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Australian Journal of Political Science,Vol. 38, No. 3, November, pp. 561–595

Book Reviews

Australian and New Zealand PoliticsArthur Grimes, Lydia Wevers and Ginny Sullivan (eds), States of Mind: Australia and NewZealand 1901–2001 (Wellington: Institute of Policy Studies, 2002), v � 363 pp.,NZ$39.00, ISBN 0908935684.

One of the most revealing statements in this collection is the quote from Simon Upton that NewZealand is the last bus stop on the planet, which makes Australia the second last bus stop. This meansthat if Australia suffers from the ‘getting away from it all’ syndrome first analysed by D.H. Lawrencein Kangaroo then New Zealand has a double dose of this condition. This was recently illustrated bythe different responses of the two countries to the war in Iraq, with Australia demonstrating a desireto engage with world affairs and New Zealand a hope that it could hide from them.

This collection illustrates many of the paradoxes in the relationship between Australia and NewZealand. At the time of the Australian federation New Zealand could have joined, and at that stagethere were close links between the two outposts of the British Empire. Then there was ANZAC,although this is something that Australians have tended to appropriate just as they appropriate anytalented New Zealander who moves to Australia as an Australian. But over the course of the twentiethcentury the two countries grew apart. Today they are quite different in terms of ethnic composition,standard of living and attitude towards the world. As Colin James points out, New Zealand is much‘greener’ than Australia and a bicultural rather than a multicultural people.

And yet sentimental ties remain between the two countries. Australians still fantasise about NewZealand joining the Commonwealth, just as New Zealanders haughtily reject the idea. Much of thisvolume is devoted to relations between the two countries, especially defence and the Closer EconomicRelations Agreement of 1983 and its implications. These are important matters, particularly for NewZealand, as Australia remains its most important partner in the international world. As New Zealandand Australia grow further apart, the relationship between the two countries in many areas ofeconomics and law grows closer.

The solution to this paradox is neither making New Zealand an additional Australian state nor goingour separate ways. The answer, as Brian Galligan points out, is to allow for ties to grow between thetwo countries in a whole range of areas but without encroaching on constitutional issues. It meansaccepting ambiguities rather than insisting on a strict conception of sovereignty. There will be closerties between Australian and New Zealand even as the two countries evolve in different directions.This book is a useful collection that gives us an indication of where that process stands at thebeginning of the twenty-first century.

GREGORY MELLEUISH

University of Wollongong

Rosemary Neill, White Out: How Politics is Killing Black Australia (Sydney: Allen &Unwin, 2002), 324 pp., $22.95, ISBN 1865088552.

This book is based on recent essays, feature articles, leaders and opinion pieces written by the authorwhile a journalist with The Australian. It is a forceful book, meant to rouse Australians from theirapathy in relation to the appalling national record in the areas of Indigenous health, domestic violence,youth suicide, family breakdown and dysfunctional communities. The central question asked by theauthor is why there has been no change in the debilitating social problems afflicting Indigenouscommunities for the last 20 years from the Hawke through to Howard governments, despite someprogressive legislation and significant government funding of programs. Neill acknowledges theadvances at the end of the century in land rights legislation, the establishment of ATSIC, the findings

ISSN 1036-1146 print; ISSN 1363-030X online/03/030561-35 2003 Australasian Political Studies AssociationDOI: 10.1080/1036114032000134074

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of Royal Commissions and the reconciliation movement but argues that none of these havesufficiently or effectively addressed social and economic issues.

The book argues the need for a bipartisan political approach to Indigenous affairs, lambasting theRight and the Left for being blinded by ideology and refusing to recognise the manifest failure ofAboriginal policy and political responses at all levels of government. Because there has been nomiddle ground on Aboriginal issues, political expediency and ideological intransigence have domi-nated, resulting in an all-pervasive ‘code of silence’ around the failure of Aboriginal policies. Neill’sargument is thrust home through numerous case studies and the matching of negative outcomesagainst positive intentions, building a powerful and overwhelming case.

Neill believes that the first step is for people to recognise the urgency of the situation and torespond to the real needs of Australia’s Indigenous population. This is the aim of this confrontationalbook. Neill agrees with Noel Pearson’s critique of the failure of land rights and the impact of welfareand government support in the collapse of communities in the Cape York region through dependence,drugs and violence. She points the finger especially at the failure of the policy of self-determinationpromoted by the white Left and Indigenous organisations, and argues that self-determination is avague concept that has detracted from the need to develop a comprehensive economic strategy thatrecognises the long-term needs of Indigenous communities.

While in agreement with much of what Neill writes, especially on the failure to develop aneconomic strategy, I nevertheless found the repetition which should have been edited out and thearrogant tone of the book annoying. Understanding what is happening is an important first step, butwhat then? Ignorance is surely only one aspect of the explanation as to why white faces are turnedaway from apartheid-like conditions in remote communities and the refusal to see Redfern asAustralia’s black ghetto. Neill not only glosses over the depth of racism in Australian society but alsoover the fundamental difference in Indigenous culture which problematises Aboriginal participationin ‘mainstream’ jobs, housing and health services. The advocacy of political bipartisanship does notconfront the complexity exposed by One Nation, which revealed the divisions within as well asbetween political parties on Indigenous issues. Nor is there sufficient awareness of the complexgovernance issues involving three levels of government, the range of decision-making patterns inIndigenous organisations and the different needs of communities located in remote areas, the fringesof country towns, metropolitan concentrations and former reserves and missions.

This is a powerful, confrontational but flawed book. Neill may be right in arguing that the first stepin resolving the Indigenous emergency is recognising that it exists—in breaking the code of silence.But it is doubtful whether recognising failures will lead to the political bipartisanship and the puttingaside of moral and ideological imperatives to develop and implement the more comprehensive andlong-term policies that the book advocates.

RENATE HOWE

Deakin University

Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making ofAustralian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002) xi� 338 pp., US$21.95, ISBN 0822328682.

The goal of this book is ‘to understand better how power operates and is configured in multiculturalsettler nations like Australia’ (p. 56). In particular, Povinelli aims to examine liberal multiculturalismin situ as opposed to the way liberal theorists talk and theorise about multiculturalism: ‘Let us lookat what various forms of liberalism do’, she argues, ‘rather than decide to be for or against them intheir abstraction’ (p. 15). For Povinelli, liberalism is, basically, the extant Australian state, as well asthe workings of the ‘liberal’ common law. In Australia, as it turns out, liberal multiculturalismembodies a kind of delusional moral optimism (p. 25) about the effects (and affects) of the recognitionof cultural and political difference. First of all, reconciliation or expressing ‘regret’ or shame aboutthe past is more about ‘purifying and redeeming’ an ideal image of the nation than it is a genuineengagement with Indigenous alterity (pp. 26–9). Second, there is a ‘cunning’ of recognition at workin actually existing liberal multiculturalism. The law’s actual aim here is the ‘re-subordination’ ofAboriginal society and law vis-a-vis European law (p. 181). The force of liberal law—embodying‘advanced forms of discrimination’ (p. 173)—is ‘more insidious and cunning in its processes ofensnarement’ than previous colonial governmental forms (p. 225). There is always an ‘invisible

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asterisk’ or proviso attached to liberal tolerance of Indigenous alterity, one that ‘indexes’ themonoculturalism of liberal settler societies (pp. 108, 276). The recognition of customary law, forexample, extends only to those practices that are not ‘repugnant’ to the common law, where thecontent of the repugnant is given by the embodied moral sense of liberal norms and values, notgenuinely intercultural ones. Indigenous people are thus caught in a terrible double-bind. They areforced to perform their ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ practices in order to qualify for liberal recognition(and gain access to the means of their survival), but only those practices not repugnant to liberalism.‘Genuine’ customary law is thus a product of liberal government. For Povinelli, this exposes a set ofdeep contradictory imperatives at the heart of ‘late liberalism’. The liberal believes he/she shouldtolerate cultural difference, but not allow the ‘repugnantly illiberal’, which only serves to ‘protect theliberal subject from experiencing the (ir)rationality of their intolerance’ (p. 109). I should be tolerant,but you make me sick! (p. 5).

Povinelli’s critique of liberal multiculturalism is relentless and often ingenious. Many of thecriticisms hit home but, at the same time, since she assumes that the choice is between Kantianrationalism or Rortyian ethnocentrism, the targets are easy enough to hit. But she does ask excellentquestions, especially about the conditionality of liberal tolerance and recognition (which have beenasked before, by liberals and their critics alike), and about the conflict between the different normativeand affective orders of obligation experienced by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people inliberal states. The chapters in which she explores the consequences of the effects of the Native Titlelegislation and jurisprudence on an actual community and its land claims are illuminating and oftenmoving, and demonstrate the enormous difficulties and complexity faced by Indigenous people inliberal settler states ostensibly committed to multiculturalism. I suppose these discussions alsoprefigure a form of political agency Povinelli is trying to capture, one rooted in radical alterity againstliberal monoculturalism. But this aspect of the book is disappointingly elusive. Much seems to hangon the effects of (genuine?) alterity on liberal orthodoxies, especially liberal law. But if actuallyexisting liberalism is so insidiously and devastatingly constraining of Indigenous difference, then whatis to be done? What resources—arguments, ideals, aspirations, hopes, institutions, laws—do we haveto work with? Which aspects of liberalism are redeemable or can be turned around and put to workin new ways? Is it all a big waste of time? One problem is the flat reduction of liberalism to actuallyexisting liberalism, which implies a very simplistic picture of the relationship between theory andpractice, which is odd given the heavy reliance on high theory by Povinelli herself. We need morecomplex and intercultural accounts of public reason and cross-cultural communication to accompanyour attempts to make sense, practically speaking, of the colonial legacy (and reality) in Australia andelsewhere. This book points out some of the enormous challenges that must be overcome in order todo so.

DUNCAN IVISON

University of Sydney

Tim Rowse, Nugget Coombs: A Reforming Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002), x � 419 pp., $59.95, ISBN 0521817838.

Tim Rowse has defended his approach to writing this impersonal biography in a recent volume ofMeanjin. In fact, he had already provided an explanation and a justification for his approach at thebeginning of this new biography. I will leave such criticism—that Rowse has failed to link up theprivate and the public man—to one side for the moment, and concentrate instead on the mainstrengths of this book.

The virtues of the book are many. The first is in the choice of subject. We need more studies ofthose policy intellectuals who have prodded, annoyed and influenced our political leaders. Rowseprovides a thorough depiction of a reforming administrator, someone who took seriously the conceptof public service (and of the public intellectual). Rather than a leader, Coombs was a facilitator ofleaders, a prompter, a designer of policy and institutions, an advocate of causes, a man who broughtthe peripheral to the centre of politics, and put marginalised groups in touch with those in power,especially in his later career. His was a life hitched to the ups and downs of the Australian nation,a national life that allows us a glimpse of the public dilemmas (managing capitalism, social welfare,unemployment, culture and the arts, the environment, and Aboriginal issues) negotiated over thetwentieth century. It charts Coombs’ early career as an economist, banker and negotiator of

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international and national reconstruction during the Second World War and in the post-war era(especially on trade and full employment), to his later career as a university administrator, academic,and cultural mandarin in the arts, the environment, and in Aboriginal affairs. Those more specificallyconcerned with Coombs’ legacy and influence in the area of Aboriginal policy should consult Rowse’searlier volume on Coombs, Obliged to Be Difficult, where this is dealt with in much greater detail.In Nugget Coombs, Rowse explores instead the extraordinary sweep of Coombs’ interests andinfluence.

The book is thoroughly researched, including extensive use of Coombs’ papers, and Rowse makesgood his claim that he is examining, through a deep analysis of Coombs’ extensive public role, certainproblems intrinsic to liberal democratic thought and practice in Australia during the twentieth century.Indeed, Coombs’ career can be seen as an intelligent working through, and dealing with, thoseproblems. Rowse brings his considerable skills as an historian and political scientist to reflecting uponthe thought and argument that stood behind Coombs’ long life of social commitment. The key is inthe subtitle: Coombs’ was a reforming life. He was always concerned with improving Australian life.His way of doing this was to build institutions, to develop good policy and to keep his eyes and earsopen to new things.

Students of Australian political history will find much of value here, as probing Coombs’ publiclife we gain an insider’s view into the political process and policy changes over the twentieth century.In fact, the book is best seen as an addition to political history, written by examining Coombs’ rationalattempts to deal with developments in the national life, within the context of a changing internationalclimate. In an important conclusion to the book, Rowse points out that one can be both economicallyrational and not an advocate of neoliberal models of economy, state and society. He presents Coombsas an exemplary figure in this respect, at once economically rational but aware of the need for a mixedeconomy with a strong public sector.

Finally, to return to the criticism referred to at the beginning, what is missing here is an accountof what drove a man like Coombs. Why was he so committed to reform and to social justice, and inso many different domains? Rowse suggests that we will seek in vain the private man standing behindthe public figure. Though not wanting to underestimate Rowse’s achievement here, one wonders,nevertheless, what someone with an interest in the connection between psychology and politics woulddo with the same material.

ANTHONY MORAN

La Trobe University

Sean Scalmer, Dissent Events, Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), viii � 218 pp., US$24.95, ISBN0868406511.

Sean Scalmer offers an insightful examination of the evolution of the political gimmick in Australiafrom the public burning of national service registration papers in 1966 to the actions of S11 protestersat the World Economic Forum in 2000. Scalmer uses the term ‘gimmick’ to refer to a range of actionssuch as performances, rallies and demonstrations designed to attract publicity to a cause. Over thecourse of the book, he explores the increasing complexity of the relationship between the media andthe political gimmick, and the gimmick’s influence on the theory and practice of politics.

The book is particularly good in its examination of the translation of the political gimmick into theAustralian environment, so that by 1965 Australians were comfortably using a range of strategies topublicise their causes. To begin with, however, Australian political activists imported their gimmicksfrom overseas, with America rather than Britain providing the inspiration. This process initiallyinvolved translating strategies such as the Freedom Ride from the American to the Australian contextalong with an American vocabulary based on racial segregation and the American civil rightsframework, which ignored important Aboriginal issues such as land rights.

The author shows how opposition to the Vietnam War produced progressively more disruptivetactics and a repertoire of theatrical protest activities. Increasingly, events were devised not toinfluence whoever might be present at the performance but rather to attract media coverage. Thisraised a central and ongoing dilemma for political activists. As new forms of action were developed,it became harder to attract media attention and new and more disruptive techniques were devised.Many of these attracted negative comment from the press so that in recent years activists have been

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disinclined to rely on media interpretation of events, but instead have sought to intervene, oftenthrough the Web, to present their own construction of events.

It is easy to forget that until women, gays and lesbians, and Aboriginal Australians developed arange of creative strategies to draw attention both to their oppression and their demands for change,these groups were once virtually invisible. Reading Scalmer’s accounts of some of these techniquesis akin to watching an old newsreel—albeit one that provides an analysis of the way in which politicalprotest created space and visibility. Events such as women chaining themselves to bars in gender-seg-regated pubs, demonstrations of Gay Pride, and the establishment of the Embassy for Aboriginalpeople on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra are a reminder of how much change hasoccurred. These changes, inadequate as many may judge them, may provide some comfort to thosewho in recent years have joined reconciliation and anti-war marches in the hope of making adifference.

Dissent Events provides a useful history and interpretation of political protest in Australia. The term‘gimmick’, with its sense of trickery and lack of substance, seems not to do justice to the eventsexamined, but that is a small quibble. Students of the media and of interest-group politics in particularshould find this book invaluable.

RAE WEAR

University of Queensland

Marian Simms (ed.), 1901: The Forgotten Election (St Lucia: University of QueenslandPress and API Network, 2001), xv � 294 pp., $30.00, ISBN 0702233021.

