American Political Science Review Vol. 91, No.

a framework, a program and sympathy, but inadequate skill. successful at describing his preferred alternative. We get little
Among Heyd's authors, by contrast, there is in general ample help in seeing exactly how the notions of real interests and
skill, moderate sympathy, but no framework or program. expressive rationality are to be spelled out, and Hollis does
Horton is informed and workmanlike. Kymlicka offers a not defend these ideas against their more obvious difficulties.
useful discussion of the relative merits of attributing rights, Hollis wants to give the social an important place in
and in this sense tolerance, to groups, as over against understanding rationality, but he has little sympathy for
individuals. Arguably the most important essay, however, is social constructivist approaches to science. His complaints
that by Gordon Graham, who establishes the crucial, logical have been made elsewhere, but they certainly bear repeating.
connection between the value of tolerance (best here to avoid Scientific beliefs, rational or irrational, may indeed be caus-
"toleration") and support for objectivism. I suspect that this ally explained, as the Strong Program claims, yet that does
is the beginning of wisdom with tolerance—the path that not preclude beliefs about the evidence, reasons, and so on,
leads most securely out of paradox and relativism. from likewise playing a fundamental role. Moreover, social
constructivism borders on being self-refuting: If all views are
just the result of negotiation and interest advancement, then
Reason in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of the Social so is social constructivist doctrine, and we thus have little
Sciences. By Martin Hollis. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- reason to believe it. Hollis lays out these kinds of difficulties
versity Press, 1996. 283p. $59.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. in charming detail.
Hollis's comments on contractarianism and political obli-
Harold Kincaid, University of Alabama at Birmingham gation more generally echo views perhaps most closely
Martin Hollis has written perceptively and eloquently about associated with Charles Taylor. Given Hollis's doubts about
the philosophy of social science for many years. This book formal notions of rational choice, he easily raises similar
brings together various of his essays spanning three decades, difficulties for the project of deriving morality from game
but it is considerably more than a mere collection. Hollis has theory considerations. His doubts about instrumental ration-
argued for the same basic picture of social explanation ality likewise fuel an interesting discussion of notions of
throughout his career, and these essays have been selected citizenship and community.
and shaped to make a continuous argument for that position. Hollis is least successful in arguing for his brand of
The essays are wonderfully written and nicely raise many rationalism. He holds that we are inevitably bound to inter-
fundamental issues in the social sciences. They are essays in pret the actions, beliefs, and so forth, of other cultures and of
the traditional sense rather than articles, however, so they others in our own culture as mostly rational. Moreover, he
lack both detailed references to the literature and elaborate claims we must find them rational not only in the sense of
argumentation. being reasonable in light of their beliefs but also in an
Hollis focuses on a tightly interrelated set of topics: the objective sense that involves truth and correctness. His
strengths and weaknesses of rational choice theory and game argument for this claim is the familiar one that interpretation
theory; the nature of rationality; the place of norms and cannot proceed without prior assumptions. Thus, he argues
social context in social explanation; the (alleged) a priori that understanding others is fundamentally different from
constraints of rationality on interpretation; and the inade- understanding ordinary physical objects or biological organ-
quacy of contract accounts of ethics and political obligation. isms—we must assume subjects are rational in a full-bodied
Among his main claims are that (1) instrumentalist notions of objective sense. This argument is suspicious at every turn.
