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The politics of community — A feminist critique of the liberal-communitarian debate
96
Book Reviews
ence of family farming in a highly modernized, and commoditized agriculture. LISE S A U G E R E S
Manchester Metropolitan University
The Politics of Community - - A Feminist Critique of the Liberai-Communitarian Debate, Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, 268 pp., 1993, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, £10.95 pbk What is the relationship between social and political theory? To what extent can we justifiably impose social order upon the individual? Should pornography be made illegal? Does feminist politics commit us to any particular theory of gender? These questions, and many others, are raised by Frazer and Lacey - - two feminist lecturers in law and politics at Oxford University. Their work is a biting criticism of current political and social debate between liberals and communitarians and the impact that the debate has had upon women, followed by an exposition of their own political theory which encompasses feminist political concerns. Their motives are both theoretical and pragmatic: they argue that 'neither liberalism, nor Marxism nor social democracy in its dominant European form, can deliver the solutions to problems of childcare, sexual violence, the ideologies of popular culture and pornography, or the legal regulation of sexuality and gender'. From their feminist worldview, Frazer and Lacey attack liberal belief in the value of the rule of law (after John Locke), individual rights (after John Stuart Mill) and liberal theories of the person as an irreducible moral individual (after John Rawls). Such current theories of liberal individualism, and the present social order which it underpins, do not account for the social category of gender. 'The relationship between the liberal individual and his or her body is one of ownership and not identity' (53); the liberal individual is pre-social (pre-existing the body); disembodied and transcendent. This means that the liberal individual has no historical or social grounding or gender and is therefore not a useful concept for dealing with relations between classes, races, or women and men. The consequence of these liberal democratic notions is the alienation of political theory from social theory with the liberal pursuit of political autonomy. This, Frazer and Lacey find unacceptable. Social and political theories cannot be divorced from each other. This is shown by the treatment of rape cases. Rape - - unconsented sexual intercourse with a woman - - is an act making a social statement about the sexualization of the female body. And in a court of law, the political-legal system deals with the social statement of rape by examining the victim's past experience with men; questioning female refusal as consent; and until recently, denying the legal possibility of marital rape. In chapter 3, 'Liberalism and Feminist Politics', Frazer and Lacey continue their critique of liberalism by citing Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin's controversial campaign against pornography. MacKinnon and Dworkin seek to construct an anti-pornography law in the U.S. because pornography constructs women as powerless sexual objects. Rather than.overcome liberal graspings at
the First Amendment which protects freedom of expression (in this example the producers and consumers of pornography), MacKinnon and Dworkin raise the question - - what is the value of freedom of expression to different members of the community? If pornography silences women in certain contexts then pornography is anti-liberal. In this way, MacKinnon and Dworkin challenge the resistance of liberal 'tolerance' to freedom of expression by conceptualising pornography as a kind of harm which liberal theory should recognise and justify proscribing. To conceptualise pornography as sex discrimination frames 'the notion of pornography in terms which were consonant with the liberal notion of harm caused to individuals' (94) and changes the way that people think about pornography. Frazer and Lacey want to change the way that people think of their bodies, gender and labour, but to merely circumvent liberal principles is not enough; they follow their feminist critique of liberal individualism with a communitarian critique of liberalism, and a feminist critique of communitarianism, before reconstructing their own political theory. Communitarianism - - 'the thesis that the community, rather than the individual, the state, the nation or any other entity is and should be at the centre of our analysis and our value system' (1) - - is a doctrine mobilised against liberal individualism by many feminists who emphasise the collective nature of social life with universal health care, the distribution of public goods and wealth, and a degendered division of labour. This feminist perspective favours a theory of the social construction of the self and social reality akin to Richard Rorty's denial of truth and objective knowledge and vision of people as 'contingent selves, conceived as networks of belief and desire, and their practices'. Although Frazer and Lacey criticise such communitarianism for failing to construct any political analysis or theory of power, or to give gender the central place in political theory which Frazer