Theory of the Democratic State [2nd printing 1939. Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674335523, 9780674365780

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THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE BY

MARIE COLLINS

SWABEY

Associate Professar of Philosophy in New York University

CAMBRIDGE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1939

COPYRIGHT, 1087 BT THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

Second Printing

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE» MASS., U.S.A.

CONTENTS CHAPTER INTRODUCTION I.

PAGE 3

T H E QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

16

T H E D E B T TO SCIENCE

32

III.

T H E CONTRAST WITH COMMUNISM

58

IV.

DICTATORSHIP AND MASTERPLANS

96

II.

V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X.

PUBLICITY OR PROPAGANDA?

120

POLITICAL M Y T H S , FICTIONS, AND POSTULATES

137

JUSTICE AS A DEMOCRATIC POSTULATE

157

NUMERICAL AND PROPORTIONAL JUSTICE

173

T H E INFLUENCE OP THE MACHINE

193

I S DEMOCRACY SOCIALISM?

211

INDEX

230

THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

INTRODUCTION

I. CURRENT opinion sees democracy as something of a fraud. To an age that has run the gamut of hero worship, fact worship, and plan worship, devotion to principles has lost its once magic appeal. Few can forget how tragically the performance of civilization has run counter to its protestations, how weakly the ideals venerated by religion and morals have fallen before the appetites of rival groups. Since the World War few have had the courage to proclaim the brotherhood of man with its shambles still before their eyes. Hypocrisy with the best will cannot compass it, and looks hesitantly around for some fresh legend or delusive myth in which to mask the old tricks of unregenerate human nature. The scales seem to have dropped from our eyes. History appears as a drama with a single recurring plot : cynical, saturnine, old as the world. It is a tale of conquest, of endlessly contending flesh, of the few forever enjoying the benefits. Precisely the state of affairs condemned by morals and social justice has always thriven and continues to thrive. There are new names to be sure, but always the same old tricks. There seems no light anywhere. Not dissimilar is the mirror that science holds up to nature. To many it seems that its world-picture has dealt a staggering blow to the humanitarian ideal and to democracy as a form of government based on that ideal. With the expansion of the universe toward the poles of inexhaustible vastness and diminution, man is thrown off his axis. Once again science enforces the hard doctrine that the universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere and privileged focus nowhere. Man is liberated from his agelong delusions as to the peculiarly favored status of his species, his planet, his solar system, and his social values. But at the same time he forfeits his power, his dignity, his meaning as a rational agent, finding himself the sport of energies too mighty to oppose or control.

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In the far-flung, myriad-centered world outlined by science, time and chance are the ruling powers. On the one hand stands duration, stretching its unimaginable vistas into the past; on the other, the blind fortuity of all the possible ways in which the primal energies can go together. Nowhere is there place for intelligence or ideal goals; history appears but a meaningless chapter of accidents. Given sufficient time all possible combinations of the elements must come about by pure chance, just as cards repeatedly shuffled must in the long run take every order or a fall of loose type in an indefinite number of trials produce the works of Whitman or Emerson. So, science imagines, the haphazard union of electric charges gave rise after undreamt-of ages to the ninety-two kinds of atoms; and these by prolonged trial and error to the simplest organic molecules. Here animalism takes up the tale. From one-cell organisms after an indefinite lapse came the different species of plants and beasts under the action of chance selection and the competitive warfare of breeds and individuals. The gist of this long, unflattering story of the upward ascent is that man is one of the animals. Today indeed this idea threatens to dominate Ufe; threatens, as it seems to me, to induce a confusion of ideas that may well lead to social self-destruction. For as a result of viewing himself as an animal, man comes to treat his fellows as animals and tries to enslave them by the same technique. Today psychological manipulation and the conditioning of human reflexes are skillfully practiced arts. As beasts are driven to the pasture with blows, so men, it is discovered, can be driven to appropriate reactions under the goad of habit, routine, and repeated suggestion. In contrast to the generations that sought to change the world by appeals to reason and conscience, this modern approach seeks to take man captive through his appetites, to trap him as one would trap an animal through tricking its impulses. Inevitably biology centers life and mind in the organic drives for continuance. Inevitably a generation under its influence enthrones hunger and sex as the dominant urges of civilization. Literature, manners, politics, and social life are saturated with these themes. Access to

INTRODUCTION

5

human nature, it is held, must be had through these channels since these are the drives that move men. Moral and intellectual ideals in comparison have only a sham, derivative efficacy. Without force in themselves, the systems built upon them are at bottom simply refinements of the appetites, obtuse ways of keeping the stomach full. All values, in short, turn out to be biologic. Once animalism is accepted, ideas like justice, truth, goodness are construed as adjustments of a specific zoologie group. Though without value in themselves, they are eloquent of the intra-organic. They give us news of the body's liking, even if they offer no indication of anything independent of it that is worth liking. Man's great mistake, according to naturalism, is to try to endow these ideals with objectivity and moving power. In doing so, he inevitably lapses into superstition. For he mistakenly converts his private feelings into public facts, covertly transforms his organic responses into attributes of the extra-organic world. If he clearly perceived the natural basis of his ideals, he would on the contrary apprehend his humanitarianism as no more than a predilection in favor of his species, a self-centeredness of feeling on the part of an animal for whom sociability has survival worth. If the ox had a god, runs an old tale, it would be an ox; similarly the values endowing a bovine world would be those of interest to oxen. But it is time to protest. Commitment to the purely biological theory of mind jeopardizes, in our opinion, not only the scientific picture of nature but the whole range of human thought. Knowledge is robbed of safe footing. Biological props alone are too weak to support the complex panorama of the cosmos. For to the inevitable question how man has arrived at his new picture of the world and the knowledge of his place in it, stimulus-response is the answer. Knowing has to be expounded in terms of the learning processes of the lower animals: in the language of contact-action, reflex arcs, nerveimpulse transmissions, and the impact of bodies on end organs. Where stimulus-response is made central, accident and repetition become the sources of enlightenment. Feeling, habit, association, and irrelevance are declared the core of persuasion

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of the animal mind. Thus in the most famous experiments in animal learning a flash of light associated with the presence of food came in time to be taken as a substitute stimulus for food, inciting all the reactions of the food itself. The outcome of such experiments showed no relation between occasion and response save those of habituation and transferred feeling tone. Beasts were found to return an essentially pain-pleasure reflex. Moreover, repetition, successive impacts of the impetus, proved the means of breaking down resistance and inducing a desired sequence of behavior. By such means almost any tricks could be played upon the animal and new habits set up. As the experiments showed, no relevance or similarity was necessary between stimulus and response: a flash of light or a dinner-bell could excite eating reactions quite as well as a beefsteak; knowledge was reduced to arbitrary association. Yet if such conditioned reflex action is the type of the complex body of our epistemic responses, the structure of knowledge seems about as substantial as a house of cards. For once having seen how easy it is to trick animal reflexes, and how purely accidental concomitants may be substituted for the original occasion and a transfer of reactions unwittingly effected, what confidence can we have that our human scientific responses may not be similarly deceptive? 1 Nothing is plainer than that 1 If it be objected that scientific knowledge refines and improves upon the crude associative feeling and conditioned reflexes that constitute animal knowing by carefully checking its responses for positive and negative correlations through a wide range of instances, the answer is that on the presuppositions of the biological theory of mind the scientist's cerebral action is itself just so much bio-chemical reaction dictated by the environment and as such the product of conditioning. In short, this hypothesis cannot prove (save by appealing to extraneous and opposite principles) that scientific method itself is other, or any more trustworthy, than animal habit. The most that can be claimed is that it represents more deeply ingrained habits of reaction (being based on a larger number of instances). And since responses that have occurred tend to recur, scientists, being subject to more repeated conditioning by the principles of recurrence and transference than lower animals with less experience', are more liable to complex interchange of stimuli than they are. But since arbitrary associations and transferred responses are essentially irrelevant to their stimuli, it is impossible to show on these principles (which are the only ones allowed for by this theory of mind) that even the reflex mechanisms of "scientists" can give disclosures that are relevant, congruous, or truly correspondent to the nature of the physical impetus or object.

INTRODUCTION

7

stimulus and response in the knowing experience may be totally unlike and that the deliverances of feeling (now that knowing is seen to be centered in feeling) are eloquent rather of the animal's intra-organic experiences than communicative of the qualities of an extra-organic source. Yet on the assumptions of the theory the sole way of knowing the stimuli is through the responses; while the problem of understanding the stimulus is the all-important problem of comprehending the nature of the surrounding world from which the knowing experience takes its rise. The great weakness of the biological theory of knowing is that it seeks to arrive at knowledge of the object wholly by describing physiological adjustments of the organism to the object. And since as biology it can never get beyond the latter, the nature of the object as distinct from and other than the organic response remains on the presuppositions of the theory incapable of being known. For stimulus-response is a physical contact theory of knowledge ; its whole force is to deny that the knowing experience is transcendent or has any valid implications beyond itself. The upshot of viewing man and his mental activities as a reflex mechanism is to drive us into a cul-de-sac. For the result of reducing all human insights and inferences about the world to mere physical contacts — bare records of something striking something else — is that knowledge itself with its claim to reach beyond the given to the possible, the non-existent, and the universal, becomes illusion. The weakness of the psychology which reduces mind to the mechanics of the nervous system is that it cannot show any reason why the patterns of reflex arcs registering what we as organisms want, or are affectively conditioned to, should give us valid clues as to what we and the objects about us are. Yet the discovery of the latter, and not the former, is admittedly the goal of science. Thus the scientist is not content to claim that the theory of evolutionary adaptation is itself merely a mode of adaptation devised by certain higher anthropoids, or that the theory that all knowledge consists in physical conditioning is itself just a case of a group of

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nervous systems being conditioned to this belief. On the contrary, he holds that his theories are true·, and in claiming that they are true he asserts that they are not merely modes of response (for false theories are genuine modes of response) but that they are accurate transcriptions of the nature and disposition of phenomena in the surrounding world. In brief, the error of the stimulus-response theory of mind is twofold: on the one hand, it asks us to admit the reality of an independent, antecedently existing world for which its theory of knowledge makes no provision; on the other, after having depicted mind as an organ guided by habit, feeling, and irrelevance, it asks us to accept the world-picture got by this organ as intellectually necessary, objectively valid, and relevant. Yet how are we to entertain such patent contradictions with untroubled faith? Only too plainly the conclusion of the theory contradicts its premises; and the result of attempting on so narrowly circumscribed a view to account for the immense universe disclosed by science is to bring the theory tumbling about our ears. Nor is it the far cry one might suppose from current psychobiology to political attitudes and outlooks. If one honestly believes that man is simply one more mechanism in a mechanistic universe, politics reduces to little more than running a government machine and the art of conditioning reflexes. Men are quite properly to be treated by the state as animals, and not as self-directing human beings. Like beasts they may be used for ends not their own and imposed on by the crudest artifices. Thus the new methods undertake to direct human nature not by appeal to ideas but by taking advantage of the laws of mass behavior. A few experts, it is now understood, can by such means exert great influence on large groups of men in indirect ways, masking their compulsion in palatable forms. For the surest way to guide men without resorting openly to physical force is to set about skillfully indoctrinating them with a body of habits and associations. Although the technique employed to influence popular behavior varies, it always seeks by one means or another to get below the threshold of reflection to primary organic motives. For not only are hunger, fear, pugnacity, and

INTRODUCTION

9

sex closely connected with the motor mechanism (and thus readily roused to action), but their excitation tends to spread by a kind of contagion, so that many men come to share the same emotion, and what is known as crowd-mindedness results. Once this herd spirit is created, the susceptibility of the group to suggestion and its docility to leadership are greatly increased. The sister arts by which social manipulation is practiced today are advertising and propaganda. Methods of controlling the public taste for the merchant's profit are studied in minute detail: means of habit-formation, the exposure of millions of minds to the same stimuli, and the association of things absolutely irrelevant — as the Unking of popular opera music with a motor fuel or of black-face comedians with a tooth-paste. As in advertising so in political matters reiteration instils in most men the habit of acceptance. Under the right circumstances almost any proposal (though totally unsupported by grounds) can evoke the wished-for response. The efficacy of the method is surprising. Thus a slogan like "Vote for Sapwit," if repeated by news, placard, and radio, can bring out the voters in his favor even though he is lacking in every personal requisite. Opposed to all this stands the democratic attitude still true to, though somewhat shaken in, its parliamentary traditions. Not biological tactics but intelligence seems to it to offer the best means for the conduct of government. For it is only through his difference from the animals that man gains his stature as man. To respect personality, not to dupe it, is the goal of human achievement. Moreover, democratic thought has far more in common with the broader postulates and methodology of science than with its factual findings and dogmas. Like science it turns to enlightenment and away from an affective approach as the means to secure its conclusions. Nor does it allow (any more than does science) the latest speculations on evolution, life, and mind, to sway its judgment of the data before it. For the temper of science is impartial, detached, in its eyes facts stand free and equal. Instead of admitting that he is conditioned to his beliefs by irrelevant emotional stimuli, the scientist as scientist claims

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THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

that he is persuaded by the evidence. He asserts that he is driven to his conclusions not by the pressure of physical forces upon him as spectator but by the logical or relational pattern of the spectacle itself. Not animal moods and brute coercion, but considerations of probability and measurement, he insists, determine his evaluation of the facts. This, too, is the spirit of democracy. In place of the pain-pleasure principle, it appeals to self-confirmation by intelligence. Its methods are public, parliamentary, a consideration of evidence and cause, and the effort to treat all alike. Ideas furnish the groundwork for its practical ends. Justice takes rank over need. It asks us to respect and consult the wishes of our fellow men, not to use and deceive them. And the sanction for all this rests, for republican thought, not in some dogmatic account of the make-up of our organisms but in the cogency of our insights. As for ways of activating the public mind, there are at least two: the method of authority and the method of criticism. And it is of immense importance at the present time that science shall not allow the prestige of its great name to be committed to the wrong method. For authority is the method of force, of coercion, of blind conformity; whereas criticism is that of reflection, questioning, persuasive conviction. The one appeals to the feelings, sympathetic and fearful, while the other arouses deliberative doubt and resistance to suggestion. Today the issue is plainly drawn. Just as surely as conditioning is the doas-you-are-told method, reflection is its contrary, the arm's length scrutiny of others' proposals, and the arrival at conclusions for oneself on the basis of searching, evidence, cause. And if society is to avoid that crowd-mindedness which is the fertile soil for the despot, its members must adopt the deliberative outlook which can alone put them beyond the reach of psychological manipulation. II. The present work, as the title indicates, is not a historical study, save incidentally, nor a handbook of political practice. Instead it is an effort to think through perhaps the chief princi-

INTRODUCTION

II

pies of democracy. As such its concern is with the intentional analysis of republican ideas rather than with the actual working of governments. It seeks, moreover, to show that, although the facts with which they deal are different, the logic of democracy and science are very similar. While the keynote of the book is struck in Chapter I, it has not seemed necessary to repeat in later chapters the "Quantitative Argument" in abstract form. Instead its applications to different problems are developed: by showing, for instance, that logical and quantitative considerations underlie the conception of justice (as arithmetic and proportional); that these same methods explain in large part democracy's "Debt to Science"; that they are at the root of its "Contrast with Communism" (which holds instead a qualitative, organic, and Hegelian theory) ; that they find expression in political myths in so far as these are bodies of belief that follow as systematic consequences from certain basic assumptions. In this connection it may be well to run through certain themes of the argument to show their bearing on one another more clearly than is possible in the detail of specific analyses. Democracy, as is well known, stakes its case on the inherent reasonableness (once called the "self-evidence") of its ideas. For governments to endure, its sponsors have held, they must not intimidate men with superstition and force but convince them as intelligent beings. More than once its trinity of watchwords has rocked the modern world. Yet democracy has not been satisfied merely to persuade men to its cause by high-flown arguments for liberty and equality. Its rationalism has not stopped here, as short-sighted historical accounts often suppose, but has worked out the details of a governmental theory. Utilizing logical and mathematical notions as a basis, it develops a distinct technique for administering the state. Citizens are to be treated as equal and identical in sharing the sovereignty. Popular elections for office are adopted, as well as ingenious devices for sampling public opinion, such as the common-law jury, representation, and reliance upon majorities as the clue to the common will. Counting heads, measurement, sampling, all

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play a part. Nor is the rationalism of democracy today a mere archaism or dead letter. Its spirit is still strong, though applied to the conquest of newfields— to industrial and economic Ufe— where the logic of the machine takes up the quantitative argument. For to the twentieth century the implications of machines are far more important than social-contract theories. As for the logic of the machine, there is not much difficulty in showing that it is specifically approved by intelligence. In the case of both, the aim is to derive much from little, the maximum output from the minimum means, by exact, impartial methods. Parsimony, simplicity, uniformity are their principles of system everywhere. Like science, machines sprang from the application of mathematical theory to the phenomena of nature. By applying measurement to motions (the most obvious fact of nature), men discovered mechanical laws and created instruments for taking advantage of these laws. Moreover, having learned to construct engines capable of creating tirelessly recurrent motions, they found themselves equipped with new sources of power. In addition to yielding immense control of physical energies, machines tended to develop new tactics of manufacture. For their analytic, repetitive processes led men to separate production into many specialized stages. Manufacture came to mean a system in which many workers, each performing a separate task (usually by mechanical means), jointly produced commodities. Not only was it found that men by dividing their labor accomplished more than all-round workers, but along with their increased output went savings in effort, time, materials. Democracies and societies informed with the spirit of science accordingly welcomed the new mechanical order as the expression of enlightened intelligence. By applying science to life, they hoped, labor might be lightened and living improved. Not merely was it obviously the method of "least means" for yielding much in the satisfaction of desires from little expenditure of energy, but its quantitative production, they came gradually to see, implied wide consumption as its complement. Today it has become a commonplace of business that, if industry is to pros-

INTRODUCTION

13

per, there must be crowds of purchasers ready to buy its products. Since any one person can at most use only a few articles of a given type, adequate power to absorb them cannot be localized in a small group, but must be spread through a large community — indeed, the larger the better. If motor car and radio factories, for instance, are to run, there must be a wide public able to buy these goods; a small wealthy class cannot use up the supply. In countries, on the contrary, whose populations lack any widespread purchasing power, mass production with its rich potentialities for bettering the standard of living becomes impossible. For mass production depends upon mass consumption; in effect the two are reciprocal. Not merely does large-scale manufacture put work, money, and machine-made goods into the hands of large numbers, thereby improving their lot, but wide consumption in turn keeps the factories running which provide the conveniences that do so much to put cleanliness, leisure, and comfort within reach of the many. Measurement, planning, and efficiency have become the new precepts of democracy; yet no less than its watchwords in a pre-machine age they reflect its reliance on ideas. For they apply to economic Ufe that combination of careful thought, technical processes, and scientific skill which is known throughout the world today under the name of "Rationalization." 2 As already pointed out, democracy's connection with science is far more one of aim and procedure than of facts and conclusions. Yet the failure to understand this has led in recent years to an outcropping of naturalistic theories of the state, in which democracy is rejected on the ground that "scientific facts" plainly disclose nature's marked preference for some other type of political organization. The economic theory of history especially is often used to enforce this argument. To uncritical minds its case is an easy one to make, since to the majority concerned with earning a living no facts are more pressing than the economic. Moreover, its argument is broad and hazy, appealing to vague influences, customs, trends, and social forces, largely 2 For the definition of "Rationalization" as a system of economy offered by the World Economic Conference, see page 85, note 22.

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divorced from quantitative considerations. It appeals, too, to the latent self-centeredness in human breasts, which seeks to recover face after the immense loss of prestige inflicted upon man by evolutionary science, through recourse to pansocial, economic, and humanistic explanations. In " T h e Contrast with Communism," the differences are dealt with between a qualitative and organic theory of the state and a quantitative and reflective one. Thus, while communism, following the teachings of Marx and Lenin, embraces a dogmatic materialism, an empirical theory of knowledge, and an economic view of life based upon the "evolutionary logic" of Hegel, democracy, on the contrary, though largely without a metaphysics, has evolved through the influences of the Enlightenment, a rational methodology resting on certain immaterial principles, which applies notions of uniformity, consistency, probability, and measurement to the treatment of men b y governments. Although claiming to find a logic immanent in history, the dialectic method which' the Marxists invoke is very different from the logic of democracy. This contrast centers in their opposing attitudes toward identity and contradiction. For while the logic of consistency holds that progress in thought and action begins with the clear apprehension of the self-same nature of each thing and the exclusion of its contradictory, the dialectic method says that nothing is itself but is inherently becoming its opposite: e.g., strife generating peace, want generating plenty, class divisions making for classlessness. As to the desirability of peace, freedom, fraternity as ends, both are agreed; only the means they recommend to obtain them are quite different. Whereas democratic theory would strive for them directly by cultivating Uberai, pacific institutions, communistic philosophy recommends the opposite method: holding the road to amity to lie through the wilderness of dictatorship, force, and suppression. But dictatorships are not confined to Marxism. They appear in varied forms and their subtle encroachments are worthy of study. For democracy there is the question whether planned

INTRODUCTION

economy and centralized industry are capable of control by the people. Strangely enough the strongest support (as well as the gravest danger) to self-government today is to be found in the technique of publicity. Publicity appears as the great new means to rouse and educate mankind. Nor is the reason far to seek. For the first time, through the aid of quantitative analysis, social facts are widely recorded, mastered, and available; while the mechanisms of radio, screen, and newsprints are presenting them to the public in irresistibly easy and attractive form. The press, films, and broadcasting have discovered the secret of how to digest, survey, and popularize social information, and how to convey it to a wide audience in vivid, entertaining style. Unquestionably the public is being roused to an unprecedented interest and participation in political affairs. As always in dramatizing a political story for wide consumption, fantasies and fictions creep in, myths and make-believes are invoked. Yet these tales are not always falsely misleading, our argument holds, but in so far as they embody the program and guiding precepts of a social order may express the basic structure of its fabric. In this and other ways we have traced the argument for democracy seeking to show how it has been aided by quantitative analysis, man's best tool in mastering his world. Even justice, the cardinal virtue of democracy, reflects its preoccupation with equality. Whether in political, economic, or penal matters, justice is concerned with quantitative equivalence in give and take. Always it seeks to maintain reciprocity and balance as between persons and things, values given and received, privileges and obligations. For in the democratic view the state itself, like the ideal of the equitable, is a give and take among equals sharing common duties and rights.3 5

I am indebted to the Editors of the International Journal of Ethics for permission to reprint portions of Chapters I and V which appeared in that quarterly (vol. XXXVII, pp. 189 ff., and vol. XLI, pp. 96 ff.).

CHAPTER

I

THE QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

IT SEEMS more than a matter of accident that the centuries which witnessed the dawn of science in the ancient world and its new developments in the modern should have been those which marked the rise of democracy as a political principle in human thinking. Yet the golden age which saw the triumphs of Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Democritus, and Zeno also beheld the flowering of classical democracy in the Greek city states; while similarly in modern times the era of enlightenment which knew such men as Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, Newton, Lagrange, and Laplace also shed its glow upon Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Paine, and Kant. Any explanation of this concurrent advance of science and democratic theory which dismisses the coincidence by ascribing it to a "general" renaissance is scarcely more than verbal. A more fruitful suggestion, if I am not mistaken, is to be looked for in the peculiar claim of each to be an age of reason and of mathematical investigation. By an inevitable extension of principles from one field to another, those generations of Greek thinkers who achieved the first great discoveries in logic, geometry, atomism, and number were led to conceive the state also as a collection of units regulated by laws of proportion and quantity; while similarly in modern times those who witnessed the successful application of mathematics to the motion of bodies found suggestions therein for the incorporation of mechanism into government. Indeed, men like Hobbes and Spinoza set themselves the specific task of applying the new mechanical philosophy to political theory. And in the current conceptions of popular sovereignty, majority rule, corporate persons, and representation, these quantitative and mathematical ideas came to be more or less clearly expressed.

THE QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

17 Democracy, like science, we shall try to show, seeks to obtain mastery over the external world by treating its objects numerically and as subject to determinations of magnitude. In this respect it ranges itself on the side of an ideal which has come to govern exact knowledge, the ideal, namely, that our most adequate understanding of things is to be gained by their correlation with, or translation into, terms of commensurable quantities. Stated in extreme form, this is the doctrine that there is just so much science in a given discipline as there is mathematics in it. Without going so far, it must yet be admitted that much, if not most, of our most trustworthy knowledge today is expressible in mathematical equations (as, for instance, the laws of chemical compounds, of gravitation, heat, sound, electricity) ; while the basic conservation principles of modern physics plainly declare the equivalence of qualitative changes to transformations of quantity. Democracy also within its special sphere aims to associate concrete data with reckonable numbers and to treat them by quantitative methods. By introducing number as a common denominator into human affairs, it seeks to weld an aggregate of freely acting individuals into that unity and order which is the object of the state. As for other modes of government which make quality and difference fundamental, they, in the democratic viewpoint, are in the long run bound to fail, just as medieval science failed, through the insufficient use of quantitative measurement; in other words, through the lack of that homogeneity in their terms which alone renders the parts of a system intelligible to each other. The unit of reckoning in democratic theory is the person or personal identity. A person indicates a human mind in a human body; while personal identity seems to imply recognition of a reflective consciousness by itself and others. Considerations of size and interest oblige the state, however, to limit the group of persons included in it by means of certain artificial restrictions (of residence, age, sex, and the like) to a narrower class known as citizens or as voters. But once membership in the state has been defined, such definition is held as fully designating the civic unit, and all persons qualifying under it are taken as on a par

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and as precisely equivalent to one another. Any additional marks which they may exhibit (such as the possession of property or special training) are held to be basically irrelevant. Citizenship, being determined by the law or constitution, takes account of persons only as examples of a class, not as individuals. What is created by definition is always universal. The state is interested in the citizen as he shares the common nature of citizenship; in so far as he claims peculiarities as a person unlike other persons, it tends to ignore him. In this sense, the democratic state while maintaining the integrity and distinctness of individuals denies their privileged uniqueness, recognizing as does science that its classifications and laws hold of beings fundamentally assumed alike. For it the issue of the sui generis value of personalities is largely avoided by conceiving men in their public rather than their private capacity, in their logical rather than their metaphysical aspect. Personal identity appears to be construed as an example of the law of identity rather than of the metaphysical principium individuationis. That is to say, the basic law of thought, Ais A, when applied to the class "persons" comes to mean I am I, you are you; and, since each is as much himself as is any other, logically speaking all are equal. Thus the integrity of each is taken as resting on the same basis as that of every other, and not on some private uniqueness or difference from the rest. The notion of equality central to democracy is clearly a logical and mathematical conception. Differences of opinion arise, however, when it is asked in what respect men can be asserted to be equal. With the growth of biological and psychological knowledge, the claim that men approximate to the same physical or mental stature has had to be abandoned. In place of equality as a fact, it has come to be affirmed as a program and an ideal. Admitting that men are not equally endowed or circumstanced, we still feel that to an indefinitely greater extent they ought to be. Along with the shift of the claim from the natural to the normative world, it has grown more specific. The phrase "Give every man his chance," which sums up the democratic attitude today as well as any, has in it the intention

THE QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

19 to guarantee not only such things as equality before the law and manhood suffrage, but universal education, public health, economic insurance—perhaps even the social control of monopolies. Now while few will deny that the idea of equality, like many another notion dealing with human relations, has the power to rouse the will, to warm the emotions, and to serve as a goal of the social process, its significance seems to lie deeper than any mere romantic make-believe. For besides consoling men's fancies, it serves as a logical condition of their experience. Upon it, in fact, depends the possibility of all communication of ideas, all cooperative enterprise. Only by accepting the genuineness of other persons in the same sense as, and as equivalent to, our own, can we enter into social dealing with them. Only by being "on the level" can we establish a common footing of give-and-take. Were I to seek to converse with a stone, I should have to treat it as "as good as" and "as real as" I. In this sense, the logical parity of the communicants in the social relation is as inevitably presupposed afe the truth of what is communicated. For without recognition of others as as much themselves as we are ourselves, intercourse loses its meaning and objective reference. But if equality is thus required as a premise of common thought and action, it may be expected to work itself out sooner or later in the conclusions that follow from them. Slowly in political organization, as in individual and racial thinking, the latent assumptions of conduct are brought to light and come to be adopted as consciously accepted standards of life. But, once equality is admitted, the notions of number, per capita enumeration, and determination by the greater number are not far to seek. In the words "each to count for one and nobody for more than one," the root of the matter is expressed. Citizens are to be taken as so many equivalent units and issues are to be decided by the summation of them. Plainly such a conception of government is quantitative; while by quantity is meant, in De Morgan's phrase, "that which is made up of parts not differing from the whole save in being less." Once we conceive the whole (the state) as composed of parts (the citizens)

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which are formally distinct but without relevant qualitative differences, we are applying the notion in its essentials. Involved here is the assumption not only that the whole is authoritative over any of its parts, but that what there is more of has ipso facto greater weight than that which differs from it merely by being less. In the democratic state this idea is expressed as the postulate that the opinion of the people as a whole, or of the greater part of them, is authoritative over that of any lesser group. So when a division of opinion occurs among the citizens and is duly recorded by voting, the largest group which agrees in its opinion is accepted, by virtue of its superior weight of numbers, as favored by the sanction of quantity. For since in a democracy the sovereign power is assumed to reside in the community as a whole, it is reasoned that, in default of unanimity and the polling of all the citizens, that part whose opinion enjoys a numerical majority in elections is more likely to represent approximately the opinion of the whole body than any other part. Thus mathematics appears to offer the elements of a method agreeable to reason by which the one and the many may be reconciled without destroying the freedom and equality of the individuals concerned. Historically the process by which men have come to apply such methods to the state has been very slow. Only gradually have men come to ask for a quo warranto of the established order; only by imperceptible degrees has the demand arisen that governments and laws should constrain men to obedience not merely by superstition and force, but through the convincingness of their claim upon them as intelligent beings. Of course, no infallibility can be claimed for per capita enumeration and determination by the greater number as devices for expressing the popular will. The most that can be urged is that such methods have a greater probability of correctly than of incorrectly representing it. Yet in this qualified reliance upon the popular election as the best available index of the wishes of the people, we have illustrated, if I am not mistaken, the logic of probability which underlies the democratic

THE QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

21

state and which lends it a certain a priori justification. Wherever in nature the human mind is confronted with large collections of facts whose members are not exhaustively or individually observable, the most reasonable way of dealing with them seems that of statistical frequencies. Since in a democracy the sovereignty is held to reside in all the people (a group not ordinarily open to exhaustive inspection), and since the government is somehow expected to take account of their wills, the most feasible solution appears to be the adoption of a statistical method resembling certain games of chance. In a democracy the community as a whole comes to be treated like a great ballot-box whose contents are being continually drawn out and registered in successive elections. By observing the character, combinations, and proportional frequencies of what is drawn, the government seeks to deduce the contents of the box; in other words, the real will of the entire people. While the result of any given election has only a probability of correctness as an indication of the popular choice, the method shares to a degree at least the deductive certainty of the laws of combinations and permutations underlying it. In other words, although the generalizations from numerical results in elections are arrived at by means of a posteriori probabilities, they are none the less assumed to be derived from what is essentially an a priori process. Let us try to make clear how these principles are involved in democratic government. In the first place, given any collection of a limited number of items of determinate constitution (be they men, stars, coins, or what not), it is, as we know, theoretically possible to deduce in advance of experience all the possible arrangements into which members of the group can enter with one another. Further, this knowledge makes possible computation of the number of ways in which a particular event (i.e., a certain disposition of the members) could come about: which number of ways, relative to the total number of possible arrangements, is said to measure the probability of the event. For instance, we can easily calculate in advance the total number of ways in which four pennies can go together in a single throw, as

22

THEORY OP THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

well as the probability of their falling in any specific grouping at a single cast. Or, substituting an election for the throw of pennies, we can determine all the possible ways in which four citizens (supposing these to be all the voters) can vote, and the probability of any given outcome of the election. The issue is assumed to be a dichotomous one upon which the voters vote either "yes" or "no." In practical politics, of course, such exact deduction of the possible results is not usually feasible, owing both to the uncertainty as to the number of voters that will vote and the difficulty of computing the combinations of large numbers. Nevertheless, the elements of the mathematical theory are clearly present, the electorate being conceived as a set of independent units capable of any possible distribution by the laws of chance, and the election being construed as the simultaneous disposition of these units under conditions formally insuring that no special reason is operative to produce one outcome rather than another.1 1 While maintaining the equality of chances, the theory is able to account for the fact that at any time certain dispositions of the elements appear more likely to occur than others: that, for instance, a "tie " is more probable in an election than a "unanimous" vote. The explanation of this seeming inequality of chances is to be found in the fact that, in counting the number of similar combinations of votes possible in an election (allowing for every possible combination once and only once), the order of the votes is disregarded. But when the permutations are ignored, certain classes of combinations prove to have more members than others, even though all the individual arrangements remain equally probable. Thus in the instance cited of an election in which four voters participate, there are sixteen possible ways in which they might vote on a dichotomous issue; but whereas six of these ways would record a táf, only two would represent unanimity; so that the probability of the first would be 3:8 as against 1:8 as that of the second. Though at first glance it might seem that tying and unanimity should be equally probable, closer inspection shows that this would violate the equality of chances. Allowing once and only once for each conceivable disposition of the votes, the logical possibilities disclose six ways of getting a tie as against only two ways (out of sixteen) of getting unanimity.

