Book Review: The Harm in Hate Speech
| Author | Raphael Cohen-Almagor |
| Published date | 01 February 2016 |
| Date | 01 February 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929915609470m |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsGeneral Politics |
108 Political Studies Review 14 (1)
class struggle; no mean feat considering that
since the early utopian socialists, the world has
only become more complex. While After the
Crisis lacks a degree of nous in what is a com-
plicated subject matter, it is a valuable consid-
eration of the factors that could engender a
broader evolution of societal values in a post-
crisis world.
Nicholas J. McMeniman
(Australian Commonwealth Government)
Please note that the opinions expressed in this review
do not represent the views of, and are not associated
with, the Australian government.
Handbook of the International Political
Economy of Production by Kees van der Pijl
(ed.). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015.
752pp., £185.00 (h/b), ISBN 9781783470204
Publishers have discovered that while the mar-
ket for edited volumes has shrunk, the appeal
of the so-called research handbooks which can
be often regarded as reference works remains
relatively robust. It is therefore no surprise that
most major academic publishers now have an
extensive range of handbooks in their lists. The
book under review comes from Edward Elgar,
an independent publisher that specialises
in carefully focussed handbook titles. This
volume presents nearly 30 contributions that
examine the international political economy of
production, most often through an examination
of the interrelation of (globalised) production
and labour. This is perhaps not altogether obvi-
ous from the title but can be detected easily
from the table of contents, and is clearly set
out in the editor’s introduction and section
overviews.
If this might seem narrower than one would
expect, actually the volume does an excellent
job of expanding the analytical and disciplinary
focus than might be inferred from the title. This
is to say, Kees van der Pijl has organised a vol-
ume as pluralistic, multi-disciplinary and varied
in commitments as one would expect from con-
temporary pluralist ‘European’ international
political economy (IPE). Conversely, and rep-
resenting a slight departure for contemporary
critical IPE, the volume seems much less
obsessed with financialisation; a shift of focus
at least partly driven by the frequent analytical
grounding in labour issues (with case material
from around global supply chains). Moreover,
the breadth of contributions allows debates
about analytical priorities and theoretical com-
mitments to be balanced with a range of chap-
ters that base their analysis firmly on the
actuality of labour relations across the global
system. This comes together in the third section
of the volume where contributors explore,
across a number of dimensions, the manner in
which the real world of labour relations is both
reflected in social ideas but also is (re)produced
through sociality. Interestingly, in the conclu-
sion to the volume, penned by Saskia Sassen,
the question of contemporary financialisation is
re-integrated into the discussion, although (per-
haps) the reader is left to infer the more detailed
interactions between this final intervention and
the volume’s main body of contributions.
Overall then, no-one interested in the contem-
porary global political economy would fail to
find a number of the chapters of interest, although
few may find every contribution equally compel-
ling, and thus the book’s implicit place as a refer-
ence work is likely assured. Indeed, for scholars
able to afford the rather expensive hardback ver-
sion of the handbook, the volume offers an inter-
esting opportunity to survey the myriad ways
labour relations should be integrated into our
contemporary account of (global) political econ-
omy. This may aid sales of the paperback when it
no doubt appears, but until then, this volume is
well worth ordering for the library and recom-
mending to advanced students in IPE.
Christopher May
(Lancaster University)
The Harm in Hate Speech by Jeremy
Waldron. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2014. 304pp., £13.95 (p/b), ISBN
9780674416864
It is rare to read a book and think: This book is
a classic; its shelf-life is likely to last for many
years. This book is such a rarity. It is indispen-
sable for anyone who reflects on how liberal
democracies should address the challenge of
hate speech.
At the outset, Waldron says that his aim is to
offer a characterisation of hate speech laws,
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