This book, while conscious of the role accidents play in history, continues the search for the general causes of which particular events are but the outward manifestations. The particular events demonstrate the inability of our society to understand, and to cope with, the political problems which the age poses, especially on the international scene. Consideration of the general causes points to a general decay in the political thinking of the Western world. This decay is represented most typically by the belief in the power of science to solve all problems and, more particularly, all political problems which confront man in the modern age.
Two moods determine the attitude of our civilization to the social world: confidence in the power of reason, as represented by modern science, to solve the social problems of our age and despair at the ever renewed failure of scientific reason to solve them. That mood of despair is not new to our civilization, nor is it peculiar to it. The intellectual and moral history of mankind is the story of inner insecurity, of the anticipation of impending doom, of metaphysical anxieties. These are rooted in the situation of man as a creature which, being conscious of itself, has lost its animal innocence and security and is now forever striving to recapture this innocence and security in religions, moral, and social worlds of its own. What is new in the present situation is not the existence of these anxieties in popular feeling but their strength and confusion, on the one hand, and their absence in the main currents of philosophy and political thought, on the other.
The main characteristic of this philosophy is the reliance on reason to find though a series of logical deductions from either postulated or empirical premises the truths of philosophy, ethics, and politics alike and through its own inner force to re-create reality in the image of these truths. This philosophy has found its classical realization in the rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet its influence extends beyond these centuries and, as a mode of thought apart from any particular school of philosophy, dominates the modern mind.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the belief science has been the main manifestation of this mode of thought. This belief in science is the one intellectual trait which sets our age apart from preceding periods of history. Whatever different philosophic, economic, and political beliefs people may hold, they are united in the conviction that science is able, at least potentially, to solve all the problems of man. In this view, the problems of society and nature are essentially identical and the solution of social problems depends upon the quantitative extension of the method of the natural sciences to the social sphere. This is the common ground on which Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer and John Dewey take their stand.
On the political scene this mode of thought is most typically represented by the political philosophy of liberalism. Yet it is not limited to the adherents of liberal political principles but permeates non-liberal thought as well and has thus become typical of the political thinking of the age. Whatever else may separate the White House from the Kremlin, liberals from conservatives, all share the belief that if not now, at least ultimately, politics can be replaced by science, however differently defined.
The philosophy of rationalism has misunderstood the nature of man, the nature of the social world, and the nature of reason itself. It does not see that man’s nature has 3 dimensions: biological, rational, and spiritual. By neglecting the biological impulses and spiritual aspirations of man, it misconstrues the function reasons fulfills within the whole of human existence; it distorts the problem of ethics, especially in the political field; and it perverts the natural sciences into an instrument of social salvation for which neither their own nature nor the nature of the social world fits them.
As a political philosophy, rationalism has misconstrued the nature of politics and of political action altogether. The period between the two world wars, which saw its triumph in theory and in practice, witnessed also its intellectual, moral, and political bankruptcy. History, it is true, has its accidents. Its course, if we can believe Pascal, would have been different had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter. Yet the political and military catastrophes of the 30s and early 40s and the political crises of the mid-40s bear too uniform a pattern to be attributed to accidents or to the shortcomings of individuals alone. They are but the outward manifestations of an intellectual, moral, and political disease which has its roots in the basic philosophic assumptions of the age.
It would be tempting yet rash to take it for granted that those who believe in these assumptions were victorious in war because they believe in them. Military victory proves only what it actually signifies: that militarily one group of men is superior to another. Those men may also excel in philosophic insight, moral wisdom, and statecraft; but if they do, they do so by virtue of their excellence in these respective fields and not because they have shown themselves to be adept in the art of warfare. The monopoly of the atomic bomb may coincide with a monopoly in virtue; but no necessity makes the latter an attribute of the former. The fact alone that Western civilization could completely misunderstand the intellectual, moral, and political challenge of fascism and be brought to the brink of disaster by those very forces it had defeated on the battlefield but 20 years before should raise doubts in the soundness of its philosophy, morality, and statecraft.
Fascism is not, as we prefer to believe, a mere temporary retrogression into irrationality, an atavistic revival of autocratic and barbaric rule. In its mastery of the technological attainments and potentialities of the age, it is truly progressive — were not the propaganda machine and the gas chambers models of technical rationality? — and in its denial of the ethics of Western civilization it reaps the harvest of a philosophy which clings to the tenets of Western civilization without understanding its foundations. In a sense it is, like all real revolutions, but the receiver of the bankrupt age that preceded it.
Man, even the most “practical” one who is most contemptuous of enterprises such as the one undertaken by this book, cannot live without a philosophy which gives meaning to his existence, by explaining it in terms of causality, rationalizing it in terms of philosophy proper, and justifying it in terms of ethics. A philosophy as a system of intellectual assumptions is static; life is in constant flux. Life is always in a “period of transition,” by which standard phrase the age reveals its embarrassment at its intellectual inability to cope with the experience of modern life. In the face of this contradiction between philosophy and experience, it is the easiest thing in the world to stick to one’s philosophic guns and, pointing to the intellectual and moral excellence of one’s philosophy, to substitute for all the creative revisions and revolutions of true philosophy the sterile incantations of a self-sufficient dogmatism.
Intellectual victories, however, are not won that way. The dominance of a philosophy over its age and its fecundity for the future are not determined by the standards of a seminar in logic or metaphysics but by its relation to the life experiences of the common man. That philosophy wins out in the competition of the marketplace, which, with greater faithfulness than any other, makes explicit and meaningful what the man in the street but dimly perceives yet strongly feels.
Man may continue to live for a while with a philosophy which falls short of this standard. He may still believe in its assumptions, listen to its exhortations, and wonder in confusion what is true and false, good and evil, right and wrong in this conflict between the known dogmas of the old philosophy and the felt experiences of the new life. Yet man will not forever accept a philosophy which is patently at odds with his experience. He will not forever listen to “appeals to reason” when he experiences the power of irrational forces over his own life and the lives of his fellow men.
The ability of an age to perform such a task of rejuvenation, which is also a task of destruction, is the measure of its intellectual vitality.
Liberal wars are generally defensive wars; for only as such can they be justified in terms of liberal philosophy. The influence of this philosophy makes itself felt even in the sphere of military strategy and organization. The specialization of the French army for defense and its inability to attack, in 1914 as well as in 1940, was the direct result of the liberal prejudice against aggressive wars. Pearl Harbor has its intellectual background in this philosophy, which was unable to consider seriously even the possibility of enemy attack. The invariable hesitations and vacillations of liberal governments, when faced with a decision implying even the remote danger of war, are due to those inherent traits of liberal philosophy.
War was now regarded as an absolute evil, not only in the ethical and philosophical sphere but in the realm of political action as well. Hence any political decision avoiding war was better than one leading to war.
This approach derives directly from the liberal misconception of international affairs as something essentially rational, where politics plays the role of a disease to be cured by means of reason. Liberalism, therefore, is able to accept only international aims which can be justified in the light of reason. Since, however, the rationalist conception of international affairs does not fit political reality where power is pitted against power for survival and supremacy, the liberal approach to international problems has necessarily an ideological quality. Liberalism expresses its aims in the international sphere not in terms of power politics, that is, on the basis of international reality but in accordance with the rationalist premises of its own misconception.
“My objection to Liberalism is this,” said Disraeli, “that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind — namely politics — of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.” The abstract goal replaces the concrete issue; the standard of eternal truth, the consideration of political interests.
Liberals had brought themselves to see in violence the absolute evil and were thus prevented by their moral convictions from using violence where the use of violence was required by the rules of the game. They fought their international battles with weapons which had been effective against the domestic enemy under the conditions of domestic politics. Taken out of their proper political context and transferred to the international arena where violence reigns supreme, those weapons became wooden swords, playthings conveying to political children the illusion of arms.
The war for national unification and for “making the world safe for democracy” is then indeed, as Wilson put it in his message to Congress, the “culminating and final war for human liberty,” the “last war,” the “war to end war.”
The same eschatological hope, based upon the same intellectual procedure, is to be found in the Marxian conception of the revolutionary war which will do away with the class war and with the international war arising from it, once and forever.
As a matter of principle, socialism is opposed to war as such. In political practice this opposition is qualified and put into effect only with respect to imperialistic wars of capitalism. The socialist war against capitalism, however, is justified. Aristocratic government as the source of all evil is replaced by capitalism, and the universal destruction of capitalism is taken to mean the end of evil itself. While liberalism expects the disappearance of war from the uniformity of governments after the pattern of democratic nationalism, Marxism connects the same hope with the universal acceptance of the socialist pattern. The very idea of world revolution as the final struggle to end all struggles, national and international, is in its unhistoric abstractness the perfect counterpart of the national and democratic wars and revolutions, whose successful conclusion will bring about lasting peace.
Logical deductions from abstract rational principles replaced in the liberal era the pragmatic decision of political issues according to the increase or decrease in political power to be expected. Political weapons were transformed into absolute truths. Thus, in the domestic field, the idea of democracy by which the rising middle class justified its quest for political power lost its concrete political function and survived as an abstract political philosophy which confines itself to claiming equal opportunity for everybody, powerful and weak alike, and, more particularly, to postulating the universal right to vote and to be elected. In its abstract formalism it does not see that democracy, as any other political system, functions only under certain intellectual, moral, and social conditions and that the unqualified principle of majority makes democracy defenseless against its enemies, who will use the democratic processes in order to destroy them. Freedom of speech, originally a principle by which religious and political minority groups tried to secure independence from state interference, outgrew its political origin and belongs today exclusively to the sphere of natural rights which ought to be enjoyed by everybody within and without the national frontiers, even by the foe who claims the right only in order to monopolize it. Freedom of the press, originating as a political weapon against the powerful and transformed into an abstract, unpolitical principle, now becomes a protective device of the powerful against control and competition. While in the 19th century the idea of the common goods was understood in terms of the interests of the middle classes as over against an aristocratic minority, it is now interpreted as an abstract principle available to everybody and particularly to minorities which, by invoking it, try to forestall those very reforms which in the 19th century the middle classes could identify with the common good.
