Book Review: Other Areas: On Rawls, Development and Global Justice: The Freedom of Peoples

AuthorErik De Bom
DOI10.1111/1478-9302.12016_38
Date01 May 2013
Published date01 May 2013
Subject MatterBook Review
Jean Drèze indicates that famine mortality is largely due
to economic and political arrangements, rather than local
food shortage. Expanding the causes of health to include
social conditions means that health policy cannot be
interpreted as merely the provisioning of medical care.In
sum, Venkatapuram argues for the expansion of the
concept and causes of health, with the consequence that
health justice entails more entitlements for each indi-
vidual and more obligations for others.
What we are presented with, therefore, is a remark-
ably broad understanding of health. Health includes,for
example, the capability to avoid preventable illness as
well as the capability to play and to have meaningful
social relations. Some may insist that the concept of
health should be restricted to its narrower meaning,
while still acknowledging the claim that health is
socially produced. Indeed, it may be argued that
research into the social determinants of health demon-
strates that most, if not all,of the other basic capabilities
identif‌ied by the author are instrumental to (rather than
constitutive of) the capability to be healthy in the
narrow sense. This book does an exceptional job of
bridging the gap between the social justice, well-being
and epidemiology literatures. It will be of considerable
interest to those curious about the interplay between
those literatures as well as those engaged in the debates
surrounding the capabilities approach.
Simon Wigley
(Bilkent University, Ankara)
The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism,
Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by
Kathi Weeks. Durham NC: Duke University Press,
2011. 287pp., £15.19, ISBN 978 0 8223 5112 2
By and large, the creation and dissemination of those
things we need and desire to reproduce ourselves is
predicated upon the exertion of human activity.
Indeed, Kathi Weeks argues, invoking William Morr is,
‘there might be for all living things “a pleasure in the
exercise of their energies” ’ (p. 12). However, this per-
suasive and well-written work of Marxist and feminist
theory argues that a very specif‌ic organisation of our
productive capacities has been both normalised and
valorised. This has occurred to such an extent that
‘work’ – and waged work in particular – rarely forms
the object of inquiry, let alone critique, in political
theory today.This book offers a corrective.
It opens with a discussion of the work ethic, as
theorised by Max Weber and others, along with a
consideration of its vulnerabilities, particularly in the
context of post-Fordism.This ethic haunts even many
critical approaches. Developing Jean Baudrillard’s 1975
critique of ‘productivist’ Marxism, Weeks demonstrates
how its limits continue to inf‌lect many feminist as well
as Marxist perspectives. Importantly, however, she also
points towards counter-currents within these traditions
advocating a ‘refusal of work’ – a strategy simultane-
ously ‘understood as a creative practice, one that seeks
to reappropriate and reconf‌igure existing forms of pro-
duction and reproduction’ (p. 99).
The book sketches out possible means towards
these ends in developing its notion of ‘utopian
demands’, touching on the ‘wages for housework’
campaign, the call for a guaranteed basic income and
the demand for shorter working hours, reclaiming
‘utopianism’ through Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope.
While there may be little gained in demanding
‘abstract utopias’ – ‘conjured up without suff‌icient
regard to present trends and conditions that could
render them possible’ (p. 195) – Weeks f‌inds potential
in those aimed at what Bloch calls the ‘Real-Possible’.
Demands for ‘concrete utopias’, she argues, are those
rooted by seeds already found sown in the present.So
while the demand for a basic income is a relatively
radical policy proposal, it retains a degree of plausi-
bility. Yet the potential eff‌icacy of utopian demands
also exceeds any capacity to win immediate reforms.
Wages for housework, for example, not only sought
remuneration, but an increase in women’s collective
autonomy. In this sense, it was ‘a demand for the
power to make further demands’ (p. 133). It is this
strategy – of ‘reformist projects with revolutionary
aspirations’ (p. 229) – that makes Weeks’ book not
only a substantial contribution to political theory but
also, potentially, to activist practice.
Ben Trott
(Freie Universität Berlin)
On Rawls, Development and Global Justice:The
Freedom of Peoples by Huw Lloyd Williams.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 242pp.,£57.50,
ISBN 9780230277823
As the title suggests, Huw Lloyd Williams’ book, On
Rawls, Development and Global Justice, is not only about
BOOK REVIEWS 249
© 2013 TheAuthors. Political Studies Review © 2013 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2013, 11(2)

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