oral resumt). a dozen are perfunctory (six pages or less). and more than that instgnificant and/or are sadly out of date (not many even refer to Denzer’s volume. not to speak of more recent work). This includes Dejan on Bodin’s ‘method’. Lestringant on cosmography. Bat-ret-Kriegel on imperium and soveretgnty, Brown on Vito and W’olodkiewtcz on private law, but there are others. Though I refrain from pursuing further numerous points of disagreement. errors, misprints, questionable speculations and comparisons (not to speak of the indulgent and redundant character of the appended .discussions’), I should judge that scarcely half of the papers are of sufficient quality to be published in a scholarly journal. Students of Bodin may protit from a representative collection on the Prat dopimon of Bodin studies. W’hether the further discussion of the

Judaising. occultist. syncretistic Bodin will bear fruit remains to be seen; but as an ex- Bodinist once remarked to me about excesstve and exclusive devotion to the subject- ‘That way lies madness’.

Lii2iversirF of Rochester

Donald R. Kelley

Diderot: Les Dernikres A&es, 1770-81, ed. Peter France and Anthony Strugnell (Edinburgh University Press, 1985), 244 pp., f20.00.

While most people were thinking about George Orwell in 1984, Diderot scholars were busy mounting celebrations and colloquia in remembrance of the philosophe’s death two hundred years earlier. Diderot: Les Dertzikes An&es issued from one of these events, a four-day colloquium held in Edinburgh. The majority of the fifteen contributors are established at British universities, but there are some French scholars and a couple of Americans here as well. It is thus curious that the editors chose to issue the volume in French. They would have been better advised to stick to English, or to a bilingual format in which each contributor could write in his native tongue. The most annoying aspect of this book is the schoolboy French in which much of it is written.

As to the theme of the book, it is certainly promising. Much good work has been done on Diderot’s youth and on the period of the Encyclopt!die, but the years covered here, which include the trip to Russia at the request of Catherine the Great, the collaboration with Raynal on the Hisroire des deux Andes, and the writing of the Essai sur les rPgnes de

Claude ei de X&on, have not been comprehensively studied. And although this book is not and does not aim to be comprehensive either, it certainly demonstrates that such a study would be both welcome and fascinating.

What emerges most strongly from this book is the polittcal radicalism of Diderot in his maturity and old age. The accepted wisdom, which has a young Diderot cowed by his experience in the prison of Vincennes and stifled for the next thirty years, does not accord well with the Diderot who emerges here. This Diderot, whom we encounter in his late fifties and sixties, is more radical both in his critique of existing society and politics and in his activist approach to changing them than he was in his youth. The text which emerges from this volume as the most significant and in need of the most careful study is the Hisroire des deux Indes. Perhaps it is because only in recent years have Diderot’s contributions to Raynal’s work been fairly clearly identified that such a conclusion is even possible. The contributor to the Histoire, passionate, activist and anticolonialist, contrasts with the Diderot who advised the Russian despot.

This is just one of the paradoxes explored in this volume. The most interesting ones concern the role of the philosophe, especially as regards politics. Ought he to be the detached sage? Or ought he to engage himself with the problems of the day? For whom and to whom does the philosophe speak? These questions are raised fruitfully by Jacques

T,, _a_ B/Ii;,-. Rt’L It’!! )

But of the radlcall~ political Didsrot emerges strongly from these essays. Dtderot the

llterar> genitls does not. Th e ebsa>s collected under the heading ‘L‘i;r,ture’ ar;‘ the most

dlsappolntlns. They are unremarkable works of ll:era~ criticism rh,lt demanstrate the

distance between such critlclsm as it IS practised today and any sense ofeIther hIstorical or

biographIcal time. \\‘a~ Dlderot tuenth years old or sixty ivhen he Lvrotr‘ Juc~u~‘.Y 1~

]ilral~s~t.” Does it matter that Esr-iibon.‘Esr-ii n~t;clzn~l.’ WAS written III the 17:iIs’.’ Itlarlan

Hobson and Jack Undank. 1~ hose essay; treat the\s texts. do not 5~). .And no L>ne would

expect them to, except in a \,olume organised around the premise that :I ps:~od of an

author’s life is a significant basis of study. The reader would have got a much better sense

of Didcrot the aging philosophe of the literary critics had been VJIIII~~ to look Jt some ot

the major texts produced durin g this period of(such as Jacr/~~~.s) in a dliferent \bay such as

to connect them with the phIlosophical and political preoccupations that we can nov+ see

\vere so important to Diderot. I am not sayin, ~1 that thev should ha\ e mined these texts for i hIstorical references and polItical content, but they might, for example. have c~amined the

literary strategies employed 1:1 them, their rhetoric and their Inlpllecl relstlL>nships t<)

readers, to bring out the literary concerns that informed Dlderot‘s political writings a5

well. The result ~vould have been a more complete vision of Diderot in his l_:zt years, ;I

vision that has only begun to be sketched out here.

Den:1 Goodman

British Labour, European Socialism and the Struggle for Peace, 1889-191-i. Douglas J.

Kcwton (Osi’ord: Clarrncton Press, 1935). xilli z 378 pp., E27.50.

In 1914, the failure of any and all European pro peace forces-radical, syndicalist,

moderate bourgeois and even rightist-to contain the outbreak and spread oi the Great

War lay across the twentieth century like a giant’s footprint. The bar had barely ended

and its sta:dering butchery hardly become apparent when scholars rushed in to dig at the

origins of the cataclysm with a persistence verging on the obsesstve. producing a literature

so massive that no one can digest it all. How, then, do we greet yet another contribution

designed to illuminate the giant footprint’?

Douglas J. Newton. a History Master at St. Patrick’s College in Campbelltown

(Australia). has contributed a very important speciahsed study of the breakdown of the

presumed pro peace community represented by organised labour m Britain. The portrait

which he painstakingly produces outlines the behaviour and values of an essentially

provincial, anti-internationalist. often militarist (anti arms control) and sadly jingoist

collection of trade unionists and even Marxist socialists. Little distinguished, for instance,

the anti-German propaganda of H. M. Hyndman, head of Britain’s small !viarxist party,

from the noisiest Tory activities in Naval leagues. Besides producing an interesting and