Antony Tudor’s name was misspelled in our review of Gay Morris’s A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945-1960 (CH, Dec’06, 44-2043).  The error was Choice’s, not the reviewer’s, and we apologize for it.

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An in-house editing error resulted in a misspelling of the name of composer Joseph Haydn in David Wyn Jones’s The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna (CH, Apr’07, 44-4376).  Choice apologizes for the mistake. 

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There was a typographical error in the review of Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850, ed. by Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli (CH, Mar’07, 44-3665).  The review should have referenced “Hume’s critique of the sovereignty of reason over the passions.”  Choice apologizes for the oversight.

Letters

To the Editor:

In her review of my edited volume Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition (CH, Oct’06, 44-0664), Marilyn Pukkila states, “Although Golden’s claims for this encyclopedia are a bit overstated (he compares it favorably with Diderot’s encyclopedia), it is nonetheless an impressive work.”

I have not been so arrogant as to compare the encyclopedia I edited to Diderot’s opus. In the foreword to the encyclopedia, Robert Muchembled writes, “Like Denis Diderot’s famous eighteenth-century Encylopédie, this work offers mature collective wisdom about the topics it surveys.”

Obviously mature collective wisdom can be found in many books, so Muchembled is not making an arrogant statement. I did write the introduction, but I did not refer to Diderot in it.

The review also indicates that I focus on “Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, and gender relations as the main causes for the crazes….” I did not write what she says I wrote. In fact, I do not even use the word “craze” in referring to the witch hunts.

Finally, the review notes that 250 scholars contributed to the encyclo-pedia. There were, however, just over 170 contributors.

Richard M. Golden
University of North Texas

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To the editor:

In reading the review of Arthur Pontynen’s For the Love of Beauty: Art, History, and the Moral Foundations of Aesthetic Judgment (CH, Dec’06, #44- 1912), it is my contention that Professor Emison’s review short-changed this unusual and important book.  She claims that the book satisfies neither art historians nor philosophers.  But what ought to bring satisfaction to an historian or philosopher? Pontynen argues the humanities are currently flawed: “… the pursuit of truth … has largely been abandoned.”  The pursuit of truth is in the hope of wisdom.  Those who consider truth a mere construct will naturally find satisfaction elsewhere.

Emison wrote: “By ‘Beauty’ Pontynen means something somewhat unitary, rather than historically complicated, something quite close to religious faith.”  Pontynen doesn’t mean anything in this regard; the book is an historical explication of the shifting definitions of beauty, how the West moved from Beauty as the manifestation of the true and good, to beauty, mere aesthetics.  To assume beauty is a disunity, a product of historical circumstance, is to miss the point of the book; the core of Western civilization, until modernity, was the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty.  The rejection of beauty has been, and continues to be, deeply corrupting and intellectually problematic for the arts and for the culture.  Emison does grasp the connection with religion, that is, world-view; how one sees the world deeply affects how one views art, beauty, and art history.

And this leads to a dilemma:  how can an intellectual position that denies truth have anything meaningful to say in regard to art made by traditions and cultures that seek truth?  Two current positions, modernism and post-modernism, can only offer facts and willful subjectivity when considering art, culture, or ethics.  In one of many examples, Pontynen discusses the Venus de Milo: “Dante would view Venus as a symbolic representation of a driving force of the universe.  He sees love, truth, and goodness uniting in a beatific vision.  But is Dante right?”  Much hinges on that question, one worthy, like Pontynen’s book, of consideration.

