This is worth reading for footnote 49 alone: "I think it possible to retain much of Adorno's analysis within a (revised) Leninist framework, but this is not a claim I propose to discuss in these pages."

Not exactly the kind of thing you get in standard political philosophizing, which ignores Adorno (probably because Habermas's horrifically bad reading of him has become the accepted understanding in the anglosphere) and regards Lenin as kind of Hitler with better prose. So at least Geuss is doing something different.

That said, there's a bit of a Wittgenstein feel to this project: it's really for people who buy the current philosophical mainstream approach to the matter, but feel a bit uncomfortable, and would like to know why. Just as Wittgenstein is a helpful purgative for analytically trained thinkers, Geuss would be for contemporary political theorists. But is there anything else to it? Perhaps not much that you don't already think.

i) don't construct ideals without attending to material circumstances. There is no 'justice,' only justice for...
ii) politics is about how people *act*, not what they believe. Their beliefs will contribute to actions, but the latter are the really important bits.
iii) political theory, and politics, is historical, and can't be understood aside from history.

Okay, sure. And he's right to bring ideology back into political discussion; and he's right to point out that standard liberal political theory just is ideological (i.e., it points us away from real problems). He's right that politics is about power relations, not about abstract good like justice/equality/fairness etc... But it's hard to see how any of this matters to anyone who doesn't already believe that standard liberal political theory is the way to go.

In other words, this is at best a ladder to be kicked away. The arguments are inconsistent (he wants to 'start with today,' rather than ideals, but doesn't want to start with rights discourse--which just *is* today's discourse), the prose pleasant, the length just right. But the audience is tiny and unimportant.

( )

A short review for a short book. This book criticizes the traditional conception of political philosophy, which sees it merely as applied ethics. I liked the general idea and some of the themes the author briefly discusses were interesting. I think he's onto something when he envisions conceptual innovation as an alternative path for political philosophy. But in the end this book, as an expanded lecture, is much too short to be influential, or even convincing. Political philosophy has to be reinvented through philosophizing. This book only suggests a few preliminary signposts for that task.