NNNA NN AN NANN ANNN 4 ways of getting 1 affirmative vote

NNAA ΝAAA NNNN NAAN ANAA AAAA AANN AANA 1 way all negative ANNA AAAN 1 way all affirmative NANA ANAN 4 ways of getting 6 ways of getting 3 affirmative votes 2 affirmative votes

THE QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

23

The purpose of the popular election is equalitarian in several ways. Its aim is not simply to insure everybody a vote and the counting of all votes as equal in reckoning results, but also to insure the equality of chances in casting them, something far more difficult. Where the citizen enjoys a title to vote, it is all important that he should be really free to vote any way he pleases (through being guaranteed secrecy, protection at the polls, and the like), and that one alternative should be as possible as another. For if afinancierand a laborer have not the same freedom of opportunity in casting their ballots (if the vote of the second is controlled by special circumstances, whereas that of the first is not), it is obvious that although the votes are counted as equal at the polls, they are not really so, since they do not spring from an equality of chances. Not dissimilar is the case of a plebiscite conducted by a dictatorial government ostensibly to learn the people's will. Though all are permitted to vote, and the votes are fairly counted, the election is a farce, since there is no genuine, unconstrained opportunity to vote on either side. Even today there are few who understand that the realization of this equality of possibilities is far more vital to democracy than the equal enumeration of the votes cast. But let us pause for a patent criticism. "What political travesty is this," it will be said, "that sees no more in the expression of the popular will than in the fall of dice or the senseless clatter of a million monkeys on typewriters? Everybody knows that it is only where the electorate is entirely ignorant of issues that the outcome of an election approximates to pure chance, whereas, where the voters have intelligent grounds for preference, the results diverge widely from the predictions of probability. The whole effort to link democracy with chance and statistical principles is sheer nonsense." In reply, we must deny that the fulfillment of formal probabilities in an election necessarily means the triumph of unintelligence in the electorate. Granted that blind, casual voting may have this upshot, it is no less true that an enlightened study of a complex, evenly balanced political situation by an

24

THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

intelligent citizenry may lead to the same result. While it indeed appears that with the growth of informed opinion and available facts public sentiment tends to deviate from the results predicted by the simple theory of per capita combinations, this is not to be taken as a violation of probability in social matters, but as a more complex illustration of its principles. For reliance upon formal probability does not exclude recognition of relevant empirical factors as valuably supplementing (without superseding) its basic laws. All that happens where detailed information of fact becomes available is that social prediction narrows its forecast to take account of the additional factors found to function in that particular field. If, for instance, the objections to an amendment to be voted on in an election are publicly known in advance to outweigh its advantages, plainly a prediction of its likelihood of passing ought not to be based on a simple calculation of the combinations of the number of voters. Admittedly, the special empirical evidence in the situation should be allowed for in the estimate, as weighting favorably the chances of a certain outcome and virtually nullifying others. But though all this would render the computation more intricate by superimposing as it were restricted alternatives, it would by no means deny the operation of the fundamental principles — the division of the field into elements and their combination into alternative groups with different probative value. However, we are concerned with probability less as a means of prediction than as a means of insuring the full, impartial play of all possibilities in social opinion. Fairly to find out the popular will, you must not (as in a dictatorship) begin by presupposing by a special framework of assumptions what that will is. To secure the conditions of genuine freedom of expression means to establish what amounts to the requisites of a fair game of chance. Any outcome must be possible of realization. Such a logic is alone adequate to democracy, in which the larger social whole is treated as a complex aggregate of units basically alike. It alone, in our opinion, makes clear the significance of "representatives" and of majorities, as parts or samples fairly chosen

THE QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

2ζ

from a totality and affording the best available knowledge as to what that totality is like. Briefly, the principle of sampling in democratic theory is that a smaller group, selected impartially or at random from a larger group, tends to have the character of the larger group. Accordingly a part, if properly chosen, may be taken as truly representative of the whole, and substituted for it. That we accept this device is admittedly a concession to practical exigency. While theoretically the sovereignty resides in the entire people, the impossibility of learning fully at any given time what the will of the sovereign is obliges the government to accept the expression of the will of a part of the people as a substitute, with the consequent chances of error and mistake. In a word, the government finds it necessary to interpret the recorded opinion of those who vote at election as a fair, trustworthy sample of what the opinion of the general public would be if they expressed it. Throughout modern "representative" democracy this principle of the valid substitution of the part for the whole is central. Nevertheless such procedure, which argues back (by inverse probability) from the known disposition of a fairly selected smaller group of wills to the constitution of the larger group, cannot claim certainty in its conclusions. The best that can be said for it is that the sampling will lead us right more often than wrong as to the character of the general will, and that the larger the number of samples the more the process tends to correct and improve itself. It 's almost needless to explain how majority voting may be construed as a corollary of the principle of sampling. Since it is necessary, if the state is to enjoy any efficiency in the management of its affairs, that some unified body of opinion be discovered and entrusted with the active prosecution of the government, and since the chance of unanimity among the voters is very slight, the plan adopted is that of accepting the verdict expressed by the greatest number of similar votes as authoritative for the conduct of affairs. Having learned that the chances which give the mean character of a collection are more numerous than those representing the extremes, we tend to believe that

26

THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

the type of vote that occurs most frequently in the election is probably representative of what most of the people want. And although a plurality of one vote may be sufficient to constitute a majority, it is recognized that generally the nearer the election approaches unanimity the more probably and exactly it expresses the popular will. Still, at best, determination by the majority is only a device. Unanimity is necessary, at least as an underlying assumption, to a full measure of organized action. Democracy is possible as a system of government only where the members of a community are willing to put their mutuality above their differences in certain matters, not merely in time of crisis but habitually and according to authorized procedure. Moreover, such appeal to the oneness of the many, to a working unity that triumphs over discord, is had only by persuasion, by winning from the many their free consent. For the reconciliation of opposites without arbitrary suppression or preferment is precisely what force cannot accomplish. Voices, not violence, must be the basis of such agreement. And in this task quantitative reason proves its worth through its device of treating men as undifferentiated units and deciding issues in favor of the largest group. For it is as much an axiom of quantity that what there is more of should be accounted more as that equals should be accounted equal. A frequent gibe at majority rule and democratic methods says that both are but polite expressions for the superiority of brute force, being really equivalent to the ancient dogma that might is right, and justice the interest of the stronger. In the language of the day, such critics describe democracy sometimes as government by natural selection or again as mob rule, arguing as suits their convenience that the power remains in the hands of the superiorly endowed few who control the mediocre many, or again (and oppositely) that it has its locus in the combined pressure of the masses of men. In either case, such views fail to grasp the central significance of mathematical notions in democracy. They overlook the immense difference between the logical weight of numbers and the existential pressure of brute

THE QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

27

fact. Everybody knows that the purpose of counting in popular elections is not to estimate the physical strength of rival factions, their literal force and mass; although of course counting may happen to render our ideas of them more definite. If it be true that Agamemnon could not count his own feet, as Plato says, obviously he could have had no very exact idea of the comparative strength of manpower of the Greek and Trojan armies. But the force of enumeration in democratic estimates is logical and mathematical, each citizen being treated as a numerical unit, and the differences of more and less being interpreted not in terms of physical strength but strictly in terms of numbers. It is quite conceivable that the majority entrusted with the execution of affairs in a democracy should be in all respects save number a minority — for instance, as regards money, social prestige, culture, and even physical strength. For none of these qualities plays any part worth mentioning in the requirements of democratic citizenship. Not of course that the mere dead iteration of units in counting is the essence of number. Dullness alone requires repetition in experience to make clear the implications of the process. Its significance is rather in the one-for-one relation of correspondence that holds, or fails to hold, between the groups compared. If one side has units to which the other side has none corresponding, the first side must be said to have more numerically. Thus the sanction by which the reins of government are put in the hands of the party with the most units is plainly logical, and not an authority of brute force. The critics of democracy also challenge its emphasis upon the number of votes rather than upon the quality of the votes cast. Such a system, they aver, inevitably raises mediocrity to the seats of power and makes for a "cult of incompetence." Where authority is accorded whatever there is most of numerically, they urge, what occurs oftenest comes to be regarded as qualitatively superior, and to be evaluated highest as well. The approval of the majority comes to confer a sacred sanction, as expressed in the democratic dicta about the vox populi and the general will being always right. Thus the popular election

28

THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

effects the metamorphosis of quantity into quality. Even where the voters aim to select an "average" (and not a superior) man as best representative of themselves, this same mediocre individual becomes suddenly and miraculously "superior" once he is anointed by the sacred authority of popular will. In response to such criticism it must be admitted that democracy does in many ways call to the foreground of operations the "mean" or "modal" man. Not only does majority rule often insure that the reins of government remain with the type of voter that occurs most frequently at elections, but it follows that to a large extent the office-holders selected by this majority belong to the same average type. According to the general assumption, the average or mediocre man is the kind of "sample" that most truly represents the public; at any rate his selection helps to keep the power in the people's hands, and often promotes government stability. What there is most of in a collection is held to picture it more accurately than any other part; while along with this assumption goes a tendency to place greater reliance upon the aurea mediocritas of "common" sense in government than upon the rarer qualities of genius or professional expertness. As for the presumed connection between the majority and incompetence, time may prove it to be wholly accidental. There seems no good reason why the type of voter which occurs in greatest numbers should be in any absolute sense incapable, dull, or worthless. Indeed, to raise the mean through education and practice is one of the chief concerns of democracy in demonstrating the masses' competence to govern. "But," says the critic, "the rule of every Tom, Dick, and Harry cannot be the rule of the best. Yet why should anything short of the rule of the best be accepted?" For answer we can only inquire how "the best" are to be found? What is to be the basis of division? How, barring the fallacy of initial predication, is a standard of evaluation to be agreed on? Shall birth, special talents, strength, wealth, or something else, be made the basis of computation? Assuming that the state should aim at the good of all, we may still doubt that, by trusting to the

THE QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

29

few, we have the best means of realizing the good of the many. While the individual may not be the best judge of his own interest, it is another question whether all may not be the best judges of the interests of all. At any rate, only by allowing all a chance to rule, as it seems, do we obtain a method of seeking the best that welcomes all possibilities on the same terms, and that gives true superiority a chance to win in a fair field with no favor. Other methods would seem by their initial assumptions to compromise the issue. The practical purposes served by popular elections appear to be several. First, they are a record of public opinion and as such claim to be mandatory upon the government in certain respects. Again, elections serve to select persons to administer on their own responsibility different departments of state for the business of which the general public has no time. Here once more statistical sampling plays a part as the basis for the choice of office-holders. In other words, elections are held for the more or less conscious purpose of choosing for office men to represent "fair samples" of the public in general. In a democracy, many (if not most) public officers are selected (as Lowell points out) "to use their judgment as fair samples of the people, on the supposition that their opinion will be the same that the public itself would form if it could spend time enough to examine the matter thoroughly." 2 No special training is therefore deemed necessary for eligibility to most of these offices, the incumbent being chosen simply as an example of everyman's common sense, and expected to function in this universal representative capacity. That the system works as well as it does is evidence that the problems are not yet too complex for legislators and executives to handle them by mere ordinary judgment and good sense. Other devices used by governments to sample public opinion come readily to mind: rotation in office, the use of lots, committees in legislatures, public hearings. One of the best examples is the common-law jury, since here the use of the lot and !

A. L. Lowell, Public Opinion and Popular Government (New York, 1914), p. 240.

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THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

the protection of the jury from outside influence to guarantee its fairness as a specimen make the device doubly clear. In the words of Lowell, "jury-men are a sample of the great and general public, whose verdict may be taken to express what the opinion of the whole people would be if everyone heard the evidence ; and they are drawn, as we draw a sample from a bale of merchandise, by a process designed to secure average, not selected, specimens." 3 Unfortunately, in practice many juries behave like unfair samples, betraying the cause of justice to narrow feeling and local prejudice. Nevertheless it is to be hoped that in time a system may be perfected along these lines by which the considered judgment of the community may be brought to bear on violations of its social code. But democracy is not wholly without recognition of the necessity of special qualifications and training for certain administrative posts. Another function of elections is to choose persons who are either themselves fitted or who are competent to appoint those fitted by professional skill, for certain expert tasks of government. Yet where special requirements are laid down for eligibility to these offices, effort is made to see that the value set upon technical skill shall not encroach upon the fundamental equality of the citizens. To this end the theory of sampling is again invoked. Even in the case of the specialist or expert, the assumption implied in his selection is that he represents a fair sample of what the ordinary good judgment of the community would be if provided with the requisite knowledge. Just as the scientist in claiming objectivity for his results implies that they represent the observations of any normal person equipped with the proper instruments and technique, so conversely the plain man in selecting a specialist to fill his place in government assumes that the specialist's judgment is what his own would be if he were provided with the requisite training and experience. But why, the critic of democracy persists, should the opinion of the people be evaluated highest? Why should it be assumed that the judgment of the public is more likely to be right than » Ibid., p. 242.

TÈIE QUANTITATIVE ARGUMENT

31

that of the intellectual minority, the men of talent and expertness? Why, in short, does quantity take precedence over quality? And the only hint of an answer is apparently that in modern thought since the Renaissance, as in ancient Greece, the ultimate sanction recognized in human affairs has come to be more and more that of individual reason. Consequently it gets to be believed that where there is a monopoly of human reasons there is also a surplus of value and authority; and in this sense vox populi vox dei. Since a modicum of understanding or reflection is common to all normal human beings, whereas special talents are more infrequent, democracy tends to accept rational consciousness and personal identity, within certain limits, as the basis of political power, and to compute the amount of this power in terms of the number of persons. Thus, although the possibility is not excluded that at any time the people may be mistaken in their expressed opinion, it is none the less believed that on the whole the totality of human reasons, if enlightened, must constitute the authority from which there is no appeal; and that in this sense the general will is right.

CHAPTER

II

THE DEBT TO SCIENCE BUT if democracy and science have stemmed alike from a common impulse to apply quantitative reflection to the natural world, it might be expected that the development of the two would be bound up together, and that the spread of democracy would mean the permeation of society with something like a scientific temper. While the substantiation of such a claim is hazardous, there is undeniably much that is congenial to democracy in the spirit of science. Its freedom, disinterestedness, and non-traditional outlook, its habit of arriving at conclusions on the basis of factual evidence — an impartiality enforced by the use of measurement and uniform standards — all this finds support in the spirit of republicanism. By contrast, the older dynastic governments in their maintenance of personages and privileges would appear to have displayed a mood more favorable to the arts and the pleasurable amenities of existence than to the cold uniformities of science. However that may be, there are many who see in the association of modern democracy and science no more than a historical accident, a chance juncture of two independent products of the last few centuries. Still others, while denying them any common theoretical inception, hold the two movements to have been connected through the practical revolution in production and exchange brought about by science's invention of new instruments to harness the energies of nature. In fact, this last version, ardently passed around, seems in danger of becoming the new Genesis of political creation. Not God, but the steam engine and the power loom, with some help from the printing press, made democracy. How else could it have been? Along came machinery and its arguments of greater profits and labor saving were practically irresistible. Even those

THE DEBT TO SCIENCE

33

who rejected the abstract theories of profit and use as intolerably dismal scrambled to adopt the new machines. Once they were adopted, men's ways of life were revolutionized completely, almost without their knowing it, and certainly without their having had any proper notion of what would happen. For the machines by lifting the load from the backs of laborers slowly emancipated them. To be sure, they crowded them into factories and cities where workmen lost light, air, space, even the ownership of their tools. But to subsequent generations came the compensation of cheap machine-made goods : clothes and edibles in great variety, engrossing new contraptions for amusement, plumbing, printed matter, and popular education. Undeniably, with every gain went a loss. Thus costly factory equipment could be bought only by the monied few; so needy hand workers, unable to compete with the machine, were forced into the circle of its dependents and sold their labor as engine tenders. As goods flowed out, money poured in, creating still greater concentration of men, capital, and machines. Urbanism, capitalism, mechanization, were the obvious effects. Yet how, enquires the skeptic, have these made democracy? In reply, these enthusiasts usually expand on the theme of unification and uniformity in the machine age. New facilities of commerce and communication, they point out, have broken down barriers of race, caste, and geographical isolation, and have knit men into an immense web of common interests. Mass consumption, foreign markets, exchange of raw materials, are the lifeblood of the new system; and any breakdown in trade or output at one point of the economic circuit inevitably leads to disastrous repercussions throughout the whole. Along with this growing interdependence of human beings in the industrial era goes a general leveling — presumably a leveling up — in standards of living. For a widespread enjoyment of machinemade comforts and conveniences is necessary to keep the factory belts turning. Mass consumption is the indispensable correlate of mass production; by means of flooding the world with standardized goods (so that even the rich cannot buy any-

34

THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

thing really different with their money) and making them cheap enough for popular purchasing power to absorb, equality and solidarity are said to have taken a long step forward. True enough, new watchwords (like standardization and centralization) have replaced the old democratic triology; while the death knell of liberty has seemingly been rung by an outpouring of popular restrictive legislation. But the sacrifice of liberty was inevitable, it is said, in a congested urban order, with everyone crowding his neighbor for elbowroom in the general industrial scramble. The fact remains, according to this theory, that wide distribution through mass production and far-flung sales of low-priced commodities has done more to alter the outlook of millions than any system of abstract ideas that was ever taught or preached to them. It has produced a closeknit unity and similarity of interests hitherto unknown in the world's history. Just as men's food, clothes, and reading matter are derived from the same sources of supply, so their ideas have come to be cut more and more to one pattern. Press, radio, motorcar, trade, and factory system bind men together in bonds of responsiveness which they see as thoroughly democratic in their implications. Admittedly this sort of thing is the easiest, most obvious type of explanation of the existing order. But it does not carry us very far. It not only leaves out of account important factors in industrialism that are distinctly non-democratic, but it fails to observe that the factors dwelt on may be susceptible of a quite different interpretation. The communist movement, for instance, has devoted itself to exposing the undemocratic side of modern industrialism with an incisiveness that can hardly be gainsaid. As the communists see it, our machine civilization, with its colossal pyramiding of men, materials, and power, has sharpened the tragic contrast between wealth and poverty, the drivers and driven, to an unparalleled degree. And the machines, on this counterview, have been one great force making for this disparity, depriving the class that runs them of property, freedom, influence, converting them to robots and slaves. The continued concentration of profits in a few hands makes for

THE DEBT TO SCIENCE

35

the very opposite of equality; while any compensatory privilege of enjoying bathtubs and motorcars is offset in the worker's case by the loss of self-reliance due to the specter of unemployment and economic insecurity. This dependence upon the pay check and hire by others of a working class that has lost almost all real property contrasts strangely with their self-supporting life on the farm in the still recent agricultural era. As for fraternity, the enormous growth of class-warfare phenomena: of unions, strikes, lockouts, the use of militia and injunctions in industrial disputes, hardly points to an excess of brotherly love; while trusts, mergers, combines, have all grown fat through the practice of dog-eat-dog. All of which goes to show how man's so-called "common interest" in goods and pecuniary gäin bespeaks anything but "interests in common." Moreover, it should not be forgotten that behind applied science stands pure science and the impulse to intellectual curiosity which has made practical inventions possible. Those who are content to expatiate endlessly upon technology as the mainspring of political development, and upon the economic changes wrought by it as the source of our present civilization, are easily put off with second-best explanations. For they refuse to pursue the analysis far enough to see that the causes which produced the machine were embedded in deeper-lying causes, and sprang in particular from the faith in mathematical investigation and measurement as the key to the understanding of nature.1 The spirit of modern science, which awoke with the application of mathematics to the phenomena of motion by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, had in its inception nothing to do with machines as practical appliances or engines of profit. Its mother was astronomy, the most abstract, remote branch of natural philosophy, whose aim was comprehension and prescience di1

Cf. R. A. Millikan, Science and, the New Civilization (New York: Scribners, 1930), p. 36. "Look for a moment at the historic background out of which these modern marvels . . . , the airplane and the radio, have sprung. Neither of them would have been at all possible without two hundred years of work in pure science before any bread and butter applications were dreamed of — work beginning in the sixteenth century with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo."

36

THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC S T A T E

vorced from dreams of diverting cosmic forces to human use. The conquering insight of science was simply that the deepest knowledge of nature was to be had by applying quantitative relations to physical facts; and in this insight the laws of motion, and apparatus involving the laws of motion (machinery), occupied a key position. Not only did motions seem the most easily mathematicized phenomena (being reducible to relations of space, time, and magnitude), but relative to their referents they revealed characters concerning which agreement was readily procurable. Accordingly, a civilization based upon the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton could hardly fail in one way or another to stress mechanical principles; that is, it could hardly fail to adopt a scientific attitude in which the laws of motion were central. But studying the way bodies moved, and how one impressed force upon another, men were not content simply to record their observed behavior in celestial and terrestrial mechanics. Inevitably they sought to take advantage of these laws by combining bodies in novel ways so that their relative movements should do work; that is, should redirect energy to some human purpose. The story is familiar how the creation of mechanisms enlarged men's power and possessions to an undreamt-of scale. Yet it would be a mistake to construe the application of machines to human economy, the discovery of their capacity to minister to bodily needs, as their sole or even primary significance. If they helped men to have more, it was by understanding more ; and their aid furthered an intellectual no less than an economic revolution. It is even possible that scientists would be as busily engaged in constructing automata and measuring motions today, if no commercially profitable engines had ever been invented. For machines have performed as great a service in extending the scope of knowledge as in producing goods to satisfy economic demands ; while on this side they are connected with pure science — not with technology. To labor an obvious but neglected point, the especial relevance of machine technique to modern thought was that it offered a way to organize facts

THE DEBT TO SCIENCE

37

about nature into patterns that revealed precise, measurable relationships. Mechanical apparatus enabled men to judge questions more objectively, to estimate events more accurately; they substituted a steady hand and an unswerving eye for the idiosyncrasies of personal response. In them the non-living replaced the living, physical and mathematical laws shouldered burdens too great for the weakness of the flesh. Not the least of their advantages was that they enlarged the range and scale of observation by many thousand degrees, immensely expanding man's natural world. Being fixed, reliable, and largely automatic in operation (so that they could be applied to almost anything by almost anybody), they made possible the development of measurement. Mention of even a few of the commonest metrical instruments, such as the clock, transit, thermometer, barometer, voltmeter, galvanometer, is sufficient to suggest their importance for scientific knowledge. Now if our account has been tending in the right direction, the connection between democracy and science is to be looked for in their common source in the quantitative method. In this technique men found a way, applicable to different fields, of settling their differences and of handling things more precisely. Indeed, this connection of method seems to me the only one that can be established between the two. No satisfactory explanation of democracy can be had from the facts of science; for the facts are too massive, too little understood at the present time, to furnish the backbone of any serious political argument. To deduce the shaping of democracy from biological, social, or historical data and from specific empirical causes is far more difficult than to exhibit a general kinship between its procedure and that of science. The facts in these fields are too complex, too capable of being read in different ways. The data of biology, for instance, can by careful selection be made to show equally well that nature favors democracy or that it favors just the opposite — according as emphasis is laid, on the one hand, on such leveling tendencies as the non-inheritance of acquired characters and the swamping of all but widespread mass variations, or, on the other hand, upon the aristocratic bias shown in the facts of

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competitive warfare, exploitation, and the preying of the strong upon the weak. But whether nature inclines to mediocrity and the extinction of rare, gifted mutants, or whether it prefers, as is often urged, ruthless inequality and the survival of the fittest, is a question to which impartial trained minds refuse an answer, recognizing that the data of the organic and social sciences are still too massive, too imperfectly analyzed, to permit the establishment of any privileged connection between them and specific types of government. Clear apprehension of this fact is peculiarly important during the present heyday of soapbox anthropologies, economics, and psychologies, each claiming to afford scientific proof of a determining nexus between certain natural influences and some favored form of social organization. The most effective effort of this sort to explain forms of government by reference to an intricate web of social and historical causes is the so-called economic interpretation of history. Recognition of this version as simply one among many versions crediting political life largely to blind, unconscious controls justifies a short digression for its estimation as a typical naturalistic view. The difficulties incident to defining the economic interpretation of history are no surprise to those familiar with the ambiguities latent in the broader concepts of the social sciences. As usually defended, the outlook urges that the struggle for a livelihood as embodied in relations of production and distribution is the most basic and important (though not necessarily the only) factor in shaping human events. For it, as for Darwinian biology, most of the adjustments of organisms center finally in the problem of existence. Owing to an incommensurability between animal wants and natural resources, conflicts arise among individuals, classes, species. Among human beings the business of getting a living is organized into elaborate group relations of making and taking, producing and consuming, which are reflected in the forms of government. In every epoch there is one class in control of the wealth and social organization of a community and a subordinate class controlled by it. In this light, history is most truly read as an age-long contest between the

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possessors and the dispossessed, a drama in which economic classes, rather than races, nations, or individuals, dominate governments and engage in a perpetual struggle for wealth and power. While there is much that is plausible in such an account, good contrary reasons remain for refusing to admit any privileged claim of the economic categories in the interpretation of human Ufe. Not only do these economic descriptions come from the newest, least developed and accredited, of the sciences, but (from a more inclusive scientific viewpoint) they represent only a small fraction of the contributory elements (physical, chemical, biological, et cetera) generally acknowledged as exercising a determining influence in nature. Viewing the social sciences in the proper perspective of the other sciences, one cannot but be struck by their dearth of tested hypotheses and quantitative laws, a fact strikingly reflected in their inability to predict the future with any accuracy and their tendency to draw from the same data opposite conclusions. All of which (as in the present instance) does little to inspire confidence in their retrospective explanations. Accordingly, a scrupulous mind may fail to be persuaded that economic causes have been proved either fundamental or the most important. As to their primacy, while there is a certain truth in saying that man must have his stomach full before he can develop the arts, science, civilization, it is no less true that he must also have his lungs full of oxygen, his veins supplied with blood, suitable conditions of temperature, and so on, before any of these things can come about. Nor is there any proof that, granted a full stomach, such things as culture, science, and art necessarily follow — as the undeveloped state of many peoples of the tropics, where living is easiest, will show. Nor is the attempt seriously made to demonstrate the superior importance of economic causes over other causes by scientific methods. Usually all that is done is to render the idea plausible by a thoroughgoing emphasis on economic factors to the neglect of others — a method of historical writing which in a manner assumes the very point at issue. Accounts of the past

4-0

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which force into the foreground such things as wages, labor, foreign trade, methods of manufacture and distribution, while consigning to the background cultural, legal, political, military, and religious happenings, tacitly imply a judgment of valuation in their choice of focus and fringe. The question naturally to be put to these writers is as to the justification of their selection. If they reply frankly that they write history in order to make history, assume important what they wish to be important, exaggerating a neglected aspect of things in order to forge a weapon for future action, then indeed such versions should be plainly recognized for what they are — propaganda, slogans, bids for power, but by no means reliable transcriptions of previous events. The point to keep in mind is that the economic theory of history does not stand alone. The individual, the race, the nation, humanity, no less than class, have all their elaborate historical myths, and have all in recent years invoked pseudopsychology, economics, and sociology in their support. Nature, in the solemn name of social science, has been depicted with a Janus face favorable to every cause: as making now for the preëminence of the Nordics, now the aristogenics, now the proletariat, and so on. In the weaving of these tales, the subtlest soothsayers and mystery-mongers have tried their skill. And the selfsame crowds that today are swayed by a legendary soapbox economics tomorrow veer to some contrary racial myth, substituting with perfect ease a fervid gospel of chosen stocks for prophesies of class domination. All this is a familiar spectacle. Now, while no right-thinking man will deny the facts of class and race, when either is offered as a major or wholesale explanation of social evolution it becomes a myth; that is, an account plainly contrary to fact although instrumental to the interests of certain groups. No scientific or scholarly case can be made for it, since neither race nor class can be shown to outweigh in consequence a host of other factors (meteorological, geographical, chemical, and so on), the closeness of whose correlations as determinants of social structure can be far more exactly estab-

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lished. It is one thing (and possibly quite true) to say that certain men desire to redistribute the world's power on the basis of race or class; it is another (and quite false) to describe the march of history as a process making for the triumph of these alignments. Such emotional historical writing composed with an eye to the future must be repudiated by the scientific-minded who seek to base their judgments on fact-finding and a remorseless checking and rechecking of the records. While admittedly the practical historian is often guided by his preconceptions, so that his text becomes a glorification of his race or a weapon of his class, the truly scientific interpreter faces the much harder task of seeking to raise himself above his class, his race, his nationality, so as to view the complex social picture with a mind disabused of illusion as to the favored claims of his peculiar and self-centered categories. For that matter, the thoroughgoing student of all the sciences whose mind subtends a cosmic outlook and who is aware of the weighty claims of a plethora of natural causes, may incline to accuse the social scientist of false perspective and provincialism in making so much of man and his habits. For the obvious localism of the phenomenon of life, when seen against the nebular and atomic backgrounds of modern astrophysics, must abash the pretensions of the hardiest humanist. In the widespread shuffling of the elementary energies of nature as depicted by science, man and his adventures appear as only a minor accident devoid of persistence or cosmic significance. Confronting this spectacle, in which even organic evolution is lost in the enveloping processes of universal degradation in accordance with entropy, the social scientist may be moved to suspect that there are forces greater than the economic. Yet at the very time that science is relieving man of his selfcentered preconceptions about the cosmos, directing him to look for truth instead in mathematical proportions whose constancy through changing frames enables mind to pass to and fro among the worlds, the old pride of race asserts itself in a resurgence of paneconomic and social explanations. This attempt to restore

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humanism and the biocentric outlook to its lost preëminence finds expression through the channels of evolutionism, historicism, and the glorification of sociality in all things. In this alliance there is nothing surprising, as socio-economic hypotheses must always lean heavily upon historical and organic ones, and presumably stand or fall with them. The shortcomings of the social sciences as an adjunct of political argument (in particular, their dearth of metrical laws that permit control of situations and foreknowledge of the future) are generally blamed on the complexity of the material. The intricacy of the organic and human worlds, it is said, largely precludes the use of exact quantitative methods. As a result, these sciences still remain on the whole at the descriptive and classificatory level. Rough statistical averages have, however, been amassed, and furnish the usual empirical basis for the explanations offered in terms of "customs," "drifts," "trends," "influences," and "social forces." That almost no exact laws have been found in these regions is admittedly due to the difficulty of establishing positive and negative correlations. In social situations, the likelihood of a system passing twice through the same state, or even through one in which only a few factors vary concurrently, is slight indeed. Thus even if a social theorist had the temerity to generalize from carefully selected instances to the effect, for example, that a nation's defeat in war is almost invariably followed by political revolution (If a, then b), no positive causal relationship would be established unless he could further show from history that practically no nation not defeated in war has had a political revolution (No non-α is b), which is extremely difficult. Nor would it suffice for him merely to show that no nation that has not had a revolution has been defeated in war (No non-b is a), since this, as the partial contrapositive of the original thesis, would add nothing to its confirmation. Or again to establish the Marxian "law" that changes in the mode of production lead to social revolution, it would not be enough to cite a number of favorable historical examples where both were present. To check the method of agreement by applying the method of difference is all

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important; that is, to show that no people that had not lately changed its modes of production ever experienced a social revolution — a thesis disputable by many apparent exceptions. As for a scientific demonstration that economic conditions are the most fundamental, that would require us to show not only that wherever the means of subsistence is lacking life is absent, while wherever the economic wherewithal is present, life is present; but in addition to exhibit the irreversible primacy of the economic in the order of vital determinants, by which the bio-chemical constitution of organisms would depend on their economic equipment, yet the latter not necessarily depend on their biochemical make-up.2 Plainly, demands of this sort exceed any possible verification that the social sciences are likely to undertake to vindicate their explanations. A t the same time, in so far as social theory relies in its method upon vague historical "forces," temporal ongoingness, and associative tendencies, without reducing them to quantitative terms or subjecting them to similar tests, it would seem obliged to renounce its claims to critically confirmed valuations. Yet, in defense of loose social estimates and prognostics, those who orient history in them contend that only such a flexible, qualitative point of view is adequate to the richly variegated tapestry of human events. As for the specious victories of those who champion more exact and quantitive methods in these fields, such victories, they maintain, are invariably won by crude reductionism and the ignoring of facts. To consider human 2

I t would not be enough to show that economic factors are a necessary con -

dition of life, since there are many other sine qua non's or invariable accompaniments, and it is as easy to say " n o oxygen or nitrogen, no life," " n o gravity, no life," as to say " n o food, no life." T o establish full economic determination it is also necessary to show that the economic constituents are a sufficient condition of life:

in other words, that wherever the means of subsistence is present, life is

present.

