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An analysis of C. Wright Mills' The Causes of World War Three. A deviant among sociol'ts, his colleagues belabor his imprecise res methods & his emotional language. He, in turn, criticizes their failure to deal with really large & important soc issues. Like Riesman, he is concerned with assessing the new US society, but unlike him, he has an unfashionable concern for the Ur poor, his tone is angry, & he is quite sure that the current course of events is both depressing & dangerous. He now calls for a liquidation of untenable alliances, more particularly in Asia; for a withdrawal from some advanced bases that give the USSR a legitimate grievance; for a halt in the testing of nuclear weapons & in the competitive scramble for propaganda advantage in outer space; for ceaseless effort to reach an agreement for general disarmament-to the point of willful self-exposure. In this last point Mills has overstepped the necessities of his own argument. Nevertheless, his call for a revival of radical-Utopian thinking is an impressive one indeed. (See SA 8148). J. A. Fishman.

A critical review of M. P. Fogarty's Christian Democracy in Western Europe, 1820-1953. That Christian democracy (CD) on its lower levels is so often ethically attractive & at its more exalted levels is correspondingly depressing is not merely an accident of circumstance. In CD, the 2nd term of the title is merely instrumental to the 1st. A CD is a Christian primarily, & a democrat only in a subordinate capacity. The adjective is more important than the noun. No real choice exists: since one term is spiritual & the other pol'al, it is obvious which necessarily takes precedence. It is for this reason that the behavior of Christian Democratic parties offers such a bewildering alternation of moral judgments & opportunist calculation, & why their behavior has been assessed so very differently by their apologists & by their detractors. CD's quite naturally feel called upon to make moral judgments in nearly every sphere of life-but since the criterion of these judgments is religious rather than pol'al, a merely opportunist selection of pol'al means to moral ends may at the same time appear perfectly permissible. Such is the more disquieting signif of that ideological flexibility in which, according to Fogarty, the CD's take particular pride. J. A. Fishman.

In the Communist world the intellectuals' dependence on state & party is complete. In Britain, Western Germany, Italy &, particularly, in France the status of the thinker or writer as an individual enjoying a special set of privileges & a special kind of respect is very nearly the same as it was 2 generations ago - except that the intellectuals no longer have the same practical effect on society & gov. The apathy & lack of understanding for things intellectual of which US writers complain may represent some halfway point between the declared hostility to free speculation characteristic of the USSR & the traditional (but increasingly hollow) respect that the public in Western Europe accords, the intellectual's situation in the US presents a kind of paradigm for the whole of industrial society in the 20th cent. The role of the free intellectuals in Europe is sketched beginning with early modern times when the lay thinker & writer began to break the original Church monopoly of intellectual life. By the 18th cent the characteristic European intellectual had been completely converted from a defender & rationalizer of existing institutions into their implacable critic. Never in its history (except perhaps briefly in the '30's & early '40's) did the US conform to this European model. The characteristic young man of brains & promise became a 'mental technician' rather than an intellectual. The American intellectual faces a dubious future. He is obliged to withstand almost irresistable pressures toward conformity to the role of mental technician. He is robbed of both his historic functions; being the ideological bulwark of society & its utopian critic. J. A. Fishman.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- 1. Some Preliminary Observations -- 2. The Decade of the 1890's: The Revolt against Positivism -- 3. The Critique of Marxism -- I. DURKHEIM AND MARXISM AS MORAL PASSION -- II. PARETO AND THE THEORY OF THE ELITE -- III. CROCE AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AS A CANON OF INTERPRETATION -- IV. SOREL AND MARXISM AS "SOCIAL POETRY" -- POSTSCRIPT: GRAMSCI AND MARXIST HUMANISM -- 4. The Recovery of the Unconscious -- I. THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND SCIENTIFIC SETTING -- II. BERGSON AND THE USES OF INTUITION -- III. SIGMUND FREUD: EPISTEMOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS -- IV. SIGMUND FREUD: SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY -- V. JUNG AND THE "COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS" -- 5. Georges Sorel's Search for Reality -- 6. Neo-Idealism in History -- I. THE GERMAN IDEALIST TRADITION -- II. DILTHEY AND THE DEFINITION OF THE "CULTURAL SCIENCES" -- III. BENEDETTO CROCE: FROM THE "FIRST ESSAYS" TO THE "HISTORIOGRAPHY" -- IV. BENEDETTO CROCE: THE CONCEPT OF ETHICO-POLITICAL HISTORY -- V. TROELTSCH, MEINECKE, AND THE CRISIS IN GERMAN VALUES -- 7. The Heirs of Machiavelli: Pareto, Mosca, Michels -- POSTSCRIPT: ALAIN AND THE RESTATEMENT OF RADICALISM -- 8. Max Weber and the Transcending of Positivism and Idealism -- PREAMBLE: DURKHEIM AND THE POSITIVIST REMAINDER -- I. INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS AND EARLY PRODUCTION -- II. THE METHODOLOGICAL PHASE -- III. THE STUDIES OF RELIGION -- IV. SOCIOLOGY AND HISTORY -- 9. The European Imagination and the First World War -- I. THE GENERATION OF 1905 -- II. PÉGUY AND ALAIN-FOURNIER -- III. THE NOVELIST AND THE BOURGEOIS WORLD: GIDE AND MANN -- IV. THE MORAL LEGACY OF THE WAR: SPENGLER AND THE "ELDERS" -- V. THE LITERARY SENSATIONS OF THE POST-WAR YEARS: HESSE, PROUST, PIRANDELLO