This is the first issue of Perspectives on Politics to appear under my editorship. In the relatively short time I have been working on the journal it has become clear that the enterprise can be no better than the people who work on it. So, rather than leaving the acknowledgments and introductions for last, I want to make them up front.

It was with great pleasure that I recently assumed the reigns as Book Review Editor of Perspectives. I am fortunate to have had excellent predecessors—Greg MacAvoy and Susan Bickford—who themselves had an excellent staff. This has made the transition relatively painless and successful. But, like all transitions, this one has involved glitches and has required patience and perseverance. We greatly appreciate the cooperation and flexibility that so many of our colleagues have shown.

In the 1970s I was among a group of scholars endlessly debating theories of the state. Others in the discussion were my recent predecessor as APSA President, Theda Skocpol, and my immediate successor, Ira Katznelson. What intrigued us was a vast literature, grounded in neo-Marxism and covering huge swaths of history and geography. Nearly all the important books and articles were by sociologists and historians, but with Structure and Change in Economic History, my then-colleague, economist Douglass North, transformed the debate by using economic models of transaction costs and property rights to model the state's role in economic prosperity over time. Most political scientists now acknowledge the importance of this perspective, but it nonetheless helped precipitate twenty years of divergence between historical and new economic institutionalists.Margaret Levi is Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle (mlevi@u.washington.edu). Among her books are the single-authored Consent, Dissent and Patriotism (1997) and Of Rule and Revenue (1988) and the co-authored Cooperation Without Trust? (2005) and Analytic Narratives (1998). Many people offered me comments. I did not always take their advice, but I am grateful to Amit Ahuja, Paloma Aquilar, Marcelo Bergman, Maureen Eger, Ann Gryzmala-Busse, Bea Kelleigh, Bob Kaplan, Edgar Kiser, Victor Lapuente-Giné, Michael Lipsky, Kenneth Kollman, José-Maria Maravall, Peter May, Leonardo Morlino, Steve Pfaff, Kate Pflaumer, Frances Fox Piven, Christoph Pohlmann, Nancy Rosenblum, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Bo Rothstein, Susan Stokes, Katherine Stovel, Joan Tronto, and Ashutosh Varshney. My greatest debt is to the two graduate students who read and commented on several drafts as well as located the materials I needed to write this presentation: John Ahlquist and Audrey Sacks.

Scholars seeking to understand the causes and consequences of political intolerance are now celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of Stouffer's pathbreaking research on intolerance and repression. Yet despite substantial advances in our understanding of intolerance, several major unanswered questions remain. The purpose of this article is to identify and discuss these tolerance enigmas, while proffering some ideas about how future research on intolerance might proceed. The article begins by documenting the significance of understanding intolerance and concludes with speculation about how resolving these enigmas might contribute to a more peaceful and democratic world.James L. Gibson is Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis and a Fellow at the Centre for Comparative and International Politics, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (jgibson@wustl.edu). This is a revised version of the Alexander George Award Lecture, delivered at the International Society for Political Psychology Annual Conference, Eden Hall, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, July 15–18, 2004. The author is indebted to many for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper, including Dennis Chong, Jamie Druckman, Leonie Huddy, Jim Kuklinski, Marc Peffley, Brian Silver, and John Transue, and especially Stanley Feldman and Donald Green. He also appreciates the research assistance of Marc Hendershot. Support for the research on which this paper is based has been provided by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, and Steven S. Smith in particular. This paper makes use of data collected from Russia with the support of the National Science Foundation (SBR-9423614 and SBR-9710137). The South African data were collected with support from NSF's Law and Social Sciences Program (SES 9906576). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Countless studies document the correlation between abundant mineral resources and a series of negative economic and political outcomes, including poor economic performance, unbalanced growth, weakly institutionalized states, and authoritarian regimes across the developing world. The disappointing experience of mineral-rich countries has generated a large body of scholarship aimed at explaining this empirical correlation and a list of prescriptions for combating the resource curse. The most popular solutions emphasize macroeconomic policies, economic diversification, natural resource funds, transparency and accountability, and direct distribution to the general population. The success of these solutions has been limited because they either presuppose strong state institutions, which are widely absent in the developing world, or assume state ownership over mineral wealth and thus the need for external actors to constrain the state. At the same time, domestic private ownership is rarely proposed and often maligned. Yet, in some countries, it would serve as a more viable way to avoid the resource curse by fostering institutions that more effectively constrain state leaders, encouraging them to invest in institution building, and enabling them to respond more successfully to commodity booms and busts.Erika Weinthal is associate professor of environmental policy in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University (weinthal@duke.edu). Pauline Jones Luong is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Brown University (pauline_luong@brown.edu). This article is part of a long-term joint project; the authors are rotating authorship on the articles they publish, sharing equal responsibility for the content and analysis herein. They gratefully acknowledge comments and suggestions from Richard Auty, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Victoria Murillo, Richard Snyder, the Colloquium on Comparative Research at Brown University, and three anonymous reviewers.