This collection of essays is the result of research by a consortium headed by Marian Simms, supportedby the National Council for the Centenary of Federation and the Academy of the Social Sciences inAustralia. A variety of techniques associated with contemporary election studies are enlisted toexplore the first Australian federal general election. For example, Glen Withers examines votingpatterns and their determinants. The results are very different in NSW and Victoria, but beyond thisWithers finds, for instance, the overseas-born were more likely to support Free Trade or Labour,young males were more likely to support Free Trade, while the Protectionist candidates drew moresupport from Catholics, women, and primary producers. Geoffrey Hawker looks at the socialbackground of the candidates.

This is a useful resource book on a neglected election. Simms provides an overview of the 1901election, stressing that although it was held under the diverse electoral laws and practices of thevarious States, it was still an important milestone in the development of modern political parties. Theissues of Protection and White Australia were central. The latter was a unifying principle of the newpolity, while the former was the dominant dividing issue for the emergent party system.

A narrative approach is added in the chapters on some key protagonists: Deakin, Reid, Kingston,and Fisher. Bruce Scates, writing on Fisher, includes an idiosyncratic fictional representation of aspeech by Fisher. I particularly recommend Stuart Macintyre’s chapter on the crucial role of Deakinin securing federation, including his relationship with David Syme and the diverse nature of theNational Liberal Association. The absence of a chapter on Barton is curious, although the compromisebetween the forces of Free Trade and Protection, which eventually saw him installed as PrimeMinister, is dealt with through the focus of Barton’s political competitors. James Jupp considers thequestions of ethnicity, race and sectarianism. Sectarianism was rife. For example, the Orange Orderled the campaign against Catholic candidates. Widespread notions of racist supremacy were to resultin the White Australia legislative program of the new parliament. The exclusion of non-Europeans andthe neglect of the Indigenous population became systemic. Dean Jaensch and Haydon Manning alsoconsider the widespread paranoia about race and immigration, alongside other campaign issues. Theyput the competing parties of capital in a longer context. It would take the best part of a decade beforea mutual fear of socialism reached sufficient intensity for these anti-Labour forces to combine. JennyFleming and Patrick Weller look at the emergent Labour Party. It achieved representation in all Statesand was able to form a national party, despite the differences between the party campaigns in thevarious States. For Labour in Queensland, for example, the issue of trade was almost absent, whilethe call for the deportation of Kanaka labourers was the most significant issue.

Informative appendices provide statistical summaries of the results, and the sources of the analysesby Withers and Hawker. Humphrey McQueen also provides a summary of Tom Roberts’ notebooks

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in which the artist comments on the appearances and personalities of those who sat for him duringthe preparation of his famous painting of the inauguration of the first federal parliament. The chaptersare very varied in approach. Two chapters examine local elections in some detail but with little todraw in conclusion.

JEFF ARCHER

University of New England

John Warhurst and Malcolm Mackerras (eds), Constitutional Politics: The RepublicReferendum and the Future (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002), xiv� 281 pp., $30.00, ISBN 0702233412.

While there is reference to the future in the title of this book, it is firmly anchored to the eventsleading to the constitutional referendum of 12 August 1999 on a republican head of state for Australia,and to the reasons for its failure. Even though this topic has been extensively analysed and some ofthe contributions express views about the republic and constitutional change which have appearedelsewhere, this is a useful collection. There are enough original contributions to make the book avaluable addition to the literature on the topic.

The first of these is the introductory chapter by the editors. This is a survey of the republican issuein Australian politics since the topic was raised by Prime Minister Keating in 1993. While the eventsin question have been dealt with in detail elsewhere, it is helpful to have them listed as awell-annotated chronology with references to relevant publications. The chapter is rather bloodlessand gives little indication of the passion the issue engendered in some quarters—but this may be theprice of having a balanced and sober account. This is complemented by an examination of the resultsof the 1999 referendum by Mackerras and Maley, which reinforces the conventional wisdom that therepublican proposal was disproportionately supported by the wealthy and those who live in cities.

Two chapters deal with technical issues which are only tangentially related to the republican issuebut are valuable nonetheless. Green provides a lucid analysis of the distinctive features of the electionfor members of the Constitutional Convention (which include voluntary voting and postal ballots) andexamines their effects on the outcome of the Convention election. In addition, he compares the resultsof the Convention election with those from the 1998 House of Representatives election as a way ofcharting the reasons for the failure of the subsequent referendum. The chapter by Gibson and Miskinis a careful examination of the media-sponsored experiment with deliberative democracy on the topicof a republican head of state. They analyse both the process by which the deliberative poll was takenand the way in which the reporting of the event compromised the experiment’s utility for the widercitizen community.

At the other extreme, there is a delightfully petulant account by Murray of his experience withdrafting a new preamble for the Commonwealth Constitution, that other and often forgotten defeatedreferendum question in 1999. His experience confirms the view that retrofitting a preamble to aconstitution is fraught with as many political as constitutional pitfalls. A similar conclusion is reachedin the thoughtful chapter by McKenna on the obstacles to be overcome to persuade Australians toaccept a republican future. His list of arguments to be avoided in supporting a republic (pp. 159–60)is an epitome of the specious points made by both sides in 1999. A similar analysis is made in thechapter by Mack from the perspective of a participant in the Constitutional Convention and thedebates over the referendum proposal.

Two concluding chapters by Brennan and Winterton wrestle with how to design a republican headof state and the accommodation of a popularly elected office. Brennan raises the critical issue ofdefining the relationship between the Prime Minister and the head of state, and Winterton examinesthe options for specifying the role of an elective head of state. Both would agree with the commentby Paul Kelly which was prompted by the resignation of Hollingworth as Governor-General: ‘Theoffice [of head of state] is now stranded—trapped between the obsolete role of representing the crownand the republican idea of representing the people’ (Australian 28 May 2003). This volume is goodindication of the nature and extent of this dilemma.

CAMPBELL SHARMAN

University of British Columbia

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Rae Wear, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen: The Lord’s Premier (St Lucia: University of Queens-land Press, 2002), xvi � 249 pp., $35.00, ISBN 0702233048.

Is there anything new to say about the Lord’s Premier? Probably not while he’s still alive. But RaeWear’s very readable study of the political career of Australia’s most famous populist leader is thebest place to start if one wants to review what is known at this point. Given that it is now more than15 years since the establishment of the Fitzgerald Commission, there is also considerable value inreminding ourselves how vulnerable to abuse and corruption Australian political systems can be, whenthe conditions are right. Wear attends above all to the practical tasks of coming to and being in power.The bulk of the book traces Joh’s management of party, Cabinet, Coalition, parliament, thebureaucracy and the media, drawing principally on a now extensive secondary literature as well as onher own interviews and correspondence with some of the principal players, including Bjelke-Petersenhimself.

There have been earlier biographies, so Wear does not need to spend much time giving us thestandard detail. Importantly she does focus in the early chapters on some formative personalrelationships and experiences (the burden of death duties on his father’s estate looming large amongthem!). The distinctive character of Queensland rural Lutheranism is explored in a valuable chapteron Joh’s religious beliefs and their relation to his later politics. For Joh the problem of separatinggovernmental responsibilities and personal interest did not arise—if one was virtuous in the personalrealm, then one’s actions in government would be right. The breathtaking indifference to observanceof some common standards of propriety in the management of one’s affairs while in a position ofpower was exemplified in Bjelke-Petersen’s 1959–60 joust with the Australian Tax Office over profitsmade from the sale of an oil prospecting authority, issued by a former partner in oil exploration whohad become Minister for Mines, carrying an express warning against trading in the authority (p. 93).The case ended in the High Court—one’s faith in Australian institutions is saved by knowing that Johlost this battle. Wear deals economically with such incidents, building a case without labouring thepoint.

Joh was famous for his verbal skills. He was generally against education—but it is useful to bereminded that he enrolled around 1940 in a University of Queensland extension course on the ‘Artof Writing’. His un-named examiner, suggests Wear, showed a ‘remarkable prescience’—cautioningagainst being ‘trivial and long-winded’ in one case, and of a ‘certain dogmatic harshness in your style’in another (p. 41). As this episode highlights, the interest in education was purely pragmatic, a devicefor building the communication skills required for the nursery of politics.

There is nothing noble in the study of the Lord’s Premier in politics—no ideas, no aspirations, novision except the hum-drum one of more and more development. It is a moot question whether thelong reign of someone who barely survived his first year as Premier of the Sunshine State contributedmuch of lasting value—anything, that is, other than unbridled gains for some at the expense of others,and unbalanced development that has left a legacy of problems for later governments. The interest ofWear’s book is therefore its careful tracing of how this happens—how party, public service and mediafell into line with Joh and ensured the descent into the Mad Hatter’s tea party atmosphere of themid-1980s when it all started to come apart. The wonder remains how the ex-Premier stayed out ofgaol, surviving even into the new century when all around him the rest of the cronies were languishingin prison or passing on to a higher place.

MARK FINNANE

Griffith University

Comparative and International PoliticsJeremy Ahearne (ed.), French Cultural Policy Debates: A Reader (London: Routledge,2002), 221 pp., $165.00, ISBN 0415275008.

This is a very useful, interesting, and timely book. It can help us all to understand why France is sooften the exceptional voice in the Western liberal-democratic chorus. France has usually taken cultureseriously, especially French and francophone culture, as an area worthy of State, national, andintellectual interest, money, and intense debates.

This is a remarkably well-constructed reader, complete with a useful, lucid introductory overview,

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excellent translations, rigorous scholarly apparatus, and careful proofreading. A sample of quotessince the end of Second World War illustrates the diversity, dynamics, and ongoing conflicts of theFrench tradition of state-led cultural policy formation:

• From 1960, Jean Vilar, the founder of the Avignon theatre festival, provides a marxisant but alsohumanist perspective, bringing high culture to the working class: ‘bourgeois culture should not berejected outright …; that is a monstrous attitude [to] works that will remain … the highest testimonyto the human spirit’ (pp. 40–1, emphasis added).

• A more Nietzschean view is from Andre Malraux, De Gaulle’s companion, writer-adventurer, andMinister for Culture, in 1966: ‘Empty time arrives with the modern world … mankind no longer hasany meaning. … Culture is what responds to man who asks himself what he is doing on theearth … never before has the world known dream factories [eg cinema, TV] like ours … such adeluge of idiocy … and also of mysterious unity … that appeal to the deepest, most organic,and … most terrible elements in a human … sex, blood, and death … The gods are dead, but thedevils certainly are not’ (pp. 56–7, emphasis added).

• More recently, we see two varieties of ‘socialist’ cultural policy. First, there is Mitterrand’s activistMinister for Culture, Jack Lang, in 1982: ‘France … has linked up again with the great traditionsof liberty and independence … through a bold cultural policy [and] the … creative flame, [based]on universal culture, national particularities and self-determination’ (p. 111, emphasis added). Later,there is Jospin’s Culture Minister, Catherine Trautmann, in 1999, illustrating what the editor calls‘the routinization of charisma’ via bureaucratic policy making into an ever more globalised world.‘[For] forty years, the State has [kept] … a sustained commitment to art and culture … proposinga coherent strategy for cultural development for the government [and society] as a whole’(pp. 196–8, emphasis added).

Unfortunately, the reader lacks an explicit comparative and explanatory perspective, eg why Frenchvoters prefer higher taxes and politicians who write books, whereas Americans prefer lower taxes andleaders who often barely read. Furthermore, the volume is prohibitively priced, ironically illustratingone of the reader’s main themes: the increasing interweaving of economics and culture, to thedetriment of the latter. Still, a policy that is collective, state led, and different can ‘work’, as befitsa nation where high-school leavers study philosophy, intellectuals are taken seriously, and presidentscollect Asian art and publish anthologies of poetry. Perhaps elsewhere too?

RICHARD DEANGELIS

Flinders University

Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca andLondon: Cornell University Press, 2002), xiii � 215 pp., US$25.00, ISBN 0801438837.

This book is an astute account of the role of the United Nations during the Rwanda genocide. MichaelBarnett, a distinguished Professor of Political Science, worked at the US mission to the UnitedNations during the peacekeeping operation in Rwanda. He feels that he too was an eyewitness to agenocide and this is his attempt to record and disclose the dynamics at the UN Headquarters.

According to Barnett, the volume is an ethical history that ‘examines the dynamic relationshipbetween the UN’s culture and the reasons that motivated UN staff and key member states on theSecurity Council’ during the crisis in Rwanda (p. 12). The objectives are twofold: to ‘reconstruct themoral reasons that guided the actions of the UN that helped, and to isolate who, if anyone at the UN,bears moral responsibility for the genocide’ (p. 16). To substantiate these claims, the author draws onMax Weber’s work on bureaucracy and conformity of bureaucratic culture.

On the question of morality and organisational culture, he argues that the ethical demand tointervene in Rwanda was subordinate to the imperative to ensure the future of the United Nations.After the peacekeeping operations in Somalia and Bosnia, the organisation lost much of its credibility.Intervention in Rwanda was particularly risky, as the failure to achieve the objectives wouldjeopardise the survival of the organisation. Rwanda was not made a priority. On the question of moraland causal responsibility, Barnett’s ‘cautious’ conclusion identifies the Secretariat and the Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali as the culpable parties. In the author’s view, the bureaucrats atHeadquarters dismissed UNAMIR Force Commander General Romeo Dallaire’s warnings as alarmist

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Tutsi propaganda. Boutros-Ghali did not submit information to the Security Council that wouldchange the characterisation of the crisis from a civil war to genocide. This omission contributed toharm.

The author is a skilful writer and he presents the reader with a convincing narrative of politicalmachinations at the United Nations. Chapter 1 describes the international political context in whichthe United Nations found itself at the end of the bipolar power struggle. Chapter 2 examines theeffects of ambitious interventionism and the ‘shadow of Somalia’ on the urge to frame the Rwandancrisis as ‘a nice “quiet” operation’ that could restore the organisation’s tarnished image (p. 69).Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are revealing accounts of miscalculations, misinterpretations and politicalmanipulations that raise important questions about private and public ethics in general and institu-tional ethics in particular. The book concludes with a chapter on ‘The Hunt for Moral Responsibility’.This is the most disappointing section of the book, not because this reviewer disagrees with theauthor’s propositions but rather because his conclusions are established by only cursory engagementwith philosophical debates on moral responsibility.

Some readers may be dissatisfied with the lack of abstract theorisation about the ‘duty to intervene’or ‘responsibility to protect’. But this is a very readable analysis that would appeal to a wide audiencebecause it captures many of the key issues in contemporary peacekeeping and humanitarianism. Itissues, among other things, a caution to those who are making grandiose claims about the UnitedNations as a global actor with the capacity to map out the blueprint for a cosmopolitan world order.For this reviewer, this sober reminder is the book’s most valuable contribution to the debate on ethicsand international relations.

ROBYN LUI

Griffith University

Roger Buckley, The US in the Asia-Pacific since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002), 252 pp., $39.95, ISBN 0521007259.

Buckley’s purpose here is to examine US hegemony in Asia, which is well-covered but neverthelessrich and interesting terrain for scholars of international relations (IR) and history. His book is anarticulate historical narrative about the ways in which, after the Pacific victory, the United Statesreconfigured the geopolitical structures of inter-state relations in the Asia-Pacific, and shaped thedomestic political forms and ideological priorities of its allies there. Over the course of the study, USforeign policy is discussed as a conduit for the central strategic imperatives according to which theCold War was waged. Buckley also provides some insight into the contemporary issues likely tothrow up future policy challenges for the United States and its allies (centring on the rise of Chinaas a regional power), though the war on terrorism and recent North Korean issues are not included.This book is written as a text for undergraduate students, and in addressing this audience Buckleyshould be very successful—his readable prose is free from the jargon and methodological anxiety thatIR is often chided for, and is well illustrated by maps and suggestions for further reading.

