622
PARTISAN REVIEW
CONSERVATISM FOR THE SALON
SOVEREIGNTY: AN INQUIRY INTO THE POLITICAL GOOD. By
Bertrond de Jouvenel. University of Chicogo Press. $4.50.
At regular intervals reviewers in the "serious" press celebrate
the appearance of a new work on politics by announcing that the familiar
plaint that political philosophy is dead must now be abandoned, for here
at long last is a work which shirks none of the traditional issues, which
challenges the accepted categories of political thinking, which raises
new problems while solving old ones, and which (for these and other
reasons) can proudly take its place in the great tradition of Hobbes,
Locke, Rousseau, Burke, TocqueviIle, T.
H.
Green .... Books of which
such things are said would seem to possess three general characteristics.
In the first place, they are long, or at any rate not short; secondly, they
are "literary" rather than academic or scientific; and thirdly, they are
conservative, in contrast to being radical (though it is sometimes felt to
be in rather dubious taste to point out the contrast).
M.
de Jouvenel's latest work,
Sovereignty,
possesses all these three
characteristics in full measure.
It
is almost as long as M . Raymond
Aron's
Opium des Intellectuels;
it is quite as "literary" as M. Albert
Camus's
L'Homme Revolte,
and it would make not merely these writers
but also Professors Talmon and von Hayek look by contrast brilliant
pinks. It is not therefore surprising that it should have received its full
share of the new treatment.
An
anonymous reviewer in the
Times
Literary Supplement
(though recognizable on stylistic grounds as Mr.
T. E. Utley, a Conservative theorist and journalist) has, for instance,
described it as "a remarkable achievement," a "book ... likely to affect
permanently the categories of political thought," "a great work in
political philosophy, a work which with all the restraint proper to schol–
arly comparison must be firmly placed in the ranks of the masters."
Confronted by such claims, no one of any intellectual curiosity can re–
main for long indifferent to the question of their substance. Is Jouvenel's
book a great work of political philosophy; or is it not?
At the outset a serious difficulty besets the reviewer-or this re–
viewer at least; others, it is true, have evaded it with amazing insou–
ciance. This is the fact that the book is really remarkably hard to read
and hard to understand. In part the trouble is stylistic, for Bertrand
de Jouvenel would appear to be the victim of a radical indecision about
literary aim. At times he seems to move in the direction of fine and
