religion in the contemporary world: a sociological introduction – by alan aldridge

Book reviews

Reviews article

The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and BeyondBoaventura De Sousa Santos, London and New York: Zed, 2006, £55.00, paper£16.99, xii + 221pp.

Rebuilding the LeftMarta Harnecker, London and New York: Zed, 2007, £55.00, paper £14.99,168pp.

The Anti-Capitalist Dictionary: Movements, Histories, and MotivationsDavid E. Lowes, London: Zed, 2006, £59.99, paper £16.99, x + 310pp.

The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and OrganisationMartin Parker, Valerie Fournier, and Patrick Reedy, London and New York:Zed, 2007, £70.00, paper £16.99, Xiv + 338pp.

The State of Resistance: Popular Struggles in the Global SouthFrancois Polet (ed.), London and New York: Zed, 2007, £60.00, paper £16.99,xvi + 208pp.

In his recent book Black Mass John Gray suggests that the idea of utopia, thegood place that is also a non place, died in the ravaged cities of Iraq. His thesisis that the notion of utopia was torn apart by globalisation’s terrible utopiantwins, Islamic fundamentalism and American neo-liberalism, and that it isunlikely that we will ever take the notion of the perfect society seriously againin the wake of the everyday carnage of Baghdad and Iraq’s other war torncities. There is, of course, nothing new in declarations of the death of utopiaand, in many respects, such proclamations are utopian in themselves preciselybecause they imagine the birth of a society that no longer dreams of a betterfuture, a world without misery, poverty, and war. Despite the return of this

The Sociological Review, 56:2 (2008)© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Published byBlackwell Publishing Inc., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148,USA.

conservative anti-utopian utopianism to the scene of today’s global society, areturn which incidentally supports the progress of the neo-liberal utopia in itsdrive to transform the entire world into a free trade zone unconcerned aboutthe condition of human life, the last decade has seen the emergence of a newutopian movement, a movement of movements, which we might loosely callglobal anti-capitalism.Against the neo-liberal utopians, who radicalised AdamSmith’s theory of the invisible hand under conditions of globalisation andlegitimised the coincidence of state power and corporate speculation throughthe cynical manipulation of the ideology of human rights and regime change,and the Islamic utopians, who countered this colonial utopianism with a globalideology of their own committed to the pursuit of Shari’a law and the birth ofan Islamic super-state, the nascent anti-capitalist utopia began to emerge fromthe ruins of really-existing communism in the 1990s with a restatement ofMarx’s original humanism, which explained that humans should not have tolive out their lives in miserable subordination to either the fetish of the marketor other false Gods that similarly stifle their ability to express their true speciesbeing.

Although it took more or less a decade for global anti-capitalism toemerge from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, it is in many ways surprisingthat the impulse of utopian humanism contained in Marx’s original critiqueof capitalism returned to the scene so quickly after over half a century ofbroken promises. Given the re-emergence of utopian humanism into globalpolitics, in the form of grassroots movements such as the Mexican ZapatistaArmy of National Liberation (EZLN), the Brazilian Landless Workers Move-ment (MST), and democratically elected governments such as Evo Morales’Movement for Socialism Party in Bolivia (the symbolic links of Chavez’sParty to both socialist demands for human dignity (more food etc) andutopian construction (more / More) through the acronym MAS (Movimentoal Socialismo), which means ‘more’ in Spanish, should not be lost on thereader) and Hugo Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela in Venezuela,I think it is true to say that it is now clear that the generalised desire for anend to misery, poverty, and the kind of everyday war provoked by the neo-liberal utopians, is more powerful than the feelings of betrayal, defeat, andhopelessness that consumed the left for a large part of the 20th century. Theview that these feelings of despair, which culminated in the collapse of SovietUnion, the transformation of Communist China into perhaps the most savageneo-liberal, authoritarian, capitalist nation in the world, and Frances Fuku-yama’s celebration of the end of history and the final victory of the Americanmodel over all other ideological systems of social, political, economic, andcultural organisation, spelled the end of the leftist utopia committed to theprinciple of human dignity has not been borne out by the events of the lastdecade. The emergence of anti-capitalism signalled by the 1999 Seattle pro-tests, the rise to power of Morales and Chavez, and the publication of seriousworks on the prospect of a post-capitalist future, such as Hardt and Negri’sEmpire, shows that utopian humanism is back on the scene. This truth is

Book reviews

327© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

further supported by the glut of books that explore the coincidence of anti-capitalism and utopianism published every year. If we take five recent works,published by the radical publisher Zed Books, we can begin to see exactlyhow the original utopian impulse which has always haunted the modernworld, and found expression in works as diverse as More’s original Utopia,Marx and Engels’ early works, such as The 1844 Paris Manuscripts and TheGerman Ideology, and Bloch’s monolithic The Principle of Hope, finds newform in our contemporary global society.