US foreign policy is seen to have undergone three key revisions—coinciding with the presidentialtenures of Eisenhower, Nixon and Clinton, which have all been relatively effective in cementingAmerican influence in the region. However, despite the ease with which Buckley shows how Americashaped the Asia-Pacific, he is less adept at charting the ways in which the objects of US influence(states and institutions) sometimes effectively challenged or influenced the United States in return.Complex local factors have shaped high politics in Asia, and these should also be vital parts ofBuckley’s story—unnecessary prejudice is given to geo-strategic factors in explaining key events. Forexample, he emphasises the centrality of the US commitment to halt the spread of communism—against what are depicted as the expansionist tendencies of both the USSR and the rising regionalcounter-hegemony of China. He does not, however, tackle local historical and post-colonial factorsthat accounted for the popularity of communism, for example in Vietnam, and therefore does notsuccessfully capture key obstacles that the United States encountered in the implementation of itsforeign policy. A second criticism is that while the author deals well with US economic interests in

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the post-Cold War period, particularly as part of Clinton’s diplomacy and in light of the financialcrisis, his discussion of economic factors during earlier historical periods is minimal.

Buckley’s main strength is his understanding of the Washington–Tokyo relationship, which hasbeen central to the story of US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific so far, though he accurately argues thatthe relationship more likely to shape the region in coming decades will be that between Washingtonand Beijing (p. 245). Some omissions, and the narrowness that comes with a realist theoretical focus,notwithstanding, this is a fine introduction to the history of the United States in the Asia-Pacific thatis well suited to its audience, rich in historical narrative, and with a good deal of contemporaryrelevance.

SARAH GRAHAM

Australian National University

Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin (eds), The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent(New York: The New Press, 2002), 224 pp., US$22.95, ISBN 156584789X.

When reading The Other Israel, one cannot help but be struck by the constant, repetitious, desperateand passionate cry for help that this eloquently written book seems to be. Incorporating Israelis fromall levels of society: intellectuals, journalists, former Knesset members and people in the armedservices, the book is an acknowledgement of their shock at the present conditions in the OccupiedTerritories and their condemnation and dismay at Sharon’s current policy of peace through militaryaggression. Written in English, the essays are clearly aimed at an international audience with a dualpurpose of both absolving themselves from complicity in the current regime and as a plea to theinternational community to step in and save Israel from itself by bringing about an end to theoccupation.

Whilst ostracised and reviled as traitors within Israel for their dissent, the writers rather viewthemselves as fierce patriots, fighting for Israel’s moral stance as a Jewish nation and for its legitimacyin the eyes of the world. Their concern is that the occupation is corrupting the democratic and liberalnature of Israel and may some day lead to her demise. One by one the voices rise in a clamour callingfor the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, peace between neighbours and an Israel free of themoral and judicial violations which an occupation inevitably brings.

The essays are organised into five sections: ‘The Setting’, ‘Dissent’, ‘Refusal’, ‘Escalation’ and‘Resolution?’ Contributors in the first section such as Tanya Reinhart, Uri Avnery and Avi Shlaimpaint a bleak picture of violence, desperation and terror. They trace the current cycle of violence tothe beginning of the occupation in 1967, but more recently to Barak’s ‘big lie’. Most of thecontributors are scathing of the myth of the ‘generous offer’ which Barak circulated after the failureof the Camp David negotiations in July 2000 and which led directly to a definitive shift in Israel tothe Right, with most believing that there is no partner for peace and that the only language thePalestinians understand is delivered through US-made Apache gunships. Subsequent sections are adepressing litany of Israeli human rights violations and are pregnant with the hopelessness andresignation that the contributors appear to feel. Blame is assigned to Sharon and his campaign ofterror, Barak for creating the myth that made it all possible, the Israeli Left for its inertia in leadingan effective opposition, the military for their deliberate escalation of the violence, the Israeli mediafor fomenting hatred, and themselves, for knowing all of this and doing so little.

The final section—‘Resolution?’—ends on a forlorn note, with Tom Segev worrying about theemergence of transfer ideology into mainstream Israeli politics. Rather than offering a sense of hope,the reader is left with a feeling of powerlessness and remorse, as if the desolation of the contributorshas been immediately transferred onto the reader. Taken together, the essays reveal that, thoughmarginal, the seeds of dissent within Israel are alive and flourishing, and perhaps just waiting for therest of the world to join hands with them in order to finally find a just settlement of theIsraeli–Palestinian conflict.

KRISTEN BLOMELEY

University of New South Wales

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James Cotton (ed.), Crossing Borders in the Asia Pacific (New York: Nova SciencePublishers, 2002), xiv � 220 pp., US$59.00, ISBN 1590334507.

One of the most contentious post-Cold War debates in international relations has focused on thecentrality of the sovereign state as a unit of analysis in an increasingly interconnected world.Regardless of where one sits in this debate, there is little disagreement that the post-Cold Warsovereign state has unprecedented international factors now encroaching upon its political decision-making processes. Crossing Borders in the Asia Pacific—a collection of extremely well-researchedessays authored by Cotton that draws upon a wide range of primary and secondary sources—entersthis debate by seeking to examine the interplay of transnational forces upon domestic political, socialand economic domains within a diverse range of Asian-Pacific countries. This promise is largelyfulfilled, with one minor exception: the chapter titled ‘The Singapore Identity: Domestic and GlobalInfluences’, while providing an interesting range of views on Singapore’s national identity vis-a-visits internal political dynamics, largely ignores the wider issue of how global factors have influenceddomestic politics in Singapore.

Most of the chapters follow a successful format that begins with a detailed historical descriptionof a region or country followed by a discussion of the present situation and concludes with a summaryof the discussion of future options and/or scenarios. The discussion that develops in each chapterexamines the tense interplay of political and economic forces between the international system anddomestic politics, and also draws several interesting linkages between this ongoing tension andtrans/national identities. The use of atypical and often under-represented case studies such as those ofMacau, China’s Jilin Province and North Korea—where analysis is usually conducted within aneconomic or security framework—successfully sets this book apart from more conventional discus-sions. Furthermore, Cotton also succeeds in graphically demonstrating how globalisation is affectingthe Asia-Pacific region in a multitude of unforeseen ways, with the result that existing political norms,practices and institutions (such as non-intervention) are simply unable to keep up with many of thechanges that transnational forces are bringing to the region. This composite analysis adroitlydemonstrates that the effects of globalisation have to date been very uneven across Asia, with somesuccess stories (such as Singapore), some partial successes (such as China’s Jilin Province) and somecases where the final result is still far from evident (such as Macau and North Korea).

An unfortunate tendency amongst scholars contributing to the discourse on Asia-Pacific inter-national relations has been to over-generalise and draw universal conclusions about the effects ofglobalisation in the region. In contrast, by reminding us that the Asia-Pacific’s complex and dynamicnature defies the drawing of unequivocal conclusions, Cotton has succeeded in producing a distinctand original contribution to the globalisation debate that should be well received by Asian studies andinternational relations scholars alike.

JAMES LLEWELYN

Kobe University

Marc Jason Gilbert (ed.), Why the North Won the Vietnam War (New York andBasingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), xiv � 254 pp., US$22.95, ISBN 0312295278.

This book derives from a conference held in October 2002 on the theme of the book’s title. Withcontributions by some of the foremost specialists on the Vietnam War, and indeed on modernVietnam, it canvasses a range of reasons why ‘the North won the Vietnam War’.

The Introduction, which traces opinion on the Vietnam War since the 1960s, is like a literaturereview on the subject. Each decade has seen new views about the Vietnam War, especially from theUnited States. To me they appear to reflect as much about the way politics has developed in theUnited States as about the nature of the Vietnam War itself. As Gilbert points out, there are manyspecialists on this war in the United States who refuse to acknowledge that they lost this war. Afterall, some argue that the Soviet Union has now fallen and it is reactionary Islam that resists Americanvalues, certainly not Left-wing revolution.

One of the big issues is the title of the book. Explicitly taken from David Donald (ed.), Why theNorth Won the Civil War (New York: Collier Books, 1960), Gilbert is quite frank that it was not somuch ‘the North’ that won the Vietnam War as the communists, many of whom were based in the

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South and lived and worked in the South. Gilbert himself emphasises the point that much Americanscholarship on the Vietnam War has been very Americocentric, though he has a good deal to sayabout broader scholarship more sensitive to the Vietnamese revolution. But it is striking that byreferring to ‘the North’ winning the war he is falling into the trap of Americocentrism himself,because it is not Vietnam itself but the American Civil War that dictates the title of a book about theVietnam War. On the other hand, to be fair, the editor is clearly aware of the problem and takes painsto include Vietnamese nationalism and anti-colonialism among the main reasons why the UnitedStates was defeated. And by framing the question as he does, he appropriately emphasises the roleof the Vietnamese in their own victory. He does not frame the outcome of the war in terms simplyof American defeat.

I was struck by the editor’s reference to the author of the splendid 1972 book Fire in the Lake asbeing Francis Fitzgerald (p. 25), while the title sheet of the book itself calls her Frances FitzGerald.In these days of feminism, it is striking that he should assume authors are men.

Overall, the book is scholarly, insightful and balanced. It is beautifully edited, with a detailed anduseful index, and most of the chapters are richly documented. The Introduction by the editor is thebest chapter for its detail on other scholarship about the Vietnam War, but there is a wealth ofvaluable material in all the chapters. I strongly recommend this book for all those interested in thiswar that has exerted so strong an impact on the societies of Western countries, and especially that ofthe United States.

COLIN MACKERRAS

Griffith University

Graeme Gill, Democracy and Post-communism: Political Change in the Post-communistWorld (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 263 pp., US$95.00, ISBN 041527205.

John S. Dryzek and Leslie Holmes, Post-communist Democratisation: Political Discoursesacross Thirteen Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 290 pp.,US$23.00, ISBN 0521001382.

These two books provide contrasting yet at the same time complementary models of how themomentous transformation of post-communist societies can be studied. Gill’s volume is a compen-dious source of information on the ‘transition’ in all the East European transition states. He has arobust theoretical framework into which he inserts detailed case studies of the institutional frameworkand political developments of the countries. He is sensitive to the peculiarities of each particular case,and indeed stresses that points of origin in the exit from communism are crucial for determining lateroutcomes. His work thus falls into the classical comparative framework of assessing the degree ofsimilarity and difference in countries that broadly started from more or less the same regime type.

The book examines these different trajectories. Gill begins by examining the various concepts ofdemocracy that have been applied to the post-communist world. He argues that these countries arecharacterised by three broad types of democratic system: democracies tout court, facade democracies,and non-democracies. These in turn he allocates to a specific regime type: ethnic democracy,plebiscitary democracy, sultanism and oligarchy. Countries are then further allocated to these groupson the basis of a range of indicators, above all the openness and competitiveness of the electoralprocess. The following chapters are then richly detailed studies based on this framework, with adescription of regime change from communism, the emergence (or not) of civil society, all the waythrough to an evaluation of which countries have made it to democracy, with some discussion of thereasons for the divergent paths. The discussion of the latter, it must be said, is not wholly satisfactory.Geographical and other factors are taken into account, but more emphasis could be given toinstitutional design and the socio-economic characterisation of the countries.

The work is thus a highly structured comparative analysis of the political trajectories of theEuropean post-communist countries, a work that also seeks to explore the reasons for the divergentoutcomes. The concluding comments on the nature of post-communism as a system, a condition andas a situation are well made, although these ideas could perhaps have been fed in from the start. Inaddition, there is probably not enough discussion of the way in which transition agendas quite earlyon in the Central European countries became subsumed into the European Union accession agenda.

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Still, for anyone wishing to check the election results, the names of parties and leaders between thefall of communism and 2002, accompanied by a good understanding of the transitological literature,this is the book for them.

The work by Dryzek and Holmes takes a very different approach. They apply a highly sophisticatedmodel of discourse theory to analyse the different realities in a number of European post-communistcountries and China. They seek to test how the application and reception of concepts like ‘democracy’works in very different cultural contexts. They note that the ‘institutional hardware’ is important, butthe work seeks to redress the balance by stressing that the ‘institutional software’, such as culturalnorms, is also extremely important. The way that people think and live the experience of post-com-munism is at the centre of attention. These discursive structures, the authors argue, are relativelydurable and last far longer than the mere blips of communism and post-communism. Employingnotions like Bourdieu’s ‘discursive field’, they seek to fashion a theory of what we could call‘reflexive democratisation’ that refuses to reduce the divergent post-communist outcomes to a singleset of determinants.

The precise approach is Q methodology, and they have used a number of co-authors from thespecific countries for each individual country chapter. In each case they study a number of statements(typically around 300, grouped differently in each case) tested on around 60 respondents. Theemphasis is on language and discourse. Does the approach generate any major insights? It wouldprobably be an exaggeration to make that claim. Instead, each case study throws up some interestingfindings, although none is particularly original in itself. For example, in China a constituency fordemocratic reform is identified, but this would have to be a democracy ‘with Chinese characteristics’.In Serbia the study demonstrated the fragility of support for Milosevic, a result later validated byhistory, although the authors are cautious about whether there is an adequate basis to suggest a strongplatform for further democratisation. The study of Belarus suggested that the prospects for democrati-sation there were rather brighter than in neighbouring Russia, a result that has not (yet) been borneout by history. The study is important in suggesting that Lukashenko’s regime could well go the wayof Milosevic’s, since the Belarusian people have not internalised Lukashenko’s sultanistic authori-tarian values. As for Russia, the authors of this chapter take a rather despondent look at Russia’spost-communist trajectory, but do not entirely rule out democratic development once the immediatelegacy of post-imperialism and post-communism, with its attendant identity crises, are out of the way.

Other countries studied are Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria,Poland and what they call Czechia. A final chapter entitled ‘Differences That Matter—And ThoseThat Do Not’ seeks to draw broader conclusions. It identifies four roads to democratisation (liberal,republican, participatory and statist), suggesting that all the countries have a potential for democracy,but that each will do it in its own way and within the framework of its own discursive traditions. Thisseems to be a sensible conclusion, and one that is backed up by this sophisticated and innovativestudy.

RICHARD SAKWA

University of Kent at Canterbury

Wang Gungwu, Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800: War, Trade, Science and Gover-nance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ix � 202 pp., $49.95, ISBN0521534135.

This volume is a revised version of lectures given in Cambridge in October 2000 in the Common-wealth Lectures series under the auspices of the Smuts Memorial Fund. It bears the hallmarks of itsorigins. It falls into that category of wide-ranging musings of an erudite scholar undertaking tohighlight aspects of a grand historical sweep, drawing together disparate threads, offering insights andstimulating thought.

It employs as its organising principle a statement drawn from Waley that the British came to Chinato ‘convert, trade, rule or fight’ and Anglo-Chinese encounters are examined in this light. While thefocus is very much on ‘encounters’ in China, it also extends to relationships in former British colonieswhere there was substance to the ‘rule’ aspect of these activities.

In the ‘to fight’ chapter, Britain is characterised as a foe in the 1840–60 period when it used itsnaval power to secure trade concessions, and thereafter its relations with China are seen as mixed.

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Some British training and assistance was extended to help in the development of a Chinese navy andBritain preferred not to seek to conquer China but to secure stability to promote trade.

The chapter on trade is most interesting. While the Chinese saw that much was to be learned fromBritain in military matters, they had initially little belief that they needed to learn about trade. Yet,it is argued, that the Chinese did learn from Britain that trade was linked to national interest as earliernotions, seen as inconceivable by the Chinese, that Britain would fight for its merchants to be ableto trade successfully, were dispelled.

