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REVIEWS

Dominic Sachsenmaier and Jens Riedel (eds) with Shmuel N.

Eisenstadt, Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese
and Other Interpretations (Brill, 2002)

So I am in two minds. I think we are condemned to modernization. If we are

going to be modern, try to be more quick and pacific about it. On the other
hand, I say ‘condemned to modernize,’ because seeing the U.S., Europe, and
Japan I think modernization is not a benediction. It can be a kind of air-
conditioned hell. Octavio Paz (1994)

The idea that modernity is a uniform condition to which all humanity

does or should aspire has been subject to serious challenge since at least the
1960s, though the critique became more sustained in the 1980s. From this
period, the main burden of the challenge fell to postmodernists, for whom
the modern was seen to have exhausted its potential, displaced by the flux
and ephemera of contemporary consumer culture. More recently, the chal-
lenge has been taken up by those advocating a pluralization and relativiza-
tion of the concept of modernity, while still appealing to it as a basic
reference point, the absence of which is seen as rendering much post-
modernist thought superficial or incoherent. Although the contributors to
Reflections on Multiple Modernities do not speak with one voice, it is this
general approach that unifies their work.
As the editors tell us in their introduction, the development of the
notion of multiple modernities was a response to a homogenized and hom-
ogenizing model of modernity, which views it in terms of what Charles
Taylor has called the ‘Enlightenment package’. Just as Romanticism had from
the late 18th century rejected the universalism and rationalism of that
package, so too does the multiple modernities approach reject a univocal
and universalist view of modernity. According to that view, modernity can
be defined in terms of the marriage of the Enlightenment ideals of progress,
political equality and scientific reason with the institutional configuration
characteristic of post-medieval Europe, and later North America and Japan.
Secular, centralized states, bureaucratic forms of administration, democratic
governance, industrial capitalism, and science linked to technological

Thesis Eleven, Number 77, May 2004: 121–140

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
DOI: 10.1177/0725513604042661
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122 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

innovation are usually taken to be the hallmarks of modern as opposed to

traditional societies. To the extent that social formations exhibit these insti-
tutions, and the Enlightenment ideals with which they are coupled, they can
be said to be modern.
Here modernization is routinely conceived of as a linear process that
tends towards a predetermined result, with various stages along the path to
realizing that result, through which all modernizing societies must pass. Apart
from its crude teleology, the problem with this view of modernity – in both
its Rostowian and Marxian variants – is that reality does not conform to the
model. Different configurations of modern institutions, and different paths
to and through modernity, have rendered the unitary model of modernity
and modernization defunct. But what is to replace it?
In attempting to provide answers to this question, the 14 essays in
Reflections on Multiple Modernities take their cue from the pioneering work
of Shmuel Eisenstadt, himself a key figure in the development of a unitary
model of modernity and modernization back in the 1960s. His essay here
summarizes the key observations of the multiple modernities problematic,
setting the tone for much of what follows. His central claim is that the insti-
tutional and cultural patterning of modern societies always preserve within
them civilizational legacies which embody different cultural standards and
practices from the Enlightenment package described earlier. While he
acknowledges the importance of the ‘western pioneers’ of modernity, he
argues that resistance to and differential reception of western modernity by
non-western societies and civilizations helped constitute alternative moderni-
ties. Consequently, he emphasizes that western patterns of modernity are not
the only authentic ones, and therefore that modernization is not coterminous
with westernization. Indeed, within the ‘West’ itself we can identify funda-
mental differences in the institutional and cultural frameworks of Western
European modernity on the one hand, and North and South American
patterns on the other. Even within these broad categories there is a great
deal of local and national variation. Moreover, while the West has been the
epicentre and originator of much of the social, political and economic trans-
formations that we typically associate with modernity, it has also been trans-
formed and indeed partly constituted by its encounters with non-western
societies and civilizations.
This point is elaborated in greater detail in Dominic Sachsenmaier’s
essay ‘Multiple Modernities – The Concept and its Potential’. Sachsenmaier
rightly suggests that the relationship between modernization and westerniza-
tion is a deeply ambivalent one, with colonized populations frequently
pursuing what they perceived to be the fruits of western modernity while
simultaneously resisting and being suspicious of its consequences for indigen-
ous culture. The product of this ambivalence was the emergence of ‘tradition’
as the necessary and mutually constitutive counterpart to modernity. In this
sense, tradition was and is very much an invention of modernity.
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This point is illustrated by Sachsenmaier’s and later Mark Juergens-

meyer’s discussions of contemporary Islamist movements, global anti-
modernisms and other defensive traditionalisms. Both authors convincingly
argue that while these are discursively constructed as traditional – by pro-
ponents and opponents alike – they are in fact profoundly modern. Anti-
modern modernisms attempt to overcome the ambivalence and
fragmentation wrought by modernity by drawing ever more rigid lines of
demarcation between the collective self and the other. The drawing of such
lines expresses an ongoing ‘quest for authenticity’ amidst the ambiguity and
anxieties of a modern world in a constant state of change. These boundary
demarcations represent the symbolic membrane separating the pure from the
impure, which is so often the text of and the pretext for ethnic and reli-
giously-inspired violence that is proliferating globally. Hence, there is a very
real sense in which modernity begets violence sanctioned by tradition, with
violent traditionalisms now being globally-oriented.
The issue of the globalization of particularism is taken up in Bruce
Mazlish’s essay ‘Globalization: The Most Recent Form of Modernity’, and
Prasenjit Duara’s ‘Civilizations and Nations in a Globalizing World’. Mazlish’s
essay, despite its promising title, is disappointing, amounting to an extended
assertion of the claim implicit in its title. Duara’s paper is more interesting,
containing some thoughtful insights into the relationship between civiliz-
ations, nations and global modernity. He traces the genealogy of the term
‘civilization’ since the 18th century, suggesting that there has long existed a
basic tension between a normative, univocal conception (Civilization with a
capital C) and an ethnographic, plural conception, with both senses having
had periods of greater or lesser intellectual popularity over the last two cen-
turies. Duara argues that both senses of the term have been critical for
modern nationalism and nation-building. On the one hand, Civilization has
served an authorizing and legitimizing function for western, imperialist
nations in their conquest of peoples defined principally by their lack of
Civilization. It was this lack which, in the rationalizing eyes of European
colonialists, disqualified these peoples from nationhood and thus sover-
eignty. On the other hand, civilization served as a badge of authenticity for
those nationalist movements struggling for independence from European col-
onizers. The plethora of new nations that emerged with the break-up of
empires after both world wars reached back into the pasts of civilizations
that were said to have nurtured the nations that were now supposedly
awakening. National histories posited an historical straight line from classical
civilizations to the emergent national subject. In this way, national particu-
larism was linked to a transcendental moral universalism, and civilization
became the ultimate rationale for national sovereignty. It also became the
basis for multiple modernities, which are discussed in more specific detail
in the later parts of the book focusing on East Asia and Europe.
The sociologist and sinologist Ambrose King, for instance, presents the
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124 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