Moreover, the thesis of the economic interpretation of history is not

merely that the economic factor is one among the many determinants of life, but that it is in some sense the most fundamental. But to prove that economic conditions enjoy this irreversible primacy in the order of causal relations requires us to show that, while organisms (objects enjoying bio-chemical functions) obey and are regulated b y the laws of economics, economic objects do not necessarily obey the laws of biochemistry. And to do this seems impossible.

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affairs to be essentially the product of physical, chemical, and biological factors — because these are measurable — while ignoring a host of economic causes that are not reducible to the former, is like saying that steel commits murder because murders are done with knives or guns of that substance, or like arguing that, since a crime was committed by a poor man of bad heredity, poverty and heredity are entirely to blame for the deed. Quantitative methods, it is charged, simply evade the issues in social problems by ignoring all but the most remote and general causes. Any sensible reply to this charge will, of course, grant that crude reduction robs causal explanations of plausibility. The multiplicity of factors functioning in human life must be acknowledged by both sides. To ignore certain factors as irrelevant and unimportant to the case in hand, however, is essential. This, science must always do — as when Newton ignored the color, size, shape of bodies to concentrate upon their distance and mass. But to neglect or to minimize certain properties in a given context is by no means the same as to reduce them wholly to their antecedents or to a mere nothing. At the same time, it seems less far-fetched for the scientist to push his analyses back to measurable, inclusive conditions than to rest satisfied with loose descriptive conjectures about concrete experience; less farfetched for him to claim physico-chemical categories as universal postulates than to descry hazy economic influences everywhere in everything. For not only are economic conditions subordinate in genesis to the more important and more exact natural laws, but there seems slight chance of ever proving their primacy by deriving physical and chemical phenomena from them. After all, if we are to trust scientific method for social guidance, why not trust the most reliable sciences — those with the greatest body of exact knowledge, power of prediction, and established laws? Why not go to biology in preference to economics? Or to mathematics and logic in place of sociology? Thus, in rebuttal, those who stress social theories of history may be charged with an inclination for the easy but unreliable explanations of common sense. To the majority engaged in

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making a living, nothing is more familiar or makes a stronger appeal than economic whys and wherefores. Yet this does not mean that they are better understood. Because the affairs of daily life have an ever-present economic side, associative habit leads us to apply these categories to everything, and without taking account of their vagueness to suppose that, because they are accompaniments of practically all our experience, they are therefore the basic and unconditional determinants of it. Deeper insight, however, leads thought to guard against these naïve associative tendencies, to recognize that the mere frequency, continuity, and intimacy of certain experiences need not establish their causal connection with one another, unless they betray positive or negative correlations and a variety of measurable factors. On the contrary, the most precise predictions (and retrospective deductions) in regard to events often connect them with what appears to immediate experience to be the most remote and inclusive range of conditions. But other things being equal, the wider the field under which we subsume a phenomenon, the greater the chance our explanation has of being true, there being less likelihood that the laws of the field will fail to cover the particular case. I am quite aware that the economic interpreters of history will protest that they have never claimed pan-economic explanations. My attack, they will say, has pilloried a man of straw. Sometimes I could wish them blessed with a stronger sense of consistency, observing how nimbly they shift their ground for purposes of defense and offense. True, under pressure of their critics they frankly admit that multiple noneconomic factors play a part in life — for instance, scientific, religious, cultural, and judicial influences. Yet no sooner is this critical surveillance removed than they turn coat, declaring the institutions of law, religion, and science to be themselves the products of economic forces. Men's customs, methods of thought, indeed their entire view of the world as reflected in their legal codes, religious beliefs, art, et cetera, are, they maintain, expressions of the prevailing property relations, occupations, and class traditions of their group. Hence the economic

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structure of a society furnishes the only real basis upon which its juridical, religious, and political superstructure can be understood.3 In short, on the defensive they retract what on the offensive they maintain. Although in the face of the evidence they have to admit economic causes to be merely one unprivileged set of conditions among many equally fundamental, they none the less seek by indirection to suggest that all other factors are finally the product of the economic.4 Whatever else they may be, these social versions of history can hardly pretend to be scientific. The almost infinite complexities in the way of any scientific history need hardly be recited here. There is above all the fact that subjective imagination and feeling play a far greater role in history than in any science. For the historian, the observation of records and remains is secondary to the reconstruction of scenes in terms of reproductive and creative imagination. Whereas the scientist works with the aid of instruments, measurement, and experiment upon present, sensed phenomena, the narrator is largely confined to verbal descriptions of vanished events resurrected through his fancy. Small wonder then that the purely objective annalist remains a myth, every real chronicler being engaged to a greater or less degree in pointing a moral or adorning a tale ! How indeed could he avoid telling a story, making a case, building a system, when faced with the immense task of reconstructing events from a few meager remains and chance records? Besides being scant and fragmentary, documents and traditions are misleading. For man is largely self-centered, construing nature in his own image and events according to his desires; while the historian who comes after is expected to perform the impossible feat of * F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and. Scientific (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1908), p. 91. 4 In the same spirit they make use of platitudes to suggest half-truths that could never be openly maintained. It is, for instance, the veriest commonplace to assert that "man is made by his tools, but the tools are made by man." But by stressing the first half of this statement and neglecting the latter, the economic interpretation can be pushed farther than would be dared openly, under the protective coloring of a truism. For there are many who would readily assent to the idea that creations react upon their creators and vice versa, but who would at once reject the thesis that "tools make the man" if taken in isolation.

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re-creating these events as they actually happened, divested of subjective trappings, from a few haphazard accounts left by untrained observers who observed under uncontrolled conditions.6 5

The unscientific character of history and its method is shown in various ways. (1) There is an absence of experimental technique, as the data are unrepeatable and uncontrollable. Cromwell or Washington cannot be recalled to the stage; nor can the factors even in a contemporary situation be kept constant, or be varied at will for study. Thus the processes of science, by which errors are gradually dispelled and laws elucidated through repeated observations of similar states of affairs (set up and manipulated by different observers), cannot be matched in history. (2) Also there is a proportionate lack of first-hand information, a widespread reliance upon secondary sources. This is inevitable since the historical interpreter usually takes up his subject long after the events are over. The eyewitnesses being dead, and the circumstantial evidence largely removed, he is forced to rely on the few records left in the way of documents, remains, and oral tradition. His handicaps are increased by the fact that such near-contemporary witnesses as there are, are often untrained observers. Either they are uncritical bystanders, accidental participants, or interested parties with a personal bias in their accounts. Rarely are they equipped with the acuteness, impartiality, and experience necessary for accurate reporting. Again, the historian far more than the scientist is forced to depend on others for an understanding of the materials with which he works. Thus he has to rely upon the archaeologist's reconstruction of monuments, upon the documentary expert's skill in the detection of forgeries and interpolations and in the assignment of period and authorship to texts, upon the anthropologist's account of lingering customs and folkways. Even in the matter of words, he has to defer to scholars in foreign and ancient languages to elucidate changes of meaning and to translate unfamiliar tongues. (3) The historian, too, unlike the scientist, does not often overtly admit his use of a hypothesis. In an effort to be purely descriptive, he may attempt to review, without explaining, events. Nevertheless, certain unavowed, guiding theories — views of life absorbed from his political, religious, or economic background — inevitably color his outlook. Indeed, hypothesis, in this sense of a tentative version or subjective slant on events, appears to play a greater part in history than in science. For not only is the historical narrator forced to arrange his imaginatively re-created events in certain conjectural patterns which he attributes to the past, but the interpretation of the material with which he works — the endlessly controversial, emotionally exciting world of persons — seems peculiarly to demand guiding theories and preconceptions. In brief, whereas science employs direct and expert observation aided by physical instruments, mathematics, measurement, and controlled experiment, history largely uses imagination supplemented by circumstantial evidence and the testimony of casual, untrained witnesses; while for quantitative devices it substitutes the inexact associations of word-painting and verbal narrative.

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Along with its faith in historical method, humanistic naturalism combines belief in cosmic evolution. Without wishing to be captious, a critic may pardonably ask whether this hypothesis furnishes much of scientific value to socio-political theory. Undoubtedly the enlargement of a biological hypothesis, verified only within circumscribed limits of plant and animal Ufe on this planet, into an unlimited cosmology, has its attendant dangers. Many feel social evolution to be still largely a speculative hypothesis. Accounts tracing a broad drift from simpler to more complex societies can be matched, it may be said, by an equal number of contrary facts depicting lapses into barbarism, the extinction of civilizations, and the decline of human institutions to simpler forms. Not only do such theories seem to trespass beyond the evidence in their conclusions, but their way of regarding time offers difficulties to stricter analysis. For one thing a suspicion of incongruity lurks about an "empirical" hypothesis which purports both to construct the present from the past and the past from the present. It is not enough for evolutionism to explain the here and now by the there and then, but it also essays to construe the processes of bygone ages from those observed immediately at hand. Here is a logical difficulty. By claiming a strictly empirical outlook rooted in the observation of the moment, evolutionism is committed to viewing the past as an elaborate construction from the present; while in also viewing the present as the child of the past, it is involved in an obvious circle. For if we cannot know the present without first knowing the past, nor the past without prior knowledge of the present, plainly we shall never know either, unless we are able to look behind our phenomenal fancies to certain timeless tests which permit us to fabricate and to check these hypotheses. Clearly it must be taken for granted that we already know the world antecedently to the distinction of past and present. Indeed, the more one considers the colossal sweep of the evolutionary conjecture erected on a narrow range of evidence, the more one wonders whether its tale of a slow, haphazard world-process drifting by continuous waste and warfare toward

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49 greater intricacy can be taken as a basic cosmology, or whether historicity as the action of a time-impulse with direction can be invoked at all. For the physical sciences, as is known, are disinclined to construe the universe as the child of time, if by time is meant duration as a dynamic agent which contributes urgency and irreversibility to the processes of nature. In the words of physics, "To time, as such, we can ascribe no influence on the processes of nature capable of detection by the senses."6 In fact, it would appear that the claim of evolution to subsist as a specific agent-patent relation, as a cumulative temporal ongoingness of change, is weakening today, since science is renouncing more and more belief in existential causal laws, and is coming to treat nature rather as a configuration of elements disposed in pure atomic jostlings and possessed of logical structure disclosed in relations of probability. In the hypothesis of biological evolution, the impulse to parsimony by grouping the empirical data in serial order so as to derive much from little, is very evident. So plain is the element of system in the doctrine of the continuity of descent from a few simple ancestral forms that it is hard to doubt that the principle of simplicity played a part in the systematization of facts. Indeed, science has always sought in explaining nature to minimize the number of its initial elements and assumptions so far as the facts permit, since the fewer its unproved assertions the fewer the chances of error. Moreover, the debt of Darwinism to Malthus and probability theory has been greatly enlarged in subsequent genetics. Essentially the evolutionary scientist's outlook is like the gambler's. Like the gambler, he confronts a complex field with no special reason to expect one grouping of events rather than another. In consequence, he has recourse to the assumptions of the game of chance. If events are related fortuitously, he supposes that if there are a certain number of elements (in the environment) and players (organisms) engaged on equal terms, there will be a certain drift apparent in the process. This trend, • Theodor Wulf, Modern Physics, translated by C. J. Smith (London: Methuen, 1929), p. 11. "The same applies to place."

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however, will not be because of any specific force or immanent natural law, but because by the working of chance the players will inevitably be divided into winners and losers; and some of these latter being eliminated from the game by runs of bad luck, a tendency will develop toward fewer and more richly endowed survivors. Transposed to nature on a large scale, the logic of the process comes to be known as natural selection, and is in fact the heart of Darwinian evolution. Yet in spite of these strictures, there are those who take their stand on the social evolutionary point of view, accepting its dialectical difficulties unsolved, and defending it as the truest method of comprehending experience. Life being essentially fluid, they say, must be learned as we go along. And the best way to grasp vital processes is to watch them unfold in the march of history, to enter into them directly through one's own original living. To do this implies not only a willingness to learn from the past but a daring to shape the future to new ends — an inclination often called "experimentalism." The term, it is carefully explained, has no reference to the formal procedure of science, but indicates simply a desire to be instructed by the course of events, to devise new plans, and to capture clues for the future from adventures by the way. At the same time, its spirit bespeaks the courage to try the untried, to venture the unknown; but to do this one must stand ready, if need be, to discard preconceived techniques, to invent new ones, and to give oneself to the leading of facts. For openmindedness — the refusal to take lessons learned as invariable rules, a searching without fixed theories — is the essence of experimentalism. Through groping, manipulating, and trying fresh processes, more can be accomplished than through more strait-laced ways. Moreover, a kinship of spirit exists, it is maintained, between this adventurous, historical outlook and the realistic, pioneering spirit of truly liberal politics. Both combine respect for the accumulation of first-hand experience, got by waiting for events to unfold, with a readiness to take chances, to try the new, supplementing the necessarily limited and inconclusive lessons of the past by fresh and novel efforts at

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discovery. On these grounds a genetic and experimental outlook is recommended for the modern state. As a liberalizing element in a program for the future, experimentalism has a tonic and bracing quality salutary to hidebound minds. When accepted as the dominant lead in political life, however, it would seem to disclose an indecisiveness and waywardness foreign to the spirit of science. That all questions are open, no knowledge conclusive, is a favorite theme. Stable laws, long foresights, fixed intentions, are thought often to smack of a priorism. True social knowledge, on the contrary, is said to be gained a posteriori, by saturating oneself in events. Yet the lessons of experience, being texts from an infinitely unwinding scroll, are never done; and are therefore never unambiguous, never settled beyond revision. Perhaps the creed of the civilized man (as suggested by a recent writer) comes then to this: "That what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open."7 But wholesale tolerance carried to these lengths bespeaks, some may suspect, not so much an intrepid zeal to test all things as a certain pusillanimity. To me, for one, such an attitude seems far more indicative of an irresolute, equivocal quality of mind than of any anticipated insecurity or problematic elusiveness in the structure of facts. Obviously on such preconceptions, disproof becomes as impossible as proof. For if no questions can be settled, no answers can ever be eliminated as false; absolute untruths grow as scarce as truths, and no crochet of belief, however absurd, is beyond the bounds of plausibility. Now whatever the source of these vagaries attributed to the modern man, they are certainly not derived from science as the mentor of our civilization. For science, though taking each empirical discovery as provisional, nevertheless settles many questions unequivocally and decisively. In fact, it is only by the constant elimination of alternatives that the structure of science builds upon its previous findings: by the discard of such things as phlogiston, caloric substance, or the ether as a fixed reference body. Even though we cannot be sure that any given 7

Clive Bell, Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1928), p. 121.

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empirical belief in its present form is absolutely correct, this is not to say that none of our beliefs is necessarily true; but only that we cannot be sure (save in the case of formal truths which are reaffirmed in their very denial) precisely which are the true ones. Nor can we seriously maintain that none of our judgments of value subtend anything beyond the human organism or reflect the intrinsic qualities of the objects to which they refer. Granted some error, some mistakes, and that we do not know exactly where these occur (else we would correct them), this is by no means equivalent to admitting that our entire world of values may be self-deception. For certainly these judgments claim to give us extra-organic knowledge, to put us in touch with a beauty and goodness that are not our mere intra-organic likings, but that mark something (not ourselves or our beliefs) of worth in the world. It is, therefore, impossible to deny or suspect the truth of their reference completely without destroying confidence in our judgments and in values altogether. If I discover that my judgment "Nature is beautiful" amounts to no more than that "My impressions of nature appear to me beautiful" (though nature may not be in the least like them), the disillusionment ensuing on this exposure that I do not really mean what I meant to mean will in time lead to my repudiation of nature's aesthetic value entirely. In brief, values suspect of not being genuine in the sense in which they are valued eventually lose their meaning and worth. By this time it is clear that we reject the pseudo-scientific myth that explains democracy as a movement issuing from economic causes and technological changes, and as such for the most part unpremeditated by human minds. On the basis of such views political philosophies and prophets tend to be dismissed as dreams and dreamers without influence, the vast transformations in political Ufe being credited instead to forces discerned by the economic interpretation of history. But the undeveloped character of the social sciences, the insufficiency of their evidence, and the speculative character of the hypothesis of social evolution on which the version of history as the march of social forces rests, lead us to deny economic claims

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as paramount. In fact, we have rejected all explanations of democracy from the special facts and hypotheses of the sciences, content rather to discern a general kinship in the method and postulates of the two. At the same time we should be the last to deny that with the spread of scientific ideas have come profound changes in political life. The grand stratagems of measurement and experiment have encouraged men to believe that by taking thought they can accomplish almost anything. This confidence takes many forms. For instance, the enormous preoccupation of modern societies with classification, definition, and measurement plainly reflects the influence of science. There is a widespread public demand for the careful grading and sorting of things important for popular use as well as the desire to enforce a standard level of quality. Everywhere the impetus to classification is rife: fruit, eggs, milk, soil, seeds — everything (including intelligence) is ranked and graded under the consuming impulse for measurement. The growth of federal definitions illustrates the same tendency. Governments are coming to issue scientific definitions and master specifications of all manner of things for the information and convenience of the public. While conformity to these definitions is not in most cases obligatory, the community comes to appreciate the advantage of having an official statement as to what constitutes the scientifically approved composition of various commodities. The publication, for instance, of a federal formula for good cement, of a safe receipt for killing potato bugs, or of the specifications of a good mattress, provides the plain man with reliable standards of practice. The existence of such definitions exerts a regulatory effect on both production and consumption, raising the scale of the demand in point of both efficiency and security. The habit of appealing to standards has both a teleological and a mechanical significance : teleological, in so far as reference to a rule or model suggests purposeful planning and critical comparison; mechanical, in that only the repetitive processes of machines seem capable of turning out products that regularly

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meet the requirements set by a rule. Inevitably the ends of a civilization informed by the spirit of science are realized by mechanical means. Y e t the danger is that these may conduce to a tiresome reduplication and sameness. A t least this is the charge of the critics. While conformity to a federal standard may tend to raise goods to a more sterling quality, accepted patterns, they urge, are the enemies of new patterns and inventions. Though government publication of specifications for the best types of articles may make for greater comfort and efficiency, it may also lead men to borrow their models of thought and action ready-made from others, which in the end means blind conformity, the death of bold ingenuity and unstinted diversity of expression. In realizing its ideal, democracy, say the critics, may have a foretaste of that paradoxical yet proverbial staleness said to pervade the celestial regions, where all, having agreed on the best, demand and receive it, life lacking variety grown flat and insipid. Too many editions of perfection turn out to be the plague of Utopias. Yet what could be more Utopian in the worst sense, be it replied, than this argument that we should not try for the better, since if everything were of the best, there would be nothing left to try for? Of the future we know only that if things were not as they are, they would be as they are not: a tautology perhaps, but no proof that a new order might not be preferable to the present one. Such reflections reveal the sentimentalism of the reactionary who seeks to betray the cause of reform by his regretful backward glances at old evils, which, though unable to prove them good, he none the less insinuates were not so evil after all. With the increase in the scientific aspect of Ufe comes an apparent decrease in the personal side, which some feel as a distinct loss, others as a gain. Intercourse grows more impersonal, but at the same time more impartial. To the doctor, his patient becomes more of a "case," to the lawyer his client is the brief for the defense, to the merchant his customer is so much buying power. The increasing range and complexity of facts with which men are faced takes their minds off the merely

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human interest in their relations with each other. With a larger and larger share of life being given over to organizations and machines, the number of the individual's close personal contacts dwindles continually. The more knowledge grows, the more men's center of interest shifts to the objects of knowledge. Facts are permitted oftener to speak for themselves, regardless of the consequences. For as the subjective emphasis wanes, questions can be judged more by the rules of evidence and less by their effect upon our egos. Surely there is something desirable in such an attitude, especially when it is informed by a just temper and largeness of spirit, even though betraying a certain detachment from our immediate feelings and concerns. Its vein is more scientific than social. The new spirit is cool yet intimate, scrupulous yet forgetful both of self and others, and as such appears in marked contrast to the enthusiastic personalism and hearty colloquialism of an earlier day. A man of this mind serves his fellows more in the name of humanity than of gregariousness, and when praised for it, replies as I lately heard a stolid citizen reply to the effusions of a lady whom he had saved from an accident: "Why, I would have done the same for anybody." Undeniably, democratic governments have shown an inclination to adopt the resources of science variously and widely. Biology, for instance, has already made revolutionary contributions to social welfare in respect of public health. In conjunction with medical science, its services are being put to governmental use through the establishment of clinics, hospitals, health departments, with free bacteriological analysis of water and food supplies. Also, through the founding of experimental stations of agriculture devoted to soil analyses and to the genetics and pathology of domestic plants and animals, information on these subjects is being distributed to the community. Through the prevention of disease, the control of epidemics, the decrease of infant mortality, and the bettering of breeds of plants and animals, these sciences have already proved of incalculable popular benefit. In addition to the services of bacteriologists, chemists, and

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sanitary experts, liberal governments are requiring the aid of a great number of engineers for socially useful work. Their task is not only to handle the vast hydraulic, mechanical, and electric problems which arise with state construction of bridges, dams, cables, light and power lines, but to introduce the precision of physics into the standards of weights and measures fixed by the state, which become increasingly important in an age of quantity production. To these ends, governments establish laboratories to house the national units of measurement, together with facilities for manufacturing duplicates, for calibrating instruments, and for exposing short-weight devices of all sorts. Other physical sciences whose agencies are employed by the state are: astronomy, in the issuance of time signals from government observatories; meteorology, in the preparation of official weather reports; physical geography and geology, in map making and the location of mineral deposits and other natural resources. Finally, the census and other federal statistics are utilized for important sociological analyses. This is an age of map making — not of geographical maps only, but of social charts, graphs, and indicators. The facts of experience and the paths it has followed are being recorded — the peaks and depressions, slopes and plateaus of countries hitherto little known scientifically, of birth and death, wages, income, agricultural production, industrial output, and corporation earnings. By furnishing comprehensive information on population, employment, cost of living, education, income, marriage and divorce, the production and sale of commodities, these statistics disclose significant trends and correlations in the national life. As such they open the way for new and far-reaching policies based on a wealth of accumulated facts. To an increasing extent, the gist of these tendencies is being summarized by graphic artists in maps, diagrams, and pictures, and is being conveyed to the public by means of the press, government publications, platform, radio, and screen. In consequence, the community is coming to be provided with requisite information for forming something like a scientific public opinion. Though such a state of affairs is still

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far from being realized, it is nonetheless true that anyone interested can at slight trouble command large bodies of reliable data; so that there is no longer excuse for political leaders to frame their conclusions on a basis of personal bias and vague surmise. That so much has been accomplished we owe in large part to scientific agencies.

CHAPTER

III

THE CONTRAST WITH COMMUNISM I. DESPITE its long history, democracy is still largely without a metaphysics and possessed of only the broad outlines of a theory of knowledge. This lack appears all the more striking, considering its emphasis upon abstract theory, if we compare it with its closest rival in modern political thought, Marxian communism. In the contemporary Russian version of communism we have a political movement equipped from the start with something like a thorough-going metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. Compared with its dialectical materialism, the rational methodology of democracy appears hardly more than a sketch. It may not be unprofitable, therefore, in the present chapter to explore the main contrasts between the two ideologies in the hope of rendering more explicit the essentials of the democratic view. To begin with, communism, as is well known, rests upon an economic interpretation of life and contemplates the reconstruction of society primarily in economic terms. Starting with the assumption that reality is wholly material, its problem centers in discerning the relation of our restless human clay to its encompassing physical conditions. And its conclusion is that man's interplay with the forces by which he gains a livelihood finally determines his fate. Man is made by all he comes in contact with, but especially by the tools he uses. In the most literal sense he is what he does for a living and the way he does it. By centering history in the struggle for existence, communism comes to depict both man's origins and his objectives as essentially economic. The roots of good and evil are located in the same sphere. Evil is fathered upon private property. Had there been no seizure of wealth by persons for their private

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59 enjoyment, the division of mankind into classes and the eternal warfare between possessors and dispossessed would never have arisen. Yet a sovereign remedy for these woes is always at hand — in the communism of property and its cooperative administration. The happiness of society can always be had by destroying private property: a relatively simple formula, yet the only means, in communist eyes, of deliverance from social oppression.1 Along with this economic outlook goes a more or less inevitable vein of empiricism and functionalism. Knowledge is accounted a response to external stimuli. When in the evolutionary process organisms develop "feelers with specialized sensitivity," they become able through contact with their surroundings to satisfy not only such primary organic wants as hunger, thirst, and sex, but also to develop through stages of successive complication highly elaborate and indirect expressions of these basic needs, which are eventually bodied forth in the institutions of civilization. Thus, while the bodily appetites and their organs furnish the central mechanism of knowledge, thought appears by implication in evolution only as a faint adumbration of these, an instrumental adjustment of the animal in getting a living. To these empiricists as to Antisthenes, the ancient cynic, truth seems finally revealed in terms of touch; hence to gain what is genuine is zu greifen or zu besitzen, to 1

"The theory of the communists," says the Communist Manifesto, "may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." In the Preface, Engels states what he regards as the central thesis of communism, a thesis which he attributes to Marx: "That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution (s) in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class — the proletariat — cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class — the bourgeoisie — without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, and class struggles."

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grasp a concrete substance or lay hold of something in the sense of property. The hope of the future lies in habit, which is four quarters (not a mere three fourths) of life. By the institution of good habits man promises eventually to be transformed from a pugnacious, predatory animal into a cooperative and pacific one. Such a metamorphosis should not prove so difficult, considering the already marked impulse to mutual aid and communal living displayed by the higher vertebrates and primitive tribal societies. Once the environment is drastically altered, once revolution has swept private property into the limbo of vanished institutions, the magic of properly conditioned reflexes and the stimulus of a common communist ideology will remold human nature into genuinely cooperative ways of life. In the words of Lenin: People will gradually become accustomed to the observation of the elementary rules of social life that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all school books; they will become accustomed to observing them without force, without compulsion, without subordination. . . . Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect. 2

Nowhere else is progress, as increased control of the environment for the benefit of all, affirmed with such supreme assurance. Nowhere is the religion of prosperity preached with more fervid conviction. To enlarge and improve production becomes a primary duty of every good communist, believing as he does that victory must rest with the social system enjoying the highest economic plane.3 Moreover, the key to power at any stage of social evolution lies, it is believed, in the hands of the class which controls the instruments of production. Nothing could be plainer to communist eyes than that the laboring class occupies this determining position in modern industrial societies. To the workers, therefore, because they are so strategically placed, belongs the task of revolutionary reconstruction. 2

Collected, Works of V. I. Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 192932), vol. XXI, bk. II, p. 220. Quotations are made by permission of the publishers. ' L. Trotsky, Whither Russia} (New York: International Publishers, 1926), p. 67: "We are acquainted with the fundamental law of history: the victory ultimately falls to that system . . . with the higher economic plane."

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6l

Already those Marxists who claim prescience as to the logic of history foresee a world-wide emancipation at their hands. In its practical, empirical temper, in its optimism as regards the future under social control (coupled with condemnation of the past), current communism seems strikingly pragmatic. If man is most reliably to be viewed as an organism among organisms, then he must submit to having all his activities correlated with the bodily organs of nutrition, reproduction, and response, and construed as expressions of these life-perpetuating functions. Once it is granted that his capacities are essentially instruments of vital adjustment, it is no surprise to learn that all his social, scientific, and religious systems are best explained as the satisfaction of economic wants. However they may be cloaked with moral and rational excuses, his ideas are ultimately actuated by the drive for continuance. And as the modes of production change with time and place (as the different pastoral, agricultural, mercantile, and machine-industrial societies bear witness), so in response to these changes men's entire social and mental life alters also. In the words of Marx: What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed.4 The method of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.6

This does not mean that the conscious motives of the individual are always self-interested and utilitarian. Yet however deeply concealed from himself and others the springs of thought and action may be, the individual cannot, according to this theory, escape the impelling influence of the customs of his class, his epoch, his locality. And this pressure of social circumstance is essentially the expression of economic conditions. Accordingly, the individual's semblance of indeterminism is nullified by the economic determinism of the social medium and the dialectical march of evolution. Indeed, so completely is the human being 4 5

Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface.

