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NONTHEMATIC / Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer 1948)


At the recent Havana conference, representatives of fifty-three nations signed the International Trade Organization charter. It can be expected that a sufficient number of countries, easily accounting for the bulk of world trade, will ratify the convention in due course, and that it will become effective in 1949. The 102 articles of the charter and two large volumes of trade agreements are the result of three years of comprehensive and intensive negotiations. By many governments and experts the charter is praised as a long step toward the removal of trade obstacles, but in the eyes of its many critics it is a complicated and irrelevant blueprint of a policy that can contribute nothing substantial to facilitating international trade.

De Gaulle himself, until very recently, disdained to outline a concrete program of party or government. He declared repeatedly in military terms that he had objectives but no program, indeed that the programmatic approach to France’s problems was unreal until prior conditions of unity and confidence had been achieved. The "objectives" consist in such generalities as a "strong state," the "separation of powers," an "end to party anarchy," and a "rally of France to herself." There has not even been any clear indication of which articles or institutions of the present constitution the RPF wants altered.

The unprecedented rise of the national debt during World War II has numbed public awareness of the size of the fiscal performances. To some extent, it has even arrested imaginative curiosity from looking beyond the appalling figures. The 230 billion dollar increase in the debt within a period of four and a half years was indeed spectacular. But so was the opposite phase which we have just witnessed--the debt reduction. Within less than two years the wartime expansion has been cut down by nearly a tenth.

The government support which the National Labor Relations Act gave to the growth of trade unions and the increase of collective bargaining served mainly to compensate for the losses generally suffered by the labor movement in periods of depressions and crises. Thus employers’ opposition to the Act met with little response. This situation changed when the emergencies of the depression and the war gave way to the prosperity of the postwar period. Only then was the full effect of this law in strengthening labor’s power felt. Reaction set in full swing and the result was the Taft-Hartley Act."

Let us turn to the content of Levy-Bruhl’s argument in La Morale et la science de moeurs. It begins with the thesis that the conception of ethical theory as a type of systematic investigation is essentially ambiguous: 'Ethical theory does not and cannot exist.' It is an impossible conception, because it fails to make the distinction between theory and practice: it attempts to be theoretical and normative at the same time.

Review of book by Robert M. MacIver. New York: Macmillan. 1947. 498 pp.

Review of book by Hajo Holborn. Washington: Infantry Journal Press. 1947. xiii& 243 pp.

Review of book by Harold Zink. New York: Macmillan. 1947. 272 pp.

Review of book by Helen Miller Davis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1947. 446 pp.

Review of book by Clarence A. Manning. York: Philosophical Library. 1947. 326 pp.

Review of book by William J. Fellner. Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1946. 239 pp.

Review of book by Guy Greer. New York: Macmillan. 1947. xiii & 210 pp.

Review of book by Howard W. Odum. New York: Macmillan. 1947. 350 pp.

Max Wertheimer has been dead now nearly five years. Between the time his heart stopped on Columbus day, 1943, and the present hour, many remembrances of him have been spoken and written. His works and ways as man and as teacher have been recalled and recounted. The import of his gestalt theory to the psychological disciplines has been examined and appraised.

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