. It is
also an excellent example of how to do rational choice
research and do it well. The book is probably not appropriate
for most undergraduates, especially those who have not been
exposed to formal theory, although advanced undergraduates
would benefit from the findings in chapter 2, based on data
from the post–World War II era.
Institutional Constraints and Policy Choice: An Exploration
of Local Governance. By James C. Clingermayer and
Richard C. Feiock. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2001. 151p. $17.95 paper.
David R. Elkins, Cleveland State University
For more than twenty years, urban scholars have debated
whether economic determinism and its fiscal implications
trump municipal political action in local government policy
choices. In a very real sense, the debate is about whether
local politics matters. Somewhat lost in this discussion,
although not entirely, is an issue that was once at the
forefront of urban scholarship: the role of institutional
structures. With the maturing theoretical interest in the new
institutionalism, the time is ripe to revisit this area and
determine whether institutional structures matter. According
to James Clingermayer and Richard Feiock, they do.
The term “exploration”in the subtitle is an apt description
of this work. Using seven separate data sets (three are
derived from the authors’surveys conducted during the
1980s, three from 1980 Census data, and one from the
International City Management Association for 1988), the
authors explore issues as diverse as economic development
decision making, municipal practices associated with zoning,
citizen-initiated contacts and casework activities of council
members, contracting out for services, and debt financing
decisions. In addition, they explore how external constraints
associated with annexation policy, exclusionary zoning prac-
tices, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 affect municipal
policymaking. The breadth of the empirical analysis makes a
convincing case that urban scholars should seriously consider
the role urban institutional structures have in shaping local
policy decisions. Indeed, Clingermayer and Feiock hope that
their work will reenergize research in this area.
The authors define institutionalism as the “formal and
informal rules operating within or across organizations”(p.
2). In their analysis of municipal governments, they place
great emphasis on the formal rules of institutions. It is argued
that institutions are important because they provide stability,
shape choice sets, and structure decision making. Specifically,
“electoral rules and constituency boundaries affect policy
makers’behaviors by determining what sorts of voters they
must please if they are to remain in office or rise to higher
office”(p. vii). Although the research is firmly anchored in
the new institutionalism, there is also a strong linkage, which
the authors readily acknowledge, to the classics in this field.
The effects of institutional features on municipal economic
development activities are examined from several angles.
First, the authors explore how differences in structural fea-
tures, particularly those of elected officials, are associated
with five separate economic development policies and prac-
tices. Second, they ask whether the adoption of comprehen-
sive zoning is attributable to either market failure or distrib-
utive politics. Third, they turn to the question of how
institutional structures shape development-based constituen-
cy-related experiences of council members. The conclusion is
that institutional structures do matter with regard to these
varied economic development activities, but institutional
effects are subtle.
Clingermayer and Feiock also examine the decision-mak-
ing effects of turnover in leadership and council membership.
They propose two general explanations for the influence of
turnover on local policymaking. The first suggests that private
organizations involved in negotiations with a city that has a
high level of turnover may be apprehensive about the city’s
ability to fulfill long-term obligations, and this political
uncertainty drives up the transaction costs associated with
negotiations. The second explanation hinges on the attempt
by elected officials to avoid blame for potentially controver-
sial decisions or to concentrate benefits to enhance political
prospects. Clingermayer and Feiock find support, albeit
weak, for both explanations but along an intriguing faultline.
They find that administrative turnover is inversely associated
with the level of services contracted out and that mayoral
turnover is directly associated with contracting out. Also, in
cities with council-manager structures, turnover in council
membership is inversely associated with various measures of
municipal debt.
Finally, the authors explore how state and federal decisions
affect municipal policymaking. Their analysis of annexation
and exclusionary zoning suggests that state-level attempts to
limit the discretionary authority of local officials have largely
succeeded. They also find that the Tax Reform Act of 1986
reduced the level of municipal revenue bond debt.
The book is not without flaws. The use of multiple data sets
and methods creates a trade-off between breadth of analysis
and continuity of argument. The authors remain focused on
the exploration of the institutional dynamics of municipal
policymaking, but the book seems to lack the unified theme
typical of research based on fewer data sources. In some
instances it seems this is a collection of discrete articles, with
little connection between one chapter or section and another.
The book would have benefited from an appendix with
details about the various data sets, the construction of
variables, and some of the statistical problems associated
with the analyses. For instance, regarding citizen-initiated
contacts, Clingermayer and Feiock note that “usable re-
sponses were received from 234 council members”(p. 39),
but the statistical analysis refers to an Nof 177 (p. 41). Why
were so many cases dropped? Although I am inclined to find
brevity a virtue, further development of some ideas would
have been helpful. For instance, the discussion of time
horizons is intriguing and warrants elaboration.
These criticisms should not dissuade urban scholars from
Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS December 2001
996
reading this worthwhile contribution. It undoubtedly will be
cited among the classics in the institutional-structural expla-
nations of municipal policymaking. Indeed, drawing on this
earlier generation of scholarship, Clingermayer and Feiock
conclude that institutions matter but in ways that “mediate
and interact with other factors”to influence outcomes (p.
123). Whether Clingermayer and Feiock accomplish their
goal of reinvigorating the institutional perspective in urban
scholarship remains to be seen, but their exploration is a
critical first step.
Empire on the Hudson: Entrepreneurial Vision and Political
Power at the Port of New York Authority. By Jameson W.
Doig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 620p.
$49.50.
Steven P. Erie, University of California, San Diego
Empire on the Hudson is a dual biography of the Port of New
York Authority, America’sfirst semiautonomous, self-financ-
ing public development agency, which helped inspire the
Tennessee Valley Authority, and of the individuals who
shaped it. It is also much more. This case study of local
government’s catalytic role in regional economic develop-
ment is a major contribution to the twentieth-century history
of the New York metropolitan region. In an era when
bureaucracy has become synonymous with failed government
programs, the Port Authority is a valuable reminder of the
positive contributions that public agencies can make. It also
serves as a useful prism through which the author views and
critiques relevant theories of political leadership.
Doig shows that the Port of New York Authority, char-
tered in 1921 by the states of New York and New Jersey, was
a latter-day child of the Progressive reform impulse of the
early twentieth century, which sought rational planning by an
activist government, purged of corruption and infused with
“business-like”efficiency. The initial impetus was the fear
that the region’s magnificent waterfront might lose its pre-
eminent status to other East Coast ports because of the
additional time and costs entailed by docking facilities lo-
cated mostly in New York but rail terminals located mostly in
New Jersey.
The newly created authority did, indeed, have a life of its
own. From the 1920s through the 1950s, it evolved from the
relatively narrow mission of rail-freight planning to a much
broader mandate to build and operate bridges and tunnels,
assume the dominant role in regional air transport (at
Newark, LaGuardia, and Kennedy), and construct a contain-
erized marine terminal, a gigantic mid-Manhattan bus termi-
nal, and a new arterial highway system.
