t11 Book Reviews

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REVIEWS
Farhad Khosrokhavar, Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah (Flammarion,

2002)
This is an important and extremely interesting book. It responds to the

keenly felt need after the terrorist events of 11 September 2001 for a sophisti-
cated analysis of Islamic terrorism that adequately counters simplistic
interpretations such as Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’. The analysis
offered by the Iranian-born, Paris-based sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar in
Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah is thought-provoking and should be compul-
sory reading for all those involved in the ‘war on terrorism’.
Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah originates from a series of interviews that
Khoshrokhavar conducted in French jails with young Muslim men who had
been prosecuted for conspiring to commit acts of terror or for alleged
membership in radical Islamic networks. The book’s analysis, however, builds
on research into the Iranian experience conducted since 1977, and is inspired
by the author’s phenomenological explorations of subjectivity and the sacred.
This complex intellectual genesis makes this exploration of contemporary
Islamic terrorism ground-breaking: by focusing on the subjective experience
of martyrdom, Khosrokhavar penetrates to the fundamental significance of
contemporary Islamic terrorism and highlights its seemingly paradoxical links
to modernity.
The theme of the book is the birth of a form of martyrdom in contem-
porary Islamism, understood as the politico-religious movement first born in
Egypt in the 1930s, which justifies the recourse to violence to impose an
authoritarian regime in conformity with what it claims is traditional Islamic
law. To establish the genesis of this martyrdom, the book starts with a com-
parative history of the notion of martyr in the two forms of Islam, Sunni and
Shi’ite, with references to the meaning of martyrdom in Christianity and the
Sikh religion. It demonstrates clearly that while Shi’ite narratives of Hossein’s
death in 680 produced a figure of sainthood to be revered, the notion of mar-
tyrdom itself remains absent from Muslim tradition, even in its Shi’ite form:
Hossein’s death, although the product of rebellion against earthly oppres-
sion, was never promoted as a model to be actively emulated.
Thesis Eleven, Number 76, February 2004: 115–144

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
[0725-5136(200402)76;115–144;040113]DOI:10.1177/0725513604040113
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116 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)
This discussion of the genesis of a modern notion of martyrdom is

invaluable in the way it provides the reader with the essential information
that is needed to make sense of the complex constellation of contemporary
Islamist movements. In particular, it highlights the crucial role played by the
doloristic cult of the Shi’ite tradition – ‘the Islam of the oppressed’ – in the
contemporary perversion of the traditional polysemic notion of djihad. In its
traditional form, the notion of djihad indeed conveyed the community’s duty
to defend the land of Islam (dar al islam) which, with the struggle against
European colonization, became the duty to expand it. Before the end of the
19th century this duty was only a political, military duty, from which the indi-
vidual could be exempt. Islamism, however, has individualized this duty by
drawing on the mystical sense of djihad developed in the Sufi tradition, that
of the individual’s inner struggle against the transgression of divine laws.
Khosrokhavar thus shows how re-interpretations of Hossein’s death have
been used in contemporary times to fuse these two notions of djihad and
give ideological legitimacy to an activist pursuit of martyrdom, alien not only
to the traditions of Sunni Muslims but also to those of Shi’ites themselves.
The book then highlights the contemporary coincidence of two forms
of Islamic martyrdom, the first associated with the subjective despair of young
individuals denied autonomy by the fact that their community’s quest for
national sovereignty has been frustrated. This form of martyrdom is an
attempt at individuation that is born of the partial modernization and de-
traditionalization of specific Muslim societies, which has engendered radically
new aspirations for recent generations, fuelled by the Western media.
However, many national communities – or non-existent but desired com-
munities as in the case of the Palestinians – have not been capable of ful-
filling these aspirations because of the failure of elites to share the benefits
of modernization, a problem compounded by geo-political factors. Khos-
rokhavar provides detailed analyses of cases of failed national-democratic
sovereignty: the Iranian revolution and its war against Iraq; the Lebanese civil
war; the two Palestinian Intifadas. Despite their substantial differences, Khos-
rokhavar identifies a common logic of martyrdom grounded in a profound
pathology of subjectivity which encourages young men to seek self-realiza-
tion in martyrdom and become ‘individuals in death’.
This mortiferous form of individuation achieves social recognition
through the destruction of a demonized other, in its most general form ‘the
West’, which is seen to be exclusively responsible for the denial of sovereignty
experienced by the national communities to which these individuals belong.
Although Khosrokhavar’s analysis highlights the ways the young generations’
‘thirst for death’ has been re-enforced and manipulated by social institutions
such as the state-sponsored Iranian Bassidje or the Palestinian Hamas, it also
demonstrates clearly that the initial driving force is an individualistic impulse
indicative of the birth of a homo islamicus novus, that is of a fundamentally
new dialectic between the individual and the community, which attests to the
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unfolding modernization of Islamic societies. In Iran, this modernization first

performed by the Shah’s autocratic regime paradoxically triggered the secu-
larization of religion and the birth of the revolutionary religious logic of
Hezbollah. This new form of religious discourse broke with the holism of tra-
ditional Islamic culture by individualizing religious discourse. It also estab-
lished a unity between the religious and the political, quite alien to the strict
dualism of the original Islamic faith, when it conferred on religious scholars
leadership of the national community, in a project more inspired by Third
World anti-imperialistic revolutionary movements than Muslim tradition.
The Islamic revolutionary utopia has now lost its appeal in Iran itself
and new social movements led by students, women and intellectuals have
totally discredited the cult of martyrdom it gave birth to. Its ideology,
however, survives in the Middle East and beyond, relayed by translations of
the writings of its major ideological leaders such as Shariati. Its continued
influence can be felt in the Second Intifada but most significantly in an even
more radical cult of martyrdom stripped of any definite political aspirations.
This second form of martyrdom is the major focus of Les Nouveux Martyrs
d’Allah and is shown to be motivated by a new utopia, the utopia of an
imaginary global Islamic community, a trans-national neo-umma, to be
realized in an indeterminate future and in indeterminate ways. Since the
events of September 11, 2001, this self-destructive form of terrorism, sym-
bolized by the activities of the loose transnational network of Al Quaida, has
presented the West with the riddle of a high level of ‘modern’ technological
and operational sophistication put at the service of a seemingly non-modern
hostility to democratic pluralism.
In his analysis of this particular type of martyrdom, Khosrokhavar con-
tinues to focus on its close association with a specific subjective experience
which puts it in continuity with the cults of martyrdom in frustrated national
communities. Khosrokhavar demonstrates that it is likewise motivated by
aspirations to individual self-realization but, in this case, frustrated by the
alienation associated with the fragmented urban life of contemporary multi-
cultural Western societies. In this respect, Khosrokhavar demonstrates how,
in its logic, this form of terrorism is very close to the phenomenon of sects,
which have become particularly predominant in the United States and Japan.
Whilst the United States was primarily targeted by Al Quaeda’s terror-
ism, which initially seems to have attracted members from Saudia Arabia
resentful of the American presence in their country, Al Quaeda was also
successful in recruiting British and French nationals. Khosrokhavar’s analysis
focuses on their specific profile, which highlights the important role played
by the Islamic diaspora associated with post-colonial globalization. In this
respect, he stresses the genesis of a kind of ‘virtual’ Islamic identity among
these alienated members of Western societies, fed by the media reports of
the conflicts in Bosnia or Israel, which have encouraged an almost paranoid
belief in the existence of a global experience of Muslim victimization. This
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identity is only ‘virtual’ as these individuals, the offspring of the first or second
generation of migrants from countries such as Algeria and Pakistan, have not
had any firsthand experience of real Islamic societies.
This group’s Islamic fervor is shown to be motivated by an acutely dis-
arrayed subjectivity, marked by an absence of communal points of reference.
The Islam on which they base their identity is shown by Khosrokhavar to
have little reality, certainly not that of a civilization competing with Western
culture. Rather, it is a mere pretext and, as Khosrokhavar puts it, Islamism
really constitutes the shadowy side of a now global condition of modernity
spearheaded by the West. In many ways, it is a perverse version of modern
narcissism and the obsessive assertion of an essential Islamic difference
which accompanies it constitutes an inversion of modern multiculturalism.
Khosrokhavar argues that its quest for an imaginary Islamic neo-umma
betrays a desperate search for a new universalism, which in fact actively
denies the complexity and specificity of existing Islamic societies. More
fundamentally, its emphasis on the individual’s will and preparedness to
realize his individuality through suicide actively refuses to acknowledge the
social role performed by culture in the expression of human identity.
Islamic identity, Khosrokhavar suggests, has in a sense become the new
symbol of oppression. His discussion of the phenomenon of conversion
among socially marginalized but culturally mainstream (Christian) individuals
in Western societies highlights the way the utopia of an Islamic community
has perhaps taken the place once occupied by the communist ideal of
unifying the world’s proletariat. Reading Khosrokhavar’s analysis, one cannot
help but be struck by the profound similarities between Islamic attempts to
re-assert a unitary identity in the face of the chaotic pluralism of late mod-
ernity and an earlier experience of European history: totalitarianism. What is
involved is a similar crisis of social cohesion, triggered by globalization,
which has re-created forms of social division at the very heart of established
liberal-democratic nation-states. In this respect, as Khosrokhavar argues,
Islamism is very much the product of the collapse of the bi-polar world and
the disappearance of political projects of universality.
Despite its highly publicized appeal among the ‘inner city poor’ of the
new global metropolis, Islamism, in its transnational terrorist form, exhibits
an overwhelming middle-class character that is not so easily explained away
with reference to material deprivation or educational backwardness. This
middle-class identity attests to the fact that Islamic terrorism is not a highly
differentiated social and cultural phenomenon, but rather a fundamental
representative of the global experience of modernization. In this respect,
Khosrokhavar’s account of the sociological and psychological profile of the
young men associated with Al Quaeda is particularly significant, clearly
debunking the myth of their lack of integration: whilst some obviously fit the
profile of marginalized inner-city youth, a considerable number are in fact
highly literate and educated, as are many Palestinian suicide bombers. There
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is often a discrepancy between their educational qualifications and their