and Lacey seek, they do adhere to the 'constitutive communitarianism' belief in the social construction of human nature and value when they write that 'social facts, social reality and social beings are socially constructed'. The authors spend so much time outlining feminist issues, perspectives and cases that their conclusion does not answer the many questions that they raise. The last chapter, 'Beyond the liberal-communitarian debate', is the section where they intend to articulate their own political and social theory, giving geflder the central place that they believe it deserves. This occurs in the last twenty pages of the book after they have criticised the dichotomised thinking of Western culture - - with polarities such as male/female, culture/nature, public/private - - and mentioned postmodernist reactions to liberal-modernity. Their political-social solution is to emphasise gender as a category of social differentiation, one that is fluid and unfixed of cultural meaning so that people may live together in diversity, 'without defining difference in terms of the "otherness" which entails political marginalisation and voicelessness'. In sum, Frazer and Lacey want to change the world by changing the way that people think and speak; a strategy which feminists have been employing for several decades with the relabelling of 'unwanted sexual attractions' as 'sexual harassment' or 'a husband's chastisement' as 'domestic violence'. They end up with a distillation of
Book Reviews liberal, postmodernist and feminist voices - - tolerant and multi-cultural, plural and contextual, maternal and matrilineal. The great value of their work is not to be found in the conclusion but in their well articulated, well researched exposition of the liberal-communitarian debate, a debate exemplified by many compelling case studies and skillfully located in the broader context of social theory. J O N A T H A N SKINNER Department of Social Anthropology University of St Andrews
The Politics of Economic Policy, Wyn Grant, 177 pp., 1993, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, £9.95 hbk The Policy Process in the Modern Capitalist State, Christopher Ham and Michael Hill, 210 pp., 2nd edition, 1994, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, £10.95 pbk The Policy Process: A Reader, Michael Hill (ed.), 422 pp., 1993, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, £13.95 pbk The Parliamentary State, David Judge, 1993, 236 pp., Sage, London The British Administrative System, Grant Jordan, 280 pp., 1994, Routledge, London, £13.99 Pressure, Power and Policy: State Autonomy and Policy Networks in Britain and the United States, Martin J. Smith, 262 pp., 1993, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, £11.95 pbk
There was a time when the arguments used by agricultural economists and rural geographers to explain policy seemed far removed from the messy world of real politics. No longer. In a recent collection of papers designed for undergraduates in Agricultural Economics the obligatory paper on policy claims that 'as in all branches of economics, technical analysis alone, cannot answer the normative questions surrounding agricultural policy'. Instead we have to look to 'the interactions of the farm lobbies, the bureaucrats and the politicians' (Winters, 1993). de Gorter (1994), addressing agricultural economists, asserts that the traditional view of government, exogenous to the economic system, seeking to correct for market failures and maximise social welfare, is to ignore the underlying political process. If policy processes are to the fore in the analysis of rural policy, the same is true in political science. From being very much the poor relation of political theory and philosophy, rooted in a rather dull public administration genre, the policy process approach has been re-born in recent years as a vibrant new sub-discipline, with the authors under review here amongst its leading exponents. It would be expected therefore, that these books would make a rapid and immediate impact on the rural studies literature, all the more so because all bar two of the authors (Ham and Judge) have conducted research on rural policy issues. Grant will probably be the best known with many articles on agricultural policy-making, a recent book on dairy policy (Grant, 1991) and current ESRC funded research on agricultural credit policy. Smith too is well known for his work on agricultural politics (Smith, 1990) and both Hill and Jordan have made modest but
97
very useful contributions to studies of rural policy (Hill et al., 1989; Jordan et al., 1994). But if the bibliographies of de Gorter and Winters are anything to go by, the impact will be strictly limited. Insightful and, in the terms of most earlier approaches by agricultural economists, innovative, their papers may be, but derived from a detailed reading of the policy process literature certainly they are not. The sociology of crossdisciplinary work would make an intriguing study (no doubt someone somewhere has tackled the subject) - why does de Gorter select Mancur Olson (1965) and Winters Graham Wilson (1977) as political scientists worthy of mention, but ignore most others? What are the reasons for not selecting the likes of Wyn Grant, Grant Jordan or Martin Smith? What are the disciplinary loyalties, modes of intellectual working, etc. which