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Among the Poles. This Portrayal Now Appears to Require Revision. The among the poles. This portrayal now appears to require revision. The egregious failure of the EU to find a strategy for dealing with the Yugoslav crisis without turning to the United States (a matter mentioned only in passing in the book), coupled with renewed American assertiveness in a number of other foreign policy arenas, and the dampening and dividing effects of Euro- pean economic stagnation and high unemployment appear to have severely undermined any European claim to foreign policy leadership. Van Ham's suggestion that Germany's release "from the burden of national partition" (p. 213) would lend it disproportionate confidence and weight, and perhaps weaken its commitment to European integration, now also seems some- what anachronistic, given the new burdens of German unity. Finally, it is necessary to call attention to a stylistic flaw that seriously impedes the book's readability. The author insists on repeatedly using the present perfect tense (e.g., "Communist leaders have acknowledged the fact ..." - p. 125) when the past tense would appear to be what is intended and would be appropriate. While this practice is in most cases only a minor annoyance, at times it obscures the author's intended meaning. One wonders why this appar- ent editing failure was permitted in what is otherwise largely a well-written study. Thomas Baylis University of Texas at San Antonio Andrew Arato. From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of So- viet-Type Societies. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993. xiv, 342 pp. $45.00. When presented with collections of previously-published essays by a single author over time in a variety of fora, one must begin by asking whether the enterprise can be recom- mended to potential readers at all. For such anthologies are generally encumbered by repeti - tion, redundancy, and outdated inaterial - particularly where the author or publisher has not taken the trouble to update or revise. All of these pathologies can be found in the volume un- der discussion here, which for the most part is a selection of Andrew Arato's essays appearing, from the early eighties onward, in such journals as Telos, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Theorv and Society, and Journal of International Affairs, as well as in edited books. A few working and conference papers are also included, and two of the essays were written for this book. On the other hand, the selected-essays format does offer the reader an opportunity to share in the evolution of the author's ideas over time and, in this case, to follow the author himself in retrospectively imposing an order and logic on what might have appeared as a series of self- contained arguments and discourses. This, I think, is the main justification for this book at this time. Arato, a professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research, subdivides the es- says into a Part I which applies "Western" Marxism (i.e., non-Orthodox Marxism Leninism) and most particularly critical theory to the analysis of Soviet-type societies, and a Part II which deals with "the rise of civil society and democratic theory" in East Central Europe and the erstwhile Soviet Union. The two parts represent an extensive but unfinished project of formulating a criti - cal theory of Soviet-type societies on the basis of the fusion of a Western tradition, especially the Frankfurt School, and an Eastern tradition of neo-Marxist social critique in Eastern Europe. The project, the author informs us, had to be reformulated to remove an initial preference for Marxist approaches and hence for constmcting a new theory "out of the self-critique of a tradition fatally flawed." That fatal flaw was the equation of civil and bourgeois society and hence the centrality of class rather than civil society in the analysis of modern society. Part II, and the author's two major book-length studies (see A. Arato and J. Cohen, Civil Society and Political Theory [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 19921; and A. Arato, "Civil Society and Revolu- tion in the Transition in Eastern Europe" [Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, forthcoming]) of the past two years, are the outcome of his theoretical movement toward a democratic theory grounded in the concept of civil society and away from Marxism's idea of the centrality of class and the myth of the proletanat - in a word "the ... unacceptable normative and analytical assumptions of even the best version of Marxism." Able to operate effortlessly in the several languages (and literatures) of East Central Europe (as well as in English, German and French), entirely at home in the political cultures and aspira - tions of the area, and with an admirable grounding in the philosophical traditions of inter alia, the Frankfurt, Budapest and Starnberg Schools, the complex writings of Bahro, Castoriadis, Szelenyi, Lukacs and many others, Arato in these essays provides a wealth of insight and anal- ysis that consistently eniightens, provokes and challenges. The analytical standards and intellec- tual content of each piece are uniformly high. Although the limits of this review preclude a complete account of all fourteen pieces, a few in particular are worthy of note. The first three essays, or about one-fourth of the book, repre- sent a sustained critique of the Frankfurt School and its failure - with the possible partial ex- eeption of Marcuse who, however, was also in part an apologist - to produce a neo-Marxist critique of "authoritarian state socialism," an omission which he regards as a kind of "fundamen- tal theoretical ambivalence." He effectively, in my view, dismisses Marcuse's much-cited 'imma- nent critique" by showing that it, "by presupposing the same normative parameters as the soci- ety criticized, cannot intend a radically different society." Of course, if this is so, then the auffior ought to be rather more critical than he is of Szelenyi's and Konrad's immanent critiques of Marxism. The second part approaches the problematique of civil society from a variety of perspec- tives. Three chapters trace relevant developments in Poland attendant upon the rise of Solidar- ity in the early 1980s, while three more examine civil society and demoralization, and a fina! chapter deals with social movements and civil society in the ex-Soviet Union. In this section in particular, a brief exercise in updating might have been of value, since so many of the author's insights are so apposite to post-1989 developments and hence invite comparison. Democratization in the East European context, Arato writes, following Bibo, Kuron et al., could begin in any of the relevant spheres of society: 'Thus the achievement of confessional freedom or a free trade union, of a workers' council or an independent peace group, repre- sents democratization even where parliamentary democracy cannot yet be put on the agenda." He develops the concept of a prerogative stafe (out of Ernst Fraenkel's dual state) which, en- joying primacy over all social spheres, can penetrate these spheres at will, thus crippling the functioning of a modern economy and precluding effective reforms from above. Hence the importance of relatively autonomous social activity from below - and the simultaneous diffi- culty of its penetrating the state-socialist system. And he examines two "projects" characteristic of the 1989 transitions, namely the elite-pluralist systems of party competition and the liberal market economies, and uncovers their innate dilemma: "The first of these actually tends to the demobilization of civil society either directly, or indirectly by reducing its influence to the nar- .
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