826 Book Reviews

Strictly speaking, it is arguable whether we can identify the aristocratic liberals’ emphasis on political participation and the value placed on community with the ideal of positive liberty itself, As Tom Baldwin has justifiably pointed out (Baldwin, ‘MacCallum and the Two Concepts of Freedom,’ Ratio 26), it is possible to see liberty not as an ‘exercise-concept’ but as an ‘opportunity-concept’ even if we assume a substantial view of human nature (e.g., a particular view of human autonomy), and it is this line of thought which we find in the arguments by the aristocratic liberals, especiafly Mill. (It must be added, however, that Kahan seems to come close to recognising this when he refers to Guicciardini’s discussion about negative liberty.) Nevertheless this does not diminish the significance of the author’s analysis. His keen sense of the variety of political languages certainly makes it possible to counter those tendencies which have impoverished the understanding of liberalism by limiting one’s scope to the discourse of contract and Hobbesian individualism or by ‘imposing our grammar’ on the vocabularies of thinkers in the past.

It is also noteworthy that Kahan points out that the aristocratic liberals were not ‘wholehearted pluralists’ although they were committed to the ideal of negative liberty and diversity. They supported diversity only within the limits set by their particular conception of the human telos, by their understanding of what human beings ought to be. This resulted in the difficulty they found in propagating their values, their sense that they were ‘working against time’, connected with their pessimism (though, in the case of Mill, Kahan makes some reservations about his pessimism). This is certainly an important insight into the relationship between their values and their isolation in society, but Kahan seems to stress their pessimism more than it is needed to do so. As he himself reminds us, however pessimistic they may have been, they were never ‘bohemians’ because of their presentism and political involvement. How could they maintain these attitudes? How, for example, even after publishing On Liberty where very strong pessimism can be detected, could Mill write Considerations on Representative Government where we find the richness of the ‘tactical statements’ to persuade the public (tactics that could be the key, I think, to understanding this latter work). Is it not possible to say that, instead of being totally despairing of political possibilities and being silent, trying to show a not worse alternative among possible political actions was a hallmark of aristocratic liberalism? There seems to be an intellectually impo~ant (and even politically urgent) need to exptain this aspect of aristocratic liberalism in more detail than the author does, especially if, as he himself seems to imply, it is much more difficult to construct the sociology of liberty today than in the nineteenth century.

Kyushu University, Japan Masashi Sekiguchi

Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German “Bildungsromarf’ as Metafiction, Todd Kontje (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992), viii + 183 pp., $32.50.

Several directions in contemporary and ‘post’-Modernist thinking inform Kontje’s book on the German Bi~dungsromane. The author begins with Jiirgen Habermas’s theory of the discursive community of the public sphere, that intersubjective culture that lies between the private domain of the home and the political institutions of the state. In short, Kontje rereads major Bildungsromane by late eighteenth- and ea,rly nineteenth-century

Book Reviews 827

German writers (Jung-Stilling, Moritz, Goethe, Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul and Hoffmann) in the light of the publishing industry of the time. The scholar succeeds in disclosing several less-frequently explored dimensions of this series of Bildungsromane. The Marxist underpinnings of both Habermas’s social philosophy and Kontje’s creative reworking thereof are disclosed when the scholar examines the ever increasing financial pressures that not only accompanied the capitalisation of the book market, but which conditioned (vs determined) these authors’ literary representations of their central heroes.

Kontje seeks to demonstrate how social problems subverted and undermined the heroes’ attempts to transform their lives into a purposeful and coherent narrative. This dimension of this series of novels seems to be consistent with the problems that attended the newly emerging concept of autonomous art in the late-eighteenth century. Time and again, the scholar illuminates how social pressures continually subvert the ideal of changing both the individual and society by first transforming one’s life into a work of art. Indeed, Kontje goes so far as to assert that the hero is, in the final analysis, incapable of understanding his life, that is, of reconciling the principles he espouses with the societal pressures and influences he experiences. The Bildungsroman thus attains a critical climax through the problematisation of the self. ‘The self that was in a state of crisis from the outset also continues to exist, if only in the form of a persistent commentary on its disappearance’ (p. 165). One of Kontje’s important contributions stems from his attempt to redefine the Bildungsroman in the spirit of ‘post’-Modernism and, paradoxically, mediation. For rather than jettison the generic distinction, the scholar argues infavour of retaining it. This redefinition, however, comes at the cost of the notion of an Anti- Bildungsroman, a term that Kontje vociferously rejects, though, to be sure, he does not consider more contemporary novels such as Max Frisch’s Stiller. In the end, for Kontje, ‘the Bildungsroman endures as a series of metafictional representations of private lives in the public sphere’ (p. 165).

