This is my final introduction as editor of Perspectives on Politics, and I'll conclude with a few thanks and hopes. But my main task here is to introduce the articles in this issue. They cluster around two themes—leadership and dilemmas of action (those themes are, of course, intimately related).

Political theorists seldom have direct experience of power. Bringing together two decades of experience in educational leadership and my vocation as a political theorist, I offer advice to prospective leaders. This essay takes Machiavelli's Prince as a model in terms of format, and occasionally draws on his prose, either in agreement or to offer a different opinion. I emphasize the importance of context and organizational type in thinking about leadership, and of paying attention to what leaders actually do. I describe some of the qualities that often prove helpful to leaders, and discuss the distinctive attractions and pitfalls of power-holding.Nannerl O. Keohane is Laurance Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School and the Center for Human Values, Princeton University (nkeohane@princeton.edu). From 1981 until 2004, she served as President of Wellesley College and then of Duke University. She is the author of Philosophy and the State in France and essays on political philosophy, education and feminism. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as the Godkin Lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, in February 2005. I acknowledge with gratitude comments on earlier drafts from colleagues at Harvard, Stanford, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, especially from Charles Griswold, Robert O. Keohane, James G. March, Norman Naimark, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Josiah Ober, and Samuel Popkin. I am also grateful to the assistant to the editor at Perspectives on Politics who suggested that I recast the lecture in the spirit of Machiavelli's The Prince. The reader who is familiar with this work will note multiple occasions where I have used his tone and even occasionally his prose, with minimal emendations, to make my own points, sometimes in agreement and sometimes in dissent, but without direct citation. After the essay was submitted for review, Harvey Mansfield made a number of helpful suggestions and drew my attention to Carnes Lord's The Modern Prince, which also uses Machiavelli's treatise as a “literary model of sorts.”

The scale, scope, and significance of humanitarian action have expanded significantly since the late 1980s. This article reflects on two ways in which humanitarianism has been transformed. First, its purpose has been politicized. Whereas once humanitarian actors attempted to insulate themselves from the world of politics, they now work closely with states and attempt to eliminate the root causes of conflict that place individuals at risk. Second, a field of humanitarianism has become institutionalized; during the 1990s the field and its agencies became more professionalized and rationalized. Drawing on various strands of organizational theory, I examine the forces that have contributed to these transformations. I then explore how these transformations have changed the nature of what humanitarian organizations are and what they do. In the conclusion I consider how the transformation of humanitarianism links to the relationship between international nongovernmental organizations and world order, including the purpose of humanitarian action and its distinctive function in global politics.Michael Barnett is Harold Stassen Chair of International Relations at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and professor of political science at the University of Minnesota (mbarnett@hhh.umn.edu). In 2004–5 he was a visiting associate at the Center on International Cooperation at the Center on International Cooperation. The author thanks Bud Duvall, Kevin Hartigan, Martha Finnemore, Abby Stoddard, Ron Kassimir, Craig Calhoun, Jack Snyder, Adele Harmer, the participants of the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium, and three anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics for their comments and corrections. Special thanks to the Social Sciences Research Council and the participants in its series on “The Transformation of Humanitarian Action.”

Michael Barnett has written a brilliant—and sobering—analysis of the dilemmas of humanitarian organizations in contemporary global politics. He argues convincingly that humanitarianism is becoming politicized and that humanitarian organizations are becoming institutionalized. These changes speak to core conceptualizations by humanitarians of themselves and to their capacity to fulfill their most essential functions. Barnett appropriately draws attention to the unexpected, counterintuitive, and at times undesirable consequences of politicization and institutionalization, particularly for ethics and identity. Humanitarian organizations, he concludes, are now far more vulnerable to external control, to the ability of states to constrain their practices and principles. By implication, Barnett concludes, politicization and institutionalization produce negative consequences for humanitarianism. Power is changing what humanitarian organizations do and what they are.Janice Stein is Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto (j.stein@utoronto.ca).

