Book Reviews 981

Comparisons are easiest when they can be rendered quantitatively, though Lieven is rightly cautious about some of his statistical evidence. The qualitative comparisons in chapters on the social life, culture and education of aristocracies are more difficult still. Here the dominant impression is that the extension of the railway network in the second half of the century meant that aristocrats no longer had to choose between city and country, cosmopolitanism and provincialism, State service and local leadership. The combinations that the British had been cultivating for a long time were finally accessible to the German noble, who now strove to imitate the English model: country sports and urban residence, metropolitan manners and local dignity, a political role in the city as advocate for the interests of the country.

Most of the comparisons attempted here are based on studies of the internal structure and culture of aristocracies. But in a final chapter on politics and a particularly penetrating conclusion, Lieven does insert the aristocracy back into society and tackles head-on the question that haunts the whole book: did aristocratic survival impede modernity? Nearly all countries-including highly ‘modern’ ones-browbeat themselves with this accusation: Britain’s industrial spirit was stunted, Germany was twisted onto a Sondenveg, Russia’s irresponsible nobility paved the way for Bolshevism. Aristocracies are thus blamed for things they did, things they didn’t do, and even-especially-things other classes didn’t do. This tendency may have much to do with the social origins of historians!

Lieven concludes, perhaps no more dispassionately, that aristocracies’ adaptations under pressure of modernity reflect the distinctive character of modernity in their home cultures. The British aristocracy merged into an upper middle class that had long been prepared to receive it. The Junkers’ statism and militarism was also well-suited to the peculiar forms of German capitalism, and even their tendency to cloak sectional interests in ‘grandiose rhetorical visions’ was shared by other groups in Imperial Germany. The Russian aristocracy was by 1900 the most permeable, the least feudal, the least attached to the land of all European nobilities, ready to make common cause with a bourgeoisie if only a bourgeoisie had existed. Unless we hold that aristocracies are so hegemonic that they create a whole culture in their own image, then we must conclude that each country gets the aristocracy it deserves.

London GuildhaN University Peter Mandler

Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory: Appropriating Historical Traditions, ed. Patricia Cook (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), vi+ 243 pp., $39.95 cloth; $15.95 paper.

The two sets of terms in the title of this book are both terms of art. ‘Philosophical imagination’, as the editor makes clear, is Alasdair MacIntyre’s term for the ability of a philosopher to inhabit temporarily an alien philosophical system, while by ‘cultural memory’ is meant the use of historical traditions. Apart from the emphasis on tradition,

which the first writer in this collection, George Allan, wants to see as foundational, the ultimate frame of reference, there are frequent references to Modernism (which one writer suggests dates from Kant!) and post-Modernism. The book originated in lectures given at a summer school, although some of the essays that have resulted were presented (and in one case at least published) elsewhere previously. It is difficult to see them as having a really common theme, although they all have some loose connection with the past, if not in all cases the philosophical past (one paper is on Keats and another on Joyce).

Volume 18, No. 6, November 1994

982 Book Reviews

The first section of the book includes, apart from the paper by George Allan, a somewhat episodical one by Donald Phillip Verene which claims that philosophy is memory because, as suggested by Vito, imagination is memory (although Vito in fact puts it the other way round) and, as suggested by Hegel, philosophy is imagination. These first two contributions are not encouraging.

The second section is much better. It includes a substantial paper by Alasdair MacIntyre, presenting what is for him the familiar thesis that philosophers presuppose

systems and that the history of philosophy can be judged by reference to the ability of a system to withstand criticisms from others and to respond to questions raised by an extra- philosophical public. Unfortunately the discussion is conducted at a high level of generality, a criticism that can be levelled at many of the papers in the book. It is interesting to compare MacIntyre’s thesis with that of George Lucas Jr, in the same section, which argues that the history of philosophy has more to do with forgetting than memory, and like art-history comprises a series of episodes dictated by current passions. The third essay in this section, by J.B. Schneewind, claims to present a case-study by discussing the evolution of the ‘modern’ idea that we are all moral experts.

The third section has no true unity. There is, first, a paper by Arthur C. Danto which considers the notion of artistic influence (and also that of ‘Modernism’ as a repudiation of

past influences) by means of a comparison between some examples of Chinese and Western art. Lynn S. Joy presents a relatively slight paper on the way in which with Gassendi a humanist interpretation of texts prepared the way for the new science. Finally, Robert Cummings Neville, provides a bit of a sermon, ostensibly on the supposed symbiotic relation between philosophy and theology, concerned with what the author calls the ‘covenantal’ view of human beings. There is also some play, as at many other places in the book, with the idea of narrative.

The final section, supposedly concerned with cultural memory and the interpretation of texts, contains, first, a piece of literary criticism in the form of ruminations on silence with reference to Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. It is claimed that this has philosophical relevance, but it is not easy to see what. A paper by George L. Kline on some Russian assessments of Spinoza in the nineteenth century in relation to their German sources is relentlessly historical, and without much philosophical interest. John S. Rickard discusses the uses of the past in various ways in James Joyce’s Ulyssees, and, finally, Stanley Rosen presents a thesis about Plato’s exclusion of poetry from his republic, which turns on the claim that the Republic must be satire, because the dialogue is itself poetry. The editor maintains that the paper ‘epitomises Rosen’s ability to seduce a text into complete self- exposure’-a large claim.

Much of the language of the discussions is exceedingly opaque, and, as already mentioned, much of the philosophy is extremely general in its presentation. A few more ‘case-studies’ would have been illuminating, and might indeed have led to a qualification of some of the larger claims. Although the question of the role within philosophy of the history of the subject is an interesting one, and the second section of the book which contains the papers by MacIntyre and Lucas is thought-producing in that connection, it cannot be said that the collection as a whole is likely to have a substantial impact on cultural memory.

Birkbeck College, London D.W. Hamlyn

History of European Ideas