{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04935064935064935, 'fraction_numerical': 0.00974025974025974, 'mean_word_length': 4.94980694980695, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant, and Republic. By Anthony D. Smith. (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Pp. xv, 245. $40.00.)

elytism, war and world conquest, artistic and intellectual activities and international trade.” Thus the sublimation of “erotic impulses” is nothing less than “the basis of the originality of our continent” (2). Repression, the key to modernity, leads to everything from “artistic and intellectual activities” to “international trade”—if also, unfortunately, to war and conquest. Muchembled marries the work of Norbert Elias to that of Foucault and dismisses contradictions. His analogies are facile. “Human sexuality is like the mechanism of a clock, in that every movement is integral to the whole,” he intones (28). But then he observes that social groups do not actually move synchronously, since some groups change while others do not. Indeed, how else could Europe ascend to hedonism, as he argues, while the United States remains puritanical? Readers interested in historical particularity will find little to savor; events elsewhere seen as transformative of sexual behavior (e.g., World War I) go unmentioned. Muchembled’s trends are always “fluid,” his clergy always “watchful,” his arguments so broad as to be true and false at once. The author claims the book to be based on “the totality of human relations,” but the only relations that seem to matter are coital, and they make for a history of pleasure that trivializes every other subject on which it alights (2).