Between 1890 and 1930 Europe underwent profound intellectual changes, reverberating throughout the Western world. Their significance is analyzed in the recently published Consciousness and Society (Knopf), by H. Stuart Hughes, well known to the readers of this magazine as a frequent contributor. The book is here discussed by George Lichtheim, a former associate editor of COMMENTARY.

_____________

Contemporary history begins with the First World War. In 1914 European society was shaken by the earlier of two armed conflicts whose after-effects have now unsettled the whole globe. The resulting chain-reactions are still with us; they detonate in the intellectual sphere as decisively, if not as loudly, as in the arena of politics. Yet Europe, once their starting point, is no longer their prime focus. When we speak of today’s crucial issues we are more likely to associate them with events in America, Russia, or even China. It is not inconceivable that in the lifetime of those still present, Europe will become a backwater. Few things would have seemed less likely in 1914. Europe in those days was not merely the greatest repository of power in the world: it was unchallengeably dominant in all spheres of thought. And within Europe the western half—England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy—maintained its traditional ascendancy over the regions to the east and south. Spain hardly counted; Russia took its intellectual notions from Germany or France; and the two last named shared an eminence which even their mutual rivalry could not seriously endanger; or so it seemed. Few people in those days were aware of the fragility of the whole structure. Even as late as 1930, on the eve of a second cycle of wars and revolutions, it was still unfashionable to suggest that the whole European era might be drawing to a close.

Yet signs of trouble had been noticeable since the closing decade of the 19th century. As usual they manifested themselves first in the intellectual sphere. There was a lessening of the optimism which accompanied the great expansion of power and productivity at the century’s height. Liberalism gave signs of aging; so did positivism; even socialism could without apparent paradox be described in some respects as outmoded. There was a stirring among the younger generation, a tendency for intellectuals to waver between the opposing extremes of romantic nationalism and world-weary aestheticism. The war of 1914-1918, so far from producing these symptoms, merely gave heightened expression to them. Indeed its outbreak neatly intersected a period of reorientation which had begun some two decades earlier and was to continue for well over another decade after its close. It is only by 1930 that the now familiar modern consciousness—typified by the names Marx, Freud, Pareto, Weber, Wittgenstein, Spengler, Croce, Gide, Proust, etc.—appears fully developed. By then, too, it is no longer confined to Europe, let alone Western Europe: it has become a universal phenomenon—perhaps the forerunner of the first genuinely world-wide civilization to be realized.

This transformation of the modern mind is the principal theme of H. Stuart Hughes’s important book Consciousness and Society. The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890-1930 .¹ Let it be said at once that the work is important not only for its subject matter but for the manner in which it confronts the problem.

_____________

Here is intellectual history, in the classical tradition, and written by an American historian whose understanding of West European thought is as penetrating as that of any European, with the added advantage of not being confined to a particular national framework. No European writer treating of German and Italian philosophic idealism, French, German, and Italian sociology, Freudian psychology, and modern literature since 1890, could have failed to over-stress the role of his own country at the expense of its traditional rivals. It takes an American to see Europe as a whole; to realize, e.g., that what happened between 1890 and 1930 concerned the Germans in precisely the same fashion as their neighbors, with whom they were twice locked in mortal conflict; just as it takes an American to make the point that during this crucial period England was pretty much outside the intellectual main stream (though not in mathematics or natural science, with which Professor Hughes is not concerned; nor in economics, which he treats rather cavalierly).

This clearly is a delicate point, and it may be worth quoting Mr. Hughes on his principle of selection: “The geographical area of study is Europe in the narrower sense—the original ‘heartland’ of Western society: France, Germany (including Austria), and Italy. Why precisely this area? Initially it may be argued that . . . an area approximating the one with which I am dealing has had a more intense European consciousness . . . [than] the countries on the West European periphery. Scandinavia, the Iberian peninsula, the British Isles—these have always seemed less self-consciously European. And as for Eastern Europe, its participation in the family heritage has appeared even more doubtful. . . . In the course of the study I hope to establish that it was Germans and Austrians and French and Italians—rather than Englishmen or Americans or Russians—who in general provided the fund of ideas that has come to seem most characteristic of our own time.”

