Political theorists have increasingly focused on the role of groups in democratic and liberal theory over the past two decades or so, something both of these books do. Yet neither discusses group rights; instead, both push the debate about groups in a different direction, looking at the issue of groups and solidarity or unity. Juliet Hooker bemoans the lack of solidarity among Americans, which she sees as a central obstacle to the achievement of racial justice. Cristina Beltrán, on the other hand, is suspicious of attempts to create a Latino unity, which she thinks betrays a democratic commitment to multiplicity. These books do not, however, argue at cross-purposes, as unity and solidarity are not defined in the same way, though they do overlap. Hooker defines political solidarity as the “reciprocal relations of trust and obligation” between members of a political community that is necessary for “long-term egalitarian political projects to flourish” (p. 4). Beltrán looks critically at the quest for unity among some Latino leaders, political entrepreneurs, and the media, who often see unity as the same as loyalty, or acting as one voting bloc.

In Race and the Politics of Solidarity, Hooker argues that a crucial lacuna in arguments for multiculturalism is the frequent lack of attention paid to solidarity. She sees multicultural theory driven largely by the Canadian political theorists Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, who are inattentive to the issue of race, as they are mostly concerned with national and indigenous minorities. Hooker's criticism is important, but the importance and role of solidarity—which, she argues, is all too absent in the multicultural literature—is sometimes not conceptualized as well as one might like. At times, Hooker connects solidarity to equality. She also argues that because democracies “require consent,” citizens must be able to see beyond their narrow self-interest; doing so means developing bonds of solidarity, which is “essential to democracy” (p. 24). The idea is that if we do not view all of the members of the political community as fellow citizens, then policies when developed will often attend only to the needs of some. Hooker argues that when one theorizes about a racialized polity like the United States, one must take race into account. Race is not epiphenomenal but is constitutive of “modern political communities” (p. 15). One wonders if that is true for Poland as much as it is for the United States, but race is surely an important issue in many political communities. If it does seem like an exaggeration to say that democracies must develop bonds of solidarity, as she says, it might be true that solidarity is necessary for an egalitarian democracy.

Hooker says that the purpose of her book is to “sketch how theories of multiculturalism would have to be reconceptualized to take account of the racialized politics of solidarity” (p. 15). Yet she has a broader aim, as she criticizes theories of multiculturalism, liberal democratic theory in general, and liberal democratic practice. She argues that John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin (and U.S. liberal theorists generally) wrongly view issues of race as having no place in ideal theory; at best, issues of race are treated in a temporary fashion, since liberal theorists view racial discrimination as a deviation from liberal theory that can be corrected: Once racial discrimination disappears, racial identity will either disappear or become a private matter, no longer a political or theoretical concern. These arguments do not see any “positive role played by membership in a racial or ethnic group,” though the author does not articulate what this positive role should be (p. 63). When she says that we should accept race as a “semipermanent” feature of the United States, it is not clear what exactly that means (p. 119).

Hooker is on firmer ground when she argues that multicultural arguments rarely distinguish culture from race, at least in the case of Taylor and Kymlicka (who discuss race, but only briefly). Of course, some American theorists do discuss race, as Hooker notes. Still, she claims that the distinction between race and culture is harmful in Latin America, where indigenous peoples are seen as distinct cultural groups, but Afro-descendants are viewed as racial groups, and so “find it difficult to have their claims to the fair accommodation of their distinct cultural identities recognized” (p. 82). However, she also says that Afro-descendants (and indigenous peoples) are treated as distinct cultural groups in Nicaragua. Now the problem is that the Nicaraguan multicultural model fails to “get at problems of racial hierarchy and inequality” (p. 133).

Hooker correctly points to the need for liberal theorists to take race into account. It is hard to see race fading away as a political issue in the United States anytime soon, and her book is an important reminder that political theories that aspire to be relevant to political communities today ought to recognize this reality. Ultimately, though, it is unclear if the lack of solidarity is the cause of inegalitarian policies that Hooker and many liberal democrats embrace, or if it is the result of these policies. The author sometimes suggests that if solidarity were to be better implanted in our political theories, then the polity would better recognize race and be more apt to choose egalitarian policies. Yet in Chapter 2, Hooker argues that dominant racial groups must change their ethical-political perspective if we are to achieve egalitarian political policies, which in the United States means that whites “must be able to see themselves seeing whitely” (p. 51). In other words, whites need to see that race matters, that being white means having certain kinds of privileges that are denied others. Until this happens, “genuine political solidarity will not exist” (p. 53). The obstacle to solidarity then seems to be invisible racialized thinking and the privilege it supports. Hooker thinks that one way to overcome this obstacle is to create a new sense of public memory, which does not obscure past wrongs, but, instead, shows the political community to be responsible for the racial injustices of the past and present.

While Beltrán accepts the idea of group identity in the American polity, she does not take it as a given, but rather aims to examine its role and the way group-based political movements wrestle with both group identity and democracy. The idea of applying political theory to movement politics is certainly unusual, but Beltrán deftly weaves together empirical observation with normative insight in ways that allow us to see the dangers and promises of identity-based political movements. She describes the rise of the Chicano and Puerto Rican political movements in the late 1960s, both of which contained a quest for political unity. But The Trouble with Unity is also concerned with the expectation today among many political analysts that Latino Americans constitute a coherent community that will or should arise as a unified political force. Once Latinos discover their common interests, this view suggests, the growing Latino American community will be a formidable voting bloc. Perhaps more important, there are what might be called political entrepreneurs, like Latinos in Congress or community leaders, who want to coalesce this nascent voting bloc around what they see as issues of particular concern to the Latino community.