The foreign policy of the Comintern, based upon an ideological alliance with Communists everywhere, is another example of the same misconception; and its complete failure, from the point of view both of international communism and of Russian national interests, proves again the practical impossibility of founding a successful foreign policy upon ideological affinities rather than upon a community of political interests.
Politics must be understood through reason, yet it is not in reason that it finds its model. The principles of scientific reason are always simple, consistent, and abstract; the social world is always complicated, incongruous, and concrete. To apply the former to the latter is either futile, in that the social reality remains impervious to the attack of that “one-eyed reason, deficient in its vision of depth”; or it is fatal, in that it will bring about results destructive of the intended purpose. Politics is an art and not a science, and what is required for its mastery is not the rationality of the engineer but the wisdom and the moral strength of the statesman. The social world, deaf to the appeal to reason pure and simple, yields only to that intricate combination of moral and material pressures which the art of statesman creates and maintains.
Contemptuous of power politics and incapable of the statesmanship which alone is able to master it, the age has tried to make politics a science. By doing so, it has demonstrated its intellectual confusion, moral blindness, and political decay.
Now he developed the same conception with respect to the origin of the laws of nature by expressing the blasphemous thought that, even if God did not exist, natural law would still exist. Thus, he took the decisive step from the concept of a theological world, whose divine government is above human understanding as well as action, to the concept of an inherently rational world of which man is a part and which he can understand and act upon.
From the fundamental concept that man and world are governed by rational laws which human reason is able to understand and apply, rationalistic philosophy draws 4 conclusions. First, that the rationally right and the ethically good are identical. Second, that the rationally right action is of necessity the successful one. Third, that education leads man to the rationally right, hence, good and successful, action. Fourth, that the laws of reason, as applied to the social sphere, are universal in their application.
It was through lack of reason that evil came into the world. This is the original sin by which man has disturbed the order of the world. Since the essence of world and man is reason, man will perform his task in the world by living up to the command of reason. The good life is the life conducted in accordance with those commands.
An action which falls short of what ethics prescribes and expediency demands indicates a lack of knowledge of the natural laws of reason. Injustice is ignorance applied to human action. The bad as well as the unsuccessful man is the unreasonable man, and the unreasonable man is the ignorant man who can be made good and reasonable by learning what reason requires. When he acts wrongly, it is not because he is bad or incapable by nature but because he does not know better. “What we fight is not evil intention; it is social stupidity.”
In this world of rationalism, emotions, whenever their existence is recognized at all, have only a subordinate role to play. Theirs is no longer a decisive part in the struggle of reason for supremacy. For the pre-rationalistic age, the passions are the exponent of evil, the great antagonist of reason; in the philosophy of rationalism they are “noble,” ready to follow the guidance of reason. It is not them that evil lies but in wrong thinking, in lack of reason. The shortcomings of man, especially in the field of action, therefore, are to be remedied not by reforming the domain of the emotions but only by improving the reasoning faculties of man.
In scientific ethics, the selective principle by which to distinguish between good and evil, reasonable and unreasonable actions, is the principle of utility. This principle is understood to mean, in a positive sense, the calculable and calculated regularity of action, the improvement of the conditions of living, and the increase of the expectation of life; in a negative sense, the absence of passionate and violent action, the absence of hardship, sufferance, and want, and, finally, the avoidance of death. Whereas the good of traditional ethics can be achieved only through a struggle within the soul of man or through an act of divine grace, scientific ethics leads man towards perfection through the mere intellectual process of learning what is reasonable and good.
This political philosophy was victorious wherever there existed a political situation similar to the one which had created it o where the philosophical premises from which it derived were not completely identified with any one political situation, so that they could be adapted to new ones. Under such circumstances, this combination between rationalism and the interests of the middle classes was a source of intellectual and political strength; for the interpretation of a political situation in terms of the immutable postulates of reason was no less powerful an ideological weapon than the invocation of religion, tradition, and custom by which the feudal order justified its existence.
Consequently, the feudal order stands condemned, not only as an isolated historic obstacle to the development of the middle classes but also as the incarnation of all backwardness and ignorance, of all the forces of darkness which disturb the rational order of nature and retard the arrival of the golden age of enlightenment and reason.
The state, tradition, politics, and violence come to be regarded as something alien to the true order of things, as a kind of outside disturbance like a disease or a natural catastrophe. Society vs. state, law vs. politics, man vs. institutions, reason vs. tradition, order vs. violence — such are the battle cries of liberalism, and this dichotomy between the true, good order of things, dominated by reason, and its political perversion has determined the course of 19th-century political thought.
As the actual world falls short of this ideal and is ever menaced by irrational forces from within and without, it becomes the main concern of the 19th century to hold at bay and destroy the enemies from within and to insulate the rational world against those from without, to restrict their sphere gradually, and to extend the borders of the rational world correspondingly.
For the advancement of its aim, classical liberalism developed 3 institutions: written constitutions which would envelop the rational sphere of economic and social endeavor in an armor of legal guarantees and, at the same time, compel the irrational forces of the state into a system of legal chains from which these forces were supposed never to escape; second, independent courts which, as the mouthpieces of reason, would discern the reasonable from the unreasonable in the conflicting claims of less enlightened parties and see to it that legal rules be applied in accordance with the laws of reason; finally, popularly elected parliaments which would subject apparently conflicting views and interests to the test of reason through intelligent discussion and resolve those conflicts either in a compromise, or in a decision of the majority through which reason asserts itself against the unenlightened few. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
It was from the experience of his actual mastery over physical nature through reason that man gained confidence in the general transforming powers of reason. Similarly, it was not until the triumph of liberal rationality over the forces of feudal darkness had provided experimental proof of the power of reason in social affairs that the abstract concept of progress, inherent, as we have seen, in the philosophy of rationalism, was transformed into the political idea of social reform. And this political experience, which was the midwife at its birth, should dominate its life in a peculiar and truly fateful way.
The very field of politics thus becomes a kind of atavistic residue from a pre-rational period. Since politics is arbitrariness and chance, just as science is order and regularity, science fits perfectly into this picture of the social world. It becomes the beneficial force which will solve the problems with which politics is unable to cope. It becomes the substitute for politics.
Modern democracy does not aim at rule at all, but at administration. How this new conception, this new estimate, of state organization can be carried out in practice is no mere question of power; it is a difficult problem of administrative technique. The principles of democracy are merely the principles of science applied to public policy.
No political thinker can expect to be heard who would not, at least in his terminology, pay tribute to the spirit of science and, by claiming his propositions to be “realistic,” “technical,” or “experimental,” assume their compliance with scientific standards.
The leading thought of the pre-rationalist age conceived of the convergence of ethics and politics as an ultimate possibility, a goal to be reached through the unceasing aspiration of the individual for virtue. For a sophist like Thrasymachus there was no possibility of convergence at all since the political sphere was governed exclusively by the rules of the political art of which ethical evaluation was a mere ideological by-product. For a realist like Machievelli convergence was possible only as an accident, if what was required by the rules of the political art — the primary concern of the political actor — happened to coincide with what was required by the rules of ethics. Only for 19th-century thought is the identity of ethics and politics more than a remote possibility to be achieved at best by the virtuous few; it is an actuality of our daily experience wherever political action conforms to the finding of science.
In this, the liberal is entirely sincere, and it is exactly this sincere belief in the unquestionable justice of his cause, these profoundly serious convictions, unmarred by even the shadow of a doubt, this complete absence of cynical design, which distinguishes the liberal from other political types and makes him a little bit of a Don Quixote on the political scene.
Among other evils which it has inflicted, this inability to conceive of conduct except as either right or wrong, and, correspondingly in the intellectual order, of teaching except as either true or false, is at the bottom of that fatal spirit of parti-pris which has led to the rooting of so much injustice, disorder, immobility, and darkness in English intelligence. No excess of morality, we may be sure, has followed this excessive adoption of the exclusively moral standard. We have simply got for our pains a most unlovely leanness of judgment, and ever since the days when this temper set in until now, when a wholesome rebellion is afoot, it has steadily and powerfully tended to straiten character, to make action mechanical, and to impoverish art.
From this triple identification of the political, scientific, and ethical stems the enormous self-confidence and conceit with which liberalism gives its adherents intellectual security and a good conscience. Were its followers unsuccessful in politics, they still were convinced of being “right” in both the intellectual and ethical sense; and it could only be because of the particular wickedness of the enemy, the irrationality of political interference, and the ignorance of mankind in general that they failed. Therefore, they never learned from history. For them, history is important only as confirmation of, or deviation from, the rational scheme with which they approach the political reality.
Reason, however, by its very nature, is not itself a product of the historic process. It is before and above all history. History cannot add to or detract from reason; it provides only a succession of experiences which give man the opportunity to found the dominion of reason over human affairs. That we can speak of historic development at all is due only to the failure of man to make full use of this opportunity. When history, on the one hand, is the scene of reason’s march to victory, it is, on the other hand, is the scene of the revolt of ignorance and wickedness agains the supremacy of reason. Without this revolt there would be no history at all.
Thucydides, Machiavelli, Richelieu, Hamilton, or Disraeli would conceive the nature of international politics as an unending struggle for survival and power. It is true that, even before modern international thought entered the field, this conception of international affairs was under constant attack. From the Church Fathers to the anti-Machiavellian writers of the 18th century, international politics was made the object of moral condemnation. But modern international thought goes further. It denies not only the moral value of political power which proves nothing as over against the rational values of truth and justice; it denies, if not the very existence of power politics as a matter of act, at least its organic and inevitable connection with the life of man in society. Francis Bacon only prophesied that the empire of man over nature would replace the empire of man over man. For the leading international thought of the 19th century, this prophecy had come true.
