ed. Jonathan Bate
The Public Value of the Humanities
Bloomsbury Academic, 2011
288 Pages
£20
ISBN 978-1849660624

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Amid the articles, blog-posts, lectures, and shouting matches which have comprised much of the recent debate about the humanities, this collection of essays, a project initiated by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and edited by Jonathan Bate, stands out as a weighty and sober defence of their importance. But whilst many of the essays offer convincing justifications of the research and the research-fields which they describe, the collection as a whole reveals that the task of justifying the humanities is much more difficult than we might like to believe.

The 24 essays which comprise the collection are grouped under four headings: “Learning from the Past”, “Looking Around Us”, “Informing Policy”, and “Using Words, Thinking Hard”. The breadth of these categories is reflected in the impressive range of topics which the essays consider and the variety of perspectives from which they explore the idea of value. But the heterogeneous nature of the humanities and the complex ways in which they affect society are also a hindrance. The most successful essays are those that provide the most straightforward examples of useful humanities research.

A case in point is Simon Szreter’s engaging account of his foundation of the History and Policy website, which provides a forum for historians and policymakers to enter into creative dialogue. He describes how historical research can help policymakers think more imaginatively and provides empirical evidence of the effectiveness of particular types of policy. Szreter strengthens his argument by describing how his own research on poor laws in Elizabethan England has influenced the formation of poverty legislation in Sub-Saharan Africa, demonstrating that a surprising range of historical research may constructively inform political decision making.

Many of the other essays are similarly convincing, but suffer from the absence of any definition of the term “humanities” or any explanation of what the various subjects which the term designates have in common. Jürgen Zimmerer’s detailed explanation of how the study of past genocides may help to prevent future ones is extremely compelling. However, the clear practical application of research on genocides and its widespread use of quantitative analysis provide reasons for reclassifying it—and funding it—as a form of social and economic research. Indeed, one might conclude that genocide studies are threatened more by their classification as part of the humanities than by any uncertainty about their value. Somewhat similarly, Michael Kelly’s essay in defence of the study of modern languages makes an excellent case, but fails to explain why languages need to be taught in university faculties, rather than in language centres and other similar environments. Kelly does not attempt the more ambitious and more urgent task of justifying the study of the history, politics, and artistic productions of foreign cultures.

The problem of how the humanities should be defined also arises in the essays defending sociolinguistics and art and design courses. The first of these simply demonstrates that trained designers are needed in a variety of professional contexts, whilst the latter describes how a broadly scientific study of language can have numerous practical applications. These essays show that the term “humanities” can encompass a surprisingly diverse range of practically and professionally useful activities. But they leave serious questions unanswered about the value of subjects such as history, literary criticism, and philosophy, which have traditionally lain at the centre of the humanities.

A similar explanatory gap can be found in Iain Borden’s essay on architecture and Stephen Daniels’s and Ben Cowell’s essay on the management of landscapes. Both essays demonstrate the importance of historical knowledge and theoretical thinking to many practical and creative endeavours, but provide no justification for the large body of research in the humanities which is read only by other researchers. These essays also seem inadvertently to support the conclusion that more humanities research should be dictated by those who use it rather than by those who conduct it. Such a change in the structure of the humanities would no doubt be unpopular and would limit intellectual freedom, but the essays contained in the collection present few arguments against such a move. In focusing on practical applications rather than the subtler ways in which we benefit from the humanities, the authors, perhaps inadvertently, present a case for making the humanities’ principal function the provision of knowledge and skills at the behest of private business and the government.

The organising principles of the collection also seem questionable. The anecdotal approach which has been adopted, in which most chapters provide a description and a defence of a particular piece of research, was presumably intended to grapple with the diverse and unexpected ways in which humanities research can be valuable. It achieves this to an extent, but by presenting the benefits of humanities research as the results of happenstance and luck, risks reinforcing a “research first, think later” attitude. There is nothing to convince the ambivalent reader of the importance of the humanities as a whole or of its underlying ethos, just the demonstration that they sometimes work. Neither ex post facto rationalisations of research nor anecdotes about gambles which paid off are likely to convince the policymakers whom Bate identifies as one of the work’s intended audiences.

There are also some moments of embarrassment. Gary Watt boldly begins his essay by stating a simple syllogism: “law has significant public value; law is a humanities discipline; so the humanities disciplines have significant public value.” One doesn’t have to be a terrific logician to see that this argument is false. The correct conclusion to draw from these premises is that at least one humanities discipline has significant public value, something which, in the case of law, most readers will be willing to concede. Equally embarrassing is Catherine Leyshon’s divulgence that after a trip with school children into woodland around Falmouth, conducted as part of research into the link between landscapes and creative writing, most of the children wrote stories which were inspired by Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and the Pirates of the Caribbean films. This rather depressing evidence against a link between landscapes and creative writing is conspicuously ignored in the chapter’s concluding celebration of the importance of landscapes in our creative lives.

There are also some dangerously poor arguments. A case in point is Jonathan Bate’s contention that research in the humanities is “the only activity” which can “establish the meaning” of the questions “what is the value of research in the humanities?” and “what is the value of research in the sciences?” The reason for this, he argues, is that the terms “value”, “research”, “humanities”. and (presumably also) “science” can “only be answered by means of the tools of the disciplines of the humanities”. This is false on several counts. A scientist (or anyone else who is not a student of the humanities) can simply define these terms and then perform an activity which involves them. Nor is it necessary to define these terms in order to use them effectively. More worryingly, Bate’s argument seeks to establish that areas of study outside the humanities are dependent on them. It is difficult to know exactly what this means. It is certainly not true that other disciplines would fail to operate or to answer questions of value if the humanities ceased to exist and neither have they been thrown into disarray by the humanities’ current plight. Bate would have done far better to argue that the humanities are uniquely equipped to deal with certain kinds of enquiry, and to point to more serious philosophical arguments about the limitations of scientific thinking, than to demarcate the realms of the humanities and the sciences through a lazy distinction between facts and values.

The involvement of the AHRC in the production of the book—we only are told that they “initiated” it and “made it possible”—casts a long shadow over its contents. Although the title of the work purports to defend the humanities in general, the essays are in fact overwhelmingly interested in defending research. It is a serious mistake to neglect the importance of teaching, and not just because teaching is a vital means by which academics communicate their findings. There is, to say the least, a compelling argument that the current fixation on research in the humanities is connected with the difficulties encountered in defending their public value. To ignore this argument, and with it any suggestion that the future of the humanities might best be served by reforming or renegotiating their current institutional structure, speaks of a defensive and inflexible attitude which may ultimately do more harm than good. These essays’ presentation of the humanities as a coherent, stable, and self-confident institution paints a brave face, but does not welcome criticism or change. Their attitude, in short, is conservative in the wrong way.

Gabriel Roberts is studying for a DPhil in English at Worcester College, Oxford.

Stéphane Hessel
Time for Outrage!
Quartet, 2011
40 Pages
£4.25
ISBN 978-0704372221

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“Ninety-three years. I’m nearing the last stage. The end cannot be far off.” It is with these sobering words that this celebrated member of the French Resistance opens his short pamphlet of indignation, now available to the English-speaking world. Pitched in a decidedly lyrical key, Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage! is a simple but spirited clarion call for today’s youth to transcend the culture of political lethargy and confront the seemingly immeasurable injustices that overshadow contemporary society.

Initially published in 2010, Indignez-vous!—as it is titled in French—was an instant, if somewhat unforeseen, success in l’Hexagone. It topped the French bestseller list, momentarily eclipsing titles from more famed authors such as Michel Houellebecq, and has sold well over a million copies in France. As such, this short appeal to “peaceful insurrection” duly projected Hessel, and his petite left-wing publisher, into the intellectual and literary stratosphere of French cultural life. Now, with this excellent translation, France’s fêted war veteran has been introduced to an international audience.

