We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. By Jason Blakely. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 184p. $99.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Boldizzoni develops his argument that two cultural factors account for the persistence of capitalism in Western societies: a long history of social hierarchy/stratification (which has taken various forms from antiquity through feudalism and now in capitalism) and the more recent, modern emphasis on individualism. In contrast, societies with a history of less hierarchical social relations, such as Norway, have tended to adopt versions of capitalism closer to socialism (p. 260). Similarly, societies that “lacked an individualist social pattern, such as Russia” (p. 260) were the most viable candidates for socialist revolution, regardless of their stage of economic development. It seems plausible that these factors at least partly account for the persistence of capitalism. But it is not clear that they prove that the goal of ending capitalism, even in the long term, rests on somany “false hopes” (p. 4). Specifically, even if individualism and hierarchy are as supportive of capitalism and as resistant to change as Boldizzoni argues, why does that make radical change so unlikely? Boldizzoni baldly states that the “highly hierarchical social structure” and “individualistic social pattern” in Britain and most of Western Europe, and even more so in the United States, make it “difficult to imagine a radical change toward socialism” (p. 261). Given the long history of social hierarchy inWestern societies, it does seem unlikely to disappear quickly, if at all. However, the claim that this rules out the possibility of socialism rests on the assumption that socialism is necessarily incompatible with or resistant to any form of social stratification or inequality, an assumption that is contradicted by the principle of distribution according to contribution (in Marx’s first phase of communism) as well as by the principle of distribution according to needs (in communism’s higher phase). Similarly, to assume that individualism renders socialism unlikely ignores the importance that socialist thought and practice have placed on individual freedom and flourishing: recall Marx’s own line that the “free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all” in communism. It is true that the forms of social hierarchy and individualism that characterize contemporary capitalist society are at odds with most views of socialism, but they might be more subject to challenge and change than Boldizzoni assumes. Anger directed at the 1%, for example, registers disapproval of the current patterns of social stratification. And to what extent do the concrete forms that individualism now takes—such as careerism and opportunity hoarding—express genuine preferences as opposed to reluctant adaptations to structural constraints? Although Boldizzoni rightly criticizes others for dichotomous thinking, he too falls into the trap: either we focus on reformist politics that avoid the false hope of a foreseeable end of capitalism, or we succumb to the naïve wishful thinking of those who believe that more radical change is possible. But why are these mutually exclusive? Here one thinks of André Gorz’s concept of nonreformist reforms, most notably used by Nancy Fraser, as a way of thinking about reformist measures that carry a more transformative potential. Ironically, giving up hope of radical social change, as Boldizzoni counsels, will help fulfill the prophecy of capitalism’s persistence.