The struggle, then, for political power — in domestic as well as in international affairs — was only a historical accident, coincident with autocratic government and bound to disappear when the latter would go. The attempts, in the domestic field, to reduce the political functions to technical ones and the international policy of non-intervention as conceived and practiced by some of the early and most of the latter-day liberals were only two manifestations of the same aspiration: the reduction of the traditionally political sphere to a minimum and its ultimate disappearance. The foreign policy of non-intervention was the liberal principle of laisser faire, transferred to the international scene; and the optimistic trust in the harmonizing power of the “course of events,” the “natural development,” and the “laws of nature” was the justification of both domestic and international inertia.
It also, and primarily, argues against war as against something irrational, unreasonable, an aristocratic pastime or totalitarian atavism which has no place in a rational world. War is essentially a thing of the past. It belongs, according to Herbert Spencer, to the age of militarism and will, of necessity, become obsolete in our industrial civilization in which men can appease their greedy instincts by the productive investment of capital. Hence war is “dead” and “impossible.” War does not solve anything. War does not pay. It is an unproductive investment. Nobody has ever won a war. There never was a good war or a bad peace. There is nothing worse than winning a war except losing it.
The middle class have an innate aversion to violent action. For them, organized violence is the dreaded enemy. The occupations of the middle classes are primarily of a commercial or a professional nature, whereas their historic enemies, the aristocracy, were brought up in the tradition of the use of arms. Whenever a decision between the middle classes and the aristocracy depended upon the use of arms, the aristocracy had the initial advantage. Even in the daily life of individuals, this superiority was a constant temptation for the aristocrats to deprive the middle classes of the fruits of their labor by violent means and thus was a constant threat to the survival and economic welfare for the members of the middle classes. The latter came to experience in violence the negation of all the values which they cherished; and they put the stigma of immorality and irrationality on its use. And irrational it actually is from the standpoint of the philosophical, social, and economic systems which the middle classes developed.
These systems are founded upon a mechanical interplay of natural forces, which is subject to calculable rational laws. Peace is a necessary condition for the functioning of these systems and for the realization of their goal, which is the domination of nature by human reason. From the standpoint of those systems, organized violence indeed does not pay; it cannot solve any of their problems; and there is nothing to be won by using it. “A war in the midst of different trading nations is a fire disadvantageous to all. It is a process which threatens the fortune of a great merchant, and makes his debtors turn pale.”
He is acquainted with commerce in all its parts; and will tell you that it is a stupid and barbarous way to extend dominion by arms; for true power is to be got by arts and industry. I have heard him prove, that diligence makes more lasting acquisition than valor, and that sloth has ruined more nations than the sword. He says that England may be richer than other kingdoms by as plain methods as he himself is richer than other men.
Furthermore, liberalism is on safe ground when it opposes violence in the domestic field; for there it has replaced to a considerable degree domination by actual violence with a system of indirect domination, originating in the particular needs of the middle classes and giving them the advantage in the struggle for political power. International politics, however, has never outgrown the “preliberal” stage. Even where legal relations hide relations of power, power is to be understood in terms of violence, actual and potential; and potential violence tends here always to turn into actual warfare. The distinction between the latter and peace is not one of essence by of degree; it is one of alternative choices, not of exclusive preference, among different means in the pursuit of power.
“Our political and philosophical fetishism requests,” Georges Suarez stated of French foreign policy between the two world wars, “that the community of aspirations and ideas prevail over the community of interests.”
“A steadfast concert for peace,” declared Wilson, “can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.” The original refusal of the League of Nations to admit autocratic governments to membership, and a similar attitude on the part of the UN, both have their roots in this same philosophy.
The counsels of plain men have become on all hands more simple and straightforward and more unified than the counsels of sophisticated men of affairs, who still retain the impression that they are playing a game of power and playing for high stakes. That is why I have said that this is a people’s war, not a statesmen’s. Statesmen must follow the clarified common thought or be broken.
Liberalism believes that the foreign policy of a country is the mere reflection of its domestic situation, so that, by transforming the latter, one is able to change the former at will. Actually, however, the foreign policy of a country is determined by many different factors, of which the form of government and domestic polices are two and, as history shows, not the most decisive ones. The fundamental foreign policies of the Great Powers have survived all changes in the form of government and in domestic policies; France, Great Britain, and Russia during the last 200 years are cases in point. Continuity in foreign affairs is not a matter of choice but a necessity; for it derives from geography, national character, tradition, and the actual distribution of power, factors which no government is able to control but which it can neglect only at the risk of failure.
The difference between liberal and non-liberal aims in the international field does not lie in the fact that the former are ideological whereas the latter are not. The ideological character is common to both, since men will support only political aims which they are persuaded are justified before reason and morality. Yet while non-liberal political concepts, such as “Roman Empire,” “new order,” “living space,” “encirclement,” “national security,” “haves vs. have-nots,” and the like, show an immediately recognizable relationship to concrete political aims; liberal concepts, such as “collective security,” “democracy,” “national self-determination,” “justice,” “peace” are abstract generalities which may be applied to any political situation but which are not peculiar to any particular one. This difference has far-reaching practical consequences. Since the non-liberal aims are the product of a concrete political situation, they will necessarily disappear and be replaced by others as soon as they have fulfilled their temporary political function; thus, they will be relatively immune from the danger of being at variance with reality and therefore failing into disrepute.
The recognition that the seemingly political goals of liberalism were actually beyond the reach of immediate political realization brought in its wake the distrust in political ideology of any kind. Since the liberal ideology did not keep its promise and thus revealed itself as mere “propaganda,” no ideology in the international field could be trusted. Since, furthermore, political aims are still mostly being rationalized in terms of the liberal ideology, they meet condemnation for this reason and regardless of whether they could be justified in terms of political expediency.
As a matter of fact, neither of them, arguing in liberal terms, was able to understand the real issue. Even the enemies of the liberal slogans are still the victims of the liberal fallacy; intellectually they are still liberals since they are able to think only in liberal terms.
The void created by the repudiation of politics was filled by the liberal mind with the conception of a world which was rational throughout and which contained in itself all the elements necessary for the harmonious cooperation of all mankind. It was for science to detect those elements, variously defined as harmony of interests, laws of economics, free trade, and modern communications; it was for law to apply them where they did not prevail spontaneously; and it was for negotiation and compromise to discover them under the surface of apparent conflict.
In order to bring about this harmony, Adam Smith still was in need of a supernatural, at least not necessarily rational, element — the “invisible hand” — which in a miraculous way would lead selfish interests towards prosperity for all.
Finally, commerce first taught nations to see with good will the wealth and prosperity of one another. Before, the patriot, unless sufficiently advanced to feel the world his country, wished all countries weak, poor and ill-governed but his own: he now sees in their wealth and progress a direct source of wealth and progress to his own country. It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it. And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race.
It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrine of Adam Smith, and of the cosmopolitical tendencies of his great contemporary William Pitt, and of all his successors in the British Government administrations.
Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth.
Here again, liberalism deduced from the limited experience of a certain age universal laws which were found wanting when applied to conditions different from those under which they were originally developed.
To reason that a similar unification and integration will be brought about by the development of modern communications on an international scale is to overlook the fact that in the domestic field modern communications have not created political unity but have only strengthened and modified political unity which existed before and independently of the development of modern technology.
This is “one world” technologically, but it is not for this reason that it is or will become “one world” politically. In fact, our world is less “one” politically today than it ever has been in the history of the modern state system; for at no time during that period of history has the Western world been so divided morally and politically as it is today.
Truth is everywhere identical with itself: science represents the unity of mankind. If therefore science, instead of religion or authority, is taken in each country as social norm, the sovereign arbiter of interests, with the government amounting to nothing, all the laws of the universe will be in harmony.
The causes of war are known and accepted by a wide group of thoughtful students. But the statement of what is to be done languishes because social science shrinks from resolving the austere findings of scholarly monographs into a bold program for action. In the
Truth is everywhere identical with itself: science represents the unity of mankind. If therefore science, instead of religion or authority, is taken in each country as social norm, the sovereign arbiter of interests, with the government amounting to nothing, all the laws of the universe will be in harmony.
The causes of war are known and accepted by a wide group of thoughtful students. But the statement of what is to be done languishes because social science shrinks from resolving the austere findings of scholarly monographs into a bold programme for action. In the case of an issue like this, where the problem does not arise from lack of knowledge, what social science appears to need is the will to mass its findings so that the truth they hold will not continue to trickle away as disparate bits of scholarship.
It was for this age of reason to replace the old methods of secret diplomacy and war by a new, scientific approach. Territorial claims, sovereignty over national minorities, the distribution of raw materials, the struggle for markets, disarmament, the relation between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” peaceful change, and the peaceful organization of the world in general — these are not “political” problems to be solved temporarily and always precariously on the basis of the respective distribution of power among quarrelling nations and of its possible balance. They are “technical” problems for which reason will find one, the correct solution, to the exclusion of all others, the incorrect ones.
Reason is at last becoming an independent agency influencing the conduct of men. This is due to the coming of science. Feeling himself now to be the master of the nature, his mind is beginning to work rationally instead of superstitiously. When forming an opinion he observes the phenomena around him and draws his conclusions. From that moment mind begins to be an independent agency of influence. It can now therefore be considered as a political force, whereas that has never previously been possible in the history of civilization. During the last 30 years this has begun to influence public opinion.
The abolition of war is obviously the fundamental problem confronting international thought. What makes a solution of this problem so difficult for the non-rationalist mind is the variety of causes which have their roots in the innermost aspirations of the human soul. Were it possible to reduce all those multiple causes to a single one capable of rational formulation, the solution of the problem of war an peace would no longer seem impossible. This is exactly what liberal foreign policy has been trying to do since its very inception; and since the heyday of the League of Nations it has become a sign of originality, which most people would take for a lack of creative thought, not to have a “constructive” plan as a remedy for the “single cause.”