It is the literary pinnacle of what has been an extraordinary life. Born to German Jewish parents in 1917, Hessel emigrated to France with his family in 1924. Following his studies at the exalted École Normale Superieure, he served in the French army during the Battle of France in 1940. A year later he fled to London to join the Free French under General de Gaulle, whose own “appel du 18 juin” was a rousing—if largely unheard—address to his fellow countrymen to resist Nazi occupation. Tasked with organising resistance networks in northern France, he was captured by the Gestapo in 1944 and then transported to the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps. After the war, Hessel became a diplomat, helping to draft the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and has acted as an eloquent and dedicated paladin of progressive causes ever since. It is this remarkable life, lived in the crucible of Europe’s fratricidal past, that has come to furnish Hessel with a finely tuned moral compass that he deploys in Time for Outrage! to confront the wrongs he sees in the world today.

Most importantly, it is Hessel’s time as a résistant that forms the historical and intellectual backdrop to his pamphlet. Stating that “The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage”, he implores us to summon the same spirit to confront the injustices that have despoiled the radical heritage of what he and his fellow dissenters fought and died for. We must, Hessel pleads, voice our indignation about the abominable levels of inequality between rich and poor, the growing inequity between rich and developing nations, the influence of the “power of money” and its adulterating effects within the body politic, the gradual choking of political rights that protect illegal immigrants, and the insouciant destruction of the environment. Moreover, citizens must resist the languid slide into apathy in the face of these issues and avoid the general acceptance of a nihilistic individualism. “The worst possible outlook is indifference”, he writes.

Among all the pressing issues of contemporary life, it is Israel’s calamitous policies toward the Palestinians that constitutes the greatest source of outrage for Hessel himself: “Today, my strongest feeling of indignation is over Palestine, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.” Revolted by Israel’s three-week war on Gaza in 2009 and dismayed by its continual suppression of Palestinian hopes for statehood, Hessel once again summons the memory of the Resistance. In this specific context, he explicitly draws upon its endorsement of armed insurrection by boldly claiming that “we must recognise that when a country is occupied by an infinitely superior military means, the popular reaction cannot be only non-violent”—a statement that has made him the target of the predictable accusations of anti-Semitism.

Those seeking a methodical and fastidious blueprint as to how we can overcome these predicaments will be left disappointed by Time for Outrage! It is not an intricate study marked by the conceptual labyrinths that define contemporary French political thought. Hessel does not engage in the charade that he bears the theoretical cipher necessary to answer the imposing questions that are informed by our present discontents. While he pays homage to Sartre, Time for Outrage! is not part of that abstract and holistic philosophical tradition in French intellectual history, epitomized by such canonical texts as Being and Nothingness. All the same, there is intellectual substance to this pamphlet. It addresses the current vogue for discussing political and social issues in a language of economics, finance, and productivity. This trend, he contends, has obscured the more important questions of ethics, morality, and justice in our public discourse. “It is high time”, he writes, “that concerns for ethics, justice and sustainability prevail.” We must unshackle ourselves from narrow considerations of profit and loss, and question the moral consequences of our public affairs.

This relates to a broader point residing at the heart of Time for Outrage! Fundamentally, it seeks to animate a tradition of republican citizenship that has slowly been eviscerated by the entrenchment of globalisation since the end of the Second World War. Rather than basing political life on the promotion of the individual, we should define it through a sense of fraternity whereby a citizen is expected not only to receive a set of goods from the state, but also to devote themselves to the public cause. Citizenship is not merely exercised through the ballot box, but is realised by means of active and continual engagement with the political institutions of society. It is this emphasis on public-spiritedness, through the sentiment of outrage against injustice, that Hessel hopes will provide a powerful stimulant for a new, invigorated, and participatory form of political culture.

Such active political engagement must not be moored exclusively in an insular and restricted concern for national affairs. Our indignation must also brave the pressing matters of international injustice. Time for Outrage! is steeped in a palpable sense of internationalism, an ideal that has clearly informed Hessel’s entire life. From his championing of immigrant rights—in the face of considerable challenges posed by the Sarkozy administration—to the defense of Palestinians and their right to statehood, Hessel has always detached his virtues from a nationwide parochialism and elevated them to embrace humanity as a whole. As he states, “The rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 are indeed universal. When you encounter someone who lacks those rights, have sympathy and help him or her to achieve them.”

Hessel’s ambitions have certainly resonated with the French public. The text adds to that tradition of intellectual engagement in the public sphere—from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, through Emile Zola, to Régis Debray—that has always proved popular in France. Its success might additionally be attributed to its simplicity; the work should be seen not as an episode of Panglossian reverie, burdened by abstraction that cannot function in practice, but as a refreshingly simple lexicon of discontent around which a broader, inclusive movement of political action can form. More importantly, however, it has tapped into a sense of despair among the French progressive left, currently in a state of fracture (unquestionably aggravated by L’Affaire DSK). But it remains to be seen whether astonishing book sales can be translated into radical political action. It seems that the political success of Hessel’s call to arms is tied to the fortunes of the French Socialist Party and the progressive movement in general; worryingly, at present, the resurgent Front National under Marine Le Pen has been more successful in rousing the French to scorn the sagging and listless politics of Sarkozy.

The effect Time for Outrage! will have on UK readers also remains to be seen. We face similar economic and social problems to those Hessel seeks to confront in France. Even the raw simplicity of the text itself would suit the British predisposition for jargon-free prose, excised of the neologisms characteristic of continental European political thought. Nevertheless, because the sentiment in Time for Outrage! is anchored in such a specific historical context—the occupation of France—it is unlikely that it will be met with the same acclaim, literary or political, as in France. Hessel’s very purpose—to summon the spirit of the Resistance—will surely prove his pamphlet’s greatest obstacle to success here in the UK. While France might easily respond to the mobilization of the Resistance as a defining historical moment from which to draw example (and help expunge the memory of collaboration), this is a leap of imagination too far for UK readers. Here, in the context of the Second World War, the historical vista is dominated by the memory of the blitzkrieg and the Battle of Britain, which has come to shape our oppositional culture. Juxtaposed to a French oppositional culture of insurrection, resistance, subterfuge, and subversion, ours is one defined by categories of endurance, fortitude, pluck, stoicism, tenacity, and tolerance. In short, a more passive culture of resistance.

Nevertheless, the UK progressive left would be wise to embrace the broad political principles that Hessel seeks to foment: indignation, collective action, and sustained mass political participation. The frustratingly anodyne Ed Miliband has certainly given progressives cause to seek out alternative spokespersons of resistance to the Tory-led coalition government. Hessel’s pamphlet, despite its historical particularity, might be one such source.

Gavin Jacobson is reading for a DPhil in International Relations at Balliol College, Oxford.

Laurie Penny
Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism
Zero Books, 2011
79 Pages
£6.99
ISBN 978-1846945212

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Laurie Penny’s Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism is a stirring call to political action. It aggressively challenges the claim that gender equality has been achieved in late-capitalist society and that for women the fight is over. However, despite its vocal invitation to feminist political action, Meat Market fails adequately to consider barriers preventing women from challenging the status quo. This is because, although Penny claims that women internalise patriarchal discourses and sentiments—indeed, her analysis of women’s inequality and subordination depends on this postulation—she under-appreciates the impact this process has on them. Although Meat Market is incredibly moving, and an important contribution to raising awareness about women’s continued subordination and oppression, one is left wondering how effective Penny’s solution for their emancipation can be.

Holding that in order to understand women’s continued inequality and subordination one must appreciate wider socio-economic arrangements, Penny claims that contemporary capitalism depends upon women’s underpaid and unpaid labour, purchasing power, and reproductive capacity in order to generate wealth. Society’s economic success therefore requires that women do the worst jobs, are underpaid, and are engaged in a constant process of buying and shopping; in sum, that they are materially unequal and occupy subordinate positions of power in society. Penny argues that this subjection is secured through women’s internalisation of patriarchal ideas, particularly idealised and unrealistic understandings about femininity. The patriarchal worldview denies the reality of women’s minds and bodies, teaching them to “shrink [themselves], silence [themselves], be small, be sexy, be nice, and never bite off more than [they] can chew.” As she writes,

[late-capitalism] quite literally brands the bodies of women. It sears its seal painfully into our flesh, cauterising growth and sterilising dissent. Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings.

Internalising these ideas, women and their activities are thus shaped to make them behave in ways that complement the demands of capitalism.

