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III

And yet to a casual observer of the politics and the thought of the twentieth century it might at first seem that every idea and movement typical of our time is best understood as a natural development of tendencies already prominent in the nineteenth century. In the case of the growth of international institutions, for instance, this seems a truism. What are the Hague Court, the old League of Nations and its modern successor, the numerous pre-war and post-war international agencies and conventions for political, economic, social, and humanitarian purposes-- what are they, if not the direct descendants of that liberal internationalism--Tennyson's `Parliament of Man'--which was the staple of all progressive thought and action in the nineteenth century, and indeed of much in the century before it? The language of the great founders of European liberalism--Condorcet, for example, or Helvétius--does not differ greatly in substance, nor indeed in form, from the most characteristic moments in the speeches of Woodrow Wilson or Thomas Masaryk. European liberalism wears the appearance of a single coherent movement, little altered during almost three centuries, founded upon relatively simple intellectual foundations, laid by Locke or Grotius or even Spinoza; stretching back to Erasmus and Montaigne, the Italian Renaissance, Seneca, and the Greeks. In this movement there is in principle a rational answer to every question. Man is, in principle at least, everywhere and in every condition, able, if he wills it, to discover and apply rational solutions to his problems. And these solutions, because they are rational, cannot clash with one another, and will ultimately form a harmonious system in which the truth will prevail, and freedom, happiness, and unlimited opportunity for untrammelled self-development will be open to all.

The consciousness of history which grew in the nineteenth century modified the severe and simple design of the classical theory as it was conceived in the eighteenth century. Human progress was presently seen to be conditioned by factors of greater complexity than had been conceived of in the `spring-time of liberal individualism: education, rationalist propaganda, even legislation, were perhaps not always, nor everywhere, quite enough. Such factors as the particular and special influences by which various societies were historically shaped--some due to physical conditions, others to socio-economic forces or to more elusive emotional and what were vaguely classified as `cultural' factors--were presently allowed to have greater importance than they were accorded in the over--simple schemas of Condorcet or Bentham. Education, and all forms of social action, must, it was now thought, be fitted to take account of historical needs which made men and their institutions somewhat less easy to mould into the required pattern than had been too optimistically assumed in earlier and more naive times.

Nevertheless, the original programme continued in its various forms to exercise an almost universal spell. This applied to the Right no less than to the Left. Conservative thinkers, unless they were concerned solely with obstructing the liberals and their allies, believed and acted upon the belief that, provided no excessive violence was done to slow but certain processes of `natural' development, all might yet be well; the faster must be restricted from pushing aside the slower, and in this way all would arrive in the end. This was the doctrine preached by Bonald early in the century, and it expressed the optimism of even the stoutest believers in original sin. Provided that traditional differences of outlook and social structure were protected from what conservatives were fond of describing as the ` unimaginative', `artificial', `mechanical' levelling processes favoured by the liberals; provided that the infinity of `intangible' or `historic' or `natural' or `providential' distinctions (which to them seemed to constitute the essence of fruitful forms of life) were preserved from being transformed into a uniform collection of homogeneous units moving at a pace dictated by some `irrelevant' or `extraneous' authority, contemptuous of prescriptive or traditional rights and habits. Provided that adequate safeguards were instituted against too reckless a trampling upon the sacred past --with these guarantees--rational reforms and changes were allowed to be feasible and even desirable. Given these safeguards, conservatives no less than liberals were prepared to look upon the conscious direction of human affairs by qualified experts with a considerable degree of approval; and not merely by experts, but by a growing number of individuals and groups, drawn from, and representing, wider and wider sections of a society which was progressively becoming more and more enlightened.

This is a mood and attitude common to a wider section of opinion in the later nineteenth century in Europe, and not merely in the West but in the East too, than historians, affected by the political struggles of a later or earlier period, have allowed. One of the results of it--in so far as it was a causal factor and not merely a symptom of the process--was the wide development of political representation in the West whereby in the end all classes of the population in the succeeding century began to attain to power, sooner or later, in one country or another. The nineteenth century was full of unrepresented groups engaged in the struggle for life, self-expression, and later for control. Its representatives counted among them heroes and martyrs and men of moral and artistic power whom a genuine struggle of this kind brings forth. The twentieth century, by satisfying much of the social and political hunger of the Victorian period, did indeed witness a striking improvement in the material condition of the majority of the peoples of Western Europe, due in large measure to the energetic social legislation which transformed the social order.

