“Women's Work” as Political Art: Weaving and Dialectical Politics in Homer, Aristophanes, and Plato. By Lisa Pace Vetter. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 190p. $60.00.

Metaphors are a staple of the practice of political theory. Socrates' “individual writ large,” Machiavelli's “Fortuna is a woman,” Hobbes's “leviathan”: These and scores of others speak to the power of metaphorical language in the theorist's arsenal. Lisa Pace Vetter's “women's work” focuses on the metaphor of weaving, a craft associated with the female working at her loom by the hearth. Vetter explores this metaphor in four texts: the Odyssey, Lysistrata, Statesman, and Phaedo. She finds in the metaphor a “dialectical foundationalism” that mediates between subjectivity and objectivity, reason and emotion, action and deliberation (p. 7). Weaving incorporates complexity, creating a new whole without destroying the particularities that comprise it. This form of weaving she values, but it appears only in the Socrates speech in the Phaedo and the construction of Plato's dialogue.