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accounted a social reflex that he often appears hardly more than a shadowy puppet in comparison with the real characters of the drama, a drama of social forces in which economic "classes" and the "powers of production" are the true protagonists. On the subject of determinism, however, there is a conflict of opinion among communists. As economic determinists, as materialists, and prophets of the proletarian dictatorship, they seem committed to it by their postulates. Y e t in order to win new converts to the revolutionary cause and to galvanize their followers into action, they are forced to mitigate their extreme contentions by appealing to individual responsibility and the arts of persuasion, both methods which presuppose the reality of indeterministic choice. For in the past Marxists have been all too ready to let the dialectic of history do the work. The same antinomy is observable in the treatment of mind and its creative activity. On the one hand, like the pragmatiste, communists stress the fertility of human ingenuity in conquering nature, the endless products of invention, and the power of thoughtful planning to alter the social situation. But, on the other, as materialists they are forbidden to admit "minds" as efficient causes or as anything other than physico-chemical processes. Their claim is to be strictly scientific. Y e t in so far as matter has been studied by the physicist, it reveals no physical properties or predictable reactions that by themselves (and without the action of minds) are sufficient to account for the products of invention and discovery. Steel, ships, language, machinery — none of these "powers of production" are as such contained in the original data of the physical world, nor could their existence have been predicted from our present knowledge of the operation of the laws of natural science. Yet communist thought shrinks in horror from the possibility of invoking the creative action of mind as a bona fide explanation of these phenomena, since if this were done the door would be open once more to spiritual forces, entelechies, and unscientific vitalism. A division of tendencies is inevitable. Though any specula-

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tion as to the lines it will take seems presumptuous, there is evidence that more dogmatic materialists incline to a behavioristic and physiological interpretation of mind, welcoming the conditioned reflexes of Pavlov as affording it scientific footing. Following Lenin, they are disposed to attack the new antisubstantialistic views of science, some even going so far as to wish to prevent the teaching of the theory of relativity in Russia. On the other hand, revisionists who incline to indeterminism and belief in creative intelligence welcome the new phenomenalistic physics, claiming to find in its "principle of indeterminacy" and the statistical interpretation of natural laws fresh support for their cause. The fact that physics and physiology find no evidence of mental force or of psychic energy to upset the conservation principles of physicál science does not disturb them. They are content to stake their case on their conviction of the endless novelty and unpredictable fluidity of the evolutionary process, and to remain oblivious of the fact that the whole argument for dialectical materialism is built upon the denial of creation and contingency, and upon the assumption of a closed, exactly ordered world. Certainly in its dogmatic materialism, in its frequent denials of opportunism, indeterminacy, and the relativism of knowledge, communism differs sharply from the pragmatic attitude. Here the doctrine betrays its Hegelian ancestry and its absolutist convictions. Instead of discerning a creative freedom in history expressive of a spontaneous, partly haphazard, world in the making, communists find an inevitable logical necessity revealed by it. In their view, nature and thought proceed by a dialectical, zig-zag movement to and fro. not unlike the swinging of a pendulum. In this universal oscillatory process, it is the antagonism of forces that keeps things going. The discovery by Hegel and Marx of this basic law of change, through which the world evolves by an unchanging process, is held of unrivaled importance. By virtue of this insight into the triadic method of cosmic development (unfolding everywhere in the order of affirmation, negation, and higher unity), communists claim to fáthom the innermost processes of nature and to become the

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authorized spokesmen for the course of history. In the words of Lenin, Marx took from Hegel the idea of evolution as a development that repeats, as it were, the stages already passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher plane ("negation of negation"); a development, so to speak, in spirals, not in a straight line; a development in leaps and bounds, catastrophes, revolutions; "intervals of gradualness"; transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses for development, imparted by the contradiction, the conflict of different forces and tendencies reacting on a given body or inside a given phenomenon or within a given society ; interdependence, and the closest indissoluble connection between all sides of every phenomenon (history disclosing ever new sides), a connection that provides the one world-process of motion according to law — such are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of evolution. 6

The heart of this mystical dogma seems to say that strife is king. The world is not to be viewed as a collection of readymade objects, but as a complex of processes which are such that "nothing is established for all time, nothing is absolute or sacred . . . save the unceasing process of formation and destruction, the unending ascent from the lower to the higher." In this picture of evolution as a self-repeating telic advance (via a zig-zag of antitheses), what stands out is not only the striking monism of the conception but especially the recurrence of conflict and violence as the central theme. Its temper here is far removed from the pacific opportunism of pragmatism, which lacks any hint of the bitter hostility, the die-hard tactics, the apocalyptic resentment, that furnishes the dynamics of Marxism. Through warfare, and warfare alone, according to communism, can opposites be reconciled and advance take place. While other truths may be relative, this one is absolute, as revealed in the basic concepts of Hegel's logic and construed by Marx in a set of authoritative propositions. Accordingly, Lenin and the orthodox communists have inveighed tirelessly against those "opportunists," repeatedly excommunicated from the party, who waver between the goals of reform and revolution and who, fearful of the latter, seek to soften by reinterpretation the Marxian doctrine of the clash of opposites as the core of the dialectical process. History, says • Lenin, Collected Works, XVIII, 24.

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Lenin, is not to be construed, as revisionists would have it, as "slow, even, gradual change, free from leaps and storms." 7 But where quantity goes over into quality, there are immense spasms and upheavals. For the birth of a new social order, force, bloodshed, revolution are inevitable. Just as there is one basic law of history (and not many), according to the iron creed of Marxism, so too there is but one way of identifying oneself with the historical process, namely, by actively promoting class warfare and the violent overthrow of unsocialistic systems.8 Indeed, the most insidious enemies of the movement are precisely those pragmatic-minded opportunists who, fearful of the passionate ideology of revolution, urge in its place diplomacy, peaceful bargaining, the cooperation of classes, and a variety of plans. Again and again these sham socialists have betrayed the workers at crises in industrial history. Instead of striking boldly at the mark — expropriating wealth and setting up a proletarian dictatorship — they have divided the movement with their counsels, frittering away its strength in negotiating petty gains and makeshift compromises. To be sure, communism advocates a limited amount of experimentalism, urging its followers to devise new stratagems for obtaining practical control instead of wasting their time detáiling Utopian blueprints of the new social order. Also, it professes to better its performance with increasing knowledge and to profit by the lessons of history. Nevertheless, its appeal to the experimental method is always within a framework of dogma — of faith in the magic power of class struggle, proletarian dictatorship, world-revolution — never in the true spirit ' Collected, Wtrrks, vol. XXI, bk. II, p. 162. 8 The task is not only, if possible, to accelerate the social evolutionary process, but also to convert it from an unconscious to a conscious historical movement. Says Trotsky {My Life, New York: Scribners, 1930, p. 334) "Marxism considers itself the conscious expression of the unconscious historical process. But the 'unconscious' process . . . coincides with its conscious expression only at its highest point, when the masses, by sheer elemental pressure, break through the social routine and give victorious expression to the deepest needs of historical development. And at such moments the highest theoretical consciousness of the epoch merges with the immediate action of those oppressed masses who are farthest away from theory."

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of science, which, divested of such preconceptions, follows the facts wherever they lead. Certainly the predetermined ends, inner impulsions, and recurrent cycles proclaimed by communism do not leave the future open or the world-process free and unpredictable. To enforce its attack upon other systems, communism is compelled to sketch the lineaments of its own ideal society, by reference to which it condemns the past and present. Indeed, few Utopias have been more specific than the combined pictures to be gleaned from the writings of Marx and Lenin. Hence the claim of communism to be "not Utopian, but scientific " has largely lost its force, despite its attempts (much condemned in its enemies) to take refuge from inconvenient difficulties in the "evasive sophism, 'Wait and see"' 9 — an appeal to eventualities rechristened under the sounding name of evolutionism. Even more striking than its opposition to opportunism and pluralism is communism's rejection of positivistic accounts of nature in favor of a dogmatic materialism. This materialism, which served Marx as a bulwark for the economic interpretation of history as well as a weapon against religion, was subsequently revamped by Lenin to meet what he regarded as the more subtle inroads of spiritualism appearing within physical science itself. Phenomenalism and the dissolution of substances into their experienced qualities constituted this new danger. Against certain communist interpreters of Mach, Pearson, and Avenarius, Lenin waged unceasing warfare, contending that, irrespective of whether matter has disappeared as a thing or substance in recent physics (being replaced by the conception of electric charges whose reality subsists solely in their observed behavior as radiations), physical science must continue to accept the thesis of the dialectical materialist. "For the sole 'property' of matter," says Lenin, "with the recognition of which materialism is vitally connected, is the property of being objective reality, of existing outside of our cognition." 10 • Lenin, Collected Works, vol. XXI, bk. II, p. 200. Collected Works, XIII, 220, 221. "To put the question from the only correct, that is, the dialectico-materialistic, standpoint, we must ask: do electrons, ether, 10

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Whether matter be conceived as wave motions, floating sensa, or as mere possibilities of sensation emanating from a locality, it is always for science, in his view, something external and objective, not something internal and subjective. Physicists have been led into the pitfalls of idealism, he declares, only because they were ignorant of dialectics. They failed to see that the accumulated evidence which forced them to abandon belief in the immutability of the chemical elements and of the basic properties of matter did not require them to construe the physical world as subjective and arbitrary. Here a little training in dialectic would have been of immense service to them; it would have made plain that the phenomena of universal change and relativity have nothing to do with — and are certainly not equivalent to — the phenomenon of subjectivity. But this knowledge they lacked. Only by taking into consideration their deficiency in logical training is it possible to understand how physicists could have overlooked the fact that the very experimental data which drove them to belief in change and relativity were obtained by means of a framework of assumptions positing denial of subjectivity. For the very technique of experimental investigation has always presupposed the extra-mental character of the objects dealt with in science, and the necessity (not capriciousness) of the laws of their behavior. But though the laws of nature, according to dialectical materialism, subsist independently of human consciousness and etc., exist as objective realities outside of the human mind? The scientists must answer this question without hesitation and the answer must be an affirmative one, for they recognize without hesitation the existence of nature prior to man and organic matter. Thus is the question decided on the side of materialism, for the idea of matter . . . epistemologically means nothing new, besides some objective reality existing independently of the human mind and reflected by it." Here the philosophic critic would, of course, point out that Lenin is defending realism rather than materialism. For the mere postulation of certain realities as independent of, and prior to, human minds is by no means equivalent to the assertion of the existence of matter. Such a theory fails to distinguish the kind of reality to which it has reference. Thus logical entities and mathematical laws, Platonic realists would tell you, are precisely the sort of thing that enjoys this independent status.

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volition, man acquires mastery over nature only by coming to understand them. Only by gaining an "accurate objective 'reflection' within the mind . . . of the phenomena of nature" outside it, does man gradually lay hold of "an objective, absolute, and eternal truth." 11 In stressing the mind's power to reproduce a world independent of it, Lenin commits communism to the correspondence view of truth. Since all knowledge springs from man's sense organs, and since nothing but matter can affect his senses, it is concluded that his senses furnish him with "copies," "photographs," or "reflections" of external physical reality. In affirming absolute truth and in holding that beliefs are true only in so far as they conform to an antecedent, independent world, dialectical materialism differs sharply from humanistic relativism. In Lenin's words : "To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth revealed by our sense organs. To acknowledge as objective truth, a truth independent of man and mankind, is to recognize in one way or another, absolute truth." 12 Though man's views at any given time are historically conditioned and to a large extent imperfect, none the less by adding together fragments of knowledge the human mind approaches a sum-total of partial truths which is absolute. " I t is unconditionally true," he continues, "that to every scientific theory . . . there corresponds an objective truth, something absolutely so in nature." "Human reason . . . is capable of yielding and does yield the absolute truth which is composed of the sum-total of relative truths." 13 By dwelling upon the independent subsistence of absolute truth, law, order, and necessity in nature, Lenin seeks to lay the uneasy ghosts of fideism which he feels still walk abroad, disguised, in relativism, indeterminism, positivism, and other forms of crypto-idealism. But it is time to turn from communistic to democratic theory, if we are to develop our proposed comparison. Unlike communism, democracy relies more on the unaided appeal to the » Lenin, Coüeded Works, XIII, 156. 12 Collected Works, XIII, 104. 13 Ibid., p. 107, p. 106.

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reasonableness of its ideas (once called their "self-evidence") to win acceptance, without recourse to an elaborate display of historical and economic "facts." Here democracy seems to many too doctrinaire. They smile at its faith in abstractions, at its trust in principles, points, programs, platforms, written constitutions, and bills of rights. In reply, democracy would declare that even communism, to the extent it has prospered, has largely owed its success to its persuasive ideology, to the fact that it alone in a world of postwar confusion had a program on which to act. Its five-year plans, for instance, showed the value of "rationalization," the measure of their success being due to indefatigable paper work, to endless calculations, reports, proposals, in short, to the outlining of a goal in advance and the means to its attainment by state planning commissions. Both movements reflect a common purpose to rebuild the world to fit an ideal, and to rid men of injustices long submitted to as dispensations of nature. Yet whereas communism largely rests its case upon its supposed discovery of the law of social evolution and immanent historical influences making for certain events, democracy claims for its ideas no such blind aid in the natural order, trusting them rather as they appear acceptable to common intelligence without extraneous support. Both appeal to reason; yet the reasons they address are worlds apart. For whereas communism, following an ancient tradition descended to Hegel from the Stoics, regards reason as inherent in nature as ah unconscious telic force, democracy denies this, holding that reason acquires direction over nature (as something more than a negative condition eliminating inconsistencies) only where it appears as a system of reflective human ideation. Again, though both rely upon logic, the logic they invoke is of very different sorts — in the one case that of Hegel, in the other that of the formal tradition. The mainspring of the one is the Logos, a mysterious power acting into the space-time order and revealing the world process as a sequence of eternal triadic forms. For communism, logic operates as the universal law of motion both in thought and things.14 But in addition to being a " Lenin, Collected Works, XVIII, 23. "Thus dialectics, according to Marx, is

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controlling cause in nature, it is the ultimate ground and final cause of the world movement as well. Thanks to Marx, this key to the understanding of the world has been placed in human hands, so that for the first time history becomes accountable and future events predictable by the careful application of the rule of thesis, antithesis, synthesis (which here replaces the major, minor, and conclusion of the old formal logic). In tracing this dialectical polarity in affairs, progress is often seen to take place independently of, and even in spite of, human awareness and its efforts. To communist eyes, human history is shaped by an unconscious, natural logic, which impelís far more than it is impelled by the ideologies of men. In combining dialectic with materialism, the bond between logic and actual thinking has been as far as possible denied. Democratic theory, on the other hand, although it would presumably admit that logical laws enjoy validity independent of human minds, conceives them as operating negatively in so far as they are without the conscious cooperation of intelligence.16 In its view, logic becomes a positive agency in reforming the world and enters into nature as an efficient cause only when it is consciously adopted as a norm and tool by actual minds. When, for instance, manhood suffrage for sane adults (i.e., per capita methods and reasoned self-identity) was introduced as a political device, logical principles of quantity and identity entered the world as practical forces in government. Logical activity is to be found, in the democratic view, only where human intelligences exert effort to reorganize the world along more reasonable Unes. For while men's minds have no power to alter logical relations, they can nevertheless apply them to human affairs to render them more consistent and systematic. Thus wherever movements arise to organize fife around rules of more universal application, to rout contradictions between ' the science of the general laws of motion both of the external world and of human thinking.'" " Thus, although every object in nature is itself and not something else, it is only when human minds combine these identities and distinctions by detecting a unity in a multitude of instances that something positive like classes and classification comes into being.

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theory and practice, and to make human conduct follow from a few basic laws, there we may say that logic is functioning in a formative way. In brief, democracy does not share the Marxian belief in progress by contradiction or in the inevitable dialectical tendency of events to go over into their opposites — class warfare into classlessness, bloody revolution into peace, dictatorship into liberty. Instead of embracing contradictions as the stuff of life and allowing them to take their course, democracy calls upon reason to reject them as the stumbling-blocks to progress — as, indeed, anything but the creative ferment that Hegelians take them to be. While the principle of polarity derives a certain plausibility from the physical analogy of the magnet whose opposite poles attract each other, the affinity of unlike electric charges, or from loose social observations, it cannot possibly, in republican eyes, claim the same force of rational -insight as the formal laws of consistency and inference. At best it only describes certain ill-explained sequences occurring in nature, in contrast to the latter principles, which are self-explanatory and reaffirm their truth in their very denial. Hegel's upside-down logic remains only a monument to the intellectual obfuscations of Romanticism. Accordingly, democratic thought cleaves to the abstract formal logic which is traditionally allied to science and exact proof, and which denies any logical significance to Hegel's thesis that "in every moment of its being, everything is ceasing to be what it is and becoming what it is not yet."16 For if fluidity is the 19

Although there is a grain of psychological truth in the Hegelian view that ideas gain their meaning as contrast effects with their opposites (that freedom, for instance, acquires significance only in contrast to oppression), logically the suggestion is misleading. There is no obvious reason why concepts should gain their whole import by reference to the equally hollow schema of their negatives. Certainly the "logic of experience" (the kind that Hegel's claims to be) is against it. You do not ordinarily gain knowledge by cultivating ignorance, learn facts by reading fairy tales, swim by sinking, live by being dead, or in general arrive at goals by seeking their opposites. All that the logical relation of opposition implies is the exclusion of the negative. In being itself an entity excludes what is not itself: the meaning of freedom is to deny that it is aUrthcUris-not-freedom,, just as the import of oppression is to declare

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final word about the universe, the whole tradition built upon Parmenides' discovery that "what is, is" and "what is not, is n o t " (said to have been the first abstract scientific thought) has been in the wrong direction, the truth of the matter being that all clear distinctions of the intellect are finally nullified by the flow of facts. Instead, such a view would enthrone immediate ongoingness, the imperceptible melting of qualities into one another, in short, the feeling of change and historicity at the heart of the universe. This is, of course, precisely what the neo-Hegelian evolutionary philosophy of communism does. The universe for it is the child of time; and even its logic is the expression of the Zeitgeist. Accordingly, the stuff of things is said to consist not in distinct selfsame entities, but in the flow of incomplete, shifting processes and events which at no stage fully realize their nature. In time we have the mysterious force that perpetually hurries things and creatures onward, changing them into their opposites — youth into age, growth into decay, life into death, being into non-being; an all-engulfing Chronos devouring his children. Like all concrete experiences, duration is in a sense abstractly inexplicable, unintelligible; as is the case with odors, sounds, contacts, tastes, it must be directly felt and had to be understood. Yet since like them it thereby suffers the fate of being excluded from the measurable world of shape, size, motion, and mass, dealt with by the exact sciences, communists are forced to look beyond these sciences for their descriptions of nature to that it is not non-oppression. Yet this reference to the negative inherent in a term does not endow either it or its opposite with specific characters or positive traits, or create existent members of the class. In having the idea of oppression, I may have a blank, omnibus notion of all-that-is-not-oppression; but this provides no definite information as to what a non-oppressive state of affairs would be like, and certainly no proof that examples of it exist. So much is obvious to ordinary logic. Yet it is precisely in denying this, and in claiming existence, positive content, and specificity for the opposites that emerge from each other by contradiction, that the Hegelian dialectic claims spurious significance as a logic of the actual, historical world. It hardly needs to be added that the so-called opposites or antitheses supposed to gain their meaning through each other in this "logic " are not full contradictories of one another, but mere contraries or species of the opposite.

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the social, historical disciplines, which still assume the real to be the immediate and the concrete. But plainly such depictions of nature as ruled by a time-force or logic of history, acting as a mysterious law above all other natural laws, represents the world in a totally unscientific way. For any belief in temporality as a metaphysical force or dynamic agent which contributes direction and impulse to the operations of nature is unknown to science. Rather the view of exact science — a view shared apparently by democratic thought — is that phenomenal changes can be broken up into, and reconstructed from, changeless elements, since what is truly objective in the world must be measurable. Therefore, instead of treating time as the mere feeling of ongoingness, or as a natural force exerting effects in the world, science regards it as a logical relationship or dimension expressing the mathematical disposition of elements with respect to each other.17 Thus, where time 17

Time, as dealt with in exact science, is assimilated to, and inseparable from, spatial relations, its movement being analyzed into an infinite collection of immobilities. Although change is the chief subject matter of science, it is understood only by breaking up and reconstructing the changing phenomena from changeless (i.e., timeless and spaceless) elements. In recent physics time measurements tend to be reduced to the velocity of light, a velocity which is postulated as constant. I t will be noted that the term "velocity " stands for a ratio between units of space and of time (i.e., so many feet per second or miles per hour), so that the conception of time seems to be presupposed in its very definition. But the time here used is mathematicized time (seconds, hours, etc.) represented by points on a line, which are placed in one-for-one correspondence with another series of units which stand for distance in space. Thus velocity is reduced to the correspondence between points of lines, which are static, spatial, given all at once. The logician, however, looking deeper, sees that the essence of this view is not spatial but logical. The true meaning of correspondence is an identity of relations between two orders, usually serial; and these transitive relations are generally embodied in continua — in series such that between any two given points, no matter how close together, there is an infinity of intermediary members. Velocity is thus reduced to a non-temporal, non-spatial, logical construction. In the concept of the continuum, a scientific explanation is offered of how the one can yet be many, of how the finite may contain the infinite, and how units may be discrete yet have no gaps between them. If the series of points standing for time corresponds in toto to one point of space, then we say we have rest, a many-one relation. If we have a one-one correspondence between the members of the space and time series, then we have motion, the velocity depending upon the quantitative value which we attach to the units, and the selection of the frame of reference. Immediately experienced duration, in contrast to time as a product of eternal mathematical re-

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appears as an ingredient of political institutions, it is taken as a variable indicating a transitive, asymmetrical relationship underlying events, which permits of their being located "before" and " a f t e r " one another in a serial order. For instance, if we say, "The American Revolution broke out in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789," what we do in dating these events is to correlate them with the arithmetical continuum conceived analogously to the points of a line, in which the units are designated as centuries, years, months, days, or still smaller subdivisions. This continuum we call "time," yet it is itself plainly timeless, given all at once, essentially a logical construction. For where historicity is denied as a force, the state cannot be treated as the product of duration in a qualitative sense, but must be studied by means of certain ideal standards of measurement. These intellectual constants, into terms of which historical movements are translated, though they are themselves discovered at a certain "time," and although it takes " t i m e " to realize their implications, are not themselves durational. Unlike objects in the organic or inorganic world, time (like justice, for example) is not subject to aging, erosion, decay, or to localization in space; but retains its selfsame generality in different embodiments and contexts. Just as triangles remain triangles whether they occur in Egyptian pyramids, Persian rugs, or as sign-posts at American railway crossings, so justice remains justice (a sense of the fitness of equality in give-andtake) whether expressed in blood-revenge or in modern legal philosophy. As for the depiction of history as a non-temporal sequence, biology has already rendered that familiar. For the biologist reconstructs the evolution of a species in terms of a few static fossils, reconstituting its genesis and modification by arranging skeletons in a graduated series (at the same time assuming the changeless selfsameness of each). Similarly, it is not hard to see how social changes may be treated as a series of lations, seems inexplicable and scientifically useless. It is therefore extruded from the domain of exact science, whose tacit postulate is that the real is the intelligible, the measurable world.

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tableaux which replace one another in an infinite series of discrete yet imperceptible gradations in such a way as to give rise to the appearance of historical becoming. Democratic theory thus interprets man and his institutions not by means of an unconscious, dialectical physics and duration as a force, but by a method of critical abstraction, seeking — like science — to discover constant relations behind the sequence of phenomena that shall render them intelligible. In thus appealing from blind natural compulsions to the certification of reason, democratic thought is patently admitting belief in a formal, non-naturalistic logic. In such a logic (in contrast to the Hegelian) the laws of consistency are central. In fact, one does not have to delve very deeply into democracy to discover the focal part played by the law of identity. An amusing echo of the value set upon abstract identity is reflected in the old doggerel : To the West, to the West, to the Land of the Free, Where the mighty Missouri18 rolls down to the sea; Where a man is a man, be he never so poor, A window's a window, a door is a door.

Here that Ais A, each thing itself, becomes a kind of charter of individualism, insuring the inviolable integrity and distinctness of everything. Though the law is formal, of its universal applicability there can be no doubt. Moreover, as applied to human beings it seems peculiarly apt. For men are identified identities ; they not only come under the law, but each applies the law to himself. Alone among things, man not merely is himself, but affirms that he is himself as a conscious right. In claiming this selfsameness prior to all other relations, he ground his rights as an individual on a logical defense. Thus with the emergence of self-reference and reflection, identity comes to function in a new way. It is no longer simply a bloodless presupposition to which everything must conform, but is applied within experience to its uses, and invests objects with a special prerogative. Not merely the integrity of individuals but their equality is bound up with the same principle. Since each, though formally " A slight mistake in geography.

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distinct, shares by virtue of its selfsameness this distinctness with all the rest, fundamentally one is as another. Accordingly, in our communication with others we assume a kind of logical equalitarianism; that is, we accept the genuineness of others in the same sense as our own as a requisite of impartiality. Nor does it seem too much to say that democracy in seeking to maintain impartial, consistent treatment, based on the assumption that each is as much himself as another, is harking back to identity as a law. Because democratic thought regards the state as dependent upon conscious assent, it looks upon organized society less as an economic whole than as a united popular will. Wherever men act to subordinate their private wishes to the corporate interest, peaceably arbitrating their disputes as a matter of established practice, there the essentials of a civil society are present. Genetic accounts of how states have developed in the natural order seem often to the democratic view beside the mark. Discussions of the needs, wants, and impulses of hungry organisms can never satisfactorily explain the objectives of the state, which is rooted in man's difference from the animals. For although the state is in a sense natural to man, it is nonnatural as compared with the rest of nature. As Aristotle said, if mere life were the object of the state, brutes long ago might have formed one. But unlike the associations of ants and beavers, states are not entirely unplanned in their structure. Forethought, ideation, voluntary effort, enter into them. Even the mythical explanations offered of their existence come to act as causes furthering their existence; so that the history of political institutions is plausibly regarded as man's long struggle to bring to open expression what constitutes a reasonable way of life with his fellows. Despite the many influences that have entered into republican thought, its chief sources are readily traceable. Locke, Rousseau, the legislators of the Enlightenment, the methodology of seventeenth-century science, had all a part. Originating in an age of renewed confidence in the power of thought to break the bonds of ignorance and outworn authority, de-

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mocracy focused these impulses in a theory of government. Science, as we have seen, helped point the way. Nature was treated as a collection of particles attracting each other by reckonable formulae, and the state likewise taken as composed of units in quantitative relations. Moreover, in the new view the individual was primary. Both the laws of physics and democratic theory centered upon individual rather than on crowd phenomena. For democracy, society was not the supreme value, but on the contrary was justified only by its creation of a richer personal life. While democracy has no political myth comparable to that of communism, its fictions of the state of nature and the social compact have often been invoked in support of freedom and popular sovereignty. Thus republican thought has in the past had recourse to the invention of a hypothetical state of nature to justify its view of civil society as composed of members enjoying an equality of weight and worth. The heart of its meaning is to assert that the individual is something on his own account independent of the group. In his essential nature, each is himself fundamental to his connection with others; and as such enjoys aptitudes and objectives not socially derived. By virtue of his inherent capacities, man is potentially self-directing, free. Yet social Ufe compels him to curb certain sides of his nature and admit restraints to which he is naturally averse. Nevertheless, the benefits of human cooperation are so great that he submits to these hindrances for the sake of larger gains. He is accordingly depicted as entering into an implied agreement with his fellows, assuming certain duties, dedicating a part of his life to service of the group, in return for benefits and protections. In essentials this is the social compact. Yet it is only on the supposition of the basic, underived integrity of the individual that his claims upon the group gain any meaning. It is doubtful how many of the exponents of the social compact and the state of nature believed in them as actualities of the past. Certainly their purpose was best served when they were offered as logical presuppositions rather than as historical facts. Yet, however we may deride the crudity of the fictions of

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the state of nature, it cannot be denied that they served to incubate and support the most characteristic feature of republican constitutions; namely, their limitations upon government in behalf of individual rights. The principle that nobody shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law finds varied expression in the most famous constitutional documents of democratic states : in the famous writs of habeas corpus, mandamus, and injunction; in the restraints upon government in defense of individual freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly; in the protection of private property against unwarranted search and seizure; and in the safeguarding of life by jury trial, right of confrontation by witnesses, and so forth. Equally characteristic is the fact that the constitution of 1923 of the Soviet Union contained no such bill of individual rights — 1 9 which was to be expected, considering that for communism the group is primary and supreme, and therefore the individual a!s its instrumental reflex can have no claims against it. Aided by the figment of the social compact, appreciation of mutual responsibility slowly matured. Possibly the most radi19 At its face value, the new constitution of 1936 seems to mark a long step toward democracy and its so-called "bourgeois horizon of rights" — and away from the communist blueprints of Marx and Lenin. Free and secret voting is permitted to all citizens, regardless of class origins, to peasants on the same basis as industrial workers. Likewise its bill of rights promises religious freedom, freedom of the press, of speech, and assembly, as well as protection of person against arrest, and imprisonment without court sanction. Individual ownership of personal property (i.e., of income, savings, home, and objects of use) is assured by law, as is also the right to "small private economy of individual peasants and handicraftsmen." Correlatively to the universal obligation of citizens to labor goes their right to be guaranteed work with payment according to the quantity and quality of the work, their right to rest, to old-age and health insurance, to free education, and to medical care. Universal military service continues to be the law; as before, jury trial has no place in their legal system. Despite this new charter of liberties, indications are not lacking that the real power will continue to reside for the present in the dictatorship of Stalin and in the bureau of the Communist Party. Everything points to the continuance of the oneparty system, to a controlled press, intolerance of serious opposition, and perseverance in educational propaganda. The inculcation of the Marx-Lenin ideology in all phases of life and the suppression of alternative views seem likely to continue for a long time to come.

