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Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism,

Multiculturalism, and Citizenship by Will Kymlicka

Article  in  Theoria · January 2004

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Reviews

Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical

Possibilities, by Alexander J. Motyl. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999. ISBN: 0231114311.
Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires, by
Alexander J. Motyl. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0231121105.
Reviewed by Roger Deacon

In two slim volumes averaging at 150 pages each Alexander J. Motyl

examines three concepts dear to political scientists, historians, anthro-
pologists, comparativists and philosophers alike: revolution, nation
and empire. The first volume, published in 1999, examines all three
concepts; the second, published two years later, examines only
empire. While the second volume, much more than the first, contains
a wealth of diverse examples from Assyria and Han China through
Rome, the Ottoman Empire and Britain to Romanov, Soviet and post-
Soviet Russia, readers interested in the history or politics of empires
should carry on looking: concepts, theories and even an occasional
scientific covering law are Motyl’s chief stock-in-trade.
He devotes his Preface and Introduction to Revolutions, Nations,
Empires to defining neither revolutions, nations nor empires but,
rather, concepts and theories. ‘Without concepts’, he argues, ‘empir-
ical data do not exist in any meaningful sense’ (1999: xii). Concepts
delimit the range of claims that a theory can make, and hence a the-
ory’s limits and possibilities, and coherent and robust theories depend
on coherent and robust concepts. Accordingly, he hopes to stake out
‘a coherent theoretical space’ between the unrealistic aspirations of
positivist social science and the anarchic implications of postmod-
ernism (1999: xii). Perfect conceptual clarity and consistency may be
unattainable, but degrees of clarity and consistency are both possible
and useful. Motyl’s precision and rigour is refreshing, but also just a
little disappointing: the former because his approach permits the
reader to clearly identify, and distinguish between, different concepts
and also locate his or her own received understandings of revolution
or nation or empire within a broader context, and the latter because it
Theoria, August 2004
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is confined largely to abstractions which not even the many examples

can sufficiently flesh out.
Arguing persuasively that neither eyewitnesses to revolutions nor
revolutionaries themselves can be assumed to know what a revolution
is, Motyl suggests that this does not mean that their experiences or
impressions cannot be treated as ‘metaphors, similes and analogies
masquerading as protodefinitions’ (1999: 24). Seemingly out of
nowhere he then produces such metaphors from Mao, Marx, Crane
Brinton and Charles Tilly—though why (only) them is not clear—
which together locate revolution in the semantic fields of (sudden,
mass) upheaval, (rapid, fundamental, comprehensive) change and
(sustained, all-encompassing) turmoil. After several appeals to ‘com-
mon sense’ and one thought experiment, Motyl then opts for the field
of change, partly because he finds it ‘more interesting’ and partly
because revolution as change, he feels, unlike revolution as upheaval
or turmoil, does not appear to exclude the possibility of revolution
from above.
Motyl’s avowedly anti-essentialist, if not quite postmodern,
approach notwithstanding, Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revo-
lutions is subjected to close scrutiny because ‘it will permit us to get
at the very essence of, and thereby evaluate, the revolutionary project
itself’ (1999: 37-38). Having disposed of Skocpol’s ambiguities and
‘muddled thinking’, as well as historicist and deductive-nomological
approaches to revolutionary theory, he concludes that revolutionary
theory simply cannot predict revolution and that ‘reformers, no mat-
ter how unimaginative and unspectacular, may always be preferable to
revolutionaries—not because they are reformers and thus likely to be
right but because they are not utopians and thus doomed to be wrong’
(1999: 50, emphasis in the original). At the very least, Motyl person-
ally prefers reform associated with Popper’s ‘piecemeal social engi-
neering’ because it avoids the severe shocks of the kind brought about
either by the Bolsheviks in 1917 or the sudden marketization in the
1990s. No doubt, in flagrant disregard of Motyl’s personal prefer-
ences and less-than-convincing arguments, revolution—in the sense
of rapid, fundamental and comprehensive systemic change—will con-
tinue to occur.
The second third of Revolutions, Nations, Empires, devoted to
examining the concept of nation, similarly begins rather arbitrarily by
submitting Eric Hobsbawm’s and Benedict Anderson’s constructivist
definitions of national identity, as ‘invented’ or ‘imagined’, to trial by
dictionary (Merriam Webster’s 1963 edition, to be exact). Motyl
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228 Reviews

