Review of Owen Abbott, Social Theorists of Morality: Essays on Moral Agency

The rapid development of Internet technology has given birth to the prevalence of pan-entertainment, which shocks the mindsets of college students. Driven by capital, the essence of entertainment is increasingly distorted, utilitarian and vulgar. Students’ original time and space for learning and thinking have been encroached, resulting in deviations in their thoughts, and even negative effects on their value judgments and choices. In this regard, universities must fully play the function of education as the main body, fully use the Internet as a new communication tool, and spread positive energy and correct values, so as to guide students to establish a correct outlook on the world, life and values. It is necessary to firmly hold the dominance of students’ thoughts, improve their ideological understanding and raise their moral realm through diversified educational methods. Teachers should integrate the theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics into classroom teaching, and make students realize the seriousness and importance of decent thoughts through case analysis. Students should be guided to realize the negative effects of entertainment, and cultivate their critical thinking and independent thinking so that they can keep sober and make correct value judgments in complicated entertainment information.

Virtues and vices in the sociology of morality Social Theorists of Morality: Essays on Moral Agency. By AbbottOwen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 352 pp. $139.99 US (hardcover). ISBN: 978-3-031-75180-6

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The reality that one’s body is subject to random acts of state brutality is an organizing tenet of everyday life under military rule. At first glance, The Security Archipelago is an account of military and police corruption and brutality on, in, and through Brazilian and Egyptian bodies. But Paul Amar has done much more than lay out technologies of rule and their hold on the individual and collective body in this dense and exhilarating work.Through the lenses of the intensely overlapping realms of morality and urban politics, The Security Archipelago provides a new map that refigures how rule works and how it fails to work. By taking governance in Brazil and Egypt seriously, Amar exposes and critiques its heterogeneity and innovative force. For too long radical and conservative scholars of international relations and critical security studies have understood right-leaning policies and practices as unchanging. In a parallel way the lexicon of neoliberalism works as a shorthand to say everything and nothing at once. Amar uses what he calls the “heuristic device” of the human-security state (41) to trouble the staid authoritarian and the ever-illusive neoliberal.The human-security regime comes to bear as a grammar of legitimacy and power. This regime’s grammar is not better, more consensus-based, or less coercive than the preceding neoliberal regime. However, there is a lot that is new about it. It governs through new fusions of morality and security politics. It uses danger and desire to police the boundary of the human. It “hypervisiblizes” raced, classed, and gendered bodies as sources of danger precisely to render the political nature of hierarchy invisible.In effect, the human-security state “queers” identity, sanctioning people as subjects of social and moral panic. There is no nonqueer, nonraced, noncolonialized subject under these regimes. We see these queer publics, or “parahumans,” from sex workers in Rio de Janeiro to activists supporting survivors of sexual brutality in Cairo. In the face of this new grammar and technology these queer publics “everted” or turned the very logic of human security inside out to radically challenge elite and state practices.By detailing the shift in policy and state circles from freedom from want to freedom from fear, Amar makes interconnected arguments. First, military institutions are not synonymous with authoritarian regimes. Second, the security state is not the ontological opposite of civil society. Third, global governance does not solely emanate from the Global North. The radical wing of critical security studies has focused on the hegemonic North, rendering people in the Global South as either victims or causalities. Perhaps this is why the experts of victimology, as Amar calls it, failed to understand, much less predict, the Arab uprisings.In chapter 1 Amar illustrates the shift from an emphasis on “development” and “liberalization” to a focus on “security” as the main framework in formal sites of policy making. Chapter 2 historicizes the neglected era of urban modernism in the decolonizing decades of 1950s Egypt and post-1930s Brazil. Here we see the Associação das Travestis e Liberados, whose members destroyed their Brazilian national documents and appealed to the world community to affirm their citizenship. We take a trip to the forgotten history of Badʿia Masabni, the queen of Cairo’s vaudeville economy who was forced underground in the 1950s. Amar shows that by the 1990s elites, urban planners, police, and nongovernmental organizations worked together to police sexuality and remake Cairo and Rio as spaces for elite heritage and shopping. Sexuality politics here are not imports. They are historical and lived sites of contention and innovation.Chapter 3 presents the “heritage” bloc, whose practitioners seek to protect “humanity,” that is, the monuments and the tourists who appreciate them, from the “thuggery” and “dirt and noise” of working-class residents. Here we see Mohammed Atta, who in the decade before he flew an airplane into the World Trade Center designed an urban plan, replete with the gender and class segregation logics that were similar to the United Nation’s Development Programme’s “human-security” plan for the city.Chapter 4 is an exposé of the other September 11 in 2002, when massive prison uprisings rocked the city of Rio de Janeiro. This uprising was a show of force by drug traffickers and narco-dealers whose power emerged at the end of dictatorship in Brazil and has since flourished. This September 11 sought to contain Benedita Da Silva, the first black woman governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, and her allies. The streets became sites of battle, and Da Silva’s antiracist reformist challenge met its end.The human-security regime is not always victorious in this account. Amar’s interventions shine brightest in chapters 5 and 6. In chapter 5 Amar focuses on the “genital xenophobia” (171) of Operation Princess (2003–5), a series of militarized raids on private homes, sex commerce venues, and tourist sites in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. The tabloid media’s fascination with closed-circuit cameras caught corrupt police in the act of racketeering sex workers. Sex workers in turn began mobilizing and together with the tourism industry revived the profit benefits of “erotic nationalism” (178). Chapter 6 indicts middle-class and state feminism’s collaboration with state brutality in Egypt. Since the early 2000s, if not before, these elite and state feminists have harnessed the politics of respectability to demonize working-class masculinity, police public femininity, contain dissent, and amplify the police’s role in segregating the city along class and gender lines. But organizations such as El Nadeem and individuals like Nuha Rushdi manipulated UN doctrines and legal frameworks to challenge the politics of respectability.In these last two chapters Amar makes three urgent interventions. First, he shows how people can use the language of the human—rights or security—to redirect the critical gaze back to state and parastate actors. Second, he reconfigures the gender struggle as between respectability and vulgarity rather than between liberal and religious virtues. Perhaps we can take our cue from radical activists as well as sex workers to rethink dissident politics as itself a form of the “vulgar,” turning our backs once and for all on the tired terms of honor and shame. Third and most powerfully, Amar poses the labor of the activist as a form of theorization. Dissidents and revolutionaries are, after all, the social theorists whom the experts must finally listen to, as Amar does so carefully and attentively in this work.