Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2015, Vol. 51, No. 3 562 voluntary organisations and/or youth representatives. Honing in on the role education plays, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, in 'Raising the Right Wing: Educators' Struggle to Confront the Radical Right,' focuses on Germany's distinct history, coming to terms with its Nazi past, and the effect this has on neo-Nazi youth movements. The author presents individual cases of youths engaging with extreme-right ideologies in Germany before arguing that teachers are often unprepared to counter extremism among their students, nonetheless identify students that might be holding contentious ideologies. The chapter also argues that the younger generations are resistant to the national taboos against neo-Nazi ideologies that overlap with national pride. Educators have a potentially strong role in helping students engage in dialogue about national issues in a way that also serves to prevent the allure of extremist ideologies. Overall, this book presents an excellent range of academic engagement with the subject of youth and extreme-right ideologies. Sections are also introduced with a range of questions for the reader to ponder while reading, making this book a good addition to syllabuses for university-level courses touching upon this subject. One is perhaps surprised that far right groups are often not addressed directly in many chapters, and instead a variety of factors are tracked that contribute to, or facilitate processes of radicalisation. Despite efforts to clarify the relationship between youth and the extreme right, the reader is rather left in a position to question the complexity and multi-variable factors that lead to extreme-right participation. The book cautions readers from the start to keep an open mind about the heterogeneous nature of what is labelled 'extreme right' across Europe and the United States. Cas Mudde reminds us that only by building an understanding of the complex life experiences and choices young people face can we better assess what makes them embrace extreme-right ideologies and join extreme-right groups and political movements. This understanding is necessary in order to effectively prevent and intercept radicalisation processes. Erin Marie Saltman Institute for Strategic Dialogue, London erin.saltman@gmail.com Dennis McKerlie: Justice Between the Young and the Old New York 2013: Oxford University Press, 223 pp. In philosophical discussions of distributive justice two issues have traditionally occupied centre stage. The fi rst is the currency of justice: whether we should concern ourselves with individuals' resource holdings, their opportunities, or with their well-being. The second is the structure of our just distribution. A concern for relative equality between individuals motivates relative egalitarians; prioritarians suggest that individuals' claims grow stronger the worse their absolute positions; and suffi cientarians insist that there are important thresholds that defi ne a stark difference in the concerns of justice. Dennis McKerlie's great contribution to the fi eld has been to highlight an important third issue, which he calls the 'temporal subject' of justice. Many accounts of distributive justice assume that the structure of our distribution should concern lifetimes. If we are welfare egalitarians, for example, we should be fundamentally concerned that people have equally good lives. This would ignore vast inequalities between groups in a society, including different generations, so long as the same patterns of inequality are replicated across people's lives. In fact, this seems much more likely to occur with intergenerational inequalities than between other kinds of Book Reviews 563 social groups, since all of us will occupy different age groups at different times. Justice between age groups has thus been seen by some as fundamentally different to justice between other groups, because individuals will occupy many different groups across a lifetime. It is true that the respective groups in a society with age group inequalities could live equally good lives. But we would also see stark inequality at every stage of this society. At all times, the best off might be far above the worst off. McKerlie's distinctive claim is that theories of justice which concern themselves solely with distributions across lifetimes ignore individuals' states at particular times, and that we need a distinct time-slice principle to correct that problem. Justice Between the Young and the Old (hereafter, Justice) builds on and adapts his prior case for considering our shares at particular times in their own right, and not just to the extent that they contribute to the overall structure of our lives. McKerlie acknowledges the importance of treating whole lives as morally important units; even if we think there is a distinct importance to shorter periods, our existence as temporally extended beings must have repercussions for our theory of justice. A theory that ignored lifetime distributions entirely would fail to recognise the ways in which defi cits at one point in a person's life can be compensated for at other times. He then deals with a distinctive objection to his approach from Norman Daniels' Prudential Lifespan Account (PLA), which claims to recognise our concern with individuals' states at particular times, but challenges McKerlie's claim that we need a distinct time-restricted principle. Daniels takes the observation that we all inhabit different age groups over our lives, and reduces the interpersonal question of intergenerational distribution to an intrapersonal question of prudence. When an elderly person sacrifi ces some of her share to improve a young person's lot, she can see herself in that younger person, so long as she benefi tted in her youth from similar sacrifi ce. The prudential account explains our concern with particular times-since at least on some theories it would be imprudent to allow yourself to become too badly off at any one time-without the conceptual baggage of an independent time-slice principle. I will consider two of McKerlie's responses. He questions the link between even such hypothetical prudence and justice. Daniels' prudential view is able to make people's complete lives better, but that this 'does not explain why we should regard a departure from the prudential distribution as an injustice rather than a