984 Book Reviews

prolonging their suffering or negatively impacting their self-respect. She feels that if we are
truly concerned about equality and justice we should support all such programs or none.
She also proposes monetary compensation for whites who are displaced by minority
candidates, to be funded by a progressive, federal tax which would distribute the costs of
preferential treatment to everyone in society. While she is right in addressing the issue of
white candidates, which forms the basis of most of the opposition to affirmative action,
her solution does not seem viable, especially in these economic times.
The final part of her book provides excerpts from various legal cases dealing with
specific aspects of affirmative action. This section is helpful as it shows the logic used to
defend these cases. While not all of her arguments are persuasive or presented in detail, the
overall case is convincing and the book would be a good introduction for any reader,
especially in a course of minorities or racial justice.

Manisha K. Desai
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, NY

La Maladie europbenne. Thomas Mann et le XX& si&cle, Odile Marcel (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1993) 352 pp., 138 FF.

Even after having finished reading this book, the reader may question the validity of
Odile Marcel’s claim that illness is a dominant theme in the writings of Thomas Mann
(1875- 1955). In one sense, she is certainly correct because sickly characters can be found
in numerous works by Thomas Mann from his early novel Buddenbrooks (1901) and
novellas Tonio Kriiger (1903) and Death in Venice (19 12) to his late novel Doctor Faustus.
Sickness and impending death are obviously of major concern to the characters in
Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain whose action takes place in a
sanatorium. Odile Marcel argues, however, that the concept of illness should be
interpreted in a broader and most unusual sense. She compares Thomas Mann’s
indifference to politics in his early writings to a moral illness. In four very long chapters,
she examined his 1901 masterpiece Buddenbrooks, which describes the rise and fall of a
middle-class family in Thomas Mann’s hometown of Ltibeck. She relied extensively on the
theories of the marxist literary critic Georg Lukacs and criticised Thomas Mann for his
failure to denounce what she and George Lukacs perceived as the social inequalities of
German society before World War I. It is perfectly valid for marxist critics to prefer novels
and short stories which support their political ideologies, but it is condescending to affirm
that Mann’s support for middle-class values represents moral blindness or indifference to
social exploitation. It would be relatively easy to argue that Odile Marcel has chosen to
interpret Buddenbrooks in a way which contradicts Thomas Mann’s declared intentions.
Thomas Mann was not a revolutionary and he did not view the German political system of
the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as inherently evil or unjust. Thomas
Mann desired that we readBuddenbrooks as the chronicle of a series of personal and family
tragedies.
Although Odile Marcel’s analysis of Buddenbrooks is not very persuasive, she did make
very thoughtful comments on the evolution of Thomas Mann’s political thinking after the
Nazis gained power in 1933. Thomas Mann thought of himself as a conservative German,

History of European Ideas

Book Reviews 98.5

but he was firmly committed to preserving the basic civil rights of all individuals. He was
unwilling to compromise his moral beliefs and he and his family went into voluntary exile
in 1933 first to Switzerland and then to the United States in 1938. In 1941, he became a
citizen of the United States. Between 1933 and 1945, he gave numerous speeches and wrote
many essays in which he denounced the Nazis and encouraged people to fight against the
Nazis. In October 1940, he began making monthly radio broadcasts in German for the
British Broadcasting Corporation. Thomas Mann believed that it was his moral and
political obligation to do everything possible in order to oppose the crimes which the
Nazis had committed against humanity. In his own mind, there was no contradiction
between his earlier indifference to politics and his role between 1933 and 1945 as a very
eloquent social commentator. The political situation had changed so drastically in his
homeland that people with a moral conscience such as Thomas Mann concluded that they
had no choice but to become politically involved.
The chapters in Odile Marcel’s book which deal with Thomas Mann’s works written
between 1933 and his death in 1955 are much more sympathetic than are her chapters on
his very early writings. This is understandable because modem readers can identify much
more easily with writers who denounced Nazi crimes than with authors who discussed
social conditions in Germany almost one century ago. Although this is a thought-
provoking book which describes very well the extraordinary career of a major German
writer, this would have perhaps been an even better book if Odile Marcel had limited her
analysis to the late writings of Thomas Mann for which she felt a great deal of enthusiasm
and empathy. It is not a wise idea for scholars to write extensively on books such as
Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks about which they have serious personal reservations.

Edmund J. Campion
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Enlightenment, Rights and Revolution: Essays on Legal and Social Philosophy, ed. Neal
MacCormick and Zenon Bankowski (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989),
vi + 396 pp., s25.00 P.B.

This book consists of papers prepared for the Fourteenth World Congress in
Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy held in Edinburgh University between 17 and
23 August 1989. The title of this book could be misleading for students of history. At any
rate, it misled this reviewer. He assumed that the essays were all concerned with how the
Enlightenment influenced theories of rights and discourse on revolution. This is true for
some of the 18 essays. The majority of them, however, while in one way or another
concerned with questions of rights, liberty, equality and, yes, revolution, have little, if
anything, to do with the Enlightenment. In a relatively short review, it would be
impossible to consider all of the essays in any case. Thus, this review will focus on those
nine which the reviewer thinks will be of interest to historians.
The first section of the book, ‘Enlightenment and Revolution’, is indeed concerned with
the relationship between these two phenomena. The first essay, ‘Enlightenment and
Revolution’, presented by the magisterial D.D. Raphael, shows that Enlightenment
thinkers, such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Richard Price, had quite differing views

Volume 18, No. 6, November 1994