The Paralysis of Governments

Perhaps, before going any further, I should say that I am a liberal democrat and have no wish to disenfranchise my fellow citizens. My hope is that both liberty and democracy can be preserved before the one destroys the other. Whether this can be done is the question of our time, what with more than half the world denying and despairing of it. Of one thing we may be sure. If it is to be done at all, we must be uninhibited in our examination of our condition.
And since our condition is manifestly connected with grave errors in war and peace that have been committed by democratic governments, we must adopt the habit of thinking as plainly about the sovereign people as we do about the politicians they elect. It will not do to think poorly of the politicians and to talk with bated breath about the voters. No more than the kings before them should the people be hedged with divinity.

Like all princes and rulers, like all sovereigns, they are ill-served by flattery and adulation. And they are betrayed by the servile hypocrisy which tells them that what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, can be determined by their votes.

If I am right in what I have been saying, there has developed in this century a functional derangement of the relationship between the mass of the people and the government. The people have acquired power which they are incapable of exercising, and the governments they elect have lost powers which they must recover if they are to govern. What then are the true boundaries of the people's power? The answer cannot be simple. But for a rough beginning let us say that the people are able to give and to withhold their consent to being governed - their consent to what the government asks of them, proposes to them, and has done in the conduct of their affairs. They can elect the government. They can remove it. They can approve or disapprove its performance. But they cannot administer the government. They cannot themselves perform. They cannot normally initiate and propose the necessary legislation. A mass cannot govern. The people, as Jefferson said, are not "qualified to exercise themselves the Executive Department; but they are qualified to name the person who shall exercise it ... They are not qualified to legislate; with us therefore they only choose the legislators."

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

The propensity to this derangement and the vulnerability of our society to it have a long and complex history. Yet the more I have brooded upon the events which I have lived through myself, the more astounding and significant does it seem that the decline of the power and influence and self-confidence of the Western democracies has been so steep and so sudden. We have fallen far in a short span of time. However long the underlying erosion had been going on, we were still a great and powerful and flourishing community when the First World War began. What we have seen is not only decay - though much of the old structure was dissolving - but something which can be called an historic catastrophe.

My Reason For Writing This Book

During the fateful summer of I938 I began writing a book in an effort to come to terms in my own mind and heart with the mounting disorder in our Western society. I was living in Paris at the time, and I had learned that the decision had been taken which was soon to lead Mr. Chamberlain and Monsieur Daladier to Munich. Little hope remained that another world war could be averted except by abject surrender, and yet there was no sure pros­pect that France and Great Britain would be able to with­stand the onslaught that was coming.
They were unpre­pared, their people were divided and demoralized. The Americans were far away, were determined to be neutral, and were unarmed. I was filled with foreboding that the nations of the Atlantic Community would not prove equal to the challenge, and that, if they failed, we should lose our great traditions of civility,1 the liberties Western man had won for himself after centuries of struggle and which were now threatened by the rising tide of barbarity..
I began writing, impelled by the need to make more intelligible to myself the alarming failure of the Western liberal democracies to cope with the realities of this cen­tury. I had done a draft of the book when the fall of France naade it evident that we, too, must soon be en­gaged and, moreover, engaged alone if the Battle of Brit­ain was lost..

But at this time the American people were as unpre­pared in their minds as in their military establishment. Could the democracies be rallied, could they be collected and' nerved for the ordeal so that they would be equal to this mortal challenge? They had the superior assets. They had the numbers, the resources, the influence. But did they have the insight, the discipline to persevere, and the resolution to go through with it? Though they had the means, did they also have the will, and did they still know how? A second world war was making up out of the ruins and the failures of the first, and there was nothing to show that the Western democratic governments were in control of their affairs and capable of making the necessary decisions. They were reacting to events and they were not governing them. Could they avoid defeat and conquest without an exhaustion which would rend the fabric of Western society, without enormities of suffering which would alienate the masses of the people, and with­out resorting to measures of violence which might be­come inexpiable? They were so very late, and they were becoming engaged in they knew not what. They had re­fused to take in what they saw, they had refused to be­lieve what they heard, they had wished and they had waited, hoping against hope.

It did not come easily to one who, like myself, had known the soft air of the world before the wars to recognize and acknowledge the sickness of the Western liberal democracies. Yet as we were being drawn unready and unarmed into the second of the great wars, there was no denying, it seemed to me, that there is a deep dis­order in our society which comes not from the machina­tions of our enemies and from the adversities of the human condition but from within ourselves. I was one of a large company who felt that way. Never doubting that the utmost resistance was imperative and that defeat would be irreparable and intolerable, they were a com­pany who knew in their hearts that by total war our world could not be made safe for democracy nor for the four freedoms. We were, I had come to see, not wounded but sick, and because we were failing to bring order and peace to the world, we were beset by those who believed they have been chosen to succeed us.

1917: The Revolutionary Year

In December, 1941 I put the manuscript away, knowing that so much was going to happen to the world and to me that if ever I went back to the book, it would be to start all over again. When I did come back to it after the war, the foreboding which had inspired it was in a terrible measure realized.

Something had gone very wrong in the liberal democracies. They had, to be sure, defeated their enemies. They had avoided defeat and subjection. But they were unable to make peace and to restore order. For the second time in a generation they had failed to prevent a ruinous war, they had been unwilling to prepare themselves to wage the war, and when at long last and at exorbitant cost they had managed to defeat their enemies, they had been unable to make peace out of their victories. They were entangled in a vicious circle of wars that led to ever bigger and wider wars. Could it be denied that they were sick with some kind of in­capacity to cope with reality, to govern their affairs, to defend their vital interests and, it might be, to insure their survival as free and democratic states?

There was no mistaking the decline of the West. Thirty years after Wilson had proclaimed a world at peace under democratic governments, the North Atlantic democracies were preoccupied with the defense of western Europe and the fringes of the Eurasian continent. In less than half a century it had come to that. In 1900 men everywhere on earth had acknowledged, even when they resented, the primacy of the Western nations. They were the recognized leaders in the progress of mankind, and it was taken as axiomatic that the question was when, and not whether, the less advanced people would have learned how to use the Western technology, to hold free elections, to respect the Bill of Rights and to live by its political philosophy. Until 1917 the model for a new government anywhere in the world, even in Russia, was liberal democracy in the British, the French, or the Amer­ican style.

But by the end of 1920 things had taken a sharp turn. Lord Bryce was then finishing his Modern Democ­racies, and though he still wrote in the prewar manner that democracy was spreading and that the number of democracies in the world had doubled within fifteen years, he had seen the warning signs and he was troubled. It might not be 'really helpful to the younger generation,' he wrote in the preface, but he could not 'repress the pes­simism of experience.' He had to say that 'although de­mocracy has spread, and although no country that has tried it shows any signs of forsaking it, we are not yet en­titled to hold with the men of 1789 that it is the natural and, therefore, in the long run, the inevitable form of government. Much has happened since the rising sun of liberty dazzled the eyes of the States-General at Versailles. Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government. If it be im­probable, yet it is not unthinkable that, as in many coun­tries impatience with tangible evils substituted democracy for monarchy or oligarchy, a like impatience might some­day reverse the process.'

Three years later Mussolini marched on Rome, and Italy became the first of the bigger democracies 'to re­verse the process.' In retrospect we can now see that what Lord Bryce, writing at the end of the First World War, thought was the pessimism of experience was in fact the intuition of a sensitive and knowing observer. He had felt in his bones, being too close to the event to perceive it, that a fundamental change in the prospects of democracy was in the making.

There had occurred, I now believe, an unrecognized revolution within the democratic states. By the third year of the First World War the cumulative losses had be­come so exorbitant that the institutional order of all the belligerents gave way under the stress and strain. The war had become, in Ferrero's telling phrase, hyperbolic, and the prewar governments were incapable of imposing such unlimited drafts upon the endurance and the loyal­ties of the people. In the defeated countries the price of this was revolution against the established order. The Romanoff, the Hohenzollern, the Hapsburg and the Otto­man Empires collapsed. In the victorious countries insti­tutions were not overthrown, rulers were not exiled, im­prisoned or executed. But the constitutional order was altered subtly and yet radically, within itself.

Internal Revolution in the Democracies

A vigourous critic of democracy, Sir Henry Maine, writ­ing in 1884 just as England was about to adopt general manhood suffrage, observed that 'there could be no grosser mistake' than the impression that 'Democracy differs from Monarchy in essence.'

For the tests of suc­cess in the performance of the necessary and natural duties of a government are precisely the same in both cases. These natural and necessary duties have to do with the defense and advancement abroad of the vital interests of the state and with its order, security, and solvency at home. Invariably these duties call for hard decisions. They are hard because the governors of the state must tax, conscript, command, prohibit; they must assert a public interest against private inclination and against what is easy and popular. If they are to do their duty, they must often swim against the tides of private feeling.

The hardness of governing was little realized in the early 1900's. For more than half a century, while democ­racy was making its historic advance, there had been a remarkable interlude during which the governments rarely had to make hard decisions. Since Waterloo there had been no world war, and after the American Civil War only a few short and localized wars. It was a time of expansion, development, liberation; there were new con­tinents to be colonized and there was a new industrial system to be developed. It seemed as though mankind had outlived the tempests of history. The governments --which were increasingly democratic, liberal and hu­mane -- were spared the necessity of dealing with the hard issues of war and peace, of security and solvency, of constitutional order and revolution. They could be con­cerned with improvements, with the more and more and the better and better. Life was secure, liberty was assured, and the way was open to the pursuit of private happiness.

In this long peace, the liberals became habituated to the notion that in a free and progressive society it is a good thing that the government should be weak. For several gen­erations the West had flourished under governments that did not have to prove their strength by making the hard decisions. It had been possible to dream, without being rudely awakened, that in the rivalry of the diverse in­terests all would somehow come out for the best. The government could normally be neutral and for the most part it could avoid making positive judgments of good and bad and of right and wrong. The public interest could be equated with that which was revealed in election returns, in sales reports, balance sheets, circulation figures, and statistics of expansion. As long as peace could be taken for granted, the punic good could be thought of as being immanent in the aggregate of private trans­actions. There was no need for a governing power which transcended the particular interests and kept them in order by ruling over them.

All this was only, as we now know, a daydream during a brief spell of exceptionally fine weather. The dream ended with the outbreak of the First World War. Then we knew that the Age of Progress had not reformed the human condition of diversity and conflict; it had not miti­gated the violence of the struggle for survival and domination.

