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Politics

The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory edited by John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, Anne Philips (Oxford Handbooks of Political Science: Oxford University Press) The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. This volume, The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, provides comprehensive and critical coverage of the lively and contested field of political theory, and will help set the agenda for the field for years to come. Long recognized as one of the main branches of political science, political theory has in recent years burgeoned in many different directions. Forty-five chapters by distinguished political theorists look at the state of the field, where it has been in the recent past, and where it is likely to go in future. They examine political theory's edges as well as its core, the globalizing context of the field, and the challenges presented by social, economic, and technological changes.

"What's your line of business, then?"

"I'm a scholar of the Enlightenment," said Nicholas.

"Oh Lord!" the young man said. "Another producer of useless graduates!"

Nicholas felt despondent.

In The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat—Steven Lukes' fictiona­lized round-up of contemporary political theory—the hapless professor has been kidnapped by the resistance movement and sent off to search for grounds for optimism. In Utilitaria, he is asked to give a lecture on "Breaking Free from the Past;" in Communitaria, on "Why the Enlightenment Project Had to Fail." Neither topic is much to his taste, but it is only when he reaches Libertaria (not, as one of its gloomy inhabitants tells him, a good place to be unlucky, unemployed, or employed by the state) that he is made to recognize the limited purchase of his academic expertise. At the end of the book, the professor still has not found the mythical land of Egalitaria. But he has derived one important lesson from his adventures: in the pursuit of any one ideal, it is disastrous to lose sight of all the others.

This Handbook is not organized around categories such as utilitarianism, communitarianism, or libertarianism, and though it also notes the continuing elusiveness of egalitarianism, it does not promote any single ideal. The Hand­book seeks, instead, to reflect the pluralism of contemporary political theory, a pluralism we regard as a key feature and major strength of the field. In this introduction, we clarify what we understand by political theory, identify major themes and developments over recent decades, and take stock of the contem­porary condition of the field. We end with an explanation of the categories through which we have organized the contributions to the Handbook.

Political Theory is an interdisciplinary endeavor whose center of gravity lies at the humanities end of the happily still undisciplined discipline of political science. Its traditions, approaches, and styles vary, but the field is united by a commitment to theorize, critique, and diagnose the norms, practices, and organization of political action in the past and present, in our own places and elsewhere. Across what sometimes seem chasms of difference, political the­orists share a concern with the demands of justice and how to fulfill them, the presuppositions and promise of democracy, the divide between secular and religious ways of life, and the nature and identity of public goods, among many other topics.

Political theorists also share a commitment to the humanistic study of politics (although with considerable disagreement over what that means), and a skepticism towards the hegemony sometimes sought by our more self-consciously "scientific" colleagues. In recent years, and especially in the USA, the study of politics has become increasingly formal and quantitative. Indeed, there are those for whom political theory, properly understood, would be formal theory geared solely towards the explanation of political phenomena, where explanation is modeled on the natural sciences and takes the form of seeking patterns and offering causal explanations for events in the human world. Such approaches have been challenged—most recently by the Perestroika movement (Monroe 2005)—on behalf of more qualitative and interpretive approaches. Political theory is located at one remove from this quantitative vs. qualitative debate, sitting somewhere between the distanced universals of normative philosophy and the empirical world of politics.

For a long time, the challenge for the identity of political theory has been how to position itself productively in three sorts of location: in relation to the academic disciplines of political science, history, and philosophy; between the world of politics and the more abstract, ruminative register of theory; be­tween canonical political theory and the newer resources (such as feminist and critical theory, discourse analysis, film and film theory, popular and political culture, mass media studies, neuroscience, environmental studies, behavioral science, and economics) on which political theorists increasingly draw. Political theorists engage with empirical work in politics, economics, sociology, and law to inform their reflections, and there have been plenty of productive associations between those who call themselves political scientists and those who call themselves political theorists. The connection to law is strongest when it comes to constitutional law and its normative foundations (for example, Sunstein 1993; Tully 1995, 2002; this connection is covered in our chapters by Stimson and by Ferejohn and Pasquino).

Most of political theory has an irreducibly normative component—regard­less of whether the theory is systematic or diagnostic in its approach, textual or cultural in its focus, analytic, critical, genealogical, or deconstructive in its method, ideal or piecemeal in its procedures, socialist, liberal, or conservative in its politics. The field welcomes all these approaches. It has a core canon, often referred to as Plato to NATO, although the canon is itself unstable, with the rediscovery of figures such as Sophocles, Thucydides, Baruch Spinoza, and Mary Wollstonecraft, previously treated as marginal, and the addition of new icons such as Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas. Moreover, the subject matter of political theory has always extended beyond this canon and its interpretations, as theorists bring their analytic tools to bear on novels, film, and other cultural artifacts, and on developments in other social sciences and even in natural science.

Political theory is an unapologetically mongrel sub-discipline, with no dominant methodology or approach. When asked to describe themselves, theorists will sometimes employ the shorthand of a key formative influence—as in "I'm a Deleuzean," or Rawlsian, or Habermasian, or Arendtian—although it is probably more common to be labeled in this way by others than to claim the description oneself. In contrast, however, to some neighboring producers of knowledge, political theorists do not readily position themselves by reference to three or four dominant schools that define their field. There is, for example, no parallel to the division between realists, liberals, and constructivists, recently joined by neoconservatives, that defines international relations theory. And there is certainly nothing like the old Marx–Weber–Durkheim triad that was the staple of courses in sociological theory up to the 1970s.

Because of this, political theory can sometimes seem to lack a core identity. Some practitioners seek to rectify the perceived lack, either by putting political theory back into what is said to be its proper role as arbiter of universal questions and explorer of timeless texts, or by returning the focus of political theory to history. The majority, however, have a strong sense of their vocation. Many see the internally riven and uncertain character of the field as reflective of the internally riven and uncertain character of the political world in which we live, bringing with it all the challenges and promises of that condition. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, liberal, critical, and post-structuralist theorists have (in their very different ways) responded to the breakdown of old assumptions about the unitary nature of nation-state identities. They have rethought the presuppositions and meanings of identity, often rejecting unitary conceptions and moving towards more pluralistic, diverse, or agonistic conceptions in their place. These reflections have had an impact on the field's own self-perception and understanding. Happily for political theory, the process has coincided with a movement within the academy to reconceive knowledge as more fundamentally interdisciplinary. This reconsideration of the function and role of the boundaries of the academic disciplines may help others, as well as political theorists, to see the field's pluralism as a virtue and a strength, rather than a weakness in need of rectification.

