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These two books by leading U.S. philosopher Martha Nussbaum take up the issue of women's inequality in a U.S. and international context. Both are hard-hitting, in Nussbaum's characteristic take-no-prisoners style, setting out a clear case that women endure ignominious oppression in the name of culture and religion, and that feminists and liberals alike should tolerate it no longer.

Religion and politics is a burgeoning subfield. Liberalism–communitarian literature now includes attention to religious communities. Theorists of civil society recognize that religious organizations implement a considerable range of policies. Since pluralism entails the presence of multiple voices in public conversation, theorists debate how a liberal society should treat religious voices. Theorists within religious traditions debate the bearing of faith on political action and the extent to which churches should cooperate with state institutions.

In this witty and contemporaneous essay, Arnold J. Meltsner, as a modern-day Machiavelli, offers advice to government and corporate leaders on the human pitfalls of seeking, evaluating, and using advice. Drawing examples mainly from the Oval Office and recent history, he examines the factors that affect decision making and proposes rules to help rulers maintain vigilance over their advisers and remain sensitive to the politics of personal influence and persuasion. Meltsner sees the advisory situation as dramatic, so he uses the metaphor of a play with four key scenes to describe the psychological and social context. Presenting numerous situations that arise during these scenes, Meltsner extrapolates about a half-dozen rules from each scene in this play. Specific, practical advice shapes his commentary: for example, 'Keep the inner circle small ...Be careful about revealing your own preferences ...Recognize partial views including your own ...Avoid public protest resignations'.In addition to the ruler-adviser relationship, the author discusses secrecy and leaks, the structure within which rulers make decisions, and the various ways of calibrating advice. Using sometimes humorous and sometimes painful examples, Meltsner demonstrates that rulers' reactions to advice are often based on such factors as expertise, trust, prior performance, predilections, and consensus. 'Rulers should temper their notion of the loyal adviser as an extension of themselves and not assume that they and their advisers are one'. Local and national leaders, military generals, industrial managers, and CEOs rulers of all kinds can surely benefit from this advice. Author note: Arnold J. Meltsner is Professor of Public Policy Emeritus at the Graduate School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley.

These 14 essays range as far and wide as the sprawling title of this collection implies. The papers originated at a 1999 interdisciplinary conference at Berry College on politics, religion, and community. Most of the authors teach at Southern colleges. They come not only from political science and government departments but also from philosophy, English, sociology, religion, and theology departments. Twelve of the 14 are male. On first glance the collection might appear to be “traditional.” Indeed, many of the essays, e.g., Daniel Mahoney's treatment of Solzhenitsyn on “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” explicitly raise religious themes and questions.

The fate of Russia's economic and political reforms is the subject of this interpretative history of the last years of the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin period, The book provides a useful, if controversial, introduction to the events of this crucial period in Russian political development, from 1990 to 1999. Special attention is given to the events surrounding important turning points in Russian history; there are particularly detailed treatments of the August 1991 coup, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin's forcible disbanding of the parliament in October 1993. In the end, though, the large number of events the authors seek to analyze is a liability because it tends to detract from and dilute the main argument.

When is freedom possible? In the silence of a shared heartbeat, when desire is not consumed by the wounds of social forces, hubris, or the historical memory of such violations. According to Cynthia Willett, the locus of that desire is in the socially embedded person. She argues that crimes against the individual as a social person constitute political wounds that should be healed via emancipatory love (p. 214).

What does liberalism imply about our duties to minority cultures, and what do the claims of such cultures imply about the nature of liberalism? These may seem like different ways of asking roughly the same question and, in a sense, so they are. Both formulations invite us to consider the relationship between liberalism and diversity, and both do so in the specific context of group, as distinct from individual, identity. However, and as these two books demonstrate, it makes a difference which question we take as our starting point. Emily Gill begins with a question about the fundamental commitments of liberalisn, and having answered that question, she then goes on to investigate the implications for cultural membership. By contrast, Monique Deveaux begins by asking what justice requires for cultural minorities, and having answered that question, she then goes on to investigate the implications for our understanding of liberal democratic theory and practice.

