Law as a Social System

Book reviews

After Habermas – New Perspectives on the Public Sphere Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts (eds), Blackwell, Oxford and Malden MA, 2004, £17.99, 184pp. The title of this book, for a start, is perplexing. You might imagine it to be about recent work inspired by Jurgen Habermas, the German social theorist. Or, perhaps, it may suggest theoretical developments since Habermas, on the assumption that his work of, say, the 1980s has been superseded by something else. In a sense, this edited collection does both. There are good summaries of Habermas’s original treatment of the public sphere in his book published in German in 1962, eventually and belatedly translated into English in 1989 as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, with the subtitle of An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Structural Transformation . . . is an historical account, a rise and fall narrative, delivering a very pessimistic message concerning how principles of public debate in what became liberal democracy have been eclipsed by manipulative public relations, commercial imperatives in the media and so forth. As contributors to this book acknowledge, Habermas’s linguistic turn of the 1970s resulted in him becoming more abstract in his thinking on communication, the orientation to mutual understanding and the division between life world and system. The original account of the public sphere given in Structural Transformation . . . has been challenged on several grounds, such as Habermas’s idealisation of a phenomenon that never lived up to its claims for inclusiveness and universal applicability. For Habermas, the public sphere did occur and remains of relevance as, indeed, a prime ideal of democracy, albeit historically with a limited public, propertied men and no women. Social criticism, almost by definition, depends on such an ideal of free and open deliberation in public affairs, otherwise criticism of how politics and its mediation operate today would be without any grounds from which to make the argument that there is, at the very least, room for improvement. This is much more important than nostalgia for a preferable past either imagined or real. © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148, USA.

Book reviews

After Habermas is reminiscent of Samantha Ashenden and David Owen’s edited collection of just a couple of years ago, Foucault Contra Habermas, which used Habermas as a whipping boy for establishing the superiority of Foucauldian thought over Habermasian thought. Perhaps this volume should have been entitled Bakhtin (with a Dash of Bourdieu Thrown in) Contra Habermas. Bakhtin’s theorising – before Habermas came on the scene though unbeknownst to Habermas until quite recently – about how people communicate with each other is not dependent on Habermas’s fanciful notion of an ideal speech situation adapted from Freudian psychotherapy. Instead, Bakhtin celebrates heteroglossia, the sheer diversity of voices, rather than some strait jacket for how to speak properly in the name of transparent communication and the will to bring about mutual understanding, which is not surprising for someone sceptical of Marxist-Leninist conformity in the Soviet Union. Due recognition of how people actually communicate their diversity, taking into account irony and intractable differences, for instance, are to be encouraged but surely the baby of better communication does not have to be thrown out with the bath water of misunderstanding. It is curious how Habermas is treated by followers compared to the treatment of other great theorists like Foucault. Habermasians are an argumentative lot: there is no adherence to a strict party line, which does, however, on the other hand, characterise the Foucauldian church. The impulse of the present collection is to bury Habermas rather than ultimately to praise him. This is symptomatic in the occasional jibe, for example, by Ken Hirschkop responding to a latter day observation of Habermas that rock concerts may constitute a site of the public sphere: ‘I’m sure many people’s first reaction, however trivial or foolish, was to wonder whether Habermas had ever been to a rock concert’. The expression of hipness or, these days, coolness at the expense of Habermas is hardly a daring stance. We all know that popular culture is not Habermas’s forte. Still, arguing with Habermas is what the game is about if it is about anything, which is, of course, a thoroughly Habermasian way of carrying on. Habermas is good to argue with. In this book, there is, for instance, an illuminating discussion by Lisa McLaughlin on feminist debates with Habermas. Other topics include the Internet, social movements and the possibility of transnational public spheres. However, there is very little on the relations between subaltern counterpublics, in Nancy Fraser’s sense, and mainstream public spheres either national or international. Habermas’s later ‘sluice gate’ model of the public sphere whereby campaigning and oppositional movements force issues onto mainstream agendas that would not otherwise be there at all. Critical issues to do with ecology, gender and warfare, say, are not typically promoted from scratch by big business and big government. Furthermore, After Habermas has nothing much to say on what might be called the cultural public sphere, a notion that takes account of affective (aes600

