Leonard Woolf: Bloomsbury Socialist by Fred Leventhal and Peter Stansky, Book Review.

Leonard Woolfs study of the relation between ideology and society, After the Deluge (1931), begins with an account of death, pain, starvation and the deliberate killing and wounding of millions of men, women and children. It is sobering to read his words on mass disruption, the forced movement of populations, material impoverishment and destruction. The First World War marked the end of civilisation for Woolf and brought about a state of concentrated mass misery `greater than human beings had ever experienced before (1937 21). Thought in individuals or communities is accordingly `dangerous (1937 22). Here begins Woolfs analysis of the relation between thought, human suffering, action and the desire for change: The years 1914 to 1922 furnish a good example of this law of communal psychology. Death and pain on a gigantic scale, starvation and disease, the monotonous discomfort and weariness of millions of combatants, bombs dropping at night upon great cities and the gradual disappearance of sugar, butter, and jam, all these things after two or three or four years quickened mens thoughts and issued in great political and social changes. (1937 22) Woolf aims to `explain the great war and understand its place in history (1937 37), a task which he admits is impossible and probably beyond his powers. Similar to French sociologist Émile Durkheim (18581917), who was concerned with the effects of social upheaval on individual lives, Woolf sought to understand the ethical, social and material causes and consequences of war and misery, deploying `a scientific historical method of investigation (1937 38).