Now, however debatable this argument may be in general, it becomes self-validating in the case of a study restricted to areas of thought in which Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen, and Italians indubitably held the lead during the period under review. Even so it is possible to note some lacunae: Austria is represented principally by Mach and Freud, to the neglect of important political, legal, and social theorists; the virtual exclusion of England is sharpened by the contrast between the attention given to the “Vienna Circle” of logicians and the fleeting mention of Russell and Whitehead; Switzerland appears only in the context of Pareto’s residence at Lausanne and Jung’s opposition to Freud, although Karl Barth is briefly alluded to in the concluding chapter.

It is also possible to feel that in the account of French social thought a little too much has been made of Sorel, whose confused maunderings scarcely deserve the attention bestowed upon them by historians in search of a successor to Comte. (Alternatively, since Mr. Hughes elects to take him seriously, he might have traced his descent from Proudhon, another self-educated apostle of populist socialism.) Lastly, the author’s indifference to economics has caused him to obscure the point of the argument over Marx with which he introduces his general theme: the really damaging criticism of the labor theory of value came not from Croce (whose understanding of economics was somewhat limited), or from Sorel (who hardly understood what all the fuss was about), but from Boehm-Bewerk; and the only impressive defense of the Marxian position was put up by the Austrian Marxists, whom Mr. Hughes does not discuss and indeed fails to notice.

This having been said—reviewers must be honest even with writings they admire—the point can now be made that Mr. Hughes has written the first integrated study of modern European thought which really goes to the heart of the subject; just as he is probably the first historian, at any rate in the English-speaking world, who has taken the trouble to trace the connection between the “crisis of values” in literature and the conceptual revision in the social sciences: thus making it plain that Croce, Max Weber, Bergson, Proust, and the existentialists were at bottom all concerned with the same problem. In the light of this achievement the reservations noted earlier count for very little.

_____________

It must be clearly understood that we are dealing here not with another conventional study in Western European history wherein the “contributions” made by the several “national cultures” to some arbitrarily defined whole are given good or bad marks in accordance with the prevailing academic fashion; nor yet with a Spenglerian or Toynbeean essay on the world spirit as manifested in selected bits of historical evidence. Rather, Professor Hughes has tried to analyze the modern consciousness through a detailed and closely reasoned scrutiny of Europe’s intellectual history between 1890 and 1930, i.e., during the forty years preceding and following the First World War. And he has done so by establishing an intricate network of internal relationships linking such apparently disparate phenomena as the assault on positivism in pre-1914 France, the growth of irrationalism in German literature, and the influence of Hegelianism and Marxism on the thinking of the Italian philosophers and sociologists of the period. In some cases the filiations thus established resist even the certainty that the theorist in question knew nothing of ideas which formed the counterpart of his own work, e.g., it seems that Pareto was unaware of both Max Weber and Freud, a circumstance greatly aided by his inability to read German; while Freud developed his thought without reference to the irrationalist philosophers of his age.

It is only toward the end of the period under review that something like a supranational integration emerges, with novelists like Gide and Mann popularizing the ideas of Freud, while “logical positivism,” from being the discovery of a group of young men in postwar Vienna, becomes an international phenomenon. For the pre-1914 era the only comparable parallel noted by Mr. Hughes is the encounter between William James and Freud during the latter’s visit to the United States in 1909, when James told the guest from Vienna that the future of psychology belonged to him. For the rest, the leading thinkers of the period worked in relative isolation, though Pareto corresponded with Croce and was at least aware of the French school in sociology. There was as yet no integrated European outlook, let alone a recognition that national exclusiveness in science was becoming outmoded. Characteristically, in 1914-18 most of the men under discussion—Pareto and Freud being the two most notable exceptions—not merely took up the conventional patriotic attitude, but made it their business to assert that civilization was best served by the particular national model to which their allegiance was due. Few went as far as Durkheim, who shared the super-patriotism of his fellow Alsatian Alfred Dreyfus (perhaps the most improbable suspect ever arraigned for treason, as Mr. Hughes justly observes); but all did their best, none more so than Max Weber, who not merely donned his reserve officer’s uniform for the duration of the war, but after 1918 took an early opportunity to proclaim the need for the reconstitution of the German General Staff, then proscribed under the Versailles settlement.

