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ions as real (to “hypostatize”), they “depoliticize” responsibility and foreclose genuinely emancipatory projects. For Vázquez-Arroyo, in short, the ethical turn’s “moralization of political life” is “a diversion from a political understanding of a world largely defined by liberaldemocratic capitalist ascendance and the defeat of the radical left” (p. 29). Drawing from Theodor Adorno, Machiavelli, Bertolt Brecht, Antonio Gramsci, Max Weber, and Simone Weil, Vázquez-Arroyo revives and revises the tradition of “political ethic” as an alternative to ethical politics (Chapters 5–6). And lest he be guilty of depoliticization, he is clear that his political ethic pertains specifically to the struggle for a “democratic socialist order,” which he also suggests is the “only” political form under which “a robust sense of political responsibility” is “possible” (p. xvii). His exegesis is erudite but also incredibly intricate. I highlight two crucial elements of his ethic: fidelity to a “political identity” and responsiveness to “predicaments of power.” Political identity is “constituted by values that set the parameters for collective life and its institutions— its political forms—along with a conception of political action and agency that demands fidelity to it” (p. 216). Fidelity to a political identity lets that identity operates as a “controlling end” to moderate the violence that is almost always implicated in politics, especially in the creation of new political orders. Fidelity requires that violent means must not undermine political identity (e.g. pp. 232, 243, 245, 249, 253). A political actor responds to predicaments of power by considering “the historically constituted situation in which the political actor finds herself, about how it came into being and how the actor in question came to be situated in it, along with material processes, practices, and discourses mediating her situated actions” (pp. 220–221; see also pp. x–xi, xv). The task is to “cognitively map” a “political situation,” “and accurately discern the realities of power the situation imposes in the name of the ideal that animates the need to rectify it” (pp. 255; see also pp. 204, 216, 219). “Realism” need not relinquish utopia, which defends against “accommodation to existing powers” (p. 255). This is no simple call back to concrete realities. This book is a theory-driven and theoryvindicating call to attend to the mediations that deliver what is concrete. The author worries that “ideas of normative foundations have come perilously close to replacing social theory” (p. 27). Like most political realists, Vázquez-Arroyo wants politics to be judged by “criteria immanent to its field” (p. 223), and like many of them he still seeks the ethical dimension of politics. Although the political field is “extramoral,” it is not without “ethical principles” (p. 222). Now, his political ethic does place significant constraints and demands on political actors; it has that binding quality we associate with the ethical. A highlight of his arguments is that responsibility must be understood, both in its historical conceptual development and as a practice, in 1108 Perspectives on Politics © American Political Science Association 2017 Critical Dialogues