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cal thing about democracy is, as we have said, its reliance upon abstract ideas to furnish this tie of mutuality. Glittering generalities like liberty and justice have been thought strong enough to cut across bonds of race and creed and to enable men of the most diverse traditions to Uve together in peaceful unity. Belief in parliamentary methods is an expression of the same unbounded faith. Government must proceed by means of discussion, arbitration, inquiry; by weighing evidence and counting voices, not by cracking heads. To the end that life may be lived with a minimum of friction and a maximum of self-direction for everyone, common principles of action must be agreed on and set forth in public records. The idea of government as a contract makes of it essentially a give-and-take among equals. Cooperation is viewed as a means to a fuller individual life, as for the sake of self-imposed, freely chosen ends. And the sometimes exaggerated respect shown for "scraps of paper" by democracies, for written constitutions and codified law, is an expression (not always consistent) of this belief in the sacredness of deliberate agreements as against the irresponsibilities of brute force. II. Even the latest watchwords of democracy reflect its reliance upon the power of ideas; though today its slogans are more specialized and factual than the golden figments of a more romantic era. Measurement, planning, and efficiency are its new goals. Even its classic trilogy has undergone a practical reinterpretation. Liberty becomes a rallying cry for freedom from unemployment, low wages, and the corrupting influence of wealth in high places; equality is pointedly applied to the equalization of standards of living; and fraternity comes to mean economic solidarity. In subsequent chapters we shall discuss in more detail these new watchwords of planning and measurement. Plainly their influence reflects the machine, that portentous offshoot of science and business that is revolutionizing modern life. Through the potency of new inventions, the blend of adventur-

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ous, humanitarian, and acquisitive impulses that inspired democracy in past centuries is being further transformed. Today, as truly as in the sixteenth century, we are living in an age of exploration — only the new worlds discovered are not geographical, but worlds of force. Electricity, steam, chemical and mechanical energy, are unlocking infinite new resources for improvement; while man, the indomitable atom, bestriding the flux, seeks to exalt his destiny on the flood of its power. Recurring to the figment of the state of nature, it is noteworthy that communism, no less than democracy, has cherished it. But instead of depicting man's original condition as individualism, communism represents it as tribal socialism. Primitive groups, communists tend to suppose, led an enviable life, holding the land and the fruits of their labor in common and gaining a livelihood in one and the same fashion from the soil or chase. But with civilization — in some manner hard to explain — cleavage and schism set in. Perhaps it was simply that some did some things better and others, others. In consequence those who were best at seizing and holding things got the habit of doing so in place of the rest — but in time lost the habit of sharing their gains with the community. At any rate, with the emergence of the division of labor, social cleavage into classes appeared, from which, in communist eyes, all miseries of mankind have sprung. Thus history became the story of the "fall of man" from an idyllic natural communism to a perpetual warfare for possessions, a warfare induced by class distinctions rooted in diverse ways of getting a living. It goes without saying that the social sciences, when appealed to for sanction, confirm neither the communistic nor the democratic picture of the state of nature. Obviously, eighteenthcentury democracy was mistaken in its romancing about the freedom of the lonely savage. At the same time, anthropology, though conceding that the earliest human condition was social, does not support belief in an original communism. While it appears true that the most rudimentary societies observable today tend to labor and share alike, such crude extensions of tribal life (antecedent to the development of vocations, di-

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verse practical arts, and to public or private property in the full sense) have, in the eyes of social science, slight identity with the complex organization known as communism. The fact is that under wild, stringent conditions of life there is little between man and starvation. Hence there is small accumulation and exchange of surplus, slight ownership of anything as property. Face to face with the elemental forces of nature, he has small leisure to build up an intervening organization like the state to handle group problems efficiently. Because of the stark simplicity of the struggle, there is little dissimilarity in thought and action. Hunting, herding, or a little agriculture is likely to be the business of all; while the only food for reflection is in the misty legends and folkways transmitted by the group. Inevitably at such a stage there is no "mine," "thine," or "ours" to speak of, slight difference in vocation or political life worth mentioning. Instead life is dominated by custom, and the individual finds his acts prescribed at every turn by tribal tradition and technique. Certainly in such undifferentiated beginnings, antedating the development of specialized trades, commerce, property, the arts, or government, there seems slight resemblance to the voluntary, classless association envisaged by communism as "without force and without repression." Though both communist and democratic accounts have mistakenly exalted the state of nature, the lessons they draw from it for the future differ in striking ways. Whereas communism portrays the desirable social order as resembling a loose tribal society, characterized by common ownership of resources, a homogeneous life of some sort, and absence of classes and political organization, democracy, on the contrary, far from demanding the extinction of individualism, classes, and the state in the name of society, looks to the resolution of difficulties through their completer development. For democracy adds to its belief in the state of nature an enthusiastic belief in government by contract, individual rights, and the dividing up of work to get more done. Thus the ideal future it foresees combines an increase in the functions of the state with the har-

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monious cooperation of classes, the multiplication of professions, and a greater aggressiveness of the individual in striking out on new lines for himself. Especially in its attitude toward the division of labor, democratic thought stands apart. No republican theorist is so romantic as to suspect that the splitting up of work means the split-up of society. Far from tracing the disunion of production and consumption to the division of labor, democracy from the first hails the latter as the instrument of progress. No better hints of the democratic view on this subject can be found, I think, than in the depiction of the origin of the state in the second book of the Republic. There the tale is told how men living in a state of nature, and each having many wants and weak powers, contrived a way to cooperate on the basis of a division of labor and rewards. The great secret they discovered was that by dividing up the work according to their diverse abilities they produced more with less effort. Nor was this all. For specialization — the concentration of each upon the thing for which he was best fitted, and the subdivision of vocations into many different ones — provided not only a key to greater output but to social justice. For social harmony ensues, according to Plato, where work is suited to talent. Where each is adapted to his calling and the callings are adapted to each other, things cannot do other than make for the general good.20 20

It needs scarcely to be pointed out that the Platonic notion of justice as the functional adjustment of classes and individuals differs in many ways from the equalitarian view of justice defended here (chapters vii and viii). That there are many undemocratic elements in the Republic goes without saying. For instance, the political division of the state on the basis of diversities of ability marks it as an aristocracy — although this does not imply, as is sometimes. charged, a caste system in which trades are hereditary and careers not open to talent. Nevertheless, Plato's state is a pyramid, in which the ruling class is adjudged the best and of highest value, while manual laborers, agriculturists, artisans, and mechanics are consigned to the lowest stratum. This inequality of classes was presumably justified to Plato's mind by his belief that in a state in which each held the position for which he was best fitted, all would be satisfied, and there would be (to borrow a phrase from Sir James Fitzjames Stephen) "the repose, the absence of conscious and painful restraint, the calm play of unresisted and admitted force, which people appear to expect from the establishment of what they call equality" (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, London, 1873; New York: Holt, n.d., pp. 235-236).

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Thus specialization spells both wisdom and efficiency. It means getting much (in the satisfaction of wants) from little (expenditure of energy), and as such is approved by both practice and theory. Unquestionably democracy has inclined toward the division of labor as the method of "least means" for social satisfaction. Republican theorists have not been slow to see that the splitting up of work into many tasks assigned to different persons makes for greater production. Nor have they failed to grasp, especially in recent years, that wide production demands wide consumption as its complement. For the continuation of a productive system with a large output obviously depends upon the existence of a large-scale demand to absorb the supply turned out. If the cobbler is to spend all his time making shoes, there must be ready buyers of shoes to pay for his work, but since the individual's capacity for the consumption of shoes or any other commodity is limited, adequate absorbing power cannot be concentrated in a small wealthy group but must be widespread among the population. Thus, because mass production requires mass consumption, its effects in a society whose life depends upon continuous circulation through the arteries of trade must be to put goods in the hands of a large proportion of the community and to raise the level of wellbeing. Though conceivably it might have been otherwise, the division of labor in modern times has been bound up with manufacture and machinery. The connection indeed is very close, for manufacture has come to mean a system of production in which many workers, each performing a special task, cooperate in the joint output of commodities; while machines aid in such work by performing the most specialized functions. Thus technological progress has seemed to depend, on the one hand, on the analysis of the act of production into various steps and their allotment to different workers, and on the other, on the invention of mechanical devices to take care of these. Of the relation of democracy and mechanism we have spoken already. That democratic societies were among the first to recognize the advantages of machine manufacture is common

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knowledge. Not only did they see that a few men doing one thing repeatedly can accomplish more than many all-round workers, but they applied this knowledge practically in developing manufacturing processes. Thus English and American inventors, by incorporating analytic and repetitive principles into their machines, demonstrated to the world the secret of lowered costs and quantity distribution. Curiously enough, letters like those of Jefferson offer some of the earliest insights into the importance of standardization.21 This system, today known as interchangeable parts manufacture, was adopted first by democratic governments — notably (and regrettably) in the manufacture of guns. Today all machinery and machine-made goods are produced in accordance with its principles. Not only was the similarity of commodities as wholes seen to be vital to the lowering of costs, increased production, and wide circulation, but the turning out of articles with exactly duplicate parts was found to be no less essential to swift repair and replacement. In fact, the achievement of this latter completed the mechanization of industry. In brief, democracy accepted with enthusiasm the industrialism of machine production so bitterly scored by the communists. It welcomed the new mechanical order as the expression of enlightened intelligence. By applying science to life and producing much from little, it hoped to lighten men's burdens and enlarge the comforts of living. To be sure, democracy did not foresee the weaknesses latent in the new system. It did not notice that the division of labor said nothing of who should labor — the source of much later injustice. For while some laboriously produced, others idly consumed, justifying Tolstoy's words that "although wealth is an accumulation of labor, . . . what usually happens is that one person does the work and the other the accumulation. This is then called by wise people 'division of labor.'" Yet even these shortcomings, democracy would say, !1

Thus Jefferson, writing to Monroe of Whitney's muskets, says: "He has invented molds and machines for making all the pieces of his locks so exactly equal, that take one hundred locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first pieces which come to hand" (The Writings o/ Thomas Jefferson, edited by P. L. Ford, vol. VIII, 1897, p. 101).

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were not attributable to the principle of division of labor itself, but to faults of human nature. Today observers trying to sum up the influence of machine power on democracy often resort to the term "rationalization." For rationalization is the name currently applied to the system of economy making for greater unity, order, and efficiency in industrial Ufe. Not only has this system emerged from democratic societies, but its program covers unquestionably many republican objectives. Indeed, the connection between the two is not hard to trace. As a mode of economy, rationalization means essentially two things : reliance upon conscious planning and upon scientific method.22 To begin with, it means taking thought with a vengeance: the outlining of a program and the perfecting of means for its attainment in the most painstaking detail. Fact-finding, reflection, criticism, must precede each project. The significance of the method lies not merely in drawing up a blueprint for action but in following it through, instead of pursuing an unplanned zigzag course from one expediency to another as in the old economy. Secondly, the spirit and technique of science are applied to industrial practice in every possible way. Scientific management, improved machinery, large-scale organization, are introduced to save costs and to promote the goals of simplification, amalgamation, and efficiency. While the beginnings of the movement may be traced back even before Galileo's day to the invention of double-entry book-keeping and to the systematic application of arithmetic to accounts, weights, and measures by Renaissance commercialists, its full development waited upon the growth of machinery and organization. Today this scientific economy, encouraged in technologically advanced countries like England and America, seems to portend a second industrial revolution. In lands where 22

Rationalization is defined in the statement on the subject published by the World Economic Conference held in association with the League of Nations in Geneva, May, 1927, as: "the methods of technique and organization designed to secure the minimum waste of either effort or material. It includes the scientific organization of labor, standardization both of material and products, simplification of processes, and improvements in the system of transport and marketing."

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private business has succeeded on a huge scale through machine production and systematic management, the movement has gained great momentum. Even Russia, as is well known, is today incorporating rationalization into communism. In pursuit of economic supremacy, the heads of the Soviet government have been led to import from more industrially advanced countries (especially America) engineers, factory managers, agriculturists, mechanics, and technical advisers to help them frame their system according to the most efficient models. And they have even outdone their mentors in taking their advice. Through the adoption of a succession of five-year plans drawn up by government advisers and enforced upon the whole economic life of the country, Russia has undertaken the most titanic effort at rationalization yet seen in the world. All the more reason then for recognizing frankly that the technique has been borrowed in its essentials from those capitalistic democracies in which laissez faire had its origin and greatest development. In the writings of Marx and Lenin there are indications that the goal of a communist society is the antithesis of rationalization and the technological superstate. Their dream seems nearer anarchism: a loose collective order analogous to primitive gentilic society, with no regulation of production and consumption and no restraining force. Yet today — driven by the stress to feed its hungry millions and by the conviction that during the transition period capitalism must be fought with capitalist weapons — Russian communism is forcing through a program of technological development and planned economic control of persons and things far greater than any undertaken by private enterprise in capitalist countries. Indeed, it is a question whether in a democratic society, even with government direction, rationalization could achieve a success comparable to that of Russia. For whereas Russia, by reason of a dictatorship, is able to determine in advance just how much everyone shall produce, consume, and market (as well as when and where), democracies, with their freer individualism and dislike of coercion, are loath to permit this — betraying a reluctance to exert

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87 concerted control in economic affairs even by parliamentary methods. As a result they have confined their state planning largely to budgeting and the supervision of certain natural resources, leaving industry, finance, and agriculture for the most part to the uncoordinated devices of private enterprise. The question as to which will prove more successful in the long run, rationalization under private enterprise and voluntary public agreements, or under national regimentation and a dictatorial regime, is one of the outstanding issues of the century. As has been suggested, two conflicting ideals appear in communist theory — the one socialistic, the other anarchistic ; the one exalting solidarity, the other personal liberty. An attempt to solve this contradiction is made by picturing two successive phases in post-revolutionary development, the earlier of which realizes the goal of the collectivistic state and the later the consummation of communist anarchism. The proletarian revolution, according to Lenin, will achieve two objectives: it will destroy private property (replacing it by public ownership of land, banks, railroads, and industries) ; and it will establish a dictatorship, a centralized government by force controlled by the proletariat. With the inauguration of a working-class state, idle parasitic modes of life will be stamped out. The old government bureaucracy buttressed by a privileged class of officials and military will disappear, their duties being taken over by the rank and file of the citizens themselves. Not only political and military functions but productive economic labor will be demanded by the state of every able-bodied citizen. "He who does not work, neither shall he eat " will be the motto of this first, or socialistic, phase of the new order. With the enlistment of the entire population in the discharge of public functions and productive labor, communists anticipate that the economic output of society will vastly increase. Not only will the community be freed of the burden of supporting idlers, but for the first time the entire national resources for production (land, factories, mines) will be open for social development. Under the leadership of those who understand the technique of industrialism, the most efficient methods of

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large-scale management will be introduced. Society will be organized into a single giant corporation, in which each member will perform (for approximately equal pay) some piece of socially useful labor. In the words of Lenin: "All citizens are here transformed into hired employees of the state, which is made up of the armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers of one national state "syndicate." . . . The whole of society will have become one office and one factory, with equal work and equal pay." 23 No doubt years of forcible rééducation will be required to exterminate the profit-making motive as a dominant impulse, and to perfect the completely socialized human being to whom communal service will be the strongest incentive. Nevertheless, such remodeling of human nature will succeed, communists believe, because personality is a product of conditioning by the group, and under a socialist dictatorship everything will be done to favor the creation of an unacquisitive type. With the revolutionary transfer of power to the working class will come great simplification of industrial and governmental functions. The workers will not only take over the intricate system of capitalist management, but will improve upon it. There will be no trouble for them in running its giant mechanism, declares Lenin magnificently, for the processes of "accounting and control" behind modern society "have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording, and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic." 24 And even if the aid of a group of experts — technical advisers, engineers, and factory managers — may be necessary for a time to run the economic machinery of the country, such activities will eventually die out as the special functions of a special class.25 23

Collected Works, vol. X X I , bk. II, pp. 229-230. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. X X I , bk. II, p. 230. 26 Ibid., p. 189. "An order in which the more and more simplified functions of control and accounting will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit, and will finally die out as special functions of a special stratum of the population." 24

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Political simplification will be achieved by reorganizing the government along communal lines. A large amount of freedom and self-control will be left to local groups. At the same time the communes will be closely integrated into a federal structure. Pyramided upon the local councils will be other councils leading finally to a supreme central authority. A marked feature of the system as described by Lenin is the absence of a separation of powers. In his picture the classic dualism between parliaments that make and officials that enforce legislation has disappeared, their places being taken by working corporations that both make and apply the laws. Throughout communism runs this tendency to hark back to more "primitive" and homogeneous political forms as if from fear that differentiation and social slavery might in the future (as in the past) tend to go together. Specialists are viewed with distrust; while efforts to separate lawmaking and law enforcement, production and consumption, are regarded with suspicion. Still the federal syndicate and factory discipline of this first phase of "socialism" fall short of the communist ideal. For although class differences are abolished under it and common ownership realized, the state — as an instrument of oppression borrowed from capitalism — still remains. Government, laws, physical force, continue to be employed, although to be sure their coercion is no longer used to protect private property. Yet something is lacking so long as the state rests on compulsion — albeit the compulsion to labor — and the stringent allotment of goods according to the amount of work performed.26 Under a really desirable social order, men should be willing to work without the threat of force. Perhaps after a long discipline under the socialist state, habits of work and cooperation will become second nature to men. When that time comes, according to Marx and Lenin, the need 26 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (edition authorized by the MarxEngels-Lenin Institute, New York: International Publishers, 1933), p. 29. "He [the individual] receives from society a voucher that he has contributed such and such a quantity of work (after deductions from his work for the common fund) and draws through this voucher on the social storehouse as much of the means of consumption as the same quantity of work costs."

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for a special apparatus of compulsion, for courts, governments, and militia, will disappear. Good habits and good customs will displace good laws. Such rare violations of social Ufe as still occur will be spontaneously repressed by society in the same simple, effective way that a crowd in the street separates a pair of combatants. When this time comes, the state will "wither away," and the second or true phase of communism will supervene. Society will have passed beyond the need of political government. Instead it will have become a free union of economic associations in which "all have learned to manage, and independently are actually managing by themselves social production." 27 Force and subjection will have vanished. Even the strict control of labor and consumption will be a dead letter. Food cards, pay checks, time clocks, will be unknown. Although in the socialist state work and pay had to be exactly regulated, under communism such restrictions will be superfluous. Everyone will be free to take and use as much as he wishes; the old factory discipline of supervision, measurement, allotment, will be gone forever. To be sure, at the stage represented by socialism the enforcement of equal pay for equal work was justice; 28 for socialism marked an advance over capitalism precisely in so far as it substituted labor for capital as the source of wealth; and reorganized distribution on the basis of the amount of work done rather than the amount of capital held. At the higher stage of pure communism, however, this arrangement too will be supplanted. Need will replace work performed as the criterion of fair distribution.29 The pitiless calculation and SI

Lenin, Collected Works, vol. XXI, bk. II, p. 230. " The ideal of justice in the socialist state as consisting in a proportional equality between labor and reward is mitigated by the further doctrine of equal work and equal pay for all (ibid., pp. 224, 228). Since all citizens are to be treated alike, and labor is compulsory, it is to be expected that all would be required to perform the same amount of work and would receive the same wage. Even statesmen, bankers, engineers should be paid approximately no more than manual workers; otherwise they are likely to forget they are simply servants of society, and to claim superiority of class (ibid., p. 189). " Marx, Gotha Programme, p. 31. "In a higher phase of communist society, after the tyrannical subordination of individuals according to the distribution of labor and thereby also the distinction between manual and intellectual work, have

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control of consumption in terms of the individual's labor will have disappeared — along with other relics inherited from the capitalist industrial system. "There will then be no need for any exact calculation by society of the quantity of products to be distributed to each of its members; each will take freely 'according to his needs.' " 30 And inscribed upon the banner of communism will be the new motto : ' ' From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." Whether such a stateless, classless society will ever actually emerge from our civilization, even communists do not dare to affirm with certainty. Yet something like anarchism, the free, voluntary association of men in productive groups bound by common interests but not by law, remains apparently their ideal. Fortunately or unfortunately all details are left vague. One can speculate endlessly on how production and consumption can ever take care of themselves in a community without any ruling authority for enforcement. One can ask (without receiving an answer) how consumption can be freed of all regulation and measurement without disorganizing production. Certainly such a tendency would mean the abandonment of that planned economy or rationalization toward which communism in the first stage seemed to be bending every nerve, and which meant primarily the mapping and enforcement of closely correlated schedules of production and distribution. One might even go so far as to predict that such an atrophy of the state, if it ever came about, would indeed mean a lapse in technical processes and a decline in standards of living that could only be described as a return to primitivism. Communism reflects both the ideals of anarchism and those of socialized industrialism. On the one hand, there is the impulse toward a simple, loose collectivism of local groups disappeared, after labor has become not merely a means to live but is itself the first necessity of living, after the powers of production have also increased and all the springs of co-operative wealth are gushing more freely together with the all-round development of the individual, then and then only can the narrow bourgeois horizon of rights be left far behind and society will inscribe on its banner: 'From each according to his capacity, to each according to his need.' " «o Lenin, Colleäed Works, vol. XXI, bk. II, p. 226.

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affiliated without any ruling power, and on the other, a drive toward a highly mechanized and federalized socialism in which all are compelled to work for the good of all under a state monopoly. Inevitably we have the back-to-nature, centrifugal tendency quarreling with the centripetal urge toward a technological superstate. (In fact, the germs of the conflict can be seen today in the schism of town and country, the antagonism of farmers and urban factory workers in the Soviet Union.) While the one exalts the liberty of the individual and the absence of constraints, the other stresses the solidarity of the group with its attendant personal sacrifices as the final value. And the likelihood that these opposites can be fused in some higher harmonious unity seems slight indeed. For it is hard to imagine that, after a period of intense technological development and control (involving mapping, checking, dictation of all important phases of life), the industrial, productive side of the system could be successfully retained and the side dealing with consumption freed of all regulation and interference. Actual experience too clearly shows how highly sensitive and interresponsive are the parts of a mechanically organized society. So long as production is left to machinery, consumption cannot be left to whim. A regulated mass output of commodities cannot be combined without disaster with an unsupervised play of individualism (no matter how brotherly in spirit), for the simple reason that supply and demand are counterparts of each other. Perhaps some such outcome is inevitable, in a social philosophy like communism which seeks to combine an industrial conception of society with a negative view of the state as the instrument of force and oppression. For on such premises even the socialist, proletarian state of the first phase (which we may suppose is approximately that of the present Union of Socialist Soviet Republics), precisely because it is a state, must rest upon violence and the tyranny of one class in suppressing another. But when finally the capitalist class shall have died out, the need for the state (as an evil to combat an evil) will disappear. In this final commitment to statelessness as an ideal and in its view of the body politic as an evil, repressive force — as opposed

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to belief in it as a voluntary agreement yielding mutual benefits among equals — lies the essential contrast between communism and democracy. Yet here too lies the distinction of communism as a philosophy. For whereas in the history of social thought the great majority of thinkers have devoted their energies to deciding which among different forms of government was the best, and to perfecting the machinery of governments, very few have arisen to question the necessity of the state itself and to devise a technique for its destruction. A Plato, a Machiavelli, a Rousseau may differ in their preferences for aristocracy, monarchy, or democracy; none of them questions but that the administrative apparatus of laws, armed forces, and officials ought to remain intact, though they may wish to see them pass to different hands. For communists, on the contrary the disappearance of both the state and classes is the goal; like the anarchists they look forward to an unpolitical society of economic associations. It needs hardly to be pointed out that democracy views the state as a good, not an evil, and looks to the perfecting of the mechanism of government, not as the sharpening of a deadly knife to be discarded once the canker is out, but as a permanent element in the realization of social justice. In so doing, it challenges the interpretation of history as a class struggle arising from "the enslavement of man caused by his subjection to the principle of the division of labor" (to use Marx's phrase). For it specialization offers a message of lasting hope, pointing as it does to the fruitful union of intelligence with technology, which has already done so much to ease men's toil and to slake the wants of the world. In other words, democratic thought, though it stands against the maiming and impoverishment of the individual life and for the full development of men's powers, finds more ground for hope than fear in the processes of differentiation. Even while foreseeing the multiplication of professions by the score as the outgrowth of new subdivisions of technology, it still believes in the possibility of a balanced life for the individuál and in the capacity of society to compel everyone to bear a share in the burdens of the community.

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Democracy, as we have suggested, rejects the communist theory of classes and the class struggle. Differences of occupation, it maintains, are not the all-important issue in society; and it is only by identifying labor with manual labor that the communist makes his thesis plausible that the propertyless work while the propertied do nothing. Admitting, as democracy must, a widespread injustice in its present phase, by which the laborer (without wishing to) is compelled to work largely for others' profit, while the capitalist works for himself, we must strive in the future, says democracy, to wipe out exploitation without destroying what is good in active self-assertion. Vast concentrations of wealth in private hands, as a social menace, must be curtailed. Yet the deletion of such excrescences must not be allowed to suppress those vigorous talents that respond best to the motive of self-advancement and self-realization. For self-direction, not social subordination, is the democratic ideal. Unlike communism, its immediate and remote goals on this point do not contradict each other. Its aim is not to reduce men to social tools, but rather to place all in a position in which they may work primarily for their own interests and only secondarily for society or for somebody else. As the historical defender of liberty and equality, democracy stands in principle opposed to slavery — to property in men in every form. With communism, therefore, it is bound vigorously to attack new forms of exploitation by which men are sold "piecemeal" as wage-laborers to work entirely for others' profit. At the same time it is to be expected that democratic sympathies when roused will be far more concerned with freeing men from industrial slavery than with the communist correlate of compulsory labor for all. For republican thought has on the whole little sympathy with compulsion — including commandeered labor — holding that it makes for exaggerated emphasis upon dictated tasks, upon manual, routine activities, with an implied restriction upon the diversification of effort. In other words, the effect of stressing superimposed economic tasks is to render mental work and spontaneous individual creation suspect, since these are difficult to measure in terms of labor-value

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and their worth not immediately obvious. As democracy sees it, social control of labor tends to make different people work in similar ways; while the effect of such regulation is to do violence to the diversity of human talents and types. Moreover, democracy aims to accomplish its ends more by persuasion than by force, by parliamentary than by dictatorial methods. In its eyes, the appeal to force means essentially surrender of the faith in reason, a return to the ancient order of mace and bludgeon — a surrender thinly disguised in the current recommendations to discard the "old logic" of consistency for the new wonders of the "dialectic method." For while the practice of candid thought in all ages has been to extrude contradictions — not to embrace them — the dialectic method pretends to unify opposites by finding the indissoluble essence of each in the other. Instead of seeking to make one's actions frankly conform to one's principles, the new Hegelian way is to arrive at one's end by seeking just the opposite: to profess one goal while bending every effort in the contrary direction. To gain peace, promote strife; to win liberty, practice oppression. What if your means contradicts your end? So much the better. For opposites, like magnetic poles, gain their power through each other. Hence, since the bad is the only way to the good, we must embrace all the evils we hope to escape — force, war, terrorism — and await their miraculous transubstantiation into blessings by the dialectic process. Yet in rejecting communism it would be a mistake to suppose that the impulse to regard force as the essence of government was confined to Marxism. As a tendency it is reflected in the growth of all sorts of dictatorial devices in modern society. How far centralized, absolute authority is compatible with democracy, and how far accountability to the people must be sacrificed in industrial autocracies, is the problem that next awaits our attention.

CHAPTER IV DICTATORSHIP A N D

MASTERPLANS

THE appeal to might never wants for sympathetic ears; romance and realism alike plead its cause. So long as conquest, discipline, the power to make things march, are admired, force and those who wield it will retain their triumphal aura in human eyes. Moreover, effectiveness in action, it gets believed, emanates from the strength and wit of the few; hence to them seems to belong the direction of the rank and file. Even had there been no aspirants for the tyrants' role, men's need, it is said, would have created them. The longing for guidance, for some being endowed with infallible, miracle-working powers to whom to transfer burdens too great for ordinary competence, is not to be withstood. To be sure, fashions and popular fancy change even in regard to autocracies. In recent times dictatorships are passing from a military to an economic phase, from aristocratic to more proletarian types, from personal to more impersonal forms. Yet the genus is still recognizable wherever the supreme power in any line is exercised over society by a person or persons not in turn answerable to a higher communal authority. Not all dictators overthrow the constitution, or rule by force — at least overtly. To operate through powers legally conferred, supplemented by pressure behind the scenes, seems often the better strategy. Through centralization of industry and the manipulation of finance business leaders may compass the virtual dictatorship of a country even while its political forms remain nominally democratic. Indeed, in those countries which cherish a liberal tradition, there appears a growing conflict between the ideal of freedom which their historical outlook approves and the rigorous subordination and centralization which a mechanical civilization

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requires. Industrial authoritarianism, or something like it, seems inescapable for modern societies. For organization means subordination; and the new wealth of goods produced by machines is made possible of enjoyment only through the operation of their mechanical analogues, the elaborate factory and distributing systems. Free scope in such intricate, close-geared structures seems possible only for those at the top. The capitalist, the engineer, the managerial expert, those who furnish the money and ideas to make things go, are exalted at the expense of the vast majority who take orders. Because men care more for commodities than for liberties, the machine is becoming a new tyrant; and a tyrant not so much because it awakens petty desires for its products that enslave men's natures as because its technique creates an instrument ready and waiting for a dictatorial will. Modern industry is no workers' parliament, but an engine requiring a skilled driver; while the logic of circumstance in an era of monopolies shows plainly that a stratified business world is the most productive. In all this, the hard-won liberties of the common man — his claim to free enterprise and to political sovereignty — fare badly. Once more he has lost the substance for the shadow. Yet he still manages to console himself for his lack of independence with constitutional "paper" rights, even while he does time in some corner of the gigantic system as errand-boy, screw-tightener, or enginetender. So the conflict between individual liberty and economic organization proceeds in the modern state. On all sides its importance is recognized though the issue is variously phrased: one group reporting it as the struggle between individualism and collectivism, another as the conflict of the lay tradition with the new scientific efficiency. In any case, there seems little doubt that the spread of science, collectivism, and technics has been accompanied by a dwindling importance of the individual in society and the concentration of power under the direct control of the few. In the past the causes of dictatorship have been many. Often hero-worship, unbounded devotion to the personality of a mili-

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tary leader, has led to his apotheosis in the state; or again fear, loss of nerve, the impulse to escape responsibility, has made men cast about for some savior of the community. Not infrequently a situation of dire emergency, of threatened social chaos has called forth a strong arm for the direction of affairs, at a time when constitutional forces appeared too weak or dilatory to handle them. More recently the bitter experience of being outdone in war and peace by nations better equipped with the latest science, finance, machinery, has induced countries that felt themselves outpaced and exploited to try the short cut of autocracy as a means of modernizing their social order. Philosophically, however, the analysis of typical situations that have led to dictatorship is secondary to the question: How do those who accept it justify it to their own minds? What sanctions do they invoke to prove not merely its unavoidability at certain times, but that it has an inherent fitness worthy of acceptance? Curiously enough, in its two leading contemporary forms the theory of dictatorship shows a marked kinship with the romantic idealism of the last century, particularly that of Hegel. The true nature of a society, according to both versions, is revealed in its history; while history, in so far as it involves growth, is marked by a continual clash of forces, by drama, strife, and change. At critical turning points in the social process, individuals arise who grasp the inner meaning of the events taking place. These are the rightful leaders of the community, since they and they alone have the necessary insight to direct human affairs in accordance with the evolutionary process. In the fascist version, emphasis is laid upon the personality of the leader, who is regarded as the focus and embodiment of the aspirations of the group, as the instrument especially created by the historical process for their realization. Possibly only a people nourished on the mysteries of the incarnation and transubstantiation could unreservedly embrace the doctrine of the concrete universal in this form, or regard their leader as the repository of the genius of the race, as an infallible savior sent to redeem the nation by awakening it to its destiny. As such he

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inevitably becomes the symbol and rallying point for perfervid nationalism. In the communist version, which is more abstract and international in temper, the figure of the dictator tends to be absorbed in that of the mass man. The program, not the man, is dominant. As a result, the leader or leaders guiding affairs are more impersonally regarded as tools for the fulfillment of far-reaching projects for social improvement, the authority for which is said to rest ultimately in the will of the workers. While such a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (in the sense of control by the class itself) is fictitious — the masses being subject to a minority rule of the communist party and its leaders — nevertheless the very existence of the myth helps to hold the rulers to the announced program of socializing resources. Curiously enough, not only has the traditional justification of the dictator as the man of crises necessary to tide society over critical junctures been invoked by both forms, but by conveniently construing the historical process as a perpetual series of hazardous changes, his office is rendered permanent, or virtually so. At any rate, transition to some other type of government is rarely mentioned or vaguely referred to some remote future. No principle of succession is incorporated in the dictatorial system; generally dictators let it be known that they will appoint their own successors. In both forms, modern autocracy proclaims itself a reaction against the futility and high-flown verbiage of doctrinaire liberalism — a return to practical necessities and Realpolitik. "What men want," says the fascist dictator, "is work, bread, roads — not liberty, an abstraction." While in the case of fascism this resolves itself into an effort to conserve the institutions of the past and the established order — family and class, church and state — which are said to have proved their worth by their long endurance, communism, on the contrary, stresses the future and the goods to be won by battling present evils, whose list includes the very same institutions of family, class, and state approved by fascism. Once men's eyes are opened to the Allmacht of economic forces, say the communists, they will repudiate the shams of a social

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system which has exploited them by invoking class distinctions as inherent in the moral order. Once it is seen that biological differences are really economic, that so-called hereditary superiority springs from a greater abundance of food supply, loyalty to national and local kinship groups will give place to a larger loyalty to economic class and the right of everyone to the means of subsistence. Plainly such theories lead to a class-conscious internationalism; yet whether communism will be able to infuse internationalism as a driving force in its movement remains to be seen. Here fascism appears if anything the more realistic. For nationalism strikes its roots deep into the feeling for hearth and home; early associations, family ties, local attachments, longstanding customs, reinforce the patriotic sentiment. Human nature is less easily roused to burning crusades against exploitation and passion for the proletariat; such doctrinal visions, as fascists remark, seem at least as bloodless as the "trinomials" of democracy. For that matter, it would appear easier to inspire loyalty to abstract ideas then to an economic class. Loyalty to a way of making a living seems if anything more attenuated than devotion to principles. Certainly it would seem stranger if farmers everywhere should be loyal to farmers than that Frenchmen should be loyal to Frenchmen or free men to freedom. So fascism remains true to local traditions, to the unity of racial and geographic groups, preferring in its dictatorships the intuitive, unplanned guidance of an arresting personality to the hard labor of long-range projects enforced by leaders as impersonally ruthless as machines. But though the dramatis personae of the two movements differ — on the one side, heroes, national genius, great deeds, splendid gestures, and on the other, the clash of economic forces, revolution, proletariat and bourgeoisie — both agree that the nature of a society is revealed in its history, and that society has an organic life. Wherever individualism is in eclipse today, the organic analogy is borrowed to enforce the dominance of whole over part. To this end emphasis is laid on the fact that men Uve by and through each other, and that each dweller in a

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community draws his substance from its life. Assuming this relation to be organic (like that of the body and its members), it is but a short step to conclude the absolutism of the group. Moreover, once society is conceived as the final sanction, autocracy and compulsion are not far to seek. For where control by society is the goal, the suppression of such anti-social individuals as hinder its realization may be undertaken as a matter of course. The individual has no rights as against society, a fact strikingly borne out by the absence of reference to personal rights in the pronouncements of dictatorships. Even in unavowed quarters the organic theory 1 of society exerts a powerful influence on political thought today because of its convenience as a metaphor elastic enough to cover the most diverse phenomena. Originating in the biological field, it still retains certain implications plainly derivative from the relation of plant and animal structures to their constitutent cells. As in the case of these organisms, the connection between the part and the whole of a society is conceived as a teleological relation of the subordination of means to end, in which each unit 1

Organisms and cells are, of course, the subject-matter of biology, not politics. In biology the part-whole relation between these entities is essentially one of means-end; a connection indisputably different from the non-teleologica! relationship which physics posits, for instance, between the atom and its component electrons. In organisms (as distinct from inorganic objects) the relation of structure and function is not coordinate, but one of instrumental subordination. This is borne out by various facts worth mentioning: (1) Structure depends upon function here to such a degree that living matter really is what it does. Thus protoplasm would lose its structural unity as protoplasm, if it ceased its functional activities of metabolism, self-multiplication, and the like. (2) Each cell by "doing work" conduces to the support of the organism as a whole. In other words, only by the diversified activity of the parts, so related as to form an interacting unity, is the systematic functioning of the whole maintained together with its properties. (3) The organs and tissues of living bodies are classified according to function by biologists, owing to its predominant importance. Thus while the structural unity of the organism is maintained by its "doing work" of various kinds, this work is not regarded as it would be by the physicist as merely the storage and release of energy, but is for the biologist essentially a means-end, economic activity, having to do with the continuance or preservation of the system. Judged by their relation to the economy of the whole, these activities are rated as production and consumption, growth and decay. So once more we are brought back to the regulative and integrative dominance of the organism as a totality, by reference to which meaning is assigned to the contributions of the various parts.