1.1 Relationship with Political Science

Political theory's relationship to the discipline of political science has not always been a happy one. Since the founding of the discipline in the late nineteenth century, there have been periodic proclamations of its newly scien­tific character. The "soft" other for the new science has sometimes been journalism, sometimes historical narrative, sometimes case-study methods. It has also, very often, been political theory. Beginning in the 1950s, behavioral revolutionaries tried to purge the ranks of theorists—and had some success at this in one or two large Midwestern departments of political science in the USA. The later impact of rational choice theory encouraged others, like William Riker (1982a: 753), to reject "belles letters, criticism, and philosophic speculation" along with "phenomenology and hermeneutics." For those driven by their scientific aspirations, it has always been important to distinguish the "true" scientific study of politics from more humanistic approaches—and political theory has sometimes borne the brunt of this.

Political theorists have noted, in response, that science and objectivity are steeped in a normativity that the self-proclaimed scientists wrongly disavow; and theorists have not been inclined to take the description of political "science" at face value. They have challenged the idea that their own work in normative theory lacks rigor, pointing to criteria within political theory that differentiate more from less rigorous work. While resisting the epistemic assumptions of empiricism, many also point out that much of what passes for political theory is profoundly engaged with empirical politics: what, after all, could be more "real", vital, and important than the symbols and categories that organize our lives and the frameworks of our understanding? The French have a word to describe what results when those elected as president and prime minister are representatives of two different political parties: cohabitation. The word connotes, variously, cooperation, toleration, sufferance, antagonism, and a sense of common enterprise. Cohabitation, in this sense, is a good way to cast the relationship between political theory and political science.

1.2 Relationship with History

History as a point of reference has also proven contentious, with recurrent debates about the extent to which theory is contained by its historical context (see Pocock and Farr in this volume), and whether one can legitimately employ political principles from one era as a basis for criticizing political practice in another. When Quentin Skinner, famous for his commitment to historical contextualism, suggested that early principles of republican free­dom might offer a telling alternative to the conceptions of liberty around today, he took care to distance himself from any suggestion that "intellectual historians should turn themselves into moralists" (Skinner 1998: 118). He still drew criticism for abandoning the historian's traditional caution.

In an essay published in 1989, Richard Ashcraft called upon political theorists to acknowledge the fundamentally historical character of their enterprise. While contemporary theorists recognize the "basic social/histor­ical conditions which structure" their practice, "this recognition does not serve as a conscious guideline for their teaching and writing of political theory." Ashcraft continued: "On the contrary, political theory is taught and written about as if it were great philosophy rather than ideology" (Ash-craft 1989: 700). For Ashcraft, acknowledging the ideological character of political theory meant embracing its political character. The main objects of his critique were Leo Strauss and his followers, whom Ashcraft saw as seeking evidence of universally valid standards in canonical political theorists and calling on those standards to judge their works. For Straussians, the wisdom of the ancients and greats is outside history.

Ashcraft also criticized Sheldon Wolin, who shared Ashcraft's displeasure with Straussians, on the grounds of their inadequate attention to politics (see Saxonhouse's contribution to this volume). Although Wolin acknow­ledged the historicity of the texts he had examined in his seminal Politics and Vision (1960), Ashcraft claimed that Wolin resisted the "wholesale transform­ation" that would result, in both his view and Ashcraft's, from putting that historicity at the center of his interpretative practice. Wolin is famous for championing what, in the style of Hannah Arendt, he termed "the political:" politics understood, not in its instrumental capacity (Harold Lasswell's (1961) "'Who gets what, when, and how"), but rather in its orientation toward the public good coupled with a commitment to the "public happiness" of political participation. Contra Ashcraft, one might see Wolin's move to the political as a way of splitting the difference between a Straussian universalism and the thick contextualism of Ashcraft's preferred historicist approach.

"The political" is a conceptual category, itself outside of history, that rejects the idea that politics is about universal truths, while also rejecting the reduction of politics to interests. "The political" tends to connote, minimally, some form of individual or collective action that disrupts ordinary states of affairs, normal life, or routine patterns of behavior or governance. There are diverse conceptions of this notion. To take three as exemplary: the political takes its meaning from its figuration in Wolin's work by contrast primarily with statism, constitutionalism, and political apathy; in Arendt's work by contrast with private or natural spheres of human behavior; and in Ranciere's (1999) work by contrast with the "police."

1.3 Relationship with Philosophy

The most un-historical influence on political theory in recent decades has been John Rawls, whose work represents a close alliance with analytic phil­osophy. On one popular account, Rawls arrived from outside as political theory's foreign savior and rescued political theory from the doldrums with the publication in 1971 of A Theory of Justice (see Arneson in this volume). Rawls' book was an ambitious, normative, and systematic investigation of what political, economic, and social justice should look like in contemporary democracies. With the distancing mechanisms of a veil of ignorance and hypothetical social contract, Rawls followed Kant in looking to reason to adjudicate what he saw as the fundamental question of politics: the conflict between liberty and equality. Writing from within the discipline of philoso­phy, he returned political theory to one of its grand styles (Tocqueville's two-volume Democracy in America, also written by an outsider, would represent another). Much subsequent work on questions of justice and equality has continued in this vein, and while those who have followed Rawls have not necessarily shared his conclusions, they have often employed similar mind experiments to arrive at the appropriate relationship between equality and choice. The clamshell auction imagined by Ronald Dworkin (1981), where all the society's resources are up for sale and the participants employ their clamshells to bid for what best suits their own projects in life, is another classic illustration. Starting with what seems the remotest of scenarios; Dworkin claims to arrive at very specific recommendations for the contemporary welfare state.

As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, one strand of current debates in political theory revolves around the relationship between the more abstracted or hypothetical register of analytic philosophy and approaches that stress the specificities of historical or contemporary contexts. Those working in close association with the traditions of analytic philosophy—and often preferring to call themselves political philosophers—have generated some of the most interesting and innovative work in recent decades. But they have also been repeatedly challenged. Communitarians and post-structuralists claim that the unencumbered individual of Rawlsian liberalism is not neutral but an ideological premise with significant, unacknowledged political effects on its theoretical conclusions (Sandel 1982; Honig 1993). Feminists criticize the analytic abstraction from bodily difference as a move that reinforces heteronormative assumptions and gender inequalities (Okin 1989; Pateman 1988; Zerilli and Gatens in this volume). As we indicate later in the introduc­tion, analytic liberalism has made some considerable concessions in this regard. In Political Liberalism, for example, Rawls no longer represents his theory of justice as addressing what is right for all societies at all times, but is careful to present his arguments as reflecting the intuitions of contemporary liberal and pluralistic societies.