The failure of British (and American) attempts to convert many Chinese to Christianity is exploredand passed over. Intriguingly, conversion is examined in terms of winning secular converts tomodernity and science where a much greater impact was ultimately achieved.

Chinese experiences of British rule are depicted as ‘indirect’ or ‘peripheral’. It is noted thatoverseas Chinese traders found British rule ‘congenial’. But apart from the international settlementsand control of the customs service, British rule is examined in Malaya and Hong Kong with someinteresting legacies noted.

Rather than consisting of sweeping, unsupported generalisations typical of the lecture series genre,this volume has substantial documentation that offers readers avenues for further exploration of topicsof interest. While it is unlikely to be set as a text in undergraduate courses, it is a stimulating readfor both specialists and generalists.

DENNIS WOODWARD

Monash University

Paul Hirst, War and Power in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 169 pp.,US$23.95, ISBN 0745625215.

One of the most significant developments in historical analysis over the past 20 years has been theemphasis placed on war and the state. A growing number of historians, social theorists and politicalscientists have come to recognise the importance of war and military factors in the development ofEurope, its state system and ultimately its commercial practices. After all, the history of Europe fromabout 1500 to 1945 is very much the history of its wars, unlike China that largely enjoyed peace formuch of this period. But then it was Europe and its progeny, not China, that created modern industrialsociety.

Paul Hirst’s book is a very useful study because it places European state development within thecontext of the military revolutions of the sixteenth century and late nineteenth century as a preludeto an analysis of the current relationship between military innovation and the trajectory of future statedevelopment. Hirst provides a succinct account of the emergence of the territorial state and itsadoption of both reason of state and mercantilism. What emerged was a unique state system, theWestphalian system, governed by its own set of rules.

Hirst is particularly good on the impact of liberalism on this system. He describes the longnineteenth century as the ‘Clausewitz–Cobden era’. Clausewitz defined the way states interacted withregard to war, Cobden with regard to trade and commerce. This is a crucial issue, as war andcommerce are the two principal means in which states relate to each other, and it is not true, asConstant argued, that commerce has replaced war as the principal means of state interaction in themodern world. Any theory of the state must account for both. Hirst does this very nicely. He sumsup his argument in the following terms: ‘The concentration of political power in the hands of thecentral state and the magnification of military force made possible by the firepower revolution createdthe conditions for radical social transformation towards a market economy and world trade’ (p. 77).What this implies is that commerce and force have always gone together. Free trade has alwaysneeded the state as an ultimate guarantor.

In the second section on the future of war and the state, Hirst displays an equal amount of insight.He remains largely unimpressed by the claim of the Revolution in Military Affairs that it hasdecisively tilted the balance back in favour of offensive warfare. Equally he is not carried away bythe claims of globalisation, noting correctly that we are not living so much in a globalised world asone in which one state has become extremely powerful. There are two areas that he does canvas thathave been largely forgotten in the recent focus on Islam and the ‘clash of civilisations’. The first ofthese is the potential for environmental degradation to become a cause of war as states scramble forincreasingly limited resources. This is essentially another version of the circumscription theory of war

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developed by anthropologist Robert Carneiro to account for early state development. And it ispersuasive. The second is the discussion of China, in particular the problems that its search forprosperity might entail in an ecologically circumscribed world.

The message of Hirst’s book is that war and the state are not going to go away. War and commerceare not mutually exclusive activities and sometimes there is a need to use force in the world. Statesare useful entities, particularly for those of their members that they protect and nourish. Finally, Hirstboth knows that it would be better if we sought to restrict our consumption and were more generoustowards less well off states, and is aware realistically that such behavioural change is unlikely everto happen.

GREGORY MELLEUISH

University of Wollongong

Stephanie Lawson (ed.), The New Agenda for International Relations (Cambridge: PolityPress, 2002), 288 pp., US$38.95, ISBN 0745628613.

The central theme of this volume is that the end of the great power competition that defined thesecond half of the twentieth century also ended a seemingly orthodox order in the study ofinternational relations (IR). The authors contributing to this volume certainly demonstrate an array ofperspectives that makes sound the notion of a break with this orthodoxy. The book containscontributions from 10 authors. James Rosenau sets the tone in an argument for a new agenda beyondstate-based orthodoxies.

The second section introduces the reader to issues that the authors believe are an important part ofa new agenda. Fred Halliday critically engages the core assumptions of Samuel Huntington’soft-quoted concept of the ‘clash of civilisations’. Jill Steans argues that contemporary Western notionsof human rights are still framed in terms of liberal-democratic and statist theory, both of which donot necessarily address the concerns of women, especially in the Third World. Caroline Thomasoutlines how underdevelopment has increasingly become globalised, and thus affects many parts ofthe OECD as well the traditional ‘Third World’. Richard Higgott argues for a less well-defineddistinction between IR and economics, in order that both disciplines take into account the complexityof ‘real-world’ situations that do not so easily divide polity and economy. Lorraine Elliott introducesa ‘Global Politics of the Environment’ as an analytic tool that she argues is more welcome in an IRthat has ‘re-turned’ to cosmopolitanism. Finally, K.M. Fierke argues that considerations of securityare contingent upon understanding the relation between the knowing subject (the IR theorist) and theobject ‘security’ itself.

The third section, ‘New Perspectives’, examines ‘new’ approaches to the competing and complexissues raised in the second section. Chris Brown examines changes in the normative framework of IRin the context of new norms of humanitarian intervention and cosmopolitanism. Richard Devetakargues that, in light of an international community willing to suspend the norm of non-interventionin the face of extreme human suffering, one can observe the emergence of a new form of Kantiancosmopolitanism. In the final contribution, Jack Donnelly advocates greater interdisciplinary debate,and argues for theories of IR rather than a single theory aspiring to universal applicability.

For those not familiar with the evolving story of IR since the end of the Cold War, the well-writtencontributions elucidate the parameters of contemporary discourse. Having said this, however, it isquestionable as to how useful a contribution this collection, taken as a whole, is to the debate on thestate of IR. There is nothing shockingly new on what makes for new directions in scholarly researchor academic pedagogy.

Without detracting from the merit of the assembled contributions, one has to question whether itis even worthwhile trying to establish a ‘one size fits all’ agenda for a vast field of inquiry. Perhapsthe study of world politics in its endless permutations requires a revolutionary, rather than evolution-ary, attitude to disciplinary arrangements. Dispensing with the pretence that ‘international relations’is a single academic discipline might be the price we pay for truly eclectic investigations into globalpolitics in the twenty-first century.

STUART LATTER

Murdoch University

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Poul Erik Mouritzen and James H. Svara, Leadership at the Apex: Politicians andAdministrators in Western Local Governments (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,2002), xvii � 334 pp., US$27.95, ISBN 082295785X.

The main lesson of this book, that a survey of 4300 local government chief executive officers (CEOs)across 14 Western countries would reveal their roles to be defined by complementarity, interdepen-dency and reciprocity between administrative and political spheres of governance, is in most respectshardly surprising. Indeed, as with detailed empirical work of such specific focus over a wide rangeof contexts, for a broad readership in politics or public policy the results are too over-generalised tobe revelatory. For these reasons, though presented as a text of general importance, Leadership at theApex is likely to be valuable to three particular audiences.

First, senior managers in local government should draw encouragement from this picture of thecomplexity and flexibility of their unique role at the interface between administration and some rawforms of electoral politics. Although rigorously compiled, this is a picture of local governmentexecutives as they should be comfortable to be seen: flexible but not politically compromised;professional but not rule bound; policy innovators satisfied by the promise of long-term rather thanpurely self-serving returns. The result seems perhaps a little too idealised to form a safe guide to whatactually happens, but is powerful as a model of what a vast bulk of Western local authority CEOsconsider the institutional role of the perfect CEO should be.

Second, researchers and practitioners in institutional design can gain from the authors’ reconcili-ation of their results with organisational theory. The form of different local government systems hassignificant impacts on the way in which CEOs manage their relationships with their political ‘masters’(or ‘partners’). Again, the typology of local government systems developed by the authors (‘strong-mayor’, ‘committee-leader’, ‘collective leadership’ and ‘council-manager’) is over-generalised. AllAustralian local government is classified in the last category even though this is no longer accuratefor some large local authorities. That said, the differences show that constitutional structure doesindeed matter in the way that managers and politicians interrelate. In Australia, this has majorrelevance for debate over the role of directly elected mayors, to say nothing of directly electedpremiers and/or heads of state.

Third, academics interested in empirical public-sector management research can draw much notonly from this volume but also its two preceding (and further planned) volumes from the Associationof European Local Government chief executives (UDiTE) leadership study. The surveys werecompleted in 1995–97. The project originated in collaboration with UDiTE (12 of the 14 countries),but widened to include the US International City Management Association and our own AustralianInstitute for Municipal Management. The Australian participants were Rolf Gerritsen and MichelleWhyard from the University of Canberra. However, as the authors point out, the next frontier is inestablishing how local CEOs’ political self-images, incentives and interfaces compare with those ofsenior managers at ‘higher’ levels of government. Internationally, local government has much to teachsenior managers about political responsiveness and the lost art of the administrator as an essentialcustodian of the public interest.

Although Australian detail is largely swamped, several findings are important for the long quest foreffective regional governance in Australia. Unlike chief executives of national or state agencies (orwhole state governments), local CEOs perceive their rewards to flow from their ability to create strongpartnerships with their mayors and direct achievements in policy innovation, rather than standardbureaucratic goals of budget maximisation and institutional self-enhancement. In many respects,their role is defined by a need for survival, integration and results at a community levelwhich continues to be less direct at ‘higher’ constitutional levels. Ironically, the effect at the‘lowest’ level of government appears to work against institutional self-aggrandisement of the kind thatthrough amalgamation or other reform might logically contribute to the building of regionalgovernments on a sensible Australian scale. Until that happens on a broader scale, it seems,Australians will receive only limited access to the secrets of some of their most adept and adaptivepublic-sector managers.

A.J. BROWN

Griffith University

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Philip Norton (ed.), Parliaments and Citizens in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass,2002), xiii � 198 pp., US$64.50, ISBN 0714643874.

Gerassimos Moschonas, In the Name of Social Democracy. The Great Transformation:1945 to the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002), xiv � 370 pp., US$22.00, ISBN1859843468.

Arguably the wellspring of democracy is not the infrequent act of voting but the ongoing relationshipbetween the representative and the represented. Unlike elections, which attract a wealth of analyticalinquiry, this relationship has attracted little academic interest, a fact that makes Philip Norton’scollection of essays on parliaments and citizens in Western Europe all the more welcome.

Norton is widely regarded as the doyen of parliamentary studies in Britain and, since 1998 whenhe became a Conservative member of the House of Lords, he has been both observer and actor. IfNorton is torn by a conflict of interest it is not apparent; this collection has all the hallmarks of theuncluttered style and meticulous scholarship that has been evident in his previous 25 books and morethan 60 scholarly articles. The present work is unashamedly a preliminary study; Norton advances sixhypotheses that are then tested against seven case studies—six European countries and the Europeanparliament. The coverage is good (France is the only inexplicable absence), and the individualchapters provide a wealth of data about how parliamentarians see their role and what citizens expectfrom their representatives.

In both respects the range is considerable: from the excessive ‘clientistic political culture’ ofBelgium and the ‘intensely localistic style’ of Irish politics to the chasm between palazzo (politicalinstitutions) and piazza (the street) in Italy and ‘non-existent’ relationship between members of theAssembleia da Republica and citizens in Portugal.

In a final chapter, Norton makes some comparisons and offers some ‘intuitive’ conclusions. Forexample, he suggests that on the basis of these studies parliamentarians engage in constituencyactivity to the extent necessary to bolster their chances of re-election. Although this conclusion servesto reinforce a grim view of politicians that is implicit in many of the chapters, all is not bleak. Nortonpartly redeems the reputation of the political class—and lays to rest a long-standing truism—byinsisting that there is no correlation between electoral marginality and constituent activity. Membersin safe seats, it seems, work just as hard on behalf of their constituents as do their colleagues inmarginal seats. If not mutually exclusive, these two conclusions certainly point in different direc-tions—which is perhaps a weakness of the ‘intuitive’ approach adopted in this chapter. Takentogether, the most striking conclusion that can be drawn from the case studies (although oddly Nortondoes not draw it) is the vast differences in political culture that exist across Europe. It is hard to seehow, in the short term at least, any set of political institutions can satisfy such varied expectations.

Nor is party difference the subject of much discussion in this collection. In his chapter on theUnited Kingdom, Norton refers in passing to ‘some evidence’ that Labour MPs are more ‘constitu-ency active’ that Conservative ones; but surely this variable warranted more systematic study? Partydifference, on the other hand, is at the centre of an important book by Gerassimos Moschonas onsocial democracy in Europe.

Moschonas’ book was first published in 1994 in French, but it has been extensively revised andupdated for this translation to include what he calls the ‘magical return’ of social democratic partiesin fin-de-siecle elections (a claim that was surely dated almost before the ink had dried). Apart fromillustrating the inevitable danger of discussing ‘the present’, this discordance does not damageMoschonas’ purpose: he does not seek to celebrate the moment of resurrection, but to explain it. Thisis not dated. What follows is a detailed, wide-ranging and thoughtful discussion. It includesinvestigations of the internal workings of numerous European social democratic parties, their relationswith the industrial labour movement, the impact of European unity and globalisation, and effect ofsociological change on the electoral base of both.

Moschonas’ principal thesis is that the resurgence of social democratic parties at the end of the lastcentury was the result of a profound ‘break’ with the past. Over ‘a very long historical term’, heinsists, two elements have constituted the ‘hard core’, the ‘enduring and crucial node’, of the socialdemocratic ‘edifice’: ‘the attribution of an important role to the state, and the preservation andaffirmation of the privileged representative link’ to ‘the working class/popular strata’. ‘Today’, hecontinues, ‘this historical dual core has been largely removed.’ What has replaced it? For Moschonas,the ‘decisive ideological leap’ has brought social democrats to a form of neoliberalism that, although

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it still seeks to unite the ‘invisible hand’ of the market with the ‘visible hand’ of the state in a ‘singleproject’, is dominated by the former: ‘Social democracy has been thus transformed from a politicalforce for the moderate promotion of equality within a socio-economic system that is by definitioninegalitarian, into a force for the moderate promotion of inequality in the face of forces that are evenmore inegalitarian.’ By turning their backs on the trade union movement, and turning theirorganisations into catch-all parties, social democrats have all but lost their distinctive identity andmission.

For Australian (or New Zealand) readers, the spectacle of a social democratic party systematicallyrepudiating the shibboleths of a proud history will be familiar. Although it is not mentioned byMoschonas, what has been called the ‘Hawke-Keating hijack’ of the Australian Labor Party in the1980s anticipated many of the later developments in Left-of-Centre government in Europe (as did therise of ‘Rogernomics’ in New Zealand). What will interest—and perhaps surprise—Australian readersmore are Moschonas’ conclusions. Has ‘neo-liberalised social democracy’ simply become the ‘otherface of the right, a right that dare not speak its name’? Moschonas’ answer is no: ‘Rather than beingan attenuated version of traditional social democracy, what the “social-liberalism” of contemporarysocial democracy is, and what it proposes, is an attenuated version of liberalism.’ Moreover, just as‘de-social-democratisation’ was a conscious choice—a ‘moment of strategic pessimism’—so too is are-transformation possible. Unfortunately, the logic of his argument suggests otherwise. PerhapsNorton and his collaborators were right to ignore party difference by treating parliamentarians asgeneric, given that party difference may soon disappear entirely, if it has not already.

