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Book Reviews Political Topographies of the African State, by Catherine Boone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0521532647. Reviewed by Julia de Kadt Political Topographies of the African State is an important addition to the literature on both post-colonial African politics and the dynamics of state-building. Boone’s work builds on a meticulous review of primary and secondary sources, uniting disparate ideas and histories on a powerful theoretical framework. Through comparing different areas in Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, she brings out both subnational differences and regional similarities, and highlights previously under-examined patterns in African state-building, most notably variation within states and persistence across time. She also counters widely held beliefs that the state-building and governance strategies of African leaders have been shaped primarily by ideology, colonial history, or purely economic motives. Instead, she argues that their strategies are guided by the need for political survival, and that for this they must rely on their rural populations – even as they also rely on these same rural populations to provide economic support to development efforts and the urban sector. Ensuring ongoing rural support is therefore a challenge critical to political survival. Boone’s work details how West African governments have adopted different strategies in different parts of their territories to gain this ongoing political support. The artificiality of African borders, and the resulting absence of a single, pre-existing national community within any country, is widely understood to have important implications for state-building. These are argued to operate through the potential for ethnic tension and conflict, difficulties in creating a national identity, secessionist and irredentist pressures, or simply because national territory exceeds the reach of governmental capacity. Boone accepts the importance of the artificiality of borders in explaining patterns of state-building in Africa, but provides a new perspective on how this plays out. Within a single state, she argues, numerous regional variations in pre-colonial political structure and development are likely, Theoria, April 2006
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and both colonial and post-colonial African governments have responded to these variations by pursuing different state-building strategies in different regions. Boone’s main thesis is that the structure of traditional rural society fundamentally shapes governmental approaches to state-building. The key features are the production of cash crops, the existence of a rural social hierarchy, and elite dependence on the resources of the central state. She details four different approaches to state-building and governance, and the conditions under which each is likely to emerge. In areas which do not produce cash-crops, the central government pursues a policy of non-incorporation, essentially ignoring the region. State institutions are concentrated and suspended above localities, and rural elites wield power at the local level. Where cash crop production occurs in the absence of a rural social hierarchy, a strategy of administrative occupation is followed. Although state institutions are still concentrated and suspended, state agents wield local power – the state has economic motivations for the control of the region. When cash crop production occurs in the context of a rural social hierarchy in which elites are economically dependent on the regime, a policy of power-sharing is adopted. State institutions are deconcentrated and created at the village level, but local level power remains with the rural elite. Because the elite are economically dependent on the state, the state is ensured of their cooperation and support. Finally, when cash crop production occurs in the context of a rural social hierarchy where elites are not economically dependent on the regime, the state sees local elites as potential rivals, leading to a strategy of usurpation. State institutions are again deconcentrated, but local power is stripped from local elites, and placed in the hands of state agents. Boone does perhaps treat her central governments as overly unitary, and there is little discussion of conflict within central government, or how this might have influenced governmental strategies in the different regions. Related to this is also an underlying assumption that the strategies which are seen unfolding were selected consciously, and with a clear and complete understanding of their implications. Yet there is little reason to believe that this must be true. Particularly in states well-known for their limited capacity and poor processes of policy development and implementation, this assumption is dangerous. Indeed, the lack of primary evidence on this point, particularly given the depth and breadth of Boone’s bibliography, is somewhat disquieting, and suggests that the intentionality of outcomes may have been overstated. Nonetheless, the details of the cases fit Boone’s
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argument well, and she makes compelling use of counterfactual governmental behavior to strengthen her case. This is a compelling and well-written book, clearly designed to provoke questions and inspire new directions in research on African state-building, and Boone leaves us curious and inspired to think about many new questions, for example about how this theory travels, what its developmental implications might be, and how intentional government behavior is. Indeed, it is the depth of this curiosity and the breadth of questions inspired that provide the strongest evidence for the importance of this book. Julia de Kadt is a PhD candidate in Politics and Public Policy at Princeton University. Her areas of interest are African politics, development and state-building. Her dissertation focuses on the politics of language policies in post-colonial Africa. Email:
[email protected]
Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy, edited by Dario Castiglione and Catriona McKinnon. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. ISBN: 1-40201760-X. The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies: Reasonable Tolerance, edited by Catriona McKinnon and Dario Castiglione. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-71906232-2. Reviewed by Laurence Piper These two texts, edited by Catriona McKinnon and Dario Castiglione, both emerge from the same conference: the Annual Conference of the UK Association for Legal and Social Philosophy on ‘The Culture of Toleration’, held at the University of Exeter in April 2000. Moreover, they both deal with the same problem, toleration, and from the same general perspective of social and political theory. Why then two texts I asked myself? Is this simply a neat publishing trick, or are both books warranted? The short answer is: yes, they are. McKinnon and Castiglione have produced two texts that, between them, frame brilliantly the theoretical debates on toleration. To my mind the most valuable articles in both volumes are the introductions, precisely because they outline the theoretical debates on tol-