case for an alternative East Asian modernity, based upon vestigial expres-
sions of Chinese civilization. While conceding that much about East Asia’s
modernization is, to some extent, westernization, he emphasizes the non-
individualistic nature of East Asia’s modernity and the active ‘reinvention and
reincorporation’ of non-western civilizational patterns. Fred Wakeman Jr.
continues this theme in a thought-provoking contribution on Chinese mod-
ernity. He suggests that since its encounters with European powers in the
19th century, China’s intellectuals and most of its leading political figures
have sought to modernize while upholding some notion of Chinese cultural
exceptionalism, as the basis on which to pursue a distinctive path to mod-
ernity. He traces this tendency to political developments after the Opium
Wars. Defenders of China’s Confucian tradition redeployed the Neo-
Confucian distinction between substance (ti) and function (yong) in their
efforts to modernize while preserving China’s cultural heritage. It was envis-
aged that western instrumental, technological advantages (the function)
could be employed to defend Chinese culture (the substance). The problem
with this position is that western, instrumental methods and technologies
cannot so easily be quarantined from a supposedly self-contained cultural
sphere. Wakeman gives the example of Chinese deployment of western
artillery in the 19th century. Western gunnery presupposed learning western
mathematics, necessitating changes in the existing curriculum, which was still
based on the Chinese Imperial examination system and Confucian classics.
As a result, the Imperial examination system was eroded and finally
abolished in 1905. This had the unintended consequence of severing the
ideological connection between the Imperial centre and local authorities,
which contributed to provincial reform and revolution in 1911.
Wakeman observes similar developments later in the century, first with
Mao’s reinterpretation of Marxism-Leninism along Chinese nationalistic lines,
and later with Deng Xiaoping’s formulation of ‘Socialism with Chinese
characteristics’ – a new expression of the ti-yong distinction. It has led, in
Wakeman’s view, to a distinctive Chinese modernity characterized by a weak
public sphere, a strong state, feeble individual rights and a high degree of
government regulation and intervention. In addition, Chinese modernity
displays ‘fervent chip-on-the-shoulder nationalism’, deep divisions between
rural and urban China, and unprecedented economic growth coupled with
widespread alienation, anomie and political estrangement. In short, Chinese
modernity displays some of the features of its western counterpart, but in
most respects is an altogether different model, which Wakeman expects to
stay that way.
The essays on European modernity collected here draw out the contrast
with the East Asian model. The social historian Hartmut Kaelble provides an
impressive, albeit contestable, overview of changes in European self-
understanding over the course of the 20th century. He argues that there has
been a shift from a view of Europe as superior to all other civilizations
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(prevalent in the decades before the First World War), to one where Europe
is now seen as one civilization among many. Whether this is true or not, and
the picture certainly seems far more variegated than Kaelble indicates, this
comes close to the multiple modernities paradigm. Kaelble claims that this
is the reason why the latter has a resonance in Europe today that it could
not have had 100 or even 50 years ago. On the one hand, the shift in self-
understanding can be explained, Kaelble submits, by the weakening of
Europe’s global geo-political position, and by its transformation from being
the world’s most important source of emigration to being one of the most
important destinations for immigration. This has massively increased ordinary
Europeans’ experiences of other cultures. On the other hand, the new self-
understanding is a consequence of Europe’s social and cultural particulari-
ties, including the nuclear family, industrial labour, and its class milieu, as
well as the specificity of its welfare states, cities and consumerism. Taken
together, these features distinguish Europe from the rest of the world and
define its modernity, though not as the archetype of modernity as was often
assumed by previous generations of thinkers.
The essays in the final section rounding out the collection are con-
cerned with the implications of the multiple modernities perspective for
economics and business. Whatever their value for marketers and entrepre-
neurs looking for a competitive edge in culturally distinct international
markets, they have little to offer social scientists by way of serious insights.
One gets the impression that their inclusion was more for the sponsors of
the project – the Boston Consulting Group’s Strategy Institute – than for a
scholarly audience attracted to the promising notion of multiple modernities.
This disappointment aside, the essays in Reflections on Multiple
Modernities offer a useful overview of some of the key issues raised by the
pluralization of the concept of modernity. The only caveat I would add is
that while the multiple modernities paradigm is an advance on its unitary
and homogenizing predecessor, it is often unclear as to what is the common
denominator of the individual instantiations of modernity. As Jurgen Kocka,
one of the contributors to the book, comments, the defining core of the
concept of modernity risks becoming ‘rather thin or vague’ when pluralized.
None of the essays, Kocka’s included, addresses this problem head on.
Hence, whether or not all modernities are necessarily condemned to be
Octavio Paz’s ‘air-conditioned hell’ remains to be seen.

