The Vision of World Peace in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France by Elizabeth V.SouleymanReview by: Leo GershoyThe American Historical Review, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Jan., 1943), pp. 320-321Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1840790 .

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320 Reviews of Books that the greatest German philosophic power lay in the mastery of the ideal material of history as embodied in the doctrine of Kant, the thought symphony of the Germans.

In the development of the modern state, Frederick the Great is branded as the Nihilist of the North. Stein is correctly portrayed as the true hero of his epoch, standing with the lofty Goethe at the portals of the nineteenth century just as Bismarck and Nietzsche stand as guardians at the exit. This is the century in which the Prussian warrior caste liberates, unifies, and organizes the German people in the depths of whose soul dwells eternally the will to obey. This is the century of rising Marxism, industrialism, and the mechanization of cultural life.

It was not in the German character to make a revolution for the sake of liberty in i9i8. Liberated in fact against their will, half starved after the armistice, the German people waited fourteen years for a new master to fight and suppress the spirit on behalf of the state. According to the author, the worst crime committed against the Germans at Versailles was the League of Nations. A critical analysis of his double history of Germany in the twentieth century reveals many more basic errors of fact and sensational interpretations.

This brilliant work concludes, however, with a pen portrait so inspiring and symbolical that it clearly reveals the author as the master of biography. An old man, a philosopher and musician, like the best Germans, is standing of an autumn evening in 1940 on the terrace of Heidelberg Castle above the oldest university in Germany, gazing toward the Rhine, and reflecting on the glory of the German name which has departed.

"Night has broken over the old Neckar town, over Germany. The old man has come home-he gazes before him in resignation. Now he opens the piano and plays the last Sonata of Beethoven." Stanford University RALPH HASWELL LUTZ

THE VISION OF WORLD PEACE IN SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHT- EENTH-CENTURY FRANCE. By Elizabeth V. Souleyman. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. I941. Pp. XVii, 232. $2.50.)

Miss Souleyman's careful study of the peace advocates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is on the whole an admirable achievement. The reservation derives from a perhaps understandable tendency of the author to overestimate the influence of these earlier projects upon later proposals and also from certain con- siderations of the manner of presentation. Working carefully from the texts, she brings together into a single and eminently useful volume the principal contribu- tions that French thinkers and publicists made during those two centuries to the abolition of war and the advancement of the cause of peace. She is fully aware that these men are joined with one another by tenuous ties of thought, and she takes especial pains to explain how variously they viewed their problem. She analyzes their overlapping and even contradictory attitudes and solutions, group-

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Knappen: Constitutional and Legal History 32I

ing their projects in the main according to their particular approach or angle of vision.

The duke of Sully, for instance, penned the Grand Design largely out of a statesman's design to hold the pretentious Habsburgs in check. His late contem- porary Emeric Cruce was a stoic cosmopolitan who thought largely in humanist terms, innocent of immediate political calculations. Pascal, the mystic, abhorred war as an abomination intolerable to a sincere professing Christian; and the deist Voltaire flayed war with the whip of his satirical genius, because it affronted his sense of the dignity and the intelligence of man. It is with the motivations as well as with the detailed provisions of the plans that the author is concerned; and it is to the eighteenth century schemes of the humanitarians and utilitarians, laissez- faire economists and free-thinking philanthropists, that she devotes the bulk of her pages.

Valuable as this work will be for serious students, the presentation is too severely atomic, sacrificing too much of informal synthesis for formal scholarly analysis and compartmentalization. The meticulous probing for attitudes and motivations, which endows her research with accuracy and exactness, reflects itself also in a toneless depersonalization of the individuals that she treats, almost as though the author were resolved not to let scholarship down by revealing that she is dealing with once living human beings, amply endowed with emotions and passions. Again, the urge for clarity and possibly the assumed claims of scholarly research lead to the use of wholly unnecessary tag identifications, such as foot- noting a reference to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or explaining that "Bentham's name is closely connected with the doctrine of utilitarianism."

These criticisms are not intended as carping comments on stylistic elegances or their lack. The reflection is principally on standards and ideals of research which constrain writers in the name of objectivity to misdirect useful intellectual energy. Sarah Lawrence College LEO GERSHOY

CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By M. M. Knappen, Michigan State College. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Com- pany. I942. Pp. x, 607- $3.25.)

THis is a manual designed to meet the need arising, on the one hand, from the current minimizing of English, and even of general European, history in American secondary schools, and, on the other, from the inclusion of the former subject in "new plan" law curricula distributing "what was formerly prelegal work throughout the entire program" and thus forcing a closer integration of con- stitutional history with legal studies than hitherto deemed necessary. The book's best review would have been its own preface which disarmingly sets forth the author's sense of the limitations inherent in its nature and purpose. No treatise, it is designed as a compendium of the elementary facts and developments of Eng-

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