For Penny, society is both obsessed with women’s sexuality and horrified by it. The eroticised images confronting us in the media teach that women should always be willing and ready to have sex; yet, at the same time, young women are admonished for being too sexual and sexualised. Thus, while women understand that, in order to get on in life, they must “sell” their sex and sexuality, trading it for success in their jobs and praise from their friends, they are also alienated from their own sexual being. Indeed, even when women are “getting it right” in terms of their sexuality and sexual behaviour, they know not to enjoy themselves too much, lest they be judged as “whores” and “whorish”. Furthermore, for Penny, women’s subordination in late-capitalist society is connected to a denial of their corporeality; eating disorders, often dismissed as women’s misguided efforts to emulate celebrities, are in fact attempts to embody the patriarchal ideal of the female form. An alarming number of young women in late-capitalist society therefore engage in self-starvation in order to make their bodies fit with expectations that demand they be ever smaller, thinner, and take up less space. Because women are taught to fear their sexuality and loathe their bodies, Penny argues that they are thus made “controllable” and willing to comply with the demands that society makes of them. Suffering from acute insecurity and striving to attain ideals of femininity that are unrealisable and disempowering, they are transformed into an underclass of labourers that own a fraction of society’s wealth but are engaged in a never ending process of consumption.

Contemporary pseudo-feminism is all about the power of yes. Yes, we want shoes, orgasms and menial office work. Yes, we want chocolate, snuggles and straight hair. Yes, we will do all the dirty little jobs nobody else wants to do, yes, we will mop and sweep and photocopy and do the shopping and plan the meals and organise the parties and wipe up all the shit and the dirt and grin and strip and perform and straighten out backs and smile and say yes, again, yes, we will do it all. Yes, we will buy, more than anything we will buy what you tell us we need to buy to be acceptable. Yes, the word of submission, the word of coercion and capitulation. Yes, we will fuck you in gorgeous lingerie and yes we will make you dinner afterwards. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

Against liberal feminism, with this emphasis on women’s exercise of choice as the means of their empowerment, Penny instead locates the solution to women’s subordination in refusing to act in these ways, rejecting society’s demands, and saying “no”.

Yet, whilst her rhetoric is incredibly rousing, Penny is unclear on how to prevent women from thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that, she argues, make them complicit in their inequality. Even if one does accept Penny’s underdeveloped claim that women internalise patriarchal discourses and sentiments, the issue remains: how do you get to women to reject these discourses when they honestly believe that to be thin is to be beautiful and that baking cup-cakes makes them a loving wife? Increasing women’s consciousness about these issues, a project to which Penny surely sees her work as contributing, is only the first step in answering this question. The second, more important step consists in finding ways to help women reject the discourses and ideas that they take for granted and in highlighting alternative ways through which they can gain social respect and self-esteem. Failing to consider fully the extent of women’s internalisation of patriarchal discourses, Meat Market fails to address this difficult practical issue: how does one persuade women to reject the comfort of familiarity and engage in antagonistic political activity?

This difficulty aside, Meat Market is a valuable contribution to understanding women’s inequality and a challenge to it. It is a welcome change to the claims that, because women are equal before the law, the fight for their emancipation is over, and it forces a consideration of how some of the ideas and understandings we take for granted are not as innocent as commonly thought.

Zoë May Sullivan is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Somerville College, Oxford.

Ivor Southwood
Non-Stop Inertia
Zero Books, 2011
106 Pages
£6.99
ISBN 978-1846945304

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Six million British workers are in low-paid jobs; nearly one in four is on a wage below the minimum income standard of £7.60 per hour. Two and a half million people are registered as unemployed. Those currently in work are increasingly afraid that they will lose their jobs within a year and so accept significant reductions in wages and conditions just to stay in work. Overtime is a given, not an exception. That organ of unreason, the Daily Mail, actually celebrates the fact that our people are the third most overworked in the EU, toiling for an average of 40.6 hours per week. In Non-Stop Inertia, one of the latest in a succession of sharp and accessible critical works from publisher Zer0 Books, Ivor Southwood investigates this situation. Having been employed in an assortment of casual jobs amid spells of unemployment, Southwood knows first hand the dispiriting cycle of unemployment and precarious, short-term employment.

Contemporary British society, Southwood argues, valorises the work ethic (Protestant or otherwise), and stigmatizes those who happen to be out of work as personally culpable. There is increasing popular acceptance of the Daily Mail portrayal of the unemployed as “scroungers” and undeserving of welfare: a 2006 poll showed that only 23% of those surveyed thought that “benefits are too low and cause hardship”, compared with 49% in 1987. The supposed virtue of the work ethic is one of the few articles of faith left in British society; this idea has paralleled the rise of modern capitalism since the Reformation. At certain moments in the 20th century, even people of the Left concurred with the principle; at a time when most industrial workers regarded work as a necessary evil to provide a wage, the left wing genuflected before the cult of “workerism” and idealised back-breaking blue-collar jobs. Meanwhile, the right wing attempted—and continues to attempt—to portray blue- and white-collar public sector workers as lazy and self-serving, comparing them unfavourably to idealised financial service workers: “Blue Stakhanovites” who toil unceasingly at the coal face of commerce.

Unemployment used to be seen as a public problem, but now it is a private one. The onus is on the “jobseeker” to attend courses and to take the first job offered, however irrelevant or inappropriate it might be. Job centres were once “Labour Exchanges” which offered support; now they are increasingly designed to provide a cheap workforce for “Welfare to Work” providers—companies who stand to profit from employing people on meagre short-term contracts with no requirement to keep them on. Society, as Southwood argues, no longer has sympathy for its citizens.

The modern precarious workplace, that hellishly banal space, is imagined in Non-Stop Inertia as a sort of retail park wilderness. The de-personalisation of the open plan call centre, Southwood argues, is practically Stalinist in its uniformity, in its anxiety to erase unproductive individuality: “In an environment of hot-desking, weak social ties and short-term projects, it seems that any evidence of attachment to place or identity is regarded as a form of bacteria which must be regularly swept away to keep the work surfaces clean and hygienic.” In comparison to more settled professions where autonomy is central, skills and previous work experience have little place in precarious labour: “blending in” is all. In this environment, an English literature degree is “valued not for its evidence of critical thought but because it shows that the applicant has word processing experience”. Southwood identifies the absurdity inherent in staff “looking busy” in quiet periods and in the manner in which contractual loopholes are used to elicit unpaid overtime. In these ways and others, casual labourers are exploited with virtually no likelihood that “playing the game” will be rewarded with more secure employment.

For Southwood, the virtual assistant typifies the British precarious worker in the new economy. Virtual assistants are personal secretaries to private sector companies, but rather than being given a place in the office, these precarious workers operate from home on a freelance basis. Whilst the job is portrayed as autonomous and rewarding, there is little human contact and no access to company equipment; they are at the beck and call of their distant managers. In this context, “home itself becomes a kind of non-place in which we are all either willing or reluctant jugglers”. This practice is merely the starkest instance of the current paradox where businesses promote “a positive lifestyle discourse” while operating a “ruthlessly lean business model”. A discourse full of terms like “empowerment”, “mobility”, and “flexibility” masks a form of wage slavery that deprives employees of a steady wage and employment rights.

Public sector institutions are not immune from this trend of casualisation; increasing numbers of staff are employed on “part-time-occasional” contracts and their goodwill is exploited to obtain unpaid overtime. Southwood evokes a climate in which departments cut corners rather than serve the common good, and in which private sector consultants are employed—using public money—to “train” staff in an attitude of “rictus positivity”. In the context of government funding cuts, management promotes the mood of precariousness to instill fear in the workforce. Contracts and pay—for those fortunate enough not to be made redundant—are downgraded, and managers are able to offload the blame onto government cutbacks. Southwood provides a frightening dissection of George Osborne’s plans to reverse workers’s hard-won rights; in his persuasive and frighteningly envisioned prediction of the future, sick pay, holidays, and notification of redundancy, among many other things, are likely to become obsolete.

