Just liberal violence: Sweatshops, torture, war
- PDF / 93,863 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 1 Downloads / 213 Views
Just liberal violence: Sweatshops, torture, war Michael Neu Rowman & Littlefield International, London, 2017, xi+149pp., ISBN: 978-1-7866-0064-6 Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00317-z
Michael Neu’s Just Liberal Violence is a well-written and timely book that develops a new framework for evaluating alternative defences of liberal violence. It combines high intellectual precision with accessible language and could thus prove an important resource for a broad audience, be it activists fighting liberal violence, students new to moral and political philosophy, or distinguished contributors to the theoretical debates on violence. As part of the ‘Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society’ series, Neu’s work presents a concise attempt at highlighting the common movements and strategies that make justifications of war, torture, and sweatshop labour not just problematic at a theoretical level; instead, they are shown to have a devastating effect on the world as they lend legitimacy to pervasive forms of violence. The book is therefore also an important reflection on intellectual complicity, which is the central topic of a concluding chapter that interpellates academics to take responsibility for the effect that theorising has on real-world actions and judgements. The first part of the book centres on the theoretical framework. Chapter 1, aptly titled ‘A Plea for Defiance’, introduces the overall argument and normative thrust of the project and provides a chapter outline. The second chapter covers a schematic guide to the reductive strategies that legitimate liberal violence. This schema is then put to use in the second part of the book, through a critical analysis of theoretical debates on sweatshop labour, torture, and war. Chapter 3 engages representatively with Benjamin Powell and Matt Zwolinski to articulate the problematic justification of liberal violence in relation to sweatshop labour. Chapter 4 considers the theoretical framing of defences of torture, illustrated in dialogue with Fritz Allhof and Uwe Steinhoff, and the fifth chapter evaluates interventions by Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan in just war theory, which similarly follow the reductive strategies identified in the first two chapters. Each chapter is informed by a sophisticated study of the difficult empirical contexts of sweatshop labour, torture, and war. The final chapter 6 turns to the complicity of Ó 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Review
the academic and uses Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go imaginatively to articulate how these reductionisms engender violence even without reverting to the use of physical violence. The book tackles forms of ‘just liberal violence’, by which Neu means theoretical defences of the use of violence to alleviate suffering and protect human rights that, on closer inspection, turn out to be nothing more than (liberal) violence (p. 1). Just Liberal Violence highlights that liberal defences of violence are beset by
Data Loading...
