Welsh Journals

Plato, Hegel and Marx are complete travesties of scholarship and that his criticisms are embarrassingly wide of the mark, why is it of any interest to be told that Popper also misses Fukuyama as a target since he manages to miss everyone else? Given the revival of Hegel as a source of inspiration in contemporary thought, even in the field of international relations to which Fukuyama's book belongs, an explanation of how his differs from con- temporary Hegelian projects would have been appropriate. For example, Mervyn Frost and Chris Brown describe their intellectual enterprises as secularized Hegelianism, Hegel without the metaphysics, yet they do not subscribe to 'the end of history' thesis. I would recommend this book as a valuable and sympathetic introduc- tion to the intricacies and nuances of Fukuyama's intellectual manoeuvres in advancing a controversial thesis in an unfashionable genre. DAVID BOUCHER Swansea THE HERITAGE CRUSADE AND THE SPOILS OF HISTORY. By David Lowenthal. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xviii, 338. £ 12.95 (paperback). In 1998, and it is not the first year, Britain's museums reported fewer visitors and theme parks more. The sound-bite culture (will even that be heritable?) requires a continuous challenge to the attention; the tourism industry, driven by market forces, demands new products. Interaction and entertainment are at present the recognized commercial saviours. Archive offices almost without exception are swamped by searchers for personal ancestry, the adult form of interaction and, judging by numbers alone, also of entertainment. Heritage, the phenomenon which Professor Lowenthal so vividly and entertainingly describes, shows no sign of weakening, and the appearance of a paperback edition with a new preface so soon after the original publication gives the author both a privilege which he acknowledges and an opportunity to soften his view that between heritage and history a great gulf is fixed, and instead to declare that both are routes to the past which 'continually merge and interact along a continuum of everyday experience'. Welsh readers may be either disappointed or relieved that there are so few local references, but the hundreds of foreign examples quoted will surely bring Welsh parallels to mind. There is, however, the splendid and comforting (but unascribed) declaration of a 'Welsh woman' about the country's history in its rocks, in the cries of its princes and in the tears of its Poets; the 'cultural prostitution' of converting locals into living museum