The financial underpinnings of this “imperial”bureaucracy
were the bridge and toll revenues that allowed the authority
to self-finance most of its capital projects by issuing revenue
bonds rather than depend on local and state governments for
funding. In classic survival-of-the-fittest fashion, it success-
fully fought off challenges from both within and without the
region. New York Mayor John F. Hylan in the 1920s mobi-
lized Tammany Hall against the Port Authority, but he was
forced into retirement by the authority’s good friend, Gov-
ernor Al Smith. Robert Moses, the region’s well-connected
transportation “power broker,”tried unsuccessfully to block
the authority’s new airport management role as well as its
Manhattan bus terminal, but he later cooperated with the
authority on bridge and highway improvements. Earlier,
there was a serious challenge from Washington when the
New Deal attempted to end the tax-exempt status of munic-
ipal bonds. This was defeated by a nationwide, ostensibly
“grassroots”campaign skillfully orchestrated from the offices
of the Port Authority.
Doig quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aphorism that insti-
tutions are “the lengthened shadow of one man”but credits
three individuals. Julius Henry Cohen, the authority’s general
counsel from 1921 until 1942, first emerged into prominence
as a garment industry lawyer who promoted the Brandeisian
cause of commercial arbitration of labor disputes. He carried
his cooperative principles into the public sector and crystal-
lized the idea of bi-state partnership embodied in the 1921
Port Compact. Swiss-born Othmar H. Ammann, the author-
ity’s chief engineer from 1928 to 1939, lobbied for, designed,
and supervised the construction of the George Washington
Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel. He returned in the 1950s to
design the second deck of that bridge as well as the new
Throgs Neck Bridge and the Verrazano-Narrow spans. The
third creative bureaucrat was Austin J. Tobin, the authority’s
assistant attorney and then its executive director. A graduate
of Holy Cross College who lost his interest in theology, he
committed himself to the authority as a crusade. He ran the
campaign that defeated the aforementioned New Deal policy
in the 1930s and then field marshaled the authority’s new
initiatives in the 1940s and 1950s as airport manager, bus
terminal operator, and highway engineer.
The author impartially documents not only the authority’s
successes but also its failures and periods of drift and
retrenchment. In the 1920s, the authority was fought to a
standstill by the dozen railroads that served the metropolitan
region and had no interest in centralizing their competitive
operations. Declining revenues during the Depression and
the early years of World War II coincided with the ascen-
dancy of Frank C. Ferguson as Port Authority chairman. A
conservative investment banker, he focused his tunnel-vision
on balance-sheet considerations. Tobin’s career from the late
1950s to his abrupt retirement in 1971 (after alienating
governors of both states) was a mixed bag. His successes in
constructing new bridges and highways were counterbalanced
by a financially disastrous mass transit experiment, the bil-
lion-dollar grandiosity of the World Trade Center project,
and the defeat of a proposed jetport in northern New Jersey.
Doig’s concluding chapter covers in less detail the embat-
tled post-Tobin era. Since the 1970s, the authority has
alternated between “malaise”or retrenchment and contro-
versial new initiatives that the author views as disguised
attempts to divert its revenues into nontransportation
projects run by local and state politicians. Critics, including
New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, want to scrap the
authority, but Doig hopes for a rebirth of creative leadership
in the twenty-first century.
This gracefully written book is a significant contribution to
the literature. Doig offers a useful corrective to Robert
Caro’s(The Power Broker, 1974) understandable overempha-
sis of the omnipotence of his protagonist, Robert Moses.
Doig also provides a sensible critique of James Q. Wilson’s
view that public bureaucracies invariably are passive respond-
ers, of necessity driven by external forces, rather than proac-
tive movers of events, motivated by creativity and innovation
emanating from within. Finally, Doig gives deserved atten-
tion to the ethical dimension of public leadership, specifically
the need to balance organizational efficiency with democratic
accountability. In so doing, Empire on the Hudson joins the
front rank of scholarship on public enterprise and enterpris-
ing public entrepreneurs.
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
997
Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Repa-
rations. By Joe R. Feagin. New York: Routledge, 2000.
311p. $25.00.
Robert C. Smith, San Francisco State University
Joe Feagin is the leading social science authority on racism in
the United States. A sociologist, Feagin wrote a series of
seminal articles on institutional racism during the 1970s,
followed by numerous essays and several books. Racist Amer-
ica is his most ambitious work on the subject. Its purpose is
to develop an antiracist theory and analysis that will explain
the phenomenon but also indicate ways to change and
eventually eradicate it. According to Feagin, there are fairly
well-developed theories and shared concepts to study systems
of class and gender oppression in America, but the social
science community has not yet reached a consensus on how
to define racial oppression and give it operational meaning,
and there is no well-developed theory to account for its
origins and persistence.
To remedy these deficiencies Feagin develops a theoretical
framework centered on the concept of “systemic racism.”
Racism is manifested throughout the economy, polity, edu-
cation, religion, and the family. This theoretical reality is
reflected empirically in a complex array of antiblack prac-
tices; in the unjustly gained economic resources and political
power of whites; and in the ideologies and attitudes of white
supremacy that developed in order to rationalize the system.
Feagin avers that a pluralistic analysis of oppression in the
United States is ultimately necessary because “class struc-
tured capitalism, sexism, bureaucratic authoritarianism and
homophobia are all important parts of the webbed package
of oppressions internal to U.S. society”(p. 6). Yet, such an
analysis is, in Feagin’s judgment, premature. Therefore,
Racist America focuses mainly on white-black oppression
(with passing references to how other oppressions interact
with it) because it is paradigmatic for the other forms of
oppression in America.
After sketching out the theoretical perspective, Feagin
provides six chapters of historical analysis and empirical data
to illustrate the theory’s utility. The empirical data include an
extensive mining of the social science literature, government
and private studies and reports, and results from numerous
field research projects Feagin and his associates have con-
ducted in the last decade. These projects include, among
other things, hundreds of interviews with blacks from all
walks of life about their experiences with racism and with
whites about their views of blacks and of racism.
Chapters 1 and 2 are historical narratives about the
creation of the systems of racism, sexism, and economic
exploitation that are at the foundations of America. Feagin
notes that under pressure from the abolitionist and civil
rights movements some progress was made in the 1860s and
1960s in modifying some of the cruder manifestations of
systemic racism, but the system has remained largely intact.
For example, he describes the reforms of the 1960s as modest
efforts designed to fit some blacks, women, and other racial
minorities into the society without attempting to dismantle
the white-male-dominated hierarchical system itself. Thus, he
concludes, all the talk about equality since the 1960s is a
“ruse and illusion”(p. 36).
Chapter 3 examines the origins and evolution of the
ideology of white supremacy; chapter 4 examines antiblack
images in the media; chapter 5 analyzes the data on racism in
the everyday practices of whites and experiences of blacks,
including institutional manifestations in housing, education,
employment, business, public accommodations, and criminal
justice. The sixth chapter shows how blacks are damaged in
material and psychological wellbeing by racism and how
whites are privileged in psychic esteem and material benefits
by it. The last chapter presents strategies and policies for the
“uprooting and replacement of the existing systems of racial-
ized power”(p. 270), focusing on the need for a multiracial
movement of a large scale, with destabilizing protests that
will alter the white elite’s calculus of the cost of maintaining
the system.