rejects these definitions in favour of one which links nations to his-

toricity—a sense of historical location—and to boundaries—a sense
of otherness—and which, moreover, falls into the semantic field of
ideology or belief systems. He proceeds to divide approaches to
understanding the nation into primordialist and constructivist, with
each containing extreme, strong and weak versions, and opts for a
version of weak primordialism such that ‘nations are human collec-
tivities that, as collections of conceptually delineated and thus stable
properties, emerge whenever those defining characteristics come
together’ (1999: 94). Many readers would object that this definition
tells us nothing new (and they would probably be right); on the other
hand, Motyl at least remains true to his project of avoiding those
forms of grand theorizing which restrict what nations are or could be,
or in what historical period they might emerge.
In terms of this definition of a nation, not only modern Britain or
France but also ancient Israel, Republican Rome and Byzantium qual-
ify as nations, notwithstanding their imperial or colonial pretensions.
However, Motyl goes further to suggest that nations are more com-
mon in recent centuries, thanks to the modern facilitating conditions
of secularism, modernization, the market, the state, democracy, and
nationalism (1999: 100). Against claims that the state is in decline,
Motyl points out that the state and its bureaucracies are thriving and
expanding throughout the developed world, and that global markets in
fact depend on nation-states to enforce the rule of law. Even the Euro-
pean Union will depend on—and will probably strengthen—its com-
ponent national states, though especially France and Germany.
Prospects for nationalism thus remain quite good: ‘the continual striv-
ing of national elites for their own states is all but inevitable in an
international system that pays homage to nation-states, human rights
and democracy’ (1999: 111). Even if one accepts this, however, it
would have been useful if Motyl had also reflected on the role and
effects of a growing stratum of cosmopolitan individuals and
groups—from professionals to international bureaucrats—who no
longer appear to look to nations or states for their own identities.
The concept of empire is the focus of the last third of Revolutions,
Nations, Empires and the whole of Imperial Ends. Candidly, Motyl
points out that, regardless of whether current or historical empires and
emperors conceived of themselves as such, ‘our preferences must take
priority over theirs, not so much because we know better or are wiser
but because we are the ones doing the writing and, for better or for
worse, the theorizing. Conceptual imperialism creates empire’ (1999:
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Reviews 229

118). Minimally, empire ‘involves a sovereign state’s domination of a

native society and its non-sovereign elite’ (1999: 119). After assessing
half a dozen definitions of the concept (many of which relate primar-
ily to Russia or the ex-Soviet Union, and all of which—excepting
Lichtheim’s Imperialism—were written in the last 20 years), he
favours Johan Galtung’s approach which emphasizes a vertical rela-
tionship between the centre of an empire and its periphery and the
lack of significant interaction between peripheral regions or between
them and other countries. It is this structure which distinguishes
empires from centralized multinational political systems. In the 20th
century, the relationships between the United States and most of Cen-
tral America, and between Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, fit this
description. Motyl not only usefully debunks claims that democracies
are seldom empires (Britain, France and America being obvious cases
in point) but devotes a whole chapter to examining how the United
States and Russia, despite the former’s apparently benign power and
the latter’s apparent decrepitude, could, even unintentionally, (again)
acquire the status of imperial cores.
While two closely related recent world events (the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the unilateral projection of American power) have
brought empire back into academic fashion, Motyl sees globalization
as presently the most powerful force facilitating real-world empires.
In Imperial Ends he defines empire much as he does in Revolutions,
Nations, Empires, using the structural metaphor of a hub (the core)
with spokes (vertical interactions with peripheries) but without a rim
(lack of interaction between peripheries). He adopts a structural
approach mainly because he is not persuaded by alternative agency-
oriented theories, but also seeks to push his approach far enough to
expose its own limits and limitations. Hence, he argues that while the
very structure of empires promotes decay, their collapse is more usu-
ally the result of some often exogenous and non-structural shock to
the system. Evolutionary accidents, market crashes, wars, plagues,
heroes and plain old Machiavellian fortuna are among the extraordi-
nary circumstances invoked to demonstrate some of the limitations of
his structural theory of imperial decline, flaws which he feels, never-
theless, are ‘far less egregious’ than agency-oriented theories, espe-
cially rational choice theory (2001: 32). Drawing on Galtung as well
as on Karl Deutsch’s theory of how totalitarian systems disintegrate
and Rein Taagepera’s calculations of the variations between the terri-
torial expanse and temporal existence of empires, he claims to have
produced a (social) scientific theory of imperial decay. Unusual for
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230 Reviews

someone writing in a theoretical climate still shaped, for good or ill,

by postmodernism, he uses Taagepera’s parabolic imperial trajecto-
ries as ‘the geometric equivalent of algorithmically compressible data
and thus as close to “lawlike” as is possible in the social sciences’
(2001: 7).
Significantly, Motyl does not attempt to explain how empires rise
or come into existence (though in Revolutions, Nations, Empires he
speculates briefly on causes ranging from military conquest and
changing economic relationships to marriage and guile); his focus is
on the necessary conditions for their decline, collapse and possible
revival. Empires ‘work’, he suggests, and resources flow efficiently,
when imperial elites are adequately informed about the conditions of
their territories, including both the core and its peripheries. In turn,
sufficient and useful knowledge requires effective administrative
apparatuses. However, it is precisely this structure which also pro-
motes decay, since—as in isomorphic totalitarian systems—usually
centralized decision-making apparatuses eventually become over-
loaded by and unable to cope with the increasing complexity of the
system, corrode, introduce delays and inefficiencies and thus pro-
mote disintegration or ‘imperial attrition’. What remains to be
explained, however, is why some empires, though decaying, suffer lit-
tle if any attrition before collapsing, as was the case with the USSR,
Austria-Hungary and Romanov Russia. Here, Motyl is forced to
resort to specific historical explanations, and to what he calls ‘impe-
rial props’, variables such as hypercentralization, geographical loca-
tion, or easy money which may both arrest decline and ‘make
buttressed empires even more prone to shocks and thus to collapse’
(2001: 73). Imperial revival, finally, depends on a relatively strong
core state, territorial continuity and contiguity, and the relative degree
and evenness of decay in different parts of the former empire.
Motyl is most well informed when discussing the ex-Soviet
Union and nationalism; he is least convincing when analyzing revo-
lution. His examination of empire is perhaps the most trenchant,
partly due to his comparatively greater use of historical evidence
(but no doubt this also has something to do with his devoting an
entire book and part of another to the concept). Despite his discon-
certing but also disarming predilection for beginning his definitional
searches from rather random, apparently arbitrary starting-points,
his subsequent reasoning is sound, his arguments clear and many of
his conclusions persuasive.
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Roger Deacon is Honorary Research Fellow in Human and Social

Studies and Honorary Lecturer in Education at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal, and Managing Editor of Theoria. His most recent
publication is Fabricating Foucault (Marquette University Press,
2003), and he is currently researching the origins of early modern
education, and the art and politics of war.
Email: deacon@ukzn.ac.za

Conversations with Žižek, by Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly. Polity:

Cambridge, 2004. ISBN: 0745628974
Reviewed by Richard Pithouse

The astonishing exuberance of Slavoj Žižek’s theoretical promiscuity

hasn’t always made his work easy. On the contrary a productive
engagement with his work has required a solid grounding in Lacanian
theory and its occasionally obtuse terminology (not to mention a lit-
tle Kant, Hitchcock, Hegel, M*A*S*H* and so on). But getting into
Žižek has been getting easier for two reasons.
The first is Žižek’s anti-capitalist shift. The central political thrust
of his early work is an attack on the totalitarianism of the authoritar-
ian state but his more recent work, beginning with the last chapter of
The Ticklish Subject (Verso 1999), moving through On Belief (Rout-
ledge 2001) and culminating in his superb afterword to his edited col-
lection of Lenin’s 1917 writings, Revolution at the Gates (Verso
2002), develops a sustained attack on the tyranny of the market. He
still uses Lacanian ideas to illuminate the processes of domination
and to defend the possibilities of revolutionary intervention in the
form of the act chosen without recourse to the legitimation of a ‘big
Other’ but the Lacanian jargon has slipped away. One doesn’t need to
be initiated into Lacan’s technical vocabulary to understand Žižek’s
newer anti-capitalist work.
The second reason why it’s getting easier to get into Žižek is that
there are now some very good books designed for this purpose.
Blackwell’s The Žižek Reader gives a good overview of his work
before the anti-capitalist turn and Sarah Kay has written an absolutely
superb critical introduction, Žižek (2003), in Polity’s Key Contempo-
rary Thinkers series. Kay’s book surveys the full range of Žižek’s work
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232 Reviews

