FREEDOM IN THE MODERN WORLD

This parallels and concludes Freedom in the Ancient World and Freedom in the Western World, the first two parts of Mr. Muller's ambitious History of Freedom. However this volume can and will stand alone and it proceeds in a direct line from the basic ""tragic view"" he first formulated in The Uses of History. Dealing here with the 19th and 20th centuries, Mr. Muller hastens to warn his reader that he does not actually ""cover"" modern history, but nevertheless this remains, in his own words, ""a fearfully complicated history, with never an occasion for simple hurrahs."" It is to his enduring credit that, in tracing out the multitude of effects and interactions of the Industrial Revolution, together with all the concurrent and consequent political, economic, and cultural, revolutions, first in Europe and the U.S. and then with gathering force throughout the non-Western world, he seldom yields to the obviously constant impulse to ignore or diminish these fearful complications. In, as he says, ""a sober even somber mood, as one who does not despair of our future but is not optimistic about it either,"" Mr. Muller has managed to complete a magnificent undertaking, and has done so ""at once with irony, with compassion, and with reverence.