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performs some function for the support of the total system. Both instrumentalism and functionalism are implied here. Not only is the harmonious activity of the parts necessary to the whole, but in a sense the community is what it does, its existence (like that of protoplasm) consisting essentially in the working of its units in interaction. And as the different organs of a living body are divided on the basis of the different types of work performed by them, so the different organs of the state may be functionally distinguished and represented. But if the continuance of structure depends upon function in the state as in organic bodies, work becomes a duty. Accordingly a gospel of labor, of deeds, of action, is readily associated with the functional theory of society. Sometimes it takes the form of a call to universal compulsory labor and the militant organization of "the workers"; at other times appeal for the more energetic performance of traditional functions seems sufficient. "Workers must work, and employers must employ" piously intones the dictator. What are social organs for, if not to be exercised? And though these organs differ according to their uses (the political divisions of the future will be occupational and professional, according to functionalism), nevertheless their differences are reconciled in the integrative action of the whole. Social solidarity is thefinalword of organicism. In the same way that the organism exerts a coordinating, regulative influence upon its constituent organs and cells, so must the state harmonize the activities of the diverse groups within it. In maintaining unity through adjusting rival claims, the state performs its highest service. Functions must function and, if necessary, be compelled to function: this is the special duty of government. Communal welfare, according to this view, depends primarily upon keeping the arteries of the social organism open, its tissues nourished, its circulation unimpeded and in good repair. In less figurative language this means that the public systems of communication and transportation must be kept running, that people must be kept supplied with food, light, water, and that cultural activities that promote social

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progress must not be allowed to die out. Because the interests of the community are so manifold, some central authority is necessary to enforce this functional solidarity. Only a strong government can keep an intricate network of services in successful operation. Indeed, the concentration of power in the hands of one man able to command and compel marks the acme of such functional efficiency — the dictator symbolizing as it were the absolutista of the whole over the parts peculiar to organic systems. One need not pause to dwell on the unscientific and speculative character of the organic analogy: how descriptions originally derived from unconscious processes of individual bodily behavior are at a stroke transported and applied to conscious processes of a social and mental sort; how characters borrowed from the reflex mechanisms of plants and animals are suddenly metamorphosed into functions of "group mind," "communal experience," or "social consciousness." That a unity of thought and feeling arising from associated living is not the same as the unity of a personality possessed by a distinct bodily structure is obvious the moment one stops to ask: What is the group sensorium? What the anatomy, the structure of the social mind? Questions like these at once expose the metaphorical, even rhetorical, nature of the whole conception. That there are abundant psychological facts to indicate the interaction of minds need not be questioned. That men of similar interests and circumstances tend to react in the same way, to develop common patterns of meaning and value, is undeniable. But the paucity of exact scientific knowledge as to the character of these phenomena cannot be compensated by construing them in the light of a facile analogy borrowed from a more accredited scientific field on insufficient evidence. Strangely enough, even among those who hold an organic social theory there are those who deny the reality of the group person or psychic organism as a fact. They talk continually of social mindedness and shared experience. Yet they seek to escape the charge of hypostatizing the group mind into a superperson by declaring that, though they regard society as no less

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real than the individual, they reject any substantialism in its interpretation—-in favor of functionalism. To their critics, however, it seems that they escape one horn only to run afoul of the other. While rejecting social substance of all sorts, they accept its blood-brother, social forces. For it is by no means clear how the stuff of social life merely by being set in motion and termed "dynamic" escapes the errors of substantialism. The difficulty is more radical; it is whether these phenomena actually exist as unities of reaction or as specific agents under either title. To perceive the essentially anthropocentric character of the idea of force in physics is not hard ; in social life it is even easier to see how we unconsciously transfer our sense of muscular exertion to the processes of the surrounding world. Yet discussions in social philosophy still appeal constantly to such forces: to habit, custom, impulse, race, class, Volksgeist, as if they were real unitary drives traceable in communal behavior. But by invoking a host of quasi-personal agencies to explain the social process, such accounts only widen the distance between their field and that of exact science by peopling it with superfluous myths and hypothetical entities. How close, yet what worlds away, is the democratic attitude! Once you deny for good and all the reality of any teleologica! forces in history save those of individual conscious purpose, a whole gallery of mythical super-persons, such as the genius of the race (Volksgeist), the spirit of the age (Zeitgeist), custom, classes, the economic-cultural complex, vanish as if they had never been. If only individuals are real — in the sense that only specific persons agree to act together, lay plans, and direct their course to a preconceived goal — these other factors are reduced either to a literary, or at most a statistical and derivative, role. B y ignoring the whole dubious galaxy of social forces and acknowledging only individual men and their combinations as having weight, democratic government becomes an expression not of some mystical urge of the group but of logical representation according to which a number of persons chosen as samples can statistically reveal the nature of a whole community. Believers in the organic nature of social wholes would do well to re-

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member that Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, rejected teleology in favor of mechanism. Where a lesser scientist might have been tempted to invent purposive forces to account for social adaptations, Darwin restricted himself to fortuitous variation by the laws of chance, the proliferation of organisms, and statistically describable tendencies as the agencies operating on vital phenomena. Democracy, we have ventured to suggest, confronted with a somewhat similar problem, has made a not dissimilar choice of method. The strongest argument for dictatorship today, however, is not any drawn from romantic evolutionary philosophies, but from the need for economic efficiency. Even the boldest usurpers find it necessary to justify their disregard of constitutional restrictions by claiming to introduce some program of industrial and agricultural reform. General prosperity, successful competition for trade with other nations, is to be had, declares the dictator, only by a strongly centralized, aggressive policy. Modernization, too, is a magic word. If he can attract foreign loans, purchase up-to-date machinery, encourage work and construction in his country, he has the surest means of keeping the people satisfied. Whereas in an agricultural age the dictator's strongest weapon was war and the conquest of new territory, under the spell of modern industrialism a prosperous trade and commerce coupled with public works are his best safeguards of power. But to wage battles of grain, oil, and coal, or to undertake a succession of five-year plans, requires a centralized control of market prices, transportation rates, labor schedules, bank credits; in other words, regulation of the varied phases of consumption and production (as in Russia), which to a greater or less extent means the suppression of free economic enterprise. At this, democratic thought protests. Yet the logic of its protest, especially in recent years, is not quite clear. For despite a few sporadic legislative efforts to keep small business and the open market alive, the march of events in republican countries as elsewhere has been toward greater and greater combinations of wealth and power. Moreover, democratic parties view this

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economic concentration — by now an accomplished fact — for the most part without censure. Why then should they so strongly condemn in other countries the administrative unification of resources under a dictator? But it is one thing, democratic thought seems to say, that free competition should destroy free competition in the economic field and should be replaced by the control of big business, and quite another that political demagogues should by force and propaganda execute a coup d'état and destroy all forms of political liberty. Yet plainly the argument is stronger in what it denies than in what it affirms; since while rightly condemning the violation of political liberty elsewhere it permits the extinction of economic liberty itself — not recognizing that the one is bound up with the other. Always the economic argument for democracy has lagged far behind the political in winning acceptance. Politically, democratic thought remains the champion of liberty, openmindedness, a free hand to everything — save, of course, to that which contradicts liberty itself. But this reservation is clearly the heart of the matter. Obviously a government which guarantees liberty in its constitution cannot allow that liberty to be exercised against itself for its destruction. Openmindedness toward conditions destructive of openmindedness is nonsense. No structure built upon postulates can tolerate within its system that which denies these postulates. Yet upon economic liberty democratic thought fails to enforce this limiting condition. Laissez faire is allowed to dig its own grave and a welcoming hand is extended to the oppressive monopolies that succeed it. Thus freedom has run riot in a world uncontrolled by its own logic, its rake's progress being labeled with unsympathetic names like greed, acquisitiveness, egotism. But the impulse to self-expression unleashed after long restraint is not readily subdued by moral epithets, especially when the movement is reinforced by new scientific mechanisms. Like pigmy runners suddenly lifted to a giant's shoulder, men's desires have sped to their gratification through the aid of scientific methods. And these new methods have created an overpowering argument for organized planning and control. But is

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it possible, democratic thought asks, to enjoy this highly organized society and at the same time to preserve the voice and authority of the individual, and to avoid dictatorship? Many enlightened economists hardly hope so much. Centralized planning, coupled with control by experts of the whole economic life, they foresee as the inevitable outcome of a mechanized society. Only so, it is argued, can waste, reduplication, and destructive competition be avoided, and a balance struck between production and demand. In short, the movement toward an economic dictatorship finds encouragement among the specialists, who claim to view the situation objectively without having a stake in the issue either way. Of course they do not use so harsh a term as dictatorship outright, but convey their meaning by intimations, grave diagnoses, scientific technicalities. What they recommend is a masterplan, that is, the compulsory organization of the entire practical resources of a society, the mapping and enforcement of one gigantic scheme for production and distribution by allotment to specific industries. Only by introducing some far-sighted, largescale system into agricultural, financial, and industrial Ufe can the hardships wrought by cutthroat rivalry, business cycles, and unemployment be avoided, and the advantages of efficiency and lowered costs be achieved. But obviously such a projected unification cannot be put through unless there is a concentrated power strong enough to compel its adoption; indeed at every step its success requires consolidated strength to enforce its authority. Yet the creation of such a force is virtually equivalent to a dictatorship. The initiation of the plan, it is pointed out, might come either from organized business or from the government. But that business itself should voluntarily set about curtailing competition, by entering into cooperative agreements with its members as to production schedules, markets, prices, and wages for mutual benefit, seems on the whole unlikely — though something has been accomplished in that direction. Accordingly, the entrance of the government as an arbiter into the economic mêlée, a movement on its part to take the situation forcibly in

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hand, would seem the better way. Yet how to get the government to do this (even granting its desirability) is another question. Needless to say, the possible inauguration of a dictatorship through an uprising led by a popular hero has little to recommend it to economists, since the resulting regime would be more likely to be a government by demagogues than by experts. But if by some means the citizenry could be made to see the enormous benefits of concentrating authority in the hands of technically qualified leaders, they might be brought to establish a partial dictatorship under the constitution, and to set up by parliamentary methods an economic council charged with the task of reorganizing the practical life of the country. At the same time it has to be admitted that to educate a democratic majority to see the advisability of such a course (which would involve the abdication by each of his treasured right to buy, sell, and manufacture anything he liked) seems next to impossible. Yet the plain man is deceived in imagining that he still enjoys economic liberty ; such choice as remains to him is only a choice between forms of regulation. The alternative facing him is really this : Shall the country continue under the insidious control of large, warring, private interests despite the laws, or shall the people consciously adopt a program of industrial coordination and bestow supreme power for its execution upon some chosen authority? Certainly it would seem better for men to face the facts and embrace a plan backed by the government than for them to blunder along without charting their course — dominated now by this, now by that, financial or industrial group bent on personal advantage. In the eyes of economists the sanctity of the democratic form of government is not always supremely important. Monopolistic planning and control, not a few are convinced, is the only way to reap the benefits of a mechanical civilization. What is needed is an economic unification of society, comparable to a political federalism, which would correlate all the basic industries (coal, steel, oil, chemicals, electric power, farming, manufacture), and which would regulate not merely output, but

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prices, sales, wages, methods of production and distribution. But whereas political direction has to a degree practically, and always theoretically, remained in the hands of the masses of voters, this new authority in economic affairs would from the outset be granted only to experts. Here problems are held to be too complicated for any to handle save the competent few — statisticians, engineers, business men, economists. Initially, however, the people have still the liberty to decide whether these specialists shall derive their power from public consent or from a financial oligarchy working behind the scenes. But popular freedom so restricted — it may be protested — is much like the condemned man's freedom to lay his head upon the block. Despite the economists' comforting phrases about technology abolishing poverty, the end they envisage of a prosperous adjustment of groups has plainly little to do with those ignes fatui, popular liberty and equality. There can be no doubt but that in recent years trusts, cartels, economic blocs, and the industrialists and bankers behind them, have exerted increasing influence upon governments in matters of loans, debts, currency, tariffs, the disposal of raw materials, and the development of natural resources. Nor is there any question that the more concentrated authority becomes in any of these fields, the nearer does the head of it approach dictatorial powers. Though his absolutism may be narrow in scope, and though he may appeal to force more by indirection than if he had an army at his back, the threat of it is none the less present. In its modern guise government by compulsion and command often takes the form of injunctions, boycotts, artificial high prices, the cornering of markets or the manipulation of credits. In short, the pressure of the industrial overlords, derived from the enormous resources of capital, raw materials, and organization which they control, is often sufficient to bend not only small property owners and the laboring class but even the government to their will. Sometimes the authority to lease oil fields or water power, to buy and sell grain, to regulate credits, is directly conferred upon them by governments; at others it is gained indirectly by evading the restrictive legislation enacted

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by the people to prevent the very acquisition of the power they seek. The essence of the autocratic method is unlimited control from the top. Much modern industry — in which the plant, materials, capital, in fact everything save a dwindling fraction of labor, belongs to the employers — is inevitably autocratic in structure. Usually the owner refuses to share his authority in the management just as he refuses to share his profits. Instead of inducing all engaged in the enterprise to make common cause in considering its problems, he and his partners (after a certain amount of consultation with a technical advisory staff) finally determine all important questions of management and output. Of course there are exceptions. But the highly specialized and intricate modern industrial machine, in which each man does but one thing, affords new illustration of that ancient wisdom of tyrants : Divide et impera. Yet in a society with a democratic political background, still free of the taint of servility and imbued with a hardy strain of self-reliance, it seems unlikely that industrial authoritarianism should permanently hold its own. The will of the masses of plain men determined to have their way and say is too pervasive: sooner or later it must preëmpt the privileges of the industrial magnate, that latest pillar of the aristocratic tradition. The way out recommended by the most outspoken economists is, as we have said, the creation of a supreme economic council charged with the unification and reorganization of this whole phase of life. That they are far more vocal regarding the nature of the plan than the means of obtaining the tremendous power necessary for its inauguration and enforcement goes without saying. Yet the question of how to put teeth in the dream is paramount. History plainly intimates that a masterplan requires dictatorship for its execution. But dictatorship means government by command backed by physical menace, not by conference and persuasion, and the magnitude of the ends involved requires a concentration of power comparable in size to their realization. Despite a measure of agreement, details naturally differ among the advocates of coercive economy. As

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we have said, it is thought that a temporary grant of power might be won by emergency decree from modern states, much as it was won in time of crises in ancient republics; though it is recognized that an almost inevitable popular reaction would insure the dictatorship too brief a Ufe to accomplish much — unless, of course, the offspring outgrew the parent. The personnel of the council is depicted as professional or functional in character ; sometimes as composed of engineers, economists, and statisticians, or again as made up of banking, industrial, commercial, farming, and labor leaders. In either case, however, the members are in the main chosen as specialists with special group affiliations, and not as representatives of the general public. As for the plan, it is usually pictured as some form of "rationalization" tempered with a strong dose of social interest. Just how such a planning commission could successfully enforce its orders upon subsidiary organizations and individuals is the most dubious part of the matter. Presumably its methods would include advisory conferences, much presentation of facts, with resort to police power and the restriction of credit only as a last resort. In brief, a small board of experts or of signally successful leaders would administer the industry of the country, outlining for every major enterprise a schedule of production and distribution representing its part in the program for general prosperity. Yet those few who can resist the argument from prosperity may still feel repugnance to dictation by an oligarchy of "experts," even when it appears in the guise of an economic necessity. However advisable unified control may be, when conditioned by force it loses the essence of real cooperation. Furthermore, government by specialists has the disadvantage not only of ruling out the advice of hosts of smaller experts, but of substituting narrow, sharp-eyed views of man as producer and consumer for the broader treatment of him reflected in popular, non-functional representation. Neither a council of business leaders nor of social scientists can be counted on to safeguard republican first principles in their plans; for neither has the common man's stake in defending them. As for the

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rationalization of industry, it will make for a democratic social good only if kept under strict popular control. Signifying as it does simply the application of scientific methods to the management of business, rationalization may be easily combined with an autocratic society. A new technique of amalgamating and simplifying industry has been its great achievement. This has involved not only the pyramiding of control but strict cost accounting, improved machinery, and great saving in labor and materials. Under private ownership, these tendencies make almost irresistibly for dictatorship; not only by eliminating the small producer, but by decreasing the number of men employed and increasing their dependence upon the employer. Even the scientific drive on industrial waste may work hardship upon the wage-earners by scrapping all but the most efficient plants and workmen. Science as science is, of course, equally oblivious of social and anti-social ends, but the harm wrought by it as a tool in the hands of uncontrolled competing business interests is all the greater. A striking instance of the amoralism resulting from the conjunction of science and business is to be found in some recent uses made of industrial psychology and social engineering. Many business firms are finding it profitable to employ what are variously called efficiency experts, consulting psychologists, or industrial relations counsel, to improve among other things the attitude and performance of their employees. These so-called experts in the technique of influencing human behavior generally make use of the principles of habit formation and suggestion to redirect the workers in the direction desired. Part of their task is to condition the employees to more enthusiastic loyalty and effort in behalf of the firm's interests. Thus their tactics may include such things as sales talks, boosting campaigns, the establishing of trade journals, baseball teams, bands, clubs, prizes — not to mention the occasional dismissal of malcontents or radicals who resist their drives for group solidarity. Recognizing that the individual is largely a social product, and that he is more readily controlled, more like-minded, in groups — the docility of crowds is proverbial — they set about organizing the

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staff in various ways, multiplying the ties that bind them to the shop, office, or factory. And since men are largely molded by the habits and associations of their daily life, it is not surprising that membership in these organizations, coupled with the business routine (both of which are controlled by the employer), should effectively orient the workers in the attitudes which the employer wants them to hold. To rule minds as well as bodies is the new achievement of scientific management. Each age has its slaveries. While serfdom and physical bondage may be largely a thing of the past, the enslavement of character is today a skillfully practiced art. Dictatorships large and small flourish in more subtle forms. For these devices are directed against the citadel of human self-confidence and initiative, inducing in men a crowd mentality and lockstep docility in following the leadership of a boss. Even the generous impulse to "service" in human nature is often traduced to private ends; the worker being urged by continual "drives" to a transfer of interests in his employer's favor which still further completes his social disinheritance. And all this is accomplished largely by the opiate of cheap publicity, ballyhoo, canned enthusiasm— as artificial and as commercially manufactured as any commodity on the market. Curiously enough, in the guise of arguments for social control by experts (i.e., by economists, business men, or psychologists), we have revived the old attack against ideas as a motive force and an appeal to the dynamism of feeling and impulse as springs of action. Not merely a factory, but a society, it is discovered, can be directed by social engineering; that is, by the proper psychological tactics in the hands of a small group that knows how to get what it wants by scheming (euphemistically called planning). A minority experienced in taking advantage of human nature can mold public sentiment to the ends it desires, and indeed can largely make of a community what it will. The secret of this power, it is intimated, lies in the fact that man's behavior is largely a function of his subliminal and passional nature, which can be controlled through a knowledge of habit formation and suggestion. Men's beliefs and actions spring

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largely, if not wholly, from reflexes of the nervous system conditioned through their association with organically pleasant or unpleasant stimuli. The successful leader of men is therefore the one who can most skillfully play upon the sensori-motor mechanisms of the masses, redirecting their basic emotional drives in line with the promotion of the enterprise he favors. Here, under the cloak of faith in science and admiration for experts, the argument for dictation reappears. If the facts of human nature are as described, it could hardly be otherwise. For if science has here laid bare the laws of mass behavior, has indeed discovered that man is determined by his instinctive, unconscious impulses and not by his intelligence, democratic methods would appear largely out-of-date. Why, indeed, should the opinion of the multitude be sought at election (in preference to the verdict of the expert few) if it reflects only herd impulse, the accidents of habit, and unconscious prompting? Why continue to appeal to the people by consultation, persuasion, and argument, if indirect conditioning of their neuro-muscular systems has been shown to be much more efficient? Admittedly, democracy in the twentieth century has more than once literally talked itself to death. Admittedly, parliamentarism can rarely achieve the swift efficacy of political action obtainable through dictation directed to the organic impulses of men. In the politics of the future, military and administrative authority may well be of secondary importance compared to the arts of habituation and social control; so that in years to come social changes may be brought about without resort either to physical force or popular consultation. Of course, the sophistication of the few is necessary to take advantage of the ingenuousness of the many. The experienced leader or social engineer who comprehends the dynamics of man's passional nature must be himself dispassionate — an intellectualist in disguise. Even while sharing the sensori-motor drives of the human animal, he himself, if he is to control, must not be controlled by them. Understanding the laws of suggestion, he must be able to set up counter-suggestions for himself which prevent him from falling a prey to their influence. There

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is a vast difference between being subject to psychological laws without knowing it and understanding and utilizing the action of these same laws. To grasp them is, as it were, to be free of them. Thus the social expert can through his critical knowledge at once outwit his own reflexes and by careful campaigns redirect the unconscious mechanisms of the crowd in line with his conscious ends. But since ignorance of the technique that is being practiced on them is often a requisite for success, it is advisable that the people should not know what is going on. Only an instructed few, the leaders, had best be entrusted with the social program. This necessity for secrecy, it is intimated, arises from the fact that human beings have a way of taking advantage of knowledge about themselves to alter their behavior in the light of it, thus rendering anticipation and direction of that behavior more difficult. For instance, if a large number of persons were to obtain scientific knowledge of the laws and processes involved in advertising campaigns, political drives, or even business cycles, the more ingenious of them would undoubtedly try to utilize this predictive knowledge to their own ends; and in so doing might alter the operation of the laws — to the great confusion of social experts and those in charge of the manipulations. Accordingly, in the interest of progress it is intimated that social knowledge should be reserved for the specialists, since the less information there is available to the many on these subjects, the less inconvenient interference there will be with the leadership of the few. This conclusion, which at best lurks only by implication in certain currents of thought, I have stated over bluntly. As a matter of fact I know of no one who defends it outright. To do so would, indeed, involve something like a shift of ground from the previous position. For, after having led us to believe that to an indefinite extent man's actions are products of his neuromuscular reflexes and can be controlled by a technique addressed to his subliminal and passional nature, the social scientist surprises us with the news that the results got by these methods may be upset because knowing makes a difference. In

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fact, it is only because knowing makes a difference that experts are encouraged to keep their knowledge under their hats — since by hiding it the trends of mass behavior which they would like to see realized have the best chance of being so. But if the arguments favoring affective conditioning in politics (in preference to methods designed to excite the higher mental processes) come to no more than this — that the less enlightened men are, the more easily they are ruled by suggestion — it is plain that they conceal a bid for power and are merely pseudo-scientific in their implications. Accordingly, democratic thought, as I see it, must oppose social engineering when it is offered as a substitute for political persuasion, on the ground that its technique is directed toward a mode of psychological enslavement. For such methods make of society an instrument dominated by means, in the hands of the expert few, which it neither understands nor fully shares. Not control, says the republican, so much as freedom, is the object of the state. And if it be sophistically maintained that to act from an unconscious prompting or a control you do not know of is to act freely, the obvious retort is, that the very fact that concealment is necessary for the device to succeed proves your lack of liberty. That knowledge is power is the tacit admission of the method, even while this knowledge is strictly reserved for leaders and specialists. Yet precisely because it is not shared, but used as a means of control by the few over the many, the method must be termed autocratic. Take an example. Suppose those in possession of the technique of conditioning and an adequate organization for applying it know that the foreign trade of the country is in a bad way, but believe that by making people suppose that it is in a good way they can actually better its condition. Their end we may suppose in this instance is benevolent, yet their tactics may very well be to flood the public with propaganda — apparently authenticated statements by experts about the profitableness of foreign commerce. The success of the drive turns, of course, upon the extent to which the public is misled by these false statements of its leaders, the extent to which (mistaking them

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for truth) it hurries to invest in enterprises doing foreign business, and by its rallying creates the improved conditions hoped for. Now the chief point to be noted comes here. If the public were not fooled by the campaign, the principles of suggestion upon which it was based would not work; therefore secrecy, concealment, the exclusion of the public from the real state of affairs and from the tactics employed, and the concentration of direction within a small group, are essential to the method. But plainly this is anything but government by popular participation. Proposals to use psychological tactics too often mean that the schemes advanced are recognized by their authors as being such that popular assent could not be obtained for them directly by a full display of evidence and cause. If success is to be had, an indirect attack must be made on man's unreasoning nature : he must be taken by surprise and irrelevance. In other words, conditioning through association and habituation is likely to be preferred for an autocratic end — when you want others to do as you want them to, rather than as they themselves might wish. Nevertheless the technique of conditioning has come to stay. The only way of combatting it therefore is by strengthening individualism and critical intelligence. Nor is it enough to make men aware of the devices that are being practiced upon them, and the motives from which they spring. Sheep remain sheep even at the gate of the slaughter-house. Unceasing education of the public in self-control and self-reliance, in knowledge of their own interests and the means to realize them, is the true defense. The only remedy against a minority that knows how to get what it wants is the unceasing enlightenment of the people as to their own aims and needs and the requisite tactics. These we shall discuss in the next chapter. Autocracy today takes three main forms : dictatorship in the name of society, by strong men, and by experts. All these we have opposed. At the same time our discussion has neglected the more drastic and brutal phases of dictatorship. Of spies, secret police, terrorism, and the abrogation of civil rights, we

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have said little. Nor have we dwelt on the familiar spectacle of a private army within the state, parliamentary suppression, the assassination and exile of the opposition, iron censorship, and the extinction of all but one political party. These dangers, as the most obvious threats to democracy, are perhaps more readily guarded against than the subtler encroachments of despotism. For the latter, as we have seen, conceal their coercion in agreeable forms — tricking men's reflexes, trapping their minds through their appetites, and committing their crimes in the name of economic efficiency. In conclusion, then, let us declare ourselves plainly against the supremacy of experts, rejecting such plans for putting them in command at the top. For although democracy needs to make full use of social engineers and business men in an advisory and administrative capacity, self-government is more important than efficient government. Let the people propose and the experts dispose in their service. For almost inevitably those whose minds have been focused on a factual, non-political goal will lack the broad vision necessary to express the many-sided aspiration of a whole community. Even though they use no violence or extra-legal methods, the unchecked ways of technicians may be fraught with ill — as, for instance, when they seek to mold public opinion by unconscious suggestion, the antithesis of a fair appeal to deliberate assent. A real danger of the times, in our opinion, is that wisdom, vision, coordinating breadth of mind, may be sacrificed to the detailed information of specialists. It is no secret that experts are not infrequently infected with the narrowness of their field, overestimating its importance, ignoring the existence of outside bodies of fact. The ability to assimilate masses of data in a given sphere does not insure the presence of a correlative aptitude for criticizing them reflectively or for organizing many fields into a balanced system. Again, a head for facts is often only half a head when it comes to judging, ruling, handling men. Accordingly, admiration for experts must not be allowed to blind us to the value of a broad, equable outlook, sagacity, sound estimates, and the

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ability to take everything into account. In social matters these qualities are of paramount importance. Hence a society which aims at participation — and not at exclusion — must seek to keep its highest places subject to public control and the seat of general judgment and oversight.