and is able to offer a clear view into its basic structure without sacri-
ficing the complexity and subtlety of his thought. It also comes with
a very useful glossary of Žižekian terms that is quite extensive and
which includes explanations of how his use of these terms has
changed as his thinking has developed.
But Conversations with Žižek is the best route into Žižek. More and
more interview books are being published. Some, like Negri on Negri
(Routledge 2004), provide new illumination but many don’t always
work well for the simple reason that people who write well don’t
always interview well. The book on Castells in the same series as
Conversations with Žižek never seems to get around Castells’s large
and unlovely narcissism. But Žižek is clearly a man who can speak as
he writes insofar as his humour, vast erudition and refusal to separate
theory from lived experience come through magnificently. Conversa-
tions is also blessed with the same absence of Lacanian jargon that
characterizes his more recent work. It doesn’t provide much that is
new but it does provide an excellent entry into Žižek’s thought.
There are five conversations in this book. The first is an often fas-
cinating intellectual biography which includes the startling observa-
tion: ‘I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing.’This is later qualified
by an explanation that the books come at such a rate because he just
writes some things down in order to delay the actual act of writing. No
doubt this explains his errors and tendency to repetition but it may
also explain his willingness to take such productive risks. The second
conversation is an equally stimulating exploration of the state and
importance of contemporary philosophy. Unsurprisingly Žižek seeks
a radical empiricism that can transcend the sterilities of cognitivism
via an appreciation of Hegel’s insight that the transcendent is immi-
nent or, in Žižek’s favourite Hegelian phrase, that the spirit is a bone.
The third conversation explores Žižek’s widely appreciated defence of
the subject. He argues, in a surprisingly productive discussion of the
Kinder children’s eggs that contain a plastic toy in the centre of a
chocolate egg, that liberal capitalism and organicist totalitarianisms
share the same belief in factor X—the toy inside the egg. In response
he prescribes the introduction of historicity into the absolute via the
historicizing of the eternal questions.
The fourth conversation centres around Žižek’s thinking of the
event—the act freely chosen in the existential void. This is at the core
of his recent work and while it does, in many senses, constitute an
unacknowledged return to Sartrean thinking, Žižek does reconstitute
this idea in the contemporary material and theoretical world. He
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makes up for his unfortunate omission of Fanon in the afterword to

the Lenin book with an argument that claims that the eruption of the
real into the symbolic must be violent. But Fanon is merely referenced
in a rather caricatured way rather than engaged with as a complex
thinker. Because Žižek misspells his first name in the same way that
Hardt and Negri do, one wonders if he has read Fanon through their
caricature. While Žižek’s attacks on multiculturalism as a racializing
and patronizing discourse are well made and hugely welcome, it does
seem that while his experiential base is universal his theoretical base
remains disablingly circumscribed by the borders of whiteness.
Amongst other unfortunate consequences this crippling limitation
dramatically weakens his articulation of the left assault on multicul-
turalism’s Kinder-egg-style pieties.
The final conversation takes up Žižek’s new anti-capitalism. It’s a
very rich discussion that centres around his insistence that ethics must
be subordinated to politics. This leads him to an attack on the pseudo-
politics of the cult of the victim in favour of the politics of the act that
can’t be accommodated by the symbolic legitimation of domination.
He argues that, since Kant, there has been an entrenched philosophi-
cal suspicion that such acts are really driven by some unconscious
pathology but that in reality it is the act in-itself and for-itself that cre-
ates so much trauma that its visceral power must immediately be con-
tained by some form of symbolic delegitimation.
Neither the blurb writers who present Žižek as the court jester able
to provide ‘the best high since Anti-Oedipus’ with a barrage of jokes
that move ‘from Kant to cunnilingus’, nor the pedants who seize on
his ultimately minor errors are able to successfully contain his hard
and supple radical energies. His blasphemy stands firm on its com-
mitment. The South African academy is urgently in need of more
blasphemers to stand with Ashwin Desai. Žižek’s inspiration might
encourage new rebels. If not it is, at least, and unlike the World Bank
and the African Renaissance, a toy without an egg. It stands as what
it is to be liked, left or opposed as what it is.

Richard Pithouse is a research fellow at the Centre for Civil Society

at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His current research interests
are in the broad areas of political philosophy and political economy
and in both instances he is particularly interested in resistance and the
constitution of counter power.
Email: Pithouser@ukzn.ac.za
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234 Reviews

Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and

Citizenship, by Will Kymlicka. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0199240981.
Reviewed by Laurence Piper