rationality are inherently flawed; (2) substantive accounts of First, all natural science depends on prior background knowl-
rationality are inevitable, must make use of some notion such edge, so such holism cannot by itself show that there is
as "real interest," and must leave a place for socially defined something fundamentally special about interpreting human
norms, habits, and expressive action; (3) interpreting the beings. Second, there is an exhaustive literature, which Hollis
meanings, desires, beliefs, and so forth, of others cannot be ignores, arguing quite convincingly that principles of chari-
done without a priori constraints of rationality; and (4) these ty—"make the other person rational"—are empirically war-
previous points help show, among other things, why contrac- ranted if they are warranted at all. We can sometimes have
tarian notions of ethics are misguided and why social con- good reason not to interpret others in a way that makes them
structivist views in sociology of knowledge cannot be right. as rational as possible. Indeed, Hollis's own discussions of
Hollis's most sustained discussion targets rational choice rationality should have led him to this conclusion. He points
theory and game theory spin-offs. His complaints are serious out repeatedly how difficult it is to come up with any purely
though well known, no doubt in part because of his own work formal and general rules of rationality—much of his critique
over the years. Rational choice explanations tend to be either of rational choice theory and game theory depends on this
plausible but trivial or interesting but empirically false. When point. But if we have no clear substantive notion of ration-
rationality requires only the usual coherence requirements on ality, it is quite hard to see how we can even make sense of
preferences taken as given, then rational choice explanations the claim that we must interpret so as to maximize rationality.
are best partial explanations, for by taking preferences and
social contexts as given, much that is important is left
unexplained. Moreover, this thin notion of rationality fre- Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market and the
quently cannot even give us determinate results, as Hollis Grundrisse. By Thomas M. Kemple. Stanford: Stanford
nicely illustrates by use of various paradoxes from game University Press, 1995. 274p. $35.00.
theory. If rational choice goes beyond the purely formal
notion of rationality, it can indeed say more, but then we Brian J. Shaw, Davidson College
must buy into the egoism and individualism it assumes. Hollis Two decades ago Perry Anderson (Considerations on Western
thinks a more helpful notion of rationality for the social Marxism, 1976) argued that the triple catastrophe of Stalin-
sciences will, indeed, be a substantive one, but one that builds ism, Nazism, and Keynesianism had prompted the fatal
in social context, describes real interests, and sees action as retreat of Marxism from the revolutionary praxis of Lenin
expressive rather than merely a means to external ends. and Trotsky to the academic (and defeatist) "Western Marx-
Though most of Hollis's criticisms are telling, he is much less ism" of Lukacs, Adorno, Sartre, Colletti, and others. Today,

171
Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY
the ignominious collapse of "actually existing socialism" in
the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, the spectacular
hegemony of "democratic capitalism" throughout the Third
World, and the thoroughgoing unfashionableness of Marxist
discourse in Western academic life have occasioned yet
another round of reflections on Marxism's prospects (if any).
Derrida's Specters of Marx (1994), Aaronson's After Marxism
(1994), Giddens's Beyond Left and Right (1995), and Whither
Marxism! (1994), a collection of essays edited by Magnus and
Cullenberg, number among the more notable.
Less well-known than these authors, Thomas Kemple also
wonders what insights Marx might still afford into contem-
porary capitalist societies so radically unlike the industrial
economies and polities of his own day. "Our question is . . .
how [Marx] in fact arrived at this futuristic vision of our
present, what its general outlines are, and in what ways might
we interpret its implications" (pp. 22-3). Unlike Aaronson
and some others, however, who bid a sorrowful farewell to
Marxism, Kemple responds to queries like these enthusiasti-
cally in Marx's favor. While eschewing any labeling of his own
thought as Marxist, Kemple nonetheless credits Marx with
enabling us profitably "to glimpse our own dilemmas through
the political and sociological imagination that informed his
understanding of our common history" (p. 25).
Kemple proposes to liberate the implications of Marx's
thought for our own situation by undertaking an ambitious
and imaginative reading of Marx, especially the eight expan-
sive notebooks Marx penned during the winter of 1857-58,
which were edited and effectively published in the original
German only in 1953 as the Grundrisse. By treating these
notebooks as a "kind of 'pre-text' for examining the literary,
political, and scientific imagination of Marx" (p. 2), and by
reading them together with the work of a wide range of other
authors, including fiction writers Marx admired (Goethe,
Balzac) and later commentators on Marx (among them
Habermas, Lukacs, Jameson, Marcuse, and Baudrillard),
Kemple claims insights into topics of concern to contempo-
rary disciplines as diverse as philosophy of science, aesthetics,
and political economy. Indeed, far from having lost their
relevance, Marx's writings emerge as well-neigh prophetic,
illuminating events as remote from one another as Nixon's
abolition of the gold standard in 1973 and contemporary
appreciations of premodern iconic art. Marx's writings,
Kemple admonishes, "provide us with anticipatory illumina-
tions . . . of our own past, present and future" (p. 129).
