As late as 1913 J. B. Bury was able to pen in his History of Freedom of Thought a triumphant hymn to the eighteenth-century ideals of rationality, freedom and progress. His brief and meager volume was hardly a substitute for Lord Acton’s projected but never completed History of Liberty, but it was a clear reflection of an age which saw itself whole, progressive, libertarian and rational. These illusions died in 1914 and during the bloody and confused years which followed; and mankind, which had sinned in the nineteenth century by believing too little, sinned even more gravely in the twentieth century by believing too much. The house which rationalism had swept and furnished became the home of all the extravagant ideological and religious commitments which have characterized our century; excess and lawlessness which would have shamed the Wars of Religion became pervasive characteristics of human behavior.
Essays on Politics and Culture, by John Stuart Mill, edited with an introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Doubleday, $4.95
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