The five books I have chosen to review include two dictionaries, Lowes’ TheAnti-Capitalist Dictionary and Parker, Fournier, and Reedy’s The Dictionaryof Alternatives, a collection which surveys the state of resistance to neo-liberalcapitalism in the global south, Polet’s The State of Resistance, and two mono-graphs on the situation of the left in contemporary global society, Harnecker’sRebuilding the Left, which offers an analysis of the state of the Latin Americanleft, and Boaventura De Sousa Santos’s study of the World Social Forum, TheRise of the Global Left. In many respects the two dictionaries, Lowes’ surveyof terms surrounding anti-capitalism and Parker, Fournier, and Reedy’s studyof the language of alternative organisation, are in themselves utopian exer-cises. This is simply because they set themselves the task of tracing the sym-bolic terrain, and as such providing a more or less detailed picture of social,political, economic, and cultural alternatives to the contemporary global domi-nant, neo-liberal capitalism, the economic form which has largely colonisedthe other spheres of human endeavour, the social, the political, and the cul-tural, to the extent that alternative forms of organisation no longer seemreasonable or even possible. One view would be that the fact of this neo-liberalhegemon is the precise reason for the explosion of materials on alternatives,utopias, and anti-capitalism and as a result the ultimate cause of the textsunder consideration in this review essay. If we swallow this claim then wemight say that neo-liberalism has now started to generate its own resistancemovements. Marx made a similar claim about industrial capitalism in the 19th

century. But regardless of how we take this dialectical thesis, we know that thereal danger of utopian projects committed to the completion of an archive ofknowledge, such as those of Lowes and Parker, Fournier, and Reedy, is thatthey either become convinced of their own ability to achieve macroscopiccompletion and as a result turn into totalitarian projects determined to sym-bolise thought in all its forms or turn to small scale mapping exercises whichsimultaneously limit their field of interest to very particular areas of knowl-edge that it seems possible to control and exclude all modes of expression thatfall outside of this narrow remit. Both projects are similarly utopian. In the firstinstance the totalitarian project bids to map thought and determine reality ona global scale. In the second instance the more restrictive brand of utopia,which we might more closely associate with the work of the early modernutopians such as More, limits the breadth of knowledge it seeks to categorise,but attempts to map the sphere of reality it chooses to consider in microscopicdetail.

Book reviews

328 © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

Fortunately, Lowes and Parker, Fournier, and Reedy avoid the temptationtowards the creation of conservative utopias by making it clear that theirrespective surveys are necessarily incomplete. In this respect they acknowl-edge the impossibility of mapping their particular area of interest completelyand implicitly recognise that the gesture necessary to limit a particular fieldof interest to a manageable number of statements is always violent preciselybecause the symbolic structures that codify reality work on the basis of net-works of signs that are practically endless. In this way both dictionaries arereflective of what we might call utopianism, rather than utopia, since theirauthors understand that their knowledge mapping projects, set up to enablepeople to situate their opposition to neo-liberal capitalism, will never tota-lise, but always remain partial, open-ended, structures. Given this qualifica-tion both works are extremely useful surveys of utopianism. The Parker,Fournier, and Reedy publication is the more expansive of the two booksbecause it considers the history of utopia as an alternative mode of social,political, economic, and cultural organisation. Despite the ambitious natureof the project, I think that the authors are fairly successful in their decisionsabout where to bound the project. They plot a course from the classicalutopians, such as Plato and More, to current anti-capitalist ideas, such asde-growth and Islamic economics, but avoid the slide into the production ofa comprehensive survey of world religion and the theological notion of para-dise. Each extract is well conceived, short enough to hold the reader’s atten-tion, but containing enough detail to properly explain the topic underconsideration.

If The Dictionary of Alternatives is more expansive in its conceptual treat-ment of utopianism, The Anti-Capitalist Dictionary suggests a more specifictreatment of the contemporary world system.This specificity is simultaneouslyan advantage and disadvantage of the book because what the survey appearsto gain in depth it loses in breadth. This concern for textual dimensions mightnot usually appear in reviews of traditional monographs, which are more orless specific depending on their author’s focus, but it is particularly relevantwhen considering works structured by the dictionary format, which requirestexts to be expansive in their treatment of a section of a particular symbolicsystem. I think Lowes attempts to address this concern by limiting the depth ofhis work and saving the dimension of breadth, and globality, necessary for adictionary through a commitment to the broadest possible understanding ofanti-capitalism. I am not sure this is a wholly successful strategy because itoften feels as though his selection of terms is in danger of losing its relation tothe master term, anti-capitalism, which is a more pointed concept than sayParker, Fournier, and Reedy’s expansive master concept, the alternative.However, in many respects this criticism of Lowes’ collection may be unfair.Anti-Capitalism is a strange term, which is simultaneously extremely broadand difficult to define, simply because of the vast numbers of movementscollected under its umbrella, and yet perfectly pointed in its general oppositionto capitalism. I think that this is the bind that Lowes’ publication struggles to

Book reviews


negotiate: how to convey the diversity of the ideas, concepts, and movementscollected under the master term anti-capitalism, but maintain some sense ofthe kind of coherence demanded by the same term’s commitment to opposingcapitalism.