It was New York Governor Al Smith's famous dictum that the ills of democracy could be solved with more democracy. Many agree with him some 75 years later. The shelves of political science overflow with books lamenting the decline of intermediary institutions that once plugged the hearts and minds of citizens into government and civic life. Democracy scaled down to the town and neighborhood allows people to address problems that are experienced in the routine of everyday life. Stripped of abstraction, politics loses its mystery and the sense of alienation that accompanies it. But Americans no longer gather at the political club, the town meeting, the church, and the union hall. Citizens are plugged into television, the family, or perhaps the job, interested in private concerns. In response, pundits, professors, and politicians call for a revival of local political and civic life. President George W. Bush's “Faith-Based Initiative,” which would use federal funds to support church social service programs, can be viewed as a response to the national mood of a people adrift. While many have forwarded tiresome critiques of what ails us, Kenneth Thomson does the nitty-gritty empirical work that should mark social science's unique contribution to this debate.

In Rational Choice and British Politics, Iain McLean applies William Riker's concept of “heresthetics” to British political history. In contrast to rhetoric (the art of persuasion), heresthetics is “the art and science of political manipulation” (p. 10). Rather than trying to convince others of one's position, heresthetics is about transforming the question and altering political dimensions so as to change the rational calculus of key actors and manufacture a supportive coalition. McLean employs the device of “analytical narratives” (historical analysis informed by rational choice methodology) to explore critical junctures in British political development, including the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Second Reform Act, the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, and the political and economic revolution of Margaret Thatcher. He also explores broader political movements, including the realignment of Victorian political parties and the attempts by Joseph Chamberlain and Enoch Powell to connect race and empire into winning coalitions.

Liberal multiculturalism contains a tension. It values culture as the source of individual identity and development, and seeks to accommodate cultural differences by granting the relevant groups special rights, exemptions, and, in some cases, varying degrees of autonomy. However, it also values basic individual rights that some of these groups might deny or severely curtail, especially in relation to women. Liberal multiculturalism is therefore faced with a conflict between what it takes to be two important goods, or what Ayelet Shachar calls the paradox of multicultural vulnerability. If it privileges cultural differences, it compromises and even jettisons its liberalism; if it privileges individual rights, it ceases to be multicultural. Is there a way of conceptualizing and organizing society such that both these goods can be realized? Shachar thinks there is, and devotes her thoughtful and well-argued book to outlining and defending it.

The publication of Dana Villa's Socratic Citizenship coincides accidentally with recent events that have shaken and solidified American society. Yet the issues his book addresses are directly relevant to how a democratic society confronts such challenges. Villa investigates various forms of democratic citizenship and argues for a kind of civic activity that has been dangerously obscured within modern debates about democracy. Particularly within periods of regime stress, liberalism's good citizen who votes, pays taxes, and plays by the rules seems underequipped to meet the commitments the times require. The framework of the communitarians or the civic republicans wherein one discovers the value of “a shared commitment to something bigger than one's self… [endorsing a] life of community or civic engagement” (p. x) seems more helpful. Villa's concern is that this view of citizenship too easily enlists the community's members in projects of collective affirmation, while ignoring the importance of a critical rationality that asks skeptical questions about the content and the moral consequences of a politics driven by a “newly rediscovered sense of political membership” (p. x). In response, he rediscovers the possibility of a form of citizenship that places “intellectual doubt at the heart of moral reflection,” demanding not commitment but conscientiousness (p. xii). It is this form of citizenship that seems most compatible with moral individualism, and thus with the basic premises of democracy. He plausibly finds the origin of this kind of citizenship in the practices of Socrates as they are portrayed within the early Platonic dialogues, Apology,Crito, and Gorgias.

