This reminds me of Alex Callinicos's review of Anthony Giddens's book _The Third Way: the Renewal of Social Democracy_ in the July/August new left review. Giddens has been called Tony Blair's favorite sociologist and has performed at White House seminars. He has been influenced by Ulrich Beck who argues that in modernization, "structures which were constitutive of industrial society -- social class, the nuclear family, bureaucratic organization -- are progressively undermined by a process of 'individualization' which leaves the individual responsible for the construction of both her personal identity and her position in the labour market." Giddens also makes all the big problems -- like chaotic financial markets -- matters of risk assessment. This is the de-ideologization, in a sense, of politics which is reduced to a form of problem solving.
However, he doesn't fall for the worst excesses of Blair-Clintonism. For instance, he writes "the idea that education can reduce inequalities in a direct way should be regarded with some skepticism. A great deal of comparative research, in the U.S. and Europe, demonstrates that education tends to reflect wider economic inequalities and these have to be tackled at the source."
Judith Shulevitz, in her New York Times Book Review review of Faludi's _Stiffed_, demonstrates her ignorance on this issue (more likely, an ideological blindspot): "[Faludi's] worried about the high school graduates or dropouts, the regular guys who lack the training or even the personality they need to get by in a computerized, sales-and-service-oriented world. The quick comeback to that would be, well, she should have said she was talking about class; she claimed to be talking about gender. The more thoughtful response is that the plight of the male blue-collar worker does indeed require him to change, to develop qualities he might not have thought of as masculine, like the ability to communicate effectively, as well as qualities that are traditionally masculine but not working-class, like entrepreneurial skill. The real solution to that problem is to demand that America give him the education he needs to succeed, not to dismiss the opportunities available to him as meaningless or sinister."
That's funny how she connects entrepreneurial skill with masculinity. I've never considered that before. What is entrepreneurial skill, by the way? Faludi, from what I understand, associates masculinity with providing for the group or doing some sort of public service whether heroic, like exploring space, or more mundane like building stuff for the community (and this translates into the maternal for women thereby highlighting the human need (desire?) to contribute). I guess entrepreneurs do imagine they are contributing to society in some way. Shulevitz is pretty much lying, though, b/c Faludi does consider and is concerned about what our consumerist, "ornamental culture" inflicts upon the "successful."
In addition to Giddens's book, Callinicos reviews a collection of pieces, _Contre-feux_, by Pierre Bourdieu. Both Giddens and Bourdieu came to prominence in the 1970s. "Each was a critical social theorist, concerned to expose the roots of social domination as a part of what seemed -- though it was somewhat vaguely specified -- to be an emancipatory project, but, at the same time, sought to distance themselves from what they dismissed as left orthodoxy." _Contre-feux_ contains a contemptuous survey of Philippe Soller's evolution from a version of the Maoism fashionable after 1968 to support for Edouard Balladur's presidential ambitions in 1995. Of Giddens, Callinicos writes "Surprisingly, in the work of a theorist whose earlier writings were concerned to conceptualize the nature and different modalities of social domination, _The Third Way_ offers no consideration of the highly unequal structures of power in the contemporary world.... A cynic might conclude that the relations of domination cease to be visible to those who have decided to embrace them."