Market Killing: What the Free Market Does and What Social Scientists Can Do About It PHILO, G. and MILLER, D. (2001) Longman, London: pp. 273. £18.99 ISBN 0-5823-8236 X (paperback)

✍ Scribed by Isaac Prilleltensky

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 34 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1052-9284
• DOI: 10.1002/casp.698

✦ Synopsis

Knowledge for Liberation or Liberation from Knowledge?

You're frustrated with the inability of positivism to make a valuable contribution to meaning in life. You're disappointed by the irrelevance of most of your studies. After years of harbouring frustrations and wondering whether university is the place to find solutions to human problems, you're ready to give up on higher education altogether. Sounds familiar? A lot of us felt that way when we took psychology in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Almost delusional by our thirst for relevant knowledge and our wish for practical solutions, we confused a mirage for the real thing. We thought that post-modernism was the oasis, only to find out that the waters were contaminated. We were excited by the promise but deflated by the product.

About 20 years after its promise, inspectors are going back to the site to see what it was all about. Some are inspecting with equanimity, others with a vengeance. Philo and Miller straddle the two. In their opening chapter they rescue the contributions of post-modernism and justifiably attack, in my view, the distractionism of the new school of thought. The editors embark on a pungent critique of post-modernism, accusing it of diverting intellectual resources from the cause of social justice and meaningful knowledge.

In my view, the editors rightly regret the slip from epistemological relativism towards moral relativism. They welcome the much-needed epistemological corrective introduced by post-modernism. They embrace the questioning of basic assumptions and the rebellion against scholastic orthodoxies that kept alternative epistemologies out of sight. But Philo and Miller reflect on the accomplishments of post-modernism not only from an epistemological point of view, but also from an ethical and political point of view, and that is where they found the contaminated waters. The toxic material contained academicism, obscurantism, sophism, indifference and apathy towards solutions in this lifetime.

Philo and Miller have a particular concern with the role of media and cultural studies in the intoxication and most of the book reflects that preoccupation. However, they make an effort to include academics from other disciplines, including geography, political economy, cultural studies and other social sciences. A chapter by Chomsky is particularly memorable for his methodical deconstruction of impenetrable prose and for his candid bafflement at the aims of the post-modern project.

Although the book seems to be about a critique of post-modernism from various disciplinary perspectives, some chapters offer a critique of the free market and not of post-modernism. In the end, the reader gets a mix of critiques, some of post-modernism and some of neo-liberal policies and globalization. What the various authors critique in both doctrines is their paralysing effect on any meaningful politics of liberation. Post-modernism has a hard time with liberation because its proponents have a hard time committing to a set of values, whereas the only liberation neo-liberals believe in, is liberation from non-neoliberal economics.

I recall a conversation with an eminent proponent of post-modernism in which I asked him what his personal values were. Befittingly, the first answer I got was 'what did I mean by values?' The remainder of the rather short conversation was a series of rhetorical questions on his part.

Andrew Gamble does an excellent job of refuting the received wisdom of neo-liberal economics in a chapter on political economy, whereas Chris Hamnett offers a lucid critique of post-modernism in studies dealing with geography and urban studies.