The Abstract Society
by Anton C. Zijderveld Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, ?2.95
Professor Zijderveld’s basic idea is very simple?that in the pura.istic ‘abstract’ society which twentiethcentury man has created for himself he lacks the capacity to exercise his dual roles, the inner man with his religious certainties, the outer man with his social commitments.
In traditional human societies, he argues, in what he calls the Common Human Pattern, or, maddeningly, the CHP, this ambiguity is intrinsic to man’s whole relationship with the world at large.
Zijderveld spends a great part of his book establishing the credentials of his theory, piling up relevant bits and pieces from all the social and political philosophers he can think of from Marx to Marcuse.
Having established the ‘dual role’ idea to his own satisfaction he then attributes a great many of our present uncertainties and bewilderments to the loss of this essential dualism and urges that it must be recovered if we are to be able to exercise a constructively critical appraisal of contemporary problems.
In his final chapter Zijderveld admits ‘the following conclusions merely complete the presuppositions and do not have the value of empirically derived conclusions’.
But he doesn’t seem to believe that this matters. He urges that we must recover our social dualism by exercising the spirit of the great amateurs of the past, by being what he calls ‘intellectually aesthetic’.
Just how this is supposed to be achieved remains obscure but the book has all the logical precision of a crossword puzzle, with all the clues beautifully explained. It makes an excellent primer of selected thoughts from ‘Great thinkers of our time’ and, if, like me, you are not quite sure what Weltenschaung means but have never dared to ask, then Professor Zijderveld will tell you.
John Percival
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