Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. By Wendy Brown. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 282p. $29.95.

Globalization, population migration, multiculturalism, identity politics, 9/11, and the war on terror—if one thinks of tolerance as an art for reconciling differences, then the need for it would seem to be greater than ever. However, tolerance, as T. M. Scanlon argues (The Difficulty of Tolerance, 2003), is never easy. At the very least, it means acknowledging that other people whom I dislike are entitled to the same legal protections as I am and should be equally free to decide how to live their lives. Asking me to avert my eyes or look away from those beliefs and ways of life that I find repugnant may mean that tolerance comes close to being an “impossible virtue” (Bernard Williams, “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?” in David Heyd, ed., Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, 1996), but the alternative—intolerance—seems a nonstarter. So for many of us the choice between tolerance and intolerance seems easy. Indeed, many liberals assume that tolerance is a defining feature of any decent society.

Completed in 2005, Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism is based on extensive research conducted by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. This book belongs to what one might call the quantitative school of terrorism studies, as it relies mainly on data gathered on suicide attacks and their perpetrators over the last two decades. Its author takes issue with the conclusions of those who stress the importance of the doctrine of Islam in the shaping of the suicide terror phenomenon. Such a debate is part and parcel of a wider dispute within U.S. academia, boosted by 9/11 and its Iraqi aftermath, though it was already rooted in the “Orientalism” battle back in the 1980s. However, it also touches on an ongoing conflict between scholarship and partisanship: Should academics take sides and advocate specific policies, at the risk of submitting their scholarly credentials to the political goals they champion, or should they shun away from politics, at the risk of remaining clad in their ivory tower while social debates rage, uninfluenced by their expertise? The issue of terrorism is crucial to that matter.Gilles Kepel is professor and chair of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, Sciences Po, Paris.

Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge. By Roxanne L. Euben. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 330p. $29.95.

Travel narratives, as Mikhail Bakhtin once noted, have a dialogic quality. Putting the unfamiliar into conversation with the familiar, they have the capacity to deepen our understanding of each. Travelers themselves have a third voice in this exchange, at times standing in each culture but never becoming located completely in either. At their best, then, travel narratives reflect multiple positions, connect multiple traditions, and speak to multiple audiences. They transgress the boundaries that most people take as given or fixed, and in the resulting blur of borders, they open new conceptual and imaginative spaces.

Bounded Divinities: Sacred Discourses in Pluralist Democracies. By Fred M. Frohock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 272p. $69.95.

While authors such as Michael Perry challenge liberal thinkers such as Bruce Ackerman and John Rawls to move beyond their neutral rendering of political discourse in order to foster an ecumenical politics between secular and spiritual perspectives, Fred Frohock contends that the public discourse of liberal theory cannot grasp the supernatural basis of sacred discourses. Instead, Frohock contends that “thin” realism (p. 159), found in international relations theory, can better negotiate the tensions between secular and religious discourses in pluralist democracies: “[R]elationships between secular and the sacred, religion and politics, church and state, are settled by the great political languages of stability, efficiency, equity, and power (among other collective level terms), not the metaphors of walls and spheres” (p. 197).

To Restore American Democracy: Political Education and the Modern University. Edited by Robert E. Calvert. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 288p. $75.00 cloth, $28.95 paper.

Power to the People: Teaching Political Philosophy in Skeptical Times. By Avner de-Shalit. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 224p. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The authors of these two books are concerned with a similar question, namely, how can scholars support their students in becoming engaged citizens? Political theorists and philosophers often wrestle with this question as a personal and professional quandary. Many researchers, particularly those whose scholarship is concerned with political questions, wonder to what extent their ideas relate to political reality in a practical way. Can ideas influence, even alter, the processes or norms of behavior in the actual political domain? If what we do is political theory or philosophy, what is political about it? Both books reviewed here grapple with these questions in the context of teaching in higher education institutions.

Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony. By Anthony J. Parel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 240p. $75.00.

Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home. By Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 272p. $45.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.

It is perhaps fitting that a political leader who chose to title his autobiography “The Story of My Experiments with Truth,” should himself be regarded today as an open text, one worthy of continuous reinterpretation as times change. Mohandas Gandhi was an unusual political leader in too many ways: in his emphasis on nonviolence and truth-force (Satyagraha) as instruments of political change during the decades dominated by world wars, genocide, and imperialism; in a relentless refusal to separate ethics from politics but possessed of an uncanny sense for the political jugular of his much stronger opponents; in the crafty use of emerging media to outflank the colonial regime alongside his ready sense of humor and quick repartee; in his ascetic lifestyle and sartorial tastes; and in the eclectic and truly universal range of philosophical and intellectual sources of his thought. He was an early critic of modern industrial civilization during the era of its hegemonic sway, and saw little point in independence if all it meant was Indians gaining sovereignty to do unto themselves what alien rule had been doing to them in the name of modernization.

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. By Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 312p. $60.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Michel Foucault is the man who gave us trenchant critiques of modernity in books such as Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. His arguments about the body, power, and knowledge have influenced a number of interdisciplinary studies and created a generation of “Foucauldians.” However, one set of his writings has been decidedly uninfluential: the set pertaining to the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79. Those journalistic essays—written for the Italian and French press (Corriere della serra and Nouvel Observateur)—are the subject of this fascinating and comprehensive volume by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson.

Naming Evil, Judging Evil. Edited by Ruth W. Grant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 232p. $35.00.

Interdisciplinarity is much praised and rarely practiced. Too often, it boils down to a sociologist adding a few anthropological works to a bibliography, or a geographer applying for a political science grant. The ideal of learning from and engaging with other intellectual traditions and conceptualizations is easily lost.

J. S. Mill's Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment. Edited by Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 400p. $85.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

John Stuart Mill is as famous for his celebrated contradictions as for the originality of his thinking. What else should we expect from a disciple of the likes of Bentham and Coleridge, Saint-Simon and Tocqueville, Wilhelm Von Humboldt and Auguste Comte? Much of the two centuries since Mill's birth has been spent trying to figure out how all of these diverse influences can be made to fit together into one tidy package, and this may explain why there are almost as many renditions of J. S. Mill as there are Mill interpreters. Simultaneously heralded as the poster child of libertarianism and of social control, defender of women's rights and whipping boy of contemporary feminists, aristocratic critic of democratic culture and defender of Athenian-style participatory democracy, a liberal reformer who condoned empire—the list of Mill's paradoxes goes on and on. What makes this volume such a breath of fresh air is the way these essays build upon, without duplicating, traditional interpretations. Original, illuminating, and suggestive of altogether new directions in Mill scholarship, this collection should carry us well into the third full century of engagement with his life and political thought.

Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century. By Lisa Anderson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 176p. $29.00.

The large question looming over this series of lectures by Lisa Anderson is the perennial problem of the relationship between social inquiry and political practice. Her engagement with this issue takes the explicit form of parsing the political—and specifically the public policy—aspirations, achievements, and failures of American academic social science from its founding in the late nineteenth century to the present. None of this is new territory, and Anderson's debt to the historical and analytical work of many (for her, mostly contemporary) scholars is both obvious and readily acknowledged (p. x). However, it is not really Anderson's intent to make a contribution to the historical or philosophical literature; rather, this is an argument with a definitively presentist goal, namely, understanding the conditions that define (as the title of her book intimates) what it means to be committed to a public role for scholarship and scholars today.

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. By Daniel Carey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 276p. $85.00.

Daniel Carey rehabilitates a dispute among John Locke, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson “focused on the problem of diversity and the question of whether any moral consistency could be located in mankind” (p. 1). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in distinct ways respond to Locke's attack on innateness, the idea that “God had implanted ideas or predispositions in the soul which guided the moral actions and beliefs of mankind” (p. 51). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson do so by evoking a “Stoic conception which saw nature as a fund of normative ideas, predispositions, or prolepses that embraced benevolence, sociability, disinterested affection, and the divine, explaining our attachments to friend, family, and nation” (p. 200).

Poverty and Inequality. Edited by David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 200p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Capabilities Equality: Basic Issues and Problems. Edited by Alexander Kaufman. New York: Routledge, 2005. 224p. $125.00.

Two trends, each a generation in the making, have affected the recent study of poverty and inequality. In 1979, Amartya Sen asked “Equality of What?” in his Tanner Lecture at Stanford University. There, and in numerous articles and books since, Sen and his collaborators developed a rich account of poverty, inequality, and of human well-being more generally considered. This work, though its original basis was in the classical political economy of subsistence and human freedom, grew to be buttressed by a wide range of ethical, social, and other economic matters. In so doing, it encouraged the development of the second trend, the greater interweaving of developments in the different social sciences and in political and philosophical theory that might be brought to bear on the consideration of poverty and inequality. There has come to be a greater understanding by economists, sociologists, political theorists, and philosophers of what they might learn from one another.

Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship. By Susan D. Collins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 206p. $70.00.

Plato and the Virtue of Courage. By Linda R. Rabieh. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 224p. $45.00.

Why do we need books about courage and civic virtue, written by ancient philosophers in an idiom so difficult for moderns such as ourselves to understand? How could such books be relevant in post–9/11 days? The whole world saw civic courage right before their eyes in the aftermath of the Twin Towers' attack. The last thing one would think Americans needed today is instruction in what constitutes courage or civic virtue more generally. Yet Americans would be decidedly wrong in thinking so skeptically. The books under review demonstrate why.

Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force. By James Boyd White. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 256p. $29.95.