Reviewed by Lloyd Cox

School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University
email: L.Cox@latrobe.edu.au
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126 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

Leonardo Avritzer, Democracy and the Public Sphere in Latin America

(Princeton University Press, 2002)

Leonardo Avritzer’s account of a vibrant self-generated public sphere

in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico forcefully argues that the recent deepening
of democracy in Latin American countries has, by and large, depended on
the emergence of non-elite publics. Taking issue with elite-focused demo-
cratic theories, Avritzer provides a lucid counterpoint to mainstream analyses
dealing with the most recent wave of democratization in Latin America. He
argues that elite-focused theories miss the democratizing impact of mass-
based collective action articulated in the public sphere. According to Avritzer,
these new non-elite publics hold the solution to Latin America’s partial demo-
cratization in as much as they ‘transfer democratic potentials that emerge at
the societal level to the political arena through participatory designs’. Such
a transfer, he claims, turns ‘informal’ publics into ‘participatory’, problem-
solving publics able to bridge the gap between democratic societal practices
and a recalcitrant formal political sphere that resists full democratization. In
short, Avritzer delivers an extremely inspiring account rich in historical and
sociological detail illustrating the emergence of social movements and volun-
tary associations participating in Latin America’s public sphere.
Avritzer points out that an independent non-elite civil society emerged
relatively late in Latin America. Recapitulating the emergence of human rights
movements in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, Avritzer documents the aston-
ishing growth of voluntary associations during the 1970s and 1980s under
the protective umbrella of the progressive Catholic Church. Amplified by the
Church and international NGOs, many of the nascent movements began to
publicly denounce the abuses of the military regimes. Others, such as urban
social movements in Brazil and Mexico, demanded better urban services and
infrastructure. This leads Avritzer to a detailed discussion of two more recent
movements that seek to transform the formal political sphere. His Brazilian
case study focuses on the emergence of the widely acclaimed participatory
budgets currently implemented in more than 140 municipalities, including
São Paulo. The case of the Alianza Cívica features a campaign aimed at
building accountability into Mexico’s electoral and fiscal procedures. Avritzer
demonstrates how public pressure and negotiations between the alliance and
the politicians resulted in the construction of an independently supervised
electoral process.
However, Avritzer concedes that this democratic thrust is seriously
undermined by pockets of authoritarianism. For instance, in Argentina and
Brazil, demands for a ‘just’ judicial response to human rights abuses are effec-
tively blocked by groups such as the cara pintadas (a group of Argentinian
military officers opposing the human rights trials of the mid-1980s) and other
vested interests. And a diffused and at times institutionalized authoritarian
culture tends to undermine basic political and juridical processes. Moreover,
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a formal political sphere re-clientelized following the restoration of civilian

democracy tends to obstruct calls for greater accountability, as secret slush
funds are a basic consensus-forming ingredient in a political environment
defined by low party loyalty and weak institutions.
Although such reactionary forces are able to temporarily suspend
demands for greater accountability, Avritzer demonstrates that societal actors
hold some capacity to limit the use and abuse of state power and have made
significant progress in reforming Latin American democracies. In particular,
his insightful analysis of the participatory budget initiative in Brazil, further
elaborated in a recent volume edited by Evelina Dagnino, provides an excel-
lent overview of a more equitable dynamics of municipal democracy in Porto
Alegre and Bel Horizonte. However, for Avritzer, the role of societal actors
is clearly limited as ‘they cannot impose sanctions at either the political or
legal level’. Hence, he shares one of Habermas’s premises regarding the role
of a self-regulated public sphere: ‘Discourses do not govern. They generate
a communicative power that cannot take the place of administration but can
only influence.’
On a theoretical level, Avritzer’s account questions the pessimism that
permeates elite democratic as well as critical theory approaches to popular
democratic culture and mass-based democratic society. Building his case
against elite-focused democratic theories, Avritzer first turns to Max Weber,
Carl Schmitt, and the early Frankfurt School whose rejection of 19th-century
romanticism and the belief in the sovereignty of ‘the people’ gave way to a
theory of democratic elitism. This resolved the problems about mass democ-
racy that had been raised by these thinkers by limiting democratic partici-
pation and by placing decision-making in the hands of supposedly rational
elites. In the case of Latin America, Avritzer claims, the main propositions of
elite democratic theory as outlined by Schumpeter and Downs, for instance,
did not hold. Democracies reverted to authoritarianism because inter-elite
competition led to an unprecedented broadening of the notion of popular
sovereignty. This posed a challenge to anti-democratically-inclined elites that
caused a descent into authoritarianism in an attempt to thwart the outcome
of election results. In contrast, mass-mobilization did not undermine democ-
racy but tried to secure the rules of the game. Turning his attention to
theories of democratic breakdown and transition, Avritzer retorts that most
of these theories ‘see the emergence of new public spheres as provisional
and to an extent elite managed’.
Avritzer’s search for an alternative approach guides him to conceptu-
alizations of the public sphere. In the public sphere he finds a rational
epistemological basis that ‘no longer rests on identifying virtuous or vicious
actors’, as is the case in much of civil society and social movement theory,
‘but on the creation of a plural space in which actors present themselves in
public and establish fields of conflict with the state’. Surprisingly, Avritzer
picks up the threads for a mass-focused democratic theory of the public
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128 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

sphere with Habermas. Utilizing Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the