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eration with masterful clarity. In the introduction to Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy McKinnon and Castiglione affirm the growing significance of the problem of tolerance, holding that traditional liberal defences of toleration are unable to respond to challenges posed by the increased, and often oppositional, diversity of contemporary social and political life. For those who regard diversity as both permanent and non-regrettable, political justifications for tolerance can no longer appeal to God or indeed, any one moral theory. Rather toleration must be justified in a way that that avoids assumptions unacceptable to a more diverse range of people than ever before. This renewal of the problem of toleration, McKinnon and Castiglione continue, implies that liberal theorists must address four areas of concern. First, advocates need to develop an account in which the same principles of toleration are equally acceptable to all in multicultural, liberal-democracies. As the editors note, many liberal theorists meet this challenge through some account of the proper exercise of public reason. This is a major debate to the extent that it forms the focus of the entire of The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies. I will discuss this debate, and this book, in more detail below. The remaining three problem areas, covered in Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy, are: the problems associated with the achievement of a tolerant society; newly emerging questions regarding the compatibility of toleration with the liberal value of neutrality; and how toleration is to be realised through democratic institutions. These three questions define the three parts of Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy as follows. Part 1 explores the significance of individual’s attitudes for the emergence of a tolerant society. Here the contributors include Ingrid Creppel on Montaigne and Elisabetta Galeotti on whether toleration is a moral or political virtue. Galeotti’s article is intriguing, but to my mind the piece that speaks best to the debate on the significance of tolerance as an attitude is Barry Barnes’ ‘Tolerance as a Primary Virtue’. Barnes rallies against sceptics who hold that tolerance is all too rare in contemporary societies, arguing that tolerance inheres in our relations with all others, and not just those we deem of a different ‘tradition’. Consequently, some degree of toleration is inevitable, although it remains a virtue to be cultivated as we take seriously our equal membership alongside others in various groups. Part 2 engages debates on the relationship between the virtue of tolerance and political neutrality. Taken together with the kindred debate on public reason in The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies this
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constitutes perhaps the most important set of issues in this volume. On the one side of the debate are scholars like Robert Paul Churchill and Saladin Meckled-Garcia who are sceptical about whether toleration is a virtue consistent with liberal neutrality. Churchill argues for a robust conception of toleration as involving restraint from interfering with another person’s actions out of respect for their autonomy, even though we have reason to prevent such wrong actions. This form of toleration requires a degree of virtue which simply cannot be assumed by liberal theorists in their accounts of reasonable pluralism. Meckled-Garcia holds that being committed to neutrality is to be committed to the creation of a world where toleration is unnecessary. Citizens who act for reasons of neutrality cannot believe that they have reason to use state power to enforce their views on those who disagree with them, and this latter belief is the spur to the value of toleration. Arguing the contrary view are Peter Jones and Colin Farrelly. Following Joseph Raz’s work on first order reasons, Jones holds that there is no reason to think of the reasons to be tolerant as secondorder reasons. Further, it is only once we think of such reasons as second-order that the ‘problems’ around tolerance and neutrality that others identify arise. Farrelly holds that, not only are toleration and liberal neutrality compatible, but that toleration is necessary to help solve some of the hard cases of the real world which liberal neutrality is inadequately equipped to fully address. Part three of Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy addresses the difficult questions about the best way to encourage toleration in a democracy. Glen Newey argues that toleration appeared at a time when political decisions were at the discretion of a centralised authority, and so the logical structure of toleration cannot be adapted to a democracy. Nevertheless, this does not mean all democratic politics is continuous confrontation. Toleration, and other approaches, can help ameliorate this. Frederic R Kellogg identifies two different sites for the public reasoning which sets the limits of toleration for liberals: judicial deliberation and conversation between judges, legislators and the judiciary. Kellogg advocates the latter model. Finally, Maurizio Passerin D’Entreves holds that liberalism is a necessary condition for effective political toleration, with significant implications for the limits of toleration in non-liberal diverse societies. As suggested above, the second book edited by McKinnon and Castiglione, The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies, is more focused on the theoretical attempts to redeem toleration in ways acceptable to all in diverse contexts through accounts of the proper
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exercise of public reason. This makes the book more focused than Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy, and perhaps more substantive, not least as this debate is more developed. As with Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy the most valuable contribution to The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies is the editor’s introduction, which takes the reader through the history, and a critical appraisal of, the debates on toleration and public reason arguments. McKinnon and Castiglione note that public reason arguments are the third in a series justifying toleration. The first was defence of toleration was a ‘reasoned answer’ to the conflicts that divided European societies along religious lines. Toleration was advocated on the grounds that, firstly, religion had little relevance to social and political co-existence, and secondly, that attempting to impose conformity on individual’s intractable inner convictions was ultimately selfdefeating. Toleration is thus defended as an outcome of prudential reasoning. The problem here is that on this view toleration is simply a tactical adjustment to a balance of power. If it were the case that peace could be maintained while one group forcible imposed its view on another then toleration is no longer necessary. The second phase of the toleration debate continued the process of making religion a private matter, and emphasised the role of the state as the neutral arbiter over citizen’s different ideas of the good life. This theory rested on a strict separation of the public from private, with toleration based ultimately on the view that ‘good fences make good neighbours’. However, the moral theories underlying this defence of toleration proved unsatisfying. On the one hand moral scepticism seems unable to establish the limits of toleration, thus allowing a greater relativism for the actions we ought to tolerate. However, this account cannot coherently sustain toleration itself as the claim that one ought to tolerant should also be read relativistically. Epistemological scepticism—that truths exist but it is hard to know them for sure—appears more promising in theory, but may be too controversial a theory, and too inconsistent with people’s often strong commitment to moral beliefs, to be workable. With the weakening of the barriers to the private sphere and the rise of multiculturalism, tolerance remained perceived as a kind of response to difference that we cannot do without, but not on moral grounds. This was the context that argument for toleration linked to public reason emerged. Briefly put, this is the view that anyone who gives reasons for a political position must assume that others could embrace these reasons too. Under pluralism, public reasons cannot simply map onto one particular set of beliefs, and therefore each per-