PAUL A. PICKERING

Australian National University

Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein (eds), Striking Terror: America’s New War (NewYork: New York Review of Books, 2002), vii � 374 pp., US$14.95, ISBN 1590170121.

This edited collection includes a diverse range of essays relating to the 11 September terrorist attacksin New York and Washington. Written by contributors to The New York Review of Books, these essaysinclude commentaries, reports and investigations into the background behind these attacks, the UnitedStates’ response to them and the potential terrorist threats of the future.

The book is organised into four sections entitled ‘comments’, ‘reports’, ‘threats’ and ‘intelligence’.The first of these sections includes five essays that generally provide critiques of Washington’sresponse to 11 September. This section also includes notes by Isaiah Berlin on the perils ofnationalism. The second section includes six essays by four authors. They provide reports on suchsubjects as Europe’s response to the War on Terror, the recent history of Afghanistan, the foreign anddomestic challenges faced by Pakistan, and the problem of defining ‘terrorism’. The two essays thatmake up the third section address, first, terrorist threats faced by the United States and, second, thepotential for bioterrorism. The final section includes three essays that respectively consider America’sfailure to respond adequately to evidence of chemical weapons manufacturing in the Sudan, the natureand purpose of the Arabic document found in the luggage of a number of the 11 September hijackers,and the organisational problems of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Independently, many of the essays included within this collection are fascinating. The ‘reports’ inparticular include detailed insights into such subject matter as the Northern Alliance campaign inAfghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and the recent civil war in Albania. The anecdotal evidence andinterviews contained within these reports are particularly refreshing.

Despite the informative nature of many of these essays, however, the organisation of this collectionlimits its appeal. The very diversity of the essays in this book makes it difficult to locate individualtopics within a broader theme. For example, this book includes, on the one hand, a limited theoreticalattempt to distinguish between ‘terrorists’ and ‘freedom fighters’, and, on the other, a description ofa mail-sorting device that would minimise the potential threat of bioweapons being delivered througha postal system. Relating such diverse issues to one another presents a challenge. The lack of asubstantial introduction or any conclusion magnifies this problem, forcing the reader to draw his orher own conclusions regarding the relationships between the various essays and sections.

Nor do the editors make any significant attempt to justify their selection of essays. A one-paragraphintroduction states that essays have been selected that will ‘last beyond the rush of events’. Despitethis statement, several of the essays, especially some of the commentaries in the first section, already

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seem dated. Indeed, the third essay—‘Notes on Prejudice’—was written by Isaiah Berlin in 1981.While a brief introduction to Berlin’s essay (not written by either of the editors) suggests that itsrelevance to 11 September ‘hardly needs stressing’, there is no explanation as to why this essay wasincluded in this collection while many other similar, and presumably equally relevant, comments oressays written prior to 11 September 2001 were not.

Such disorganisation is evident in other edited collections focusing on 11 September, such as JamesF. Hoge and Gideon Rose’s How Did This Happen? and Ken Booth and Tim Dunne’s Worlds inCollision. Yet, unlike Striking Terror, these books benefit from containing more comprehensiveintroductions, and concluding essays that draw upon some of the broader themes that run throughoutthe respective books.

In general, then, the flaws outlined above limit the utility of Striking Terror as an academicresource. Many of the issues covered by the essays incorporated within this book have been addressedin greater depth elsewhere. However, the variety of subjects covered, and the detail in which they areindividually addressed, do ensure that this book provides interesting reading.

EDWARD LOCK

University of Queensland

Kellee S. Tsai, Back-alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 2002), 318 pp., US$35.00, ISBN 0801439280.

The apparently narrow focus of this title is misleading, for the book’s range and interest is far greaterthan it would suggest. It does indeed explore, through hundreds of interviews and in fascinating detail,the multiple and shifting kinds of informal finance operating at the margins of legality in many partsof China. It also, however, describes the history and growth of the private sector (which has beenoverwhelmingly dependent on such finance); it sheds much light on the nature and operation of theChinese state (especially at the local level) and on the divergence of interests and policies betweenand within central and local governments; and it makes a systematic international comparison andevaluation of micro-finance schemes.

Overall, the author seeks to counter both theories of development that stress the primary need forsecure property rights, and those that emphasise the political role of the developmental state. Shedemonstrates that the financing of the enormous growth and successes of the private sector in Chinahave occurred without either of these being present. In their place have been a range of creativesymbiotic relations, between entrepreneurs and local governments, operating according to social aswell as political and economic logics. The diversity of attitudes of local governments in differentlocalities is explained in terms of path dependencies rooted in different local histories back to the Maoera or earlier. The divergent strategies adopted by individuals within the same locality are explainedin terms of their different social resources, derived from factors such as gender and access tonetworks.

The book is replete with fascinating stories: how women in Fujian came to replace men as theprime constructors and users of rotating credit associations (hui); how a factory, employing 160workers and exporting ‘Beebok’, ‘Mike’ and ‘Abibas’ sports shoes to Romania, Poland and thePhilippines was founded by the pooled savings and expertise of 11 small subcontractors (eachpreviously producing one part of the product); how private enterprises obtained ‘red hats’ throughpersonal connections, so they could disguise themselves as legitimate collective enterprises; howforbidden private financial institutions obtained registration as permitted industrial or commercialenterprises; how loan pyramids (of mutual savings and credit cooperatives) grew, in places, to suchbubbles that tens of thousands lost their savings, leading to mass bankruptcies and suicides and to riotswhen the authorities moved in to close them down.

This an important and fascinating book, although there a few minor caveats. In places, carried awayby enthusiasm for her subject, she implies (for example in the conclusion to chapter 1) that ‘China’seconomic miracle’ was achieved solely by the private sector. In fact it is clear that its most importantmotor has (at least until very recently) been the explosive growth of collective township and villageenterprises. These have also often been the most common Chinese partners of foreign-invested jointventures.

A minor irritation is the vast number of forgettable acronyms, only partly redeemed by a glossary.

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The extra space required to use abbreviated word titles for them would have been well worth thesavings in time and patience of the reader.

This review ends with the concluding words of the book:

Rather than an irrepressible rolling or convergence toward a familiar model of marketcapitalism, China’s reform era has seen a divergence in the political economic strategiesof localities, divergence in local logics and the emergence of unanticipated forms ofeconomic organisation. It is within this context of developmental diversity and possibilitythat private entrepreneurs have conducted their banking—behind the state, with the stateand despite the state. Neither loyal bureaucrats nor perfect property rights could orchestratesuch local miracles and tragedies. Entrepreneurs create credit—not only out of greed butalso out of gratitude, guilt and gullibility. They deserve credit for daring to do so.

CONSTANCE LEVER-TRACY

Flinders University

Aat Vervoorn, ReOrient: Change in Asian Societies, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2002), vi � 362 pp., US$29.95, ISBN 0195513339.

I enjoyed this book. Reading it gave me a sense of Asia as an entity, a sense which I do not get fromreading area studies books, or local ethnographies. Vervoorn does not attempt to present an adequatetreatment of every Asian country, nor to pay equal attention to those that are discussed—this wouldbe an impossible task in a book discussing a geographic region as vast and diverse as Asia. Rather,Vervoorn’s concern is to ‘focus on countries that illustrate, in a vivid and informative way’ (p. 4), thethemes about which he writes. The two primary aims of ReOrient are to describe the major issuesfacing societies in Asia around the turn of the twentieth century, and to use contemporary Asiansocieties as an exercise in thinking about societies in general (p. 1).

The major topics of the book are encapsulated in 11 chapters: Globalisation and Insulation; State,Society, Individual; Human Rights; Ethnic Minorities; Economic and Social Development; Patterns ofPopulation Change; Environmental Impact; Family Matters; The World of Work; Media, Communi-cation, and Censorship; and Using and Creating Knowledge.

What I like most about this book are the comparisons it offers of issues in various countries. Whilethere is certainly value in looking at the smaller picture, general comparisons aid us in understandingglobal trends and issues. As Vervoorn argues, adequate understanding comes only through comparinga number of societies. Cultural boundaries are not as sharp as people sometimes think, Vervoornmaintains, and people have the same needs, interests and concerns, despite the fact that they may bearticulated and satisfied in quite dissimilar ways (p. 10). Vervoorn makes comparisons based onstatistical information, from which interpretations are drawn, and by comparing different thematicissues (eg how caste is experienced in Japan and India (p. 53)).

My criticisms of the book are few. It would have been nice to have read about the experiences ofreal people, but admittedly this is a job for ethnographers. Women are highlighted in the index, butmen are not. Surely men deserve an index citation too. There are, of course, problems withgeneralisations (eg ‘The majority of Thai men believe that it is right for men to have a greater sayin family matters’ (p. 224)). The absence of religion as a topic is striking. Given the current worldsituation, it would be particularly useful to have some background understanding of religion in theregion. Religion in Indonesia is ignored, and with so much violence ostensibly revolving around it (egChristian–Muslim clashes in Central Sulawesi), religion is a topic that must be discussed. While issuesof politics are implicit throughout the book, a detailed analysis of conventional political structures andprocesses is unfortunately missing.

A final comment relates to terminology. While I found the discussion on globalisation engaging,I remain troubled by the use of the term ‘insulation’. Vervoorn uses this term to refer to the processby which individuals and groups make or conceive themselves as separate or distinctive (p. 17). Tome, localisation would seem a more appropriate term. Individuals or groups rarely function inisolation. Rather, a sense of identity is developed, and the (imagined/created) ‘local’ asserted, inreaction/relation to foreign influences.

ReOrient is a satisfying book. It succeeds in describing and analysing the major changes takingplace in contemporary Asian societies. It is written in a clear and engaging style, with evocative

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photographs interspersed amongst the text. We could take well Vervoorn’s concluding exhortationthat we need to reorient ourselves: ‘to accept change as the only reality; to recognise that a varietyof ways of conceptualising change may enhance rather than undermine our understanding of it’(p. 301).

SHARYN GRAHAM

Auckland University of Technology

Political Theory and MethodologyDavid Boucher and Paul Kelly (eds), Political Thinkers from Socrates to the Present(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xv � 548 pp., US$37.95, ISBN 0198781946.

Derek Matravers and Jon Pike (eds), Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy (NewYork: Routledge, 2003), x � 454 pp., US$29.95, ISBN 0415302110.

Authors and editors of political theory textbooks seeking to cover a broad range of theorists and ideashave typically adopted one of two approaches in arranging their subject material: thematical orchronological. Whereas under the former approach related theories are grouped together according totheir main focus—eg individual rights versus collective duties, the politics of identity, and soforth—the second approach focuses not on particular theories dealing with similar topics but ratherindividual theorists. As its title suggests, Political Thinkers from Socrates to the Present adopts thelatter approach by concentrating on a variety of political philosophers who have shaped politicalthought. The book is divided into five parts: (a) The Ancient Greeks (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle);(b) ‘The Two Kingdoms’ (St Augustine, Aquinas, Marsiglio of Padua and Machiavelli); (c) TheRationalist Enlightenment (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, the Federalist Papers,Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville, Bentham, J.S. Mill); (d) The Counter-Enlightenment (Burke, Hegel,Marx, Engels, Nietzsche); and (e) The Twentieth Century (Oakeshott, Habermas, Rawls, Foucault).

The list of contributors is impressive, including scholars of such high repute as Carole Pateman,Terence Ball and Jeremy Waldron. Perhaps the book’s most outstanding feature is the way in whicheach chapter is structured as a miniature book in itself and begins with a list of the different sectionsof the chapter and each section’s relevant page number. This is followed by a ‘Chapter Guide’—es-sentially a very short abstract—that lists the aims and key ideas of each section. Next is a briefbiography of the theorist under consideration which precedes a list of the key works of that theoristas well as the main work referred to in the chapter. Finally, there is a list of important ideas centralto the relevant theorist with a brief explanation of each idea and a comprehensive index at the rearof the book. Together these features provide a useful reference for the reader that makes itcomparatively easy to locate a specific item of interest and to immediately determine the structure andcontent of each chapter.

The main problem facing editors of books such as this is the decision of who to include and whoto omit. In many senses this decision is frequently made for them. No review of notable politicalphilosophers would be complete without including the likes of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, J.S. Mill andso forth. Things become less clear-cut, however, when we enter the realm of the twentieth centurywhere history has yet to make a final judgement on the relative importance of each theorist. Theinclusion of John Rawls is arguably the least controversial, given that most scholars of liberalismseem to find it necessary at some point or another to make reference to Rawls in their own work.Given the often bitter division of opinion that Foucault’s writings have created, his inclusion mightalso be said to be unremarkable. However, one can’t help but wonder whether a more broad-rangingsurvey of so-called ‘postmodernist thought’ including other writers such as Derrida and Heideggermight not have better served the same purpose. Moreover, there are other, non-postmodern, theoristssuch as Popper and Hayek who—conspicuous by their absence—have arguably exercised a muchgreater influence than their postmodern counterparts and for whom a more compelling case forinclusion might also be made.

The influence of Rawls is similarly evident in Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy whichis an anthology of seminal works that post-date the 1971 publication of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.Here too the list of contributors is impressive, including Brian Barry, G.A. Cohen, Amy Gutman,David Miller, Robert Nozick, Derek Parfit, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, Iris Marion Young and

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15 others. The book is thematically divided into seven sections, each of which contains a minimumof three readings. Every section is preceded by a brief introduction that places each reading withinthe wider context of the debate in which it is a constituent component, and explicates the variouslinkages between the readings in that particular section. The opening three sections—(a) ThePhilosophy of Social Explanation, (b) Distributive Justice, and (c) Liberalism and Communitarian-ism—deal with critiques stemming from a concern that liberalism’s individualistic moral ontology isat the very least descriptively inadequate, if not fundamentally flawed. Conversely, the latter foursections—(a) Citizenship and Multiculturalism, (b) Nationalism, (c) Democracy and (d) Punishment—focus upon specific concerns where the philosophical debate is anchored in particular issues of publicpolicy.

Given the much narrower chronological focus—three decades as opposed to almost three millen-nia—one could be forgiven for thinking that this book’s editors faced a comparatively easier task thanin the case of the former collection. However, the enormity and complexity of the relevant literaturemeans that the reader can at most be afforded a fleeting insight into each debate. For every theoristincluded—eg Young, Parekh and Barry in the ‘Citizenship and Multiculturalism’ section—there areothers whose inclusion would have been equally warranted, such as Kymlicka or Kukathas. Such awide area of coverage also precludes a thorough investigation of the various linkages between eachdebate (eg between the communitarian and multiculturalist critiques of liberalism) and how one hassustained and contributed to the other.

As in the case of the previous volume, however, these concerns relate more to the nature of theproject than the manner in which it is pursued. Any comparable publication with a correspondinglybroad focus seeking to cover an equally wide range of subject material with the space constraints thatthis entails would run into the same problems and criticisms. Indeed, if there is one constant inpolitical philosophy it is that there is never any final word to be had and that there will always remainthose who are unmoved or overly critical. Thus, despite these drawbacks, both books not only achievewhat they set out to but are also more than equal to other comparable works currently available, andso should be well received by both students and scholars alike.

MATTHEW WEBB

Yokohama City University

Harry Brighouse, School Choice and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003), ix � 222 pp., US$18.95, ISBN 0199257876.

Although arguments about social justice in education have been conducted for centuries, the debatethat gives a context for this book began with Milton Friedman’s proposal in 1955 (updated in his 1962Capitalism and Freedom) that an effective instrument for education funding by governments thatwould foster both justice and free choice is a system of school vouchers. Since that time, the issueof school vouchers has become one of the slogans of the Right—its proponents arguing that vouchersenable private education to compete more effectively with what they often see as a discredited publiceducation system. Not surprisingly, the concept has had a number of airings in Australia since the1960s, most recently from the present Commonwealth government.

