Political Studies (1993), XLI, 685-691

Book Reviews
Iain Hampsher-Monk, A History ofModern Political Thought: Major Political Thinkers
from Hobbes to Marx (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), xiii + 609 pp., &50.00ISBN 1 55786
146 3, f14.99 pbk ISBN 1 55786 147 1.
Students of modern political thought for whom conceptual analysis is too abstract and
intellectual history too opaque will not find a more authoritative treatment of their subject
than this guide to the classics from Leviathan to Capital. The chapters on Hobbes, Locke,
The Federalist, Burke and Hegel are mainly addressed to just a single work in each case,
while those on Hume, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill and Marx pursue themes across several
writings - almost always in sufficient depth to carry conviction. The authors joint
editorship of History of Political Thought over the past dozen years has served him well,
encouraging a rich (perhaps even too dense) annotation which includes many secondary
sources and specialist articles in addition to textual references; his very closely printed
bibliography alone comprises thirty pages. These commentaries tread a deliberately
circumscribed path between a critical and contextual reading of major political doctrines,
showing both philosophical sophistication while at the same time locating their subjects
meaning in the particular controversies in which they figured. In the sense that they form a
collection of more or less independent essays, they d o not really comprise a history of
modern political thought, but their subtle treatment of both the shape and detail of
doctrines sheds much historical light upon the separate and particular ways in which
political thinkers themselves conceived and designed their works.
While sensitive to the nuances of language - for instance, the imagery and moral
vocabulary of both Burkes and Marxs political economy - Iain Hampsher-Monk is
anxious to interpret arguments as unique statements which do not derive their meaning
exclusively from that of the linguistic conventions o r terms they deploy. He is too modest
in ascribing originality mainly to other scholars whose views he distils, for his chapters on
Hobbes and Mill above all are not only particularly fine but also framed in an unobtrusive
idiom still very much his own. In intersecting philosophy and history he nevertheless pays
a price for his diffident fidelity to the texts he scrutinizes, perhaps most evident in his
remarks on The Federalist, which manage to be at once masterful and obscure, in that the
essentially decontextualized analysis they offer makes one wonder what HampsherMonks interpretation adds to the meaning of the work itself, identified only in a
fragmentary way through footnote references. No less than the methodologies through
which his own approach wends its way, the light he brings to bear unavoidably darkens
other avenues. It is remarkably luminous just the same, and would have shone with even
greater clarity if the publishers had allowed two volumes in a larger typeface in place of
just this one, doubly trying on the eyes on account of an apparently arbitrary selection of
different fonts, sometimes even on facing pages.
ROBERT WOKLER
University of Manchester
GI Political Studies Association 1993. Published by Blackwell Publishers. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF, UK and 238 Main
Street. Cambridge. MA 02142. USA.

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Book Reviews

Jack Crittenden. Beyond Indiridualism: Reconstituting the Liberal Self (Oxford, Oxford
University Press. 1992). x + 230 pp.. f30.00 ISBN 0 19 507330 4.
This book is a contribution to the on-going debate between liberals and communitarians.
Jack Crittenden seeks to transcend the debate by developing a theory of the self called
'compound individuality', which allows the self to be partially defined by its commitments. but makes space for genuine agency and autonomy in a way that he thinks
communitarian accounts cannot. He also argues that his theory differs from the dominant
liberal view because it does not regard selves as isolated atoms and because it frees the
notion of autonomy from the idea of self-sufficiency. Crittenden doesn't aim to reconcile
this revised conception of autonomy with community. however: he thinks community is
flawed on the grounds that i t excludes autonomy of any sort; he offers 'sociality' as an
alternative which can be combined with autonomy, so long as autonomy is distinguished
from independence.
Crittenden's theory of compound individuality is not only designed to provide a
philosophical reconciliation of autonomy and sociality. but also an account of what it is
for a self to be well-adjusted and morally mature. He argues that the true purpose of the
liberal state is to promote self-development in the direction of compound individuality by
providing appropriate institutional structures. These structures would be designed to
encourage full participation in political decision-making. emphasizing contextual
thinking and openness to different perspectives.
The strength of Crittenden's book is the interesting way in which it draws upon research
by developmental psychologists: he shows how their models of self-development conceive
the self as proceeding through a number of different stages, each of which involves agency
and self-definition. Many liberals and communitarians will be unpersuaded by his central
contentions, however. I t is not clear that Crittenden's theory of compound individuality
provides a coherent answer to the question of how a self which is genuinely constituted in
part by itsends and attachments might (as he wishes to allow) reflect upon one of these and
decide to relinquish it: how can one (in principle) imagine oneself in the absence of a
constitutive commitment. which is needed if one is to entertain the possibility of
abandoning it? Furthermore. in my view he is unsuccessful in showing that community,
properly understood, must exclude autonomy.
ANDREW MASON
University of HUN