Here a passing remark is in order. Mr. Hughes, in a laudable desire to be fair to ex-enemies, passes lightly over such episodes, or even (as in the case just referred to) ignores them altogether. Thus we get no mention of Weber’s National-Liberal, i.e. expansionist rather than merely patriotic, outlook in foreign affairs; or of his notable conversation with Ludendorff in 1919, when he instructed the fallen war-lord on the meaning of popular leadership, in terms suggesting a somewhat Caesarist conception of democracy. The fact is that Weber’s attitude remained authoritarian even after he had despaired of the Bismarckian Reich. It is possible that in time he would, like Thomas Mann, have mellowed into a liberal democrat; no one can say, for he died in 1920, having meantime helped to saddle the Weimar Republic with a presidential system that was to prove its undoing.

_____________

On balance such omissions do no great harm; the most one can say is that they give evidence of a conciliatory spirit which at times exceeds the bounds of mere fair-mindedness. Mr. Hughes clearly is of a very different temper from Jacques Barzun, who some years ago devoted large sections of a vigorous but ill-tempered and curiously parochial essay to the thesis that Darwin, Marx, and Wagner were very small beer compared with their French contemporaries Lamarck, Proudhon, and Berlioz. By contrast Mr. Hughes is inclined to think well of his protagonists, and in the case of Weber he is helped by his subject’s truly impressive intellectual and moral stature. Indeed, Weber is one of the two heroes of this book, Freud being the other. Significantly, both belong to the German-speaking orbit. Had Professor Hughes carried his account forward to 1945, and at the same time rescinded what appears to be a tacit ban on theology, he would have found himself under the necessity of allotting similar importance to the German-Swiss Karl Barth. As it is, his volume opens with a consideration of the impact made on the “generation of 1890” by yet another German thinker, Karl Marx.

There is matter for reflection in this list, notably if one is not impeded by Mr. Barzun’s blinkers. The fact is that during the period under review Germany and Austria held the initiative in promoting that intellectual transformation which is the subject of Mr. Hughes’s study. For all that Pareto and Durkheim were able to do, the new sociology in the end emanated from Heidelberg, much as the new psychology made its way from Vienna, despite Freud’s early studies under Charcot and Janet. In the philosophical sphere there was no single thinker to rival Croce in the degree of influence over the national life, or Bergson in fashionable success; but the decisive contest in the logical domain was once more waged in Central Europe (if England is left out of account). Lastly, the Germans held their earlier lead in the historical field, and even lengthened it by developing new categories of thought whose discussion constitutes one of the most fascinating chapters of Mr. Hughes’s study. They were relatively weak in economics, though here the Austrian contribution made up for the deficiencies of the “historical school”; and it is arguable that despite Einstein and Planck they did not quite match the British achievement in natural science, which however lies outside the scope of Mr. Hughes’s investigation. As against this, France could claim preeminence only in the field of literature, and Italy in none whatsoever.

The last point is perhaps debatable, depending on one’s view of the three theorists whose doctrines Mr. Hughes summarizes in a chapter headed “The Heirs of Machiavelli”: Pareto, Mosca, and Michels. Here the reviewer is obliged to part company with the author, though only for a short distance: one cannot help feeling that Mr. Hughes (who after all is the author of a book on Italy and clearly has a good deal of personal liking for Italian literature) makes a little too much of his chosen examples. He duly notes the antiquated character of much of the thinking that went into Pareto’s Trattato, but he does so with evident regret and something like surprise that more is not to be got out of this elephantine study in political chicanery. He does his best to establish Mosca as a figure of more than local importance, but it is difficult to feel that he has succeeded. And as for Michels, whose early anti-democratic bias took him all the way to Fascism, can one really at this time of day take his “iron law of oligarchy” as seriously as he himself did? Of the three, only Pareto ranks as a major theorist, and of him Professor Hughes in the end candidly observes that “by his stubborn adherence to an outmoded philosophical position” he “denied himself a claim to greatness both as a scientist and as a speculative thinker.” And again, “In one of his guises Pareto was the last of the system-builders, the residuary legatee of Comte and Spencer. In trying to establish what could properly be accomplished by their method . . . he had indeed proved how very little that was. He was a sufficiently penetrating critic to point out where Comte and Spencer had gone astray—but he was unable to recognize that it might be their whole approach that was radically at fault. A transition figure, too old to learn a new method, Pareto, like Sorel, could find no way out of his difficulties.” But can the problem be thus disposed of in personal terms? Despite his half-French upbringing and his residence in Switzerland, Pareto was fundamentally Italian, and Italy’s position was not sufficiently central to encourage a really relevant form of political thinking. Like Michels’s “law of oligarchy,” Pareto’s critique of liberal democracy was geared to the unsolved problems of a relatively backward country; his indifference to whatever lay outside the Latin world mirrored a deeper parochialism in Italian life as a whole.

