Book reviews

Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transforma-tion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Peter Evans's Embedded Autonomy provides a remarkable analysis ofthe conditions under which states in newly industrializing countriesencourage and cajole private enterprises to pursue the dynamic entre-preneurial strategies that such scholars as Schumpeter and AlbertHirschman saw as being the key to successful industrial development.In doing so, it musters insights from both political and economic soci-ology about the nature of state power and the relations between statesand society that inform a serious attack on rational-choice theoriesthat view the state as an inhibitor rather than facilitator of economicdevelopment. Indeed, for Evans the critical question is not how muchstate intervention is necessary for development, but what kind ^ aquestion, he suggests, that can only be answered adequately through acomparative institutional analysis of states and state-society relations.

He argues that because di¡erent types of state structures create di¡er-ent capacities for state intervention these structures de¢ne the rangeof roles that states can pursue. Developmental outcomes depend onwhether these roles ¢t the surrounding social context and how wellthey are executed by political elites. For instance, ` predatory'' stateslike Zaire lack the bureaucratic institutions (e.g., corporate coherence,meritocratic recruitment, professionalism, esprit de corps) necessaryto ensure political elites enough autonomy to resist curruption andcapture by actors whose rent-seeking behavior would otherwise derailthe state's e¡orts to promote development and formulate policy in thenational interest. This is why predatory states rarely succeed in fosteringeconomic development. In contrast, Japan, Taiwan, and other ``devel-opmental'' states have more mature bureaucracies and thus greaterautonomy that has enabled them to promote development success-fully. However, developmental states are not completely insulated fromsociety either. Instead, they are embedded in a dense network of socialties that enable political elites to negotiate goals, policies, and imple-mentation strategies with business actors. These are not personal,clientelistic ties but rather connections between constituencies and thestate as an organization. Neither autonomy nor embeddedness alone is

Theory and Society 27: 103^146, 1998.ß 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

enough to ensure success. Both must be carefully balanced for states tomove beyond simply regulating production at arms length or be-coming producers themselves. In short, states must enjoy embeddedautonomy to provide the appropriate incentives for entrepreneurial¢rms to £ourish and become strong enough to compete e¡ectively inthe global market place.

This argument is based on Evans's analysis of the promotion of theinformation-technology sector during the 1970s and 1980s in Korea,Brazil, and India. Korea is a developmental state insofar as elites with-in a mature state bureaucracy maintained close ties to conglomeratebusiness groups (chaebol) that enabled them to devise and implement avariety of policies providing local technology ¢rms with protectionfrom international competition and incentives and resources to devel-op research and production facilities. For instance, the Korean govern-ment provided substantial ¢nancial support and tax relief for R&D,grants for cooperative research projects, and other inducements tostimulate the development of cutting-edge computer memory chips.Eventually, Korean ¢rms grew strong enough to thrive in the inter-national market for chips and other computer technologies.

Brazil is an ` intermediate'' state because its institutions were lessmature than Korea's but more so than those of predatory states.Although some technology agencies were well-established bureauc-racies, other parts of the state apparatus were not and operated onthe basis of clientelism and self-aggrandizement. The absence of fullydeveloped bureaucratic institutions throughout the state often under-mined the stability and coherence of technology policy and inhibitedpolitical elites from establishing regular ties to market actors that mighthave resulted in the administrative guidance necessary for widespreaddevelopmental success. For instance, some technology agencies triedto cultivate hardware and software ¢rms but failed when they becamemired in interministerial rivalries and politics associated with a state inwhich political elites were often more concerned with guarding theirturf then pursuing good public policy. India is also an intermediatecase but for di¡erent reasons. Although the Indian state resembled theWeberian bureaucratic ideal more than Brazil did, its relations withsociety were far more complex. In particular, India was more frag-mented along ethnic, religious, and regional lines than Brazil and stillhad a politically powerful land-owning class, all of which made it di¤-cult for the state to negotiate industrial-transformation policies withsocial actors. It could not always count on the private sector for either

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informatin about what policies were likely to work or help implement-ing them. Thus, the Indian state tended to assume responsibility as adirect producer of information technology during the initial stages ofdevelopment and manufacturing processes never became a source ofstrength for local technology companies. To be sure, both countriesenjoyed some successes but because Brazil lacked enough bureaucraticautonomy and India needed more embeddedness neither one matchedKorea's achievements.

This is not a book simply for those interested in newly industrializingcountries or technology policy per se. Its theoretical implications aremuch broader than that. For instance, those who followed the debatesabout how to ` bring the state back in'' to theories of economic devel-opment and political sociology will be interested in Evans's critique ofearlier work in this tradition that stressed how important it was forpolitical elites to be bureaucratically insulated from classes, interestgroups, and others in society in order to formulate and pursue policygoals in a coherent and systematic manner that yields intended results.Evans is clear that both Weber and more recent scholars within thistradition missed an important part of the story. Although the bureau-cratic conditions necessary for disciplined and successful industrialpolicy making are many, success depends heavily on political elitesbeing accessible to and working closely with entrepreneurs and ¢rms^ not being cut o¡ from them. It is the delicate blend of autonomy andembeddedness that makes the di¡erence. Furthermore, whereas eco-nomic sociologists have grown fond of noting how economic activityis embedded in social institutions, Evans £eshes out this metaphor byshowing that it is the state that often provides the institutional contextwithin which economic activity occurs and that economic outcomesare determined by the types of constraints and incentives that politicalelites create for entrepreneurs and ¢rms. In other words, it is notenough just to understand that economies are embedded in politicaland social relations, one must seek to understand the di¡erent ways inwhich relations of embeddedness are structured and what e¡ects thishas on economic outcomes. In this sense, the book resonates clearlywith other scholars of development, including Gary Hamilton andNicole Biggart, Alice Amsden and Robert Wade, as well as observersof economic policy and institutional development in advanced capitalistcountries, such as Fred Block,Wolfgang Streeck, and Peter Hall.

Despite the book's important contributions to these literatures thereare some important questions that remain unanswered. First, Evans's

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treatment is tilted toward an analysis of state structures at the expenseof economic structures. By this I do notmean that he holds the state asthe ultimate determinant of all outcomes, a criticism that has occa-sionally been leveled against others who have sought to bring the stateback in to political-economic analysis. His emphasis on the institu-tional nexus of state and economy mitigates statist reductionism. How-ever, he devotes much less attention to the institutional arrangement of¢rms and entrepreneurs than to state agencies and political elites in histhree countries. There were important di¡erences, particularly insofaras much of the Korean economy was organized through a set of well-established business groups whereas Brazil and India were not. Mightnot the relative success of Korea's developmental state have turned asmuch on the institutional arrangement of its business community as itdid on the state's bureaucratic structure and its connections with¢rms? Perhaps the presence of well-organized business networks inthe ¢rst place facilitated precisely the sort of embeddedness that hesuggests is so important. Indeed, the literature on West European cor-poratism as well as some scholarship on political economic bargainingin Japan, notably Richard Samuels's The Business of the JapaneseState, suggests that economic structures are just as important as statestructures in facilitating the sort of policies that Evans deems so essen-tial in newly industrializing countries. In fact, the issue of economicstructure begins to emerge more clearly at the end of the book whenhe notes that strong links between local technology ¢rms and trans-national corporations frequently developed as local ¢rms becamemore successful ^ a situation, he argues, that may jeopardize thestate's relationship with domestic ¢rms and subvert its developmentpolicies in the future. But this important insight is more of an ap-pendage to the basic argument than integral to it. A more balancedanalytic approach that grants relatively equal weight to the institu-tional arrangement of state, economy, and their intersection, albeit inthe context of advanced capitalism, can be found, for example, in PeterKatzenstein's Between Power and Plenty. Because Evans is familiarwith Katzenstein's later work and relies heavily on it for a brief dis-cussion of Austrian corporatism in order to generalize the basic argu-ment, it is surprising that he does not give this issue more attention.

Second, Evans acknowledges that an important ingredient for success-ful developmental policy is that political elites share a common senseof purpose and direction, an esprit de corps, which they acquire duringtheir training at the same handful of elite universities. This, of course,raises the issue of shared cognitive structures, ideology, and political

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culture as determinants of political economic outcomes ^ a subject thathas become fashionable lately particularly among political sociologistsand organization theorists. Because Evans treats the professional andideological conviction of political elites as one among several dimen-sions by which we can measure bureaucratic development, rather thandealing with it separately as an independent causal factor in its ownright, neoinstitutionalist scholars such as John Meyer and Frank Dob-bin, who are interested in how culture and cognitive structures a¡ectpolicy making and institutional development, are likely to ¢nd thebook somewhat disappointing. In particular, some may object to thelack of attention given to how national political cultures may havevaried across Korea, India, and Brazil in ways that accounted fordi¡erent outcomes. The book never addresses this question. Nor doesit explore in much detail the possibility, dear to many neoinstitutional-ists, that national policies tend to converge over time due to the world-wide di¡usion of common policy practices. Are these three countriesmoving toward a common approach to development policy? Are theremechanisms facilitating such convergence, such as the in£uence oftransnational corporations? Although Evans recognizes that duringthe early years his countries exhibited some similarities in their stra-tegic approaches to the development of technology industries, he in-sists that there was enough variation among national institutions tomilitate against convergence over the long run. Yet again he neverconfronts the popular neoinstitutionalist claim or seeks to engage theirperspective.

On the other hand, neoinstitutionalists as well as many others will befavorably struck by Evans's rejection of simple rational-choice argu-ments that view all political elites as inevitably self-interested and thusall states as ultimately predatory. Indeed, one of the book's mostimportant points is that neoliberal theories of development that acceptrational-choice assumptions about political behavior and thereforemaintain that less bureaucracy and political intervention is the key todevelopmental success are simply wrong. Evans mobilizes an impres-sive amount of evidence to prove this point. Moreover, they will takeheart in his critique of theories of comparative advantage, which assertthat developmental success is determined by a nation's inherent re-source endowments or its position in the global division of labor.Instead, Evans demonstrates that comparative advantage, at least inthe computer industry, is socially constructed, as a result of the inter-action between institutional settings and strategic decision making,and that it is the state that bears much responsibility for seeing to it

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that things turn out right. As a result, there is a lesson here for policymakers as well as academics who debate development policies ^ alesson that is just as germane for both advanced capitalist and post-communist European countries, where there have been strong pres-sures to adopt neoliberal policies, as it is for newly industrializingcountries.

In summary, Embedded Autonomy is a richly detailed volume of broadtheoretical scope that will capture the attention of readers even if theyare not interested in the particulars of the information-technologyindustry per se. This is a very important book that will be widely citedand discussed by political and economic sociologists, area specialists,and scholars interested in the development of newly industrializing aswell as advanced capitalist countries. It is a tour de force.

Dartmouth College John L. Campbell

Neera Chandhoke, State and Civil Society. Explorations in PoliticalTheory. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, and London: Sage Publications,1995.

Neera Chandhoke is a member of an unusually gifted cohort of politi-cal theorists from New Dehli (the others include Rajeev Bhargava,Gurpreet Mahajan, and Niraja Gopal Jayal) whose writings are not aswell known in what we think of as ``the West'' as they deserve to be.State and Civil Society is a case in point. Now that books with similartitles are burgeoning all around us, it would be a great pity if this onegot lost in the £ood, for it is an impressive accomplishment, one thatcuts through a lot of the conceptual confusion that the broader inun-dation all too frequently washes up.

