In five brief chapters that began as a lecture series, she offers stimulating but somewhat sketchy and discursive observations from a perspective unconstrained by ideology. Elshtain laments the fragmentation of family and community, criticizing both Left and Right for shortsighted solutions. She observes that leaving controversial decisions like abortion to the courts rather than public debate leads to "a politics of resentment."

The "collapse of the personal into the political," she argues, provokes excesses in the way women claim victimization and gays claim government sanction. She deplores a multiculturalism that brings about identity politics rather than critical reflection. Elshtain believes in democracy's promise, citing examples from the American civil rights movement and dissidents in Argentina and Eastern Europe; we must engage such traditions, she concludes, to address our deficits and pursue our ideals.

By a University of Chicago professor, this set of lectures makes a generalized inspection of American democracy. The data and anecdotes are minimal; the discussion occurs on the elevated plane of philosophy and asks: What hath been wrought by the combined revolutionary growth in personal rights and the redistributionist/therapeutic state? As the title implies, and a section on Hobbes makes explicit, the Leviathan is upon us, and cynicism runs rampant as people feel powerless against the government or vulnerable to litigious rights-bearing citizens. "Nervous" about this, Elshtain scores various manifestations of incivility (crime, abortion battles, generations on welfare) that have grown out of the fusion of the private with the public spheres. It would be easy to label her a neo-con, but Elshtain has solid feminist credentials (e.g., Women and War, 1988) and hinges much of her argument on the totalistic implications of the feminist slogan "the personal is political."

Readers sharing such second thoughts about that phrase will find this work a cogent critique and a gloomy warning of democracy's decline as a philosophy.

 Basic Books, 0-465-01616-2 / 9780465016167
Hardcover New New book Jacket New York 

Price: 22.05 USD