professional activities, which only feeds their sense of being dominated. As
a result, they are much more sensitive to the kind of stereotyping and dis-
crimination that their immigrant status invites than other migrants who accept
this as the price to be paid for their integration in Western societies.
In many ways, these individuals are the product of Western globaliza-
tion. Often polyglot, they can easily shift from one cultural code to another
as their existential difficulties encourage them to use their education to
pursue their lives in more than one Western society and to adopt the nomadic
lifestyle of a now globalized skilled workforce. Their general malaise is
symptomatic of the difficulty of individual self-realization in the fragmented
world of highly individualistic modern societies. Although Khosrokhavar
does not discuss it in depth, it is also extremely representative of another
crisis which seems to accompany the socio-economic changes of globaliz-
ation, the crisis of masculinity.
The problem revealed by this phenomenological account of the sub-
jective experience of Islamic terrorism lies elsewhere, however. It lies in the
relationships that are forged between the religious, the political, the sub-
jective and the social. As Khosrokhavar’s concluding comments on the
dynamic but profoundly unegalitarian and iniquitous character of modern
societies demonstrate, it is centered on the fate of democratic sovereignty
in the highly individualized globalized world. The problem, in other words,
is the emergence of a totally self-referential form of individualism, which
renders social communities incapable of articulating and implementing
projects of political sovereignty over the direction of society, without which
the goal of individual autonomy, confusedly pursued through suicidal terror-
ism, remains unattainable. As Khosrokhavar points out, the self-annihilation
of Islamic terrorist martyrdom has indeed a profoundly democratic charac-
ter, which is totally alien to the traditional universe of Islamic communities.
The new martyrdom breaks with the elitist aristocratic vision of religion: the
concept of a sacred death asserts a fundamental equality. Here Khosrokhavar
touches upon the fundamental problem of the anthropological specificity of
modernity, which totally transforms the relationships that exist in pre-
modern societies between the religious, the political, the subjective and the
social.
To conclude, Khosrokhavar’s book very convincingly fulfils its main
objective, which is to demonstrate that Islamic terrorism is not a civilizational
phenomenon or a regressive appeal to tradition, but in fact an extremely
modern phenomenon. Behind this explicitly stated objective, however, lies
an implicit one discernible in the more peripheral comments on Islam and
the evolution of the Iranian revolution. If I interpret it correctly, Khosrokavar’s
book has a greater ambition, which is to refute the widespread belief of a
congenital incompatibility between Islamic culture and modernity, or even
more positively to argue for the profound relevance of Islam in the modern
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pluralistic world afflicted by a specific pathology of subjectivity. In this

respect, Khosrokhavar repeatedly stresses the profound rationality of Islam,
its non-dogmatic character; in other words, its inner pluralism.
There is much food for thought in Khosrokhavar’s book to warrant its
immediate publication in English, and it seems that its fascinating insights (of
which this review provides merely a glimpse) would benefit from a more direct
engagement with currents in contemporary French social theory that have been
particularly fruitful in analyzing the relationships between religion and mod-
ernity. Clearly, truly pluralistic conceptions of modernity must do justice to the
possibility of alternative paths to modernity. In this respect, the path opened
by Gauchet’s work should not be interpreted as closing the exploration of
human spirituality conducted by religion but perhaps in fact as the liberation
of individual faith from its enslavement in a social logic of symbolic closure.
Reviewed by Natalie Doyle

French and European Studies, Monash University
email: natalie.doyle@arts.monash.edu.au
Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F.

Cocito-Monoc (The Athlone Press, 2000)
Luce Irigaray’s To Be Two is an interesting and provocative text, both

lyrical and philosophic. It is rich with poetic imagery, assured in its intellec-
tual critique and generous in offering new possibilities for thinking about the
relationship between ‘two’. It is a book concerned with how ‘to be two’. I
have always admired that Irigaray does not rest with the deconstruction of
existing knowledges: she also dares the task of reconstruction, risking both
the ossification of ideas that are only a part of a bigger conversation and the
deconstructive desires of others. This bravery gives her work both strength
and vulnerability. It is, after all, generally easier to knock down a good home
than it is to build a new one.
The home that Irigaray attacks in To Be Two has been erected by Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, but her critique reaches for other targets too.
Irigaray is concerned with a relationship between ‘two’ that is true to the
concrete specificity of two subjects who do not give up their specificity nor
their subjectivity in the encounter. It is a loving relationship that she is con-
cerned with, but one that resists abstraction, possession or the annihilation
of the other; that resists turning a subject into an object – of desire, of thought,
of submission. It is the difference between subjects that gives them their
identity as concrete others of body, heart, words, sensibility, thought and
truth. This irreducible difference of the other that I know in this present way
assures me of my own identity, my own interiority, as not ‘the same’ as them.
If I annihilate, abstract or seek to possess or ‘merge’ with the other, ‘I’ suffer
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because I also diminish myself: my concreteness, my interiority, my differ-

ence from them. ‘What makes me one, and perhaps even unique’, Irigaray
writes, ‘is the fact that you are and I am not you’. In this, To Be Two forms
part of Irigaray’s long running critique of a logic of the same and of her
interest in positioning sexual difference as one of the guarantors of the differ-
ence that should be recognized in its place.
To Be Two is framed by a prologue and epilogue which suggest ways
of being with an other and in nature in this present and concrete sense.
Irigaray relates the kind of quiet attention needed to appreciate the breath
of the world and the wonder of the seasons to the kind of attentiveness
needed to see another in the wonder of their difference from you. This kind
of knowing takes work, as it is, ultimately, a knowing that accepts its own
not-knowing. A stillness is needed to nurture this delicate relationship of
becoming. This is a stillness that appreciates the ‘animated silence’ of the
earth and can feel the envelope of air that remains between two and of which
they both breathe. The air ‘seems a living being, a bridge, a relationship’.
Irigaray uses it here to suggest both a substance that remains between two
people, a cloud that veils their being in mystery and ensures their difference
from each other, and the possibility of ‘being two’ within this cradle; in
sharing the air and in attuning the breath to the inhalations and exhalations
of the universe.
This attentive listening and sensitive attunement to the earth in its
rhythms and to the other in their difference is contrasted by Irigaray with
the ‘restless, chattering, forgetful . . . universe of death’ in which, ‘all too
often, the living move about’. This is the world of consumption, counting
and calculation where subtleties and mysteries cannot be tolerated and
relationships are reduced to equivalences, exchanges or competition. The
din of the marketplace is too great for the kind of listening Irigaray advo-
cates to be possible there. Irigaray flirts with essentialism here in her evo-
cations of a benign and bountiful force (nature) that is contrasted with what
can only seem, in this context, an ‘evil’ culture. But I think this is more than
a naive materialism at work. Irigaray employs the example of a way of being
in what we understand to be ‘nature’ to illustrate the possibilities of knowing
that inhere in this attitude. It is not the ‘nature’ of nature that is important
but the attitude toward it. Irigaray is also insisting that we are ‘material’
subjects too, but without defining once and for all the nature of that materi-
ality. There is something that matters, a part of us that is also ‘nature’ and
that can attune itself to the rhythms of the world. Nature here is a kind of
concreteness, a ‘what is’ rather than a ‘what if?’ Attention to this ‘what is’
leads to a respectful and loving relationship with a ‘concrete, corporeal and
sexuate subject, rather than an abstract, neutral, fabricated and fictitious
one’. Nature here is, perhaps, not outside the human world but a quieter
realm within it.
Irigaray’s critiques of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas in To Be Two
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centre around this difference between the concrete and the abstract attitude
toward the difference of an other. Her concern is to conceive of a relation
between two that preserves the subjectivity of the ‘two’, a knowing and
attentive relationship that does not dissolve subjectivity into ambiguity as per
Merleau-Ponty, nor see it as a threat to subjectivity, as for Sartre, for whom
the relationship with the other ‘resembles hell’. Her critique of Levinas centres
on his conception of the feminine as passivity and of erotic relations as being
the antithesis of subjectivity. Irigaray proposes alternative conceptions of the
erotic, the caress and the intersubjective. These are grounded in a respect
that is absolutely the outcome of the irreducible difference between two and
which does not exist outside of language, subjectivity or bodies. They are
informed by a perception that rises above blind sensation and ‘feeling’, it is
not merely directed toward the increase of the intensity of feelings. This kind
of perception thinks about what it feels:
perception remains aroused by what presents itself. It cultivates the attention

required to discern reality, truth, love, the world, and other things as they are
rather than as I imagine them to be. Sensation remains more blindly passive in
what is felt and does not discriminate between dream, artifice and what is real
or true. (p. 44)
This distinction between perception and sensation is very important to