Feagin’s ambitious effort to place racism in a systems
framework is an important contribution that should be widely
read and used in research on racism in the United States. It
is a refreshingly comprehensive departure from the seem-
ingly omnipresent books since the 1970s that focus on the
declining significance of or even the end of racism in Amer-
ica. The work, however, is not without problems that may
limit its use both in the research process and in the develop-
ment of antiracist strategies and movements.
The most basic limitation is the theory of systemic racism
itself. As briefly sketched out by Feagin, the theory is
ambiguous. It is not clear, for example, whether racism is
systemic in the sense of being a core, defining value of
America equivalent to capitalism, democracy, and constitu-
tionalism, or whether it is simply systemic in the sense of a
complex, interdependent, interactive series of components. A
related but distinct ambiguity is whether the theory suggests
that racism may not be a core or defining American value but
is nevertheless so integral to the operation of the economy
and polity that its elimination requires the elimination or at
least radical modifications of capitalism and the existing
constitutional basis of the democracy. Clarifying work on
both of these aspects is necessary before the theory can be
used in research and in antiracist activism.
Feagin refers to the concept of oppression throughout the
book without ever defining it. This will not do. As he himself
writes, “concepts delineating and probing racism need to be
clear and honed by everyday experience”(p. 4). This is
especially important because the term is used to encapsulate
the experiences of women, homosexuals, and recent immi-
grants as well as African Americans, and, as Feagin knows,
the experiences of these groups are not isomorphic with
those of blacks. It is useful, therefore, to distinguish between
oppression and such related but distinct phenomena as
racism, discrimination, prejudice, xenophobia, and stereotyp-
ical thinking and behavior. Finally, how does one measure
the decline of oppression? If the changes brought about by
the civil rights movement of the 1960s were modest and a
“ruse and illusion,”what would major and real changes look
like? Indeed, short of absolute equality in psychic and
material wellbeing among all groups, how would we know
when systems of oppression have been uprooted and elimi-
nated?
Feagin’s work points the study of American racism in the
right direction. As the author observes in the first chapter,
the social scientific examination of U.S. racism is in the early
to middle stages of theoretical and empirical analysis. La-
mentably, this is true even after more than a hundred years of
studies. Most of the scholarship on race from its beginnings
until the 1930s reflected a racist and white supremacist
character, and since then the social science community—
political scientists especially—has been unwilling to devote
the necessary interest and resources to racism in graduate
studies, research, and academic journals. Feagin, whatever
the limitations of this book, has made an important contri-
bution that will advance the study of the realities of racism in
America.
Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS December 2001
998
Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the
Loss of Democratic Responsiveness. By Lawrence R. Ja-
cobs and Robert Y. Shapiro. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2000. 425p. $50.00 cloth, $17.00 paper.
Jeffrey E. Cohen, Fordham University
Many observers of contemporary American politics argue
that political leaders are overly sensitive to public opinion,
that they pander to the public. Lawrence Jacobs and Robert
Shapiro suggest that this view is wrong on two counts. First,
at least for the past two decades, politicians have not been
very responsive to public opinion. Indeed, they are likely to
try to manipulate it. Second, from a democratic theory
perspective, Jacobs and Shapiro muse upon the oddity of
viewing responsiveness in a democracy as disreputable (p.
xiv).
The authors pursue three major tasks. First, they attempt
to explain why responsiveness to public opinion has declined
over the past two decades. Second, they build a theory of the
dynamics of contemporary American politics, which they test
on two important cases, the Clinton health care initiative and
the Republican Contract with America. Third, they redirect
discussion about the role of leadership and responsiveness in
democracy and democratic theory. This is a large agenda for
any project. The authors succeed quite admirably and have
produced one of the most important books on American
politics that I have read in years.
In chapter 1, Jacobs and Shapiro critique the idea that
politicians pander and discuss the limitations of theory and
research on the lack of responsiveness in current American
politics. In chapter 2 they lay out their theoretical framework.
The next five chapters provide a detailed case study of the
Clinton health care initiative. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the
behavior of the protagonists and antagonists in the policy
debate. Chapters 5 and 6 present a detailed look at media
coverage of the health care debate, and chapter 7 focuses on
the public response. Chapter 8 presents a less detailed case
study of the Contract with America. The book concludes with
two chapters that deal with issues of democratic theory.
Chapter 9 discusses the dilemmas of modern democracy,
especially the implications of crafted talk and leader nonre-
sponsiveness. Chapter 10 offers suggestions about how to
increase responsiveness to public opinion but at the same
time provide leadership and improve the quality of demo-
cratic deliberation.
Jacobs and Shapiro begin by suggesting that responsive-
ness has declined and marshal considerable supporting evi-
dence from other scholars. They then address why this
decline has occurred and point to five major factors: polar-
ization of the political parties, the rise of individual indepen-
dence in Congress, the effects of increased incumbency, the
proliferation of interest groups, and increasingly divisive
interbranch relations. Along the way, they also critique the
two major theories that explain the behavior of politicians:
electoral incentive models, which emphasize responsiveness
to the median voter, and policy motivation models. They do
not eschew either, but they forcefully argue that each is
incomplete.
Jacobs and Shapiro then move to their second task,
building a theory of contemporary American politics. Their
framework is extremely rich and subtle and cannot be easily
summarized here. Their theory deals with the interconnec-
tions among politicians, the mass media, and public opinion.
Politicians, according to Jacobs and Shapiro, currently
have strong incentives to pursue their policy preferences
rather than respond to public opinion, but they also have
strong incentives to appear responsive, which Jacobs and
Shapiro term “simulated responsiveness.”This is done by
“crafting talk,”which is a major conceptual contribution of
this work. That is, politicians track public opinion to identify
the words, arguments, and symbols that the public finds most
appealing with regard to particular issues. These are then
used to prime the public, not so much to persuade, but to
raise the issue to the top of the agenda. Policy advocates tend
to prime the public to the benefits of a policy and avoid
discussing the costs; opponents prime the costs, encouraging
the public to view proposed reforms as threatening.
The media pick up on this policy debate, and Jacobs and
Shapiro make an important argument in this regard: The
heightened attention in the media to political conflict may
reflect reality and is not merely the imposition of media
practices on political discourse. Still, the media amplify the
conflict. As a result of the behavior of competing politicians
and media coverage, public uncertainty about the benefits
and costs of policies is elevated. Opponents are often advan-
taged, because managing uncertainty is easier than keeping
the public focused on potential benefits. As a consequence, it
is hard to implement reforms. Furthermore, the emphasis on
crafted talk and the atmosphere of conflict breeds public
disaffection with politics and politicians. This brief summary
does not do justice to the richness and sweep of the theory,
which deals essentially with the core operation of the current
political system.
The empirical aspects of this study are no less ambitious.
To test the theory requires data on the behavior of politi-
cians, media news coverage, and the reactions of the public.
Jacobs and Shapiro collect a wide variety of data, including
content analyses of politicians’public statements, interviews
with politicians and other participants, content analyses of
the news media, and public opinion polls.
