Goldmann has a very marked interest in the rationale of his enterprise; this, among other things, is what makes The Hidden God, his first book to be translated into English, a virtuoso performance by an energetic critic. Goldmann is not a gifted stylist … and so the book seems at first to be a somewhat scrappy affair. It is nevertheless a substantial, complex achievement, because Goldmann knows what he is doing, does it thoroughly and tells us why he did it. Every step along the way is carefully and perhaps laboriously reasoned, so that if one accepts the terms of his argument one stands in the center of a highly challenging and flowing pattern, a "dialectic" whose every detail sustains and is sustained by every other detail…. This economy serves him doubly: it shows his readers that the tragic vision of Pascal and Racine and the dialectical vision (of...