This volume represents a collection of essays, some of them published previously and others delivered more recently as lectures in China. The quality is uneven, some dreary old pieces on Marxist historiography and rambling commentaries on the idea of China or the history of Sinicization of the social sciences. But a couple of older pieces, such as “Confucius in the Borderlands” (first published in 1995) still sparkle and continue to illuminate. More importantly, the author seeks to synthesize some of his older critiques through the notion of “global modernity” in the opening and closing chapters of the book.

To be sure, global modernity is apparently an idea whose time has come and several scholars, including the present reviewer, have developed versions of it in earlier and forthcoming works. Needless to say, each version has a different take, and I will focus my attention here on Dirlik's interpretation. According to Dirlik, the decline of the West has been accompanied by a multi-centered political order and, more importantly, by a breakdown in Western hegemonic modernity. There is no more universalism, and different rising parts of the world, most obviously China, have sought to create their own “alternative modernities.” This kind of fragmentation is at the same time what we might think of as a universalization of the non-universal.

Dirlik traces three moments of modernity: a kind of early modern version that was multi-centered and non-hegemonic; a Euro-American period of hegemony lasting a couple of hundred years; and the present moment, which is once again characterized by multi-centeredness and, ideologically, a field of competing alternative modernities. Dirlik does not believe in alternative modernities but he occasionally demonstrates a sympathetic view of them when he suggests that they may be necessary to bring back those voices suppressed by colonial modernity. Thus the new Confucianisms, the return of Turkish glory, and Gandhian alternatives, among others, may have a dimension that we can try to understand. Ultimately, however, these represent the ideologies of globalized elites in the non-West for whom they bring the comfort of a secure identity in a competitive world. As such, these elites and their views continue the Euro-American project of competitive capitalism with a different pecking order of its beneficiaries.

For Dirlik, modernity is singular and global. If, however, that is the case, is there no difference between modernity and capitalism? Dirlik does not appear to differentiate between the two in any sustained way. In one chapter, instead of “Global Modernity” (his capitalization), he uses “Global Capitalism” but without much explanation of the reasons for differentiation. My sense is that this lack of differentiation can obfuscate an entire analysis. By conflating the two, and presumably identifying modernity with the ideals, values, and everyday practices subsumed in capitalist society, Dirlik continues to view the political and cultural systems as the superstructure of capitalism. Is this an acceptable proposition even among today's Marxists?

This proposition is particularly problematic if one has forsaken the only route that traditional Marxists had identified as the scientific way out of the crisis of capitalism: working-class revolution. This was the only logical outcome of a scientific view of capitalism. Ironically, while Marx's analysis of the logic of capital (especially “the falling rate of profit”) is being selectively accepted by even segments of the corporate world, the outcome seems ever further away from the predicted working-class revolution. Instead, nationalism, gender, migration, technology, consumerism, and most of all the crisis of the environment have dispersed the response to capitalism's crises into many different sectors and approaches. The concept of modernity should develop an analytic robustness to be able to address these responses to capitalism in addition to perceiving their links to it.

The challenge for the analyst of China is particularly sharp because Chinese statist capitalism on a global scale—whether in Wukan, Zambia, or Laos—is a more complex form of capitalism and will have even more complex consequences and ramifications. At any rate, by synthesizing his views of capitalism and ideology (or culture and history, of the title) on a global scale in a rather less polemical style than we have been used to, Dirlik has invited his readers to explore the problems of capitalism and modernity as their unfolding histories continue to push the horizons of the unknown and unexpected.