Jacobs and Shapiro also address important themes in
democratic theory. They try to find a balance between
leadership and responsiveness, which they term “responsive
leadership.”Their discussion blends normative political the-
ory with empiricism and bridges the divide between the two
approaches, which is rarely done.
There is little to criticize in this important book, although
more cases to test the theory would have been desirable. The
Clinton health care initiative and the Contract with America
were not fully enacted. The theory predicts that, outside
election periods, it will be difficult to enact major reforms.
Yet, some important policy changes were implemented in the
1990s, such as NAFTA, and a major tax reform was passed in
2001. What accounts for the success of these major policy
efforts? How would the theory take account of these cases?
Jacobs and Shapiro provide a fertile agenda for future
research.
We apply too readily the label “instant classic.”This book
not only deserves that label but also will redirect thinking
about American politics and will be read for years to come.
Presidents, Parties, and the State: A Party System Perspec-
tive on Democratic Regulatory Choice, 1884 –1936. By
Scott C. James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000. 318p. $59.95.
Marc Allen Eisner, Wesleyan University
Following a narrow victory, a president seeking to strengthen
his party’s coalition begins to embrace regulatory initiatives
that appear to be at odds with the commitments of his party
and the demands of core coalition members. Yet, if these
efforts secure the support of pivotal voting blocs and ensure
future victories in the Electoral College, many loyalists would
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
999
be satisfied. After all, control of the presidency is necessary if
one wants to control the policy agenda, and that control is
impossible without reelection.
This drama, played out in the months following the 2000
presidential election, is as old as the regulatory state itself,
according to Presidents, Parties, and the State. Although Scott
James focuses on three earlier episodes in American political
development, he offers important insights into the evolution
of the regulatory state more generally. At first glance, one
would not expect the current occupant of the White House to
embrace new initiatives in environmental protection. But
who would have expected an antistatist Democratic Party to
promote the Interstate Commerce Act? Who would have
anticipated that a party strongly opposed to the rule of reason
would advocate a Federal Trade Commission along the lines
suggested by Teddy Roosevelt?
The core argument is that pressure-group and district-level
models of legislative choice do not provide adequate ac-
counts of regulatory choice during 1884–1936. A more
satisfactory explanation is the party system perspective, which
places national party competition for the presidency at the
heart of regulatory choice. “In confronting the problems of
industrial capitalism, Democrats were forced to choose be-
tween the short-term desire to enact policies consistent with
the long-standing party commitments, or jettison these com-
mitments in deference to the preferences of electoral groups
whose political support was pivotal to the consolidation of
governing power. It was a Hobson’s choice because in the
world of democratic politics, the stabilization of a winning
electoral coalition was a precondition for anything else the
Democratic party might reasonably hope to accomplish in
office”(p. 268).
After framing his party system perspective, James presents
three case studies: the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the
Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, and the Public
Utility Holding Act of 1935. Each explores the incentives
created by the Electoral College and party system, the
regulatory preferences of the voting blocs deemed essential
to victory, and the historical and political contexts that
shaped policy alternatives and the intervention of party
leaders. James provides a lively but theoretically informed
account of legislative action and coalition building that
integrates careful historiography with quantitative analyses of
congressional voting behavior. Each case study is situated
within the larger dynamic of evolving relationships among the
parties, the president, and Congress; the decline in congres-
sional party government; and the emergence of a president-
centered polity.
In the case of the Interstate Commerce Act, deeply seated
antimonopoly and antistatist impulses within the Democratic
Party generated strong opposition to the creation of a railroad
commission staffed with experts and charged with the task of
administering the industry. Yet, business Mugwumps had as-
sumed the status of a swing group in the presidential election of
1884. Grover Cleveland and other party leaders needed to
obtain their allegiance if they wanted to increase the chances of
future electoral success. This required the passage of the
Interstate Commerce Act over the objections of agrarian Dem-
ocrats. The demands of coalition maintenance and the incen-
tives created by the Electoral College trumped the historic
commitments of the party.
The Federal Trade Commission Act involved many of the
same issues. The Democratic Party’s antitrust program was
strongly opposed to the Supreme Court’s rule of reason,
corporate consolidation, and any efforts to manage this
consolidation through the creation of expert commissions.
The party demanded instead that new laws be passed to force
deconcentration and unrestricted market competition. By
1914, an impending depression led many to counsel Wood-
row Wilson to suspend the pursuit of new antitrust legisla-
tion. Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Party threatened
to dominate the reform debates and link Democratic policy
failures to the growing economic malaise. Understanding the
potentially disastrous electoral consequences for the midterm
elections and his own reelection, Wilson embraced the
Federal Trade Commission Act. Its passage would allow the
party to appeal to Progressives and organized business,
thereby strengthening the Democratic coalition. As in the
earlier episode, coalition building would carry a price: the
alienation of agrarian Democrats.
The case of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act
(PUHCA) of 1935 returns to the theme of coalition mainte-
nance. Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party had yet to
consolidate its hold on power. This may have been impossible
without the support of midwestern Republicans, who had
become disenchanted with the collectivism of the New Deal
and the lack of structural reform. Roosevelt met the demands
for reform with PUHCA. It was a death sentence for utility
holding companies and struck at the heart of the so-called
Power Trust, thereby exhibiting the Democratic Party’s com-
mitment to reform. Ironically, the demands of coalition
maintenance created incentives for Roosevelt to move to the
left of congressional Democrats and take up the antimonop-
oly impulses of earlier generations of agrarian Democrats,
who had been sacrificed previously in the name of electoral
victory.
The final chapter of Presidents, Parties, and the State
explores a number of provocative questions. For example,
why was the Democratic Party—but not the GOP—forced
repeatedly to choose between well-established party commit-
ments and the demands of electoral blocs whose political
support was pivotal to coalition building? Given the compro-
mises involved in building and preserving coalitions, what was
the regulatory legacy of Democratic agrarians? These are
important questions for anyone interested in American po-
litical development and policy history. Although one might
wish for some sustained discussion of the implications of the
party system perspective for regulatory choice in the contem-
porary period, James has accomplished much with this
volume. It makes a significant contribution and should have
an effect on future discussions of the role of parties, elections,
and presidents in the construction of the regulatory state.
Race, Neighborhoods, and Community Power: Buffalo Poli-
tics, 1934 –1997. By Neil Kraus. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2000. 294p. $19.95 paper.
David L. Imbroscio, University of Louisville
This book grapples with what are perhaps the two central
questions preoccupying the academic study of cities in the
postwar era, questions that are quite familiar to political (and
other social) scientists. The first asks who (or what) governs
cities, that is, the community power question. The second
examines why (or how) cities became marked by—to use
Jonathan Kozol’s powerful phrase—savage inequalities, es-
pecially along racial lines. The first concerns process: how
political issues are resolved and the relative power and
influence of actors and structural forces in their resolution.
The second involves outcomes, specifically, the pervasiveness
of deeply entrenched poverty spatially concentrated in the
older neighborhoods of the urban core.
Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS December 2001
1000
Through an examination of the political processes and
resulting outcomes in one American city, Buffalo, New York,
Neil Kraus admirably aspires to address both questions
concurrently. Based on his study of housing, redevelopment,
and education during more than a half-century, Kraus offers
provocative contentions regarding both questions, as he
challenges to some degree the conventional wisdom sur-
rounding each.
First, Kraus postulates that the strong focus on the influ-
ential role of private sector elites who act largely behind the
scenes—whether expressed through the current dominant
paradigm in community power studies, regime theory, or
early elitist theories—is “somewhat misplaced”(p. 11), at
least in regard to issues that affect residential patterns and
neighborhoods (as opposed to downtown redevelopment).
Instead, he revives and embraces some of the key tenets of
pluralism; that is, the nature of community power can be
understood by examining overt, clearly visible, and publicly
debated decisions. The core of Kraus’s story is about race,
location, and racism, as whites in Buffalo used their numer-
ical majority to limit residential choice and economic oppor-
tunity for Africans Americans via the traditional and straight-
forward processes of elections and political representation.
As for the second question, Kraus contends that concen-
trated urban poverty can be strongly linked causally to
politics, as opposed to economic or demographic trends,
because “political structures have played a critical role in
ghetto formation”(p. 11). This stands in opposition to the
standard explanation, which focuses largely on the timing of
southern black migration to northern cities and the contem-
poraneous white flight to suburbia, coupled with the effects of
postwar economic restructuring and deindustrialization.
Most interesting is the way Kraus brings both questions
together. He not only argues for the significance of politics in
explaining the formation and durability of the American
ghetto but also emphasizes “the decisive influence of local
politics,”that is, the struggle over community power (p. 7,
emphasis added). Rather than focus solely on macrolevel
processes, Kraus attempts to demonstrate that concrete local
public policy decisions must be included in any explanation of
ghetto development in Buffalo and the plight of its African
American poor. In this sense the book can be read as yet
another work in the literature stream that emphasizes “local
politics matters”in shaping urban outcomes.
By advancing this claim Kraus astutely draws attention to a
causal relationship often overlooked in studies of urban
poverty. For this reason alone, his book makes a positive
contribution, although his analysis could have been more
penetrating. For example, Kraus makes the “local politics
matters”argument by attempting to show that deindustrial-
ization was not a significant factor in creating concentrated
poverty in Buffalo because African Americans never had
access to good industrial jobs in the first place (pp. 6–7,
38–41, 221). But Kraus fails to take his localism argument far
enough. Work on cities such as Baltimore and Chicago
reveals that deindustrialization was not simply the result of
macroeconomic change; it also was driven in part by local
policy decisions to pursue economic strategies built around
downtown real estate development and tourism rather than
preservation of the manufacturing base. Therefore, one can
argue that local decisions mattered deeply in worsening the
problem of concentrated poverty and acknowledge that dein-
dustrialization was a significant cause of concentrated pov-
erty. But doing so requires an appreciation of how urban
economic processes are far from beyond the influence and
control of local politics.
Chapters 4 through 8 provide a highly detailed account of
Buffalo politics from the mid-1930s to the late 1990s. It is
presented in a chronological, event-by-event fashion, and
serves as the empirical data for the study. As a telling of local
history, this section of the book (roughly two-thirds of the
total pages) works reasonably well. Those with little interest
in Buffalo politics may lack the patience for the level of detail
presented, however. In addition, the careful description of
historical events could have been placed in a much tighter
analytical framework and tied much more closely and rigor-
ously to Kraus’s theoretical propositions regarding commu-
nity power and the development of the ghetto.
In the final chapter, Kraus discusses the evils of segrega-
tion and concentrated poverty and makes some gestures
toward policy solutions. He also reiterates many of his claims
regarding the nature of community power, such as the
continuing importance of pluralist theory for understanding
city politics. In both discussions Kraus nicely draws on the
Buffalo case to illustrate his main analytic points, but these
concluding sections would have benefited considerably from
a more thorough and systematic treatment. Especially
needed is a fuller demonstration of how the empirical case
supports the validity of his rather provocative theoretical
propositions. This chapter is a mere ten pages and could have
been extended and deepened to strengthen the book’s overall
significance and contribution.
Despite many flaws, this book is well written and addresses
meaningful urban issues. Moreover, unlike numerous other
American cities of similar size, such as Cleveland, Atlanta,
Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and New Haven, the Buffalo political
story has “not really been told”(p. xi). This book is a
welcome addition to the academic literature on the politics of
American cities.
Crafting Law on the Supreme Court. By Forrest Maltzman,
James R. Spriggs II, and Paul J. Wahlbeck. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000. 206p. $49.95 cloth,
$17.95 paper.
Cornell W. Clayton, Washington State University
Important contributions in the social sciences are usually
made in one of two ways. Either they tell us something we
previously did not know, or they verify, in a systematic way,
something that we did. Crafting Law on the Supreme Court
falls into the latter category. The premise of this book is
remarkably simple. The authors argue that decision making
on the Supreme Court is interactive; justices consider the
views of their colleagues when writing their opinions. Justices
engage in the “collegial game”of bargaining and compromise
because they are constrained from unilaterally writing their
individual policy preferences into law by a set of institutional
rules, such as the need to attract five votes for a majority,
which make the Court a collegial institution.
The collegial character of the Court is well known. The
authors quote Chief Justice Rehnquist, who candidly admits
that, in the process of producing opinions, “give and take is
inevitable, and doctrinal purity may be muddied in the
process”(p. 152). Indeed, even among political scientists,
who usually are slow to recognize the obvious, the interactive
nature of opinion writing was thoroughly discussed nearly
forty years ago in Walter Murphy’s classic, Elements of
Judicial Strategy (1964). What makes this book a crucial
contribution to the literature is not its premise but its use of
a sophisticated method and innovative database to test a
multivariate model of interactive decision making. Specifi-
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
1001
cally, the authors seek to identify systematically “what factors
affect whether, when, and to what extent justices decide to
bargain, negotiate, or compromise in the process of writing
opinions”(p. 25).
In the first chapter the authors present a model of decision
making based on two central postulates: (1) Justices prefer
legal rules that comport with their policy goals, and (2) given
the Court’s institutional rules, justices often act strategically
to secure their policy preferences (p. 17). The first postulate
draws on the work of attitudinal scholarship, especially that
of Jeffrey Segal and Harold Spaeth (The Supreme Court and
the Attitudinal Model, 1993); the second builds on scholarship
in the positive theory of institutions, or the “strategic choice”
tradition, especially the work of Walter Murphy as well as
more recent scholars, such as Lee Epstein and Jack Knight
(The Choices Justices Make, 1998). To test their postulates,
the authors created a database of all cases that received full
disposition opinions during the Burger Court (1969–86).
Using the files of Justice William Brennan, the authors culled
data from assignment sheets, docket sheets, and circulation
records (such as draft opinions and memoranda distributed
to the justices generally) about how the justices interact when
drafting and circulating opinions.