This analysis of such a pervasive and important phenomenon serves not only the unemployed or fearful public sector workers, but everyone who works too many hours, too few, or simply feels insecure. It serves the millions of citizens who experience “a precariousness which does not register on the scrolling news tickers but is nevertheless felt as an internal pressure nudging at the ceiling of the skull”. Southwood concludes that we “must resist the pressure to go with the flow” of “compulsory positivity and flexibility”; he proposes that we use the Internet to have meaningful debate on the nature of work, wresting it away from the forces of “workplace conformity” and “pseudo-participatory leisure”. Taking his cue, exploited casual workers and increasingly casualised public sector workers must find common cause, first sharing experiences, followed by organised opposition to the ideology and experience of work under neo-liberalism.

Tom May is a Lecturer in Further Education at Newcastle College, and has MAs in English (Cambridge) and Film Studies (Northumbria). He records music as Dream Cargoes and blogs at Where Shingle Meets Raincoat and A Window on the World.

Richard Watson is a writer and consultant, who specialises in scenario-planning and the analysis of trends. On 27 January, Watson spoke at Blackwell’s in Oxford about his newest book Future Minds: How the Digital Age is Changing our Minds, Why this Matters, and What We Can Do about It (2010). Future Minds expresses concern about the pernicious effects of technology on the brain, arguing that the Internet and contemporary multimedia impair the ability to think deeply and creatively. The book enters an ongoing discussion about the Internet’s influence on cognitive ability (see articles by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal), but is unique in its focus on ways to curb our addiction to technology. He spoke to the Oxonian Review about the relative rate of contemporary innovation and the relationship between technology and education. For more about Richard Watson, visit What’s Next and Future Files & Future Minds.

You argue that technology can impair the development of important skill sets, namely the ability to think deeply and creatively.

That’s really my focus. What are these technologies doing to our thinking? But we’ve got to be careful because obviously there are different types of technology and equally there are different types of thinking. And I think [technology] is enhancing different types of thinking but it is eroding others.

Should recourse to technology in the classroom be limited?

I think it should. I need more time to think about how that works…But I think fundamentally we need to ask: What kind of thinking are we after? What kind of technology best supports that? I would regard pencils and papers and books as much a technology as a blackboard. So we need to think very hard about what we’re trying to achieve and what are the best tools for the job…There should be periods when technology is switched off. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you are trying to cram information, then by all means use a computer, use a whiteboard. But if you’re trying to do more than that, to understand context—for instance, what was the Battle of Britain and why did it happen?—then I think that needs physical interaction.

You criticise the current emphasis that schools place on quantitative analysis. Do we change the curriculum to give more emphasise to the humanities?

Yes, and this isn’t particularly my view. It is Ken Robinson’s more than anyone else’s. But I think we are only educating one half of our brain: the left logical side…The education system is still producing the same type of person and the world has changed. Bear in mind if you’re 5 years old and starting education, the world when you graduate is going to be an incredibly different place. It seems to me we’re training people for the wrong skills… The thing that has real value is the ability to relate to other people physically and emotionally. We talk about the information economy ad nauseam but we don’t really educate for it, and so creativity is sort of relegated…It’s not a real subject. The real subjects are like law and medicine. But these other things have equal weight…Essentially the education system is set up to say there’s a right answer for everything. Learn it; go and apply it. That’s true if you’re an engineer, and for a lot of scientists, there is one answer. But in a lot of areas, there isn’t. There are lots of different answers…We essentially teach convergent thinking: there’s one right answer. And actually, if you want a culture of innovation, you need to encourage divergent thinking.

In the United States there’s a big scare that the Chinese are out-educating Americans in the maths and sciences. Do you think these fears are missing the point?

Someone sent me an e-mail last night and it’s got a great slogan. They’ve got this campaign called “No right brain left behind”. It’s fabulous; I love that. I read a statistic recently. It said that 90% of PhDs in science and engineering reside in Asia…The issues in America are healthcare, obviously, but also education. The same is true in Britain. We are falling behind…We just don’t know what’s about to hit us. The Chinese take education so seriously. There are certain subjects you can’t teach unless you have a certain grade in that subject. Here, you can fail maths four times and eventually pass and then teach maths. You could not do that in China.

The interesting thing about China [and a few other countries] is that they’ve got a model that’s all about the production of low-cost stuff. The challenge now is to move up the value chain; they’ve got to start not just producing this stuff. They’ve got to start inventing. Now to what extent can they do that? To what extent is Silicon Valley dependent on the American Dream and that political system of freedom, etc.? Some people say you can’t have an innovation economy without freedom, but those people were probably also saying you can’t have capitalism without democracy, and the Chinese have proved that completely wrong. My feeling is that there are issues [correlating] serious innovation and creativity and originality. Unless you have openness and freedom, [innovation] could be quite constrained. I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal stuff from McKinsey. When they hire Indian and particularly Chinese graduates, there is a sort of groupthink going on there. They’re not going to challenge the teacher in a different direction. And for serious innovation you need that disruptive element; you need the wise ass. And maybe the Chinese system isn’t creating that, but maybe I don’t know enough about it.

In your talk, you said that Alvin Toffler was 30 years ahead of his time. You also invoked phrases of another mid-century analyst of technological change, Marshall McLuhan, such as “the global village” and “the medium is the message”. To me this suggests that Toffler wasn’t ahead of his time at all, but rather these technological changes have always been with us, and I wonder whether this is merely a change in pace?

There’s a quote I use from William Gibson: “The Future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.” Change always comes from the fringe…If you want to see the future, there are certain places you can go and you’ll get it. The history of prediction is appalling. It’s not that they’re wrong; it’s that their timing stinks. They are too optimistic about how quickly change is going to happen. There’s an argument that says change is accelerating; that it’s happening quicker than it used to. A lot of people are [predicting] what’s going to happen in the future, and [their predictions] are probably a decade off. There’s also the classic mistake of saying x will replace y. It’s a sort of binary argument. And actually it’s not like that. [For example] physical newspapers will not die. They may be an exception rather than the rule, and the same with books. There are going to be multiple futures and you can buy into the future you want.

With Toffler, that’s what’s been the case. There’s a really good book called Future Hype, written by an American computer scientist, who tries to put the predictions of technology into some kind of a historical context, and it’s really interesting looking at what people say now versus what they said 100 years ago. To some extent, I think his argument is that compared to the level of change we talk about now, there was actually more change during the Industrial Revolution. It was far more rapid, far more impactful. In a sense, there’s no reason to be anxious—it’s all nothing.

You encourage people to occasionally isolate themselves from technology and offer advice for how to do this: experiencing the outdoors, turning off mobile phones whilst on vacation, etc. But how optimistic are you that people will voluntarily remove technology from their lives?

[Technology] is a bit like drugs, cocaine, and alcohol. It’s rather satisfying if you are involved in social networks; [they] make you feel in control and important…A study was done on cell phone use, and [the researchers] withdrew the cell phone and a few other things, and the physical and emotional symptoms were exactly the same as going cold turkey from serious drug addiction. I don’t think we’re going to acknowledge this as a problem for 5 to 10 years minimum. I then think it will be acknowledged. South Korea and America are the only countries that have Internet addiction clinics at the moment. I think it will become more common 15 to 20 years down the line. Even so, most people will deny that they have a problem.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review. William Kolkey is reading for a DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxonian Review.

A stream of slender youths from the Apuk Dinka tribe meander past us and disappear in the direction of the Jur River. Bare-foot, guns slung over their shoulders, they wear impassive expressions despite their lethal intentions. We are standing in the pounding Sudanese sun; beyond this final mud hut there is nothing but the nomadic cattle camps that line the last couple of miles to the Jur River. This morning, on a scrap of paper, with frayed edges and a crumpled corner, we collected the names of the 16 tribe members killed in the raids the day before. Now the youths are leaving to claim back their cattle and avenge their tribe’s dead. During January 2010, over 150 people were killed and over 50,000 head of cattle were taken in this kind of inter-tribal raiding between the Apuk Dinka of Warrap State and the Nuer of Unity State (South Sudan).