In fact, the violence was intensified and extended as never before. The expansion and development during the peaceful decades had wrought, as Graham Wallas pointed out on the eve of the war, 'a general change of social scale,' and that change of scale had revolutionary con­sequences. The forty years which separated the Franco-Prussian War from the First World War were, says John U. Nef, 'in terms of material welfare ...the most successful years in history ...In little more than one generation the world's population grew by almost as much as it had grown during the untold generations which separate Adam, the first man, from Newton, the first man of science of the seventeenth century. According to the enterprising calculations of Colin Clark, the real income per person gainfully employed improved 75 percent or more from 1870 to 1914 while the hours of work were substantially reduced in the wealthier coun­tries of Western Europe ...and in North America.'

Because of the increase in the population, in the vol­ume of production, and in the destructiveness of weapons, the war which brought to an end the Age of Progress had, says Nef, 'none of the limiting features of the warfare which had been characteristic of Newton's age. Europe could now afford enormous armies, could replenish and supply them again while the fighting proceeded. More money was needed to kill than ever before, but the money required turned out to be small in comparison with the money that could be raised (with the help of refined ad­vances in the use and manipulation of credit), and in relation to the quantity of munitions which money and credit could buy.' All this meant that when war broke out again, the advanced nations had become, as Nickerson says, 'capable of sacrifices so irrationally great that the bleeding victor would faint upon the corpse of his vic­tim.'

The strain of the war worked up a menacing popular pressure upon the weak governments. We can, I think, point to 1917 as the year when the pressure became so strong that the institutional framework of the established governments broke under it. The strain became unbearable. 1917 was the year of the two Russian revolutions. It was the year of the American involvement which brought with it the declaration of the Wilsonlan principles. For Italy it was the year of Caporetto. For Austria-Hungary it was the beginning of the end under the successor of Francis Joseph. For Germany it was the year of the July crisis and of the need of the Prussian mon­archy to listen to the Reichstag and its demand for a negotiated peace. For France it was the year of the mu­tinies, and for Britain the year of mortal peril from the submarine. In eastern and central Europe tortured and in­furiated masses brought down the historic states and the institutions of the old regime. In western Europe and in North America the breakthrough took the form - if I may use the term - of a deep and pervasive infiltration. Behind the facade, which was little changed, the old structure of executive government with the consent of a representative assembly was dismantled--not every­where and not in all fields, but where it mattered the most--in the making of high policy for war and peace.

The existing governments had exhausted their imperium- their authority to bind and their power to com­mand. With their traditional means they were no longer able to carry on the hyperbolic war; yet they were unable to negotiate peace. They had, therefore, to turn to the people. They had to ask still greater exertions and sacri­fices. They obtained them by 'democratizing' the conduct and the aims of the war: by pursuing total victory and by promising total peace.

In substance they ceded the executive power of decision over the strategical and the political conditions for concluding the war. In effect they lost control of the war. This revolution appeared to be a cession of power to the representative assemblies, and when it happened it was acclaimed as promising the end of the evils of secret diplomacy and the undemocratic conduct of unpopular wars. In fact, the powers which were ceded by the execu­tive passed through the assemblies, which could not ex­ercise them, to the mass of voters who, though unable also to exercise them, passed them on to the party bosses, the agents of pressure groups, and the magnates of the new media of mass communications.

The consequences were disastrous and revolutionary. The democracies became incapacitated to wage war for rational ends and to make a peace which would be ob­served or could be enforced.

Democratic Politicians

At the critical moments in this sad history, there have been men, worth listening to, who warned the people against their mistakes. Always, too, there have been men inside the governments who judged correctly, because they were permitted to know in time, the uncensored and unvarnished truth. But the climate of modern democracy does not usually inspire them to speak out. For what Churchill did in the Thirties before Munich was exceptional: the general rule is that a democratic politician had better not be right too soon. Very often the penalty is political death. It is much safer to keep in step with the parade of opinion than to try to keep up with the swifter movement of events.

In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. They are deprived of their independence. Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people. And since not telling it, though prudent, is uncomfortable, they find it easier if they themselves do not have to hear too often too much of the sour truth. The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right.

'As we look over the list of the early leaders of the republic, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and others, we discern that they were all men who insisted upon being themselves and who refused to truckle to the people. With each succeeding generation, the growing demand of the people that its elective officials shall not lead but merely register the popular will has steadily undermined the independence of those who derive their power from popular election. The persistent refusal of the Adamses to sacrifice the integrity of their own intellectual and moral standards and values for the sake of winning public office or popular favor is another of the measuring rods by which we may measure the divergence of American life from its starting point.' James Truslow Adams, The Adams Family (1930), p. 95

With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular--not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

This devitalization of the governing power is the malady of democratic states. As the malady grows the executives become highly susceptible to encroachment and usurpation by elected assemblies; they are pressed and harassed by the higgling of parties, by the agents of organized interests, and by the spokesmen of sectarians and ideologues. The malady can be fatal. It can be deadly to the very survival of the state as a free society if, when the great and hard issues of war and peace, of security and solvency, of revolution and order are up for decision, the executive and judicial departments, with their civil servants and technicians, have lost their power to decide.

The Pattern of the Mistakes

In order to see in its true perspective what happened, we must remember that at the end of the First World War the only victorious powers were the liberal democracies of the West. Lenin, who had been a refugee in Switzerland until I917, was still at the very beginning of his struggle to become the master of the empire of the Romanoffs. Mussolini was an obscure journalist, and nobody had dreamed of Hitler. The men who took part in the Peace Conference were men of the same standards and tradition. They were the heads of duly elected governments in countries where respect for civil liberty was the rule. Europe from the Atlantic to the Pripet Marshes lay within the military orbit of their forces. All the undemocratic empires, enemy and ally, had been destroyed by defeat and revolution. In 1918--unlike 1945--there had been no Yalta, there was no alien foreign minister at the peace conference who held a veto on the settlement.

Yet as soon as the terms of the settlement were known, it was evident that peace had not been made with Germany. It was not for want of power but for want of statesmanship that the liberal democracies failed. They failed to restore order in that great part of the world which--outside of revolutionary Russia--was still within the orbit of their influence, still amenable to their leadership, still subject to their decisions, still working within the same economy, still living in the same international community, still thinking in the same universe of discourse. In this failure to make peace there was generated the cycle of wars in which the West has suffered so sudden and so spectacular a decline.

Public opinion, having vetoed reconciliation, had made the settlement unworkable. And so when a new generation of Germans grew up, they rebelled. But by that time the Western democracies, so recently too warlike to make peace with the unarmed German Republic, had become too pacifist to take the risks which could have prevented the war Hitler was announcing he would wage against Europe. Having refused the risk of trying to prevent war, they would not now prepare for the war. The European democracies chose to rely on the double negative of unarmed appeasement, and the American democracy chose to rely on unarmed isolation.

When the unprevented war came, the fatal cycle was repeated. Western Europe was defeated and occupied before the British people began seriously to wage the war. And after the catastrophe in Western Europe eighteen agonizing months of indecision elapsed before the surprise and shock of Pearl Harbor did for the American people what no amount of argument and evidence and reason had been able to do.

Once again it seemed impossible to wage the war energetically except by inciting the people to paroxysms of hatred and to utopian dreams. So they were told that the Four Freedoms would be established everywhere, once the incurably bad Germans and the incurably bad Japanese had been forced to surrender unconditionally. The war could be popular only if the enemy was altogether evil and the Allies very nearly perfect. This mixture of envenomed hatred and furious righteousness made a public opinion which would not tolerate the calculated compromises that durable settlements demand. Once again the people were drugged by the propaganda which had aroused them to fight the war and to endure its miseries. Once again they would not think, once again they would not allow their leaders to think, about an eventual peace with their enemies, or about the differences that must arise among the Allies in this coalition, as in all earlier ones. How well this popular diplomacy worked is attested by the fact that less than five years after the democracies had disarmed their enemies, they were imploring their former enemies, Germany and Japan, to rearm.

The record shows that the people of the democracies, having become sovereign in this century, have made it increasingly difficult for their governments to prepare properly for war or to make peace. Their responsible officials have been like the ministers of an opinionated and willful despot. Between the critical junctures, when public opinion has been inattentive or not vehemently aroused, responsible officials have often been able to circumvent extremist popular opinions and to wheedle their way towards moderation and good sense. In the crises, however, democratic officials -- over and above their own human propensity to err -- have been compelled to make the big mistakes that public opinion has insisted upon. Even the greatest men have not been able to turn back the massive tides of opinion and of sentiment.

There is no mystery about why there is such a tendency for popular opinion to be wrong in judging war and peace. Strategic and diplomatic decisions call for a kind of knowledge--not to speak of an experience and a seasoned judgment--which cannot=be had by glancing at newspapers, listening to snatches of radio comment, watching politicians perform on television, hearing occasional lectures, and reading a few books. It would not be enough to make a man competent to decide whether to amputate a leg, and it is not enough to qualify him to choose war or peace, to arm or not to arm, to intervene or to withdraw, to fight on or to negotiate.

Usually, moreover, when the decision is critical and urgent, the public will not be told the whole truth. What can be told to the great public it will not hear in the, complicated and qualified concreteness that is needed for a practical decision. When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute. Even When there is no deliberate distortion by censorship and propaganda, which is unlikely in time of war, the public opinion of masses cannot be counted upon to apprehend regularly and promptly the reality of things. There is an inherent tendency in opinion to feed upon rumors excited by our own wishes and fears.

Democratic politicians rarely feel they can afford the luxury of telling the whole truth to the people… The men under them who report and collect the news come to realize in their turn that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right.

With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.

The Compulsion to Make Mistakes

The errors of public opinion in these matters have a common characteristic. The movement of opinion is slower than the movement of events. Because of that, the cycle of subjective sentiments on war and peace is usually out of gear with the cycle of objective develop­ments. Just because they are mass opinions there is an inertia in them. It takes much longer to change many minds than to change a few. It takes time to inform and to persuade and to arouse large scattered varied multitudes of persons. So before the multitude have caught up with the old events there are likely to be new ones coming up over the horizon with which the government should be preparing to deal. But the majority will be more aware of what they have just caught up with near at hand than with what is still distant and in the future. For these reasons the propensity to say No to a change of course sets up a compulsion to make mistakes. The opinion deals with a situation which no longer exists.

