Total Commitment

The term ""total commitment"" is an admirable English rendering of the title of Maurice Blondel's most important (and most obscure) work, L'Action. Mr. Somerville's book itself is, in a sense, a preface to a full-scale translation of and commentary on L'Action, in that its purpose is to lay out all of the essential themes of Blondel's sometimes tortured dialectic and to synthesize the available commentaries on it in the light of Blondel's own clarifications. In that context, Total Commitment follows closely the sense of L'Action. First, there is a statement of the question: is there a problem of action, and, if so, what is the nature of its solution? Then, the ""ethic"" of action as a phenomenon is discussed within the framework of man's moral life. The final section is a summary and review of the foregoing sections. From the fact that there is very little available in English on Blondel, and from the consideration that every study of his thought must necessarily begin and end with the controversial L'Action, Mr. Somerville renders a real service to Catholic thinkers with the publication of this work. It is not a work, however, that will have wide appeal, just as Blondel himself is admired only by a relatively small circle of intellectuals, and it will be useful only in extensive academic collections.**