In the domestic field, however, the “method of the single cause” has been of rather limited theoretical and practical importance; for here, except in periods of collective insanity, immediate personal experience reveals the abstrusity of the approach; and the pressure of the affected interests prevents the quack from being mistaken for the savior.
The internationalist, on the other hand, has no direct contact with the international scene. His thought, if it is sufficiently general, can roam over the globe without ever risking collision with the stark facts of politics.
He who signs a petition, makes a speech, writes an article, or simply attends a meeting in support of international understanding experiences the satisfaction of having done something for a worthwhile cause. That the good deed does not entail any sacrifices, incur any risks, or bring about any changes in the actual conditions of the actor’s life makes the action only the more attractive.
One will find that the urgency of domestic reform in a certain period is to a certain extent proportionate to the quantity of panaceas offered to the ills of the world in general, and to the insistence with which they are offered.
Since the hunt for the “single cause” derives from a vague desire to contribute something to the betterment of human affairs rather than from a definite resolve to intervene in a definite political situation in a definite way, any general explanation of the ills of the world and any general plan to remedy them will satisfy those vague emotions.
This period of international relations was dominated by the idea that there is inherent in the free exchange of conflicting opinions a miraculous power of doing away with the conflict itself. By talking things over, statesmen will become conscious of the common ground of reason upon which they all take their stand. Rational argument will reveal as misunderstanding what uninformed opinion has taken for unbridgeable conflict. Debate will clarify the issue and the position of the disputants, and understanding on the basis of rational settlement must follow.
Compromise, appeasement, is at once our weakness abroad and our strength at home.
Through a mere quantitative extension of the domain of the rule of law to an ever widening sphere, through submitting more and more human actions to legal regulation, the dominion of law over the world will finally be established.
The more people live under democratic institutions, the wider is the area where democracy reigns. The more closely their constitutions resemble the model constitution in which all the theoretical elements of democratic institutions are combined, the more perfect is the democracy the those peoples enjoy. “Truth, reason, justice, the rights of man, the interest of property, of liberty, of security are everywhere the same. One cannot see why every nation should not have the same civil, the same criminal, and the same commercial laws. A good law ought to be good for all men as an axiom is true for all men.”
The Greeks thoughts of law in terms of politics, we moderns think of politics in terms of law.
The fundamental rights of nations correspond to the fundamental rights of individuals and a bill of rights should codify the former as domestic constitutions have codified the latter. An international bill of rights would reinforce the freedoms of the individuals by adding international guarantees to the traditional safeguards of national constitutions.
Take, finally, as a kind of crowning achievement, the proposition that the outlawry of war in a legal document, the signing of it by all nations, and the invocation of it in the case of threatening or actual war are effective contributions to the preventive war. Chamberlain’s waving a piece of paper with Hitler’s peace pledge as guarantee of “peace in our time” is a tragic symbol of this period of intellectual history, which believed in the miraculous power of the legal formula through its inherent qualities to drive out the evil and improve the conditions of man.
The liberal conception of the function which the rule of law actually fulfills and is able to fulfill in the international sphere reposes upon a threefold misinterpretation of reality. It misunderstands the general relationship between law and peace; it overlooks the particular conditions which the rule of law encounters in the international sphere; and it presumes that all social conflicts, domestic or international, can be settled on the basis of established rules of law.
The ineffectiveness of the international law of the liberal period reveals the impotence of a legal system which meets the test of rationality yet is supposed to work irrespective of social conditions, that is, in a social vacuum.
The legal decision, by its very nature, is concerned with an isolated case. The facts of life to be dealt with by the legal decision are artificially separated from the facts which precede, accompany, and follow them and are thus transformed into a “case” of which the law disposes “on its merits.” In the domestic field this procedure is not necessarily harmful; for here executive and legislative decisions, supposedly taking into account all the ramifications of a problem, together with the “spirit of the law” manifesting itself in a judicial tradition of long standing, give the isolated legal decisions that coherence which they by themselves cannot have.
On the international scene, however, these regulating and integrating factors are absent; it is for that very reason that here the social forces operate on each other with particular directness and spontaneity and that here the legal decision of isolated cases is particularly inadequate. A political situation presenting itself for a decision according to international law is always one particular phase of a much larger situation, rooted in the historic past and ramifying far beyond the issue under legal consideration. There is no doubt that the League of Nations was right, according to international law, in expelling Russia in 1939 because of her attack upon Finland. In view of the fact, however, that the political and military problems with which Russia confronted the world did not begin with her attack on Finland and did not end there, was it wise to pretend that such was the case and to decide the issue on that assumption?
Whenever the League of Nations endeavored to deal with political situations presenting themselves as legal issues, it could deal with them only as isolated cases according to the applicable rules of international law and not as particular phrases of an overall political situation which required an overall solution according to political principles. Hence, political problems were never solved but only tossed about and finally shelved according to the rules of the legal game.
Hence, what is at stake in conflicts of this kind is not who is right and who is wrong but what ought to be done in order to combine the particular interests of individual nations with the general interest in peace and order. The question to be answered is not what the law is but what it ought to be, and this question cannot be answered by the lawyer but only by the statesman. The choice is not between legality and illegality but between political wisdom and political stupidity.
Lawyers, I know, cannot make the distinction for which I contend, because they have their strict rule to go by. But legislators ought to do what lawyers cannot; for they have no other rules to go by, but the great principles of reason and equity, and the general sense of mankind.
Law and political wisdom may or may not be on the same side. If they are not, the insistence upon the letter of the law will be inexpedient and may be immoral. The defence of the limited interest protected by the particular rule of law will injure the larger good which the legal system as a whole is supposed to serve. Therefore, when on the national scene basic issues in the form of economic, social, or constitutional conflicts demand a solution, we do not as a rule appeal to the legal acumen of the judge but to the political wisdom of the legislator and of the chief executive. Here we know that peace and order do not depend primarily upon the victory of the law with the aid of the sheriff and of the police but upon that approximation to justice which true statecraft discovers in, and imposes upon, the clash of hostile interests. If sometimes in our domestic affairs we are oblivious to this basic truth of statesmanship, we pay with social unrest, lawlessness, civil war, and revolution for our lack of memory.
Thus, an age which seems to be unable to meet the intellectual and moral challenge of true statesmanship or to face in time the cruel alternative to its political failure takes refuge in illusions: the illusion of international law as a standard for political action, the illusion of a naturally harmonious social world, the illusion of a social science imitating a model of the natural sciences which the modern natural sciences themselves no longer accept.
In 3 fundamental respects rationalist philosophy has failed to understand its object. It has failed to understand the nature of man; the nature of the world, especially the social world; and, finally, the nature of reason itself.
It has become rather trivial nowadays to point out the fallacy of the rationalistic conception of man, to wit, its depreciation of, if not its complete disregard for, the spiritual and emotional aspects of human life.
From its point of view, those very problems are specious since they are incapable of solution through science, to be asked only by children and fools. Scientism is unable to visualize problems, fields of knowledge, and modes of insight to which science has no access.
Scientism assumes that the significance of nature and society for man exhausts itself in isolated sequences of causes and effects, that, in other words, this is all man wants to know about his physical and social environment. “Bentham was interested, not in the problems of life, but in the mechanism of living; his reforms were a series of political gadgets.”
When it speaks of the “free will,” the “freedom,” and the “choice” of man, of his “good star” and his “luck,” of “hazard” and of “chance,” it recognizes a domain for which the assumptions of its philosophy do not allow. By embracing, especially in the desperation of individual or social crisis, degenerate derivations of art, religion, and metaphysics, such as astrology, prophecy, belief in miracles, occultism, political religions, sectarianism, all kinds of superstitions, and all the lower types of entertainment, the common man of the Age of Science testifies to the limitations of its power.
Since reason in the form of causality reveals itself most plainly in nature, nature became the model of the social world and the natural sciences the image of what the social sciences one day will be. There is only one truth, the truth of science, and by knowing it man would know all. This was, however, a fallacious answer. Its universal acceptance initiated an intellectual movement and a political technique which retarded, rather than furthered, man’s mastery over the social world.
Physical nature as seen by the practitioner of science, consists of a multitude of isolated facts over which human action has complete control.
A great, complicated, and delicate social organization represents a vast array of phenomena of all kinds, many of which are paradoxical and contradictory in their relation to each other. The analysis of these phenomena and the interpretation of them is the easiest thing in the world if we go about it with a few so-called “ethical” principles; but if we approach it with any due conception of what it is that we are trying to do, we find it the hardest mental task ever yet cast upon mankind. However I am so skeptical as to our knowledge about the goodness or badness of laws, that I have no practical criticism except what the crowd wants.
A certain group of people may react upon an identical cause in an identical or in a different way according to the physical or psychological conditions prevailing in the group, and according to the same conditions it may react upon different causes in an identical way. Since man is largely ignorant of his own future reactions, how can he know more about the reactions of his fellow-men? Detached observation may tell him things about them that he does not know about himself. Yet he will remain forever unaware of what only one’s inner consciousness can tell one’s self.
It is, indeed, a kind of folklore of science which receives its dignity from tradition and from the longing for intellectual as well as actual security but not from the inherent truthfulness of its propositions. Modern scientific thought has long abandoned it. The modern history of the natural sciences is marked by an ever widening cleavage between nature as perceived by our unaided senses and nature as constituted by scientific theory.
People who know nothing about the subject, or just less than I do, will tell you that science and philosophy and theology have nowadays all come together. So they have, in a sense. But the statement, like those above, is just a “statistical” one. They have come together as 3 people may come together in a picture theatre, or 3 people happen to take apartments in the same building, or, to apply the metaphor that really fits, as 3 people come together at a funeral. The funeral that is that of Dead Certainty. The interment is over and the 3 turn away together.
