I recall being told explicitly during the first week of my doctoral studies that I should never use culture as an explanatory concept because it can be neither observed nor measured. Such was the prevailing culture of the time. But while culture has since enjoyed something of a renaissance in North American political science, thanks largely to the efforts of constructivists, even those who acknowledge its importance admit that it is a challenging concept to use.

Few take culture more seriously than does Peter Katzenstein, who has done pioneering work on the subject epistemologically, methodologically, and empirically, and who has deployed it to advance our understandings both of security and of political economy from both comparative politics and international relations perspectives. This book completes an ambitious multinational trilogy that takes on the subject of civilization, or “culture writ large” (p. 208). The first volume, Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives (2010), challenges Samuel Huntington’s monolithic and essentialist understanding of the concept and explores six major civilizations to demonstrate their heterogeneity, fluidity, and syncretism. Sinicization and the Rise of China: Civilizational Processes beyond West and East (2012) uses China as a vehicle to explore the dynamics of civilizations so understood. Anglo-America and Its Discontents tackles the question of civilizational identity.

Katzenstein opens the volume with a chapter titled “The West as Anglo-America” (pp. 1–30), which deftly and directly challenges both Louis Hartz’s and Huntington’s “unitary and singular” accounts of “the West” that “stress the crystallization of a broad consensus around core values and uncontested identities” (p. 11). It also draws to our attention for the first time a theme that recurs, namely, the uncomfortable juxtaposition of liberalism and racism in Anglo-American culture.

In Chapter 2, “The Project for a New Anglo Century: Race, Space, and Global Order” (pp. 33–55), Duncan Bell provides a masterful history of the evolution of Anglo-Saxon supremacism in its various self-conscious and unself-conscious forms from the late nineteenth century to the present. In Chapter 3, “Anglo-America as Global Suburbia: The Political Economy of Land and Endogenous Multiculturalism” (pp. 56–78), Herman Schwartz offers a materialist perspective on the interaction of land, labor, capital, and cultural accommodation in various parts of the Anglosphere.

In Chapter 4, “The Imperial Self: A Perspective on Anglo-America from South Africa, India, and Ireland” (pp. 81–104), Audie Klotz examines from subaltern perspectives what she calls the “bifurcation of the former British Empire into ‘Anglo-America’ and the ‘New’ Commonwealth” (p. 100), challenging teleological accounts of the development of liberal security communities and demonstrating the fluidity of insider/outsider distinctions. In what is essentially a complement to Bell’s chapter, Srdjan Vucetic returns to the question of how racism and liberalism eventually gave rise to multiculturalism (Chapter 5, “The Search for Liberal Anglo-America: From Racial Supremacy to Multicultural Politics,” pp. 105–24).

In Chapter 6, “Negotiating Anglo-America: Australia, Canada, and the United States” (pp. 127–51), Louis Pauly and Christian Reus-Smit argue that “Complex Interdependence” mischaracterizes U.S.–Canadian and U.S.–Australian bilateral relations by failing to recognize the importance and interplay of internal and external identity politics, geographical proximity or distance, shifting economic and security incentives, and the binding and legitimating power of shared heritage. Brian Bow and Arturo Santa-Cruz then explore how the presence or absence of a shared Anglo-American heritage has resulted in divergent forms of diplomatic practice in the U.S.–Canadian and U.S.–Mexican cases (Chapter 7, “Diplomatic Cultures: Multiple Wests and Identities in US–Canada and US–Mexico Relations,” pp. 152–75). In Chapter 8, David MacDonald and Brendan O’Connor provide a nuanced and revealing look into the one bilateral relationship in which the Anglo connection is strongest (“Special Relationships: Australia and New Zealand in the Anglo-American World,” pp. 176–203).

The book concludes with Chapter 9, “Many Wests and Polymorphic Globalism” (pp. 207–47), in which Katzenstein restates the conceptual frame animating all three installments of the trilogy and makes the case once again—now with the benefit of hindsight—for treating civilizations as works in progress in constant and increasing conversation with each other, rather than as rigid, reified, essentialized obstacles to those very conversations.

Those looking for an exhilarating read will not be disappointed. The sheer intellectual firepower on display is impressive. Not only are the chapters erudite and thought provoking; they are beautifully written and meticulously documented. But the acid test of any edited volume is whether the whole is greater or less than the sum of the parts. Has it cleared up confusion, moved debate forward, and pointed us clearly in a productive direction?

The answer to this question depends upon which of two ways one chooses to read the book. If one reads it as an attempt to discipline the concept of civilization so as to render it more tractable as an explanatory concept, the answer is no. On this reading, one would run into heavy waters in the very first paragraph. Katzenstein begins the book by asserting that “Anglo-America is a clearly identifiable part of what is commonly referred to as the West” (p. 1), but the remainder of the book painstakingly shows that it cannot be identified clearly. Katzenstein speaks of Anglo-America as a civilization, but insists that it is a part of “the West” and that there are “multiple Wests” that “coexist with each other and with other civilizations” (multiple Easts?) as “parts of one global civilization.” Within the first few hundred words, Katzenstein has claimed the label “civilization” for at least three nested levels of cultural abstraction, none of which has a fixed address. Reviews that appeared in these pages of the first two volumes in the trilogy complained that at the end of each, it remained unclear what a civilization is, how we know one when we see one, how we distinguish one from another, and how we should use the concept.

There is, however, a second way of reading the book that yields the answer “yes” and turns its apparent shortcomings into strengths. On this reading, the point is to improve not explanation but understanding—understanding, moreover, not primarily of civilization in general or civilizations in particular but of the use and abuse of these ideas. One might wish that Katzenstein had made this more obvious, but the signposts are there for those who look. Nowhere, for example, does he—or any of the authors, for that matter—employ the concept of civilization in causal explanation. None attempts to operationalize it, or even define it precisely. No two authors use “Anglo-America” or “the West” in exactly the same way. The same may be said of other crucial concepts, such as liberalism and racism.

In Chapter 9, however, Katzenstein finally makes clear why civilizations matter (p. 208). First, politicians use “civilizational imageries” instrumentally. Second, civilizations condition identities and interests. But if civilizations are fluid and scalable, they can also be used to condition identities and interests instrumentally. Since everyone has multiple identities, elites always have a menu of options from which to choose identities to activate. This is the insight that is rich with explanatory power. We have seen the dynamic deftly and tragically played out in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere.

The very form of the book suggests the second reading. The scholarship, like Katzenstein’s “one global civilization,” is itself polymorphic. The essay from which Katzenstein takes its title and to which he devotes its very last paragraph—Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929)—suggests this reading as well. Toward the end of his essay, Freud raises the question of whether the “many systems of civilization—or epochs of it” had become “neurotic”:

These words may have been somewhat hyperbolic in 1929, but surely not in a world of nuclear weapons.

Fortunately, the identities most commonly activated in human conflict are small in scale, reflecting the “narcissism of minor differences.” But given our current capacity to destroy, a world of activated (falsely essentialized) civilizational identities could well be nightmarish.

As the contributors to this important volume make crystal clear, civilizational discourse is not something we can hope to purge or discipline. We have internalized it far too deeply for that. We will continue to use it in fluid, imprecise ways, because we have come to see it as a rich and powerful shorthand for a wide variety of purposes in a wide variety of contexts—a shorthand, moreover, whose appeal in part lies precisely in its ability to liberate us from the burdens of onerous analytical precision. Let us hope that this probing book helps scholars and policymakers alike see this, and the associated dangers, more clearly.