Kontje argues his case with conviction, verve, and, at times, humour. However, a few critical remarks are in order.

Kontje tends to reduce the problems suggested by this series of novels to products of the book publishing industry. He goes too far when, in following Martha Woodmansee, he subscribes to the idea that, in the eighteenth century, literature became ‘subject to’ the laws of a market economy [‘The Interests in Disinterestedness’, A4LQ 45 (1984), p. 461. This reader is not convinced that the scholar has grappled with the real complexities of this series of novels because of their semantic richness, structural sophistication, and the power of signification. But this evaluation is, in part, ‘prejudiced’ by the understanding that a selective reading of only one of the parts of a given text, while admitting that such an investigation may well illuminate certain aspects of a text that we have not fully appreciated or simply taken for granted, necessarily excludes some knowledge of the text. This unavoidable fact leads this reader to be sceptical about the overall merits of any reading that is too narrowly focussed. Perhaps in our ‘post’-Modern condition we underestimate the suggestiveness of texts as, when under the sway of New Criticism, we had overinterpreted texts by attributing meanings to them which, in the final analysis, could not always be confirmed.

The impact of contemporary and ‘post’-Modernist thinking on Kontje’s study is indeed profound. References to Lyotard (one of the main explorers of the post-Modern condition), Habermas (whose theory of communicative action and numerous essays on social philosophy oppose the seemingly nominalist underpinnings of deconstruction), Terry Eagleton (Marxist literary theory), and Stephen Greenblatt (New Historicism), for instance, create an interesting, though not always compatible, fusion or, perhaps, confusion of perspectives. In any case, these male thinkers make very strange bedfellows. However, it is precisely because of the tacit violation of the development of a consistent argument from one privileged direction that Kontje’s study remains true to ‘post’-

Book Reviews

Modernist thought. Still, there is a slight contradiction. For while Kontje cites Patricia Waugh’s work on rne~~ctio~ (without sufficient theoretical elaboration, however), Christa Burger, and others, he does not assimilate the ideas of major female thinkers into his ‘post’-Modem reading of the texts under discussion as he does in the case of his male models.

Only once, in Chapter six [‘Nostalgic and Progressive Utopias’in Novalis’s Heinrich van Ofterdingen (ZSOO)], does the author rely too heavily on recent scholarship [Alice Kuzniar’s Delayed Endings (1987) and Gexa von Molnar’s Romantic Vision, Ethical Context (1987)]. It also becomes quite obvious in the course of reading this interesting text that Kontje should have included more than the very few examples he uses from each of the novels in order to better support his claims. In any case, Kontjesucceedsin developing a provocative series of interrelated topics.

In sum, Kontje’s study provokes discussion because it interrogates commonly-held ideas and preconceptions of the nature and function of the German Biidungsroman,

University of Arizona Steven D. Martinson

Alienated ~ino~ty: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe, Kenneth R. Stow (Camb~dge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 346 pp., $45.00.

The Jewish population of medieval Europe was one of the great anomalies of the age. Never accepted by or integrated into the mainstream of Latin society, the Jews could not be expunged from it (for reasons having perhaps as much to do with hegemonic Christian culture as with the resilience of Judaism itself). Indeed, the number of Jews in medieval Europe seems to have fluctuated at about the same pace as the general population of Latin society. Medieval Jewry may have been reviled and despised, but it played a vital and ineiiminable role is the social, economic and inte~~tual life of the Middle Ages. The medieval Jews were, in Kenneth Stow’s phrase, an ‘alienated mino~ty’-neither fully a part of nor fully detachable from their milieu.

A prominent historian of European Judaism, Stow synthesises in his book a Iine of research that he has been pursuing for the past two decades. The result is an important and stimulating study that deserves wide readership among those interested in late antique, medieval and early modern European social, ecclesiastical, political and intellectual history. The topic with which Stow deals is by no means novei; a number of monographs on medieval Jewry have been published is the last few years. But his volume is distinctive in significant ways; although he may cover some familiar ground, his path across the terrain takes us to new vistas.

Most obviously, Stow adopts a unique geographic focus in comparison with existing studies of medieval Jewry, which tend to be either broader in scope (covering the entire Mediterranean world) or narrower in conception (focussing on a single country or province). By contrast, Stow ordinarily leaves aside Spain and Eastern Europe, as well as Islamic-dominated regions. His concentration is instead on the Latin West, on the grounds that Western Europe demands to be treated as a coherent whole in several