On Populist Reason
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project exclusively, whether in origin or development, as they were and still are premised on modernist evolutionary eugenicist theories of human sexual difference and heterosexual procreation. Tracing the inherently international nature of feminist and Enlightenment intellectual movement in modern China in this way, she shows the link between the development of such ideas and theories in Europe and Japan and the surfacing of a national tradition of feminism in China, still firmly placed within a contemporary globalized discourse seeking to stabilize modernist concepts of womanhood. This dynamics created the problem that theoretical projects ultimately simultaneously rest on and produce the analytical need for a categorically stabilized subject and frozen in time, but which in Barlow’s challenging and original feminist historiographic re-reading, also enables future potential and aim of gender equality that unites feminist theory everywhere as a globalized project. The book thus provides the reader with a comprehensively detailed, yet highly readable, insight into Chinese modern history seen from a feminist angle. The question of women in Chinese feminism should be of interest to anyone fascinated by the challenges an increasing globalized world poses to academic understanding and analysis in terms of the interrelationship between claims to universality and local knowledge regimes, as well as to those with particular interests in China and feminist theory. Elisabeth Engebretsen Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
On Populist Reason Ernesto Laclau Verso, London, 2005, 76pp. ISBN: 1 85984 651 3. Populism and the Mirror of Democracy Francisco Panizza (ed) Verso, London, 2005, 358pp. ISBN: 1 85984 489 8. Contemporary Political Theory (2006) 5, 362–367. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300255
One consequence of the so-called war against terror is that the line between ‘left’ and ‘right’ is ever more blurred. Opposition to the Iraq invasion, for Contemporary Political Theory 2006 5
Book Reviews
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instance, united Trotskyists, Jacques Chirac, the British Liberal Democrats, and the Pope; support for the war set Europhile Tony Blair against his EU partners and brought former dissidents such as Christopher Hitchens into the same camp as George W. Bush. In part this confusion reflects an increasingly evident tension between the politics of specificity (multiculturalism and identity claims) on the one hand, and a (liberal, secular) politics of universalism on the other. The French debate over the permissibility of religious symbols or clothing in schools is perhaps the clearest symptom of this tension. Arguably, disagreements over globalization have similar roots. Equally, however, the difficulty of locating political positions results, first, from the marginalization of class from political debate and, second, from the extreme malleability of political discourse in a mediatized era of sound bite and spin. For some, the current prevalence of uncertainty, ambiguity, and rhetori
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