Joseph de Maistre's Life, Thought and Influence: Selected Studies ed. by Richard A. Lebrun (review)

humanities 403 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 British operations at Louisbourg and Quebec, with brief notices of Cook=s role, some of which is only a matter of conjecture. In effect, the first half of the book is a very well written campaign summary, and might have merited a different title. The second half of the book has similar problems. It is difficult to write about surveying the Newfoundland coast in a manner which will interest the general reader, and the excerpts from Cook=s sailing directions are most interesting to those with sailing experience. Cook=s discoveries on the west coast of Canada where he established the British claim at Nootka Sound on the west side of Vancouver Island have to be put into the context of his three Pacific voyages, and they into that of the scientific observation of the transit across the sun of Venus in 1769, intended to serve the purpose of measuring the distance from the earth to the sun, and the search for the great Terra Australis Incognito. History, however, can be messy to write about. Suthren has put together a book which will interest and entertain readers with little or no knowledge of eighteenth-century history. His credentials for the job are considerable. He was a historian at fortress Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island and director-general of the Canadian War Museum from 1986 to 1997, and his sailing experience has been such that in 1997 he was appointed an honorary captain in the Canadian navy. His experience as an author has been as a novelist. These achievements well qualify him for the task of presenting a complicated and technical subject to a general readership. Some objections can be raised. Suthren has not resisted the pernicious tendency in contemporary popular history to make extensive use of quotations from other modern scholars, sometimes without identifying the authorship in the body of the text. The only purpose of quoting other scholars should be to support a case with their authority, for which purpose the reader obviously needs to be told who is being quoted, and why. Dundurn Press has at least clearly identified such passages as quotations. Another complaint is about the quality and number of the charts reproduced. A book about exploration and chart making which does not provide the reader with clear reproductions of the charts described, and modern maps, where necessary, is sadly deficient. Suthren=s undoubted capacity as an author and historian deserved a little better handling by the publisher. The book contains references, and a bibliography, but no index. (NICHOLAS RACY) T Richard A. Lebrun, editor. Joseph de Maistre=s Life, Thought and Influence: Selected Studies McGill-Queen=s University Press. x, 338. $75.00 A decade ago Francis Fukiyama announced the end of history. Whether the Hegelian political homeostasis proclaimed by this obscure official in the 404 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 United States State Department would today receive the same scholarly notice it did then is perhaps a good question. What seems less open to question is the apparent lack of political alternatives, certainly in the Western liberal democracies, where there are no credible oppositions, loyal or otherwise. We live in a homogeneous technocracy in which even the language expressing an alternative has been expunged by the physicians of angular momentum (read: spin doctors). According to the editor of this volume, part of its rationale is that >studies that help us to understand Joseph de Maistre and his thought may also stimulate our reflections on a host of general philosophical and political questions.= He is right, not only about what might be stimulated, but also about the need for it. Joseph de Maistre (1753B1821) has come to be known for his throneand -altar reactionary criticism of the modern period, which he expressed with a cynicism and irony of which the paragraph above, for example, is but a faint imitation. There may be some disagreement about how the various parts of his critique hang together, but the main elements would be an utterly evil French Revolution as the dénouement of a history...