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Lawrence Hamilton is Professor of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Affiliated Lecturer in Political Theory, Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), Cambridge University, UK. He is also an Elected Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf).[Hamilton] is very good at defining the historical issues that have created a country ... His description of how the ANC has lead South Africa into what statistically seems to be a worse off position than the country they inherited is rigorous and largely without fault ... [an] excellent evaluation of the current state of South Africa.
Blackman's Review, A New South African Literary Review
The form and depth of [the author's] explorations ... makes the book worth reading for those who engage more closely with South African realities today.
Africa Spectrum
Hamilton argues that post-apartheid freedom implies more than liberation from political oppression: it requires effective power. He argues his case with analytical acuity, imagination, and rare precision.
Saul Dubow, School of History, Queen Mary, University of London, UK.
Pulls no punches and, in near to scornful language, tears apart the constitution and post-1996 politics as beholden to a human rights discourse of which the greatest danger is that it creates the false belief that individuals have the power to change their lot ... His axiom that freedom only comes from power to assess one ’s own situation correctly and then control the agents one uses to go against society’s norms to change that situation provides useful and easily comprehensible tools for analysis ... thank heavens for a scientist who shies from the almost ritualistic contortions some observers adopt to reduce every issue to the constructs of apartheid.
- Hans Pienaar, Business Day, South Africa
Are South Africans Free? interweaves the political concepts of freedom and representation with empirical evidence to construct a powerful analysis of the deep-seated problems facing South Africa as a young democracy. It demonstrates the value of political theory for understanding the threats posed to democracy by the absence of genuine freedom, at the same time as it challenges political theorists to look beyond the often idealised world of human rights discourse to the concrete material, social and political conditions of South Africa. The book also provides some novel suggestions regarding how the challenges facing this nation can be met, enabling South Africans at last to achieve true liberation from the domination, poverty and violence that are the legacy of a brutal colonial past.
David James, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
In Are South Africans Free? Lawrence Hamilton advances a bold vision of a free South Africa based on more than a liberal constitution and individual rights, and yet also wary of the oppressive hegemony of ‘people’s power’. It is a vision of freedom through power; that is freedom through a state democratically revived by new institutions of representation. These institutions recognise the inevitable gap between rulers and ruled, but look to make this gap a space of accountability such that citizens can genuinely influence social and economy policy. Hamilton’s vision is a street-wise, twenty-first century republicanism: tempering the reality that freedom is indivisible and that political community must be defended, with the recognition that people are different and that power must be constrained.
Laurence Piper, Department of Political Studies, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
With great urgency and acuity, Hamilton brings illustrates the need to reconfigure the power relations which arrange our particular social order ... What makes his study persuasive is his figuring of social pathology in terms of freedom.
- Joshua Maserow, Aerodrome: Words and People (website)