This book by Brighouse is quite explicitly concerned with the debate among philosophers ofeducation, rather than public policy analysts. Nevertheless, the philosophical debate is important forits own sake, and Brighouse happily steers his own path along possible routes to social justice andfree choice mapped by other contributors to the debate such as Rawls, Dworkin, Gutman, Jencks and,of course, Friedman.

Although it is usually people on the Right who advocate a voucher system, Brighouse is criticalof many arguments from the Right, and does not fit easily into that stereotype. He is aware that themarketplace does not necessarily promote social justice policies, just as he acknowledges thatgovernment-imposed uniformity of schooling reduces genuine choice. He sees that there are systemicfactors in most societies that make the achievement of both ends—school choice and socialjustice—very difficult to achieve in one policy package.

As a philosopher, Brighouse is content to put the arguments for and against a voucher system basedon assumptions about the nature of democracy, the autonomy of parents and children, the demandsof the common good, and the health of a liberal pluralist society. He acknowledges explicitly thatactual programs will need considerable trade-offs of principle in order to achieve a balance of choice

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and justice. At the conclusion of the book he does try to evaluate some of the public policy examplesof choice and justice in Britain and the United States, but none of the programs meet with hiscomplete theoretical approval. It is a pity that he did not look at the Australian experience, since Isuspect that the trade-offs made by Commonwealth and State governments over the last 40 yearswould probably meet with his approval. That is not to say that everybody should agree withBrighouse. However, the debate in Australia might be advanced if his arguments were at leastexamined.

MICHAEL HOGAN

University of Sydney

Neil Carter, The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2002), 382 pp., $59.95, ISBN 0521469945.

This is a well-organised and attractively laid-out textbook that introduces all aspects of environmentalpolitics. It is divided into three sections. The first discusses environmental philosophy, both generaland political. The second focuses on politics: on Green parties, Green politics, and environmentalmovements. The third and longest section deals with environmental policy. The text engages withimportant debates and issues, like the diversity of views within organised Green political movements,changes that are occurring within environmental movements over time, the utility of the sustainabledevelopment concept, and the efficacy of international environmental policy initiatives.

The text makes good use of text boxes to give illustrations of concepts apart from the main text.It provides chapter-by-chapter tables of contents, identifies the key issues addressed by each chapter,and provides discussion questions throughout the text. The questions are good ones, well chosen.There is also a section on further reading and Websites of interest at the end of each chapter.

My criticisms are limited. Despite being an introductory text, there are no maps or illustrations andalmost no graphs or diagrams. It is tightly focused on verbal learning. Yet many of the topics coveredin here could be readily and helpfully illustrated: graphs of Green voting or environmental groupmembership; maps showing locations of parks or environmental disasters; illustrations of direct actionor protest events, and so on.

There might also be a hint of a particular bias in the work. I wonder whether an introduction toenvironmental thought and policy should acknowledge more some of the critics of environmentalismand environmental movements. There are no references in this book to the work of Simon and Kahn,or Budiansky, or Stott, or Kellow, or any of a host of others who are constructing credible andreasoned alternative perspectives on a wide range of environmental policy and political questions. Thebook may place itself too exclusively within one mainstream, environmentally sympathetic tradition.

There is also little attention paid to the social construction of the environment as a category. Yetthis is important to understanding what has come to constitute an environmental issue, and what hasbecome the target of environmental action—as well as what has not. William Cronon remarked that‘to protect the nature that is all around us, we must think long and hard about the nature we carryinside our heads’. I think a work like Carter’s would be strengthened by an early chapter on this topic.I also would have liked to see more about environmental issues and movements outside the OECD.

Nevertheless, this is a well-structured and well-written work for provoking ideas and debateamongst students, and I would happily consider setting it as a text.

IAN HOLLAND

Parliament House, Canberra

John Christman, Social and Political Philosophy—A Contemporary Introduction (Londonand New York: Routledge, 2002), 245 pp., US$75.00, ISBN 0415217989.

John Christman’s Social and Political Philosophy—A Contemporary Introduction is yet anothercontribution to the apparently inexhaustible market for political philosophy textbooks. As a teachingguide as well as a textbook, this present addition to the field of survey works is very user-friendlyin its organisational layout. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction, followed by somewhat

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dense but clear prose (refreshingly conscious of gender language). A short chapter summary follows,a topical case study is offered to initiate debate in the classroom and, finally, a further reading listis provided. The book is divided into two parts, the first offering a detailed account of contemporarydebates within the liberal paradigm (with a single historical chapter on the contributions of Hobbes,Locke, Rousseau and Kant), while the second half of the work engages with a series of critiqueslevelled against liberal philosophy from a variety of schools—conservative and communitarian (ch.5), critical race studies and feminist theory (ch. 6) and Marxist and post-modernist interventions (ch.7). Finally, the work offers an extensive and very useful bibliography.

More substantively, while the title of Christman’s work promises a broad mapping of currentdebates within the field of contemporary social and political philosophy, such expectations areimmediately squashed and the objective of the work immediately curtailed by Christman’s somewhatapologetic confession, in his Preface, that the focus of this present study is limited to an engagementwith ‘Anglo-American social and political philosophy over the last thirty years’ (p. xi) which, asChristman goes on to explain, essentially means Anglo-American liberalism.

Christman’s Social and Political Philosophy offers, for the most part, a detailed examination ofJohn Rawls’s distributive justice thesis and the subsequent critiques, modifications and elaborationsthat followed in the wake of Rawls’s 1971 publication. It is, therefore, Rawls’s work that constitutesthe framing device of Christman’s text (it functions as both the point of departure as well as theconstant point of return for all subsequent critiques). For this very reason, Christman’s recent workcan be critiqued for being very narrow in its philosophical range but can be praised for the level ofdetail it offers on the subject it does engage with (this problem of breadth versus depth is, of course,not new). It is precisely Christman’s mastery over the ‘distributive justice’ debate and the subsequentdetail he provides wherein lies the strength of the present work. Readers interested in the ins-and-outs,the claims and counterclaims, the appropriations and modifications of Rawls’s thesis will findChristman’s textbook invaluable.

However, precisely what constitutes the strength of Christman’s book also proves to be the sourceof its weakness. The conceptual framework of Christman’s work, organised as it is around Rawlsianliberalism, forces one to work within the liberal paradigm even when criticising it for even the criticalengagement he offers in the second part of the work (via race, gender, etc) is, from the outset,confined within, and limited to, the possibilities, questions, problems and concerns posited by liberaltheory itself. Thus, when discussing the interventions of feminist or critical race studies, Christmanlimits his discussion to issues of identity politics, distributive justice issues and group prejudice(which is somewhat disturbingly assigned to ‘culture’). What is obscured in Christman’s account ofthese critiques is the fact that, for the last 15 years or so, much of the feminist and race literature thathas emerged (even within the Anglo-American academy) has sought to reject the epistemologicalfoundations of not only liberal theory but Enlightenment philosophy more generally. Preciselybecause postmodernism is relegated into a distinct subsection of a final chapter, the appropriation ofpostmodernist theory within feminist and critical race studies is ignored, leaving Christman’s criticalengagement with liberalism somewhat unsatisfactory.

As a textbook on Rawlsian liberalism and the subsequent debates it inspired, Christman’s Socialand Political Philosophy is an excellent source. For more substantive and in-depth critiques—es-pecially in the areas of feminist and race studies—other textbooks may need to be assigned.

VANITA SETH

University of California, Santa Cruz

Diana H. Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststruc-turalism (London: Routledge, 2000), 272 pp., US$29.95, ISBN 041503177X.

In Negativity and Politics, Diana Coole engages in an examination of the problem of negativity as itoccurs in philosophy and political theory. While negativity is never precisely defined by her(necessarily so, she claims), it is associated with terms like resistance, negation, criticism, trans-gression, lack and absence, all of which bear an obvious political resonance. To contextualise herargument, recent European philosophy for Coole has become apolitical (or political in an irredeemablesense) and mainstream analytic philosophy has also become apolitical. The former emphasises a typeof negativity that makes a precise understanding of the political impossible, while the latter makes the

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political precise, but nevertheless too narrow because it ignores the dynamic and conflictual aspectsof all politics (that is, the importance of negativity).

Her criticisms of the analytic conception of politics are largely a background motivation for thiswork, but she accords a lot of attention to the European philosophical treatment of negativity. Inparticular, she considers the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty andKristeva in some detail, and her book also includes ongoing references to the work of Foucault,Derrida and Deleuze.

But to return to her argument, for Coole the post-structuralist take on negativity is too much aboutthe wholly other, too negative if you like (it does not have any interaction with the positive), andhence it does not bear enough relationship to the ‘reality’ of collective life. As Coole suggests, ‘awareof the dangers of contamination by the positive, negativity’s defenders have tended to push itincreasingly in a transcendental direction, where it becomes pure process: mobility, flows, the virtual’(p. 6). According to this conception, she argues that politics becomes reduced to ethics or aesthetics.In other words, one cannot get a meaningful understanding of the political, and her project henceattempts to bring the political back into any understanding of negativity.

What follows in her book is an insistence upon the importance of dialectics—as practised by Hegeland more particularly by Merleau-Ponty—to any meaningful understanding of the relationshipbetween negativity and politics. Coole wants to rescue dialectics from its post-structuralist denuncia-tions and Merleau-Ponty is a good resource for this. After all, Merleau-Ponty never entirely gave upon the dialectic, and she convincingly argues that his conception of a ‘hyper-dialectic’ avoids manyof the problems that have been raised in regard to Hegelian dialectics. While Merleau-Ponty’sHumanism and Terror and Adventures of the Dialectic contain many important implications regardingpolitical responsibility, Coole’s book is a very helpful resource in further delineating the politicsimplied by Merleau-Ponty’s hyper-dialectics.

My only criticism of this work is that Coole’s suspicions regarding post-structuralist politics aresomewhat under-elaborated. She offers an interpretation of Derrida akin to that proposed by SimonCritchley some years earlier, but there is not enough analysis of the work of Derrida to justify this.Similarly, her ascription of negativity to figures like Nietzsche and Deleuze is a contentious one thatcould have been explored in more detail.

That aside, though, her engagement with Hegel, Marx, Adorno, and Merleau-Ponty is tremendouslyevocative in suggesting not only that dialectics has been unjustly castigated, but also that it is animportant component of any satisfactory political theory.

JACK REYNOLDS

University of Tasmania

George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London: Continuum, 2002), ix� 276 pp., US$29.95, ISBN 0826450474.

George Crowder has written an impressive and important book on the relation between liberal politicsand value pluralism. His thesis is that value pluralism rightly understood is consistent with, in factundergirds, liberalism rightly understood. Part I offers a sketch of liberalism and its contending modesof justification and of value pluralism. Part II examines (sympathetically yet critically) Isaiah Berlin’sargument in favour of a link between value pluralism and the politics of negative liberty, and (lesssympathetically) John Gray’s strenuous effort to drive a wedge between liberalism and valuepluralism. Part III fleshes out Crowder’s case for a path leading from value pluralism to a liberalismresting on diversity, reasonable disagreement, and virtues, the most important of which is autonomy.

Space does not permit me to list, let alone discuss, the many arguments is this book that I findpenetrating and congenial. I will focus, rather, on my major disagreement. Crowder believes that valuepluralism leads to a strong form of liberalism whose central value of autonomy is to be understoodas a form of positive rather than negative liberty. His argument is that in a moral world of pluralvalues it is choice that defines our lives. Not just any choice; rational choice. In order to chooserationally among contending values, ‘one needs to be autonomous’. This requires not only thecapacity to reflect critically on one’s first-order desires but also the understanding to do so from anexplicitly pluralist standpoint that critically interrogates all priority rules among desires.

While this line of argument certainly advances one permissible and attractive orientation within a

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pluralist society, I do not believe that it succeeds in demonstrating that autonomy, as Crowderconceives it, is a virtue that all individuals must possess. Here are three reasons why not.

In the first place, pluralism may actually circumscribe the role of rational choice. In a given choicesituation, there may well be a range of legitimate alternatives that reason does not permit us torank-order. When we incline toward an option, we may do so on the basis of background features ofour lives and circumstances that we need not submit to further critical examination.

Second, while pluralism protects choice, it does not insist that all valid ways of life must reflectchoice. From a pluralist point of view, many lives based on habit, tradition, and faith fall well withinthe wide range of legitimacy.

Finally, value pluralism does not insist that all individuals lead their lives as consciously aware andcommitted value pluralists. The reason is straightforward. It is one thing to say that X is true, anotherto say that truth is good, yet another to say that trust is the highest good, or some sort of deontologicalside-constraint on legitimate ways of life. Many forms of what philosophical value pluralists mustregard as illusions will embody other kinds of goodness. It is no part of value pluralism to equateillusion with badness simpliciter.

A worry at work here is that, absent the conscious endorsement of value pluralism and the virtueof autonomy, individuals will possess neither the habit of tolerance nor reasons for it. In myjudgement this worry is misplaced, because there are many roads to tolerance. Some run throughvalue pluralism, others through ways of life that do not explicitly endorse it.

WILLIAM A. GALSTON

University of Maryland

Jeffrey Goldsworthy and Tom Campbell (eds), Legal Interpretation in Democratic States(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 270 pp., US$99.95, ISBN 0754622150.

The antipodean and American legal theorists who contributed to this interesting book were asked toexplore relationships between legal interpretation and ideals associated with democracy. That brief hasresulted in a set of eclectic essays on matters concerning legal interpretation. Readers should notexpect a sustained focus on democratic concerns in all of the essays. Although the quality of thepapers is not uniform, many are both thought provoking and rich in insight (and of likely interest tothose outside the legal theory community).

The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines the role of intentions, primarily instatutory interpretation; the third part looks at a number of issues concerning constitutional interpret-ation.

Part 1 of the book contains some excellent papers. Tom Campbell is, I think, right that theories ofstatutory interpretation are inevitably grounded in normative views about the respective roles oflegislatures and courts (even if general theses about the nature of language might illuminate particularquestions or, perhaps, even provide outer constraints on normative theories). One could add thatnormative conclusions about legal interpretation might (should?) also be influenced by facts about themodern administrative state; namely, that much legislation occurs outside legislatures and moststatutory interpretation occurs outside courts (in administrative agencies). Jeff Goldsworthy’s sophis-ticated paper offers a challenge to legal positivists (like Campbell), who are sceptical of intentionalisttheories of interpretation: give up your positivism or forget your worries about intentionalism. Hispoint is that plain-meaning approaches to interpretation lead either to absurd or unjust results orrequire judges to displace the meaning of statutes to overcome that problem. The second optionconflicts with the constitutional bedrock of legislative supremacy. But Goldsworthy’s claim thatnon-intentionalist theories cannot be held by legal positivists holds only for those positivists who, onnormative grounds, seek to steer ‘clear of judicial supremacy over statute law’.

The second part of the book is composed of five very diverse essays. Arthur Glass’ insightful andadmirably clear introduction to the relevance of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and MaimonSchawarzschild’s paper both raise the interesting question of whether an examination of actualinterpretive practices in the law are ever likely to be captured by a single regulative ideal. The mostambitious paper in Part 2 is Michael Detmold’s attempt to locate law in a general philosophicalaccount of meaning and, further, to locate that account of meaning in the natural world. He concludesthat the ‘law of love’ (namely, the lawful relation of minds based on the Kantian injunction to lovethe other as oneself) ‘is installed in nature just as the law of gravity is installed’. I am not sure that

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I understood this paper, but I doubt whether the reduction of everything onto an ontological par helps.If the law of love is part of the natural world, is it not necessarily realised? (Compliance with gravityis not, after all, normally thought of in normative terms.) Detmold’s reply, that historically ‘ordinarydomestic interactions’ have been ‘overwhelmingly lawful’, implausibly closes off inquiries into theway law may be implicated in unequal power relationships.

