The thirteen articles in this book originated in a conference held at the European University Institute in 2000. Situating itself in the context of current arguments about the decline of the nation-state, but taking for granted the permanence of the state for the foreseeable future, the articles set out to explore the history, intellectual underpinnings and prospects of the relationship between states and citizens in Western Europe, from the middle ages to the present.

The volume is divided into five sections, mostly along chronological lines. Most of the articles focus on specific historical problems, such as the article by Quentin Skinner on the debates on the concept of liberty in England from the seventeenth century to the present, the article by Martin Van Gelderen on the development of alternative models of political communities (alternatives to the state) in the early modern period, or the articles by Magnus Ryan and Almut Hofert in the medieval section. Other articles offer general observations on the themes of the book, such as the article by Gianfranco Poggi on the various ways in which citizens have represented themselves to the state in European history and the current challenges to these conceptualizations of citizenship. Overall, the articles can be grouped under the heading of the history of political ideas, or, to use a formulation from Anabel S. Brett's article in the volume, "the history of modern European political self-perception and self-description." (p. 98). As such, the book presupposes a working knowledge of European history and historiography.

Given the scope of the theme and the period under consideration, it is virtually impossible to elucidate a common perspective from the book. However, certain common threads do link the different sections. One common thread that runs through the volume is the issue of rights, and many of the articles bring a historical perspective to bear on current debates over civic and human rights. Judith A. Vega explores the Enlightenment's debates on women's social and civic participation, and suggests that the origins of the politics of identity lie with these discourses. Similarly to the Enlightenment, she says, "today, it is the meaning of human rights for questions of exclusion and translation into encoded civil rights that is contested." (p. 129) Anabel S. Brett's article traces the development of the idea of citizens' rights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As she shows, this idea was articulated within an idiom of pre-civic, natural rights, and as such, imbued the notion of civic rights with an inherent paradox which we are still dealing with today.

Two articles focus on the French case, and indicate the extent to which current political challenges in France can be traced to the revolutionary legacy of citizenship. Through an analysis of competing notions of citizenship in the French Revolution, Lucien Jaume argues that the revolution bequeathed an abstract notion of citizenship, which dominated French political culture, but which is inadequate for dealing with the challenges of globalization and European unification. Michèle Riot Sarcey's article focuses on citizenship and the equality of the sexes in republican France. Employing a Foucauldian standpoint, Sarcey's analysis of the principle of political representation leads her to conclude that the French model of citizenship is in fact incompatible with equality of the sexes: "Associated with property and family, which depend upon the maintenance of mechanisms of domination for their perpetuation, [political] representation is only viable at the heart of an exclusionary system." (p. 205)

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this volume is the dynamic between historical and present perspectives. This is most dramatically evident in the final section on contemporary history, where the discussion shifts from issues of liberty and equality to new idioms of responsibility. Bo Strath presents a complex discursive analysis of critiques of the state in the second half of the twentieth century. Emphasizing the upheavals of 1968, Strath shows how new political discourses of responsibility and flexibility emerged from the essentially Marxist critiques of the state and, ironically, the extent to which these new discourses buttress the structures of the neo-liberal state. Andrew Dobson's article-to my mind, one of the more engaging articles in the volume-discusses the possibilities of an environmentalist concept of citizenship. Environmental problems are not only global by definition, but also inter-generational, since current impacts on the environment effect the future. Reminding us that citizenship is a compound of rights and obligations, Dobson suggests that the source of an environmentalist notion of civic duties will have to be based on a concept of interdependence rather than on reciprocity.

Since principles of civic rights are central to many of the discussions here, two articles do not fit so well with the volume as a whole. David Runciman asks what is the state, and concludes that it is a kind of fiction, the power of which lies precisely in its ambiguous phenomenological status. Sudipta Kaviraj's article on the contradictions of Indian democracy is illuminating on its own terms. However, notwithstanding her justified claim that the story of the European state cannot be complete without taking its effects on the colonial world into account, the implications of this perspective for the themes of the volume remain unclear.

As a final point, and given Quentin Skinner's observation that at present the balance between citizens and states seems to be shifting "away from the liberty of citizens and towards increasingly arbitrary forms of state authority," it is interesting to note that none of the articles tackles another central principle in this relationship, namely that of security (p. 25).

Ronen Steinberg, The University of Chicago

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