At the center of Elshtain's work is a passionate concern with the relationship between political rhetoric and political action. For Elshtain, politics is a sphere of concrete responsibility. Political speech should, therefore, approach the richness of actual lives and commitments rather than present impossible utopias.

Elshtain finds in the writings of Vaclav Havel, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus a language appropriate to the complexity of everyday life and politics, and in her essays she critiques philosophers and writers who distance us from a concrete, embodied world. She argues against those repressive strains within contemporary feminism which insist that families and even sexual differentiation are inherently oppressive. Along the way, she challenges an ideology of victimization that too often loses sight of individual victims in its pursuit of abstract goals.

Elshtain reaffirms the quirky and by no means simple pleasures of small-town life as a microcosm of the human condition as she considers the current crisis in American education and its consequences for democracy.

Beyond exploring the details of political life over the past two decades, Real Politics advocates a via media politics that avoids unacceptable extremes and serves as a model for responsible political discourse. Throughout her diverse and insightful writings, Elshtain champions a civic philosophy that regards the dignity of everyday life as a democratic imperative of the first order.