David Lockwood. Solidarity and Schisni: 'The Problem of Disorder ' in Durkheimian and
Mursist Sociology (Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1992). xvi + 433 pp., f48.00
ISBN 0 198 27717 7 .
There have been two main schools of sociological thought, those who follow Durkheim
and subscribe to a consensual model of social order and those who follow Marx and focus
on conflict and the role of power in holding a community together. The analysis of these
contrasting views is the subject of David Lockwood's book. He claims that when one
looks at the problem of disorder in each of these theories, the dominant conception of
society and social action proves inadequate and each has recourse to residual concepts
that reflect the main perspective of its respective rival. Thus, the need for Marxists to
explain the absence of disordcr through a lack of revolutionary consciousness led to a
gradual abandonment of predominantly utilitarian theory of action, whereby agents
pursued their system determincd interests and its replacement by a theory of hegemony in
which class-neutral common values and non-rational commitments to ultimate values
played a central role. As Lockwood observes, 'in this way, the theory ofclass polarization
<

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appeared to return full circle to the problem of disorder entailed by Durkheims notion of
solidarity. Similarly, when explaining anomic disorder Durkheim ended up introducing
an extraneous quasi-structural element of a Marxian kind deriving from sudden changes
in the distribution of power, wealth and the division of labour, with economic or
utilitarian motives playing a key role. Lockwoods analysis is intended to show that these
two bodies of theory are at once antithetical and complementary, in that the residual
concepts of the one theory are those which enjoy analytical priority in the other. His aim,
however, is not to produce a synthesis. Indeed, his enterprise began as a critique of
Parsons attempt to unify the two. He contends that all such attempts inevitably end up
striving to integrate the categories of the one into the manner of thinking of the other in
ways which ultimately prove incoherent, resolving their differences by dissolving their
substance. Instead, his purpose is to demonstrate how they exhibit significant points of
convergence arising from the complementarity of their core and peripheral concepts of
the structuring of social action. In particular, he argues both bodies of theory seek the
chief source of disorder in a structural incongruity or contradiction which can most
appropriately be understood as a state in which the system of class relationships becomes
incompatible with the system of status relationships. Lockwoods analysis is persuasive
and often illuminating. Yet in many respects the book now seems dated. For as he himself
remarks, Marx and Durkheim offer less than a comprehensive analysis of the subject of
order and conflict in that neither theory is able to deal adequately with those empirically
important instances of conflict between groups divided from one another by such
ascriptive solidarities as ethnicity, territoriality, and language. In a post-industrial
society, these seem categories that no social theorist can afford to ignore and which require
us to go beyond the classics to think about.
RICHARD BELLAMY
University of East Anglia

Charles Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1993), xx + 389 pp., E37.50 ISBN 0 521 38570 9, E12.95 pbk ISBN
0 521 38597 0.
Richard Rorty, Essavs on Heidegger and Others: Phitosophical Papers. volume 2
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), x + 202 pp., L27.50 ISBN 0 521
35370 x, and E8.95 pbk ISBN 0 521 35878 7.
Charles Guignon has put together a useful collection ofessays on Heidegger, which covers
a range of important topics and takes a first step towards addressing the question of
Heidegger and politics. This question takes at least three forms: the endorsement of Hitler
in 1933; the critique of nihilism and technology; and Leo Strauss suggestion that
Heideggers end of philosophy is also an end of politics. Some of the essays collected
here address the first two questions; readers of this journal will be disappointed that none
address this last one. True to the pattern for volumes in this series, the essays are with one
exception specially commissioned and published here for the first time. The exception is
Rortys essay Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the reification of language, reprinted from
Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991). Heidegger is much invoked both in Rortys now
famous Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1989) and in the earlier Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1979). As early as 1976, in Overcoming the tradition; Heidegger and
Dewey, not included in Rortys Heidegger volume, Rorty reads Being and Time (1927) as
sympathetic to pragmatism. He sees Heideggers account of technology as mistaken in
regretting a triumph of pragmatism in the twentieth century. While Rorty may claim this
interpretation to be weak thought in Vattimos sense, it is also strong, indeed violent
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Book Reviews