Public Sphere as the foundation of his conceptualization, Avritzer focuses on
the egalitarian aspects of the embryonic public spheres in 17th- and 18th-
century British and French bourgeois society, ignoring the class implications
of Habermas’s focus on the ‘reading society’. Moreover, Avritzer ignores
Habermas’s pessimistic reading of the 20th century, where a fragmentation
of the bourgeois public occurs as the result of a commodification and mas-
sification of the public sphere. Clearly, Avritzer derives much of his insights
from Habermas’s later work when he claims that Habermas, ‘instead of
entering the debate between elitist and participatory version of democratic
theory . . . finds a third path, which involves a different way of reconnect-
ing reason and will, one in which reason results from public debate in a
sphere located between the market and the state’. In this way, Avritzer is
able to distil an ideal public sphere in which a sense of common humanity
prevails and the better argument can assert itself against social hierarchy and
status.
Yet Avritzer does this without seriously addressing the impediments to
the emergence of a lifeworld-based, self-regulated, critical, horizontally-inter-
linked public sphere as, for instance, outlined by Habermas in the Strucu-
tral Transformation or in his later work. The question is whether the
autonomy of societal actors facilitated by the social-welfare state in con-
junction with the expansion of formal schooling raised by Habermas in
Further Reflections on the Public Sphere is indeed the key ingredient in Latin
America’s lifeworld-based public sphere. Cohen and Arato’s insistence on
constitutionally enshrined rights to freedom of assembly and speech as basic
preconditions for a vibrant civil society seems secondary to Avritzer’s story.
Yet Avritzer’s account suggests that somehow, this new lifeworld-based
public sphere managed to successfully compete with Habermas’s manipula-
tive, power-infused public sphere that is aimed at producing uncritical
consent. However, an answer to such questions must be sought outside the
pages of Democracy and the Public Sphere. Rebecca Neaera Abers’ Invent-
ing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil, focusing on the same
participatory budget process in Porto Alegre, comes to mind. Abers main-
tains that a synergetic ‘scaling up’ of social conflicts, a concept she borrows
from Peter Evans, involving a multiplicity of regional, national, as well as
international non-governmental as well as governmental actors is vital to the
emergence of a vibrant civil society.
Avritzer’s attempt to envisage a public sphere predominantly populated
by social movements tends to miss these wider connections. According to
Avritzer, ‘transforming the public space into a dialogic and interactive space
and introducing social movements as its main occupants can help us to con-
struct a concept of democratic publics’. Indeed, infusing Habermas’s life-
world-based public sphere with potentially offensive social movement
exorcises its bourgeois connotations, albeit on a conceptual level. To a
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similar end, Avritzer outlines four main points alongside Habermasian speech
act theory that define what he calls ‘participatory publics’. First, participatory
publics operate at the public level through the mechanism of face-to-face
deliberation constitutionally anchored in the right for free expression and
assembly elevating new issues onto the political agenda. Second, social
movements and voluntary associations address contentious issues by intro-
ducing alternative practices at the public level, such as non-clientelistic forms
of claiming public goods. Third, they preserve a space for administrative
complexity while challenging the exclusive access of technicians to decision-
making forums. Fourth, the deliberation of these publics is bound up with
the search for institutional forms capable of addressing the issues raised at
the public level. These points clearly delineate Avritzer’s commitment to a
social movement paradigm influenced and expanded by civil society theory
and, in particular, by contributions from Robert Putnam, Jean Cohen, Andrew
Arato and others. Rather than examining the wider context of this public
sphere, for instance, its media, technologies, and infrastructure that make
possible the emergence of non-elite publics, Avritzer focuses on the selec-
tive institutionalization of deliberative processes within civil society. With this
he aims to link novel community-based communicative practices to a reno-
vated model of constitutional democracy but without giving up the notion
of local autonomy. We are back on Habermasian territory.
Yet by limiting his public sphere to the discursive circuits of those
movements and associations that in his view play a decisive role in the demo-
cratization of Latin America, Avritzer creates a number of problems. For
instance, by conceiving the public sphere as the communicative practices
internal to civic associations, advantages that were claimed by approaching
democracy from the vantage point of the public sphere have evaporated.
And the danger of mob rule looms large. As a result, we not only have to
re-introduce the moral distinction between virtuous and vicious actors, but
have to contend with an equally problematic differentiation between anti-
institutional and state-cooperative mass-mobilization. From my point of view,
the difficulties associated with these dichotomies could have been reduced
– or perhaps only converted – by turning to Habermas’s concept of a
modernizing lifeworld (Lebenswelt – the realm of cultural and social inter-
action) taken up by Cohen and Arato. By drawing on Habermas’s concept
of a ‘modernizing lifeworld’, a process that opens up the lifeworld’s sacred
traditions, norms, and authority to the processes of communication, Cohen
and Arato are able to deliver ‘civil society’ from its potentially regressive
‘Other’ without having to employ a problematic moral dichotomy.
Moreover, in Avritzer’s account, authoritarian practices form a fright-
eningly effective counterpoint to the public demands of civic associations.
In fact, a sober assessment of authoritarian continuities indicates that
Avritzer’s public sphere is too narrowly conceived. This is especially the case
in the light of Avritzer’s admission that without the support of elected
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130 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

officials, experiments such as the participatory budget would hardly have

had a chance. Bearing these significant constraints in mind, it could be of
advantage to cast the public sphere wider and admit publics that are con-
stituted by weaker ties. I am thinking of publics associated with community
radio stations, professional associations, elite advocacy groups, but also web-
based logs (blogs), for instance. For it seems unlikely that a public opinion
that exclusively issues from grassroots-based movements or voluntary associ-
ations holds sufficient purchase to neutralize the authoritarian inclination of
power brokers. Clearly, if the deepening of democracy depends on the
election of sympathetic politicians, the opinion of the wider public (Oef-
fentlichkeit) does indeed matter and should not be excluded. Yet such
‘informal publics’, as Avritzer calls them, are located outside the conceptual
boundaries of a social-movement-based public sphere. In this sense,
Avritzer’s ‘participative publics’ have to be situated within a wider public
sphere in which commercial and political interests wield a decisive influence.
Yet if Avritzer’s ‘participative publics’ have to compete with a mass media
whose ownership is extremely concentrated, and whose journalism is far
from independent, Habermas’s pessimism with regard to the role of the
public sphere in late modernity needs to be addressed.
Avritzer’s account demonstrates that under certain unspecified circum-
stances new participatory publics capable of making a significant contri-
bution to the reformation and strengthening of democratic structures can
emerge. Indeed, their utopian craving for a fairer society is strong enough
to crack open institutionalized anti-democratic structures that pervade the
formal political sphere in Latin America. Although Avritzer’s account focuses
more on social movements than on Latin America’s public sphere, its case
studies prompt us to suspend any Adorno-inspired pessimism, if only for a
moment.