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son must tolerate the reasonable political views of others. If toleration is a requirement of reasonableness then the forcible imposition of one set of beliefs is always unjustifiable—avoiding the problem of prudential justifications of toleration. Further it is a less controversial doctrine than moral or epistemological scepticism. McKinnon and Castiglione want to argue against liberal theories of toleration drawing on public reason arguments, and the first half of The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies compiles chapters dedicated to this end. Thus Jeremy Waldron argues that, in practice, real conflicts are often organised in such a way that appeals to the principle of reasonableness may lead to impasse as much as resolution. Matt Matravers and Susan Mendes argue that the liberal theories of Brian Barry and John Rawls offer weak accounts of toleration. Where Barry’s conception of reason imposes unacceptable existential costs on agents, Rawls’ conception makes toleration a requirement of a modus vivendi only. The remainder of the essays in the first section look to a justification of toleration distinct from the public reason tradition, typically linking toleration to a conception of justice associated with issues of recognition. Thus Ranier Forst argues that social and political arrangements should be such that the ethical identity of persons, as citizens, is the object of equal respect. Thus toleration is linked to a just social order based on recognition and respect. Nancy Fraser suggests that while the respect of others is essential, this needs situating in the context the dialectic between recognition and distribution in liberal-democracies. In her view we should be more circumspect in dealing with the ethical dimension of identity politics. Catriona McKinnon argues that the incommensurability of ethical views is only part of the reason why pluralism makes toleration a requirement. Different accounts of toleration can be justified with different accounts of the character of pluralism, and questions about the character of pluralism are questions about the attitudes people can reasonably be expected to develop of those who are different from them. Thus she notes that there are many attitudes to difference all resulting in some form of acceptance (resignation, indifference, stoic endurance, openness and full engagement), and stoical resignation is probably the one most assumed in theoretical debate. However, contemporary political culture seems to demand that we move from stoicism in the direction of a deeper engagement with difference reflected captured by ideas of respect and sensitivity to others. The second part of The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies looks to explore the internal coherence of this more ‘open-minded’
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conception of toleration. James Bohman argues that openness to others in discourse, and their treatment as free and equal, is part of a kind of reflexive toleration required of the deliberative context. Individuals recognise each other as part of the same community, and they do so by taking each others reasons seriously, but also by taking each others’ perspectives on board. Andrew Mason argues that the tension between cities and communities is overdrawn and can be made to work in complementary ways in an account of reasonable tolerance. Jonathan Wolff explores tolerance as part of the process through which a certain state of affairs of a community is changed. Toleration involves overcoming certain fixed ideas by accepting the innovative value that difference might bring at different levels. The same dynamic is central to Cécile Laborde’s conceptual and historical analysis of the way in which the practice and principle of toleration have operated in the debate in France over the wearing of head scarves. In practical situations appeals to toleration might only acquire a meaning in a more complex discursive and institutional context. In Stuart White’s and David Heyd’s contributions on tolerance in the work place and education respectively, they show how quality of opportunity and moral instruction, seem to come into conflict with the value of tolerance, since this undermines the operation of other principles. Nevertheless, both White and Heyd agree that tolerance remains an important element in our universe of moral values. To my mind the McKinnon and Castiglione books succeed as justifications for taking toleration as seriously as ever, and as agenda-setting tools in contemporary theoretical reflection on toleration. There is little doubt that reading these texts will familiarise the reader with the broad shape of these debates, and some of the sharper arguments. While personally I remain unconvinced by many of the claims against public reason justifications of toleration, and somewhat sceptical of the case for alternatives that link tolerance to some recognition based conception of justice, this does not affect the standing of these texts. They are defining contributions to the theory of toleration. Dr Laurence Piper is senior lecturer in the School of Politics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus. A graduate of Cambridge University, Great Britain, with a PhD in Zulu nationalism, he has published on nationalism, the IFP and KwaZulu-Natal politics. More recent research interests concern elections, participation and democracy, especially in South Africa. Email:
[email protected]
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Democracy, edited by David Estlund. London: Blackwell, 2002. ISBN: 0—22104-2. Reviewed by Laurence Piper David Estlund has put together a remarkable collection of recent philosophical reflections on democracy in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. The intention, as Estlund explains, is to guide the reader through some of contemporary literature and debates, with special, but not exclusive, attention to deliberative democracy. Consequently, while of interest to the deliberative democrat, this collection engages democratic issues more broadly, including the challenges posed by social choice theory to the rationality of voting, indeed to all forms of preference aggregation. At first glance the diversity of issues that Democracy covers is somewhat bewildering. The book is thematised into six parts: ‘Procedural Fairness’ (Christiano and Waldron), ‘Ideal Deliberation (Cohen and Habermas), ‘Wise Decisions’ (Rehg and Beitz), ‘Deliberation and Institutions’ (Estlund and Young), ‘Why Vote?’ (Brennan & Lomasky and Goldman), and ‘Formal Models and Normative Theory’ (Miller and Grofman & Field). However, Estlund brilliantly develops the relationships between these various themes in the introduction, taking readers on a remarkable tour of the shifting terrain of political philosophy of the last forty years. He begins by tracing the emergence of the ‘economistic’ framework of social science, exemplified in the American social choice theory of the 1950s and 60s, before recounting the revivification of normative political philosophy with John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971. Rawls prompted some fifteen years engagement with the issue of distributive justice, a concern more recently supplanted by the re-emergence of the issue of democracy, and deliberative democracy more especially. It is out of this history that Estlund distils the above six themes, and in the rest of the introduction he takes the reader through the debates associated with each, engaging the substantive arguments of articles, teasing out their implications, relating them to each other and asking critical questions. In short, the introduction redeems the coherence of the book. To my mind the diversity of six themes and twelve articles in Democracy can be distilled into three major debates: whether to conceptualise democracy in terms of procedural right or substantive good; theorising the institutionalisation of deliberation; and the challenge of social choice theory. My only real criticism of Estlund is that each of these debates is worthy of an edited collection on their own,
