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

World Risk Society

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

The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. By Robyn Eckersley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 344p. $62.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. Some argue that market democracies do not engage in war with one another, and therefore that if one promotes markets, franchise, and elections, or democratic-capitalist states, this will lead to international peace and cooperation. This idea has informed both the theory of international law (e.g., a right to democratic governance) and the practice of American foreign policy (e.g., Bush Doctrine). A counterargument is built on the suspicion that institutional political/economic process is largely independent of the propensity of a state to cooperate in international relations, and that a focus on democracy and markets as a cure-all for international dispute settlement distracts both theorist and practitioner from the real problems that plague the international system. These skeptics call the focus on the creation of democratic states the “consoling myth.”

The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty

From the combination of knowledge and actions, someone can improve their skill and ability. It will lead them to live and work much better. This is why, the students, workers, or even employers should have reading habit for books. Any book will give certain knowledge to take all benefits. This is what this an essay on liberation tells you. It will add more knowledge of you to life and work better. Try it and prove it.

An Essay on Liberation

forms of life characteristic of its (capitalist) context, while remaining bound to the immediacy of the forms of appearance of that context” (Postone, 2002: 79). Regarding modern Western science, Lukacs asserts: The more highly developed it [modern science] becomes and the more scientific, the more it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which it is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 104) Lukacs here criticizes the economist Tugan-Baranovsky’s attempts to explain production in purely quantitative terms. The formalism of bourgeois thought, according to Lukacs, has political implications: The reified world appears henceforth quite definitively—and in philosophy, under the spotlight of ‘criticism it is potentiated still further—as the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world vouchsafed for us humans (...) By confining itself to the study of the ‘possible conditions’ of the validity of the forms in which its underlying existence is manifested, modern bourgeois thought bars its own way to a clear view of the problems bearing on the birth and death of these forms, and on their real essence and substratum. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 110) Lukacs then works through the antinomies of bourgeois thought, as indicated by the problems and contradictions of modern Western philosophy. Here Lukacs focuses on Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself and the more general notion that the world can be known to us to the degree to which it is created by us. Lukacs (1971 [1923]: 112) regards the latter as the defining problem of modern Western philosophy. However, Lukacs is not simply interested in the intellectual history of Western philosophy. Rather, his aim is to 90 Tugan-Baranovsky’s student, Nikolai Kondratiev, would later become well known for his theory of longterm cycles of economic expansion and contraction. It is interesting to note here the connection to Arrighi (1994), whose theory of structural transformation within the capitalist world-system, which draws heavily from Kondratiev, I critique in chapter four along lines similar to, yet distinct from, Lukacs’s critique of Tugan-Baranovsky. 85 grasp “the connection between the fundamental problems of this philosophy and the basis in existence from which these problems spring and to which they strive to return by the road of the understanding” (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 112). When writing about the idea that the world can be known to us to the degree to which it is created by us, Lukacs (1971 [1923]: 112) indicates that the question of “why and with what justification” we should view this human-created world as constitutive of human reason never arises. According to Lukacs, the reason this basic question never arises can be explained with reference to the intrinsic relationship between social structure and subjectivity. To put it another way, Lukacs explains that bourgeois thought exhibits a “double tendency,” which is also characteristic of bourgeois society, and that it expresses this opposition between an objective material world and subjective consciousness: On the one hand, it [bourgeois thought] acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand it loses—likewise progressively—the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualification for leadership. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 121) Lukacs (1971 [1923]: 122) believes this problem is ultimately rooted in the division between theory and practice. Lukacs’s theory of praxis seeks to move beyond traditional subject-object epistemology. He indicates that both subject and object develop simultaneously through practice—and that this process is thoroughly dialectical. In other words, through praxis the subject both constitutes and is constituted by social structure. This practical activity, according to Lukacs, is also historically determinate. It is on this basis that Lukacs is able ground his explanation of the antinomies of bourgeois thought, particularly the opposition between objective matter and subjective consciousness, in the relationship between social structure and subjectivity, a relationship reflective of the contradictory nature of modern capitalist society: [M]an in capitalist society confronts a reality ‘made’ by himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural phenomenon alien to himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its ‘laws’, his activity is confined to the exploitation of the inexorable fulfillment of certain individual laws for his own (egoistic) interests. But even while ‘acting’ he remains, in the nature of the case, the object and not the subject of events. The field of his activity thus becomes wholly internalized: it consists on the one hand of the awareness of the laws which he uses and, on the other, of his awareness of his inner reactions to the course taken by events. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 135)

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Alexander Stoner

Papers

Sociobiophysicality, Cold War, and Critical Theor y: Human-Ecological Transformation and Contemporary Ecological Subjectivity