602 The American Political Science Review Vol.

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what is most needed is more time, more liberty, who do not. For example, Erasmus did not get
more peace for the individual student and involved, but Montaigne did; Goethe did not
teacher to develop his own interests, ideas and really care, but Schiller did. These essays are
techniques as he matures. Silence and solitude filled with much nice detail, summations of the
can do more for continuous learning than can spirits of ages and anecdotes about the lives of
the cult of incessant communication. the large cast of characters. Professor Levi as-
W. B. GALLIE sures us that he could have begun with Socra-
Peterhouse, Cambridge tes, but that would have been to overextend his
"canvas," which is already of proportions that
Humanism and Politics. By Albert William would put Veronese to shame.
Levi. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University These essays, however unconnected they
Press, 1969. Pp. 498. $15.00.) may appear, actually convey a general impres-
This book is a response to an urgent need. sion of a subtle humanistic strategy. After the
Professor Levi argues that our civilization is on quick tour of Renaissance humanists, we are
the edge of an abyss which threatens to swal- introduced to the "great refusal," the turning
low up the works of Proust, Picasso, Wallace away from politics practiced by many great hu-
Stevens, and Stravinsky just as it did those of manists, particularly German. Levi tells us they
Menander. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are the were good men because they were humanists,
warnings, and the author reminds us again and but they, Goethe in particular, did not fulfill
again, lest we forget, of the stakes for which he their potential for good works to mankind at
is playing. Although our situation is such as to large. Goethe in some way is responsible for
have induced the despair and withdrawal from Auschwitz, for he did not engage. Thomas
political involvement of Martin Heidegger and Mann was another who refused engagement
Norman Mailer, this is a temptation which but who later changed his mind. And we know
must be avoided, for we can be saved, Levi that he gave up a rightwing sentimental cultural
says, only by the intervention of the humanistic snobbishness for the politics of the left. As Pro-
imagination. fessor Levi puts it, ". . . Lukaics urged on the
Science, with its technological barbarism and regenerate Thomas Mann that at the heart of
merely manipulative social branch, can offer us his intellectual and moral life, 'he should re-
no help, says Levi, and he quickly dismisses it. place the tradition which runs: Goethe-
Only humanism offers a resource because it is Schopenhauer-Wagner-Nietzsche with another
the endeavor which can be defined as "the which runs: Lessing-Goethe-H6lderlin-Bdchner-
quest for value" (p. 15). It assumes "not only Heine-Marx" (p. 418). The point is that all hu-
the existence of standards of value which are manists must be engaged; the refusal leads to
not merely arbitrary, but the human freedom to Nazism or the like; and when any true human-
commit oneself to values through an act of the ist does engage, he must do so on the side of
will" (p. 17). He does not, however, give us the humanitarian left, for that is all that a hu-
much indication of what the nonarbitrary val- manist could do. He must also be a cosmopoli-
ues are or how they are arrived at. Happily, tan, for nationalism, it seems, almost inevitably
though, one can catch glimpses of Professor leads to positions like those held by Treitschke,
Levi's views in the course of the book-man of whom Levi presents a sinister portrait.
must always care for man and avoid his reduc- The left which we must join in order to be
tion to thingness or to brutishness as well as his useful humanists is the Marxist left. Marx, we
transcendence of man. He steers carefully be- learn, cannot be opposed any more than can
tween the Scylla of behavioralism and the Descartes. Even in disagreeing with him, we
Charybdis of religion. Some of his imperatives are agreeing with him. He constitutes our his-
might read: Thou shalt not serve the military- toric ambiance. The issue is not whether to ac-
industrial complex (a commandment broken by cept Marx but how to interpret him. Therefore,
Herman Kahn). Thou shalt not admire a politi- it follows that the last half of the book, and
cal assassin who is not willing to die himself (a more, is devoted to the postures of various hu-
commandment obeyed by Camus). manists with regard to Communism, except for
The specific task of this book, which Profes- a stop to annihilate Herman Kahn who repre-
sor Levi seems to understand as an act of hu- sents science which is responsible for Hiro-
manistic beneficence to politics, is to investigate shima and the Cold War. Picasso, Brecht, Pas-
the relation to politics of humanists from Eras- ternak, Camus, Sartre, Merleau Ponty, and Lu-
mus to Hochhuth. The fundamental distinction kaics are looked at. The existentialists men-
is between those who get involved and those tioned are all members of Sartre's circle and
 1973 Book Reviews 603

their thought treated as a footnote to Marxism. quarian merely; even the royal house of Savoy,
At all of this, one might wonder whether Sta- which Maistre served with distinction, had gone
lin's Russia was more open to a humanist's val- down to dusty death. Yet Jack Lively (of the
ues than was Hitler's Germany. This is a diffi- University of Sussex) took Maistre very seri-
cult point. Professor Levi knows that Stalin was ously when this useful volume of selections was
not nice, but for him the experience with Stalin first published in 1965; and that influential soci-
does not have the same absolute value that the ologist Robert Nisbet, in his foreword to this new
experience with Hitler did. Somehow, human- paperback edition, finds Maistre worth compar-
ism is not excluded by it. Thus Goethe's stance ing with Plato and Hobbes-for good reason.
