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Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond. By Paul Dragos Aligica. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 256p. $81.56.

between law and justice” (p. 13). Whereas, following Walter Benjamin, law and justice are themselves conjoined through a means/ends justification, to judge then essentially reveals the contingency and particularity of the various means and ends relations. Judgment thus acts as a form of “dejustification” (p. 10). Democratic judgment is precisely, then, this cultivation of openness to the embodied “other,” but in ways that are rhetorically contentions or agonistic by a pluralistic set of voices. Democracy is thus never reducible to a particular relation between law and justice, nor is it even separable from the potential for violence to emerge. It is, for Vadoulakis, “a process of transformation” that allows participants to realize that the “completeness of sovereignty is an illusion” (p. 202). An openness to democracy and judgment is an openness to the contingency and unpredictability of life. Vadoulakis’s work is also noteworthy for two reasons. First, the text is replete with engaging discussions taken from the literature of the particular epoch in order to illustrate his arguments. From Sophocles and Shakespeare to Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (2004)., Vadoulakis is able to demonstrate the important nuances of his arguments in novel ways. Second, more generally, is the significance placed on the role of violence in political theory that all too often gets obfuscated in much of the contemporary literature. The discussion in Chapter 2 on Thucydides and the logic of state sovereignty is one which international relations theorists would find useful. One curiosity of Vadoulakis’s text, however, is the lack of sustained engagement with Arendt’s own notion of judgment. Arendt inchoately theorized a nonsovereign capacity to judge from the perspective of the spectator as a type of reconciliation with a tragic past versus a specific faculty of judgment of the actor for use in the public realm. This form of aesthetic judgment (following Kant’s Third Critique) evokes shared meaning, imagination, and a capacity to relate to each other. Judgment, Arendt further realized, was a key means for an active life that could not be constrained by the conceit of sovereign notions of truth or validity. An Arendtian theory of judgment might thus fit with Vadoulakis’s emphasis on the rhetorical dejustification of sovereignty. Nonetheless, he has written a particularly interesting work that advances key insights into the concepts of sovereignty, judgment, and violence.