interpretation in Heideggers sense of that term. Rorty like Heidegger has a problem with
the status of his interpretations. Neither can claim their accounts to be definitive, since
both leave open the possibility of multiple readings. Neither can claim their accounts to
have the status of mere opinion, since they entail falsifiable claims about the current state
of thought. The other essay on Heidegger in Essays on Heidegger and Others, Heidegger,
contingency and pragmatism is to be found in Dreyfus and Hall (eds.) Heidegger: u
Critical Reader (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1992).In that volume there is a challenging essay
by Mark B. Okrent questioning the adequacy of Rortys reading of Heidegger.
The names of Guignons contributors form a roll call of North American expertise:
Caputo, Dreyfus, Olafson, Rorty, Sheehan, Taylor, Zimmerman. Two of Guignons
contributors, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall, are the editors of the Blackwells rival
volume. To complete the exchange, Guignon contributes an astute essay to the
Blackwells volume. In Heidegger scholarship, who is talking to whom, and who is reading
whom, is a key issue. While Guignons volume is less uneven than its immediate
competitor, with a more systematic coverage of issues, they share a common problem.
Neither cast any light on the recent disputatious correspondence in the New York Review
of Books, following Tom Sheehans review of Richard Wolins second version of his reader
The Heidegger Controversl. (Columbia University Press, 1991; MIT University Press,
1993). The question to which they provide no hint of an answer is: why did Derrida so
emphatically decline to appear under the editorship of Richard Wolin? Since the issues are
highly complex, I cannot hope to provide an answer to this question here. The problem is
that Guignon. and indeed Dreyfus and Hall, give no account of the differences within and
between German. French and American readings of Heidegger: between Otto Poggelers
careful reconstructions and Jiirgen Habermas brief dismissals; between Jean Beaufrets
blanket endorsements and Jacques Derridas complex disentanglings; between William
Richardsons detailed documentations and Tom Rockmores outraged condemnations. It
was clearly editorial policy to avoid controversy and it is comforting to think that one day
it may be possible to discuss Heideggers work without getting caught up in polemic; but
the result is the absence of the entire French response to Heidegger, in all its diversity.
Guignons contributors are mostly taken up with discussing what Heidegger may have
meant. As a result close engagement with text, as practised by Derrida, goes missing.
This obscures one of Heideggers central themes: the lived relation of thinking as a
process in the present, opening out of the past into the future, and at the same time coming
into the present out of whatever future we may project, thus casting a new light on the
past. This structure makes the interpretation of texts multiple. As Derrida has recently
shown, if we read Marxs Comrniinis~Manifesto in the light of an expected revolution we
read it differently from rcading it in the light of the fall of the Iron Curtain. The pragmatic
dimension of Heideggers thought is his disruption of the priority of detached description
over engaged positionality within processes at work above and beyond our control. The
obliteration of engaged thought by detached reportage, reconstructing what the other said
instead of responding to the others thinking. undermines spontaneous linkages between
people and subverts the possibility of genuine collective agency. This renders even more
mythological the founding democratic notion of collective will, constituting a group
identity. Derridas readings of Heidegger explore the ways in which Heideggers thinking
could providc an analysis of why it is easier to denounce than to listen; why it is easier to
endorse democratic process than to take part in it; easier to make monological claims to
democratic purity than to engage in genuine dialogue. It is this exploration which makes
Derridas absence from Guignons volume regrettable. especially for readers of this
Journal.
JOANNA H O D G E
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Michael Sullivan, The Politics of Social Policy (London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992),
xvi + 253 pp., E9.95 ISBN 0 7450 0785 6.
This examination of social policy after 1945 attempts to explain the waxing and waning of
support for the kind of welfare state envisaged by Beveridge; a collective attack on the five
giant evils barring the way to social progress through the extension of citizenship rights,
founded on full employment guaranteed by the application of Keynesian nostrums in
pursuit of economic expediency and social justice. Michael Sullivan is mainly concerned
with the UK but uses Swedish and US experience to illustrate greater and lesser
commitment to state welfare; the Swedes with a more sturdy commitment reflecting a
longer tradition of successful corporate negotiation, the Americans with no commitment
to speak of at all, wedded to low taxes and self help, with only brief bursts of government
activity during the New Deal and the Great Society Programmes of the War on Poverty in
the 1960s.
Sullivan deftly untangles the intricate process of policy formation, distinguishing
successive periods of building and then managing consensus, followed by entrenchment
and divergence, by retrenchment and finally, in the 1940s-90s, by restructuring, in the
UK if not in Sweden, in response to economic decline and the rise of the New Right.
Whether restructuring represents a substantial rejection of state welfare in Britain
remains an open question. Sullivan is optimistic, despite disillusion on the Left that has
reinforced the attacks from the economic liberals on the Right. He reminds us that
support for state welfare was never solid even during the late 1940s and 1950s, but nor was
the retreat during the 1980s. Sweden hung on to collective policies in face of economic
troubles because the New Right was relatively weak. In the UK Sullivan finds evidence
from the British Social Attitudes Surveys of popular, if selective, support for the welfare
state, consolidated in the 1940s and still persisting. Perhaps attitude surveys are uncertain
indicators - given those same attitudes have allowed a succession of apparently
entrenched conservative administrations devoted to cutting public spending, though as
Sullivan points out, the strength of the Right in Britain has been in large part a reflection of
the splintering of the Left.
The study breaks no new ground but is a lucid comprehensive review of current debate
on the rise and fall of welfare policies.
JULIA PARKER
University of Oxford
Mark Franklin and Philip Norton, Parliamentary Questions (Oxford, Clarendon, 1993),
vi + 215 pp., f27.50 ISBN 0 19 827317 7.
D. Shell and D. Beamish, The House of Lords at Work: a Study Based on the 1988-1989
Session (Oxford, Clarendon, 1993), viii + 412 pp., f45.00 ISBN 0 19 827762 8.
If one were to introduce an entrance examination to membership of the House of Lords,
The House of Lords at Work: a Study Based on the 198811989session would be compulsory
reading. Based on the 1988/89 session it contains a detailed statement of the workings of
the House both in its more and less conspicuous capacities. And it certainly seems to bear
out the comment that although no one starting from scratch would create a Second
Chamber anything like the House of Lords, the one that we actually have works
remarkably well and requires at the most only minor adjustments.
The book analyses the various activities of the House and bases its comments on actual
experiences, particularly during the particular session mentioned. This session appears to
have been selected as a pretty typical, although very busy one.
I could only discover in a very detailed book two minor factual inaccuracies. These are
the statement on p. 21 1 that starred questions, that is to say questions requiring oral
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Book Revieir,s