_____________

II

After these preliminaries it is time to come to terms with Mr. Hughes’s central theme. Some salient points have already been noted: the modern consciousness of society was first elaborated by a group of West European thinkers around the turn of the century; at the same time, the new mode of thinking and feeling in literature, psychology, and philosophy, reflected a social transformation that gave rise to the wave of romantic irrationalism on the eve of the first world war; lastly, the crisis of the European nation-state, of which the 1914-1918 war was a violent expression, was also the crisis of the liberal culture to which the philosophers, sociologists, and artists of the period belonged; and the critique of liberalism-cum-positivism thus came to have political meaning. In Mr. Hughes’s argument these three strands are interwoven with others, but in the main they indicate the trend of his thought, which aims at a synthesis of historical and philosophical concepts—i.e., at intellectual history in the Crocean manner. From the customary academic concern with “ideas” this approach differs principally in its awareness that new concepts are pointers to unsolved material problems, while materialism is held at bay by insistence on the autonomy of the spirit. This kind of balance can in practice only be maintained with the greatest difficulty—as the author is not slow to note, the resultant inner tension had its share in driving Weber nearly mad; in other cases it produces nothing more original than a collapse into eclecticism. Though he is to be felicitated on his ability to avoid these pitfalls, Mr. Hughes would be the last to claim that he has gone significantly beyond stating the problem, and then leaving it open. A passage in the introductory chapter on the leading thinkers of the epoch may be read as a partial description of his own mode of approach:

In the shifting, transitional world of ideas in which they dwelt, the problem of consciousness early established itself as crucial. Another way of defining their intellectual epoch would be to suggest that it was the period in which the subjective attitude of the observer of society first thrust itself forward in peremptory fashion—hence the title of this study. . . . Thus the various thinkers with whom we shall be dealing were all in their different ways striving to comprehend the newly recognized disparity between external reality and the internal appreciation of this disparity.

And again:

Regarded in this fashion, the intellectual labors of the forty years from 1890 to 1930 group themselves as a series of attempts to solve the specific questions that the new awareness of the problematical character of social observation had thrust to the fore. Such attempts . . . notably raised the general level of intellectual self-consciousness. . . . But this increase in sophistication also had its dangers. . . . The new self-consciousness could readily slip into a radical skepticism: from an awareness of the subjective character of social thought it was an easy step to denying the validity of all such thought—or, alternatively, to the desperate resolve to “think with the blood.”

In considering these remarks it is worth bearing in mind the standpoint of their author, a procedure to which Mr. Hughes gives his implicit sanction in the opening paragraphs of his study. Philosophical neutrality being out of the question, it is relevant to ask where the historian has taken his stand, and here the reply is unambiguous: “The influence of Croce and Freud and Weber will be apparent on nearly every page. The implicit notion of what constitutes history is basically Crocean. Yet it is a Crocean attitude profoundly modified by psychoanalytic and sociological theory—things to which Croce himself was temperamentally hostile.” The danger of eclecticism is partly met by a refusal on the author’s part to let incompatible systems of thought run into each other. Thus he notes Freud’s indifference to history, and Weber’s rationalist blinkers in the psychological field. No attempt is made to suggest that an adequate synthesis can be constructed out of Crocean philosophy, Weberian sociology, and Freudian psychology, as they stand. The reader is thus left more or less in the same questioning posture in which Weber found himself at the end of his life, when—in Mr. Hughes’s words—“he pushed all the contradictions to their point of maximum lucidity.” Significantly, he adds: “It is for this reason that Weber sums up, more than any other single figure, the major themes of the present study.” In short, what makes him the representative thinker of his generation was his recognition that the central problem was insoluble.