One of the reasons State and Civil Society is such an eye-opener has todo with the book's Indian provenance that, instead of making Chand-hoke's argument seem restricted or parochial, manages to broaden andsharpen it. The problems facing India provide her with a timely spring-board for her overall argument. Chandhoke's is an urgent, impassionedbook. She sees no virtue in being dispassionate, neutral, or ` value-free,'' convinced as she is that the kind of civil society she would like tosee in India is today as never before threatened, not from within civilsociety but from outside it, by resurgent religious fundamentalism. Yet

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this resurgence had its preconditions, and these were all political pre-conditions. In Chandhoke's own words, ``the repression of the Telen-gala armed struggle, the banning of the Communist Party in the earlydays of Independence, the brutal measures taken against the Naxalites,the declaration of emergency in 1975, the virtual occupation by thearmy of the North-East of the country, the violation of civil liberties inPunjab and Kashmir, and the various Draconian acts passed by theparliament'' ^ all these had already ``created a neutralized civil society^ one that can function only according to the norms laid down by thestate.'' All of the above are instances of ``the overreach of the state''that always results in ``the submergence of civil society.''

Thus, when in 1992 Hindu vigilantes demolished the Ayodhaya mos-que, ` what was brought down was not simply a mosque, but an entireedi¢ce of democratic life in India, an edi¢ce which had been painstak-ingly constructed out of the rubble of Partition in 1947.'' The SanghParivar ^ the electoral arm of which is the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) ^ ` claims to abide by democratic norms (but) is actually acounter-civil society and hence anti-democratic movement because itprivileges religious a¤liation over any other identity ^ that of thecitizen, for example . . . it denies the importance of individuals asindividuals who deserve dignity and respect irrespective of their reli-gious a¤liations.'' Civil society has been ` engulfed by in£uences thatemanate from particularistic loyalties such as religion, caste, tribe,ethnicity, linguistic a¤liation.'' The grim thought is provoked at thisjuncture that of this inventory, only caste is well-nigh restricted toIndia. When Chadhoke writes that ` intensifying communal and castetensions, the construction of linguistic and regional identities, socialand political polarizations and the politics of intolerance threaten todemolish the public sphere,'' it is clear ^ as our sorry century begins topeter out ^ that these particular bells are bells that toll for all of us.

Chanhoke's is not a counsel of despair in the face of these unwelcomedevelopments, but she refrains from taking the easy way out andinvoking the state as their solution ^ another instance of India's work-ing to the advantage of an argument that is designed to be of muchbroader application. Chandhoke regards the nation-state in general as` the most mythologized of all institutions of the modern world,'' andits Indian variant as being well-nigh fatally contaminated. The Indianstate, itself ` vulnerable to these chauvinistic passions'' is in no positionto counteract them. Since the consensual model represented by theNehruvian model has exhausted itself, the solution to India's social

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and cultural problems ^ which as Chandhoke forcefully and rightlyinsists are political problems in the last analysis ^ can only lie in arejuvenated and politically-conscious civil society. In general, saysChandhoke, the logic of civil society is marked by communication andcommunity (community of the kind that is the reverse and not theexpression of Indian communalism); the logic of the state, by contrast,is that of bureaucracy and authoritarianism. It simply won't do todevalue or depoliticize the ` zone of engagement'' that civil societycould, in principle, provide, or to identify politics with the state insuch a way that it gets severed from the ` processes of a¤rmation andcontestation in civil society,'' processes that are themselves putativelydemocratic in character. To identify democracy with the practices ofthe state is to run the risk of reducing it to staged political events orrituals (elections, plebiscites, parliamentary representation) that aredesigned to rea¤rm the legitimacy of the state, not to do anythingabout what assails people in civil society. Institutions like politicalparties, trade unions, and pressure groups, bureaucratized and far re-moved from the constituencies they are supposed to serve, can simplycolonize the life-worlds of the people (as Habermas might put it) if left^ as they should not be left ^ to their own devices.

As Chandhoke goes on to indicate, it is the very di¡erent ` call fornetworks of self-help independent of the state'' that ` constitutes thedi¡erentia speci¢ca of contemporary thinking.'' This is in large measure` because it is opposed to older forms of struggle which called for eithera share in or a takeover of state power.'' New social movements ^ muchas these are conceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mou¡e ^relocate the discourse of democracy from the political to the civildomain, and this is precisely their value, now that ` the fairly lengthyhoneymoon of the Keynesian, the welfare, the command model andthe developmentalist state is obviously over.'' ` Rather than a once-in-an-epoch event like a revolution, what is needed is a civil society thatcontinually re-enacts itself and which brings about slow and incre-mental ^ but substantial ^ changes in the state.''

It should not be thought, however, that Chandhoke settles on civilsociety either as a hypostatized panacea or by a process of elimination^ whereby the state as an instrument of regeneration is summarilywritten o¡ and civil society simply substituted in its place. Chandhoke,to the contrary, is severely critical of such approaches; she insists thatstate and civil society should not be conceptualized as oppositionalcategories operating at each other's expense, as they are in much con-

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temporary theorizing of the kind that (consciously or unconsciously)re-runs the excesses of the classical political economists. Civil societyon her understanding of it should not in any case be treated as aresidual, catch-all, portmanteau category, as everything that the stateis not. Chandhoke, who has read her Hegel, Marx, and Gramsci (aswell as the classical political economists) with some care, insists thatthat the concept of civil society has much more speci¢city, and muchmore promise, than ` residual'' understandings of its character mightsuggest. Civil society, which does not admit of reduction to ` the mar-ket,'' lies between the economy and the state, and is constituted byboth. State and civil society, on this understanding, are relational cate-gories that cannot be understood or even identi¢ed in abstraction fromeach other: ``civil society,'' in Chandhoke's words, ` only acquires rele-vance in relation to the state.'' The concept of civil society ¢rst cameinto existence, she reminds us, when classical political economistssought to control (or derail) the power of the mercantilist state, andthe concept was subsequently resurrected whenever the power of thestate needed to be challenged or controlled.The present day is one suchmoment ^ and certainly not just in India. While she admits that thecurrent return of civil society to our political vocabulary has in partstemmed from neoliberal projects such as privatization, de-nationali-zation, deregulation, and de-statization, which aim to ` roll back thestate,'' she wants none of us to accept the truncated understanding ofcivil society ^ as the market ^ such an agenda implies, since the sameargument that calls for ` rolling back the state'' can unleash the marketand pulverize the individual autonomy and liberty that is civil society'svery basis.

The overpowering states of our epoch, which of course had no historicalcounterparts in the heyday of classical political economy, can be heldin check not by marketization but only ` through democratic practicesof an independent civil society.'' This is today ``increasingly concep-tualized as a sphere where a plurality of associations bring individualstogether in common concerns'' and not as ` a negative space, a spacewhere the state doesn't interfere.'' Civil society, if it is to be re-charged,should be seen more positively, more actively, as a space where indi-viduals fashion a political discourse, or come to voice. Public discourseso conceived ` comes up against all e¡orts of absolutist states to restrictpolitics to the palace.''

Chandhoke's central point is that ` the concerns of our age prompt ade¢nition of civil society that brings together the insights of . . . liberals

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and those of . . . Marxists.'' To the extent that they treat the state aspublic and civil society as private, liberals ` depoliticize power rela-tions'' in civil society and by extension throughout society at large. Butif ``liberals concentrate on the oppressions of the state, but . . . do notinquire into the oppressions of civil society'' ^ an accusation, inci-dentally, which may be true of some liberals, but which is untrue iflevelled against Mill or Tocqueville ^ Marxists, for their part, fail tosee civil society ` as a meaningful sphere of rights, publicity, debate anddiscussion which has the potential both to control the state and achieveinternal democracy.'' Chandhoke makes out a powerful case that this isthe way civil society should, indeed must, be seen today.

Civil society was Hegel's ` achievement of the modern world,'' Marx's` theater of history.'' The inhabitant of civil society is not just homooeconomicus; he is also, and more importantly, the citizen in statunascendi ^ because he is the unencumbered individual whose mem-bership in civil society is not based on inherited or ascribed status.The leitmotifs of civil society ever since its inception have been asso-ciational life based on voluntary, revocable membership, along withacceptance of diversity, dialogue, mutual respect, and tolerance.Chandhoke's civil society really is civil in the sense of being based oncivility. It cannot, pace some liberals, be reduced to the separation of` private'' from ` public'' because it did not originate in this separation.The Greek oikos signi¢ed a private sphere separated from a politicalsociety de¢ned as public. But the oikos was a residual space to whichpeople who did not enjoy the bene¢ts of citizenship were, in e¡ect,banished. Civil society by contrast is at once the sphere where activitiescentral to society at large are organized and the topos of citizenship.

It was Hegel who removed civil society from being identi¢ed with theeconomy. ``Civil society in the Hegelian formulation is not negativelyde¢ned as the area of freedom where the state should not interfere .. .It becomes the active moment where the dialectic between particularand universal is resolved.'' But it lacks the wherewithal to resolve theseunaided; indeed, civil society is prone to fragmentation and even dis-solution. ` The civility of civil society depends upon its being verticallyorganized into the state.'' Civil society is the arena where individualscome to recognize themselves as social beings ^ this is the strength ofthe Hegelian formulation ^ and where individuals can learn toleranceand civility, because individual self-realization is bound up with anddepends upon the self-realization of others.

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To turn the argument one more notch, even if most civil societies have(historically) denied democratic political identity (and Chandhoke isunder no illusions about this), there can today be no democraticpolitical identity without civil society. To recognize this ^ as Hegel,blithely unconcerned about democracy (or scared of it) failed to do ^is to acknowledge an agenda. Before civil society can play its desiredrole and democratize the state, it must interrogate and democratizeitself. ` For the radical political theorist,'' says Chandhoke, ` the recon-struction of civil society is in the nature of an emancipatory design,''and we all have work to do. Chandhoke puts her case pungently andcourageously. One could, of course, cavil and quibble and ask what(for instance) a democratized prison system or stock exchange couldpossibly look like. (Indeed the present reviewer ^ Chandhoke hasmade him less cynical ^ once posed this very question elsewhere). ButChandhoke doesn't need to establish that all institutions in civil societyare equally susceptible to democratization. She simply needed to showthat some of them are, and are so in principle, and this she has donewith stunning clarity. This is more than enough for one good book. Ican only hope that other good books ^ ones that answer the question` how?'' as well as the question ` why?'' ^ will duly follow in its wake.

University of California-Berkeley Paul Thomas

Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism. ACritical Study.Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1995.

It is a paradox of our sad century that one of its central politicaldoctrines, Marxism, took shape amidst ^ perhaps even because of ^its practitioners' astounding ignorance of what its founder had written.The belated publication of Marx's Economic and Political Manuscriptsof 1844 is doubtless the most celebrated case in point. But it is oftenforgotten that even The German Ideology did not see print in anylanguage ^ in any version ^ before the 1930s, by which time its argu-ments had to be brought into line with another set of arguments thathad already been consecrated as the ` o¤cial'' or ``orthodox'' Marxismof the Soviet Union.

Kevin Anderson's arresting book, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism,is positioned on the fault-line of this gap, where theory and practicesignally failed to meet. Anderson's thesis ^ that in one respect, at least,

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Lenin as well as Marx falls through this gap, and that Lenin's buriedwritings, as well as Marx's, point down a road not taken ^ is notlacking in audacity. Anderson's examination and contextualization ofLenin's 1914^15 ``Hegel Notebooks'' lead him to believe that Lenin'swork in these years ` places him closer to key Hegelian or `Western'Marxists such as Georg Lukacs and the members of the FrankfurtSchool than to orthodox Marxists, including o¤cial Soviet Marxist-Leninists.'' In particular, Lenin ` developed a radical concept of sub-jectivity from his reading of Hegel, carrying him far beyond the scien-tistic and objectivistic materialism of the Marxism of the SecondInternational.''

