This symposium examines an emergent orientation within the American feminist movement called “choice feminism.” Choice feminists are primarily concerned with increasing the number of choices open to women and with decreasing judgments about the choices that individual women make. Choice feminists are best known for their argument that a woman who leaves the remunerated labor market to care for her children is a feminist in good standing; she makes a feminist decision. While media coverage of choice feminism has been extensive, political scientists have been comparatively quiet. In this symposium, four political scientists analyze and evaluate choice feminism, revealing their disagreement about the validity of the choice feminist position and about the meaning of choice feminism for movement politics, political judgment, and liberal political theory.

Choice feminism is motivated by a fear of politics. It arises in response to three common criticisms of feminism: that feminism is too radical, too exclusionary, and too judgmental. In response, choice feminism offers a worldview that does not challenge the status quo, that promises to include all women regardless of their choices, and that abstains from judgment altogether. Moreover, it enables feminists to sidestep the difficulties of making the personal political: making judgments and demanding change of friends, family, and lovers. Yet judgment, exclusion, and calls for change are unavoidable parts of politics. If feminists are not to withdraw from political life altogether, we have to acknowledge the difficulty of engaging in politics. Political claims are partial; we will inevitably exclude, offend, or alienate some of those whom we should wish to have as allies. The political concerns and dilemmas to which choice feminism responds are very real. However, we can take seriously the political motivations behind choice feminism without withdrawing from politics. Instead, we need to complement an acknowledgment of the political dilemmas facing feminists with a celebration of the pleasures of engaging in politics with those who differ from and disagree with us.

How should feminist theorists respond when women who claim to be feminists make “choices” that seemingly prop up patriarchy, like posing for Playboy, eroticizing male dominance, or advocating wifely submission? This article argues that the conflict between the quest for gender equality and the desire for sexual pleasure has long been a challenge for feminism. In fact, the second-wave of the American feminist movement split over issues related to sexuality. Feminists found themselves on opposite sides of a series of contentious debates about issues such as pornography, sex work, and heterosexuality, with one side seeing evidence of gender oppression and the other opportunities for sexual pleasure and empowerment. Since the mid-1990s, however, a third wave of feminism has developed that seeks to reunite the ideals of gender equality and sexual freedom. Inclusive, pluralistic, and non-judgmental, third-wave feminism respects the right of women to decide for themselves how to negotiate the often contradictory desires for both gender equality and sexual pleasure. While this approach is sometimes caricatured as uncritically endorsing whatever a woman chooses to do as feminist, this essay argues that third-wave feminism actually exhibits not a thoughtless endorsement of “choice,” but rather a deep respect for pluralism and self-determination.

One attraction of “choice” feminism has been its refusal to judge the diverse desires of women. Yet for feminism to retain its political vision as a quest for social justice, we must continue difficult conversations concerning how acting on our individual desires impacts the lives of others. In this essay, I argue that feminists can acknowledge women's diverse desires while forging a meaningful feminist community. I make this argument by considering feminism's relationship to time, and particularly how women's diverse desires are read in each moment in time. If we abandon the generational model, wherein each new generation of feminists improves upon the last, for a genealogical perspective where women recognize our feminist origins and empathize with the diverse struggles of other women, we might reaffirm social justice for the community as central to feminist politics. To articulate this possibility, I turn to the work of Simone de Beauvoir to explain her discovery of how her embodiment as a woman and her relationship to femininity becomes a way of grounding a feminist politics. Recognizing the “demands of femininity” in other women's lives allows us to affirm feminist community while retaining the capacity to make judgments that realize social justice as a feminist goal.

I respond to the foregoing essays and take up an ambivalent defense of Hirshman's argument. While agreeing with various points the contributors make, I highlight the fact that women's choices are still made under conditions of oppression that shape not only the options women have, but the desires themselves that shape their choices. Recognizing oppression as a social phenomenon allows feminists to accept a wider range of individual choices than we might think acceptable under the feminist umbrella, but it also requires a distinction between making a feminist choice and offering feminist support for choice.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a powerful journalistic account of the oppression of women worldwide, and of the ways that some women and men have struggle against this oppression and discovered new forms of economic empowerment. The book—in its eleventh printing in less than a year, and with testimonials from the likes of Angelina Jolie and George Clooney—is also a publishing sensation. Half the Sky brings much attention to an important and timely topic, and it creatively combines narrative, analysis, and policy prescriptions, and so we invited three prominent scholars of gender inequality and development to reflect on the book's strengths and weaknesses: Ayelet Shachar, Uma Narayan, and Valentine M. Moghadam.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a powerful journalistic account of the oppression of women worldwide, and of the ways that some women and men have struggle against this oppression and discovered new forms of economic empowerment. The book—in its eleventh printing in less than a year, and with testimonials from the likes of Angelina Jolie and George Clooney—is also a publishing sensation. Half the Sky brings much attention to an important and timely topic, and it creatively combines narrative, analysis, and policy prescriptions, and so we invited three prominent scholars of gender inequality and development to reflect on the book's strengths and weaknesses: Ayelet Shachar, Uma Narayan, and Valentine M. Moghadam.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a powerful journalistic account of the oppression of women worldwide, and of the ways that some women and men have struggle against this oppression and discovered new forms of economic empowerment. The book—in its eleventh printing in less than a year, and with testimonials from the likes of Angelina Jolie and George Clooney—is also a publishing sensation. Half the Sky brings much attention to an important and timely topic, and it creatively combines narrative, analysis, and policy prescriptions, and so we invited three prominent scholars of gender inequality and development to reflect on the book's strengths and weaknesses: Ayelet Shachar, Uma Narayan, and Valentine M. Moghadam.

