Enlightenment Against Empire. By Sankar Muthu. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 348p. $19.95.

In this rich and elegantly written book, Sankar Muthu breaks the now-stereotypical association of Enlightenment political thought with an arrogant universalism that was implicitly or explicitly allied to imperialism. He suggests than an important strand of eighteenth-century political thought generated, and was intended to generate, a searching critique of the conquest of the world by European states. Indeed, far from being uniquely aligned with imperialism, eighteenth-century political thought was distinctive for generating such an opposition. Neither the two centuries that preceded it nor the century that followed saw such a systematic stand against imperialism from European philosophers.

The State of Democratic Theory.

From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. By Charles W. Mills. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 312p. $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

The author of the influential The Racial Contract (1997) has gathered together a provocative collection of his essays. These disparate papers do not form an argument for an overarching thesis. Nor do they converge on a single theme, for example, the need to shift away from a focus on class toward race, as the title might suggest. Rather, the essays reveal the recent changes in Charles Mills's philosophical interests, away from core problems in orthodox Marxism toward the project of developing a critical race theory. One constant throughout is Mills's attempt to demonstrate that the methods of analytic philosophy are not inherently “bourgeois,” as many radicals have supposed, but can be usefully applied to problems that concern leftists. Yet unlike much of analytic philosophy, these essays are never boring but instead are generously laced with the author's characteristic biting sarcasm and bold humor.

Plato Through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues. By Zdravko Planinc. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 152p. $37.50.

This is the kind of book that gives great pleasure to a reviewer. Not only does it reward the act of taking time away from one's own reading agenda to evaluate an unknown and undiscovered text, but it warrants a strong recommendation that others do the same. This review will provide a summary of the refreshingly simple and provocativeargument of Zdravko Planinc's Plato Through Homer, and a short explanation as to why this small volume is worthy of our attention.

Marx, Tocqueville and Race in America: The “Absolute Democracy” or “Defiled Republic.” By August H. Nimtz, Jr. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 314p. $90.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Something Alexis de Tocqueville said about the irritable patriotism of the Americans might be just as easily applied to his own political theory. One would gladly agree to praise much in Tocqueville's writings if one were occasionally permitted to be critical of him. This book serves as a much-needed reminder that he was not omniscient, that he did not get everything right in his visit to America, and that he was never unequivocally on the side of radical participatory democracy. Bringing Marx's critical thoughts on race to bear on Tocqueville's vision of America as the “absolute democracy,” this book focuses on the fascinating question of why Tocqueville and Marx saw America in such radically different ways—as the vanguard of democratic equality, on the one hand, or as the epitome of racial inequality, on the other. How can these two mutually exclusive critical visions be reconciled? This book's animating premise is every bit as promising as its execution is disappointing, at least with respect to Tocqueville.

Deliberative Democracy and the Environment.

The Cultural Defense. By Alison Dundes Renteln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 416p. $45.00.

While there is a burgeoning scholarly literature on such topics as cultural pluralism, ethnic diversity, and the politics of recognition, there has been relatively little systematic attention given to ways that courts can embrace or thwart the maintenance of cultural traditions. Yet, as is often the case, court cases provide concrete examples of conflicts that capture the attention of the popular press and the public. If polygamy is part of a religious or cultural tradition, can state and federal laws forbid it within the United States? If a recent immigrant to the United States belongs to a tradition that permits an “honor killing” to punish the improper sexual behavior of a female relative, to what extent is that immigrant legally culpable? Many of the cases discussed in the book present extraordinarily difficult conflicts between cultural traditions. The author should be praised for presenting them unflinchingly.

Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Violence.

Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. By Lorraine Smith Pangle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 255p. $65.00.

Aristotle is not generally regarded as the friendliest of writers. No doubt the starkness and seriousness of his elliptical prose is felt to be less than companionable. Nonetheless, he does devote one-fifth of the Nicomachean Ethics to an analysis of friendship. Moreover, the two books on friendship (VIII and IX) hold the penultimate position, coming right before Book X's concluding assertion of the superiority of the philosophic life. Lorraine Smith Pangle seeks the reason for and the meaning of friendship's privileged position within Aristotle's ethical explorations.

Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power.

Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England. By Vickie B. Sullivan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 284p. $75.00.

In this important and insightful book Vickie B. Sullivan offers an impressive and ambitious examination of the philosophical roots and historical development of liberal democratic theory in early-modern England. In the Introduction, Sullivan frames her analysis in the context of the various contours of the debate about the character of early-modern thought between the advocates of classical republicanism, on the one hand, and the proponents of the liberal school, on the other. The opening chapters on Machiavelli and Hobbes, respectively, provide a provocative interpretive lens through which to evaluate and critique the prevailing liberal and republican paradigms. The lion's share of the book deals in five successive chapters with the way in which English republicans from the civil war era through the early Hanoverian period—including Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and the coauthors of Cato's Letters, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon—modified, balanced, and ultimately synthesized the Machiavellian republican and Hobbesian liberal elements of their complex philosophical inheritance. With the final consummation of this synthesis in the commercial republic of Cato's Letters, Sullivan argues, a distinctively modern form of liberal republicanism was born.

Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. By Thomas L. Pangle. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 285p. $39.95.

Thomas Pangle's book begins with a flourish: Taking issue with modern rationalists (e.g., Hobbes, Locke) and their claims that Scripture is wholly amenable to and comprehensible by the tools of rational analysis, Pangle argues that “this contention of theirs is in fact a key dimension of a titanic strategy of propaganda, whereby Holy Writ is to be reconceived and in a sense rewritten so as to be subsumed in a vast secular cultural revolution” (p. 6). As opposed to Socratic philosophy, which always recognized and insisted on the knowledge of its own ignorance, such modern rationalists ultimately want “to reduce religious reflection and argument … to the status of a birdlike cacophony of merely private and personal, shallow and shifting, opinions” (p. 11). Furthermore, Pangle insists, any reader of the Platonic corpus will recall that Socrates was prosecuted for impiety, and relied heavily on his daimonin in justifying his public conduct in the Athenian square, thus throwing into doubt all such attempts to subsume the revealed under the rational.

Overruled?: Legislative Overrides, Pluralism, and Contemporary Court–Congress Relations. By Jeb Barnes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 219p. $50.00.

Students of the interaction between the judicial and elected branches of government typically assume that each branch can understand the other's intentions and capabilities. In classic separation-of-power models, justices do not craft opinions they know will be overridden, and Congress does not pass laws likely to be struck down or interpreted in a manner hostile to Congress's interests. In reality, the assumption of complete information is tenuous: The transmission of information between the branches is less than perfect. Members of Congress lack the capacity to perfectly anticipate future judicial decisions, and courts cannot anticipate how elected officials will respond. Hence, congressional goals are regularly thwarted by the courts, and on occasion, judicial attempts at policymaking are overruled by Congress.

Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics. By Andrew Sabl. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 304p. $75.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

This book is filled with useful insights, but the parts do not fit together. The reader is treated to many interesting commentaries on authors ranging from Cicero to Charles Fried, from James Madison to Anthony Downs. Yet it is often difficult to discern why Andrew Sabl makes assertions that are supposed to be part of, or derived from, the “theory” he proposes in the process of offering these commentaries—his proposed “theory of democratic constancy.” On the basis of this theory he offers surprisingly specific prescriptions for how political actors, such as U.S. senators, activists, and political organizers, should act. Yet the connection between the theory and these prescriptions is far from clear. And he goes on to dismiss alternative theories, such as “populism” and “deliberative democracy,” that can be interpreted as offering prescriptions for some of the same political roles he is interested in, yet it is difficult to see the basis for the asserted superiority of “democratic constancy” over these alternatives.

Relevant No More? The Catholic/Protestant Divide in American Electoral Politics.