Perhaps no work since John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has attracted as much recent attention as Robert Nozick’s case for a minimal state—an ingeniously argued critique, not only of antinomian individualism, but also of liberal and socialist contractualism. It might be added that the book is no solace either to more conservative political theorists, who lament state incursion into private life, but whose political structures exhibit either actual or potential constriction of human life. Nozick’s book is both a searching (...) examination of the limitations of utilitarian consequentialism and the redistributivism of Rawls. His essential theme is that "a minimal state limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts etc., is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right." It is also Nozick’s contention that the coercive power of the state should not be used paternalistically to prohibit activities to people for their own protection, or to force some citizens to aid others. The last part of the book is a framework for Nozick’s utopia, and it is in this section that an essentially theoretical approach, amplified by little political or sociological data, exhibits its defects. One suspects that almost all states started with simplistic hopes for minimal coercive activity, and succumbed almost inevitably to the metastasis of function as socio-political life grew in size and complexity. Night watchmen become more than night watchmen when more than watching is needed. Moreover, Nozick’s utopia would seem to necessitate, at least by implication, coercive redistributivism and some kind of compensatory or levelling taxation process. This reviewer is not sure that he understands precisely what Nozick considers correct property theory in a state of nature. The author modestly asserts the tentative, incomplete, and conjectural nature of his work. But the taxed and manipulated citizen who grows in sympathy for the sentiments of Proudhon’s famous litany should welcome this highly literate and well argued case.—R.P.M. (shrink)

Quand en 1856 Jenny P. d’Héricourt (1809-1875), sage-femme, féministe et philosophe, critiqua Pierre-Joseph Proudhon pour sa théorie sur l’infériorité féminine, celui-ci refusa tout discussion, invoquant son infériorité intellectuelle naturelle. Néanmoins d’Héricourt continua de publier de ferventes critiques des théories des philosophes sociaux de son époque sur l’inégalité des sexes. L’article veut d’une part éclairer la notion d’intellectuelle et les conditions nécessaires pour agir comme telle. D’autre part, il questionne les limites d’une existence intellectuelle féminine telles qu’elles se présentent non seulement (...) dans le refus des contemporains mais aussi dans l’historiographie de la pensée sociologique qui ignore la contribution d’Héricourt aux questions fondatrices du discours sociologique anticipant un concept clé d’Émile Durkheim. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 279 shirted gangsters of the totalitarian regimes. Only gradually did Sorel come to seek his paragons of virtue among the proletariat, partly because of his disillusionment with Jean Jaur~s over the Dreyfus case. Sorel had been one of the first to champion Dreyfus, but felt that demagogues had transformed the latter's cause into a new dogmatism and a new establishment. Sorel was genuinely concerned about some of (...) the deepest problems facing modern industrial man. He could not believe that they could be solved, either by "demagogic plutocracy" or by orthodox Marxism. Hence he sought to synthesize Vico, Proudhon, Marx, and Bergson in a new movement that should be both liberal and revolutionary and heroically virtuous. The strongest influence upon his thinking, says Goriely, came from Vico, from whom he borrowed "the fundamental idea of his whole work: "Man does not know what he does' " (105). History can therefore be rational only after it has happened: "The future is the field in which we use our imaginations, not our understandings" (109). That Sorel anticipated many twentieth-century developments in philosophy and politics, there can be no doubt. The author says that he was "the first philosopher in France who sought not only to locate man in history and society, but also to locate history and society in man, to give them a significance which may be called existential" (148). Before William James's pragmatism reached European shores, Sorel had made such statements as "Science is a means of verifying the possibility of acting in a certain manner." 1Even some of his pessimistic fears anticipated such developments as Burnham's "managerial revolution," at the same time that he welcomed the growth of industrial techniques in other hands (155). Professor Goriely's careful tracing of Sorel's profusion of suggestions for the ethical redemption of mankind in a machine age reveals the unreconciled contradictions in his pluralism. In the R~[lexions he could resolve the conflicts of myth versus utopia, force versus violence, liberalism versus absolutism, says Goriely, only "'by a conceptual jugglery.., which sets the mind's teeth on edge rather than stimulates it" (200). Caught between the poles of an attachment to historical tradition and to liberty, Sorel celebrated the constant tension between the two. Man lives only to create; he "has no other end than the creative ~lan itself. Born of liberty, history can never block its course.., it is always a point of departure toward the future.... Human institutions, the products of an infinity of obscure causes, never realize any universal moral principle. They live in the relative, which man ought to accept with moderation and a sense of the limits of the possible, without ever losing the sense of the unlimited" (222). HAROLD A. LARRABEE Union College 1Georges Sorel, "Storia e scienza sociale," Rivista itallana di sociologia, March-June, 1902,p. 224. Storia Della Filosofia: La Filosofia del Novecento. By E. Paolo Lamanna. Intuizionismo, filosofia dell'azione e modernismo--Prammatismo--La problematica della scienza--La problematica della storla. (Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1963. 671 pp. 3800 L.) This first of three volumes describing the philosophies of the twentieth century, and the fifth volume in Lamanna's History of Philosophy, is truly a monumental and encyclopedic work. In this volume alone there are concise, clear, scholarly expositions of the important ideas of more than fifty philosophers, including biographical information and bibliographical references. The style is exceptionally intelligible and the organization of even complicated materials is well defined with good headings and with definitions that are intelligible 280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY even to a layman. The work is not only very informative but amazingly objective and dispassionate. And despite its disinterestedness it is highly interesting, for it succeeds in presenting each philosopher's ideas as one imagines he would like to present them himself, sympathetically and persuasively. One leaves the book after reading about the achievements of our own little century marvelling at the variety and range of recent achievements. For over and above our follies and horrors, these thinkers emerge as men trying hard and ably to be sane and tell the truth. Lamanna himself emerges as a mind with an extraordinary critical ability to... (shrink)