Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:350 BOOK REVIEWS Nor could he abide their separation from the true ehurch of Christ. Nevertheless, he was opposed, at least initially, to government coercion of the separatists and worked long and diligently for corporate reunion with them. As the government's policy of coercion seemed to be working, however, he came to see it as remedial and therefore acceptable. It is the very human Augustine of the Confessions who is the subject of all the rich experiences of his long and varied life. To him we owe the insightful, indeed classical self-portrait of,a marvelous human being who in his mysterious human nature is so like to us. In nine hooks of the Confessions he writes movingly of the presence of God in his life. Then in books 10-13, he leaves autobiography behind and launches out into a discussion of time, memory, and creation. Far from being in the nature of a digression, Chadwick claims, these final four books really bear the clue to the whole work. Augustine's story he explains is actually the microcosm of the creation, fall, and ultimate return to God's love. Thus is the personal experience of the first nine books seen on a cosmic scale in the last four. Coming almost twenty years after Peter Brown's excellent Augustine of Hippo, Professor Chadwick's study can be highly recommended as a practical and readable introduction to Augustine's thought and especially to his literary work. It presents with style and substance the gripping image of this eternal man who can teach us much about our world, our nature, and ourselves. GEORGE c. BERTHOLD Saint Anselm College Manchester, New Hampshire From Marx to Kant. By DICK HOW.ARD. SUNY Series in Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. Pp. 300. $39.50. One of the major points of departure of the modern from the classical tradition is its answer to the question whether reality and experience can best be explained in terms of transcendence or immanence. Dick Howard, whose outlook is modern, has written a detailed study of one aspect of the immanent, or ideologieal, nature of modernity, namely, the theorypractice or philosophy-politics relation in the theories of Kant, Hegel, and Marx as representative modern thinkers. His purpose is to provide, for modern immanence, " a systematic account of the relation of philos~ phy and politics." Howard apparently came to this work as much through practical, or political, interests as through theoretical. He describes the book as "the BOOK REVIEWS 351 product of twenty years of reading, thinking, talking, and doing," the "doing" being active involvement in the New Left, including participation in a Paris demonstration in May, 1968. Howard characterizes the New Left as attempting "to redefine the political as a questi"on/' as being, therefore, theoretically oriented beneath its practical activities of demonstrations, freedom rides, and voter registration drives. The goal was to articulate particular instances in a manner that forced the citizens to recognize in them the universal demands of living in and as a society. In this, the New Left was 'Kantian' and republican: it sought to create the space for the public exercise of judgment. In this attitude, according to Howard the New Left is the opposite of the Right which, much like the rulers of a totalitarian state, wants to keep political power away from the public and in the hands of the few. The goal of the New Left, then, is to develop a new approach to politics which avoids both capitalism and totalitarianism. This is also Howard's theoretical purpose in this book, which displays an impressive mastery of the Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian texts. Unfortunately, however, precisely what he has to say about these three exponents of the modern is often difficult to comprehend, for he makes few concessions to readers who have not already climbed to his rather rarefied level of abstraction. The book is full of passages such as the following: The political is not constituted by a progressive development from the simple to the complex; it is not the product of an inductive demonstration. The need for methodological independence was demonstrated... by the constitutive ontological temptation which...