Rod Miller
Hendrix College

  The reviewer replies:

I do not accept that modernism and postmodernism constitute a uniform rejection of “the core of Western civilization.”  On the contrary, Western civilization, whether or not it has any core, produced both.  I am more interested in trying to understand why and how twentieth-century culture developed the way it did than in speculating what Dante would have thought had he ever seen the Venus de Milo—much though I love to read what Dante did actually write down for us.  I do not myself mind when facts are offered to help explicate art, nor do I think that either modernism or postmodernism has a patent on subjectivity, willful or otherwise.  Neither modernism nor post-modernism can fairly be characterized as “a position”; each is a complex phenomenon.  The role of beauty in the history of Western art likewise cannot be so simply summed up as Drs. Miller and Pontynen would like to.  Keats can be granted the right to be summary on these matters, but prose writers had better tread more meticulously.  Beauty is nothing if not elusive, as artists and lovers of art both know, but as this book on beauty seemed to miss.  The patterns of judgment displayed there struck me as categorical rather than considered.  The past appears as though tailor-made to aid and abet a negative and simplistic polemic about contemporary society.  As ripe for critique as the present undoubtedly is, the past is reliably too interesting and multifarious to serve merely as grist for the mill of such a polemic as this.

Patricia Emison
University of New Hampshire

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Dear Editor,

How should an author respond to a negative book review (Rousseau’s Theory of Human Association: Transparent and Opaque Communities, CH, Nov’06, 44-1788) when the reviewer has plainly misunderstood the book’s opening arguments and admits to having read only one-quarter of its pages?  The reviewer happens to be the general editor of Interpretation, a journal devoted to the “close reading” of texts with the aim of disclosing the (often hidden) “teachings” of great thinkers, a manifesto that draws its inspiration from the important work of Leo Strauss.  Unfortunately, asking a Straussian to review a book that draws on rational choice theory and simple thought experiments to elucidate, extend, and assess Rousseau’s political theory is like asking a Marxist to review a conventional economics text—chances are you’re going to get a critical opinion.

Rather than offering yet another “close reading” of Rousseau’s texts (whether Straussian or postmodernist), my book undertakes a “rational reconstruction” of Rousseau’s political thought.  I begin with the Rousseauean distinction between social relations in which people can easily read one another’s intentions and social relations in which people are more opaque to each other.  Reasoning from this distinction, plus a few other simple premises, I arrive at the following conclusions:

1.  Civic cooperation in Rousseau’s model republic requires an extensive regime of mutual surveillance.

2.  Hobbes’s argument for a sovereign authority requires as a necessary premise the natural opaqueness of human intention.

3.  Adam Smith’s argument for unfettered markets assumes that the quality of goods, services, and contractual commitments is perfectly transparent.

4.  Civil society is less robust, but more egalitarian, when the character of citizens is opaque.

Professor Butterworth’s unsupported claim to the contrary notwithstanding, I did not pick illustrative passages from Rousseau’s work out of “thin air.” 

Sincerely,
Greg Hill

  The reviewer replies:

I regret having to aggravate a harsh review by showing why it is justified, but Mr. Hill’s attempt to attribute irrational biases to me necessitates such a defense.  Nowhere have I admitted “to having read only one-quarter of” Mr. Hill’s book.  In a private communication, I explained that I had limited my 180-word review to his account of Rousseau because, finding that account inadequate, I did not go on “to consider whether [he] did a better job of explaining Tocqueville, Smith, and others.”  In other words, I did not explore the adequacy of those other applications of his model.  I examined them and found them just as wanting, but space limitations precluded commenting on them.

Interpretation “welcomes manu-scripts in political philosophy in the broad sense.”  Little else Mr. Hill asserts about the bent of the journal or my scholarly leanings is accurate either.

In my review, I cite chapter 1, note 12 as evidence that Mr. Hill takes material out of “thin air.”  Here is why. To support his contention that Rousseau focuses in his “critical discourses” on “the kind of life that is possible when everyone possesses considerable deceptive powers,” Mr. Hill refers the reader to Rousseau’s Confessions and Reveries and cites what is supposed to be a phrase from Rousseau. However, neither work qualifies as a critical discourse; they are autobiographical writings intended to justify Rousseau’s life. The phrase in question occurs in neither of these works nor, to the best of my knowledge, in any of Rousseau’s writings. 

Rousseau’s objection to Hobbes’s immoral teaching has wide political implications.  He does not investigate “our ability to communicate or conceal our real intentions,” but why we do so. Mr. Hill’s account ignores this.

Sincerely,
Charles E. Butterworth