"This massive, wide-ranging and highly simulating jeremiad is organized around two related claims: that the increasingly global market system that has emerged in recent decades diminishes freedom for the vast majority of the world’s population, subordinating virtually the whole of social life to a market logic at odds with rational desires, defensible environmental concerns, and, for many people, fundamental human needs; and that this economic transformation (functionally) explains the increasingly pervasive but patently false conviction that there is no feasible alternative to what is coming to pass and therefore that political efforts aimed at enhancing freedom or even at restoring the condition that obtained before the pace of globalization accelerated are futile at best. [...] It would be wrong, however, to conclude that what McMurtry has produced is, wittingly or not, a contemporary remake of Marx’s classic. [...] If it is fair to say that Unequal Freedoms brings the 1844 Manuscripts [of Marx] up-to-date, it is also fair to say that it lightens the philosophical load and political bearing of its distinguished predecessor. [...] McMurtry’s tract is consistently well-argued, eminently clear, and carefully constructed. But it is more a work of public than academic political philosophy and political economy. Philosophers, economists, and political scientists will find their disciplines ably represented, insofar as McMurtry’s discussions focus on their express concerns. But they will also find much with which to quarrel at the level of specificity that the best academic writing in these fields characteristically assumes. [...] Thus Unequal Freedoms does not stand out for the contributions it makes to the academic fields it draws on any more than it does for the originality of its outlook. Its considerable merit lies instead in the cogent, sober, but still passionate way in which it brings so much philosophy, political science, economics, and plain common sense to bear — to indict existing and emerging economic, political, and social arrangements and the ideological operations that sustain them. Unequal Freedoms is public philosophy of a high order. "