Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

The central unifying theme in the Manuscripts is the alienation of labour under capitalist conditions of private ownership and its transcendence and abolition under communism. The doctrine of total emancipation which, as I have argued, was crucial in enabling Marx to assimilate ‘class’ and the ‘division of labour’ in his work is much more clearly articulated here and eloquently expressed. Communism, Marx argues, is ‘the positive transcendence of all estrangement’; the abolition of private property, communism: 
is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution.27
The vision of communism Marx unfolds in the Manuscripts derives much of its force from his remarkable analysis of the alienation of labour and is clearly underpinned by a preconception of truly human, free productive activity. Man’s productive interchange with nature is in fact taken as the defining characteristic of the species: ‘the productive life is the life of the species’; and Marx is careful to point out that while an animal can also be said to engage in production it ‘only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young’.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Many writers either glorify globalization or vilify it, particularly for its destructive environmental effects. In this book environmental sociologist Arthur Mol provides a more balanced understanding of the relationship between globalization and environmental quality. Mol bases his arguments on his theory of ecological modernization, which holds that although processes of modernization and globalization often result in environmental degradation, they also can encourage policies and programs designed to arrest degradation and improve environmental quality. Building on earlier ecological modernization studies that focused on Europe, North America, and East and Southeast Asia, Mol takes here a more global perspective. He also addresses the increasing roles of nonstate actors, especially international institutions, nongovernmental organizations, popular movements, and transnational corporations. After examining the confusion created by the failure to distinguish among globalization, global capitalism, and neoliberalism, Mol analyzes both globalization's destructive environmental consequences and its contribution to global environmental reform. Elaborating on the subject of reform, he focuses on three case studies, one involving the economic triad of the European Union, the NAFTA region, and Japan; one involving the relationship between the triad and developing countries; and one involving three developing countries: Vietnam, the Netherlands Antilles, and Kenya.

Globalization and Environmental Reform: The Ecological Modernization of the Global Economy

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, New York: Monthly Review, 2010, 544 pp. The Ecological Rift confronts environmental degradation with capitalism squarely in its cross-hairs. Acco...

The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth

Editors' introduction Introduction: science and pseudoscience 1. Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes 2. History of science and its rational reconstructions 3. Popper on demarcation and induction 4. Why did Copernicus's research programme supersede Ptolemy's? 5. Newton's effect on scientific standards References Lakatos bibliography Indexes.

科学研究纲领方法论 = The methodology of scientific research programmes

Today, to perceive the link between society and environment does not require that we engage in an effort of great abstraction. What remains paradoxical is that the intensity and scale of societally...

Sociobiophysicality and the Necessity of Critical Theory: Moving beyond Prevailing Conceptions of Environmental Sociology in the USA

Over the past few years, French sociologists Luc Boltanksiand Laurent Thevenot have developed a so-called “prag-matic sociology of critique.” In an e ort to overcome theperceived shortcomings of Bourdieusian “critical sociol-ogy”—namely, the relative neglect of the perspectives ofsocial actors—Boltanksi and Thevenot’s work turns to theways in which individuals justify their actions and legitimizetheir views to others in quite ordinary, everyday situations(see Boltanski and Thevenot, 1999, 2006). In his most recentbook, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, Boltanksigoes a step further to argue the interdependence of both crit-ical sociology and a pragmatic sociology of critique.On Critique stems from three talks Boltanski gave as partof the Adorno Lecture series at the Institute for Social Re-search in Frankfurt, Germany in November 2008. Each talkis divided in two, making up the six chapters of the book.Boltanski focuses on the sociology of domination throughoutand in doing so, he attempts to make explicit the relationshipbetween sociology and critique.In part one, Boltanski compares two sociological modelsof critique: Bourdieusian critical sociology and the prag-matic sociology of critique developed by Boltanski and hiscolleagues. Although critical sociology is concerned withthe role of reﬂexivity in both the discipline of sociology andeveryday life, for Bourdieu, the relationship between criti-cal reﬂexivity and practical reﬂexivity remains asymmetrical(see Bourdieu, 2004). The pragmatic sociology of critique,on the other hand, reexamines the distinction between criti-cal sociologist and “ordinary” actor. This pragmatist modelroots the capacity for critique in the situations where “ordi-nary” actors engage evaluation and criticism in their day today activities. Whereas critical sociology requires the criticto assume a privileged position in order to debunk the facadesof social reality (as for example in the traditional critique ofideology); pragmatic sociology of critique involves a plural-ism of critique. The main contribution of pragmatic sociol-ogy of critique, according to Boltanski (pg. 68), has been toshow how everyday moments of dispute have the potentialto shed light on the relationship between reality (that which

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Alexander M. Stoner

Papers

Sociobiophysicality and the Necessity of Critical Theory: Moving beyond Prevailing Conceptions of Environmental Sociology in the USA

Book Review: On Critique by Luc Boltanski