American Political Science Review Vol. 90, No.

democracy under capitalism (or Archer's socialism) is po- under the more familiar billing of socialism and capitalism,
litically feasible. have dominated the politics of the twentieth century. The
heart of this debate should be pretty clear by now, you
Archer claims that it is. To be more exact, he holds that
by gradual incremental reform trade-offs, initiated by a might think, so that the book must either be very ambitious
centralized labor movement and supported by a pro-labor or not ambitious enough. But the confusions sown by the
government, economic democracy is feasible in a corporat- Soviet's apologetic use of Marx make it still a worthwhile
task, and Booth does a good job in introducing what is most
ist industrial relations system (p. 107). (His focus is western
Europe and Australia.) In considerable detail, he shows important in Marx while staying clear of the early-Edwar-
that these trade-offs have been successful in combating dian interpretation the Soviets built on, according to which
stagflation and, in a later period, have generated a more Marx offers above all a general theory of institutional
flexible and high-wage economy. change. The household model is represented by Aristotle
Archer fully recognizes the seamy side of corporatism, and Marx (parts 1 and 3), a conjunction suggested to him by
Nussbaum, and the liberal contractarian one by Locke (Part
that it has the potential to foster class collabration, union
oligarchy, and other dangers to democracy. But he believes 2). The liberal and Aristotelian-Marxist traditions are
probed and contrasted interestingly and ingeniously in
these risks can be controlled and, in any event, are overbal-
anced by the crucial role of corporatism in the growth well-researched considerations chiefly of the secondary
toward economic democracy. Primarily, it performs this literatures, and the result makes a serious contribution to
function by providing labor a structure by which it can the growing genre on Marx's debt to Aristotle.
combine its industrial power with the political power of The main idea, taken initially from Aristotle, standard to
government. By providing a centralized bargaining arena, sympathizers of Marx and anathema to sympathizers of
corporatism also enables labor to use its bargaining power economics, is that human productive activity can serve
to achieve goals over which it does not have direct leverage.
noneconomic ends that embody a conception of human
In effect, it serves as an essential framework in the promo-good drawn up independently of economics and has done
tion and implementation of a series of trade-offs in which so for most of history. Booth conveys imaginatively how
labor agrees to help generate profits in exchange for an strange an episode in our history the last three hundred
increased share in decision making (p. 231). years of market economy have been, in somehow suppress-
ing our capacities to choose the ends we pursue coopera-
Archer limits the question of feasibility by assuming that
the labor movement wants to achieve economic democracy. tively and to deploy social wealth toward such ends. But he
does not connect this clearly enough with the advent of
If it wants to achieve this goal, he argues, it can do so (p.
65). His claim is based on the proposition that workers who economics, which one might have expected to be at the
forefront of his considerations. Booth gives surprisingly
have demonstrated their ability to gain partial control of the
little attention to defining economics, taking it too much at
lower level of a firm's hiararchy will be able to "accumulate
greater and greater control until they finally achieve full its own valuation as a universal science, which has been
economic democracy" (p. 133). He concedes that to attain done in all periods of history, rather than as a peculiarly
this goal may take 50 or 100 years. modern science of market economy. This creates avoidable
problems for him and it has ramifications throughout the
Archer's corporatist trade-off strategy is flawed, however,
since it does not recognize that the final incremental book.
