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224 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 this return to St Thomas (Peguy's celebrated response to the neo-Thomist urgings ofMaritain is quoted on page 147) tended toremain Bergsonian (a later generation would see them as disciples of Teilhard de Chardin). But at the urgings of the Church, which would later put Bergson's writings on the Index, most Catholic philosophers returned to Aquinas for inspiration. This whole situation described in chapter 7, entitled 'The Catholic Revival,' makes that chapter perhaps the most interesting in this worthwhile book for those interested in the course of philosophical thought in France. (ALBERT SHALOM) Jack N. Lightstone. Society, the Sacred, and Scripture in Ancient Judaism: A Sociology of Knowledge Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Studies in Christianity and Judaism, no 3. xiv, 126. $14.95 paper Professor Lightstone attempts, in this slender volume, to account for the varying perceptions of Scripture in four distinct sets of historical circumstances: 1 / the Restoration community in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (the fifth and fourth centuries BCE); 2 / the Judaism of the Graeco-Roman Diaspora, to the end of the fourth century ofthe Christian era; 3 / earliest rabbinic Judaism in second-century Palestine; and 4 / Talmudic Rabbinism in Babylonia down to the sixth century of the Christian era. Lightstone calls his study a 'sociology of knowledge.' A cumbersome translation ofthe German Wissensoziologie, this term refers to a sub-area of sociology which concerns itself with the social origin of ideas. Although hints of the social determination of culture and knowledge may be found in the social thought of classical antiquity, in modern times it is Montesquieu who is regarded as a pioneer in this sphere. However, it was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that this area of inquiry received a renewed impetus in the writings of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Scheler, and Mannheim. In his famous 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx appeared to present guidelines for a sociological analysis ofthe origin ofideas. The mode ofproduction ofmateriallife, he asserted, tends to determine the general character of political, legal, and other ideas: 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.' Max Weber, writing early in the twentieth century, rejected the apparently mechanistic and one-sided implication of Marx's epigram, and went on to develop his own method of studying the role of ideas in history. The result was his extraordinarily fruitful analyses of the world religions, and the work for whieh he is most famous, The Protestant Ethic HUMANITIES 225 and the Spirit of Capitalism, where he demonstrated an 'elective affinity' between the norms of ascetic Protestantism and the ethos of the new economic system called capitalism. Emile Durkheim, Weber's French positivist contemporary, also proposed a theory of the social determination of ideas, notably in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life and in other works co-authored with Marcel Mauss. For Durkheim, the 'Divine' was an unconscious, collective representation of Society. Moreover, the spatial organization of·a primitive group's camp or village is reflected in its conception of the cosmos, just as the group's conception of time is derived from its religio-ceremonial calendar. Durkheim thus proposed what was, in effect, a new epistemology: time, space, cause, effect, necessity, etc are socially determined aprioris and not, as Kant had maintained, immanent categories of the mind. Another distinguished advocate of Wissensoziologie was Max Scheler, who, indeed, coined the term. Rejecting both the Marxian and the French positivist approaches, Scheler presented a scheme in which both ideal and real factors co-determine thought and knowledge. He attempted to integrate materialistic and idealistic interpretations by insisting on the preservation of the 'eternal essences' of his phenomenological period, essences that are independent of social determination. Finally, we should mention Karl Mannheim, who, inspired byboth the Geisteswissenschaften school and Marx's epigram, defined the sociology of knowledge as the task of relating a group's ideas to the particular location it occupies in the social structure. Of all these approaches, Lightstone seems to favour that of the Durkheim-Mauss school as exemplified in the work of E.E. EvansPritchard...

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