C. Heike Schotten, Nietzsche's Revolution: Decadence, Politics, and Sexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2009)

Nietzsche’s Revolution argues that Nietzsche is a revolutionary who aims to liberate modernity by overthrowing Christianity. Although Nietzsche’s terrified inability to follow through on this revolutionary project causes him to retreat into a retrograde essentialism of race and gender that betrays his own revolutionary promise, Nietzsche’s complicity in this failure bequeaths this revolution to us, his future readers, who can take it up in the form of poststructuralist queer theory and politics. This is a revolutionary future Nietzsche could neither have foreseen nor endorsed, but is the necessary consequence of his quest to overthrow Christianity’s cult of meaning in the West.

David A. Dulio, Erin O'Brien, John S. Klemanski, Diversity in Contemporary American Politics and Government (Pearson Longman, 2009)

Organized to follow the structure of a standard introduction to American politics text, this unique reader highlights the role of diversity in U.S. politics through exploration of engaging, contemporary political issues. Based on the thesis that demographic diversity in America plays a significant role in political outcomes and policy processes, this reader covers a wide range of today's issues and encompasses a myriad of group cleavages. Carefully selected readings from both academic and popular sources–wedded to helpful introductions by the editors and end-of-chapter resources–present complex issues in an accessible, engaging way.

Jalal Alamgir, India’s Open-Economy Policy: Globalism, Rivalry, Continuity (London and New York: Routledge, 2009)

This book is the first major exploration of Indian political economy using a constructivist approach. Arguing that India’s open-economy policy was made, justified, and continued on the basis of the idea of openness more than its tangible effect, the book explains how policymakers privileged international needs over domestic political demands, replaced economic independence with interdependence as a priority, and ensured that the broad basis of India’s openness could not be challenged effectively even though certain policies faced severe opposition.

Conventional wisdom believes that solidarity among the working poor is rare in the United States and identity politics shoulders a large portion of the blame. The Politics of Identity offers a fresh take on solidarity building and identity among America’s working poor by placing workers’ voices center stage through the use of fieldwork and in-depth interviews. The book provides the first empirical assessment of long-standing theoretical debates over the effect of identity politics for developing additional solidarities that is politically relevant, theoretically rich, and highly readable.

James Ward, Leo Strauss: From Politics to Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming)

Through a study of Strauss's complete works, Ward shows that for Strauss political philosophy is the principal gateway to philosophy in a traditional and comprehensive sense. All of the major interpretive issues concerning Strauss's ideas are related to and, the book contends, most adequately examined when this status is recognized, including the difficult issue of how Strauss's thinking is related to conservative politics.