What part does punishment play in the constitution of political order, and under what circumstances does punishment reinforce or undermine that order? In recent decades, suggests Keally McBride, this question has too often been ceded by students of political science to sociologists, legal scholars, and criminologists. In this discerning collection of essays, McBride seeks to reclaim this turf by asking, first, how certain pathbreaking texts have responded to the dilemmas generated when political orders, real or imagined, inflict suffering in response to misdeeds and, second, how we might make, specifically, political sense of controversies engendered by contemporary practices of punishment, especially but not exclusively in the United States.

The volume's opening essays offer intriguing juxtapositions of otherwise familiar texts. The first plays Thomas More's Utopia against Franz Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” in order to show how the traveler's tale, related in each, encourages readers to find strange those penal practices otherwise considered unexceptional, while the second essay opposes the inscrutable suffering endured by Job, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible, to the rationalist account of punishment offered by Hobbes in his Leviathan. Anticipating a theme that recurs throughout the book, McBride concludes the latter essay by arguing that any effort to redeem deliberately imposed political suffering via a purely secular logic is in perpetual need of shoring up, which explains why Hobbes insisted that the sovereign be considered a “mortal god.” Much the same theme is key to the third essay's discussion of punishment in relation to the current debate about the contemporary status of state sovereignty. Following the obligatory review of Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Foucault, this essay reiterates McBride's contention that, absent divine sanction, modern political orders must forever invent new ways to negotiate the destabilizing potential that attends any affirmation on the part of some of a right to inflict harm on others.

In one way or another, the remaining essays all concern the United States. Chapter 4 indicates how certain of the Republic's Founders articulated a penology predicated on a form of “democratic idealism” (p. 13) in order to confirm the new nation's repudiation of the authoritarian punishments characteristic of England, whereas Chapter 5 argues that this idealism has now almost entirely disappeared from contemporary discussions of punishment in the United States. What happens when punishment becomes merely punitive, McBride contends in Chapter 6, is indicated by the “spectacularly unproductive” (p. 14) practice of prison labor; and, in much the same vein, the final chapter concludes that the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib reveal the United States to be a regime in which the claims of imperial power now trump the ever more faint imperatives of justice.

Considered collectively, the essays in this volume appear to be animated by two impulses, one of which is more modest and, in my view, more defensible than the other. Sometimes, McBride seems to want to offer something akin to a comprehensive theory of the categorical relationship between punishment and political order. Now and then, this impulse leads her astray. For example, on occasion, it encourages ahistorical claims that are suspect or, at the very least, insufficiently nuanced: “The basic task of political order is to create harmony out of what is a volatile and varied population” (p. 18). Moreover, this impulse sometimes engenders claims that are unlikely to be disputed, not because they are incontestable but because they are not particularly interesting: “What transforms punishment into an injustice is perception” (p. 148). Finally, the principal categories of this general theory, which are suggested by the author's claim that punishment serves as the conceptual linchpin of her effort to show “how behavior, law, institutions, perception, and ideals all work together in creating a political system” (p. 3), are never elaborated with the care they would require if the articulation of such a theory were indeed her aim.

At other times, however, McBride disavows the theoretical ambitions that appear to animate these problematic assertions: “Like all the other dynamics this book describes, the role that punishment plays in the creation of political disorder cannot be pinned down” (p. 147). If the ineradicable ambiguity of political affairs invariably thwarts efforts to pin them down, theoretically speaking, then her essays can be profitably read as a set of diverse meditations bound together by nothing more, but also nothing less, than a fascination with the politics of punishment.

Construed in this way, the success of McBride's project is perhaps most fully evident in her provocative discussion of prison labor in the United States. There, she begins by inviting her readers to consider the continued use of prison labor in an era of chronic unemployment. If the expropriation of wealth is no longer the aim of such labor, as was the case when convict leasing programs flourished in the era of Jim Crow, what is its contemporary role? Her intriguing answer suggests that prison labor provides a means of negotiating the tension between the inadmissible reality of structural unemployment, especially among black and brown populations, and neoliberal ideologies, which contend that those who can but choose not to work are not citizens but criminals. The incarceration of significant portions of these populations substantially reduces the state-certified unemployment rate, and compulsory labor confirms the inability of these persons to secure the status of full citizens. That this is little more than a pernicious sham is made apparent when, for example, the states of Alabama and Arizona pay for boulders to be shipped to prisons, and the gravel produced inside their walls is left idle in nearby pits. The myth to be invoked in making sense of this labor, the author proposes, is that of Sisyphus.

Toward the close of Punishment and Political Order, McBride expresses her hope that one day the senselessness of the penal state in America will become visible, that “the standard of reason” will be invoked genuinely, rather than farcically, in assessing the politics of punishment, and that there “may yet be a day of reckoning and reform” (pp. 124–25). While her own analysis gives us little cause to think this day is near, she is to be commended for recalling the democratic ideals that might inform critical reflection about modalities of punishment, which, today, are exercised in the name of justice, but for the sake of power without justification.