Hegel (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 233 In the last, literary, section, essays by Robert Adolph and Philip Pinkus deal with Mandeville 's satire and paradox. The former stresses satire; the latter, paradox. Both are interesting so far as they refer to the social meanings of Mandeville's satire or paradox. But as Pinkus put it, "the problem of whether or not the Fable is satire is obviously a matter of definition and in most literary terms there is always the danger of making one's definition so restrictive as to be meaningless." Regardless of how one may define satire and paradox in detail, it is surely satirical or paradoxical that a literary essay criticizing "an ossified history-of-ideas approach" is one of the best two of this volume judged by the history-of-ideas point of view, the other being Speck's. In "The Cant of Social Compromise: Some Observations on Mandeville's Satire," Robert H. Hopkins starts with Macpherson's interpretation of the "state of nature": Though Macpherson's overall treatment of Hobbes appears to be too reductive in order to support a Marxist interpretation, I would plead that his analysis of the ironies of Hobbes's "State of Nature" is sound because he has hit upon the uses of this loaded term for a literary strategy.... What I am suggesting is that in the 1714 edition of the FableMandeville was using "State of Nature" in the Hobbist sense.... By equating the Hobbist "natural condition of man" which reflects a possessive-individualistic market society with the Augustinian viewof fallen, unregenerated man in "Remark (O)", Mandeville articulates a highly vexing paradox. Mandeville's mythical "State of Nature" represents an image of early eighteenth-century London society as it really was. By showing a formidable gap between traditional Christian ethics and the new ethics of the market, Mandeville criticizes effectively the bourgeois optimism of Addison and Steele, who are the main targets in the 1714 edition of the Fable of the Bees. Since Steele is one of the supporters of the Charity School Movement, which is also supported by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, Hopkins gives us the same answer in a different expression to the question mentioned above. Those bourgeois optimists do not realize the discrepancy between the prosperity they enjoy and the ethics they stick to. Mandeville sees this gap clearly; but he cannot simply ignore the declining older ethics, even though he is standing on the other side of the gap. Swift may be said to be standing on the opposite side with the same penetrating sight as Mandeville has. One of the main reasons why Mandeville cannot abandon the older ethics is that the emergent market society has not yet reached the stage of autonomy that Adam Smith foresees. Mandeville's market society needs political power to curb its activity but not to keep it within the limit of the older ethics. In thus understanding the nature of political power in Mandeville I am afraid that I differ with Hopkins. HIROSHI MIZUTA Nagoya University Hegel. By Charles Taylor. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 580. $36.00) This book has interested me for personal as well as impersonal reasons. I have been told that Taylor started his book on Hegel for the British Penguin series, as I did mine: in both cases, however, the scale of the work and the necessary depth of the treatment soon outgrew what was possible in a Penguin book. In Taylor's case the work has swelled to nearly 600 closely printed pages, in which, incidentally, there are far more misprints than should have been allowed (e.g., "immorality" for immortality" on p. 190). Taylor makes no mention of my work, though others are cited, so it is perhaps the case that he did not think overmuch of it. If this is the case, I do not share his attitude, for I consider his work a vastly solid, estimable study, concentrating on the sense and worth of Hegelian doctrines, and only subsidiarily interested in historical minutiae, the study of which has been for many a substitute for philosophical understanding. And he has expounded and criticized Hegel in a manner not unintelligible...