If Anderson is right about this, the ironies run deep, at two distinct butpresumably related levels. The ¢rst centers around Lenin's aphorism:` It is impossible fully to grasp Marx's Capital, and especially its ¢rstchapter, if you have not studied .. . and understood the whole of Hegel'sLogic. Consequently, none of the Marxists for the past half centuryhave understood Marx!'' This cryptic aphorism, which Andersonglosses very painstakingly, amounts in his opinion not just to acriticism of Plekhanov, and through Plekhanov of Engels; it amountsalso to an autocritique on Lenin's part, for Hegel's Logic underminesthe crude copy theory of perception Lenin had outlined inMaterialismand Empirio-Criticism (1908). Not only was Lenin ` the ¢rst Marxistof the twentieth century to stress the `Hegelianism' of Chapter Oneof Capital ''; the second level of Anderson's argument is that ``Lenin inhis post^1914 writings creatively extended the Marxist dialectic fromone of labor versus capital inside Europe and North America to onethat also embraced early twentieth-century national liberation move-ments in such countries as China, India and Iran as a central form ofthe dialectics of revolution in the era of imperialism.When these con-nections were missed or ignored by many Western Marxists, a vitallink between the dialectic proper and new forms of subjectivity waslost . . . . All too frequently, the realm of Western Marxism has been oneof philosophy and culture, cut o¡ from living social movements in theindustrialized countries and the third world, movements of people ofcolor, youth and women. These movements, in turn, were robbed of theinsights that could have been gained from a philosophy of liberationrooted in Hegel and Marx. All too often, these movements encoun-tered Marxism in the truncated, undialectical form of Marxist-Leninistvanguardism.''

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These poignant, well-intentioned sentiments have much to commendthem, at least to this reviewer. But look at their trajectory. They startout from one Lenin, the author of the ``Hegel Notebooks,'' then spiralaway from him, only to come home to roost on another Lenin, theLenin Anderson admits is the paterfamilias of ` Marxist-Leninistvanguardism.'' This means that a great deal hangs on Anderson'scapacity to connect what Lenin derived from Hegel in 1914^15 withthe ``new forms of subjectivity'' he (proleptically?) outlines. Sad to say,he does not make the connections very clear. He wants to insist ^ andthis is the most original part of his thesis ^ that ` Lenin's post-1914writings on imperialism and national liberation were grounded insome important ways in his `Hegel Notebooks,' '' but is at his murkiestwhen he tries to specify what these ` ways'' were. I don't know what tomake of a sentence like the following, for instance: ``Hegel's critique .. .of the Kantian focus on phenomena instead of notions will later beused by Lenin to attack other Marxist theorists writing on imperial-ism.'' But I assure you it's there. Much is held to depend on onesentence from Lenin's Imperialism: ` Capitalism only became capitalistimperialism at a de¢nite and very high stage of its development, whencertain of its fundamental assumptions began to change into theiropposites.'' Such change, Anderson earnestly assures us, ` was funda-mental to the `Hegel Notebooks.' ''A skeptic would be quick to add thatit is fundamental to many other works too, Marx's Eighteenth Brumaireamong them.

To make these points against it is by no means to invalidate Anderson'sargument altogether. It is to characterize it as needlessly exaggerated.It is still salutary to be reminded that Lenin was ` the only Marxistleader of his generation to have made an extensive study of Hegel'' (hisabstract of Hegel's Science of Logic runs to 150 pages) and that ` Lenindevoted himself to Hegel in the midst of the most important politicaland organizational crisis of his life'' (before 1917). And it may beremarkable, not just noteworthy, that Lenin found himself ` astoundedby the degree to which Hegel conceives of logic as being not abstractbut directly connected with daily human activity and practice,'' andthat ` Lenin sees in Hegel not an abstract and otherworldly idealismbut key links to materialism and to practice.'' That this provides anunexpected echo of Marx's 1844 ` Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic'' ^a text that Lenin could never have encountered ^ is not at issue. Norindeed is the further point that Lenin, far from inadvertently repeatingwhat Marx had said, actually adds to it by focussing on Hegel's Logic^ for Marx had privileged The Phenomenology of Spirit. Again, if we

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look at the matter prospectively as well as retrospectively, it is by nomeans fanciful to identify what Lenin, however brie£y, derived fromHegel's Logic as a presentiment of important features of what came tobe known as ``Western Marxism.'' There is a strong case to be madethat Lenin's excursus into Hegel, had it been better known, could havecontributed to the enterprise of ` Western Marxism,'' perhaps ^ whoknows? ^ even as a foundational text.

If there is such a case to be made, does Anderson make it? Sad to say,he overstates it instead. After all, it follows from none of the abovepoints that Lenin can or should be regarded as ` the ¢rst HegelianMarxist of the twentieth century,'' save in a momentary and intermit-tent sense. Nor is the claim the only example of theoretical overkill.Leszek Kolakowski ^ no admirer of Lenin, as Anderson is quick toindicate ^ observed in Main Currents of Marxism that Lenin's ``HegelNotebooks'' ``suggest an interpretation of Hegelianism that is lesssimpli¢ed than Engels's. The dialectic is not merely an assertion that`everything changes' but an attempt to interpret human knowledge as aperpetual interplay between subject and object, in which the `absoluteprimacy' of either loses its sharpness.'' Anderson, who cites this sen-tence, goes on not simply to concur with it, but to stretch Kolakowski'spoint beyond all reasonable bounds. Lenin's understanding of thedialectic, we are now assured, ``has been a rich source for subsequentMarxist and radical theory;'' Lenin's `Abstract'' of Lenin's Science ofLogic ``helped pave the way for Gramsci, Korsch, Marcuse, Lefebvre,Bloch and Dunayavskaya.'' The road not taken seems a well-travelledone after all. If Anderson here is making a case for the historicalin£uence of Lenin's writings on Hegel, his claim is vitiated by much ofthe evidence about the reception of these writings that he produceshimself. (On the other hand, I would be betraying my trust as reviewerif I failed to indicate that, for my money, Anderson's very able account,in Part III of Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism, of the reception ofthese writings by generations of Marxist stalwarts and ideologues ^Althusser's distortions and evasions in Lenin and Philosophy get par-ticularly short shrift ^ is alone worth the price of his book.)

There is, of course, a deeper problem even with Anderson's narrowerclaim that ` the `Hegel Notebooks' in£uenced not only Lenin's generalconcept of dialectic but also his political and economic writings as awhole.'' This has to do with the fact that Lenin failed publicly to discussHegel ^ ``he never published a book or even an article on Hegeliandialectics'' ^ and this alone led Raya Dunayevskaya to conclude that

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Lenin's life and works are characterized by a marked ``philosophicalambivalence.'' Anderson, far less circumspect than Dunayevskaya inthis respect, is constrained to admit that Lenin ``never made public (hisunpublished) attacks on Plekhanov and vulgar materialism, not evenin his writings on Hegel and dialectics after 1917''; to notice Lenin's` uncritical published references to Engels and Plekhanov, even thoughhe had critiqued their concepts of dialectic in the (Hegel) Notebooks'';and to add that Lenin in 1920 ` allowed the reprinting without changesof his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,'' (along with a new prefacethat says nothing about the ` Hegel Notebooks''). These admissions arevery damaging to Anderson's case. Even if we grant him the point thatthe Notebooks are a distinct philosophical advance over Materialismand Empirio-Criticism ^ and I see no good reason not to grant him this^ we are left with the question of whether this really matters if Leninhimself retreated from his own advance and set an example to otherswho would e¡ectively suppress or distort the ` Hegel Notebooks.'' Inany event, as Anderson is uncomfortably aware (along with the rest ofus), Lenin's well-known ``concept of a centralized vanguard party,which soon after 1917 became the basis of a one-party state, tended tovitiate the whole notion of self-determination.'' Anderson himselfposes the question: ``What was the decentralizing content of the rightto self-determination when the world revolution was supposed to beled by a group of parties under Moscow's discipline?'' The question isa good one. The answer has to involve Lenin's ` failure to work out adialectical critique of his earlier concept of the party,'' as well asAnderson's further point that ` Lenin's concept of the party . . . seriouslyundermined the liberatory concept of notions of the state and revolu-tion and of Soviet power,'' let alone the liberatory content of his 1914^15 dialectic on which these, in Anderson's view, were based. Ander-son's argument has positive and valuable features. For these reasons, itis all the more dismaying to watch it implode at its most central andoriginal point.

University of California-Berkeley Paul Thomas

StephenTurner,The Social Theory of Practices:Tradition,Tacit Knowl-edge, and Presuppositions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Stephen Turner's The Social Theory of Practices is a provocative andcarefully constructed philosophical essay. The book attempts to demon-

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strate, in the style of analytic philosophy, the logical and epistemologicaldi¤culties inherent in accounts of social reality that rely on someversion of the idea that society is in part constituted of ` practices.'' Theterm ``practices,'' in Turner's usage, refers both to shared, tacit presup-positions that make intersubjective order possible within boundedsocial systems, and to forms of embodied knowledge that, through theactions and chains of reciprocal reactions they generate and give senseto, reproduce the structural conditions of their embodiment. WhileTurner acknowledges the heuristic role that practice constructs ofvarious sorts can play in descriptive ethnology, he registers un£aggingindividualist opposition to the ontologizing tendencies of a whole slateof thinkers, including Eè mile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss,Thomas Kuhn,Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, who, he claims,view practices as real and historically e¤cacious collective objects.

Turner's attack on the concept of practices is waged on three fronts.First, using as an example the early nineteenth-century jurist JohnAustin's discussion of the habits of mind conducive to governance saidto have been possessed by successive generations of British gentry,Turner notes that the characterization of practices as supra-individualhistorical entities (such as the ` talent for compromise'' identi¢ed byAustin) implies both that practices have some causal power, and thatpractices can retain their identities over time. Both implicationspresent what Turner calls ``epistemic'' di¤culties. As for the causalpower of practices, a power whose production is mediated at theindividual level through some form of habituation, it is di¤cult todetermine whether the e¡ects hypothesized to result from the workingsof a particular habit stem in fact from the habit in question. The causalnexus between practices and habits on the one hand, and their allegede¡ects on the other hand, can never be scrutinized directly, and it istherefore di¤cult to make inferences about any practice's causale¤cacy.

Equally troubling for Turner is that social practices, unlike other kindsof objects, can only be identi¢ed as objects by culturally situatedobservers whose prior expectations the observed practices violated.Turner illustrates this point by reference to Mauss's 1934 lecture ontechniques of the body. There, in the course of recounting how he cameto identify bodily techniques as an analytically new and distinctiveclass of social phenomena, Mauss described the experience of comingto realize the sociological signi¢cance of the fact that people fromdi¡erent cultures walk with di¡erent gaits. Mauss noticed, while ill in

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a NewYork hospital, that the American nurses he saw around him didnot walk as he would have expected French nurses to walk. It was onlyon returning to France that Mauss realized a great many women therehad adopted `American walking fashions,'' a change he attributed tothe in£uence of American movies, and one that led him to see in bodilyhabits ` the techniques and work of collective and individual practicalreason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repeti-tive faculties'' (Mauss, Economy and Society, 1974, vol. 2, p. 73). Turnerclaims that Mauss would never have identi¢ed ``the American gait'' asa practice, much less as one capable of being transmitted through themedium of the cinema, had not his subconscious cultural expectationsabout women's walking styles been violated. What is true of Mauss'stechniques of the body Turner holds to be true of practices moregenerally: they are never separable from the ` cultural perspectives'' oftheir observers in the sense that they ` do not lose their dependence onthe contrast with unarticulated expectations with which they con£ict''(p. 24). The problem, Turner insists, is that this means there can be noobjective description of practices. By the same token, it becomesdi¤cult to explain how a practice, as an object whose being is sotightly bound up with its being apprehended, can be said to persist onits own strength over time. ` Durkheim's Nightmare,'' according toTurner, is that the conditions under which practices can be constitutedas social facts are not the conditions under which other causal objectsare constituted. There is thus a ``systematic mismatch .. . betweenpractices as a part of the world of cause and practices as they come tobe revealed .. . (p. 24).