When the world wars came, the people of the liberal democracies could not be aroused to the exertions and the sacrifices of the struggle until they had been frightened by the opening disasters, had been incited to passionate hatred, and had become intoxicated with un­limited hope. To overcome this inertia the enemy had to be portrayed as evil incarnate, as absolute and congeni­tal wickedness. The people wanted to be told that when this particular enemy had been forced to unconditional surrender, they would re-enter the golden age. This unique war would end all wars. This last war would make the world safe for democracy. This crusade would make the whole world a democracy.

As a result of this impassioned nonsense public opinion became so envenomed that the people would not countenance a workable peace; they were against any public man who showed 'any tenderness for the Hun,' or was inclined to listen to the 'Hun food snivel.'

Public Opinion in War and Peace

Writing in 1913, just before the outbreak of the war, and having in mind Queen Victoria and King Edward the VII, Sir Harry Johnston thus described how foreign affairs were conducted in the Nineteenth Century: "In those days, a country's relations with its neighbors or with distant lands were dealt with almost exclusively by the head of the State - Emperor, King, or President - acting with the more-or-less dependent Minister-of-State, who was no representative of the masses, but the employé of the Monarch. Events were prepared and sprung on a submissive, a confident, or a stupid people. The public Press criticized, more often applauded, but had at most to deal with a fait accompli and make the best of it. Occasionally, in our own land, a statesman, out of office and discontented, went round the great provincial towns agitating against the trend of British foreign policy - perhaps wisely, perhaps unfairly, we do not yet know - and scored a slight success. But once in office, his Cabinet fell in by degrees with the views of the Sovereign and the permanent officials (after the fifties of the last century these public servants were a factor of ever-growing importance); and, as before, the foreign policy of the Empire was shaped by a small camarilla consisting of the Sovereign, two Cabinet Ministers, the permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and perhaps one representative of la plus haute finance."

Without taking it too literally, this is a fair description of how foreign affairs were conducted before the First World War. There were exceptions. The Aberdeen government, for example, was overthrown in 1855 because of its inefficient conduct of the Crimean War. But generally speaking, the elected parliaments were little consulted in the deliberations which led up to war, or on the high strategy of the war, on the terms of the armistice, on the conditions of peace. Even their right to be informed was severely limited, and the principle of the system was, one might say, that war and peace were the business of the executive department. The power of decision was not in, was not even shared with, the House of Commons, the Chamber of Deputies, the Reichstag.

The United States was, of course, a special case. The Congress has always had constitutional rights to advise and to be consulted' in the declaration of war and in the ratification of treaties. But at the time I am talking about, that is to say before the First World War broke out, it was American policy to abstain from the role of a great power, and to limit its sphere of vital interests to the Western Hemisphere and the North Pacific Ocean. Only in 1917 did the American constitutional system for dealing with foreign affairs become involved with the conduct of world affairs.

For the reasons which I outlined in the first chapter this system of executive responsibility broke down during the war, and from 1917 on the conduct of the war and then the conditions of the armistice and the peace were subjected to the dominating impact of mass opinions.

Saying this does not mean that the great mass of the people have had strong opinions about the whole range of complex issues which were before the military staffs and the foreign offices. The action of mass opinion has not been, and in the nature of things could not be, continuous through the successive phases in which affairs develop. Action has been discontinuous. Usually it has been a massive negative imposed at critical junctures when a new general course of policy needed to be set. There have, of course, been periods of apathy and of indifference. But democratic politicians have preferred to shun foresight about troublesome changes to come, knowing that the massive veto was latent, and that it would be expensive to them and to their party if they provoked it.

In the winter of 1918-1919, for example, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson and Orlando were at a critical juncture of modern history. The Germans were defeated, their government was overthrown, their troops disarmed and disbanded. The Allies were called upon to decide whether they would dictate a punitive peace or would negotiate a peace of reconciliation.

In the Thirties the British and the French governments had to decide whether to rearm and to take concerted measures to contain Hitler and Mussolini or whether to remain unarmed and to appease them. The United States had to decide whether to arm in order to contain the Japanese or to negotiate with them at the expense of China.

During the Second World War the British and the American governments had again to make the choice between total victory with unconditional surrender and negotiated settlements whose end was reconciliation.

These were momentous issues, like choosing at the fork of the road a way from which there is no turning back: whether to arm or not to arm - whether, as a conflict blows up, to intervene or to withdraw - whether in war to fight for the unconditional surrender of the adversary or for his reconciliation. The issues are so momentous that public feeling quickly becomes incandescent to them. But they can be answered with the only words that a great mass qua mass can speak - with a Yes or a No.

Experience since 1917 indicates that in matters of war and peace the popular answer in the democracies is likely to be No. For everything connected with war has become dangerous, painful, disagreeable and exhausting to very nearly everyone. The rule to which there are few exceptions - the acceptance of the Marshall Plan is one of them - is that at the critical junctures, when the stakes are high, the prevailing mass opinion will impose what amounts to a veto upon changing the course on which the government is at the time proceeding. Prepare for war in time of peace? No. It is bad to raise taxes, to unbalance the budget, to take men away from their schools or their jobs, to provoke the enemy. Intervene in a developing conflict? No. Avoid the risk of war. Withdraw from the area of the conflict? No. The adversary must not be appeased. Reduce your claims on the area? No. Righteousness cannot be compromised. Negotiate a compromise peace as soon as the opportunity presents itself? No. The aggressor must be punished. Remain armed to enforce the dictated settlement? No. The war is over.

The unhappy truth is that the prevailing public opinion has been destructively wrong at the critical junctures. The people have imposed a veto upon the judgments of informed and responsible officials. They have compelled the governments, which usually knew what would have been wiser, or was necessary, or was more expedient, to be too late with too little, or too long with too much, too pacifist in peace and too bellicose in war, too neutralist or appeasing in negotiation or too intransigent. Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this century. It has shown itself to be a dangerous master of decisions when the stakes are life and death.

The People and the Voters

A recent historian of the Tudor Revolution, Mr. G. R. Elton, says that 'our history is still much written by whigs, the champions of political freedom,’ and that 'while the safeguards against despotism have long been understood and often described, -- strong rule, preventing anarchy and preserving order, requires still much exploration.’

There have been periods, he goes on to say, of which the Tudor Age was one--and our own, we may add, is another--when men were so ready to be governed, being so oppressed by disorder, that they have preferred strong government to free government.

The Western liberal democracies are a declining power in human affairs. I argue that this is due to a derangement of the functions of their governments which disables them in coping with the mounting disorder. I do not say, indeed it is impossible to know surely, whether the malady can be cured or whether it must run its course. But I do say that if it cannot be cured, it will continue to erode the safeguards against despotism, and the failure of the West may be such that freedom will be lost and will not be restored again except by another revolution. But for either contingency, for cure now or for recovery after a catastrophe, our first necessity is to work towards an adequate knowledge of the two functions, their nature, and their derangement.

In order to do so it is necessary at the outset to reduce the ambiguity of the term 'the people.’ For it has two different meanings, which it may be convenient to distinguish typographically. When we speak of popular sovereignty, we must know whether we are talking about The People, as voters, or about The People, as a community of the entire living population, with their predecessors and successors.

It is often assumed, but without warrant, that the opinions of The People as voters can be treated as the expression of the interests of The People as an historic community. The crucial problem of modern democracy arises from the fact that this assumption is false. The voters cannot be relied upon to represent The People, The opinions of voters in elections are not to be accepted unquestioningly as true judgments of the vital interests of the community.

To whom, for example, did the Preamble of the Constitution refer when it said that 'We, the People of the United States... ordain and establish this Constitution''? On September 17, I787, about forty members signed the draft on which they had been working since May 25, for one hundred and sixteen days. In Article VII of their text they stipulated that if and when conventions in nine states had ratified it, then for those nine states The People of the United States would have ordained and established the Constitution. In this context a majority of the delegates elected to nine state conventions were deemed to be entitled to act as The People of the United States.

The inhabitants of the United States who were qualified to vote for these delegates were not a large number. They included no slaves, no women and, except in New York, only such adult males as could pass property and other highly restrictive tests. We do not have accurate figures. But according to the census of I790 the population was 3,929,782. Of these, 3,200,000 were free persons and the adult males among them who were entitled to vote are estimated to have been less than 500,000. Using the Massachusetts figures as a statistical sample, it may be assumed that less than 160,000 actually voted for delegates to all the ratifying conventions; and of those voting, perhaps 100,000 favored the adoption of the Constitution.

The exact figures do not matter. The point is that the voters were not--and we may add that they have never been and can never be--more than a fraction of the total population. They were less than 5 per cent when the Constitution was ordained. They were not yet 40 percent in I952 when, except under the special conditions in the South, we had universal adult suffrage. Manifestly, the voters can never be equal to the whole population, even to the whole living adult population.

Because of the discrepancy between The People as voters and The People as the corporate nation, the voters have no title to consider themselves the proprietors of the commonwealth and to claim that their interests are identical with the public interest. A prevailing plurality of the voters are not The People. The claim that they are is a bogus title invoked to justify the usurpation of the executive power by representative assemblies and the intimidation of public men by demagogic politicians. In fact demagoguery can be described as the sleight of hand by which a faction of The People as voters are invested with the authority of The People. That is why so many crimes are committed in the people's name.

There are eminent political philosophers who reject this analytical distinction. Those who are strongly nominalist in their cast of mind, which modern men tend to be, look upon the abstract concept of a corporate people as mere words and rather like conjuring up spooks. Thus, according to that resolute nominalist, Jeremy Bentham, 'the community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what?--The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.’

There is an apparent toughness and empirical matter-of-factness in this statement. But the hard ice is thin. For Bentham has forgotten that 'the several members who compose’ the community are never identically the same members from one hour to another. If a community were what he says it is, then in theory it should be possible to make a directory of its members, each with his address. But no such list could ever be compiled. While it was being compiled, new members would be being born and old members would be dying. That is why it makes no sense to describe 'The People of the United States’ who ordained and established the Constitution as the inhabitants of the United States on that particular June 21, 1788, when the Constitution was established and ordained. Between sunrise and sunset of that historic day the persons composing The People had changed. In thirty years they had changed greatly; and in a hundred years, entirely.

