Société québécoise de science politique

Globalization, Technology, and Philosophy by David Tabachnick; Toivo KoivukoskiReview by: William BuschertCanadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 38, No. 3(Sep., 2005), pp. 810-812Published by: Canadian Political Science Association and the Société québécoise de science politiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25165873 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 23:23

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Canadian Political Science Association and Société québécoise de science politique are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne descience politique.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.129 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 23:23:51 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

810 Recensions / Reviews

preach radical shortcuts to Utopian goals. If any set of Utopian goals is justifiable, it

has to be achieved through legality and respect for humanity.

Although original, the analysis in this book is at times stretched with regard to how central Hobbes' legacy is to Kant's efforts to construct a distinctive political and

moral project. Clearly Hobbes is one of many for Kant in a list of rival analysts, such as Machiavelli and Grotius. Nevertheless, the book succeeds as a cogent juxtaposi tion of two compelling giants of international and political theory.

Antonio Franceschet Acadia University

Globalization, Technology, and Philosophy David Tabachnick and Toivo Koivukoski, eds.

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004, pp. vi, 251

Technology is an underlying cause, probably the chief underlying cause, of the com

plex phenomenon of globalization. That much is virtually axiomatic among global ization theorists and social scientists generally. From at least early modernity to the

present, global flows of people, commodities, ideas and information have expanded, and sped up. In recent times, trans-border social networks and international gover nance have become increasingly important. Political decision making is increasingly directed at management of the planet as a whole; the world of politics is increasingly Earth. All of these aspects of globalization (and others besides) depend on the devel opment and deployment of technologies, and on the development and deployment of

technoscientific knowledge. Yet given the central role that technology plays in globalization, it is somewhat

surprising that, at least up until recently, there has been relatively little contact between

globalization studies and the philosophy of technology. Some such collaboration could be very useful for both areas of inquiry. Consider: Does technology develop accord

ing to a logic of its own, or does it simply appear that way from our perspective in

the present? If technology is an autonomous force, then, to the extent that technol

ogy is the independent variable informing globalization, our ability to direct and con

trol the processes of globalization may be limited, or even entirely illusory. Are

technologies morally neutral tools subordinate to human will (as many people seem

to suppose), or has technology become, for us moderns, a limiting and/or distorting way of encountering the world? If the former, we may need to look elsewhere for an

explanation of why globalization so often appears to us as a virtually unstoppable,

self-augmenting, quasi-autonomous force. If the latter, then we may have cause to

wonder whether technological development?commonly understood to be an index

of societal development and, some say, the global North's great gift to the global South?isn't instead a form of epistemological imperialism and a force for cultural

homogenization. Given the contemporary significance of such questions, this collection of essays

could not be more timely. Tabachnick and Koivukoski have brought together an impres sive assortment of papers by philosophers, political scientists, communication theo

rists and others, some well known, others less so. That might sound like a reasonably diverse pool of talent but, upon inspection, it turns out that most of the contributors are concerned with a fairly specific set of issues within the traditional ambit of the

philosophy of technology. This is apparently a deliberate choice on the part of the

editors. Both technology and globalization, they explain in their introduction, are

"expressions of our will to master the planet" (1) and, accordingly, both phenomena should be understood in essentialist terms as fundamental transformations in the very nature of human community and human existence. Yet, as Heidegger says, the essence

of technology is nothing technological. So, while "conventional wisdom" might hold

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.129 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 23:23:51 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recensions / Reviews 811

that in order to understand technology and globalization we ought to draw upon tech

nical expertise, economic data and the social sciences, a purely philosophical account

can do without their help, since it seeks not to solve particular practical problems but

to understand the whole (2). By some lights, this focus on "pure" philosophy may be

one of the great virtues of this collection, but it is arguably also its main vice.

That may sound like faint praise (or worse), but the virtues of this volume

really are quite considerable. The collection is divided into two thematic sections?

Community and Humanity?and while it is not always readily apparent how each

essay relates to its respective theme, what does emerge is a kind of sustained debate

over the questions of modernity, technological determinism, the autonomy of tech

nological development and, in particular, the significance of Heidegger's account of

technology as an "enframing" of reality. These are worthwhile questions, of course, but to a large extent they are pursued here at the cost of pushing some important issues surrounding globalization to the margins. I will not attempt to summarize all

of the essays in the volume in support of this claim, but instead will simply point to what I take to be some of its highlights.

