BRUCE ACKERMAN teaches at the Yale Law School and has been honored by Time magazine as one of the ten outstanding young law professors in the nation. His aim in this book is herculean, even for one with such laurels: He wants to do nothing less than establish, in the face of powerful critics, that “liberalism is capable of formulating a self-consistent response to the struggle for power.” What is most interesting about his attempt, however, is that it is virtually a case study in why that is an impossible task.