I was surprised by The Game of Justice, and by this I mean to offer high praise. Ruth Lane's argument is clear and her style is direct. She succeeds outstandingly well at wending her way through many fraught disciplinary disjunctures: analytical philosophy versus continental theory, empirical social science versus interpretivism, and large-scale political observation versus politics as a “technique of the self.” Borrowing judiciously and insightfully from each of these traditions, Lane offers a vision of individual self-government as part of an immanent critique of liberalism. The problem with liberals, she argues, is in their focus on an abstract state that becomes the sole target either of criticism (as the source of injustice) or praise (as the place where the concrete particulars of injustice might be redressed). This misplaced focus ignores the real activity of politics, which happens in a constellated fashion as part of what she calls “political society.” Patently unlike the familiar trope of civil society—with its nostalgic perspective on bygone bowling leagues, PTAs, town meetings, and fraternal orders—political society is the place where competition over scarce material and social resources takes place. It “reaches directly down into what is called private life,” she argues, and “is where individual persons, members of the different social categories and groups that make up the social fabric, engage in competitive interaction over the distribution of social values” (p. 41).

Decentered, local, and conflictual, Lane's political society is a place where micro-level acts of oppression and rebellion occur. In these small-scale skirmishes, some win and some lose, and over time the winners reinforce their status by constructing and naturalizing a set of allegedly characteristic virtues. The losers, on the other hand, become the unfortunate bearers of characteristic vices. The resulting world is one in which there are not only the underprivileged but the overprivileged, namely, those who play the game of justice with intransigent, arbitrary, and unfair advantages. On this matter, Lane's critique is relevant not only to liberals who would view the state as the source of this inequality or as the place where it might be overcome—in Rawlsian fairness, for example—but also to those nonliberal visions that would promote a kind of political agonism. In political society, as the author understands it, public space is a rare thing. In the rare cases when it opens up, moreover, Aristotelian judgment or Machiavellian skill most often come to naught. What matters instead are the accretions of past victories and defeats, reified into social categories. The pursuit of justice may be a game in a Wittgensteinian sense—a pitch or field not closed and strictly formal but open-ended, not permanently hierarchal but creatively changing and internally fluid, perhaps most importantly “existential rather than practical” (p. 94)—but the parameters of practice and the rules of play are written, for the most part, by the past winners for the sake of maintaining their status and dominance. Political change can occur, indeed the players must be committed to this possibility, but they must also be patient and resilient. Like baseball, the game of justice has no clock.

Under these conditions, the question becomes one of en-couragement in the most literal sense: how to inculcate a sense of courage within an indifferent or even hostile political society. For an answer, Lane turns intriguingly to well-known political outsiders like Rousseau and Thoreau. She also turns, in a short but particularly moving passage, to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In that passage, Lane offers a reading of the narrator's memory of a grandfather who on his deathbed offered a confession to his children: The persistence of racism means that life is war, and you must brace yourself for a “a life with your head in the lion's mouth” (p. 99; Ellison, 16). The reality of this condition—one in which obscurity and prominence offer distinct risks and rewards—means a peculiar piece of advice: “agree 'em to death and destruction” (p. 100; Ellison, 16); “let 'em swaller you till they burst” (p. 100; Ellison, 16).

The grandfather's advice haunts the narrator, and it should haunt contemporary political theorists as well. On the one hand, it undermines the commonplace notion—perhaps articulated for the first time by Montesquieu, and repeated more recently by Isaiah Berlin—that civil society under liberalism is at its core a polite society, a form of life moving in almost a teleological fashion toward an order in which individual men and women become ever more courteous to each other. On the other hand, it exposes as well the irrelevance and indeed the foolishness of an agonal perspective in a world where for some even the merest political appearance, the smallest act of political speech, invites scorn or even retribution. Lane helps us see that one can appreciate the pursuit of justice as a game, and yet realize that “(t)he game perspective does not mean that all wars can be won; sometimes the constraints of history pose very high barriers” (p. 99). Behind these barriers, sometimes the only viable political strategy is one of self-effacing humility, or the strategy of the narrator's grandfather.

To be sure, there is a danger in promoting this kind of strategy if the political world is even slightly open, or if the “game of justice” allows for at least a modicum of fair play. The judgment distinguishing a difficult political project from an impossible one is most often made after the experience of defeat and disappointment. The cultivation of a techne biou has since Hellenistic times served to cushion the blows of fate that attend an uncertain world, and Lane clearly evokes this tradition in her turn to thinkers like Michel Foucault. The problem with that tradition, however, and the characteristic feature that makes its integration into political theory difficult, is the ironic tendency to heighten, rather than philosophically lessen, the experience of anxiety and sensitivity to the highs and lows of social and political life. Here, not Foucault but Rousseau is perhaps more exemplary. From fame and full-throated philosophical and literary denunciation, through increasing alienation and estrangement, to a state of isolation and paranoia, Rousseau's late vision was a curious but internally consistent example of a techne biou gone wrong.

On this matter, the agonal critics of liberalism may be closer to the mark than Lane seems to admit: The real danger to contemporary political life may not be the curse of overly high expectations (leading to crashing lows) but the presumption of disappointment leading to political disillusionment and quietism. Put somewhat differently, citizens of the postmodern polity already expect to be disappointed by their leaders; they might not be born stoics, but they almost certainly are preternatural cynics. In a world such as this, the trick is to treat that experience seriously, and to transmute the expectation of disappointment into a kind of meditation on social reality, as well as the impossibility of a permanent escape from it. In large part, this describes Lane's project, and for this reason I highly recommend this book to an audience well beyond the usual circuit of readers interested in contemporary political theory.