determine such outcomes? These questions imply that the reasons are to be found within agricultural economics, or rural geography, or rural planning, etc. But another answer almost certainly lies within the policy books themselves and what they tell us about the requirements of contemporary scholarship and publishing. Much has been made in recent years of the development of sub-disciplines which cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. We are told that new academic communities are coming into being - - rural studies being one - - in which the imperialist claims of the parent disciplines are disputed or, more likely, marginalised. But there are strong countervailing tendencies and parent disciplines still have a very strong hold. Research assessment exercises ensure that, as do publishers anxious to exploit the undergraduate market; and, of course, academics are equally keen to supplement their salaries with books that sell. Increasingly, in contrast to the old dualism of research monographs or text-books, we have a hybrid category of books, both research based and aimed at the undergraduate market. This combination means that they are inevitably strongly focused on their own discipline. With the exception of Hill's reader, all the books reviewed here fall into this category, although Grant's is nearest to the traditional student textbook and as always with his work, well written and approachable. The disciplinary focus is particularly apparent in Ham and Hill and in Smith and is far from absent in Judge. All three develop arguments based on a re-reading of key policy process texts and a delineation of key theories. Despite up-dating, Ham and Hill (originally published in 1984) continue to base much on an examination of the four-fold theories of policy making - - marxism, elitism, pluralism and corporatism - - so prevalent until the explosion of policy network analysis in the late 1980s, which is touched only in passing. By contrast the network approach is reflected strongly in Smith's contribution and, refreshingly critically, by Judge. In addressing their peers and presenting the fruits of research, Ham and Hill's focus on implementation no longer has its original novelty, but their general account remains one of the best available. Both Smith and Judge have opted for a version of bringing the state back in, eschewing the abstract theorisations of earlier state theorists and focusing instead on state actors, developing the ideas of state autonomy (Smith) and the parliamentary state (Judge) to capture this sense of the state as an empirically rather than a theoretically derived category. Both are effective and stimulating contributions and highly recommended to those engaged in studying rural policy processes.
Book Reviews
ence of family farming in a highly modernized, and commoditized agriculture. LISE S A U G E R E S
Manchester Metropolitan University
The Politics of Community - - A Feminist Critique of the Liberai-Communitarian Debate, Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, 268 pp., 1993, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, £10.95 pbk What is the relationship between social and political theory? To what extent can we justifiably impose social order upon the individual? Should pornography be made illegal? Does feminist politics commit us to any particular theory of gender? These questions, and many others, are raised by Frazer and Lacey - - two feminist lecturers in law and politics at Oxford University. Their work is a biting criticism of current political and social debate between liberals and communitarians and the impact that the debate has had upon women, followed by an exposition of their own political theory which encompasses feminist political concerns. Their motives are both theoretical and pragmatic: they argue that 'neither liberalism, nor Marxism nor social democracy in its dominant European form, can deliver the solutions to problems of childcare, sexual violence, the ideologies of popular culture and pornography, or the legal regulation of sexuality and gender'. From their feminist worldview, Frazer and Lacey attack liberal belief in the value of the rule of law (after John Locke), individual rights (after John Stuart Mill) and liberal theories of the person as an irreducible moral individual (after John Rawls). Such current theories of liberal individualism, and the present social order which it underpins, do not account for the social category of gender. 'The relationship between the liberal individual and his or her body is one of ownership and not identity' (53); the liberal individual is pre-social (pre-existing the body); disembodied and transcendent. This means that the liberal individual has no historical or social grounding or gender and is therefore not a useful concept for dealing with relations between classes, races, or women and men. The consequence of these liberal democratic notions is the alienation of political theory from social theory with the liberal pursuit of political autonomy. This, Frazer and Lacey find unacceptable. Social and political theories cannot be divorced from each other. This is shown by the treatment of rape cases. Rape - - unconsented sexual intercourse with a woman - - is an act making a social statement about the sexualization of the female body. And in a court of law, the political-legal system deals with the social statement of rape by examining the victim's past experience with men; questioning female refusal as consent; and until recently, denying the legal possibility of marital rape. In chapter 3, 'Liberalism and Feminist Politics', Frazer and Lacey continue their critique of liberalism by citing Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin's controversial campaign against pornography. MacKinnon and Dworkin seek to construct an anti-pornography law in the U.S. because pornography constructs women as powerless sexual objects. Rather than.overcome liberal graspings at
