History and the Social Sciences

...An attempt is made to see Olmsted as more than the genius of landscape architecture...

...Education, Philosophy, Theology Bernard Murchland I HAVE HAD a fair spell of reading and of the books before me for comment no particular order imposes itself...

...University presses certainly do not control original scholarly publication, but tradition and money sustain, even in inflation and recession, their commitment to printing books which will never have a second printing--complete with the rich apparati of notes, charts, bibliographies and illustrations which enable others to test and progress further...

...Here they write either on Jean Santeuil or on specific topics related to Remembrance o[ Things Past...

...Some, like Salem Possessed, also present new ways of studying society, most notably Jackson Turner Main's Political Parties Before the Constitution, (North Carolina University Press, $15.95...

...Students of early modern history take Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as the point of departure for the study of the Renaissance, abandoning Tuscany and the city itself to the relative obscurity of Medici monarchy...

...First of all he is well known to readers of this journal as a former editor and they might therefore be expected to look upon this collection with special interest and fondness and welcome comment upon it in something of the BERNARD MURCHLAND teaches in the Philosophy Department at Ohio Wesleyan...

...same affectionate spirit...

...Roper was instrumental in shaping) and of personal conCommonweal: 287 tacts makes possible a detailed review of his life as farmer, Free Soil agitator, writer and public servant...

...the authoritarian ideologies...

...The universities are after all in the business of education (although this is sometimes overlooked) and in the current crises that beset them, and beset the liberal arts above all, I would have thought a critical interest in this plight a normal concern of their publishing endeavors...

...Four of the thirteen essays in Marcel Proust: A Critical Panorama, (University of Illinois Press, $7.50), edited by Larken E. Price, were originally papers read at the University of Illinois to commemorate the centennial of Proust's birth (1871-1971...

...We learn that brain weight and number of convolutions in tissue were originally considered to be the clue to establishing intelligence...

...When they happen to be clearly structured and well-written--as well as thoroughly researched--such books are more valuable than the survey and the digest even for the busiest reader, who knows that these studies will be the building-blocks of the next synthesis or policy debate...

...reader who wants to transcend pop social prophecy and panoramic warmedover history should read such books...

...Bernard Bailyn is also sympathetic to his subject, the loyalist governor of the Bay Colony, though without the clear affection Terrill shows for his...

...Putnams versus Porters, supporters of Reverend Parris (himself a failed merchant in search of status in a place remote from Boston) against those who would remove him...

...His most recent book is The New Iconoclasm (Doubleday...

...One wants to know," he writes, "whether it is conceivable that members of two taxa may differ in large numbers of groups of genes affecting many parts of the body, but not at all in those that affect the nervous and sensory systems and therefore play a part in determining mental qualities...

...If for the variety of human taxa we are to posit equality in mental capacity, Baker asks "what known cause of evolution could have produced this result...

...Baker pursues the history of the development of intelligence testing, being careful to point out that intelligence is divisible into discrete parts and that tests have only been developed to measure cognition...

...The scientific problem, if not the moral dilemma, lies in the fact that current cytological research has refined what nineteenth century science pointed to as the issue but has run up against the limitations of modern technology...

...Another reason that commends this volume for initial comment is its subject matter...

...In presenting the history of thinking on race he attempts to unite in one continuous line of development the speculations of eighteenth century philosophers, nineteenth century physical scientists, and twentieth century geneticists...

...No single system is best to reconcile these goals: and more importantly, "Democratic goals conflict . . . . " After exquisite analysis of graphs and charts the authors call not only for "more research" but for more "normative-empirical theory bearing on democracy...

...Whatever biologists may think of the legitimacy of this leap, others interested in the social ramifications of the "ethnic problem" are bound to feel uneasY...

...The contributing scholars are known for previous writings on Proust...

...Biological microteehnique can deal only with the activities of single genes which produce secondary characteristics: it is not sufficiently developed to reveal the morphological basis of complex thought processes...

...Rose by providing a capsule version of the his24 May 1974:288 tory of race relations from the time of Jackson to the Nixon era, Wilson by drawing out the implication that far more than color shapes individual perspective on race: the white fear of encroachment on economic and status preserves heightens racial tension...

...It is also a picture of French culture as it unfolds between the first letter sent by Cocteau in 1912 and his last letter in 1951, and as it was seen by two of France's most articulate and most informed witnesses...

...The approach in most of the essays is historical criticism rather than the new structuralist criticism...

...Race is the problem on which to linger--and with which to end this review...