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

This is a superb book. Lisa Wedeen brings a complex theory of interpretation to the study of nation building in Yemen. She explores the power of performances that penetrate cultural life as they work upon bodily dispositions and valences. Peripheral Visions has several high points, including a critique of secular theories that separate national imaginaries from Islamic practices of piety; a wonderful exploration of “qat chews”—a custom through which democratic dispositions and a national imaginary are promoted through semipublic discourses; an account of how the weakness of the state can enlarge the imagination of the nation; and an engagement with the effects of global neoliberalism on discursive practices in Yemen. Each level and mode is interwoven with the others. So we gain a complex understanding of politics that is irreducible to the kind of study organized around fixed categories of analysis and “variables” that do not interpenetrate.

William E. Connolly's review of Peripheral Visions is what any author should want, a thoughtful, appreciative account of the book's merits and an invitation to push aspects of the argument further than the book currently does. One point of clarification: I did not mean to suggest that Foucault's work should be read only in terms of its emphasis on coherence and control, or that my own is intended as a blanket critique of his. My understanding of political power and resistance is beholden to Foucault's insofar as he shows how power depends on multiple points of resistance. He thus describes how existing mechanisms of social control get reproduced and yet are also vulnerable to creativity, innovation, and surprise. My point was to challenge Foucault-inspired scholars of colonialism, in particular, who tend to exaggerate the capacities of colonial administrations and to neglect not only outright challenges to colonial rule, but also the ways in which colonial rule could, at times, be irrelevant to inhabitants' political experience. The goal was to distinguish between the stated claims of colonial rulers and colonialism's actual effects. At stake is not simply a reading of Foucault, of course, but a sense of what matters politically—whether scholars emphasize the reproductive power of institutions and ideas or whether they focus on how reproduction places those very ideas and institutions at risk. I want to chart a middle course here, neither exaggerating coherence nor romanticizing resistance.

In this passionate, insightful book, William E. Connolly tracks the work of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” both source and exemplification of a destructive ethos characteristic of contemporary American political life. Born out of the elective affinity between a segment of evangelical Christianity, based on vengeful visions of the Second Coming, and the “cowboy sector of American capitalism,” defined by its “exclusionary drives and claims to special entitlement” (p. 7), this evangelical-capitalist ethos works to shore up and deepen existing inequalities. Through church sermons and Fox News Reports, in practices of consumption and investment, the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine reverberates, working to stymie political debate and deflect political responsibility for the problems this same destructive ethos creates.

My (outlandish) hope in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is to help push capitalism closer to the center of political theory and political science. On my reading, a capitalist “axiomatic” binds together labor, capital, growth imperatives, and commodities. But these defining elements are also insufficient. A specific capitalist assemblage simultaneously depends upon, affects, and folds to varying degrees into its institutions other relatively autonomous force fields, including climate change, religious intensities, mutating diseases, scientific research, new political movements, novel financial instruments, compensatory hopes poured into investment and consumption, wars, and security anxieties. Such intersections combine with the intrinsic instability of markets to produce the volatility of capitalism. It, too, is an open system in a world of open systems that invade, energize, and threaten it.

In this book, Graciana Del Castillo draws on theory, her own experiences as senior economist in the Cabinet of the United Nations secretary-general and as an International Monetary Fund staffer, and qualitative case studies to critically reconsider the challenges of postconflict economic reconstruction. The core argument is as follows. Countries making the shift from war to peace face a multipronged transition in the economic, legal, political, social, and security sectors. Given this multifaceted transition, economic reconstruction is fundamentally different from the “development as usual” approach taken by the international community to address typical socioeconomic challenges faced by peaceful developing countries. Instead, economic reconstruction in postconflict countries is a “development plus” challenge, meaning that these countries face the same challenges as other developing countries plus the added challenge of achieving reconciliation and peace. Del Castillo concludes that many post–Cold War reconstruction efforts have failed because of the development as usual approach to reconstruction, a lack of comprehensive planning, insufficient aid and assistance, and the inadequacies of international organizations (e.g., the United Nations and international financial institutions) in dealing with the challenges of reconstruction.

As an academic and editor of a theoretical journal on Austrian economics it is understandable that Christopher J. Coyne fails to grasp what is at stake on the ground. Like Dambisa Momo, Coyne has a dogmatic and unflinching belief in the markets and naively thinks that poor countries coming out war or chaos can do it on their own.

This is a highly readable book that provides strong and rigorous arguments to prove a thesis that is intuitive to many but still denied by some—that the United States foreign policy of using military intervention, occupation, and reconstruction to establish liberal democracies across the world is more likely to fail than to succeed.

I would like to thank Graciana del Castillo for her remarks regarding After War. I will focus my response on what del Castillo finds to be the major shortcoming of my book—the main policy implication. In After War, I conclude that current approaches to reconstruction, which typically rely on military occupation, are more likely to fail than to succeed. This outcome is not due to a lack of planning, effort, or political will, but is instead is the result of the array of incentives and constraints limiting what occupiers and policymakers can rationally design and implement in foreign societies. In considering alternative strategies for exporting the ideas, values, and beliefs underpinning liberal democracy, I argue that the U.S. should assume a default position of military non-intervention and free trade (unilateral if necessary). Del Castillo is sympathetic to this position as a “preventive measure,” but does not seem convinced of its suitability as a primary strategy. For example, she points out that offering trade preferences to the Taliban following 9/11 would hardly have brought liberalism to Afghanistan. I agree. However, I do not think this point undercuts my argument for a default position of free trade and non-intervention. Let me clarify why I believe this to be the case.