Part 3 of the book contains a valuable discussion of constitutional implications. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s distinction between ‘necessary-condition’ derivations of implied rights and ‘bestjustification’ derivations will interest anyone evaluating the various strands of the High Court’scontroversial implied rights jurisprudence. Michael Moore insists upon a comparative institutionalanalysis in arguments over how best to protect rights. Moore accepts Jeremy Waldron’s argument thatjudicial review always comes at a democratic cost, but insists that we must also consider whetherjudges are more likely to give greater protection of rights than would the legislature. Politicalscientists are likely to welcome the increasing recognition by legal theorists that ‘fact-sensitive’inquiries (into, for example, the nature of legal institutions in a given jurisdiction and the surroundinglegal and political cultures) are central to these debates. The last paper I will mention is Heidi Hurd’sstrained, though clever, attempt to read Goldsworthy’s ‘moderate originalism’ as resting on Burkeanpremises. However, a large part of the normative strand of Goldsworthy’s argument is based on theexistence of a serviceable constitutional amendment mechanism, and thus his theory does not appearto me to be committed to conserving the general stock of nations and ages.

LEIGHTON MCDONALD

Australian National University

Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson (eds), Historical Sociology of International Relations(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xi � 315 pp., $59.95, ISBN 0521004764.

This is an important and timely (overdue) book, for throughout much of its recent past the dominantsub-disciplines within international relations have tended to deny or ignore the importance of thepassage of history, particularly history that pre-dates the ‘arrival’ of the discipline. At best, history hasserved as little more than a catalogue of case studies whose usefulness has by and large been limitedto a testing ground for this or that particular theory. This is a coherent book with a sequential logicto the individually authored chapters, including a considerable amount of cross-referencing, not justa hastily hobbled together collection of essays, as is too often the case with edited volumes.

The stated purpose of the book is to call for a historical sociological turn—or, more accurately, areturn—that ‘brings historical sociology back into international relations’. To that aim the volume isintended to be something of a ‘historical sociology manifesto’; at the same time it is also meant toserve as an ‘international relations manifesto’. It begins with introductory chapters by the editors thatoffer a well-rounded critique of the ahistorical and asociological tendencies of mainstream inter-national relations theories. They also provide an outline of what historical sociology has to offerinternational relations by pointing to the role it has played in the past—hence the call for a return.What follows is an outline of the seven major sub-fields of historical sociology in which notedpractitioners expound on their respective approaches; in doing so the contributors are not afraid tooffer critiques of the alternative historical sociological approaches employed by their colleagues. Thecontributors and their respective approaches are: John M. Hobson and Martin Shaw on neo-Weberi-anism; Michael Barnett and Chris Reus-Smit on constructivism; A. Claire Cutler on critical historicalmaterialism; Andrew Linklater on critical theory; Steve Smith on postmodernism; Barry Buzan andRichard Little on structural realism; and Barry Gills on world systems theory. The volume concludeswith chapters by Fred Halliday in which he makes a case for what he calls ‘international sociology’,and the editors’ summary in which they advocate a complementary account of what they prefer to call‘world sociology’. While the editors acknowledge that a feminist historical sociological approach hasmuch to offer the broader project, they ‘regret’ that such an account is not included in the book;precisely why that is so is unclear but it is a sentiment with which I concur.

Overall the book advocates a shift in the study of international relations away from the largelyahistorical and asociological behaviouralist or rationalist approaches that have dominated the disci-pline in recent decades. In endeavouring to do so the project attempts to bring together and open atwo-way dialogue between historical sociologists and international relations theorists. It is worthnoting, however, that the impressive array of contributors are essentially all international relations

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scholars who happen to be or make use of historical sociology techniques; it might have beeninteresting (and complementary) to have a perspective from the other side of the fence. This isundoubtedly a significant and important development in the theorising of international relations,providing a much-needed counterbalance to the discipline’s mainstream paradigms. An equallypressing yet altogether more difficult task is to generate a greater awareness of and appreciation forthe importance of historical sociology, or even history more generally, amongst practitioners ofinternational politics/relations.

BRETT BOWDEN

Australian National University

Nicholas Hopkinson, Parliamentary Democracy: Is There a Perfect Model? (Aldershot:Ashgate and Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, 2001). 127 pp., US$79.95, ISBN0754622134.

Relax, it’s now official: ‘There is no perfect model of democracy’ (p. 117). This is the predictablefinding of a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association working party on comparative parliamentarydemocracy. But opinions differ on how best to account for this finding: does it mean that all modelsare more or less equally acceptable, or does it mean that no model is nearly good enough to deservepublic support? Idealists and pragmatists will each find comfort here.

Despite its modest size, this book contains much useful, if rudimentary, material of interest toteachers of parliamentary government. The very fact that so many different models are noted makesthe publication helpful for those preparing brief overviews of comparable parliamentary systems. This120-page volume grew out of a 1999 conference organised by the Commonwealth ParliamentaryAssociation at the famous UK conference centre at Wilton Park. The timing is relevant: a decade orso after the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, when democracy assistancebecame all the rage. And the author (or rapporteur) is also relevant, being the deputy director atWilton Park, which is notable for its coverage of international relations issues.

Britain, in common with many other established democracies, is increasingly engaged in democ-racy-promotion internationally, and this book reports views about preferred models of what one istempted to call ‘export-quality’ democracy from around the Westminster-derived world. The BritishCommonwealth has developed many declarations about democratic values, and it noteworthy that therelevant chapter here defining democratic government has more to say about an independent publicservice working in tandem with a dependent military than about a democratic parliament. Theinteresting suggestion is that the institutions of Whitehall are no less valuable than those ofWestminster, and perhaps more ‘exportable’. It is noteworthy that there are four pages on electoralsystems, comparing many different approaches; but eight pages on the impartial administration ofelectoral systems, separate from the issue of which system might be preferable from a democraticpoint of view. Any form of democracy is tolerable, provided its administration is in the hands ofcompetent public servants.

At its worst, this book reads like an abstract for an unwritten textbook. But some of the vices ofsummary treatment can become virtues of refreshing brevity. For instance, the chapter on representa-tion surveys three models of political representation (labelled mandate, populist, and conscience, atpp. 45–8), derived from a presentation by Philip Norton, a professor of politics who now serves inthe House of Lords as Lord Norton of Louth, and edits the Journal of Legislative Studies. There aretimes when four pages is about right for a general audience, as this section proves. A Canadian-de-rived account of the value of federalism (pp. 23–30) has similar value.

By contrast, the two pages on gender representation miss the boat completely. Similarly, thefreestanding chapter on cultural relativity is only three pages long. But there are some pleasantsurprises: given debates over independent speakers, it is flattering to find that the longish section onthe roles of presiding officers is derived from a presentation from former Senate President MargaretReid (pp. 73–8). The volume ends with a plea for pluralism, with a series of case studies illustratingthe many Commonwealth variations on both parliament and democracy, many of which make noclaims to perfection, and deserve none.

JOHN UHR

Australian National University

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Dudley Knowles, Hegel and the Philosophy of Right (London: Routledge, 2002), xviii� 382 pp., US$15.95, ISBN 0415165784.

This guidebook, intended for students, aims to introduce one of the most arduous classics of politicalphilosophy, G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1820). Dudley Knowles’ humorous, at timesimpertinent, turns of phrase, which some readers will probably find irritating, should not distract fromthe great pedagogic and philosophical qualities of his book.

He presents clearly and accurately the main ideas of the Philosophy of Right, hidden though theyare in the intricate technical jargon of German idealism. Undoubtedly, this book is a most useful aidfor readers not familiar with Hegel’s thought and terminology. It provides direct, yet intelligent,access into his moral, legal, social and political theory.

Just as importantly, however, Knowles demonstrates convincingly the relevance of the Philosophyof Right to contemporary questions. What underlies the relevance of Hegel today lies in his accountof autonomy. Knowles does not hesitate to claim that ‘we should regard [Hegel] as the greatest andmost sophisticated of philosophers of freedom’ (p. 27). He argues rightly that this sophisticated modelof autonomy is the result of Hegel’s emphasis on the intersubjective constitution of selfhood throughprocesses of recognition. The fundamental consequence of this is that it is impossible to conceptualiseindividual autonomy separate from the social and political conditions that make it real and concrete.The institutions of social life (the legal sphere, the economy, the family, the world of labour, the state)and the laws and norms they produce are ‘structures of the will’ in a very particular sense: theyrequire the subjective interest of individuals to function, but they also exist objectively, beyond thedirect reach of individual subjectivity. To the individual they represent the different frameworks inwhich concrete features of identity are established. Knowles shows the coherence of Hegel’s treatiseby analysing each section as addressing a specific ‘structure of the will’. The final notion of ‘ethicallife’ captures the full interdependency of institutions and subjectivities. The chapter devoted to thisnotion (ch. 9) is the best in the book.

The implications of this model of autonomy are immense. It denounces the abstraction of theindividualistic moral philosophy grounding liberal theories of justice. Knowles does full justice toHegel’s famous critique of Kantian ethics (ch. 8). It is strange that he should then reject Hegel’scritique of social contract theories. A whole series of conceptual solutions to specific problems openup as a result of Hegel’s institutionalist definition of freedom. To mention three particularlythought-provoking chapters: Hegel’s theory of rights offers a viable alternative between a utilitarianand a Kantian foundation of legal theory (ch. 4); the definition of property avoids the problems withwhich liberal theories of justice are faced regarding the problem of distribution (ch. 5); the theory oflegal punishment announces modern critiques of consequentialist views (ch. 6).

Knowles correctly reminds the reader of the importance of Hegel to understand communitarian-ism’s critiques of liberalism. He might have added that there is space today for other types ofHegel-inspired political theory, as the work of Axel Honneth illustrates brilliantly.

JEAN-PHILIPPE DERANTY

Macquarie University

Rama Mani, Beyond Retribution: Seeking Justice in the Shadows of War (Cambridge: PolityPress, 2002), x � 249 pp., US$26.95, ISBN 0745628362.

In the last two decades, the literature on ‘dealing with the past’ and other unfinished business ofviolent conflict has grown considerably. One theme that has emerged from the vast body of work isthat the end of conflict represents an opening for claims of justice. Beyond Retribution addresses theissue of justice in war-torn societies by examining the complex relationship between peace and justicein contemporary Western philosophy and evaluating the efforts by international actors to rebuildpeace and restore justice in low-income countries.

The book makes three propositions. First, in post-conflict societies, ‘justice must be restored in anintegrated manner, covering all its distinct but interrelated dimensions’ (p. 4). The author distinguishesthree dimensions of justice: legal, rectificatory and distributive. Second, ‘there is a chasm between the

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concept and practice of justice’ (p. 4). That is, the practitioners whose task is to restore justice afterviolent conflict lack ‘a conceptual and philosophical understandings of the dimension and scope ofjustice’ (p. 4), and philosophers have paid no attention to the practical challenges to address injusticesin low-income countries. Finally, international peace-building operations have largely failed to builda just peace because policy makers are often unaware of the three dimensions of justice incontemporary political and legal philosophy. With these deficiencies in mind, the inquiry sets out tointegrate theory and practice and develop a comprehensive and holistic approach to building peacewith justice in post-conflict reconstruction.

After introducing the scope of the study in chapter 1, the author provides an overview of herconceptualisation of legal, rectificatory, and distributive justice. The following three chapters examine‘justice in practice’. The experiences in eight countries—El Salvador, Haiti, Namibia, Mozambique,Cambodia, Rwanda, South Africa and Guatemala—are used to illustrate the failure of internationalbodies to address issues of justice in post-conflict societies. In Mani’s view, international peace-build-ing efforts have focused on the minimalist conception of justice, with its emphasis on proceduraljustice or the administration of justice. In war-torn societies with low GNP this approach does notaddress the root causes of violent conflict and, indeed, is contributing to the frustration anddisappointment felt by many victims. The cycle of violence continues. The book concludes with aproposal to develop a more effective model of peace building that addresses the issue of substantivejustice.

Rama Mani is a Senior Strategy Adviser at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, a non-govern-ment organisation based in Geneva, and the book reflects her commitment to humanitarian values. Attimes, the analysis functions as an instrument of advocacy for increased international commitment inpost-conflict societies. But can we assume that the so-called ‘international community’ consistentlyacts in a benign manner? This reviewer has serious misgivings about the author’s uncritical view ofthe post-conflict reconstruction agenda of international actors. If there is one lesson that needs to beleant in international affairs, it is that what seems universal often serves particular interests. One couldargue that peace building and claims of justice no longer necessarily run counter to the currentinterests of powerful states. We need to be cognisant of the bounds of justice; that is, the limits towhich the issues of justice are allowed to be incorporated into the international political agenda.Further, Mani’s analysis, by confining its focus to mainly internal matters in war-torn countries,absolves the responsibility of many Western states in creating the conditions of inequality andinjustice and their involvement in many conflict situations.

Despite this weakness, Beyond Retribution is an ambitious book that covers a wide range of issueson post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation, and is thus a good starting point for those interestedin transitional justice. In clarifying and drawing out the multiple dimensions of justice in post-conflictsocieties, it asks the reader to consider that, although rebuilding peace with justice is less ‘heroic’ thanpeacekeeping operations or delivering emergency humanitarian assistance, it is no less important.

ROBYN LUI

Griffith University

Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform andConstitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xi � 291 pp.,$52.95, ISBN 0521797063.

Joel Migdal is renowned for his work on state–society relations within comparative politics andcomparative political economy. In State in Society, Migdal builds upon his prior work on statecapacity building in the Third World, broadening out to discuss more generalised changes to the stateas a concept and subject of analysis. Migdal kicks off by criticising Max Weber’s ‘ideal type’ stateas a source of distortion on how we understand the state and its relationship with society. It is notWeber’s fault, Migdal asserts, but that of scholars who have missed the methodological point ofpositing an ideal type. But rather than salvage Weber’s ideal typical state, Migdal provides a newdefinition of the state that focuses on ‘the image of a coherent, controlling organization within aterritory’ and ‘the actual practices of its multiple parts’ (pp. 15–16, emphasis in original). By positingthe importance of image construction alongside practices, Migdal argues that we have a better notionof how states operate in societies to shape everyday practices and, in turn, how societies shape states.We must look beyond elite interests and recognise that some states are simply not as effective in

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changing their people’s daily lives as public officials would have us believe. There is a bit ofFoucauldian chopping-kings’-heads-off governmentality at play here, but with Migdal’s caveat thatsocial practices not only enforce images of what the state does but also alter what the state can do.While Migdal has been banging this ‘state in society’ drum for quite some time now, this booksummarises Migdal’s theorising in a very succinct manner. It sounds like Max Weber playing WorldMusic, and the rhythm is very agreeable.

In Parts II and III of the book, Migdal takes us through a range of state-in-society practices,emphasising how the ‘politics of survival’ often compels leaders to disable part of their own stateapparatus or, for example, to appoint executives on the basis of kinship. Migdal also deals with whyso many states stay intact, his answer being: (i) the legitimising force of laws—including the globaladvocacy of the sovereign state as the form of organising societies; (ii) public rituals that invokeshared meanings; and (iii) informal behaviour in the public sphere (a la Habermas), where the‘perceived effectiveness of the state rests on how well other sorts of implicit laws or rules guideproper behavior’ (p. 165, emphasis in original). In Part IV, Migdal discusses the relationship betweenindividual change and the state, arguing that there is no unity of personality (traditional man asopposed to modern man) and we must appreciate how people often cobble together different culturalpractices to get on in life. In Part V, Migdal takes on how we understand the state’s role in the processof development, taking us through the literature on corporatism, Gerschenkronian ‘backwardness’,dependency and interdependency. In the end it comes down to the issue of authority, which is heldprimarily by the state. But this is not to say that the state is all powerful, as societal and globalpressures impinge upon it. Rather, the book’s emphases are on how states struggle to alter everydaypractices, how societies struggle back, and how these struggles produce shared meanings. In all, it isa fabulous work and should be widely read not only in comparative politics but also in internationalrelations.