Reviewed by Goetz F. Ottmann

School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University
email: G.Ottmann@latrobe.edu.au

Kwang-Ki Kim, Order and Agency in Modernity: Talcott Parsons,

Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel (State University of New York,
2003)

Never judge a book by its cover is a saying that could very well stand
as one of the few eternal truths despite its worn-out, dated and by now end-
lessly quoted status in the social sciences and elsewhere. In the case of
Kwang-Ki Kim’s new book Order and Agency in Modernity, however, this
saying is once again revitalized and shows its rightful persistence. Despite
being presented as a small book with a somewhat anonymous cover, Kim’s
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book is nevertheless full of fascinating insights, interesting conclusions and

cross-references regarding some of the most central social thinkers of the last
century – Parsons, Goffman and Garfinkel – a century otherwise full to the
brim of brilliant thinkers, analysts, commentators and critics of our discipline,
of our human predicament, and of our modern condition.
One could legitimately claim that order and agency stand as the twin
towers of modernist thinking and this, therefore, is also not surprisingly Kim’s
contention throughout his book. These two academic concepts, supposedly
covering phenomena ‘out there’ in the real social world, rose to prominence
throughout the 20th century’s social thought either as forces potentially pre-
serving society or subservient forces potentially threatening this preservation.
This duality between order and agency is classical in sociology and is closely
related to what Zygmunt Bauman in another context termed respectively the
structure and the praxis dimension within cultures, the stabilizing and the
creative aspect of human endeavour. To deal with this duality is also
the errand of Kim’s book, although he limits his discussion to the three afore-
mentioned distinct thinkers. Thus, the explicitly stated aim of the study is to
‘counter-balance the predominant concern with structural aspects of mod-
ernity, to recapture the importance of a cultural or phenomenological under-
standing of modernity, and to revisit the grounds for ambivalence that come
with any deeper understanding of modernity’ (p. 5). This cultural and
phenomenological understanding of modernity that Kim sustains throughout
the book is, as mentioned, formed on the basis of a discussion of, respec-
tively, order and agency, as the title suggests, but also as a lengthy clarifi-
cation of the relationship between abstraction and pluralization as social
dynamics and developmental traits.
The three chosen exponents of a particular modern stance in sociology
leaning towards a cultural understanding and appreciation of order and
agency are Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel: one pre-
senting classical structural functionalism, another a hybrid between symbolic
interactionism and Durkheimian sociology with his focus on ‘the interaction
order’, and the last scholar being also a hybrid between Parsonian inspira-
tion and the sociologies of everyday life in his ethnomethodological tradition.
Together these three stoic scholars spanning a period of more than half a
century provided sociology with some of its vintage theoretical perspectives,
models and concepts as well as some of the most illuminating empirically
inspired studies of order and agency.
The first chapter dealing with the nature of modern society is, to the
best of my knowledge, one of the most compressed and yet poignant presen-
tations of the ‘modern sensibility’, as Kim terms it, found in contemporary
sociology. Without many digressions or excursions, Kim is capable of pin-
pointing and capturing the very essence of modern social life, its causes,
transformations and consequences, equally on the level of institutions, inter-
action and individual identity. The main emphasis is on discontinuity,
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132 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

discomfort, contingency and alienation, and the reason for this is that Kim
characterizes modernity primarily through the eyes of some of the most
renowned cultural pessimists within sociology, such as Simmel, Berger,
Fromm and Zijderveld. However, Kim is not a sinister pessimist, and through-
out the book he points to possible ways of transcending the inherent
problems in modernity. This is done by looking to three theorists who were
not acknowledged for their expressed pessimism but for their analytical and
somewhat distanced observations on central aspects of the modern world.
In his presentation of the work of Parsons and his attempt to dig up
the cultural aspects implicit or explicit in this, Kim is making the case for a
new, nuanced and somewhat positive understanding of Parsons despite the
many criticisms voiced against his theoretical universe. Kim’s understanding
implies and indicates the more flexible and less rigid aspects of society,
values, culture, norms etc., than is usually the case among critics, and he
apparently seeks to provide corrigenda to many of the critically biased
assaults raised against Parsons’ social theory as being reactionary and a
vanguard of the status quo. Social order for Parsons is not presupposed as
an empirical phenomenon but is expected to be represented in theories
about reality – theories that ‘draw a desirable picture of the world’. Moreover,
agency is not locked in the iron cages of standardized roles and functional
expectations but assumes a certain level of freedom found in, for example,
anonymity. This freedom is embedded in modern institutional society where
not only alienation constitutes the order of the day, but also freedom, flexi-
bility and unpredictability. Indeed, this appears as a very positive evaluation
of Parsons’ contribution to an understanding of the cultural realm of mod-
ernity.
The presentation of the writings of Erving Goffman, unfortunately,
leaves much to be desired, primarily because Kim refrains from giving inter-
pretative primacy to any of the various existing traditions within writings on
Goffman’s sociology. By doing this, he makes it impossible, I believe, to
locate Goffman more solidly in an explicitly modernist tradition where actors
are either Machiavellian or moral and societies appear as either sacred or
profane. Thus, he professes not a lack of sensitivity towards the multi-faceted
and nuanced views of Goffman and his interpreters but an inability firmly
to determine on what grounds he labels the concern of Goffman’s sociology
particularly modern. Although I do not disagree that something relating
particularly to modernity (as opposed to traditional society) is evident in
Goffman’s work, I believe that Kim in his eagerness to illustrate Goffman’s
modern embeddedness somewhat confuses the analytical aspects of
Goffman’s work on, for example, interaction rituals, with historical facts
about phases in social and historical development. A demonstration and
interpretation of Goffman’s views on self and society has to form the basis
for any sound evaluation of his particular modern stance. Moreover, where
the picture presented of Parsons was primarily optimistic and positive,
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regarding a reinterpretation of the supposed solidity of order in his writings,

