312
PARTISAN REVIEW
One could argue with him on some points ofdetail. For instance, in connection
with the question of French economic development, he initially quotes, with
evident approval, the claim that "in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
France was the greatest industrial power in the world." Later on, however,
he repudiates the "left-wing myth" of a bourgeois domination of France.
M–
ter the Revolution, "land remained the main force of wealth ... the ruling
elites were composed more oflandowners than businessmen or financiers
well into the twentieth century ... most manufacturing in France was done
in
small workshops until well into the twentieth century." Perhaps it is possible
for a country to
be
the leading industrial power in the eighteenth century, and
also to be industrially retarded at the beginning of the twentieth. Yet this
would seem to call for some discussion. If true, it would suggest that the
Revolution was an agent of economic retardation - an original interpretation
indeed.
Bosher eschews and derides general interpretations, on the grounds
that those who propound them also wish to impose them on their listeners
and to inhibit thought. However, not all of us theorists are also dogmatists.
Bosher wishes to make us think: with the help of a rich assembly of facts,
lucid prose, and critical discussion of theories he repudiates, he certainly suc–
ceeds. He helps one rethink those general ideas which he so distrusts. This is
an enjoyable and stimulating book.
ERNEST GELLNER
SUCH WERE THE JOYS
NEW YORK: CULTURE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, 1940-1965.
Edited
by Leonard Wallock. Rizzoli. $65.00.
With its hyperbolic title and lavish illustrations - more than three
hundred of them, including eighty in color - this volume comes to us cunningly
disguised as a coffee-table book. In fact it's a shrewd, useful, often brilliant
collective portrait of a period that's coming to be seen as a golden age in
New York's cultural life. Impressively, over half the contributors are younger
scholars who at most have a hazy memory of the postwar years. None are
tempted by a neoconservative nostalgia for the stable, untroubled, hierarchi–
cal world that we supposedly enjoyed before the disruptions of the late six–
ties. Yet their aim, like that of some revisionist historians, is to recover the
cultural achievements of New York in the forties and fifties, including those
