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exercise in American intellectual history, but is also an indispensable
book for the re-education of the American liberal.
The theme of the book, as the subtitle suggests, is the revolt against
formalism. By formalism Mr. White means the addiction to abstract
argument, to syllogistic logic, to rigorous and symmetrical patterns
which characterized the prevailing thought of the late nineteenth cen–
tury, whether in philosophy or in law, in economics or in history. The
fact that much of this formalism masqueraded as empiricism in the
British tradition did not make it any the less formalistic. Against this
tradition of scholasticism the new intellectual leaders made an af–
firmation in favor of the vital, the concrete, the living reality ; they
sought, in Mr. White's adaptation of Holmes's famous apothegm, "to
emphasize that the life of science, economics, and law was not logic
but experience in some streaming social sense."
Thus each generated new attitudes; each sought to reconstruct
his own discipline so that it could come to grips with the multifarious
realities of life. Dewey's instrumentalism, Holmes's legal realism, Veb–
len's institutionalism, Beard's economic determinism, Robinson's "new
history" had in common the rejection of formalism; each new doctrine in
the separate fields fortified and fertilized the others. Mr. White is strik–
ingly successful in suggesting the lateral passes in the field of ideas which
characterized the period.
Where traditional social thought had populated analysis with fic–
tions-logical, legal, economic man-the new school sought to sub–
stitute life itself, with all its complexities. "In place of a 'natural' man,
an 'economic' man, a 'religious' man, or a 'political' man," wrote
Beard, "we now observe the whole man participating in the work of
government." So the rej ection of abstractions was followed by the
formulation of more positive ideas, made larger and more concrete by
the application of what Mr. White calls "historicism" and "cultural
organicism"-that is, by the attempt, on the one hand, to explain facts
by reference to earlier facts, and, on the other, to find explanations in
social sciences other than the one primarily under investigation.
Their arsenals enriched by these striking new conceptions they pro–
ceeded to establish the "new history" and the "new ethics," to initiate
the sociological study of the law and of economics. By 1912 the main
outlines had been drawn; and, though some of the leaders suffered set–
backs during the First World War, they became more popular than ever
in the twenties. In the thirties, as Mr. White well says, they were
retrospectively honored as "the
philosophes,
the encyclopedists of the
Roosevelt 'revolution.''' Their influence in the meantime spread from