_____________

Now what was this problem? In a nutshell it can be defined as the question of meaning in history. Does history have a recognizable pattern, and if so, can it be brought into harmony with an acceptable theory of human nature and the human mind? Or must we be content with subjective interpretations into which our own predispositions enter, so as to leave us with nothing save a choice between different world views and different moral alternatives, all equally good or bad? For himself, Weber—as Mr. Hughes notes—rejected the relativist label, but he did so only because he was blind to the implications of his own thought. On this point the present reviewer agrees wholeheartedly with the author. There seems indeed no question that “in the sense of a point of view that denies any metaphysical certainty—whether of ethics or of historical truth—Weber can properly be characterized by this term. He frankly recognized the personal affective origin of his own convictions: he found no ultimate grounding for them. But he grew dizzy at the abysses that this line of reasoning seemed to open. We of the generation of his grandchildren, who have grown up in an atmosphere of intellectual and moral relativism, may find ourselves less frightened.”

What was true of Weber was likewise true of his German contemporaries, Dilthey, Meinecke, and Troeltsch, except insofar as the last named was kept afloat by vestigial remnants of his inherited Protestant faith. Dilthey, who may be said to have originated the whole drift toward relativism by his investigations into the history of European culture, was sufficiently old-fashioned to hold fast, as a man, to the humanist values of the Enlightenment, while as a scholar he laid the axe to the foundations. Meinecke, perhaps the leading historian of the period, saved himself by maintaining a precarious balance between the old liberal cosmopolitanism and the new nationalism, which was also the new irrationalism. He died, aged over ninety, after the Second World War, having twice in his lifetime witnessed the debacle of what Marx a century earlier had contemptuously termed “the German ideology.” Troeltsch became a Christian social reformer and a moderate supporter of the Weimar Republic, whose collapse he did not live to see. Others were more reckless. Long before Dilthey in the 1880’s had begun to saw at the branch on which he was perched, Treitschke opted for nationalism and “realism” in its most vulgar and flamboyant form; in the following generation, with Nietzsche’s philosophy to guide him, Spengler plunged straight into nihilism, and soon the number of relativists grew legion: if all choices were equally subjective, one might as well “think with the blood,” or else assert with Spengler that Western culture was doomed. No wonder a man like Weber, who resisted this witches’ sabbath with all the strength at his command, yet had no absolute certainties to guide him, felt that he was defending a lost cause.

_____________

The trouble was not indeed confined to Germany, but for a variety of reasons it assumed a particularly dangerous form. Elsewhere, relativism was held in check by powerful vestiges of the classical humanist tradition. Or, if the romantic irrationalists won out, as they did in Italy under Mussolini, the opposition kept up a real resistance, rather than a mere façade of respectability. On this point Mr. Hughes, whose own allegiance goes to the Enlightenment (with a few obvious qualifications), might have done well to give more weight to such factors as the relative weakness of German liberalism ever since the later 19th century: to be exact, since the failure of the 1848 revolution and the subsequent Bismarckian unification. A liberalism whose political backbone had already been broken was in no condition to give a successful account of itself when the romantic challenge arose in a new form around 1900. The French, for all their political failures, did a great deal better; while in England, with its unshaken tradition of social stability, the conflict was muffled by compromise—which is indeed a good reason for excluding it from the purview of such a study. England throughout this period continued to reproduce the old conservative-liberal seesaw, while Fabian socialism presented itself as the legitimate heir of Millian liberalism: quite unlike Marxism, with its roots in Hegel and its head in the clouds. The real storm-center, as Mr. Hughes correctly perceives, was Germany (plus Austria, which was falling to pieces politically amidst a belated though genuine cultural efflorescence); and the problem is why in Central Europe as nowhere else matters were allowed to drift until the final disaster of 1933-45. But this question cannot be answered wholly in intellectual terms, unless one chooses to regard the defeat of liberalism in the 1848 revolution as being due to intellectual weakness. For the 1848 failure led straight to the bigger disaster in 1918, when the Social-Democrats re-enacted the fate of their liberal ancestors. Once the Weimar Republic had lost its hold on the middle class, the reactionary intellectuals who had always detested it saw the way free to subverting it, just as their counterparts in France did in 1940. But in contradistinction to Germany, France (as the Resistance movement was to show) possessed a liberal tradition which was genuinely popular, and this fortunate circumstance the French owed solely to their Revolution. It would seem that liberalism, like other philosophies, needs to be acclimatized by way of some kind of historical drama which unites it to the national tradition.

