Content area
Full text
Drawing the Line: Public and Private in America, by Andrew Stark. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010. 245pp. $28.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780815703334.
Andrew Stark's Drawing the Line seeks to clarify and find common ground regarding private market-based and public sphere oriented values in contemporary discussion. The sections of this book concern place, primarily gated communities and schools; health, concerning public and private health insurance issues; and welfare.
Based on interviews and documents, Drawing the Line does not distinguish two forms of political and legal behavior and language. One form consists of the struggle among interest and interest groups 9or classes or status groups) for advantage. The language of such struggles in contemporary contexts may be cloaked in populist terms or "substantive justice." Whatever the public discourse, the strategic game, for example, in tax politics is quite straight forward and everyone understands though few articulate it clearly: make someone else pay for the price of civilization1. This is political action.
The second form of behavior and language - upon which Stark wants us to focus - is that of formal rationality, that is, the channels of legal discourse that allow disputes to be settled in courts or legislatures rather than by guns, riots, or meaningful elections. This produces a different kind of discourse, legal to be sure, but basically what one might term "pretextual" as in the use of a pretext to cloak a motive. Such uses are not all ignoble. For example, the "pretext" of public health once produced a substantive bounty in working conditions in industries (e.g., apparel) where women workers were disproportionately employed.
This work does not distinguish serious theory from lawyerly gamesmanship. A tax or land use lawyer with municipal or gated community clients will find useful and thoughtful examples, turgidly explicated, from which to consider strategy and precedents. Qn the other hand, most of the discourse bears the same relation to social reality...