fear or disgust, and no criterion is proposed which would enable the reader to know what claim the list of thirteen laws might have to being complete.

The central interest of social psychologists is, or should be, the search for a method of investigation which would compel assent to scientifically derived laws. It is here that the reader finds the book most at fault. The laws may be adequately stated, and perhaps their total number is the unlucky thirteen, but no method of investigation is even hinted at, and the formulations after all are the effort of a brilliant essayist who sets down his observations about life, illustrating them with examples composed for the purpose. Nevertheless the book is very valuable and genuinely important. The author spent some years in America after a European training, and wrote this book upon his return to his university chair in Poznan. No contemporary social psychologist has had comparable advantages of first-hand acquaintance with the trains of thought in Europe and America, and the formulations here set forth will undoubtedly be stimulating and provocative of further research.

There is one concept which occurs scores of times which seems to fill a long-felt want. Znaniecki uses the term "axiological" to denote an object which seems to be real to the person who experiences it. There are axiological obstacles, axiological companions, and so forth. It can be freely predicted that this word will be widely used in spite of its six syllables.

Social psychology is still groping, but its groping is energetic and active. It is too much to hope that human behavior can be reduced to thirteen laws, but it is not too much to hope that eventually we shall be able to formulate whatever laws there be. When this formulation shall have been reached, part of the credit for it will be due Professor Znaniecki.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

ELLSWORTH FARIS

The Phantom Public. By WALTER LIPPMANN. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1925. Pp. 200. $2.00.

When Walter Lippmann wrote on the problem of public opinion in politics in 1922 he concluded that controversial questions ought to be threshed out before government commissions in order that "a public opinion in the eulogistic sense of the term might exist" (Public Opinion, p. 405). Today he doubts whether a public opinion can ever deserve a

eulogy. "I set no great store on what can be done by public opinion and the action of the masses" (Phantom Public, p. 199). He now says that the public is incompetent to decide with wisdom and justice upon the substance of policy, because it is doomed to act from outside upon those who have inside knowledge and responsibility. The public should not concern itself with settling disputes according to what it thinks right; it ought to recognize its own incapacity for substantive choice, and to favor those who conform to a procedure.

"For the purpose of social action, reasonable behavior is conduct which follows a settled course whether in making the rule, in enforcing it or in amending it." "It is the task of the political scientist to devise the methods of sampling and to define the criteria of judgment. It is the task of civic education in a democracy to train the public in the use of these methods. It is the task of those who build institutions to take them into account." (P. 145.)

It is superfluous to pay lengthy tribute to the cogent and spirited qualities of this tract. Mr. Lippmann amply sustains his reputation as a creative thinker about the fundamental nature of democracy, and the fact that his conclusions fly in the face of accepted dogma gives them new pith and point. There is some reason for believing, however, that if he has succeeded in escaping from the ditch in which the orthodox democrat flounders, it has been to fall into it again farther upstream. He begins with the very sound proposition that it is not good to demand more from the public than it can reasonably be expected to perform. "The ideal of the omnicompetent, sovereign citizen is, in my opinion, such a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment” (p. 39). What he has done has been to picture the public as spasmodic, superficial, and ignorant, and then he has proceeded in his constructive prescriptions to exhort this wreck to exercise the superlatively difficult virtue of self-restraint. He says that it should disinterest itself from the substantive content of policies and confine its participation to the reading of signs to determine whether certain procedures have been observed.

Now the plain facts are that the public (or more properly the plurality of publics) is marked by active sentiments and conceptions about right and wrong, the desirable and the undesirable, and that part of its essence is to opinionate about policies, projects, and panaceas. That the total number of issues about which this is true is likely to be exaggerated by the orthodox democrat may be admitted; but that Mr. Lippmann can

hope for any fundamental change in the state of affairs by exhorting the public to quit meddling when it feels an impulse to interfere is to set out upon a crusade which has no prospect of consummation within a predictable future.

Mr. Lippmann seems to flinch from drawing the conclusions to which the logic of his own brilliant studies into the nature of opinion seems to lead. Inasmuch as the public verdict is "made to depend on who has the loudest or the most entrancing voice, the most skilful or the most brazen publicity man, the best access to the most space in the newspapers," as he said in Public Opinion (p. 401), it would seem that those who want to control the public in the interest of what they conceive to be sound policy ought to outbrazen the rest. If the intelligentsia and the academics shrink at first from participating in or supporting such a continuing body of agitation, and if they have erected this infirmity into a taboo, it is perhaps easier to overcome this taboo of a minority than to remold the entire electorate in the patterns of restraint.

Sign systems and intelligence bureaus may help the few to make up their own minds, but the mobilization of the many depends upon other

means.