Turner's second major argument concerns the idea of practices under-stood as tacit cultural presuppositions. Making reference to work byFoucault, Jacob Burckhardt, and members of the Annales school,Turner questions the apparent reasonableness of the view that publiclocutions and other forms of cultural meaning-rendering are informedby hidden premises shared by the community for which the locutionsare intended to be meaningful. In the ¢rst place, this assumes thatmost such locutions can be formulated as explicit logical statementsbehind which tacit presuppositions could hide. But most of what takesplace at the level of the cultural has little to do with explicit, discursiveformulations. Moreover, the presuppositions view is subject to its ownversion of the ``Maussian problem.'' Presuppositions can only be iden-ti¢ed from the standpoint of other presuppositions and this suggeststhey can never be grasped in any truly objective fashion. Finally, Turnerargues that there is no solid basis on which to assume that tacit

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presuppositions are ever really shared by the members of a collectivity.Social scientists have no direct access to the presuppositions held byindividuals, and it is easy to imagine a situation in which two peoplereason to the same conclusion (or enact the same public ritual) on thebasis of di¡erent premises or presuppositions. The most that can besaid is that members of a given collectivity behave ` as if'' they allsubscribe to the same presuppositions. But such ` as if'' statementsare predictively very weak, and are inconsistent with the language ofcausation.

The third leg of Turner's critique involves the issue of transmission, orthe process through which practices ` get'' from wherever they areoriginally located (for example, in the collective conscience or theinterpretative community) into the minds of the individuals whoseactions are then said to be caused by those practices. The basic prob-lem here is that the transmission of things as ontologically elusive aspractices cannot be explained using ordinary epistemic language. Toget around this problem, Turner claims, thinkers who employ thepractices construct have had to engage in two obfuscatory tactics.First, they have had to resort to a scienti¢cally defunct metaphoricallanguage rife with ` such dubieties as introjection and unconscious imi-tation'' (p. 48). Second, they have pointed to regularities in humanconduct that seemingly could not be explained unless practices were,in fact, transmissible. The burden then falls on others ^ psychologists,social psychologists, perhaps even philosophers ^ to come up withcoherent accounts of the process of transmission. Turner's exampleof this strategic evasion is Bourdieu, who, he alleges, ` does not troubleto give a psychological account of how [the reproduction of thehabitus] . . . might happen ^ he leaves that to the psychologists, or tothe imaginations of his readers'' (p. 48).

Turner's intention is not simply to accuse Bourdieu and others ofnegligence. He wants to insist as well that of the three potential typesof solutions he identi¢es to the problem of transmission ^ ` dualisticsolutions,'' ` collective-object solutions,'' and ` private solutions'' ^ onlythe last, which denies that practices are collective at all and insteadlocates them exclusively within the habits of individuals, are possible.Dualistic solutions, which Turner identi¢es with Durkheim and To« nnies,locate practices in both collective entities and in the individuals whoseactions produce and reproduce those entities (as in Durkheim's ac-count of homo duplex). But this amounts to little more than substitutinga metaphor of spatial simultaneity in place of the problem of trans-

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mission. Practices may be located at once in individuals and, by virtueof that, in the collective conscience, but there must still be some plau-sible account given of the interaction between the two levels.

Collective-object solutions, which locate practices in ` analogical ob-jects'' like linguistic conventions and rules, fare no better. They requirethat we be able to explain how such objects, or their presuppositions,come to be internalized in individuals. But this is a heavy explanatoryburden, given that the objects themselves, in order to be consistentwith accounts of social reproduction, must be postulated as a cause oftheir own internalization.

We are left with only private solutions to the related problems oflocation and transmission, solutions that proceed on the assumptionthat ` [t]he individual mental trace in which practices persist, namelyindividual habits, may be understood as the true location of the prac-tice'' (p. 50). But this opens the door for a complete re-conceptualiza-tion of the idea of practices. Throughout the book, in fact, Turner is atpains to point out that the empirical facts of human sociality are onlyconsistent with, and nowhere demand, a theoretical explanation thatrelies on some version of the idea that practices are collective objects.The facts that lead us to infer the existence of hidden, collective prac-tices come, Turner says, in two varieties: those that highlight the` anomalous persistence of patterns of behavior'' (pp. 79^80), andthose that suggest the imperviousness of cultural systems to under-standing by outsiders. As an example of the ¢rst variety of facts,Turnercites the apparent persistence, over long periods of time, of culturaltraditions with European roots among ethnic immigrants to the UnitedStates (as described, for example, in Herbert Gans's The Urban Vil-lagers, The Free Press, 1962). However, facts of this sort have also toface the Maussian problem: they appear anomalous only to the outsideobserver, never to the participant, suggesting that the collective prac-tices whose reality they are supposed to establish are not very real atall. In addition, it is almost impossible to be sure that any given set ofanomalous facts of this kind have a particular collective practice astheir cause.

As for the imperviousness of cultural systems, Turner claims thatanthropologists such as Cli¡ord Geertz and Claude Levi-Strauss arein error. The di¤culty, according to Turner, is that attributing a closednature to cultural systems makes it impossible to explain change.Moreover, the examples of systemic closure most frequently o¡ered up

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^ such as the ` inability'' of E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Azande informantsto abandon their theories of magic in the face of rational scienti¢cexplanations of the phenomena at hand ^ are remarkably weak. Theseexamples show, ` at most, that these people failed to notice the factsthat are obvious to us, or to think of them in ways other than thestrange ways in which they apparently did think of them. Failures tonotice are rather mundane errors of inattention or else the result of thede facto unavailability of alternative but learnable ways of thinking.They are not proofs of the de jure closure of a mental world'' (p. 91).

The alternative, for Turner, is clear enough. There simply are nocollective practices or hidden presuppositions that serve as causalengines of social life. There are only individual habits, which indi-viduals acquire by emulating other individuals. As for the socialtheory of practices, it is ` faced with such serious di¤culties withrespect to the means of the transmission and acquisition of theseobjects that it cannot be accepted, and .. . appeals to `practice' used inthis sense, either in philosophy or social theory, are therefore appealsto nothing'' (p. 100).

Such is Turner's argument. Broad in its sweep, the book is bold,ambitious, and often ingenious in its reasoning. From the standpointof contemporary sociological and anthropological theory, where em-ployment of the conceptual language of practices is widespread, theargument can even be judged brilliantly iconoclastic.

Nevertheless, Turner's is not a book about ` practice theory,'' which isthe domain from which much current social thought takes its vocabu-lary of practices. ``Practice theory,''of the kind expounded by Bourdieu,Michel de Certeau, Anthony Giddens, and others, does employ con-cepts that might be legitimately ¢t under the heading of ` practices,'' asTurner is using the term. But what is distinctive about ` practicetheory'' is not its use of these concepts. Rather, ` practice theory''(insofar as it can be spoken of at all as a uni¢ed theoretical corpus)represents a novel approach to the study of human action, one thatrecognizes the degree to which action's unfolding in time is itself aconstitutive component of action. This recognition necessitates theelaboration of, on the one hand, sociological models capable of ac-counting for the social patterning of action qua practice, and, on theother hand, new sets of assumptions about such matters as the natureof subjectivity and the epistemological and methodological stancesappropriate for grasping intellectually, as well as they will allow them-selves to be grasped, the generative mechanisms of social practice.

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Turner is not unaware of the fact that there is a di¡erence between` practices,'' as he is using the term, and ``practice,'' as used by thinkerssuch as Bourdieu. Early in the book he alludes to this distinction,which he identi¢es as stemming from nineteenth-century discussionsof Kant (though the more appropriate place to look, given that thelineage of ``practice theory'' can be traced back through Durkheim ^himself heavily in£uenced by Aristotle ^ would be to the Aristoteliandistinction between art and science). According toTurner, a number ofpost-Kantian, and, later, Marxian discussions came to center on theidea that there is something about praxis that can never be completelyformulated in theoretical terms. He calls this conception of practice` telic,'' meaning that it expresses the idea that ``there is a living activity,with its own inherent goals, that cannot be captured in principles andprocedures or reduced to theory'' (p. 8). Turner goes on to say that thebook will not address this ` telic notion of practice'' (p. 8).

What is unique about conceptualizing human actions as practice, how-ever, has little to do with the goal-oriented nature of action. The keypoint, in Bourdieu's words, is that ` [p]ractice unfolds in time and it hasall the correlative properties, such as irreversibility, that synchroniza-tion destroys. Its temporal structure, that is, its rhythm, its tempo, andabove all its directionality, is constitutive of its meaning'' (The Logicof Practice, Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 81). The same emphasison time's role in action is evident in de Certeau's description of thetactics of resistance that su¡use the art of consumption (The Practiceof Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984). These tactics,employed by subordinated agents who lack what de Certeau calls a` place'' from which to exercise both power and will, rely instead on thehuman capacity to play with the given temporal structure of discourse,as in wit, or to appropriate, for one's own purposes, the already-alienated time of one's labor, as in the activities of ` making out'' thatMichael Burawoy (Manufacturing Consent, University of Chicago Press,1979) found to be the axes around which culture and con£ict revolve onthe shop £oor under late capitalism. Such resistances remain ignored,and both consumption and subordination more generally seem to bematters of pure perceptivity or passivity, unless one is sensitized to theembeddedness of action in temporality. But such a sensitization alsonecessitates a new scienti¢c approach to the problem of action. It is nocoincidence that Bourdieu and Giddens, who both attempt to capturethe manner in which sense is made of action for the agent alwayswithin the context of an acute awareness of temporality, each begintheir major theoretical statements by trying to navigate between various

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time-blind forms of objectivism and subjectivism. Thus do structural-ism and the Sartrean philosophy of the subject serve, for Bourdieu, asperspectives to be transcended, as do, for Giddens, functionalism andhermeneutics.

At no point does Turner discuss this temporally-embedded conceptionof practice. True enough that an author can hardly be faulted forneglecting to treat something that he or she does not set out to treat.But in this instance, negligence is a problem, because ` practice theory''makes a compelling case for viewing practices in ways antithetical toTurner's own. ` Practice theory,'' in fact, suggests at least three majordi¤culties withTurner's argument.

The ¢rst di¤culty becomes apparent when one considers the issue ofpractical mastery, or the process by which agents come to acquiresu¤cient competence in a social ¢eld to participate e¡ectively therein.Mastery is not simply a matter of learning the actions appropriate to agiven set of situations. It also involves being able e¡ortlessly to ` carryo¡,'' across situations, a kind of easy comportment that is, preciselybecause of the temporal £uidity it expresses, the best non-evidence ofuneasiness in, and hence disquali¢cation from, the ¢eld. At the sametime, mastery involves the operative possession of the classi¢catorylogic of the ¢eld, at once intellectual, moral, and structural. This logiccan be understood as the prism through which the ¢eld sees itself, andthus as the point through which all attempts at movement within the¢eld must be refracted.

The process of coming to develop practical mastery is, at one level, amatter of emulation. But what is emulated is not the performance ofany one individual, or even of any number of individuals. The object ofemulation is instead the logic that is common to the ¢eld itself. Each¢eld, in other words, has a set of ``structuring dispositions'' appropriateto it, but no individuals operating on the basis of a particular habituspossess the entirety of that set. An empirical example of this can befound in Bourdieu's discussion of food tastes. It is possible to develop,as Bourdieu does, a diagram expressing the cultural values of variousfoods ^ and, in particular, the logic of the relationship of the di¡erencesamong those values to other foods and to what might be called the` socio-symbolic structures'' of such things as the household economyand the sexual division of labor ^ within what Bourdieu terms ``thefood space.'' By showing the homologies between the logics of, forexample, the food space, the practical philosophy of masculine bodily

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identity, and the division of labor within the household, Bourdieu isable to identify the sphere of cultural practice as the site in which theseinstitutions reinforce one another's reproduction.