the First Amendment which protects freedom of expression (in this example the producers and consumers of pornography), MacKinnon and Dworkin raise the question - - what is the value of freedom of expression to different members of the community? If pornography silences women in certain contexts then pornography is anti-liberal. In this way, MacKinnon and Dworkin challenge the resistance of liberal 'tolerance' to freedom of expression by conceptualising pornography as a kind of harm which liberal theory should recognise and justify proscribing. To conceptualise pornography as sex discrimination frames 'the notion of pornography in terms which were consonant with the liberal notion of harm caused to individuals' (94) and changes the way that people think about pornography. Frazer and Lacey want to change the way that people think of their bodies, gender and labour, but to merely circumvent liberal principles is not enough; they follow their feminist critique of liberal individualism with a communitarian critique of liberalism, and a feminist critique of communitarianism, before reconstructing their own political theory. Communitarianism - - 'the thesis that the community, rather than the individual, the state, the nation or any other entity is and should be at the centre of our analysis and our value system' (1) - - is a doctrine mobilised against liberal individualism by many feminists who emphasise the collective nature of social life with universal health care, the distribution of public goods and wealth, and a degendered division of labour. This feminist perspective favours a theory of the social construction of the self and social reality akin to Richard Rorty's denial of truth and objective knowledge and vision of people as 'contingent selves, conceived as networks of belief and desire, and their practices'. Although Frazer and Lacey criticise such communitarianism for failing to construct any political analysis or theory of power, or to give gender the central place in political theory which Frazer and Lacey seek, they do adhere to the 'constitutive communitarianism' belief in the social construction of human nature and value when they write that 'social facts, social reality and social beings are socially constructed'. The authors spend so much time outlining feminist issues, perspectives and cases that their conclusion does not answer the many questions that they raise. The last chapter, 'Beyond the liberal-communitarian debate', is the section where they intend to articulate their own political and social theory, giving geflder the central place that they believe it deserves. This occurs in the last twenty pages of the book after they have criticised the dichotomised thinking of Western culture - - with polarities such as male/female, culture/nature, public/private - - and mentioned postmodernist reactions to liberal-modernity. Their political-social solution is to emphasise gender as a category of social differentiation, one that is fluid and unfixed of cultural meaning so that people may live together in diversity, 'without defining difference in terms of the "otherness" which entails political marginalisation and voicelessness'. In sum, Frazer and Lacey want to change the world by changing the way that people think and speak; a strategy which feminists have been employing for several decades with the relabelling of 'unwanted sexual attractions' as 'sexual harassment' or 'a husband's chastisement' as 'domestic violence'. They end up with a distillation of
Book Reviews liberal, postmodernist and feminist voices - - tolerant and multi-cultural, plural and contextual, maternal and matrilineal. The great value of their work is not to be found in the conclusion but in their well articulated, well researched exposition of the liberal-communitarian debate, a debate exemplified by many compelling case studies and skillfully located in the broader context of social theory. J O N A T H A N SKINNER Department of Social Anthropology University of St Andrews
The Politics of Economic Policy, Wyn Grant, 177 pp., 1993, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, £9.95 hbk The Policy Process in the Modern Capitalist State, Christopher Ham and Michael Hill, 210 pp., 2nd edition, 1994, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, £10.95 pbk The Policy Process: A Reader, Michael Hill (ed.), 422 pp., 1993, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, £13.95 pbk The Parliamentary State, David Judge, 1993, 236 pp., Sage, London The British Administrative System, Grant Jordan, 280 pp., 1994, Routledge, London, £13.99 Pressure, Power and Policy: State Autonomy and Policy Networks in Britain and the United States, Martin J. Smith, 262 pp., 1993, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, £11.95 pbk
