The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions by Michael Walzer
| Author | Dubi Kanengisser |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702016663171 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
write (221). Indignation at the ways that power and money appear to intersect does
not imply that the council should be rejected—or even radically reformed. Vreeland
and Dreher do have some ideas for modest change. Most concretely, they advocate
allowing the immediate re-election of council members. That would require amend-
ing the UN Charter—no easy feat—but the authors make a convincing case that
the possibility of re-election would make elected countries more accountable, par-
ticularly in their regions.
If there is a flaw to this thorough and careful book, it is one endemic to much
modern scholarship on international relations. The insistence on scientific and quan-
titative analysishas brought needed rigour and empirics to a field oncedominated by
historians, lawyers, and philosophers. But that shift has had costs, including a pro-
fusion of scholarship inaccessibleto general readers and, in some cases, the elevation
of methodology above relevance. To a degree, this book suffers those defects. While
the authors write clearly, few general readers will venture much beyond the first
equations and regression analyses. More importantly, Vreeland and Dreher are pur-
suing a narrow question of limited interest even to specialists. Put bluntly: Does
exploring whether states receive a modest boost in foreign aid when they serve on
the Security Council merit book-length t reatment? The authors sometimes evince
more relish for the methodological hunt than conviction that the quarry matters.
Michael Walzer
The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015; 192pp. US$26.00 (cloth)
ISBN: 978–0–001–8780–9
Reviewed by: Dubi Kanengisser (dubi.kanengisser@utoronto.ca), University of Toronto
Peoples under prolonged foreign rule will tend to develop submissive traditions,
most likely mediated through religious institutions. To negate this submissiveness,
those elements of the people who strive for liberation are likely to negate religion
altogether, and they might do this by adopting an ideology from the very foreigners
they oppose. These secular liberation movements are engaged in a double struggle:
opposing the foreigners in the name of the primordial peoplehood; and opposing
the religious tradition through the ideologies of the foreign rulers. Yet while the
fight against the foreigners may be successful, the fight against tradition rarely is.
This failure to truly replace traditionalism with secularism enables the traditional-
ists themselves to undergo a transformation into a radical form. Radical religion
sheds its former submissiveness while maintaining its illiberal faults. The result of
the religious counterrevolution is a threat to the very secular revolution that
enabled it to hatch. This, in brief, is what political theorist Michael Walzer
terms ‘‘the paradox of liberation’’: in order to succeed in the project of liberation,
the people must be ‘‘liberated’’ from the very ways and values that they cherish. His
recent thought-provoking book discusses this paradox, rejects those explanations
502 International Journal 71(3)
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