Irigaray’s argument and is, I think, the philosophical analogue of the attentive
listening advocated in her more poetic prologue. It is important to Irigaray
that relations between two have this kind of thoughtfulness to them: that they
are no more about abstraction than they are about blind sensations. Her
notion of the caress, contra Levinas for example, would include the ‘exchange
of words between those who love each other’, a place for intersubjectivity
and the recognition of the subjectivity of the other in the consent from each
that should precede each caress.
Against what Irigaray identifies as a masculinist assumption of a giving
up of subjectivity in eroticism (traced through her critiques of Sartre, Merleau-
Ponty and Levinas), Irigaray insists upon the maintenance of subjectivity in
eroticism. But hers is also an argument against the idea of a gain in mastery
in eroticism. Eroticism should no more serve the needs of power than it
should erase subjectivity. This can only be achieved where the subjectivity
of each is recognized and valued both as irreducibly different and as what
guarantees my own subject position. The emphasis on consent would seem
directed at ways to think about eroticism in order to be fully mindful of the
subjectivity of the other. A tendency to absentmindedness in this regard is
identified by Irigaray in Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas to be the outcome
of understandings of the erotic that both subordinate the feminine to the
other of the masculine and view eroticism as the annihilation of self and
other. The contribution of a feminine voice to the conversation about love,
because it comes from an absolutely other specificity and not simply from
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the ‘other’ of man, will be something different: a way to love without losing
the self and without losing the ‘two’.
The feminine perspective is needed in the conversation about eroticism
because, for Irigaray, it has something utterly other to add, something no
‘man’ can see. For Irigaray, sexual difference is foundational and irreducible;
in fact, it is sexual difference that safeguards us in our difference from each
other. There is a part of each subject, irreducibly feminine or masculine,
‘which is not suited to represent the whole of the human being’. Subjectiv-
ity therefore cannot be thought of as a one, or a minus one, it must be thought
of as a two: a relationship between genders. Philosophy’s problem to date,
Irigaray claims, is that it has been trying to think this ‘two’ in terms of a ‘one’.
I am sympathetic to Irigaray’s project here in its desire to open subjectivity
up to the speculation of a ‘more than one’, but I am also and always (from
Speculum onwards) made uneasy by its insistence upon irreducible sexual
difference as the basis of a new understanding. For me, it seems in danger
of reifying a system of ordering and enforcing difference that contains at least
as much potential for shutting difference down as it does for safeguarding it.
I would prefer to read Irigaray’s text here as using the model of sexual differ-
ence as a way to begin to think about difference per se: differences between
each gender, each subject and each sex. This would be similar in its non-
literalness to the reading of Irigaray’s lyrical evocation of ‘mother nature’, a
reading that sees this as a way to begin thinking about different kinds of
attentiveness toward others. To divide humanity up into only two seems to
sell it a long way short of the richness and complexity we find there. We can
instead read Irigaray’s emphasis upon sexual difference as a model for
thinking about the irreducibility of the difference of an other, of any other,
because ‘I’ am never enough to represent the whole. This seems to me to be
a very useful place to begin.
It is the earlier chapters of To Be Two that contribute most, in my
reading, to the development of this argument. Later chapters elaborate
elements raised there including questions of noise and silence, sexual differ-
ence, abstraction and attention, and a reading of Sophocles’ Antigone.
Chapter Six, entitled ‘I Announce to You that We Are Different’, speaks quite
concretely about ‘women’ and ‘men’ in terms of the psychoanalytic account
of the origins of sexual differentiation. It is here that Irigaray’s apparent val-
orization of irreducible differences between the sexes seems most disturb-
ing. But again, a reading that takes this as a model for thinking about loving
relations rather than a prescription about men and women as such can find
much of value there. Being forced to think, and think hard, about what it is
that Irigaray is saying is much of what she offers here, as in her earlier work.
Because she offers new ways of thinking along with her critiques of Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, we are able to be pushed to find new ways to
make use of her constructions. Some of Irigaray’s ideas seem disappointingly
enamoured of limiting the conception of the social world to only ‘two’ (which
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is, admittedly, twice as interesting as ‘one’). The possibility of conceiving of

a more ‘polymorphously perverse’ social world is not addressed. To be able
to come to this point in one’s thinking, however, is the gift Irigaray’s
ambitious reconstructions give us here. To Be Two offers a thoughtful,
provocative and loving discourse in which an ethics is proposed that might
bring to love a new good, a good that is not just for one or the other in a
loving union, but which would enable them ‘to be two’.
Reviewed by Chris Dew

Women’s Studies, La Trobe University
email: c.dew@latrobe.edu.au
Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid-

1970s, trans. Gregory Elliott (Verso, 2001); Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody
Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion
(Verso, 2002); Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoy-
ment as a Political Factor, 2nd edn (Verso, 2002.); Slavoj Žižek,
Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and
Related Dates (Verso, 2002)
Responding to Martin Amis’ pompous and a-historical musings on Stalinism

(communism equated with Hitlerism, the Left as unconcerned with Soviet
repression), Christopher Hitchens comes up, as ever, with the perfect
response: ‘Don’t. Be. Silly’. Sadly, though, Third Way post-politics and post-
September 11 international relations debate make Amis seem the one more
in step with the march of the times. At such a time, these four new books
from Verso offer a much needed intellectual and political antidote.
Dominique Lecourt was a student of Althusser’s and was charged with
the no doubt depressing task of clearing out the Althussers’ flat at the Ecole
normale superieure after Louis’ descent into madness and criminality.
Althusser had earlier advised Lecourt against publishing ‘Dissidence or Revol-
ution?’, a tract written in 1978 and included as an appendix to The Medioc-
racy. This essay – though often tryingly polemical (as Lecourt admits) – fits
nicely with the newer piece as an attack on disillusioned intellectuals who
have betrayed their vocation, have been seduced by the media spectacle, and
have retreated from politics into hand-wringing cautions about totalitarian-
ism. The target is the New Philosophers who, Lecourt charges, merely re-
deploy tired Cold War clichés, championing a demobilizing dissidence over
revolt (thus inheriting Stirner’s mantle), all in a florid style that clearly indi-
cates ‘the mania for standing out’ (p. 151).
The new work, The Mediocracy, again targets Glucksmann and Levy (as
well as Luc Ferry and Andre Comte-Sponville) – though, 20 years on, Lecourt
locates some general coordinates of an intellectual shift, and, thankfully, the
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tone improves. Regarding the intellectual shift, Lecourt’s term for these
treasonous intellectuals – ‘the mediocracy’ – signals their desire that things
remain as they are, their lack of audacity, vigour, and scope (compared with
the master thinkers who came before them), and their obsession with achiev-
ing the status of ‘opinion-makers’ within the spectacle.
One part of this shift is the much talked of ‘ethical turn’, in which
Lecourt detects a retreat from politics, from the desire to change the world.
With some melancholy, Lecourt notes the distance travelled since 1968: ‘we
knew that politics could touch and shatter people’s daily lives’ (p. 13).
(Nevertheless, Lecourt vociferously rejects the idea that there existed such a
thing as a ‘pensee ‘68’.) The mediocracy – unlike Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze
– refuses to problematize ‘our’ values, opting for privatization and sentimental
appeals against totalitarianism when faced with the manifold tragedies of the
late 20th century. Here, all questions of responsibility and all hope for rational
historical understanding slip away beneath a noisy but vague humanitarian-
ism. For Lecourt, the key factors in this turn are the return to the fiction of
the sovereign subject and the gathering power of the society of spectacle
(specifically in its effects on intellectuals: ‘literary and philosophical market-
ing’ or ‘one-minute-thought’; Deleuze, pp. 57–8). This is all convincing stuff,
but it must be said that there is a sustained reluctance on Lecourt’s part to
discuss the shape of the politics that he is promoting. Are we talking about
Althusser’s politics? Debord’s politics? Foucault’s politics? It matters, yet
Lecourt is, in the end, irritatingly blank here.
It seems likely that Lecourt would warm to Slavoj Žižek’s description
of the notion of totalitarianism in the latter’s Did Somebody Say Totali-
tarianism? as ‘one of the main ideological anti-oxidants, whose function
throughout its career was to tame free radicals, and thus to help the social
body to maintain its politico-ideological good health’ (p. 1). ‘Totalitarianism’,
in fact, ‘relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from
thinking’ (p. 3). One instance of this, says Žižek, is the elevation of the Holo-
caust into diabolical evil – non-political, incomprehensible, enigmatic, and
casting a long shadow over every radical project.
As ever, Žižek tackles his subject matter in both infuriatingly obscure
and brilliantly funny and enlightening ways – putting to work his Lacanian
theoretical apparatus (the desire of the Other, the little object, a fantasy, etc.)
by way of his trademark film scenarios, jokes, perverse twists and rhetorical
questions. Žižek’s approach makes the reviewer’s task rather awkward, and
so I will simply work through the three books, confining myself to broad
brushstroke comments and highlights.
A common theme of Žižek’s recent work has been to champion Chris-
tianity over paganism and western Buddhism. Importantly, the Christian tra-
dition allows us something truly new; it enables us to begin again – against
a paganism that allots everyone and everything a fixed place. Part of this is
Christianity’s notion of the external traumatic encounter (akin to the role of
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the analyst in psychoanalysis or the Party in revolutionary socialism), as

