Book Review: Political Theory: Times of Crisis: What the Financial Crisis Revealed and how to Reinvent Our Lives and Future
| Published date | 01 August 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1478-9302.12100_27 |
| Date | 01 August 2015 |
| Author | Evangelia Sembou |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
the use of recall measures. More detailed coverage is
given to the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty
and the UK referendum on the alternative voting
system in 2011. Although each of these chapters offers
interesting insights I was left hoping for a more com-
prehensive picture of the democratic merits and limits
of referendum democracy. Qvortrup has much to say
about the comparative application of referendums and
I felt that the book would have benefited from further
analysis, with the author drawing out his conclusions at
greater length. That said, the book provides a great
deal of useful empirical information for readers inter-
ested in the subject and, in a lucid and entertaining
style, adds to what is sure to be a developing area
of scholarship for political scientists in the coming
decades.
Stephen Tierney
(University of Edinburgh)
Times of Crisis: What the Financial Crisis
Revealed and How to Reinvent Our Lives and
Future by Michel Serres (trans. Anne-Marie
Feenberg-Dibon). New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
75pp., £12.99, ISBN 9781441101808
This book, a translation of the 2009 French original, is
not what I would have expected. The reader might
have foreseen an analysis of the financial crisis. For this
reason, it is rather odd. It starts with a definition of the
word ‘crisis’, which derives from the Greek κρι
´νω
(krino) and means ‘to judge’ (p. x). In fact, the author
is concerned with when ‘the new enters by force’
(p. xviii).
In Chapter 1, Michel Serres sets out the six events
that have transformed the West since the Second
World War: agriculture, transportation, health, demog-
raphy, connections and conflicts. He then says:
[I]t is not enough to talk about the recent
financial disaster, whose loudly proclaimed
importance derives from the fact that
money and the economy have seized all
power, the media and governments. It
would be better to accept the fact that all
our institutions clearly and globally are experi-
encing a crisis going far beyond the scope
of normal history (p. 17; emphasis in
original).
For thousands of years, he continues, the ‘triad’ of
priests and clerics, warriors and producers has ‘shared
power in the Indo-European era’ (p. 18). Yet, institu-
tions remained unchanged (p. 20). Using the names of
three Roman gods metaphorically, Serres asks ‘[a]fter
Jupiter and Mars, will Qurinius leave the throne?’ (p.
23), where Jupiter refers to the class of priests and
clerics, Mars to the military chiefs and Quirinius to
producers (p. 21).
In Chapter 2, Serres argues that the game with
two players, which was characterised by a game of
humans versus humans, changes when a third party
intervenes. This third party is the world itself. ‘This is
what I call “Biogea”, ... inert and alive, water, air,
fire, the earth, the flora and fauna and all the living
species’ (p. 31).
In Chapter 3, the author maintains that it is the Life,
Earth and Environmental Sciences (LESC) that speak
Biogea’s own language (p. 54). Scholars can only speak
‘in the name of Biogea at the WAFEL [water, air, fire,
earth, life]’ (p. 65).
Serres concludes with an intimation of solutions to
the crisis. In just six pages he contrasts the hardness of
Biogea with the softness of the revolutions of writing,
printing and the computer. He concludes the book
with a promissory note: ‘I promise a long book on the
Soft for tomorrow’ (p. 72).
A drawback of the book is that it has an incom-
plete table of contents. Also, the book’s style,
which is aimed at a scholarly audience, is quite
idiosyncratic.
Evangelia Sembou
(Independent Scholar)
Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics by
Lars Tønder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
185pp., £19.99, ISBN 9780199315819
In 2005, the Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten entered
into the global collective consciousness when it
published twelve cartoons depicting the prophet
Mohammad. The cartoons remain a theoretically inter-
esting, if divisive, incident. These events, discussed at
length in the final chapter of this book, reveal the very
limits of what Lars Tønder sees as an unduly rational
approach to the subject of tolerance, which treats the
practice of being tolerant as a zero-sum game, caught
between neo-Kantian procedures of universal reason
BOOK REVIEWS 409
© 2015 The Authors. Political Studies Review © 2015 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2015, 13(3)
To continue reading
Request your trial