"This new translation will help to moderate the emphasis normally placed upon Maistre's authoritarianism. He anticipated something of the twentieth-century understanding of the active role played by the human mind in the empirical/inductive process utilized in modern science. An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon reveals Maistre to be a complex thinker, whose focus on the centrality of power, in the tradition of Machiavelli and Hobbes, is balanced against a genuine spiritualism informed by Christian neo-Platonism and the European tradition of humane learning." David Klinck, Department of History, University of Windsor