The title of E. J. Dionne's 1997 book about today's progressives is They Only Look Dead; Jeffrey Isaac's latest book reads as if to retort: “They are—and there is not much that can be done about it.” More on that dour conclusion later. For now, I focus on what led to it.

This is an extremely literate rumination on progressive politics today, largely told through an examination of various books directly or indirectly related to the topic. Readers should expect nothing less than an extremely literate work from Isaac, given his previous two books, one on power and the other on the relevance of such giants as Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus to today's politics. Then there are his engaging contributions to Dissent, especially those focused on the need for the Left to confront its limited position in the contemporary political scene. In fact, the book under review grows out of several of those Dissent essays.

Yet what The Poverty of Progressivism is decidedly not is an analysis of the actual state of the Left. This is all the more surprising given that Isaac has previously written on the need for political theory to address contemporary politics. While the book may be closer than some theoretical interventions in dissecting our current political predicament, it is actually further away than other examples from academic political theory. Simply because the literature considered here is about mass political mobilization, rather than, say, gender politics, does not mean that the book more directly engages contemporary politics. While the study of texts is surely a legitimate way to gauge the status of the Left today, this book could use more engagement with the words and actions of social movement participants themselves. The result is a mediated meditation on monographs that only defers the connection to real political struggle and only continues the alienation of contemporary political theory from its own desired object of inquiry—politics itself.

Nonetheless, Isaac once again demonstrates he is a master commentator. For the most part, he provides a thoughtful reconsideration of early-twentieth-century progressive thinking, noting that its reformist impulses were not radical and involved elements of social control of the lower classes. His criticism of Jane Addams's alleged paternalism, however, is dated and overstated; and he totally ignores that Addams was intent on finding ways for the well-off to give up privilege as much as she was intent on helping the poor learn to live better. Overall, his assessment of neoprogressive thinking today is cogent as to its misplaced optimism for overcoming the forces currently working against it. His dismissal of national mobilizing, however, is historically suspect, overlooking that the episodic uprisings of social movements are the primary means by which most meaningful political change occurs in the United States.

Isaac begins his analysis with various works that he says point to a shared wish for a “progressive revival.” He offers close readings of books by such thoughtful analysts as E. J. Dionne and Joel Rogers, who, while they may disagree on various issues, can be read, Isaac argues, as suggesting that the progressivism of the dawn of the last century can be the basis for a progressive politics at the dawn of this century. Isaac next offers a more sobering assessment of the prospects for such a revival, noting that progressivism was never that radical and that politics has changed to become less hospitable to even the liberalism of the old progressivism, let alone the more radical variants promoted by today's revivalists. Things look more than bleak.

The book pivots on the literature of civil society with Isaac offering again thoughtful readings, this time of key works addressing this revived concept. He again deftly dismisses hope by noting serious limitations in the idea as discussed by Robert Putnam and others. Isaac notes that civil society suggests working outside the state, in the mediating institutions of the community, and at the local level, and that this can be the slow road to capitulating to the parochialisms that progressives seek to challenge. Nonetheless, he suggests that civil society may be the only route available to progressives in an era of diminished political expectations. Progressives not only need a new label; they also need to stop investing their hopes in national movements and turn to the long march through the intermediary institutions of civil society at the local level. Things just got a lot bleaker.

The author ends with what he calls the “Sisyphean task of civil society politics” (p. 138). He relies on a number of books, but especially Mark R. Warren's Dry Bones Rattling (2001), which examines how the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) has successfully built a viable network of community development programs in the Southwest and other parts of the United States. The IAF's community organizing deserves much celebration, but Isaac overemphasizes its ability to network for purposes of community development and deemphasizes its ability to mobilize for political change. The IAF for years has focused almost exclusively on working with church congregations that give it a captive audience already organized but largely passive politically. The result is an elaborate network of organized constituencies not necessarily prepared to be mobilized politically. The long march through institutions just got a lot longer.

This elision is most problematically coupled with Isaac's total erasure of national movement politics. While it is true that social movements often only have episodic impact on national politics, the historical record suggests that the over-whelming majority of instances of significant political change in the United States have come when people on the bottom rise up in social movements and demand it. That this happens only episodically is unfortunate, but without these episodes it is arguably the case that significant progressive change would not occur at all. Isaac does not discuss this issue; instead, he dismisses it. He makes a choice to not read the historical record that way.

And I guess that is my main concern with this admittedly eloquently written meditation on the prospects for a progressive revival. It is more about reading a literature than assessing a politics. For this reason, I would remain nervous about the book's conclusions even if it decided that progressivism is alive and well. Throughout The Poverty of Progressivism, good books are consistently given a good read. The analysis covers a small library to offer a bracing assessment of left-leaning social-change efforts in an era of right-dominated politics. What is never really sufficiently considered are those actual efforts themselves as enacted by social movement leaders and followers. While Isaac reads books about mobilizing, others are doing it.