Among the great creations of the seventeenth century, one of the liveliest and most rich in promise is Don juan. Even the changes that he undergoes from age to age are full of significance. This article will attempt to clarify one aspect of this evolution from a point of view exclusively that of the baroque.

The reader is asked to accept as the basis for these reflections a definition of the baroque which I have given elsewhere, and which I will merely summarize here.

The relations between psychoanalysis and sociology pose a difficult problem. The complexity of psychoanalysis, the evolution of certain features of Freud's theories, the diversity of doctrines and interpretations encountered among its representatives (and this is often true even within the same country), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the youthfulness, one might say, infancy, of sociology—that latecomer among the sciences of man, which derives its concepts and its methods from research itself and from the problems with which our civilization confronts it—all this would justify labelling as imprudent—even rash—any attempt to study their relationship and their prospects for collaboration. We readily accept the reproof. And yet, however rash it might be, this venture, in our opinion, is in no sense a concocted one. The necessity of attempting it is evident. For more than twenty years, the studies, inquiries, researches which we have been involved in concerning collectivities of men at work, the interpretation of their attitudes, of their reactions to new techniques and to the constraints of rationalization from “higher up,” as it evolved from Taylor through the diverse stages of so-called “scientific” organization, the attempts to measure their “satisfaction,” to explain the variations in their output, their absences, their professional fluidity, and, last but not least, their behavior when not at work, the forms and content of their “leisure” —all these experiments have continuously and increasingly stimulated our interest in psychoanalytical concepts and interpretations. Frequently this evoked in us the temptation to indulge in “unseasonable extrapolations,” utilizing analytical theories which, having been discovered in the field of individual psychology, ran the risk, at first glance, of not being transferable to the field of collective behavior.

Jewish mysticism represents the totality of the attempts to interpret in terms of mystical conceptions the meaning of rabbinical Judaism as it has crystallized in the time of the Second Temple and later. Such a development, of course, could take place only after this process of crystallization had attained a certain degree of fixity. This holds good for both the type of legal Judaism which Philo of Alexandria tried to interpret, as well as for the more developed type of Talmudic Judaism which served as a frame for the spiritual efforts of the Medieval Kabbalists. It is not my purpose to discuss here the historical problems of the development of Jewish mysticism, and especially of Kabbalism; I have done so in other places, especially in my book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. On the other hand, the subject with which I propose to deal here occupies a central place in Jewish mysticism. In a religious system that is based on Divine Revelation and the acceptance of Holy Scriptures which determine its tenets, the questions connected with the essential nature of such revelation in Scripture are obviously vital ones. Moreover, in a time of crisis—andmysticism as a historical phenomenon is a child of times of crises—such questions are especially pressing. Mystics are people who, through their own experience and speculation on such experience, detect new layers of meaning in their traditional religion. If this kind of experience and speculation does not lead them to break away from the traditional institutional framework of their religion, then the first question bound to come up is how to find their own experience reflected or anticipated in their sacred texts; also how to reconcile their vision of things with that accepted by their own tradition. It is, of course, a truism that allegorical interpretation makes its appearance spontaneously whenever new ideas clash with those of a holy book, seemingly standing in contradiction to them and requiring some process of reconciliation. What is true of allegorical interpretation applies even more so to mystical interpretation in a more precise sense.

Today, the French word “syndicat” designates both an association of workers and a group of producers or business concerns. In the nineteenth century, it was identified with “associations of resistance” which the law called “workers’ coalitions” and which were associations of workers, de facto or de jure, formed to improve the lot of the working class by one means or another. In this study we shall consider such organizations exclusively.

The theoretic structure of Marxian economy was elaborated to provide an understanding of the laws of the motion of capitalism. The motion of capitalism, however, is nothing but the process of economic development under conditions of multiple centers of investment-decisions. It becomes, then, an interesting question to ask how much of the theoretic structure of Marx applies to the problems of economic development in general and how much is limited to those aspects alone which follow from the theoretically contingent condition of decentralized investment-decisions. It will not, therefore, be the primary purpose of this paper to examine the adequacy of the conceptual structure of Marxian economic thought, or even its relative advantages or disadvantages over the more widely accepted school, following the inquiries of Walras, Menger, Jevons, and others; but, rather, to assume the general framework of Marxian theory and attempt to seek an answer within its limits.

“What I wish to make clear … is … that from all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics.” Thus the founder of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schroedinger, expounds in a recent book “the obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for … events” which occur in a living organism.

Modern literature, viewed superficially, presents two phenomena that attest its vitality rather than its decline, at least in our Vestern countries: the anormal development of the novel and the advent of criticism as a genre.

The novel today appears to be omniscient and does not always succeed in disguising its didactic intent. Formerly, the various disciplines—once their methods were acquired and their end discerned—detached themselves from literature, leaving to it exclusively the domain of fiction. Devoured by the voracity of the novel, not only the young and as yet uncertain sciences such as psychoanalysis, ethnology, and criminology, but older ones as well, like philosophy, history or law, come back to it and use it readily in maintaining their theses and in emphasizing their needs. Thus the novel takes over their diverse ambitions.