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it.
Many political writers and political scientists, however, claim that they can do more than that, and they seem to be actually able to predict social events with a high degree of certainty. In fact, they as well as their public are the victims of one of two delusions. Since the number of possible trends in a given situation is limited — victory or defeated in war and elections, success or failure in policy, and the like — the “prophet” who predicts, in a more or less qualified fashion, the materialization of the few possible trends in successive columns, chapters, books, or speeches is bound to have been right at least once, or in a certain measure all the time, since one of the trends under discussion is bound to materialize. Furthermore, many writings convey the idea of historical necessity, which is the godmother of political prediction, but are really prophecies after the event.
In order to make an intelligent forecast at all, he would need to know who will be the president of the US, who will be the most influential members of the houses of Congress, of the Supreme Court, of the armed forces, of industry, and of labor, etc., and what will be their reactions, as individuals, to the problems of the day.
Those who maintain a deterministic theory of mental activity must do so as the outcome of their study of the mind itself and not with the idea that they are thereby making it more comfortable with our experimental knowledge of the laws of inorganic nature.
From this perspective we recognize a spiritual world alongside the physical world. Experience — that is to say, the self cum environment — comprises more than can be embraced in the physical world, restricted as it is to a complex of metrical symbols.
Since it is the human mind which mirrors the physical world and which determines the human actions within and with respect to it, the qualities of the mind must in turn be reflected in the picture we have of nature. Thus, the physical world, as we are able to know it, bears in a dual sense the imprint of the human mind; it is in a dual sense its product. We are able to know it only within the limits of our cognitive faculties; that is, we know it only in so far as the structure of our mind corresponds to the structure of the physical world. On the other hand, the relationship between mind and nature is not exclusively cognitive even when the human mind confronts nature only for the purpose of perception. It cannot do so without intervening in its course and thus disturbing it.
We saw 19th-century science trying to explore nature as the explorer explore the desert from an aeroplane. The uncertainty principle makes it clear that nature cannot be explored in this detached way; we can only explore it by tramping over it and disturbing it; and our vision of nature includes the clouds of dust we ourselves kick up.
Take, for example, the prediction of the weather this time next year. The prediction is not likely ever become practicable, but “orthodox” physicists are not yet convinced that it is theoretically impossible; they hold that next year’s weather is already predetermined. We should require extremely detailed knowledge of present conditions, since a small local deviation can exert and ever-expanding influence.
What he sees and what he does not see are determined by his position in those streams; and by revealing what he sees in terms of his science he directly intervenes in the social process. Mr. Gallup, by forecasting the result of an election, transcends the functions of theoretical analysis and becomes an active agent intervening in the social process which determine the election returns. Karl Max, arguing scientifically for the inevitability of the class struggle and of the proletarian revolution, strengthens through the persuasiveness of his scientific arguments the tendencies in modern society towards making the class struggle and the proletarian revolution actually inevitable.
Since there exists a necessary correlation between the quality of the human mind, on the one hand, and the quality of the physical and social world, as we know it, on the other, the irrationality of human action cannot but be reflected in nature and society and in our knowledge of them.
A plan is an intellectual scheme which anticipates a chain of causes and effects, partly created by the planner’s action, partly taken into account by his social experience. The realization of the anticipated effects then depends upon the control the planner is able to exert upon the causes, as well as upon the reliability of his social experience, which makes him foresee the intervention of other causes not created by him.
Military discipline constitutes an attempt at eliminating the spontaneous actions and reactions of the individual as such, which are, as we have seen, one of the main sources for the unpredictability of social causation. On the other hand, military discipline constitutes an attempt at reducing individual actions and reactions as such to statistical averages, allowing a degree of certainty in prediction to which, as a rule, only the natural sciences can lay claim.
The psychological influence of such losses upon the armies and civil population is an important, yet unpredictable, factor in all battles and wars. A natural catastrophe may decide the battle. In modern time, a small and incalculable difference in industrial production, technical progress, or speed and reliability of transportation may make the difference between victory and defeat. It is in recognition of those elements of extreme insecurity, inherent in planning for war, that we refer to war as a “gamble” and that we speak of the “fortunes” and the “goddess” of war. We can plan up to a point. We have certain theories to go by. After that there is the Jesus factor — the unpredictable.
The good that results from the execution of their plans is generally not the good they anticipated, and the evil that comes from their plans is either not the one anticipated or is not anticipated at all. The purer the intention and the more comprehensive the plan, the wider will be the gap between expected and actual result. This cannot be otherwise, since the more “planned,” that is, the more abstract and logically coherent the plan is, the greater will be its incongruity with the contingencies of social life.
Social life is contingent, but it is more than that. Its contingencies are not mere chaos but follow each other with a certain regularity and are subject to a certain order. What to the contemporaneous observer seems to be mere chance — “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” — appears in retrospect as a meaningful process, governed, if not by necessity, at least by certain objective laws.
It is only under this last assumption that the very idea of a science of history can be conceived at all. If life in society were completely contingent and irregular, only religion and philosophy would be able to give meaning and order to the historic past. This is, indeed, the opinion of those who find that whatever meaning and order there is in history is only the reflection of the historian’s own mind. Yet, even to the contemporaneous observer, the contingencies of the present and of the future array themselves in a limited number of typical patterns. An historical situation always contains only a limited number of potentialities into which it might develop. The German situation in 1932, for instance, contained essentially 3 such germinal developments: parliamentary democracy, military dictatorship, and nazi-ism. Which one of these 3 possibilities would finally materialize depended upon the contingent elements of the situation and therefore could not be foreseen. It was, however, inevitable that one of those 3 possibilities should occur. Within each of those general trends, a limited number of possible patterns of a more specific nature were again discernible.
Ultimately, the whole future of the social world appears to the analytical mind as a highly complicated combination of numerous systems of multiple choices which in turn are strictly limited in number. The element of irrationality, insecurity, and chance lies in the necessity of choice among several possibilities multiplied by the great number of systems of multiple choice. The element of rationality, order, and regularity lies in the limited number of possible choices within each system of multiple choice. Viewed with the guidance of a rationalistic, blueprinted map, the social world is, indeed, a chaos of contingencies. Yet it is not devoid of a measure of rationality if approached with the expectations of Macbethian cynicism.
It is this measure of rationality inherent in the social world, which gives social planning its meaning and justification. Since this rationality consists in a limited number of potential trends, one of which is bound to materialize, social planning, correctly understood, is the marshaling of human and material forces in rational anticipation of those potential trends.
The reason of rationalism is a goddess enthroned immovably over man and things. She is today what she has always been and always will be, identical with herself regardless of time and place. She is the sole guide of men. Above other motivating forces, whenever they are recognized, she governs in splendid isolation and with assurance of final victory. Thus the entire task of man reduces itself to exhausting, in thought and action, the logical possibilities of rational premises.
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect that any logic which speaks not to the affections will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.
Reason is one of the feeblest of nature’s forces, if you take it at only one spot and moment. Appealing to reason as we do, we are in a sort of forlorn-hope situation, like a small sandbank in the midst of a hungry sea ready to wash it out of existence.
If irrationality is to be subdued to empirical rationality, then it will come as the result of purpose and will, of choices, made with reference to the conceptions of desirability. It will not come from the neutral observation of objective data.
Reason is like a light which by its own inner force can move nowhere. It must be carried in order to move. It is carried by the irrational forces of interest and emotion to where those forces want it to move, regardless of what the inner logic of abstract reason would require. To trust in reason pure and simple is to leave the field to the stronger irrational forces which reason will serve. The triumph of reason is, in truth, the triumph of irrational forces which succeed in using the processes of reason to satisfy themselves.
Whereas, normally, reason functions as means to an end chosen by nonrational impulses, the latter, in the blindness of passion, may scorn the counsel of reason and determine, to their own satisfaction, ends and means alike. When, thus, passion shakes off the control of reason and man becomes a predominantly irrational being, he may still reach his goal by a mere coincidence between the commands of reasons and the steps passion dictates, or he may fail and in his failure destroy himself. The hybris of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, the want of moderation in Alexander, Napoleon, and Hitler, are instances of such an extreme and exceptional situation.
In human beings such as Hamlet and the ivory-tower artist and scholar, this type of man finds his historic concretization. Yet, since this concretization takes place in an environment dominated by passion and not by fully rationalized impulses, this type of man is bound either to fail, like Hamlet, when he goes out to meet the irrational forces on their own ground, or else to preserve his precarious existence in the insulation of the ivory tower. In either case, it is not his will that determines the course of events in the social world.
Reason uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by reason.
Reason fulfills a fourfold harmonizing function for human action. It tends towards creating harmony among several conflicting irrational impulses. It brings ends and means into harmony with irrational impulses. It establishes harmony among several conflicting ends. It brings means into harmony with ends.
If several incompatible irrational impulses compete for dominance over action, reason will support the one most favorable to the survival, the growth, and the socially approved interests of the individual. If an irrational urge has a choice among different objectives, the actual selection is normally controlled by reason, that is, that objective will be chosen which is compatible with other ends already chosen, which is within the reach of technical realization, and which at the same time promises, both during the process of realization and as consummated goal, the highest degree of satisfaction. If, the objective having been selected, several roads seem to be leading towards it, reason will normally choose the one easiest to travel and at the same time promising the highest degree of satisfaction.
Yet even here the limitation of rational choice should be noted. There may be objectives and techniques much more attractive from the standpoint of reason than those actually chosen. Since irrational determination does not include them in the group of possible choices, they are, under the circumstances, inaccessible to reason.
