| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Mlada Bukovansky. Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture. (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. viii, 255. $39.50.

The writing of a comparative history always presents a challenge, and so, too, does any attempt to incorporate the insights of a more theoretical discipline into an historical account. Mlada Bukovansky is to be commended for trying both at once, and in a relatively short work. Her goal is to use the examples of the American and French revolutions to study the world-historical shift "from dynastically legitimated monarchical sovereignty to popularly legitimated national sovereignty" (p. 1). She does so not as an historian but as an international relations specialist, and it is with the implications for that branch of political science that she is most concerned. 1

Bukovansky's method is to interweave the political and diplomatic history of the American and French revolutionary period with the history of ideas. In so doing, she proposes a view of cultural systems as at once constitutive of the understanding of political actors, and at the same time manipulable by them in a strategic fashion. She refers to this as a "dualistic" perspective (p. 55), and one that allows the identification of "fault lines" or "contradictions and complementarities" within cultures that facilitate actors' attempts to effect change. This use of dualism as a concept would not be recognized by many in the history of ideas, as it seems to be more about connection than differentiation. Indeed, in its formulation, it has more in common with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, a structure both structured and structuring, creating the limits of possibility for social actors but within which they can act strategically toward their own goals, changing the configuration of their habitus by actions that nonetheless draw on it for their form and content. . . .

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