The essential reason that it is unfair to lumber Lowes with the responsibilityfor effectively weighing the need to encompass diversity and maintain focus inhis work is because in many ways this is the problem of contemporary anti-capitalism itself, the real alternative to the current neo-liberal hegemon. Weencounter the same problem in Polet’s collection, The State of Resistance:Popular Struggles in the Global South. In this work there is little effort to focusthe diverse contributions of over thirty writers and activists from LatinAmerica, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. Instead the worksimply presents a snapshot of the various resistance movements across par-ticular parts of the world.While this exercise is useful on its own terms, I foundthe book ultimately problematic because there is little sense of the widercontext necessary to focus such resistances and unify them into some more orless coherent form. In Polet’s collection the problem is not only that there islittle sense of the intersections and coincidences that might unite diverseresistance movements, but also that the object of resistance is only very looselydefined as neo-liberal globalisation. Beyond this broad definition there is littlesense of capitalism in the book itself. Why is this problematic? The essentialreason it is necessary to systematise neo-liberalism today, and understand it asan abstract global structure, is because it operates on a microscopic, bio-political, level that simultaneously naturalises and obscures its macroscopic,systemic, reality. Is neo-liberalism natural? The answer is ‘no’. Do local resis-tance movements undermine its capacity to translate human qualities intofinancial qualities on a mass scale? ‘Yes’, but the problem is that such resis-tance movements will always remain just that, resistance movements, until theyfind ways to relate their local schemes to a globalised anti-capitalist networkable to confront neo-liberalism on an abstract, systemic, level. Again, weconfront the problem of weighing the need for an appreciation of diversity andthe necessity for focus in the anti-capitalist struggle against neo-liberal capi-talism. In essence this is exactly the problem Boaventura De Sousa Santos andMarta Harnecker explore in the two monographs under consideration in thefinal part of this review.

For De Sousa Santos the key space of global anti-capitalism, the WorldSocial Forum (WSF), is currently grappling with the problem of the relativeimportance of sustaining the diversity of local resistance movements andemphasising the need to unify these movements at a higher level in order topresent a workable alternative to neo-liberalism on a global scale. His view isthat the WSF has yet to suggest a proper alternative to neo-liberalism. This isbecause it has not been able to unify the myriad of local resistance movementsacross the world in ways that would enable it to rival the mastery of scalingsdisplayed by neo-liberal capitalism which is simultaneously a macroscopicEmpire, a series of regional cartels, an array of national capitalisms, and a more

Book reviews


or less endless range of ways of living everyday life conditioned by the bio-political reach of the macroscopic level, the neo-liberal system itself. In thisway De Sousa Santos presents a terrifying image of contemporary neo-liberalcapitalism. In his account neo-liberalism controls more or less the entire worldfrom the macroscopic level of global finance to the microscopic level of every-day life and everything else in-between. Essentially, this is why local resistancemovements and the WSF find themselves in such a difficult position today.How is it possible to combat the new form of totalitarian capitalism that haspenetrated every aspect of human life from the massive scalings of globalcommunications to the minutiae of everyday life? Perhaps the fact that localresistance movements, which have always been present, began to make use ofthe global scale to suggest intersections and coincidences, and as a resultinvented the ideas of anti-capitalism and the WSF in the first place, is evidencethat the ‘age of endings’ caused by the emergence of neo-liberal totalitariancapitalism was never as complete as writers like Frances Fukuyama led us tobelieve in the early 1990s.The alternative position to this view that neo-liberaltotalitarian capitalism was never really complete and that the ‘age of endings’was always an expression of American ideology is the idea that it was the veryfact of the complete domination of American liberal democracy obsessed withcapitalism that produced the anti-capitalist counter-movement and raisedutopian humanism from the dead (De Sousa Santos calls the leftist tradition‘dead thought’).

Regardless of which view we choose to take, it is clear that there is somekind of resistance to the totalitarian mode of capitalism operative today andthat this resistance exploded onto the global scene in the late 1990s with theSeattle WTO (World Trade Organisation) protests in 1999 and the formationof the WSF in 2001, the first year of the new Millennium. Following theformation of the WSF the term ‘Porto Alegre Consensus’ became commonparlance in recognition of anti-capitalism’s challenge to the neo-liberalWashington consensus on the value of monetarism, deregulation, privatisa-tion, and the minimal state. Unfortunately, what this term suggests, which isthat first there is some kind of consensus of opinion in the WSF about theway to oppose neo-liberal capitalism on a global level and second that linkedto this consensus view the WSF has some kind of concrete programme forchange in place that will realise the motto of the anti-capitalist movement‘another world is possible’, is not reflective of the current reality of themovement. De Sousa Santos recognises this problem. He tells us that theWSF is a diverse gathering of resistance movements, now in its seventh year,that must become more than a ‘talking shop’. Although there is some resis-tance to the idea of the WSF as a co-ordinated movement with prescribedaims, precisely because it is thought this will offend the movement’s com-mitment to the celebration of diversity, De Sousa Santos understands that itmust start to deliver results. But how will the WSF deliver on its promisethat ‘another world is possible’? De Sousa Santos sets himself the task ofanswering this question. Given that local resistance movements already

Book reviews


exist, his view is that the WSF’s role should be to co-ordinate the formationof a globalised critical utopia. He recognises that this co-ordination work isessential but is also sensitive to the need to prevent the emergence of a newconservative utopia crippled by the kind of ideological iron cage that domi-nated the left for much of the 20th century.