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and would have been better served by such – especially the selection on ‘theorising the institutionalisation of deliberative democracy’. It is nevertheless to Estlund’s credit that he identifies these three major debates, not least as the third of these, the challenge of social choice theory is typically ignored by political philosophers who find its terms both foreign and technical. In many ways the originality of Democracy lies in Estlund’s cajoling of his fellow philosophers to seriously engage social choice theory. But let me begin first with the debate on the right versus the good. The terminology of the ‘right’ and the ‘good’ comes from moral rather than political philosophy, although it is embraced by Rawls in his work. Traditionally, the ‘right’ refers to what is obligatory, an act we ought to perform, whereas the ‘good’ refers to what is desirable, whatever is worth having or doing. In the realm of deliberative democracy, this contrast is manifest most obviously in the question of whether democracy is simply a procedure independent of conceptions of the ‘good life’, the ‘right way’ to manage collective choices, or whether democracy involves some substantive commitment to a notion of the ‘good life’ too, for example human rights. For Estlund this is a question of the meaning of the political equality, more specifically, the meaning of ‘procedural fairness’. Is the democratic political process best understood as one where each has an equal chance to affect the outcome, as Christiano and Waldron argue, or is a democratic process one which produces just results, as Nelson, Beitz and Estlund argue? The argument for the ‘right’ runs something like this: given reasonable pluralism on just outcomes, it seems more sensible to settle for less controversial fair procedures as the basis of democracy. Waldron, and Christiano advocate for this view, although for different reasons. Against this, and for the ‘good’, Estlund is sceptical of ‘right’ theories capacity to escape reasonable pluralism in grounding democracy in procedural fairness. More developed and subtle variations of this initial debate cover much of the first three parts of the book with proponents of procedural right making their case in Part One, proponents of the substantive good in Parts Three and Four, and Cohen and Habermas ambivalently poised in between in Part Two. The second major debate, theorising the institutionalisation of deliberative democracy, is located mostly in Parts Two and Four of the book and the selection reflects Estlund’s scepticism about the possibility of making deliberation real. Thus, in the introduction Estlund queries Cohen’s imperative to ‘mirror’ the ideal deliberative situation in social institutions, drawing on no less than Habermas, Cohen’s
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inspiration, for ammunition. Deepening doubt is Iris Marion Young’s account of difference democracy and its implications for the ‘better quality’ of decisions. Estlund continues in a similar vein in his contribution entitled ‘Political Quality’ where he argues that some inequality in political influence might, under certain circumstances, yield better quality deliberation. To my mind this idea seems consistent with Dryzek’s view that deliberation is better conceptualised in terms of contending discourses, opening up the possibility of some kind of ‘discursive representivity’ and the kinds of formal inequality that Estlund gestures towards. Certainly Bryan’s (2004) close empirical study of town meeting democracy in New England confirms a de facto process of representation in town meetings with an average of only 38% of attendees contributing. It might just be the case that the boundaries between deliberation and representation are not as clearly drawn as many suppose, or should be reconceptualised. Although I found much to enjoy in Estlund’s selection here, the sample was simply too small to reflect the huge range of issues at stake, not least the glaring omission of some account of equality for theories of both representative and deliberative democracy. Another glaring omission concerns the moral conduct required for deliberation, a dispositional requirement potentially in tension with agents interests; another concerns the meaning of inclusion and participation in democracy. Consequently, in my view, the selections on theorising the institutionalisation of deliberation are too simply few, and unconventional, and so appear somewhat arbitrary. For example, Estlund’s selection would have been more ‘representative’ had it had included Bohman’s (1996) capacity arguments around political equality. However, it might be argued in Estlund’s defence that originality trumps representivity, and that the relationship between inequality and the quality of deliberation is thus more worthy of inclusion. Certainly, one does get the sense that setting the agenda of philosophical inquiry into democracy is one objective of this book, and nowhere does this come through more clearly than in Estlund’s invocations to political philosophers to fully engage social choice theory. Thus in Part V, entitled ‘Why Vote?’, we encounter engagements with social choice arguments against the rationality of voting. Similar social choice concerns are evident in Part VI entitled ‘Formal Models and Normative Theory’. Here Estlund considers Miller’s rejoinders to Arrow’s ‘Impossibility Theorem’, and Grofman and Feld’s arguments for democratic arrangements using social choice methods, more specifically Condorcet’s ‘Jury Theorem’. Notably, on
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reading Estlund’s commentary on these articles in his introduction, one gets the sense of someone quietly optimistic that the social choice sceptic can be repelled – if only political philosophers would trouble themselves to do so. Thus Estlund notes that all forms of deliberative democracy, including contracturalist versions, are vulnerable to social choice objections as they ‘must still arrive at rankings of the social alternatives’(23), and consequently social choice theories ‘should neither be dismissed as philosophically irrelevant, nor studied with a tunnel-like vision in which they appear as self-sufficient philosophical systems conclusively pronouncing on the prospects for democracy’ (26). In the end then, David Estlund has written a brilliant introduction to what would ideally have been three books, each with a more thorough-going selection of articles on the three major debates he identifies, but especially the theoretical debates around institutionalising deliberative democracy. Nevertheless the reader is exposed to some key authors, articles and debates, and also challenged by Estlund’s substantial and fine insights into these debates, especially his views on social choice theory. This collection is more than a record of recent philosophical debates on democracy – it is also a set of understated but provocative interventions.
References Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy, by James Bohman. Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT Press, 1996. Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations, by John S. Dryzek. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Dr Laurence Piper is a senior lecturer in the School of Politics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus. A graduate of Cambridge with a PhD in Zulu nationalism, he has mostly worked on nationalism and South African politics. He has an emerging interest in the theory and practice of democracy, especially deliberative democracy, and how it might relate to the developing world. Email:
[email protected]
