Volume 8, Number 6 · April 6, 1967
Home Away From Home
By George Lichtheim
French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924
by Robert Wohl
Stanford, 530 pp., $12.50
Contemporary French Political Thought
by Roy Pierce
Oxford, 276 pp., $5.75
The anniversary season is upon us once more. Three years ago it was the outbreak of war in 1914 that furnished historians and essayists with a theme for reflections upon the course of the preceding half-century. Now it is the Russian Revolution in 1917, or rather its opening phase, for the Civil War went on until 1921, and there were further upheavals to come. During those years of turmoil something of importance happened to European civilization, but what? Was it merely given a new shape, or did the life go out of it? Everyone is pretty well agreed that the nineteenth century terminated in the First World War, for what came to an end then was not merely the familiar balance of power, but something more important: a particular culture generally associated with bourgeois liberalism, parliamentary government, national patriotism, and European pre-eminence in world affairs. Socialism was transformed too—the Second International split, and Bolshevism arose to confront Social Democracy. Yet Eastern and Western Europe were affected in quite different ways. It is even possible to hold that in some respects Western Europe turned out to have more in common with North America than with the Eastern half of the European Continent.
Review, 2597 words
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