Thus De Sousa Santos maintains the view that the WSF must continue torespect local diversity and celebrate the need for internal critique. In otherwords, the WSF must evolve into a movement, or space, capable of sustain-ing a critique of both the stupid neo-liberal system, which simply reproducesitself for no reason worthy of the name reason, and its own structures inorder to prevent its own transformation into a similarly stupid ideologicalsystem. In terms of the former objective to critique the neo-liberal systemand suggest alternative worlds, De Sousa Santos offers a two-step strategy,which he calls the sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences, inorder to explore the utopian possibilities pregnant in other forms of knowl-edge, other conceptions of time, other notions of identification, other modesof scaling, and other ideas about productivity. If the aim of the sociology ofabsences is to explore alternatives ways of thinking and living ignored byneo-liberal culture, so that we might begin to see the advantages of otherforms of identification, other ways of thinking through the issue of the rela-tive value of local-global scalings, and other conceptions of productivityuncoupled from the pursuit of surplus value, then the objective of the soci-ology of emergences is to think about how these other ways of thinkingmight contribute what Harnecker calls ‘struggle potential’ to the confronta-tion with neo-liberalism.

Given that the overall aim of the sociologies of absences and emergences isto excavate possible futures from the neo-liberal present, which seems bereftof possibilities for change, I think De Sousa Santos is correct to align his visionof the WSF with utopianism, and in particular, the work of Ernst Bloch, whowrote about the present as a temporal state latent with possibility. If the roleof the WSF is to provide a space for the translation of local resistance move-ments into a globalised movement of movements, then we might suggest thatit has already begun to fulfil this role through its annual meetings in PortoAlegre in 2001, 2003, and 2005, Mumbai in 2004, and multi-centres in 2006, and2008. But what we must not forget is that the next step in the WSF’s strategymust be to scale the lessons learned at the global level back down to the locallevel where struggle really takes place. This is where De Sousa Santos is inmore or less complete agreement with Harnecker, author of Rebuilding theLeft, in that they both explain that what is needed today is a form of radical,high intensity, democracy to oppose the neo-liberal form of low intensitypolitical participation that never really stretches further than intermittentcontributions to local and national elections. In this respect both De SousaSantos and Harnecker more or less agree about the relative weightings oftheory-practice, globalism-localism, and organisation-diversity required bythe global left. They both suggest that it is necessary to secure some form of

Book reviews


organised, globalised, structure defined by a set of abstract principles able toprovide local resistance movements with some sense of global community, butthat this structure should not be allowed to solidify or turn into an ideologicalgospel impervious to criticism.

On the one hand, the necessity to ensure organisational flexibility is aboutthe need to secure internal democracy in the WSF and prevent the emergenceof a new brand of leftist totalitarianism, but on the other hand I think DeSousa Santos is quite right when he suggests that neo-liberal capitalism is toofast, too inter-connected, and too enamoured with spectacle to suffer old styleideology critique regardless of what the left concluded about its own needs.As he suggests, what we need today are tactics, rather than theory. Whereasthe latter term suggests a logical system of ideas that is more or less fixed andnot necessarily orientated towards practice, the former conception implies arecognition of first the necessity of mobility of thought, second the reality ofconflict, and third the need for praxis, the need to translate thought into action.But surely this celebration of tactics, mobility, and short term thought isproblematic? How are we to think about the long term future if all we have aretactics? For both De Sousa Santos and Harnecker we must try to escape fromour modernist attachment to the long term and think about how tactics releaseus from the need to define our possible futures. This is where both authors’utopianism shines through. Neither wants to map the future in the manner ofthe classical utopians. Instead both suggest that we must confront the presentand try to build the future from the materials to hand. Although Harnecker ismore explicit about her reasons for insisting upon the rejection of the Leninistmodel of the Vanguard, which failed the Latin American left so badly in the20th century, I suspect that De Sousa Santos’ motivations for setting out histheory of radical democracy are similarly bound up with this knowledge ofLatin American politics. In the end both writers reflect a commitment to localparticipation and radical democracy. They both reject the idea that politics isabout working within the limits of the possible, since in their view contempo-rary politics should be about excavating the impossible from the possible andliberating the potential of the present from the iron cage of neo-liberal capi-talism that admits no alternative futures.Thus we confront the condition of theleftist utopia today. The five books under consideration in this review essayprovide an essential framework for thinking about the prospects for radical,socialistic change in our contemporary world. Hopefully these texts, two com-pendiums of utopian terminology, a survey of resistance movements in theglobal south, and two meditations on the utopian possibilities of anti-capitalism, will provide readers with plenty of material to consider perhaps themost pressing issue of the 21st century, the systemic violence of neo-liberalcapitalism.

Keele University Mark Featherstone

Book reviews


Reviews

A Brief History of NeoliberalismDavid Harvey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, £8.99, 247pp.

If we live in a postmodern world where the grand narratives of history havegone into terminal crisis, there is a bit of a problem. One could easily make thecase that never before has one discourse so dominated the thinking of so manypolitical traditions. With minor embellishments, one group of ideas has wonadherents ranging from the centre left to the far right. Dictators and demo-crats alike are committed to the programmes forged under conditions of itsoverweening dominance. There are no serious alternatives, nor can there be.Neoliberalism is the master narrative of the early 21st century. David Harvey,however, is not one to be taken in by neoliberalism. As one of the small groupof scholars who has kept the Marxist flame burning in academia, this smallbook sets out to dissect neoliberalism’s claims and show its baleful influenceon the world.