The people, then, is not only, as Bentham assumed, the aggregate of living persons. The people is also the stream of individuals, the connected generations of changing persons, that Burke was talking about when he invoked the partnership 'not only between those who are living’ but also with 'those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ The People are a corporation, an entity, that is to say, which lives on while individuals come into it and go out of it.

For this reason Bentham cannot have been right when he said that the interests of the community are no more than the sum of the interests of the several members who happen to compose it at any particular instant of time. He cannot have been right when he said that 'the happiness of the individuals, of whom a community is composed, that is their pleasures and their security, is the end and the sole end which the legislator ought to have in view.’

For besides the happiness and the security of the individuals of whom a community is at any moment composed, there are also the happiness and the security of the individuals of whom generation after generation it will be composed. If we think of it in terms of individual persons, tile corporate body of The People is for the most part invisible and inaudible. Indeed as a whole it is nonexistent, in that so many are dead and so many are not yet born. Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burke's words, a man to his country with 'ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron.’ 6 That is why young men die in battle for their country's sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.

This invisible, inaudible, and so largely nonexistent community gives rational meaning to the necessary objectives of government. If we deny it, identifying the people with the prevailing pluralities who vote in order to serve, as Bentham has it, 'heir pleasures and their security,’ where and what is the nation, and whose duty and business is it to defend the public interest? Bentham leaves us with the state as an arena in which factions contend for their immediate advantage in the struggle for survival and domination. Without the invisible and transcendent community to bind them, why should they care for posterity? And why should posterity care about them, and about their treaties and their contracts, their commitments and their promises? Yet without these engagements to the future, they could not live and work; without these engagements the fabric of society is unraveled and shredded.

The Governors and the Governed

When I describe the malady of democratic states as a derangement in the relation between the mass of the people and the government, I am, of course, implying that there is a sound relationship and that we should be able to know what it is. We must now examine this assumption.

We are looking into the relation between, on the one hand, the governing or executive power, and, on the other hand, the elected assembly and the voters in the constituencies. The best place to begin is in the simple beginnings of our constitutional development--in the medieval English Parliament--before the essential functions and their relation had become complicated by their later development.

No relationship, sound or unsound, could exist until the functions of execution and representation had become differentiated. In primitive societies they are not differentiated. Under the Norman and Angevin rulers the differentiation had not yet occurred. These rulers "judged and legislated as well as administered." ~ But by the thirteenth century the differentiation is already visible, and the essential relation in which we are interested can be recognized. There is a writ issued under Henry III in 1254 summoning Parliament. The sheriff of each county is ordered to "cause to come before the King's Council two good and discreet Knights of the Shire, whom the men of the county shall have chosen for this purpose in the stead of all and of each of them, to consider along with knights of other shires what aid they will grant the King."

Let us note the dualism. There is the government, which means the King and his Council of prelates and peers. Then there are the Knights of the Shires, representing the men of the counties. They are to meet, and the King will ask the Knights what aid they will grant to him. This is the basic relationship. The government can act. Because it can act, it decides what action should be taken, and it proposes the measures; it then asks the representatives of those who must supply the money and the men for the means to carry out its decisions. The governed, through their representatives, the two Knights of the Shire from each county, give or withhold their consent.
From the tension and the balance of the two powers that of the ruler and that of the ruled -- there evolved the written and the unwritten contracts of the constitution. The grant of aid by the ruled must be preceded by the ruler's redress of their grievances. The government will be refused the means of governing if it does not listen to the petitions, if it does not inform, if it does not consult, if it cannot win the consent of, those who have been elected as the representatives of the governed.

The executive is the active power in the state, the asking and the proposing power. The representative assembly is the consenting power, the petitioning, the approving and the criticizing, the accepting and the refusing power. The two powers are necessary if there is to be order and freedom. But each must be true to its own nature, each limiting and complementing the other. The government must be able to govern and the citizens must be represented in order that they shall not be oppressed. The health of the system depends upon the relationship of the two powers. If either absorbs or destroys the functions of the other power, the constitution is deranged.

There is here a relationship between governors and governed which is, I would contend, rooted in the nature of things. At the risk of reasoning by analogy, I would suggest that this duality of function within a political society has a certain resemblance to that of the two sexes. In the act of reproduction each sex has an unalterable physiological function. If this function is devitalized or is confused with the function of the other sex, the result is sterility and disorder.

In the final acts of the state the issues are war and peace, security and solvency, order and insurrection. In these final acts the executive power cannot be exercised by the representative assembly. Nor can it be exercised after the suppression of the assembly. For in the derangement of the two primary functions lie the seeds of disaster.

The Recently Enfranchised Voters

The doctrine of popular sovereignty is ancient and venerable. But until about the second half of the Nineteenth Century, it did not imply the enfranchisement of the people. When, for example, Charlemagne was crowned in 800 A.D., the Pope professed to be declaring the will of the people. This has been called the principle of 'virtual representation.’ Those who do not vote because they lack the franchise, or cannot vote because they are infants or even unborn, are presumed to be represented by someone like the Pope, the king, the parliament, speaking in their name.

By the coronation of 800 A.D. the empire was being transferred from the Greeks to the Germans. A reason was needed to explain why a German prince, rather than the Emperor of Byzantium, was to be henceforth the lawful successor of the Roman Caesars. The office of emperor was not hereditary, and in any event Charlemagne could have made no claim of kinship; the emperor was not appointed by the Pope; he was chosen by the German princes who belonged to the College of Electors. A doctrine was necessary which would justify and could compel everyone to believe that Charlemagne was the legitimate successor of Caesar.

The publicists of the new empire took for a foundation the accepted theory that 'the Imperial power, as successor to the Imperium of the Roman Caesars, was founded originally on an act of transference performed by the people in the Lex Regia.’ They argued that what had happened once at the beginning of the imperial power would have to happen again whenever the throne was vacant. As the imperium 'escheats or reverts to the people’; and the people had then to choose a new emperor, they might even 'translate’ the empire from one nation to another, in this instance from the Greeks to the Germans. Needless to say, 'the people,’ who were presumed to have this power, had neither votes nor any other means of making their will known. It was presumed that they wished to have their power exercised for them. In the coronation of Charlemagne, the Pope did this: he 'merely declared and exercised the people's will.’

All this seems long ago and far away. But if we reject virtual representation, the question remains: if the Pope or the king, or the parliament of magnates, cannot represent The People, how do a plurality of voters truly declare and exercise The People's will? It sounds incongruous to modern ears that the Pope should represent the people. But is it so congruous that the people should be represented by a count of the votes of some persons? The conundrum springs from the fact that while The People as a corporate body are the true owners of the sovereign power, The People, as an aggregate of voters, have diverse, conflicting self-centered interests and opinions. A plurality of them cannot be counted upon to represent the corporate nation.

The distinction upon which I am dwelling does not, as one might suppose, cease to matter when the voters become enormously many. Cannot a multitude of voters be regarded as the practical equivalent of all the people? They cannot be. To multiply the voters makes it no more probable that a plurality of them will truly represent the public interest. Our experience with mass elections in the twentieth century compels us, I think, to the contrary conclusion: that public opinion becomes less realistic as the mass to whom information must be conveyed, and argument must be addressed, grows larger and more heterogeneous.

All this will seem less odd if we remind ourselves that political democracy, as we know it in this century, is a very recent political phenomenon. The moral presumption in favor of universal suffrage may perhaps be said to have been laid down by the American and the French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. But (until the end of the nineteenth century) the actual advance towards universal suffrage was in fact spasmodic and slow. In 1900, voters in the United Kingdom were only 11 per cent of the population: they were 43 per cent in 1922. The Representation of The People Act in 1918 had very nearly tripled the electorate by simplifying the extremely complex regulations for voting and by extending the suffrage to women thirty years of age and qualified as occupants. In France the voters were 27 per cent of the population in the election of 1881; in 1951 they were 45 per cent. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in most of Western and Northern Europe, the proportion of voters to population was not more than 5 per cent. In 1890 voters in the United States were about 15 per cent of the population. It has been only since the First World War, owing to the enfranchisement of women and, in some measure, of southern Negroes, that the proportion has risen to over 30 per cent.

Large mass electorates are something quite new, much newer than the ideals, the ideas, the institutions and the usages of the liberal state. Political orators often assume that the mass of the people voted their own liberties. But the fact is that they acquired the vote after they had acquired their liberties and, in fact, largely because not being able to vote was felt by free men to be incompatible with their equal dignity. The Bill of Rights is more than two centuries older than universal suffrage in Great Britain. The enfranchised people did not establish the rule that all powers are under the law, that laws must be made, amended and administered by due process, that a legitimate government must have the consent of the governed.

I dwell upon this point because it throws light upon the fact, so disconcerting an experience in this century, that the enfranchised masses have not, surprisingly enough, been those who have most staunchly defended the institutions of freedom.

The Equations of Reality

A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done. It is only in imaginary worlds that we can do whatever we wish. In the real world there are always equations which have to be adjusted between the possible and the desired. Within limits, a man can make a free choice as to where he will strike the balance: If he makes his living by doing piece-work, he can choose to work harder and to spend more. He can also choose to work less and to spend less. But he cannot spend more and work less.

Reality confronts us in practical affairs as a long and intricate series of equations. What we are likely to call "facts of life" are the accounts, the budgets, the orders of battle, the election returns. Sometimes, but not always, the two sides of the equations can be expressed quantitatively in terms of money, as supply and demand, as income and outgo, assets and liabilities, as exports and imports. Valid choices are limited to the question of where, not whether, the opposing terms of the equation are to be brought into equilibrium. For there is always a reckoning.

In public life, for example, the budget may be balanced by reducing expenditures to the revenue from taxes; by raising taxes to meet the expenditures, or by a combination of the two, by borrowing, or by grants in aid from other governments, or by fiat credit, or by a combination of them. In one way or another the budget is in fact always balanced. The true nature of the reckoning would be clearer if, instead of talking about "an unbalanced budget," we spoke of a budget balanced not by taxes but by borrowing, of a budget balanced by inflation, or of a budget balanced by subsidy. A government which cannot raise enough money by taxes, loans, foreign grants, or by getting its fiat money accepted, will be unable to meet its bills and to pay the salaries of its employees. In bankruptcy an involuntary balance is struck for the bankrupt. He is forced to balance his accounts by reducing his expenditures to the level of his income.
Within limits, which public men have to bear in mind, the choices as to where to balance the budget are open. In making these choices, new equations confront them.