But one of the least predicted results of this trend (although isolated thinkers like Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Herzen, and, of course, Nietzsche had more than an inkling of it) was a decline in the quality of moral passion and force and of romantic, artistic rebelliousness which had marked the early struggles of the dissatisfied social groups during their heroic period when, deeply-- divergent though they were, they fought together against tyrants, priests, and militant philistines. Whatever the injustices and miseries of our time--and they are plainly no fewer than those of the immediate past--they are less likely to find expression in monuments of noble eloquence, because that kind of inspiration seems to spring only from the oppression or suppression of entire classes of society.1.3 There arrives a brief moment when, as indeed Marx with much insight pointed out, the leaders of the most articulate, and socially and economically most developed, of these suppressed groups are lifted by the common mood and for a moment speak not for their own class or milieu alone, but in the name of all the oppressed; for a brief instant their utterance has a universal quality.

But a situation where all or nearly all the great sections of society have been, or are on the point of being, in at any rate the formal possession of power is unfavourable to that truly disinterested eloquence--disinterested partly at least because fulfilment is remote, because principles shine forth most clearly in the darkness and void, because the inner vision is still free from the confusions and obscurities, the compromises and blurred outlines of the external world inevitably forced upon it by the beginnings of practical action. No body of men which has tasted power, or is within a short distance of doing so, can avoid a certain degree of that cynicism which, like a chemical reaction, is generated by the sharp contact between the pure ideal, nurtured in the wilderness, and its realization in some unpredicted form which seldom conforms to the hopes or fears of earlier times. It therefore takes an exceptional effort of the imagination to discard the context-of later years, to cast ourselves back into the period when the views and movements which have since triumphed and lost their glamour long ago were still capable of stirring so much vehement idealistic feeling: when, for example, nationalism was not in principle felt to be incompatible with a growing degree of internationalism, or civil liberties with a rational organization of society; when this was believed by some conservatives almost as much as their rivals, and the gap between the moderates of both sides was only that between the plea that reason must not be permitted to increase the pace of progress beyond the limits imposed by `history' and the counterplea that la raison a toujours raison, that memories and shadows were less important than the direct perception of the real world in the dear light of day. This was a time when liberals in their turn themselves began to feel the impact of historicism, and to admit the need for a certain degree of adjustment and even control of social life, perhaps by the hated state itself if only to mitigate the inhumanity of unbridled private enterprise, to protect the liberties of the weak, to safeguard those basic human rights without which there could be neither happiness nor justice nor freedom to pursue that which made life worth living.

The philosophical foundations of these liberal beliefs in the mid-nineteenth century were some what obscure. Rights described as `natural' or `inherent', absolute standards of truth and justice, were not compatible with tentative empiricism and utilitarianism ; yet liberals believed in both. Nor was faith in full democracy strictly consistent with belief in the inviolable rights of minorities or dissident individuals. But so long as the right-wing opposition set itself against all these principles, the contradictions could, on the whole, be allowed to lie dormant, or to form the subject of peaceful academic disputes, not exacerbated by the urgent need for immediate practical application. Indeed; the very recognition of inconsistencies in doctrine or policy further enhanced the role of rational criticism, by which; in the end; all questions could and' would one day be settled. Socialists for their part resembled the conservatives in believing in the existence of inexorable laws of history, and, like them, accused the liberals of legislating `unhistorically' for timeless abstractions --an activity for which history would not neglect to take due revenge. But they also resembled the liberals in `believing in the supreme value of rational analysis, in policies founded on theoretical considerations deduced `from `scientific' premisses, and with them accused the conservatives of misinterpreting `the facts' to justify the miserable status quo, of condoning misery and injustice; not indeed like the liberals by ignoring history, but by misreading it in a manner consciously or unconsciously calculated to preserve their own power upon a specious moral basis. But genuinely revolutionary as some among them were, and a thoroughly new phenomenon in the Western world, the majority of them shared with the parties which they attacked the common assumption that men must be spoken and appealed to in terms of the needs and interests and ideals of which they were, or could be made to be, conscious.