toward politics foreshadows Hitler, but Marx's The powerful intellect of Maistre, at the be-
possible connection with Stalin is not even ginning of the nineteenth century, stood in op-
hinted at; hence, humanist activism hardly position to the Age of Reason. In the closing
seems a danger. Herman Kahn is prime facie decades of the twentieth century, much of the
corrupt because he worked for the Rand Cor- rising generation sets its face against political
poration, but Berthold Brecht who accepted and moral Rationalism-if more on the princi-
Stalin Prizes and put the money in Swiss banks ples of Rousseau than on those of Maistre.
was merely exercising peasant canniness in pre- Once more people seek, as Maistre sought, for
serving the freedom of the artist; those human- an enduring principle of order: some principle
ists who supported and praised Stalin receive quite different from the liberal order of the past
no blame, or else their little failings are buried two centuries. So it is that the conservative ar-
under sociological or psychological explana- guments of Maistre regain significance.
tion. "Where the liberals and radicals of their day
Professor Levi is suggesting a transnational, saw the new order rising like a phoenix from
even a transpolitical, politics, peopled by "hu- the ashes of the old regime," Professor Nisbet
manists" with special privilege but committed writes in his foreword, "the conservatives saw
to the proletarian cause. Regimes are indiffer- not the new order but the new disorder-one
ent; one does not have to study that sort of that they declared would be the permanent con-
thing; whichever has more "humanism" is best. dition of man so long as the values of individu-
This allows a dialogue across the opposing re- alism, secularism, progress, and mass democ-
gimes with Marxists from bourgeois societies racy prevailed" (pp. xv-xvi). That principle of
politely disagreeing with Marxists from Com- order, Maistre (though no theocrat) found in
munist societies about the interpretation of obedience to God's design. The study of his-
Marx. Marxism has been freed from party rig- tory, rather than of philosophy, is the proper
idity, and the success of this endeavor is vouch- discipline of politics.
safed by the stunning flowering of humanism in Mr. Lively selects many of the more impor-
Yugoslavia. This is the perfect ideology for the tant sections and passages from Maistre's Con-
cultural congresses in pleasant Eastern Euro- siderations on France, Study on Sovereignty,
pean resorts (p. 342 ff.), and it allows one to The Pope, Essay on the Generative Principle of
play the conscience to both decadent bourgeois Political Constitutions, The Saint Petersburg
societies and intolerant people's democracies Dialogues, and Enlightenment on Sacrifices.
which misinterpret Marx's humanism. The character of these writings is so foreign to
The achievement of this book, the political the tendency of political belief in America and
central segment of a monumental trilogy, is to Britain during the past two centuries that Mais-
reduce to nothingness the gap separating phi- tre now has an exotic charm; some readers will
losophy from journalism. be impelled to consult the sources at greater
ALLAN BLOOM length.
University of Toronto In his perceptive and impartial introduction,
Jack Lively traces the opposition-and the sim-
The Works of Joseph de Maistre. Selected, ilarities-between Maistre and Rousseau, on
translated, and introduced by Jack Lively; the one hand, and between Maistre and Hume,
foreword by Robert Nisbet. (New York: on the other. These three political philosophers
Schocken Books, 1971. Pp. 303. $3.95.) had this in common, that they denied the au-
A few years ago, surely, no political thinker thority of a complacent rationalism, and dis-
would have seemed more irrelevant to the pres- covered in intuition, moral sentiments, and cus-
ent condition of society-in the eyes of the typ- tom the enduring bonds of society. For under-
ical educated American-than Joseph de Mais- standing in modern context such criticism of
tre. Ultramontanist politics had become anti- the Enlightenment's basic assumptions, it may