Sanford Lakoff's aptly titled Ten Political Ideas That Have Shaped the Modern World is both a timely exploration of the genesis and trajectory of some of the most salient ideas in Western political thought and history, and a capstone that unifies and expands research spanning Lakoff's long and fruitful career. As with any large-scale study of political ideas and their practical fortunes, Lakoff's book is significantly shaped by the initial choice of ideas to be included and explored. One chapter is devoted each to equality and its roots in Christianity; civic humanism; liberalism; conservatism; socialism; nationalism; fascism; realism in international relations; Islamism; and democracy. Lakoff thoughtfully notes, in the book's preface, that any such list is liable to provoke questions and criticisms. Offering both explanation and justification of his inclusions and exclusions, he presents a deliberately crafted landscape while recognizing that no list is exhaustive of all relevant ideas, just as no list could satisfy all readers.

Lakoff's approach to the study of political ideas is salutary both in the decisiveness of his exposition and in his recognition that his very subject matter comprises ideas whose meaning, origin, and significance are not only contestable, but regularly contested. He treats his subjects not as fixed historical entities or mere ideologies to be reductively defined and classified, but rather as patterns and dispositions of thought and practice that are bound up in an “ongoing dialogue” with one another (xii). Lakoff aims at perspicuous representation, rather than at simplification and categorization for its own sake. The result is a work impressive in its intellectual curiosity and generosity as well as in its mixture of breadth and concision. Thus, though the book treads ground common with summary tracts on political ideologies, it makes an independent contribution to the history of political ideas.

Chapter by chapter, Lakoff's discussion of his subject matter varies noticeably in tone and method. This appears to be in part due to the fact that several chapters of the book are culled from earlier writings, which, though updated, often bear the impress of their previous formulations. The chapter devoted to liberalism, for instance, is a learned, if somewhat dated, discussion of the thesis and reception of Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America. This approach provides a needful and insightful frame to focus the consideration of a polyvalent political idea, but it also steers the analysis of liberalism down a fairly narrow historical and conceptual path. Variations in tone and method also appear to follow from the inevitable dimension of artistry involved in the characterization of ideas that transcend a single text, thinker, or historical period. While unavoidable, this proves both a virtue and a vice, as illustrated by the chapter on conservatism. Lakoff constructs a careful and scholarly comparative analysis focusing on the lives and works of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. While the discussion provides genuine insight into the conceptual marrow of conservatism, Lakoff explores only one variety of conservatism (which he terms “liberal conservatism”) that emerged under the political conditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The engaging and well-crafted exploration of conservatism thus provides heavily qualified perspective on the larger genus. Nevertheless, shortcomings should be viewed realistically, within the inherent limits of the genre in which Lakoff participates. Each chapter sketches in a few dozen pages a political idea that has been the subject of many volumes and centuries of discussion, and therefore each chapter is liable to criticism for omission, selective emphasis, and incomplete consideration of the depth and ambiguities of key concepts. However applicable such criticisms may be, Lakoff makes no pretense to definitive completeness. Instead, his discussions provide useful frames of reference and insightful invitations to further thought, opening at least as many doors as he closes.

While Lakoff's style is consistently scholarly and expository, the book might have benefited from a more present authorial voice. Both within and between chapters, the work vacillates between passages of fresh and insightful reflection by the author (such as the chapters on conservatism and democracy) and passages of thoughtful yet distant and encyclopedic recounting (such as the chapters on fascism and realism). Without committing fully to either approach, the book's avoidance of strong ideological bias is purchased at the expense of a guiding conceptual vision or narrative thread. While such distance and formality is admirable in a work intended to be an encyclopedia of political ideas, it appears that Lakoff intends to offer more than just this. A more explicit and consistent authorial voice would underscore Lakoff's own contributions to our understanding of the political ideas he explores.

Such a voice emerges refreshingly, though somewhat late, in the book's epilogue. In this eleventh chapter, Lakoff draws together themes from several earlier chapters in a discussion of American democratic culture. He presents America's undergirding political culture as an innovative historical synthesis of English liberal individualism, Roman pluralism, and Athenian communalism. In the American synthesis of these traditions, a distinctive style of and commitment to democracy is forged out of three counterbalancing yet compatible understandings of autonomy. Lakoff describes the American state of political mind as a complex and evolving compromise between ideals of individual self-determination, competing group membership and interests, and the sense of an overarching common good. The book is arguably at its best in the examination of American political culture through the confluence of several ideas that continue to animate and shape it. Here Lakoff makes a genuine contribution to a conversation carried on by the likes of Bernard Bailyn, Louis Hartz, J. G. A. Pocock, and Gordon Wood regarding the potency of ideas in the lives of our political practices. By way of his epilogue, Lakoff illustrates the living power of ideas with an uncommon degree of clarity and vivacity.