Book Review: American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World by Michael S. Hogue

• Author: Andrew R. Murphy
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Date: 01 December 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718821897
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 899

emphases in original). On this understanding of care it’s not hard to imagine

caregivers suffering “burn-out,” which is a well-recognized problem. But the

bigger issue, from the perspective of commitment, is that it makes care too

much a one-sided affair. Except in extreme cases where a person cannot care

for themselves in ways necessary to sustain life—and especially a life that’s

meaningful to them—care is a relationship between caregiver and dependent,

and one that can take many forms. Perhaps the person I care for is deeply con-

cerned that I also attend to myself, such that he or she encourages me not to

focus too much on them; perhaps they experience “constant attentiveness” as

overbearing or even disempowering; perhaps I am not well-equipped, for what-

ever reason, to switch between many different roles, or perhaps my partner is

not comfortable with me performing all of these roles. Is the care I provide not

“good?” Or, rather, is it a kind of care that works and is meaningful as an exer-

cise in reciprocity between us? Marin’s discussion of care rests on a normative

evaluation of what it entails that seems beyond contestation.

There are more such examples in the book, but I think these are enough to

point to my central concern with the argument as a whole. I think one could

read Marin’s understanding of commitment as a provocative, critical response

to the depoliticization wrought by liberalism: the moves from contract and

promise to commitment and obligation, from the sovereign individual to one

entangled in open-ended, unpredictable relationships, and from individual to

social-structural theorizing all serve to remind us that liberal disavowals of

politics only conceal them but never erase them. On the other hand, by seem-

ingly ruling out contestation over what counts as commitment and what com-

mitted relationships should look like, Marin engages in a different kind of

depoliticization. To borrow what Leo Strauss said of Carl Schmitt, Marin’s

“critique of liberalism occurs in the horizon of liberalism.” That horizon

blunts the force of her thoughtful critique.

American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World, by Michael S. Hogue.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2018, 256 pp.

Reviewed by: Andrew R. Murphy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718821897

As I began preparing this review, several sobering reports proclaimed an

imminent tipping point for climate change, a “new normal” of increasingly

extreme and destructive weather events with potentially catastrophic social

and economic consequences. In the words of the International Panel on

Climate Change, the world’s population faces not merely rising temperatures

but a host of associated conditions: increasing probability of drought in some