With this collection of 18 essays Will Kymlicka confirms his status as

the leading proponent of national and ethnic rights in liberal political
thought. Over the last 15 years Kymlicka has almost single-handedly
defined the liberal approach to the philosophy and theory of group
rights in Liberalism, Community and Culture (1989) and Multicul-
tural Citizenship (1995). In Politics in the Vernacular Kymlicka
applies his theoretical views to various real-world political problems
in the spirit of the superbly accessible Finding Our Way (1998)—his
account of Canadian citizenship and group rights.
For readers new to Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular is an entic-
ing introduction to his work. It covers all his major themes. Thus, Part
One examines the evolution of the debate on minority rights; Part
Two looks at the question of ethnocultural justice; Part Three exam-
ines nationalism, and the final section explores citizenship in multi-
ethnic states. In addition, while not a full-going account of his
philosophy and theory, readers are introduced via quick sketches
where relevant to the issue at hand.
In my view there are two main arguments which set Kymlicka
apart. The first and most well known are the arguments that reconcile
group rights with liberalism. Echoing Ernest Gellner, Kymlicka
argues that developed liberal democratic states require a societal cul-
ture to function effectively. A societal culture consists of the cultural
attributes (such as a common language) integral to both public life
and the market, and all states must cultivate these to prosper. In a
manner reminiscent of Michel Billig, Kymlicka terms the process of
building a societal culture as ‘nation-building’.
The problem in the contemporary world is that most states are mul-
ticultural entities with minority cultural groups who are disadvan-
taged in respect of the dominant societal culture. In this context
difference-sensitive rules might be needed to enhance liberal ends, in
particular individual autonomy, depending on whether the minority
group is an immigrant group or a pre-existing national group with its
own societal culture. In the case of the former some rights may be
required to facilitate integration into the state societal culture on
terms that are fair. In the case of the latter, nations retain the norma-
tive right to maintain their own societal culture.
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This core argument has gained much currency in the theory, but
also the practice, of immigration, education, citizenship and the like.
In my view the weak point in Kymlicka’s argument is the link between
societal culture and national identity. Is it really the case that the func-
tional cultural requirements of the state and market bind the state to a
particular nation or ethnic group as tightly as Kymlicka imagines? For
one thing, the differentiating cultural requirements of modernity seem
fairly minimal, indeed are we talking about anything other than lan-
guage? If so perhaps all we need for individual autonomy in multi-
cultural liberal states is to ensure bilingualism or multilingualism.
For another, must societal cultures coincide exclusively with the
dominant cultural content of a particular ethnic or national identity?
There seems little difference between the mainstream Anglophone
societal culture of Canada and America for example—does this make
them no longer different nations? At best the relationship between
identity and societal culture is contingent. On both scores then, the
link between culture and group, and thus group rights and the auton-
omy of their individual members, is weakened.
Indeed, the ambiguous significance of culture for identity politics
is confirmed by Kymlicka himself in his discussion of race relations
in the U.S. (see Chapter 9). Here he characterises African-Americans
as having a notable degree of institutional separateness due to racist
state policies rather than due to a distinct societal culture (181-2). As
a result African-Americans do not fit Kymlicka’s immigrant/nation
model and thus ‘we have no clear theory or model for understanding
or meeting the needs of African-Americans’ (184). He proposes an
ad hoc, historically specific set of strategies to deal with the histor-
ical disadvantages. To my mind the case of African-Americans, and
I would suggest apartheid South Africa, points to the importance of
institutionalising identities rather than culture, suggesting that per-
haps identity rather than culture is what matters in multiethnic soci-
eties, and what Kymlicka and other liberal nationalists ought to
focus on.
Kymlicka’s second argument concerns the role of culture in the
contemporary state, a view which takes us some way from both the
traditional liberal view of the state as substantively neutral, and the
notion of a ‘nationalist-free’ state politics. As noted above, states are
not culturally-neutral as their business must be conducted in the soci-
etal culture of some group. Moreover, all states must engage in some
practice of ‘nation-building’ in developing and institutionalising a
societal culture, and it is this process which often provokes minority
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236 Reviews

nationalisms to defend their societal cultures. Indeed, as with Quebec

nationalism, such nationalisms are often as liberal and inclusive as
dominant societal culture. My view is that this second set of argu-
ments is as significant as the first, indeed it forms the foundation
without which the link between culture, identity and individual auton-
omy would be lost. They also have the advantage of standing inde-
pendently of any commitment to liberalism.
In addition to (1) introducing the reader to these cutting-edge and
provocative arguments, Politics in the Vernacular showcases the other
three main virtues of Kymlicka’s work. These are (2) his rare ability
to translate political philosophy into theory and apply it to real-world
problems, (3) a clarity of expression and economy of style second to
none, and (4) an unsurpassed ability to synthesize and structure the
myriad voices in an intellectual conversation into a simple and coher-
ent debate. These qualities make Kymlicka a perfect read for students
and practitioners alike.
Relatedly, for the reader more familiar with Kymlicka’s work, Pol-
itics in the Vernacular offers not so much new insights or applications
but a brilliant overview of the debates in the literature. Here the Intro-
duction, but especially Chapter 1 (The New Debate Over Minority
Rights), are required reading.
Of course the book has its faults. It is a collection of essays mostly
published elsewhere and thus does not have quite the same clean
organisation as his other works. Arguments or aspects of them are
repeated in various chapters as each must stand on its own. It is thus
not also the sustained tour de force that his three monographs are.
However, these points are but minor quibbles. Politics in the Vernac-
ular is yet another instalment in Kymlicka’s deeply impressive cor-
pus—a book designed for students or practitioners concerned with
how best to think through the practical politics of multicultural liberal
democracies.

Laurence Piper is a senior lecturer in Political Studies at the Univer-

sity of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. A graduate of Cambridge
with a PhD in Zulu nationalism, he has research interests in democ-
racy, racial desegregation and nationalism.
Email: piper@ukzn.ac.za
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Frantz Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination, by Nigel Gibson.