merely ineffi cient use of resources'. But while it is true that a distribution's being prudential does not make it just, Daniels could surely respond that a deviation from prudence for some would be an injustice, because those people would have to make sacrifi ces at other times for others' prudentially sound distributions. The reduction of the interpersonal to an intrapersonal distribution is only fair if all generations go through roughly the same pattern. This may in itself be a weakness of the PLA, since changing socio-economic circumstances may make it impossible to replicate the same pattern across generations, but McKerlie does not entertain this response. The second response notes a problem with Daniels' assumption that all individuals will live equally long lives, and that those lives will be 'complete' i.e. include all ages. This assumption counters the worry that a prudential deliberator would know that she is less likely to reach older ages, and so assign lower resource shares to older people for reasons that are irrelevant to justice. One problem with the equal lives assumption is that it is false. Daniels might claim that this is merely a simplifying assumption which we can drop prior to implementation. But as Lazenby [2011] notes, this assumption grounds Daniels' intraperSociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2015, Vol. 51, No. 3 564 sonal conclusions in a way that makes it hard to relax while retaining those central conclusions. Once we abandon the equal lives view, it becomes much harder for a young person to see herself in her elderly neighbour, since she might not make it to that age. McKerlie also notes that if we assume we will live through a 'complete' life, the status of our calculations as prudential looks suspect; for a prudential calculation would surely include a sense of how likely we are to die at different ages. If we assume we will live a complete life, we cannot include such data. McKerlie has previously defended equality as the goal that should govern our time-restricted principle. However, despite defending the intuitiveness of this idea in Justice, he ultimately acknowledges an apparently insurmountable problem. This central problem is choosing the length of the time-slices with which we are concerned. Any choice seems somewhat arbitrary, perhaps aside from a concern with momentary states; but an egalitarian version of this view seems implausible, since it would have us object to momentary inequalities between individuals that just seem innocuous. Although McKerlie has previously suggested that this no great issue for his theory, he now regards it as a knockdown objection. As such, he prefers prioritarianism for his time-slice principle. At this point, it is worth noting an issue in the book's methodology. Justice is heavily reliant on intuitive responses to hypothetical cases, and the defence of timeslice prioritarianism is no exception. At times, this reliance on intuition is somewhat weak since it is not backed by much exploration of the reasons behind our intuitions. Having devoted signifi cant discussion to two of the three mainstream structural views, McKerlie relegates his dismissal of suffi cientarianism to a single footnote. His reasons for not addressing suffi cientarianism are twofold. The fi rst is that he fi nds it 'intuitively implausible', while the second is that he regards it as simply a form of prioritarianism. These two reasons make an odd pair. The latter suggests that suffi cientarianism is too similar to prioritarianism to make it worth addressing. That may be true under some taxonomies of the approaches, although it would still have been worth unpacking that claim; even if suffi cientarianism turns out to be only a branch of prioritarianism, it is a branch with enough difference from its parent view to make it worth discussing in an under-explored avenue like time-slice distribution. More importantly, this pair of views commits McKerlie to the surprising view that suffi cientarianism is (a) too similar to prioritarianism to spend time on, but (b) implausible even though it is barely distinct from the view he actually adopts. Even if McKerlie is right to reject suffi cientarianism, there is a distinct weakness to his doing so on the basis of unspecifi ed intuition, given the reliance of Justice on our intuitive reactions to particular cases. Although some may fi nd this a questionable method of doing ethics at all, I personally felt my agreement with several examples to be based on a concern for those involved being absolutely badly off. For instance, McKerlie opens the book with a vivid picture of what is wrong with a purely lifetime view, imagining a society where after an 'affl uent and happy' life, the elderly are shipped off to 'overcrowded and badly managed' retirement homes, which afford them 'little dignity and little opportunity for anything approaching happiness'. There is certainly space for prioritarians to explain this concern-especially if McKerlie is right to say that suffi cientarianism is just a brand of prioritarianism- but this is surely prima facie suffi cientarian territory. One reason for failing to explore a suffi cientarian time-slice principle may have been a desire to leave room for what seems to be the second 'half' of the book, followBook Reviews 565 ing the mid-point conclusion of what our time-restricted principle should be. The second half of Justice begins by considering whether a time-restricted view is committed to a revisionary theory of personal identity. The thought is that a concern for periods of time shorter than a life might seem to demand that we see individuals as in some sense different people in their youth and their old age. This would explain why gains at one point cannot (fully) compensate for losses at another. McKerlie claims that such a move is unnecessary, and indeed would show too much. If I will be a different person in my old age then I should replace my prudential concern with my future self with something akin to the moral concern that I show other people. McKerlie makes interesting observations about the implications of his view for our theory of prudence. If we think it right to step in when people are particularly badly off, even at the cost of maximising their welfare across their entire life, perhaps we should rethink the classical view of prudence as maximising lifetime value. Perhaps the best kind of life includes