Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), viii + 107 pp. Raymond Geuss's Philosophy and Real Politics, an expansion of a 2007 lecture he gave under the title "(Lenin), Rawls, and Political Philosophy," is a broadside on political philosophy as it has been articulated since the publication of Rawls's seminal A Theory of Justice. Even when placed in parentheses, the appearance of Lenin's name is usually enough to convince hardheaded political philosophers that they need not read further, but this would be a mistake on a number of levels. Geuss, a professor of moral and political philosophy at Cambridge University, is as hardheaded as they come, and his objective, "to suggest the possibility that there might be a viable way of thinking about politics that is orthogonal to the mainstream of contemporary analytic philosophy" (18), is one that must be taken seriously, for it credibly calls into question just how hardheaded contemporary political philosophy actually is.