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War and Gender, by Joshua S. Goldstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0 521 80716 6. Reviewed by Michael Lambert Women are almost always the victims of men’s wars. Massacred in Rwanda-Burundi, raped in Bosnia, bombed or widowed in Iraq: the depth of women’s suffering seems to be an ineluctable feature of our ‘vale of tears’. Yet women have been and are warriors; women have supported wars with relentless vigour and women have been amongst those guilty of torture and human rights abuses in current conflicts. For Goldstein, this apparent contradiction, that women are both victims and aggressors, that women are not biologically ‘wired’ for peace and cosy nurturing is at the heart of the ‘puzzle’ he attempts to unravel: if women can be warriors, why is it that most combats throughout human history have been fought by men and have, almost always, deliberately excluded women from the rank and file? Professor of International Relations at American University (in Washington, D.C.), Goldstein adopts a multi-disciplinary approach to ‘solving’ this puzzle, drawing on a wide range of research in biochemistry, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science and history. Before he assembles his ‘dossier of evidence’ (p.58), Goldstein indicates that he does not accept the sex-gender distinction which ‘constructs a false dichotomy between biology and culture’ (p.2). Consequently, he uses the term ‘gender’ to refer to both masculine and feminine roles and bodies, as he strongly believes that biology and culture shape each another in complex ways, which highlight the flexibility of both systems. This rejection of the ‘fixed’ nature of biology underpins his analysis of the hypotheses he constructs in each chapter. In addition to clarifying his concept of gender, Goldstein defines war as any ‘lethal intergroup violence’ (p.3) in communities as diverse as, for instance, ‘gathering-hunting’ (sic) societies, urban gangs and guerilla forces. Finally, Goldstein indicates that he writes as a feminist (p.2), despite his rejection of one of the philosophical pillars of second wave feminism. In Chapter One (pp. 1-58), Goldstein examines mythological and historical examples of women as warriors (from the Amazons to the Soviet Union during the Second World War), together with evidence of ‘truly peaceful societies’, to test his first hypothesis: that gender-linked war roles are not in fact cross-culturally consistent. Not surprisingly, his lengthy detour through some arcane corners of anthropology, which includes a demolition of the romantic Marxist notion that some
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sort of blissful matriarchy prevailed before those vile patriarchs, armed with private property, monogamy and inchoate capitalism, appeared, leads him to conclude that gender-linked war roles are cross-culturally consistent and that in virtually no extant human community (‘gathererhunters’ included) is a male-dominated ‘war-system’ unknown. Chapter Two (pp. 59-127) expands on women’s participation in wars, marshalling evidence from West Africa (Dahomey) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to women in guerilla armies in South Africa’s recent history, to test the second hypothesis: that sexist discrimination has shaped gendered war roles, despite the demonstrable competence of women as combatants, leaders and killers. Even Boudicca, the British queen who led a famous revolt against her Roman overlords, and Joan of Arc get an honourable mention. Again, rather predictably, Goldstein finds that his extraordinary collage of evidence supports his hypothesis: ‘overall, the war system works to push women away from killing roles except in the most dire emergencies such as when defending their homes and children’ (p.127). Chapters Three to Six (pp. 128-402) are underpinned by the same methodology with some more interesting conclusions. Using numerous comparative studies of male and female anatomy and physiology, in which particular attention is paid to the perceived role of testosterone in causing male aggression, Goldstein demonstrates, convincingly for the most part, that testosterone levels do not cause aggression, but that socially learned aggressive behaviours affect testosterone levels (p.153). He thus explodes the ‘myth’ that men’s participation in the structured violence of war is the direct result of their biology. In fact, none of the assumed physical differences between men and women (e.g. strength and height), concludes Goldstein, adequately accounts for the gendered nature of war. Drawing on studies of our ‘close relatives’ (bonobos and chimpanzees), in which great diversity in gender relations and social organization is revealed, Goldstein then casts doubt on the hypothesis that ‘innate’ gender differences in human group dynamics (e.g. the perceived male ability to bond better in groups and work more ably in hierarchical structures) contribute to the puzzle of gender and the war-system. In keeping with his ideological position, Goldstein argues, in chapters five and six, that cultural constructions of masculinity, linking ‘manhood’ with aggression and performance in battle, and femininity with submission to conquest, are amongst the tricks cultures devise to ‘coax’ male soldiers into combat (p.331). Again, rather predictably, it turns out that socialization and
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its evil agents—sport, the media, video games, war play, peer pressure—prepare boys for emotional impairment, war and possible death. Often, argues Goldstein, women support and ‘facilitate men’s militarized masculinity’ (p.306): patriarchies and their armed forces would not have endured for so long had it not been for the support of women. Aggressive and extreme masculinity of this kind can only survive if it defines and denigrates its opposite. In the book’s most interesting chapter (pp.332-402), Goldstein demonstrates how a vicious misogyny, which results in military brothels, prostitution, gang rape and the systematic ‘feminization’ of the enemy (by, for instance, castration and homosexual rape) fuels warrior masculinity, which at the same time boasts of defending ‘our women’ and is deeply reliant on exploiting women’s labour for the war effort. This kind of contradiction at the very centre of war-time masculinity cries out for the kind of probing analysis Goldstein’s work lacks. In the final chapter, Goldstein solves the puzzle. The gendering of war is a product of culturally constructed gender roles in dangerous combination with ‘small innate biological differences in average size, strength and roughness of play’ (p.406). Lest one imagine that Goldstein’s logic is hors de combat, he does stress that these differences, which he has been at pains to underplay, cannot on their own solve the puzzle of near-universally gendered war roles. Nature and nurture react, after all, in complex and diverse ways and the war-system which is not ‘set in stone’ (p.413) can only change if there are profound changes in socialization and gender relations. There is nothing original in this book, but it will be a very useful reference work (there is a sixty-five page bibliography which, astonishingly, omits reference to Connell’s important work on masculinities published in 1995). Furthermore, it succeeds in its aim —to bring gender to the attention of war scholars (p. 407) — and effectively shows how ‘multiple levels of analysis’ are indeed essential for an understanding of the mutuality of war and gender. At times one longs for some rigorous theoretical analysis, but Goldstein makes it clear that his contribution is not theoretical (p.58). War and Gender is a competent synthesis: nothing more. Mike Lambert is a classicist with a wine-dark interest in gender. Email:
[email protected]
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The Uncanny, by Nicholas Royle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. ISBN: 071905561X. Reviewed by Kevin A. Morrison Writing in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Nicholas Royle begins his study with ruminations on some of the uncanny aspects of that event: 9-11 is both the date on which terrorists struck at the financial heart of the United States and the emergency services telephone number; and the seeming accident of the first plane flying into one of the World Trade Center towers was quickly followed by what appeared to be an eerie repetition—the second plane hitting the other tower—which forced observers to call into question their original assessment of what was taking place. These aspects of the attack involve peculiar similarities, surprising connections (as between the emergency services number and the date), and doubling and repetition that are all essential features of the uncanny as we have come to understand it. While the uncanny is a notoriously difficult concept to define precisely, Freud formulated perhaps the most significant definition; the uncanny, according to him, is ‘that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and long familiar’.1 It thus manifests itself as