Critical Visions is a
collection of essays addressing various aspects and important figures of
contemporary social theory. Moving back and forth from Habermas and Giddens to Lacan
and Kristeva, the author, Anthony Elliot, considers sexuality, citizenship,
politics and ethics as issues central to social theory. The book is divided into
two parts, the first one dealing with important interventions in contemporary
social theory and the second one dedicated to central issues in today’s social
theory. In the first five chapters, Elliot discusses the main ideas of six
authors: Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Jacque Lacan, Cornelius Castoriadis, Habermas
and Kristeva. These authors are considered the most important figures in
contemporary social theory. Whereas in the case of some of them the reason why
they have been chosen (Giddens or Habermas) is rather self-evident, for others
it seems that the intellectual interests of the author played an important role
in selecting them as writers critical for today’s debates in social theory. While
I agree that psychoanalysis has a great potential for social theory, I am not
so sure if another author, one less interested than Elliot in psychoanalysis,
would include Lacan and Kristeva in a book on critical visions in social
theory.

The second part’s chapters (‘Sexualities:
Social Theory and the Crisis of Identity’, ‘The Reinvention of Citizenship’, ‘Politics
and Social Theory’ and ‘Social Theory, Morality and Ethics’) have several fresh
insights which shade a new light on the societal changes as well as theoretical
approaches of these changes. The discussion on citizenship (‘The Reinvention of
Citizenship’, Chapter 7), for example, is really interesting. The citizenship
based on the nation-state idea, says Elliot, is threatened nowadays by two
forces: globalism and localism. The nation–state is not anymore ‘the main
regulator of sociosystemic order and thus no longer politically accountable for
finding solutions to major and traumatic crises (p.152)’. Today citizenship is increasingly
seen as an ideology, ‘a kind of hangover from the Enlightenment’s privileging
of rationality and individuality’ (p.152). After examining the relationship
between personal identity and citizenship, and describing some modern and
postmodern strategies of identity, the author summarizes four new paths of
citizenship. Individualization of citizenship is one of them because, as
Elliot (following Becker) argues, most of the social welfare rights are
individual and they ‘call upon the individual kindly to constitute himself or
herself as an individual. ‘ (p.159) Another characteristic of the new concept
of citizenship is intersubjectivity: ‘Citizenship, in this sense,
liberates us from the prison house of self-referentiality and becomes a primary
social-historical site for explorations in both solidarity and subordination.'(p.160)
The increasing flow of immigration and tourists also altered some of the classical
dimensions of citizenship. The idea of ‘consumerist citizen’ is popular
nowadays even for governments, ‘as the shift from taxation of income to
consumption begins to take hold everywhere.’ (p.163) As a consequence of all of
the above, citizenship has to be comprehended from a global rather than from a
national perspective.

Although I enjoyed the book, there
are a number of things, mainly related to the structure of the book, that seem
to need some improvement. Firstly, coherence: despite the efforts of
building a certain structure, it is too obvious that the book is in fact a
collection of essays, written and conceived for various conferences or other
collections of essays. In the Preface the author stresses that he has changed a
lot the materials included in order to make the book a compact object, but
there are still problems. There are no interconnections between different chapters
as ideas from one are not followed up in the following and the structure of
each chapter differs from the preceding or the following one. For example,
chapters 1, 4, 7 and 9 have a short conclusion, summarizing the main ideas, but
none of the others follow this format. Obviously, one might argue that the
structure of the book is somehow ‘postmodern’, with no regularities, and this
could be an interesting perspective for reading it.

Secondly, there are some inconsistencies
between the first and second part. I assumed that the ideas of certain ‘central
figures’ (the object of the first part) must be at the same time, somehow
necessarily, ‘most important issues’ in social theory (second part).
Consequently, I expected that, if an author is dealt with in the first part of
the book (as a central figure), his/her ideas would be discussed in the second
part of the book (as central issues). However, this is not always the case. For
example, Beck’s ideas, an ‘important figure’ theorizing about risk and
reflexivity as presented in the first part of the book, are not considered as ‘central
issues’ in social theory.

As an overall, Critical Visions
is a really useful reading for those interested in understanding what is
happening with the social theory nowadays.

© 2003 Christina Bradatan

Cristina Bradatan is a Ph.D.
candidate within the Department of Sociology, Pennsylvania State University.
Her interests include family, psychoanalysis and mathematical demography.

Categories: Philosophical