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Irène Eulriet, Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture Versus the Culture of Power By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb. Polity Press. 2011. 200 pages. $22.95 paper, Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 1, September 2015, Page e7, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sot036
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Jeffrey Goldfarb's Reinventing Political Culture is both an imaginative and ambitious undertaking. It addresses key issues in the analysis of political culture, namely: what are the social and cultural foundations of political life and engagement? How do group-level interactions coalesce to effect political change? In which way does such change affect existing institutions and power relations? These big questions have prompted many publications and discussions over the past 10 to 12 years. Goldfarb's book goes to the heart of these debates, which entail a more fundamental interrogation: what concept of political culture does one need to grasp the relationship between a society's imaginary and the way power is exerted within it?
To tackle these challenging issues, Goldfarb sets out to analyze three case studies on the basis of a multidimensional analytical framework. He distinguishes three concepts of power: first, in the manner of Weber, power as an ability to coerce accompanied by different forms of legitimation (charismatic, traditional, rational legal); second, following Arendt, power as a capacity to act stemming from concerted action; and third, after Foucault, power as a truth regime permeating the whole of the social order. Goldfarb embarks on his examination with the help of such lenses, assuming that they can all be used simultaneously on a given setting and that they will also bring to light various counterstrategies.