a feeling or sensation of something strangely familiar— a feeling evoked by the peculiar echoing of 9-11 in two distinct contexts and of the planes impacting the twin towers. Freud’s 1919 essay, ‘Das Unheimliche’ (translated into English as ‘The Uncanny’), attempts to account for, among other things, the experience of the uncanny in the process of reading. He contends that the feeling of strange familiarity is provoked by some frightening occurrence in literature or in life that leaves one momentarily afraid, though perhaps unaware of the exact source of the fear. Freud notes that while what excites a sensation of the uncanny varies from person to person, the sensation itself is shared, and he attempts to demonstrate psychoanalytically how and why this feeling arises. By deciphering the cause, Freud hopes to neutralize the uncanny aspects of the texts with which he works. Freud begins with a philological exploration of the term’s antonym, heimlich. His initial discovery is that heimlich refers to security, comfort, hominess, friendliness, and familiarity. As he continues his research, however, he learns that heimlich also refers to secrecy and what is kept from view. Heimlich, he concludes, is ‘a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally
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coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’.2 All that is familiar is inextricably intertwined with its opposite. The experience of the uncanny, he therefore concludes, naturally disrupts both a sense of one’s own self and one’s place in the world. Thus part of the effect of the uncanny is that it brings to light that which should have remained concealed. While Freud’s concern is solely with individual psychology and aesthetics, Royle highlights the wider cultural applicability of the concept. Soon after the terrorist attacks, Royle notes, it became more apparent the extent to which the person responsible had been supported and trained by U.S. military personnel. September 11th stands as a kind of case study of the uncanny because what unexpectedly arises in a strange and unfamiliar context are the consequences of U.S. and, more generally, Western political, economic, and military strategies that ‘have unforeseen and undesirable after-effects’ (viii). Royle’s reading of September 11th demonstrates that the uncanny cannot be reduced to aesthetics or psychology and that it is intertwined with modernity itself. As he ably argues, the uncanny serves as a significant concept for philosophers concerned not with individual psychology but with the political, economic, and social forces shaping modern identity. Indeed, aspects of modernity—industrialization, capitalism, forced and chosen migration—have suggested to many thinkers in the continental philosophical tradition that post-Enlightenment life is uncanny in the sense that security and familiarity are largely absent; Heidegger, for example, writes of modern Being as not-at-home in the world, and Marx writes of alienation. Of all the theorists this study considers, however, Freud looms the largest. Yet Royle aims to move beyond Freud in two ways: he considers a wider range of uncanny phenomena and literary and cultural representations of uncanniness than those to which Freud confined himself in his 1919 study; and he argues, bringing together Freudian psychoanalysis and poststructuralist theory, that the ‘critical elaboration’ of the uncanny is ‘necessarily bound up with analysing, questioning and even transforming what is called “everyday life”’ (23). According to Royle, the uncanny offers itself as a heuristic tool for exploring the most pressing social, cultural, and political issues of modernity and postmodernity and the role that individual feelings, belief, and affect play. Indeed, Royle’s interest is in bringing together the concerns of psychoanalysis and critical theory, particularly deconstruction, in order to think about the uncanny in new ways. He argues that deconstruction and psychoanalysis are themselves ‘uncanny modes of thinking, uncanny
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discourses’. Psychoanalysis ‘makes the familiar (the self, desire, memory, sexuality, everyday language and behavior) uncomfortably, even frighteningly unfamiliar’ whereas deconstruction ‘shows how difference operates at the heart of identity, how the strange and even unthinkable is a necessary condition of what is conventional, familiar, and taken-forgranted’ (24). Neither psychoanalysis nor deconstruction require that we simply ‘give ourselves up or over to the uncanny’. ‘There has to be an abiding attachment to the familiar,’ he contends, ‘even if it is one that requires ceaseless suspicion’ (25). According to Royle, psychoanalysis and deconstruction—as modes of thinking—allow us to maintain a vigilantly suspicious stance toward what is familiar. That psychoanalysis and deconstruction both have an inherently pedagogical aspect—teaching us to see the world anew—leads Royle to conclude that the uncanny might be usefully conceived as a ‘“field of research” that calls for new ways of combining and transforming the concerns of art, literature, film, psychoanalysis, philosophy, science and technology, religion, history, politics, economics, autobiography and teaching’ (27). One of the book’s greatest strengths is its wideranging analyses of the uncanny as it manifests itself in different discursive contexts, as well as of the uncanny’s relationship to paranormal or supernatural phenomena and to the senses (especially aural and visual). Indeed, in taking up a range of topics and concerns in twentytwo chapters ranging from telepathy and cannibalism to fears of being buried alive, as well as discussions of fiction, pedagogy, and methodologies in literary criticism, Royle’s book demonstrates more than it explicates this notion. Yet, because of the protean quality of the concept of the uncanny, which allows for such disparate topics to be grouped together, perhaps the most valuable aspects of the book are its introduction—providing a broad historical overview of the uncanny and the different ways in which it has been theorized in post-Enlightenment thought—and its extensive bibliography. As if to complement the diversity in subject matter, Royle deploys an array of writing styles. This results in a certain amount of disconnectedness among chapters, ranging from formal works of scholarship to ruminations to experimental writings. Chapter four, for example, which explores cinematic uncanniness, opens with these lines and continues throughout in a similar vein: Witness explode in the face a detonated bullfrog or similar, its viscid FX ‘film’ embodied. Has ‘writing on film’ ever really begun? The caul of film (75).
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Chapter nineteen, however, on the subject of telepathy, begins, ‘This chapter aims to explore what is the most intriguing feature of narrative fiction and to open up new ways of thinking about it’ and continues by following the fundamental essayistic conventions of literary/critical analysis (256). On one level, this marked difference among chapters makes for a rather jarring reading experience. The reader might account for the diversity in style by noting both the author’s indebtedness to deconstruction and the fact that most chapters were written as separate essays or talks for different audiences over a number of years. On another level, however, this variation perfectly underscores the point of the uncanny itself—that it cuts across disciplines and modes of inquiry and manifests itself in a variety of forms. Given Royle’s illuminating treatment of September 11th, one might wish that he had more to say about the political implications of the uncanny. His concerns are, for the most part, with its many manifestations in literature and culture. Nevertheless, Royle has provided a fresh look at the concept by liberating it from aesthetics and psychology, to which it has largely been tethered. Notes 1. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny,’ in The Standard Edition of the Com-
plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74) 17: 340. 2. Ibid., 347.