Conservatives, liberals, radicals, socialists differed in their interpretation of historical change. They disagreed about what were the deepest needs, interests, ideals of human beings, about who held them, and how deeply or widely or for what length of time, about the method of their discovery, or their validity in this or that situation. They differed about the facts, they differed about ends and means, they seemed to themselves, to agree on almost nothing. But what they had in common--too obviously to be fully aware of it themselves--was the belief that their age was ridden with social and political problems which could be solved only by the conscious application of truths upon which all men endowed with adequate mental powers could agree. The Marxists did indeed question this in theory, but not in practice: even they did not seriously attack the thesis that when ends were not yet attained and choice of means was limited, the proper way of setting about adapting the means to the ends was by the use of all the skill and energy and intellectual and moral insight available. And while some regarded these problems as akin to those of the natural sciences, some to those of ethics or religion, while others supposed that they were altogether sui generis and called for altogether unique solutions, they were agreed--it seemed too obvious to need stating--that the problems themselves were genuine and urgent and intelligible in more or less similar terms to all clear-headed men, that all answers were entitled to a hearing, and that nothing was gained by ignorance or the supposition that the problems did not exist.

This set of common assumptions--they are part of what the word `enlightenment' means--were, of course, deeply rationalistic. They were denied implicitly by the whole Romantic movement, and explicitly by isolated thinkers--Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. And there were obscurer prophets--Buchner, Kierkegaard, Leontiev--who protested against the prevailing- orthodoxy with a depth and originality which became clear only in our own time. Not that these thinkers represent any one single movement, or even an easily identifiable `trend'; but in one relevant particular they display an affinity. They denied the importance of political action based on rational considerations, and to this extent they were rightly abhorred by the supporters of respectable conservatism. They said or implied that rationalism in any form was a fallacy derived from -a false analysis of the character of human beings, because the springs of human action lay in regions unthought of by the sober thinkers whose views enjoyed prestige among the serious public. But their voices were few and discordant, and their eccentric views were ascribed to psychological aberrations. Liberals, however much they admired their artistic genius, were revolted by what they conceived as a perverted view of mankind, and either ignored, it or rejected it violently. Conservatives looked upon them as allies against the exaggerated rationalism and infuriating optimism of both liberals and socialists, but treated them nervously as queer visionaries, a little unhinged, not to be imitated or approached too closely. The socialists looked on them as so many deranged reactionaries, scarcely worth their powder and shot. The main currents both on the Right and on the Left flowed round and over these immovable, isolated rocks with their absurd appearance of seeking to arrest or deflect the central current. What were they, after, all, but survivals of a darker age, or interesting misfits, sad and at times fascinating casualties of the advance of history, worthy of sympathetic insight--men of talent or even genius born out of their time, gifted poets, remarkable artists, but surely not thinkers worthy of detailed attention on the part of serious students of social and political life?

There was (it is worth saying again) a somewhat sinister element dimly discernible from its very beginning in Marxism-- in the main a highly, rationalistic system--which seemed hostile to this entire outlook; denying the primacy of the individual's reason in the choice of ends and in effective government alike. But the worship of the natural sciences as the sole proper model for political theory and action which Marxism shared with its. liberal antagonists was unpropitious to a clearer perception of its own full nature; and so this aspect of it lay largely unrecognized until Sorel brought it to life and combined it with the Bergsonian anti-rationalism by which his thought is very strongly coloured; and until Lenin, stemming from a different tradition, with his genius for organization half instinctively recognized its superior insight into the irrational springs of human conduct, and translated it into effective practice. But Lenin did not, and his followers to this day do not, seem fully aware of the degree to which this essentially romantic element in Marxism influenced their actions. Or, if aware, they did not and do not admit it. This was so when the twentieth century opened.


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