The Objectionable Society

The Age of the Enlightenment, Coleridge wrote, was full of enlighteners but curiously lacking in light. One may say of modern sociology that it abounds in reformers without any notion of what reforms they would like to effect. Two new books, though founded on different systems, illustrate how decadent twentieth-century social thought has become: for decadence, as C.E.M. Joad suggested, is the loss of an object.

Mr. Maurice R. Stein, of Brandeis University, has published The Eclipse of Community: an Interpretation of American Studies (Princeton, $6.00). Though he aspires to work toward “a theory of community,” Professor Stein, as a positivist, never gets beyond case histories. His book is little more than a fat summary of the principal well-known “community studies” and surveys published in this century, and sufficiently satirized by Mr. J. P. Marquand: Caste and Class in a Southern Town, Middletown, Greenwich Village, The Gold Coast and the Slum, etc. The summaries are sufficiently thorough to save the prudent bookman from having to read these works in their unabridged turgidity.

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Russell Kirk

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The Age of the Enlightenment, Coleridge wrote, was full of enlighteners but curiously lacking in light. One may say of modern sociology that it abounds in reformers without any notion of what reforms they would like to effect. Two new books, though founded on different systems, illustrate how decadent twentieth-century social thought has become: for decadence, as C.E.M. Joad suggested, is the loss of an object.

Mr. Maurice R. Stein, of Brandeis University, has published The Eclipse of Community: an Interpretation of American Studies (Princeton, $6.00). Though he aspires to work toward “a theory of community,” Professor Stein, as a positivist, never gets beyond case histories. His book is little more than a fat summary of the principal well-known “community studies” and surveys published in this century, and sufficiently satirized by Mr. J. P. Marquand: Caste and Class in a Southern Town, Middletown, Greenwich Village, The Gold Coast and the Slum, etc. The summaries are sufficiently thorough to save the prudent bookman from having to read these works in their unabridged turgidity.