It was the misfortune of Germany in the 19th century that at the crucial moment she took the wrong turning. Had events fallen out otherwise, the “crisis of values” which struck German intellectual life after 1900 might have been more manageable. At least it need not have taken the catastrophic form it did in 1933, when philosophers like Heidegger, and political theorists like Carl Schmitt, gave the signal for the stampede into outright irrationalism. The spectacle of thousands of German intellectuals jumping down the sewers at the behest of such leaders has no counterpart in modern times—Italy was never really conquered by Fascism, and the Vichy regime was a stale absurdity. Definitely, there was something very sick in German society, but the sickness was not just an intellectual one.

_____________

From a different standpoint it can be argued that Weber (and following him, Mr. Hughes) gives to the “value” problem a formulation which impedes greater critical awareness. The term itself is not altogether happy: “Values” that are “possessed” or “lost” by their owners suggest a relationship conditioned by exclusive individual ownership—a notion appropriate to bourgeois culture, but for that reason inadequate for theoretical purposes when the culture itself is called in question. (It seems odd that so few theologians have in recent years protested against the term “spiritual values”: there is surely something rather inappropriate about it.) The romantic irrationalists who followed Nietzsche’s lead were not altogether wrong when—like their socialist rivals—they denounced this whole outlook as class-bound, stuffy, and altogether unendurable. It is probable that “values” come to be regarded as such only when they are no longer spontaneously felt and lived; in other words, when the cultural integration is breaking down. In such a situation it does no good to posit abstract principles and demand acceptance for them, at the cost of instinctual spontaneity, since it is precisely this dichotomy which signifies the breakdown. Nor is the intellectual position saved by opposing moral ideals, in the Kantian manner, to an incomprehensible “reality.” When Weber took this kind of stand, he followed in the wake of Kant, while his opponents—on the left as well as the right—appealed to Hegel, who a century earlier had ridiculed the Kantian moralism. But then Hegel believed that history had a meaning, and though his system has gone the way of all others, it is still arguable that he has something to teach the historian. At any rate, since his philosophy had by 1870 been expelled from the universities, he cannot be held responsible for the intellectual situation around 1914, when the only choice appeared to lie between romantic irrationalism and the bleakest kind of positivism. The fact is that when Weber and his contemporaries experienced “the problematic character of rationality in the Western world” (to quote Mr. Hughes), they did so in a manner peculiar to their generation—a generation brought up on the more or less unquestioning acceptance of certain principles which were called in question during their lifetime. These principles, in the last analysis, were those of the Enlightenment. The point is worth making because the currently fashionable academic neo-conservatism might lead one to suppose that what distressed the thinkers of that generation was the loss of religious faith. This is not so, and Mr. Hughes is to be commended, among others, for having made the matter perfectly clear: with the exception of Troeltsch, none of these men entertained theological notions (Bergson’s mystical intuitionism did not represent a communicable religious faith). Here, too, Western Europe was a generation ahead of England (and several generations ahead of Russia, which was then just beginning to undergo a belated Enlightenment period).

The problem was precisely how the new secular, humanist, and positivist outlook could be squared with the urge for certainty, if one assumed that traditional metaphysics was outmoded. Hence the split between the positivists and those who refused to shelter behind scientific certitudes; hence also the growing identification of the right-left cleavage in politics with the clash between romantic irrationalism and scientific positivism. As the balance swung to and fro—for positivism made a come-back after 1918, when its enemies were temporarily discredited by the slaughter they had helped to promote—the leading European thinkers of the older generation who tried to straddle the issue were driven to a defense of rationalism which in the end assumed the paradoxical form of an appeal to reason in the name of duty: the intellect might not be able to comprehend the world, but it must on no account renounce its claim to preeminence. And similarly in ethics: even if the various value-systems were incompatible, one had to “opt” for one of them, and then stick to one’s choice through thick and thin. But if this was the last word of Kantian rigorism—and Weber was fundamentally a Kantian—there were others who preferred to put their trust in “history,” or in the outstanding individual, or in “the blood”; while some found their way back to religion, or went forward with the philosophers of “nothingness” and “the absurd.” By 1930, on the eve of the second European catastrophe, neo-Calvinism, neo-Marxism, Fascism, and Existentialism all held greater attraction for the young than the doctrines of the generation whose active life had come to an end with the First World War.

