This thoughtful and wide-ranging book addresses a problem that is as salient for modern as for ancient democracies: Given that democracy is necessarily predicated on judging the worth of public speech, how can democratic decision makers, whether legislators or jurors, know when speech is truthful? The Athenian political orator Demosthenes put the issue clearly: “Where the political constitution is based on speeches, how can it be safely administered if the speeches are false?” (Demosthenes [On the False Embassy] 19.185; Hesk, p. 164). Jon Hesk shows how that question becomes sharper with the availability of ever more sophisticated techniques of persuasion. Democrats today agonize over the problem of “spin”: manipulation of the media by professionals who are cherished by politicians for their ability to persuade voters to believe that which is advantageous to their paymasters. Hesk cites a well-chosen array of modern examples, drawn primarily from British politics. In ancient Athens, a similar concern centered on techniques of persuasion associated with professional teachers of rhetoric: the socalled sophists. As he proves, the term “sophist” was no more approbative in classical Athens than “spin-doctor” is today.

Foundings depend upon foreigners, or more precisely, founding narratives often rely on the device of the outsider who appears as if from nowhere to bring order where previously there was none, to free a people from the unjust rule of a tyrant, and to act as lawgiver to the lawless. Democracy and the Foreigner addresses the paradoxical centrality of the foreigner to the political identity of nations and peoples. Reading classic works of political theory (Rousseau, Freud), contemporary debates about multiculturalism, liberal democracy, and immigration policy (Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith, Michael Walzer, Richard Rorty), late-modern social theory (Rene Girard, Julia Kristeva, William Connolly), biblical accounts of the origins of a chosen people (Exodus and Ruth), and twentieth-century films (The Wizard of Oz, Shane, Simply Ballroom), Bonnie Honig offers a rich and original meditation on the politics of home, migration, and democratic politics.

Over the course of the past year, we have had many opportunities to reflect on the nature of citizenship. Defining and contesting citizenship is a high-stakes enterprise, and in light of the current climate, Engin F. Isin's Being Political is a timely intervention into these debates. It is a series of genealogies that describe citizenship as alterity in cities, chronologically spanning urban spaces from the Athenian polis through the present-day cosmopolis. Taking his methodological cue from Michel Foucault, Isin's genealogies seek to break up the continuous narratives of citizenship imagined by the victors of history—that democratic citizenship in the United States, for example, is the direct descendant of Athenian democracy—and reveal the disparate forms that citizenship and its others have taken over time. By exposing these discontinuous narratives of citizenship, Isin demonstrates how the fiction of the unified city serves the interests of dominant groups by suppressing the agonistic character of this space.

I would not be surprised—indeed, I would be gratified—if some professor built a course in political philosophy around one, or several, of the books in the Nomos series, yearly collections since 1958 based on papers given at the annual meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. These collections deal with current topical themes in politics and political philosophy. The articles in the collections are reliably rigorous yet accessible, well crafted, learned, provocative, and well selected. Stephen Macedo and Yael Tamir's collection, Moral and Political Education is no different. I am not sure, however, how well this collection would fit, without substantial empirical supplementation, as the core for a course in political theory. Political theory differs, to my mind, from political philosophy by the amount of attention theorists give to the real world of politics. In this book, insufficient attention is given to political reality.

These two books represent an evolution in the ethic of care literature by taking up the challenge of how to combine care and politics. Fiona MacKay argues that women's full inclusion into democratic politics requires the use of a political ethic of care to reshape the nature of representative institutions, at a variety of levels of governance, from local to transnational. Nel Noddings argues that the care ethic practiced in ideal homes should be taken into the state to redirect public policy. In developing the arguments, both stress women's experiences of caring for others and both counterpose care and justice. Their theoretical discussions of the ethic of care cover familiar ground, with Noddings's maternalist version and MacKay's nonmaternalist formulation. Where both books depart from the literature is in their uncritical embrace of the state as a policymaking engine or as the site for representative institutions. While Noddings uses the ethic of care to argue for a series of compassionate public policies, ranging from housing for the homeless to education in caring, her analysis does not engage with feminist discussions of care and the welfare state. The appeal of Starting at Home is that Noddings places the raising of caring human beings at the center of a policy agenda. Love and Politics is much more compelling for political scientists, because MacKay offers a political analysis of how moments of democratization, such as Scotland's devolution process, could advance a redefining of politics in a more woman-friendly, caring direction. The juxtaposition of the two books suggests that the success of Noddings's humanistic vision rests on a complicated political project: the creation of a family and woman-friendly practice of democratic politics shaped by women's equal political agency and a political ethic of care.

Scholars of contemporary Islam in thrall to ideas of globalization are constantly surprised at what Peter Mandaville calls “transnational Muslim politics” and others call “diasporic Islam”: the assumption that a village or tribal society is now truly international. They point to the transformations taking place in society and the consequences therein. Some of the political turbulence is attributed to the rapid changes taking place in these societies. Like Mandaville, they are inclined to cite examples of individuals (like the scholar Mohammed Arkoun) who are born in one part of the traditional Muslim world (North Africa) and live and work in Europe (France, in the case of Arkoun) to show the impact of ideas across borders.