Back-To-Back Review: Motives, Essentialism and Defending the West Pole
| Author | Colin Wight |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836708097036 |
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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BACK-TO-BACK REVIEW
Motives, Essentialism and Defending
the West Pole
COLIN WIGHT
Patrick Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the
Invention of the West. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
304 pp. ISBN 13: 978 0472069293.
A book review is not an obvious place to raise the question of what the role
and function of an academic discipline is, or should be. Yet, it is precisely
this question that frames my review of Patrick Jackson’s excellent Civilizing
the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. I have
known Patrick for some time now; an intellectual and personal friendship
forged over late-night Dionysian-influenced theoretical discussions, the
content of which will no doubt resurface in our respective reviews. I expect
Patrick to be merciless in his critique of those points he continues to dis-
agree with me about, and he would expect nothing less in return from me.
Before engaging in detailed critique, however, I want to set the overall
argument of his book in context and provide the reader with an overview
of his argument.
What we really have in Civilizing the Enemy are two books. Chapters 1
and 2 provide a compelling, albeit schematic, introduction to Jackson’s the-
oretical position; what he terms a ‘transactional social constructivist
approach’ (p. xvi).6 This is an approach to social inquiry that Jackson has
been developing with Dan Nexon and others for some time now. In some
important respects it displays similarities with my own approach, although
there are important differences. However, in so far as we both accept an
ontological starting point to inquiry and foreground the importance of
human agency embedded in social relations then we are certainly working
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through the same theoretical terrain. Chapters 3 to 8 of Jackson’s book
involve a detailed and often painstaking study of discourses surrounding
post-World War II German reconstruction and, in particular, the de-
ployment of a discourse of Western Civilization to produce and legitimate
certain politics outcomes. There are two ways to read these latter chapters.
On the one hand, they can be considered as an illustration of the power of
his proposed approach, and from this to draw some general, albeit contin-
gent, conclusions about the political deployment of what Jackson calls
‘rhetorical commonplaces’. Or, on the other hand, it may be that his theo-
retical approach is being used to illuminate previously unexplored aspects
of post-World War II discourses surrounding reconstruction in Germany.
By ‘rhetorical commonplaces’ I take Jackson to mean the discursive ways of
framing a given issue through the use of seemingly ‘natural’ and almost
commonsense frameworks of understanding that are ‘common’ simply
because they are taken as given. The key for Jackson, however, is that these
‘rhetorical commonplaces’ do not actually refer to anything ‘real’; hence
their deployment is then revealed as politically charged.7 The two
approaches, of course, are not mutually exclusive, and if the latter is suc-
cessful then presumably the theoretical framework is also vindicated.
However, there is a difference in focus between the two approaches that
has implications for how we should understand the aim of the book. My
own view is that chapters 3–8 do make a substantial contribution to our
understanding of the deployment of ‘rhetorical commonplaces’ and that
this book should be required reading not only for scholars interested in the
specific case study that illuminates Jackson’s more general points, but also
all those interested in public legitimating strategies across a whole range of
domains. However, I do not think the empirical chapters introduce any new
material, and the value of the empirical detail lies in Jackson’s interpret-
ation of it within his own framework of understanding.
Yet the value of...
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