Book Reviews 97

What did the Parliaments’s scheme offer and not offer? Which practical proposals have been made in the different fields where the integration-movement is active? This, not more and not less, does Juliet Lodge’s book give us. It thereby is much more than the analysis of

an episode: it contains a piece of fundamental thinking on Europe’s future. The book offers nine essays, written by competent authors, most of whom have been

professionally linked to the events. After an Introduction by Lodge herself (she also contributed the chapter on parliamentary democracy in a continental framework) and the prospective framework for the necessary economic action, by John Pinder, Doreen

Collins comments on a ‘Policy for Society’, before Derek Prag MEP treats ~International Relations’. The last chapters deal respectively with the legal problems (David Freestone& Scott/Davidson), ‘Progress and Prospects’ (Richard Corbett & Juliet Lodge), whereas Michael Burgess concentrates on Spinelli’s personality, his reasons to become a Federalist and how he envisaged his work for the EU-treaty.

All in all, an admirable book of great lasting value. A book written by British academics (the University of Hull has contributed as many as three authors!) in a remarkably progressive spirit. Curiously, it was published only in America. But let us hope that it will find many readers in Europe as wefl.

Henrik Brugmans former Rector of the

College of Europe

Die Verwicklungen im Denkens Wittgensteins, Susanne Thiele (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1983), 342 pp.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is unquestionably one of the masters of modern philosophy. In the last four decades his philosophical works have been looked upon by the vast majority of their readers as the most notable philosophy in western thought. Considering that most of Wittgenstein’s later philosophical criticism has been interpreted in very different forms, far from their origin, it is extremely important for modern scholars to judge his works as a whole. Thiele, in her study, attempts to solve one of the most central questions of Wittgenstein’s perspectivism, namely his own criticism about his early philosophy. Some interpretations might be better than others, but the author shows that many of them are a part of their own world view or a part of Wittgestein’s legend or philosophical myth.

This book is based on a dissertation at Heidelberg University and it is highly influenced by H.G. Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy. According to its interpretation, it seems that Wittgenstein’s later philosophical criticism reflected his inwardly philosophical discourse, which was removed from any traditional or scholarly ways of thought. He repeatedly developed his own terminology, symbols, propositions and concepts, in such a way that the thought developed itself to become an obsessive philosophy. That might have been the reason for the author to claim his later philosophy as being infused with psychologistic and anthropological ideas. Wittgenstein’s philosophy became an inherent part of our cultural athmosphere, while his own ‘mythology’ has the traits of mystical forms, This form of interpretation enable us to understand Wittgenstein’s private language and his contemplative thoughts. Although we know that in the ‘Tractatus’, as a rule, he does not attempt to explain his own doctrines or discuss their background or sources, we must develop a historical reconstruction and causal explanations. In a way, Wittgenstein’s style of philosophy has naive aspects, and tries to avoid Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Indeed Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is far from being concerned with Kant’s criticaf philosophy, as some of his critics have argued. The very naive aspects of his

98 Book Reviews

early philosophy have been partialy reconstructed in his later thought, mostly as a part of his self-criticism. Many of Wittgenstein’s other later theories have been interpreted by Thiele as entanglements stemming from his earlier work. While the Wittgensteinian themes are familiar, they are attractively and clearly developed.

Thiele’s exposition is both elementary and illuminating. The number of the philosophical works that are taking a critical position and open free discussions about his ideas, is very small (p.321). When there is no critical attitude to a philosophy, there is no philosophy at all. This book has been written as a counter point to most critical literature on Wittgenstein’s work and tries to prove why most of it does not reach the suitable standards of philosophical criticism. Both Wittgenstein scholars and scholars of history of ideas will want to quarrel about the arguments which actually have been discussed in this book. As a result, Thiele has produced a well written account of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and especially so is the analysis of his philosophy with a deeply hermeneutic exposition. This is therefore a useful contribution to a very important subject.

Technion-Technical Institute of Israel Israel Idalovichi

Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu (Harvard University Press, 1984), xiv+ 613 pp., $29.50 cloth, $12.95 paper.

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the leading sociologists-or anthropologists-in the world today, and this book, originally published in 1979, is a major stage in his long-term project of rethinking social-or cultural-theory, a project which includes books on the museum- going public (1966), on education (1970), and on what Bourdieu describes as the theory of practice (1972). Distinction is concerned with what the author calls, following or parodying Kant, a ‘social critique of the judgement of taste’.

This massive treatise can be read on at least three levels. In the first place, it is a description of life-styles in contemporary France, or more exactly (since most of the empirical research was carried out in the 196Os), of a France almost distant enough to inspire nostalgia. A sample of some twelve hundred Frenchmen and women in Paris, Lille and elsewhere were studied, and a mass of statistics collected, some of which appear in the 36 tables and 21 figures of this book, dealing with the sociology of variations in moral and political attitudes, entertaining, opinions on literary prizes, beauty care, and so on. These statistical bare bones are fleshed out with case-studies, newspaper interviews, photographs, and references to Proust.

Bourdieu’s main conclusion resembles Disraeli’s view of nineteenth-century Britain; it is that France is two nations, and that the distinction between the bourgeoisie and the working class (urban and rural) goes very deep. The author has a number of interesting observations to make on the behaviour of different ‘class fractions’ as he calls them, but the binary opposition is basic to his book. Besides being a description and analysis of class cultures, the book is, as the title proclaims, a critique, of the kind one has come to expect from Bourdieu. For much of the time he remains a detached observer, an anthropologist of his own society. Every now and then, however, the author’own values break through, and he satirises rather than describes the life-styles of the bourgeoisie, letting the reader suspect that a deep resentment underlies and fuels his brilliant analyses of the socio- cultural system of contemporary France.

At a third level, most interesting to readers outside France and most important, in all probability, in the long term, Bourdieu uses this enormous case-study to elaborate his conceptual apparatus (including keywords such as ‘habitus’ and ‘practice’) and to refine his social theory. Eclectic in its origins, drawing on predecessors as different from one