1.4 Relationship with "Real World" Politics

The way political theory positions itself in relation to political science, history, and philosophy can be read in part as reflections on the meaning of the political. It can also be read as reflections on the nature of theory, and what can—or cannot—be brought into existence through theoretical work. The possibilities are bounded on one side by utopianism. Political theorists have seemed at their most vulnerable to criticism by political scientists or economists when their normative explorations generate conclusions that cannot plausibly be implemented: principles of living, perhaps, that invoke the practices of small-scale face-to-face societies; the or principles of distri­bution that ignore the implosion of communism or the seemingly irresistible global spread of consumerist ideas (see Dunn 2000, for one such warning). There is an important strand in political theory that relishes the utopian label, regarding this as evidence of the capacity to think beyond current confines, the political theorist's version of blue-sky science. Ever since Aristotle, how­ever, this has been challenged by an insistence on working within the param­eters of the possible, an insistence often called "sober" by those who favor it. At issue here is not the status of political theory in relation to political science, but how theory engages with developments in the political world.

Some see it as failing to do so. John Gunnell (1986) has represented political theory as alienated from politics, while Jeffrey Isaac (1995) argues that a reader of political theory journals in the mid 1990s would have had no idea that the Berlin Wall had fallen. Against this, one could cite a flurry of studies employ­ing empirical results to shed light on the real-world prospects for the kind of deliberative democracy currently advocated by democratic theorists (see for example the 2005 double issue of Acta Politica); or testing out theories of justice by reference to empirical studies of social mobility (Marshall, Swift, and Roberts 1997). Or one might take note of the rather large number of

political theorists whose interest in contemporary political events such as the formation of a European identity, the new international human-rights regime and the politics of immigration, the eschewal of the Geneva Convention at the turn of the twentieth century, or the appropriate political response to natural disasters leads them to think about how to theorize these events. Concepts or figures of thought invoked here include Giorgio Agamben's (1998) "bare life" of the human being to whom anything can be done by the state, Michel Foucault's (1979) "disciplinary power" that conditions what people can think, Carl Schmitt's (1985) "state of exception" wherein the sovereign suspends the rule of law, Ronald Dworkin's (1977) superhuman judge "Hercules," Jacques Derrida's (2000) "unconditional hospitality" to the other, or Etienne Balibar's (2004) "marks of sovereignty" which signal the arrogation to themselves by political actors in civil society of rights and privileges of action historically assumed by states.

As is clear from the contributions in this Handbook, political theorists take their cue from events around them, turning their attention to the challenges presented by ecological crisis; emergency or security politics; the impact of new technologies on the ways we think about privacy, justice, or the category of the human; the impact of new migrations on ideas of race, tolerance, and multiculturalism; the implications of growing global inequalities on the way we theorize liberty, equality, democracy, sovereignty, or hegemony. In iden­tifying the topics for this collection, we have been struck by the strong sense of political engagement in contemporary political theory, and the way this shapes the field.

1.5 Institutional Landscape

Institutionally, political theory is located in several disciplines, starting of course with political science, but continuing through philosophy and law, and including some representation in departments of history, sociology, and economics. This means that the professional associations and journals of these disciplines are hospitable (if to varying degrees) to work in political theory. Among the general political science journals, it is quite common to find political theory published in Polity and Political Studies, somewhat less so in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics. On the face of it, the American Political Science Review publishes a substantial number of political theory articles, but the majority of these have been in the history of political thought, with Straussian authors especially well represented. In philosophy, Ethics and Philosophy and Public Affairs are the two high-profile journals most likely to publish political theory. Some of the more theoretically inclined law journals publish political theory, and so do some of the more politically inclined sociology journals.

Political theory's best-established journal of its own is Political Theory, founded in 1972. Prior to its establishment, the closest we had to a general political-theory academic periodical were two book series. The first was the sporadic Philosophy, Politics and Society series published by Basil Blackwell and always co-edited by Peter Laslett, beginning in 1956 and reaching its seventh volume in 2003. Far more regularly published have been the NOMOS yearbooks of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, which began in 1958 and continue to this day. Recent years have seen an explosion in political theory journal titles: History of Political Thought; Journal of Political Philosophy; The Good Society; Philosophy, Politics and Economics; Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy; European Journal of Political Theory; Contemporary Political Theory; Constellations; and Theory and Event (an online journal). The Review of Politics has been publishing since 1939, although its coverage has been selective, with a Straussian emphasis for much of its history. Political theorists can often be found publishing in related areas such as feminism, law, international relations, or cultural stud­ies. Journals that feature their work from these various interdisciplinary locations include differences; Politics, Culture, and Society; Daedalus; Social Text; Logos; Strategies; Signs; and Millennium. However, political theory is a field very much oriented to book publication (a fact which artificially de­presses the standing of political theory journals when computed from cit­ation indexes, for even journal articles in the field tend to cite books rather than other articles). All the major English-language academic presses publish political theory. Oxford University Press's Oxford Political Theory series is especially noteworthy. While the world of the Internet changes rapidly, at the time of writing the Political Theory Daily Review is an excellent resource that opens many doors.'

Political theory is much in evidence at meetings of disciplinary associ­ations. The Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association is especially important, not just in organizing panels and lectures and sponsoring awards but also in hosting what is for a couple of hours every year probably the largest number of political theorists in one room talking at once (the Foundations reception). The field also has associ­ations of its own that sponsor conferences: the Conference for the Study of Political Thought International, and the Association for Political Theory (both based in North America). In the UK, there is an annual Political Theory conference in Oxford; and though the European Consortium for Political Research has tended to focus more on comparative studies, it also provides an important context for workshops on political theory.

As befits a relentlessly critical field, political theory is prone to self-examination. We have already noted controversies over its relationship to various disciplinary and interdisciplinary landscapes. Occasionally the self-examination takes a morbid turn, with demise or death at issue: the most notorious example being when Laslett (1956) claimed in his introduction to the 1956 Philosophy, Politics and Society book series that the tradition of political theory was broken, and the practice dead. Even the field's defenders have at times detected only a faint pulse.

