This issue of Perspectives contains reviews of a wide range of books across the conventional subfields. One theme that links many of the books under review, and thus the reviews themselves, is the theme of trust. In short, to what extent is effective and enduring political governance reliant on the development of forms of credibility, or “credible commitment,” among citizens and between citizens and political institutions? The problem of trust has been central to political inquiry at least as far back as Hobbes and arguably Aristotle, for whom civic “friendship” was an indispensable condition of politics. And it has recently assumed particular prominence in political science, as evidenced in the reviews below.

One source of this attention is no doubt the influence of rational choice perspectives which, proceeding from assumptions about strategic action, have conceptualized trust as a fragile means of surmounting coordination problems. Three books under review, all written by prominent contributors to discussions of rational choice, address this issue: Cooperation Without Trust? by Karen S. Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi, Rationality and the Ideology of Disconnection by Michael Taylor, and Social Traps and the Problem of Trust, by Bo Rothstein. While the first two are reviewed in the Theory section, the latter appears in the Comparative section. There is an element of arbitrariness in this placement—as in many placements—since all three books are highly theoretical, and at the same time each is informed by empirical work not limited to a single country. Rothstein's book was commissioned as a Comparative book primarily because it appeared to be more oriented toward empirical application. But clearly these books ought to be read together. Pierre Rosanvallon's The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, which appears in the Theory section, is a very different kind of book addressing a very similar theme. Rosanvallon is one of the foremost contemporary French political philosophers and, influenced by Tocqueville, his book is a meditation on the importance of the intermediate networks of civil society in sustaining freedom in the modern world. While not framed around the social scientific discourse of “trust,” the book centers around the relationship between social norms and understandings and political authority. Similar themes are developed, in a very different idiom, in Japan's Dual Civil Society: Members Without Advocates by Robert Pekkanen, which is reviewed in the Comparative section.

A number of books on federalism can also be seen as addressing the problem of trust in a more empirical vein. Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism, by Daniel Ziblatt, and Federalism, Fiscal Authority, and Centralization in Latin America, by Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, both analyze the ways that federal institutions of multi-level governance address problems of social coordination, service delivery, and identity formation. These problems are perhaps most urgent in civil war and post-conflict settings, as current events in Iraq make clear. And so it is fitting that we also feature a review of an edited volume on The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq, which addresses a situation that seems characterized by a striking absence of trust.

This issue also features an important review essay by Beate Sissenich on “Postnational Rulemaking, Compliance, and Justification: The New Europe.” The original occasion for the essay was a stunning proliferation of books on the European Union and the need for Perspectives to commission reviews of many of them. But this essay is much more than an extended review, for it makes clear that this proliferation of publications represents a truly transnational effort of scholars to understand what is perhaps the most interesting and important experiment in “postnational” governance in today's world. Sissenich makes clear that the EU is an ambitious effort to institute new forms of “trust” and accountability along multiple dimensions, from formal institutions of regional governance to informal social networks, and from forms of social policy to forms of political identity and authority. Sissenich demonstrates that the EU is the site of extraordinary experimentation, and that these developments speak to broader issues of governance and citizenship in a world in which national borders and sovereignties have become increasingly porous. She also makes clear that, in the same way that EU politics highlights the porousness and flexibility of boundaries, the study of EU politics highlights the porousness and flexibility of disciplinary boundaries. Her conclusion focuses on the need to rethinking the relationship between Comparative Politics and International Relations. But her piece also demonstrates, implicitly, similar rethinking is needed for Political Theory and even for American Politics. For in a world in which the U.S. is at the center of global networks and economic, political, and demographic flows, and in which the system of federalism pioneered in the U.S. is increasingly used as a model in new situations of governance, it is clear that American Politics opens out to the broader domain of world politics. The EU, in short, as a challenge of postnational governance, might also symbolize the need to rethink conventional divisions within political science.