The present book by William L. McBride is included in Roman & Littlefield’s ambitious and promising series on New Critical Theory under the general editorship of Patricia Huntington and Martin J. Beck Matustik. It consists of sixteen essays and a book review, written between 1983 and 1999, which cover, among others, issues such as global injustices, the New World Order, rethinking democracy in the light of the Eastern European experience, consumerist cultural hegemony, and the globalization of philosophy. The essays collected in this book are an exceptional contribution to the reanimation of the long-forgotten topics of classical Critical Theory as well as a successful attempt to instill some hope into the scholars who still find this trend of thought relevant. They also serve as prolegomena to any future social and political criticism from a philosophical perspective.
McBride develops a solid argument, denouncing and refuting the common clichés circulating in the Western media after 1989, as well as in those philosophies condemned to be forever embedded in unilateral schemes of understanding. In some places, his criticism seems to take its subject too seriously, but this impression is soon dissipated by a number of ironic insertions, eloquently exemplified by his remark about NATO’s “humanitarian” war against Yugoslavia: “Perhaps someone in NATO had the constructive idea that, with so many factory jobs eliminated by the bombing, the next generation of Serbians would have greater opportunity to train for alternative employment as psychiatrists such as Julia Kristeva and Radovan Karadzić.”1 The ideological formulas that the author argues against are the ones that replace the “scientific” ideology of former times, enforced by the secret police2 and other oppressive agents of the state apparatus. Although, as McBride acutely observes, these restrictive measures affected relatively small segments of the population in the socialist regimes, targeting mainly intellectuals. Even in these cases, there was an elaborate antidote in the form of Aesopian language and code, which was used extensively both by the rulers and the ruled in the fields of politics, art, philosophy, and everyday communication.