But homologies such as these can only be charted analytically, as aresult of the scienti¢c analysis of data about, in this case, the foodpreferences of the social aggregate, and of the correlations betweenparticular patterns of preference and social position. Thus, whileagents may act in reference to the total logic of the ¢eld in enactingpractical mastery, this logic is never directly available to them, at leastin its totality, in the actions of any empirical individuals. It could only,therefore, be the logic of the ¢eld itself, and not merely the perform-ances of particualar individuals, that agents internalize in the processof gaining practical mastery.

Second, ` practice theory'' bears directly on the Maussian problem.Practices may be identi¢able to the observer only by virtue of his orher prior expectations being violated, but the identi¢cation of prac-tices is an activity that itself takes place at the level of practice. A niceexample of this can be found in Philippe Bourgois's recent book, InSearch of Respect (Cambridge University Press, 1995). The PuertoRican-American drug dealers studied by Bourgois initially thoughtthat the white ethnographer was homosexual. On hearing about thesesuspicions some two years into the research, Bourgois asked his in-formants what it was about him that led them to harbor such suspi-cions. ` Philippe: So was it my accent? My voice? The way I move mybody? Benzie: Yeah, like your accent . . . Primo: {interrupting} I toldhim you were an anfropologist [sic], and that the way you speak isjust like intelligent talk. I mean you just speak your way. And maybe,we don't understand a few words, but it's all right'' (pp. 43^44). Thedealers, never before confronted at the level of day-to-day interactionwith someone with an academic manner or style of speaking, were ledto constitute his style as a practice (in the same way that Maussconstituted ``the American gait'' as a practice) and to identify it withthe label ``intelligent talk.'' This bit of dialogue illustrates the obviouspoint that social actions are not simply evaluated one at a time, fromsituation to situation, but come to be linked across situations in such away as to seem to betray some quality attaching to the stable identitiesof the individuals who carry out those actions. The set of possibleattributes that agents can ascribe to other agents is thus nothing lessthan a set of practices, as Judith Butler has shown in her performativerenderings of gender and sexuality (Bodies that Matter, Routledge,

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1993). Durkheim's intellectualist error lay not in seeing a cognitivedimension to religious practice or myth, and in thereby centering hissociology of knowledge around taxonomic considerations, but in failingto see that social classi¢cation, especially the classi¢cation of entitieswhose classi¢able properties unfold themselves in action over the courseof time, is cognitive and synchronic only through the diachronic me-dium of interaction.

The relevant point for our purposes is that agents act on the basis ofthe practices they identify. They go so far as to come to regard theseactions as natural, and to elaborate norms of conduct and, indeed,institutions around them. Practices may not be real, as Turner alleges,in the same way that other objects are real, but they are treated as realby the agents who act in reference to them. Insofar as Bourgois'sinformants settled upon ways of acting in the presence of the ethnog-rapher that revolved around his participation in the identi¢ed practiceof ` intelligent talk'' ^ a practice, it should be emphasized, that wasregarded as collective if only in that it was held to attach to a socialworld, a de Certeauian ``place,'' from which the dealers felt excluded ^can it be denied that that practice became e¤cacious within the set ofinteractions that constituted the study? The e¤cacy is even moreapparent at the level of, for example, government policy, in whichidenti¢ed collective practices, such as a community's ``being on wel-fare,'' come to serve as the basis for state intervention. It would be astrange kind of social science that denied itself, in the name of objec-tivity, access to the practices that social agents themselves identify andact on the basis of. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Bourdieu andothers have protested vigorously against the kind of objectivism forwhichTurner seems to want to be an epistemological standard bearer.

Third, ``practice theory'' suggests that Turner's orientation to practicesis one-sided. The sociological concern, after all, is not just to explainthe ways in which agents act on the basis of particular practices, butalso to ask about the work that practices do in the production of socialorder. Regularities in the distribution of practices across the socialsystem would seem inexplicable without recourse to some supra-indi-vidual mechanism establishing the conditions for the reproduction ofthat distribution. In addition, because of what Bourdieu calls the` represented'' nature of the social world, and especially, as E. P.Thompson was able to show in his reading of Marx (The Poverty ofTheory, Monthly Review Press, 1978), the always-represented nature ofmateriality, these mechanisms come to serve as the matrices through

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which such ` macro level'' processes as mobility in the social space,acquisition of capital, and the appropriation of socially-granted poten-tialities for the exercise of power become possible. The idea that thesepatterns of practice-regularity could be explained by reference to indi-vidual habits and public ceremonies alone simply strains the imagi-nation. That no complete psychological theory capable of accountingfor the transmission of the habitus has yet been elaborated is hardly acompelling reason for abandoning the entire idea of collective practi-ces, given their obviousness to all who would but look.

These considerations can, of course, only be presented here schemati-cally. But it is precisely because of considerations akin to these thatcontemporary social thought has become enamored of the notion ofpractice. Given that Turner's book purports to be a critique of socialtheory's reliance on the practices construct, its not having grappledwith the central concerns of ` practice theory'' constitutes a seriouslacuna.

University of Wisconsin Neil Gross

Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis andCritical Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Last week I called a large independent bookstore serving Berkeley'sintellectual community. I was looking for a recent copy of Theory andSociety. After searching the computer ¢le, the clerk informed me thatthe only journal the store carried started with the word ` theory'' wasthe journal Theory/Slut. Given this current academic and culturalclimate, Joel Whitebook's ambitious and passionate work Perversionand Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory is all themore remarkable.

Whitebook's study is intended as a direct challenge to postmodernist,deconstructionist theorists. Whitebook takes on the critics of ` theproject of modernity'' and the heirs to that project as well. He isleading us toward the construction of a theory that would allow forthe possibility of a radical autonomy of the subject: an autonomy thatwould encourage the subject to struggle against omnipotent domination(internally and externally) and creatively to employ the ``psychic imagi-nary'' in a ` refashioning of the contents of cultural tradition'' (p. 89).

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Drawing upon considerable knowledge of the ¢elds of philosophy andpsychoanalysis, he attempts to reenliven critical theory with a non-perverse notion of the subject and its relationship with the unconscious.This is a decentered but not deconstructed subject that must negotiatebetween conscious and unconscious demands, between individuallibidinal and external social constraints, and plausibly be able tomediate between the ``psychic imaginary'' and a political extrapsychicreality.

Joel Whitebook's work is a major contritution to the ¢elds of psycho-analytic and political philosophy. The breadth and complexity of hisarguments that address the last century of these philosophies is extra-ordinary. A review of this brevity cannot do justice to the scope ofWhitebook's accomplishment. I would brie£y like to address threeaspects of the intersection with psychoanalysis: Whitebook's review ofthe cul de sacs created by the critical theorists and Marcuse's attemptsat a solution; Whitebook's view of the nature of the unconsciousespecially as contrasted with Habermas's use and abandonment of it;and Whitebook's response to Castoriadis's concept of ` the psychicimaginary'' through a reformulation of sublimation as a way to revital-ize psychoanalysis and critical theory.

The ¢rst part of Whitebook's work is dedicated to demonstrating howthe trajectories of the critical theorists led to various dead-ends. Hork-heimer and Adorno's interpretation of Freud at mid-century led themto postulate that ``humanity had to dominate its own inner nature inorder to undertake the domination of external nature'' (p. 23). Inpursuing the need for the domination of a conscious, repressive egoover libidinal desires, Adorno and Horkheimer could not ` envisionany alternative to civilization whose regressive features were notmore distrubing than the given historical prospects'' (p. 24). The nextgeneration of critical theorists inherited this vision of an autocraticdomination by the ego imposed upon the Other and against poly-morphous perversity.

Marcuse's solution to this line of thought was to reconceptualize apsyche that can creatively, non-autocratically respond to internal andexternal demands. Whitebook argues that Marcuse does this by mak-ing the reality principle into a historical concept: A response to realityis not intrinsic to the organization of the human psyche. The ego'sneed to adapt to and respond to reality is a matter of convention.Reality is jettisoned and one can rede¢ne at will any attitudes toward

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libidinal demands and social convention. Using contemporary psycho-analytic theories of perversion as elaborated by Chasseguet-Smirgel andMcDougall,Whitebook convincingly describes how this ``utopian'' atti-tude toward reality is by de¢nition a perverse attitude, one that deniesand disavows the real. In its failure to integrate external reality, thispsyche cannot attempt a true integration of instinctual life. Marcuse'snotion of the psyche disavows reality; it destroys meaning, and abolishessigni¢cation and an acknowledgment of the existence of otherness. Thedisavowal precludes then the negotiation of loss. If the subject cannotnegotiate loss or separation, it must rely on narcisstic defenses ofomnipotence. Using contemporary theories of narcissism to elaboratefurther on the nature of the perverse, Whitebook shows how thesedefenses prevent the psyche from developing workable strategies totolerate anxiety. At the same time, Whitebook critiques Chasseguet-Smirgel's social theory and her conservative idealization of maturity,conformity to paternal law, and views of radical action.

Whitebook clearly identi¢es with the progressive project of criticizingexisting democratic structures, but dismisses any further explorationof Marxist political philosophy or use of a contemporary historicalmaterialism. His discussion of critical theory is curiously one sided,absenting from discussion any explicit attempts to address the integra-tion of historical materialism into the external/social aspects of theradical project of critical theory. However, Whitebook's thoughtfuland clinically informed psychoanalytic discussion of motivations ofperversion is of use to would-be critics of deconstructionist thought.His elucidation of the nature of perversion and the destruction ofmeaning through the disavowal of reality can be leveled at variouspostmodernists for whom ` all that is solid melts into air'' (p. 11).

In his ``Excurses: The Suspension of the Utopian Motif in CriticalTheory,'' Whitebook engages with Habermas and his move away fromthe negative dialectic, the utopian and the perverse.Whereas Marcusehas perverted ` the utopian moment,'' Habermas has lost ` the redemp-tive moment'' (p. 7). Habermas jettisons the body and the unconscious,leading to ` excessive rationalism'' and, to paraphrase Whitebook, thedomestication of Freud's most subversive discovery, the unconscious.Whitebook goes on to give a forceful critique of Habermas's rationalistturn, the turn from psychoanalytic models to learning and cognitive-based models of the mind. Whitebook then draws upon his psycho-analytic expertise to discuss the di¡erence between a dynamic uncon-scious and a descriptive one (which he describes in terms of ` self

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re£ection' versus ` reconstruction''). As a goal of clinical psycho-analysis, self re£ection ^ which I take to be increased subjectivity ^ is` the practical (and a¡ective) re£ection by a subject on, and struggleagainst, the ossi¢ed blockages to insight and development that havebeen incurred in the self formation process'' (p. 82). In the struggle tobe free of these constraints, the subject engages opposing forces. Henceit is a dynamic struggle.

Reconstruction, on the other hand, ` seeks to locate the structures,schemata, etc. . . . that underlie our knowledge and action but are notopposed by any dynamic forces. They are therefore only unconsciousin the descriptive sense'' (p. 82). Whitebook shows how Habermas'sfailure to distinguish a dynamic sense of the unconscious from adescriptive sense leads him to jettison the dynamic unconscious fromhis view of the mind. As Whitebook eloquently states, ` It is safe toassume that human beings have continued to dream after the linguisticturn'' so we are left with the question ` what is the fate of the trans-gressive-utopian impulse?'' (p. 84).

Whitebook has led us to the set of questions that he will explorethrough the remainder of the book. How do we understand the subjectand its relations to an imaginary preverbal nonlinguistic unconcious?Can we establish a view of the ego that is decentered but not frag-mented, understood vis-a-vis the relationship of ego to id? How do wedevelop a view of the unconscious that is not driven by a perverseattitude toward reality nor squashed under a conformist, constricted,autocratic subject?

