Review by Choice Review
May argues that in rejecting Marxists' reductive economic understanding of power, the poststructuralist thought of French thinkers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard has an affinity with classical anarchism. Anarchists such as Proudon, Bakunin, and Kropotikin, however, still conceived power as a wholly suppressive force that restrains a fundamentally good human nature. The poststructuralists find power to be as creative and positive as it is negative, and reject the idea of a human nature. Since power is omnipresent and ineradicable, the problem is not to liberate some true human essence from suppressive force, but to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable practices of power. May contends that although poststructuralists themselves have been reticent about an ethical theory that could provide principles for making such determinations, their political thought, contra its critics, does admit of an ethical justification, which he attempts to sketch in broad outline. Whether or not one agrees with the conclusions of the book, it provides good synoptic overviews of the issues. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty.
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
