Book Reviews
relations as well as his disregard for the religious factor is remarkable- even, if I may say so, unhistorical. D OUGLAS S TURM , Bucknell University. B ARBALET , J. M. Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 119 pp. $29.50 (cloth); $1 1.95 (paper). B AUMAN , Z YGMUNT . Freedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 106 pp. $29.50 (cloth); $1 1.95 (paper).

T U R N E R , B RYAN S. Status. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 91 pp. $29.50 (cloth); $1 1.95 (paper).
These three brief volumes are part of a series titled Concepts in Social Thought, edited by Frank Parkin, that now numbers ten monographs. Each addresses a basic concept in sociology o r political science, beginning with a definition of the concept and then reviewing treatments of it. T h e monographs have the air of commissioned works and appear to be designed as textbooks, o r supplemental texts. As such they promise to fill a lacuna. T h e books are reminiscent of the Foundations of Modern Sociology Series published by Prentice-Hall, yet their subjects are somewhat narrower, and they d o not exhibit the influence of an editor determined to package the material for undergraduates. These three volumes were written by sociologists from the British neo-Marxist tradition. Beyond the fact that each deals with a single concept and runs to roughly a hundred pages of text, the three differ widely. J. M. Barbalet's Citizenship is more o r less an exegesis on, and update of, T . H. Marshall's Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950). T h e book begins with the basics, defining citizenship and reviewing Marshall's thesis, before going on to critique Marshall in the light of subsequent social changes and ensuing debates over his ideas. Barbalet is broadly sympathetic to Marshall's thesis that, while early citizenship rights supported the growth of capitalism by fostering free commodity and labor markets, as citizenship grew to include political and social rights it began to provide a challenge to capitalist class structure. He argues that Marshall perhaps overestimated the impact of citizenship rights on class structure and concludes that its effects have been quite modest. In short, expanded political and social rights (welfare entitlements) only alter the distribution of income, they d o not alter the "institutions of economic and social power which preserve class domination and exploitation" (p. 58), for example, private property. T h e book is cogently argued, and parts are quite elegantly written, however it is neither comprehensive, as a text ought to be, nor terribly original. Barbalet's discussion of Marshall is certainly didactic, at times even talmudic in its adherence to Marshall's text, yet his coverage of other theorists is quite thin. As the author notes in the preface, his empirical examples are limited to Britain, which is rather unfortunate, and his theoretical discussion is limited almost entirely to British responses to Marshall's thesis. T h e r e is virtually no reference to American o r Continental treatments of citizenship. Barbalet neglects novel treatments of the subject, such as Benedict Anderson's brilliant monograph on nationalism (Imagined Communities [London, 1983]), as well as treatments that are sympathetic to his own line of argument, such as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's

The Journal of Religion
Democracy and Capitalism (New York, 1986). Finally, Barbalet's own thesis, that capitalist class relations are not threatened by citizenship rights, echoes the common neo-Marxist assertion that material relations overdetermine political life, not vice versa. Bryan S. Turner's Status is a different sort of book. It is both more comprehensive and more analytic. Beginning with the classical differences between Marx and Weber on the nature of status, T u r n e r examines historical changes in the nature of status and explores the salience, and varieties, of status in modern settings. Turner's own perspective is fundamentally materialist (neo-Marxist), yet he tackles status from a decidedly neo-Weberian stance. T u r n e r draws heavily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to discuss status in anthropological and cultural terms. Life-style constitutes the core of status in modern societies, and T u r n e r does a nice job of distinguishing class from status and tracing the historical rise of status. T h e chapters stand on their own rather well, dealing with distinct yet related aspects of status. After the first chapter outlines the positions of Marx and Weber, the second chapter turns to a historical analysis of how the development of contractual relations was associated with the rise of achievement as the basis for status differentiation. Turner nicely weaves history and theory together here to explain how status came to overshadow class in the West. T h e third chapter examines status and political power, focusing on entitlement claims made by different status groups, and suggests that status-based entitlements may prove to revive particularism and reinforce the lines between status groups. T h e final chapter returns to theory, developing a synthesis of Marxist and Weberian perspectives that draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (and Frank Parkin). T u r n e r turns to the future here, asking what postmodernism and cultural relativism bode for the future of status distinctions. He concludes that status distinctions are here to stay, despite the fact that traditional cultural hierarchies may be disintegrating. A strength of this volume is Turner's pluralistic approach to the topic and his coverage of a wide range of literature. Zygmunt Bauman treats the topic of Freedom sociologically, as d o T u r n e r and Barbelet their topics, yet Bauman's task is the most difficult of the three, for there has been little sociological writing on the topic. Bauman's monograph is thus the most original of these three books, but also the most disappointing in some ways. It is not an effort at exegesis o r synthesis, but an effort to develop a theory of freedom by drawing on current thinking on the absence of freedom (domination). Bauman correctly points out that, while historically the condition of freedom is relatively rare, social scientists have largely taken freedom to be a natural state of affairs and thus have focused on domination and coercion. Bauman's own thesis on freedom is that, as a concept, and in reality, it can exist only in opposition to "unfreedom." Bauman's monograph is a critique of liberalism to a large extent. He argues that what we call freedom is in reality merely consumer freedom, and it has been juxtaposed against a single alternative, political-bureaucratic oppression. Consumer freedom takes care of the problems of social integration and social repro. duction, and it leads to a plurality of life-styles and beliefs, Bauman argues, but i~ does not breed political self-determination: " T h e paradox is, of course, that suck freedom of expression in no way subjects the system, o r its political organization to control by those whose lives it still determines, though at a distance" (p. 88) Bauman suggests that consumerism has elevated amorality to a sort of science, bl institutionalizing notions of market allocation and organizing all social relation