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

Book reviews

thetic and emotional) communications in public, not only cognitive communications, the official stuff and nonsense of journalism. Over forty years ago, Habermas himself had something to say about that with his distinction between literary and political public spheres. The literary public sphere was not necessarily about the immediate topics of the day but explored deeper, longer run and more oblique matters than that, broadly speaking, to do with life, art and rest of it. The cultural public sphere today is not confined to the complexities of high art and literary disputation. It has its populist aspects too. Carnivalesque acting out in public demonstrations by sections of the global justice movement is an obvious case in point. Less pointedly, from a Habermasian perspective, we might think of Big Brother as a modern morality play, a disquisition on personal conduct in a post-traditional moral universe. That After Habermas is poor on up-to-date elaboration of Habermasian thought and light on substantive case studies deprives it of usefulness for students. Which is not to say that the essays themselves are without interest. They are, in the main, perfectly well written and thoughtful pieces. Loughborough University

Jim McGuigan

Law as a Social System Niklas Luhmann, translated by Klaus A. Ziegert, edited by Fatima Kastner, Richard Nobles, David Schiff, and Rosamund Ziegert, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, £75.00, 498pp. With the translation of Niklas Luhmann’s Law as a Social System one of the most important works of German legal sociology is now available in English – a work which surely rivals in significance the more widely renowned legal writings of Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas. Originally published in German in 1993, this work might well be viewed as Luhmann’s most important publication. It is one of a loosely connected series of books in which Luhmann accounts for the specific functions of the distinct sub-systems of modern differentiated societies; it should therefore be seen in the context of his wider systematic explorations into the social functions and operations of art, science, politics, religion and the economy. However, this work has a particular distinction in Luhmann’s overall sociology. Luhmann was originally trained as a lawyer, and his reflections on law combine the immense historical range and synthetic abstraction of his other inquiries with a very detailed practical and institutional knowledge of what actually happens in the interpretation and application of the law. The result is a piece of theoretical sociology, well supported by factual and historical analysis, which raises entirely new questions about the role of law and the rule of law in modern societies, and which disturbs many commonplace assumptions about such matters. As far as it is possible to summarize the content of this work in a few lines, Luhmann’s basic argument is that modern society is characterized and con© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

601

Book reviews

stituted by an evolutionary logic of differentiation, through which the social sub-systems of politics, law, the economy, art, medicine, religion and education are differentiated out from each other and establish self-referential modes of communication for the fulfilment of their own specific internal functions. On this account, law is a positivized, operatively closed, and autopoietic sub-system of society, whose one and only function is to stabilize ‘normative expectations’ over time (p. 152) and so to institute legal expectations as a relatively constant reality of meaning against the disorganized environments to which law is applied. To accomplish this, law generates the ‘binary scheme’ or code legal/illegal to determine whether its normative expectations are fulfilled or disappointed (p. 173); by establishing this code the law also communicates information to itself and decides which are the social issues requiring legal regulation and which not, and the code thus provides the basic mechanism through which law avoids conflation with politics, art, economics, etc. On these grounds, Luhmann’s work has generated great controversy amongst legal theorists who think about the law within moral parameters or whose ideas about the law are tied to socially interventionist or transformative ambitions. Luhmann construes law, quite simply, as a contingently self-reproducing subsystem of society whose social functions are determined by law and by law alone, not by any external factors or substantial considerations, and whose communications relate to law and to law alone, not to broader social problems or disputes. He expressly denies that law can act as an instrument for social steering or for the direct implementation of moral-political directives, that it can transmit value-rational contents through society, or that its claims to represent or effect ‘justice’ are anything other than the ‘formula of contingency’ through which the legal system crystallizes its own paradoxical selfreferentiality and contingency, and so makes sense of itself for itself as a plausible or meaningful sequence of communications (p. 217). For this reason, Luhmann’s works in general, and this work most particularly, mark a crucial theoretical challenge to all academics and intellectuals (whether based in Law, Sociology, Philosophy, or Political Science) who employ moral-normative or purposive categories when thinking about the law, and who accept at face value the belief that law is a privileged medium, which recognizes and reflects human demands and needs, and which can render all society accountable to these demands and needs. In this work Luhmann also sets out a series of important reflections on the relation between law and politics in modern societies, in which he strategically depoliticizes the legal system. By rejecting substantial-normative conceptions of law, he manifestly undermines the conventional liberal conviction that in modern societies legally formalized agreements have a direct and constitutive impact on the political order. Despite admitting a ‘reciprocal and parasitical relationship between law and politics’ (p. 371), he argues that law cannot regulate the exercise of political power, and that the legitimacy of political power does not in any way depend on its constitution through law.