Concerns about the fate of theory peaked in the 1950s and 196os with the ascendancy of behavioralism in US political science. Such worries were circumvented, but not finally ended, by the flurry of political and philosoph­ical activity in the USA around the Berkeley Free Speech movement (with which Sheldon Wolin 1969, and John Schaar 1970, were associated), the Civil Rights movement (Arendt 1959), and protests against the Vietnam war and the US military draft (Walzer 1967, 1970). At that moment, the legitimacy of the state, the limits of obligation, the nature of justice, and the claims of conscience in politics were more than theoretical concerns. Civil disobedi­ence was high on political theory's agenda. Members of activist networks read and quoted Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and others in support of their actions and visions of politics.

Throughout the 196os, the struggle over the fate of theory was entwined with questions about what counted as politics and how to find a political-theoretical space between or outside liberalism and Marxism. It was against this political and theoretical background that John Rawls was developing the ideas gathered together in systematic form in A Theory of Justice (1971), a book devoted to the examination of themes that the turbulent 196os had made so prominent: redistributive policies, conscientious objection, and the legitim­acy of state power. Later in that decade Quentin Skinner and a new school of contextualist history of political thought (known as the Cambridge school) rose to prominence in the English-speaking world. Still other works of political theory from this period give the lie to the idea that political theory was in need of rescue or revivification. The following stand out, and in some cases remain influential: Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History (1953), Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism (1957), Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1963), Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision (1960), Friedrich A. von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics (1962), James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's The Calculus of Consent (1962), Judith Shklar's Legalism (1964), Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964), Brian Barry's Political Argument (1964), and Isaiah Berlin's Four Essays on Liberty (1969).

2.1 Liberalism and its Critics

Looking at the field from the vantage point of the first years of the twenty-first century, there is certainly no indication of political theory failing in its vitality: this is a time of energetic and expansive debate, with new topics crowding into an already busy field. For many in political theory, including many critics of liberal theory, this pluralistic activity obscures a more im­portant point: the dominance that has been achieved by liberalism, at least in the Anglo-American world. In its classic guise, liberalism assumes that individuals are for the most part motivated by self-interest, and regards them as the best judges of what this interest requires. In its most confident variants, it sees the material aspects of interest as best realized through exchange in a market economy, to the benefit of all. Politics enters when interests cannot be so met to mutual benefit. Politics is therefore largely about how to reconcile and aggregate individual interests, and takes place under a supposedly neutral set of constitutional rules. Given that powerful individ­uals organized politically into minorities or majorities can turn public power to their private benefit, checks across different centers of power are necessary, and constitutional rights are required to protect individuals against govern­ment and against one another. These rights are accompanied by obligations on the part of their holders to respect rights held by others, and duties to the government that establishes and protects rights. Liberalism so defined leaves plenty of scope for dispute concerning the boundaries of politics, political intervention in markets, political preference aggregation and conflict reso­lution mechanisms, and the content of rights, constitutions, obligations, and duties. There is, for example, substantial distance between the egalitarian disposition of Rawls and the ultra-individualistic libertarianism of Robert Nozick (1974).3 Liberalism's conception of politics clearly differs, however, from the various conceptions of the political deployed by Arendt, Wolin, Ranciere, and others, as well as from republican conceptions of freedom explored by Quentin Skinner (1998) or Philip Pettit (1997).

In earlier decades, liberalism had a clear comprehensive competitor in the form of Marxism, not just in the form of real-world governments claiming to be Marxist, but also in political theory. Marxism scorned liberalism's indi­vidualist ontology, pointing instead to the centrality of social classes in political conflict. The market was seen not as a mechanism for meeting individual interests, but as a generator of oppression and inequality (as well as undeniable material progress). Marxism also rejected liberalism's static and ahistorical account of politics in favor of an analysis of history driven by material forces that determined what individuals were and could be in different historical epochs. Different versions of this were hotly debated in the 197os, as theorists positioned themselves behind the "humanist" Marx, revealed in his earlier writings on alienation (McLellan 197o),4 or the "Althus­serian" Marx, dealing in social relations and forces of production (Althusser 1969; Althusser and Balibar 1970). Disagreements between these schools were intense, although both proclaimed the superiority of Marxist over liberal thought. In the period that followed, however, the influence of academic Marxism in the English-speaking world waned. The fortunes of Marxist theory were not helped by the demise of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91, and the determined pursuit of capitalism in China under the leadership of a nomin­ally Marxist regime.

Questions remain about liberalism's success in defeating or replacing this rival. One way to think of subsequent developments is to see a strand from both liberalism and Marxism as being successfully appropriated by practi­tioners of analytic philosophy, such as Rawls and G. A. Cohen (1978). Focusing strictly on Marxism vs. liberalism, however, threatens to obscure the presence of other vigorous alternatives, from alternative liberalisms critical (sometimes implicitly) of Rawlsianism, such as those developed by Richard Flathman (1992), George Kateb (1992), Jeremy Waldron (1993), and William Galston (1991), to alternative Marxisms such as those explored by Jacques Ranciere (1989) and Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991), and Nancy Hartsock (1983). Michael Rogin combined the insights of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis to generate work now considered canonical to American studies and cultural studies (though he himself was critical of that set of approaches; see Dean's essay in this Handbook). Rogin (1987) pressed for the centrality of race, class, property, and the unconscious to the study of American politics (on race, see also Mills 1997).

Liberal theory's assumptions about power and individualism were criti­cized or bypassed from still other perspectives through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, a fecund period during which political theorists had a wide range of approaches and languages from which to choose in pursuit of their work. In France, social theorists writing in the 1970s (in the aftermath of May 1968) included, most famously, Michel Foucault, whose re-theorization of power had a powerful influence on generations of American theorists. In Germany, a discursive account of politics developed by Jurgen Habermas (for example, 1989, first published in German 1962) captured the imaginations of a gener­ation of critical theorists committed to developing normative standards through which to assess the claims of liberal democratic states to legitimacy. The 1970s Italian Autonomia movement inspired new Gramscian and Foucaultian reflections on equality, politics, violence, and state power (Virno 2004). For much of this period, feminism defined itself almost as an opposite of liberalism, drawing inspiration initially from Marxism, later from psychoanalytic theories of difference, and developing its own critique of the abstract individual. In Canada and at Oxford, Charles Taylor (1975) was thinking about politics through a rereading of Hegel that stressed the im­portance of community to political autonomy, influencing Michael Sandel (1982) and many subsequent theorists of multiculturalism. Deleuze and Guattari combined post-structuralism and psychoanalyisis into a series of difficult ruminations on the spatial metaphors that organize our thinking at the ontological level about politics, nature, and life (1977; see also Patton in this volume). Ranging from Freudian to Lacanian approaches, psychoanalysis has provided political theorists with a perspective from which to examine the politics of mass society, race and gender inequalities, and personal and political identity (Butler 1993; Laclau 2006; Zizek 2001; Irigara 1985; Zerilli 1994; Glass in this volume).