In the four chapters at the heart of the book the authors
test hypotheses drawn from the two central postulates and
related to four distinct stages of the process: the initial assign-
ment of the majority opinion, the response to draft opinions, the
author’s subsequent reaction to those responses, and the deci-
sion whether to join an opinion (i.e., the politics of coalition
formation). Their analysis finds strong support for the strategic,
interactive model of decision making during each stage. Justices
constantly engage in bargaining and compromise over the final
content of the Court’s opinions. In a short concluding chapter
the authors summarize their findings and comment brieflyon
the scientific study of courts.
Few of the substantive findings in this study are intended to
challenge conventional wisdom. For example, the authors
find that justices are less willing to accommodate the views of
potential joiners to an opinion once they have secured a
majority. Likewise, the Chief Justice, who has institutional
responsibilities for the Court as a whole, appears to be more
sensitive to questions of equitable work load and Court
efficiency when assigning opinions than are assigning associ-
ate justices. There are no major surprises here. The signifi-
cance of this book lies in its “scientific”or quantitative testing
of the interactive model of decision making. The method-
ological work is first rate. The hypothesized relationships are
clearly specified and conceptualized. The development and
use of the data are ingenious. The analysis is thorough and
rigorous. The empirical findings are robust and conclusive
with respect to what they measure.
One minor quibble has to do with the types of research
design compromises that data constraints impose on this type
of study. Specifically, in order to understand how institutional
structures shape judicial behavior, it would be useful to have
more variation of those structures across time. For example,
how do we know that Burger’s assigning patterns stem from
his institutional role as Chief Justice, as the authors assume,
rather than his own idiosyncratic or attitudinal concerns
about Court efficiency? It is possible that Burger would have
demonstrated similar assigning patterns even if he were not
Chief Justice. Of course, the authors’assumption is perfectly
plausible and in fact quite likely. The point is that we cannot
know with an nof 1. Still, this criticism, which relates to
broader problems of how quantitative political science has
come to conceptualize the relationship between research
methods and problems, should not distract from what the
authors have accomplished with the data available. They have
told us more about the systematic dynamics of opinion
writing on the Court than any previous study.
The book stands either as a formidable challenge to or a
major bridge between two separate strands of research on
Supreme Court decision making. Attitudinal scholars have
long claimed that the process is driven by the justices’
individual policy preferences or “attitudes”alone. Most in
this camp, however, only claim that individual preferences
determine the final vote on a case’s disposition, and that
nonattitudinal variables may operate in other areas of Su-
preme Court decision making (see Harold Spaeth, “The
Attitudinal Model,”in Lee Epstein, ed., Contemplating
Courts, 1995, p. 314). The authors view their research as a
bridge to attitudinal scholarship because they find abundant
evidence that individual “preferences shape behavior beyond
the final vote”(p. 151). Nevertheless, their powerful empir-
ical evidence that institutional variables condition Supreme
Court behavior generally is a challenge to many of the
theoretical assumptions that underlie attitudinal research.
The authors also argue that their approach is a bridge to
historical-institutional or “traditional legal scholarship”on
Supreme Court decision making (p. 151). This literature
tends to focus on the historically evolving normative institu-
tions and symbols that structure judicial decision making.
Legal doctrines, judicial role conceptions, and other norma-
tive institutions that define “good judging”are thought to
have a constitutive influence on judges, shaping their values
and attitudes (Howard Gillman and Cornell Clayton, eds.,
The Supreme Court in American Politics: New Institutionalist
Interpretations, 1999). The authors of Crafting Law present
strong empirical evidence that justices are concerned about
the content of legal opinions, not just the disposition or
outcome of the case, as generally suggested by attitudinalists.
This is an important finding for historical-institutionalists and
supports the proposition that legal doctrines matter very
much to the justices. Yet, the authors argue that justices care
about the content of opinions for strategic reasons only,
which rejects the core historical-institutionalist position that
judges are often normatively driven actors and favors the
position that judges are simple policy maximizers self-con-
sciously using legal doctrines instrumentally. Whether this
primary assumption can be tested using positivist methods is
the subject of intense debate within the field (see “Sympo-
sium: The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model,”Law
and Courts Newsletter 4 [Spring 1994]: 3–12). As in Segal and
Spaeth’s landmark study on Court decision making, many of
the findings here with regard to the ideological motivation of
the justices, not to mention the central conclusion that
justices care about the content of Court opinions, may be
perfectly consistent with a “legal”or normatively driven
institutional explanation of their behavior. The authors ap-
pear to reject this possibility in order to adopt the more
narrow attitudinalist explanation for judicial motivation.
Consequently, this study has the potential to be a valuable
link to broader institutionalist work, but its key theoretical
and methodological assumptions probably serve as a surer
bridge to traditional behavioralist research on the Court.
This book is a major contribution to our understanding of
Supreme Court politics. It is a significant expansion of
empirical-quantitative studies of the Court, moving beyond
the typically narrow focus on judicial voting patterns. Simul-
taneously, it is a major step toward systematically verifying
the important role that institutional structures play in shaping
judicial politics generally. There is enough empirical fodder
here to provoke and console scholars of all theoretical
persuasions. The authors do a superb job of drawing insights
Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS December 2001
1002
from disparate theoretical traditions and melding them into a
conceptually sound, parsimonious, and rigorous model. Their
book is an important milestone in research on judicial
decision making and commands the attention of all serious
students of Supreme Court politics.
Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment. By George E.
Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael MacKuen.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 199p. $42.00
cloth, $15.00 paper.
Mark R. Joslyn, University of Kansas
Perhaps it is ironic that a book about rational judgment is
entitled Affective Intelligence. This is a rousing and provoking
effort, with an unmistakable double agenda. One objective is
to dispute conventional wisdom regarding the relationship
between affect and reason, especially the rational choice
vision of political judgment. A second is to establish a more
prominent role for emotions in models of political behavior:
“The scientific community might fruitfully devote more at-
tention to the idea that emotions are centrally important to
political behavior”(p. 129). The two objectives are linked. By
demonstrating that emotions influence how and about what
we think, and what we do, the authors effectively challenge a
prevailing disposition of the research community to set aside
the complexities of emotional dynamics or to conceive of
emotions as distorting agents in judgmental processes. Ra-
tional choice is the proverbial straw man in this regard,
because it generally defines human affect as endogenous.
Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen argue persuasively that
emotional engagement motivates individuals to think more
deeply about political affairs and thus enhances rational
choice.
The first half of the book is devoted to the first objective,
which details the traditional understanding of emotions: We
think first and then feel. Moreover, emotion and cognition
are thought to work in opposition. A passionate citizen is
unlikely to be a deliberate one. Emotions appeal to the heart,
not the mind. Against this backdrop of scholarly consensus,
the authors posit that emotions activate reasoned consider-
ation. Emotions draw greater attention to environmental
circumstances, which allows people to process information
required for a rational choice. The authors invoke Herbert
Simon: “The human organism living in a demanding environ-
ment requires an interrupt mechanism to redirect human
attention to higher priority real-time needs”(p. 7). This
“interrupt mechanism”is key to Affective Intelligence.
