Torture: A Collection. Edited by Sanford Levinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 328p. $29.95.

Seventeen short essays, together with a very detailed Israeli Supreme Court judgment (1999), provide useful discussions of a timely and important subject. Considerable disagreement occurs, and sometimes participants address each other in strong language. Thus, when Ariel Dorfman pleads for “humanity to say no to torture under any circumstance” (p. 17), Judge Richard Posner responds that the statement “is not only overwrought in tone but irresponsible in content” (p. 295).

Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles. By Lisa García Bedolla. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 278p. $21.95.

In 1994, Lisa García Bedolla wondered about the impact on Latino political attitudes and activity of Latino participation in the campaign on Proposition 187. Would the young people who participated be more likely to be politically engaged later on? Would their involvement change their feelings of identity and efficacy? These questions drove her study of the political engagement of Latino immigrants and their children, which she conducted by comparing the political attitudes and behavior of Latinos involved in the campaign in two areas of Los Angeles County: East Los Angeles and Montebello, a working-class and middle-class majority Latino area, respectively.

Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. By Linda M. G. Zerilli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 272p. $55.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

In her book, Linda Zerilli sets out to accomplish three very important and difficult tasks. The first is to persuade contemporary feminist theorists to leave behind their methodological concern with the category woman and to pursue political freedom understood as the practice of “beginning anew.” The second is to articulate and defend such an understanding of political freedom in light of other ways of thinking about the topic. The third is to show how political freedom so understood might be used to develop a feminist project of political freedom that empowers women as a group without imposing false universals on them.

The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. By Virginia Held. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 220p. $45.

In her latest book, Virginia Held elaborates on themes from previously published articles to explicate and defend the ethics of care. For those unfamiliar with this well-developed tendency of feminist thought, she reviews its evolution from the 1980s writings of Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, and Nel Noddings to the more recent work of theorists including, among many others, Eva Kittay, Annette Baier, Joan Tronto, and Selma Sevenhuijsen. Held also underlines the differences between the ethics of care and dominant moral and political perspectives, including Kantian universalism, utilitarianism, liberal contract theory, and virtue theory. She proposes that care is, compared with justice, the more basic value, on the grounds that society can exist without the latter but not without the former. She recommends that men and women participate equally in care activities; that care infuse citizen as well as familial relations; and that society beat back the imperializing thrust of the market ethos and the conflict-mongering thrust of the militarized state to improve the well-being of children, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the community, culture, the environment, and deprived regions of the world.

The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America. Edited by Xavier de Souza Briggs. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2005. 353p. $29.95.

The Social Medicine Reader: Health Policy, Markets, and Medicine. 2d ed. Edited by Jonathan Oberlander, Larry R. Churchill, Susan E. Estroff, Gail E. Henderson, Nancy M. P. King, and Ronald P. Strauss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 288p. $22.95.

These two books, each in its own way, provide much-needed resources for thinking about how public policies should change to address the latest developments associated with the enduring problem of unequal access to basic resources in U.S. society, including housing and health care. In recent years, unequal access to affordable and decent housing and uneven access to affordable and decent health care both have taken on new features posing new challenges for participants in the public policymaking process. The Geography of Opportunity, edited by Xavier de Souza Briggs, brings together a set of richly detailed essays that look at the housing disparity problem from the increasingly popular perspective of regionalism; and The Social Medicine Reader, edited by Jonathan Oberlander and colleagues, offers an equally informative group of essays that range more widely to address a variety of issues concerning the changed landscape of health care in the United States today. Both books are likely to prove to be critical resources for energizing renewed efforts to make policy less exclusionary in each area.

Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in American School Districts. By Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 226p. $26.95.

An important and ambitious empirical study of policymaking in the (K–12) school districts of America, this book presents statistical support for noteworthy and sometimes surprising conclusions about the functioning of democracy at this level. The study is important because it raises and answers theoretically valuable questions about democracy in the organization and functions of the public schools. It is ambitious because the data and analytical requirements upon which these questions and answers depend are substantial.