There was a time when the arguments used by agricultural economists and rural geographers to explain policy seemed far removed from the messy world of real politics. No longer. In a recent collection of papers designed for undergraduates in Agricultural Economics the obligatory paper on policy claims that 'as in all branches of economics, technical analysis alone, cannot answer the normative questions surrounding agricultural policy'. Instead we have to look to 'the interactions of the farm lobbies, the bureaucrats and the politicians' (Winters, 1993). de Gorter (1994), addressing agricultural economists, asserts that the traditional view of government, exogenous to the economic system, seeking to correct for market failures and maximise social welfare, is to ignore the underlying political process. If policy processes are to the fore in the analysis of rural policy, the same is true in political science. From being very much the poor relation of political theory and philosophy, rooted in a rather dull public administration genre, the policy process approach has been re-born in recent years as a vibrant new sub-discipline, with the authors under review here amongst its leading exponents. It would be expected therefore, that these books would make a rapid and immediate impact on the rural studies literature, all the more so because all bar two of the authors (Ham and Judge) have conducted research on rural policy issues. Grant will probably be the best known with many articles on agricultural policy-making, a recent book on dairy policy (Grant, 1991) and current ESRC funded research on agricultural credit policy. Smith too is well known for his work on agricultural politics (Smith, 1990) and both Hill and Jordan have made modest but
97
very useful contributions to studies of rural policy (Hill et al., 1989; Jordan et al., 1994). But if the bibliographies of de Gorter and Winters are anything to go by, the impact will be strictly limited. Insightful and, in the terms of most earlier approaches by agricultural economists, innovative, their papers may be, but derived from a detailed reading of the policy process literature certainly they are not. The sociology of crossdisciplinary work would make an intriguing study (no doubt someone somewhere has tackled the subject) - why does de Gorter select Mancur Olson (1965) and Winters Graham Wilson (1977) as political scientists worthy of mention, but ignore most others? What are the reasons for not selecting the likes of Wyn Grant, Grant Jordan or Martin Smith? What are the disciplinary loyalties, modes of intellectual working, etc. which determine such outcomes? These questions imply that the reasons are to be found within agricultural economics, or rural geography, or rural planning, etc. But another answer almost certainly lies within the policy books themselves and what they tell us about the requirements of contemporary scholarship and publishing. Much has been made in recent years of the development of sub-disciplines which cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. We are told that new academic communities are coming into being - - rural studies being one - - in which the imperialist claims of the parent disciplines are disputed or, more likely, marginalised. But there are strong countervailing tendencies and parent disciplines still have a very strong hold. Research assessment exercises ensure that, as do publishers anxious to exploit the undergraduate market; and, of course, academics are equally keen to supplement their salaries with books that sell. Increasingly, in contrast to the old dualism of research monographs or text-books, we have a hybrid category of books, both research based and aimed at the undergraduate market. This combination means that they are inevitably strongly focused on their own discipline. With the exception of Hill's reader, all the books reviewed here fall into this category, although Grant's is nearest to the traditional student textbook and as always with his work, well written and approachable. The disciplinary focus is particularly apparent in Ham and Hill and in Smith and is far from absent in Judge. All three develop arguments based on a re-reading of key policy process texts and a delineation of key theories. Despite up-dating, Ham and Hill (originally published in 1984) continue to base much on an examination of the four-fold theories of policy making - - marxism, elitism, pluralism and corporatism - - so prevalent until the explosion of policy network analysis in the late 1980s, which is touched only in passing. By contrast the network approach is reflected strongly in Smith's contribution and, refreshingly critically, by Judge. In addressing their peers and presenting the fruits of research, Ham and Hill's focus on implementation no longer has its original novelty, but their general account remains one of the best available. Both Smith and Judge have opted for a version of bringing the state back in, eschewing the abstract theorisations of earlier state theorists and focusing instead on state actors, developing the ideas of state autonomy (Smith) and the parliamentary state (Judge) to capture this sense of the state as an empirically rather than a theoretically derived category. Both are effective and stimulating contributions and highly recommended to those engaged in studying rural policy processes.