Kevin Morrison is an independent scholar. Email:
[email protected]
Political Reconciliation, by Andrew Schaap. Routledge Innovations in Political Theory. London & New York: Routledge, 2005. ISBN: 0-415-35680-6. Reviewed by Michael Phillips Andrew Schaap wonders whether his book ‘Political Reconciliation’ is already outdated, having been written for the time in between the Cold War and the War on Terror. In this period a range of countries engaged in reconciliation politics with a view to adjusting to changed political
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circumstances and confronting a legacy of grave state wrongs. All that changed when the twin towers fell. No one seems to worry so much about the turmoil within when the enemy without is wreaking havoc in Iraq and detonating bombs in mass transit in Madrid and London. One can readily imagine the feeling of panic and frustration that might have descended on our unlucky author as the political salience of ‘reconciliation’ waned in Schaap’s native Australia and around the world. I can readily sympathise. God knows my own dissertation on the politics of reconciliation is gathering dust at a record pace, locked in the rare book collection at the University of Sydney. There are, broadly, two kinds of responses to the rapid disappearance of the political relevance of one’s academic specialization. One can bravely soldier on, hopeful that the problems which animated one’s initial project have only been temporarily eclipsed and that the enduring relevance of these problems will again absorb the attention of the general public (and the academic publishers) in the near future. This is, understandably, the position adopted by Schaap; having laboured so long, it would have been a tragedy for this well-reasoned, judicious text to have not found a readership. And who can say that, when the War on Terror subsides, it will not have left a legacy of wrong doing inviting a fresh bout of reconciliation? The second approach, to reconsider whether the questions which one had initially found to be the most important were ever in fact as one had imagined them to be, is to take kerosene from the pump and start a bon-fire on one’s political world-view. That hurts, but who can deny that politics has not become awesome in a literal sense in the years that have followed September 11? Whereas the politics of reconciliation engages the moral faculties in a terrible series of quandaries revolving around the twin poles of historical guilt (think apology, forgiveness, justice) and political realism (think amnesty, democracy, power-sharing), the politics of war/terror continually leaves one gasping for breath as the world descends, seemingly, into a primal and spectacular contest. I couldn’t help reading Schaap’s book against the background of these changed political circumstances. Thankfully, there is an enormous amount in this book which is relevant to how we think about politics in a fundamental sense. The book is divided roughly into two parts, with the first part containing the heavy lifting as Schaap sorts through first Locke, then Charles Taylor, before settling on Hannah Arendt as the pre-eminent theorist of ‘political reconciliation’. Schaap also engages with Carl Schmitt, and it is his encounter with
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Schmitt that grounds Schaap’s well-developed and consistently held understanding of the political. Schaap states in the preface that one aim of the book is to bring together the literature on reconciliation and forgiveness, in fields such as political science, theology and political theory, and the literature on Hannah Arendt, ‘the only significant political theorist to accord forgiveness a central role in politics.’ Schaap claims to be the first author to develop Arendt’s thoughts on forgiveness and politics systematically in the context of reconciliation, and therein lies the significance of this work. It is one of the joys of this book that the author articulates his understanding of the political clearly and that the political is one of the corner-stones of his thinking throughout the entire text. This feature alone distinguishes Schaap’s text from the saccharine theorising so often found in the literature on peace and conflict studies. As such, ‘Political Reconciliation’ is a welcome, and much overdue, addition to the literature on reconciliation and forgiveness in politics. For Schaap, politics is a risky business conditioned, as Schmitt contended, by the ever present-danger of the friend-enemy distinction. Schaap goes beyond Schmitt by adopting Arendt’s concept of politics as a world-disclosing enterprise by which former enemies can create a world in common through ongoing dialogue. As Schaap notes, ‘Political interdependence is based not only on the need for mutual protection but on the desire for meaning, for a sense of the reality and worth of things. The possibility of reconciliation depends on this world-disclosing potential of politics.’ Accordingly, Schaap distinguishes ‘political reconciliation’ from the Christian and therapeutic imagery which was so prevalent in the popular discourses of reconciliation in Australia and South Africa. This imagery is anti-political in so far as it suggests harmony, restoration, healing and redemption, thus obscuring the risk of politics by presuming the existence of a prior ‘we’ which it is the object of reconciliation to restore. Rather, the appropriate starting point to consider the politics of reconciliation is ‘a relation of enmity between rival political groups, rather than a relation of alienation between comembers of a moral community’. The second part of ‘Political Reconciliation’ is devoted to the consideration of a cluster of problems associated with the politics of reconciliation; constitution, forgiveness, responsibility and remembrance. This section of the book will be of particular interest to political scientists and practitioners who have made more detailed studies of reconciliation in particular contexts and who would like to enjoy a
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broader view of what political reconciliation means in relation to each of these topics, as well as to scholars of transitional justice and to theologians who already have a theoretical interest in these issues. Certainly the text is not cluttered by extensive references to any particular reconciliation process. I was initially surprised that the text did not also include a chapter on justice, and on reflection, I am not sure that the absence of such a chapter is entirely justified, given that the politics of reconciliation is typically a response to a keenly felt historical grievance, such as apartheid or colonialism. However, the chapter on forgiveness is particularly good and, in part, remedies the absence of a chapter devoted to justice. Schaap deftly canvasses an issue which was, at least in Australia, at the heart of difficult debates on what reconciliation means. The latter chapters also have the virtue of being able to be read in isolation if need be, and thus may make good selections for advanced undergraduate or post-graduate reading lists. Stylistically, Schaap rarely strays too far from the argument at hand and kindly summarises, at intervals, the argument to date. Schaap also does well to avoid the temptation to move into the higher rhetorical register which the material invites. One suspects that the text has been carefully pared back to avoid any dramatic excesses. As a consequence the prose occasionally tends to the workmanlike, although this is less of a criticism than it might sound. In summary, Schaap’s fears that time may have passed this text by are not entirely born out. The opening chapters will stimulate readers with a general interest in political theory. The second part of the book will engage those readers with a particular interest in any one of the various national reconciliation processes, such as those seen in South Africa or Australia, who will enjoy the opportunity to take a broader view of reconciliation and politics. For the future, I hope that Schaap will provide us with another book in which he reconsiders his fundamental political concepts in light of events post September 11. Michael Phillips completed his Phd at the University of Sydney in 2003. Email:
[email protected]