The Amish are often cited as a paradigm illiberal group, mistrustful of and separated from the modern world. But the Amish practice of rumspringa complicates this common image. At age 16, Amish children are released from church strictures and given a year or more to “run around” in violation of Amish norms. Only after the opportunity to taste life with cars, electricity, alcohol, and rock and roll do Amish-raised teens decide whether to be baptized and enter the church. Consent must be express, never tacit: to paraphrase Locke, an Amish youth is born a member of no church. But is rumspringa a meaningful exit option? Are there plausible ways to make it more meaningful? What does this practice suggest about the debate between “toleration” and “autonomy” liberals, who divide over whether illiberal minority cultures ought to be accepted or somehow reformed? This paper brings a potent case study to the cultural rights debate and argues that both sides fundamentally err. While tolerance liberals tend to vastly underestimate what is required of a meaningful right of exit, autonomy liberals fail to appreciate how much intervention would be necessary to provide such a right. The Amish case suggests that the exit option is deeply flawed as the litmus test for whether and how minorities should be accommodated in a liberal polity.Steven V. Mazie is assistant professor of politics at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan and has taught previously at Bard College, New York University, and the University of Michigan (smazie@bard.edu). His articles have appeared recently in Polity, Field Methods, and The Brandywine Review of Faith and International Affairs. His first book, Israel's Higher Law: Religion and Liberal Democracy in the Jewish State, is forthcoming in early 2006. Earlier versions of this article were delivered at annual meetings of the Western Political Science Association (2003) and the Midwestern Political Science Association (2004) and in a Bard High School Early College Faculty Seminar (2005). The author would like to thank anonymous reviewers, the editors of Perspectives on Politics, and particularly Jennifer Hochschild for their valuable suggestions and criticisms. In addition, he is grateful to Herman Bontrager, Harry Chotiner, Andrey Falko, John Hagan, JoAnne Jensen, Donald Kraybill, Chandran Kukathas, Emile Lester, Carol Levy, Renanit Levy, Marc Olshan, Marek Steedman, Conrad Stern-Ascher, Jennifer Sutton, Lucy Walker, David Wiacek, Ed Wingenbach, Joe Wittmer, and Lee Zook.

Europeanization has brought radical change to the governance practices of all European Union (EU) member states, and these practices have clashed with traditional ideas about democracy. The degree to which EU member states have been affected is largely a matter of institutional fit. The EU, as a compound supranational polity in which governing activity is highly diffused through multiple authorities, has been more disruptive to simple national polities such as Britain and France, in which governing has traditionally been channeled through a single authority, than to compound national polities such as Germany and Italy, in which it has traditionally also been diffused through multiple authorities.

The main problem for EU member states, however, is that national leaders have generally failed to develop new ideas and discourses to reflect Europeanized realities. But here too institutional differences matter. Simple polities are better positioned to address changes because their concentration of authority ensures them a more elaborate communicative discourse with the general public, in which they are able to speak with one voice, than are compound national polities, let alone the EU, given the number of potentially authoritative voices with differing messages.Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University (vschmidt@bu.edu). Her recent books include Policy Change and Discourse in Europe, coedited with C. Radaelli (2005), and The Futures of European Capitalism (2002). Her forthcoming book Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities (2006) explores the impact of the European integration on national democracies. This article is a revision of a paper prepared for presentation to the American Political Science Association National Meetings in Chicago, September 1–5, 2004.

Does the academic literature on U.S. immigration adequately capture the experiences of immigrants outside their traditional areas of concentration? This article reviews the three major fields of research in immigrant incorporation—economic, sociocultural, and political. It emphasizes the two most prominent conceptual frameworks in each: the human capital frame and the more recent sociological frame, which highlights “modes of incorporation” and “contexts of reception.” Although research in immigrants' political incorporation is less developed than its economic and sociological counterparts, I pay close attention to the ways in which structural and contextual factors shape participation. Immigrants' geographic dispersal complements this trend toward contextualism by providing greater variation in their places of destination; that variation can help advance the comparative research agenda.Helen B. Marrow is a doctoral candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University (marrow@wjh.harvard.edu). Preparation of this article was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT grant 98070661), a David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Summer Research Grant, a Center for American Political Studies Dissertation Fellowship in American Politics, and a partial Rural Poverty Research Institute Rural Poverty Dissertation Fellowship. Opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any of the supporting sources. Thanks to Mary Waters, Luisa Heredia, Jennifer Hochschild, Katherine Newman, William J. Wilson, and three anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on previous drafts.