Women's movements are increasingly divided along lines of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. When such division obstructs cooperation, women lose their most effective advocates in the public sphere. How can movements overcome these divisions and improve their influence on policy and society? In some contexts, it seems that activists are able to overcome such divisions without denying politically salient conflicts. The transnational movement against gender violence, for example, mobilizes people not only across differences of race, class and sexuality but also across differences of language, national context, level of development, and the like. How do they do this? I argue that the movement against gender violence has achieved cooperation through the development of norms of inclusivity. Such norms include a commitment to descriptive representation, the facilitation of separate organization for disadvantaged social groups, and a commitment to building consensus with institutionalized dissent. Developing such norms is not the only possible path to cooperation, but it is an important and overlooked one. It illuminates a way of maintaining solidarity and improving policy influence without denying or sublimating the differences and conflicts among activists. Existing scholarship on social movements that attributes successful cooperation to shared interests, identities, or opportunities, is incomplete because it does not take account of relations of domination among activists who cooperate. Attending to the context of structural inequality in which social movements operate improves our understanding of social mobilization and illuminates overlooked paths to cooperation.S. Laurel Weldon is associate professor of political science at Purdue University (weldon@polsci.purdue.edu). The author thanks Jane Mansbridge for her help. Thanks also to Karen Beckwith, Elisabeth Clemens, Jennifer Hochschild, Aaron Hoffman, Debra Liebowitz, and Iris Young for comments on earlier drafts. Thanks to Anne Walker and Vicki Semler for helpful conversations, and to Charlotte Bunch, Arvonne Fraser, and Jutta Joachim for helping with key details. Reviewers for Perspectives provided many valuable suggestions. Errors and shortcomings remain my responsibility.

Imagine for a moment, that we—we in this liberal democracy—want to design the basic institutions of our economic and political interactions so that they are just. In order that just institutions be designed fairly, we will not be allowed to reason from our own particular circumstances. We are not to know our own race or religion, our own material resources, or even our own personal abilities and whether these abilities are valued by our society. Imagine that once this “veil of ignorance” about ourselves is lifted, we might discover that we are the person least advantaged by racist social norms or least advantaged by the relative value that our society places on skills (for example, that we have the skills of a seamstress, not of a professional basketball player). In this view of the bases for an agreement about first principles of justice, the things that we think of as “ours”—our innate skills and those we develop through education and commitment—do not entitle us to the benefits of deploying them in our political economy. Instead, our personal endowments and the value that society puts on them are morally arbitrary. From the moral view of this “original position”, choosing the principles used to guide the distribution of the benefits that accrue from exercising these should be a political decision that we make together. Yet, imagining that we might be a seamstress, a basketball player, or unemployable, each of us reasons the same way.Brooke Ackerly is Assistant Professor at Vandervilt University (brooke.ackerly@vanderbilt.edu). She is the author of Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (2000). Special thanks to W. James Booth, to the participants in the Vanderbilt interdisciplinary theory seminar Mark Brandon, John Goldberg, Steve Hetcher, Bob Talisse, and John Weymark and to Talisse, John Geer, and the anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics.