One may interpret the question to mean that whoever is able to produce the best and least expensive aluminium shall produce it and may then by a mere process of abstract reasoning, arrive at a conclusion which is valid from the point of view of the given premise. Yet one may also start with the premise that whoever is able to produce the greatest quantity of aluminium, regardless of quality and cost, shall produce it; and the answer to our question may differ correspondingly. One may furthermore require that only producers of aluminium who can make use of existing water power shall stay in business, and the answer to our question will differ again. Others may qualify the question under the point of view of private vs. public enterprise, capitalism vs. socialism, corporate vs. individual ownership, monopoly vs. competition, private vs. public interest, and so forth; and in each particular instance the use of the same reasoning powers will produce a different answer. Reason has not one answer to the question, “Who shall produce aluminium?” It has as many answers to offer as there are conflicting interests and emotions striving for different ends.
On the one hand, those emotional forces found in scientific truth a substitute for the lost paradise of metaphysics and religion and because, on the other hand, those economic and social interests find satisfaction only through the domination of nature by man. In other words, the triumph of “pure” reason over nature was but a historical coincidence and not a necessary stage in the ever progressing expansion of reason.
In the social sphere, however, the laws of abstract reason are always meaningless unless they are supplemented by the individual data of the particular situation to which they refer. Socially useful reason is socially determined reason. Social science is scientific only under certain premises whose universal acceptance it presupposes but never achieves.
For whatever their ulterior purposes, men searching for the truth in physical nature approach the object of their investigation with the same immediate motives and interests, assumptions and methods. Searching for the cause of cancer, different men may be moved by different ulterior purposes, such as curiosity, ambition, humanitarianism, increase in population, eugenics, economics. Yet these motives and purposes do not affect their relation to the medical problem at hand, their assumptions about the nature of the problem the methods to be used, and the results to be achieved.
In the social science, the social conditions determine not only the ulterior purpose but also the object of inquiry, the investigation’s relation to it, his assumptions, methods, and immediate aims. In all societies certain social problems cannot be investigated at all, or only at the risk of jeopardizing life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. The basic philosophic assumptions by which a society lives, such as Marxism in Russia, racial inequality in certain regions of the US, the profit motive and free enterprise in capitalistic societies, are generally not subjected to critical analysis by the members of these societies.
In all societies certain results are beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, or again they can be reached only at grave risks. No Russian economist is likely to arrive publicly at the conclusion that capitalism is superior to communism, nor is an American professor of economics likely to maintain the reverse position. Russian political scientists will consider as scientifically true the statement that capitalism means war; socialism, peace.
In our civilization, the experimental method cannot be applied to religion or sex relations; psychoanalysis and the materialistic interpretation of individual or group actions are not respectable methods of research. The ostracized objects, results, and methods of inquiry differ from society to society yet all societies limit the social sciences in this respect.
Social research which stands low in the esteem of a particular group or society will be classified as “propaganda,” “metaphysics,” “collection of data,” “theory,” “ideology,” “description,” “useless,” “vocational,” as the case may be; and its scientific value will thus be denied or at least minimized.
These social forces exert their influence upon the mind of the social scientists. It is, therefore, in the “personal equation” of the social scientist that the social determination of the objects, methods, and results of social research becomes actual. The mind of the social scientist is the meeting place of all the pressures emanating from particular groups and society as a whole, and his own reaction to these pressures will determine the objects, methods, and results of his scientific investigation. This reaction, in turn, is the outgrowth of all the biological and psychological factors which have made the social scientist a distinct human personality. These factors are not of his own choosing, they are not of his making at all. They are the result of hereditary influences and social experience.
It is this decision which manifests itself in the conscience of the scientist as a moral choice between two extreme alternatives: the sacrifice of truth to the pressures of society, or the risk of earthly goods for the sake of searching for, and telling, the whole truth. Few will decide for the former alternative, fewer will choose the latter. The great majority of social scientists will try to satisfy society and scientific conscience at the same time. They will remain within the limits of scientific endeavor which society has marked out as safe; and their intellectual courage or lack of it will be measured according to whether they exhaust these limits and advance to the signposts which read, “Stop or advance at your own risk,” or whether, fearful even to approach these limits, the conceive of their sphere of investigation more narrowly than even the social limitation would require. In any case, the truth of the social sciences will be less than the whole truth. How much and what part of the whole truth it will be is determined not by the scholar’s intellectual ability to recognize the truth but by his moral willingness to know what he is able to know and to tell what he knows.
To be an uncompromising public champion of the conclusions of science is to be a politician, in the wildest and noblest sense. When he decides to what extent he will yield to social pressures in selecting the objects, methods, and results of his inquiry, the scholar makes a moral decision. When he selects from among the “safe” objects, methods, and results, those which he deems significant and hence worthy of scientific attention, he again applies a moral standard which transcends the confines of scientific investigation. The greatness of the scholar does not alone depend upon his ability to distinguish between true and false. His greatness reveals itself above all in his ability and determination to select from among all the truths which can be known those which ought to be known.
Their claim to universality, however, is actually detrimental to their scientific claim, since it obliterates the social and moral determination by which all social science is qualified. It is only through the recognition of this social and moral determination that social science is possible at all. A social science which refuses to recognize this determination and clings to the illusion of universality destroys through this very attitude its only chance for scientific achievement. The truth of the social sciences then, is truth only under the particular perspective of the observer, yet under this perspective it is truth. And this is the only kind of truth to be had in the social sphere.
Whoever seeks more will get less. For without awareness of their social and moral determination, reason and science become empty ideological justifications which any social agent may invoke in his own behalf. What in the social sphere seems to be reasonable to one questioner from his point of view is then deemed unreasonable by another from his premises. Truth itself becomes relative to social interests and emotions.
The age of science misunderstands the nature of man in that it attributes to man’s reason, in its relation to the social world, a power of knowledge and control which reason does not have. It misunderstands the nature of man in yet another respect; for it does not see the understanding, and action according to understanding, is not the only dimension in which man faces the social world. Not only does man try to know what the social world is about and to act according to his knowledge, he also reflects and renders judgments on its nature and value and on the nature and value of his social actions and of his existence in society. In brief, man is also a moral being. It is this side of man which the age of science has obscured and distorted, if not obliterated, by trying to reduce moral problems to scientific propositions.
Man is a political animal by nature; he is a scientist by chance or choice; he is a moralist because he is a man. Man is born to seek power, yet his actual condition makes him a slave to the power of others. Man is born a slave, but everywhere he wants to be a master. Out of this discord between man’s desire and his actual conditions arises the moral issue of power, that is, the problem of justifying and limiting the power which man has over man. Hence, the history of political thought is the history of the moral evaluation of political power, and the scientism of Machiavelli and Hobbes is, in the history of mankind, merely an accident without consequences, a sudden flash of lightning illuminating the dark landscape of man’s hidden motives but kindling no Promethean fire for a grateful posterity. Even when mankind seems to be preoccupied with the science of man’s political nature and considers ethics either as an empirical science or considers it not at all, the moral issues raise their voices and demand an answer. The answers, like the questions, are mumbled, ambiguous, and distorted when scientific prejudices do not allow the moral problems to be seen in their true light and the answers to be given in their true relation to the questions.
According to the prevailing school of thought, the aim of moral action is the attainment of the greatest amount of human satisfaction. Moral action itself is the result of a conscious weighing of anticipated advantages and disadvantages connected with certain actions. Moral conflict, then, is at best a rational doubt as to which of two alternatives action is more appropriate to the desired result. Ethics, anticipating through rational calculation the relation of certain means to certain ends, becomes indistinguishable from science; and moral and successful action are one and the same thing. God, then, is always with the stronger battalions, with the party who wins the elections, and with the biggest bank accounts.
Lack of success, on the other hand, testifies to ethical inferiority, which carries with it defeat in war, politics, and business as just rewards. Action falling short of the ethical ideal thus conceived in terms of perfect social adaptation is attributed to ignorance or to lack of experience. Consequently, the remedy is found in education and training for “social living in a changing world.”
Yet, when he becomes aware of this contrast between the acknowledged standards of utilitarian ethics and his own ethical experience, he will resort to one of two extremes. He will either dismiss his ethical experience as a psychological oddity, a queer deviation from the utilitarian norm, or he will foreswear the utilitarian standards and with them the empirical conditions of human conduct altogether and retire into the realm of pure thought, that is, of perfectionist ethics.
For it may be regarded by those who are actively engaged in the political struggle for the prevention of war not only as an individual demonstration necessarily empty of political results but also as a particular kind of personal selfishness which cultivates the peace of one’s own conscience bought by abstention from meaningful political action.
The state as such is, if not the source, at least the manifestation of morality on earth, and whatever is done in the name of the state partakes of the ethical dignity emanating from it.
There is still in our civilization a strong tendency to minimize whatever discrepancy might exist between the commands of ethics and the practice of politics. This is achieved either by calling attention to the commands of Christian ethics in their most general form without reference to any concrete political situation or by bemoaning the sinfulness of the world in general, of which politics has its share.
Secular thought in Western civilization, in so far as it goes beyond mere utilitarianism, seeks in the main to avoid the pitfalls of perfectionist ethics, for it recognizes the chasm which separates political action and ethical standards. Nevertheless, it falls prey to another misunderstanding by setting the political sphere apart from the private one for purposes of ethical evaluation. This misunderstanding reveals itself in 3 fundamental attitudes: one proclaiming the permanent exemption of political action from ethical limitations; the second subjecting political action permanently to particular ethical standards, and the third, while recognizing the second alternative as a temporary fact, looking forward to the acceptance, in a not too distant future, of a universal ethical standard of which the private one is thought to be the model.
The first attitude is connected with the names of Machiavelli and Hobbes and is known in the history of ideas as “reason of state.” According to it, the state is subject to no rule of conduct but the one which is dictated by its own self-interest. When the statesman is confronted with a choice between two actions, the one ethical, the other not, of which the latter has a better chance of bringing about the desired result, he must choose the latter. When he acts, however, in a private capacity, he, as any other private individual, must choose the former; for, while political action is free from ethical limitations, private action is subject to them. The individual as such is moral by nature; political society is amoral, also by nature.
