Pakistan's Political Parties: Surviving between Dictatorship and Democracy Mariam Mufti, Sahar Shafqat and Niloufer Siddiqui, eds., Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020, pp. 336

Abstract

reference to what has become the “orthodox” view. As for approaching Marx’s ambivalent statements about rights in the German Ideology and elsewhere, the book tries to assess Marx’s positions in “real time”—that is, by examining where he stood when issues of justice, legality and rights were critically at stake. Examples include the 1843 petition by leaders of the Rhenish Jewish community for equal rights, which Marx endorsed; his consistent defence of civil and political rights during the European Revolutions of 1848; and his detailed reflections on legally enforced limits on the working day in Capital. In all these critical instances, Marx’s political actions speak louder than his ambivalent statements about rights. As Gray dutifully acknowledges, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism offers a “ ‘reconstruction’ of Marx’s critique of liberal rights and law.” In Habermas’ terminology, a critical reconstruction “signifies taking a theory apart and putting it back together in a new form in order to attain more fully the goal that it has set for itself” (1979: 95). There are retrospective and prospective dimensions to the critical reconstruction that was pursued in the book. Retrospectively, the book revisits Marx’s critical reflections on justice, legality and rights, as well as their political reverberations in the twentieth century, taking stock of possible paths that remained untravelled. Prospectively, it looks to the present and foreseeable future, identifying features of Marx’s thought that remain prescient for a world confronting vast inequalities and exhibiting widespread assaults on hard-won rights and liberties.