Chapters in Western Civilization ed. by Contemporary Civilization Staff of Columbia College (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 615 book is probably one of the best. The philosophy back of it, however, is vitiated by the same prejudices which dominate modern thinking in so many fields. The desire, on the part of this author and of many of others, to see the dignity of human nature recognized everywhere, in all forms of culture and in all peoples, is praiseworthy. Such an universal humanitarianism should not make, however, the student of eultural anthropology blind to the differences of value which are as real as those of technology or any other side of human activity. Georgetown University, Washington, D. C. RUDOLF ALLERS Chaptets in Western Civilization. Selected and edited by the Contemporary Civilization Staff of Columbia College. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. fl volumes. Challenges to Columbia University's various schools and departments have not been infrequent, although most of them have been directed in recent years at its Teachers' College. The undergraduate liberal arts college, however , has lately received more and more critical attention, particularly since the publication of A College Program in Action and the appearance of some published censures of the College penned by former members of its staff. These critical comments will undoubtedly he augmented by the appearance of Chapters in Western Civilization, which is a sort of textbook for the Contemporary Civilization course at Columbia College. This course, in which students are divided into groups of about thirty-five and placed under the care of a young instructor in the College, is expected to familiarize the student with the historical antecedents of the problems which surround him. In existence for thirty years or more, the validity of its approach to the problem of transmitting historical knowledge has been frequently questioned. The latest questionings have come from widelyone might almost say wildly-dissimilar quarters: Thomas Merton's Seven St&rey Mountain makes a number of caustic remarks on how little the student learns from this course- Merton was a Columbia man; teachers and writers of history at the last American Historical Society convention were practically unanimous in their disapproval of the method of the course, in the special section which was concerned with the Jllethods of presenting broad survey courses. If the students feel they do not learn, and the teachers feel they cannot teach- Barzun, for instance, was sceptical while at Columbia - according to this celebrated and tested plan, then, perhaps, something in these texts will reveal at least one of the reasons for the difficulty. 616 BOOK REVIEWS Volume I begins with a two-chapter survey of the mediaeval period, and concludes with the French Revolution. Each chapter in this volume, as in the other, is a separate piece of work by an expert, although some men have written more than one chapter or part of a chapter. Volume IT begins with the nineteenth-century Romantic movement and takes the narrative to the period between World Wars I and IT. As is to be expected, the chapters are of varying degrees of worth and are presented with different degrees of skill. Oddly enough, the second volume seems to suffer much less from these difficulties than does the first, rather a reversal of the usual case in two-volume works; Undoubtedly, unevenness in presentation could be a major difficulty to teacher or student, particularly where the chapter of one very well known figure is placed next to that of someone relatively obscure. The intrinsic difficulty, however, seems really to be that some of these experts are more than a Iitle inept or badly-informed in their particular fields. A natural result would be the appearance of considerable insecurity or doubt in the minds of the readers. When this insecurity is augmented, as it is certain to be, by the diversity of group instructors, many of whom are not trained in history at all, it should be.comparatively easy to see why students and teachers at Columbia are dissatisfied. As for readers outside Columbia, a few examples of the type of careless, inaccurate, and - in some cases downright vicious writing· these volumes contain should suffice to explain the situation to them. In Chapter I, Marshall Clagett declares that the Christian Fathers held that ownership of...