Arguing carefully from classical texts for a reinterpretation of Freud'sideas,Whitebook proposes a view of the ``decentration'' of the ego. Hedoes not see the decentration of the ego in opposition to enlighten-ment. Rather, decentration reorients the subject ``by dislodging one'snarcissistic egocentrism (and) increases one's perspective toward one-self and the world'' (p. 93), ultimately leading in the direction of a moreadequate ego. He reminds us that the ego is ` ¢rst and foremost abodily ego'' (p. 112). The capacity to self-observe is developed throughthe projection and internalization of the surface of the body into theinterior, thus creating a dual aspect within the ego. The ego develops acapacity for re£ection where it can treat itself as an object, experienc-ing itself from the inside and observing from the outside at the sametime.Whitebook argues within this psychoanalytic perspective that theego must move from a place ``where the projection of our wishes causes

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us to form distorted representations of the world'' (p. 95), to a renun-ciation of omnipotence and narcissitic entitlement. The ego, vis-a-visthe id, may ` no longer (be) master in its own house, (but) it has notbeen evicted either'' (p. 99).

Whitebook argues persuasively against the notion of drive as a bio-logical concept, about the preverbal nonlinguistic nature of the uncon-scious, and about aspects of the non-violent synthesis of the ego. Hepositions himself in opposition to aspects of Lacan's, Adorno's, andWellmer's views of the unconscious. Ultimately he argues for the logi-cal possibility of a decentered, re£ective subject. He conceptualizes anautonomous subject not passively determined by the id, but one thatwould be able to ``establish an active relation toward fantasy life thatwould no longer need to be defensively warded o¡'' (p. 118). ` Thetransgressive phantasms of the unconscious [are] not only a source ofregression but also provide the imagos of a di¡erent reality'' (p. 7).How these phantasms communicate themselves is the subject ofWhitebook's ¢nal chapter and main thesis.

Whitebook proposes the elaboration of the concept of sublimation asa way to ` represent a third alternative to the romantic idealization ofthe irrational (a© la Marcuse) and the rationalist isolation from it a© laHabermas)'' (p. 12). His idea is to envision an autonomy of the ego thatis established by using and maximizing inner nature, allowing desireinto conscious awareness and situating it in a political context. In theseformulations,Whitebook draws upon Castoriadis and Loewald, a rad-ical and innovative psychoanalytic thinker who emerged out of Amer-ican ego psychology.

Whitebook's call for a theory of sublimation that would create amediation between ` the psychic imaginary which includes fantasies''and ` the social imaginary which includes institutions, language andhistory'' (p. 231) is more passionate than his elaboration of that theoryis successful. His arguments about the lacuna in Freudian thoughtwhere sublimation is concerned are well taken. However, he is limitedby his reliance on more traditional albeit contemporary trajectoriesof Freudian thought. He does not utilize current schools of object-relations theory that might have contributed to an understanding ofwhat ``autonomy'' could mean in a dynamic sense. A contemporarypsychoanalytic object-relations perspective would de¢ne the tasks ofthe negotiation of loss and relinquishing of narcissistic defenses indi¡erent terms. The child's negotiation of separation is not just the

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child separating from the mother. It is made possible by the acknowl-edgment of a third, which allows for the development of a concept ofself as di¡erentiated from other. The existence of this third creates andis created by the Oedipal situation. The emerging psyche of the childmust therefore struggle to tolerate the idea of an exclusion from theparental couple. In this theoretical perspective, the capacity forthought (which is essential if an autonomy is to be possible) developsout of the negotiation for tolerance from within the Oedipal situation:only outside of the maternal-child dyad, only from within the con-¢guration of the Oedipal triangle, can there be a space from whichthe capacity for thought, for signi¢cation can be created. If separate-ness cannot be tolerated, the subject relies on a false insistence ofcontrol over the object, employing omnipotent defenses. While theobject is controlled by the subject, so too is the subject controlled bythe object. Under such circumstances, no true autonomy of the subjectis possible. Paranoia and autistic withdrawal from the social world ofothers is inevitable.

In this perspective, mediation between the psychic imaginary and thesocial world is constant. While one could subsume the creation of aspace where thinking is possible under a ` theory of sublimation,'' wemight be able to argue that mediation is inherent in the constantstruggle for autonomy. Signi¢cation, social meaning, even thinkingemerges from a continuing dynamic that exists between the acceptanceof separateness (a capacity to tolerate the depressive position) and apull and desire for omnipotence. Omnipotence involves the negationof the Other, destroys social meaning and discourse, and leads to thedenial of loss (including denying the other as the imago of the parentalcouple). Autonomy and creativity spring from the well of this struggle.These concepts central to object relations use very di¡erent terms ofdiscussion from those of ego psychology with its centrality of focus ondrives and positioning of the ego vis-a-vis the id. Theorists such asNancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin have proposed the possibilityof a radical theory using an object-relations perspective. (Whitebookcites Chodorow's use of object relations to critique Marcuse but simplystates he uses a di¡erent perspective.) An elaborated theory using objectrelations could, for instance, develop ideas about socially mediatedpulls for dissociation and disavowal as constructs imposing themselveson the individual psyche and destroying the capacity for autonomy andthe democratic character.

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Whitebook's work resuscitates the project of integrating a dynamicunconscious and a non-perverse notion of the subject with criticaltheory. His proposal to develop a theory of sublimation is one that isessential reading for those who care about the need for a psychoana-lytically informed radical political philosophy. I would hope that, infuture work, contemporary views of object relations and historicalmaterialism will ¢nd their way into this debate to enrich furtherWhite-book's useful contribution to the defense of critical theory.

University of California, San Francisco Maureen Katz

John C. Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent. The East GermanOpposition and Its Legacy. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1995.

There is an old joke about the policy that used to circulate in theGerman Democratic Republic (GDR). Why, ran the question, do thepolice always travel in threes? Well, ran the answer, you need one towrite everything down, another to read what the ¢rst one has written,and a third to keep an eye on the two intellectuals. The joke, which wasmost likely told throughout the Soviet Bloc, derives its humor from itsinsinuation that the police are both stupid and paranoid. As with somuch of the black humor engendered by political repression, however,this joke relies on an important insight into the structure of domina-tion for its bittersweet punchline. In order to poke fun at the police, thejoke emphasizes the ambivalent position of intellectuals under com-munism, who not only act as the eyes and ears of the regime, but arealso the object of its uneasy surveillance. It is precisely this story ofcomplicity and opposition that John C. Torpey examines in his well-written and stimulating history of East German intellectuals.

One of the book's greatest strengths consists in its analytic £exibility.Torpey adopts a variety of interpretive strategies to explain a centralpeculiarity of East German history ^ namely, the late development, incomparison to other Soviet Bloc countries, of an organized intellectualopposition. He begins by linking East German exceptionalism to theconditions of the GDR's creation, arguing that the legacy of NationalSocialism served to inhibit dissent in the GDR. The extent of thedevastation unleashed upon the world by theThird Reich, he contends,convinced many German intellectuals that a fascist revival had to be

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prevented at all costs. In the climate of the immediate post-war period,the economic reorganization of society along socialist lines enjoyedconsiderable support for precisely this reason. Even many ChristianDemocrats openly expressed sympathy with socialism (see, for example,the Ahlener Program). The real virtue of Torpey's argument, however,is that it reconstructs the logic, often lost in retrospective analysis,behind the willingness of many intellectuals on the left to paper overtraditional rivalries within the working-class movement. In the view ofthese intellectuals, the often violent competition between communistsand social democrats during the Weimar Republic had made the for-mation of a uni¢ed front against the Nazis impossible, leaving the wayopen for Hitler's seizure of power. Trans¢xed by romantic notions ofwhat this solidarity might have accomplished, many of them weremotivated by a sense of ideological urgency to support the establish-ment of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1946. Because social demo-crats living in the Soviet Zone were compelled to join communists in thenew party, however, founding the SED was tantamount to the forcibleappropriation of social-democratic traditions by the communist party.Yet for many intellectuals, the desire for membership in a communitybased on a shared opposition to fascism overshadowed the element ofcoercion attending the new party's creation. This fact was not lost onthe SED's leadership, which became adept at invoking the politicalmythology of anti-fascism to obscure its dictatorial methods. To sup-press the memory of the compulsion that had been integral to itscreation, for example, the party compelled its members to displayprominently the legend of anti-fascist solidarity. That is, the SEDseized the famous handshake between communist leader WilhelmPieck and social-democratic leader Otto Grotewohl, which had calledthe SED into being, reduced it to the oddly impersonal metonymy oftheir intertwined hands, then enshrined this moment of harmony asthe o¤cial emblem of membership in this community of enforcedsolidarity.

The newly-formed party also bene¢ted greatly from the intellectualtopography that coalesced out of the Cold War, a circumstance thatTorpey skillfully interweaves into his narrative. In particular, the terri-torial and ideological division of Germany facilitated the party's e¡ortsto establish its moral superiority over its capitalist cousins in the eyesof intellectuals. The fact, for example, that prominent Nazis continuedto wield in£uence in West German public life did not simply make iteasier for the SED to portray the socialist state as a bastion of anti-fascism, but lent its tireless e¡orts to con£ate capitalism with fascism

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more credibility than they merited. As Torpey points out, ``the EastGerman intellectuals thus tended to evaluate the socialist ideal interms of the reigning interpretation of fascism as a degenerative butalways potential form of capitalism and of the GDR as a bulwarkagainst its resurgence'' (p. 31). The party's skilled exploitation of thissocialist ideal ensured it a measure of loyalty. But its invocations of theGDR's anti-fascist, anti-capitalist mission had an almost talismanice¡ect on intellectuals, paralyzing their will to criticize the more author-itarian characteristics of the workers' and peasants' state. For thesereasons, the ideal of socialism possessed an integrative force amongEast German intellectuals that was without parallel in Eastern Europe.

Torpey proceeds to make the important argument that the conse-quence of their commitment to socialism ruled out the possibility of acoalition in the GDR between intellectuals and workers. This ¢rstbecame clear during the East German uprising of 1953, which standsin great contrast to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague Springof 1968, and the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s, when intel-lectuals joined workers in protest against the regime. Instead of takingto the streets with the working class in 1953, however, East Germanintellectuals and their organizations demonstrated a curious mixtureof resistance and submission that derived from their uneasy proximityto power. Either they carefully quali¢ed their public criticisms of theSED's policies, lacing them with support for the regime in the hopes ofextracting political concessions, as did the Kulturbund, or simply sup-pressed their dissent, as did the writer Bertolt Brecht.

Although Torpey curiously fails to mention it, the iconoclastic StefanHeym's novel Five Days in June, which revisits the uprising, providesan excellent illustration of the ambivalence that characterized the atti-tudes of many intellectuals. The novel allows that the worker's com-plaints had merit, even o¡ering its own criticism of narrow-mindedbureaucrats and opportunistic party o¤cials. At the same time, how-ever, Heym lambastes the workers for con£ating an analysis of theirshort-term material position with the long-term reality that only theGDR, as a workers' and peasants' state, could really protect working-class interests. In doing so, Heym reproduces the discursive tactics thatcharacterize the Marxist-Leninist approach to dissent: invoking theepistemological divide between subjective perception and objectivereality to denigrate criticism of the regime as sel¢sh and dangerous.But Heym does not stop at de£ecting real grievances; in one of his leastconvincing subplots, he even embraces the SED's dubious contention

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that the revolt was really the work of West German agents provoca-teurs. His willingness, I would argue, to deploy the authoritarian logicof Marxist-Leninist argumentation to rationalize away the workers'lack of support for their ` own'' state results from his unwillingness tocriticize the GDR for fear of emboldening its capitalist (i.e., potentiallyfascist) enemies. After 1953, however, most workers shared neitherHeym's concern about fascism nor his con¢dence in socialism, whiletheir antipathy toward the SED's manipulation of both contributed tothe increasing political isolation of East German intellectuals. Torpeyconcludes tht ``the lack of an alliance between the working class andthe intelligentsia against the party, rooted to a substantial degree in theintelligentsia's endorsement of the party's claim to legitimacy as anantifascist force, would in subsequent years become a familiar featureof political opposition to the SED'' (p. 39). As Torpey so convincinglydemonstrates, even by 1989, when the nimbus of anti-fascism had givenway to an obscurantist fog, the split between workers and intellectualscontinued to shape politics in the GDR.

