After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith by Judith N.ShklarReview by: W. M. SimonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Apr., 1958), pp. 639-640Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1848885 .

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Shklar: After Utopia 639 bart, whenl he describes himself as a verstehende economist, fails to acknowledge the connection. Somewhere he asserts the function of the historian to be like that of the artist, in that the various parts of the anatomy must fit together with verisimilitude to be "true." In short, historical and economic truth for Sombart was a relativity among the observer, the evidences, and the reconstructed actuality, not a simple positivism in the sense advanced by Marshall and Clapham. A rail- road for Sombart was not merely so much rail and rolling stock; it was mobility of goods and persons.

A useful feature of the little book that should be mentioned is the bibliography of Usher's writings.

University of Wyoming F. L. NuSSBAUM

AFTER UTOPIA: THE DECLINE OF POLITICAL FAITH. By Judith N. Shklar. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. 1957. PP. X, 309. $5.00.)

THIs ambitious book is an outgrowth of a Radcliffe dissertation written under the direction of Carl J. Friedrich. In its original form it won a thesis prize from the American Political Science Association. To the reviewer, this circumstance offers an excellent illustration of the different standards by which theses and books are judged. The reviewer can well understand the award of a prize to Mrs. Shklar's thesis; he would be delighted if any graduate student came up with half the ideas in this book and wrote about them half so well. But a published work is a different matter. Mrs. Shklar has not had time to chew all that she bit off. She has many perceptive and incisive things to say, but also some naive and foolish ones. She is very good on Rousseau and Godwin, but bad on Goethe (whom she has not read). She gets to the essentials of Herder, but exaggerates the cultural pessimism of the late Hegel and misunderstands Vigny. In general she writes economically and crisply, but she makes too much play with the phrase "the un- happy consciousness" and is not innocent of the utterly meaningless.

More serious than any of these objections are two others. First, it is often difficult, to put it mildly, to see how the argument of the book is furthered by Mrs. Shklar's versatile and literate ranging over the whole field of intellectual history. Second, in this reviewer's opinion, Mrs. Shklar's thesis could not be proved even by better and tighter arguments, because it is wrong. The thesis, stated repeatedly in the preface and in the introduction, is that there has been a disastrous decline nlot only in political utopias but in political theory as such, since the Enlightenment. This is not the place to suggest the many possible lines of attack on this contention; two specific weaknesses only are indicated. Mrs. Shklar often implies that political theory that is not optimistic is not political theory at all, and she jumps from the romantics virtually straight into twentieth-century existentialism and Christian fatalism, with only a brief backward glance at the end to Mill, Tocqueville, and Marx (whom she makes out a pessimist). She has

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640 Reviews of Books read Hayek's Counter-Revolution of Science but seems to know little about the nineteenth-century revolution in science or the scientific utopias to which Hayek refers (those of Comte, above all, as well as Marx) and which rather damage her argument.

If it seems ungenerous to have been so severe with Mrs. Shklar, one must re- member that she has offered what ought to be the fruit of a lifetime's work in her first book. Let her now deepen her knowledge, and her intellectual powers and literary gifts will take her far.

Cornell University W. M. SIMON

Ancient and Medieval History ORDER AND HISTORY. Volume I, ISRAEL AND REVELATION. By Eric

Voegelin. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. I956. Pp. xxv, 533. $7.50.)

IN the first volume of a six-volume philosophical inquiry into the order of human existence in society, Professor Voegelin deals with the nature of Israel's unique place in human history. An analysis of symbols of truth provides the key for assessing the distinctiveness of Israel. Israel's true character emerges when its basic symbolism is contrasted with that of the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopo- tamia. The cosmological myth as a symbolic form gave intellectual meaning to the organization of the societies in the latter areas. In Israel, however, there ap- peared a radically new departure, "a leap into being," a qualitative step expressing itself in a special symbolism: "Israel alone had history as an inner form, while the other societies existed in the form of the cosmological myth." Throughout the volume there runs the exposition of this essential difference. Even when the Biblical sources for Israel's order of being are paradigmatic in character, the symbol is seen as essentially different from that of its neighbors.

In the first part of the volume the author makes use of the recent enlarge- ment of ancient Near Eastern sources to document the imperial organizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. His sources are the most recent translations of the texts as well as the discussions of Frankfort, Wilson, Jacobsen, and the older reliable commentaries. Just as new archaeological discoveries have made possible a re- appraisal of the order of being in Egypt and Mesopotamia, so has the new freedom in dealing with the longer known sources for Israel's history made it possible to inquire into the meaning of Israel's order. The author has drawn heavily upon the significant work of Scandinavian scholars, particularly those of the Uppsala school. The relevance of this task of inquiring into the intellectual and conceptual history of ancient Near Eastern civilizations is suggested in the preface by the remark that the work should be read "not as an attempt to explore curiosities of a dead past, but as an inquiry into the structure of order in which we live presently."

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