2.2 Liberal Egalitarianism

As the above suggests, alternatives to liberalism continue to proliferate, and yet, in many areas of political theory, liberalism has become the dominant position. Marxism has continued to inform debates on exploitation and equality, but in a shift that has been widely replayed through the last twenty-five years, rein­vented itself to give more normative and analytic weight to the individual (Roemer 1982, 1986; Cohen 1995, 2000). There has been a particularly sign­ificant convergence, therefore, in the debates around equality, with socialists unexpectedly preoccupied with questions of individual responsibility and desert, liberals representing equality rather than liberty as the "sovereign virtue" (Dworkin 2000), and the two combining to make liberal egalitarianism almost the only remaining tradition of egalitarianism. One intriguing outcome is the literature on basic income or basic endowment, which all individuals would receive from government to facilitate their participation in an otherwise liberal society (van Parijs 1995; Ackerman and Alstott 1999).

For generations, liberalism had been taken to task for what was said to be its "formal" understanding of equality: its tendency to think that there were no particular resource implications attached to human equality. In the wake of Rawls's "difference principle" (see Arneson in this volume) or Dworkin's "equality of resources" (see Williams in this volume), this now seems a singularly inappropriate complaint. At the beginning of the 1980s, Amartya Sen posed a question that was to frame much of the literature on distributive justice through the next decade: equality of what? This generated a multiplicity of answers, ranging through welfare, resources, capabilities (Sen's preferred candidate), to the more cumbersome "equality of opportunity for welfare," and "equality of access to advantage."5 None of the answers could be dismissed as representing a merely formal understanding of equality, but all engaged with key liberal themes of individuality and responsibility. The subsequent explo­sion of liberal egalitarianism can be read as a radicalization of the liberal tradition. But the convergence between what were once distinctively liberal and socialist takes on equality can also be seen as demonstrating the new dominance of liberal theory. Much of the literature on equality is now resolutely individualist in form, running its arguments through thought experiments designed to tease out our intuitions of equality, and illustrating with stories of differently endowed individuals, exhibiting different degrees of aspiration and effort, whose entitlements we are then asked to assess. It is not always clear what purchase this discourse of individual variation (with a cast of characters including opera singers, wine buffs, surfers, and fishermen) has on the larger inequalities of the contemporary world. "What," as Elizabeth Anderson has asked, "has happened to the concerns of the politically oppressed? What about inequalities of race, gender, class, and caste?" (Anderson 1999, 288).

In the course of the 1990s, a number of theorists voiced concern about the way issues of redistribution were being displaced by issues of recognition, casting matters of economic inequality into the shade (Fraser 1997; also Markell and Squires in this volume). There is considerable truth to this observation, but it would be misleading to say that no one now writes about economic inequality. There is, on the contrary, a large literature (and a useful web site, The Equality Exchange6) dealing with these issues. The more telling point is that the egalitarian literature has become increasingly focused around questions of individual responsibility, opportunity, and endowment, thus less engaged with social structures of inequality, and less easily distinguishable from liberalism.

2.3 Communitarianism

One central axis of contention in the 198os was what came to be known as the liberal–communitarian debate (for an overview, see Mulhall and Swift 1996).

Communitarians like Michael Sandel (1982), influenced by both Arendt and Taylor, argued that in stressing abstract individuals and their rights as the building blocks for political theory, liberalism missed the importance of the community that creates individuals as they actually exist. For communitar­ians, individuals are always embedded in a network of social relationships, never the social isolates that liberalism assumes, and they have obligations to the community, not just to the political arrangements that facilitate their own interests. This opposition between the liberal's stripped-down, rights-bearing individual and the communitarian's socially-embedded bearer of obligations seemed, for a period, the debate in political philosophy. But voices soon made themselves heard arguing that this was a storm in a teacup, a debate within liberalism rather than between liberalism and its critics, the main question being the degree to which holistic notions of community are instrumental to the rights and freedoms that both sides in the debate prized (Taylor 1989; Walzer 1990; Galston 1991). Liberalism, it is said, was misrepresented. Its conception of the individual was never as atomistic, abstracted, or self-interested, as its critics tried to suggest.

2.4 Feminism

In the 1980s, feminists had mostly positioned themselves as critics of both schools. They shared much of the communitarian skepticism about disem­bedded individuals, and brought to this an even more compelling point about the abstract individual being disembodied, as if it made no difference whether "he" were female or male (Pateman 1988; also Gatens in this vol­ume). But they also warned against the authoritarian potential in holistic notions of community, and the way these could be wielded against women (e.g. Frazer and Lacey 1993). Growing numbers challenged impartialist con­ceptions of justice, arguing for a contextual ethics that recognizes the respon­sibilities individuals have for one another and/or the differences in our social location (Gilligan 1982; Young 1990; Mendus in this volume). Still others warned against treating the language of justice and rights as irredeemably masculine, and failing, as a result, to defend the rights of women (Okin 1989).

As the above suggests, feminism remained a highly diverse body of thought through the 1980s and 1990s; but to the extent that there was a consensus, it was largely critical of the liberal tradition, which was represented as overly individualistic, wedded to a strong public/private divide, and insufficiently alert to gender issues. There has since been a discernible softening in this critique, and this seems to reflect a growing conviction that liberalism is not as dependent on the socially isolated self as had been suggested. Nussbaum (1999: 62) argues that liberal individualism "does not entail either egoism or normative self-sufficiency;" and while feminists writing on autonomy have developed their own distinctive understanding of "relational autonomy," many now explicitly repudiate the picture of mainstream liberal theory as ignoring the social nature of the self (see essays in MacKenzie and Stoljar 2000). Some of the earlier feminist critiques overstated the points of differ­ence with liberalism, misrepresenting the individual at the heart of the tradition as more self-contained, self-interested, and self-centered than was necessarily the case. But it also seems that liberalism made some important adjustments and in the process met at least part of the feminist critique. It would be churlish to complain of this (when you criticize a tradition, you presumably hope it will mend its ways), but one is left, once again, with a sense of a tradition mopping up its erstwhile opponents. Some forms of feminism are committed to a radical politics of sexual difference that it is hard to imagine liberalism ever wanting or claiming (see Zerilli in this volume). But many brands of feminism that were once critical of liberalism have made peace with the liberal tradition.