Needless to say, in light of the tremendous transformations
since Marx's death in 1883, more than a few readers may
respond skeptically to assertions like these. To persuade
them, Kemple seeks to justify these claims not by arguing for
the continued "scientific" relevance of Marx's theories to
late-twentieth-century capitalism (something he explicitly
denies), but by pleading that the remarkable revelatory
qualities of Marx's writings emerge from readings of them
carefully attuned to their melodramatic, poetic, musical, and
even "science fictional" (p. 128) character. Thus, far from
taking seriously Marx's "profit law," Kemple urges us to
recognize its "fictional origins and even farcical intentions" as
"part of a polemical joke he is playing on his fellow political
economists" (p. 158). Kemple also recommends abandoning
Marx's labor theory of value in favor of a "leisure theory of
value" or even a "concept of tele-value" (p. 163), notions
which allegedly work better to explain the widespread docility
of workers within contemporary capitalist societies than do
any of Marx's own contributions to political economy.
In fact, attempting even to read Marx's writings as science,
or worse, attributing to him the intention actually to write
science, Kemple dismisses as hopelessly misleading. Instead,
172
March 1997
to glean from Marx's writings their fullest illumination of the
present situation, we must open ourselves to their "rapturous
delight" (p. 18), "hilarity" (p. 162), "delirium" (p. 30), and
"even madness" (p. 105). Far from seeking systematically to
grasp his own or any other age, "Marx's intention is . . . to
expose the irreducible phantasmic dimensions of all science"
(p. 137). Indeed, Kemple admonishes, this must be the case,
since only the "fictional dimensions of Marx's theoretical
abstractions" (p. 126) allow him—and us—adequately to
capture a reality that is itself socially constructed. The
ultimately literary character of Marx's writing captures best
the "fictionality of our sense of reality" (p. 114). Marx's
legacy thus resides not in any principles or empirical insights
but in a unique "theory and practice of reading" (p. 48) by
means of which he deciphers both literary and social texts.
In the end, how successful are Kemple's own readings of
Marx and other authors, and how persuasive the claims he
offers for Marx on their basis? My own judgment on both
counts is "not terribly." Most strikingly, while Kemple ap-
pears at first blush to have spent a great deal of time in the
company of an impressively large number of texts, his read-
ings appear almost willfully (wantonly?) careless. Sustained
readings and arguments to support them remain strikingly
absent; instead, Kemple hurdles from one provocative and
implausible assertion to another, pausing in most instances, if
at all, merely to refer the reader to clusters of authors and
texts (often without pagination), as if simply gesturing in their
direction were enough to establish the plausibility of his
claims.
Now, many of us who, like Kemple, enjoy the company of
Marx and his commentators also appreciate the richly literary
and aesthetic qualities of his writings. Almost half a century
ago, after all, Edmund Wilson (To the Finland Station, 1972)
rightly praised Marx as a fine satirist and even the "greatest
ironist since Swift," an opinion confirmed during the last
decade by Robert Paul Wolff's fine little book, Moneybags
Must Be So Lucky: On the Literary Structure of Capital (1988).
But to appreciate the literary qualities of Marx's writing as
more than mere accouterments to his broader purposes is
hardy to see in them the sort of "delirium," "raptures,"
"nightmares," and "madness" Kemple does. For this to
happen, Kemple must offer more than jargon culled from
hurried (and often similarly global) references to the writings
of poststructuralists like Barthes and Derrida, jargon which
might appear, at least to sympathetic readers of these au-
thors, both to authorize Kemple's claims and to immunize
him against the need to present arguments of his own.
