Book Shelf. - Review - book review

National Review, Oct 9, 2000 by Mike Potemra

The Internet is fast becoming a Borgesian universal library of books in print. Millions of books are available almost immediately, through a simple click of the mouse. But even if we prescind from the conservative complaint that books aren't as good as they used to be, it's still statistically improbable that the best books in any given field will happen to be the most recent ones. That's why it's so important that worthy old titles be restored to print; they need to be kept in the classrooms and in the conversation.

ISI Books is doing excellent work on this. Shakespeare as Political Thinker (416 pp., $24.95), edited by John E. Alvis and Thomas G. West, is a good example. This anthology, an expanded edition of a 1981 work, is defiantly untrendy in its contributors' refusal to read back into the Shakespearean canon the political agendas of the present. In his introduction, Alvis says that "if Shakespeare composes a supreme fiction, its supremacy rests upon its singular comprehensiveness as an image of truth"; based as it is on a knowingness about human nature, Shakespeare's politics sets modest goals, and "we may doubt that Shakespeare envisions the likelihood of discovering even these realized in actual historical regimes."

Paul A. Cantor's essay on The Tempest is especially noteworthy in discovering important political insights in one of the least political plays. Cantor points out that Prospero lost his dukedom because-though a very bright man-he had failed to understand the motivations of human nature. His skillful use of the storm and shipwreck proves that he has learned his lesson. The public man must deal with human nature as he finds it, before he can hope to establish justice: a central insight of politics.

Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor (357 pp., $24.95) by Ellis Sandoz-a revision of his 1971 original-is another impressive recent release. Dostoevsky's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" is a story within the story of the 1879-80 novel The Brothers Karamazov, but it has taken on an intellectual life of its own as a philosophical parable on free will and utopianism. The "Legend" is a monologue in which a church official argues-to his silent prisoner, Christ-that the exercise of authority for people's good is more desirable than the preservation of individual freedom.

Sandoz gives a convincing account of the "Legend" as "an allegory of the cosmic drama of the creation as this is played out in the history of mankind and in the microcosm of the human soul." The totalitarian temptation is part of freedom itself; Dostoevsky is so scrupulous in his presentation that some readers take the "Legend," out of context, as an endorsement of that impulse. Sandoz's explication of this powerful work will make readers want to tackle it themselves, and reach their own conclusions.