For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family. By Michael J. Shapiro. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 248p. $47.95 cloth, $18.95 paper

Michael J. Shapiro reflects on “the politics of the family” from the point of view of an outlook on political life inspired by “genealogy,” an approach originated by Friedrich Nietzsche and refined by Michel Foucault. Although Shapiro would not characterize it quite in these terms, that outlook is roughly as follows. Ideas about political regimes are typically governed by the values of unity, agreement, or consensus. But that is highly misleading. A consideration of how political concepts and institutions come into being (that is, a genealogy of the political, as opposed to a theorization of it) leads to a picture in which disagreement and conflict are as central as consensus and harmony. Words like “authority,” “democracy,” and “freedom” are continually redefined as people put them to different uses in changing contexts of conflict and interpretation. What they are thought to mean at any given moment will be an incomplete, contested, and on the whole incoherent echo of actual usage. Individuals, too, shape their outlooks by means of clashing and contradictory desires, norms, and perspectives. For this reason, the goals and beliefs that move any actually existing political regime (and any given individual) will typically be ill defined, ambiguous, and amenable to additional equivocation and conflict.