Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900-1918 (review)

334 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:2 APRIL 1988 tragedy, personal as well as philosophical. In his last decade he suffered from a crippling illness, family disasters, and the desertion of his disciples" (x). Although Royce's last years were troubled in many respects, they were no more troubled than the last years of many, many human beings, and Royce had compensations few others have. To be sure, the loss of disciples is not commonly experienced, but that cannot be considered tragic since he never lost the respect of many in the philosophical community , much less suffered disgrace. It needs to be stressed (as Wilmon H. Sheldon, an 1899 Royce Ph.D., once told this reviewer with much feeling) that for about a decade Royce enjoyed a preeminence on the American philosophical scene that no philosopher before or since has enjoyed. Neither James nor Dewey ever enjoyed the eminence that Royce briefly had. During that period Royce had no serious competitor in the U.S.--James was then considered eminent only in psychology. It seems an overdramatization to think of Royce's partial descent from such Olympian heights as tragic. One suspects that it is partly the half century of neglect of Royce's work after his death that led Clendenning to overdramatization of what happened beforehis death. Sadly, if not tragically, it was not until the late 196os that Royce's work began to be again considered sophisticated philosophy when judged by the same standard applied to Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Peirce, and Quine. Clendenning's superb biography can be expected to contribute significantly to the continuing restoration of respect for Royce as a major philosopher. That restoration will not be complete, however, until serious scholarly work is done on Royce's many unpublished and published writings in logic and related areas. If philosophers today become persuaded that Royce made important contributions to the most technically and formally demanding areas of philosophy, they will take seriously his work in other areas. PETER H. HARE State Universityof New York at Buffalo Mary Gluck, GeorgLutMcsandHis Generation. 19oo-1918. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Pp. ix + 265. $25.oo. Fifteen years ago, a year after Luk~ics died, a "treasure trove" came to light from the safe of a Heidelburg bank, deposited there by Lukfics himself in 1917. It contained numerous letters, diaries, fragments of planned writings, articles and notes which called into being a great deal of literature dedicated to the life and cultural predicament of the young Lukfics and his friends. The best informed and intellectually most interesting of this literature is a book by Zoltfin Novfik: A VastirnapT(~rsas(u t (The Sunday Circle, [Budapest: Kossuth K6nyvkiad6, 1979], 3o6 pp.) which covers much the same ground as Mary Gluck's book, although in considerably greater detail and with more reliable historical accuracy. However, while the book under review cannot compete in terms of original scholarship with Nov~ik's study, it has the advantage over the latter in that it is written for a Western audience that would probably find the wealth of refer- BOOK REVIEWS 335 ences and asides contained in a book destined for a Hungarian readership rather overwhelming. The principal merit of Mary Gluck's book is that she tells her story with great sympathy and liveliness, without attempting to overburden the reader with undigestible detail and too much controversy. The story line is clear and well presented, allowing the main protagonists to speak for themselves. The best part of the book is Chapter 2 in which the author ably puts together a considerable amount of secondary literature to describe the historical formation of Luk~cs's generation. By contrast, the weakest are the Introduction and Chapter i in which she tries to press the subject of her enquiry into the fashionable Procrustean bed of "modernity and its discontents," sometimes on the oddest ground, by saying that in Hungary at the time "the majority of the population still lived in conditions of rural backwardness, insulated from the benefits, as well as the discontents, of modernity" (23). What is methodologically very problematical in this book is that too much credibility is given to much later reminiscences...