| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Culture's Vanities: The Paradox of Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World. By David Steigerwald. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. xviii, 257 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 0-7425-1196-0. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 0-7425-1197-9.)

This series of interconnected essays, based on readings of classic texts of Western philosophy and cultural criticism, as well as on secondary literature in the social sciences and social criticism, vigorously analyzes American culture, especially at the end of the last century. The author focuses on the embrace in the 1990s of cultural determinism; the long struggles over the meaning of culture that stretch back at least to Matthew Arnold, Raymond Williams, and William Morris (the author's hero) and forward to Lawrence Levine, Andreas Huyssen, Herbert Gans, and John Fiske; and the relationships between culture, work, identity, and race. David Steigerwald, critical of the Left that is most identified with multiculturalism and identity politics, seeks to "remind progressives that culture is not the same as economic and political power and set them free to reengage those realms in ways that might return the Left to relevance" (p. 238).

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