In the vast wilderness of northern South Sudan, the dry months of November to April bring the necessary movement of cattle from the villages to the waters and swampy terrain near the river. This draws the opposing tribes into physical proximity, with the river marking their only boundary. The cattle are the prime store of wealth for the semi-nomadic pastoralist tribes, allowing them to save for marriage, times of famine, and illness. The proximity of the tribes during the dry season induces the temptation of violent raiding. Although these raiding patterns are thousands of years old, in the peace between North and South Sudan since 2005, inter-tribal raiding in the south has escalated in scale and frequency. In 2009, more people died in these raids in the south than died in the notorious conflict of Sudan’s Darfur region.

Simultaneously, in this post-war era, schools are starting to emerge, with trees as classrooms and sticks for stationary. It is these schools that finally offer an alternative to this insidious and increasingly violent cultural habit. Since the 1990s, in the most remote reaches of South Sudan, a growing demand for formal education has been driven by a personal desire for survival. With this increase in classroom education, there is finally a promise of pacifying the raiding of the Apuk Dinka cattle camps.

When formal education was first introduced amongst the Apuk Dinka by Europeans, it was seen as nothing better than a punitive measure for delinquent youth. A former commissioner from the Apuk Dinka, Deng Mariak, recalls the attempts by the British authorities to force him to attend education. Not only did he flee school for days through lion-laden scrub land, but his family hid him from armed soldiers searching the mud huts of the village to return this escapee to the classroom. No respectable father would allow his child to attend school, and adulthood was found in the training and rites-of-passage of the cattle camps.

This attitude prevailed until the late 1990s when circumstances demonstrated how formal education could lead to survival. Conditions had conspired to create one of the 20th century’s worst famines amongst the Apuk Dinka. A failed harvest, bombing raids from the north, and local militia raids on the ground resulted in a shortfall of food which caused the deaths of over 100,000 people. Locals still remember the road to the market lined with the corpses of those who had starved to death on the journey.

The food aid provided was consistently sourced and organised by the World Food Program. Coordination of the delivery of food involved the recruitment of local staff, and crucially, literacy and some English language were a key condition for employment. Employees and their families were guaranteed adequate provision of grain prior to its distribution to the rest of the community. For the first time, the local community equated literacy and education with survival and prosperity. Education suddenly made sense.

The continued, active, quasi-governmental involvement of the United Nations and international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) in South Sudan has further cemented this perception. Demand has caused the price of education to rise to five cows per year in the leading schools, and even first-born sons are now being sent to classrooms instead of the cattle camps.

The increase in education is likely to result in a reduction in deadly cattle raiding for at least three reasons: first, the educated youths have new values and aspirations; second, the educated youth have alternative means of wealth acquisition; third, alternative means of wealth storage, other than cattle, are emerging.

The younger generation of literate Apuk Dinka profess to have abandoned some of the traditional values and aspirations that have historically fuelled cattle raiding. In order to acquire a wife, men pay from 31 and up to 200 cows (based on costs in 2010 amongst the Apuk Dinka). Conventionally, men would marry between three and five wives throughout their lifetime, requiring the acquisition of hundreds of cattle. This practice, in combination with the depletion of herds during 50 years of civil war, has inflamed the tendency for raiding.

In contrast, the educated youth repeatedly claim to aspire to take only one wife. Having received their education in the refugee camps of Kenya and Uganda, education in South Sudan has become synonymous with the adoption of their moral code, including the one-wife policy. Therefore, this changed aspiration results in demand for fewer cattle and a reduced propensity to raid.

Second, the educated youth have an alternative source of income that vastly exceeds that available through the herding of cattle. One INGO amongst the Apuk Dinka, for example, employs over a hundred literate, local staff. Employment for these INGOs often equates to a salary of ten cows per year. Traditionally, in contrast, a labourer in the cattle camps receives a wage of just one cow per year. With the possibility of amassing enough cattle for a good wife over a decade, the relative benefit of raiding is depleted. Because of the high cost of carrying out a raid, largely due to the significant risk of death or serious personal injury, it has become, on balance, more sensible not to raid.

Third, education offers understanding of an alternative means of wealth storage. Local and international currencies are in increasing usage, changing the economic mechanisms away from a barter economy with cattle as the central means of exchange. Exposure to global culture through education has also brought alternative expressions of wealth. Not only cows and wives, but also inanimate property such as permanent home structures, technology, clothes, and vehicles are now the desired acquisitions. Such items of wealth storage and expression are not found in the cattle camps where vulnerability to raids is more extreme. Instead such possessions foster a more sedentary lifestyle that does not create close tribal proximity.

The dichotomy between the choice of the classroom or the cattle camp can be exaggerated. Many youth will find themselves at the camps in the dry season and the schools in the wet season. Yet, the choice to return to the village for school, motivated by the desire for survival, offers the hope of an end to the ever more deadly inter-tribal raiding. With altered aspirations, sources of income, and sources of wealth storage, the educated youth, who have been in the classroom, are starting to reject the raiding of cattle camps.

As the sun sets Deng Mariak’s son walks home with me. “Yes, I’m scared for my brothers. The oldest brother just left to head north to the Jur River to see if our cattle and our younger brothers are okay. But I was away at school so long that I never learnt to fire our gun.”

Naomi Pendle graduated in 2005 with a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Merton College, Oxford. She currently teaches at Marol Academy in Warrap State in South Sudan.

Anastassia Tsoukala
Football Hooliganism in Europe:
Security and Civil Liberties in the Balance
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
192 pages
£50.00
ISBN 978-0230201149

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To the horror of Western Europe’s liberal intelligentsia, the ancient alliance between popular attitudes and muscular executive force has excluded asylum seekers and radical Muslims from “normal” society. Yet the same intelligentsia that has campaigned against the unlawful treatment of these groups has turned a blind eye to the de-humanisation and denial of civil liberties affecting the young, male football supporter. Away from the headlines of asylum prisons and 42-day detention, suspected football hooligans have been demonised in a pan-European spiral of social construction, which implicates governments, the EU, police forces, and the media.

Football Hooliganism in Europe is Anastassia Tsoukala’s effort to expose this trend. Turning to the histories of European lawmaking and law enforcement, Tsoukala, a professor of criminology at Paris XI, traces the process by which the football hooligan became a modern folk devil. Despite its flaws, her book admirably attempts to redirect academic focus toward the less recognised—but no less oppressive—manifestations of the contemporary obsession with security.

As Tsoukala makes clear, the demonisation of football hooliganism is an outgrowth of a new security paradigm in which “non-traditional threats” justify disproportionate executive power. Within this frame, sub-groups like the asylum seeker, the radical Muslim, and the hooligan are violated due to pre-emptive assessments of “risk”. This process occurs independently of violence itself, facilitating the erosion of human rights across Europe.

For instance, in Britain, the Football (Disorder) Act 2000 allows authorities to ban suspected hooligans from stadiums and restrict them from traveling abroad to games through passport confiscation. Authorities can take these measures on the basis of police complaint alone. Violating the principle of proportionality and illustrating the punitive bite of civil orders, the law has allowed restriction of movement—and even detention—during “control periods” of suspected hooliganism. By the time of the 2006 World Cup, 3,286 of these banning orders were in force in England and Wales.

In February of that year, one case, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester v. Davies, deliberated on a man who received a football banning order based on a complaint, despite the failure of either policemen or CCTV footage to identify him. In another case, a man received a banning order after a bottle was thrown in a pub, even though authorities could not positively identify the man as the perpetrator. Such “guilt by membership in a disorderly group” is a common, if patchy, pattern that feeds on the arbitrary predilections of local constabularies and magistrates.

This pattern persists across Europe. In France, Law (2006)-64, ostensibly an anti-terrorism measure, bans people from stadiums who have been found guilty of certain offences. Germany, Belgium, and Italy have similar measures in place. Moreover, even after these bans have expired, offender backgrounders remain on shared databases across Europe, contrary to the stipulations of the European Convention on Human Rights. Apart from infringing on the right to freedom of movement, these civil laws circumvent the procedural guarantees of the criminal justice system, most notably the crucial tenet of “innocent until proven guilty”. In this way, bans on football hooliganism constitute a noteworthy shift from traditional criminal justice toward what criminologist David Garland has called “the culture of control”.

