Blue-Sky View

HOW TO THINK ABOUT WAR AND PEACE--Mortimer J. Adler--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

At the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Law School, Professor Mortimer J. Adler is known to older and possibly somewhat envious teachers as the "professor of the blue sky." An intellectually wily, bland, brash and confident man, he has married scholarship to intellectual impertinence with amusing and sometimes instructive results. His chief conviction is that if one knows how to think, one can think about anything. Four years ago Professor Adler was busy telling the U.S. public the "rules" of reading in a best-seller (TIME, March 18, 1940) which he gaily titled How to Read a Book. How to Think About War and Peace is another potential bestseller.

What Big Teeth You Have. With disarming modesty, Author Adler confesses that only recently has he begun to think about war and peace at all. But this is only mock modesty, the grandmother's cap which Adler wears to distract attention from his sharp eyes and wolf's teeth. Walter Lippmann, Herbert Hoover, Hugh Gibson, Sumner Welles, the editors of the New York Times and the Popes of Rome are a few of the more important thinkers on war and peace who feel the crunch of the Adler incisors.

Adler says flatly that there can be no peace between sovereign states; at best there can be nothing more than an uneasy "truce," a period of jockeying and diplomatic cheating preliminary to the next outbreak of armed conflict. Mr. Lippmann is Adler's particular semantic bete noire, for Mr. Lippmann is always using the word "peace" when Adler thinks he should be speaking of "truce" or "armistice." The average reader may think this a matter of verbal quibble, for Mr. Lippmann uses the word peace with the full knowledge that there are kinds and degrees of peace. But to Adler the only sort of peace worthy of the name is the civil .peace that exists inside a sovereign government. Leagues, confederations and alliances cannot achieve or keep world peace, he says, because they lack the powers which are to be found in a binding constitution, a set of courts, and the power of the bailiff or the sheriff.

500 Years or So. It follows from Adler's definitions that we won't have world peace until we have a world state. A "short-term pessimist," Adler thinks the world state will not come into being for some 500 years. Yet Adler thinks we can work toward the objective, even though our grandchildren's grandchildren will not live to see it. He calls this "longterm optimism." It is as if somebody were trying to console a weary harvester in a 15th-Century grainfield by hinting that in the 20th Century a mechanical reaper and binder might be invented.

Without even so much as an apology to Lippmann or a bow to the Pope or Clarence Streit, Adler admits toward the end of his book that perhaps leagues and alliances and regional enlargements of the "Peace-Group" have something to be said for them. With the air of a schoolmaster granting his pupils a brief holiday of the spirit, Adler counsels his readers to support or at least not interfere with a revived League of Nations. For a League or a Confederation might, he thinks, help accustom people to the idea of a single sovereign government for the world.

A Very Small Mouse. Adler will be accused of going through mountainous labor pains in order to bring forth a mouse of common sense. But readers who are reasonably conversant with the literature on war and peace will consider it a very small mouse. Some of them may note that Adler seems oblivious of the historic distinction between limited and unlimited wars which have different social origins. They may note that there is no attempt, in How to Think About War and Peace, to meet the arguments of enlightened pessimists who think we would be doing pretty well if wars could be made less universal and less "total." And Adler's "pure reason" contains no hint of the "practical reason" needed to prolong the next "truce," knock down trade barriers, promote enlarged federations, and persuade Stalin to forego unilateral action in eastern Europe.

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