Beltrán contends that these trends mistakenly rest on an unwarranted assumption of unity among Latinos. She suggests that there are two related mistakes in this assumption. First, she argues, one form of unity is about loyalty to the group, which in turn is about feeling and attachment. But Latinos are not a unified group with a singular view of all or most issues. When Latino leaders in the 1960s dismissed those who challenged their political agenda as treasonous, they acted antidemocratically, and misunderstood the nature of Latino politics, which should not simply be a matter of group members following the leaders. Challenges to the agenda and ideas of the leaders often came from Latina feminists, whose concerns were dismissed as “white” and inauthentic. Beltrán quotes one loyalist who argues that ideas “such as liberation, sexism, male chauvinism [are] concept[s] of the Anglo society,” and so are alien to Latino culture (p. 49).

Beltrán's chapter on Rousseau nicely shows the affinity between his argument for the general will and the quest for unity among some Latinos; both promote a strategy of identity, which includes poetry, festivals, and public rituals, rather than one of democratic deliberation. Beltrán finds this troubling, since both Rousseau and movement politics have an “aversion toward political deliberation and public contestation” (p. 95). She compares her criticism of the Latino political movement with earlier criticisms of the women's movement: In both cases, movement politics emphasized unity and loyalty over voice, deliberation, and dissent. In the latter case, however, the women's movement learned to live with its multiplicity, embracing its diverse voices. Beltrán finds particularly instructive those feminists of color who try to build bridges “while simultaneously challenging the exclusions and silences that exist within all forms of community” (p. 62). Her argument here focuses on the importance of democratizing movement politics.

Beyond the issue of whether the Latino community has unified interests and how the community might be democratized, Beltrán questions whether there is a Latino community at all. Latinos in the United States consist of immigrants from Cuba, Mexico, South America, and Central America, as well as those from Puerto Rico and those whose ancestors were incorporated in the United States after the Mexican-American war. This is clearly a rather diverse group. The author says that we should see that Latinos “are not so much an electorate as an aggregate” and that terms like “Latino interests and Latino issues will become increasingly meaningless” (p. 126).

Here, a comparison with other groups or aggregates might have filled out the argument more: Asian Americans are similarly disparate, yet often treated as a group. Is it possible to turn an aggregate into an electorate, or is doing so a fruitless quest? Or a harmful one? Some of the obstacles faced by Latina feminists seem similar to those faced by black feminists within African American movement organizations in the 1960s; a comparison of the two may have added another dimension to Beltrán's argument. Do movement politics often begin with an assumption of unity that later becomes challenged by dissenters? Similarly, one wonders if the women's movement had or has political entrepreneurs like the Latino movement, political leaders who try to turn an aggregate into an electorate, and what their experience has been. Is it possible to transform aggregates, or are such attempts doomed to fail?

Sometimes Beltrán suggests that Latinos do not constitute a community, yet she thinks that being a Latino means something. If not a community, then, what are Latinos? The way out of this tension seems to be an acceptance that a Latino identity is something that is always in process, always being created, not something that simply exists: “Latino politics is best understood as a form of enactment, a democratic moment in which subjects create new patterns of commonality and contest unequal forms of power” (p. 157). Beltrán argues for a form of democratic politics whereby we refuse to look for a Latino core, but embrace “the instability and incompleteness of the category Latino” (p. 161). Latino identity is “productively incomplete—a heterogeneous form of process rather than resolution” (p. 162).

Pushing Latino unity too much has antidemocratic consequences; Hooker argues that solidarity among whites too readily excludes African Americans in anti-democratic ways. Both authors are clearly right to see political dangers in affective ties; strong notions of unity too easily translate into wrongful exclusion or loyalty tests that undermine democratic discussion. Ties of community should be constrained by the demands of democracy that insist on treating all members as equals, and being open to deliberation and dissent.

Yet these books raise anew old questions that have been posed to liberal theorists about motivation. While Hooker wants to retain some kind of racial group identity as an intrinsic, she also argues that solidarity among citizens should not be based on a group identity, because it is the sharing of space and membership that enmeshes people in relations of mutual obligation. Yet Hooker never explains what would make sharing space and membership sufficient for people to see it as generating obligations, since many now clearly do not, according to this reviewer. What must happen for fellow citizens in large countries to feel obligated toward one another? And what must happen for them to feel this obligation so that they will pursue an egalitarian democracy, as Hooker wants? One is reminded of the accusation that liberals (or at least certain versions of liberalism) do not sufficiently motivate citizens to treat one another equally, that for obligations to be felt widely they must be tied together affectively. Race and the Politics of Solidarity leaves us with this puzzle still unanswered.

Similarly, how do Latinos come together to act politically if they do not see themselves as part of a political movement? The centerpiece of Beltrán's concluding chapter is the immigrants' rights demonstrations of 2006, where, she says, these demonstrations contested unequal forms of power and created new forms of commonality. But it seems nearly inevitable that some people will want to translate these moments into a movement, or even that these moments are the products of a movement. Widespread demonstrations, after all, rarely just happen. They are the result of organization, networks, and planning. When they succeed, the organizers will want to build on their success to organize their community to tackle the next issue of common concern. The visible political moments are often the result of nearly hidden political organization. Robert Michels wrote long ago about the iron law of oligarchy—all political movements must have leaders. It is hard to imagine that these leaders will avoid trying to turn these political movements into something solid, with a core identity that can affect politics. But perhaps this shows the importance of The Trouble with Unity, since the interest and aspirations of these leaders may undermine the democratic moments and processes that Beltrán correctly wants to protect.