Book Reviews 4.55

intended than any previous one. Its usefulness is enhanced by a good set of indexes (especially the valuable index of subjects); by notes on the people Hobbes mentions in the book; and by a ‘concordance’ that keys the page numbers of this version to that of editions by Molesworth, Oakeshott and Macpherson. The publishers, too, have contributed to the success of this book, using a clearer typeface and less crowded page-format than their rivals. The only blemish, perhaps, is the sometimes over-tight binding of the paperback copies.

The editor contributes a short introduction to the book, summarising an interpretation that he has developed over a number of years. This is not the place for any extensive comment on it, but it might be noted that in recent work (especially his essay on Hobbes, Locke and toleration in Mary Dietz (ed.), ThomasHobbes andPolitical Theory [Lawrence, Kansas, 1990)) Tuck seems to be pushing lines of interpretation that come close to making his position self-contradictory. He wishes to emphasise both the awesome extent of the authority that Hobbes accorded the sovereign, and the potential within the theory for toleration and freedom of thought. It is not always clear how these two positions fit together. Consider, for example, the following statement from the introduction to this new edition: ‘Hobbes handed the sovereign unlimited ideological authority.. . but there were limitations on it’ (xviii). There may indeed be sensein attributing to Hobbes a theory of ‘limited unlimited sovereignty’ (my phrase, not Tuck’s); however, it would need extensive exegesis of the text to convince. A start is made (xxi-xxii), but I am not yet persuaded that we have here a coherent or a fully convincing interpretation of Leviathan.

Tuck’s introduction, in addition to providing an interpretation ofthe book, adds to our knowledge of its immediate context. On the subject of the actual writing of the book one might quibble: Tuck, very tentatively, suggests that Hobbes may have begun Leviathan in early 1649; but it should be noted that Hobbes’s own (brief) remarks in his Latin-verse Vita seem to imply an earlier start (perhaps as early as late-1646). What is interesting, though, is the suggestion that Leviathan was a contribution to Royalist debates in the period between Dunbar and Worcester (1650-51), and may have had, as one of its purposes, the intention of suggesting that Charles II should purchase his return to England by abandoning the Church of England (x-xi, xxiv-xxv). The irony is that the content of the book served, in the end, to do little more (in the eyes of many of Hobbes’s contemporaries) than impair for ever his claim to be a Royalist at all.

Glenn Burgess University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Die Aufkliirung in bterreich: Ignaz von Born und Seine Zeit, ed. Helmut Reinalter (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991), 145 pp., DM 42.-/SFr. 35.-.

The Aufkliirung in tisterreich, a collection of essays which constitutes a fourth volume by the Internationalen Forschungstelle dealing with democratic movements in central Europe between 1770 and 1850, focuses on the Austrian Enlightenment through the life and career of Ignaz von Born. Although his mentality and approach to life (given the dates of his life span) designates Born as a member of that international alliance to promote Reason, Born’s peripatetic activities would have earned him the label ‘Renaissance man’ by Jacob Burckhardt and his contemporaries. Born not only worked in and otherwise pioneered in

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the fields of Geology and mining engineering, but he wrote on the results of his researches in a scientific way that endorsed reason. Because of the high quality of his researches, Born also was lionised by like minded spirits throughout Europe. (His admittance as a member of the British Royal Academy was chief among these honors.) In addition, he became one of the foremost among Joseph II’s Berufadel, and as one of the chief bureaucrats of the Habsburg government, supported the Emperor’s effort to refashion his realm into a centralised and rational state grounded on ‘Enlightened’ principles. In addition, Born used his entire wealth, accumulated through inheritance, marriage and, not the least, as a result of his being a central figure in the Josephinian civil service, to introduce contemporary literature and music to Viennese society. It was in this latter capacity, for example, that Born played a part in promoting the fame of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

One of the chief avenues used by Born in promoting his ideas was the Masonic Order. Austria’s major urban centers saw the rise and spread of Masonic and ihminati orders which, because they were centers where intellect and talent congregated and because these worldlings were willing to give themselves over to the tutelage of the likes of Born, became underground vehicles, attached to one another by a common cause, for the spreading of ‘Reason’. In Vienna, Born became a member and leading light in different lodges including, ‘Zur wahren Eintracht’, and after its founding by the Master of the former, ‘Zur gekriinten Hoffnung’. These Masonic activities of Born are especially interesting to cultural and social historians. In these lodges talent, be it bourgeois, noble or Beamter, met. Moreover, the internal hierarchy of these institutions, founded as far as practicable, not on birth, but on merit brought together like minded gentlemen bent on reforms that would lead to a just society. These orders constituted then a kind of closed microcosm of those progressive societies that operated more generally and openly during the latter half of the nineteenth century to bring about what might be called bourgeois civilisation. Born, because he is linked to the early founders of the progressive spirit, stands then as a harbinger of the socio-cultural push that was to take up the century to come. Hence, while focusing on Born rather than on the Aufklarung as a whole, Helmut Reinalter’s symposium is an engrossing study yielding insights not only into the Austrian Enlightenment but on the roots of the Monarchy’s socio-cultural development in the century following the death of Joseph II.

George Strong College of William and Mary, Virginia

Understanding Phenomenology, Michael Hammond, Jane Howarth and Russell Keat (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), viii+319 pp., $35.00 H.B., Ji12.95 P.B.

In their Preface the authors of this book correctly state that making sense of phenomenological texts can be a daunting task for English-speaking students. The problem (they say) ‘is due largely to a combination of esoteric terminology, opaque style, and apparently unfamiliar philosophical concerns’.’

There is another problem too, one referred to elsewhere by Professor Dummett: ‘Husserl is among those philosophers-Wittgenstein and Kant are others-who tempt those trying to expound them to lapse into pastiche, which presents the very same obstacles to understanding it as does the original’.* Dummett however does go on to point