The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times (review)

This fairly small book has big ambitions, namely, to show how small-scale interactions among ordinary citizens can transform politics. Goldfarb sees transformative potential in the "politics of small things" in a variety of places – from the kitchen tables and proto-democratic "free spaces" in pre-1989 Eastern Europe to the internet-based presidential campaign of Howard Dean. In fact, one underlying theme of the book is that there are important parallels between the creative resistance to totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century and the challenges of terrorism, war and political disempowerment in the 21^st century.

Goldfarb seeks to unpack these phenomena by developing a framework for thinking about the democratic potential of seemingly small acts of resistance, dialogue and deliberation. He combines Arendt's conception of politics as the root of "factual truth" (as opposed to "official truth") with Goffman's account of the interactive definition of a situation, peppering the discussion with references to Vaclav Havel's account of small-scale acts of resistance. Goldfarb's goal is to retain the possibility of identifying spaces of true democratic potential, rather than acceding to a Foucauldian position in which one official "truth regime" simply replaces another. In this regard, the book succeeds in developing a unique voice and stimulating a critical but non-nihilistic view of politics.

Much of the book is devoted to showing how these "small things" matter in a variety of settings. Demonstrating this empirically is a difficult task, and Goldfarb's level of success in this regard is uneven at best. On some topics, his brief analyses are captivating and useful. His account of subaltern configurations of civil society in Eastern Europe, for example, helps explain the puzzle of why political transitions played out differently in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, and in particular, why the latter case quickly devolved into brutality. Yet even here, one might want a clearer analysis of how these factors mattered, whether in interaction with or above-and-beyond other differences in these countries.

The arguments are less convincing when it comes to more recent events. His discussion of 9/11 and the "war on terror" tries to draw a parallel between current Islamic radicalism and 20^th century totalitarianism that never quite comes together. While it may be true that "the task [of both] is to impose on a complex society a unified cultural code"(59), there is an unresolved tension in Goldfarb's account of the decentralized network structure of Al Qaeda and the centralized and layered power of a totalitarian system ("the structure of the onion."(57) Furthermore, his splitting of the political debate about terrorism into those who support or oppose the grand narrative of the "official story" and those who reject that story altogether (in favor of "the politics of small things") is a far cry from a careful analysis of foreign policy.

Similar problems arise in the chapters on the internet and virtual political activism, which focus primarily on the role of MoveOn.org in the anti-war movement and Meetup.com in the Howard Dean campaign. Goldfarb argues that the virtually-generated meetups among Dean supporters empowered participants, created new social bonds, altered the relationship between the mass media and its audience, and transformed political culture, even if the ultimate goal was not met. But the evidence for these claims is weak and seemingly based on observing a few meetups and citing emails posted to a listserve. As a result, it is difficult to discern the extent to which this new "virtual politics of small things" truly mattered or whether it simply sat beside older, bigger political shifts (such as growing popular resentment about the war in Iraq, the role of organized labor in supporting the Dean campaign, etc.) Similarly, although Goldfarb does point out some limits to MoveOn.org's role in the anti-war movement, he does not attempt to assess the extent to...