Interest in strategic approaches to an understanding of judicial decision making, including the implications of the separation of powers (SOP), has grown dramatically in recent years. Unfortunately, almost all the research on these SOP interactions has been limited to those involving the U.S. Supreme Court. Laura Langer's book provides a refreshing alternative to the exclusive Supreme Court focus by examining the significance of separation of powers concerns for the exercise of judicial review by state supreme courts.

Benjamin Reilly makes an important contribution to the debate on the appropriate institutional design of electoral systems for mitigating conflict and sustaining democracy in ethnically plural societies. The dominant position in this debate posits the importance of proportional representation (PR) systems. An alternative position, less widely accepted largely because of an ostensible absence of empirical examples, posits the importance of majoritarian preferential systems that encourage cross-ethnic vote pooling. Reilly extends this debate by drawing on heretofore unknown or understudied cases to examine the operation of both majoritarian (the alternative vote or AV and the supplementary vote or SV) and proportional (single-transferable vote or STV) preferential systems in different social contexts and in different elections (legislative and presidential).

The once-formidable Japanese economy has fallen upon hard times. After posting a roughly double-digit rate of real annual growth from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, and generally outperforming the economies of other advanced industrial democracies during the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese economy suffered a prolonged period of stagnation throughout most of the 1990s. Given this dramatic reversal, Bai Gao sets about the ambitious task not only of explaining why the Japanese economy has soured, but of providing a broad institutional framework that underscores the common factors behind the high growth period, the bubble economy of the 1980s, and the collapse of the bubble in the 1990s. To achieve this task, Gao applies what he terms “the logic of reverse reasoning”; he takes the rise and collapse of the bubble economy as the “starting point fortheoretical reasoning,” examining the institutional mechanisms that purportedly produced it. He then works backward in time to reexamine how these institutional mechanisms operated during the high-growth era, and to identify the “environmental changes” that account for the reasons these institutional mechanisms produced such varied outcomes over time (pp. 6–7).

One of the most vexing questions posed over time by political scientists is: Why do democratic polities develop in some countries, but not in others? In his seminal work Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1986), still read today by most students of comparative politics, Barrington Moore strove to answer that question by examining the historical process in which commercial agriculture emerged in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China. In his book, Fernando López-Alves takes the framework that Moore provided and applies it to three countries in Latin America whose trajectories in the nineteenth century led to different polities and experiences with democracy—Argentina, Colombia, and Uruguay (he also makes brief reference to Paraguay and Venezuela as so-called control cases). While conceding the need for “further testing” (p. 220), he arrives at conclusions that differ significantly from Moore's, even though he does not attempt to dismiss that earlier work.

Nowadays, it is easy to forget just how pessimistic observers were in 1990 about the possibility of simultaneously introducing capitalism and competitive politics to the ex-socialist states of Eastern Europe. Often, debates seemed to hinge simply on which would subvert which, that is, whether the economic shocks of reform would destabilize democratic governments or whether populist appeals to the losers of economic adjustment would derail economic reform. That popularly elected government and systemic economic change could mutually reinforce each other seemed, at the time, to describe a fool's paradise. Yet now that the dust has begun to settle, this appears to have been exactly what happened.

J. Ann Tickner's Gendering World Politics revisits—in the best sense of the term—many of the same themes she explored in her pathbreaking 1992 book, Gender in International Relations. The current volume comes almost a decade after that first book appeared—a decade during which both the field of international relations and the subfield of feminist IR have seen dramatic change and, especially in the case of the latter, exponential growth. Gendering World Politics brings us up to date on the current state of debates within IR and provides a thoroughgoing and sophisticated introduction to what is now a very sizable feminist IR literature. Perhaps the most important contribution of this book, however, is that it allows Tickner to move forward an agenda she has been exploring for a number of years now, to encourage “conversations” between mainstream and feminist IR, and, in particular, to ask why authentic conversations, despite a decade of both turmoil and growth, have not been more forthcoming. As she writes in the Preface, “I have spent much of this time trying to understand why the intellectual gulf between different IR approaches is so wide and why conversations between proponents of these various approaches can be so difficult” (p. x).