the picture presented of Goffman is, on the contrary, generally sinister,
sombre and pessimistic. Kim especially exaggerates the instability of order
in Goffman’s work instead of looking at the marvellous persistence and
reliability of order that it actually also displays. Nevertheless, Kim offers an
interesting and indeed novel analysis of Goffman’s writings in the light of
the themes of social order and agency.
Finally, the summation of the perspective of Garfinkel is also illumi-
nating with regard to modernity despite the fact the Kim acknowledges and
admits that ethnomethodologists abhor the notion of abstract theorizing
included within, for example, formal analysis and formal theories on
historical development. The order of ethnomethodologists is constantly
produced in the everyday practices of members of the ordinary, immortal
society, to use Garfinkel’s own powerful terminology. Through a discussion
of the concepts and real life phenomena of order, rules, norms, structure and
last but not least agency within ethnomethodology, Kim argues that this tra-
dition is best seen as relying on assumptions about order and agency that
are specifically accentuated in modernity, for example ambiguity, uncertainty
and radical changes. Moreover, ethnomethodology seeks to normalize the
apparent lack of encompassing basic or normative rules and norms and to
specify the relativity, contextuality and flexibility as well as the undermining
of order, structure and rules that is taking place in the era of modernity – an
era by many other observers actually described as being obsessed with rigid
rules, regulations, norms and structures. One can, however, have certain
reservations about the specifically modern stance in ethnomethodology and
conversation analysis that Kim is trying to persuade the reader to accept.
Order and Agency in Modernity is concluded with a brief – too brief
for my taste and for the purposes of the book – comparison of the three
theoretical perspectives. Here Kim could have gone into much more concrete
detail but, be that as it may, his concluding remarks clearly indicate that he
ends up where he started – a self-fulfilling and somewhat unsurprising
prophecy of the modern mentality of the three writers. He states that ‘these
three bodies of theory can be read as reflecting modern social conditions,
and actually open up to such a reading, revealing new dimensions and
depth’ (p. 107). This leaves me with some ultimate questions: first, why
exactly these three bodies of theory and, second, can they not be read as
something other than exactly expressions of modernity? On these issues, Kim
seems curiously quiet, and I believe this is due to a widespread confusion
throughout the book regarding the obvious and explicit modern statements
of these theorists and their potential implicit modern orientations. Because
modernity is so generally and loosely defined, every writer from the 20th
century could, not surprisingly, be said to contain certain modern elements.
Despite these criticisms, the book is definitely worth consulting. What
Kim achieves is to point out the specifically modern stances in these three
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134 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

theories. By looking at them through the prism of modernity, order and

agency, he is capable of extracting new insights that can enhance the
appreciation of the respective theories as well as their common points of
reference. Despite almost overburdening the book with references and (key)
quotations (half the book is actually dedicated to notes and references), Kim
is instrumental in inscribing Parsons, Goffman and Garfinkel in an explicitly
modern framework that makes it quite clear to the reader why the relation-
ship between these three thinkers and modernity, order, agency, abstraction
and pluralism is of vital importance.
As an endnote, I believe that the type of theoretical comparison
provided in Order and Agency in Modernity is a fruitful way to analyse and
appreciate academic work more fully. It provides readers, whether familiar
or unacquainted with the theoretical works under discussion in the first
place, with a point of common reference often lacking in the endless stream
of ever-new studies, empirical observations, theoretical trends, fads and
inventions that sociology appears to be so full of these days. Order and
Agency in Modernity is, as a consequence, one of those rare books that with
its original perspective and perceptive analysis provides sociology with
something genuinely novel.

Reviewed by Michael Hviid Jacobsen

University of Aalborg, Denmark
email: mhj@socsci.auc.dk

Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art

(Duke University Press, 2002)

For a long time now, calls have been made for a body of work that
critically engages with the amorphous and challenging category – ‘Aborigi-
nal Art’. Recently we have seen publication of several outstanding books in
the field. For example, the exemplary catalogue Papunya Tula: Genesis and
Genius (2000); the encyclopaedic reference work The Oxford Companion to
Aboriginal Art and Culture (2000); and the introductory survey Aboriginal
Art by Wally Caruana, (revised 2003). All of these works have their individual
merits, but none could rightly be called a work of art history or art criticism,
as the categories are currently understood; neither could Fred Myers’
Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Indeed, owing to
the great diversity in styles, themes and ideas, constructing working method-
ologies needed for rigorous criticism, and the sheer volume of knowledge
required to come close to circumscribing related historical processes, this
probably is an impossible task for one volume.
Despite this, at 400-odd pages, Painting Culture represents a
substantial foray into the complex network of ideas, places, people and
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events that together constitute the world of Aboriginal art. It is certainly

unique as a sustained critical view of the representation of a particular Abor-
iginal art (Pintupi painting), from its origin at Papunya and Yayayi in the
early 1970s to its inclusion in the cultural festival leading up to the Sydney
2000 Olympic Games. Criticism tends to be directed more toward how the
paintings have been received (by government bodies, gallery owners and
dealers) rather than stylistic development or other aesthetic concerns
addressed by the works themselves. In his critique of the market, Myers is
unafraid to name prominent persons currently working in the art world in
Australia and the USA; some may not like what they read (see Nicholas
Rothwell’s review in the Weekend Australian, 3–4 May 2003).
Falling roughly into three parts, Painting Culture firstly establishes its
purpose, scope and methodology, highlighting the importance of making the
activity of representation itself an object of study. Early on Myers states that
he is ‘attempting to make a different sort of contribution than those that have
dominated consideration of the art – an anthropological contribution based
on many years of fieldwork and association with the painters, as well as
limited ethnography of the exhibition scenes’ (p. 15). Indeed, Myers’ account
of a specific lived experience (his own) in these first few chapters is one of
the strengths of this work, his contact with and knowledge of the painters
providing rare insight into one of the most interesting, dynamic and least
understood moments in Australian history.
Readers may be familiar with Myers’ previous work, Pintupi Country,
Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics (1986), and the associated critique
by Eric Michaels (1987), ‘The Last of the Nomads, the Last of the Ethnogra-
phies or “All Anthropologists are Liars” ’ (Mankind 17[1]: 34–46). Painting
Culture draws on Myers’ previous publication as well as addressing its per-
ceived shortcomings by keenly attending to his own position (spatially and
temporally) in relation to his subjects. Myers began writing Painting Culture
in 1988, a time which represents ‘a dramatic intensification in the represen-
tation of Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal identity’ through the activities of
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and this historical and political
context vividly marks his approach to writing. Currently Chair of Anthro-
pology at New York University, Professor Myers lived with Pintupi people
at Yayayi, Northern Territory, from 1973 to 1975. The ‘acrylic painting
movement’, as it is often termed, began two years prior to his arrival, at
Papunya, 42 km east of Yayayi and roughly 250 km west of Alice Springs,
although it was still at a pivotal point in its development when Myers was
undertaking fieldwork. Myers reflects on the time when he began as a 25-
year-old PhD student, unsure of what or whom he was studying, with
degrees of regret and uncertainty. Commenting on his own blindness to the
importance of the art movement taking place around him, Myers asks: ‘With
what voice can I discuss . . . my understandings or misunderstandings of
acrylic painting in 1973 or 1974, from the perspective of a current writing? I
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136 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