Cambridge: Polity, 2003. ISBN: 0745622615.
Reviewed by Richard Pithouse

Frantz Fanon’s life was as blazingly intense as it was short. He was

born in 1925 in the remote French colony of Martinique where he had
the good fortune to have the poet and prophet of Negritude Aimé
Céssaire as a high school teacher. He died in Washington DC, in the
hands of the CIA and at the heart of the new imperial power, where he
succumbed to leukaemia in 1961. In these 36 years he was a deco-
rated soldier in de Gaulle’s army, a student and writer in Lyon, the
head of a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, a fighter and writer
for the Algeria revolution and a critic of neocolonial arrangements
and authoritarian rulers in postcolonial Africa.
A generation has passed since Fanon’s death. It is a generation that
has failed. It has failed to redeem the promise of the struggles against
colonialism and, with notable and often brave exceptions, to act and
think effectively against that failure. There is work to be done.
We have a lot of good work, much of it inspired by Fanon, against
racism. There is also a growing body of empirical literature that
explains the mechanisms by which African societies are being re-
organised in the interests of foreign capital and local elites, and that
demonstrates how this is making the majority poorer and producing
all kinds of social pathologies. There is also a very much smaller but
also growing body of work that catalogues African resistance from
the IMF riots that began in the mid 1970s through to the struggles
against authoritarian regimes that reached a peak in the early 1990s
and the current struggles against commodification and the remaining
dictatorships.
But we have very few new theories of the ethics and practice of
resistance. Antonio Negri has been writing from a Roman prison
about the capacity of antagonism to constitute counter power and
drive resistances unburdened by teleological or mechanistic fantasies.
And the theorists of the Zapatista insurgency, Sub-commandante
Insurgente, Marcos and John Holloway, have been writing from Mex-
ico about the need to rigorously subordinate theory to lived experi-
ence. These are both key Fanonian ideas. But there are more rich
seams in Fanon’s work on resistance that are still to be mined.
For some time this project has been constrained by the degree to
which Fanon’s work has been misappropriated with a staggering dis-
regard for its manifest content. It has been squeezed into and thus
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238 Reviews

deformed by Marxist orthodoxy, various nationalisms and a range of

pretentious postmodern strategies for proclaiming radicalism while
refusing politics. Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire continues this
sorry tradition. They begin by misspelling Fanon’s name and go on to
repeat the standard Western caricature of Fanon as, in their terms,
‘simple violence’ but to give it a positive valorization. They reduce
Fanon’s nuanced narrative of the multiple dialectical overcomings of
colonial Manicheanism to a ‘negativity’ that is ‘merely a healthy
expression of a real antagonism’ which ‘is not a politics in-itself’.
It is only with Edward Said’s (1993) Culture and Imperialism that
we see the beginning of a movement within the academy to treat
Fanon as a philosopher, a creator of concepts, rather than a symptom.
Two very good books have come out of this. The first is Lewis Gor-
don’s (1995) Fanon and the Crisis of European Man which is a
detailed examination of the existential and phenomenological cur-
rents in Fanon’s work against racism. The second is Ato Sekyi-Otu’s
(1996) Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience which situates Fanon in the
African context from which he wrote his last three books and reads
him within the perspective of the disaster of ‘the economic, political,
and utter moral bankruptcy of postcolonial regimes’ and the project
of recreating them as ‘simulacra of democracy’ under the authority
of ‘international overlords bent on administering plans that … will
spell even more devastation for the majority of citizens’. Perhaps the
principal gift of Sekyi-Otu’s beautifully written book is his rigorous
demonstration that Fanon’s utterances are meant as part of a dra-
matic dialectical narrative, of movement and consequence, and not
as a list of declarative statements. This is an essential corrective to
the widespread tendency to take what Fanon describes as the ‘bru-
tality of thought and mistrust of subtlety’ that tends to characterise
some of the resistance to colonial brutality as a prescription rather
than a diagnosis.
With the publication of Nigel Gibson’s Fanon: The Postcolonial
Imagination we now have a third good book on Fanon. Gibson’s prose
is elegant and clear and his book is by far the best introduction to
Fanon’s life and work. But it does much more than this. If Gordon
leans a little to the black Fanon’s anti-racist point of departure in
Black Skin White Masks, and Sekyi-Otu leans a little to the radically
anti-authoritarian African Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth, Gib-
son seeks to pull it all together.
Gibson explains Fanon’s theorization of racism and anti-racism
through existential and psychoanalytic theory, his exploration of the
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promises and dangers of both Negritude and nationalist resistance to