But do football hooligans really matter? After decades of critical work by academics, the problems and implications of persecuting asylum seekers and radical Muslims are relatively clear. But aren’t football hooligans simply a case of deviant—or, as New Labour would have it, “anti-social”—people getting the punishment they deserve? Aren’t the control orders simply a way to prevent destruction of life, property, and public order?

For Tsoukala, the answer is a resounding no. While she does not deny the realities of football violence, Tsoukala asserts that football bans reveal latent ideologies—and key contradictions—in contemporary crime-control practices. In a skillful historical survey, she explains how a concrete, continent-wide legal framework specific to sports-related violence first emerged after 39 Juventus supporters were killed during a fight at Belgium’s Heysel Stadium in 1985. She then explores how this framework exhibits overlaps with approaches to similarly imagined non-state threats, such as recent legislation designed to combat terrorism, drug networks, and riots. The genealogy provides a timely corrective to the praise heaped on the policing of the 2006 World Cup: Tsoukala demonstrates that the measures the media has lauded—police co-operation, database sharing, and cross-European passport revocation—are a triumph of self-reinforcing logic and pernicious social construction.

While her analysis of legal history is compelling, Tsoukala’s survey of academic research on the phenomenon of hooliganism displays a myopic commitment to her own arguments about the problem at hand. She hastily dismisses decades of economic, social, and psychological research on sports-related violence, most notably the work of sociologists Peter Marsh and Eric Dunning. A more thorough acknowledgment of this research would add depth and empirical force to Tsoukala’s analysis, and perhaps more importantly, would endear her to—rather than alienate her from—the academics she aims to convince.

In the end, the problem with Football Hooliganism in Europe is that Tsoukala only hints at what she might state more explicitly: that the construction of the anti-hooligan hyperbole is as much about economics as it is about a social construct. Who wins in this economic exchange? All involved: newspapers whip up a storm to sell more newspapers; police forces point to the newspaper reports and get more resources; and European institutions such as Interpol emphasise (or perhaps invent) the transnational aspect of the problem to justify their coercive measures. In this system of internal logic, actual events bear little relation to outcomes: either violence occurs, necessitating more punitive measures, or it does not, in which case the preventive apparatus is praised, extended, and replicated. To some extent, the War on Terror works the same way.

Tsoukala gives too little time to these sorts of motivations, which underlie the very social construction she indicts. But she does succeed in convincing the reader that football hooliganism matters. This contribution should not be overlooked, for the patterns Tsoukala highlights suggest the need for more critical assessment of European laws and institutions. They also speak to the continued presence of impetuous punitive measures in Europe, which discriminate against particular persons based on prejudices and assumptions.

The precedent set by banning and restricting alleged hooligans, a precedent of “punishment on the basis of suspicion”, is dangerous, and the prevalence of such bans illustrates the need to keep a sharp eye on European institutions—the Council of Europe, the European Commission, and increasingly the European Parliament—that have undermined their own “rights and freedoms” rhetoric in the treatment of sports-related violence. In short, the continued failure to critique football-hooligan bans permits an erosion of the very values Europeans claim to uphold. By highlighting this paradoxical process, Tsoukala has not merely provided a new slant on a single phenomenon; she has shown that the seemingly banal control machinery of European integration can and does infringe on hard-won rights.

Mark Baker is reading for an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

Tristam Hunt
The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
Allen Lane, 2009
464 pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0713998528

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If at some point an academic calls you the “global architect” of some –ism, you either have had an impressive career or you are a founding member of al-Qaeda. At the beginning of his new biography of Friedrich Engels, Tristram Hunt situates “one of the central architects of global communism” closer to the latter, deliberately conjuring the evils of Soviet state utopianism and referencing buzzwords like terrorist “insurgency” and “guerrilla warfare”. But the sulphur fog clears after the introduction. Over the course of this well-researched and entertaining biography, Hunt shows how Engels’s social and political critique was not ferocious or fanatical, but rather nuanced and circumspect. Unlike many 20th-century communists, who willingly used violence to translate their imagined utopia into practice, Engels proved much more realistic about the revolution on the horizon. Contrary to popular associations, Hunt argues, this “second fiddle” ideologue and life-long friend to Karl Marx was neither dictator nor enthusiast: in fact, he was a toff.

Unlike Marx, Engels was born into a morality-conscious family of wealthy conservatives, devoted to evangelical piety and a starchy Protestant work ethic. The air was thick with dutiful domesticity, well-groomed paternalism, and a heavy dose of religiosity. Engels, the atheist-to-be, would always remain impressed by this religious upbringing. His father owned a cotton spinning and thread producing company in the small Rhineland town of Barmen, and by 1840, it would become the empire of Ermen and Engels, stretching across Europe from the German homeland to Manchester, England. Tradition demanded Engels become a Fabrikant like his father.

Instead, he became the lifelong disruptive factor in his father’s enchanted worldview. Though the young Engels was sent to the town of Bremen to hone his business skills, he spent much of his time there fencing, drinking, skirt-chasing, and reading blasphemous books distributed by the progressive Young Germany. At university in Berlin, he embraced the “dragon seed” of Hegel, and cloaked under the journalistic pseudonym Friedrich Oswald, he began to attack the miserable conditions of mill workers in his hometown of Barmen.

During these years he met Karl Marx, whose explosive hairstyle had brought him the nickname “Moor”. Together they embarked on a communist voyage that would leave their two names inextricably connected in the history books. Upon being sent to Manchester in 1842 to become a proper merchant, the young Friedrich’s ivory tower of theoretical philosophy crumbled, and the rough and raw situation of the English working class sharpened his senses to reality. The facts spoke for themselves, and at the precocious age of 24, he wrote the chilling Condition of the Working Class in England.

Despite his criticism of the very sort of exploitation that brought his family money, Engels continued to accept a monthly allowance from his parents. In 1848, it allowed him to travel to Paris, “the capital of the nineteenth century”, to write, drink, and think together with Karl Marx. A lifelong friendship was forged over the pair’s theoretical agreement about the rotten state of world affairs.

In 1848, hunted by arrest warrants and Prussian spies, Marx and his family fled to London. Engels returned to Manchester, taking up a job at Ermen and Engels, and he would devote the next 20 years to earning money as a merchant to support Marx’s work on Das Kapital. Despite his social and political views, Engels was not ashamed to openly love the lush life of a German expatriate. He became adept in the art of the English upper-crust life, dining at posh restaurants, hunting foxes, and joining half a dozen Manchester gentlemen’s clubs. Having earlier despised frock-coated philistines, he now proudly donned the patrician attire himself.

The paradox of the communist toff proves uncomfortable for those who equate communism exclusively with the hard-working urban proletariat suffering under despicable conditions. Cynics tend to chastise the champagne socialist: once one can afford it, any extravagant opinion can be tossed up and played with over port. But in choosing not to break with his origins, Engels simply gave in to necessity and practicality. He milked the system for the greater cause, giving generously until his death in 1895.

Most importantly, Engels supported Marx and his family, as well as a whole clique of loving dependants. More than half of Engels’s annual income went to funding the Marxes’ housing and education in London, family holidays, and Marx’s journalistic exploits. Marx’s wife Jenny gratefully looked forward to the letters and cheques from “Mr. Chitty”. Beyond money, Engels provided Marx with empirical facts for his treatises, as well as theoretical input and much-needed editing for the gargantuan Das Kapital. From 1870 onwards, Engels, the “General” and “Grand Llama of Regent’s Park”, pulled the strings behind the advancement of world socialism.

For a modern-day audience drilled to believe that the age of grand narratives is dead and that everything is but a Grand Failure, Hunt’s biography is refreshing. It toes the line between grounding the political ideas of socialism in their historical context on the one hand and declaring them timeless on the other. As an added bonus, the biography’s details feed the voyeuristic mind: see Marx’s 1866 letter to Engels, in which the principal architect of global communism laments the “the itching and scratching between [his] testis and posterior”. Hunt highlights Engels’s Jekyll-and-Hyde character: he was both a proto-feminist and a lover of prostitutes, both a merchant fox hunter and a loving socialist revolutionary. Yet The Frock-Coated Communist hardly forsakes political and theoretical realms in pursuit of such personal details. Hunt’s primary interest rests in recovering the left-wing criticism from Engels’s pages that remains relevant in a contemporary context: we need not re-invent the wheel to see much of what is going wrong today.