The title of this essay might strike some people as odd. Rawls a revolutionary? Could one ever imagine the careful, gentle, and eminently sensible figure of John Rawls manning a barricade? The very strangeness of this image illustrates the uneasy connection between equality and politics in his work. Rawls's egalitarian vision would take nothing short of a revolution to bring about, and Rawls was anything but a revolutionary.Simone Chambers is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto (schamber@chass.utoronto.ca). Special thanks go to Robert Amdur for his helpful, careful, and as usual, accurate criticisms of an earlier draft. She would also like to thank Steven E. White for his research, the many reviewers at Perspectives on Politics for their comments, and Joe Carens, Duncan Ivison, and Jeff Kopstein for all the equality talk.

The theory of justice that John Rawls spent his life developing and refining contains dozens of ideas that each have spurred major scholarly debate. One of these is that the subject of justice is the basic structure of society. In his major works Rawls gives slightly different formulations to the concept of basic structure, but the core idea remains the same. Early in A Theory of Justice Rawls proposes to offer “a conception of justice as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed.” Political Liberalism devotes an entire chapter to explicating what it means to say that the basic structure is the subject of justice. There Rawls defines basic structure “as the way in which major social institutions fit together into one system, and how they assign fundamental rights and duties and shape the division of advantages that arise through social cooperation”. More recently, Rawls reiterates the notion of the basic structure in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement:Iris Marion Young is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago (iyoung@uchicago.edu). Among books she has published is Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2000. Global Challenges: On War, Self-Determination and Global Justice is forthcoming from Polity Press in 2006.

How political is Rawls's political liberalism? By calling his theory “political liberalism,” he means something, as he says, “quite different … from what the reader is likely to suppose.” In particular, he distances his theory from the hurly-burly of electoral contests and the deal-making of legislative log-rolling. By “political”, Rawls mainly intends to contrast his theory with those that rely on metaphysical foundations. But Rawls's theory is political in at least one ordinary sense: it is not meant to be only a theory. He does not intend to offer the kind of utopian account that stands across an unbridgeable gap from the sentiments, opinions, and institutions of everyday politics. On the contrary, as a “realistic utopia” his theory is a blueprint for a building that can in fact be built. What part does politics play in this picture? How much distance does Rawls put between political liberalism and “what the reader is likely to suppose”? Does politics as it is normally understood both popularly and in much democratic theory recede into the far distance? Does it disappear altogether?Russell Muirhead is Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University (muirhead@fas.harvard.edu); Nancy L Rosenblum is Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University (nrosenblum@latte.harvard.edu). The authors would like to thank Corey Brettschneider and Erin Kelly for helpful comments.

We live in “one world.” The globe is an ecological whole, sufficiently connected that it is now possible to envision climate changes and catastrophes that affect the entire planet. The world's economy is increasingly becoming interconnected. Human beings recognize a common humanity, including a body of human rights. But we are not the “single nation state” hypothesized by the South Commission. We are divided into many peoples, governed by the slightly more than the 191 states recognized by the United Nations as members. But the existence of many peoples does not answer the normative questions implicit in the South Commission's warning. Should we be trying to govern the one world as if we were one people—and take on the task of building a single stable world order, bridging the divides between the much better-off top fifth and much less well-off bottom four-fifths? Or, should the one world be governed as if it were two sets of peoples, one set free and the other not? Or, should a third order shape the world, one that encompasses many peoples who develop the rules, agreements and accommodations that are needed to keep those peoples at peace where possible and promote mutually advantageous cooperation, while taking those measures that address the emergencies and extremes to which all decent states would concur?

John Rawls is the towering figure of academic liberalism. A gentle, dignified, self-effacing man, he taught philosophy at Harvard for more than thirty years and from his commanding position exerted a decisive influence on his profession. Through his scholarship and teaching he played a major role in establishing the now-dominant understanding of liberalism in the academy and, more generally, of the method and purpose of the philosophical study of politics.Peter Berkowitz teaches at George Mason University School of Law and is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution (berkowitz@hoover.stanford.edu). He is the editor of the companion volumes Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover Institution Press 2004) and Varieties of Progressivism in America (Hoover Institution Press 2004).This essay weaves together (and in places corrects) the argument of “John Rawls and the Liberal Faith,” in The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 60–69, and “The Academic Liberal,” in The Weekly Standard, Dec. 16, 2002.