To explain the social origins of this rift, Torpey then shifts analyticgears away from his discussion of ideology. He examines how theSED's economic policies in the 1950s, which bene¢ted intellectualsmaterially but threatened to reduce the real income of workers, drovea wedge between the two groups. A growing number of intellectuals,for example, owed their training and greater social mobility to the newpolitical order, and were thus reluctant to side against it. More impor-tantly, those who were unwilling to serve the regime often emigrated toWest Germany, despite the growing impediments. The result wasa more homogeneous and cooperative intellectual landscape, as dis-sent was diminished by a combination of material blandishment andattrition.

Nevertheless, the division of Germany, which seemed initially to playinto the SED's hands, quickly became a major threat to the party'spower. The proximity of the Federal Republic and its economic` miracle'' continued throughout the 1950s to attract intellectuals,especially members of the technical intelligentsia. To stanch the out-£ow of skilled workers and complete the division of Germany, the SEDconstructed the Berlin Wall in 1961. In keeping with much of GDRhistoriography, Torpey invokes Albert O. Hirschman's categories of` exit'' and ` voice'' to explain how theWall functioned as a safety valvefor the SED. Hirschman describes the choices available to members ofan organization when they dissent as consisting of leaving the organ-

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ization (exit) or staying on to criticize it from within in the hopes ofreforming it (voice). By constructing theWall, the party leadership wasable to close o¡ the exit option and exercise greater control over themobility of its population. As the gatekeeper, however, the SED couldalso use the exit option to weaken the voice option. Not only could theparty compromise artists and intellectuals in the eyes of the majority ofEast Germans, who could not venture beyond the Wall, by grantingthem the privilege of making work-related visits to theWest ^ it couldalso decapitate opposition movements at will by exporting trouble-some dissenters to West Germany, which was eager to integrate EastGerman opposition ¢gures for the public-relations victory. In a fasci-nating inversion, Torpey then applies Hirschman's organizing princi-ples to the structure of dissent itself to show how the Wall encourageddisunity among opponents of the regime by dividing those who believedthe GDR could be reformed from those who thought any cooperationfutile. His discussion of the refusal of the ` reformers,'' who were will-ing to remain in the GDR, to work with the ` emigrants,'' who wantedto leave, against a common foe constitutes an important contributionto GDR historiography precisely because it underscores once againthe signi¢cance of ideology in East German intellectual cricles.

Even in Torpey's skilled hands, however, Hirschman's categories ofexit and voice are of questionable value as an explanation for thebelated appearance of an organized intellectual opposition.When ap-plied to the GDR, they summon up an important interpretive paradox.According to Hirschman's scheme, denying people the freedom totravel outside the GDR through an authoritarian mixture of concreteand guns should have strengthened domestic discontent, not dampenedit; no matter how many dissidents were exiled, the authoritarian struc-tures themselves would have generated new dissent. Nor is it clear thatthe adjacency of the Federal Republic, which constitutionally guaran-teed East Germans West German citizenship, made it any easier forthe GDR to deport ` troublemakers'' than it was for Poland to deportdissenters or the Soviet Union to oscillate between internal and exter-nal exile of its dissidents. Furthermore, disagreement over the mostappropriate means of expressing opposition to a dictatorship is afunction of the competing loyalties and di¡ering political prioritiesthat have always plagued resistance movements, from the SPD beforeWorld War I to the West German student movement of the 1960s. AsTorpey himself notes, the tensions between reformers and emigrants inthe GDR re£ected less the putative attractions of exile and more themeasure of a given individual's commitment to socialism.

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Most importantly, however, the explanatory power of exit and voice asanalytic categories relies on a clear-cut binarism that does not conformto empirical observation. That is, their application to the East Germancase is based on the premise that the SED fully controlled the GDR'saccess to the West. Yet, the fact is that exit and voice were not com-pletely split o¡ from each other. On the contrary, East Germany was¢rmly bound to West Germany by the West German public sphere.Except for those living in the so-called ``valley of the clueless'' (Tal derAhnungslosen) near Dresden, for example, East Germans were able toreceive West German television and radio, and so ` illegally emigrate''(Republik£ucht begehen) every night. Moreover, West German televi-sion shows such as ` Kennzeichen D'' performed precisely the samefunction that East German samizdat, or underground literature, wouldhave. Interestingly enough, Torpey himself implicitly discounts theexit/voice structure as a causal factor, noting that ` dearth of independ-ent publishing re£ected the availability of the GDR's dissidents of theersatz public sphere of the Federal Republic'' (p. 97). But aside fromnoting that the emergence of underground publishing activity in 1986arose out of the growing East German peace movement, he fails topursue this promising line of inquiry.

There is one other instance worth mentioning where Torpey arrives atan important idea, but shies away from exploring its consequences.Early in the book, he remarks in passing that the commitment tosocialism entailed a concomitant belief that political freedoms werederived from the economic organization of society. This subordinationof civil to economic rights, he contends, ` was the most importantideological factor delaying the emergence in East Germany of a trulyoppositional movement for `bourgeois' civil rights comparable to Cze-choslovakia's Charter 77 and similar organizations in the other Sovietbloc countries'' (p. 68). This is, to my mind, a most original andinteresting explanation of East German exceptionalism. Not onlydoes the priority of economic over political arrangements explain thelonglived loyalty of intellectual opposition and its gradual transforma-tion during the 1980s into a resistance movement, it also underscoreshow the anti-capitalism of many intellectuals ultimately marginzalizedthem. In his two chapters on the dissolution of the GDR, Torpeyargues that the ``reformers'' were able to attract popular support inmass demonstrations only as long as reform of the GDR constitutedthe limit of what seemed possible. As soon as the prospect of demo-cratic elections neared, however, the economic reforms espoused bythese intellectuals, coupled with their reluctance to wield power, made

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them singularly unappealing to the vast majority of East Germans,who were concerned that a country laboring under a mountain of debtin obsolete factories not embark on further economic experimentation.

Although his arguments are often well-considered and thought-pro-voking, Torpey does not always su¤ciently substantiate them. For asociological work, there is surprisingly little discussion ^ with theexception of chapter four ^ of the demographic characteristics of theEast German intelligentsia. Symptomatic is his failure to make use ofhis potentially rich de¢nition of intellectuals as a social group, whichfocuses on training and occupation but includes ` activities that clearlyentail forays into the symbolic realm of ideas and values, even in theabsense of the relevant `role' characteristics'' (p. 3). But Torpey nevergives us a sense of who these people were or how they di¡ered fromeach other. For example, a close analysis of the technical intelligentsia,such as physicians and engineers, might have provided a broader pic-ture of East German intellectuals and compensated for Torpey's con-centration on writers, whose political and material interests weresurely di¡erent from those of, say, professionals or applied scientists.

Related to this lack of sociological di¡erentiation is the over-relianceon and uncritical treatment of his main source: interviews. Torpey failsto give the reader a sense of how he conducted his interviews (did hepose the same questions to each person?), how many he conducted,and the criteria according to which he selected his subjects (of what arethey representative?).With few exceptions, moreover, his interlocutorsseem to have been Berlin intellectuals, who are not di¡erentiatedenough to provide a set of data that permits the sort of generalizationsat a national level that Torpey is given to make. For example, thehighly-centralized nature of the SED-state accorded great privilegesto Berlin at the expense of other cities and regions, and so led toregional rivalries and resentments. These con£icts account to somedegree for the prominence of the periphery ^ for cities such as Leipzigand Dresden ^ during the revolution of 1989. But Torpey does notdi¡erentiate between the intellectual milieus of center and periphery,despite its relevance to his analysis of the revolution of 1989. The lackof attention to such key details also shows up in the glossary of names,which is intended as a guide to the biographies of some of the indi-viduals discussed in the book. It would be more useful if each entryincluded comparable information, such as parentage, social origin,and confession.

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The real problem with Torpey's use of interviews, however, lies not intheir lack of representativeness, but in their admissability as evidence.Nowhere does Torpey discuss the role of memory in shaping the viewsof his subjects. To present as unmediated fact a statement made byformer Politburo-member Karl Schirdewan in 1992 about his ousterfrom the party leadership in 1958 is to neglect not one, not two, but threeevents that surely in£uenced his recollections: the building of the wallin 1961, Honecker's takeover in 1971, and the GDR's collapse in 1989/90. Instead, Torpey deploys the statements made by his interlocutorswithout calling attention to the process of self-editing, the layers ofmemory, or even the subjects' possible motivations. His insu¤cientlycritical use of oral history is most likely responsible for the occasionalrash statement, such as his claim that ` the Germans in the GDRnurtured a deeper historical consciousness than their compatriots inthe Federal Republic'' (p. 8). Aside from its over-general premise, thestatement is simply false. To take just one ^ but one very important ^example, communism's denial of ethnicity as a causal factor in socialstrife (including the Holocaust) and its lack of true internationalismpermitted all kinds of racism to £ousish. Opinion polls as well as ad hocdiscussions with East Germans today, including intellectuals, reveal afrightening lack of historical consciousness and a grotesque amount ofanti-semitism and anti-Slavic sentiment, not to mention antagonismtoward Turks and other people of color.

These weaknesses, however, are more than compensated for by theagility of Torpey's writing and the versatility of his approach. It is athoughtful and thought-provoking book, and where Torpey might havedone more to demonstrate the validity of his speculations, he hasshown other scholars the way to future research. Indeed, Torpey'srefreshing analysis of East German intellectuals and their uncomfort-able relationship with the communist party constitutes an importantcontribution to the literature on the GDR and its demise.

University of California, Berkeley Jonathan R. Zatlin

AshaVaradharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, andSpivak.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

About half-way through Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said,and Spivak, AshaVaradharajan makes the following claim:

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I would state categorically that what is in crisis is not the subject but theobject. The indiscriminate celebration of otherness, di¡erence and radicalindeterminacy within academic discourse has precluded precise accounts ofthe growing backlash against minorities (as de¢ned in terms of race, gender,or sexual orientation) as well as fostering a dangerous inattentiveness to theexistence and possibility of resistance (p. 68).

This passage provides an excellent, if polemical, context for the inter-vention this book seeks to make within ` post-colonial studies.'' Varad-harajan examines the contributions of two of this ¢eld's originators,Gayatri Chakravortry Spivak and Edward Said. Over the past twodecades, Spivak and Said have sought to appropriate the critical in-sights of ` post-structuralism'' ^ that of Jacques Derrida and MichelFoucault, in particular ^ to lay bare, in di¡erent ways, the manner inwhich the nexus of power/knowledge plays itself out in colonialismand its aftermath. The importance of post-structuralism in postcolo-nial studies is made no clearer than in the case of Spivak. Prior to theadvent of her reputation as a postcolonial critic, Spivak translated andintroduced Derrida's important work Of Grammatology to an Englishreadership.