colonialism, and his thinking about intellectuals, nationalism and
humanism. In each case Gibson is able to draw on an understated but
expert knowledge of the philosophical and historical contexts in
which Fanon wrote as well as the realities of contemporary Africa.
The key idea that runs throughout the book is that of the dialectic.
Gibson argues, persuasively, that there is an ‘unstable, critical, and
creative element’ at the heart of Fanon’s thought that seeks to move
through apparently ‘absolute, irreconcilable contradictions’ by work-
ing in a critical and actional mode for reciprocal and critical agency
within the ‘fluctuating movement’ against human objectification.
This kind of analysis is what we would expect from any responsi-
ble engagement with Fanon’s work and Gibson develops it very well.
But he goes further and makes an original and significant contribu-
tion to thinking about Fanon by showing that for Fanon this kind of
progress requires the development of a fighting culture.
Gibson works with this idea throughout his book but deals with it
most explicitly in a chapter on Fanon’s theorization of the lived expe-
rience of resistance in the Algerian revolution. Gibson shows that for
Fanon military strategies must be subordinated to the political task of
bringing into being a ‘whole universe of resistances’. In Mexico the
Zapatista army uses its guns only to create the space for politics and
in Durban the movements against disconnections and evictions use
their legal arsenal in the same way. In each case the refusal of an elite
politics is premised on the desire to develop radically democratic
alternatives that are just too large, too multiple and too immediate to
be co-opted or mediated. Gibson goes on to show that for Fanon this
process requires the constant creation and defence of the spaces and
attitudes necessary for self-creating, imaginative and critical cultural
regeneration. Gibson also explores, in illuminating depth, how Fanon
sees the openness, fluidity and instability of this kind of social move-
ment as the key to transcending the Manichean binaries of both colo-
nialism and many responses to it. So, for example, if colonialism
employs its medical technologies in its project of domination the col-
onized will often develop a deep suspicion of these technologies. But
when, in Fanon’s words, the doctor is ‘sleeping on the ground with the
men and women of the mechatas, living the drama of the people’ then,
in Gibson’s words, ‘lived experience … liberates and transgresses the
restrictive physical and mental boundaries of the colonial … order’.
Many states seek to mobilize particular nationalist discourses to
produce good citizens — citizens who only take what they can afford
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240 Reviews

and are obedient and docile in the face of the systematic and often
violent exclusion of the poor from the means to life. Citizens who, in
other words, wait patiently for things to get better while they get
worse. At the same time the World Bank, and its academics, journal-
ists and NGOs, seek to mobilize a universalizing set of discourses to
produce ‘The Poor’—a universal category of people whose material
circumstances are a consequence of the venality of other poor people,
inefficiencies on the part of the state and the delusion that they are
victims of larger structural forces. Overcoming this delusion and
developing entrepreneurship and survivalist organizations that offer
mutual support are presented as the only grounds for hope. As these
ideological pincers close more tightly the courage and imagination
recommended by Fanon and very eloquently explored by Nigel Gib-
son become ever more necessary and generative.
Nigel Gibson has made a superb and accessible contribution to the
study of Fanon. There is no better introductory text and this book is
also essential reading for the serious Fanon scholar. But don’t let Gib-
son’s achievement fool you into assuming that the rest of the titles in
Polity’s Key Contemporary Thinkers series are of equal value. Valerie
Kennedy’s book on Edward Said is miserably and irredeemably
stunted. So it goes.

Richard Pithouse is a research fellow at the Centre for Civil Society

at University of KwaZulu-Natal. His current research interests are in
the broad areas of political philosophy and political economy and in
both instances he is particularly interested in resistance and the con-
stitution of counter power.
Email: Pithouser@ukzn.ac.za

If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? by G.A. Cohen.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN:
0674006933.
Reviewed by Ben Parker

How do we explain apparent inconsistencies between a person’s

beliefs and their behaviour? G.A. Cohen takes us on an intriguing
journey combining biographical anecdotes with exegesis and argu-
ment as he grapples with this conundrum. The chapters of the book
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are based on the Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edin-

