Gerald M. Mara's Between Specters of War and Visions of Peace offers novel interpretive readings in the history of political thought, moving between the frames of reference of war and peace and of philosophy and politics. The book is hard to summarize, partly because it moves thematically through the history of political thought, and partly because it is profoundly committed to multivocality. Between Specters of War and Visions of Peace is a book that takes its stand on not taking a stand, but rather on embracing a conversation. This is the dialogic theory of the title, which is bound up with Mara's examination of the ways war, peace, theory, and practice are illuminated in the writings of select canonical authors, which are explored through paired comparisons with one another. Against the historicist presumption, Mara maintains that the tradition of political reflection furnishes resources for us today, but more in the raising of unsettling questions than in any purported timelessness to the answers (cf. 201).

In Mara's own words, his “book offers . . . a non-traditional defense of tradition and a democratic justification for moving beyond democratic theory” (10). Mara's dialogic theory is thus a way for democratic theory to become self-conscious through engagement with undemocratic voices and the foundational commitments anchoring these voices. This movement “beyond democratic theory” requires a fuller appreciation of political practice than that evinced by contemporary theory. Mara's interpretation of the tradition also bears an express relationship—the exact relationship remains underspecified—to a democratic practice that he would like real citizens to engage in. On his view, then, dialogic political theory can invigorate democracy itself.

Mara opens Between Specters of War and Visions of Peace with a natural conversation between Schmitt and Derrida on friends and enemies—natural because Derrida is actually responding to Schmitt—which introduces war and peace as the book's frames of reference (chapter 1, “Enmity or Friendship?”). He explores Schmitt's The Concept of the Political and the Derridean rejoinder in The Politics of Friendship. This serves as an introduction because both thinkers, albeit in differing ways, “challenge the broadly peaceful international order that underlies the liberalism of Rawls and Habermas” (37). Peace, however, cannot be presumed, either theoretically or practically. Chapter 2, “War and Order,” turns to Aquinas and Machiavelli, offering principally a discussion of part 2 of the Summa Theologiae in comparison with Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses on Livy. Here, Mara compares political order in Aquinas and Machiavelli, “a moral philosophy discoverable by reason versus a pragmatic politics driven by agency,” respectively (83). He argues, essentially, that the commitments of both are ultimately “self-undermining” because they are one-sided, privileging either philosophy over politics or politics over philosophy (83).

Chapter 3, “Perpetual Peace,” examines Hobbes's Leviathan and Kant's Perpetual Peace. Mara compares the two as problematizing peace as the central dilemma of political life, where again the implied portrait of real politics complicates the philosophical programs of the thinkers. According to Mara, both also neglect history, privileging a “stable rationality . . . that is timelessly valid” (126). This claim justifies chapter 4, “War Is History,” which scrutinizes Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of History, and Elements of the Philosophy of Right, putting these works into dialogue with Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. Mara concludes that “in spite of their grounding in epistemologies of historicism, neither perspective [i.e., Hegel's or Nietzsche's] seems fully able to assist serious efforts to deal with violent historical change” (176). Moreover, both thinkers “may also leave philosophy diminished, for one of political philosophy's strengths must be its capacity to contribute to public discussion about this most wrenching political phenomenon [i.e., war]” (176).

Chapter 5, “Political Philosophy between War and Peace,” doubles as Mara's conclusion. It compares Thucydides's War Between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians with Plato's Republic. For Mara, Thucydides and Plato neglect neither war nor peace—one of the recurrent problems of the other thinkers (177). Thucydides and Plato are the subject of Mara's 2008 book, The Civic Conversations of Thucydides and Plato: Classical Political Philosophy and the Limits of Democracy (SUNY Press); as its title indicates, this book too examines the limits of democracy. These limits, the value of pushing hard against them, and the notion that democracy itself requires reexamination thus emerge as through-lines in Mara's thinking. This 2019 book, then, ends with a celebration of two aristocratic Greeks, who achieve some salutary balance between a philosophy permeable to politics (Plato) and an account of politics undistorted by theory (Thucydides) but open to philosophy (9–10, 198–204). For this reader, what this means for democracy remains uncertain. In the scholarship generally, there are valuable democratic appropriations of Plato and Thucydides. Yet these authors remain ambiguous democratic allies at best, since prominent elements of their thought communicate explicit skepticism about democracy.

At times, Between Specters of War and Visions of Peace communicates a sum less than the whole of its interesting parts, since Mara's own authorial voice can become drowned out in the loud multivocality he is intent on bringing to the surface. The rationale behind Mara's choice of thinkers and the progression of the chapters are not always clear—the chapters are “linked by thematic filaments” (5). Nonetheless, the innovative interpretative readings themselves will be of interest to broad audiences. Mara's book is an extremely rich one, and it can be recommended on precisely this score. It consistently stimulates thought, and it opens up startling new pathways for thinking about politics, especially in its sensitive untangling of the dynamic relationships between political philosophy and the living, breathing world of politics.

In places, I found Mara's style difficult. This is unfortunate, because, unlike scholars whose prose is a fig leaf covering their nakedness, Mara really has something to say. But his provocative comparisons, incisive questions, and illuminating antitheticals come dense and fast, and so there is sometimes too little room to process them. Indeed, Mara raises so many interpretive possibilities that his own views remain underexplored in places. To give one example, a more sustained critique of democratic theory's inability to hold actual politics within its theoretical ken would have been especially useful. It would have helped to deliver more fully on the book's promise to establish the living relevance of the tradition for contemporary theory and practice.

A word is necessary about the book's usefulness for democracy. Mara expects a lot from democratic citizens, principally that they remain open to profoundly contentious questions. If they seek closure surrounding these issues, however, then Mara's book perhaps proposes a role for theorists more than for citizens. One of theory's purposes becomes the Socratic unsettling of pieties. Democracy, then, requires multivocality, that is, genuinely opposing views. But Mara also maintains that another of theory's purposes is “critically commenting on the directions of public choice” (35). Criticism, of course, presupposes some fixed standpoint where the criticism is leveled. How these two functions of democratic theory fit together was a circle I struggled to square. And should today's embattled liberal democrats, citizens and theorists alike, really engage seriously (and in good faith) with powerful forms of antidemocratic thought, which might well nourish the contemporary groundswell of antidemocratic practice? Mara's book is a novel, big-picture intervention in the scholarly conversation about the history of political thought and its relationship to democracy. Such accounts are rare. Fittingly enough, perhaps, it represents more a first word than any final one.