MIDDLING NESS:

Juste Milieu PoliticalTheory in France and England, 1815-48.By Prof. Vincent E. Starzinger (Government). Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1965. 158 pp.$4.00.

Dartmouth students know Professor Starzinger as an extremely able and vigorous expounder of American constitutional history and law. They are less aware of the fact that he is equally gifted and skilful in the analysis of political theory. Middlingness is a proof that he is. This able book deals with the political ideas of two leading French statesmen, Royer-Collard and Guizot, and two British, Lord Macaulay and Lord Chancellor Brougham, in the period between 1815 and 1848. Middlingness — the expressive title is taken from George Eliot — is thoroughly researched, dexterously organized, ized,and very well written, and constitutes a valuable contribution to the history of political thought and to the technique of comparative political theory.

Inasmuch as all four of the statesmen here analyzed were exponents and devotees of the center position in politics, a comparison of them naturally leads to certain conclusions about the nature and the effectiveness of juste milieu ideas. These conclusions are both surprising and persuasive, and are of a nature to interest any reader, even though his passion for the politics of 1815-1848 is somewhat less than consuming. Professor Starzinger's monograph thus becomes, in addition, a case study of the viability (a word everyone is using nowadays) of what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls the vital center.

In its original context, "middlingness" is a word with a pejorative flavor, and it can readily be guessed by anyone who knows professor Starzinger that he has not labored to make it any less so. Both Doctrinaires like Guizot and Royer-Collard and Reform Whigs like Brougham and Macaulay were examples of the middling mind: "In any political context... there are invariably those who crave the middle way." The problem lemis, Is this a valid and self-sustaining political philosophy?

Professor Starzinger suggests that it is not, that middlingness misunderstands the problem of change in human affairs, and therefore becomes either unrealistic or irrelevant, in contrast to "the effective left and right." It is a conclusion that staggers people who, like the Doctrinaires and the Reform Whigs, have made a virtue of the Aristotelian golden mean. But it is a conclusion that here is thoughtfully and almost diffidently posed, without the fanfare of polemics. It will bear a great deal of thinking upon.

Daniel Webster Professor, andProfessor of Biography and Government