Book Reviews 381

intelligent man who has valuabk observations to make about the meaning and subtexts of the films which he discusses. He did not want to write a history of French films and disregards questions of aesthetics. instead he examines what films reveal about French society. It is of course, a non-controversial proposition that films, perhaps even more than other cultural products reflect the society in which they were made. Buss, however, recognizes that films are not simple mirrors ofsociety. Cinema, after all, is made to attract audiences and produce a profit; it is influenced by a sometimes heavy handed censors; and also films create their own conventions and stereotypes. What a scholar can do is no more than to compare and contrast the image of the French as they appear in films, and the image which we have from other sources.

The author sees, aboveall, diversity. There is no ove~~dingthemethat emerges from iris interpretation of films. Instead, he makes wo~hwhile small asides. He notes that the French really value f~endsh~p more highly than love, He shows that while in the films of the 1920’s and 1930’s the characters were clearly situated in a social class, in contemporary cinema everyone seem to belong to a homogeneous middle class. He shows how the portrayal of life in the country changed; at one time it represented virtue and now it is a place for retreat. He argues that what was remarkable in the films ofthe 1950’s was not so much what they depicted, but what they left out: the subject of colonial wars.

The task Buss set for himself was a difficult one. How is one to explain to readers hundreds of films? I suspect the author erred by taking too much for granted. Few of his readers will have seen even a fraction of the films which he mentions. It is not an easy task following him jumping from decade to decade from topic to topic, making oblique references to the works of many directors. It is particularly unfortunate that for some reason Mr. Buss decided to give all titles oniy in the original. It takes some time to realize, for example, that ‘Sans toit ni toi’ refers to the films which we know as ‘Vagabond’.

Peter Kenez

Clswsewitz, Michael Howard (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, ‘Pastmasters’, 1983), 79 pp., 295.

Clausewitz’s massive work, UPI l&r is not only difficult to read and sometimes to comprehend, but also the most important book written on war. No other military thinker can compare with the profundity of Clausewitz’s analysis of the phenomenon of war, even though others may exceed him in clarity and persuasiveness. Given the difficulties facing the newcomer to the subject, whether these students be civilian or military, the need has been sorely felt for a short and authoritative account of Clausewitz’s thought, and Professor Sir Michael Howard has provided this in an elegant and thoughtful little book. Professor Howard, the co-editor of the definitive text of On War in English, begins his survey of Clausewitz’s thought by placing him firmly within the context of the Napoleonic Wars thraugh which he lived and served, He then considers the relationship between military thought and practice. Professor Howard emphasises that Clausewitz saw that the main function of military thought ‘was toe&cute ~~ej~~ge~~~#of the Commander; not to tell him what to do’ t’p* 32). It is possible that this lesson still has not been learnt,especially in the US Army, where officers dutifully read On War expecting operational enlightenment as from the philosopher’s stone. The heart of Clausewitz’s teaching is then

382 Book Reviews

surveyed in two chapters, ‘Ends and Means in War’ and ‘Limited and Absolute War’, and the book is rounded off with an assessment of his legacy. Throughout Professor Howard’s gift for a pithy phrase and fluent synthesis is seen to good effect. The only criticism to be made of this book is that this reviewer wished it was three times as long.

King’s College, London Brian Holden Reid

Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, ed. T.K. Hearn, James Montgomery Hester Seminar, no. 6, 1985 (North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1986), 144pp., cloth, U.S.$15.

This is a collection, without index or apparent editorial input, of four papers of unequal length and quality that have been loosely classified under the borrowed title Hume’s Philosophy of Religion

The first, ‘The Impossibility of the Miraculous’ by Antony Flew, is, as we have learnt to expect from this prolific writer, vivacious, challenging and readable. In the present instance I am not, however, really satisfied that Flew significantly advances his case beyond the position reached by him in various other publications, notably Hume’s Philosophy of Belief (1961) and Chapter 5 of David Hume (1986); nor am I entirely convinced that it is of over-mastering importance to Hume’s purposes in ‘Of Miracles’ that he should be able to give what he cannot give in terms of his own philosophy, namely a hard and fast distinction between a miracle (i.e. a transgression of a law of nature by a god or invisible agent) and a marvel (i.e. an extraordinarily unusual event). The point surely is that carefully checked uniform experience that the world works in this way, opposed by suspect and very rare testimony that it works in that way, ‘amounts to proof both for Hume and for us that the world does indeed work in this way. Among events thus ruled out as not the way the world works will be all putative miracles and all fabulous or marvelous stories. It is only when the testimony for a miracle/marvel appears to be convincing (something Hume erroneously contends is never the case) that the distinction between a miracle and a marvel becomes important. It will then be open to Hume, despite his stultified account of laws of nature, to point out that the event is unusual rather than miraculous because it is an instance of a re-drawn natural law, or of obscured action in accordance with ‘general causes’, or because there is no contextual evidence of divine agency, and so on. Indeed Hume is not entitled to distinguish between the impossible and the very unusual on the basis of his own philosophy, but that does not prevent him distinguishing the unusual from the miraculous well enough for him still to be able to conclude that ‘a miracle can never be proved, so as to be the foundation of a system of religion’.

The second (and second longest) contribution is Donald Livingston’s ‘Hume’s Conception of True Religion’. Having enjoyed his Hume’s PhiIosophy of Common Life (1984) I was disappointed with the present offering. He attempts to take seriously the claims of what he calls Hume’s ‘piety’ towards common customs, including religion, and thence to give content to Hume’s apparent affirmations of belief in the Natural History of Religion and elsewhere. Livingston’s position leads to and from such unlikely judgements as ‘In the Treatise, Hume shows how the entire world of human culture may be viewed as a religious ritual’ (p. 63). His position is sustained by ill-substantiated over-views of Hume’s philosophy and generalizations which take no cognizance of contrary evidence or secondary work by others in this area.