answers, were not limited in respect of the time taken in dealing with them. While this is
true of the individual question the time limit of half an hour for the maximum of four
questions taken each day is strictly enforced with the consequence that if an excess of time
is taken over the earlier ones the last one gets badly squeezed.
The other statement which I would be disposed to query is that the existence of a
speakers list for the conduct of debates cuts out spontaneous interventions. It is true that
in the recently introduced short time-limited debates. where the number of speakers
sometimes involves limits of four or five minutes for a speech. does make it all but
impossible for the Peer speaking to give way to an intervention. But in ordinary debates,
including debates on Bills, it is very much the convention of the House that the Peer who is
speaking will give way to an intervention and then seek to answer it. It is indeed one of the
objections to the system of time-limited debates that they d o have the effect of cutting out
spontaneous interventions and tend to be to some extent an occasion for the reading of
essays which have little connection with preceding orations.
The book brings out admirably the very important and valuable work done by the
House of Lords Select Committees. Above all it draws attention to what is the most
important of these, that is the Select Committee or Committees which look at the work
and orders of the European Commission. No other organization in this country supervises
the output of Brussels to the same extent, or with the same authority.
This book will undoubtedly be the standard work on the House of Lords for a good
many years to come.
Parliamentary Questioris is a good deal more technical than the work on the House of
Lords and faces up to the increasing complexity of the rules now governing Parliamentary
Questions, particularly in the Commons. This is, of course, the result of the steady increase
in the number of Oral. and the quite startling increase of Written Parliamentary
Questions. The book recounts the successive steps made to try to deal with as many Oral
Questions as possible in a limited time and indicates how this has been only partially
successful. It certainly brings out the growing enthusiasm for asking both starred and
unstarred questions. It also seeks to deal with what many of us regard as the decline in the
quality of Parliamentary Questions put to the Prime Minister, particularly as a result of
the expedient of simply asking him what his engagements are for the day and then
following this up with some specific policy matter.
Winston Churchill greatly enjoyed answering Prime Ministers Questions under the
former system when he was Prime Minister. In those days Prime Ministers Questions
were, as the book records, put down to begin at Question 45. If, therefore, earlier
questions took longer than they should it was quite possible for Prime Ministers
Questions not to be reached. So far from gratifying Winston Churchill this was a situation
which he very much resented. I recall answering questions on a date when No. 45 and
3.30 pm were growing closer together and how he told me simply not to answer
supplementaries so as to enable Prime Ministers Questions to be reached. He was
certainly an artist in answering them, and revelled in the use of his skill.
There is a very interesting chapter on Questions in the Lords. It skates very tactfully
over the frequent disparity between the knowledge and experience of the questioner and
the fact that the Minister replying may not even be in the Department to which a question
is directed. The number of Ministers or other representatives of a Department is now
below the level at which Question Time could be a fully balanced exercise. Moreover in a
number of cases where the Peer replying is in the Department concerned he is
inexperienced and dependent on the Civil Servants in the Box. On the other hand the
questioner is often full of experience on the subject and very often in the Department as
well.
There is a very interesting chapter on Questions outside Parliament. The growth of
outside media and organizations skilled in operating them has grown in recent years so as
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to make this a very significant area of activity and although the book is entitled
Parliamentary Questions its interest is substantially increased by the inclusion of this
chapter which deals with an area of activity which is increasing both in scope and
significance.
This book brings together both the history of the development of Questions in the
Commons and summarizes the present somewhat complex rules.
BOYD CARPENTER
House of Lords

f,Political Studies Association. 1993.