James Boyd White's recent work is as impressive as his earlier work in terms of the clarity of argument, the originality of thought, and the commitment to social analysis that incorporates language analysis, legal theory, and ethics. While drawing from current theories of language, White does not quite belong in the postmodern tradition because he searches for authentic representations of thoughts and emotions. This brings him closer to phenomenology. His title phrase, “living speech,” taken from Simone Weil, sets forth his primary argument. He makes a distinction between living speech, which represents genuine, creative thought, and “dead speech,” which reiterates slogans, clichés, and speech patterns from a culture's ideologies, including advertising and propaganda. Dead speech endeavors to get the listener to act in a prescribed way, while living speech tries to persuade the listener to see the virtues of an argument. White's goal is to encourage living speech in order to move societies closer to love and justice. Like the postmoderns, he believes that speech is the foundational human activity because it conveys the imagination, but unlike postmoderns, he wants to talk about the ways in which speech articulates aspects of a human mind by making meaning.

The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition. By Roger Berkowitz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 234p. $49.95.

Roger Berkowitz's The Gift of Science is about the genesis and development of legal codification from its birth in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's work to the German Civil Code of 1900. Leibniz's legal writings have been long neglected and this study is to be commended for bringing these writings back to our attention. Berkowitz charts the development of Leibniz's legal thought from his early to mature writings, illuminating Leibniz's surprisingly helpful reflections on the nature of law.

Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism. By Janet Halley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 418p. $29.95.

Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking. Edited by Lori Jo Marso and Patricia Moynagh. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 136p. $50.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.

Dispelling the myth of the given, probing the tacit presuppositions of dominant discourses, challenging the naturalization of oppressive relations, investigating processes that produce invisibility, demonstrating the deficiencies of reductive arguments, and engaging difference and plurality have been hallmarks of feminist scholarship in general and of feminist theory in particular. Through sustained engagement with canonical texts, disciplinary discourses, and historical and contemporary events, feminist theorists have enabled new ways of seeing and thinking. Has feminist theory exhausted its potential, or worse, become an impediment to emancipatory projects? These two works provide markedly different responses to these questions.

Reconstructing the Commercial Republic: Constitutional Design after Madison. By Stephen L. Elkin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 416p. $35.00.

In this engaging book, Stephen L. Elkin offers an account of the politics necessary to realize the nation's aspirations for an American commercial republic, in which economic inequality is dramatically reduced, citizens engage in meaningful (and surprisingly powerful) local government, and both they and their representatives deliberate to promote the good of all. The starting point for Elkin's analysis is a familiar list of what ails America: growing economic inequality, declining “civic and political involvement,” economic insecurity particularly among the middle class, as well as weakening family structure. He argues that we will never resolve these problems until we first have a “compelling and comprehensive theory of republican political constitution” (p. 2). Although no clear explanation is given for what it means to have such a theory, Elkin implies that such a theory would be based on the interrelation of the economic and political order.

Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought. By Michael Hanchard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 352p. $35.00.

“What does contemporary political and social theory look like when viewed from a vantage point of a black life-world?” (p. 8). Crucial though this question is—particularly at a moment when U.S. citizens are deeply divided across racial lines on a wide array of political issues—it remains largely neglected by political scientists. Michael Hanchard responds to this inattention by presenting a dazzling, learned tour of the contours of contemporary black political thought. Moving fluently from the local to the national to the hemispheric to the global and traversing disciplinary lines at the same time, Party/Politics has much to offer scholars in multiple fields, both within political science and beyond. At the risk of understating this larger contribution, this review will focus on the example it sets for the practice of political theory.

On Justification: Economies of Worth. By Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. Translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 400p. $85.00 cloth, $39.50 paper.

Those interested in any of a variety of fields—reasoning about justice, the foundations and mechanics of social interaction, rational action, value formation, norm change, or conflict—will find rich potential in this ambitious and challenging book by sociologist Luc Boltanski and economist/statistician Laurent Thévenot, which does not fit into any single research paradigm. Published in France more than 15 years ago, the book is available in this English translation and ought to have a significant impact on social theory generally.

The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy. By Bruce Ackerman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 266p. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

As the title of this book indicates, Bruce Ackerman does not believe that the Founding Fathers produced a finished, or flawless, frame of government in 1787. In particular, their method for selecting the president of the United States was ill-conceived and left critical questions of procedure unanswered and open to contestation. These failures aggravated the controversy surrounding the presidential election of 1800, when neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson won a majority in the Electoral College and Federalists in the outgoing House of Representatives nearly threw the election to Aaron Burr. As the House deliberated, the governors of Massachusetts and Virginia readied their militias to prevent each other's favorite son from stealing the election. Ackerman suggests that a civil war was avoided only by the statesmanship of Adams and Jefferson and the unraveling of a plot to install John Marshall as acting president.