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The Illusion of Conscious Will, by Daniel M. Wegner. Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 2002. ISBN: 0-262-23222-7. Reviewed by Lance Lachenicht David Hume thought that the problem of free will was the most contentious question in all of metaphysics. Some have argued that it is the most discussed problem in all of philosophy, going back to the time of the ancient Greeks. The issue is important because free will is thought to be necessary for responsibility. We hold others and ourselves accountable for our actions because we believe that we freely choose to act the way we do. Without free will the foundations of morality and law seem to be threatened. The metaphysical problem of free will turns on determinism. Many thinkers in the ancient world, and also many modern scientists, think the universe is deterministic, that is, all events are determined by prior events. If this is true, then human actions are also determined by prior events, and there is no room for free will. According to incompatibilists determinism cannot coexist with free will and people of this persuasion argue that free will must be an illusion. Random processes in nature do not provide a loop hole in which free will can exist, according these thinkers, because if the processes are truly random, then they cannot be influenced by us at all. In contrast compatibilists seek some way of making determinism and free will compatible with one another. For example, the discovery of chaos, in which physical systems can be entirely determined by their initial conditions and yet the final state of the system cannot be predicted, is often invoked as one way in which compatibilism is possible. In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have made increasing contributions to the free will debate. For example in 1985 the brain scientist Libet tried to answer the question of what starts an action off when someone deliberately flexes their wrist. Is it a conscious decision to act or is it some unconscious brain process? In his research Libet asked his research participants to flex their wrists some 40 times at moments of their own choosing. These research participants were wired up to his apparatus and Libet measured the time at which the wrist flexing occurred, the beginning of the associated brain activity, and the time at which the participants reported consciously deciding to flex their wrists. The first two are easy to measure (electrodes on the wrist and electrodes on the scalp), but the moment of conscious decision required careful thought. Libet placed a screen in front of his participants. On
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this screen was a dot going round in a circle in the same way as the hands of a clock. He asked his subjects to watch the screen and note the point at which they decided to act. When they had flexed their wrist Libet’s subjects could then report where the spot had been at the moment of their conscious decision to move. Libet found that the conscious decision to act came 200 milliseconds before the action, but that the associated brain activity started about 550 milliseconds before the action. In other words, the brain processes planning the movement actually began about a third of a second before the person consciously decided to move. Libet’s experiment has been extremely widely discussed in the burgeoning literature on consciousness. Daniel Wegner’s book, The Illusion of Conscious Will is a tangential commentary on it—tangential because the book does not report a new set of brain timing experiments but rather investigates the ‘feeling of conscious will’ that for most people makes Libet’s findings surprising. In investigating the ‘feeling of conscious will’ Daniel Wegner draws on a long psychological tradition of investigating illusions. Hs book begins with a discussion of the investigations carried out by the great English physicist Michael Faraday (1791—1867) into table tipping, a staple of the ‘spiritualism’ craze so popular in the latter half of the 19th century. In table tipping sitters gather around a table, placing their hands on the table in front of them. The medium would then call on the spirits to make themselves known and to answer various questions by tapping once for ‘yes’, and twice for ‘no.’ Mysteriously the table would begin to move and tapping would occur, and sitters would go home believing they had communicated with their long lost dear ones. Investigating, Faraday attached pieces of cardboard to the table using a flexible adhesive. Faraday reasoned that if the spirits were really moving the table, then the sitters’ hands resting on the card, would lag behind the movement of the table. But if the sitters were actually moving the table themselves then the card would move ahead of the table. The results showed that the card always moved further in the direction of the table movement. The sitters, not the spirits, were responsible for moving the table. Close questioning of the sitters led Faraday to believe that the sitters did not realize what they were doing. In Faraday’s experiment Daniel Wegner perceives a clear disassociation between the experience of conscious will and action. He deliberately sets about using similar tasks (e.g., a Ouija board) as well as various tasks developed by magicians to create demonstrations similar to Faraday’s tipping tables that people can perform actions without
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awareness of conscious will, or that they can experience a feeling of consciously willing an action even when the action is actually carried out by someone else. For example, Wegner and some of his students used a task from some of the Marx Brothers’ movies called ‘helping hands’. In this task one person stands behind another, putting their hands under the first person’s arms so that the second person’s arms appear in the front of the first person. The second person wears gloves and other clothes to make it difficult for an observer to determine whose arms are really appearing and acting. The subject watches himself and the moving arms in a mirror. The second person is instructed to perform various actions—such as clapping their hands, or touching the first person on the nose. The first person—the subject—is then asked, ‘Does it feel as though these hands are yours, that you are consciously willing their movement?’ Most subjects deny any feeling of conscious will at this point. But Wegner now changes the experiment slightly by allowing the subject to hear the instructions as they given to the person at the back—‘Now clap four times, now touch your nose with your left hand,’ and the like. Under this changed condition participants are much more likely to say, ‘Yes it feels somewhat as though I am doing this. I know it is not my hands but it does feel rather as though I am doing it.’ So Wegner’s idea is that normal action is initiated in the brain. The unconscious brain process involved sometimes—but not always— sets in motion a conscious experience of will as well as the action itself. The conscious experience of will does not cause action, rather the unconscious brain process does. Instead of being a causal process the feeling of conscious will itself is caused by unconscious brain processes. Still, illusory though it is, Wegner sees it as useful. Apart from reporting many different studies demonstrating in various ways that the feeling of conscious will can be separated from real action, Wegner also applies these ideas to a range of psychological and social phenomena and discusses the larger implications of his ideas. A discussion of hypnosis, for example, argues that although from the outside the person appears to be acting voluntarily the person’s experience may be that the actions are involuntary. So Wegner views hypnosis as a method for breaking down the normal process by which we infer our conscious will. In summary, then Daniel Wegner sees the human brain as creating a sense of virtual agency within each of us—a feeling that we are a ‘self’ that does things. The advantage of this virtual agency is that it helps us to distinguish our actions from those of others, and allows
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moral accountability to function. It is a construction manufactured by our brains rather than a real agency, but it nevertheless is real in the sense of allowing us to act as responsible social agents. Oddly enough Wegner finds great peace in this view of agency. Wegner states happily that he realizes that he is really just a little window on a lovely and very complicated machine and that he doesn’t have to worry about trying to do the right thing—the complicated machine that is his brain will take care of that. Wegner’s book is an interesting contribution to the larger debate about human agency and free will, as well as an important contribution to the exploding study of consciousness. Readers will find many examples of carefully designed experiments, and many interesting historical digressions and examples of how psychologists have identified and drawn conclusions from illusions in a great variety of other areas. I think his interpretation of his findings is preliminary and will certainly be altered as we learn more about the brain and how it works. Lance Lachenicht teaches research methods, human development, decision theory and social psychology in the School of Psychology, UKZN, Pietermaritzburg. His research includes social language (politeness and insults), procrastination, and developing general theories of human action. Email:
[email protected] 