Granted that it is possible to bring the budget into balance by raising taxes, how far can taxes be raised? Somewhat but not ad infinitum. There are no fixed criteria.

But though we are unable to express all the equations quantitatively, this does not relieve us of the necessity of balancing the equations. There will be a reckoning. Practical judgment requires an informed guess: what will the taxpayers accept readily, what will they accept with grumbling but with no worse, what will arouse them to resistance and to evasion? How will the taxpayers react to the different levels of taxes if it is a time of peace, a time of war, a time of cold war, a time of social and economic disturbance, and so on? Although the various propositions cannot be reduced to precise figures, prudent men make estimates as to where the equations balance.

Their decisions as to where to balance the accounts must reflect other judgments - as to what, for example, are the military requirements in relation to foreign affairs; what is the phase of the business cycle in relation to the needs for increased or decreased demand; what is the condition of the international monetary accounts; which are the necessary public works and welfare measures, and which are those that are desirable but not indispensable.

Each of these judgments is itself the peak of a pyramid of equations: whether, for example, to enlarge or to reduce the national commitments at this or that point in the world -~ given the effect of the decision at other points in the world.

We may say, then, that public policy is made in a field of equations. The issues are the choices as to where the balance is to be struck. In the reality of things X will exact an equivalence of Y. Within the limits which the specific nature of the case permits - limits which have to be estimated - a balance has to be reached by adding to or subtracting from the terms of the equation.

Oftener than not, the two sides of the equation differ in that the one is, as compared with the other, the pleasanter, the more agreeable, the more popular. In general the softer and easier side reflects what we desire and the harder reflects what is needed in order to satisfy the desire. Now the momentous equations of war and peace, of solvency, of security and of order, always have a harder or a softer, a pleasanter or a more painful, a popular or an unpopular option. It is easier to obtain votes for appropriations than it is for taxes, to facilitate consumption than to stimulate production, to protect a market than to open it, to inflate than to deflate, to borrow than to save, to demand than to compromise, to be intransigent than to negotiate, to threaten war than to prepare for it.

Faced with these choices between the hard and the soft, the normal propensity of democratic governments is to please the largest number of voters. The pressure of the electorate is normally for the soft side of the equations.

That is why governments are unable to cope with reality when elected assemblies and mass opinions become decisive in the state, when there are no statesmen to resist the inclination of the voters and there are only politicians to excite and to exploit them.

There is then a general tendency to be drawn downward, as by the force of gravity, towards insolvency, towards the insecurity of factionalism, towards the erosion of liberty, and towards hyperbolic wars.

What Is the Public Interest?

We are examining the question of how, and by whom, the interest of an invisible community over a long span of time is represented in the practical work of governing a modern state. In ordinary circumstances voters cannot be expected to transcend their particular, localized and self-regarding opinions. As well expect men laboring in the valley to see the land as from a mountain top. In their circumstances, which as private persons they cannot readily surmount, the voters are most likely to suppose that whatever seems obviously good to them must be good for the country, and good in the sight of God.

I am far from implying that the voters are not entitled to the representation of their particular opinions and interests. But their opinions and interests should be taken for what they are and for no more. They are not--as such--propositions in the public interest. Beyond their being, if they are genuine, a true report of what various groups of voters are thinking, they have no intrinsic authority. The Gallup polls are reports of what people are thinking. But that a plurality of the people sampled in the poll think one way has no bearing upon whether it is sound public policy. For their opportunities of judging great issues are in the very nature of things limited, and the statistical sum of their opinions is not the final verdict on an issue. It is, rather, the beginning of the argument. In that argument their opinions need to be confronted by the views of the executive, defending and promoting the public interest. In the accommodation reached between the two views lies practical public policy.

Let us ask ourselves, How is the public interest discerned and judged? From what we have been saying we know that we cannot answer the question by attempting to forecast what the invisible community, with all its unborn constituents, will, would, or might say if and when it ever had a chance to vote. There is no point in toying with any notion of an imaginary plebiscite to discover the public interest. We cannot know what we ourselves will be thinking five years hence, much less what infants now in the cradle will be thinking when they go into the polling booth.

Yet their interests, as we observe them today, are within the public interest. Living adults share, we must believe, the same public interest. For them, however, the public interest is mixed with, and is often at odds with, their private and special interests. Put this way, we can say, I suggest, that the public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.

The Elected Executive

Our inquiry has shown, I believe, that we cannot take popular government for granted, as if its principles were settled and beyond discussion. We are compelled to agree with Sir Henry Maine who wrote, some seventy years ago, that 'the actual history of popular government since it was introduced, in its modern shape, into the civilized world,’ does 'little’ to support the assumption that popular government has an indefinitely long future before it. Experience rather tends to show that it is characterized by great fragility, and that since its appearance, all forms of government have become more insecure than they were before.’

We have been dwelling upon the devitalization of the executive power as the cause of the fragility that Maine speaks of. It is, I have been saying, the disorder which results from a functional derangement in the relationship between the executive power on the one hand, the representative assemblies and the mass electorates on the other hand.

Democratic states are susceptible to this derangement because congenitally the executive, when dependent on election, is weaker than the elected representatives. The normal drainage of power in a democratic state is away from the governing center and down into the constituencies. And the normal tendency of elections is to reduce elected officers to the role of agents of organized pluralities. Modern democratic governments are, to be sure, big governments, in their personnel, in the range and variety of their projects, the ubiquitousness of their interventions. ; But to be big is not necessarily to be strong. They are, in fact, swollen rather than strong, being too weak to resist to the pressure of special interests and of the departmental bureaucracies.

As a rule competition in the electoral market works like Gresham's law: the soft money drives the hard money out of circulation. The competitive odds are heavily against the candidate who, like Burke with the electors of Bristol, promises to be true to his own best reason and judgment. The odds are all in favor of the candidate who offers himself as the agent, the delegate, the spokesman, the errand boy, of blocs of voters.

In a modern democratic state, the chief executive office must be elective. But as heredity, prescription, consecration, rank and hierarchy are dissolved by the acids of modernity, the executives become totally dependent on election. They have no status and no tenure which reinforce their consciences, which invest them with power to withstand the tides of popular opinion and to defend the public interest.

They hold their offices for a short time, and to do this they must maneuver and manipulate combinations among the factions and the pressure groups. Their policies must be selected and shaped so as to attract and hold together these combinations. There are moments, the 'finest hours,’ when communities are lifted above their habitual selves in unity and fellowship. But these moments are rare. They are not the stuff of daily life in a democracy, and they are remembered like a miracle in a dream. In the daily routine of democratic politics, elected executives can never for long take their eyes from the mirror of the constituencies. They must not look too much out of the window at the realities beyond.

The Protection of the Executive

During the nineteenth century good democrats were primarily concerned with insuring representation in the assemblies and with extending the control of the assemblies over the executive power. It is true that the problem of the inadequate executive, overridden and dominated by the assembly, was very much in the minds of the Founding Fathers at the Philadelphia convention, and it has been a continuing concern of the critics and opponents of democracy. But until the twentieth century the problem was not sharply and urgently posed.
That there was such a problem was well known. But it was not the immediate problem?

For some generations before 1914, the West enjoyed fine political weather. Moreover, the full force of the coming enfranchisement, emancipation, and secularization of the whole population had not yet worked its consequences. Governments still had authority and power, which were independent of the assemblies and the electorates. They still drew upon the traditional sources of authority - upon prescription, hereditary prerogative, and consecration.

Yet the need to protect the executive and judicial powers from the representative assemblies and from mass opinion has long been understood. Many expedients have been devised to soften, to neutralize, to check and to balance the pressure of parties, factions, lobbies, sects. The expedients have taken, says Bryce, two general forms, the one being to put constitutional restrictions upon the assembly and the other, by a division of the whole power of the people,’ to weaken it. This has been done by electing the legislature and the executive separately, or by having the legislative bodies elected by the differing constituencies and at different times.

The constitutional mechanisms have never themselves been sufficient to protect the executive. And much invention and reforming energy have been applied to finding other ways to insulate the judicial, the executive and the administrative functions from the heavy pressures of 'politics'' and 'politicians.’ The object has been to separate them from the electoral process. The judiciary must be independent of fear and favor. There must be no connection between the judgment of the courts and the election returns. The civil service, the military services, the foreign service, the scientific and technical services, the quasi-judicial administrative tribunals, the investigating commissions, the public schools and institutions of learning, should be substantially independent of the elections. These reforms were inspired by the dire effects of the spoils system, and they were pushed as practical remedies for obvious evils.

Yet implicit in them there is a principle which, if it can be applied deeply enough, gets at the root of the disorder of modern democracy. It is that though public officials are elected by the voters, or are appointed by men who are elected, they owe their primary allegiance not to the opinions of the voters but to the law, to the criteria of their professions, to the integrity of the arts and sciences in which they work, to their own conscientious and responsible convictions of their duty within the rules and the frame of reference they have sworn to respect.

Liberalism and Jacobinism

We are living in a time of massive popular counter­revolution against liberal democracy. It is a reaction to the failure of the West to cope with the miseries and anxieties of the Twentieth Century. The liberal democracies have been tried and found wanting--found wanting not only in their capacity to govern successfully in this period of wars and upheavals, but also in their ability to defend and maintain the political philosophy that underlies the liberal way of life.

If we go back to the beginnings of the modern democratic movements in the eighteenth century, we can distinguish two diverging lines of development. The one is a way of progress in liberal constitutional democracy. The other is a morbid course of development into totalitarian conditions.

One of the first to realize what was happening was Alexis de Tocqueville. He foresaw that the 'democratic nations are menaced' by a 'species of oppression ...unlike anything that ever before existed in the world." But what is more, he discerned the original difference between the healthy and the morbid development of democ­racy. In I833, after his voyage in America, where he had foreseen the threat of mass democracy, de Tocqueville visited England. There he was impressed with the contrast between the attitude of the English aristocracy, which was just in the way of accommodating itself to a newly enfranchised mass of voters, and the French noblesse of the Ancien Régime. He went on to reflect that

…from an early time a fundamental difference existed between the behavior of the governing classes in England and in France. The nobility, the cornerstone of medieval society, revealed in England a peculiar ability to merge and mix with other social groups, while in France it tended, on the contrary, to close its ranks and preserve its original purity of birth.

