Book Review: Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917712148 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsPolitical Theory |
Book Reviews 613
brings Müller to highlight the common logic of
populism: its antipluralism.
Populists, Müller suggests, claim that only
some of the people are really the people, and
that only they as populists can identify and rep-
resent them. In consequence, he submits, the
populist claim fundamentally contradicts the
pluralism of democratic societies, to which it
belongs that the demos is not seen as a closed
singularity but as an open union of diverse
individuals. By defining populism as a moral-
ised form of antipluralism, Müller echoes some
of the most influential definitions of populism
in the literature (notably those of Cas Mudde
and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser), but he goes
beyond them in offering a clear criterion that
allows separating populism from legitimate
forms of democratic persuasion.
Based on various examples from Viktor
Orbán in Hungary to Hugo Chávez in
Venezuela, Müller identifies in the second part
of the book three populist techniques for gov-
erning that illustrate populism’s antipluralistic
tendency: colonisation (or occupation) of the
state, mass clientelism, and oppression of the
civil society and the media. This development
of the argument convincingly proves that pop-
ulists are willing and capable of governing and
do constitute a concrete threat to democracy.
In the last part of the book, Müller engages
with the question of how best to deal with popu-
lists. While he recommends an increased readi-
ness for a substantive dialogue with those who
are unjustly dismissed as populists, he also
strongly advocates a determined vindication of
democratic values in confrontation with true
populists.
Müller’s clear thesis about populism’s anti-
pluralist core is illuminating. However, it
leaves the reader with questions regarding its
far-reaching normative underpinnings, which
are not investigated given the conciseness of
the work. That said, this is a study which is
excellently done and that provides an account
of how to understand and tackle populism in
modern democracies.
Michael I Räber
(University of Zurich)
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929917716098
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Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism
and Empire by Duncan Bell. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2016. 441pp., £29.95
(h/b), ISBN 9780691138787
Reordering the World collects together some
of Duncan Bell’s most notable writings of the
past 10 years, focusing in particular on British
imperial thought in the Victorian era. With the
exception of two chapters, these essays have
all been published previously. But it is a mark
of the quality of Bell’s scholarship, and the
integration of his thought, that their assembly
here works as well – indeed, better – than many
freestanding monographs.
Equally adept in the disciplines of political
theory and the history of political thought, Bell
moves seamlessly between them. Encouraging
us to understand the ongoing conceptualisation
of liberalism as bound up with its own self-
affirmed history, he shows that at crucial points
in its genesis, liberal thought was inseparable
from meditations on empire. Moreover, because
liberal practice was also bound up with real-
world imperial administration, it is hopeless to
attempt to understand either liberalism or empire
via single-track interpretations. One must be
simultaneously historian and political theorist.
The depth of Bell’s engagement pays off in
many rewarding ways, two of which deserve
special mention. First, a major upshot of the
work is that we must learn to move beyond
existing debates on the alleged opposition, or
co-dependence, of liberalism and empire. Much
energy has been expended upon the question of
whether liberalism is inherently imperialistic,
or whether the two can come apart (and hence
whether liberalism can transcend and repudiate
its bloody imperial past). Bell, however,
impresses the necessity of seeing that the varie-
ties of liberalism and imperialism – and in turn,
the varieties of imperial and liberal thought –
entail that no simple story of opposition or
integration can ultimately be tenable. Under-
standing the relationships between liberalism
and empire requires detailed study of a range of
complex cases, which often pull in different
directions. History is just too messy for neat
conceptual stories here. Adequate theory will
have to reflect this.
Second, Bell brings to the fore the thus-far
neglected importance of settler colonialism to
imperial thought, in particular how the fate of
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