Nothing prepares the audience for Rappaport and Stewart's invigoratingly critical appraisalof the text itself. How carefully they tread the line that Fox and Prilleltensky had intended forthe whole book! They have written what is probably the clearest and least rhetorical chapter ofthe entire volume. They begin by giving a concise account of critical psychology and manage tosay more in eight pages than other contributors have said in whole chapters. They fully, andyet brie¯y and comprehensively, address the irony of critical psychology's bizarre relationshipwith mainstream psychology:

Its way of thinking cannot in itself become the dominant way of thinking. The momentany idea wins (becomes the way things are thought about or practised by most membersof a discipline or profession), that idea becomes the enemy of a critical psychologyÐthatis, it becomes the status quo to which one is expected to adjust and the role relationshipthat becomes institutionalized (Rappaport and Stewart, p. 305).

They then move on (as requested by the Editors) to a critique of the preceding chapters in anastounding mixture of blatant criticism, wary praise, precise deconstruction and wickedly drywit.A primary aim of the book is to provide an accessible introduction to critical psychology,

avoiding fruitless intellectualism. The contributors have steered away from presenting theirmaterial as experts but the complexities of the ®eld necessarily result in fairly heavy reading.This is not a book for newcomers to psychology, as it draws upon sub-disciplines with whichfamiliarity is assumed. Indeed, it would be di�cult to be critical of a science of which one hadno experience. I recommend the book to ®nal year students or post-graduates who might ®ndit useful and intriguing to view the psychological world without donning the rose-tintedspectacles of their mainstream mentors.

BEN ANDERSON

benster67@aol.com

Ben Anderson graduated from Stirling University in the summer of 1998 with an HonoursDegree in Psychology and intends to continue as a community psychologist by teachingchemistry at secondary school level.

Culture of Fear: Risk-tasking and the Morality of Low Expectation

FUREDI F. (1997).Cassell, London and Washington: pp. 184. £45.00 ISBN 0-304-33750±1 (hardback), £12.99ISBN 0-304-33751-X (paperback).

The 1990s have been described as an unnervingly safe decade. In this provocative book, Furedi(Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent) cuts across political and ideological divides inhis attempt to unravel the causes and consequences of what he describes as society's increasing,and damaging, fear of taking risks. He asserts that as a society we are obsessed with safety(seeing everywhere abuse, stranger danger, disease and environmental damage), with avoid-ance of risk being taken as a self-evident good, regardless of how rational or irrational the fearsunderpinning the avoidance and irrespective of the probability of harm.In support of his contention that risk sensitivity is increasing, Furedi quotes a study which

showed that the number of articles on ``risk'' in medical journals in the UK, Scandinaviaand the USA jumped from 1000 to 80,000 during the ®rst and last ®ve years of the period1967±1991. He argues that we systematically over-in¯ate risk and amplify dangers, citing foodscares (BSE, Listeria), environmental concerns (pollution, global warming), impact of tech-nology (genetic engineering, biomedicine) and crime (abuse, assault) as examples where ourpreoccupation is far in excess of the actual risks. It is ironic, he suggests, that in real terms wehave actually never been safer than we are today, and that we pay proportionally much greaterattention to safety issues than to more justi®ed concerns about the impact of poverty, poornutrition and social inequalities.Furedi's documentation of risk sensitivity is confusing in its broad range. I feel he weakens

his argument by failing to di�erentiate between individual and collective concerns, by making

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comparisons between the present and the past with little empirical data and by failing todi�erentiate between fears which do and do not have their basis in realistic estimates ofprobability of occurrence and damaging consequences: surely not all our current fears aregroundless? Nevertheless, he makes a convincing case that many of our fears are out ofproportion and he goes on to make an intelligent attempt to understand the social dynamicunderpinning risk consciousness and to alert us to the social consequences.Furedi runs through a range of possible contributory causes, including technological

advances, media hype, heightened awareness and mistrust of authority, but ®nds each aloneinsu�cient to account for the ubiquity of risk in¯ation. In the end he concludes that thebreakdown of natural communities underpins our anxieties, with the rise of an individualisticculture leaving people feeling insecure, fragile and vulnerable, with low expectations and animpaired sense of humanity. ``The weakening of social cohesion means, ironically, thediminishing of individual autonomy'' (p. 162). I feel that Furedi perhaps over-simpli®es thepicture, searching for a fundamental cause rather than acknowledging the complex trans-actional nature of social phenomena, and in so doing he underplays other mechanisms,including our helplessness in the face of multinational corporations and a global economy, andrising expectations that medicine will conquer all ills and that consumerism will satisfy all oururges, along with moves to give consumers greater rights with increased litigation when thingsdo not turn out as we want, leading to self-protection against responsibility and blame. Yet thecentral theme of his argument is convincing: being ``at risk'' individualizes us, yet diminisheshuman agency.Furedi goes on to argue that the new moral imperative to stay safe, enforced through a rising

tide of rules, protocols and regulatory frameworks, acts to constrain and inhibit experimentand creativity, and also continually acts to reduce our trust and belief in ourselves and in oneanother. Thus, for example, the unprecedented extent to which adults supervise children toprotect them from de®ned and unde®ned risks results in children having few opportunities tobe free of adult scrutiny, to play unfettered in their own world, to learn to rub along with oneanother and to fend for themselves. Similarly, the rise of professional advisors and experts(counsellors, facilitators, consultants) along with the pathologizing of ordinary human misery,re¯ects a lack of con®dence in people's natural abilities to deal with life's knocks and blows,resulting in diminished organic support networks and a weakening sense of individuals,families and communities being able to manage their own lives. He sees a vicious circle ofpowerlessness, caution, lack of self-con®dence and weakening social support. Furedi concludesthat the precautionary principle represents a socially damaging accommodation to power-lessness and a collective resignation to victimhood, leading to a cult of su�ering. His challengeis for us to regain our nerve, start taking risks, begin trusting ourselves and get on with living.This book deserves to be widely read. It reworks, in a modern context, many of the

arguments that Ivan Illich put forward so compellingly in his book Limits to Medicine (1976).It is not comfortable reading and there is much that we may disagree with, especially when were¯ect on ways in which social caution and regulation have led to real and needed protection ofvulnerable people. But it should stop us in our tracks, and force ``helping professionals'' toquestion our assumptions and lead us to examine the ways in which our own practice may bepromoting a socially damaging culture of fear.

ANNIE MITCHELL

Clinical and Community Psychology,University of Exeter, UK

REFERENCE

Illich, I. (1976). Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health. Boyars,London.

Annie Mitchell is Lecturer and Clinical Tutor for the Doctorate in Clinical and CommunityPsychology at the University of Exeter and has a particular interest in user views of healthservice provision. She is co-author (with M. Cormack) of The Therapeutic Relationship inComplementary Health Care (1998, Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh).

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