In the earlier Middle Ages all Western Europe had a similar social system. But some time in the Middle Ages, one cannot say exactly when, a change pregnant with tremendous consequences occurred in the British Isles and in the British Isles only--the English nobility developed into an open aristocracy while the continental noblesse stubbornly remained within the rigid limits of a caste. 

This, observes de Tocqueville, is the most revolutionary fact in English history, and he claims to have been the first to observe its importance and to grasp its full significance. It is, truly, a deep and illuminating observation on the conditions which are favorable to a healthy and progressive evolution of democracy and on the conditions which make it morbid and degenerative. The crucial difference is between what we might call enfranchisement by assimilation into the governing class, as exemplified in England, and, per contra, enfranchisement by the overthrow and displacing of the governing class as exemplified in France. In the one the government remains but becomes more responsible and more responsive; in the other, the government is overthrown with the liquidation of the governing class.

Although the two ways of evolution appear to have the same object a society with free institutions under popular government--they are radically different and they arrive at radically different ends.

The first way, that of assimilation, presumes the existence of a state which is already constitutional in principle, which is under laws that are no longer arbitrary, though they may be unjust and unequal. Into this constitutional state more and more people are admitted to the governing class and to the voting electorate. The unequal and the unjust laws are revised until eventually all the people have equal opportunities to enter the government and to be represented. Broadly speaking, this has been the working theory of the British movement towards a democratic society at home and also in the Commonwealth and Empire. This, too, was the working theory of the principal authors of the American Constitution, and this was how --though few of them welcomed it --they envisaged the enfranchisement of the whole adult population.

The other way is that of the Jacobin revolution. The people rise to power by overthrowing the ruling class and by liquidating its privileges and prerogatives. This is the doctrine of democratic revolution which was developed by French thinkers in the eighteenth century and was put into practice by the Jacobin party in the French Revolution. In its English incarnation the doctrine became known as Radicalism. In America, though it had its early disciples, notably Tom Paine, not until the era of the Founding Fathers was over, not until the era of Andrew Jackson, did the Jacobin doctrine become the popular political creed of the American democracy.

The Jacobin philosophy rests on a view of human so­ciety which the encyclopedist, Holbach, stated in this way: 

We see on the face of the globe only incapable, unjust sovereigns, enervated by luxury, corrupted by flattery, depraved through unpunished license, and without talent, morals, or good qualities,

What Holbach had, in fact, seen on the face of the globe was the French court then the most powerful in Europe and the paragon of all the lesser courts. When he was writing, it would have been difficult for anyone on the continent of Europe to imagine a king and a ruling class who were not, like those he saw living at the Court of Versailles, exclusive and incompetent, corrupt, unteachable and unconcerned.

'Would you know the story in brief, of almost all our wretchedness?' asked Diderot. 'Here it is. There existed the natural man, and into this man was introduced an artificial man, whereupon a civil war arose within him lasting through life ...If you propose to become a tyrant over him.... do your best to poison him with a theory of morals against nature; impose every kind of fetter on him; embarrass his movements with a thousand obstacles; place phantoms around him to frighten him. Would you see him happy and free? Do not meddle with his affairs.... I appeal to every civil, religious and political institution; examine these closely, and, if I am not mistaken, you will find the human species, century after century, subject to a yoke which a mere handful of knaves chose to impose on it.... Be wary of him who seeks to establish order; to order is to obtain the mastery of others by giving them trouble.

If we compare the mood of this passage with that of the Declaration of Independence, the work of the other brand of revolutionists, we must be struck by the nihilism of Diderot. Diderot had been exasperated to a blind destructive despair by the rigidity of the French governing caste. He could not feel that there was anything to be done with any government, judging by the one he suffered under, except to abolish it.

Jefferson and his colleagues, on the other hand, were interested in government. They were in rebellion because they were being denied the rights of representation and of participation which they, like other subjects of the same King, would have enjoyed had they lived in England. The Americans were in rebellion against the 'usurpations' of George III, not against authority as such but against the abuse of authority. The American revolutionists had in fact participated in the colonial governments. They intended to play leading parts, as indeed they did, in the new government. Far from wishing to overthrow the authority of government, or to deny and subvert, as Diderot did, the moral foundations of authority, they went into rebellion first in order to gain admittance into, and then to take possession of, the organs of government.

When they declared that 'a prince (George III) whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,' they were not saying that there was no one who was fit to be the ruler of a free people. They were imbued with the English idea that the governing class must learn to share its special prerogatives by admitting new members. The American Revolutionists were themselves the new members who had been unjustly, in fact illegally, excluded from the government of the colonies. They themselves meant to govern the colonies after they had overthrown the government of the King. They were not nihilists to whom the revolutionary act of overthrowing the sovereign is the climax and consummation of everything.

The Paradigm of Revolution

Of the two rival philosophies, the Jacobin is almost everywhere in the ascendant. It is a ready philosophy for men who, previously excluded from the ruling class, and recently enfranchised, have no part in the business of governing the state, and no personal expectation of being called upon to assume the responsibilities of office.
The Jacobin doctrine is an obvious reaction, as de Tocqueville's observation explains, to government by a caste:

Though [The Jacobin doctrine] professes to be a political philosophy, the doctrine is not, in fact, a philosophy of government. It is a gospel and also a strategy for revolution. It announces the promise that the crusade which is to overthrow the ruling caste will by the act of revolution create a good society. ...Again and again it has been proved how effective is this formula for arousing, sustaining and organizing men's energies for revolution: to declare that evil in society has been imposed upon the many by the few - by priests, nobles, capitalists, imperialists, liberals, aliens - and that evil will disappear when the many who are pure have removed these few who are evil.

Since the world will be good when the evil few have been overthrown, there is no need for the doubts and the disputes which would arise among the revolutionists if they had to make serious practical decisions on the problems of the post-revolutionary world.

To Rousseau, as to John Calvin who lived in Geneva before him, men were fallen and depraved, deformed with their lusts and their aggressions. The force of the new doctrine lay in its being a gospel of redemption and regeneration. Men who were evil were to be made good. Jacobinism is, in .fact, a Christian heresy--perhaps the most influential since the Arian.

in the Jacobin gospel, this transformation was to be achieved by the revolutionary act of emancipation from authority. The religious end was to be reached, but with-out undergoing the religious experience. There was to be no dark night of the soul for each person in the labor of his own regeneration. Instead there were to be riots and strikes and votes and seizure of political power. Instead of the inner struggle of the individual soul, there was to be one great public massive, collective redemption.

Democratic Education

We live long enough after the new gospel was proclaimed to have seen what came of it. The post-revolutionary man, enfranchised and emancipated, has not turned out to be the New Man. He is the old Adam. Yet the future of democratic society has been staked on the promises and the predictions of the Jacobin gospel.

For the Jacobin doctrine has pervaded the theory of mass education in the newly enfranchised mass democracies. In America and in most of the newer liberal democracies of the Western world, the Jacobin heresy is, though not unchallenged and not universal, the popular and dominant theory in the schools.

Its popularity is easily accounted for. It promises to solve the problem which is otherwise so nearly insoluble --how to educate rapidly and sufficiently the ever-expanding masses who are losing contact with the traditions of Western society. The explosive increase of the population in the past hundred and fifty years, its recent enfranchisement during the past fifty years, the dissolution, or at least the radical weakening, of the bonds of the family, the churches, and of the local community have combined to make the demand upon the schools almost impossibly big.

Not only do the schools have to teach the arts and sciences to a multiplying mass of pupils. They have also to act in the place of the family, the household economy, the church, and the settled community, and to be the bearers of the traditions and the disciplines of a civilized life. What the school system could do has never been anywhere nearly equal to the demands upon it. The modern democracies have never been willing to pay the price of recruiting and training enough teachers, of supporting enough schools and colleges, of offering enough scholarships to give all children equal opportunities.

The Jacobin doctrine does not solve this problem of mass education- as it does not solve or even throw light upon the problem of how to construct and govern the utopian society which is to exist when the revolution has taken place. What it does is to provide an escape from these unsolved problems. It affirms that in politics the state will wither away and then there will be no problems of how to govern it. For the democratic schools it affirms that there is no problem of supplying the demand: for almost nothing has to be taught in school and almost no effort is needed to learn it.

'The fundamental principle of all morality,' said Rousseau in his reply to Archbishop de Beaumont's condemnation of his book, Emile, 'is that man is a being naturally good, loving justice and order: that there is not any original perversity in the human heart, and that the first movements of nature are always right.'

And so, when Rousseau's disciple, Pestalozzi, the celebrated educator, said that 'in the newborn child are hidden those faculties which are to unfold during life,' he meant that the hidden faculties which would unfold were all of them good ones. Only good faculties, it transpired, were inherited. The evil faculties, on the contrary, were acquired. So Froebel, who was Pestalozzi's disciple, felt able to say that 'the still young being, even though as yet unconsciously like a product of nature, precisely and surely wills that which is best for himself.'

Froebel, of course, had no way of proving that infants are precise and sure about anything. Nor did Rousseau know how to prove that there is no perversity in the human heart, and that the first movements of nature are always right. But if only all this could be taken as true, how miraculously it simplified the problems of the new democracies! If men 'do not have to acquire painfully by learning, if they are born with the necessary good faculties, if their first intentions are always right, if they unconsoously but precisely and surely will what is best for themselves from infancy on, then there is in the very nature of things a guarantee that popular government must succeed.

The best government will be the one which governs the least and requires, therefore, the least training and experience in the art of governing. The best education for democracy will be the one which trains, disciplines, and teaches the least. For the necessary faculties are inborn and they are more likely to be perverted by too much culture than to wither for the lack of it. There is, moreover, no body of public knowledge and no public philosophy that the schools are called upon to transmit. There are, therefore, no inconvenient questions of faith and morals, questions on which there is no prospect of agreement by popular decision. The curriculum can be emptied of all the studies and the disciplines which relate to faith and to morals. And so while education can do something to enable the individual to make a success of his own career, the instinctive rightness and righteousness of the people can be relied upon for everything else.

