David Spitz

Democracy and the Problem of Civil Disobedience.

If Sophocles were alive today to recast the dilemma of Antigone in contemporary, if less sanguine, terms, he might well seize on the problem of the citizen who refuses to answer questions put to him by a congressional investigating committee. Antigone, you will recall, was torn between two loyalties. Her religion commanded her to bury the body of her brother, while her state commanded that his body be left, unburied and unmourned, to be eaten by dogs and vultures on the open plain outside the city walls. As a loyal citizen, Antigone was required to yield her conscience to the state, to guide her conduct not by her rational moral knowledge but by the precepts of the law. As a person bound to her kin by the dictates of her religion, she was required to subordinate the instructions of Creon the king to those of her faith. She chose to obey her conscience and paid the penalty. Socrates, who—according to a traditional interpretation of the Crito —would doubtless have counseled otherwise, was also executed by the state. Thoreau, who at a critical moment followed what has scornfully been termed “the primitive attitude of Antigone, rather than the mature comprehension of Socrates,” found that refusal to obey a law resulted not in loss of life but in temporary loss of physical freedom.

JOHN M. ROBSON. The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill. Pp. xii, 292. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968.

quently, a bit ambiguous. (Witness the latest, Humanae Vitae.) So conservatives used them to back their positions, and liberals used them just as often to support theirs. Two chapters seem to merit special attention : the first is that on Father John A. Ryan, who was an outstanding leader in the 1920’s and 1930’s, an apostle of the principle of &dquo;subsidiarity,&dquo; but as interpreted by him to support the federal government’s taking over much formerly left to the state or local goyernment. Opponents perceived it the opposite way. Basically, it meant that local government should surrender its duties to remote government only when it could not perform these duties adequately. The other chapter which I would single out is that on the rise and fall of Charles E. Coughlin, the radio-orator priest who had a national audience during some years in the 1930’s. At first a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, he eventually attacked him and formed his own third party. Later he became anti-Semitic, according to the author. &dquo;He can be classed in no

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a well-developed structure, such diversity might be a source of strength. As it is, however, there seems to be little method to this mixture. There has been, until recently, a serious shortage of sociological scholarship concerning the schools. Social scientists in professional schools of education have emphasized psychology rather than sociology, while other scholars have largely neglected the social aspects of education. Sociology can contribute greatly to our understanding of institutions of learning. Serious studies focusing on the functions of the schools in our society are useful to educational scholars. However, a book such as the one Professor Sexton has written is of little

JOHN STUART MILL. Essays on Economics and Society, Vols. I and II. (Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vols. IV and V) Edited by J. M. Robson. Pp. lv, 847. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967.

while disdaining the needs of the classes below them. The Puritans fit this mold in that they sought to repair the inequity between a rising merchant class and the entrenched aristocracy. That many aristocrats and nonmerchants joined their crusade does not change the basic character of their inherent goal. If they were not democrats, subscribing to the thesis of government by consent of the governed, it was because they were in the intermediate position of seeking relief for this middle class while frowning on the aspirations of the lower classes. It is this characteristic which made the Puritans so distasteful to the Anabaptists, Diggers, Quakers, and other Separatists who sought a levelist society, in religion and politics as well as economics. If by &dquo;saints&dquo; Walzer refers to men who have a closed view of their historical destiny, then the Puritans were perhaps saints. But they were far from saintly in the true meaning of the word. They were not selfless or sacrificing in the same sense as Roger Williams, Babeuf, Blanqui, or Rakovsky. The comparison to the Jacobins

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one-acre lot, with

ELIAS BERG. Democracy and the Majority Principle: A Study in Twelve Contemporary Political Theories. Pp. 166. Göteborg, Sweden: Akademiförlaget-Gumperts, 1965. No price

1,000 worth of furniture ; (2) a library worth

PENNOCK, J. ROLAND. Liberal Democracy. Pp. xii, 403. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1950.

5,000,000 for every community of approximately 200,000 inhabitants in those countries; (3) a fund that would yield enough interest to pay

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1,000 a year to 125,000 teachers and 125,000 nurses for an indefinite period; and (5) still leave enough to replace the wealth of France and Belgium. (Scholastic, November 10, 1934, p. 13.) Similar figures for World War II would be even more im-

BUSH, VANNEVAR. Modern Arms and Free Men. Pp. 273. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1949.

notable careers-one as a major architect of American foreign policy in the early years of the Republic, and a second as a crusader in the Congress against the expansion of slavery in the &dquo;middle period.&dquo; Between these two careers his unhappy presidency appears as almost a strange interlude, deserving treatment on its own. Professor Bemis’ long and closely packed volume deals with the first of Adams’ careers, covering his life, with special emphasis on his contributions to American foreign policy, from his birth more or less