LEONARD SEABROOKE

Australian National University

Noel Preston and Charles Sampford with Carmel Connors, Encouraging Ethics andChallenging Corruption (Sydney: Federation Press, 2002), 216 pp., $55.00, ISBN1862874484.

This is a welcome addition to the Australian literature on public-sector ethics. Preston, Sampford andConnors manage to bring together a critical history of the post-Fitzgerald reforms to Queenslandgovernance with a more general analysis of design principles relevant to public-sector ethics. Theaccount of Queensland is used as something of a test case, explored in chapters 6 and 7, of thetheories of public-sector ethics that the authors outline in the early chapters, particularly chapters 1–3.The set of two intervening chapters (4 and 5) acts as a bridge between the general theory and theempirical analysis, offering an unusual examination of ‘the individual public official’ after the moreabstract systemic examination in earlier chapters and the Queensland specifics that follow.

The theme is that ethics can and should be made the heart of governance reform, if the reformingelite has the will to extend public accountability to cover compliance with legitimate democraticvalues. Just what those values are is never subject to very close analysis, with calls for ‘ethics’ to beadded to the roster of responsibilities facing public officials. The argument in support of this case isquite general, with many references to ‘ethics’ and ‘governance’ and to their nurturing medium, whichis something called ‘institutional ethics’. This notion is contrasted with ‘individual ethics’ in whichthe problem of proper conduct is reduced to one of individual character. The authors claim that theyreject this approach, yet the chief presentation of the positive content of ‘ethics’ is in terms of AlasdairMacIntyre’s school of virtue ethics, which is all about personal character.

The challenge then becomes how to institutionalise character. The merit of an institutional approachis that it sees the problem in systemic terms, with individuals responding to institutional cues aboutwhat is proper according to the public-sector context rather than simply their private conscience.Unfortunately, the book has no explicit theory of institutional design and lacks a tightly disciplinedconcept of institution, preferring instead to describe many practical institutions which have showntheir capacity to bring an institutional sense to public officials. Codes of conduct emerge as favouredinstitutions, but the book has no hard evidence on the power of codes to institutionalise official

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conduct. The final chapter sensibly favours as many checks and balances as one can imagine, againplacing ‘virtue’ in a solid institutional setting.

Although the name of MacIntyre features prominently, the spirit of Machiavelli is evident. TheFitzgerald Inquiry, which gets good attention here, is an example of just such an institution favouredby Machiavelli: a nice little inquisition to restore the regime. No less Machiavellian in thisinstitutional sense is the authors’ defence of public-sector ethics in terms of an ethic of publicjustification, with the burden placed on officials to account publicly for their use of their officialpowers. The chapters on corruption detection and subsequent prevention in Queensland nicelydocument the value of institutions of public accountability to curb corruption and strengthen ethics.

JOHN UHR

Australian National University

Robbie Robertson, The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of a Developing GlobalConsciousness (Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, and London and New York: ZedBooks, 2003), 291 pp., US$25.00, ISBN 1856498611.

David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-globalization (Cambridge: PolityPress in association with Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 158 pp., US$19.95, ISBN074562989X.

Brian Galligan, Winsome Roberts and Gabriella Trifiletti, Australians and Globalisation:The Experience of Two Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 217 pp.,$45.00, ISBN 0521010896.

The precise meaning of globalisation continues to be the subject of much controversy. These threebooks have different purposes for their investigations of globalisation and different understandings ofthe concept inform their results. The terms in which globalisation is defined will necessarily impacton any movement towards the realisation of democracy in a global context, hence the importance ofthe debate. Recent literature has attempted to bring a historical perspective to the notion ofglobalisation in order to comparatively investigate the extent of the transformation and the best waysto direct its development. Each of these books engages with historical issues, while questions ofdemocracy and political organisation provide the motivation for doing so.

In The Three Waves of Globalization Robertson argues for a new reading of history which identifiesthe origins of globalisation. He contends that globalisation derives from an impulse towards ‘humaninterconnectiveness’ that has been present throughout history. Globalisation is not therefore exclu-sively ‘Western’ or primarily technological in origin or drive. It is rather the result of a universalhuman dynamic whose history his book attempts to chart. It is an ambitious project. The mostinteresting chapter in the book traces human interconnectiveness to the earliest of times. Humans,Robertson claims, cooperated and imitated instinctively as a more efficient means of survival, securityand well-being. That cooperation led to exchanges in the form of migration, technology andeventually trade that have been global in scope for many centuries and key to shaping social, politicaland economic life.

Robertson identifies three waves of globalisation: the first after 1500 based on trade, the secondafter 1800 based on industrialisation, and the third after 1945 driven by American globalism and anew international architecture. While the first two waves brought exchanges of trade, technology,currencies, people, ideas, food and disease with increasing speed and intensity, they were aimed atconquest rather than communication. The third wave is distinctive for Robertson in that it alone wasdriven, at least initially and in part, by a genuine desire to build a more inclusive and consensualinstitutional global framework, and a conscious attempt to construct a truly global community.

While the present wave of globalisation has forms specific to its time, Robertson’s historicalanalysis identifies much continuity with its predecessors. Like the first two waves, Americanglobalism is vulnerable to overextension, excess, exclusions and ultimately to collapse. That many ofthe inequalities which have arisen are not from globalisation itself but are from the particularstrategies employed to drive globalisation are evidence of this potential. In order to avoid this we must

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meet three challenges: economic democratisation, environmental sustainability and multiculturalaccommodation. Justice in these areas requires us to harness ‘our nascent global consciousness’ formore inclusive readings of the history of globalisation and plans for its future.

This book is at its best when it highlights the continuity that globalisation in its current form shareswith previous historical eras. Much of what is considered the result of modern and contemporary(sometimes Western) excesses, argues Robertson, have been common features of human history:environmental destruction, resource depletion, extraordinary technological change, population press-ure and species extinction all have historical precedents. The book is particularly effective inhighlighting the globalisation of ideas as a multi-directional phenomenon (how racism, for example,became an ideology and system of political administration exported to colonies, internalised andtransported to the Americas via slavery; or tracing the origins of laissez-faire economics to the Daoistideal of wu wei). Charting these flows creates spaces to ask new, historically- and critically-informedquestions about what globalisation is, about its place in human history, and where it might lead. Assuch, the historical perspective Robertson brings is an extensive, imaginative and impressivecontribution to the literature on this topic.

Robertson is not so successful or thought provoking in his attempt to outline a strategy for a moreinclusive direction for contemporary globalisation. Like other cosmopolitan approaches, his sugges-tions allude to the democratisation of global economic governance without providing any real cluesas to how people on the ground might be more empowered by top-down institutional reforms at theglobal level. While he raises the need for democratisation at the local, family and relationship levelhis ideas on this are not so imaginatively developed. This is disappointing, given the insight andenormous breadth of his historical analysis.

Cosmopolitan theorists Held and McGrew also provide a top-down analysis of globalisation and thepotential for global governance. Their book Globalization/Anti-globalization is an updated andexpanded version of a chapter from their edited volume Global Transformations Reader. The bookis extremely successful as a short and concise summary of the globalisation debate. It provides a clearand informative account of the arguments for and against the significance and novelty of globalisation(globalists and sceptics), and arguments for and against globalisation in its neoliberal manifestation.The book provides historical context to key ideas within the debate: sovereignty, nationalism, identity,culture, political community, state and other forms of power. It grounds its account in solid analysisof trade, production, finance, governance, labour, wealth and poverty, alongside recognition of howthe facts of globalisation can be represented differently for different purposes. This informed andsuccinct discussion of an extremely complex debate adds to the authors’ considerable contributionsto the field and is an ideal teaching resource.

Such an intentionally short summary is vulnerable to over-simplification of the globalisation debate.Yet the authors avoid this for the most part, being careful to note the crossover between differentapproaches and to present positions as archetypes rather than those of specific authors. The title andmethod of identifying literature in terms of globalisation/anti-globalisation is unfortunate since muchof the detail in the book provides a more nuanced picture of the range of relevant literature.

The emphasis in this book is on the economic and governance of the economic. The final chaptergoes some way towards articulating an agenda for cosmopolitan social democracy—a multilateralgovernmental and civil society framework for governing globalisation. While the authors acknowl-edge the significance of social movements, their discussion of global governance nevertheless remainsat the institutional level. Consequently, one significant omission is a discussion of some of the moreturbulent ethnic, cultural and identity politics emerging as global movements.

In terms of Held and McGrew’s summary of positions, Galligan, Roberts and Trifiletti fit squarelyinto the sceptics’ category of the globalisation debate—at least in relation to Australia. In Australiansand Globalisation, a historical analysis is employed to counter and moderate claims about thesignificance of current forms of globalisation and to demonstrate the historically global character ofAustralian citizenship and governance. The book raises important questions about the extent to whichthe Australian state and its political community have been changed by global forces.

The authors make two main claims. The first is that the effects of globalisation as a newphenomenon upon Australia are overstated. In contrast to the state/sovereignty-in-decline thesis, theyargue that Australia has never been truly sovereign. Over the past two centuries, Australia’sgovernment and citizenship has been negotiated through imperial and federal relations such thatmultiple legal jurisdictions and global forces have been a feature of Australian political life and ofthe experience of Australian citizenship.

Second, the authors argue that—despite the contrary findings of the Australian Citizenship

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Council’s 2000 Report—Australia does indeed have a distinct political life and culture of citizenship.They argue that the Council’s emphasis on ‘diversity’ underestimates the commonalities of main-stream Australian political life, based on an identification with political institutions as well as apersistent degree of homogeneity. For Galligan et al citizenship is to do with political rather thancultural identity and Australians’ sense of the former has been shaped by the nation’s globalisedrelations over the last two centuries. The authors pursue a concept of citizenship that is multidimen-sional, encompassing loyalties and affiliations to local state, national, and international governingbodies. At the same time, they isolate a distinctly Australian character to political identity which hasbeen shaped by this multi-layered experience of citizenship.

The authors argue that Australia’s historical international relations have made ‘globalisation’ a partof the nation’s experience from its inception. They provide a wealth of historical detail to demonstratehow various governments have mediated global influences in this sense. A weakness in this approach,however, is the slide within the term globalisation from interstate and imperial relations of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries to qualitatively different integrated globalised economies, commu-nications networks, consumer-culture and transnational communities of identity in which Australiaand Australians are currently involved. While sections of the introductory chapters acknowledge thespecific qualities of contemporary globalisation, the authors contest the significance of thesetransformations (for both government and citizenship) relative to Australia’s global past. WhileRobertson’s historical case for globalisation attempts to chart the flow of ideas between a variety ofcontinents and peoples, Galligan et al rely heavily on Australia’s relationship with Britain to maketheir case. A later chapter discussing the place of international law in Australia’s history is moreconvincing in terms of highlighting a global relationship that goes beyond that of two states and theircolonial interactions.

The strength of Galligan, Roberts and Trifiletti’s work is as an introductory text for Australiansseeking an inroad to the globalisation debate within the context of their own political history.Robertson, Held and McGrew engage more directly and substantively with the subject of globalisa-tion. They investigate the phenomenon as a key point of material and discursive analysis vital to thedemocratic relationships it may be possible to pursue in political life beyond the nation-state.

ANNE MCNEVIN

Australian National University

Frank Stilwell, Political Economy: The Contest of Economic Ideas (Melbourne: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002), xii � 440 pp., $49.95, ISBN 0195514580.

The establishment of political economy as a field of study in Australia has involved a long and oftenbitter struggle. Nowhere has this been more evident than at the University of Sydney. Politicaleconomy has become established as a relatively autonomous discipline area at Sydney, now the onlyhigher education institution in Australia which offers degree programs in the subject. Stilwell’sPolitical Economy: The Contest of Economic Ideas is very much a product of this struggle to establisha place within universities for a voice that challenges the conventional wisdom of economicorthodoxy.

The study is an ambitious one, not only because it charts the parameters of the intellectualfoundations of economic thought generally and political economy more particularly but also becauseit seeks to introduce the reader to the influences that shape ‘modern political economy’. In the process,it draws upon a range of traditions, from the liberal through to the heretical and the more radicalcritiques of economic orthodoxy. The measure of the ambitious character of Political Economy is alsoevident in the way in which Stilwell expands upon the schema for interrogating the intellectualconcerns of economic discourse. The study moves beyond the standard trinity of questions—theessentially allocative issues of what is produced; how it is produced; and, for whom—to posit abroader remit of issues warranting our critical consideration: ‘What is happening? Why? Who gainsand who loses? Does it matter? If so, what can be done and by whom?’ This sets the basis for briefoutlines of the dominant theoretical traditions that have defined economic discourse. These include:classical political economy, Marxist economics, neoclassical economic theory, Keynesian economictheory and institutional economics. The summary of each of these different traditions is succinct andprovides a sound introduction to the appreciation of key conceptual concerns of the respectiveperspectives.

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The exploration of the contest of economic ideas is extended by introducing some of the concernsof ‘modern political economy’. Interestingly, rather than approach this challenge through a ‘compar-ative paradigms’ framework, the author approaches the survey of developments by identifying someof the key subjects of concern concentrating the political economists’ oeuvre. These include:‘economy and the environment’; ‘technology, industry and work’; ‘class, gender and ethnicity’; and‘the state’. This provides for a less didactic and more pluralist introduction to the evolution of‘modern political economy’. It is one that prompts the advocacy of a radical political economy asproviding the mantle for addressing the questions of what forces are driving change and the inequitiesand uncertainties that are engendered by this change.

Structuring the survey in this manner also prompts some critical reflection on the role of economictheory in framing the direction of change. Not surprisingly, neoclassical economic theory isintroduced as the intellectual adversary. It is taken to task partly because its ‘pseudo-scientific“positive economics” approach’ is so narrowly defined and because it largely avoids addressingquestions of equity and economic uncertainty. It is also questioned because it has become theintellectual rationale for a whole gamut of conservative policies, including the deregulation putsch.Neoclassical economic theory provides the intellectual justification for neoliberalism, shaping policiesto free the movement of capital and finance from the regulatory authority of the state and the policiesthat enforce the deregulation of labour markets. It is the basis for ‘economic rationalism’, and theprivatisation or outsourcing of a whole range of public services. The ‘Who gains? Who loses?’questions have an unambiguous response. The neoliberal economic and political agenda has enhancedthe power of capitalists vis-a-vis workers, consumers and others dependent upon government servicesfor their well-being, and this cannot be justified on equity grounds.

Political Economy: The Contest of Economic Ideas provides an important entree for students andothers who are discomforted with the present engagement with neoliberalism and its deleteriousconsequences. The study provides a starting point for considering the impact of the effect ofgovernments abandoning responsibility for endeavouring to ameliorate the plight of the people and thenatural environment that capitalism has so blatantly failed. It also provides something of a springboardfor those looking for a foundation upon which to develop a critique of the more contemporaryconcerns of the orthodoxy—especially those which are not surveyed, including the new neoclassicaleconomics and game theorists. Most importantly, it helps set an agenda that invites students andothers to critically engage with the more recent research endeavours that define contemporary radicalpolitical economy. Herein lie the foundations for challenging the economic orthodoxy that has cometo define policy making.

STUART ROSEWARNE

University of Sydney

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