2.5 Democracy and Critical Theory

In the literature on citizenship and democracy, liberalism has faced a number of critical challenges, but here, too, some of the vigor of that challenge seems to have dispersed. Republicanism predates liberalism by two thousand years (see Nelson in this volume), and emphasises active citizenship, civic virtue, and the pursuit of public values, not the private interests associated more with the liberal tradition. Republicanism enjoyed a significant revival through the 198os and 1990s as one of the main alternatives to liberal democracy (Sunstein 1990; Pettit 1997); indeed, it looked, for a time, as if it might substitute for socialism as the alternative to the liberal tradition. Nowadays, even the republican Richard Dagger (2004: 175) allows that "a republican polity must be able to count on a commitment to principles generally associated with liberalism, such as tolerance, fair play, and respect for the rights of others;" this is not, in other words, a total alternative. Deliberative democracy also emerged in the early 1990s as a challenge to established liberal models that regarded politics as the aggregation of preferences defined mostly in a private realm (J. Cohen 1989). For deliberative democrats, reflection upon preferences in a public forum was central; and again, it looked as though this would require innovative thinking about alternative institutional arrangements that would take democracies beyond the standard liberal rep­ertoire (Dryzek 199o). By the late 199os, however, the very institutions that deliberative democrats had once criticized became widely seen as the natural home for deliberation, with an emphasis on courts and legislatures. Prom­inent liberals such as Rawls (1997, 771-2) proclaimed themselves deliberative democrats, and while Bohman (1998) celebrates this transformation as "the coming of age of deliberative democracy," it also seems like another swallow­ing up of critical alternatives.

The recent history of critical theory—and more specifically, the work of Jurgen Habermas—is exemplary in this respect. Critical theory's ancestry extends back via the Frankfurt School to Marx. In the hands of Max Hor­kheimer and Theodor Adorno (1972; first published 1947) in particular, critique was directed at dominant forms of instrumental rationality that defined modern society. Habermas rescued this critique from a potential dead end by showing that a communicative conception of rationality could underwrite a more congenial political order and associated emancipatory projects. Habermas's theory of the state was originally that of a monolith under sway of instrumental reason in the service of capitalism, which had to be resisted. Yet come the 199os, Habermas (1996) had redefined himself as a constitutionalist stressing the role of rights in establishing the conditions for open discourse in the public sphere, whose democratic task was to influence political institutions that could come straight from a liberal democratic textbook (see Scheuerman in this volume).

2.6 Green Political Theory

Green political theory began in the 1970s, generating creative proposals for ecologically defensible alternatives to liberal capitalism. The center of gravity was left-libertarianism verging on eco-anarchism (Bookchin 1982), although (at least in the 1970s) some more Hobbesian and authoritarian voices were

raised (Ophuls 1977). All could agree that liberal individualism and capitali economic growth were antithetical to any sustainable political ecology. In his chapter, Meyer charts the progress of "post-exuberant" ecological politic theory, characterized by engagement with liberalism. Not all green theory h moved in this direction. For example, Bennett and Chaloupka (1993) wor more in the traditions of Thoreau and Foucault, while Plumwood (2004 draws on radical ecology and feminism to criticize the dualisms and anthro- pocentric rationalism of liberalism.      

2.7 Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is often seen as merely critical rather than constructive. This mistaken impression comes from a focus on the intersections between post-structuralist theory and liberal theory. Some post-structuralist theorists seek to supplement rather than supplant liberalism, to correct its excesses, or even to give it a conscience that, in the opinion of many, it too often seems to lack. Hence Patton's suggestion (in this volume) that the distance between post-structuralist and liberal political theory may not be as unbridgeable as is commonly conceived. And some versions of liberal theory are more likely to be embraced or explored by post-structuralists than others: Isaiah Berlin, Richard Flathman, Jeremy Waldron, and Stuart Hampshire are all liberals whose work has been attended to in some detail by post-structuralist thinkers.

But post-structuralists have also developed alternative models of politics and ethics not directly addressed to liberal theory. One way to canvas those is with reference to the varying grand narratives on offer from this side of the field. Post-structuralism is often defined as intrinsically hostile to any sort of grand narrative, a claim attributed to Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984). This claim is belied by a great deal of work in the field that does not so much reject grand narrative as reimagine and reiterate it (Bennett 2002). Post-structuralists do reject foundational meta-narratives: those that present themselves as tran­scendentally true, for which nature or history has an intrinsic purpose, or that entail a two-world metaphysic. Those post-structuralists who do use meta-narratives tend to see themselves as writing in the tradition of social contract theorists like Hobbes, whose political arguments are animated by imaginary or speculative claims about the origins and trajectories of social life. Post-structuralists, however, are careful to represent their post-metaphysical views as an "onto-story whose persuasiveness is always at issue and can never be fully disentangled from an interpretation of present historical circumstan­ces" (White 2000, 1011; see also Deleuze and Guattari 1977).

What post-structuralists try to do without is not the origin story by means of which political theory has always motivated its readers, nor the wagers by way of which it offers hope. Rather, post-structuralists seek to do without the ends or guarantees (such as faith, or progress, or virtue) which have enabled some enviable achievements (such as the broadening of human rights), but in the name of which cruelties have also been committed (in the so-called "develop­ing" world, or in the West against non-believers and non-conformists).' These ends or guarantees have sometimes enabled political theorists to evade full responsibility for the conclusions they seek, by claiming the goals or values in question are called for by some extra-human source, like god or nature.

We turn now to the way we have organized this Handbook. Part II, "Contem­porary Currents," assesses the impact, and considers the likely future trajec­tory, of literature that proved especially influential in framing debate through the last decades of the twentieth century and opening years of the twenty-first. The selection is not, of course, meant to sum up what political theory has been about over that period: if it did that, there would be little need for the remaining essays in the Handbook. We have included three figures—Rawls, Habermas, and Foucault—whose work has so shaped the field that it became possible for a time to label (although somewhat misleadingly) other political theorists by their adherence to one of the three. We have also included three thematic styles of theory—feminism, pluralism, and linguistic approaches—that have sought (successfully or not) to refocus debate in a different direction. The theorists and themes addressed in this section are ones that have particularly marked out this moment in political theory, and the chapters assess their continuing influence.

