Book Review: General Politics: Trotsky: Writings in Exile
| Date | 01 May 2015 |
| Published date | 01 May 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1478-9302.12087_7 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
into the model of social development proposed in his
Theory of Communicative Action (several of the chapters
engage with this draft at length).
The quality of the contributions varies. Some echo
articles published by the authors elsewhere. Others,
however, particularly J. M. Bernstein’s trenchant secular-
ist critique of Habermas’ embrace of religion, offer new
perspectives and raise important challenges to which
Habermas must respond. Without a doubt the most
valuable piece of the book is Habermas’ own chapter,
where, in addition to his thoughtful (though by no means
comprehensive) responses to his critics, he clarifies his
use of terms like ‘genealogical’and hints at the direction
his thought is taking in the unfinished monograph.
A note on the physical volume: the review copy had
a regrettably large number of typographical errors, both
in the text and citations, and pp. 57–88 were bound
upside-down and in reverse.Hopefully these issues have
been fixed in later printings.
Jacob Abolafia
(Harvard University)
The Ethics of Immigration by Joseph Carens.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 416pp.,
£22.00, ISBN 9780199933839
In this book, Joseph Carens brings together his
longstanding work on integration and border control
practices into a very comprehensive debate on the ethics
of immigration policies. The raison d’être of the first
part of the book is that the legitimacy of a liberal
democratic state in regulating its borders vindicates no
absolute moral permissibility for every single immigra-
tion and integration policy.Thus, Carensstar ts his‘politi-
cal theory from the ground up’ (p. 9) on the policies by
assessing the social, economic and political rights
assigned to different migrant statuses, such as children of
immigrants, permanent residents, guest workers, irregular
migrants and their children, from an ethical perspective.
Carens successfully infers the limits of the different
inclusion and exclusion practices, both by grounding
them on democratic ideals and principles, and by appeal-
ing to the conventional morality that birthright citizen-
ship is based upon – namely, that it is protecting the
interests of the individual shaped by the scope of his or
her community, identity and prospects. Democracy as a
guiding framework in all of these empirically well-
established debates is therefore centred around the idea
of social membership based on ‘residence over time’ (p.
160) from which different levels of interests and claims
are assessed in relation to the length of residence.
In the last two chapters Carens questions the
assumption that the state has a discretionary right over
its border control,and he delineates the limits of exclu-
sion in first admission policies. For Carens,none of the
communitarian claims justifies the stance against open
borders, including the claims to sovereignty, security
and the prioritisation of communal bonds. Although his
idea of social membership does not contribute to this
debate, it is not incompatible with it.
The book in general, and particularly in the first
part, is designed as an inquiry into the moral permis-
sibility of different inclusion and exclusion practices
such as naturalisation and the conferment of socio-
economic rights, and therefore is not a deeply philo-
sophical work. To some extent the book is a critical
depiction of conventional immigration practices rather
than self-reliantly contemplative. Although there is a
pro-inclusion stance in each of the cases studied, it stays
within the framework of pro-exclusion arguments and
does not seem to leave adequate space for contempo-
rary moral cosmopolitan debates on immigration, espe-
cially in the first part. Regardless, this book offers a
very well-written and insightful introduction for schol-
ars of migration in general – not simply for ethicists.
Yusuf Yuksekdag
(Linkoping University)
Trotsky: Writings in Exile by Kunal
Chattopadhyay and Paul L e Blanc (eds). London:
Pluto Press, 2012. 238pp., £14.99, ISBN 978 0 7453
3148 5
Leon Trotsky’s later writings collected in Trotsky:Writ-
ings in Exile (1929-40) bring together a sample of
works from perhaps the most fruitful period of the
revolutionary’s thought. Published as part of the Pluto
Press ‘Get Political’ series of edited volumes of radical
thought, it is clearly aimed at readers new to Trotsky.
The editors have chosen shorter essays and speeches
rather than his book-length writings, arguing that
‘excerpts do not provide a full sense of his ideas’ and
their selections ‘provide a comprehensive introduction
to his essential theoretical and political perspectives’ (p.
5). An introduction by Chattopadhyay and Le Blanc
gives biographical details of Trotsky’s life,the Trotskyist
242 POLITICAL THEORY
© 2015 TheAuthors. Political Studies Review © 2015 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2015, 13(2)
To continue reading
Request your trial