This is a convenient and agreeably plausible escape from reality. Pestalozzi described it by saying that . . .
Sound Education stands before me symbolized by a tree planted near fertilizing water. A little seed, which contains the design of the tree, its form and proportion, is placed in the soil. See how it germinates and expands into trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and fruit! The whole tree is an uninterrupted chain of organic parts, the plan of which existed in its seed and root. Man is similar to the tree. In the newborn child are hidden those faculties which are to unfold during life.>

The metaphor reveals very neatly how the Jacobin theory inhibits education. In no way that is relevant to the problems of politics and education is a man similar, as Pestalozzi says he is, to a tree which is planted near fertilizing water. For the tree will never, no matter how fertilizing the water near which it is planted, grow up and take to writing treatises, as Pestalozzi did, on the education of trees and how to raise the best trees from all the little saplings. The tree will never worry about whether its little saplings are going to be planted near the most fertilizing of the waters. The educator of a tree is, in short, not another tree. The educator of a tree, the man who plants it near the fertilizing water, is a being so radically different from a tree that the tree is incapable of being aware of his existence. If, however, the tree were enough like a man to notice such things, the teacher of the trees who cultivates them would be worshipped as the god of trees.

Pestalozzi's trees are, in fact, a caricature, but a telling one, of the educational vacuum created by the Jacobin theory. The tradition of the trees is transmitted in their seed, and the older trees are unable to teach and the saplings are unable to learn. Each tree exists for itself, drawing what it can from the fertilizing waters if they happen to be there. Now if human education is founded upon this notion, it must fail to transmit the moral system, indeed the psychic structure, of a civilized society. Relying upon the inherent rightness of the natural impulses of man's first nature, the Jacobin theory does away with the second civilized nature, with the ruler of the impulses, who is identified with the grand necessities of the commonwealth. It overthrows the ruler within each man, -- he who exercises 'the royal and politic rule' over his 'irascible and concupiscible powers.'

When reason no longer represents society within the human psyche, then it becomes the instrument of appetite, desire and passion. As William Godwin said in 1798: 'Reason is wholly confined to adjusting the comparison between the different objects of desire and investigating the most successful mode of attaining those objects.' More than a hundred years later (1911) Prof. William MacDougal put it this way: 'The instinctive impulses determine the end of all activities, and ...all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but ...the instrument by which those impulses seek their satisfactions ....' Or, as Bernard Shaw has it, 'Ability to reason accurately is as desirable as ever, since it is only by accurate reasoning that we can calculate our actions so as to do what we intend to do -- that is, to fulfill our will.'

If it is the role of reason merely to be an instrument of each man's career, then the mission of the schools is to turn out efficient careerists. They must teach the know-how of success, and this--seasoned with the social amenities and some civic and patriotic exhortation-- is the subject matter of education. The student elects those subjects which will presumably equip him for success in his career. The rest are superfluous. There is no such thing as a general order of knowledge and a public philosophy, which he needs to possess.

From Jacobinism to Leninism

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels produced an explanation of why the first revolution had not fulfilled the promises of the Jacobins. It was that 'Modern bourgeois society, rising out of the ruins of feudal society, did not make an end of class antagonisms. It merely set up new classes in place of the old.'

As Marx and Engels were scholars and men of the world, they should not have been surprised to find that 'the history of all human society past and present has been the history of class struggles,' and, had they not be-come possessed by the Jacobin dogma, they would have thought it most probable that there would be class struggles in the future. But in the Jacobin philosophy the world as it is must be transformed; the day is soon to come when history, reaching its culmination, will end, and there will be no more struggles. So Marx and Engels decided that one more, though this time the conclusive and the final, revolution was called for, in order to achieve the classless society: 'The proletariat ...is compelled to organize itself as a class,' and 'by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production.... Then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.'

The revolution which is behind us has failed. But the revolution which is still to come will put 'in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms ... an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.'

By the beginning of the twentieth century it was becoming more and more apparent that Marxism was going to undergo the same disappointment as had the Jacobin movement. Since Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto a very considerable progress had been made in carrying out its specific planks. What that document had asked in 1848, 'the most advanced nations'' had gone a long way toward doing. They were taxing inheritances, they had virtually nationalized central banking, transportation and communications, they were extending the industries owned by the state, they were abolishing child labor and providing free education in public schools. 

Yet these reforms were not leading to the classless society. Instead of one class or no class it was more probable that modern societies were heading towards a diversity of classes. Nor, as Engels had promised in his 'Anti-Duhring,' did it look as if 'the state ...withers away.' As a matter of fact the progressive reforms were requiring a rapid enlargement of the powers of the state and an expansion of the bureaucracy. The Marxian predictions were not being fulfilled. The rich were not becoming richer while the poor became poorer. The middle class was not disappearing. It was growing larger. Society was not splitting into the two great hostile camps of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. If it was splitting, it was into factions and into pressure groups.

Owing to the wide disparity between the dogma and the existential reality of things, a crisis developed within the revolutionary socialist movement. This crisis was resolved by Lenin. He could not do again what Marx had done a half century earlier. He could not once more identify the next class, and this time the positively last class, that had to be overthrown. He could not point to the last barricade that had to be stormed. It was then that Lenin resolved the crisis within the revolutionary movement by committing it to the totalitarian solution. Abandoning the naive but attractive promise that utopia would follow simply and automatically from the revolutionary act, he replaced it with the terrible doctrine that utopia must be brought about by an indefinitely prolonged process of unlimited revolution which would exterminate all opposition, actual and potential.

The totalitarian tendency has always been present and logically implied in the modern revolutionary movement. Yet Mr. Isaiah Berlin is no doubt right in saying that while Lenin's solution of the crisis within the revolutionary movement 'marked the culmination of a process,' this was 'an event ...which altered the history of our world.'

In 1903, at the conference of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which began in Brussels and ended in London, Lenin was asked by a delegate named Posadovsky 'whether the emphasis laid by the 'hard' Socialists... upon the need for the exercise of absolute authority by the revolutionary nucleus of the Party might not prove incompatible with those fundamental liberties to whose realization Socialism, no less than liberalism, was officially dedicated.' Posadovsky asked whether the basic, minimum civil liberties -- 'the sacrosanctity of the person''- could be infringed and even violated if the party leader so decided.

The answer was given by Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russian Marxism, and, says Mr. Berlin, 'its most venerated figure, a cultivated, fastidious and morally sensitive scholar of wide outlook,' who had for twenty years lived in Western Europe and was much respected by the leaders of Western Socialism. Plekhanov was the very symbol of civilized 'scientific' thinking among Russian revoiutionaries. 'Plekhanov, speaking solemnly, and with a splendid disregard for grammar, pronounced the words, salus revolutiae suprema lex. Certainly, if the revolution demanded it, everything--democracy, liberty, the rights of the individual --must be sacrificed to it. If the democratic assembly elected by the Russian people after the revolution proved amenable to Marxist tactics, it would be kept in being as a Long Parliament; if not, it would be disbanded as quickly as possible. A Marxist revolution could not be carried through by men obsessed by scrupulous regard for the principles of bourgeois liberals. Doubtless whatever was valuable in these principles, like everything else good and desirable, would ultimately be realized by the victorious working class; but during the revolutionary period preoccupation with such ideals was evidence of a lack of seriousness.'

Mr. Berlin goes on to say that 'Plekhanov, who was brought up in a humane and liberal tradition, did, of course, later retreat from this position himself The mixture of utopian faith and brutal disregard for civilized morality proved too repulsive to a man who had spent the greater part of his civilized and productive life among Western workers and their leaders. Like the vast majority of Social Democrats, like Marx and Engels themselves, he was too European to try to realize a policy which, in the words of Shigalev in Dostoevski's The Possessed, 'starting from unlimited liberty ends in unlimited despotism.' But Lenin accepted the premises, and being logically driven to conclusions repulsive to most of his colleagues, accepted them easily and without apparent qualms. His assumptions were, perhaps, in some sense, still those of theoptimistic rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the coercion, violence, execution, the total suppression of individual differences, the rule of a small, virtually self-appointed minority, were necessary only in the interim period, only so long as there was a powerful enemy to be destroyed.'But how was it that Lenin, and so many after him, have accepted easily and without apparent qualms the repulsive process of violence, executions, suppressions, deception, under the unlimited rule of self-appointed oligarchs? Why do the full-fledged totalitarians, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, not shrink from the means they adopt to achieve their end? The answer is that the inhuman means are justified by the superhuman end: they are the agents of history or of nature. They are the men appointed to fulfill the destiny of creation. They have been known as atheists. But in fact God was their enemy, not because they did not believe in the Deity, but because they themselves were assuming His functions and claiming His prerogatives.

The Overpassing of the Bound

This is the root of the matter, and it is here that the ultimate issue lies. Can men, acting like gods, be appointed to establish heaven on earth? If we believe that they can be, then the rest follows. To fulfill their mission they must assume a godlike omnipotence. They must be jealous gods, monopolizing power, destroying all rivals, compelling exclusive loyalty. The family, the churches, the schools, the corporations, the labor unions and cooperative societies, the voluntary associations and all the arts and sciences, must be their servants. Dissent and deviation are treason and quietism is sacrilege.

But the monopoly of all power will not be enough. There remains the old Adam. Unless they can remake the fallen nature of a man, the self-elected gods cannot make a heaven of the earth. In the Jacobin gospel of the eighteenth century, and even in the Marxist gospel of the nineteenth century, the newman would be there when the artificial garments were removed--when once he was emancipated by the revolutionary act from the deformation imposed upon him by the clergy, the nobility and the bourgeoisie. A hundred years later the new man was nowhere in sight. So the early and softer gospel gave way to a later and infinitely harder one. The new man and the new heaven on earth demanded the remaking of pre-Leninist and pre-Hitlerian man. The decrees of history as revealed to Marx, and the decrees of nature as revealed to Hitler, had to be carried out.

But in order to do that, the human species had first to be transformed--or failing that, exterminated. Destiny called upon the mortal god to make surviving mankind "an active unfailing carrier," as Hannah Arendt says, "of a law to which human beings would otherwise only passively and reluctantly be subject." 

In the eyes of its devotees, this is not an inhuman and satanic doctrine. It is above and beyond humanity. It is for the superman that its gospel announces. The ruthlessness, the arbitrariness, the cruelty are not monstrous wickedness. They are natural and necessary, predestined like the fall of a sparrow, in the sublime construction of the earthly paradise.

The issue is carried outside the realm of rational discourse. As Richard Hooker said of the Puritan revolutionaries three centuries ago, when men believe they are acting "under the absolute command of Almighty God," their discipline "must be received ...although the world by receiving it should be clean turned upside down.' There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation. This is the sovereign evil against which the traditions of civility are arrayed.