_____________

III

A crisis of such dimensions was bound to express itself at all levels, from the most abstract to those closest to daily life. Above all, it was certain to be reflected in literature—a mode of expression situated halfway between abstract theorizing and concrete existence. But “reflected” is the wrong word: the change that came over European literature before and after the First World War did more than simply “reflect” something that was going on elsewhere. The altered literary consciousness was itself an important agent in transforming the prevailing outlook of the public—meaning by the latter term both the intellectuals and their following. Literature mediated the transformation that was going on in all spheres of life, and it did so not merely by popularizing the thought of scholars, but by confronting the latter with problems of which they had been unaware. Indeed, in the case of Nietzsche—whose work had terminated by 1890, but who was among the chief agents of decomposition throughout the succeeding period—one is hard put to say where literature ends and philosophy begins. His case is indeed unique; but even men like Bergson and Croce, who came much closer to the traditional image of the cloistered scholar, maintained a life-long contact with the literary and artistic work of their age; as for Sorel, it is scarcely possible to understand him unless one grasps the fact that someone was needed to interpret (or misinterpret) Marx, Croce, and Bergson to the litterateurs and students who flocked to his endless extempore lectures in the backroom of a Paris bookshop. More or less the same process went on in Vienna, the other intellectual capital of the period; though hardly in Berlin, where the literati were less numerous, and not on the best of terms with university professors.

If one excepts Vienna, the main center of this process of transmission was Paris; it is thus not surprising that Mr. Hughes devotes to its leading literary figures the bulk of an illuminating chapter entitled “The European Imagination and the First World War.” What he has to say here gains in importance from his preceding analysis of the “crisis of values” in philosophy, quite apart from the intrinsic merits of his presentation, which are considerable: his customary lucidity is here united to a sympathetic understanding of modern French literature during one of its great periods. In the strict sense he does not offer literary criticism, and what he has to say about the work of Gide and Proust may not strike the specialists as particularly novel; but then the purpose of his analysis is philosophical rather than literary. (The same applies to his comments on Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse). The manner in which the European literary sensibility, before and after 1914, was affected by the impact of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud is traced with an assurance which reveals full mastery of the subject; and though this approach is unfashionable with the “new critics” (who are no longer new), it discloses its fruitfulness to anyone interested in intellectual history (“the history of the enunciation and development of the ideas that eventually will inspire . . . governing elites”).

Lest this formulation be thought narrow and snobbish, let it be said that the ideas of rebels and “outsiders” receive their full due. Indeed they alone are represented in strength, while the academicians are missing: thus Péguy gets almost a whole chapter to himself, while the laureates of the period are not even mentioned. But this is as it should be. Few French writers of this generation have had a greater long-term impact than Charles Péguy, who was almost totally unknown when in September 1914 he fell at the head of his column in a skirmish with the Germans outside Paris. Mr. Hughes does full justice to the peasant-boy who became a Dreyfusard and an unwilling ally of the left-wing intellectuals whom he personally disliked (therein resembling Orwell, with whom in other respects too he has something in common). He does not perhaps quite appreciate the tragedy of a man who was both a socialist and a patriot at the very last moment in European history when it was possible to share the naive popular view that war was a matter of defending one’s country. A generation later this simple faith was no longer available to intellectuals, however many might join the Resistance movement. But this is to open the window on a later phase in the process. Rightly or wrongly, Mr. Hughes—save for some concluding remarks—ends his account in 1930. Simone Weil, who in some sense continued the tradition of Péguy, lies outside his horizon; as does Orwell, in whom the British “left” found their spokesman when Hitler at last forced a choice upon them. (The point is of importance if one happens to believe that England has now entered upon the stage of self-criticism which continental Europe attained a generation ago.) At any rate it can be said that in 1914, the French had not yet shed their belief in the absolute value of the nation-state, and the Catholic peasant-boy Péguy was as unselfconsciously patriotic as the anti-clerical Clemenceau who eventually led France to victory. Neither would have known what to make of the talk about “the crisis in values” which was beginning to affect the intellectuals.

