Society as the Patient by Lawrence E. Frank (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 119 dearly just how the shattering of the unity of Spanish "soul" in Spain paved the way for the acceptance of the ideao£ independence on the part of the colonies. Although Mr. Madariaga (and we think unfortunately) does not dwell at length upon these problems, he does make public, in his dramatic and fascinating way, what the esoteric circle has known right along, that the Spanish empire did not break up as the result of the ignorance of the Spanish Americans, or the blighting effect of the Inquisition, or the repression of the authorities, or the cruelty of the Spaniards to the Indians, or any of the romantic reasons advanced by the Creole leaders of the independence movement, who were trying to gain sympathy in England and France even at the risk of having to tell patriotic lies. In The Fall of the Spanish American Empire, Mr. Madariaga has in this regard done for England and the United States what M. Marius Andre did for France i.n his La Fin de l'Empire Espagnol d'Amerique, but Mr. Madariaga has done it in a more exciting manner. Even so, the results are at times uneven. Mr. Madariaga has blind spots in his love for Spain, and these color at times his objectivity. His Castilian imperialism, of the kind so well described by Fidelino de Figueiredo, leads him at times into the absurdity of wishful thinking. He would like to see the map of the Iberian Peninsula of one color, a thing which Castilian imperialists have at various times tried to achieve; he is at what he calls Portuguese "separatism," and begrudges the independence of Portugal as though the Portuguese were recalcitrant relatives cheating Castilian heirs out of what rightly belongs to them. Toward Spanish America his feelings are mixed. He admires the fecundity of Spain in the New World, but regrets the circumstances that kept Spain's American children from forming part of a great Spanish commonwealth. He laments the fragmentation of the Hispanic world and, by extension, its ineffectualness ; he believes that the shattering of the " Spanish pomegranate" was It mistake. The book suffers here and there from these personal attitudes, yet the author's disciplined mind does not allow them to get out of bounds. Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C. MANOEL S. CARDozo. Society as the Patient. Essays on Culture and Personality. By LAWRENCE E. FRANK. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1948. Pp. 395. $5.00. This is a collection of essays which appeared in various journals from 1916 to 1946. The essays range over the field of economics, law, sociology, mental hygiene, and education, emphasizing what their author cans "the uo BOOK REVIEWS psycho-cultural approach" to the problems of man in society. The dominant ideas are those of Darwin, Freud, and Dewey. Man is seen as nothing more than a product of organic evolution who rose above the level of other animals through the development of a large brain which made it impossible for him to be content with the mere satisfaction of his organic drives. This condition coupled with the experience of boredom impelled humanity to develop cultures and socialized patterns of living that distinguish man from the other animals and gave him an area of freedom and control over the compulsions of his biological nature. Culture and institutions, according to Frank, are human creations, products of historY, whose only justification is their ability to satisfy human needs and desires in a completely this-worldly perspective. Science has made all the older views of man's nature and destiny (including the Christian) obsolete, by showing that the earth is not the center of the universe and man-not a rational animal but a descendant of mammalian ancestry, chiefly impelled by feelings and emotions. Frank believes there is no longer any room for the traditional concept of man as an individually responsible agent, since man has no "fixed " nature and his "personality" is itself a creation of soci~ly inculcated ways of thinking and behaving. He expresses the Freudian view that very many of the pr9blems of society are to be traced to the warped personalities produced by harsh childhood training...