The first and arguably the more thematically cohesive section of the book is

arranged around the general question of how or whether technology, especially infor

mation and communication technology, affects citizenship and community. Here Waller

Newell contributes a jeremiad against the decline of civic virtue in contemporary

society brought about by the twin forces of globalized technological efficiency and

postmodernism. For Newell, this decline is not mainly an artifact of modern technol

ogy per se, but is instead reflective of a more basic tension between autonomy and

community that goes back to the beginnings of modernity. Darin Barney maintains

in his carefully argued contribution that virtual communities mediated by the Inter

net may serve to undermine real communities: virtual communities are too easy to

join and to leave; they neither require nor promote the genuine moral obligation that

is the basis for a liberal polity. Bernardo Attias, for his part, argues that Marcuse's

revolutionary rhetoric of the "great refusal" has been co-opted by "information age"

capitalism, making the prospects of genuine liberation problematic. Against these

more or less pessimistic assessments stand the contributions of Don Ihde and Andrew

Feenberg, whose essays are the main exceptions to the essentialist/substantivist focus

of the collection as a whole. Ihde, in his usual folksy manner, suggests that if we

attend carefully to the phenomenology of technology and globalization, we see that

both the standard Utopian stories of total transformation and boundless progress, and

the standard dystopian stories of determinism and irrecoverable loss, are implausi ble, even ludicrous. Instead, the trajectories of globalization and of technological

development are partly matters of choice and partly of "non-choice," with conse

quences that are partly foreseeable and partly unforeseeable. In order to choose the

kind of globalization that we want, what is needed, says Ihde, is not so much "deep"

pronouncements about the nature of technology, but good institutional arrangements for critical hermeneutics and democratic decision-making in research and develop

ment. Feenberg's essay (one of only two essays in this collection previously pub lished elsewhere) takes up a similar theme, drawing on Habermas. We are indeed

always already embedded in the technological system, Feenberg argues, but that sys tem inevitably creates sites of resistance and, through human action and interpreta tion, it remains open to shaping and direction.

The second section (which includes essays by Trish Glazebrook, Gilbert Ger

main, Ian Angus, Horst Hutter, Charlotte Thomas and Donald Philip Verene) is more

wide ranging, less thematically unified and, therefore, difficult to summarize. I pick out one essay in this section for special attention, however. Arthur Melzer's admira

bly clear and carefully reasoned "The Problem with the 'Problem of Technology'" does indeed provide, as the editors claim, an excellent "general introduction to the

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.129 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 23:23:51 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

812 Recensions / Reviews

philosophy of technology" (4), but it is by now more than ten years old (it is the other previously published essay in the collection). That in itself is not necessarily a

problem?it would be churlish to suggest that there is nothing to be learned from a

decade-old paper?but it is noteworthy that constructivist, feminist and rational choice

theory approaches to technology that have become prominent in the last decade or so are scarcely represented in this collection. If someone new to the philosophy of tech

nology were to take the editors at their word and rely on Melzer's essay (or, for that

matter, to rely on this collection) as her introduction to the area, much valuable work would never come to her attention.

On the whole, Tabachnick and Koivukoski have put together an admirable and, for scholars already acquainted with the standing debates in the philosophy of tech

nology, probably very useful book. That said, I think there is still room in the litera ture for a similar but better collection, one more accommodating to approaches outside of Heideggerian and/or Straussian orthodoxy and which deals more directly with

specific issues surrounding globalization.

William Buschert University of Saskatchewan

Turbulence and New Directions in Global Political Economy James Busumtwi-Sam and Laurent Dobuzinskis, eds. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2003, pp. xiv, 234

Few would argue with the observation that the world economy today presents a more changeable, unpredictable and unrecognizable environment than a mere decade ago. In the mid- 1990s, at the heyday of the so-called "Washington Consensus," neoliberal

market orthodoxy appeared both predictably and triumphantly at global, regional and national levels: the World Trade Organization had emerged with great fanfare to osten sibly establish a new rules-based system for international trade; the North American Free Trade Agreement had been enacted to liberalize trade and investment across the continent; while the Maastricht Treaty had begun to exert fiscal constraint on the national policy priorities of European Union member states. Today's global political economic setting is by contrast ideologically unsettled, destabilized by a post-Cold

War, post-Seattle, and post-September 11 agitation, and beset by a host of new actors, emerging new power alignments and new capabilities. It is this state of turbulence and flux that is captured in this book, the varied contributions of which intelligently grapple with the challenges such unrest poses for practitioners and academic observ ers alike.

The book is based on papers originally presented at a conference, "Global Tur bulence: Instability in National and International Political Economy," held at Simon Fraser University, Harbour Centre Campus, in July 2001. The editors, Busumtwi Sam and Dobuzinskis, have organized 11 succinct and manageable chapters into three sections, which differently attempt to illustrate select examples of how glob alization processes have affected political economy in both academic and policy cir cles. Many of these chapters are quite frankly tough going for those uninitiated into the nuances of debates on the instabilities impacting political-economic trends at both the level of theory and practice. Yet the editors admit from the outset that the goal of the book was not to produce a simplistic, broadly applicable mega-theory that might accurately delineate the precise dimensions of the multi-layered changes to global political economy. Rather, what one takes away from this book are strong and rich analytical contributions that are generalizable beyond the contexts and cases examined herein; the collection impresses upon the reader that these documented instabilities are the product of political processes rife with contentious debate and unresolved ideological struggle.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.129 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 23:23:51 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions