Political Thought in France from Sieyes to Sorel. By J.
P. Mayer. (Faber and Faber. 8s. 6d.) Political Thought in France from Sieyes to Sorel. By J. P. Mayer. (Faber and Faber. 8s. 6d.) Tins book is less than one hundred and fifty pages long, and in it Mr. Mayer has undertaken to survey, quote and interpret the main political writers of France in a century and a half astonishingly fertile in them. To add to his difficulties, he has very properly included as political writers marginal cases like Lamartine and Chateaubriand, the second, at least, a figure of permanent importance as far as the history of Catholicism in France is concerned. With these limitations of space and these expansions of content, Mr. Mayer has done well not to do worse. But he has not produced an in- dispensable or even a very valuable book, though, for the moment, it fills a real need, especially as the French authors dealt with are often hard to come by in libraries and bookslieps. Well-read in the German literature on this subject, Mr. Mayer's bibliography is perhaps more of a serious contribution than is his text. The text itself is very uneven in quality.. Mr. Mayer is never original or profound, and when he essays to cast new light on old themes he is not very impressive. It would be a very naïve Marxist who was upset by the alleged indebtedness of Marx to Lamennais which is implied here. In any age there are commonplaces of language, of ideas, of bias that are shared by all the writers on one side of a great controversy (often they are shared by writers on both sides). But the originality of Marx is not to be discredited by real or apparent identities of language. Mr. Mayer is better as a kind of historical Baedeker than as an original commentator ; where Baedeker's methods suffice, he is adequate; when they do not, he is not helpful to the inexpert or rewarding to the expert.
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