HAROLD D. LASSWELL

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Races, Nations, and Classes. The Psychology of Domination and Freedom. By HERBERT ADOLPHUS MILLER, with an Introduction by EDWARD CAREY HAYES. Lippincott Series in Sociology. Philadelphia: Lippincott Co., 1924. Pp. xviii+196. $2.00.

A morning paper quotes a distinguished professor of political science to the effect that the secret of political control eventually may be found in the thyroid and endocrine glands, and that society may be governed in future with the aid of the surgeon's knife. This is one way of emphasizing the fact that politics has ceased to be a normative science merely; that in future the science of government must, in increasing measure, take account of human nature. It is this that lends interest and significance to "the psychology of domination and freedom," as Professor Miller describes his study. As a matter of fact, what he has written is a sort of first book, or primer, in political psychology. Intended primarily as a study of the racial and national conflicts in Europe and their reverbera

tions in American life, it sketches in outline what is practically a new division of the social sciences, namely, the sociology of politics.

The volume outlines the rise of race and national consciousness among the so-called "oppressed minorities" of Europe, most of whom, by the way, are now, since the changes brought about by the war, eagerly engaged in oppressing other racial minorities, some of whom were formerly their oppressors.

In order to make his account of events intelligible, the author has introduced them with a general statement of the nature of social groups; of the relations of these groups, on the one hand, to the individuals of whom they are composed, and on the other, to the groups with which they are on terms of conflict, of toleration, or of friendship.

For the purposes of analysis and description, groups may be classified as "vertical" or "horizontal." Race, religion, and nationalities are examples of vertical groups. Class and caste, on the other hand, are examples of horizontal groups. "The conflicts of the world," we are told, "are between every possible combination of horizontal and of vertical groups."

Races, Nations, and Classes is, in the main, a detailed analysis and illustration of this fundamental thesis. What the author writes on this theme is invariably interesting and suggestive, even when it is not wholly convincing. The conception "oppression psychosis" seems a little overworked at times, particularly as it involves the tacit assumption that conflict in some form-not necessarily war-is something less than the normal relation of social groups. As a matter of fact, nationalities, like political parties, exist for the purpose of conflict. There is no other way of maintaining the disinterestedness which we call "idealism" in individuals, nor the discipline which we call "morale" in social groups. The struggle to rise of the peoples who are down is one of the most wholesome exercises in which human beings have ever engaged. It was in such struggles that democracy was conceived, and it is only through similar struggles that it can be maintained. Something like this is indeed recognized by the author when he writes, in reference to the class struggle: "A man may perform drudgery for a few hours a day and feel that he has attained the dignity of a man if he fights for the group to which he belongs."

One criticism which will undoubtedly be made of this volume is its rather sketchy character. There are a great many general statements that need qualification. It is probably inevitable, in a book which at

tempts to cover in so few pages so large a subject, that its generalizations should sometimes be more epigramatic than true. On the other hand, it is a real contribution to social science to have nationalities, classes, and social groups studied, as they have been here, empirically, and not as formal categories or legal abstractions.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

ROBERT E. PARK

Interpretations of Legal History. By RoscoE POUND. Introduction by HAROLD DEXTER HAZELTINE. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1923. Pp. xvii+171. $2.25.

The Underlying Principles of Modern Legislation (6th ed.). By W. JETHRO BROWN. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1920. Pp. xvi+319. $3.50.

Primitive Ordeal and Modern Law. By H. GOITEN. London:

George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1923. Pp. 17+302.

Problems of the history, nature, and function of law have been approached from many points of view and by many methods. Professor Pound's emphasis is here, as elsewhere, distinctly sociological. The same emphasis characterizes Professor Brown's attempt to discover the underlying principles of legislation from a survey of legal history.

Mr. Goiten has attempted to trace the development of modern law from primitive ordeal by appeal to principles of psychoanalysis, which, one is bound to admit, he takes over uncritically.

The keynote of Roscoe Pound's interpretation of legal history is contained in the statement, "Law must be stable, yet it cannot stand still. Hence all thinking about law has struggled to reconcile the conflicting demands of the need of stability and the need of change." He takes up the various schools of legal thought, from the time of Greece and Rome to the present, and interprets them in terms of this conflict. He shows English and American legislation, not as isolated phenomena, but as an aspect of the development of the whole complex of Western civilization. He discusses the interpretations of legal history under the following heads: "Ethical and Religious Interpretations," "The Political Interpretation," "Ethnological and Biological Interpretations," "The Economic Interpretation," and "The Great Law-Giver Interpretation." His own interpretation of law is presented as an "engineering interpretation":