BOOK REVIEW 107 based style of functioning which would encourage mutual tolerance within an overarching cultural framework. This line of thinking is becoming familiar to us in India and one feature of such thinking is that it can rarely move beyond generalities when outlining political programmes based on such a view of politics and the state. Miller is no exception to this. One wishes that critics of modernity would now think about what kind of politics they support, what kind of solutions they envisage to such problems as poverty and backwardness. The strong point of many post-modernist critiques has been their analysis of the limitations of the modernist vision. Here they express the more general disillusionment which has set in regarding the goals of development as well as regarding other axioms of the past. Doubts have come to replace certainly in many areas. But post-modernist social scientists are not often able to go beyond critique. Hence the tendency to describe the critique as a project in which politics becomes a 'constant rephrasing, an ever new constitution of the self (p.l7). Such politics is seen as a primary form of political activity which can, hopefully, help to change the world. The Marxian notion that ideological struggle can be effective only if it is accompanied by other forms of social and political struggle would not be acceptable to critics like Miller. They question the modernist assumption of a unified subject of knowledge and action for whom the world can be transformed and emphasize instead that subjectivities are constituted and need to be questioned. Marx was not unaware of the problem of the social constitution of identities but his solutions point in a different direction since they would stress the possibility of reconstructing the subject in the process of transforming the world. In the absence of such a goal only a nihilistic prospect of continual rcinterpretation remains. Miller is not unaware of these problems but cannot also avoid them. Thus he resorts, as others like him have done, to upholding the world view of Vedantic Hinduism as a possible solution to the problems of modernity. SARAH JOSEPH Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi