Book Reviews : Imperialism. By J. A. HOBSON. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1948. Revised Edition. Pp. vi, 386. $3.00.)

• DOI: 10.1177/106591295100400417
• Date: 01 December 1951
• Published date: 01 December 1951
• Subject Matter: Articles

654
love and the absolute value of moral good&dquo; (p. 111). Hospitable as the
pluralist theory is, it does after all demand a creed (however arrived at),
and must therefore shut its doors against that form of liberalism which
conceives &dquo;democratic society to be a kind of lists or arena in which
all the conceptions of the bases of common life, even those most destruc-
tive to freedom and law, meet with no more than the pure and simple
indifference of the body politic, while they compete before public opinion
in a kind of free market of the mother-ideas, healthy or poisoned, of
political life&dquo; (p. 110). Who is to judge what is healthy and what is
poisoned? Not the State. The State, as an instrumentality of the body
politic, is severely limited to aiding, with equal hand, the various elements
in the community, to extend and deepen the common secular faith by
whatever justifications are acceptable to them, and are not overly sub-
versive.
Let no one imagine, from anything said here, that Maritain has
begun to believe that two contrary propositions can be equally true. He
argues, as stoutly as ever, but with a new and very pleasant American
inflection, that the true foundation of democratic society is to be found
in the natural law and the inspiration of the Gospel. Many will find
the discussion of the Emergent Catholic Theory (really an ancient one)
of Church and State about the best available treatment of the subject
in Fnoliqh-
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RICHARD
E. TWOHY, S. J.
Gonzaga University.
Imperialism. By J. A. HOBSON. (London: George Allen &
Unwin Ltd.
1948. Revised Edition. Pp. vi, 386. $3.00.)
As one of his critics correctly remarked, Hobson attempts in his
writings to connect &dquo;barren abstractions&dquo; with &dquo;human values&dquo;; in other
words, Hobson combines factual analysis with value judgments-a pro-
cedure of which modern science disapproves. The mixture of theory and
moral indignation which Hobson’s Imperialism represents makes it difficult
to arrive at a just evaluation.
The book is mainly a study of...