John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic. By Jeffry H. Morrison. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. 240p.

In his The Origins and Progress of the American Revolution, loyalist Peter Oliver spoke of the New England clergy as the “black regiment” of the Revolution who, “tinctured with republicanism,” supported the war for independence. John Witherspoon was a New Jersey Presbyterian, but he might well fit Oliver's description. He brought Princeton University to the side of the Revolution, mentored the first generation of the new regime's leadership, served in the Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence, and was an active supporter of the Constitution. Yet while Witherspoon was highly praised by his contemporaries, who predicted that he would be honored by later generations of Americans, he instead became a neglected figure with few memorials erected in his name. Somehow, despite credentials that compared favorably to Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, fame deserted him. Jeffry H. Morrison's engaging and enthusiastic study of John Witherspoon attempts to redeem him as a “forgotten founder.”

Political Obligations. By George Klosko. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 276p. $74.00.

Do citizens have even a prima facie moral obligation to obey the law of a reasonably just state? Most contemporary political theorists think not. George Klosko disagrees with these philosophical anarchists, and in this book he explains why. In the first, longer section, he builds upon his earlier work, The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation (1992, new ed. 2004), to produce a new, multistranded argument for the existence of a moral obligation to obey the law. In the last four chapters, Klosko examines, empirically, what constitutional courts in three liberal states, and a selection of ordinary people in the United States, have to say about the nature and foundations of political obligations.

A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State. By Pierre Manent. Translated by Marc LePain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. $35.00.

Has the world outgrown politics? The conviction that it has, according to the French political philosopher Pierre Manent, is what animates sophisticated European thought today. The self-understandings of the creature, the parent, and, above all, the citizen have increasingly been displaced by that of the individual. And what an individual is is determined by the individual, and whatever he or she decides for him- or herself is dignified and deserves our respect. The idea of dignity is being liberated from any particular human content, from any particular conception of human goodness or morality. That means, among other things, that the idea of human rights has been liberated from any conception of civic or national obligation. So the idea of compulsory national military service is an affront to the individual's dignity, and in the name of human dignity the Europeans increasingly seem even to believe that they can unilaterally become pro-choice on war.

Framing American Politics. Edited by Karen Callaghan and Frauke Schnell. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 264p. $27.95.

The Mediated Presidency: Television News and Presidential Governance. By Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 236p. $60.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Researchers generally agree that media frames are an outcome of what Tim Cook (in Making Laws and Making News, 1989, 169) calls a “negotiation of newsworthiness” between elites and reporters. The idea is that each side to this exchange brings a set of resources to bear on the framing of issues and events: Elites control access to information; reporters control access to the news. Since neither can exercise complete control over the process, the participants seem destined to engage in a never-ending struggle. These two recent books buttress and refine this proposition, and also challenge it in some important respects.

Electing Justice: Fixing the Supreme Court Nominating Process. By Richard Davis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 211p. $28.00.

Richard Davis could not have produced his examination of the Supreme Court nominating process at a better time. The book was released just prior to the announced retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist—the first vacancies on the Supreme Court in 11 years.

The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject. By John Sanbonmatsu. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004. 272p. $65.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

As the title suggests, this book has a great and admirable ambition. It seeks to write a version of Antonio Gramsci's Modern Prince for a post–New Left, postmodern era. While it does not actually do this, it does provide a critical settling of accounts both with the legacy of the American New Left and the subsequent appearance of a (largely academic) leftism informed by postmodern theory. More significantly, it tries to suggest, though very sketchily, what a unitary actor with strategic acumen and a leftist program might look like, given the decline of parties of the working class and the fragmentation of emancipatory social movements. Both the criticism and the reconstructive aim are informed by Gramsci's emphasis on politics as a struggle for hegemony.

Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. By Tom De Luca and John Buell. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 228p. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

This is a book that looks toward achieving a democracy without demons—a more inclusive, respectful, egalitarian, participatory, and just political covenant—by examining the current proliferation of demonizing rhetoric in the United States as indicative of a dangerous and divisive moral paradox. America's moral paradox, according to Tom De Luca and John Buell, is a deeply rooted dilemma of two fundamentalisms—social “Puritanism” versus material “hedonism”—that must be negotiated with care if we are to avoid projecting hidden fears and forbidden desires onto “despised others” (pp. 48–49). Each pole of the paradox exists in every American, but when one pole begins to dominate, the desire to displace anxiety onto others begins to swell.

Manliness. By Harvey C. Mansfield. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 304p. $27.50.

Harvey Mansfield gives the book to us, in the first instance, as a response to feminism. Feminism, he argues, has sought to erase all differences between the genders, a project which must ultimately fail, for those differences are founded in nature. Feminism has succeeded, however, in diminishing the value and suppressing the practice of the virtue of manliness. The author sets himself the task of restoring that virtue.

Who Leads Whom? Presidents, Policy, and the Public. By Brandice Canes-Wrone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 192p. $47.50 cloth, $18.00 paper.

The good news: The public actually does influence policy decisions at least some of the time, and presidential demagoguery is not pervasive. The unremarkable: We can only judge these facts for issues within the scope of polling, and presidents act strategically when they attempt to influence policy.

The Idea of the State. By Peter J. Steinberger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 344p. $75.00.

In the early decades of American political science and its political theory, the state was the main subject matter of the discipline. This book recalls that era (though it is situated mainly in the deeper history of political thought). As the author recognizes, its subject matter is today somewhat unfashionable in political theory. Moreover, the book's theory is first and foremost metaphyscial rather then political, thus reversing the priority that John Rawls and most other contemporary theorists proclaim. To complete his separation from contemporary theoretical currents, the kind of state advocated by Peter Steinberger is “omnicompetent in scope, absolute in authority and organic in composition” (p. xiv).

Choosing Your Battles: American Civil–Military Relations and the Use of Force. By Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 268p. $22.95.

In their book, Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi have several agendas. They succeed at some better than others. Their first goal is to establish the fact of a civil–military opinion gap over the use of force. They find that civilian elites are more willing to expand U.S. foreign policy goals to include nontraditional missions related to human rights, whereas military elites are more supportive of a traditional Cold War foreign policy agenda (p. 42); and that nonveteran civilian elites are more willing to use force incrementally, whereas elite military officers support the decisive use of force enshrined in the Powell Doctrine. Both insights have been documented in the case study literature, but Feaver and Gelpi bring large-n analysis and original survey opinion data to bear on the topic.

Beyond the First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech and Pluralism. By Samuel P. Nelson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 240p. $50.00.

In this ambitious and fertile book, Samuel Nelson proposes to reconceptualize the theory of freedom of speech independently of American constitutional law. The effort offers insights into the limitations of constitutionally founded free speech theories and an intriguing proposed alternative, which Nelson dubs the “pluralist” framework. His framework seems especially suited for honoring justifications for freedom of speech other than the search for truth or democratic debate and for addressing restrictions on speech by authorities other than government (e.g., private employers).

Solidarity in Europe: The History of an Idea. By Steinar Stjernø. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 406p. $75.00.

Steinar Stjernø's important and fascinating book will be valuable to political theorists and sociologists interested in the idea of solidarity from the nineteenth century through the present, to political historians concerned about the uses of solidarity in the political discourses of left-wing, religious, and fascist parties and movements, and to historians of political thought and of ideas who address methodological questions in their field.

Congress and the Constitution. Edited by Neal Devins and Kieth E. Whittington. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 320p. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.

For years, students of American government have been taught a highly compartmentalized version of our democratic system where legislative actors “make” law, actors in the executive branch “enforce” law, and judges in the judicial branch “interpret” law. Under this overly simplistic framework, the Supreme Court is often characterized as citizens' exclusive protection from myopic lawmakers who would flout the dictates of the Constitution to achieve their short-term policy goals and/or enhance their own authority. The collection of essays in Congress and the Constitution, edited by Neal Devins and Keith E. Whittington, presents a challenge to this conventional wisdom.