...To start with men: Ross Terrill's R. H. Tawney and His Times (Harvard University Press, $15) sketches the English socialist's life as teacher, scholar, publicist: the upper-class boy, second at Balliol, devoting his life to learning and justice, developing his ideas--here elaborated as a system from books and essays and occasional speeches--through confrontation with the twentieth-century enemies of democratic socialism, capitalism...

...Skipping the nineteenth century we come to scholarly and policy-oriented confrontations with national and urban politics today...

...If this study is continued.--I presume that is Mr...

...Professionals ignore at their peril the articles and books in which new models of inquiry and the results of new researches are presented to the academic and general public...

...Such awareness of social milieu, either in the time of the subject or that of the scholar, is less significant in Laura Wood Roper's FLO: A Biography o[ Frederick Law Olmsted, (Johns Hopkins Press, $15...

...Each of these scholars makes a valid contribution to Proustian criticism...

...But Cocteau was a poet and had far more wit and versatility than Gide...

...His "tragic" historiograph is not only the product of distance in time from the eighteenth century but of an understanding "sharpened by the course of American politics" in the last ten years...

...A collection of essays, Through Different Eyes, edited by Rose, Rothman and Wilson ($12.50), and Race ($15) by John R. Baker, both published by Oxford University Press, offer different approaches to a subject which links science to politics through perception...

...Loyalists" and "cosmopolitans" disagreed on debts, land prices, and paper money...

...I found very little...

...There are essays here on religion and politics as well as education but it is primarily the voice of Commonweal: 289...

...The aim has been, as Rose says in his introduction, to develop a "Rashomon" approach: to see the same essential problem, race relations in the United States today, from a variety of perspectives...

...By contrast with this, Salem Village in 1692 is a concentration of time and place: mysterious seizures and apparitions of hysterical adolescents, men and women hung as incarnate devils...

...His study of this "socialist for all seasons," often identified only with Religion and the Rise el Capitalism, grows into a portrait of the moral conscience of much of the leadership of the Labor Party which finally came to real power in 1945...

...Readers of Shockley and Jensen take notice...

...The Revolution had justified opposition, and patterns of factionalism, similar in several states, may foreshadow later historical divisions...

...So much for scientific materialism...

...History & the Social Sciences Lou and John Ratte N EW SCHOLARSHIP is constantly reorienting learning in every discipline...

...Rothman has developed a typology of group perceptions which cuts across the color line to some extent, ranging from white conservative to black nationalist...

...Johnson's intention--it may well be monumental...

...Salem Bewitched is a model of the new social history at its best...

...Bailyn, whose books have illumined the origins of the Revolution for this generation, wrote this magisterial work in the late 1960s...

...Written in the late middle ages by Jews trading their way from the western Mediterranean to India, learnedly located in time and space by the general introduction and detailed head notes, these letters tell us much about trading practices, personal suffering, and constant care for God...

...We follow, in reading the book, much more than the curious, often tortured friendship between Gide and Cocteau...

...Stated baldly, and without justice to the subtlety of research and argument which marks the book, the witchhunt was in part the manifestation of a struggle by the rural families of Salem Village to maintain their economy and religious world view against encroaching commercialcapitalist and urban values, represented by old Salem Town with its world trade and worldier religion...

...In Size and Democracy (Stanford University Press, $6.95) Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte study comparatively and statistically the "federated policy" which has succeeded the nation-state and the city-state in order to conclude that "maximizing citizen effectiveness" and maximizing "the capacity of the system" are often conflicting goals...

...Studies from the animal world reveal that morphological differences also determine adaptability...

...When I began to canvass the lists of University Presses for this assignment I was looking especially for books on the philosophy of education...

...The full use of the Olmsted collection (which Mrs...

...One remains skeptical about such leaps from the biological to the psychological laboratory, and, with his link-up between cognition and civilization, about the ultimate social and humane implications of this type of biological research...

...Baker is concerned with the apparent break between the direction of morphological thinking in the nineteenth century and contemporary thought on the ethnic problem...

...Beginning with Binet in Paris in the late nineteenth century, through the refinements of Terman and Spearman in America, Baker believes that culturefree tests have now been developed which enable us to catalogue the cognitive potential of the different human taxa, and to rate them on an hierarchical scale...

...Of what I did find the Shuster volume is by far the most impressive...

...A number of titles published by university presses this past year show why: they reveal larger worlds of events and issues through careful study of one man, or one milieu, or one problem...

