David Block's Political economy and sociolinguistics provides an engaging account of the contemporary intersection(s) of political economy, neoliberalism, and social class, and outlines the insights that critical sociolinguists can draw from sustained attention to these issues. The book is structured in a clear, intuitive manner: starting with Block's selective yet insightful account of where and how ‘political economy’ has emerged in sociolinguistic research; proceeding to its in-depth discussions of critical social theory on global political economy, neoliberal ideology and policy, and social stratification; and concluding with two empirically oriented chapters discussing the emergent ‘neoliberal citizen’ and ‘class warfare’ in Spanish politics.

All in all, the book provides an extremely valuable resource for critically minded language scholars—an excellent introduction to historical/modern perspectives on topics like Marxist political theory, social class, and the development of neoliberalism from/within classical liberalism. However, the book's important focus on materialist politics also somewhat limits its full potential, for two intertwined reasons. First, the book is overall structured as a one-way resource for sociolinguistics to learn from political economy—and not vice versa. Block's book, let alone this short review, cannot adequately describe the myriad ways that Marxist political theorists have responded to economic globalization and the emergence of neoliberal thought. To be sure, though, I would argue there are many ways in which greater attention to language, symbolic practice, and sociolinguistic theory would yield richer critiques of neoliberal political economy than those with which Block generally aligns. The book would have been improved through a more thorough description of what scholars of language, social interaction, and (digital) media already tell us about globalized political-economic relations—not simply the other way around.

A second possible limitation of the book is that its Marxist framing means it largely (and surprisingly) ignores the intersections of class identity and economic stratification with other dimensions of inequality. Indeed, the book's welcome commitment to a Marxist position overall seems to prompt a less welcome denigration of sociolinguistic attention to identity, so-called ‘identity politics’, and the symbolic aspects of social inequality. Many sociolinguists (including Block himself) now pay more attention to complex interrelations of class, race, gender, sexuality, other axes of discrimination, and language (e.g. Jonathan Rosa & Nelson Flores, ‘Unsettling race and language’, Language in Society, 2017; E. Levon & Ronald Mendes, Language, sexuality, and power, 2016; David Block & Victor Corona, ‘Intersectionality in language and identity research’, The Routledge handbook of language and identity, 2016). Most of these scholars would readily acknowledge that ‘class distinctions and social inequalities hinge on and arise through enculturated symbolic economies as much as they do on material or political ones’, as Crispin Thurlow & Adam Jaworski put it (‘Elite mobilities’, Social Semiotics, 2012:490). However, tellingly, Block dismisses this very claim and those like it off-hand ‘because it is hard for [him] to imagine how discourse and other symbolic activity could actually cause material inequalities’ (22). Neoliberalism is nowadays imbricated with genuinely emancipatory, transformative politics in complex, uncomfortable ways. It is vital that scholarship acknowledges this contemporary interwovenness of progressive ideals and capitalist exploitation. Regardless, Block's book provides an erudite foundation for renewed sociolinguistic engagement with class and social inequality.