The actors on the political scene, however they may be guided by considerations of expediency, must pay their tribute to these standards by justifying their actions in ethical terms. Domestic measures enacted in the interest of special groups must be capable of interpretation in terms of the common good. The moves and countermoves in the struggle for political power must be intelligible as a dialectic movement towards the realization of justice.
Every man is the object of political domination and at the same time aspires towards exercising political domination over others. His back is bent under the political yoke, yet while he bends down he must be aware of somebody, at least in his imagination, who bears the yoke on his behalf. Man is the victim of political power by necessity; he is a political master by aspiration. It is this aspiration which drives him toward obscuring the fact of his political dependence and giving it an ethical justification.
Whatever some philosophers may have asserted about the amorality of political action, philosophic tradition, historical judgment, and public opinion alike refuse to withhold ethical valuation from the political sphere.
Political acts are subject to one ethical standard; private acts are subject to another. What the latter condemns, the former may approve. “If we had done for ourselves what we did for Italy, what scoundrels we would have been!”
No civilization can be satisfied with such a dual morality; for through it the domain of politics is not only made morally inferior to the private sphere but this inferiority is recognized as legitimate and made respectable by a particular system of political ethics.
It is the latter alternative, we are told, that we have to choose. For as the means are subordinated functionally to the end, so they are ethically. A good end must be sought for and an evil end must be avoided — in both cases regardless of the means employed. The end taints the means employed for its attainment with its own ethical color and thus justifies or condemns that which, considered by itself, would merit the opposite valuation.
What a man would not be allowed to do for himself, that is, in behalf of his own limited interests as the end of his action, he is allowed and even obligated to do when his act would further the welfare of the state and thus promote the common good. The action which would make him a scoundrel and a criminal there, will make him a hero and a statesman here.
Actually, however, the tendency to justify otherwise immoral actions by the ends they serve is universal. It is merely most conspicuous in politics. It has been said that there are just wars but no just armies. One might as well say that there are just foreign policies but no just diplomats.
In order to achieve it, one must weigh the immorality of the means against the ethical value of the end and establish a fixed relationship between them. This is impossible. One may argue from the point of view of a particular political philosophy, but one cannot prove from the point of view of universal and objective ethical standards that the good of the end ought to prevail over the evil of the means; for there is no objective standard by which to compare two kinds of happiness or of misery or the happiness of one man with the misery of another. That the welfare of one group is or is not too dearly paid for by the misery of another has always been asserted but has never been demonstrated. The analysis of the artificial and partial character of the end-means relation will make this clear.
Kant and Marx have decried the use of man by man as a means to an end, proclaiming the ethical maxim that every man be treated as an end in himself, and the disinherited have taken up the cry. Yet from Plato and Aristotle to Spencer and Hitler, philosophers and practitioners of government alike have maintained the claim that certain men are born to serve as means for the ends of others, and this claim this disinherited themselves support once they have risen to the top and then determine for themselves what is end and what is means.
Conversely, what we call “end” is a point at which a chain of actions is supposed to come to a stop, while it proceeds actually beyond it; in view of this “beyond,” the end transforms itself into a means. All action is, therefore, at the same time means and end; and it is only by an arbitrary separation of a certain chain of actions from what procedes and follows it that we can attribute to certain actions the exclusive quality of means and end. Actually, however, the totality of human actions presents itself as a hierarchy of actions each of which is the end of the preceding and a means for the following. This hierarchy culminates in the ultimate goal of all human activity which is identical with the absolute good — be it, God, humanity, the state, or the individual himself. This is the only end that is nothing but end and hence does not serve as a means to a further end. Viewed from this end, all human activity appears as means to the ultimate goal.
For if the ethical end justifies unethical means, the ultimate and absolute good which all human activity serves as means to an end justifies all human actions. Among them there may be differences in degree, there can be none in kind.
A similarly deceptive harmony and a false moral justification derive from the origin of the action, that is, the intention of the actor. The ethical worth of the action is here judged not by its results but by the intention of the actor. If the action resulted in evil, if it brought about war and death and misery for millions, the statesmen are not to blame, provided that their intentions were good.
A French proverb says that in politics there is one thing worse than a crime, and that is a blunder. In other words, the political actor has, beyond the general moral duties, a special moral responsibility to act wisely, that is, in accordance with the rules of the political art; and for him expediency becomes a moral duty. The individual, acting on his own behalf, may act unwisely without moral reproach as long as the consequences of his inexpedient action concern only himself. What is done in the political sphere by its very nature concerns others who must suffer from unwise action.
“I do the very best,” said Lincoln, “I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”
It is the common mark of all these attempts at solving the problem of political ethics that they try to create a harmony which the facts do not warrant, either because there is no discord in the first place or because the existing discord is final. All these attempts start with the assumption that the individual sphere is ethically superior to politics.
Such a comparison shows that our intentions are generally good, whereas the consequences of our actions generally are not. As soon as we leave the realm of our thoughts and aspirations, we are inevitably involved in sin and guilt. While our hand carries the good intent to what seems to be its consummation, the fruit of evil grows from the seed of noble thought. We want peace among nations and harmony among individuals, yet our actions end in conflict and war. We want to see all men free, but our actions put others in chains as others do to us. We believe in the equality of all men, and our very demands on society make others unequal.
He who acts is always unjust; nobody is just but the one who reflects. The very act of acting destroys our moral integrity. Whoever wants to retain his moral innocent must forsake action altogether and go to a nunnery.
First of all, because of its natural limitations, the human intellect is unable to calculate and to control completely the results of human action. Once the action is performed, it becomes an independent force creating changes, provoking actions, and colliding with other forces, which the actor may or may not have foreseen and which he can control but to a small degree.
The typical solution, however, will be a compromise which puts the struggle at rest without putting conscience at ease.
Loyalty to the nation comes into conflict with our duties to humanity. Even though most men will in our age resolve the conflict easily in favor of the nation, the conflict is nevertheless a real one; and there are more individuals than the war literature would let us suspect who bore as a heavy burden the dual duty to kill in the name of their country and to respect in the fellow-men the image of God.
For the typical goals of selfishness, such as food, shelter, security, and the means by which they are obtained, such as money, jobs, marriage, and the like, have an objective relation to the vital needs of the individuals; their attainment offers the best chances for survival under the particular natural and social conditions under which the individual lives.
The desire for power, on the other hand, concerns itself not with the individual’s survival but with his position among his fellows once his survival has been secured. Consequently, the selfishness of man has limits; his will to power has none. For while man’s vital needs are capable of satisfaction, his lust for power would be satisfied only if the last man became an object of his domination, there being nobody above or beside him, that is, if he became like God.
There is in selfishness an element of rationality presented by the natural limitation of the end, which is lacking in the will to power. It is for this reason that mere selfishness can be appeased by concessions while satisfaction of one demand will stimulate the will to power to ever expanding claims.
This limitless character of the lust for power reveals a general quality of the human mind. In this limitless and ever unstille desire which comes to rest only with the exhaustion of its possible objects, the animus dominandi is of the same kind as the mystical desire for union with the universe, the love of Don Juan, Faust’s thirst for knowledge. These four attempts at pushing the individual beyond his natural limits toward a transcendent goal have also in common that this transcendent goal, this resting-point, is reached only in the imagination but never in reality. The attempt at realizing it in actual experience ends always with the destruction of the individual attempting it, as the fate of all world-conquerors from Alexander to Hitler proves and as the legends of Icarus, Don Juan, and Faust symbolically illustrate.
There is no social action which would not contain at least a trace of this desire to make one’s own person prevail against others. It is this ubiquity of the desire for power which, besides and beyond any particular selfishness or other evilness of purpose, constitutes the ubiquity of evil in human action. Here is the element of corruption and of sin which injects even into the best of intentions at least a drop of evil and thus spoils it. On a grand scale, the transformation of churches into political organizations, of revolutions into dictatorships, of love for country into imperialism, are cases in point.
Politics is a struggle for power over men, and whatever its ultimate aim may be, power is its immediate goal and the mods of acquiring, maintaining, and demonstrating it determine the technique of political action.
The test of political success is the degree to which one is able to maintain, to increase, or to demonstrate one’s power over others. The test of a morally good action is the degree to which it is capable of treating others not as means to the actor’s ends but as ends in themselves. It is for this reason alone inevitable that, whereas non-political action is ever exposed to corruption by selfishness and lust for power, this corruption is inherent in the very nature of the political act.
The state as the receptacle of the highest secular loyalty and power devaluates and actually delimits the manifestations of the individual desire for power. The individual, power-hungry for his own sake, is held in low public esteem; and the mores and laws of society endeavor to strengthen through positive sanctions the moral condemnation of individual aspirations for power, to limit their modes and sphere of action, and to suppress them altogether. While, however, the state is ideologically and physically incomparably more powerful than its citizens, it is free from all effective restraint from above. The state’s collective desire for power is limited, aside from self-chosen limitations, only by the ruins of an old, and the rudiments of a new, normative order, both too feeble to offer more than a mere intimation of actual restraint. Above it, there is no centralized authority beyond the mechanics of the balance of power, which could impose actual limits upon the manifestations of its collective desire for domination. The state has become indeed a “mortal God” and for an age that believes no longer in an immortal God, the state becomes the only God there is.
What was egotism — and hence ignoble and immoral — there becomes patriotism and therefore noble and altruistic here. While society puts liabilities upon aspirations for individual power, it places contributions to the collective power of the state at the top of the hierarchy of values.
All these factors work together to stimulate the individual’s lust for power and to give its manifestations a free reign, as long as the individual seeks power not for himself directly but for the state.
In the end, the individual comes to believe that there is less evil in the aspirations for state power than there is in the lust for individual dominance, nay, that to the former attaches a peculiar virtue which is lacking in the latter.
The radical evil is, in the words of Kant, “a principle which falls completely outside the rational world view.” A civilization which has made this world view its own has deprived itself of the intellectual faculty to master the radical evil of the lust for power.
There is no escape from the evil of power, regardless of what one does. Whenever we act with reference to our fellow men, we must sin, and we must still sin when we refuse to act; for the refusal to be involved in the evil of action carries with it the breach of the obligation to do one’s duty. No ivory tower is remote enough to offer protection against the guilt in which the actor and the bystander, the oppressor and the oppressed, the murderer and his victim are inextricably enmeshed. Political ethics is indeed the ethics of doing evil.
Such an attitude is but another example of the superficiality of a civilization which, blind to the tragic complexities of human existence, contents itself with an unreal and hypocritical solution of the problem of political ethics. In fact, the invocation of justice pure and simple against a political action makes of justice a mockery; for, since all political actions needs must fall short of justice, the argument against one political action holds true for all. By avoiding a political action because it is unjust, the perfectionist does nothing but exchange blindly one injustice for another which might even be worse than the former. He shrinks from the lesser evil because he does not want to do evil at all. Yet his personal abstention from evil, which is actually a subtle form of egotism with a good conscience, does not at all affect the existence of evil in the world but only destroys the faculty of discriminating between different evils. The perfectionist thus becomes finally a source of greater evil. “Man,” in the words of Pascal, “is neither angel nor beast and his misery is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” Here again it is only the awareness of the tragic presence of evil in all political action which at least enables man to choose the lesser evil and to be as good as he can be in an evil world.
Neither science nor ethics nor politics can resolve the conflict between politics and ethics into harmony. We have no choice between power and the common good. To act successfully, that is, according to the rules of the political art, is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment.
Rationalism misunderstands the nature of man, the nature of the world, and the nature of reason itself. It sees the world dominated by reason throughout, an independent and self-sufficient force which cannot fail, sooner or later, to eliminate the still remaining vestiges of unreason. Evil, then, is a mere negative quality, the absence of something whose presence would be good. It can be conceived only as lack of reason and is incapable of positive determination based upon its own intrinsic qualities.
When the preliberal writers decry the evils of man’s earthy existence, they do not think in the first place of the waste of life and effort, of the disproportion between merit and reward, but of man’s damnation or of his inherent inability to find peace and happiness in this world. This evil is symbol and expression of all that, in a positive way, is fateful, sinister, and destructive in human life.
The prerationalist age is aware of the existence of two forces — God and the devil, life and death, light and darkness, good and evil, reason and passion — which struggle for dominance of the world. There is no progress towards the good, noticeable from year to year, but undecided conflict which sees today good, tomorrow evil, prevail; and only at the end of time, immeasurably removed from the here and now of our earthy life, the ultimate triumph of the forces of goodness and light will be assured.
Out of this everlasting and ever undecided struggle there arises one of the roots of what might be called the tragic sense of life, the awareness of unresolvable discord, contradictions, and conflicts which are inherent in the nature of things and which human reason is powerless to solve.
Man — and here we have to exclude the rationalist — meets in his intellectual experience the unceasing struggle between his understanding, on the one hand, and the riddles of the world and of his existence in this world, on the other — a struggle which offers with each answer new questions, with each victory a new disappointment, and thus seems to lead nowhere. In this labyrinth of unconnected causal connections man discovers many little answers but no answer to the great questions of his life, no meaning, no direction.
Man is not born to solve the problems of the world but to search for the starting point of the problem and then to remain within the limits of what he is able to comprehend. The reason of man and the reason of the divinity are two very different things.
The lack of tragic art in our age is but another manifestation of the rationalist unawareness of the tragic element in life. The same unawareness expresses itself philosophically in the belief in continuous progress and in the trivial optimism for which life dissolves into a series of little hurdles which, one after another, increasing skill cannot fail to overcome.
The conceptions are valid only under the assumption that the essence of world and man is rational throughout; for only then it is possible to do away with a normative sphere altogether and to reduce ethics to calculations of utility. It is only under this same assumption that one can hope to solve all the problems of the modern world by a quantitative extension of knowledge through education.
In the social sphere, however, the dissemination of knowledge through education can bring no decisive result since the deficiencies of social action are not due to a lack of knowledge, or at least that sort of knowledge which modern education is able to provide.
There is no indication that the trained social scientist as actor on the social scene is more competent than the layman to solve social problems, with the exception of technical problems of limited scope. A knowledge of a different and higher order is needed to solve the problems of the social world.
First of all, the practical application of this knowledge is dependent upon the irrational conditions of interests and emotions operating upon the will of man. In other words, man is likely to act according to his interests and emotions even though his knowledge of social causation suggests him to a different course. Thus lawyers and physicians will give competent advice to their clients and will act quite foolishly when the same problem arises in their own persons, in members of their families, or in friends, that is, whenever interests and emotions interfere with rational judgment.
The journalist will be a reliable and penetrating reporter of events and situations in which he is not involved through his emotions or interests. Yet when he has to report on labor or monopolies, on France or Russia, he becomes a partisan who sees at best only part of the truth. No technical improvement in news-reporting and no international guarantees of free access to the sources of news everywhere in the world will alter this elemental subordination of factual knowledge to interests and emotions. The historian and political scientist will give the most brilliant analysis of a political situation which occurred in distant times or lands, but the records know of few if any historians or political scientists who have been at the same time successful statesmen, that is, able to apply professional knowledge successfully to a situation in which their interests or emotions had a stake. Machiavelli was unsuccessful in politics; yet it was not knowledge, that is, the education of the political scientist, that failed him.
The amount of superstition is not much changed, but it now attaches to politics, not to religion.
Forgetful of the inherent uncertainty of social action and searching in its social endeavors for a security of which even the natural sciences know nothing, modern man has taken refuge in a bastion of facts; for, after all, “facts do not lie,” and they, at least, are “real.”
The latter are either solvable at a particular moment of history or they are not. When they are solved, they are solved once and for all.
Social problems, such as marriage, education, equality, freedom, authority, peace, are of a different type. They do not grow out of temporary limitations of knowledge or temporary insufficiencies of technical achievement — both of which can be overcome by the progressive development of theory and practice. They are the result of those conflict in which the selfishness and the lust for power, which are common to all men, involve all men. Social problems are never solved definitely. They must be solved every day anew.
What has changed in the process of history are the techniques of warfare and, perhaps, the rationalizations and justifications but not the thing itself, that is, the murderous conflagration of human collectivities through which the individual egotisms and aggressive instincts find vicarious and morally expedient satisfaction.
Actually, the disturbance of peace at one particular spot may or may not endanger peace everywhere, and sometimes it may be necessary to buy general peace or peace for one’s own country with a localized war between two other countries. Peace is subject to the conditions of time and space and must be established and maintained by different methods and under different conditions of urgency in the everyday relations of concrete nations. The problem of international peace as such exists only for the philosopher.
The temporary and ever precarious solution of this, as of any other, social problem depends essentially upon 3 factors: social pressure which is able to contain the selfish tendencies of human nature within socially tolerable bounds; conditions of life creating a social equilibrium which tends to minimize the psychological causes of social conflict, such as insecurity, fear, and aggressiveness; and, finally, a moral climate which allows man to expect at least an approximation to justice here and now and thus offers a substitute for strife as a means to achieve justice.
It is in the insight and the wisdom by which more-than-scientific man elevates his experiences into the universal laws of human nature. It is he who, by doing so, establishes himself as the representative of true reason, while nothing-but-scientific man appears as the true dogmatist who universalizes cognitive principles of limited validity and applies them to realms not accessible to them. It is also the former who proves himself to be the true realist; for it is he who does justice to the true nature of things.
A statesman differs from a professor in an university; the latter has only the general view of society; the former has a number of circumstances to combine with those general ideas, and to take into his consideration. Circumstances are infinite, are infinitely combined; are variable and transient; he who does not take them into consideration is not erroneous, but stark mad. A statesman, never losing sight of principles, is to be guided by circumstances; and, judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment, he may ruin his country forever.
As the scientist creates a new nature out of his knowledge of the forces of nature, so the statesman creates a new society out of his knowledge of the nature of man. The insight and the wisdom of the statesman gauge accurately the distribution and relative strength of opposing forces and anticipate, however tentatively, the emerging pattern of new constellations. The statesman has no assurance of success in the immediate task and not even the expectation of solving the long-range problem. No formula will give the statesman certainty, no calculation eliminate the risk, no accumulation of facts open the future. While his mind yearns for the apparent certainty of science, his actual condition is more akin to the gambler’s than to the scientist’s.
In different ways all ages have tried to escape recognition of this tragedy. An age, in particular, whose powers and vistas have been multiplied by science is liable to forget for a moment this perennial human tragedy and to exalt in the engineer a new man whose powers equal his aspirations and who masters human destiny as he masters a machine.
Reappeared, too, has the old despair which with fierce and feeble passion, hunts for security where there is none; accepts nothing but reason or rejects reason altogether; and, distrustful of the higher faculties of the human mind, either sacrifices the fullness of man’s human heritage on the altar of science or else laments with Herodotus: “Of all the sorrows that afflict mankind, the bitterest is this, that one should have consciousness of much, but control over nothing.”
Without assurance of victory and with the odds against him, man persists in the struggle, a hero rather than a searcher for scientific truth. Above this struggle, never ended and never decided in the perpetual change of victory and defeat, of life and death, a flame burns and a light shines, flickering in the vast expanses of human freedom but never extinguished: the reason of man, creating and through this creation illuming in the triumph and the failure of scientific man the symbol of man himself, of what he is and of what he wants to be, of his weakness and of his strength, of his freedom and of his subjection, of his misery and of his grandeur.