Book Reviews
as market relations. Thus the tenets of procedural fairness have prevailed in developed nations and have overshadowed concerns for substantive equity (at the national and international levels) and for true political self-determination. In essence, Bauman suggests that consumer freedom represents only a narrow form of freedom and is a historical construct that may well be ephemeral in its present form. Freedom challenges liberal notions of self-determination and offers a novel, nonphilosophical treatment of the subject. Bauman's main arguments, however, are drawn from current neo-Marxist thinking and d o little to push forward the frontiers of that line of thought. F RANK D OBBIN , Princeton University. L IGHTSTONE , J A C K N. Society, the Sacred, and Scripture in Ancient Judaism. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988. 126 pp. $1 7.50 (paper). T h e brevity of this work belies its importance in canonizing the sociological approach to the study of Judaisms in mid- and.late antiquity. Dr. Lightstone's methodology offers a grid for interpretation of biblical and rabbinic documents that consistently reveals new facets of those texts and resolves old cruxes with graceful ease. Page after page of this carefully structured book applies the disciplines of sociology of knowledge and symbolic anthropology to the role of scripture in ancient Judaism with brilliantly illuminating results. Lightstone insists that the social world behind the documents mirrors the structure of the texts and vice versa. Again and again he shows how in four historic settings-the "Restoration" community, the Hellenistic Diaspora, Mishnaic Palestine, and the Talmudic communities of Palestine and Babylonia-the canon of the Jewish community reflects its,worldview. Using analytic techniques made familiar to students of religion by Emil Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas, Lightstone demonstrates the "open" o r "closed" nature of commuhity and its sc;ipture. Lightstone makes his arguments most effectively in describing the earlier periods under study. He goes awry, however, when he contrasts and opposes Mishnaic Judaism with both Diasporic and Talmudic Judaism. By following too closely the idiosyncratic views of his mentor, Jacob Neusner, Lightstone offers a flawed picture of Mishnaic Judaism that forces him to depict its society in revolution against earlier Jewish communities. More perplexingly, Lightstone's Mishnaic rabbinism shows no continuity with the Judaism that follows and comments on it. Lightstone would have done better to recharacterize Mishnaic Judaism (pace Neusner) and focus on its continuity with and evolutionary status within Jewish social structures of late antiquity. ~ ' also errs in repeating'~eusnerYs e dictum "Midrash is to scripture, as Talmud is to Mishnah" (p. 83). Since this is a book about Judaism's relationship to its scriptures, these flawed characterizations and analogies are a serious detriment to fully accepting Lightstone's overall theses. Nevertheless, the work abounds with so many keen perceptions, brilliant insights, and felicitous applications of sociological method that it remains highly recommended. It is must reading for both students and scholars of Ancient Judaism. All future works on either the history of this period o r its biblical interpretation will owe a debt to Lightstone's thought-provoking contribution. B URTON L. V ISOTZKY , Jewish Theological Seminary, New York.