BETWEEN THE FLOODS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 782, 16 July 1954, Page 12

BETWEEN THE FLOODS

AFTER THE DELUGE, 2 vols.; PRINCIPIA POLITICA, by Leonard Woolf; the Hogarth Press, English prices, 21/-, 15/-, 25/-. "HE Deluge was for Mr. Woolf, when he first started writing what he calls his "study of communal psychology" in the 1920s, the First World War. Just after he published his second volume he was deluged by the Second World

War. But he keeps on manfully, thinking and writing, and now has republished the volumes of 1931 and 1939 with the latest of 1953, re-named on a Suggestion of J. M. Keynes. Adequately to review the three together is manifestly impossible; adequately to review the last, even, in a short space, is impossible, for Mr. Woolf is a discursive though interesting writer, who is almost thinking aloud as he writes, and within his general system he is unsystematic. In his first volume he examined the ideas of "democratic psychology" which were explicit or implicit in the 18th Century and the two great revolutions, American and French, that burst its conventional system asunder; in the second he goes on to the ideas of the European revolutions of 1830 and the contemporary reform crisis in England. He is concerned with the fundamentals of democracy, the clash between political and economic democracy, which is one of our most devilish problems. In his third volume he is driven, inescapably, to examine the authoritarian systems of Italy, Germany, Russia and the Roman Church; and this he does, making his own standpoint quite clear -the standpoint of one who was born into an exceedingly comfortable and well-off English middle-class milieu in 1880, has been concerned almost all his ‘ conscious life in and with politics, and has moved from "radicalism" to socialism, and yet remains a liberal, with a fast hold on the liberal-rational convictions which began to become dominant in so many men of goodwill and clear thought in the 18th Century. He is not, as sO many of them were, an easy optimist. He decides that totalitarian- dictatorship, of any sort, is not a viable form of government for our century. But is democracy possible, a society based on freedom? Mr. Woolf finds another volume still necessary. He is not a professional historian and not a professional psychologist; but I think that anyone who wants to know what it is all about could do many things much worse than read through these books. The rational and liberal mind has not been exhausted yet and (this reviewer agrees with Mr. Woolf) we deride its political principles

at our peril.

J.C.

B.