In the wake of the Bush administration's use of executive power since 9/11, Abraham Lincoln's executive actions during the Civil War have received more attention than usual. Typically associated with the idea that constitutions should recede in favor of the rule of one during crisis situations, Lincoln's actions have been used on one side as the implicit and even explicit basis of presidential claims to increased power and on the other side as the example par excellence of what presidents should not do. Taking issue with this conventional interpretation and continuing the more recent scholarly recovery of Lincoln's profound concern for constitutionalism, I explicate the principles that guided Lincoln's use of executive power during the Civil War. By drawing out the importance of political necessity as the basis for “prerogative” over and against both popular approval and unlimited constitutional powers, I show how this principle also provides an alternative perspective and even an antidote to the current scholarly debate concerning whether constitutions are better preserved by “Jeffersonian” or “Hamiltonian” prerogative. Lincoln's example also shows us that we should not legalize, regularize, or institutionalize those powers that may be necessary to avert a crisis. Perhaps most importantly, Lincoln's statesmanship teaches us that constitutions can moderate and limit discretionary executive power only if the people learn an attachment to their Constitution that does not come naturally to them.Benjamin A. Kleinerman is assistant professor in the Department of International Studies at the Virginia Military Institute (kleinermanba@vmi.edu). His current research focuses on the relationship between executive power and constitutionalism. The author thanks Bernard J. Dobski, Steven Kautz, and M. Richard Zinman for commenting on earlier versions of this manuscript, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

George W. Bush elevated the value of definition in presidential leadership and made it central to his political stance. This was as much a strategic calculation of political advantage in the moment at hand as it was a reflection of the man's innate character. Accounting for Bush's leadership posture in this way helps to situate it on a larger historical canvas as a particular rendition of a familiar type; reference to general characteristics of the type facilitates, in turn, an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Bush's performance over the course of his first term. Conclusions consider deviations from the patterned political effects of leadership of this sort and weigh their possible significance.Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University (stephen.skowronek@yale.edu). He is author of The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton and more recently with Karen Orren, The Search for American Political Development. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at CIDE in Mexico City, at the University of Texas, and the University of Tulsa. It was also featured as the Abbott Memorial Lecture at the Sondermann Symposium on the Presidency at Colorado College, Colorado Springs (December 2004). The version printed here was completed on May 10, 2005.

At the conclusion of World War II, several international institutions were created to manage the world economy and prevent another Great Depression. These institutions include the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now called the World Bank), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was expanded and institutionalized into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. These institutions have not only persisted for over five decades, but they have also expanded their mandates, changed their missions, and increased their membership. They have, however, become highly contested. As Stiglitz notes, “International bureaucrats—the faceless symbols of the world economic order—are under attack everywhere…. Virtually every major meeting of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization is now the scene of conflict and turmoil.”Helen V. Milner is the B. C. Forbes Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School (hmilner@Princeton.edu). She has written extensively on issues related to international trade, the connections between domestic politics and foreign policy, globalization and regionalism, and the relationship between democracy and trade policy. Her writings include Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (1997), Internationalization and Domestic Politics (co-edited with Robert O. Keohane, 1996), “Why the Move to Free Trade? Democracy and Trade Policy in the Developing Countries” (International Organization 2005), “The Optimal Design of International Trade Institutions: Uncertainty and Escape” (coauthored with B. Peter Rosendorff, International Organization, 2001). The author thanks David Baldwin, Chuck Beitz, Robert O. Keohane, Erica Gould, Steve Macedo, Lisa Martin, Thomas Pogge, Tom Romer, and Jim Vreeland for invaluable comments. She also received much useful advice from seminars at Princeton University and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center.

The last decade has seen a contentious dialogue between quantitative and qualitative scholars over the nature of political science methodology. Even so, there has often been a consensus that quantitative and qualitative research share a “unified logic of inference;” that the differences between these “traditions are only stylistic and are methodologically and substantively unimportant.” All of the books under review here share these convictions. Yet the most remarkable feature of these works taken as a whole —and the focus of this review essay—is the more capacious view of the scientific enterprise on display. John Gerring's Social Science Methodology, David Collier and Henry Brady's Rethinking Social Inquiry, and Charles Ragin's Fuzzy-Set Social Science all focus on aspects of the scientific process beyond the testing of hypotheses—science being “a systematic, rigorous, evidence-based, generalizing, nonsubjective, and cumulative” way of discovering the truth about the world (Gerring, p. xv). If science is the systematic gathering of knowledge, testing hypotheses—the central concern of statistical inference—is an important part of this. But it is only one part. Before we can turn to testing hypotheses, we must be clear about concepts, theories, and cases. And here both Barbara Geddes's Paradigms and Sand Castles and the Elmans' Bridges and Boundaries complement the other works by attending closely to these issues even when the larger goal remains the testing of theory.George Thomas is assistant professor of political science at Williams College (gthomas@williams.edu). The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics, Mark Blyth, Brian Taylor, and, especially, Craig Thomas for helpful comments.

Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. By Danielle S. Allen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 254p. $25.00 cloth.

It may seem odd, given its title, but this is a book about friendship. The central problem of American democracy, according to Danielle Allen, is a lack of trust among citizens. For democracy to be stable, its citizens must feel confident that the obligations and opportunities of society are shared equitably. Yet majority rule is a breeding ground for distrust, particularly in a polity marked by race. Without trust, there is nothing to bind the minority and the majority together. The task of this book is to find ways for citizens to trust one another in these unsettled times. Doing so, Allen argues, requires developing habits of political friendship. The challenge of democratic politics, ironically, is to turn strangers into friends.

The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. By Seyla Benhabib. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 251p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

Between 1910 and 2000, the world's population more than tripled, from 1.6 to 5.3 billion. The number of persons who live as migrants in countries other than those in which they were born increased nearly sixfold, from 33 million to 175 million, and more than half of this increase has occurred since 1965. Almost 20 million of these are refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons. In her book, Seyla Benhabib grapples with both the political and moral implications of this rapid increase in transnational migration, arguing that the central principles that shape our thinking about political membership and state sovereignty are in tension, if not outright contradiction, with one another. “From a philosophical point of view,” she writes, “transnational migrations bring to the fore the constitutive dilemma at the heart of liberal democracies: between sovereign self-determination claims on the one hand and adherence to universal human rights principles on the other” (p. 2). She argues for an internal reconstruction of both, underscoring the significance of membership in bounded communities, while at the same time promoting the cultivation of democratic loyalties that exceed the national state, supporting political participation on the part of citizens and noncitizen residents alike.

Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS. By Michele Tracy Berger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 248p. $32.50.

How do women who face the multiple stigmas associated with drug use, sex work, and HIV-positive status engage as political actors in the wider environment that shapes their lives? This question is at the heart of Workable Sisterhood. Michele Tracy Berger offers one of the first studies of the development of critical consciousness and political participation of women of color who are HIV positive. All of the women she interviewed for her study have also struggled with drug abuse and engaged in sex work, and all have found a way to translate their experiences into a range of political actions designed to empower themselves and other women who face similar challenges. These activities include contesting the stigma associated with HIV-positive status, working “face-to-face” with other HIV-positive women, designing events and cultural projects to educate the wider community about HIV and about those living with HIV and AIDS, and advocating for social and economic changes that would help improve the lives of HIV-positive people (p. 12).

Isaiah Berlin: Liberty, Pluralism, and Liberalism. By George Crowder. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 256p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The conventional recent history of Anglophone normative political philosophy, which credits John Rawls's publication of A Theory of Justice (1971) with its rebirth, is unfair to those important figures who came before Rawls—chiefly Karl Popper, Michael Oakeshott, F.A. Hayek, and—the subject of this critical introduction—Isaiah Berlin. There is a further irony in that what can be clearly identified as the major theme of Berlin's lifework—moral pluralism—also dominates the late writings of John Rawls and those influenced by him. Indeed, it is arguable that the intense interest displayed in Berlin's account of pluralism owes much to the importance of this topic in contemporary moral and political philosophy. To some extent, even the Berlin of the classic and influential lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty”—which has for long constituted the inescapable starting point for any serious analysis of this ideal—is overshadowed by the Berlin who insists that the goods human beings pursue are inescapably plural, conflicting, and incommensurable.