opposed to the idea of change as an inner journey of self-discovery: ‘Freedom
is ultimately nothing but the space opened up by the traumatic encounter
. . .’ (p. 58). In this mode, Žižek reads the Pope – with his stubborn prin-
ciples, with his acknowledgement of the ethical price to pay – as the ‘authen-
tic ethical figure’ over the Dalai Lama with his vague, feel-good spirituality.
In, for me, the best chapter of the book, Žižek tackles the Stalinist show
trials. In particular, he examines Bukharin’s ill-fated attempts to hold to a sub-
jectivity that cannot in any way be accommodated within a discourse in
which Bukharin’s guilt is ‘the guilt of persisting in the position of subjective
autonomy from which one’s guilt can be discussed on the level of facts . . .
[T]he ultimate form of treason is this very sticking to the minimum of personal
autonomy’ (p. 110). In such a situation, the threat or deed of suicide by an
accused cannot have even a sniff of personal authenticity and becomes
instead a final and ultra-violent counter-revolutionary plot against the Central
Committee.
What the highpoint of the terror and the divinization of Stalin signal,
for Žižek, are not monstrous genius and complete, unquestioned control but
instead impotence/an inability to govern. Stalinism’s excess is also, accord-
ing to Žižek, a sign that we are dealing here – contra the fascist case – with
a ‘perverted authentic revolution’ (p. 127): ‘[The Stalinist terror] bears witness
to a kind of “imp of perversity” which compels the post-revolutionary order
to (re)inscribe its betrayal of the Revolution within itself . . . the Stalinist con-
fession of guilt conceals the true guilt . . . purges are the very form in which
the betrayed revolutionary heritage survives and haunts the regime’ (pp.
127–9). Similarly, Žižek declares that the Left’s difficult task is to face the real
‘emancipatory potential’ (p. 131) of even the worst misery of ‘really existing
socialism’s’ reality: that is, something has been lost with the disappearance
of ‘really existing socialism’.
Such assertions are surely deeply questionable. In the past, Žižek has
declared that we need to repeat Lenin in the sense of developing new insights
and interventions (just as Lenin did in 1914 and 1917, say) for our new times.
This formal adherence to Lenin’s legacy sees Žižek distancing himself from
Bolshevik authoritarianism. Despite this, and despite his constant theoretical
guerrilla warfare of irony and reversal, Žižek again and again returns to a
stronger attachment to Leninism – for instance, a certain relish about the
revolutionary price to pay (for example, Lenin wasn’t afraid to accept the
harsh consequences of his decisions, and doesn’t a revolution require secret
police?) – that is surely still susceptible to the criticisms of the libertarian Left.
So, yes, Cold War liberal Sovietology is of little help – blatantly ideological,
basking in its own assumed empiricist neutrality, seeing only ‘really existing
socialism’ as plagued by the problem of ‘dirty hands’. But isn’t there still much
of value in the Left theories of totalitarianism that connect Nazism/fascism
with ‘really existing socialism’? And are not the various Trotskyist attempts at
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saving the idea of an ‘authentic revolution’ unconvincing beside the liber-

tarian (the Left Communists, Pannekoek, Ruhle, Mattick, Korsch, Castoriadis,
James, for instance) critiques of ‘really existing socialism’ as authoritarian state
capitalism?
Žižek’s orientation on ‘really existing socialism’ is perhaps best read
against his much more convincing critique of a Third Way politics and the
post-political condition of which it is a part. Here, ‘tight fiscal policy’ is the
only choice, and anti-capitalism and class struggle are wiped completely from
the political menu. In such a space, ‘New Right populism is the “return of
the repressed”, the necessary supplement, of global capitalist multiculturalist
tolerance . . . the Third Way Left gets its message back in its inverted-true-
form’ (p. 244). New Right populism emerges with the Left’s retreat, as the
only antagonistic force appealing to the working class anymore.
In terms of the possibility of intervention against Third Way pragma-
tism and depoliticization, Žižek champions Badiou’s notion of the Event.
According to Žižek, the Event ‘is not only “beyond the reality principle” . . .
rather, it designates an intervention that changes the very coordinates of the
“reality principle’’’ (p. 167). It is worth, I think, quoting one of Žižek’s
examples at length:
For example, how did General Pinochet’s arrest in the United Kingdom affect
his symbolic status? The untouchable all-powerful eminence grise was all of a
sudden humiliated, reduced to an old man who, just like any other common
criminal, can be interrogated, has to invoke his bad health, and so on. The
liberating effect of this mutation in Chile itself was exceptional: the fear of
Pinochet dissipated, the spell was broken, the taboo subjects of torture and
disappearances became the daily grist of the news media; the people no longer
just whispered, but openly spoke about prosecuting him in Chile itself; even
younger army officers began to distance themselves from his legacy. (p. 169)
Žižek’s For They Know Not What They Do began life as six lectures in
Ljubljana in 1989–90. This second edition includes a 90-plus page foreword
that covers many of the new themes and shifts appearing in Žižek’s work
over the intervening 10 years (and covered to some degree already): the
Event, intolerant Christianity over compassionate Buddhism, the abyss of the
Other’s desire, the stronger Leninist note, for instance. Of particular interest,
Žižek makes a couple of important self-criticisms. First, he renounces The
Sublime Object of Ideology’s ‘quasi-transcendent’ reading of Lacan, which
ends up celebrating failure. Instead, the real is now read as ‘that which gets
lost, that which the subject has to renounce . . . and, consequently, that which
then returns in the guise of spectral apparitions’ (p. xvii). This gets politically
inscribed in the following way: ‘class struggle is real in the strict Lacanian
sense: a “hitch”, an impediment which gives rise to ever-new symbolizations
by means of which one endeavours to integrate and domesticate it . . . but
which simultaneously condemns these endeavours to ultimate failure’ (p.
100). Second, a note of political radicalization is struck, Žižek seeking to
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move in a Leninist direction (attacking objectionable relations of production)

away from a Lefortian praise of democracy that he now reads as a residue
of ‘bourgeois ideology’.
As Žižek says, the book’s basic insight in developing a Lacanian theory
of ideology ‘is that Hegelian dialectics and the Lacanian ‘logic of the signi-
fier’ are two versions of the same matrix’ (p. xviii). As in his more recent
debate with Laclau, Žižek wants to save Hegel from a deconstructive interpre-
tation of his philosophy as the unfortunate culmination of the metaphysics
of presence. Against Gasche, Žižek claims that Hegel well understood that
reflection always fails: ‘the subject qua subject of the look “is” only in so far
as the mirror-picture he is looking at is inherently “incomplete” – in so far,
that is, as it contains a “pathological” stain – the subject is correlative to this
stain’ (p. 89); and ‘Hegel knows very well that every attempt at rational total-
isation ultimately fails, this failure is the very impetus of the “dialectical
progress’’’ (p. 99). And, against the Derridean criticism of Hegelian monism:
The final moment of the dialectical process, the ‘sublation of difference’, does
not consist in the act of its sublation, but in the experience of how the differ-
ence was always-already sublated; of how, in a way, it never effectively existed.
The dialectical ‘sublation’ is thus always a kind of retroactive ‘unmaking’; the
point is not to overcome the obstacle to Unity but to experience how the
obstacle never was one; how the appearance of an ‘obstacle’ was due only to
our wrong, ‘finite’ perspective. (pp. 62–3)
Dispensing political advice freely as ever, Žižek reads the new social
movements as a Left victory (a reading apparently reversed a decade later),
but warns against a tacit Left accommodation with liberal democracy and
with the thesis of the End of History. The Left must not renounce its past –
a past that includes the establishment of those very rights and freedoms today
appropriated by liberal democracy, a past in which the Left was the most
incisive analyst and critic of ‘really existing socialism’. The Left, argues Žižek,
needs to simultaneously avoid the following three ethical fates: the ultra-Left
enjoyment of marginalization; the social democratic ‘obsessional ethics of
compulsively satisfying the Other’s [voter’s] demands’, thereby remaining
within the ‘limits of the possible’; and the perverse Stalinist illusion of serving
as an instrument of the big Other of History. A fourth Left ethical possibility
exists – ‘to mark repeatedly the memory of a lost Cause’ (p. 272):
This, then, is the point where the Left must not ‘give way’: it must reserve the
traces of all historical traumas, dreams and catastrophes which the ruling
ideology of the ‘End of History’ would prefer to obliterate – it must become
itself their living monument, so that as long as the Left is here, these traumas
will remain marked. Such an attitude, far from confining the Left within a
nostalgic infatuation with the past, is the only possibility for attaining a distance
on the present, a distance which will enable us to discern signs of the New.
(p. 273)
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For Žižek, in the third of his books under review here, Welcome to the
Desert of the Real, much of the Left has failed to live up to this ethical possi-
bility when faced with the September 11 crisis: schadenfreude, hysterical
defensiveness, and the ‘ethical catastrophe’ of the following Left tendency on
those events – ‘Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully
solidarise with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperial-
ism’ (p. 51).
On the other side is what Žižek calls the ‘liberal-totalitarian emergency
of war on terror’ (p. 107) – a good counterweight to the newly fashionable
phrase ‘Islamo-fascism’. Here, torture becomes a legitimate topic of dis-
cussion; al-Qaeda members fall between the gaps as ‘unlawful combatants’;
humanitarian aid and war become intertwined; and ‘terror’ gradually becomes
an ideological quilting point, ‘the hidden universal equivalent of all social
evils’ (pp. 110–11) that links reactionary fundamentalists and Leftist protes-
tors.
The most important task becomes avoiding the truncated choice of
‘fundamentalism versus democracy’. This is not, argues Žižek, a clash of but
a clash within civilizations: thus Jerry Falwell’s and Pat Robertson’s readings
of September 11 as a product of American hedonism and liberalism; thus
Žižek’s penetrating contention that we are not seeing a contest of McWorld
versus Jihad because ‘Jihad is already McJihad’ (p. 146) – contemporary
fundamentalist Islam is a product of modern global capitalism. This sort of
choice in which (following Stalin) both options are worse is a pervasive
feature of a post-political age where (after Agamben) we are all becoming
Homo sacer – excluded from political community. The two sides – Bush and
Bin Laden – belong to the same field, together the ‘them’ who ‘we’ must
oppose. Against the common despairing post-political practical conclusion to
all this – a withdrawal into privacy – Žižek champions a new collectivity:
Today, more than ever, the lesson of Marguerite Duras’s novels is relevant: the
way – the only way – to have an intense and fulfilling personal (sexual) relation-
ship is not for the couple to look into each other’s eyes, forgetting about the
world around them, but, while holding hands, to look together outside, at a
third point (the Cause for which both are fighting, in which both are engaged).
(p. 85)
Žižek’s analysis is often brilliantly acute: from his discussion of the ter-
rorist/thriller movie fantasies that existed prior to September 11 (‘in a way,
America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise’ [p.
15]); to the needed American response – a move from ‘a thing like this
shouldn’t happen here’ to ‘a thing like this shouldn’t happen anywhere’ (p.
49); to the Israeli refuseniks as a miraculous interruption of a cycle of violence
– an authentic ethical act that treats the Palestinians as neighbours in the
Judaeo-Christian sense of the word.
Some of his conclusions are also surprising and/or questionable. For
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instance, he calls for the intervention of an international (even NATO) force