facts about distribution as well as about total value, including the avoidance of severe suffering at any one time. To risk repeating myself, however, this seems a fundamentally suffi cientarian idea. A time-slice prioritarian would surely want to avoid people becoming worse off at particular times, even at the cost of their life going worse overall. But the persuasive element of McKerlie's discussion concerns the rationality of being above certain thresholds. Some classifi cations will make this approach available to prioritarians; but it is at least a prima facie suffi cientarian idea. A discussion of suffi cientarianism might have been more apt, given the central focus of Justice, than the fi nal two substantive chapters. The material in these chapters is well worth reading on its own merits. The fi rst considers the problem of changing preferences. The satisfaction of preferences and realisation of values presumably has an impact on how one's life goes. These attitudes often change-sometimes quite radically-as we age, and it is central to prudential reasoning to decide how to accommodate this fact. McKerlie offers a clear and interesting summary of the various proposals in this area. The last full chapter applies this discussion to Alzheimer's disease. Since Alzheimer's often radically divorces sufferers from their previous values and attitudes, it is certainly apt for discussion, and McKerlie applies the conclusions of the previous chapter with care and precision. As interesting as these chapters are, there is a certain lack of unity with the rest of the book, made particularly stark in the fact that these chapters barely merit a mention in the fi nal summary chapter. McKerlie notes at the start of this latter discussion that social institutions should aim to make lives as good as possible, and that this requires our knowing what makes a life good. But it would have been interesting to have made greater connections with the central philosophical discussion in Justice. There are certainly further links to be made. First, Justice earlier discusses the issue of personal responsibility as a constraint on theories of distributive justice, but he does not seem to draw much connection between the role of responsibility and changes in an individual's values over time. If a subject's being responsible for her poor condition weakens our justice obligations, as McKerlie argues, does a lack of connection between different stages of a life in turn undermine this weakening effect? Second, given McKerlie's view that prudence should incorporate the value of priority-a view he suspends for this latter discussion-and that there is independent value to just distributions, is the state justifi ed to act coercively in making our lives go as well as possible? These are hard Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2015, Vol. 51, No. 3 566 questions, but they seem to me to be at the appropriate level of generality for a book of this kind, and central to the motivating question that drives it. Ben Davies King's College, London benjamin.1.davies@kcl.ac.uk References Lazenby, H. 2011. 'Is Age Special? Justice, Complete Lives and the Prudential Lifespan Account.' Journal of Applied Philosophy 28: 327–340. Zenonas Norkus: On Baltic Slovenia and Adriatic Lithuania: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Patterns in Post-communist Europe Vilnius 2012: Apostrofa, 375 pp. In this rich book Zenonas Norkus aims to develop a general theory of patterns of post-communist transitions, constructed using the method of multi-value comparative qualitative analysis. He goes to great lengths to avoid the teleological traps of transitology in explaining the 'entire spectrum of economic and political outcomes of post-communist transformation' (p. 13). Even more ambitiously, the author aims to explicate the entire spectrum of political and economic outcomes of the post-socialist transformations. Norkus complements an impressive methodological display with in-depth historical inquiries. On the other hand, it seems legitimate to ask: does this allow the author to offer innovative insights, or does this amount to a re-iteration of the 'fanciful', yet rigid, comparative impetus of transition studies? This represents the lingering question for a work that surprisingly juxtaposes a very refi ned small intra-Baltic comparison, with a rather rigid, overarching comparison, that echoes the forcing and oftentimes static 'state-of-theart' of political science transition studies. The book begins with a neat layout of typologies of communist regimes following Kitschelt, which is laced with small inserts of interwar history. The scope is very wide: outside the typical clusters of CEE communist regimes, detailed dissections of China and Vietnam are used in the construction of in-depth variables. By building on his previous work on 'mechanismic approaches' [Norkus 2005], the author is extremely precise in delineating the strong and soft points of competing explanations of communist regimes (such as communism as path to modernisation and communism as totalitarianism). While a pinch of salt can be advocated in reading the overarching comparison of a centrally planned economy to an oikos, individual points about regime typologies warrant attention as they open up fascinating research avenues. To give just some examples, Norkus suggests pushing the pathstarting moment of certain social phenomena in national-communist regimes to the interwar (p. 40), and argues that middle classes of patrimonial-communist regimes originate from villages and hence see their mobility as 'historical' success (p. 41). Simple and effective defi nitions and thresholds characterize the otherwise detailed categorisations-transition as exit (p. 43; unlike Kopecky and Mudde [2000], who defi ne transition as the time-lapse between the dissolution of the old regime and the installation of a new one) and the country is considered as not being communist when Marxism-Leninism stops being the offi cial or dominant discourse, or when the Communist Party loses its monopoly, or when a free market starts to function (p. 44). It is exactly in this line of thought that the author confi rms the existing consensus that transition and consolidation are different (p. 89). From the very careful categorisation stems one of the author's central aims: a 'hard' theory which can predict outcomes under different combinations of initial con-