As the passage cited above indicates,Varadharajan is deeply skepticalof the theoretical and practical potential of postcolonial discourse.While Spivak and Said look to France, Varadharajun turns to Ger-many, to the ``negative dialectic'' of Frankfurt School theorist TheodorAdorno, to begin the di¤cult work of recasting the terms of debatewithin postcolonial theory. Varadharajan's appropriation of Adornois, at ¢rst glance, surprising. It runs decidedly against the grain ofwhat is currently practiced in departments of literary studies in theNorth American academy where, as Fredric Jameson has indicated,the dialectic is con£ated with totality and then simplistically dismissedas ` totalitarian.''Adorno's work in particular, has, since the receptionof his infamous essay on jazz, acquired the taint of ` elitism'' and` Eurocentrism'' and is therefore viewed with suspicion in an era thatoften pays obsequious homage to popular culture. On deeper inspec-tion, however,Varadharajan's reading of Adorno makes perfect sense.For she goes on to compare the ` radical criticism'' now practiced in theacademy as ` uncannily'' reminiscent of what Adorno once called the` jargon of authenticity.'' In Adorno's view, the quintessential exemplarof the latter was the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.With its emphasison di¡erence over dialectic, post-structuralism is heavily indebted toHeidegger's attempt to destroy or ` unbuild'' the tradition of Westernmetaphysics. Indeed, this is partially what commends it to the project

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of undermining the imperialist project of the West. While recognizingthe power of Heidegger's thinking, Adorno sought throughout hiscareer to engage in an immanent critique of phenomenology in such away as to provide a materialist alternative to it. Against Heidegger'snotion of the ` ontologial di¡erence,'' the di¡erence between ` Being''and ` beings,'' Adorno unearths the dialectic between ``nature'' and` history'' without collapsing either of the two poles, as he believedHeidegger to have done, into a notion of ``historicity'' that simplynaturalizes history.

Exotic Parodies can be read as an important continuation of thisdebate by other means. The book's objective is two-fold: it attempts toascertain the conditions for the possibility of critique beyond whatVaradharajan considers the ``paralyzed re£exivity'' of post-structural-ism by staging a confrontation between ` dialectics and di¡erance ''(p. xi). In its attempt to foster a rapprochement of feminism, Marxism,and deconstruction, postcolonial discourse, according to Varadhara-jan, runs aground on a number of problems.

The unmasking of the subject or the ``death of man'' within post-structuralism, which is itself hugely indebted to Heidegger's ` Letter onHumanism,'' has not produced the emancipation and autonomy of theobject. The object continues to be thought simply as the negation of theEurocentric self. In its reception of this theoretical current, postcolo-nial discourse is itself beset by the problem of ` representing empiricaland historical others'' (p. xii). Thus, while postcolonial discourse laysbare the implication of knowledge in the colonial project, it precludesthe possibility of a negation of this relation, namely, ` the production ofknowledge [that] can also serve the cause of emancipatory critique andresistance.'' What is required, therefore, is a thorough-going rethinkingof the relation between self and other in such a way as to identify theconditions for the possibility of the latter's material liberation. Whatis necessary, in other words, is a way of thinking about this relationthat keeps in mind the object's resistance not simply as ` the elideddi¡erence within the imperialist self, but as the defaced inhabitant ofcultures, histories and materialities subject to an other than this self ''(p. xi). These problems are discussed in the ¢rst two chapters of thebook, which address the ` The End(s) of (Wo)Man; or, the Limits ofDi¡erence,'' and ` Rethinking of the Object,'' respectively.

In the third chapter, Varadharajan addresses in some detail Adorno'scontribution to ` rethinking the object.'' Like Foucault and Derrida,

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Adorno also acknowledges philosophy's complicity with power. At thesame time, however, he emphasizes its ability to critique itself. Nega-tive dialectics reveals the inescapable lacerations in£icted on philoso-phy by the social contradictions it contains; philosophy is free only tore£ect upon the conditions of its own unfreedom. It is therefore theobject's primacy ^ as opposed to the structure of language (la langue)^ that discloses the hubris of the subject. While anticipating many ofthe insights of post-structuralism, Adorno emphasizes the resistanceof the object to the identi¢cations imposed upon it by the transcen-dental or knowing subject. Indeed, Adorno shows that if the other isburried beneath the sheer weight of subjective representations, thisother is always buried alive, which is to say, endowed with the rudi-ments of subjectivity and agency.

Accordingly, in the colonial context, the subject-object relation mustbe understood dynamically, as ` an interplay between the power of thecolonizer and the resistance of the colonized. The split between subjectand object is not inherent but historically produced and negated''(p. xvii).While the Orientalist imagination produces an ` other'' as theinverse mirror image of theWest that it uses to simply re-a¤rm its ownidentity, negative dialectics shatters the mirror and in the processre£ects as human what is di¡erent rather than the same.

Once Varadharajan has outlined the respective positions of ``di¡erance''and ``dialectic,'' the stage is set for her to examine critically the post-colonial theory of Spivak and Said. Her critique of Spivak centers onthe political implications of the latter's deconstruction of epistemol-ogy.Varadharajan cannily puts her ¢nger on a central epistemologicalproblem in Spivak, what Spivak, herself, might call ``either/or-ism.''Either the subaltern is present in all of her fullness and plenitude orshe must be understood as absolute alterity. Such an either/or logice¡ectively consigns the subaltern to oblivion for, in its attempt toundermine Western metaphysics, deconstruction withdraws even themost provisional location from which she might speak. There is, how-ever, a deeper problem here: having disavowed the colonized object as` essentialist,'' ` it is di¤cult to escape the tautological conclusion thattheory is its own (insubstantial) object'' (p. xxiii). Paradoxically, then,while taking to task the insularity of the West, deconstruction fallsheadlong into the very narcissism it wishes to call into question. Itleads Spivak to make the highly questionable judgment that she is,herself, ` subaltern.'' While suggesting that the sexed and ethnic otherof colonial discourse occupies a place within Spivak's discourse analo-

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gous to that of the ``object'' in negative dialectics,Varadharajan arguesthat the crucial di¡erence lies in the fact that the latter is to be under-stood relationally through its active resistance to the identi¢cationsimposed upon it while the former is understood simply as absence.

The di¡erences between Spivak and Said parallel in signi¢cant waysthe dispute between Derrida and Foucault. While Spivak focuses herattention almost exclusively on the inherently unstable nature of signi-¢cation, Said, in contrast, is mindful of the irreducible relations among` world,'' ` text,'' and ` critic.'' Said argues that the representation of theorient as other was not just a contingent or superstructural e¡ect ofcolonization, but rather one of its necessary if not su¤cient conditions.The Orient had to be constituted discursively as ` other'' in order to beconstituted as an object of conquest. In this analysis, however, theemphasis is clearly placed on ``the history and tradition of `thought,imagery, and vocabulary that have given [the Orient] reality and pres-ence in and for the West ' '' (p. 124). With his exclusive concern forWestern representations of the other, Said overlooks the dialecticbetween represented and representation, subjective and objective mo-ments. The consequence of which ^ despite Said's attention to thefacticity of the ` world'' ^ is the dissolution of history into discourse.

Said does, however, try to address this problem in Culture and Impe-rialism, which ` is at its Adornian best in its proclivity for doubledformulations: culture cannot be thought without simultaneous atten-tion to the `sordid' practices of the society that engages in imperialistactivity, and imperialism must itself must be thought in conjunctionwith indigenous resistance to the march of Empire'' (p. 133). Nonethe-less, the ` colonizing impulse'' is contested not through the object'sresistance but, rather, ` in the £exibility of the third term (the postcolo-nial intellectual as exile and shape-shifter)'' (p. 133). Just as Spivakconsiders herself to be subaltern, Said takes the postcolonial intellec-tual as both the subject and object of postcolonial discourse.

In her pithy conclusion, among the best pages in the book, Varad-harajan, pushes beyond the discussion of di¡erance and dialectic andconsiders the contributions of Ashis Nandy and the Subaltern StudiesGroup as a way of illuminating her thesis of the possibility of self-representation and resistance from the side of the object. Movingfrom the abstract to the concrete, she shows how, in the Indian context,subaltern resistance functions as a negation not only of the British Rajbut also of bourgeois nationalism. It lays bare the dialectic through

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which ` preponderance of the object . . . produces an indigenous sub-ject'' (p. 141).

This is a perspicacious and important book that deserves a wide read-ership. In its engagement not only with post-colonialism, but also withthe larger frame of postmodernism, Exotic Parodies will certainlyrepay serious reading. In the phenomenological spirit of Adorno'sMinima Moralia, Varadharajan re£ects movingly, and entirely withoutthe false pathos of those who mechanically reiterate that the ``personalis political,'' on the speci¢city of her location as a postcolonial intellec-tual.Varadharajan does not rest content with merely juxtaposing Ador-no with the objects of her critique, rather, she engages in dialecticalthinking, often with tremendous verve and incisiveness. In the processshe shows not only that the demise of the Frankfurt School is greatlyexaggerated, but also that its star is a particularly brilliant one withinthe current theoretical constellation. Despite her often visceral impa-tience with some of the ethico-political implications of post-structural-ism, Varadharajan adheres to the best tradition of immanent critiqueand truly enters into the strength of her opponent's arguments in sucha way as to discover not only the falsity but also the truth contentburied there. In the process, she identi¢es what is often overlookedwithin temporary discourse: the ` death of man,'' has very di¡erentrami¢cations in a world in which the social and historical conditionsconfronted by its subjects are indeed very di¡erent; in the ` ThirdWorld,'' the deconstruction of the subject can have extremely debilitat-ing political consequences.

Having said that, the strengths of this book are perhaps at the sametime its weaknesses. In her attempt rigorously to engage di¡erancewithdialectic, Varadharajan tends to let the one slide into the other. Sheoften explicates the respective positions of Spivak and Said in thelanguage of negative dialectics followed by a subsequent critique. Inthe chapter on Said, one gets the sense that he is being criticized for notincorporating enough Adorno into his work. At the same time, Ador-no's words are used to gloss his texts, creating some confusion. Forinstance, on one page, Varadharajan refers to ` The negative dialecticbetween exile and a¤rmation that Said discerns in the conditions thatproduced Auerbach's `de¢nitive' work'' (p. 117), while only three pageslater, she attempts to ``distinguish Said's negative stance from theprocedure of negative dialectics'' (p. 120).

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More generally, does immanent critique involve only ascertaining theextent to which Spivak and Said fail to live up to the stringent demandsof negative dialectics? Are the ethico-political aporiae of postcolonialdiscourse simply the result of theoretical and methodological failings?What role does the baleful history of arrested decolonization in the` Third World'' ^ a period in which the object's resistance is indeeddi¤cult to discern ^ play in postcolonial theory's fetishization ofrepresentation?

The Adorno chapter, the longest in the book, spends a great deal oftime going over already well-traversed ground on the FrankfurtSchool's historical context. Nonetheless, this might provide a salutaryintroduction for those schooled only in French theory. Puzzlingly,however, while Varadharajan acknowledges the dubious nature ofLeszek Kolakowski's assessment of the Frankfurt School as ``not somuch a continuation of Marxism .. . as an example of its dissolutionand paralysis'' (p. 35), she continues to cite him as an authority onWestern Marxism as a whole. She also strikes something of an oddnote in her interpretation of the Frankfurt School's politics. Varad-harajan states that

the utopian moment in their thinking seems particularly pertinent to eman-cipatory critique in ours. Indeed, the very rigor with which they resisted theinstrumentalization of their theory by the forces they sought to opposesuggests the power of their philosophy of praxis, of their faith in revolution(p. 35).

While the Frankfurt School is nothing if not political, especially whencompared with the resolutely anti-utopian orientation of post-struc-turalism, is it really appropriate to speak of its ` faith in revolution''?Indeed, what is most compelling about the Frankfurt School ^ andwhat lends it its undeniable contemporaneity ^ is its stubborn commit-ment to thinking within the horizon of utopia ` after the moment torealize [philosophy] was missed.'' But to say this is hardly to contestVaradharajan's interpretation. On the contrary, it only serves to con-¢rm the important contribution Adorno can make to postcolonialstudies. Negative dialectics keeps alive the possibility of critique in thewake of a painfully aborted process of decolonization. Through itsredemption of the object from the damaging gaze of Orientalism andbourgeois nationalism alike, Exotic Parodies constitutes a cruciallyimportant and unique re£ection on such a possibility.

University of California, Berkeley Samir Gandesha

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