trade-off—the one that transfers complete decision-making Following Hasebroek and Weber, Finley, the crucial
authority from owners to workers—is a major, if not a author in considering Aristotle on matters that today would
revolutionary, change, hardly compatible with other incre- be called economic, established a powerful case that antiq-
mental trade-offs that preceded it. Again, he overlooks the uity had nothing like what we mean by an economy, that
impact of the global economy on corporate decision mak- ancient statesmen did nothing like economic policy, and
ing. Given the increasing global mobility of capital, it is ancient thinkers did only ethike and politike and nothing
extremely doubtful that in the foreseeable future a pro- that could be called economic analysis. Booth neglects this
posed trade-off of this nature would see the light of day, case almost entirely, and holds that although the ancients
much less prevail. had no market economy, they nonetheless managed to
engage in "economic thought" and "economic policy," even
It is true that in 1976 the powerful and centralized trade
union movements in Germany and Sweden were successful, though he seems to be aware that the phenomena those
in alliance with pro-labor governments, in enactmenting a things deal with were unknown to them. He tries to hold
co-determination system, a system that empowered workers things together by suggesting that they did a funny sort of
with a participatory share, although unequal, in decision economics, "normative political economy" (pp. 61, 76,147),
but this is unconvincing. This failure to consider sufficiently
making on all levels of a firm. Subsequently, both labor move-
the nature of economics and its relation to ethics leads him
ments failed to gain parity, much less dominance, in corporate
decision making. Today they remain subordinate partners. into some of the familiar modernist confusions about
ancient economic activity, weakens his accounts of Aristotle
Archer's feasibility strategy is an imaginative and tightly
reasoned position. With a future decline of capitalist dom- and Marx, and saps the main conclusions of the book. The
problem comes home to roost in the claims both that Marx
ination in the world economy, it is likely that his position will
gain influence among proponents of economic democracy. did economics in Aristotle's way and that he did it in "the
modern theoretical discourse" of economics. Booth does
little to ease this tension, and he hedges on the underlying
Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy. By problem of how far Marx is to be counted an author of
William James Booth. Ithaca and London: Cornell Uni- modernity at all.
versity Press, 1993. 305 p. $34.50. The history of the USSR, he claims, suggests that Marx's
desiderata of freedom and nonmarket economies cannot be
Scott Meikle, University of Glasgow jointly met and that critics of markets must be content with
Booth aims to get to the heart of the debate between "the regulation of market excesses. How permanent a solution
household and market models" of society (p. 3), which, this can be he does not say, nor does he consider the history

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Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY
of Keynesian regulation, what led to it, and the deregulation
that followed it. Our best hope for the future is to make
economics more ethical, as Aristotle's economics suppos-
edly was, and market economy better geared to attaining
human requirements instead of frustrating them.
But Aristotle had argued that use-value and exchange-
value are metaphysically distinct as quality and quantity (in
Nicomachean Ethics 5.5, which Booth does not consider in
any detail), and that the pursuit of one is incompatible with
the pursuit of the other (which Booth largely ignores in his
account of Politics 1). Marx founded his theory of market
economy on this analysis, which he took directly from
Aristotle, arguing that market economy of its nature pur-
sues exchange-value primarily and that this is the reason for
all its failures in respect of use-value. These are ends that
can be combined to a limited degree, but not sufficiently for
human flourishing, so that we have to choose between
them. Aristotle and Marx could have been wrong, of course,
but this is what they said. In preparing the ground for his
view that the two pursuits can be made compatible, Booth
does not argue that they were wrong or that they did not say
this at all; he simply does not consider the case. Aristotle
and Marx based their accounts on the analysis of wealth,
showing it to be ambiguous between use-value and ex-
change-value or money. Booth does not go into this either
and instead distinguishes the two pursuits by resorting to an
unilluminating spatial metaphor: the two types of economy
have different locations in society.
If economics had been around in the fourth century B.C.,
Aristotle would have thought it incompatible with ethics, as
Marx did. Economics is nonethical, and that is how econo-
mists like it. The tendency in this century has been toward
conceiving it as a science every bit as independent of ethics
as physics is. When Robbins suggested this in 1932 few
economists were bold enough to follow him, but now most
do. This is not only hard-headed posturing, but a recogni-
tion that the end of market economy is exchange-value, with
use-value serving merely as a means. Economics did not
become the nonethical science of exchange-value by acci-
dent; it simply became clearer about itself, and ethical
recommendations to reverse this are unlikely to get far.
Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of
History. By Alex Callinicos. Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995. 252p. $45.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.