in the West Bank and Gaza, and for Europe to ‘move quickly to assert itself
as an autonomous ideological, political and economic force, with its own
priorities’ (p. 145) as a counterweight to America. Sometimes, too, his
critique of liberal democracy and liberalism, his praise of the radical risk
entailed by the Event, and his love of reversal and hyperbole can propel
him towards uncomfortable conclusions that sound all too much like a
politics of heroic blood and combat. Here, contemporary cultural studies
gets read as largely mere radical chic; and the Frankfurt School is casually
dismissed as secretly simply on the side of Western liberal democracy. In
a similar way, Žižek’s analysis of Pim Fortuyn as an intersection of Rightist
populism and liberal political correctness is important – thus indicating the
falsity of a simple-minded opposition between the two forces – but what
are we to make of the following? ‘Should we not, therefore, be striving for
the exact opposite of the unfortunate Fortuyn: not the Fascist with a human
face, but the freedom fighter with an inhuman face?’ (p. 82). Is this not
some signal of Žižek’s own Leninist passion for the real when faced with
an unpromising political situation? As such, should we not confront Žižek
with Laclau’s and Lefort’s ‘bourgeois’ reservations? If Žižek is, to an extent,
right that Laclau ends up too much on the side of a pragmatism without a
project, weak on a utopian dimension, perhaps Laclau is right in contend-
ing that Žižek’s discourse ends up split between a sophisticated Lacanian
analysis and an unreconstructed Leninism that is strong on the rhetoric of
refusal and reversal of perspective but much less convincing in political
terms.
Reviewed by Chamsy el-Ojeili

Open Polytechnic of New Zealand
email: chamsy.el-ojeili@openpolytechnic.ac.nz
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle

Eastern Response (Phoenix, 2002)
Completed just before the events of September 11, 2001, Bernard Lewis’ book
diagnoses the fatal decline of the Middle East with brilliance, prescience, and
assuredness. This is a sobering and disturbing account of the descent of a
once great geopolitical region into the abyss.
There was a time when Islamic civilization was impressive. It was a
sophisticated world civilization. Its influence stretched from the borders of
China to Spain. As Lewis remarks, it was polyethnic, multiracial, international,
and intercontinental. It absorbed the learning of Greek antiquity, synthesised
this with Persian and Syriac influences, and added its own advances in math-
ematics and music. Islam was also a paradox. Its social assumptions were
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feudal and patriarchal, yet it spread across vast distances and tolerated other
religions and religious-social communities to a high degree.
At its best – represented by Sufi Islam and the Central Asian falasifa –
the Islamic sense of world-order was suffused with great beauty and intelli-
gence. Medieval philosophers like al-Farabi and Ibn Sina – or the Andalu-
sian-Spanish philosopher-Sufi-mystic Ibn al-’Arabi – are of real intellectual
interest. But, past its best days, Islam reverted to a theocratic mind-set shaped
by its origins. Mohammed was the ruler of a state – consequently, Islam
always has had difficulty recognizing the separation between church and
state, or between secular and religious law. Conversely, Islam lacked the
sense of divine or pantheistic natural law that provided the foundation for
the Greco-Roman idea of a constitutional state and the corresponding Greco-
Western determination to struggle against despots. Where Roman-style
Christianity developed virtue ethics (Catholicism) and iconic-aesthetic ritual
(Orthodoxy), mainstream Islam did little more than posit a set of repressive
rules. When 10th to 13th century Islam incorporated Hellenism, Islam became
unorthodox and interesting. What would have been a renaissance in the
context of the Latin West or the Greek-Byzantine East was actually a driver
of enlightenment in Islamic states. But this proved to be the exception, not
the rule, in the Muslim world.
Through repeated renaissances, the West has constantly re-engaged
with an anti-theocratic, anti-despotic Hellenic imaginary. These renaissances
time and again have laid the ground for the separation of thought from
dogma and church from state. By the time of Constantine, Roman society had
been through Greek revivals, literary enlightenment, and what amounted to
the first great religious reformation separating what is Caesar’s from what is
God’s. In contrast, since the time of Islam’s medieval intellectual golden age,
these types of movements have been disturbingly absent in the Islamic world.
Militant or fundamentalist or theocratic assertions of a repressive legalitarian
faith have been substituted for renaissance, reformation and enlightenment.
The tragedy of Islamic civilization is well illustrated by the rise and fall
of the Ottoman Empire. In a dramatic burst of energy, Islamized Turks from
Central Asia conquered Syria, Anatolia, the Balkans and North Africa. Their
challenge to Europe was comparable to that of the Arab Muslims who had
once commanded Andalusia. The Ottomans ruled Hungary for a century and
a half, and also came close to conquering Austria. That was in the 13th to
the 16th centuries. By the beginning of the 17th century, the peak of Ottoman
power had already passed. As Lewis notes, in 1606 the Ottomans were forced
to negotiate a peace treaty with the Austrians on neutral territory on the
Danube, and not as always before in their capital, Constantinople. Hungary
was lost to the Ottomans in 1686.
The story of Ottoman decline, though, is not one to be measured in
terms of fighting power. The real decline is to be measured in terms of the
Empire’s lethal incomprehension of modernity. Like Islamic states today, the
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Ottomans – when they did recognize the power of modernity – thought that
they could buy this power. After repeatedly losing land wars with Austria and
Russia, the Ottomans responded by importing foreign weapons, training and
tacticians. Strikingly, this made no difference at all to their long-term decline.
Their mistake was to interpret modernity as the command of arms. Modernity
in fact is defined by the command of knowledge.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Ottoman officials noted the presence of
Portuguese, Dutch and English in Asian waters. As Lewis notes, Ottoman
efforts to counter European oceanic power were ineffectual (pp. 14–17). The
Ottomans did not invest in ocean-going fleets. They were blind to the fact
that the most successful modern power is oceanic, global and projected from
the seas, not the land. In the mid-16th century, the Ottomans drew up plans
for a Suez Canal, and for a canal between the Don and Volga rivers. This,
Lewis surmises, was an effort to extend their limited sea power beyond the
Mediterranean to the Black, Red, and Caspian seas. The problem, though,
was not just that these schemes were abandoned when they became diffi-
cult. The real problem was that they were based on an outmoded pre-
Columbian episteme. They defined the world in pre-modern schemas of sea
command. In this the Ottomans were like the Venetians, who, for all their
brilliance, could not give up their Mediterranean-style galleys and could never
make anything of Vasco da Gama’s historic sailing around Africa. The
Ottomans worried much more about the 18th-century Russian annexation of
the Crimea, and Russian control of Black Sea navigation, than they ever did
about Western seaports on the Arabian Gulf. The Crimea had been Turkish
Muslim territory dating back centuries. The oceans were an unknown
quantity.
That was the rub. European domination of the oceans was not just a
matter of military might or commerce, but also of knowledge. As Archimedes
long ago demonstrated against the Romans, knowledge is power. Islam was
the warrior religion par excellence. It understood territorial conquest. The
Ottomans learnt how to subsume and accommodate multiple religions and
states over vast swathes of territory. But they entirely lacked the modern or
Western trait of speculative curiosity. They lacked what the classical Greeks
had called theoria. Greed, the drive for power, and mercantile motives drove
the Europeans into the oceans. But so did theoretical curiosity. Centuries of
renaissance, reformation and enlightenment taught Westerners to value
knowledge above law, religion and tradition. At the same time that the Dutch
and Flemish were figuring out how to project maps onto a globe, Islamic
judges were still prohibiting journeys to Christian Europe (p. 41). The Muslim
law doctors resisted the learning of infidel languages and the establishment
of permanent diplomatic missions abroad. Through the 17th and 18th cen-
turies, the Ottomans relied on the Empire’s minorities (the Greeks especially)
to study medicine in the West. Likewise they entrusted their diplomacy to the
ever-curious Greeks.
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In the 19th century, when the Ottomans finally did send Muslim
students abroad, the initial motive was to master the secrets of Western
warfare (p. 48) – shades of the September 11 terrorists who studied engi-
neering and computing in Western universities. In this world-view, the only
Western knowledge worth having was that useful for the art of war. It is
remarkable how self-defeating this is. There is no sign that instrumental Islam
ever understood that the real strength of Western military power in a global
context is its naval supremacy, or that its military power is based on know-
ledge, and not vice versa. This misconception is bad enough, but what makes
it worse is that the Islamic world has never understood that Western wealth
also is based on knowledge. Just as knowledge equals power, so knowledge
equals productivity. This is not just packaged, formulaic knowledge. The
richest states in history – ancient Athens and Rome, medieval and Renais-
sance Venice, golden age Holland, and Victorian Britain – were all know-
ledge-intensive. All displayed exceptionally high levels of interest in and
appetite for artistic creation, scientific discovery, or intellectual speculation.
The latest addition to their ranks – the United States – exhibits the same
characteristics.
The popular, even pervasive, contemporary myth in the Middle East is
that the West oppressed, exploited and aggrandized its way to wealth and
power. In fact, such episodes usually cost it dearly. Extracting ‘gold’ from
colonized domains can never match the administrative or political outlays
involved. This pitiless calculus destroyed the Romans. Spain vegetated for
centuries under its weight. The British gave it up before it bankrupted them.
The great wealth of states does not come from land but from knowledge.
Yet, somehow, the myth persists that Western powers – even in their most
gasoline populist moods – have not learnt this through and through.
As long as resource-grabbing imperialism is blamed for the woes of the
Middle East, and the fires of resentment against Western productiveness are
fanned, the principal wealth of the region will remain lucky wealth like that
of oil. Oil is not the prize of the Middle East. It is its greatest curse. It papers
over the region’s systemic lack of industry. When the oil runs out, fortunate
states like Saudi Arabia will join the ranks of their poor neighbours. Nowhere
in the region is there any underlying knowledge economy to drive economic
growth and stave off escalating unemployment and poverty. Indeed, those
fighting ‘imperialism’ have adopted ignorance – in the guise of religious
fundamentalism – as a badge of pride.
Today, what passes for modernity in the Middle East is perverse. It dan-
gerously blends imported modern technology and archaic ideology, lazy oil
wealth and minimal industry. The region has falling per capita income. The
total exports of the Arab world, excepting oil, are less than that of Finland
(p. 52). The Middle East’s most famous export now is terror. The United
Nations’ ‘Arab Human Development Report 2002’ makes disturbing reading.
It portrays long-term declining rates of private and public investment. In the
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first half of the 1990s, when South Korea’s real wages grew by 50 per cent,
the region registered stagnant or declining real wages. In 1998 the entire
region had three (per million population) technology creation patents
awarded to it. Finland had 187, the United States 289, and Japan 994. It had
two websites per 10,000 persons compared with 30 for Latin America; 10 per
cent of females were in some form of tertiary education compared with 49
per cent in Europe; 38 per cent of the region was illiterate compared with
1.4 per cent in Eastern Europe and the CIS.
The authors of this report understand the conditions of freedom
required for a knowledge society, and the power of such a society. Yet they
can also assert that Israel’s illegal occupation of Arab lands is one of the chief
obstacles to regional progress. That occupation may be unjust. But, both on
the part of the Israelis and the Arabs, the conflict over Palestine elevates land
into a metaphysical value that checkmates progress. The fetish of land helps
us understand why the economic problems of the region are not just
economic but also intellectual. The region has never experienced renaissance
or reformation. Its only enlightenment was in the 10th to 13th centuries. As
long as land remains the icon of progress, the mentality of the region remains
feudal. Women today in the Middle East still live in gilded or desperate sub-
jection. Monarchies, dictators, theocrats, patrimonial bosses and military
chiefs dominate the politics of the region. Its diplomacy is a mix of court
intrigue and bullying. Petitioners are mistaken for citizens.
The signs of political degeneration are legion. It was the rich scions of
America’s two-faced ally, Saudi Arabia, who funded Osama bin Laden. Uni-
versity graduates-turned-killers dream of distant medieval glories dressed up
in crude religious garb. No Islamic equivalent of Christian Democracy or
Christian Socialism exists. The best achievement of the region, Turkey’s
semi-democracy, practises a murderous nationalism on its Kurdish popu-
lation.
All normal routes to reform are closed. There is an iron-clad case for a
Palestinian state. But how is such a thing possible when Yasser Arafat’s notion
of state finance is to personally hand cash to his cronies like a neo-feudal
boss? England had an exchequer independent of the king in the 12th century.
Nine centuries later, this is still news to a political movement that wants state-
hood and international support. No political settlement of the Palestinian
question is possible without rational state building. Likewise, no attempt at
a ‘soccer-democracy’ in Iran will be successful unless there is in place a
plausible model of a modern constitutional and procedural state.
It is for this reason that the Americans conceived the strategy of a ‘revol-
ution from above’ in Iraq. The rationale of a reconstructed Iraq is to provide
a regional prototype for an industrious state that does away with patronage.
This means lawful and honest administration. It means business enterprise
based on knowledge not on the lucky extraction of natural resources. It
means a constitutional state that fairly treats all religious, ethnic and regional
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groups. It means global traffic in goods, services, and ideas. But, above all,
it means renaissance, reformation and enlightenment. This latter expectation
is very difficult to achieve. Revolutions from above can work. The United
States’ occupation of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan after the Second
World War are cases in point. But these occupations had their limits. They
produced quietistic, eunuch states – states that are responsible, procedural,
rational, but unimaginative and unassertive. These are infinitely better than
despotic and totalitarian states. But they are nonetheless missing something
important. There is no comparing the exceptional intellectual talent that came
out of aggressive inter-war Germany with the ordinary talents of contem-
porary pacificist Germany, a state scared of its own shadow. The inter-war
talent fled to the United States.
One of the problems of today is that the Middle East will again avoid
renaissance, reformation and enlightenment. For a while it seemed as if the
Ottoman Empire was open to real reform of itself in the 19th century. But it is
interesting to note what happened then. One of Bernard Lewis’ most interest-
ing observations is about the ambiguous role of secularism in Middle East
reform politics. Ottoman liberals seized on secularism as a kind of easy
enlightenment (pp. 107–129). It was the only European ideology ever to be
really successful amongst Ottoman Turkish and Arab intellectuals, largely
because it was anti-Christian (p. 116). The ideology of secularism was of French
inspiration (pp. 116, 126). The educated elites of 19th-century Constantinople
were predominately francophile in sentiment. Ottoman reformers drew their
ideals from French models.
Secularism was a kind of French bastard enlightenment. It allowed post-
revolutionary French society with its Catholic majority to evade the question
of reformation, both in the original Roman sense of the separation of church
and state, and in the subsequent Protestant sense of privatizing religion (i.e.
making it an inner experience). The ideology of secularism allowed, for
instance, the French Communist Party to substitute itself for an unreformed
church aspiring to control both state and spirit (through ‘ideological state
apparatuses’). The near farcical set piece of the French Communist Party
atheist mayor vs. the local reactionary Catholic priest is the product of a
society that equates enlightenment with neo-religious atheism, and that has
thereby avoided the principle questions of both enlightenment and reforma-
tion.
The ideology of secularism offered the Ottomans and their 20th-century
successors in Iraq, Syria and Turkey a way of having enlightenment without
renaissance (classical revival, neo paganism, etc.) or reformation. At first
glance, this looked good. The ‘tri-colore’ of nationalism, socialism and repub-
licanism was the harbinger of the secular state. Reform movements arose that
spoke a Franco-European political lexicon. But the states that were shaped
over the long term by these movements were dictatorial or dysfunctional.
Typical of the slide from reform to dictatorship is the case of Michel Aflaq,
17U 08-040113 (ds) 17/2/04 1:06 pm Page 136
the Greek Orthodox Christian who founded the multinational non-confes-

