BOOKS
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Hinze knows, as ifhe has read Peter Handke's play,
Kaspar,
or as if Handke
has read
Puss In Boots,
that human speech tends to exercise tyranny over
living creatures when they submit
to
its laws; it requires dogs to jump
through hoops, and worse. But Hinze is too clever to indulge the vanity of
hoop-wielding men, or to accept their language's tyranny. When Law,
personified by a mouse in Tieck's play, obstructs Hinze's journey, Hinze
devours the Law . As long as there are cats like him , and cat-calling,
rebellious audiences like the one in Tieck's play, the tyrannies that lan–
guage and art exercise over us will remain incomplete.
JOEL SCHECHTER
MARX UPENDED
Twilight of Authority.
By Robert Nisbet. Oxford University Press. $10.95.
The author of this likeable but sligh tly crotchety book is a
distinguished historian of social thought. It is a book clearly inspired by an
acutely, sincerely felt sense of malaise concerning Out shared social and
political condition . But it is very much argued at the level of social ideas
rather than of realities; or at least, that is where the stress seems to be. The
ills are described concretely enough, but one somehow has the impression
that in the author's estimation both their roots and their remedy lie in the
sphere of thought. As if to confirm one in this impression, the author
defiantly tells us:
Everything vital in history reduces itself ultimately to ideas, which are
the motive forces . Man
is
what he thinks . Thus might the epigram be
restated ...1 know nothing more absurd than the 'realist' position that
ideas and ideals do not shape history .
There follows a slightly suspect demonstration that this must be so.
Granted that, as Nisbet states, human history differs from biological
history, which is a statistical account of the development of populations .
Agreed that human history has as its units whole institutional complexes.
These however, Nisbet continues, embody or express or are based on ideas .
This step seems to me far more questionable, though of course it can be
made trivially true by equating an institution with the idea or ideas it
