On Paul Radin's Method in “Economic Factors in Primitive Religion

similarly have drawn them. Every great novelist by virtue of his capacity to present essential aspects of contemporary life is creating documents which will have a different significance for later generations. There are passages in Balzac which when read today seem predictions not merely of the coming domination of finance capital but of its harmful social consequences. But it would be idle to believe that these passages had a similar significance for Balzac. His talent made possible his writing them, but it did not also supply him with a key to all possible interpretations of them. For these reasons I cannot agree with Grib that Balzac's was revolutionary, if he means that his satire was consciously revolutionary; for I have tried to show that though we today may understand it so, Balzac and his contemporaries probably did not. They accepted the novels as exposing with the cheerful cynicism of a Voltaire the fait accompli of bourgeois domination, and not as seriously desiring its overthrow. Nor would I agree if Grib means that Balzac was an innovator in the technique of the novel. Precisely the opposite is true. Flaubert was the innovator. Balzac's kind of style and plot belong to the accepted tradition of midnineteenth century fiction. They are the French counterpart of Dickens in England. What Grib doubtless means by Balzac's revolutionary method is his freedom from delusion (as it seems to us today and could seem to the isolated prophetic Engels years ago) in presenting middle class life, his pressing almost to the point of caricature its parody of the good life. But as social conditions change, the reactions of readers to literary style shift also. To his contemporaries Balzac, like Dickens, was more the realist than the satirist. Now the realism is fading and the impression of satire sharpens, so that Balzac seems the critical historian of the middle class in its prime. EDWIN BERRY BURGUM

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• Endangering the integrity of science by misusing unvalidated models and untested assumptions as facts

  Open Access•Roland W Scholz, Friedrich‐Wilhelm Wellmer•Sustainability Science•2021

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