602

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

Book reviews

At the same time, however, he also places himself squarely against Marxist and Weberian lines of sociological analysis, and he asserts that the modern legal order should not be viewed as evolving from the malign colonization or instrumentalization of law by a coercive or ideologically dominant political apparatus. Opposing both normative and critical theories of law, therefore, Luhmann insists that it is the differentiation of law and politics which forms the key underlying determinant of modern societies, and of modern democracies. This differentiation, to be sure, might involve manifest instances of interdependence or structural coupling between law and politics, through which law might formally check politics or impose criteria of generalizability or legal compliance on political power: such structural coupling, he explains, is usually expressed in the form of the legal state (Rechtsstaat). However, for Luhmann, law is always law and politics is always politics; it is simply impossible for the political system to expect law to fulfil politically programmed objectives or to solve political problems, and it is equally impossible for the legal system to insist that law should have a formative role in generating political power. Attempts to fuse law and politics are in fact always likely to trigger a de-differentiation, or a dissolution of the unity and self-reference of the two sub-systems, which is in turn likely to engender malfunctioning in both the legal and political system. Underlying the conceptual complexity and abstraction of Luhmann’s sociology, therefore, is always a neutral – and indeed, at times, surprisingly benign – account of how modern societies work, and of how law operates in these societies. Law, he argues, is nothing more than a formally normative medium whose functions are quite strictly limited and closely demarcated against those of other sub-systems, especially politics. Precisely for this reason, however, law also plays a crucial role in perpetuating in modern society a socio-political condition which is marked by a high degree of pluralism and democracy, by the absence of direct or violent political coercion, and by a variety of contingent liberties open to all social agents. Sociologists and political theorists who have wondered about Luhmann’s political orientation will thus find clear evidence in this book that Luhmann supports a political outlook which in some respects replicates and reformulates aspects of nineteenth-century Liberalism, insisting on the value of a constitutional separation of power and law, but reluctant to expect too much of law as a potential mechanism for distributing material goods, for guaranteeing social welfare and equality, or for maintaining broad-ranging societal control. Indeed, those looking for a concrete political message in Luhmann’s thought may detect between the lines of this work an important and theoretically striking attempt to reconfigure the core liberal ideas on the legal state, the constitution, the relation between politics and law, and the legal conditions of social autonomy and pluralism. Considering the importance of this book, however, it is deeply regrettable that this publication should, like many English editions of Luhmann’s works, be so badly marred by poor translation. There are many sentences in this book

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

603

Book reviews

which strain the recognized rules of English syntax, and there are some which make no evident sense at all. As a result, the complexities of Luhmann’s argument are often much more difficult to follow than in the original German edition. In addition to this, there are also a number of casual errors and mistranslations of basic German terms, which often distort Luhmann’s argument or even undermine the factual accuracy of his historical sociology. Obviously, there are certain mitigating factors which should be taken into consideration when expressing criticisms of this kind. Luhmann’s books are notoriously difficult to translate, and a perfect rendering of the sense and style of his work into English is clearly beyond the ability of any translator, however accomplished. Moreover, this, in my view, is such an important book that it is better to have a poor translation of it for English readers than to have no translation at all. Nonetheless, an individual reader or an academic library willing to pay as much as £75.00 for a long-awaited edition of the major work of a major sociologist, published by one of the most distinguished presses in the English-speaking world, might reasonably expect to purchase a translation in which every effort has been made to ensure linguistic precision, argumentative coherence, and accurate representation of the content of the original text. King’s College London

Chris Thornhill

Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer Loïc Wacquant, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, £14.52, 274pp. In 1988, in an effort to find an ethnographic foothold in an area of Chicago’s black ghetto, Loïc Wacquant enrolled at a local boxing gym. Professionally this led him to write a series of papers for which he has become well known within the sociologies of both sport and the body. Personally it led him to compete in the Chicago ‘Golden Gloves’ competition, and to consider professional boxing as a possible career shift. Body and Soul, the first of two projected book-length accounts, is the story of this personal and professional experiment. The book is divided into three sections. The first and longest, a revised version of an early (originally French language) article, is the most straightforwardly sociological. Entitled ‘The Street and the Ring’, it offers an ethnography of boxing as a craft and of the boxing gym as a distinct social world within the urban ecology of the ghetto. The second, ‘Fight Night at Studio 104’, is an extended discussion of one night’s boxing, where a number of Wacquant’s new buddies took to the ring. The final section, ‘ “Busy” Louie at the Golden Gloves’, is a more personal account of Wacquant’s own venture into boxing competition. I was captivated by the book from start to finish. It is a well-written, insightful and above all fascinating account which draws the reader in, combining sociological insight with good stories about strong characters. 604

