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The Environment: Between Theory and Practice. By Avner de-Shalit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 238p. $60.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Although there is a lot of it about, environmental philosophy has [...]

Richard Sakwa (ed.), The Experience of Democratization in Eastern Europe; Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995. Basingstoke: Macmillan, and New York: [...]

Christopher Rootes (ed.), Environmental Movements: Local, National and Global (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 316 pp., 17.50 [pounds sterling], ISBN 0 7146 8066 4. Social movements have a habit of getting [...]

Justice and the Environment: Conceptions of Environmental Sustainability and Dimensions of Social Justice. By Andrew Dobson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 280p. $55.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: [...]

Michael Saward, The Terms of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 205 pp., $42.95 (pbk), ISBN 0745 61991 6. From the severely analytical tendency of the Tasmanian Diaspora comes this fine [...]

Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (eds), A New Handbook of Political Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 845 pp., $130, ISBN 0 19 828015 7. The first Handbook of [...]

Most political theory still proceeds as if the human world floats free from nature. Yet arguably, environmental limits now pose the most fundamental question for both politics and political theory; [...]

If the allocation and distribution of goods and burdens is central to both politics and economics, then Local Justice should cover some crucial issues in political economy. The topic is narrowed somewhat by Elster's focus on scarce and mostly indivisible goods and burdens as allocated in kind by purposeful and autonomous governmental bodies to identifiable individuals. The problems covered therefore include human organs, military service, (French) sperm, college admissions, adoption, child custody, immigration, employment layoffs, and wartime rationing. Obviously, a lot of scarce goods and burdens are excluded by this definition--as are goods that do not involve scarcity, such as places in heaven as allocated by God (Elster seems unaware of Christian sects that put numerical limits on this good). Justice is local in the sense that it is confined to the particular good or burden as allocated by a particular autonomous institution, be it a draft board, court, or admissions office. Variety in local justice problems is matched by a proliferation of principles, rules, and mechanisms for allocation. The latter covers everything from lotteries and points systems to seniority and professional discretion. Rarely can any particular mechanism prove superior on all criteria in a particular case--let alone across all cases. Schemes that try to incorporate multiple principles can become baroque, if not bizarre. The world of local justice according to Elster is a diverse and complicated place--hardly, it would seem, a single world at all. But Elster strives valiantly to impose some order on this chaos by categorizing allocation principles, looking at the consequences of particular principles and combinations, and explaining why principles and mechanisms are adopted. Along the way, the reader is sensitized to the often-perverse incentive effects of seemingly justifiable principles. (Individuals can go to great lengths to affect their eligibility, such as having children or removing a body part to avoid the draft.) The explanations for why principles are adopted stress public opinion, professional norms, national characteristics, and political mechanisms for preference aggregation. When all is said and done, few generalizations across cases prove possible, still less any general theory of local justice; and Elster consciously retreats from this objective. Though in several places he brings his customary analytical acuity to bear, the analysis and discussion (and thus the book) prove radically particularistic. Nevertheless, Elster provides all kinds of useful insights into what he refers to as the phenomenology of local justice. The reader learns a great deal about the sheer variety of ways to allocate goods and burdens, from the complex ways children are tested for eligibility for admission to Norwegian kindergartens to the ingenious methods college admissions officers in the United States have used to limit the enrollments of particular ethnic groups. By the end of this exercise, the reader also has a feel for the general inapplicability of general theories of justice as advanced by moral philosophers. The usual suspects--utilitarianism, Rawls, and Nozick--make an appearance in chapter 6. Despite the occasional parallel that can be drawn between a local justice practice and these philosophical principles, the more frequent case seems to involve substantial divergence. Elster goes on to induce (somewhat impressionistically) a 'common-sense' theory of justice held by most decision makers, involving maximization of total welfare, subject to a democratically defined floor for individual welfare and excluding people who drop beneath it through their own informed choice. The articulation of this commonsense principle is the closest Elster comes to a conclusion, and the final chapter contains only an agenda for future research. The lack of any more general concluding statement may, in fairness, be partly a function of the subject matter. Local Justice remains an instructive volume which should be remembered as one of the better books published by Jon Elster in 1992.