Book Notes
| Date | 01 March 2006 |
| Published date | 01 March 2006 |
| Author | Håkan Wiberg |
| DOI | 10.1177/002234330604300210 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK NOTES 229
These two books, however, provide a very
readable refutation of such academic snobbery.
Both books are collections of articles from
distinguished journalists, and while they could be
read from cover to cover, it is much more enjoy-
able to dip into them from time to time. Brittan’s
book contains many of his Financial Times
columns, and some speeches, lectures and articles
from other publications. He covers a very wide
range of subjects from international security,
through the ‘holocaust industry’, to biographies
of eminent economists. Brittan, as a thinker, is
impossible to categorize. He supports some causes
associated with the left, such as providing
everyone with a guaranteed income, and is highly
critical of the arms trade. Conversely, he backs the
muscular US approach to terrorism and is a firm
believer in the utility of markets and the need to
avoid unnecessary restrictions on the movements
of global trade and capital. At one point, he states
that his ideas appear to be contradictory only to
people who believe in the outdated distinctions
between right and left. Indeed, his philosophy
could best be described as wishing to provide the
best freedom and welfare for individuals. To this
end, he criticizes both the left for restricting
economic freedom and the right for restricting
individuals’ freedom to pursue their values and
lifestyles of choice. Cooke, on the other hand,
could best be described as a conservative liberal.
Cooke’s column for the BBC (the eponymous
Letter from America, some of which are collected
in the book reviewed here), which he read out
once a week from 1949, became a British and
global institution and continued until a few
weeks before he died in 2004. They provide a
unique portrait of the ‘national traditions’ of the
USA. Cook was able to write with great alacrity
on a vast range of subjects, ranging from the
structure of the government, through the
development of the idioms and accents we asso-
ciate with American speech, to biographies of its
great writers and actors. Cooke could be
described as a conservative because reading his
dispatches over 55 years, one is given the
impression that most of the hype is wrong –
America really hasn’t changed that much. US
presidents have consistently failed to provide con-
vincing and consistent reasons for going to war.
Moreover, they seem to veer from the hyperactive
to the inactive. Critics of George W. Bush’s long
vacations should bear in mind Cooke’s descrip-
tions of other presidents, notably Coolidge, who
apparently used to sleep for 15 hours a day. Even
when Cooke does enthuse about change, he is
often wrong, particularly so when he assumes that
the end of segregation would lead to the end of
racial discrimination within a few decades. What
these two books have most to recommend them
is the sheer quality of their writing and the edu-
cation and clarity of thought of their authors. If
a reader of this journal is trying to sum up a
complex subject in a short space, then they could
do no better than reading these books for a master
class.
Nicholas Marsh
Buzan, Barry, 2004. From International to
World Society? English School Theory and the
Social Structure of Globalisation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. xviii + 294 pp. ISBN
0521541212.
Much of Buzan’s work is focused on conceptual-
ization – and provocation. Peoples, States, and Fear
was an inspiring challenge to peace research and
strategic studies alike. This book – for which his
alternative title is Peoples, States, and Transnational
Actors – critically analyses the English School, but
aims at reconstruction and promotion, thus also
challenging traditional American IR theory. It
develops a whole set of concepts as an alternative
to ‘globalisation’, which means anything and
therefore nothing. Human beings relate and
associate to form non-state actors (‘civil society’,
including transnational actors), what Buzan calls
‘first-order societies’ (close to how sociologists
tend to use the term ‘society’), and states. The
English School uses ‘international society’ for
what Buzan calls ‘inter-state society’, with states as
the individuals who associate with each other – a
special case of ‘second-order societies’. Like other
traditions, it also uses the term ‘world society’,
albeit incoherently, according to the author.
Hence, he proposes, rather, his own definition,
trying to combine both richness and rigour.
Inspired by Wendt’s constructivism, Buzan moves
from a succinct summary of the English School
and its weaknesses, through a review of other uses
of ‘world society’, the main conceptual opposi-
tions involved, the degrees of commonality in
second-order societies (‘pluralism’ vs. ‘solidarism’)
and the roles of institutions and geography. In the
grand finale, the new set of concepts is used to
describe today’s international society and how we
got there. In the preface, Buzan underlines that he
has learnt much from many. As he pedagogically
steers between the Scylla of conceptual and theor-
etical oversimplification and the Charybdis of
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