The Brief History is ideology critique and a critique of political economy.Harvey’s account defines the chief contours of the theory, examines neoliber-alism’s origins and spread, the characteristics of the neoliberal state, assessesits record in terms of its devastating social effects, and crucially, as a regime ofcapital accumulation. By way of a working definition, Harvey holds neoliber-alism as ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that humanwell-being can best be advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms andskills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private prop-erty rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create andpreserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices’ (p. 2). Inneoliberal theory, the market is held to be sacrosanct: millions of simultaneoustransactions combine to become greater than the sum of its parts. Buying andselling are the circuits by which information is processed to ensure the wholeeconomic metabolism runs smoothly. The state however must be strictly dis-ciplined. As a political entity standing apart from the economy it is insensitiveto price signals and largely immune to market discipline. Should it overstep itsrole as guarantor of property rights and midwife to new markets there is everydanger of unbalancing the market’s equilibrium and bringing about a wholeseries of economic problems.

Neoliberalism as a semi-coherent body of thought was articulated underthe auspices of the Mont Pelerin Society, a small and exclusive club of aca-demics founded by Friedrich von Hayek in 1947 and brought together the likesof Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Moses, and Karl Popper. From here, aninterlocking network of intellectual and activist/PR cadres distributed acrossthink tanks, campuses, and voluntary organisations was patiently built up untilthey began exerting an influence over policy from the mid 1970s in the USA.At this time the ‘embedded liberalism’ (Keynesian mixed economies) of the

Book reviews


post-war years went into crisis. The regulatory mechanisms were perceived tobe a break on capital accumulation, growing inflation posed a threat to profits,and the share of national income accruing to capitalist elites was in long-termdecline. But most dangerous of all embedded liberalism sowed the conditionsfor a number of popular forces – the labour movement, new social movements– that constituted a potential political threat to ruling class privilege. Theadvantage of neoliberalism was its proven track record in buttressing classdivisions. After the 1973 coup in Chile, Harvey shows how the whole countryacted as a laboratory for its prescriptions. Nationalised industries were priva-tised as was social security, industry (particularly resource extraction) deregu-lated, and barriers to foreign direct investment lifted. After an initial bursteconomic growth had halted by 1982, but neoliberalism was a success in termsof restoring profitability and securing ruling class power by distributing wealthfrom the poor to the rich. The Thatcher and Reagan governments enthusias-tically embraced this agenda, establishing a pattern that was to recur incountry after country. Privatisation, tax cuts, deregulation, cuts in social expen-diture, privileging of finance capital, and union-busting/tight regulation oflabour markets are the political common sense of our day.

What has neoliberalism managed to achieve? Has it lived up to the hype ofits adherents? For Harvey, the answer has to be an emphatic no. For example,neoliberal rhetoric complains that if business were freed of the burden ofexcessive regulation economic growth would take off. Well, after two decadesof neoliberal medicine Harvey notes aggregate global growth rates for the‘Keynesian’ 60s and 70s stood at 3.5 and 2.4 percent respectively as comparedto 1.4 percent for the 80s and 1.1 percent in the 1990s. There has been anappreciable decline in the rate of economic growth, which is thrown into sharprelief when the main drivers of growth – south-east Asia and particularlyChina – still tend to favour state-led models of development! Then there hasbeen the change in the way capital has been accumulated. Profits have beenfuelled by a new wave of enclosures, characterised by the sorts of cuts/privatisation policies pursued by neoliberal governments everywhere. InHarvey’s argument, the expansion of wage labour, that is productivity-ledeconomic growth, has been largely absent. Capitalism has taken to consumingthe very social relations that sustained it in the recent past – this is accumu-lation by dispossession.

Neoliberalism has also affected the forms of opposition it faces. As it hastaken over the championing of the individual against the state, it is not toosurprising that opposition to the erosion of the global commons assumes thegarb of individual human rights. Without wanting to dismiss struggles thatutilise this discourse, Harvey argues they accept the parameters neoliberalismsets out for them. With the burgeoning Non-Governmental Organisationsector in mind struggle has become largely synonymous with legal petitions toexecutive and judicial centres of power. Utilisation of/pressure on existingdemocratic institutions is not pursued with as much vigour.The mobilisation ofthe disaffected around collective rights and the creation of new social solidari-

Book reviews


ties are not on the agenda. The NGO represents a constituency, albeit at asocial distance – NGOs do not have the same relationship to those it speaksfor as political parties, trade unions, and other forms of social movementorganisation.

In summary, neoliberalism may be the favoured ideology of capital run rioton a global scale. But it is not a viable strategy for capital accumulation in thelong term.We have seen in recent times the beginnings of the onset of a globalcredit crunch and how this has forced the UK government to nationalise onebank.This hardly heralds a global return to the Keynesian consensus, but morestate intervention into key sectors of the economy is a possibility. Howevercrisis manifests itself, Harvey argues global workers’ movements couldundergo a renaissance as capital seeks to find more pools of cheap labour asthe avenues of dispossession dry up. In fact, he notes the irony of the left andprogressive forces abandoning class as neoliberalism ever more starklyretrenches class relations and class privilege. As he puts it, ‘if it looks like classstruggle and acts like class war, then we have to name it unashamedly for whatit is. The mass of the population has to either resign itself to the historical andgeographical trajectory defined by overwhelming and ever-increasing upperclass power, or respond to it in class terms’ (p. 202).

