Citizens of well-developed liberal democracies enjoy an unprecedented standard of living, while a staggering number of people worldwide live in unbelievable poverty. It seems obvious that the well-off have moral obligations to those who are impoverished. But there’s a question regarding the nature and extent of these obligations. Some hold that well-off societies and their citizens own substantial duties of humanitarian assistance to the global poor. Others claim that our duties are stronger than this; they claim that our duties to the global poor are a matter of justice.

In her new book, Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Nicole Hassoun proposes a new kind of argument for what she calls “serious moral duties to the global poor.” She claims that in our globalized world, people all over the globe are subject to the coercive power of international institutions. She then argues that these coercive institutions are legitimate only if they can win the consent of those subject to them. From this, she concludes that international institutions owe to the global poor whatever is required in order to enable them to exercise a kind of minimal autonomy; and this autonomy requires access to food, shelter, water, and education. Hassoun’s argument, then, is that familiar minimal requirements for legitimate coercion entail more extensive positive duties to the global poor.

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Daniel Kreiss is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012) traces the integration of new media into the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and then Barack Obama. Kreiss argues that by focusing on innovation, infrastructure, and organization, scholars can better understand how new media has become central to understanding political campaigns in the US. The book draws on dozens of interviews with most of the largely unknown, but integral members of the campaigns of Dean and Obama. The story Kreiss tells reveals much about the nature of modern political campaigns and how the Internet has shaped the last decade of American politics.

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It is difficult to overstate the importance of John Rawls to political and moral philosophy. Yet Rawls’s work is commonly read as fundamentally divided between “early” and “late” periods, which are marked mainly by the publication of his two major books, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993). The most common account of Rawls’s intellectual trajectory has it that the later Rawls came to regard the project of A Theory of Justice as deeply flawed. That is, Political Liberalism is often read as an attempt to dial back or even renounce the project of A Theory of Justice. In fact, Political Liberalism is commonly taken to represent a drastic lowering of the ambitions for political philosophy as such.

In his book, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn (Oxford University Press, 2010), Paul Weithman meticulously develops and defends a non-standard account of Rawls’s turn from the view proposed in A Theory of Justice to that of Political Liberalism. According to Weithman, both works are centrally focused on the very same problem, namely, how a stably just society is possible among creatures like us. Weithman argues that Rawls’s “turn” involves not a change of topic, or a lowering of ambition, but a change in how Rawls understood the nature of social stability. If Weithman is correct, the standard understanding of Rawls’s philosophy must change significantly. Perhaps more importantly, if Weithman is right, many of the most common criticisms of Rawls more obviously miss their mark.

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Clifford Bob is the author of the new book The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (Cambridge University Press 2012). Bob is an associate professor of political science at Duquesne University. This new book draws on the rich literature on the politics of public policy making, but adapts them to the international arena. Bob argues that too little focus has been placed on right wing groups and their causes in favor of progressive movements. Part international relations, part comparative politics the book traces the competing policy networks in several countries in the areas of gay rights and gun rights. The book is provocative, readable, and a real contribution to a variety of subfields of political science.

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David Karpf is the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (Oxford University Press 2012) and an assistant professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. His book is timely, well-researched, and insightful. He explores the adoption of Internet technologies by advocacy groups in the early 2000s, specifically MoveOn, DailyKos, and Democracy for America. Karpf argues that these technologies are transformative and disruptive, permitting the establishment of whole new types of advocacy group based on low-cost, high-speed virtual mobilization and organizing. Readers from both the academic and professional political world would benefit from reading this book. Its conclusions suggest a radical change in the population of interest groups as we know it.

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Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His book traces the intellectual history of marijuana from Europe to Mexico and the ways in which usage of the drug was portrayed – as a source of madness and violence — in the Mexican media. Campos turns on its head the popular myth that drug regulation in Mexico derives from US sources. For political scientists and for all those interested in the issue, the book offers a deep historical context for the current “war on drugs” and related violence in the US and in Mexico.

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Jesse Rhodes‘ book An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind (Cornell University Press, 2012). The book synthesizes nearly forty years of US political history. It tells the story of the development and passage of the No Child Left Behind law by George W. Bush. The book builds on political science theories of political entrepreneurship, institutionalism, and incrementalism to narrate the debate about education reform. Rhodes captures the people, the organizations, and the institutions that have defined education policy since the 1980s. The book is accessible, thorough, and a must read for scholars of education politics and policy.

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Benjamin Wittes is senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and the editor of Campaign 2012: Twelve Independent Ideas for Improving American Public Policy (Brookings Institution Press 2012). He also directs the Campaign 2012 Project for Brookings.

This collection of essays on critical national issues ranges from the well-publicized, health care reform, to the wonkish, institutional reform. The book is arranged as a series of critical debates that reflect on the first four years of the Obama administration and ways to improve public policy. Authors include many luminaries in the field including: Thomas Mann, Alice Rivlin, and William Galston. The issues range from domestic, budget deficit and federalism, to international, Iran and Middle East policy. The book could be used in an undergraduate political science course on the election and public policy, but also is a serious evaluation of issues facing policy-makers.

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In his new book, Lobbying the New President: Interests in Transition (Routledge, 2012), Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at Seton Hall University, considers the impact of presidential transitions on the political landscape, and the opportunities they offer for new or policies.  Brown examines different ways in which special interest groups capitalize on presidential transitions, and how that has changed over time.

In our interview, we talked about some of the more famous transitions in history, how the transitions have become more formal and official over time, and what we can expect from transitions in the future. Read all about it, and more, in Brown’s informative new book.

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It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a platform with a raucous audience at its feet and some noble man or woman about to put on–with the executioner’s aid–the finale to their ordeal. The guillotine is also often taken as a token of France’s human rights enlightenment. It made execution swift and supposedly painless.

Such characterizations miss an essential point: The guillotine was meant to make execution disappear. France’s republican founders sought efficiency and discretion in carrying out what they saw as a necessary evil. They had come to view execution as a sort of ultimate banishment, and not as an opportunity for an object lesson. It was a tool for getting rid of people–the quicker and quieter, the better. In fact, the French government finally put an end to public executions in 1939 when one particular guillotine collided with photo journalism. No matter how speedy the blade, the shutter was faster.

Historian Paul Friedland concludes his rich and expansive new book, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Punishment in France (Oxford University Press, 2012), by drawing back the curtain on this aspect of the guillotine’s past. Even more importantly, moreover, Friedland demonstrates that modern preoccupations with exemplary deterrence as a justification for punishment have led to distortions in how we understand public executions as they happened in the past. He begins his study in the medieval period, where he observes that public executions functioned mainly as rituals for repairing damage to the social fabric. He then follows the thread over half a millennium, tracing many evolutions in attitudes and practice, but never finding deterrence theory at work quite as some commentators have.

Paul Friedland is an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a fellow of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2011-2012).