did not know Aboriginal painting then as what I perceive it to be now – a

sign of an emerging Australian national identity not quite yet brought into
social being’ (p. 9).
Compunction aside, Myers attempts a comprehensive and detailed
study of the development of two important Pintupi painters, Yanyatjarri
Tjakamarra and Wuta Wuta Tjangala – comparing the work of the latter, all
too briefly, with that of his friend and brother-in-law, Charlie Tjaruru
Tjungurrayi. Referring back to his limited notes of the time, Myers offers little
interpretation or criticism of the artwork but describes many paintings, with
anthropological precision, utilizing the rough sketches he made of them,
noting their relation to geographic features and associated Dreaming. As this
work is repeated from an early chapter in Howard Morphy and Margo Smith-
Boles’ Art from the Land (1999), this seems a missed opportunity to expand
and develop an important topic. Exactly how much of this new book has
been drawn from previously published material is not indicated. Framing,
methodology, qualification and positioning are prevailing themes in these
opening chapters, drawing predominantly from the work of French sociolo-
gist Pierre Bourdieu, and flecked with Myers’ personal reminiscences of his
time at Yayayi (one of the first outstations established in the early 1970s).
Despite identifying the need for careful and detailed studies of the develop-
ment of particular painters, his work ultimately falls short of delivering this
kind of response by moving all too quickly onto discussion of ‘the Papunya
Tula scene’.
Papunya Tula is the name of the company incorporated in 1972 by
indigenous artists residing at the government settlement formed to house
Anmatyerre, Arrernte, Warlpiri, Luritja and Pintupi people brought in from
the desert in the late 1950s and 1960s. The second, loosely imposed, section
of Painting Culture analyses the growth and development of the market of
Aboriginal art both in Australia and overseas beginning with the early days
at Papunya. Several extant publications cover this early period from a
number of different perspectives. See especially: Geoff Bardon’s Aboriginal
Art of the Western Desert (1979) and Judith Ryan’s Mythscapes (1990). Myers
seeks to add his own ethnographic and historical approach by concentrat-
ing largely on exchanges between painters and a succession of art advisors
(a title given to persons employed by the company and government to facili-
tate the sale of paintings, organize supplies, and a range of other duties).
When writing of the many difficulties that beset the early art advisors, Myers
states: ‘the need for “love” or attachment from the Aboriginal . . . is both the
sine qua non of a white person’s legitimacy and the Achilles’ heel of advising’
(p. 181). Acknowledging the complexities of economies of exchange, this
seems a strangely personal observation, one which might equally apply to
Myers’ own relationships with his subjects.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 cover periods of roughly 10 years and, in each,
certain tropes or tendencies are isolated: 1972–1981 ‘a time of little demand’;
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1981–1989 ‘the boom years’; and 1989–2000 ‘the privatisation period’. Myers
brings several different strategies and dealings into focus in this ‘art-world
ethnology’, while a great deal of the information he covers is not new – see
Altman and Taylor, Marketing Aboriginal Art in the 1990s (1990). Myers
argues that during the boom years artwork gained in prestige and monetary
value through substantial purchases by Australian cultural institutions. ‘There
is . . . a revealing link between economic rationalization and the cultural re-
evaluation of Aboriginal art, a linkage whose compromise formations make
the artistic success of acrylic paintings a significant national symbol’ (p. 205).
Whilst most are familiar with the concept of acrylic painting as forms of
activism, objectifying political aspirations and identities of Indigenous artists,
Myers argues that the Whitlam Labor government’s acquisition of Jackson
Pollock’s Blue Poles in September 1973 ‘opened up a new aesthetic space
(abstraction) that came to be filled with Aboriginal art’ (p. 204). At one level,
Myers displaces the power he recognizes in Aboriginal artworks and makes
the sensibilities and imaginings of the Whitlamite ‘professional managerial
class’ the dominant factor in the work’s success. This is largely based on
Myers’ acceptance of Bourdieu’s theory that ‘the field of cultural production
is the area par excellence of clashes between the dominant fractions of the
dominant class’ (p. 203) and seemingly pays little heed to the political aspir-
ations of the makers of the art.
Comprising a third section of the book, the international touring exhi-
bition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, produced by the Asia
Society Gallery in New York and the South Australian Museum in 1988, is
examined in fine detail in chapters 8, 9, and 10. Such a concentrated expo-
sition of one show, however important, sits oddly out of proportion with the
rest of the history covered in Painting Culture. Myers’ justification is that
exhibitions are not actualizations of pre-existing discourses but are social
practices actively involved in discursive production. Dreamings was one of
the largest exhibitions of Aboriginal art to tour internationally, and Myers
sees it as ‘an objectification and transformation of Aboriginal culture’ (p. 277).
As a contributor to and participant in the multitudinous events that framed
this exhibition, Myers might be a little biased as to its importance but is able
to provide a close and nuanced reading of the inner workings and complex
processes involved in the preparation of this show. His insight, coupled with
a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the critical reception of the Dream-
ings exhibition in major publications and periodicals, makes this section one
of the most scholarly and interesting of the entire book.
In summary, Painting Culture is thought provoking and considered in
its analysis of the complex workings of a portion of the artworld; it is not a
work of art history or art criticism but, Myers claims, it is ‘a new anthro-
pology of art that treats the category of art in a critical fashion’ (p. 7). In this
respect, it is ultimately unsettling: anthropologists rattling around in the
closets of art history! Debates have long raged between anthropologists and
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138 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