Of course, Kemple knows that many readers will, in fact,
insist upon raising precisely such demands, and these he
seeks to deflect by adopting at least two strategies, neither of
which works especially well. The first is simply to declare that,
in keeping with the spirit of the Grundrisse, Kemple will
imitate Marx's "unruly methods," including his habit of
falling into frequent digressions and parenthetical commen-
taries and even deliberately "mistranslating his sources ac-
cording to his own interests" (p. 207). More substantially, and
again seeking to evoke Marx's ironic spirit, but actually
evincing more the influence of Derrida and Barthes, Kemple
simply renounces the very notion of faithful readings in favor
of declaring the "writerly" rather than merely "readerly"
quality of Marx's texts (p. 66). Marx's own "reading prac-
tices," Kemple insists, "require a reader's own inscription
into a conflict of interpretations" (p. 60). Accordingly, it is of
no consequence that other readers (like myself) might per-
ceive irony and richly figurative language in Marx's writings
but fail to glimpse the hilarity, madness, delirium, night-
mares, music, or whatever else Kemple thinks he sees in
American Political Science Review Vol. 91, No. 1

them. Any attempt to challenge such readings both hope- Manent first clarifies Tocqueville's understanding of the
lessly betrays one's lack of literary sophistication and even nature of democracy. Its core, he shows, is neither the social
voices an authoritarian demand for "magisterial" readings (p. state of equality, as TocqueviUe first suggests, nor the fact of
54). Not to yield uncritically to Kemple's interpretations, majority rule. It is, rather, the principle of popular sover-
apparently, is illicitly to refuse to "implicate" oneself in a eignty. This principle ultimately destroyed aristocracy and
"complex hermeneutical structure of multiple readings" (p. reshaped all aspects of human life according to its egalitarian
56). requirements. Its most enduring and revolutionary accom-
Kemple's refusal to explore sensitively either the conse- plishment was to reconstitute aristocracy's hierarchical rela-
quences of the hermeneutical strategies he adopts or the tionships on the basis of individual independence and auton-
kinds of arguments others have offered for them would be omy. Manent artfully uses Tocqueville's often ignored
worrisome enough (interpretation remains, after all, a noto- discussion of the master-servant relationship to illustrate how
riously contentious and thorny process!), but the problem this process works. Democracy did not eliminate this inher-
goes even deeper. At the same time Kemple renounces any ently unequal bond but put it on a contract-oriented rather
hermeneutical method which might invalidate his own "writ- than a status-oriented foundation. Thus, in this as in all such
erly" readings, or even demand that he actually defend them, cases, equality lessened both the social distance between the
he is not at all reluctant to disqualify others' readings. Thus,parties involved and their capacity to exert personal influence
for instance, Habermas's influential (and certainly debatable) over each other.
interpretation of Marx is simply (magisterially?) dismissed by Manent also offers a fine explanation for one of the most
Kemple in several pages as "rather simplistic" (p. 28), salient features of Tocqueville's liberalism: his doubts regard-
"limited," and reductive (p. 29); Baudrillard's "restrictive" ing the future of political freedom. Manent's TocqueviUe
and "ungenerous" reading is criticized for trivializing the found some elements which support and others which endan-
"subtleties and niceties of Marx's analysis" (p. 99); Robert ger political freedom in both aristocracy and democracy.