This includes engaging the fatal argument against Marxism—and, by extension, against Engels—which is that Marxism’s ideas led to Josef Stalin’s brutal dictatorship. Hunt rightly points out the flaw of such argumentation. Despite their interest in the parousia of revolution, Marx and Engels were too pragmatic to believe in the quick possibility of a workers’ paradise hic et nunc. Throughout their lives, both Marx and Engels argued against enthusiasts of all stripes. In the 1840s it was the Owenites, Charles Fourier, and followers of Saint-Simon’s utopian socialism, whom Marx and Engels deemed too reminiscent of the Radical Reformation. Their demands for equality through violence were at odds with Engels’s insistence on the necessity of authority and order. Marx and Engels were equally suspicious of Mikhail Bakunin, the globetrotting Russian anarchist, whom the early Berlin intellectuals spurned as a hot-headed grump.

Hunt notes that Engels is falsely regarded as “a pioneer theorist of guerrilla warfare”, noting that the thinker remained deeply sceptical of any sort of insurgency. In 1886, a pragmatist Engels chided Henry Mayers Hyndman, who had gathered 8,ooo unemployed East Enders for riots in the West End: “What has been achieved is to equate socialism with looting in the minds of the bourgeois public and, while this may not have made matters much worse, it has certainly got us no further”, Engels wrote. Stalin’s socialism, an all-encompassing philosophical system that cemented and centralised the tovarishch’s absolute power, would have been anathema to Engels’s ever-critical mind.

The thinking of Marx and Engels is as far from dogmatism as it is from an inevitable precursor of dictatorship. More than an ideology, it is a critical method, one that Hunt acutely applies to contemporary sweatshops in his epilogue. Occasional dictatorship and terrorism terminology fortunately turns out to be more redressing than j’accuse. Having read this book, even the last dreamy post-materialist will realise that Engels’s critique has not ceased to be explosive.

Therese Feiler is reading for a DPhil in Theology at Exeter College, Oxford.

Pia Riggirozzi
Advancing Governance in the South: What are the Roles for
International Financial Institutions in Developing States?
Palgrave MacMillan, December 2008
213 pages
£50.00
ISBN 978-0230220119

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Two years ago, the International Monetary Fund’s loan portfolio was a mere $13 billion—down 87% from 2003. In the spring of 2007, a Washington think tank hosted a debate entitled, “Is the IMF Obsolete?” In September of that year, the new managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said that the “very existence” of the IMF was in question. The “two main issues” facing the fund, according to Strauss-Kahn, were “relevance and legitimacy”.

The IMF’s relevance is no longer in question. Since the start of the global financial crisis this past fall, the IMF has lent $50 billion to Eastern European countries, Iceland, Pakistan and El Salvador—and it received a $500 billion boost at the G-20 summit in London this month. Its sibling organization, the World Bank, is on a lending spree as well. However, the legitimacy of these Bretton Woods brethren remains hotly contested, as the enormous protests taking place today in Washington demonstrates. In the post-crisis world, the crucial question is not if the international financial institutions (IFIs) have a role to play, but how the IFIs should approach their roles.

The title of Maria Pia Riggirozzi’s new book promises to answer that question from a global perspective. In its catalogue, publisher Palgrave Macmillan promises to answer the question on a “regional scale”. But the book actually asks the question from a national perspective—specifically, an Argentine one. The mismatch between the country-specific contents and the global aspirations of the title actually provides an ironic (and unintentional) commentary on the state of scholarship on IFIs. Scholars berate the IMF and World Bank for applying one-size-fits-all solutions to development challenges. Yet most scholarship on the IFIs is marketed under the same assumption: that the conclusions from one country are applicable to all others.

Amid the current global economic drama, Riggirozzi’s careful study of the power relations between IFIs and a single country is more important than ever. The core of IFI action lies in the individual relationships between IFI staff and national policymakers, and those dynamics determine if an IFI has the legitimacy it needs to be effective. Riggirozzi argues that in the case of Argentina, the IMF’s top-down model of power imposition led “not only to a loss of legitimacy, but in turn to the disempowerment of the institution”. In her analysis, the success or failure of IFI intervention is determined by how policy is made: is it a top-down imposition and conveyance of money and ideas, or is a consultation with local experts to broker policies? Riggirozzi identifies IFI staff doing both in her case study of Argentina in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis. She differentiates between divisions of the World Bank and shows the most successful IFI teams acted as sensitive, nimble “brokers” of policy ideas, not as “conveyors” or “imposers” of global best practice. Although sharply critical, Riggirozzi does not see IFI action in Argentina as an unmitigated disaster: she is more interested in understanding policy-making mechanisms than placing blame.

Riggirozzi’s analysis shows the enormous insights gained from approaching IFI interactions as specific encounters embedded in a local context. However, the generalisation in the title of the book assumes that one country’s relationship to a single IFI can serve as a description of all countries in the ‘South’ and their relationships to all IFIs. This “global” approach to IFIs encourages imprecise terminology, trivializes local political-economic dynamics and discourages inquiry into specific local grievances. It lumps all anti-IFI discourses into a single globalised bundle of discontent. But globalisation has many discontents, and each one is worth exploring individually.

Generalisations seem endemic to international political economy as a discipline, but imprecise terms are particularly prevalent in less academic discussions of international finance. The terms “international financial institution” and “global South” are commonly used (as in Riggirozzi’s title), but rarely are their exact meanings explored or questioned. This is unfortunate for many reasons, not least because this casual use helps perpetuate stylised critiques of the IFIs, which discredit them simply by referring to a pervasive stereotype that they are all part of some monolithic neo-liberal monster.

Certainly the IFIs themselves deserve some of the blame. Their geographic concentration in Washington does nothing to dispel the notion that they are agents of American hegemony. The persistent mission creep of the IMF and World Bank onto the turfs of one another makes it difficult for anyone to tell them apart. Worse yet, instances of “cross-conditionality” in which the World Bank and IMF demand the same concessions from borrowers reinforce perceptions of a singular IFI agenda.

But that agenda appears to be changing or, at the very least, evolving in the current financial crisis. In March, the IMF approved a new Flexible Credit Line framework that guarantees emergency funding—without preconditions—for emerging-market economies with “very strong track records”. The program has provided a $47 billion line of credit to Mexico. IMF officials have indicated that Poland and Colombia will receive “no-strings-attached” guarantees in the near future as well. As the IMF shows signs of greater flexibility, the question remains: will academics and activists cling to their rigid stereotyping of international financial institutions?

The idea of a unitary “global South” is even more of a leap from reality than the idea of a unitary international financial institution. To begin with, it is factually incorrect to split the world into a “rich North” and “poor South” (Moldova, meet New Zealand). Not only does the term “global south” implicitly equate poverty with geography, it assumes similarities and solidarities between nations that do not exist. For example, Riggirozzi argues that the IFIs need to empower local experts. Her choice of Argentina, with its sophisticated domestic think tanks, helps her make this case. If she had chosen Guinea-Bissau, by contrast, she might be less convincing.

If the title was her choice and a global perspective really her goal, Riggirozzi could have chosen from a variety of similar middle-income countries to underscore her conclusions beyond Argentina. Not only would a comparison of countries highlight how context-specific politics and personalities can drive international financial policy-making, it would also raise interesting questions about the degree to which IFIs are seen as “patrons” or as “partners” in different regions. Why, precisely, is it that Poland and other Eastern European countries still broadly trust and rely on the IMF? And why, as Argentina’s Economy Ministry questions the competence of IMF officials, does the leader of neighbouring Brazil say that he is “proud” to lend to the fund?

