ABSTRACT
The Danube Edition in which Macmillan is reprinting Arthur Koestler's complete works offers the opportunity for a review of his intellectual development. The circumstances of Koestler's life led him back to three engrossing themes: the consequences of man's will to transform society; the nature of his place in the world; and his capacity for rational understanding and action. Koestler sought in Communism a means of saving something from the disaster that he felt certain was about to overwhelm the people of the Continent. Koestler had little sympathy for the gradual improvements of parliamentary democracy, and he understood all too well the dangers of Red totalitarianism. The belief that man had a unique destiny in an orderly, purposeful, and rationally comprehensible universe was Koestler's legacy from the Central European Jewish world which in a previous generation had produced Freud and Einstein.