CHAPTER V PUBLICITY OR PROPAGANDA? To MANY the parliamentary methods of democracy appear as quite archaic. Why should governments give a thought to them any longer, they ask, as against the prescriptions of specialists? In the face of modern expert knowledge in social matters, respect for the uninformed opinion of the common man becomes sheer stupidity. Even those who do not feel that this is so are convinced that new methods are imperative. For even the blindest among us can see that, if the people are really to be arbiters of their lot, they must first be in a position to judge it fully and intelligently ; while the assurance of this requires the development of a vast system of ways and means whereby knowledge affecting public interest can be brought to popular attention in an accurate, impartial manner. In short, questions of the franchise and elections are seen to be of subordinate importance as compared to tactics of publicity. Otherwise, where the public remains unenlightened on questions vitally concerning it, the will of the majority, despite a smooth-running machinery of government, remains but a blind leading of the blind. The term publicity is used to indicate both a state and a function. As a state, it connotes the condition of being open to the observation of anyone and everyone ; while as a function, it has come to signify any organized attempt to disseminate ideas among the people at large, often with a view to equipping them for some course of action. In this broad sense, publicity may be taken to include not only education but any means by which information and doctrines can be imparted to the masses of citizens. No one has surpassed the philosopher, Kant, in perceiving the ethical import of publicity. "All actions," declares a famous

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precept of his, "relating to the rights of other men are wrong, if the maxims from which they follow are inconsistent with publicity"; to which he has added the even more striking converse: "All maxims which require publicity, in order that they may not fail to attain their end, are in agreement both with right and politics." 1 That publication should thus be made the criterion of right in the Kantian system springs no doubt from the fact that it offers the most feasible way of applying universality and consistency as tests of truth to concrete social relations. Where the principles of a political action will not bear the light of common knowledge, it seems likely that they harbor inconsistency, unjust preference, groundless exceptions. Otherwise why should they not be made available to everyone affected in a given situation? If it be objected that the public is not always the best judge of its own interest, Kant would reply that at least the public has a right to judge of it. Secrecy breeds suspicion, distrust, and social unrest, while these would seem to constitute a greater danger than the risk of popular misunderstanding from exposing causes to the public view. After all, good reasons, if plainly set forth, ought to make their way among candid minds. This is a postulate of democratic theory. Hence publicity becomes a sign of fair practice in politics; for truth, as the saying goes, loves open dealing. Moreover, publicity is a positive means of realizing a program. Indeed, there would seem to be a class of proposals, commendable both morally and politically, which can only hope to attain their ends if they are backed by the most assiduous technique of dissemination and advertisement. If Kant's second maxim is correct, the test of their worth may even be their capacity to run the gauntlet of educative publicity. Nor is it enough, where the success of a cause depends on the thorough arousal of the popular will, that information regarding it should be passively on file in public places, theoretically accessible to 1

Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, translated by M. Campbell Smith (London, 1903), pp. 185, 195. A striking parallel may be drawn between the articles of Kant's treaty for perpetual peace and President Wilson's program of world peace set forth in his address to Congress, January 8, 1918. Cf. especially the advocacy of "pitiless publicity."

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everyone. In addition, the ideas must be spread abroad, diffused, circulated, if they are to enlist active resistance or support. But once this need of active instruction to create intelligent public opinion is admitted, the distinction between propaganda and publicity becomes of great account. In respect of such issues as child labor, sanitary regulations, prohibition, there is little question but that without a long campaign of education carried on by a fervent minority of supporters, successful legislation in these fields would have been impossible. Yet here as elsewhere the discrimination of legitimate publicity from propaganda is no easy matter. While the right of free speech is supposed to be guaranteed to everyone under popular government, it may be questioned whether this includes permission for every special pleader or advertising agent to attempt to sell his cause to a defenseless public. In a sense, of course, all zealous planning and organized activity in disseminating ideas may be termed propaganda. Nevertheless, a very real, though perhaps vague, division is recognized as separating practices along this line into the justifiable and the unjustifiable. Often the evil of the latter sort of propaganda rests in the anonymity of its source. Frequently, by suppressing the origin of purported information, rumors are spread, whispering campaigns insinuated, and credence obtained for unauthorized findings and reports. Thus responsibility is evaded for exaggerated, if not actually false, statements. Certainly one of the duties of a society which tolerates free speech should be the cultivation of a strong correlative principle of accountability for such speech. Corporations and officials should be made responsible for their reports; nameless rumors should be frowned on by the press; and in addition to strict laws against slander and speculative advertising, a widespread sentiment should be created against such irresponsible practices. Again, the evil in propaganda may be laid to its suppression of free speech. Admittedly propaganda is not only negatively dependent upon censorship but is positively characterized by the policy of withholding from the public knowledge of certain

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facts in order to strengthen the impression made by other facts released by the censor. While propaganda in this sense of letting the public know only what certain persons in power want it to know need not involve direct falsification, nevertheless, in omitting (for special unavowed reasons) all mention of some integral phase of the facts, it violates the spirit of truthfulness. Yet such practice is often widely approved, as in the suppression of unfavorable news by governments in wartime in order not to injure the morale of their nationals. And in peacetime a virtual government censorship exists to restrict freedom of speech when it verges on blasphemy, sedition, or obscenity. But the root fault of propaganda lies in its aim, which is the control of actions rather than the enlightenment of minds (by which men might become capable of self-control). Whereas a system of legitimate publicity would gather the news and leave the public to form judgments for itself, propaganda attempts to make up people's minds for them. It is a conscious organized effort to influence human behavior through the instincts and emotions rather than through education by the facts themselves. To this end it takes advantage of psychological laws. Visual and auditory appeals, for instance, are addressed to the public from countless news prints and radios in behalf of specific beliefs and enterprises, and the desired suggestion is repeated thousands of times on the assumption that by the law of the conditioned reflex the millions of minds exposed to the same stimuli must on the whole tend to give the same favorable response. Amusing variations on the argument from authority, based upon the prestige of numbers, custom, or leadership, are used to capture the crowd's interest in all sorts of objects. Key men in the sporting, financial, and political worlds are approached and induced for one consideration or another to lend their endorsement to everything from a cigarette to a constitutional amendment. Ours is an age of buying and selling, of merchandising and bargaining. That even ideas can be sold is one of our greatest discoveries — as witnessed by our mushroom arts of advertising and propaganda. In advertising, public interest in a com-

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modity is captured by circulating reports of it for purposes of trade. Creation of a demand for the article is accomplished by insinuating into people's minds the idea that they need or want the thing in question. Fetching pictures, catch-phrases, lavish testimonials, instill the belief and arouse the acquisitive response. In exactly the same way, propagandists campaign to sell ideas in the interest of some special group. As in advertising, the aim is inculcation — to impel to a specific action — not enlightenment and information; while duplicity is implied in the failure to avow the real motive, in the one-sidedness of the presentation, and in the resort to unconscious controls and a subliminal approach. Reiteration of political doctrines often leads to a presumption of their truth without an inspection of their claims. Thus emphasis upon certain dogmas in newspaper headlines, screen dialogue, radio speeches, can go far toward determining popular trends. Continued harping upon race as an issue can rouse race antagonisms ; stress upon economic disturbances sharpens industrial counterclaims; while columns devoted to popular hero worship awaken longings for the man on horseback. Man is naturally a believing animal, and if you tell him often enough that something is so, the chances are that he will acquiesce without investigation in what you say. Where the docility of the public can be counted on, the technique takes its boldest form. Without wasting time on any supporting argument, the desired command is whipped out with military directness: "Buy British"; "Eat yeast"; "Vote Communist." Here the aim of the method, to rule action, stands clearly revealed — its disregard of everything but the neuro-muscular response and its amazing confidence in the power of such tactics to gain control of the nervous system, while ignoring the cerebrum. But if man is really an animal, as this approach implies, what is to be said against men training each other to take commands exactly as they break in a dog or horse with blows and sweetmeats to do the things it has no desire to do? What objection to converting our human kind into a yapping pack in pursuit of what the propagandist wants it to want? Yet the very persons

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who use these methods would be shocked at the intimation that the process of taking advantage of others b y indirection, of molding them to alien wills b y playing on their responses, was a deadly drug, a fresh form of exploitation. None the less, the drug analogy is apt; for as the effect of narcotics is to stupefy the higher centers, to excite emotionally, and to undermine the power of choice, so the effect of floods of propaganda, b y poisoning the sources of public information, m a y shift channels of trade, make wars, overthrow governments, and induce a passionate confusion of ideas that tends to self-destruction. N o doubt m y account will be accused of exaggeration. Deception of the public, it will be said, is nowhere practiced in such flagrant form. Nevertheless, political realists will frankly admit that publicity in this sense often serves as a high-pressure instrument of government. Wherever ideas are disseminated on a wide scale, they will say, the inevitable affinity of the human mind for propaganda is bound to be exhibited. T h a t the people love to be fooled is no idle jest. The public prefers to feel, not to think; and it gets what it wants. Public demand determines the news supply. So long as the choice of what is to be published has to be made by somebody (with specific interests) and for somebody (viz., for a public that reads only in its slack moments for recreation and excitement), the material selected will reflect both the intellectual lassitude of the audience and the private schemes of the editors. After all, there is no use in printing what will not be read, slight value in telling people what they ought to be interested in for their social and political welfare, if as a matter of fact they are not. The publicist who does so only courts financial disaster. For himself, at any rate, he would apparently do better to cater to the instincts of demos, and give the people the news they want — tales of horror, laughter, tears, and personalities. The difficult fact must be recognized, in the words of Walter Lippmann, that " t h e items the public finds interesting do not often coincide with its real interest." B u t if democracy is not to be abandoned, new ways must be devised b y which what is of genuine public concern may be made to concern the public. Despite the increased and un-

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flattering knowledge of human nature that has followed the growth of evolutionary biology, man should still be able to direct his efforts toward self-government and to develop a technique of publicity by which (without arousing a stampede of crowd emotion) important general issues can be clothed in simple, appealing dress so as to claim the attention they deserve. For after all man is still a thinking as well as a feeling animal, and the problem is largely one of presentation. To an untold extent the way questions are put determines whether the public will be vitally concerned with them. As the technique of propaganda has shown, ideas may be rendered attractive by establishing unconscious associations between them and specific reactions of the nervous system; on the other hand, as we shall urge, issues may be made directly appealing to awareness by utilizing man's largely reflective interest in art and science. This second method, which essays to engage the popular mind at the level of its aesthetic experience and curiosity for exact knowledge, is here taken as the ideal of publicity. The time has passed when it can longer be questioned that the masses of men have such tastes. But the great problem of presentation remains, a problem primarily of simplification: how to pose complicated issues in an uncomplicated way so as to gain popular notice. For the solution of this difficulty we must look chiefly to art and science, aided by the new modes of transmission, as the means best adapted to acquaint men with their social situation in both its dramatic and its factual significance. The educative power of art has indeed rarely been questioned since the days of Plato and the Greek city states. The drama, the oration, the lyric, the epic, and later the novel, have all admittedly played important parts as purveyors of ideas to mankind. Painting and music also, although probably to a less degree, have helped to convey to a wide audience in an immediate, effortless way something of the spirit of an age, of the patterns and problems that confront it. To be sure, art has often been the agent of propaganda. Yet where it has sacrificed free expression to preachment, it has not infrequently declined as art and lost social influence. For in

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art, as in science, if a man's reading of the facts is impelled by some scheme for advantage, or emotional bias, his impressions grow distorted and untrustworthy. Again where the artist's view of reality is strongly colored by abstract theory the public loses confidence in his vision and the fidelity of his depiction of life. If one seeks the spirit of our day in art, everywhere disrespect is obvious. Depreciation of the old, the tried, the traditional, voices revolt and disillusionment. Praise is withheld from rich, reposeful works with an antiquarian flavor suggesting art as an anodyne, to be extended instead to daring new forms, Icarian flights that fail, yet, failing, retain some trace of a cold, breath-taking ether. As might be expected, this new art, striving to catch something from the rain of sensations that we call modern life, reflects a medley of flickering aperçus, bizarre new slants, strident outbreaks, frank erotic transcriptions, violent confrontations of convention, startling contours of abstract line. There is even the divorce of sensuous image from plastic form and of both from meaning. Always the scene is appraised with an impatient reportorial eye, alert for scareheads and the intensest impressions. Bent on creating a sensation, captious cleverness may not shrink from sacrificing a deeper truth to produce some fillip of over-statement or to do brittle violence to an expectation. Everywhere are impressions of getting and spending, with here and there bursts of inhuman power and speed. Through the new media of screen and radio, the arts are introducing revolutionary changes into the social Ufe of many lands. In Russia, for instance, and the countries of the Near East, the cinema is serving the ends of mass education. By taking advantage of the universal love of amusement, curiosity, and the longing for distraction, streams of new ideas are fed to the people. In this new democratic theater the Russians especially perceive that they have an instrument which can convey a message to all races, ages, and localities. With its aid new standards of living are being introduced, instruction offered in the use of agricultural and industrial machinery, and propa-

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ganda carried on for the government and against alcohol — and religion. As for the social effects of the radio, these may well mark the opening of an entirely new era in politics. By its means something like the classic ideal of direct democracy becomes realizable on an undreamt-of scale. The classic unities of time and place seem reestablished, and the way opened to convene immense popular assemblies. Through the instrumentality of the radio, telephone, and television, simultaneous audition and communication become possible to a community of millions scattered over thousands of miles. By these devices leaders can speak directly to their constituents at any time on important matters. What is almost more striking, they speak not to a limited audience in some public hall but to the nation's families gathered in their homes. Politics, suddenly freed from confinement within party clubs, convention halls, and newspaper columns, becomes all-pervasive. Already it is taking advantage of the new intimacy. Government affairs of all sorts are being carried straight to the public's door via the radio by leaders eager to gain its good will. Nor is it uncommon for the highest executive to appeal directly to public opinion in this way for support in conquering a hostile legislature or in a national emergency. By the electric arts of light and sound, opportunities of sharing impressions and ideas have increased a thousandfold. The chances of hearing and seeing what is important are thrown open to almost everyone. Information and amusement rove the ether for any ear to catch. Democratization is entering a new phase — yet with a difference. For in place of the old face-toface local groups there is growing up a new national, even worldwide, community conferring through disembodied sights and sounds. Fleeting images from machines are displacing the richness of immediate contacts. What is stranger, the stream of communication is at present largely one way. The auditor or spectator has no choice but to be passive; there is no give-andtake, no chance for discussion with a radio voice or a silhouette on a screen. Despite the unprecedented facilities for intercourse,

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members of the new community seem paradoxically condemned to a greater passivity, anonymity, and isolation than ever. In the near future, the problem whether a world of floating percepts can be successfully substituted for social reality may become of serious political moment. For it remains to be seen whether disembodied sights and sounds can produce the same vigorous response as the old face-to-face political encounter. Unquestionably the tide of future politics depends upon how far the personal magnetism of leaders can be projected through the data of voice and image. That man has succeeded in creating machines for the recording and transmission of sights and sounds as readily as he has produced machines of motion must inevitably have far-reaching effects, for the world of concrete human relations and the world of tones, colors, and shapes largely coincide. But how far the simulacrum can replace the social original, time alone can tell. More than once democracy has been called government by discussion. But if it is to remain so, it must be garbed in strange new forms. For the local community, once a miniature world in itself, bound by ties of direct acquaintance and informal chat, is gone; and there are few signs of its return. In its place has grown up a vast system of contacts with machines, in which almost every phase of existence is subject to remote control. Though a man's life is bound up with millions of others, they are for the most part unknown. In a society in which his food, clothes, news, and even amusements are produced at a distance by unknown persons, personal relations grow weak and tenuous. The larger community proves the enemy of the smaller. In cities and factories men have fewer intimacies, less free and unguarded talk, than anywhere else. With the disappearance of the crossroads store, the school district, the town meeting — not to mention the ancient agora and forum — the influences of familiar interchange, dialogue, chat, have largely vanished from political Ufe. As to what will be the result of these transformations, one can only guess. Undoubtedly, with the decay of local ties and with the new mechanical facilities for combining personal privacy

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with public information, the public has an unrivaled chance for an independent survey of the facts and parties in political dispute. If this could mean that the people would come to take matters into their own hands, and to follow the persuasion of social facts (now for the first time widely reported, recorded, and available), ignoring demagogues and local prejudice, then indeed the change might not be one to be regretted. But at best this is only a hope. That the feeling of national solidarity will be intensified, and that in general the public will be better informed on the issues of the day, seems fairly certain, when one considers that for the first time in history the masses of men are gaining something like immediate access to the chief events of national life. Yet when against these increased opportunities one weighs the power of reiterated suggestion in the everpresent voice of the radio and the trend toward same-stimulus same-response in human behavior, the chances of avoiding crowd-mindedness on a scale greater than ever appear somewhat dubious. Although each individual may be technically in a position to "hear" and to "see" for himself, this does not guarantee that he will be able to resist microphone dictation, or strong enough to contribute constructive insights of his own toward the formation of a liberal public opinion. Nor are these difficulties mitigated by the fact that the present broadcasting system is largely supported by tolls received from the sale of program space to commercial advertisers. For where the control and selection of material is in the hands of private interests, and the claims of advertising are paramount, a false self-interested philosophy comes subtly to permeate the presentations. The life of luxury, of passive enjoyment, is endlessly glorified. Happiness, it is continually reiterated, consists in the maximum purchase of commodities. Here is plainly a point at which new methods of publicity are needed. As against the dangers of a supine public under the control of propagandists and commercial advertisers, at least one suggestion may be offered. This is a proposal for the development of a great national bureau of publicity. Through the growth of a judiciously handled intelligence and entertainment

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organization directed by the state (to include federal broadcasting, syndicated films, and other services), a great deal might be done, it would seem, to arouse the public to freer, more enlightened activity. The aim of such a bureau would be the collection of information on all socially important subjects and its dissemination to the public by means of the various scientific and artistic devices of the day. A first requirement would be to obtain a highly trained personnel devoted to the ideal of educative publicity, who would undertake to furnish the nation with a vivid yet faithful picture of leading social, scientific, and artistic events. The great press associations of the world have undoubtedly progressed far already in the non-partisan collection of news; from them much could be learned. This bureau, however, would be more in the nature of an agency of national education backed by the government, to awaken people to the issues of cultural and political Ufe, and to invite their participation. Obviously the duties of such an intelligence service would not stop with mere sight and sound broadcasting. One of its primary functions would be the accumulation and organization of socially significant facts as well. In many respects the plan would resemble Walter Lippmann's 2 proposal to establish a government office to act as a clearing house of information upon industrial and political problems. According to his suggestion, the bureau would have at its disposal a trained staff of investigators, a large reference library, free access to government archives and institutions, as well as materials for analyzing social phenomena by a statistical technique. But whereas the chief function of such an office in Mr. Lippmann's view would be to prepare the facts for the use of executives in charge of the administration, the service we have in mind would be more concerned with distributing information to the country at large. In other words, the institution which we are envisaging would 1

Public Opinion, chap. xxvi. According to his idea, a permanent intelligence section might be organized in this country around each of the federal deparments represented in the cabinet, and the group of them so inter-related as to form a fixed body of research and information. The same plan in its essentials might be extended to state governments.

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serve not only as an intelligence bureau for the government, but as a publicity and educational organ for the people. It would function as a great agency of news, culture, and instructive diversion for the common man, widening his horizons and preparing him to take a greater part than hitherto in public affairs. But to stimulate the interest of the common man without compulsion, strong motives must be induced. To catch his eye and ear after the day's work requires a vivid appeal. While his curiosity, his hope of betterment, his latent ambition are always there to be aroused, to engage them requires real ingenuity. Information must be disguised as entertainment. Usually only what can be pleasurably absorbed without noticeable effort can hold the attention of the public in its leisure moments. Yet to devise ways to make knowledge interesting requires the highest skill in the preparation of programs. While art can always be used to give pleasure and yet inform (without seeming to), with science the task is far more difficult. The need, however, is pressing. One of the most critical issues of the day is how to reduce complex bodies of facts to a scientific form that shall be both widely attractive and intelligible. Indeed, only if this problem can be solved, that is, only if widely successful devices for the simplification and popularization of information can be found, does the continuance of self-government seem possible. Oddly enough, those who set the highest value upon the contributions of science to modern life often deny its capacity to educate the common man politically. It is sheer foolishness, they say, to imagine that the masses of men can ever by any technique of publicity be provided with the information necessary to decide the intricate problems of government. How, they ask, could the average man ever be expected to have even approximately reliable views on leading domestic questions, when they involve such issues as tariffs, transportation and postal rates, the development of superpower, or the regulation of air routes and radio waves? Knowledge in these fields remains the possession of the very few with the time and ability to devote themselves exclusively to them. Government, like every other complicated business, must be left to experts.

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133 Inevitably democracy must face this major problem: whether it is any longer possible for the faculties of the ordinary man to compass the cumulative intricacies of his surroundings. While civilization is apparently increasing in complexity at an accelerated rate, man's native capacities remain static and constant. How then can the logic of events be circumvented which is depriving the masses of their share in shaping the policies of government, and which is concentrating authority in the hands of the few specialists who alone are able to grasp the involutions of the modern system? Some attempt to answer this question, though admittedly difficult, seems necessary. For, if we are not mistaken, a very real danger lurks in the loss of political courage and of a broadgauge view of things, which comes of relinquishing general responsibilities for a policy of extreme specialization. Man's greatest aid, it seems, in mastering the complexities of the modern world, has been the method of quantitative analysis. By breaking up wholes into parts and studying their subdivisions, human wits have again and again proved a match for intricate situations. Why may not the same means be used to assist the cause of popular government? Certainly analysis is as much a matter of simplification as of specialization. By resolving complex events into more elementary units, man succeeds in making plain to himself otherwise incomprehensible states of affairs. Not only this; by the same process by which the technician is able to make things clear to himself, he is often able to convey the results of his investigations to the less expert members of the community. What needs to be recognized is, that in many cases analysis and measurement offer the best means for spreading knowledge as well as of providing a reliable body of information that is worth circulation. In the statistical method of the sciences, for instance, man has at his disposal a powerful instrument of analysis which also serves as an aid in the diffusion of knowledge. The unique advantage of statistics where political questions are concerned is, of course, that they can combine numbers with pictures, science with art so to speak, quantitative measurement with

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publicity value. Thus a pictogram on a poster representing soldiers of different heights can accurately and instantaneously inform the larger public as to the comparative sizes of the different armies of the world; or a sectored circle can render public accounting of the division of expenses in a government project. While the pure scientist may be satisfied with a mathematical formula, not so the common man. He hankers for an image to drive home the point. Even though what tells upon his mind is the quantitative fact, he needs imaginative aids and analogies with familiar experience to appreciate it. But today almost every Uterate person is familiar with, and open to, the appeal of averages. Hence things like wage scales, trade curves, census tables, and agricultural reports need not fail of a popular hearing provided they are colorfully and dramatically conveyed by the proper statistical technique. It is a commonplace that modern democracy lives in a statistical age, in an era which deals with large masses of facts by averages and proportional estimates. Not only are these methods employed in practical affairs (of business management and actuarial concern) and in the physical sciences, but they are generally recognized as contributing all that can be called scientific to modern sociology and politics. What has not hitherto been fully appreciated, however, is that through the skillful use of charts, graphs, and pictures, summarizing vast stores of facts, the modern state can impart what is known about the people to the people themselves. By such means, the public which has neither the competence nor the desire to go into the intricacies of political problems might nevertheless be informed clearly, dramatically, and with a fair degree of accuracy by the specialist as to the outcome of his long investigations. Moreover, as compared with other agencies, the government is in a favored position to obtain these social measurements, since it alone is provided with compulsory powers and an administrative machinery adequate to the task. Too often, in the past, political questions have been approached in a hazy, verbal, emotional manner, and their solutions based on a smattering of unorganized data or on un-

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135 critical personal experience. In politics, as in certain pseudosciences, the phrasemaker and the orator have done their work, building up an elaborate nomenclature to conceal the lack of exact concepts and systematic method. Historical and literary studies of government, together with those based upon loose analogies between the state and the organism or the machine, have not done much to help the development of exact social research. But in dealing with complicated social questions such as the causes of poverty, disease, criminality, or with agricultural problems, severer methods are needed. More and more the solutions to these issues are being sought by statistical means. That is, the issues are analyzed and defined in terms of certain variables, and on the basis of observations covering a wide field, the degree of correlation, if any, is determined between these variables. In framing a problem, the definition of the elements in more or less quantitative form is desirable. Then follows the tabulation of a large body of observations, their analysis by means of ratios and averages, and the expression of the result in charts and graphs. Throughout the process the study of variations (or changing phenomena) and the careful notation of any tendency of these to vary together — either in the same or in opposite directions — is important. For wherever a correlation appears (as, for instance, between the death rate and population density of a municipality), it is likely that a genuine causal relation has been found. To be sure, the handicaps incident to statistical methods can never be wholly discounted. Chief among these are the number of variable factors involved, the difficulty of finding adequate units of measurement, and the inapplicability of statistics to uniquely novel situations. The fact is that statistics in concentrating on the quantitative aspect of things almost wholly neglects their individual, qualitative side. Thus the statistician can tell you the mean free path of the molecule of a certain gas; he can predict the increase of population in the United States from past censuses, or forecast the Dakota wheat crop from the tables of precipitation and temperature. He can even arrange

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school children in the order of their I. Q.'s. Nevertheless he cannot tell you what is the personality of a specific child, the exact behavior of a particular molecule, or whether a given farmer in South Dakota will have a wheat crop above or below the average. Presumably there will always be a gap between the symmetry of outline of the statistical picture and its accuracy in detail. But something must be foregone in seeking a general view. Just as when you stand too close to a large object you lose its contour, so in confronting massive social problems the individual method almost inevitably exaggerates trifles and obscures the whole. In part at least this narrow personalism can be overcome and men's minds trained to more comprehensive views by the use of statistics. What would seem to be wanted is the formulation of more precise concepts in political thought, together with an increase in government reporting, and the accumulation of statistical information covering sociological and economic as well as strictly administrative material. Along with this goes the need for the development of the survey, for the more intensive local study of special samples of social phenomena to throw preliminary fight upon large-scale conditions. Finally should come the growth of a great central clearing-house of information, spoken of earlier, to organize and distribute facts to the country at large. This would mean nothing less than a new system of public education, by which the field of knowledge would be surveyed by experts and the resulting information on leading questions presented to the people in simple, forceful, and attractive form. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that when such a bureau of publicity is realized the common man will be stirred to more active participation in government. But in order that this may come about, political life must be freed of a host of myths and make-believes. Men must come to embrace their beliefs not as blind prejudices but as tentative guiding precepts in an enlightened program of social effort. To these matters we shall turn in the next chapter.

CHAPTER VI POLITICAL MYTHS, FICTIONS, A N D

POSTULATES

political position, even the most realistic, has recourse to moving abstractions. Although recent discussion has dwelt extensively upon physical factors in human association: upon the formative influence of tools, weapons, race, materials, and habits of behavior, it tends to minimize the fact that these are everywhere accompanied by ideas and beliefs which also serve as motivation to collective action. To be sure, there are occasional references to these latter as myths or fictions. And though some might like to quarrel with the names, their ancient political lineage running back to Plato and to Roman law, together with their congeniality to modern thinking, seems to justify them. A myth may be said to be a series of fictions ; while a fiction is here taken as a mental construction recognized as in a sense contrary to fact, which yet commands some belief in its theoretic truth or practical efficacy. Political fictions like the social contract, the divine right of kings, or the law of nature have had great effect; while the contemporary influence of such myths as Roma rediviva or the classstruggle theory of history is plainly apparent. An idea may be taken as contrary to fact in at least two ways. In the first place, it may be regarded both as disagreeing with the facts of the physical world and as theoretically incomprehensible (through inconsistency with itself or with other beliefs). Such an idea is plainly a falsehood. Yet if, instead of rejecting it as in the case of most falsehoods, the mind retains it as possessing some practical or emotional value, it is called a fiction. The mental attitude toward it is one of feigning. That is, the idea is asserted as if true, even though the person holding it recognizes it as both factually and theoretically impossible. He continues to put it forward because he finds it emotionally EVERY

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satisfying or useful to some purpose. Fairy tales, legal artifices, even religious dogmas like the trinity are not infrequently looked on in this way. Of the various motives that lead men to cherish absurd ideas despite intellectual skepticism in regard to them, practical utility is perhaps the strongest. 1 At any rate, it has received most emphasis among philosophers, who in some cases would apparently be glad to see utility substituted for truth altogether. In the second place, an idea even though not in agreement with actual fact may be regarded as theoretically congruous and comprehensible. To me indeed this seems the only type of fiction that is politically justifiable. To entertain, on the contrary, ideas that we know to be irrational as if they were true by playing a kind of sophistical bopeep with them only encourages confusion and superstitition. This second or justifiable sort of fiction, however, may combine logical possibility with empirical impossibility: that is, though conceivable, it may seem to contradict the factual sequence of any known experience, or (as in the fiction of perpetual peace) require to have its realization postponed to some indefinitely remote future. But in no case can an idea which is regarded as a correct description of the past or present be called a fiction, since in that event (as in the belief in a golden age) it becomes a judgment of historical fact. After all, the distinction between fact and fiction depends on a attitude of belief and is relative to the minds holding it. For instance, the doctrine of descent from some plant or animal as a totemic ancestor may be accepted as a plain statement of fact by members of an Australian tribe. Yet from a more critical scientific point of view, the same notion is a figment of the imagination. Indeed, there are no statements of fact which we 1 While some myths are useful, it is a mistake to claim that all are, unless we are prepared to go the length of affirming that "everything that is, is useful," which if true is not specifically significant. I may shout on street corners that "Cross-eyed men are predestined to rule the world." Besides being presumably false, this message has no obvious utility. Yet of course a consistent pan-utilitarian might point out that no cause is so ridiculous as not in time to attract some followers, and that even a limited success would entail some practical advantage to its pushing organizers.

