Justice in the Risk Society
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to provide a powerful new analytical framework for the study of international relations, which nevertheless also retains the unique qualities and advantages of the classical English School tradition. By making the English School more theoretically self-conscious and situating its contributions within more recent developments in the International Relations literature, Buzan has turned a tradition, whose fortunes had arguably been languishing, into a vibrant research programme, which will have considerable appeal to a younger generation of IR theorists. References Buzan, B. (1993) ‘From international system to international society: structural realism and regime theory meet the english school’, International Organisation 47(3): 327–352.
Ewan Harrison The Queen’s College, Oxford, UK.
Justice in the Risk Society Barbara Hudson Sage Publications, London, 2003, xvii þ 258pp. ISBN: 0 7619 6160 7. Contemporary Political Theory (2005) 4, 353–355. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300209
Imagine Seyla Benhabib standing in for Jerry Springer, or Jurgen Habermas standing in for Oprah Winfrey, or Judith Butler standing in for Judge Judy. Imagine Michael Walzer presenting Neighbours from Hell or Carole Pateman presenting Wife Swap or Iris Marion Young presenting Crimewatch UK. These possibilities might spring to mind when reading Barbara Hudson’s Justice in the Risk Society because they capture the central problem the book establishes and explores. In the 1980s and 90s, sociologists such as Ulrich Beck observed that for a range of reasons the contingency of modernity had become reflexive. Because nothing could be guaranteed, life became a matter of more risk and less trust. Thus, if, for one reason or another, individuals reject the guarantees which the state and its institutions provide for them, they will have to bear the consequences themselves. Unfortunately, such an imperative has been very difficult for most people to swallow categorically. Instead, unregulated social life is generally viewed as a matter of getting caught or getting away with it. Above all, the trick is to find someone else to blame, and thus the moral advantage of someone else to fear. Contemporary Political Theory 2005 4
Book Reviews
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In the face of these attitudes the dominant modern liberal approach to legal practice and jurisprudence is powerless to establish its own legitimacy in its own terms because these are not shared, accepted or recognised by legal subjects except for instrumental or, as Rawls said, ‘wrong’ reasons. Moreover, the self-serving liberal assumption that individuals are rational insofar as they agree with its axioms and accept its conclusions is simply ignored without the bother of argument or debate. Devastatingly, whereas liberalism justified the appropriation of a monopoly of force on the basis that doing so guarantees individual protection, individuals now regard states and their systems as a resource to be used as a means to further their own individual ends and demand to receive at least the equivalent of what they cont
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