Claus Offe

Amazon's product description fails to forewarn about the marxist content in this book. The first five essays are awful marxist gibberish of 1970s vintage. The author's "marxist social science" supposedly describes the societal problems created by "late capitalism", whatever that is. In chapter 11 he tries to anticipate how marxists can turn the current "capitalist crisis" into a socialist triumph. I would have thought that Popper's critique had closed the book on such naive historicism 20 years before these essays was written. But needless to say, all marxist chapters in this book have aged badly, so I tried to waste as little time as possible on them by skipping selectively.

I would have just skimmed the entire book if it had been marxist through and through, but fortunately the author wrote essays 6-10 from a more neutral perspective. I liked essay number 7 in particular, where the author argues that democratic institutions are losing their ability to articulate and resolve political conflicts and that politics as we know it is shifting away from these institutions. The author proves to be an adept thinker once he releases himself from his marxist shackles. His diagnosis turned out to be overly pessimistic as far as European democracies are concerned, but he still makes a number of good general observations. At the end of the book there's a long transcript of an interview with the author which gives a fairly interesting view of the roots of 1970s German marxism.… (més)