sional Baath (‘resurrection’) Party. Aflaq studied at the Sorbonne in the late
1920s, and took back with him to Syria and Iraq an odd mix of Leninism,
fascism, trans-national nationalism, the mysticism of struggle and anti-Western
sentiment. This pan-Arab secularism was a perverted parody of nationalist,
socialist and republican sentiment. Such a parody is created when the broader
and deeper threads of Western civilization – in particular its high regard for
knowledge – no longer inform the ‘tri-colore’ of 19th-century ideology.
The Middle East today produces many distinguished exiled and internal
critics with high ideals. But their social criticism remains trapped in the ‘tri-
colore’ mould. There is no reason to expect that their ideas in power would
not repeat the tragic cycle of the past. This has nothing to do with the honesty
or courage of these critics. It has everything to do with the causality of cheap
enlightenment. Cheap enlightenment produces secular states that have a
pseudo-faith to propagate – nationalism, ‘Arab socialism’, Saint-Simonianism,
or just simply the republican glory of l’état. Without the context of renais-
sance and reformation, republicanism turns into a republican praetorian
guard, and the nation into a death camp.
Secularism also makes bad enemies. Invariably, pseudo-faiths come into
conflict with various strains of fundamentalism. Were not the anti-semitic,
anti-industrial Action Française or the Gaullist-era radical right anti-
republican Catholic terrorist sympathizers in France a genus of this, as much
as today’s Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalists? These populations can’t
and don’t distinguish between law and faith, and fight back against the
secular state in the name of their religion. Without the forces of renaissance
or reformation to discipline it, this religion only knows the pseudo-enlighten-
ment of a technological magic imaginary – terror is just a species of this –
and ever-depleting intellectual resources.
If the West has a responsibility for the fatal course of the Middle East,
it is because of the French ideology. This ideology was a result of the French
themselves evading the major questions of modernization. That evasion was
then passed onto the Middle East where it was amplified by local motivations
and constraints. The interesting question will be whether the Americans can
do any better than the French?
The American strength is that they have never dodged the religion
question. In some ways, America today is the most religious nation on earth,
and yet it is firmly anchored in the experience of renaissance, reformation
and enlightenment. It is this triumvirate – and not technology, money or
missiles – that are the true drivers of modernity. There is no guarantee that
the Americans can successfully translate their historic experience into a very
different geopolitical environment. The understandable temptation will be to
construct a moderately efficient procedural state in Iraq, and leave it at that.
But a real sustainable future for the Middle East requires not only rationaliz-
ation, and the end of corrupt, dictatorial patrimony, but also the kind of
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Reviews 137
knowledge-intensive society that only comes out of the rich, deep experi-
ence of renaissance, reformation and enlightenment.
Nobody of course can deliver such a thing ‘from above’, but some of
the conditions for it can be encouraged in this commanding manner nonethe-
less. It is for this reason that reconstruction should not only mean civil
administration but also the implantation of models of universities, art schools,
theological colleges and scientific publics that can prod the historically-
sleeping forces of renaissance, reformation and enlightenment to awake.
Peter Murphy
Victoria University of Wellington
email: peter.murphy@vuw.ac.nz
Peter Wagner, A History and Theory of the Social Sciences: Not All That
Is Solid Melts into Air (Sage Publications, 2001)
The stakes are high in Peter Wagner’s A History and Theory of the Social
Sciences: Not All That Is Solid Melts into Air; at issue is the viability of the socio-
logical project itself. As he sees it, its viability has been called into question
from opposite ends of the theoretical spectrum, as divergent perspectives
coalesce around the idea of ‘the end of the social’. On one side, many post-
modernists have abandoned any attempt to render the social world intelligi-
ble in the face of its complexity and lack of evident reason or order; their
radical critique of the tradition’s epistemological and ontological premises has
led to an emphasis on diversity and singularity, and fuelled an exodus into
other modes of inquiry. On the other side, the proponents of rationalist indi-
vidualism allege that there are no social phenomena, only individuals and
their rationality. This (increasingly pervasive) current of thought also rejects
many of the longstanding premises of the sociological tradition, but in their
case it is in favour of an asocial, individualist mode of theorizing.
Against both, Wagner insists on the possibility of maintaining the socio-
logical project, on the condition that it is put on a new footing. To secure its
viability, he argues, it is necessary to rethink rather than abandon some of
its most deep-seated assumptions. And to this end, he has provided us with
a penetrating historical contextualization of the tradition’s development,
which guides an original and highly productive project of theoretical and
conceptual renewal.
As Wagner sees it, the renewal of the sociological project depends upon
the renewal of the theory and analysis of modernity. The idea of the advent
of an era of postmodernity cannot be sustained, because the ‘imaginary sig-
nifications’ (Cornelius Castoriadis) of modernity – autonomy and mastery –
are far from exhausted. And the supposedly salient features of post-
modernity – plurality and indeterminacy – are, despite the postmodernist
17U 08-040113 (ds) 17/2/04 1:06 pm Page 138
caricature, characteristic of modernity. But in the face of the important but

ultimately untenable postmodernist questioning of modes of interpretation
and investigation, the very possibility of analysing entire societal configur-
ations and their historical transformations hangs on furthering the opening
up of social thinking that was begun with the shift from the idea of ‘modern
society’ to that of modernity. And in the face of postmodern disinterest, mod-
ernity is the concept that is being used to move the social sciences back to
a conceptually informed diagnosis of the present.
Wagner’s contribution to this broader project of renewal is already
impressive. In his groundbreaking A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and
Discipline (1994), he opened up new avenues for the substantive analysis of
the plurality and indeterminacy of modernity with his interpretation of its
successive phases as ‘mutations of liberalism’. This history is recalled often
here, as the context in which he situates the development of the social
sciences. An initial phase of ‘limited liberalism’, based on the exclusion of
women and workers from the realms of freedom and responsibility, had a
certain coherence in the early 19th century. This coherence was disrupted
later that century in a period of ‘disembedding’ in which individuals were
uprooted from their established social contexts by the dynamics of indus-
trialization, struggles for the extension of suffrage and the emergence of the
‘social question’. In response to this ‘first crisis of modernity’, a new set of
relatively stable practices and orientations – in which nations, class and state
were the main conceptual and institutional ingredients – were created, which
accommodated the increased demand for participation (primarily through
universal political rights and access to consumption), but channelled it in
such a way that the viability of the social order was not put into question.
Increasingly, however, the boundaries and institutions of ‘organized mod-
ernity’ are being eroded, and we have since the 1960s been witnessing a
further period of deconventionalization and disembedding – the ‘second
crisis of modernity’.
This work of comparative historical sociology was not undertaken
without the theoretical reflection that Wagner sees as an essential component
of the renewal of the theory of modernity, but this part of his project received
its most systematic development in Theorizing Modernity: Inescapability and
Attainability in Social Theory (2001). His objective in this densely argued
work was to develop a theoretical framework which was fully adequate to
the plurality and indeterminacy of modernity, and it revolved around two
main contentions. First, that the widespread attempt to derive a particular
institutional structure from the imaginary significations of modernity – in insti-
tutions like democracy, science and the market – must be replaced with an
understanding of modernity as a situation, or a ‘condition’, which throws up
inescapable ‘problématiques’ of social life – including the question of the cer-
tainty of knowledge, the viability of the polity, the continuity of the self, the
accessibility of the past and the transparency of the future – which are open
17U 08-040113 (ds) 17/2/04 1:06 pm Page 139
Reviews 139
to multiple interpretative and institutional responses. Second, that the plu-

ralization of perspective that is demanded by and consonant with this con-
ception of modernity can profitably be achieved by bringing a number of
divergent perspectives into an intelligible and productive relation to each
other. More concretely, he argued for a tri-polar approach, and in particular
for theorizing within the space defined by the poles of ‘modernism’, the
‘critique of modernity’, and ‘postmodernism’. These contentions play a crucial
role in A History and Theory of the Social Sciences. However, his primary
focus here is to explore the ramifications of his project of theoretical renewal
for the specifically conceptual level of theorizing.
The first half of this collection of essays, initially published as stand-
alone pieces, sets the central modes of sociological theory building and
concept formation against their historical – and especially political – contexts.
Its interpretive power stems in large part from his understanding of the
relationship between theory and history. The social sciences, he insists, devel-
oped neither independently of their historical context, nor in a linear and
unequivocal relation to it (p. 4), but as (changing and competing) responses
to the enduring socio-political problématiques generated by the modern con-
dition.
Against this background, ‘classical sociology’ and the political dis-
courses of ‘the crisis of classical liberalism’ at the turn of the 19th century
makes sense as responses to the first crisis of modernity. The social sciences’
contribution to the ideas of societal planning and the ‘rationalistic revolution’
of the golden age of capitalism during the 1950s and 1960s appear as partici-
pation in the subsequent ‘organization of modernity’. And the postmodernity
debate is seen as symptomatic of the second crisis of modernity – what post-
modernists refer to when they talk about the all-pervasiveness of simulacra
and the disappearance of reality is the fact that, in this second period of dis-
embedding, many more people have become aware of the always already
transformed nature of society.
This is not a purely historical exercise, though. Its aim is to separate
what in the key concepts of the social sciences is historically contextual and
should be superseded, and what points to the problématiques that social
theorizing still need to address. And it is in this capacity that it forms the
background to the project of rethinking the central concepts of the socio-
logical tradition that occupies the second half of the book. Here too, Wagner’s
deeply historical approach proves very fertile. His emphasis on historical con-
textualization, this time applied to the origins and main interpretations of the
tradition’s core concepts, allows him to identify with notable clarity the
restrictive assumptions with which they have been burdened.
The choice of concepts to be treated in this manner reflects not only
the main developments within the sociological tradition, but also the impera-
tives of his own theoretical strategy for its renewal. His analysis of ‘choice’
and ‘decision-making’ is motivated by the rapidly spreading influence of
17U 08-040113 (ds) 17/2/04 1:06 pm Page 140
rational choice theory. His distinctive (and in some respects surprising)