Joshua Foa Dienstag, University of Virginia the one proposed by Marxism. In Callinicos's view, how-
The last fifteen years have seen a revival of interest in the
topic of narrative across many disciplines in both the social
sciences and the humanities. While in many ways this
interest has the appearance of a unified movement, in fact
the different fields have had rather varied attitudes toward
narrative. While some historians (e.g., Simon Schama) have
taken to defending narrative as the most appropriate form
of writing for their studies, other literary and political
theorists (e.g., Hayden White and Jean-Franc,ois Lyotard)
have taken to criticizing narrative expression itself as im-
plicitly bound up with power and authority. At the same
time, philosophers have hotly debated the proposition
advanced by, e.g., Alasdair Maclntyre and Martin Heideg-
ger that narrative plays a crucial role in human life in
general.
While the title of this book overstates its scope, its author would be difficult since Callinicos concedes that history "is
is nonetheless well aware of these debates. Callinicos's main
purpose here is a defense of the feasibility and value of
Marxist historiography. In this sense, it is a continuation of
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June 1996
his previous efforts in Making History (1988), Against Post-
modernism (1989), and The Revenge of History (1991). But
the opponents he identifies here are not merely other
historians and social theorists. Recognizing the wide-rang-
ing character of his project, he attempts to address the
broader literature on narrative itself, particularly the cri-
tiques of it by postmodernists. At the same time, Callinicos
aims to lay out a Marxist approach to the past that is both
philosophically rigorous and yet revolutionary.
To this end, he develops a distinction first made by G. A.
Cohen between philosophies of history and theories of history,
where the latter (which he defends) forswear the search for
"the meaning of the historical process" and "rely on
straightforward causal and intentional explanations" while
sharing with the former (which he does not defend) a desire
to apply these explanations to the human past as a whole
(pp. 41-42). While admitting the "theory-ladenness of
facts," Callinicos argues that Lakatos's idea of a scientific
research program surmounts the difficulty this poses in
analysis without invalidating the correspondence theory of
truth or the doctrine of realism (pp. 78-80). In Callinicos's
judgment, "Almost all that is interesting and controversial
in historical materialism is capable of being stated in a
philosophically defensible form that is open to empirical
corroboration" (p. 165). The book is aimed not so much at
providing that corroboration as to establishing the legiti-
macy of the task itself. (In this sense, the book might be
compared with Jon Elster's Making Sense of Marx, though
Callinicos does not share Elster's insistence on methodolog-
ical individualism.) While these pages seem to me to
achieve their purpose, it is not clear who would dispute the
claim that Marxism is capable of being framed as a set of
testable hypotheses. Callinicos has also covered this ground
before, and much more systematically, in Making History. It
is, nonetheless, provocative to see this conservative defense
of social science methodology paired with the judgments
that Lenin's approach to imperialism "seems basically
sound" (p. 135) and that Trotsky was a great historian (p.
210).
A great deal of the text, however, is taken up with a
critique of those whom Callinicos considers the principal
opponents of this view: postmodernists such as Hayden
White, "Weberian" theorists of history (e.g., Ernest Gellner
and Anthony Giddens), and Francis Fukuyama. The prob-
lem with the first group is that they question all attempts to
impose a single grand narrative on history, while the latter
two suggest that history has a very different narrative from
ever, they all have something else in common: they have all
been decisively influenced by Nietzsche, who lurks here like
an intellectual bogeyman, repeatedly invoked as a danger
but never directly engaged.
In these sections, it seems to me, the book is less
successful. The connections to Nietzsche are more asserted
than established; the link to the Weberian historians seems
especially thin. Even in the cases where the charge sticks
better, however, it is weakened by Callinicos's declining to
deal with the man identified as the principal culprit. Rather
than being examined, Nietzsche's influence is simply as-
sumed to be pernicious.
The irony is that here Callinicos sounds less like a radical
Marxist and much more like a traditional moralist. Rather
than confront White's skepticism epistemologically (which
theory all the way down" [p. 76]), he denounces it as
"simply outrageous" in the light of such unquestionable
historical horrors as the Holocaust (p. 66). White's skepti-