Here is "the mortal sin original," the forbidden fruit, which Satan tempts Eve to eat:
Taste this, and be henceforth among the Gods Thyself a Goddess.

This tasting of the tree, as Adam says to Dante, was "the overpassing of the bound."

Zeus, says Aeschylus
.. is a chastener of forward wills
And he correcteth with a heavy hand.
Wherefore be ye instructors of your Lord,
And with well-reasoned admonitions teach Him
To have a humbler heart and cast away
The sin of pride, for it oftendeth God?

The delusion of men that they are gods -- the pretension that they have a commission to act as if they were gods- is, says Aeschylus, "the blind arrogance of childish thought." It can become "the very madness of a mind diseased." Yet it is not a new and recent infection, but rather the disposition of our first natures, of our natural and uncivilized selves. Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.

Rousseau and the Jacobins, Marx and the nineteenth-century socialists, did not introduce new impulses and passions into men. They exploited and aggravated impulses and passions that are always there. In the traditions of civility, man's second and more rational nature must master his first and more elemental.

The Jacobins and their successors made a political religion founded upon the reversal of civility. Instead of ruling the elemental impulses, they stimulated and armed them. Instead of treating the pretension to being a god as the mortal sin original, they proclaimed it to be the glory and destiny of man. Upon this gospel they founded a popular religion of the rise of the masses to power. Lenin, Hitler and Stalin, the hard totalitarian Jacobins of the twentieth century, carried this movement and the logical implications of its gospel further and further towards the very bitter end.

And what is that bitter end? It is an everlasting war with the human condition: war with the finitude of man and with the moral ends of finite men, and, therefore, war against freedom, against t justice, against the laws and against the order of the good society--as they are conserved in the traditions of civility, as they are articulated in the public philosophy.

On the Efficacy of Ideas

There are those who would say, using the words of philosophers to prove it, that it is the characteristic illusion of the tender-minded that they believe in philosophy. Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach and theorize. And being theorists by profession, they exaggerate the efficacy of ideas, which are mere airy nothings without mass or energy, the mere shadows of the existential world of substance and of force, of habits and desires, of machines and armies.

Yet the illusion, if it were one, is inordinately tenacious. It is impossible to remove it from the common sense in which we live and have our being. In the familiar daylight world we cannot act as if ideas had no consequences. The whole vast labor and passion of public life would be nonsense if we did not believe that it makes a difference what is done by parties, newspapers, books, broadcasts, schools and churches. All their effort would be irrelevant, indeed nonsense, like an argument about what Nebuchadnezzar should be served for tomorrow morning's breakfast.

The most thoroughgoing skeptic is unable, in practice, to make a clean sweep - to say that since ideas have no consequences there is no such thing as a good idea or a bad one, a true idea or a false one. For there is no escaping the indubitable fact of experience that we are often mistaken, and that it makes a difference to have been wrong.

The chemistry of our bodies is never mistaken. The reaction of one chemical element to another chemical element is always correct, is never misled by misinformation, by untruth, and by illusion. The doctor can be mistaken about the chemistry of his patient, having failed to detect a substance which falsifies his diagnosis. But it is only the doctor who can be wrong; the chemical process cannot be.

Why do men make mistakes? Because an important part of human behavior is reaction to the pictures in their heads. Human behavior takes place in relation to a pseudo-environment - a representation, which is not quite the same for any two individuals, of what they suppose to be - not what is - the reality of things.
This man-made, this cultural environment, which has its being in the minds of men, is interposed between man as a biological organism and the external reality. It is in this realm that ideas are efficacious. They are efficacious because men react to their ideas and images, to their pictures and notions of the world, treating these pictures as if they were the reality.

The airy nothings in the realm of essence are efficacious in the existential world when a man, believing it to be true or good, treats the idea as if it were the reality. In this way faith in an idea can quite literally remove a mountain. To be sure no man's idea can remove a mountain on the moon. But if the American people took it into their heads that life would not be worth living until Pike's Peak was in the suburbs of Chicago, they could move Pike's Peak. They could do it if they and their descendants were sufficiently devoted to the idea for a long enough time.

Nothing would happen to Pike's Peak if the idea of removing it were merely proclaimed and celebrated. The idea would have to become, like the idea of winning a war, the object and the focus of the nation's energies.
Then the idea would operate in the minds of men who voted, who planned, who would engineer the undertaking, who would raise the money, would recruit the labor, would procure the equipment, and - shall we say - would suppress the mounting resistance of the objectors to the project.

Because ideas have the power to organize human behavior, their efficacy can be radical. They are indeed radical when, as the image of what a man should be, they govern the formation of his character and so imprint a lasting organization on his behavior. Because the images of man are the designs of the molds in which characters are formed, they are of critical concern. What is the image of the good king, the good courtier, the good subject - of the good master and of the good slave – of the good citizen, the good soldier, the good politician, the good boss, the good workingman? The images matter very much. The ones which prevail will govern education. The ideas of what men should be like become efficacious in the existential world because, as they are imposed by the family, the school and the community, they cause men to "acquire the kind of character which makes them want to act in the way they have to act as members of the society or of a special class within it." They learn "to desire what, objectively, it is necessary for them to do," and ~outer force is . . . replaced by" the "inner compulsion" of their own characters.

That there are limits to education in this sense, we cannot doubt. But we do not know where they are. There is, that is to say, no clear and certain boundary between character which is acquired and those more or less uneducable traits of human nature, evolved during the long ages and transmitted by inheritance. We are quite unable to predict with any certainty or precision how far the individual pupil is educable - or rather how far he is still educable by the time a particular educator gets hold of him, and after he has already acquired a character of sorts in his infancy.

Yet, however crude and clumsy our knowledge of the process, there is no doubt that a character is acquired by experience and education. Within limits that we have not measured, human nature is malleable. Can we doubt it when we remember that when Shakespeare was alive there were no Americans, that when Virgil was alive there were no Englishmen, and that when Homer was alive there were no Romans? Quite certainly, men have acquired the ways of thinking, feeling and acting which we recognize as their ethnic, national, class and occupational characteristics. Comparatively speaking these characteristics are, moreover, recently acquired. Even within the brief span of historical time characters have been acquired and have been lost and have been replaced by other characters. This is what gives to man's history, despite his common humanity, its infinite variety.

Because human nature is, as Hocking puts it, "the most plastic part of the living world, the most adaptable, the most educable," ~ it is also the most mal-adaptable and mis-educable. The cultural heritage which contains the whole structure and fabric of the good life is acquired. It may be rejected. It may be acquired badly. It may not be acquired at all. For we are not born with it. If it is not transmitted from one generation to the next, it may be lost, indeed forgotten through a dark age, until somewhere and somehow men rediscover it, and, exploring the world again, recreate it anew.

The acquired culture is not transmitted in our genes, and so the issue is always in doubt. The good life in the, good society, though attainable, is never attained and possessed once and for all. So what has been attained will again be lost if the wisdom of the good life in a good society is not transmitted.

That is the central and critical condition of the Western society: that the democracies are ceasing to receive the traditions of civility in which the good society, the liberal, democratic way of life at its best, originated and developed. They are cut off from the public philosophy and the political arts which are needed to govern the liberal democratic society. They have not been initiated into its secrets, and they do not greatly care for as much of it as they are prepared to understand.

In Toynbee's terrible phrase, they are proletarians who are "in" but are not "of' the society they dominate.

The Capacity to Believe

The freedom which modern men are turned away from, not seldom with relief and often with enthusiasm, is the hollow shell of freedom. The current theory of freedom holds that what men believe may be important to them but that it has almost no public significance. The outer defenses of the free way of life stand upon the legal guarantees against the coercion of belief. But the citadel is vacant because the public philosophy is gone, and all that the defenders of freedom have to defend in common is a public neutrality and a public agnosticism.

Yet when we have demonstrated the need for the public philosophy, how do we prove that the need can be satisfied? Not, we may be sure, by exhortation, however eloquent, to rise to the enormity of the present danger, still less by lamentations about the glory and the grandeur that are past. Modern men, to whom the argument is addressed, have a low capacity to believe in the invisible, the intangible, and the imponderable.

Exhortation can capture the will to believe. But of the will to believe there is no lack. The modern trouble is in a low capacity to believe in precepts which restrict and restrain private interests and desire. Conviction of the need of these restraints is difficult to restore once it has been radically impaired. Public principles can, of course, be imposed by a despotic government. But the public philosophy of a free society cannot be restored by fiat and by force. To come to grips with the unbelief which underlies the condition of anomie, we must find a way to re-establish confidence in the validity of public standards. We must renew the convictions from which our political morality springs.

In the prevailing popular culture all philosophies are the instruments of some man's purpose, all truths are self-centered and self regarding, and all principles are the rationalizations of some special interest. There is no public criterion of the true and the false, of the right and the wrong, beyond that which the preponderant mass of voters, consumers, readers, and listeners happen at the moment to be supposed to want.

There is no reason to think that this condition of mind can be changed until it can be proved to the modern skeptic that there are certain principles which, when they have been demonstrated, only the willfully irrational can deny, that there are certain obligations binding on all men who are committed to a free society, and that only the willfully subversive can reject them.

When I say that the condition of anomie cannot be corrected unless these things are proved to the modern skeptic, I mean that the skeptic must find the proof compelling. His skepticism cannot be cured by forcing him to conform. If he has no strong beliefs, he will usually conform if he is made to conform. But the very fact that he has been forced by the government or by the crowd will prove that the official doctrine lacked something in the way of evidence or of reason to carry full conviction. In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief.

In order to repair the capacity to believe in the public philosophy, it will be necessary to demonstrate the practical relevance and the productivity of the public philosophy. It is almost impossible to deny its high and broad generalities. The difficulty is to see how they are to be applied in the practical affairs of a modern state.

We are back, in a manner of speaking, before the Roman lawyers worked out the ius gentium and related it to the ius naturale, back with Alexander the Great, who understood the pressing need for common laws in a plural society, and with Zeno who formulated the higher generalities.Given the practical need which is acute, and the higher generalities, which are self-evident, can we develop a positive working doctrine of the good society under modern conditions? The answer which I am making to this question is that it can be done if the ideas of the public philosophy are recovered and are re-established in the minds of men of light and leading.