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IN THIS ESSAY, THE AUTHOR REVIEWS AND CRITIQUES THE SCHOLARLY LITERATURE ABOUT RULES AND OTHER STRUCTURAL ARRANGEMENTS IN CONGRESS. HIS FOCUS IS ON EMPIRICAL RESEARCH THAT HAS BEEN INFORMED BY RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY. HE EMPHASIZES THREE CATEGORIES OF RULES--COMMITTEE JURISDICTIONS, LEADERSHIP PREROGATIVES, AND FLOOR PROCEDURE. AN IMPLICATION IS THAT THE FORCES SHAPING PROCEDURAL POLITICS VARY DEPENDING ON THE ASPECT OF CONGRESSIONAL STRUCTURE UNDER CONSIDERATION.

THE AUTHOR, WHO REPRESENTS NELSON-CRESTON IN BRITISH COLUMBIA'S LEGISLATURE, DISCUSSES THE DIFFICULTIES OF REPRESENTING A LARGE, SPARSELY-POPULATED RURAL CONSTITUENCY.

"In The Whips, C. Lawrence Evans offers a comprehensive, systematic, and historical exploration of party coalition building and legislative strategy in the U.S. House and Senate, ranging from the relatively bipartisan, committee-dominated chambers of the 1950s to the highly polarized congresses of the 2000s. In addition to examining roll call votes, personal interviews with lawmakers and staff, and other standard techniques of congressional scholarship, Evans utilizes the personal papers of dozens of former members of the House and Senate leadership, especially former whips. These records allow Evans to create and examine a database of nearly 1,500 internal leadership polls about evolving member preferences on hundreds of significant bills across five decades of recent congressional history. The result is a rich and sweeping contribution to scholarly and public understanding of congressional party leaders at work. Since the whips regularly provide leaders and members with valuable political intelligence, examining them is essential to understanding how coalitions are forged and deals are made on the most important legislation considered on Capitol Hill. But their impact--and the impact of other leaders in the lawmaking process--is far more nuanced and interesting than is implied by most other treatments of partisan coalition building in Congress"--

Introduction to the project -- The beginnings of Western philosophy: the pre-Socratics -- Socrates and the Sophists -- Plato -- Aristotle -- Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman periods: Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Neoplatonism -- Early Christian thought through Augustine -- Early medieval philosophy -- The High Middle Ages (I): Thomas Aquinas -- The High Middle Ages (II): Bonaventure, Scotus, Ockham -- Philosophy between the medieval and modern periods -- Descartes and the beginning of modern philosophy -- Continental rationalism: Spinoza and Leibniz -- British empiricism: Locke and Berkeley -- The Scottish enlightenment (I): David Hume -- The Scottish enlightenment (II): Thomas Reid -- Enlightenment deism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft -- Immanuel Kant -- German idealism and Hegel -- Karl Marx -- S²ren Kierkegaard -- John Stuart Mill and nineteenth-century positivism -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- Conclusions: some lessons from the history of Western philosophy.

C. Stephen Evans provides a clear, readable introduction to Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) as a philosopher and thinker. His book is organised around Kierkegaard's concept of the three 'stages' or 'spheres' of human existence, which provide both a developmental account of the human self and an understanding of three rival views of human life and its meaning. Evans also discusses such important Kierkegaardian concepts as 'indirect communication', 'truth as subjectivity', and the Incarnation understood as 'the Absolute Paradox'. Although his discussion emphasises the importance of Christianity for understanding Kierkgaard, it shows him to be a writer of great interest to a secular as well as a religious audience. Evans' book brings Kierkegaard into conversation with western philosophers past and present, presenting him as one who gives powerful answers to the questions which philosophers ask