Keele University Phil Burton-Cartledge

Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of GenealogySarah Franklin, Duke University Press, Durham NC and London, 2007, £12.99,253pp.

Sometimes one is still asked – often by natural science colleagues – what thedifference is between sociology and anthropology. Sarah Franklin’s bookwould provide (half of) a convincing answer. It is a carefully crafted, techni-cally well informed, consistently clever work of social research which is, neverthe less, somehow alien to the sociologist.

It starts with clones, which is what the reader expects from Dolly. Franklinexplains carefully the basis of Dolly’s reproduction and the whole range ofrelated work on animal cloning.As is now well known, Dolly was produced bya process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer: the nucleus of a cell from anadult sheep was introduced into an emptied-out egg cell from a different sheepand this egg cell was then stimulated to reproduce itself. The egg was placedinto a surrogate ewe and grew into an embryo and thence into Dolly. TheDolly process involves no father but up to three mothers.

Roughly speaking, Dolly showed that an adult mammal could be repro-duced so as to generate almost-clones of that adult. I say almost-clones sincethe host cell was not entirely emptied out. Mitochondrial DNA remained, sothat Dolly developed in a cellular environment with some DNA from anunrelated sheep (in fact, from a different breed in her case). Also, at the time

Book reviews


of her birth, Dolly’s own DNA was already old – having undergone repeatedepisodes of replication and cell division during Dolly’s genetic mother’s life –and thus Dolly at one month was not exactly like her (un-named) predecessorhad been at the same age even at the genetic level, even though her codingDNA sequence was fundamentally the same. Still, the astonishing thing wasthat an adult mammal had virtually been cloned using one body cell (in thiscase a mammary cell) to generate all the other kinds of cells in the body. Dollywas even fertile, so that she could have passed on some of her genetic endow-ment (and thus her ‘mother’s’) to her offspring. Franklin spent a good deal oftime talking with the scientists who developed Dolly (Ian Wilmut and others)and visiting their workplace, and she covers this material well.

But Franklin is not writing the usual kind of book on cloning and itsregulation; indeed early on she firmly sets herself apart from that literature.After discussing Dolly, she follows an unexpected route, locating our dealingswith Dolly in the context of our broader connections to sheep. Though sheepmight be thought to have lost their key place in the economy before industrialtimes, she finds that sheep are still all around us.Australia has over 110 millionsheep and New Zealand approximately half that many, and Australia’s sheepeconomy is dependent on live sales to the Middle East and North Africa.Humans are still modifying sheep biology, even away from the laboratory –choosing which breeds are favoured in Middle Eastern markets and respond-ing to changing preferences for leaner or younger (or older) meat. Indeed,sheep breeds only really came to be understood in the modern sense in theeighteenth century. ‘Pure’ breeds were established by in-breeding, to an extentthat wasn’t far off cloning in any event; well before Dolly, sheep were humancreations.

As Franklin happily acknowledges, we have grown used to the idea thathumans think about themselves and their ‘natural’ properties in terms of otheranimals. Ape narratives are deployed to show us what we are not as well aswhat we are. Experimental mice in some ways do the same thing, both standingin for us and standing out from us. Franklin proposes that we think of sheep ina similar way; we have built landscapes for sheep and now sheep regulate thelandscapes. We shape sheep but sheep shape our view of nature.

From breeds and commerce Franklin moves on to sheep troubles, specifi-cally the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in Britain, which resulted inthe mass culling of farm animals, and the probably less well known story of thelive sheep cargo from Australia aboard the Cormo Express two years later. Inthe latter case, some 60,000 sheep were sent to Saudi Arabia from WesternAustralia but, on arrival in the Middle East, were rejected on the grounds thatthey were affected by a viral disease. Australian spokespersons rejected thisclaim but the sheep were turned away. The unlucky animals were stuck at seawith no nearby country willing to accept them. Even if they weren’t unwell onarrival in port, being cooped up for much longer was likely to make themgenuinely sick. Representatives of the industry in Australia rejected the ideathat the animals could be repatriated – since this might lead to the idea in the

Book reviews


Middle East that other Australian animals could be infected by them; in anyevent the animals might have now become vectors of some other disease. Theauthorities could find no one to take the sheep, even for free and in the endhad to pay for them to be unloaded (and presumably eaten) in Eritrea.

Franklin unfolds her stories about Dolly in an attractive manner but manyof her claims are allusive rather than specific. Let me take two points of detailto illustrate what I mean. First, there is the contested issue of how old/agedDolly is. At birth her DNA had already been around for six years. It had gonethrough numerous cycles of replication and cell division as Dolly’s geneticmother grew from fertilised egg to maturity. Reproduction generally results inthe DNA becoming slightly shorter; the very end of the string is dropped.DNA molecules are protected from this process by having lengthy elements atthe ends (telomeres) which do not code but which seem to function preciselyto prevent the shortening process from affecting vital bits of the DNAsequence. The question is, was Dolly pre-aged at the genetic level? Franklinreports on suggestions that this may have been so and that this may haveimpacted her health in mid-life, but then concludes by noting that ‘Wilmut andhis colleagues caution that these measurements were made in several differentexperiments and may be misleading’ (159). Given the centrality of this issue,one might have expected more detail on this debate but the discussion is leftwith Wilmut’s vague reassurance.