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

Book reviews

Wacquant lets us into the world that let him in, giving us the same reason to respect it as he does. One of the most interesting aspects of the book, for me, was Wacquant’s attempt to produce an embodied ethnography; to explore the embodiment of a particular social world by subjecting himself, his own embodied being, to its regimes, routines, physical hardships and exigencies. It is only by way of ‘observant participation’, as he puts it, that he feels he will be able to unearth the largely unspoken and taken-for-granted corporeal constituents of the boxing world. He can analyse the pugilistic habitus, with its distinctive body techniques, perceptual schemas and embodied ethos, only by attempting to acquire that habitus. There is nothing quite like the lack of competence manifest by the novice to bring that competence and its importance to light. And participation and the learning it entails thus enable the ethnographer to reflect upon processes which normally elude the sociological observer because they are neither reflected upon or talked about. Not that participation alone is sufficient; the sociologist must still observe and must find ways to translate this unspoken world into discourse – a literary talent as much as anything else. For the most part I think that Wacquant succeeds here. He could have gone further. He could have given us more. But this would perhaps have detracted him from his other concerns and what he does present is very good. We do get a strong account of embodied practices and dispositions which are acquired and transmitted in largely unspoken and practical, rather than theoretical ways. Given Wacquant’s Bourdieusian connection, his ‘social capital’, comparisons with the latter are inevitable. Wacquant comes off favourably in my view. The tools of the Bourdieusian trade (habitus, capital, field, illusio etc.) are all here, alongside a number from interactionist sociology, and are set to work with good effect. Wacquant’s attention to context and process, his ‘thick descriptions’ (not a phrase he uses) and personal respect for his subjects moderate the use and impact of these tools, however, adding a richness and sophistication that is not always evident in Bourdieu, and offering a clearer path between and beyond the hazards of mechanism and utilitarianism that often intrude upon the work of the latter. The gym, for example, is clearly positioned both in terms of the boxing field and the urban ecology of the ghetto, just as surely as its members are positioned in the social space of American society. Wacquant draws our attention to these overlapping positions and to their effects. And yet in both explicit and seemingly unintended ways he reveals the particular gym he belonged to as a world with its own very specific history and characteristics, a world made and remade on a daily basis by a network of social actors. Moreover the network and its members each have their own personal histories, quirks and concerns. The gym is thus revealed as relatively autonomous from its positions. Likewise, the members of the gym stand out from their positions and from the generic dispositions constitutive of the pugilistic and black American habitus. They are shaped, they reflect their circumstances but there is more to them than this and this © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

605

Book reviews

‘more’ is drawn out by Wacquant, not necessarily explicitly but rather through the stories he tells. In a similar vain, Wacquant manages to discuss bodily capital and the wheeling and dealing that surrounds the boxing world without reducing action to strategy (as Bourdieu sometimes appears to do). Agents make strategic choices but they do lots more besides. Their strategies are only one aspect and output of their agency. Boxing offers some of them a possible way out of the ghetto through material gain, but it also offers them meaning, friendship, structure, respect and recognition. For some, boxing is perhaps the only route to these goods and is thus what Bourdieu calls a ‘choice of the necessary’ but this is not true throughout. Not everyone chooses boxing, even if it is necessary. Conversely, boxing is not necessary for all who choose to fight. We learn of one pugilist, for example, a young French sociologist with more cultural, symbolic and social capital than most who will read Body and Soul, who considers giving up his privileged position to become a boxer. He might have his gains to make by doing this. Indeed we could not meaningfully speak of choice if this were not the case. But these gains are not materialistic, even by the broadest and most cultural definition of materialism. They are born of an enthusiasm which animates every word of the book from start to finish, an enthusiasm generated in the gym by the networks and agents who populate it. It is no doubt true that Wacquant’s attention to local particularities detracts from the bigger picture that a different approach might have given us. One can imagine that Bourdieu would have mapped forms of pugilistic capital, elite gyms, champion boxers etc. on an enormous correspondence map, demonstrating statistically what Wacquant can only hint at. This is scarcely a criticism, however, since this would have been a very different project which would not have achieved what Wacquant achieved. Moreover, Wacquant gives us what the theory of practice arguably most needs at the present stage in its development: sensitivity to detail and context. In short, this is a great book which I recommend to anybody with even a vague interest in embodiment, sport, or boxing. University of Manchester