Tucker's analysis is both overly psychologizing and insuffi- Aristocracy honors reason and virtue in principle, strength-
ciently "attentive" (p. 54); and Althusser's reading is dis- ens social ties, and nourishes genuine political sentiments.
patched as essentially authoritarian. Indeed, far from gener- These, in Tocqueville's view, are essential prerequisites of
ously extending to others the interpretative license he grants healthy political life. At the same time, however, it oppresses
himself, Kemple rather patronizingly lectures these authors the many and denies them the opportunity to fulfill their
and the other particular (mis)interpreters of Marx he sum- natural potential. Democracy offers political opportunities to
marily discusses. Kemple also repeatedly declaims against yet all but weakens social ties, breeds indifference to politics, and
other, unnamed readers less "careful" (p. 47) and "versatile" renders the natural excellences suspect and vulnerable. In the
(p. 71) than he. end, TocqueviUe tips the scales of justice in favor of democ-
In the end, Marx's reputation and relevance may or may racy but warns that its triumph should give liberals pause.
not survive the traumatic developments that have prompted The aim of Tocqueville's political science, according to
the latest round of reflections on his meaning for us. But if Manent, was to check those elements of democracy hostile to
they do (and I think they will), this will come not from rescue freedom while strengthening those elements supportive of it.
missions like Kemple's, which seek to save Marx by trans- Tocqueville's Americans provisionally accomplished this task
forming him into a sort of postmodern or Barthean avant la by linking freedom to various forms of enlightened self-
lettre, a writer more concerned to "develop a style" (p. 114) interest and, above all, by using Christianity to spiritualize
and "the theory and practice of reading" than politically to democratic life and to reconstitute civic and moral virtue on
revolutionize an entire social structure. If Marx does re- a democratic basis.
emerge to speak to us anew, he will do so in the course of Manent considers religion the "strategic plane par excel-
engagements with texts both we and Marx himself might lence in the Tocquevillian doctrine" because TocqueviUe, in
more readily recognize as his than with anything Kemple his view, believed that faith alone could check democratic
presents us. excess from a vantage point external to democracy: the
natural human desire for eternal life (p. 106). Yet, as Manent
shows, TocqueviUe was fully aware that American Christian-
TocqueviUe and the Nature of Democracy. By Pierre Manent. ity had to compromise extensively with democracy in order to
Trans. John Waggoner. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield serve the cause of freedom. Tocqueville's Americans, who
Publishers, Inc., 1996. 148p. $40.00 cloth, $18.95 paper. were skeptics at heart, supported only those forms of Chris-
tianity that accommodated to their prevailing ideas and
Sanford Kessler, North Carolina State University interests and valued religion more for its utility than its truth.
Pierre Manent's book illuminates the core of Tocqueville's TocqueviUe approved of these arrangements, Manent be-
political philosophy as it appears in Democracy in America lieves, because they enabled American religion to remain a
and The Old Regime and the Revolution. Manent defines his potent social force.
interpretive task, as TocqueviUe did, by the nature and needs Manent clearly admires Tocqueville's subtle and penetrat-
of his audience. TocqueviUe sought to reconcile a dying but ing account of America's modified religion. He criticizes
still powerful aristocracy to the inevitability of democracy by TocqueviUe quite sharply, however, for placing too much
softening his portrait of democracy's dangers with a generally confidence in this particular type of faith and for failing, as a
bright account of Jacksonian America. Manent presents result, to provide a secure theoretical foundation for free-
TocqueviUe to an audience largely transformed by democracy dom. The "central difficulty" of Tocqueville's religious states-
and too prone to think well of it. He therefore highlights manship as Manent describes it is this: Religion's power over
those Tocquevillian themes which illuminate the often hid- people's souls depends on the quality of their attachments to
den democratic forces that adversely affect our personal lives it. It can only thrive, and hence be useful in addressing the
and political destinies. Although not withoutflaws,Tocque- spiritual ills of democracy, if people consider it true. When
ville and the Nature of Democracy is a stunning intellectual skeptics are self-consciously religious for selfish reasons, as
achievement worthy of a place in the first circle of Tocque- were Tocqueville's Americans, religion's moral efficacy be-
viUe studies. comes inextricably linked to selfish assessments of interests

173