Something similar happens in the Cormo Express case. Australian export-ers seem to have believed that the disease claims were sparked not by anyactual disease but by the fact that the Australian dollar had suddenly appre-ciated, making the sheep much dearer on arrival than had been anticipated.Steps were taken to try to construct some ‘objective’ body that could pro-nounce on whether the sheep were sick or not, though it is not clear in detailhow the Saudi Arabian authorities responded to these moves. Again Franklinis more interested in what the generalities of the case tell us than the specifics.

Overall Franklin has tried to lift our gaze from Dolly as clone to sheep-in-society. This is an interesting move but I worry that it may have been achievedat the cost of detailed analyses of the construction of Dolly’s age, of theinfectednessofAustraliansheep,andofnumerousotherspecifics–theverykindsof details that have been the bread and butter of recent sociology of science.

University of Edinburgh Steve Yearley

Religion in the Contemporary World: A Sociological Introduction (secondedition),Alan Aldridge, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, 2007, £16.99,242pp.

This second edition of Religion in the Contemporary World (2007) amountsto a fairly radical re-structuring of the initial volume. Certainly, it is more

Book reviews


informative and engaging than the first in providing an introduction to thesociology of religion.The title, as before, is however, perhaps a little misleadingon two counts. First, the ‘contemporary world’ seemingly refers to westernsociety. Indeed, the western context provides the volume’s central focus,although it does range further albeit largely limited to references to globalisedaspects of religiosity. Secondly, if the prospecting reader expects a tour throughreligion in post-modernity they may be rather disappointed (in fact post-modernity rarely gets a mention).

The volume has a number of central themes that are skillfully woventhroughout the various chapters. Two such themes appear to be paramount.First, the tension that religion displays with the contemporary world which, inturn, suggests aspects of secularisation where religion has to cope with andrespond to secularising processes. And, relatedly, the more direct challengesoffered by secularity to many expressions of religiosity. Secondly, the matterof religious liberties is central to the volume and this is clearly connected tothe first theme. Incorporated here is a useful discussion of what or doesnot constitute religion. This overview of the differing definitions of religionis indeed one of the strengths of the volume. Perhaps these two themes arenot the most obvious way of structuring an introductory text to the sociologyof religion. Nonetheless, for the most part this framework is successfullyemployed. Beyond these core issues, the author takes a number of sub-themesthat are chiefly subsumed under the various chapter headings.

The first chapter deals with religious diversity, the second with social con-flicts and the related sociological debates. These opening chapters clearly setthe scene for a discussion of religious-secular tensions and religious freedoms.Chapter three considers varieties of religious movements and takes the readerthrough the familiar typologies of sects, denominations and new religiousmovements, and useful discusses the limitations of these classifications. Chap-ters four and five overview theories of secularisation. The former provides asurvey of theories of secularisation in their ‘classical’ renditions, ranging fromComte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel et al, to the works of Peter Bergerand Bryan Wilson. Chapter five considers the new paradigms including ‘believ-ing without belonging’ and rational choice/supply-side theory. The latter isexplored, if sometimes rather awkwardly, with reference to Mormons, JehovahWitnesses, Pentecostalism, and the mega-churches.

Chapter six is concerned with religious fundamentalism, if substantiallylimited to Christian and Islamic variants. Chapter seven deals with the oftenneglected area in standard sociology of religion volumes, namely civil reli-gions. Chapter eight overviews religious controversies including the ‘brain-washing’ debate, joining and leaving the new religions, cults and moral panics,and those cults which are most definitely a threat to life, limb and property.Theconcluding chapter engages with religious identity and meaning in consumersociety. These themes are explored widely through such topics as the RomanCatholic Church, sexuality and gender, the new ‘spiritualities’ and the NewAge. This denotes how, throughout the volume, such diversity of subjects

Book reviews


related to a central theme are sometimes only integrated with a certainamount of force. Also, by way of illustration, there is a section in chapter onewhich rather curiously lurches from a discussion of global civilisations andtheir religion to pick ‘n mix Christianity, to spiritual ‘shopping’.

All in all, Religion in the Contemporary World provides as good an intro-duction to the sociology of religion for the uninitiated as any current volume.Just about every topic that might be expected is to be found, thus providing acomprehensive reader. That said, so many areas are overviewed that thevolume deserves a more comprehensive index than that provided. Anotherobservation is that the author ends, perhaps unnecessarily, with something ofa polemical note on religious freedoms. Also, there are, unfortunately, a fewthrow-away lines such as to be found in the overview of Christian charismaticswhere we are told that ‘. . . fewer people outside the churches either know orcare about them’(p. 57). Finally, I cannot resist a comment about the frontcover. That of the first edition was very engaging. It depicted the message ‘Doyou have any idea where you’re going - God’ as written on a bus shelter. Thecover of this second edition seems to portray a hooded Hobbit going shopping,perhaps giving the impression that religious people are very strange people.But that, of course, is only a personal interpretation.