Drawing heavily from recent literature in the neuro-
sciences, the authors advance a surprisingly straightforward
picture of affect-driven judgments. We possess two emotional
subsystems that enable us to rely on habit and to activate
reasoned consideration, each in the appropriate circum-
stances. These subsystems are labeled disposition and sur-
veillance; the former manages our reliance on habits, and the
latter identifies circumstances that require a shift from habit
to reasoned consideration. The disposition system monitors
the relationship between our behavior and its expected
execution. If behavior matches expectations, emotions of
satisfaction and enthusiasm are forthcoming, and the behav-
ior is reinforced and ultimately becomes habitual. By con-
trast, the surveillance system monitors the environment for
novel or threatening stimuli. When such a stimulus appears,
emotions of anxiety and unease arise, dependence upon
habitual routines declines, and individuals are more likely to
attend to the relevant stimulus. Anxiety, like Simon’s inter-
rupt mechanism, triggers human attention to threatening
elements in the environment. Both subsystems are subcon-
scious emotional responses, and surveillance has clear impor-
tance for evolutionary survival.
Various political events and symbols trigger the surveil-
lance system, but an obvious threat comes from the economy.
The authors demonstrate that during hard economic times it
is supportive partisans who are likely to feel anxiety about
their president’s poor economic record. A poor record
threatens their habitual partisan views, and their surveillance
system responds with anxiety. By contrast, opponents are
unmoved, as they are neither threatened nor necessarily
surprised by events. Anxious citizens are more likely to show
interest in campaigns, acquire knowledge about politics, and
participate in politics beyond voting. More profoundly, the
authors demonstrate that anxiety about candidates leads
individuals to deviate from their partisan habits and rely
more heavily on policy proposals and personal qualities of
candidates. This effect of anxiety is neither trivial nor exclu-
sive to the domain of voting. The authors offer confirming
evidence with judgments about the Gulf War and NAFTA. In
each case a perceived threat in the political environment
alters the nature of people’s attention to that environment;
consequently, habitual judgments are subject to change.
Emotions, especially anxiety, “enhance rationality because
they allow citizens to condition their political judgment to fit
the circumstances”(p. 124).
Affective Intelligence is a compelling and challenging work,
but there are several points with which one may quibble.
First, the interpretation of what is rational may be called into
question. Although rationality may assume various forms,
often at the behest of the researcher, reliance on partisan
cues can in fact be considered a rational strategy. Starting
from Anthony Downs’s classic work, a large and significant
literature has demonstrated the “rationality”of cue-taking,
information short-cuts, or the use of heuristics, in which
partisan identification plays a key role (see Arthur Lupia and
Mathew McCubbins, The Democratic Dilemma, 1998). By
contrast, Affective Intelligence defines rationality as a depar-
ture from partisan tendencies. Is it necessarily more rational
to use issue stances and personal qualities rather than party
identification as criteria for candidate choice? Among anx-
ious voters, Affective Intelligence says “yes.”
The reader also may be struck by the causal connections
crucial to the affective intelligence thesis. Notwithstanding
the forceful arguments, it is plausible that cognitive aware-
ness of campaign dynamics, perceived differences with one’s
partisan choice, or simple acquisition of knowledge may
trigger the surveillance system. As in the case of a threatening
economy (p. 79), anxiety may be a consequence rather than
an antecedent of cognitive awareness. We thus may first
consider the economy and then respond with an appropriate
emotion. The authors’reliance on pooled cross-sectional
ANES data does little to clarify such important issues of
causal inference. Furthermore, when dynamics are explored
using the 1980 ANES panel, the authors’findings are less
persuasive.
I ponder the authors’assumption of linearity between
anxiety and the various dependent variables used throughout
the book: campaign interest, political knowledge, and the
like. Without a defense of this assumption, a nonlinear
hypothesis appears equally reasonable. As anxiety increases,
the capacity to attend and learn may diminish. Similarly,
moderate levels of anxiety may produce participatory activity,
but high anxiety may well demobilize. One only needs to
observe undergraduates at semester’s end to find supporting
anecdotal evidence. Yet, considerable detail on measurement
American Political Science Review Vol. 95, No. 4
1003
strategy is found in the two appendices, which will undoubt-
edly be important for replication and future research.
I am impressed by the magnitude of the argument and the
force with which it is presented. Affective Intelligence speaks
to a broad cross-section of political scientists; it has implica-
tions not only for campaigns, voting, and political learning
but also for the myriad political topics that potentially
address human emotions. But the implications for political
learning are perhaps the most compelling. If, in fact, danger,
threat, and novelty move people to learn and think more
critically about political choices that confront them, then the
character and intensity of present-day political communica-
tions, and indeed campaigns, is perhaps not surprising.
Inflammatory media, negative ads, and alarmist appeals
made by various interests will continue to draw the ire of
reform-minded citizens and elites alike, but Affective Intelli-
gence offers a clear motive for their frequency and occasional
success. In spite of what we may initially believe, the evidence
in this book suggests that a more threatening and dangerous
political information climate will produce an electorate much
closer to the ideals of citizenship—in terms of interest,
knowledge, and participation—embodied in classic demo-
cratic theory.
Although confident in their thesis, the authors are never-
theless cautious and strike an appropriate balance. The fine
distinction between conviction and prudence makes this book
a pleasure to read and a must for those seeking the cutting
edge in political behavior. The mechanistic models of human
cognition have clearly influenced the field of public opinion,
but it now appears that motivated cognition must be recog-
nized in order to grasp fully the complexities of political
choice. When the rational choice school responds to this
book, I suspect it will be because Affective Intelligence awak-
ened an emotion within.
Governing Race: Policy, Process, and the Politics of Race. By
Nina M. Moore. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. 248p.
$65.00.
Francine Sanders Romero, University of Texas
at San Antonio
Scholars who study civil rights policies face an inherent
disadvantage. This chapter of American politics is very
complex, involving elements of legislative and judicial behav-
ior, federalism, public opinion, social movements, and so on,
and works on this topic are often expected to cover too much
ground. The most feasible way to approach the subject is one
piece at a time, and Nina Moore ably explores one crucial
component of this complex story. Governing Race examines
the divisive effects of race on U.S. Senate consideration of
key civil rights bills and on the substance of the laws
ultimately passed.
Moore’s premise is that issues of race are essentially
ungovernable. Specifically, normal parliamentary procedures
have not prevailed in the consideration of civil rights legisla-
tion by the modern Senate. The process is marked by
abnormal procedures: obstructionism, Byzantine parliamen-
tary maneuvers, and eventual concessions. All this is due to
deep regional and partisan divisions over the need to create
and preserve civil rights protections.
The book is clearly written, nicely organized, and easy to
follow. At its core are four similarly structured chapters that
trace three continuing threads—politics, procedures, and
policy outcomes—from the late 1950s through the early
1990s. The concluding chapter offers additional empirical
support for the assertions regarding each theme. The overall
story is that the politics of race has been and continues to be
divisive, on both a regional (strong at the beginning and
weaker over time) and partisan (weaker at the beginning and
stronger over time) basis. As a result, Senate deliberations
have been uniquely abnormal. Civil rights advocates were
fought at every turn by opponents and had to compromise in
order to gain the support of uncommitted senators (usually
moderate Republicans). These concessions were of necessity
significant and resulted in policy outcomes far weaker than
originally intended.
