The Kingdom of Free Men, by G. Kitson Clark

[p023] The Kingdom of Free Men, by G. Kitson Clark (Cambridge University Press, 18s. 6d.) THIS book is compounded of a series of lectures given by the author to the Divinity Faculty of the University of Cam- bridge in 1955. That the members of the faculty and indeed the public at large should be asked to ponder on the subject of the title is something wholly to be desired. How to arrive at the Kingdom of Free Men is, after all, the basic subject- matter of twentieth century politics. But how far this book helps us on the way is quite another matter. ' It would be easy enough to criticize the book in points of detail. Its picture of corrupt clergy or cowards co-operating with the State in eastern Europe and brave men opposing it is grotesquely false; on the question of Greece and many others it takes the well-known cold war positions. Yet for all that the book has really to be criticized for something much deeper. It sees (p. 5) the whole tension of the modern world in terms of a struggle between ‘the liberal democracies’ and “the communist totalitarian States’; it sees this struggle wholly in terms of politics and is therefore able to ignore completely the economic tensions of the modern world and the whole struggle for common ownership. . It needs hardly to be said that the tyranny of Empire passes unnoticed. It may have passed muster with some in 1955, but in the world of Algeria and France of 1958 it all seems strangely irrelevant. STANLEY EVANS Against Superstition On Religion, by K. Marx and F. Engels (Lawrence and Wishart, 4s.) THIS volume, comprising writings of Marx and Engels on various aspects of religion, is something of a ‘package deal’. Some lesser-known and newly translated works are mixed with extracts from such familiar classics as Anti-Diihring and the Communist Manifesto. Especially interesting is some early work, Young Marx’s 116 Siang + it a Fenn Pte tite August-September 1958 1842 article in the Rheinische Zeitung is a Left-radical attack on the censorship, defending the right of the Press to discuss religious and philosophical questions. Already the first signs of the new materialist world outlook can be discerned. In the introduction to the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1844) this outlook can be seen emerging from its idealist Shell. Starting from the ‘criticism of religion’ made by the Young Hegelians, Marx goes on to show how ‘the demand to give up illusions’ implies ‘the demand to give up the condition which needs these illusions . . . Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth’ (p. 42). The working class is recognized as the group which can carry through this ‘criticism’ by revolutionizing German society. In some later articles Engels discusses the origins of Chris- tianity and the early history of the Church. In another essay, he examines the Book of Revelation as a revolutionary docu- ment. The book as a whole serves to remind us of Marx’s and Engels’s constant struggle against all forms of superstition and unreason, a struggle to lay bare ‘the truth of this world’. As Prometheus has it in the quotation Marx gives in the introduction to his doctor’s thesis (1841): ‘I shall never exchange my fetters for slavish servility. Better to be chained to the rock than bound to the service of Zeus.’ CYRIL SMITH Moscow in Wartime