artists/curators concerning the ‘correct’ approach to Aboriginal art, but art

historians have been loath to wade into the battle. Rapprochement has
recently been suggested via an anthropologically informed art history (see
Howard Morphy, Humanities Research 8[1], 2001, pp. 37–50). Again, this is
not what Myers has produced.
For all the faults Myers sees with the art world, its networks of dealers
and the market regulation (or lack thereof), his concerns lie with questions
of ‘how’ rather than ‘why’. By tracing the development of a specific style,
medium, and location (‘dot painting’, acrylic, Western Desert), Myers
analyses how these objects were made into ‘high art’. He states that his book
‘is an attempt to understand exactly what happened and how it happened.
How did acrylic painting come to be a valued, meaningful signifying
practice?’ (p. 7). In this respect, this is important work and the first consoli-
dated effort to comprehend this history. However, Myers remains ultimately
uncritical of the implied project his work examines; his anthropology is not
informed by art history. It is as though he views the making of ‘high art’ –
the move from ethnographic object to tourist art to high art – as progress.
The wonderful exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius held at the Art
Gallery of New South Wales in 2000, described in the closing chapters of the
book, seems to become the pinnacle achievement of a movement in decline.
Certainly, there is much to celebrate and learn in Aboriginal art, recent argu-
ments regarding ‘post-history’ notwithstanding. As Myers sagely observes,
‘For the formal construction of these paintings to become intelligible com-
munication for white Australians, then, some local art history – ethnographic
and historical understanding – is needed’ (p. 310). As one of the few people
working on Aboriginal art with any great knowledge of indigenous culture
and language, Myers delivers his ‘local art history’ in tantalizingly small doses.

Reviewed by Susan Lowish

Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University
email: susan.lowish@arts.monash.edu.au

Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left
(Merlin Press/Monthly Review Press/Fernwood Publishing, 2002)

Ralph Miliband was a remarkable figure, independent socialist, writer

and editor of Socialist Register. Famous for combat with Nicos Poulantzas, in
the days of our youth, he left us wonderful books including Parliamentary
Socialism (1961) and The State in Capitalist Society (1969). Looking back
through my own correspondence, and remembering occasional encounters
with him, I have the distinct image of a sharp, literate, eloquent man who
carried his independence proudly, as a matter of faith. Reading Michael
Newman’s fine biography confirmed my memories of Ralph Miliband, but it
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also filled them out. This is a fine and important book about the life and
times, ideas and politics of a radical torchbearer.
Miliband was born in 1924 in Brussels, and died in London in 1994.
The events of world history took him to England where, self-made, he came
to be seen as the successor of Harold Laski. The mix of Marxism and politics
was similar, yet distinct. Like Laski, he came to work the transatlantic axis.
His connections with the Monthly Review folks were lifelong; his special
soulmate in the earlier days was C. Wright Mills. He was a Marxist, but never
a communist, a pioneering critic of labourism who nevertheless veered closer
to left labour, and to Tony Benn, later in life. Miliband took an independent
path in the division between the two generations of New Left Review. He
opposed the original merger of New Reasoner and Universities and Left
Review, took a distance from Trotskyism and later from Althusserianism.
There is nevertheless a sense in which he anticipated the position that New
Left Review still inhabits today. In his own time, Miliband’s was a kind of
non-party Marxism which centred on politics, rather than culture or political
economy, and sustained hopes of both the Communist Party, early, and the
left of the Labour Party, later on.
Socialist Register began in 1964, edited together with John Saville, later
with Marcel Liebman and Leo Panitch. It is still, in a sense, Miliband’s most
enduring monument. For those who do not know it, or came later, the best
advice is likely still to go to the library, look it up, and take a cut lunch. For
to revisit The Socialist Register is also to revisit the history of parts of the
British and associated Left. Miliband’s students included Australians such as
Winton Higgins, who wrote eloquently on the Australian left in the 1974
Register. Ten years after, when Australian Labor was just opening its long
decade, the great transformation, I wrote to Miliband to ask if he would like
a sequel. My essay, ‘The Australian Left – Beyond Labourism?’, appeared in
the 1985/6 Register. None of this, nor my subsequent work on the critique
of Australian labourism, would have been possible without Miliband’s
example. Miliband was entirely open with me editorially, as open as he was
honest when I then, perhaps foolishly, asked his views of my decidedly anti-
Deutscher book Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism. He told
me in no uncertain terms what he thought of the book. As Newman observes,
Marcel Liebman offered a strikingly similar response to Miliband’s Parlia-
mentary Socialism, criticizing it less for what it said than for its silence (in
my case, on the transition itself, beyond or after Trotskyism). And then our
correspondence went on. He spoke his mind, but was generous of spirit,
and keen to keep moving. I suspect, on reading Newman’s book, that the
strength of his criticism of my critique was also, in a sense, self-critical. For
even if we were able, intellectually, to shift Bolshevism’s attraction, we were
unable to develop better ways, in those days still referred to as third ways.
The State in Capitalist Society helped legitimate the period need to
discuss politics; if it did not inform Franco-German state theory substantially,
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140 Thesis Eleven (Number 77 2004)

it nevertheless enabled all that to happen. Miliband was, in fact, supportive

of Poulantzas, though preferring Fascism and Dictatorship to the earlier
Political Power and Social Classes. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism was
more directly influential on period debate; and the final instalment, State,
Power, Socialism, most poignant of all. Miliband, meantime, had escaped
from the London School of Economics to Leeds, where he became friendly
with the Baumans. More books followed, most notably Marxism and Politics.
Now Miliband began commuting to Brandeis, and to City University in New
York, and to Toronto, where his influence on North American political soci-
ologists in the making was substantial. But the process was wearing, taxing,
and he was slowing down.
My clearest recollection of Ralph is of his visit to Australia in 1990, for
the Socialist Scholars Conference. His public presentations were witty, sharp
and strong. This was, more, a personally significant moment for me. I
remember, in that moment of our lives, two visitors from distant lands who
came into our home and who were full of affection for our children, then
still small. The other was Cornelius Castoriadis. Ralph Miliband’s letters to
me in this period always close with a hug for the kids. He was an import-
ant figure, but more, he was a good man.
Michael Newman’s book should be widely read. As Newman has
written biographies of Laski and Miliband so well, perhaps he might now
contemplate adding a biography of Paul Hirst to his achievements. We are
so much the less for their loss.

Reviewed by Peter Beilharz

Sociology, La Trobe University
email: p.beilharz@latrobe.edu.au