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American Conservative Opinion Leaders Mark J. Rozell and James F. Pontuso, eds. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990, pp. viii, 262To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism Jerome L. Himmelstein Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, pp. xi, 290

"What is Living and What is Dead in the Political Theory of John Locke?" When Dunn addressed this same question in his classic study of the Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) he concluded: "I simply cannot conceive of constructing an analysis of any issue in contemporary political theory around the affirmation or negation of anything which Locke says about political matters" (9). This judgment Dunn now repudiates. He does so, in part, by arguing that a central element of Locke's political thinking "stubbornly remains alive," namely, Locke's contractarian approach to the understanding of legitimate authority. The contractarian approach enabled Locke to capture "what politics is like." And because this is the way politics still is "and is likely always to remain," we have good reason to study Locke "to help us think again" (25). Of course, the significance of Dunn's retraction is not only that it rescues Locke for the contemporary world, but also that it legitimates a type of political theory that is often scorned by historians of political thought. Those who wish to adhere to Dunn's earlier view will find little to console them in the present collection of essays. Dunn's aim in the collection is not, however, purely or even mainly methodological. His overriding aim is to understand modern politics, and he uses all the resources available to him to accomplish this objective. "Political theory," Dunn writes, "may be an epistemological parlous enterprise . . . but it cannot sanely turn its back on the very attempt to understand modern politics" (3). All of the essays, he goes on to say, seek to judge "how human beings have good reason to act, both in the light of modern politics and within modern politics" (3). What Dunn concludes is that modern politics demands the exercise of prudence, which is for him "the central political value" (214). The importance of prudence derives from the fact that "[tjhereare no solutions: just better and worse things to do and say and feel" (212). Because this is so, modern politics needs to recapture "a sense of openness and the ineliminably problematic character of collective social life" (213). Liberalism and socialismfail to capture the nature of modern politics, because "each ideology is occupied by an unproblematic image of value" (213). Even democracy has little to offer on its own, given its responsiveness to modern narcissism. Dunn does not seek to displace democracy, however; his call, rather, is for the "democratization of prudence." Not only is such a democracy "the only genuine form of political community now possible on the scale of the nation state," but the democratization of prudence appears to have become the precondition "for any life at all" (215). Interpreting Political Responsibility is a sobering collection of essays, yet its central message is not one of despair. For if, as Brian Barry has suggested, "we are headed for a new Dark Age," then John Dunn may well have provided us with a philosophy for such an age.