University of the West of England Stephen Hunt

Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 PerspectivesGarnett, J., Grimley, M., Harris, A., White, A., Whyte, W. and Williams, S.,(eds) SCM Press, London, 2006, £18.99, 308pp

Redefining Christian Britain, with its array of editors and wide-ranging panelof contributors, is an innovating, challenging and stimulating volume whichoffers a unique account of the place of religion in Britain since 1945.While thesubject has previously been discussed within rather limited frameworks, thisvolume embraces a far wider range of themes and perspectives. Contributorsfrom the disciplines of economics, history, philosophy, sociology and theologyare all well represented.

The general tendency of earlier volumes on the subject of religion in Britainhas been that of focusing on dimensions and indexes of secularisation, notleast of all through the measurement of formal religious commitments. Rede-fining Christian Britain marks a challenge in that the various contributorsemphasise the more diffuse, hidden and dynamic influence of religion in bothprivate and public life. In this sense the volume establishes new areas ofinquiry. In doing so, it follows three different conceptual frameworks thatclaim to comprehend the transformative nature of Christianity in Britain overthe last six decades: authenticity, generation and virtue.

Redefining Christian Britain contains eighteen chapters divided over sixparts exploring the central themes of authenticity, generation and virtues.

Book reviews


‘Authenticity’ incorporates the ‘experience’ of Christianity and is detailedthrough changes in liturgical language (Allana Harris), worship (Ian Joneswith Peter Webster) and the neglected area of congregational dynamics(Mathew Guest). Authenticity is further explored through ‘performance’. Thewide ranging themes here include the priesthood and gay sexuality (WilliamWhyte), theology in the public arena (Mark Chapman), and the papal funeralof John Paul II (Grace Davie).

‘Generation’ takes the volume into the areas of popular music and literature(William Whyte), the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Holger Nehring)and Christianity in the internet generation (Jane Garnett). The theme ofgeneration also delves into the vicinities of art and religion (George Pattison),children’s literature (Bernice Martin) and architectural expressions of belief(WilliamWhyte).‘Virtue’ is explored through its ambivalence (Harriet Harris),religious education (Ashley Rogers Berner),Christianity and economics (RufusBlack), liberalism and the public sphere (Raymond Plant), intellectuals and themedia (Matthew Grimley), and religious identity in Ireland (Robert Tobin).

The rationale behind Redefining Christian Britain is clearly to dispel someof the alleged ‘myths’ in respect of the level of secularity in Britain. Hence,Christianity is viewed as undergoing a transformation rather than decline. Onthis premise the editors maintain that levels and expressions of authenticity,generation and virtue undermine the traditional secularisation thesis as articu-lated by Berger, Wilson, Martin, Bruce et al. Collectively, their works areinterpreted as a ‘master narrative’ that has considerable flaws. The volume,then, is largely in line with ‘revisionist’ interpretations of the essence andfunction of religion in contemporary society – an endeavour that seeks outlargely unseen and more discursive aspects of the Christian faith given thatsome 70 percent of the British population, according to the 2001 nationalcensus, still identify themselves as Christian.

It follows that ‘authenticity’ erodes the acceptance of the ‘subjective turn’from collective identities towards a privatised individualism and all that entailsfor matters of faith. Rather, some people have rejected traditional expressionsof Christianity, while others have engaged in debates regarding its merit andmay seek more expressive and meaningful articulations of religiosity.‘Generation’ points towards ‘chains of religious memory’ and the matter of thetransmission of religious ideas and identities over the generations. Hence, thevolume’s concern with the way in which religious ideas, formations and infor-mation circulate beyond the purely literary, textual and theological and findexpression through architecture, art and children’s literature.Thus, the volumeattempts to show how Christian language and grammars have been trans-formed in post-war Britain. ‘Virtue’, especially through language, seeminglyhas not disappeared altogether. Collectively, according to the editors, aspectsof authenticity, generation and virtue indicate that Christian Britain has notceased to exist. The volume concludes by pointing towards the potential of are-imagined Christian community, while finding an inherently and historicallyrelational dialogue between Christianity and its surrounding culture.

Book reviews


Redefining Christian Britain is a compelling book and constitutes aninformed counterpoint to conventional accounts of secularity, not least of all inrelation to the British environment. In that respect it is a compulsory read forthose interested in contemporary debates on the subject. That said, I am notpersonally convinced of the general thrust of the volume, although its enter-prise is commendable. The Introduction of the volume substantiates the‘promiscuous flexibility’ (p. 3) of the secularisation thesis in its remarkablepropensity to absorb objections and repair itself in the face of contrary evi-dence. As much may be said of the ‘revisionist’ standpoint. A great deal isexemplified by the volume’s opening observance of the high percentage ofBritons claiming to be Christian. However, surely diffuse and hidden aspectsof authenticity, generation and virtue cannot wholly and ultimately account forthis statistic when only some 6 percent outwardly express their Christianidentity in church attendance. Indeed, the erstwhile search for the diffuse andthe hidden suggests that such vague identity remains little more than a faintcultural remnant rather than the potential of an imagined community.

University of the West of England Stephen Hunt

Book reviews


religion in the contemporary world: a sociological introduction – by alan aldridge

Documents