To the editor:

The Reporter for January 14 attributes to the executive director of the McGill-Queen's University Press, Mr. Philip Cercone, the opinion that Joseph De Maistre's St. Petersburg Dialogues (1821) "is the most important book in Western society after [Plato's] The Republic."

Since I have not read this book, my education as a physicist and a philosopher must have been very deficient. Nor have I read Mein Kampf, by a certain Adolf Hitler -- another big hole in my education. And yet we all know that this book has been, alas, extremely important.

Why this association between Hitler and de Maistre? Because in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Fontana, 1991), Sir Isaiah Berlin, a specialist in the Counter-Enlightenment, tells us that de Maistre was a prophet of fascism. He also quotes Emile Faguet, who one century ago had this to say about Mr. Cercone's hero: "A fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist [partisan of the Bourbons dynasty], apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of Pope, King and Hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest, most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner."

Should I be alarmed, or just amazed and disgusted?

Mario Bunge FRSC
Frothingham Professor of Logic and Metaphysics