Part III, "The Legacy of the Past;' focuses on historical work in political thought. As James Farr notes in his chapter, the history of political thought has been a staple of university instruction since the end of the nineteenth century, long recognized as a branch of political theory. But the role and object of historical inquiry has been much debated in recent decades, and the idea that one should search the classical texts for answers to the perennial problems of political life has been subjected to especially searching critique. Some theorists have been happy to jettison any study of historical traditions, regarding it as a merely antiquarian exercise. But the greater attention now given to context—to what can and cannot be thought at any given period in history—has also enabled radically new readings of political thought. The essays in this section can give only a taste of the wealth of scholarship in this field, and have been selected with an eye to that continuing discussion about the legacy of the past and its relationship with the present. They include a meta-level discussion of the relationship between political theory and the discipline of history; a disciplinary history of the history of political thought; and essays on a number of historical traditions that have been subject to significant re-evaluation and reinterpretation in the recent literature.

Questions of context are spatial as well as temporal, for even the most abstract of political theories cannot transcend its location, and the issues with which theorists become preoccupied reflect the histories and concerns of the worlds in which they live. The chapters in Part IV, "Political Theory in the World," make matters of location more explicit. They explore differences, misconceptions, and mutual influences between Western and non-Western political traditions, with the latter represented here by Confucianism and Islam, and look at how ideas of America on the one hand and Europe on the other enter into and shape ideas of democracy, representation, and nation. This section should be understood as a gesture, but just that, towards decentering what has come to be known as Anglo-American theory. This Handbook of political theory is published in Oxford and written in the English language but one modest objective, nonetheless, is to highlight the specificity of all work in political theory, and the way the questions addressed reflect particular histories and locations.

The chapters in Part V, "State and People," combine historical analysis the shifting understandings of state and people with normative exploration of democracy, constitutionalism, and representation. As the essays indicate the last decades have been a time of very considerable innovation. For much of the twentieth century, democracy was conceptualized as a matter of universal suffrage (sometimes quaintly equated with one man one vote) competitive party elections, and the rule of law. The outstanding problems were not thought to be theoretical, but centered on how to spread this conception more widely; and much of the work on democracy (often comparative, or dealing with the conditions for democratization) was carried out by political scientists rather than theorists. This picture has since changed radically, with a complex of concerns about the nature and limits of constitutionalism, the exclusions practised under the name of democracy; and the possibilities of wider and deeper practices of popular control. All reflects the breadth of these debates, this is one of the largest sections in the Handbook.

Part VI, "Justice, Equality, and Freedom," evokes the combination of concerns that runs through the work of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and the liberal egalitarian tradition: the idea, for example, that justice is a, matter of treating people as equals rather than treating them equally; or that egalitarians must recognize individuals as responsible agents, accountable for their own choices. The chapters in this section reflect that legacy, but also problematize it by reference to arguments drawn from feminist literature and work on recognition. They include essays on the relationship between equality and impartiality, and the relationship be­tween treating people as equals and recognizing them as different; and address the questions about individual responsibility that became central to the literature on justice and equality through the last decades. The literature on historical injustice goes back further, but has drawn new sustenance from debates on reparations for slavery and the treatment of indigenous peoples.

Part VII, "Pluralism, Multiculturalism, and Nationalism," reflects areas of debate that have proved particularly fruitful over the last thirty years. As noted earlier in our introduction, it also reflects explorations of the implica­tions and/or limits of the liberal tradition. The literature on multiculturalism has its precursor in a sociological literature on cultural pluralism, but as normative political theory dates from the 1980s. Theoretical work on toler­ation or the right of nations to self-determination is not, of course, new. But the recent synthesis of liberalism with nationalism is more unexpected, as is the reframing of long-established liberal principles of toleration to take account of issues of identity as well as belief. This last point is part of what unites the chapters in this section. All engage with arguments that have been central to the liberal tradition, but in relation to the new questions that arise when people make claims on the basis of identity. The authors reach very different conclusions—including, at its most heretical, that the pursuit of justice may not be such a compelling concern.

Part VIII, "Claims in a Global Context," takes this from the national to the global level. It explores the debates that have developed between seemingly universal discourses of secularism or human rights and more relativist em­phases on cultural difference; examines the connection between multicultural and post-colonial theory; and considers the challenges globalization presents to current conceptions of justice. Although justice has been at the heart of recent debates in normative political theory, the dominant conceptions have been very state-centered—and often very Western state-centered. The chap­ters in this section consider what happens in the move from national to global—and what theoretical possibilities become available if the center of gravity shifts from the Western to non-Western world.

Part IX, "The Body Politic," takes what has long been employed as a metaphor for the political community at its face (or bodily) value, and uses it to engage with new areas of theoretical debate. These include the way the body itself has been politicized in the theoretical literature, including in the literature on self-ownership; and the way the social "body" has been politicized, as in the discussion of crises and paranoia. A number of the chapters in this section begin with changes in the social world: the impact of global migration, for example, and the way this alters our understanding of the individual subject; the development of new medical technologies, and the dilemmas these present about organ transplants or genetic engineering; the developments in surveillance technology combined with radical changes in the relation between the sexes, and the challenge this poses to our understanding of the relationship between public and private space. This reconceptualizing of the political space owes much to the influence of feminism, as do a number of the essays themselves.

We have argued in our introduction that political theory is something of a mongrel sub-discipline, made up of many traditions, approaches, and styles of thought, and increasingly characterized by its borrowing from feminist and critical theory, film theory, popular culture, mass media, behavioral science, and economics. These tendencies will be evident throughout the chapters in the Handbook, but are most directly addressed in Part X, "Testing the Boundaries?' Here, we include essays that set political theory in dialogue with work in cultural studies, political economy, social theory, and the environment. The current academy confronts two opposing trends. One draws the boundaries of each discipline ever more tightly, sometimes as part of a bid for higher status, sometimes in the (not totally implausible) belief that this is the route to deeper and more systematic knowledge. Another looks to the serendipitous inspir­ations that can come through cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary work; or more simply and modestly, realizes that there may be much to learn from other areas of study. It is hard to predict which of these will win out—and most likely, both will continue in uneasy combination for many years to come. The essays in this section reflect the importance we attach to the second trend.

