Book Reviews : Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France. By W. J. STANKIEWICZ. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960. Pp. x, 269. $6.00.)

• Published date: 01 September 1961
• Author: Truman Driggs
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296101400340
• Date: 01 September 1961
• Subject Matter: Articles

801
elsewhere and then introduce or amend the system in his own country as local
conditions seem to dictate.&dquo;
The diversity of practice reported is both a reminder of past developments
and a challenge to the unremitting search for election procedures which will
increase the accuracy of the process by which a people declares its choice among
men and measures. A
book like this is a constructive point of departure.
FREEMAN HOLMER
Salem, Oregon
Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France. By W. J. STANKIEWICZ.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960. Pp. x,
269. $6.00.)
In troubled times we sometimes turn, and properly so, to periods of the past
which seem to contain problems similar to our own. If we do not find solutions
there, at least we sense a recognition of the familiar and perhaps gain some com-
fort from the thought that other generations have known these ills as well as we
-
and that despite the knowing the world somehow has survived.
Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France is such a look at the
past. It was inspired originally, according to the author, by the late Harold
Laski, a man deeply interested in the fate of our present civilization. Indeed
Professor Laski had at one time intended to use the same theme for a study of
his own. The book contemplates a society divided between two dogmatisms,
each claiming to be the sole possessor of &dquo;Truth&dquo; and each claiming authority
over man based upon its possession of that &dquo;Truth.&dquo;
Both dogmatic groups
favored &dquo;liberty,&dquo; by which they meant freedom for &dquo;Truth&dquo; to destroy error
and, if need be, to destroy the erring.
The two sides were not as evenly balanced as the above paragraph might
imply. Indeed the French Huguenot movement was, for a variety of reasons,
doomed to eventual destruction almost from the start. In time it might have
overcome its minority status, if it had represented in any sense a wave of the
future....