Beissinger, Mark R. and Crawford Young, eds. Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002).

Herbst, Jeffrey. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Luong, Pauline Jones. Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post Soviet Central Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Reno, William. Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1998).

Rotberg, Robert I., ed. State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

Rotberg, Robert I., ed. When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).John R. Heilbrunn is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in International Political Economy of Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. Heilbrunn has publications on democracy in Africa, corruption in France, and is currently writing a book analyzing institutional change among Africa's petroleum economies. The author gratefully acknowledges helpful comments from Vincent Foucher, Phil Keefer, Nic van de Walle, and the anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics.

Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein. Edited by Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 400p. $80.00 cloth, $32.00 paper.

This festschrift for Richard J. Bernstein succeeds in celebrating his career, not only through the editors' insightful introduction and the excellent biographical essay by Judith Friedlander but also through 13 significant essays and an excerpt from Shoshana Yovel's novel that speaks with keen philosophical insight on radical evil. As the editors say, one of the distinctive contributions of Bernstein to philosophy is a view of social critique that encompasses normative as well as empirical and interpretive dimensions and that employs a form of pragmatic reason both dialogical in nature and political in its implications (p. xiii). The contributors draw upon Bernstein's approach to salvage what Jerome Kohn, in his fine essay based on Kant's Critique of Judgment, understands to be a “common world” that is “fit for human habitation” (pp. 270–74). The latter is the location for self-creation and for the freedom that sustains it. Nonetheless, self-creation is threatened by the totalitarian mind, which is intent upon using its freedom to destroy all freedom. As a counter, the essays in this volume embrace what the editors refer to as Bernstein's “Deweyan view of philosophy as the self-reflection of democratic society” and thereby make self-creation the centerpiece of human flourishing (p. viii).

Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond. By Andrew Biro. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. 270p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Andrew Biro's dense argument for a “denaturalized ecological politics” should have wide appeal. At one level, it should make political theorists generally—whether or not they consider themselves “ecological theorists”—reflect more systematically on how concepts of nature structure the ideas of canonical thinkers. Political ecology is too often treated like a specialty shop in the theory emporium, a boutique that one enters or not according to the inclinations of taste. In fact, its insights recast the central concerns of political theory broadly conceived. Just as feminists have uncovered how gendered concepts are woven throughout the entire fabric of political discourse, so ecological political theorists demonstrate how nature in multiple guises (wildness, savagery, emotional connectedness, fecundity, scarcity, etc.) subtly inflects the meaning of notions of rights, justice, and human well-being. In this regard, Biro's perceptive analyses of Rousseau and Marx—like John Meyer's reading of Aristotle and Hobbes in Political Nature (2001)—add heft to a growing literature that, in the name of environmental concern, wrings new meaning from familiar theorists.

Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement. By Stephen Eric Bronner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 224p. $29.50.

Stephen Eric Bronner reclaims what he takes to be the genuine spirit of Enlightenment thought from a variety of contemporaneous and historical critics on the Left and Right, but first and foremost from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (DE) (1947). Bronner contends that many criticisms of Enlightenment thought today can be traced to what he characterizes as Horkheimer and Adorno's brilliant but ultimately inaccurate and misleading analysis. The losses involved are not only scholarly but political, Bronner argues, for progressive activists and intellectuals today can benefit from the ethical orientations and philosophical temperaments that informed Enlightenment thinkers. Reclaiming the Enlightenment is also a response to historians of political thought who have too often, in Bronner's opinion, missed the forest for the trees. While the recent historiography of Enlightenment thought has deepened and broadened our understanding of particular figures, themes, and regional variants of eighteenth-century political philosophy, he contends that the contemporary emphasis on multiple Enlightenments can have the effect of obscuring what he takes to be the fundamental ethos of Enlightenment thought.