The strength of Governing Race is its cogent portrayal of
civil rights legislative battles not as historical anecdotes but as
a continuing process marked by notable consistencies. The
material may not be new, but it is presented in a manner that
makes the broad picture more apparent than previously. For
example, the crucial role played by Republican moderates,
the importance of the cloture rule, and the frequent bargain-
ing down of enforcement mechanisms from the administra-
tive to the judicial level (what Moore terms “constitutional
redundancy”) emerge as constant and meaningful character-
istics of this issue and venue over time. Moore provides an
accurate and useful narrative framework for the study of civil
rights deliberation in the U.S. Senate. On this level, the book
is quite effective and will be a boon to professors interested in
teaching a civil rights policy class from an actual political
science perspective, as opposed to the largely historical
orientation of most works on this topic.
Moore makes broader claims for the analysis, and on this
plane she is less successful. In particular, the assertion that
race is an ungovernable issue is not fully sustained. First, the
argument that this analysis of thirteen civil rights bills in the
U.S. Senate is generalizable to the overall governance of
racial matters is unconvincing. Despite her declarations to
the contrary, the Senate is too distinct for this claim to be
made. Other institutions do manage nonconsensual issues in
a more efficient way. The author’s fall back position, that
what happens in the Senate is meaningful simply because that
body must approve all potential laws, is much more reason-
able, and the entire book would have benefited from relying
on that more moderate justification for the importance of this
setting.
A second concern is a lack of convincing evidence that the
procedures associated with civil rights bills in the Senate are
in fact “abnormal.”Not enough attention is paid to such
works as Barbara Sinclair’sUnorthodox Lawmaking (1997),
which suggests that putatively unusual procedures have be-
come much more commonplace. In addition, the data mus-
tered in support of the central argument are weak. For
example, the final chapter presents figures to demonstrate
that typical civil rights bills are more likely than average bills
to be marked by numerous quorum and roll calls, longer
debates, and so on. It is not clear what is counted as an
average bill, but given the argument that civil rights deliber-
ation is unique, a better comparison would have been to
other contentious issues. That is, “average”bills may include
a large number of fairly inconsequential measures and thus
may be skewed toward a nonrepresentative level of consen-
sus. Further confusing this argument is the imprecise defini-
tion of abnormal procedures. At one point, for instance,
weakening amendments are referred to as an example of
traditional, normal deliberation. Later, the large number of
substantive amendments associated with civil rights bills are
cited as evidence of abnormal processes.
The purported divisiveness of the race issue, although
plausible, is not fully explored. For example, there is no
Book Reviews: AMERICAN POLITICS December 2001
1004
discussion of meaningful variation within the civil rights
policy realm. Certainly, race is a divisive issue, but some
questions are far more controversial than others, and Moore
ignores the literature that suggests this. In addition, Moore
never comes to terms with an ever-present foil to this
argument. Despite her insistence on some endemic feature of
race as the key to dissent in the Senate, she cites several
examples in which uncommitted senators insisted on substan-
tial concessions in return for their support, not because they
objected to civil rights gains per se, but because of the
increased federal role the original bills represented. Thus, the
asserted ubiquitous lack of consensus on racial issues never
becomes fully apparent.
Overall, Governing Race is a useful approach, with a
political science orientation, to one significant aspect of civil
rights policymaking in the United States. It does not
completely achieve its stated goals, but scholars and
students alike will learn from it and will gain a new under-
standing of civil rights policy creation as a systematically
difficult process.
Before Roe: Abortion Policy in the States. By Rosemary
Nossiff. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001.
195p. $69.50 cloth, $21.95 paper.
Raymond Tatalovich, Loyola University Chicago
Twenty years ago, when I coauthored a case study of the
abortion controversy (Raymond Tatalovich and Byron W.
Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 1981), few books tackled
that subject, but in the years since there has been an
overabundance of books on abortion. What immediately
comes to mind is: Why yet another one? Detailed case studies
of pre-Roe abortion politics have been published on five
states (California, Georgia, Hawaii, North Carolina, and
Texas), and adding New York and Pennsylvania hardly seems
enough justification for this book. The more important
rationale for Nossiff is that these neighboring states are
similar demographically (except for the Jewish presence in
New York), but their abortion policies before the 1973
landmark ruling diverged sharply. New York enacted the
most permissive abortion-on-demand statute in the period
before 1973, and Pennsylvania tightened a restrictive but
somewhat ambiguous statute.
Nossiff’s objective is to analyze the interactions among the
Catholic conferences, political parties, and interest groups at
the mass and elite levels, based on the framing strategies by
ideological adversaries, group mobilization, the antagonists’
political resources, and most important the permeability of
the party system. To veteran observers of abortion politics,
her chronicle of events will be less interesting than her
theoretical packaging of this political story. Although
prochoice won in New York and prolife prevailed in Penn-
sylvania, Nossiff finds parallels insofar as the victors in both
states fully exploited their political advantages.
Discourse looms large as an explanatory factor. For exam-
ple, New York advocates shifted the framing of abortion
from a medical problem to one of women’s rights and, in the
process, became one with the newly emerging women’s
movement. The Catholic opposition remained rigidly anti-
abortion in its framing of the issue, with the result that in
New York it could not embrace therapeutic reforms to head
off demands for repeal. One troubling aspect of viewing
discourse in purely instrumental terms is that the reader may
forget that, for single-issue activists and most assuredly
people who are religious, ideas have worth, and they bring an
intensity of commitment to moral conflicts that sets issues
like abortion apart from the rest.
Why did Catholic intransigence pay off in Pennsylvania but
falter in New York? The answer is the party system—
Nossiff’s critical variable—or more precisely the Democratic
Party. Abortion pitted reform against machine Democrats in
both states. But the Pennsylvania machine Democrats, in
league with the Catholic Church, regained their political
hegemony against reformers who operated in the elitist
tradition of old Philadelphia, whereas in New York City a
grassroots slugfest between factions gave rise to a strong
reformist contingent within the statewide Democratic Party.
Borrowing from social movement theorists, Nossiff argues
that the changed political opportunity structure, manifested
as intraparty rivalry, allowed the proabortionists to gain
policy leverage and ultimately prevail within the New York
legislature.
Nossiff states that recent cross-sectional analysis of pre-Roe
abortion policies in the fifty states neglects intraparty com-
petition (that empirical analysis indicates party competition
was negatively related to state abortion reform). Yet, I
wonder whether New York and Pennsylvania were not both
outliers in the politics of abortion at the time. Most of the
early abortion reform states were southern, and conservative
Democrats still reigned unchallenged, although they saw fit
to enact therapeutic reforms at a time when most northern
two-party states did not. Furthermore, just how many states,
North or South, were characterized by machine versus reform
cleavages within one of the major political parties? In other
words, Nossiff gives detailed accounts of what transpired in
these two jurisdictions, but her key insight has limited
relevance to the dynamics of abortion politics among the