[In the following review, Mandel outlines the major thematic concerns of Of Fear and Freedom.]

Carlo Levi is now known in this country for his brilliant Christ Stopped at Eboli, a sociological, anthropological, and political diary-novel describing Levi's year of exile in a small Southern Italian town because of political activities against Mussolini in 1935. Toward the close of the book he makes a strong distinction between two civilizations—that of the country and that of the city. The former he regards as pre-Christian, the latter as a civilization no longer Christian.

Of Fear and Freedom explores briefly but profoundly in essay form the question of what is psychologically common to both civilizations and what is materially different. What might be taken for Mr. Levi's main theme is his cogent observation:

History is nothing but the eternal venture of the human mass in its laborious endeavor to determine itself, to resolve itself into state, poetry, liberty, or to abscond into religion, rite, custom …

Each phase of this theme is lucidly developed down to very nearly its last nuance. Along with becoming conscious human beings, there is in the experience of all men the urge to express the inexpressible and to worship and cling to the concrete symbols of that expression—primarily religion and the state.

The author describes this process of expression as an escape from pure anarchy into pure tyranny. Somewhere in between there is the freedom which men fear—a freedom which rejects idols, wars, and concrete symbols that are substitutes for freedom. Until men find that liberty and freedom there remains no choice but “to believe, to obey, to fight,” whether it be for God or Caesar.

Mr. Levi's ideas are considerably ingenious, sometimes overly so (but so is the psychology of both the primitive and the sophisticate), and they touch with stylistic finesse on the problems of myth, sin, slavery, symbols, love, art, and politics. These conceptions help explain the “pre-Christian” country civilization with its tendency toward religious expression, and the “no longer Christian” city civilization with its political emphasis. Freedom resides within neither and must still be sought out.

Fond of startling paradoxes, contrasts, and statements whose opposites imply equal, or equally questionable, truths (“There is no rabble without a king, there are no masses without God”), Carlo Levi has the gift of baring psychological motives clearly and of summarizing neatly a wealth of experience. At times Mr. Levi borrows from psychoanalysis and theology but he is indebted more to his personal experiences.