All the Handbooks in this series end with what is perhaps unhappily termed the "Old and New" section. In this case, it provides the opportunity for two highly influential but very different political theorists—Arlene Saxonhouse and William Connolly—to reflect on their experiences and perceptions of theory as it has changed, developed, improved, and/or worsened in the course of their careers. Where other contributors were asked to weave their own distinctive take on a topic into essays that would also work as overviews of the sub-field, our last contributors were encouraged to write from a more personal angle.

Ours is not the first or only handbook of political theory. We believe this Oxford Handbook is distinctive in its exploration of political theory's edges as well as its several cores, its global emphasis, and its contemplation of the challenges that contemporary social and technological change present to the field. Political theory is a lively, pluralistic, and contested field, and we invite readers to construct their own summary interpretations and embark on their own imaginative theorizing by sampling the wide variety of options on the palette that follows.

Handbook of Political Psychology edited by David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, Robert Jervis, David O. Alexander (Oxford University Press) (HARDCOVER) is a comprehensive, contemporary, cumulative, and international reference work for the field of political psychology. On the broadest level, political psychology is an application of what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. The topics covered build up from the individual level (attitudes, values, decision making, ideology, personality) to the collective (group identity, mass mobilization, political violence), span models of the mass public and political elites, and cover both domestic issues, international relations, and foreign policy.

This work is a self-conscious précis of the current professional norms of political psychology that loosely applies what is best known in psychology to political science. In many ways political psychology puts a human face on social political processes that addresses motives  as well as clusters of behavior needing explication that soft pedals reductive theory for more empirical observation quantified from many events and cultural circumstances. The essays in Handbook of Political Psychology serve to convey the general nature and range of the subject while also being a guide to the central issues and studies in the field. It belongs in every political science library.

The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, editors (Ivan R. Dee, Publisher) In this important and insightful collection of wide-ranging essays, ten distinguished critics reflect on the direction of our society.

The essays in this collection, The Survival of Culture, drawn from a special series of the same name in the conservative journal the New Criterion, which Kramer and Kimball edit, are united by a common theme: the struggle to uphold traditional Western values – those embracing individualism and capitalist democracy – in the face of "the encroaching desert of mindless conformity and rancorous political correctness." These values are under attack in the media, the political arena, universities and cultural institutions.

The essays focus on a range of subjects, from Robert Bork's piece on the influence of politics on the judiciary and Mark Steyn's scathing indictment of the U.N. conference on racism in Durban to Martin Greenberg's look at the writings of political philosopher Edmund Burke. Some contributions are provocative, like Keith Windschuttle's "The Culture War on Western Civilization," which argues against conventional wisdom about Europe 's imperialism and aggression.

The Survival of Culture should be applauded for its attempt to stimulate debate, which it surely will among those who read it.

Fears in Post Communist Society: A Comparative Perspective by Eric Shiraev and Vladimir Shlapentokh (Palgrave) is addressed to everybody who is interested in European politics, East European studies, and, in particular, post‑communist and transitional societies. This volume appeals to political scientists, historians, political psychologists, and sociologists. The book is also con­templated for classroom use as a required reading in comparative politics, international relations, and Russian and Eastern European politics. It can supplement a wide spectrum of university undergraduate and graduate courses.

This book is a result of a 3-year-old cross-national research venture sponsored by the National Council for Eurasian Studies, which has already endorsed the results of the project. The work is based on a series of empirical projects‑primarily national pools and smaller surveys‑conducted in post‑communist European countries in the 1990s and 2000, including Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Czech Republic. The goal of these projects was to investigate and discuss the content of fears, wor­ries, and concerns in post‑communist society. In particular, this book dis­cusses various economic fears, fears of catastrophes, worries about internal and foreign enemies, health concerns, and environmental alarms in connection to various aspects of political, social, and economic life in post­communist countries.

This work is based on two types of analysis. The first is an empirical ex­amination of human fears and worries in the designated countries. The methodology of the project is based on multiple‑source approaches, in­cluding both "snapshots" of opinion polls and longitudinal methods. The researchers were able to consolidate results of public opinion polls with other sources of empirical information, such as small surveys, case studies, and analyses of focus‑group discussions. The second type is the exploration of political and social factors that influenced these worries. In this book, the authors gauge sociological traditions that emphasize both rational and irrational elements of the individual's fears.

The book contains a foreword, seven chapters, two essays, an analytical conclusion, and a list of references. Chapter 1 is written by V Shlapentokh and E. Shiraev and includes a comprehensive description of the nature of human fears, followed by an overview of various societal impacts on fears and worries of the individual in democratic and transitional societies. The chapter also addresses general political, social, and cultural changes during the period of post‑communist transition in Europe.

Chapters 2 through 7 are dedicated to six national cases: Russia, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. Chapter 2 is written by a group of leading Russian sociologists and pollsters: Yuri Levada, Vladimir Yadov, Vladimir Shubkin, Grigoriy Kertman, Veronika Ivanova, and Eric Shiraev. Chapter 3 is written by Martina Klicperova­Baker, an expert in political and social transition of contemporary Czech Republic. Chapter 4 is dedicated to analyses of worries in Poland and prepared by Urszula Jakubowska, a senior researcher from the Polish Academy of Sciences. Chapter 5 is written by Vladimir Paniotto, a chief pollster and sociologist from Ukraine, and Eric Shiraev. Chapter 6 is prepared by Larissa Titarenko, a leading sociologist from Belarus. Chapter 7 deals with fears and worries of people in Lithuania and is written by Vladas Gaidys, a sociologist and chief specialist in national public opinion. Chapter 8, written by Samuel Kriger, is dedicated to the study of fears among ex‑Soviet immigrants in the United States. The final two commenting essays provide additional comparative information about the dynamics of some people's worries and concerns in two countries: Israel (immigrants from ex‑Soviet republics), prepared by V Aptekman, and the United States, written by David W Rohde. Chapter 9 is written by Vladimir Shlapentokh and Eric Shiraev as an analytical conclusion to the book.

Please visit the book's website (http://classweb.gmu.edu/eshiraev). There you can find additional tables and charts related to this study. We also provide regular updates of new polls, public opinion studies, and post opinion essays on a great variety of topics related to post-communist countries of the former Soviet bloc.

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