The change came swiftly. By 1927, Julian Benda, who before 1914 had spent hours in the company of Péguy, listening to Sorel’s interminable monologues, felt constrained to denounce the majority of his contemporaries for abandoning the values of the Enlightenment. La Trahison des Clercs is a limited and parochial tract (like most French intellectuals of his time, Benda had no knowledge of, and no use for, anything outside the Latin tradition, therein differing considerably from the present breed of his countrymen), but it retains its significance as a storm warning. With his Jewish and Dreyfusard background, Benda could indeed scarcely fail to notice that the atmosphere around him was changing. Rationalism was in discredit; Bergson had begun to toy with Catholicism; and some of the younger men were looking to Mussolini for guidance. In short, the crisis had begun to grip France (it is still doing so—witness the attraction of Soviet Marxism for some leading minds). Thirty years ago, Benda still tried to meet the enemy with the time-honored weapons of Cartesian rationalism: as Mr. Hughes notes, the names Croce, Weber, Freud are absent from his pages. By now this kind of provincialism has become impossible, which is another way of saying that the French have abandoned the attempt to live exclusively within their national framework. In this respect, too, the 1930’s represent a watershed. No European country, not even England, now retains its former self-sufficiency: witness the watered-down existentialism of the “Angry Young Men,” in whose plaintive writings the “age of anxiety” has found a provisional expression.

_____________

What then is the precise significance of Mr. Hughes’s study in intellectual history, which must be reckoned an intellectual event in its own right? Throughout its limpid pages there is discernible an undertone of worry which may without exaggeration or paradox be described as a distant echo of the upheaval he has portrayed. His own allegiance is to the Enlightenment, with the modifications made necessary by the impact of modern historiography, sociology, and psychology—typified for him by the names Croce, Weber, Freud. In personal terms, he appears conscious of a certain intellectual tension in himself due to the superimposition of German and Italian studies upon an Anglo-American and Anglo-French background. This cleavage gives point to his analysis of the European crisis which came to a provisional term in 1930, with the passing or aging of the thinkers who had carried the main burden for some forty years. It renders him sensitive to problems normally slighted by historians confined to the traditional frame-work of Anglo-American empiricism and pragmatism. At the same time he is clearly not disposed to join the growing army of neo-conservative ideologists who have lately begun to import some of the more questionable fragments of the European inheritance into America—here and there in the name of a “realism” supposedly appropriate to a world power. Although the issue is somewhat delicately balanced in his pages (“Proceeding on the assumption that only a small number of individuals are actually responsible for the establishment and maintenance of civilized values”), he comes down without hesitation on the side of liberal democracy—not merely freedom for the social and educational elite, in the style of Mosca and Pareto, whose “liberalism” was quite compatible with qualified support of Mussolini.

Some questions remain: e.g., is it still plausible, in the light of the European experience he has described, to suggest that the principles (or “values”) of the Enlightenment can be successfully generalized in the form of liberalism, given the fact that the characteristically liberal institutions (private property, the family, individualism in social life) are being eroded by the industrial revolution? And if liberalism cannot carry the whole burden, where is support to be sought without endangering democracy and freedom itself? Lastly, should the discussion of these issues be regarded as a sign that the “crisis of values” is beginning to make its appearance in the United States, so long the impregnable stronghold of the empiricist tradition? Perhaps if Mr. Hughes devotes a companion volume to the post-1930 period, we shall be in a better position to answer these questions. Meanwhile it must be sufficient to record that he has given us a work whose significance is not wholly contained in its value as a lucid and learned study of European intellectual life since 1890. In its own manner it represents a distinctive contribution to the debate on fundamentals recorded in its pages. One need not be a Crocean or a Hegelian to recognize that philosophy can make its appearance in the guise of history.

_____________

¹ Knopf, 433 pp., $6.00.