488
PA RTISAN REV I EW
and in their futile aspirations to universalism, they were sacrificing the
concrete realities of race, country, class, family and nationality to those
crackpot notions that would be the death of France and of civilization:
the Rights of Man, pacifism, internationalism, and socialism."
I had long suspected that the utter deadliness of French small town
and family life acted as a secret source of energy and inspiration, and
this book provides solid documentation for that belief. For what, after
all, would it have profited Mlle. de Beauvoir to grow up in a society
where the young were offered bribes to read books, coaxed towards
enlightenment like so many young Popeyes towards spinach? The por–
trait of Sartre, in the closing pages of the book, is alive with admira–
tion and surprise: that such a person could exist, so serious and so
liberated from petty concerns! But without that twenty-year hammer–
ing about "the concrete realities of race, country, class, family and
nationality," there would have been no shadow for this light to shine
into. I s there a young Simone de Beauvoir in London or New York?
And
if
so, where is her Sartre?
"-------------------------,
A brilliant and
beautifully reasoned
example of what
Freud's influence
has really been:
an increasing intellectual
vigilance about human nature.
. .. The examination is
exciting, for Mr. Rieff has not
only a sociologist's alertness
to
the cultural implications
of Freud's doctrine, but he
has acute resources-and
knowledge---as a student of
intellectual history."
-ALFRED
KAZIN
The Reporter $6.00
FREUD:
The Mind of the Moralist
by Philip
Rieff
THE VIKING PRESS, N. Y. 22
John Wain
Blaise
Pascal
The Life and
<
Work of a
.b'
Realist
By ERNEST MORTI MER.
"This is
the best-informed and most up–
to-date, the liveliest and the
most discriminating volume on
Pascal which has appeared in
English in a generation . . . a
concise presentation of the re–
ligious and philosophical thought
of one of the greatest geniuses
who ever lived."-HENRI PEYRE,
Sterling Professor of French,
Yale University.
Illustrated.
$4.00
At your bookseller
HARPER
&
BROTHERS, N. Y. 16
