Book Reviews

Mandelstam, the martyred Russian literary giant, observed in 1978 that, ‘It is a
miracle that the worst of times produced the best of poets.‘This might be saidof the
whole century. If we agree that the twentieth century has brought forth some of
humanity’s worst times, it has also produced great quantities of excellent poetry,
music, and all other forms of art and thought. It is our prerogative, if we choose to
exercise it, to reject the century’s dismal side and build on its proud achievements.

One of numerous merits of the book is that it deals, on equal terms, with both Western
and Eastern segments of the divided Europe. This is a rare phenomenon. Bravo!

M.K. Dziewanowski
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

NOTES

M.K. Dziewanowski is the author of War at Any Price: World War IZ in Europe (Prentice-
Hall, 1987), which will be reviewed in this journal, and of A History of Soviet Russia
(Prentice-Hall, 1979, 1985 & 1988).

Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Reinhart
Koselleck (Learnington Spa, Hamburg and New York: Berg, 1988), x + 204pp,, $25.

Reinhart Koselleck is a philosophical historian. A former student of Martin Heidegger

and Carl Schmitt, his philosophical approach to history is parti~ul~ly apparent in this
early work, first published in 1959. Critique and Crisis is concerned with the relation
between Absolutism and Enlightenment in France, England and Germany between the
wars of religion and the French Revolution. Unlike more empiricist historians, Koselleck
sees this relation as a necessary one and an essential aim of his study is to demonstrate the
‘inner connexion’ between the Enlightenment and the political structures within which it
developed. His argument is that the Enlightenment was the product ofthepolitical stability
provided by absolutism, but undermined that stability by its critique. The shift from the
inner moral freedom possible under absolutism to the outward political freedom of the
modern age was a crucial one; criticism invaded the public sphere and claimed pre-
eminence over the state, leading inevitably to the crisis of the French Revolution and
beyond.
The argument is illustrated and supported by a consideration of Englishpoliti~l theory
(from Hobbes to Paine), the Republic of Letters (from Bayie to Voltaire), and the Masonic
Lodges. In some ways this work is a traditional piece of German Geistesgeschichte:
Hegelian reflections on a theme of Paul Hazard. The main categories are virtually
personified, so that Koselleck can write of the Enlightenment as ‘the victim of its own
mystique’. Yet other approaches keep breaking through, notably the social history of
ideas, developed in the author’s later work on 19th-century Prussia and the history of
concepts such as ‘critique’ and ‘crisis’, which has led to the Begriffsgeschichte Koselleck
now advocates and practices.
At once allusive and abstract, this is not an easy essay to absorb, and the task is rendered
still more difficult in this version by the translator’s inadequate knowledge of English. All
the same, the effort is worth making.

Peter Burke
Emmanuel College, Cambridge