And when Tully says that with recognition and then dia- logue “consent can replace coercion and confrontation” (Vol. I, p. 239; emphasis added), he seems quite close to the ideal speech situation he opposes (e.g., Vol. I, pp. 240– 41). For while it might be possible and desirable to heighten consensual aspects of politics by way of participation, it seems odd to conclude, as Tully does, that we can replace coercion with consent: “[D]ialogue itself will gradually transform from within the distorted intercultural practices in accordance with the demands of justice” (Vol. I, p. 241; emphasis added). These issues arise out of his commit- ment to move beyond the thin reasonableness of Geuss’s model of politics to issue a call to justice. Here, some chastening of Tully’s infectious optimism might be in order: When some Euro-Canadians today respond “unreasonably” to Aboriginal claims of sover- eignty, that is not simply because Euro-Canadians have a “distorted” understanding but because they sense, not wrongly, that their maintenance of privilege in a new Canada-form is at stake. This is also the deep truth in the otherwise crazy claims made in the U.S. health-care debates about government death panels. The claim is false as fact but true as symptom, something realists both Old and New may have a hard time saying but critical political theory is well positioned to point out. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich has noted for several years, the Amer- ican white majority will soon be a minority. Some of its members cling all the more desperately to their privilege as it is about to be eclipsed, not because Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election but because of the twenty-first century configurations of citizenship and power that allowed him to win. In these developments, there is indeed a death knell. Hence, the phobic discussion of “death panels,” which gives nonreferential expression to the fears of those caught in a moment of political mortal- ity. If end-of-life counseling is demonized in this context, that is because death counseling postulates acceptance of mortality, and this acceptance (humane, for most individ- uals) is what death panel activists seek to deny (as a polit- ical fact). In Strange Multiplicity (1995), Tully saw politics as often tragic, but he would now rather reorient us toward broader ways of conceiving public goods and shared fates than attend to (and risk contributing to the enhancement of ) the zero-sum elements of politics. He is reluctant to take up issues of woundedness, resentment, mortality, and loss. Even with regard to Aboriginals who could make deep claims of wrong, he keeps the focus not on the trail of tears but on the history of treaty making (Vol. I, p. 239– 240). These people have a claim to be free and sovereign now, not because they have suffered at European hands, though they have, but because they were free and sover- eign at the moment of first encounter. Thus, Tully replaces Geuss’s picture of politics—which, invoking Lenin, focuses on “who does what to whom?”—with a different focus on the complex (dis)empowerments of agency, historicity, and discourse. Emplotting Aboriginal claims in a narrative of sovereignty and equality, optimistically identifying and making real to us the often obscured (even by many real- ists) realities of daily postcolonial practices of freedom, Tully writes about politics as a new realist, in a way that dignifies all sides and vivifies an agonistic humanism all too often absent from even the best political theorizing today. Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination. By Dean Hammer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. 358p. $39.95. doi:10.1017/S1537592710000745 — Benjamin Straumann, New York University In his book, Dean Hammer wants to remind us of a for- gotten “Roman dimension of modern thought,” in order to reconnect certain political concepts with the “experi- ences that animated them.” What recommends the Romans and their political thought to Hammer’s aim is the alleged “attempt to articulate a political vision that is organized around affective associations,” as opposed to Greek polit- ical thought, which is said to overemphasize the role of reason (p. 12). In league with the Romans, Hammer aims at giving the experience of human passions and political emotions their due, the loss of which is credited with the “corruption of the community” (p. 224). The book is pervaded by a melancholy nostalgia for an “affective” com- munity held together and legitimized not by institutions of a certain kind but, rather, by shared experiences and emotions, placing Hammer in a tradition of nostalgic polit- ical thought that owes as much to thinkers of the New Left, such as the British literary critic Raymond Williams, as it does to Hannah Arendt. Hammer’s place in this tradition is hard to pinpoint; his nostalgic view goes hand in hand with skepticism toward institutions, and while the former sometimes has a Hege- lian, sometimes a Burkean, feel to it (without Burke being mentioned) but more often pays tribute to Arendt, the latter can be assimilated to a tradition contemptuous of institutions and mere “formal” democracy, reaching from Rousseau to Sartre’s groupe en fusion. The democracy Ham- mer wishes to “reclaim” from the “meaningless clichés . . . that obscure vision” (p. 225) is not a mere formal decision- making process, but presumably closer to some collective entity governed by a general will that does not simply cater to our “private interests” and “global economic mar- kets,” but can be held “publicly accountable” (p. 12). It remains unclear if Hammer’s preference for emotions over reason in political thought is owed to a reasoned norma- tive defense of that preference, or if it is due rather to an encompassing moral skepticism of an emotivist brand. Leaving aside this question of how allowing shared emo- tions and human passions such a privileged status is mor- ally defensible absent sound reasons for it, it seems to me Book Reviews | Political Theory 660 Perspectives on Politics