analysis uses an interpretation of the polysemy of these terms to throw into
relief its reductive logic. Action and institution have been core concepts of
the tradition from its inception, and along with culture, society, polity and
modernity (which have the additional distinction of being collective concepts
that both postmodernist and individualist perspectives have considered
untenable), are also more constructively linked to his theory of modernity.
A single argument runs across his treatment of these concepts. The
historical context of the emergence and development of sociological thinking
has been conducive to an overemphasis on (actual or desired) coherence
and equilibrium, and this bias has been built into its core concepts as (usually
unacknowledged) presuppositions. As a consequence, the analyses in which
they have been deployed have presumed a coherence that did not (always,
or in equal measure) exist, and have been unable to deal effectively with the
shifts in the nature and degree of coherence in different phases of modernity.
They have, in short, been inadequate to the indeterminacy and openness of
modern social relations generally, and the disembedding and deconvention-
alization that is characteristic of contemporary social relations. It is urgent,
therefore, that these premises be dislodged, and to this end more open
formulations which will allow the coherence which has largely been pre-
supposed to be made the subject of empirical analysis must in each case be
constructed. The singularity of Wagner’s central argument has not, however,
precluded rich substantive detail in his analyses, nor prevented him from mar-
shalling a multiplicity of theoretical resources and insights for his construc-
tive proposals.
The concept of ‘action’ has been burdened with premises about social
order, ‘institution’ with the assumption that coherence, agreement and equi-
librium are the norm. Sociology has also regularly worked with strong
assumptions about the boundedness and coherence of culture and its con-
sistent capacity to determine social action and institutions. And it has been
unable to deal with temporality. The sociological concept of the ‘polity’ has
assumed some need for, and/or tendency towards, a neat coherence of social
identities, social practices and modes of collective rule-setting. In conceptu-
alizations of modernity, the bias towards coherence has taken the form of a
belief that there is a single definitive institutional structure of modernity.
However, Wagner argues, the sociological tradition’s precipitous and
undue emphasis on coherence is most pronounced in the concept that is
most truly its own. The emergence of the social scientific concept of society
from within 18th century moral and political science discourses has had a
lasting influence. The new meaning, denoting the structure of the new con-
nections between human beings arising from political and economic develop-
ments, has remained tied to a strong interest in theorizing the form and
feasibility of moral-political order. Coupled with a widespread tendency to
conflate ‘society’ with the newly relevant boundary of the nation-state, these
17U 08-040113 (ds) 17/2/04 1:06 pm Page 141
Reviews 141
circumstances fed into the identification of society with the integration of a

multitude of diverse parts into an effectively bounded whole and ontological
premises of holism.
The insights that emerge in response to this critique range widely. Some
commentators have responded to recognition of deep-seated tensions in the
idea of society by arguing for a ‘sociology without society’ (Touraine). But
Wagner pulls back from proposing the abandonment of the concept, not
because he doesn’t consider the gravitational pull of premises of coherence
to be highly problematic, but because calls for the dropping of the concept
of society are increasingly coming not from reflection on its restrictive
assumptions but from dubious arguments about its decreasing empirical refer-
ence, in the form of either rational choice theory’s ‘there is no such thing as
society’, or in the idea that there is nothing between the individual and the
global system that is characteristic of the growing discourse on globalization.
Wagner’s worry that many globalization theorists are mistaking the trans-
formation of institutions for their decline or disappearance lies behind the
subtitle of the book.
On the other hand, his insistence that the degree and form of the
overlap or cleavage between social identities, social practices and modes of
collective rule-setting be treated as an open (empirical and interpretive)
question acquires a more dramatic hue when he acknowledges that a certain
overlap between them may be a precondition for (re-)establishing political
agency. Wagner is circumspect on the ramifications of this point, but he insists
that it is necessary to go beyond ‘the unsurpassed limit of political sociology’
to rethink the very idea of the need for coherence.
But the theme that returns repeatedly in his constructive proposals for
rethinking these concepts is the necessity of building into them a recognition
of the pervasive and inescapable role of interpretation in human affairs.
Taking up the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, he argues that
action must be analysed in the context of the ‘situation’ in which it takes
place, insisting that such situations are established by the constant, multi-
faceted and shared interpretive efforts of actors. He spells out some similar
conclusions about culture that were less explicitly drawn by the interaction-
ist tradition; beliefs are actualized in particular situations which are always in
need of interpretation, and it is through the work of (interpretive) appropri-
ation of the ‘past’ in the minds of present beings that ‘history’ acquires its
openness. And in his final chapter, he returns to his main theme, that mod-
ernity is a ‘condition’ which poses a series of inescapable problématiques
that are given different interpretive and institutional contents through
struggles over the situation-grounded appropriate meaning in different socio-
historic situations.
In his earlier work (and, to a considerable extent, in this book) Wagner’s
thematization of the plurality and indeterminancy of modernity has focused
on the historical dimension. But he has now expanded what in A Sociology
17U 08-040113 (ds) 17/2/04 1:06 pm Page 142
of Modernity was, in principle, a recognition of the cultural diversity of mod-

ernity (it incorporated a comparative perspective on Europe, the Soviet Union
and the USA) into an explicit and central theme. And to pursue it, he connects
his work explicitly with ‘civilizational’ theory and its idea of multiple
modernities, co-determined by civilizational legacies.
In fact, Wagner’s affinities with civilizational theory are extensive. Like
him, its proponents have thematized the historical and cultural variety of
modern constellations, and have made the task of refashioning theoretical
premises and conceptual infrastructures in a manner consonant with this
theme central to their work. And there are also marked convergences in the
direction of their detailed elaboration of these themes. This convergence of
a growing number of theorists around a broadly shared set of thematic, per-
spectival and conceptual innovations bodes well for the renewal of the socio-
logical project. The thematization of the historical and civilizational
multiplicity of modernity, and the opening up of the theoretical and con-
ceptual means for understanding and expressing it (perhaps best thought of
under the broader heading of ‘polymorphous modernity’) is one of the most
productive trends in contemporary social theory. Already, it has been able to
outflank postmodernism on its own terrain of new levels of pluralism and
indeterminacy, and to offer more penetrating insights into the analysis of con-
temporary social constellations. And it is, as Wagner points out, the most
effective antidote to the unacknowledged return of assumptions about coher-
ence that is involved in the spreading discourse of ‘globalization’, to the
extent that it presumes that exchange-oriented ‘individualization’ is the uni-
versal trend to which all collective arrangements have to adapt.
Although Wagner’s contribution to this project of sociological renewal
has been huge, there is room to argue with him on detail. To my mind his
own premises and language call for a more extensive exploration of the
sociological re-appropriation of the hermeneutical and phenomenological
philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that he mentions only
in passing. Wagner would probably defend this absence in terms of the mar-
ginality of such modes of thinking within the sociological field. But the role
of interpretation in his account of the modern condition is only the most con-
spicuous point of connection with these philosophers. More particularly, this
current of thought has something to offer the further development of his
multi-polar interpretive strategy. In the work in which it was elaborated, there
are already hints that its present formulation is not without difficulties.
Wagner himself notes that any attempt to relate the inescapable probléma-
tiques of modernity to a multiplicity of perspectives is necessarily formulated
in one specific language, irreducible to any of the interpretations it aims to
relate to one another. It could be added that his proposal to relate the three
perspectives has its own presuppositions about modernity and about the
possibility of bringing divergent perspectives into a meaningful relation. In
short, he is adopting a meta-perspective. In the phenomenological and
17U 08-040113 (ds) 17/2/04 1:06 pm Page 143
Reviews 143
hermeneutical tradition he refers to, there can be found a philosophical elab-

oration of such a meta-perspective that would not only be consonant with
Wagner’s own presuppositions, but enrich the project which is based on
them.
But we can only admire the magnitude of his achievement. Wagner has
succeeded not only in establishing the viability of the sociological project,
but in opening up enormously rich interpretive veins in the quest to under-
stand our current condition.
Reviewed by Glenda Ballantyne

Sociology and Anthropology, La Trobe University
email: G.Ballantyne@latrobe.edu.au

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17U 08-040113 (ds) 17/2/04 1:06 pm Page 115

Farhad Khosrokhavar, Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah (Flammarion,

This is an important and extremely interesting book. It responds to the

Thesis Eleven, Number 76, February 2004: 115–144

116 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

This discussion of the genesis of a modern notion of martyrdom is

unfolding modernization of Islamic societies. In Iran, this modernization first

118 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

is often a discrepancy between their educational qualifications and their

120 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

pluralistic world afflicted by a specific pathology of subjectivity. In this

Reviewed by Natalie Doyle

Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F.

Luce Irigaray’s To Be Two is an interesting and provocative text, both

because I also diminish myself: my concreteness, my interiority, my differ-

122 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

perception remains aroused by what presents itself. It cultivates the attention

This distinction between perception and sensation is very important to

124 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

is, admittedly, twice as interesting as ‘one’). The possibility of conceiving of

Reviewed by Chris Dew

Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid-

Responding to Martin Amis’ pompous and a-historical musings on Stalinism

126 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

the analyst in psychoanalysis or the Party in revolutionary socialism), as

saving the idea of an ‘authentic revolution’ unconvincing beside the liber-

128 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

move in a Leninist direction (attacking objectionable relations of production)

130 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

instance, he calls for the intervention of an international (even NATO) force

Reviewed by Chamsy el-Ojeili

Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle

132 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

134 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

136 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

the Greek Orthodox Christian who founded the multinational non-confes-

138 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

caricature, characteristic of modernity. But in the face of the important but

to multiple interpretative and institutional responses. Second, that the plu-

140 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

rational choice theory. His distinctive (and in some respects surprising)

circumstances fed into the identification of society with the integration of a

142 Thesis Eleven (Number 76 2004)

of Modernity was, in principle, a recognition of the cultural diversity of mod-

hermeneutical tradition he refers to, there can be found a philosophical elab-

Reviewed by Glenda Ballantyne

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