...But the longest in the book, by Professor Theodore Johnson, seems to me exceptionally important not only in the facts concerning Proust's discovery of Giotto, but in the allegorical interpretation of the vices and virtues in Giotto's Padua and in Marcel Proust's Combray...

...Economist and bureaucrat, Downs argues that well-to-do suburbs which effect urban decay did not get that way by accident...

...Boyer and Nissenbaum find in the crisis of 1692 a matrix for understanding the social history of Salem and third-generation Puritan New England...

...The contributions are uniformly interesting, and scholarly apparatus is at a minimum: two concluding essays by Wilson and Rothman assess and analyze the contributions and thus provide their own best review...

...Eccentric, a material failure, Tawney rode the leading edge of social thought in his times...

...Next year the Rattes will be teaching history at Lander College in South Carolina...

...In Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide: an Abrasive Friendship (Rutgers University Press, $17.50), Arthur King Peters has collected a large number of documents each one of which is presented in French with an accurate translation...

...these families and individuals were acting out both a unique personal tragedy and a crucial experience of the larger society...

...It is perhaps appropriate to begin with a George Shuster anthology (On the Side o/ Truth, edited by Vincent P. Lanie, University of Notre Dame Press, $9.95) for a couple of reasons...

...The common I LOU and JOHN RATTE live in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he is chairman of the History Department at Amherst College...

...Cognition, however, is the force, Baker asserts, which has built civilization...

...Theory and empirical study are combined in Anthony Downs' Opening Up the Suburbs: An Urban Strategy for America (Yale University Press, $7.95...

...Intention can also be brought to bear on their transformationand on the renewal of the cities--by turning from "trickle-down" theory towards comprehensive urban development which will open up the suburbs by introducing low and moderate income housing, and at the same time "create new opportunities for more meaningful interactions among economic groups that could enrich American culture...

...Voices represented in the anthology come from a broad spectrum of American society, including academicians, politicians, welfare workers, policemen, teachers and students...

...Baker quotes Rousseau in saying that his aim has been to "learn to know men by their conformities and by their differences...

...The Arab world and three hundred years of Tuscany are somewhat extended space-time continua, unified for the readers of these books by the science of historical scholarship and the art of composition...

...Immanuel Kant, a 1,715-gram brain, and Beethoven, "only the usual complexity of convolutions...

...The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Harvard University Press, $12.50) presents, through full use of a fund of papers, many never touched before, the picture of a constrained and meticulous and intelligent merchant and public servant inhibited by personality, political conviction, and wealth and family connections from any understanding of the ferment seizing the American colonies in his day...

...ordinary, rich in money and honors, Thomas Hutchinson failed in thought and action, in the minds of his contemporaries and in most of historiography...

...Terrill likes his subject...

...The author rarely leaves the man for the larger issues of his time, but we can see the full development of the aesthetic sense which enabled him to integrate experience and talent to become the originator of the rural park movement and the first American to see the need to humanize the urban environment of this democracy...

...Thus, Oliver Cromwell had a 2,332-gram brain, the average for the Europid being 1,400...

...Baker's book issues from the laboratory rather than society today, the work of a biologist and cytologist who laments the lack of scientific thinking on the "ethnic problem...

...Professor S. D. Gotein adds to his multiple publications on Jewish society in the Arab world this collection of 80 letters chosen from about 1,200 preserved in a Cairo synagogue...

...Three very different milieux are freshly revealed by a collection of Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders by S. D. Gotein (Princeton University Press, $12.50), Eric Coehrane's Florence in the Forgotten Centuries 1527-1800 (Chicago University Press, $1250), and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (Harvard University Press, $10...

...Main presents, through computer analysis of roll-call votes in the lower houses of a number of states, the emergence of party divisions in the early years of independence before the Constitution...

...Two complex problems are taken up from varying perspectives by books dealing with politics and race...

...Rather than abandon the problem to future scientists with more sensitive equipment, Baker states: "In the existing circumstances reliance must be placed on easier, though still very difficult, observations --not on the source of mental activities in the cerebral hemispheres, but on their results as manifested in the activities of man...

...the "bureaucratization, apathy, and materialism" of collectivism...

...Through an integrated presentation of the culture, commerce and civic life of the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Professor Cochrane makes it clear that the modern city owes much to the pre-national and post-Machiavelli period...

...the black American will experience tension in relation to his marginal status...

...Taking the results of cognition testing carried out on American school children from differing racial backgrounds, Baker concludes that the direction of morphological investigations has been proven to be correct: intelligence will vary in accordance with racial background...

...Gide had greater prestige and was far more brilliantly the heroine de lettres...