A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics. By Jill Frank. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 208p. $49.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

Jill Frank's book seeks to make Aristotle's political philosophy “available for democratic political practice” (p. 8). Her use of Aristotle in this regard resembles most closely that of Hannah Arendt, to whom she refers in her opening paragraph and whose treatment of work, action, and the vita activa would appear to have influenced Frank's discussion of the “work” of politics referred to in her subtitle. But in bringing out the Aristotle who “harbors democratic possibilities,” the author also draws support, as well as distinguishes herself, from scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, Stephen Salkever, Fred Miller, Arlene Saxonhouse, Mary Nichols, and Alastair MacIntyre, who have, in very different ways, sought the aid of Aristotle to inform contemporary political life. A Democracy of Distinction thus engages a student of the ancient Academy in a serious conversation with the modern Academy. As Frank rightly says in closing, “Aristotle's ethical and political lessons are no less timely for us than they were for fourth century Athens” (p. 180). By her own admission, the lessons she draws may not represent the view of the “definitive Aristotle,” but they do represent, she suggests, his effort both to reform fourth-century Athens and to lay the ground for a timeless possibility: a “democracy of distinction” that she sincerely and earnestly seeks to promote (pp. 8, 139–42).

Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness. By Gal Gerson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 239p. $45.00.

This is a book whose title does not adequately convey its content. On the one hand, it is admirably broad in its scope relating issues in the philosophy of mind, psychology, sociology and of evolutionary biology to politics and ideology. On the other, the anticipation of relating the new liberalism in England (nothing is said of Scotland and Wales) to European liberalism is not fulfilled. Instead, the crisis of European consciousness relates to quite different considerations. The period between 1870 and 1930, it is claimed, saw an unprecedented questioning of the cohesion between reason and enlightenment, especially in three fields of knowledge that provide the focus for Margins of Disorder, social psychology, biology, and classical studies. The revolt against the enlightenment was manifest in the proliferation of fields of knowledge developing their own vocabularies and procedural rules, rendering them incommensurable with one another. Encyclopedic reason was undermined by self-interrogation and increasing specialization. In social studies, for example, there were doubts about the existence, or alternatively the apprehension, of a universal set of standards for social good. Max Weber saw rationality as relational and historical, and Emile Durkheim, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto formulated issue-specific terminologies allowing systems of social behavior to be analyzed without reference to their truth values or moral functions. Such arguments, Gal Gerson contends, justified the exercise of power by elites for its own sake (p. 17).

Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays. Edited by Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 336p. $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

This is a fruitful collection of essays focusing on adoption in order to explore “deeply held but often tacit assumptions about what in human life is natural and what is social” (p. 1). The editors rightly recognize that adoption is a social practice through which family and identity are explicitly shaped and regulated by social institutions. They explore this notion in contrast to the ideological view of family and identity as “natural,” “genetic,” and “biological.” They argue that “[w]e need to ask of families: how have the institutions shaped our understandings of family, and how might critical reflection on these understandings help us reshape the institutions to be more just?” (p. 8). The anthology is organized around three general areas of concern: “‘Natural’ and ‘Unnatural’ Families,” “Familial Relationships and Personal Identities,” and “Constructions of Race and Constructions of Family.” While some contributions are stronger than others, overall the anthology achieves the authors' goal of creating a “context for rethinking family and adoption, and the norms and rules that govern them, in a more humane and just fashion” (p. 15).

Machiavelli and Empire. By Mikael Hörnqvist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 320p. $75.00.

This study of the formation of Machiavelli's republican imperialism concludes with great political questions: “Machiavelli had created a power destined to put an end to centuries of backwardness, obscurantism, and oppression. By tearing asunder veils of political and religious illusion, uprooting and devouring all that comes in its way or opposes its principles and interests, [Machiavelli's modernity] has transformed, and is in the process of transforming, the lives of millions of people. Is it a destructive or benevolent force? A new form of imperialism, disguised as democracy and globalization, while in reality relying on naked, shameless, and brutal exploitation? Or is it a liberator that will bring justice and benefit to mankind? Perhaps it is too early to say. What is beyond doubt, though, is that the aim of this power is to conquer the world, and to do so in the name of liberty” (p. 290).

Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville's Democracy in America. By Laura Janara. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 256p. $75.50 cloth, $25.95 paper.

A professor used to remark that “you can say that Hobbes is about dairy farming if you back it up.” Laura Janara writes that Tocqueville's Democracy in America is about embryology, the feminine and masculine, gestation, birth, and gender relations, and she backs it up.