Understanding that each country’s relationship with the Bretton Woods institutions has its own distinctive flavour is critical for national and international policy responses to the financial crisis. The success of potential policies depends on their domestic palatability, which varies according to country-specific historical and political legacies. In Peru, the IMF may forever be associated with the repressive regime of Alberto Fujimori. In the Czech Republic, the IMF may eternally be intertwined with the image of Vaclav Havel, who left behind a happier, but still complicated legacy. In Argentina, as Riggirozzi’s work illustrates, what the IMF approached as “technocratic reforms” were implemented alongside ugly and unethical local political actions—such as President Carlos Menem packing the Supreme Court—and it may take many decades for the fund can live this down. In that respect, Riggirozzi delivers an important message, even if her title obscures it: whatever the role of IFIs, success depends on sensitivity to local politics—from academics, activists and the institutions themselves.

Taylor St. John is a DPhil student in Development Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Her research deals with World Bank-sponsored arbitration of water disputes in Latin America.

Peter Singer
The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
Picador, 2009
214 pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-0330454582

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Peter Singer and Jimmy Cayne are not natural allies. Singer is an Oxford-educated philosopher, a vocal vegetarian and an anti-poverty crusader. Cayne is a high school dropout who, until recently, feasted on bacon, salmon and red wine before beginning his workday as CEO of Bear Stearns. Yet in Singer’s new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, Cayne makes a cameo appearance—not as a villain, but as a good corporate citizen.

Singer heaps praise upon Cayne’s company: “Bear Stearns—before its sale to JPMorgan Chase during the 2008 crisis—made sure that neither apathy nor selfishness prevented its leaders from doing the right thing.” Such a pronouncement would be considered lavish praise for any corporation—but especially for Bear Stearns. When the investment bank collapsed in March 2008, one industry insider called it “payback” for a “firm that seemed to be overly selfish and overly interested in their own gains”. But for Singer, Bear is a beau ideal of benevolence. The firm required all of its senior managing directors to donate 4 percent of their salaries and bonuses to charity, and it checked their tax returns to make sure they complied. In 2006, according to Cayne, the firm’s senior managing directors donated more than $45 million (£32 million) combined. “As far as I know, we are the only company that has this type of policy,” Cayne said.

To be sure, Singer and Cayne do not entirely see eye-to-eye on all matters of philanthropy. Cayne’s charitable giving goes to museums and private prep schools, among other causes. By contrast, Singer believes that “philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious”. He chastises the Metropolitan Museum of Art for paying $45 million for a single Duccio panel painting when the same amount of money could have funded 900,000 cataract operations for people in developing countries “who can’t see anything at all, let alone a painting”. Singer donates 25% of his income to anti-poverty groups each year. (All royalties from The Life You Can Save will go to Oxfam.) Comparatively, Cayne is much less generous: in 2006, his charitable trust gave gifts amounting to 7 percent of his CEO compensation. By Singer’s personal standards, Cayne is still a scrooge.

Nevertheless, Singer sees enormous potential in the Bear Stearns model of employee giving—albeit, with important modifications. Singer suggests that employers withhold 1 percent of every employee’s paycheck, which would then go to an anti-poverty organisation of the employee’s choice. Workers could opt out of the program, but the default would be to donate (and, specifically, to donate to an organisation that fights global poverty rather than a posh prep school, ornate opera house or other “dubious” cause). If major corporations, universities, and other employers adopted Singer’s suggestions, it “would yield billions more for combating poverty”.

For those who are familiar with Singer’s philosophy, the employee giving proposal will stand out as one of the more innovative elements of The Life You Can Save. To a large extent, the book rehashes arguments that Singer has already made elsewhere—starting with his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Singer argued then—as he does now—that from a financial perspective, it is relatively easy to save a life in the developing world. He cites a statistic from William Easterly—a New York University economist who is famously skeptical about the effectiveness of third-world aid. Easterly acknowledges that the World Health Organization’s efforts against malaria, diarrhea, respiratory infections and measles save approximately one child’s life for every $300 (£210) spent. That is roughly the price of a new wool single-breasted suit from Marks and Spencer, or dinner for two with a fine champagne at Brasserie Blanc. When we spend our money on fine clothes or fine food, Singer says, we are valuing frivolous fun above the lives of real human beings.

Yet if every £210 suit is another child’s life, then every £21 hardcover book is a tenth of a child’s life and every £2.10 latte is one-hundredth. Does Singer’s argument imply that all luxury spending is problematic? Yes, but he does not ask us to become bare-bones ascetics. Rather, he sets out specific standards for charitable giving based on income level, and he asks his readers to abide by them. Everyone should strive to donate at least 1 percent of their income to anti-poverty efforts, he says, but someone like Jimmy Cayne should be giving close to 30 percent. (The full set of standards is posted online here.)

More than one thousand people, from China to Chile, have logged onto Singer’s website and pledged to abide by his percentage-of-income standards. Tim Harford—the Financial Times columnist who once penned an “economic case against philanthropy”—now says that Singer’s book has motivated him to donate to Oxfam. William Easterly, writing in the Wall Street Journal, is less persuaded. According to Easterly, “Mr. Singer argues from a small number of… examples that it is relatively easy to do good things for the poor,” even though much aid is wasted due to corruption and incompetence.

But Singer only needs “a small number of examples” to prove his point. Even Easterly would have to acknowledge that some aid organisations are effective. For example, the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital treats women who suffered debilitating injuries in childbirth that cause them to leak urine and feces continuously; for as little as £100 per surgery, the hospital can cure the condition with a 93 percent success rate. (Singer’s Australian publisher is giving 5 percent of its proceeds to the hospital.) As long as well-run organisations like this exist, and until they are fully funded, donors can be reasonably confident that their charitable donations are going to good use.

Granted, this is not a message that many will want to hear during a deep economic recession. As reviewer Katha Pollitt wrote in the Nation, “the gods of publishing must have had a good laugh” when they arranged for Singer’s book to come out when “so many are broke”. Yet in some sense, The Life You Can Save has appeared at the perfect moment. As a result of the financial crisis, the world has a rare opportunity to put Singer’s ideas into action.

Barack Obama has already imposed a $500,000 (£360,000) compensation cap on bank executives who receive bailout money. Gordon Brown is calling for a global code on bankers’ pay. The public is demanding some sort of change in the way that top executives are remunerated. But as one executive compensation consultant told the Los Angeles Times recently, people in his industry are “pretty damn smart” and will come up with ways to skirt the caps. Companies will compensate their CEOs with restricted shares instead of providing stock options or cash bonuses. They will offer their CEOs new perquisites that do not count toward the $500,000 cap. CEOs might be breakfasting on red wine, bacon, and salmon once again—this time, on their companies’ tabs.

Imagine, however, if Obama and Brown—instead of imposing quixotic compensation caps—forced banks to adopt Bear Stearns-style policies for top executives. Banks might implement an “opt-out” 1 percent plan for the rest of their employees. Unlike compensation caps, bankers might actually embrace such an approach. (Cayne says that most executives found that charitable giving was “incredibly gratifying”.) And unlike compensation caps, society might actually benefit as a result.

Inevitably, some senior executives will object to Singer’s stipulation that their donations go to anti-poverty efforts. They will fight for the right to donate to museums, musical groups and other organisations that Singer deems “dubious”. And whereas Singer believes that developing-world aid is almost always more cost-effective (from a life-saving perspective) than domestic aid, an argument he makes forcefully in One World (2002), it seems unlikely that Singer’s suggestion will garner support unless it allows for gifts to local causes. Even so, a plan that raises the quantity of charitable giving—regardless of which charity—is preferable to a plan that raises the quality of the executive dining room menu, and Singer’s proposal would do more than that. The £32 million from Bear executives alone in 2006 could have funded, by one estimate, 45 million meningitis or measles vaccinations in the world’s poorest places.

Of course, there still is one problem with the “Bear Stearns Plan”: there are few brands that are as associated with ignominy (though “Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC “and “Stanford Financial Group” give “Bear Stearns” a run for its money). We might call it the “one percent doctrine ”, except that Dick Cheney has already dragged that moniker through the mud. The Bear Stearns Plan is an idea whose time has come—but whose name has yet to arrive.

Daniel Hemel, an MPhil candidate in International Relations at New College, Oxford, is writing a thesis on global financial regulation. He is a Senior Editor of the Oxonian Review.