Nick Crossley

Sociology of Family Life David Cheal, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2002, £16.99, 192 + xipp This brief introduction to the sociology of family life has several strong points. In the first place, David Cheal seeks to emphasis diversity and complexity. This is reflected in his choice of the title ‘Sociology of Family Life’ rather than anything that refers to the sociology of the family. He reminds the reader of the diversity of ways in which people define family members and the varieties of ways in which family members relate to each other. His diversity extends to include gay and lesbian households with brief but useful references to intimate relationships such as friendships. Diversity is also apparent in the range of 606

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

Book reviews

theoretical perspectives that he discusses and deploys in his analysis of particular topics. Thus the chapter on ‘Money and the Family Economy’ adopts a broadly transactional approach, although not to the exclusion of a discussion of the structural constraints within which such transactions take place. Complexity is apparent in the way in which the book is organised. Generally speaking, Cheal avoids the more conventional headings such as ‘Couples’, ‘Parenting’, ‘Kin Relations’ and so on and organises his chapters around themes which frequently cut across more traditional divisions. Thus, for example, there is a chapter called ‘Entries, Exits and Voices Off-stage’ which explores the processes whereby individuals move into and out of particular domestic arrangements and considers those on the margins (fathers who no longer live with mothers, for example) who nevertheless have some kind of influence on these family processes. Other chapters deal directly with family complexity, family priorities and family environments. Sometimes, this reordering of the mainstream ‘family’ topics can make demands on the readers although at other times there are very real gains. Including an excellent discussion of domestic violence and abuse in a chapter called ‘Intimate Relations’ rather than giving the topic a chapter in its own right should cause the reader to stop and think about the darker side of intimacy. Another strength of this volume is its geographical scope. As in some of his other works, David Cheal has read widely and there are few areas of the world that are not referenced at some point in the book. He thus avoids the parochialism that is a feature of some British and American texts on family relationships. Yet he also avoids the dangers of suggesting some universal ‘family’ (from which one can select apt illustrations) by constantly reminding the reader of the importance of historical and cultural context. Thus there are brief, but useful, discussions of family practices in, for example, Palestine, Hong Kong and Finland. It is also worth noting that this is a thorough-going sociological treatment of family living rather than a set of more or less descriptive accounts. This means, for example, that the student will also find discussions of the comparative analysis of welfare regimes and, perhaps inevitably, ‘individualization’. But more importantly, this discussion lies very much in the tradition outlined by C.Wright Mills and others, one which encourages the reader to explore connections between his or her own experiences of family life and wider patterns of historical and cultural change. Each chapter begins with a brief statement of the questions to be explored and the key concepts which are to be deployed. At different points in the book there are boxes for the more advanced students, dealing with particular theoretical issues such as ‘rational choice’ or ‘social constructionism’. There is a ten- page glossary at the end and a very extensive list of references. The reader would be wise not to attempt to read the book from cover to cover but would probably be better advised to use the index and the glossary to follow up particular topics. There is much here that could be used as the basis for classroom © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

607

Book reviews

work as the discussions on particular topics (care, the welfare state, family violence, for examples) are concise, lucid and to the point. Some of the larger textbooks convey the illusion that there is nothing more to be said on the topic. Cheal, on the other hand, succeeds in providing the basis for further thought and analysis. Inevitably perhaps, in such a short book, there are some omissions or overbrief treatments of certain topics. Thus there are fleeting references to class differences and race and ethnicity but there could be a more systematic treatment of social divisions in relation to family life. Similarly I missed any discussion of the methods of family research. Nevertheless, this is probably one of the most useful introductions to the topic currently available and it could readily find a place near the topic of undergraduate reading lists. Keele, Manchester and NTNU, Trondheim.