burgh in 1996 and the style of the book reflects their original oral pre-
sentation. This has positive and negative consequences: on the one
hand, the text is easy to read and has a strong narrative flow; on the
other hand, oral presentations allow for a looseness of argument and
coherence that are disconcerting in a written form.
The book begins with an account of Cohen’s childhood which he
uses to show how one’s upbringing—especially family, religion and
education—are the source and foundation of many of our most deeply
held moral beliefs and dispositions. Cohen extends the notion of
upbringing by reflecting on the character of social equality as it has
been framed within three traditions that have exerted a strong influ-
ence on the evolution of his own thinking: classical Marxism (Hegel
and Marx), egalitarian liberalism (John Rawls) and Judeo-Christian-
ity (from a perspective that draws on Hegel, Marx and Feuerbach).
Two overarching questions occupy Cohen’s attention in this book:
‘What distribution of benefits and burdens in a society is just?’ and
‘How can a rich person behave as a selfish wealth maximizing capi-
talist and claim strongly to believe in equality?’
Unsurprisingly, given his authorship of Karl Marx’s Theory of His-
tory: A Defence (Cohen 1978), the four chapters on Hegel and Marx
are the most rigorous and interesting chapters. Cohen develops what
he calls an ‘obstetric’ conception of Marxism where ‘the means of
transforming the mode of production … will be found within that
existing mode of production itself’ (56). The role of socialist politics
and vanguard intellectuals is ‘shortening and lessening the birth
pangs’ (Marx in Cohen 76). Hence Marxists are prepared to work for
reforms within capitalism as these become part of capitalism’s self-
transformation into socialism (71). Capitalism’s supposed evolution
towards socialism is grounded in two irrepressible historical trends:
the rise of an organized unified working class that constitutes an
‘immense majority’ of society; and the development of productive
forces in a world of infinite abundance. Cohen shows that both trends
are empirically unfounded and have played a destructive role in the
history of Marxism on at least two counts. Firstly, the necessity of
capitalism’s transformation into socialism evacuated Marxism of
moral discourse: Marxism was a science with no need for moral rea-
soning. Secondly, there was no need for Marxists to consider the
‘design’ of a socialist society.
In the second half of the book, Cohen begins to address these
moral questions, especially those relating to the design of a more
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242 Reviews

equal and just society. He starts by addressing religion and the famous
dictum that religion is the ‘opium of the people’ (79). He interprets
Marx to be saying that religion is ‘… the demand for, the promise of,
and the obstacle to human liberation’ (81) and that there is a strong
resonance between the role of religion and the role of philosophical
theory. Cohen believes that Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach has been
subject to considerable misinterpretation. When Marx claimed
‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is
to change it’, he was not denying the importance of philosophy.
Rather philosophy is a necessary albeit not sufficient activity to bring
about social change (95). Unfortunately, Cohen does not tie in this
discussion of religion with the discussion that follows, leaving the
reader to wonder about the import of the digression. Although not
made explicit, the implication is that changing the institutions and
rules of society, although necessary, is again insufficient; structural
changes need to be supplemented by human agents with appropriate
moral character who make personal choices within these frameworks.
The key implication is that religion may be a major source for such an
appropriate moral character.
The last four chapters provide an extended critique of Rawls’s the-
ories with passing critiques of Nozick, Dworkin and Nagel. Cohen
identifies two contradictions within Rawls’s account of the ‘difference
principle’. Firstly, in an unequal society, the talented require the moti-
vation of incentives to utilize their talents making them richer and
increasing inequality. These talented individuals at the top of the eco-
nomic ladder will either reject the difference principle (an option that
Rawls rules out), or agree with it. If they do agree, however, and apply
the principles of justice in their daily lives, they should not need
incentives to minimize inequality (127). Secondly, for Rawls, on
Cohen’s account, justice applies only to the ‘basic structure’ of soci-
ety. Although he believes Rawls fails to provide a clear and convinc-
ing account of what is meant by ‘basic structure’, Cohen believes that
it excludes from the purview of justice the moral choices of everyday
life, thereby marginalising the moral influence of major institutions
such as family, religion and education (142).
In the final section, Cohen examines the question of the title, using
a distinction between excuses for failing to live up to moral standards
and justifications for not acting in accordance with one’s beliefs
(157). He scrutinizes would-be justifications and finds none of them
entirely convincing (175-179). Here, deploying an effective technique
of oral presentation, he leaves the reader hanging. There are, however,
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strong implicit threads running through the lectures and a basic prin-
ciple. The principle is ‘… both just rules and just personal choice
within the framework set by just rules are necessary for distributive
justice’ (3). The threads lie in the importance of family, religion and
education as an influence on personal choices and the actions accom-
panying them. Part of Cohen’s personal story lies in his close encoun-
ters with Marxism and his analysis of Marx is absorbing. His
expression of his dissatisfaction with the overly structural and
restricted focus of major modern liberal thinkers is insightful. His
partial account of other more personal influences is less satisfying
and he does not explore the relations between the perspectives
although he clearly believes a structural account is necessary. In the
written text, the incompleteness of this account undermines the value
of the book, in the final instance.

REFERENCE

Cohen, G.A. 1978. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Ben Parker teaches applied ethics in the School of Human and Social
Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, and is
deputy-director of the Unilever Ethics Centre. His main research
interests are in the areas of education, policy and development.
Email: parker@ukzn.ac.za

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