Breaking with Athens: Alfarabi as Founder. By Christopher A. Colmo. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 210p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The thesis of this book is novel and provocative. Christopher Colmo argues that Alfarabi breaks with Plato and Aristotle. In other words, contrary to Leo Strauss and others (among whom I count myself), Alfarabi is not, among other things, a useful guide to the recovery of a forgotten Plato and Aristotle. At his most ambitious, Colmo insinuates that Alfarabi offers a third path between the metaphysically grounded politics of the ancients and the moderns' excessive reliance on philosophic concepts such as human rights (p. 168). This third way is often referred to as the “autonomy of politics” from theory. Although Colmo is tentative about it, like all claims to a third way, it offers the utopian hope of escaping all of the pitfalls of the other two.

Peace Talks—Who Will Listen? By Fred Dallmayr. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 288p. $40.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

In this book, Fred Dallmayr tries to discover what intellectual resources are available for peacemaking today, in a world that he believes to be fundamentally violent. To do so, he scans the world's philosophic and religious traditions to find their arguments on behalf of peace. He takes as his starting point Erasmus, whose The Complaint of Peace of 1517 begins with a personification of Peace: Querela pacis, “Peace talks.” Dallmayr's book starts with an analysis of what Erasmus said about how to make peace, then goes on to survey other such arguments and practices in the world's philosophical and spiritual traditions. The work is remarkably wide-ranging, as it examines in some depth figures as varied as Aristotle, Confucius, Grotius, Kant, Gandhi, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martha Nussbaum.

How Patriotic Is the Patriot Act? Freedom Versus Security in the Age of Terrorism. By Amitai Etzioni. New York: Routledge, 2004. 224p. $26.00.

From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations. By Amitai Etzioni. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 272p. $29.95.

In How Patriotic Is the Patriot Act? Amitai Etzioni analyzes the United States response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, from the perspective of “responsive” or “new” communitarianism. New communitarianism, according to the author, can be distinguished from authoritarian communitarianism because it seeks a balance between freedom and security or social order (pp. 3–4). According to Etzioni, during the 1960s and 1970s, America “overcorrected” for forms of authoritarian government, such as racial segregation or J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation. As a result, the country experienced “excessive individualism” and “moral anomie.” With what he considers to have been an overemphasis on individual rights, certain policies, such as the possibility of a quarantine in the face of bioterrorism or highly communicable disease, have been “stigmatized” as being “beyond the pale” of reasonable discussion (pp. 87–89). By noting, for example, that the United States has allowed for quarantines at earlier junctures in its history and that a quarantine could be set up on a vacation island, he is clearly trying to rehabilitate the quarantine as a policy option. But this is just one policy among many that are emerging post–September 11 in the United States that are correcting the balance between liberty and security, for Etzioni. That is, he understands policies such as the USA Patriot Act, US VISIT (U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indication Technology program), CAPPS II (a proposed measure to update the current Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System (CAPPS) airline security program that was subsequently killed in the summer of 2004 because of its burden on civil liberties), national identification cards, and various biometric and facial recognition technologies to be relocating a balance between freedom and security that was apparently lost in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Practice of Liberal Pluralism. By William A. Galston. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 216p. $65.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

This book seeks to defend the idea of value pluralism set out in William Galston's earlier Liberal Pluralism (2002) against the various criticisms to which it has been subjected, and to explain the ways that this kind of pluralism can be given practical political application. The first of these tasks is efficiently done (in the final section), and as well as offering Galston the chance to modify some previous overstatements of his position (for example, to tone down his criticism of the idea of personal autonomy), the book provides a useful summary of the current state of various philosophical controversies surrounding the politics of liberalism. However the real interest lies in his attempt to make pluralism a practical political doctrine in its own right. Here, his success is mixed. His argument is most persuasive when he is criticizing excessively “monistic” or, as he calls them, “totalist” conceptions of liberal politics. The problem is that these criticisms often appear unobjectionable precisely because they are only weakly connected to a distinctively pluralist alternative.