David H.J. Morgan

Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi Zygmunt Bauman, Cambridge, Polity, 2004, £11.99, 104pp. Over the past few years Zygmunt Bauman has demonstrated a remarkable ability to deal with big issues in small books. Following on from his discussions of globalization and community, with this book Bauman turns his attention to the question of the personal troubles with identity. The book is structured as a series of responses (‘answers’ is too focused a word) to stimulations (‘questions’ it too strong a word) that were sent to Bauman by the Italian journalist Benedetto Vecchi (who also has also written an Introduction outlining main points of Bauman’s life and concerns). The argument builds on the insights of Bauman’s analysis of liquid modernity, and he contends that identity has become something about which men and women are presently vexed because the old ‘solid’ institutions that gave identity a measure of inevitability and evident naturalness (institutions such as the state as nation or as provider of welfare to citizens of the polity) have now either withdrawn or become indifferent about that role. Today, we are obsessed with identity precisely on account of the emergence of a condition in which no one and nothing else is bothered about it on our behalf. Our identities are no longer given us at birth, now they are something that we are consigned to construct for ourselves, on the basis of our own material and social resourcefulness. In solid modernity identity was possessed of coherence. One was born into a nation-state that would defend itself either culturally or through force of arms, and within that nation one was also born into other fixed categories of identification and identity, categories such as (that trinity banalised by sociological orthodoxy), class, race and gender. Identities were given not made, and therefore they posed no meaningful personal troubles, except for accommodation of the self within categories of identity that were themselves presumed to be obvious; and then the problems with accommodation were invariably 608

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

Book reviews

constructed as problems of the discipline of subjects and their ‘maladjustment’. But Bauman argues that with the neo-liberal withdrawal of the state from its solid modern functions, and with the puncturing of national identity by globalization, identity has lost its social anchors and is left to float free: ‘Identities were given a free run; and it is now up to individual men and women to catch them in flight, using their own individual wits and tools’ (p. 29). And that is exactly why identity is such a personal trouble and so personally troubling; it is at once something that we need to make, and it is a security for which we yearn (here then there are shades of Bauman’s understanding of the contemporary allure of community). He says that: ‘Once identity loses the social anchors that made it look “natural”, predetermined and non-negotiable, “identification” becomes ever more important for the individuals desperately seeking a “we” to which they may bid for access’ (p. 24). But that ‘we’ is also something that has to be made. It is not out there, simply waiting to be found. This thesis connects to arguments that Bauman has developed elsewhere, and particularly to his explanation of the extraordinary violence which has come to be a feature of local wars. By Bauman’s account, these wars (such as the war of the Yugoslav succession) are conducted so violently because their participants are men (and, let it be said, women; think of Abu Ghraib) who are trying to constitute an identity for themselves and in terms of the search for a we group within which they might feel existentially and morally secure (in the case of Abu Ghraib, that is the we-group of fun loving torturers). Consequently, these men and women engage in spectacular demonstrations of we-group membership and, in so doing, constitute an identity that is certain, although utterly indifferent about the fates of the others who are thereby used as fragmentary – and fragmented – means to ends external to themselves. In this book Bauman explores the personal troubles with identity through the metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle. He says that this metaphor is only partially correct. It is valid in so far as men and women, like the jigsaw puzzler, are attempting to construct something certain out of fragments, but it is invalid because the puzzler knows what the final picture is going to look like and, moreover, she or he starts the puzzle in the full knowledge that he or she already possesses all the pieces that are necessary to make the picture. Those are levels of confidence that are denied to men and women in liquid modernity. Men and women who are engaged in identity constitution can never rest and can never be certain that their task is complete. ‘We may say that the solving of jigsaw puzzles follows the logic of instrumental rationality (selecting the correct means to a given end); the construction of identity, on the other hand, is guided by the logic of goal rationality (finding out how attractive the ends are that can be achieved with the given means)’ (p. 49). And so men and women are fated always to be on the move, always trying to demonstrate that this we-group really is the absolutely final we-group to which they will ever belong (before the next one, anyway). © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004

609

Book reviews

That is the nub of the thesis of this book but, as with all of Bauman’s recent work, it needs to be read as more than a series of words that might – or might not – provide inspiration for empirically operable sociological concepts (indeed, that is exactly the way not to approach this book). This book is a provocation to the reader; Bauman wants the reader to work with and against this text in order to go about the constitution of its meanings and meaningfulness for her or him self. In this way, this text that is about personal troubles will be taken up by others and thereby it might become the basis of a chance of the constitution of a public issue about identity that avoids personalisation and, instead, enables a measure of inter-human togetherness. In other words, this is a book that seeks to escape its covers and to become something with which its readers engage, and which might help constitute its readers as a we-group that participates in respectful togetherness. As such, the conclusion to this review can only be of one sort: read and discuss this book. University of Portsmouth

610

Keith Tester

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2004