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make that may not be construed by others or by ourselves at a later date as fictitious. But even though no factual propositions are accepted everywhere and by all, the individual or group has no difficulty in distinguishing at any given moment between those ideas that are believed to be in accord with reality and those that are not. Perhaps the most interesting class of fictitious ideas politically are those whose actualization is projected to the indefinitely remote future. For these especially serve as ideal referents by which men assess their present practice. Thus the notion of fraternity or the brotherhood of man has been used by democratic theorists for estimating contemporary institutions much as a standard yardstick is invoked to measure lengths. Sometimes, in addition to serving as gauges, these notions function as polestars or dynamic incentives to human effort. Nor are they always positive in their attraction; instead of being sought, they may be shunned as disvalues; yet whether positive or negative, they serve as guiding concepts of thought and practice, implying an infinite process of approach or recession. It is the grossest error to imagine that fictions are confined to political thought or to a doctrinaire rationalism. As a matter of fact, the use of conceptual "perfects" contrary to fact is so firmly imbedded in the technique of the sciences that appeal to them can no longer call forth charges of superstition and the reification of abstractions. If science, to choose but one example, can dare to define the simple pendulum as "a particle or material point suspended by a thread without weight and oscillating without friction," surely democratic theory needs no apology for defining men as equal or the state as the sovereign expression of the social will. For though admittedly there can be no actual thread without weight, no oscillation without friction, no mass concentrated at a point (all this being outrageously contrary to fact and empirical possibility), nevertheless by positing these in the definition the physicist achieves internal consistency and congruence in his body of concepts. Plainly his definition describes a perfect system, not a natural one; while his statements, though theoretically true (as forming

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a coherent picture), are not so experimentally. Yet the construction of such ideal systems seems necessary if the intellect is to move freely, simply, intelligibly, about its appointed task of reorganizing nature; while the fact that the particulars never exactly coincide with the universale of definition does not prevent the physicist from working out his problems in terms of general rules, and then subsuming the actual cases under them as instances and approximations. Similarly with political fictions. To be sure, babies are not born with bills of rights sticking out of their mouths, nor has anyone yet met on a city street the Promethean giant, Proletariat. These things are not seen with the bodily eye, any more than the scientist actually observes his absolutely elastic molecules, his perfect gases, or his potential energy. None the less these shibboleths appear to have an effect upon men's minds, aiding them in their efforts to square the real with the ideal. Amid the tangle of political Märchen and heroic myths it seems possible to distinguish certain ones which accord with man's deliberative nature from others expressive of nothing but fantastic dreams and emotional projections and as such discordant with his critically reflective side. To the latter class usually belongs the riotous hedonic imagery of the demagogue intent on feeding a hungry following with the sugar-coated paintings of his fancy. Yet along with such visionary "pie in the s k y " and arbitrary make-believe often go political figments dictated by men's intelligence. These figments, which cannot be wholly adopted or discarded at will like ordinary fictions, we shall call essential postulates and regulative ideas. Though both are in a sense voluntary creations of the mind, they differ strikingly from each other as preëstablished rules of procedure inevitably differ from the goals that arise in the course of that procedure. Let us begin with these ideas which are farthest removed from the arbitrary fantasies of the imagination and which are involved in the structure of every ideology whatever. In political thought, as elsewhere, any organized body of notions rests upon certain assumptions. Such suppositions are important, not only because if nothing is assumed nothing can

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be proved, but because their selection determines the later consequences of the system. Among these stipulations it is apparently possible to distinguish two sorts: those that as individual thinkers we are free to adopt or not as we like, and which as a result differ widely from one ideology to another, and those which perhaps ought not to be called postulates at all, since though we seem free to assume them, we are not free not to assume them because they constitute the very notion of system itself. The latter are here called essential postulates. Thus any unified body of theory or practice must consist first of all of notions regarding a set of entities, together with statements about these entities and rules for their combination. In other words, to have a program we must have a base and must lay down rules as to what things can be done and what cannot be done with the elements of our base. Secondly, our stipulations must be as far as possible free from contradiction, and must cover all members of the set. So general, indeed, are these requirements that they will be found to be satisfied by almost any business code, corporation charter, rules of sport, creed, or body of scientific law. Applied specifically to politics they mean that any organized program must include certain terms taken as units, referents, and rules of procedure, which it promises to abide by consistently. Obedience to these notions is essential, since any thoroughgoing violation of them would destroy all that gives the system its distinctive character. To begin with, the notion of an element is essential to any political theory to provide the conception of a social unit of which the new order is composed. These units may be citizens, dollars, or even soviet cells. Whatever they are, their function is broadly analogous to that of the atoms of physical science. Although not regarded as structureless, they are taken as points of departure, as constituents from which a complex whole is built up, and whose internal differences are unimportant compared to their external relations. Moreover, any developed political belief must set up certain rules and standards and declare what actions accord and what do not accord with them. In much the same way that science

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creates a body of definitions and postulates regarding such entities as mass, acceleration, and energy, political theory pronounces on liberty, property, and rights. And though admittedly these notions are discovered by reflection at a definite place and time, the ideal entities to which they refer are not assumed to have spatio-temporal characters. In other words, there is precisely as little relevance in contending that justice and rights change, age, corrode, or alter their size and shape, as in maintaining that mass and acceleration do. To be sure, our ideas about them change with time and place; but so long as social Ufe persists there must be norms of appraisal for thought and action distinct from the local, transitory situations to which they are applied. Thus, while the bases of social and scientific systems vary from age to age, the rudiments of their formal framework retain a certain functional identity, since without referents, elements, and rules of procedure pretty consistently applied, there could be no organized beliefs or meaningful behavior whatever. Although in one theory a standard of reference may be called "the greatest happiness principle," in another "self-determination" or any of a hundred names, in different contexts it retains an essentially identical character, which is that of a prescriptive notion or gauge by which place and due are assigned to particulars. For as in science there can be no exact knowledge without 2 measurement, and no measurement without the assumption of fixed referents, so in political life there can be no estimation without criteria, no valuation without values, no reconstruction without a social archetype. And as in measurement the results gotten with an ordinary meter-stick are held to be finally tested by some absolute meterrod, so any given political institution is inevitably compared with some ideal state of society conceived as the maximum or perfection of its type. 2 If measurement appears too narrow a term to which to limit science, classification may be substituted. At any rate, there is no science without comparison to a standard, which the object is said to be more or less like. Classes, no less than measuring-rods, are finally taken as trans-empirical archetypes. But whereas in classification objects are subsumed as instances under the type, in measurement they are conceived as ratios in terms of it.

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It is a mistake, however, to suppose that these ideal norms or referents to which we compare the actual particulars are perfect in any sense of being necessarily approved or morally superior to reality; too many colloquialisms about "perfect slavery," "the perfect crime," "a perfect tyrant," and the like, bear witness to the contrary. Rather they are to be thought of simply as maxima, unsurpassables, as that beyond which it is impossible to go, there being no beyond for the process. Implicit in this notion of ne plus ultra is the concept of a limit, of a fixed value, which though it may be approached indefinitely cannot be reached by any inductive step-by-step process. In the sphere of the regulative ideas the notion of the limit becomes of great importance. Just as the number one can never be reached by enumerating the series of proper fractions, so it would seem that values like liberty and equality remain in their fullness unattainable, despite the fact that men may come so near their realization in the actual world as to fall short of them by less than any assigned amount. While dispute may arise as to how much political theory is necessary to political practice, a considerable body seems requisite as a nucleus about which to organize a significant movement. That great modern revolutions like the French, American, and Russian were inspired and preceded by elaborate social philosophies is a momentous fact. Such widely effective documents as Magna Charta, the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791, the Communist Manifesto, and the Soviet Constitutions may indeed be regarded as collections of political postulates.3 Especially in their constitutions and ' Examples of these postulates are almost too familiar for mention: "No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned . . . unless by the legal judgment of his peers and by the law of the land" (Magna Charta). "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed" (Declaration of Independence). "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (ibid.). "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances" (United

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fundamental laws peoples declare the definitions and rules of procedure under which they seek to live. Needless to say, when the laws of a country lack uniformity and are redundant (as is the case with the collections of dooms of early peoples), they reflect the confusion, disorganization, and conflicting practice from which they emerge. But as the implications of communal life become more evident, regulation by the community grows more systematic. Vigorous efforts are made to classify the multifarious instances of social relations under a limited number of types so as to eliminate arbitrariness and inconsistency in their treatment. Naturally, too, in the course of a nation's history its laws are subject to constant revision with changing circumstances. Yet so long as a people remains one and the same cultural unity, it must preserve its traditions by interpreting its past to its present; that is, it must construe the alterations in its legal system as explications of a fundamental code to meet new conditions of Ufe, and not as breaches in its social continuity and coherence. For if, to put the matter more abstractly, a system did not abide by its postulates in its developments, but modified them as it went along without introducing any formulas equating the additions with its initial assumptions, there could be no way of determining the identity of the later system with the earlier one. In affirming that every social system embodies certain postulates, emphasis seems to be placed on a set of claims arbitrarily laid down, not as in themselves true or false, but as improved conditions from which consequents are derived. The question States Constitution). " The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Communist Manifesto). "Political power is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another" (ibid,.). "The theory of the communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property" (ibid.). "Proletarians of all lands, unite!" (Constitution of 1923 of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics). "The states of the world have divided into two camps: the camp of capitalism and the camp of socialism. In the camp of capitalism are national enmity and inequality, colonial slavery and chauvinism, national oppression and pogroms, imperialist brutalities and wars. Here in the camp of socialism (under the dictatorship of the proletariat) are mutual confidence and peace, national freedom and equality, a dwelling together in peace and brotherly collaboration of peoples" (ibid.).

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naturally arises as to whether these social premises are the same as ordinary fictions. Where stress is placed upon the fictitious character of assertions, the factor of their material falsity, their contrary-to-factness, is made central. Not only is special weight attached to the negation of the real by the terms myth and fiction, as against the affirmation of a relation between ideal essences by postulates; but the former suggest a fabric of imagination (often inconsecutive, uncritical, and compensatory), whereas the latter, once launched through a voluntary fiat, may give rise to systematic derivatives. To be sure, both fictions and postulates are spontaneous creations of the mind, stipulations regarding certain ideas as if constant and perfect. Yet there is a difference often overlooked between a system developed as a loosely associated pattern of images and one developed as a nexus of theorems derived from definitions. The age-old association with magical practice on the one hand, and with geometrical science on the other, however it threatens to beg the question, cannot be shaken off. What I am urging here is that social fictions be taken as postulates. The hope of the future requires it; for though the very same doctrines may be construed either way, the difference in attitude between fabricating and stipulating is very like that between superstition and science. Thus human equality embraced as a fiction becomes the sentimental pretense (and patent fraud) that "Men are created equal" in some inexplicable factual sense. At the same time the adverse verdict of science in the matter destroys the doctrine's credibility. Only by rejecting equality as a myth is way made to accept it as a postulate. That "Men are to be treated with equal consideration," on the other hand, seems quite feasible as a political precept. Here a promise takes the place of fantasy, and the idea instead of being pretended is actively adopted as part of a program of social operations. A great deal may be learned respecting a political outlook by discovering whether its basic stipulations are regarded as myths or as postulates. If the former, we may expect a kind of playful or pragmatic illusionism, in which the inconsecutiveness of the

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imagination is the keynote. The social bond will be made to depend upon the unifying effect of certain dreamlike longings of animal faith woven into a pattern and made to serve as the sacred legend or titular deity of the group. What could be more natural than that the masses of mankind, ignorant of the intricate web of physical forces and transmitted institutions that surround them, should prefer the creations of popular fancy to the arduous task of acquiring knowledge in regard to facts. After all, it takes epic tales of monsters and heroes, stirring drama personal and picturesque, to rouse the passionate allegiance of common men; legends of the fatherland, of the divine right of kings, or the manifest destiny of a race to awaken in them the sense of sympathetic kinship in a common cause. Even where they half see through these fabrications, they exhibit a pathetic determination to believe them, preferring the consolations of the word to any suspicion of their folly. But science and economic change have dealt sad blows to the old myths of state and church. Today, shorn of their romantic glamour, they are derided in many quarters as mere outworn idols of earlier superstition. In their place, men are seeking new gospels of social salvation, a new hope and sanction of collective responsibility. Just how they will be able to clothe in drama and mysterious enchantment the stuff of modern life : technology, mass production, the economic integration of mankind, is hard to see; the more so because modern life is so thoroughly mechanized, while to construe its action as a story means that purposive tendencies, movement toward some crowning issue, must be read into it. To be sure, as the spirit of science penetrates the masses more and more, its exact impersonal outlook, its respect for facts, will weaken romantic illusionism. Practical programs of improvement, experimental blueprints for immediate execution, will be valued more highly than hazy emotional paintings of the ideal divorced from methods of realization. Yet, human nature being what it is, the eclipse of these floating fantasies will never be complete. Men are too lazy and emotional, too needful of some sustaining hope in the future, to put away the magic car-

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pet of the dreamer. They will still cherish the fiction of a new social order dropped ready-made from the clouds, requiring no long and painful construction on their part. The gap between reality and unreality will still be bridged by recourse to miracles. So new myths will have to be invented to capture the beatitudes of every age; a new divina commedia written depicting perhaps the lure of speed, power, money, and the amusement-seeker's paradise; new apocalyptic visions caught of longevity and good digestions for all in a world of whirring wheels, rushing motors, and cloudcapped skyscrapers. Yet if life is further civilized, it seems likely that popular myths will increasingly be understood as social postulates. That is, men's political theories will be treated less as miracles to be dreamed about and more as starting-points for search and discovery. Detached Utopian aspirations are not enough; to bring to light the basic affirmations of social life and to organize these into a connected pattern of practical projects is seen to be far more important. But it is time to turn to the second class of figments involved in social theory, to the regulative ideas. Although these have long engaged the attention of philosophers in religion and ethics, they are more rarely treated in political theory. Yet that at least two of them — the ideas of progress and of freedom — are essentially bound up with any organized program of government seems capable of being shown. Unlike essential postulates, regulative ideas serve not merely as coldly deliberate rules of procedure, but as dynamic incentives and guides to practice. Yet how to explain the magnetic persuasiveness, the summons to deeds, that is so marked a feature of these ideas, is a difficult task. Whereas postulates only require us to submit to them, these call upon us to imitate them. Let us pause in the interests of clarity to pick up the threads of our discussion. Under the genus fictions — mental constructions admittedly in disagreement with actual fact yet commanding some sort of belief in their theoretical truth or practical efficacy — we have distinguished two types of primarily conceptual (as opposed to imaginative) figments: regulative ideas

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and essential postulates. Both are in a sense voluntary creations of the mind that sets out to build a structure of fancy and intellection; both are, as it were, taken without proof. We have dwelt upon referents, elements, and consistent rules of procedure as essential to political postulates, and made barest mention of the heuristic notions of freedom and progress. The most striking difference between postulates and regulative ideas is that between self-imposed rules and desiderata. A set of postulates is a list of promises which it is agreed in advance to abide by in a course of action. Since these promises are what give the subsequent operations their character, to abandon or to violate them would be to destroy the procedure. Though the inventor of a code enjoys the greatest freedom in devising his postulates, once chosen he must stick to them. His obligation is simple : either not to lay down regulations or else, having done so, to abide by them. For the development of any system as a system consists precisely in keeping its promises in its performance. As for the regulative ideas, they resemble limits in mathematics — yet with a difference. For whereas in mathematics there is nothing about the concept of the limit that requires one to approach it as nearly as possible, these prescriptive notions lead men to strive to reach them inductively and empirically. They seem both to persuade us to accept their antecedent theoretic reality and to spur us on to attain their subsequent actualization. Though not explicitly included in the postulates, regulative ideas appear to be implied in the development of any system. They are like promises unwittingly made, of which (though not explicitly nominated in the bond) one becomes gradually aware as commitments implied in the very resolution to maintain an integrated body of theory or practice. Progress and freedom, we shall seek to show, are such regulative notions implied in every political theory. For any derivation of consequences from initial assumptions involves both the notion of a process unfolding by successive increments in which one step depends upon another (which is the essence of the idea of progress) as

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well as the notion of assent within a system to self-imposed laws (which is the import of freedom). To project these ideas into the world of fact, however, is to mistake formal for material truth, to endow logical processes with natural force, and then, having raised a dust of mystery, to complain that we cannot see. Like postulates, regulative ideas are methodological principles laying no claim to material verity. Yet, being implicated in the terms upon which any set of assumptions is framed and manipulated, they are common to different types of procedure. If we are right in thinking that progress is one of these regulative notions, which we are not free not to assume, then it must be found almost everywhere. Whether it appears disguised as the idea of increased adaptation to the environment, the kingdom of God upon earth, or the proximity of world revolution, it means essentially a movement of events tending in some direction and cumulative in the sense of representing a series of approaches nearer and nearer to the fulfillment of the process. As such, we might add, it need not be optimistically construed, it being perfectly possible to consider, say, the progress of an epidemic or of a military campaign without any implication of a desirable outcome. Nor is the notion a modern invention. Wherever men have dreamed of a heaven or of hell, of a land of promise or of bondage, and have set up a social archetype to be sought or shunned, the idea has entered human thinking. Bound up with it too is the conception of a hierarchy of institutions. Those who deplore the persistent efforts of political philosophers (from Plato to Marx) to rank states in some order with respect to the nearness with which they approach a defining pattern will have first to exorcise the shadowy yet allpervasive implications of progress from their own thinking before the point of their criticism can be unambiguously stated. For if progress is to be banished as a category of interpretation, belief in the possibility of social reform must go also. Without it, the exercise of comparative judgment upon social orders as better or worse, together with the assumption of possible advance in the solution of political problems, loses all meaning.

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For if the chance of realizing any genuine improvement is assumed baseless, no ground remains for preaching the desirability of social change — save pure animal restlessness devoid of hope. But if, as we have urged, the idea of progress (in the sense of the fulfillment of the nature of a process) is a universal requisite, then the idea of a social archetype (as the limit of the process) has an important function; and it is absurd to contend that, since no society has completely attained the ideal, therefore no society is any nearer to it than any other, but that all (like Zeno's runner) remain equally at the starting-point. For although the archetype can never be reached by a succession of finite steps, nevertheless we can approach indefinitely toward it, so that the disparity between the ideal and its realization becomes less and less. Although progress is always definable relative to a standard, when this is made the primary meaning of the idea, progress becomes hardly distinguishable from change or motion. Granted that movement of any kind must be estimated relative to a referent, it follows that the choice of a frame will largely determine the rate and kind of movement that will be discovered. Whether, for instance, there has been progress in the development of political constitutions in the world's history (and if so, how much) will be decided mainly by our choice of a definition of constitution and agreement on its essential marks. Yet, conceived in this sense, as the mere measure of the amount of change relative to a standard, progress is seen to lack those characters earlier stressed: its cumulative, irreversible aspect of upbuilding. Divested of its qualities as a logical progression, it loses its meaning as progress. To construe progress as the mere relativity of velocity to a referent is to miss its chief significance. Another familiar mistake is the pluraliste. While admitting the possibility of progress within a given "period" held to be characterized by certain common traits, canons, and objectives — and therefore subject to certain common criteria — he denies any significance to the idea of progress as applied to history or the world as a whole; because, he maintains, there can be no

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common characters pervading so wide a field, no basis of comparison, no impartial balance in which they can be weighed, since the very criteria of world-progress must be taken from the world it is proposed to evaluate. The first of these difficulties is to be met, it seems to me, in the same way as'the theory of relativity rebuts the charge of relativism: by pointing out that the plurality of different measurements obtained relative to different frames gain their meaning only through presupposing a common relational framework (of invariant ratios and transformation-formulae), which renders the estimates got with one frame intelligible in terms of another. That is, it is only by granting a certain universal constancy of relations in the meaning of "progress" that significance can be attached to its applications to diverse historical movements. Thus, although standards of reference in regard to progress vary from age to age (and even from person to person), it is only by presupposing that they alter in some fixed proportion according to law that the estimates made by observers in one period can be significantly correlated with, or translated into, those of another. Even the assertion that "advance within a period4 can only be accurately measured by standards that are peculiar to that period" plainly contradicts itself. For the very claim to credibility made by this assertion rests on the assumption that it has been verified by some competent comparative survey made with inclusive criteria. In brief, acceptance of a disconnected plurality of local frames and of the complete relativity of standards to these frames, lands the historical critic in a hopeless inconsistency. Thus, if I, a twentieth-century American observer, assert that 4

It is hardly necessary to call attention to the disputes that arise among pluralista once they attempt to specify definite periods or epochs, and to determine the boundaries and criteria peculiar to them. What two critics are ever likely to agree as to the exact limits of the Renaissance or its outstanding traits? Here disagreements appear between the less egregious and the more egregious pluraliste. Every so-called "period" will be broken up into a host of smaller, disparate "periods" by those whose eyes are sharpened for differences rather than identities; and the process of historical division can be pushed to any length, approaching individualistic relativism indefinitely as a limit.

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"philosophy has made some progress in the last two decades," it is obvious that even though I Uve within the epoch judged and presumably share its perspective and local criteria, nevertheless I am inevitably claiming the truth of m y judgment on grounds that transcend the frame considered. For it is only by granting that I ideally encompass the epoch which actually encompasses me, only b y assuming that m y criteria are not wholly part of the progressive process considered, that I can avoid the charge of circularity and make any significant declaration. Y e t in so doing I am clearly contradicting the standpoint of local relativism and pluralism. The point grows twice as obvious when I consider another epoch. For instance, if I affirm that " G r e e k science in the third century B.C. was superior to that of the fifth century," m y judgment plainly invokes standards of estimate that transcend the epochs referred to. For I have never lived in these periods nor shared their outlooks at first hand. And just as surely as I am unable to see the world with the eyes of a third-century Greek, or to limit myself to his horizon without addition or subtraction, I am unable (on the logic of pluralism) to obtain true knowledge of "progress" in that or other periods, whose canons and outlook by definition I am unable to share. If the pluralist replies that he concedes the right of the critic of progress to use both internal and external criteria, I must protest that this concession grants the very point at issue, namely, that I am able to occupy a plurality of historical frames, and to pass from one to the other in such a manner as to retain the constant ratio of their perspectives and their several validities. For if the critic, after applying his twentieth-century standards, derived under his conditions, is able to compare his results with those of men in other ages arrived at under other conditions, he is obviously applying a translocal standpoint, in principle at least universal since no limit can be set to the capacity for such inclusion. As for the charge that no scale of measurement can be found to measure world progress because there is nothing independent of the object to be measured — this logic becomes immediately

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suspect when we ask, if all estimates of wholes made by parts included in them are similarly to be rejected as question-begging? If so, what becomes of the previous thesis that progress can only be measured by observers and tests that are themselves indigenous to the progressive process? Certainly even pluraliste admit the possibility of knowing the nature of life without being dead, of matter without being immaterial, of mind without being mindless. Yet unquestionably there is a possible predicament implied here. Wherever a law is estimated by an instrument subject to the law, or a conclusion is drawn as to a large range of phenomena from a smaller included sample, there is always the chance that the results may turn out to be like the measurements of the expansion of a steel rail got with a steel rod itself expanding. Nevertheless, in defense of this kind of estimate (to which belongs the evaluation of progress by criteria that are part of the progressive process), it may be said that a large part of inductive knowledge is of this type; and since it seems well-nigh impossible to believe it invalid, escape is had from the circle by assuming the priority and independence of the technique to the objects measured, in other words, by assuming the power of rational comparison to transcend its empirical fields of application. But in addition to progress, freedom emerges as a regulative principle of social thought. Especially in the democratic state, the whole structure of civil and criminal law and the theory of sovereignty rests on the supposition of individual responsibility, which is meaningless without the assumption of freedom. Freedom implies the presence in the individual of a deliberative principle which can determine his actions. Thus, if there is any justice in punishment, there must be guilt — freedom and accountability for the deed. Could offenses be shown to be nothing but the products of physical causation, the inevitable outcome of hereditary and environmental factors, the criminal could plead the necessity of his act (and the jury the necessity of its verdict), but the meaning of justice would have disappeared. Similarly with popular government. If it could be shown to be impossible that the voters should ever really express

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their autonomous, deliberate preferences in an election, then indeed popular sovereignty and popular government would be proved a sham. In the past, freedom has generally been identified with psychical or physical indeterminism, conceived as the antithesis of natural mechanism. Indeed, these two alternatives, indeterminism and natural mechanism, have been usually supposed to exhaust the field. Either, it was thought, a man's political acts must be regarded as entirely determined by environmental and interorganic controls, or they must be taken as betraying an element of lawlessness, spontaneity — something quite inexplicable in terms of antecedent conditions. The traditional seat of this libertarianism was a private, ineffable ego, conceived as a capricious first cause or wayward demigod in nature; although recently there has been some attempt to locate it in the physical world: in certain hypothetical mutations of the genes and in certain subatomic processes acting under the "principle of indet e r m i n a c y " — both at the farthest remove from all macroscopically observable (and verifiable) applications. But the possibility of there being a tertium quid or third alternative fundamental to both physical mechanism and to indeterminism, in the form of logical determination, has generally been denied by naturalists of every hue. For the admission that a man's act might be decided by considerations of evidence and probability would mean admission of a determinant that was as such neither physical, physiological, nor psychological, neither an internal nor an external force, but a coerciveness attributable simply to the implicative pattern of the facts themselves. Yet this is the genuine sort of freedom which serves, in our opinion, as a regulative idea in the body politic. For in so far as a citizen enjoys true liberty and sovereignty, his acts are due not merely to the pressure of natural conditions upon his organism, nor to his subjective whims, but spring from his recognition of the relevant testimony of the data, the total articulation of their structure. Usually the voter has some reason (however vague) for voting as he does, which reason, he would maintain, is inherent in the disposition of the evidence.

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Thus logical determination, though in a sense automatic, is marked by reflective insight which differentiates it from mere blind conformity to the laws of motion. A place remains for self-imposition and accountability, since to act freely is to act deliberately in consequence of some illumination of intellectual persuasion. It is, in fact, by assenting to the drift and weight of evidence, by identifying one's thought with what appears to be the objective bearing of events, that the individual assumes responsibility for his political procedure. But this autonomy no more consists in the mere scientific acceptance of one's animal nature (of its complete control by drives of the sensori-motor system) than it consists in blind ignorance of the causal laws governing one's actions, an ignorance which permits the enjoyment of an illusory spontaneity. Rather, freedom lies in seeing that behind these natural sequences there are more basic relations conditioning human activity without being determined by it, and that by grasping these one realizes a self-determination of one's nature through reason. For since deliberative conclusions are not imposed as brute facts, but are legislated by the rational being upon himself, they alone may be said to be the true expression of freedom, that is, of self-imposition and accountability. In conclusion, let us plainly admit that in our view certain ideal referents do enjoy a power of light and leading. Often no doubt their semblance of coerciveness is illusory; and to distinguish the authentic guiding concepts of endeavor remains a most difficult task. In general it may be said that ideas expressive of some irresistible feeling unsupported by grounds are to be mistrusted. Their apparent efficacy is probably no more than an afterglow in awareness of the action of subliminal physical causes. Where, however, the mind discerns some rationale or articulated persuasiveness in its object, it is more likely to be confronted with the genuine power of ideas. In such cases it encounters a cogency or momentum attributable neither to external nor to internal existent forces, but to the pure generative form of the logical process. A thinker, in so far as he is genuinely convinced by his thinking, submits to dictation by the nexus of

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ideas, not to mere dictation by his glands and muscles. Indeed, wherever demonstration enters knowledge (and what is knowledge but a tissue of them?), it is recognized that any authentic intellectual advance is finally justified neither by the neuromuscular responses of those who entertain the belief nor by the physico-chemical properties of the objects discoursed about, but by the formal relations of entailment of the subject matter. At bottom, then, the laws of society are to be regarded as guiding ideas of a system of life that is seeking expression. While as postulates they lead us to look backward to insure conformity with preëstablished rules, as regulative ideas they challenge us to look forward to new achievments. Nor is it surprising that their manipulation should generate a sense of activity. For the fulfillment of the laws of the process becomes the goal, imparting zest to our obedience of its cainons. In the tangle of political myths received from the past, the notion of an ideal equilibrium repeatedly recurs. The feeling that there ought to be a balance in social give-and-take is expressed by divers peoples, even when they are unable to separate the idea from an image — from the figure of a pair of scales. Curiously enough the instrument that served the earliest measurings of trade and science is here invoked as the symbol of man's social ideal. To the meaning of justice we turn in the next chapter.

CHAPTER

VII

JUSTICE AS A DEMOCRATIC POSTULATE IT IS an old story that to the blindfold goddess with the scales justice is a form of equality. For her bandaged eyes qualitative differences do not exist, and only the equilibrium of opposing quantities measures its essence. Yet despite these plain indications in one of the most ancient and universal of symbols, many problems as to the meaning of justice remain unsolved. In what, it is asked, does this equivalence consist? In equal amounts of wealth, labor, honor, or political power? Is it straight numerical equality or one of ratios that is meant? And is the relation the same throughout its political, legal, social, and economic applications? To these questions democratic theory should have some answer, for not· only is the essence of justice the demand for equality, but democracy is founded on the same demand. For the democratic movement of the eighteenth century, the demand for justice centered in the claim for political equality in a simple arithmetic sense. Once this was gained, it was believed general amelioration of the human lot would follow; while manhood suffrage, representative government, and the abolition of hereditary aristocracy were held to be the means to its achievement. In the sequel, however, these high hopes have fallen short of realization. While the condition of the masses has been bettered under republican governments, extremes of inequality between rich and poor, privileged and unprivileged, remain. Even though birth no longer carries distinction in political rank, the accident of membership in a particular group still confers a headstart or a handicap on the individual in attaining the goods of life. Following the apparent failure of political equality to coax justice from the clouds, new prophets arose. In the nineteenth

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century men like Proudhon and Marx came forward to point out inconsistencies in the republican ideal that were weakening its efficacy. The functioning of its political postulates, they held, was largely nullified by the action of certain economic postulates. For the logical rigor of republicanism had stopped short of the idea of economic equality. Instead, the old system of wealth and ownership had been accepted on its own terms, being transferred virtually intact into what was intended to be a new social order. Not only were the existent property holdings of the old regime and the common laws regarding them largely retained (save for the confiscation of certain ecclesiastical and noble estates), but private property was even exalted as a natural right by the new governments.1 As a result of their acceptance of its sacredness and of their obligation to defend the citizens' title to the same, the protection of private property became a chief function of modern states. Diverse considerations presumably justified private property to democratic thought: above all the sentiment for individual rights, and the belief that the state exists to secure to its members completer personal development. To be a man in the full sense, it was felt, one must have something to do with as one likes, the means to carry out one's ideas. Thus the power to use, control, and dispose of certain goods at one's pleasure came to be looked on as a condition of self-realization and personal happiness. Nursing such feelings, it was easy for men to believe that the land they (or their ancestors) had tilled or occupied was peculiarly theirs and essential to the fullness of their individuality. Again the notion of private ownership seemed a natural extension of the solitary nature of consumption. Each animal hungers and thirsts to itself by reason of the exclusiveness of its organs. Moreover, acquisitiveness (the urge to seize and store goods for private enjoyment) appears as an instinct involved in 1

Thus the four natural and inalienable rights of man according to the French Declaration of Rights in the preface of the Constitution of 1793 were liberty, equality, property, and security. Cf. Article V of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

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the very impulse to survival. The very nature of organisms requires a perpetual give-and-take with their environment; and when the taking side of the relation is considered apart from the rest, it is seen as the rudimentary impulse to acquire property. From all this it was easy to conclude that the acquisitive struggle is sanctioned by nature ; and since most men accept the world as they find it, to salute private property as right because it exists and has outlasted rival systems in the long competition of history. Yet to the critics who were unpersuaded by such arguments, it became increasingly clear that property rights were continually defeating human rights under republican governments. With the growth of this sentiment in the twentieth century, socialism took form as a world movement; and with it emphasis shifted from political to economic equality as the key to justice. Carried away by their perception of the industrial exploitation perpetrated under the aegis of the democratic state, some socialists went the length of despairing of equitable political organization altogether. Instead they embraced anarchism, statelessness, as an ideal, declaring all political power to be merely the organized force of one class for oppressing another. It did not seem to occur to them that the unfortunate results they noted might be attributable to a perversion of the democratic principle rather than to the principle itself. The brunt of their attack was directed to the overthrow of private property. Only by its destruction, socialists felt, could justice be done. For justice subsists between equals; whereas the hereditary and cumulative inequalities of wealth bred by private ownership destroy the well-being of a large section of society. Without economic equality, they urged, democratic justice becomes a sham, since it rests upon an aristocratic system of possession in which wealth is controlled by the few, and not in the interests of the majority. Along with the abolition of private property drastic reforms were suggested looking to the participation of all alike in the rewards and labors of the community. But having reviewed the march of radical ideas toward the

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notion of economic equality, what shall we say is meant by it? According to traditional theory, commutative justice was concerned solely with equivalence in the exchange of goods — with mercantile equality you might call it. In any equitable business transaction the values given and taken had to be equal; but no stipulation was made that the persons involved should be equal in fortune or in any other respect. The classic theory restricted itself to the measurement of the commodities in the particular transfer, taking no account of the persons participating or of the antecedent conditions of the industrial system. It made no difference in the justice of the bargain that one of the parties was poor, the other rich; that one had labored at vital cost to himself to produce the commodity, while the other had done nothing save inherit the money offered as its equivalent. Yet today many would call such a trade unfair, not only because the necessitous man must sell or starve, while the rich can wait his price; but also because the one toiled to produce the article, whereas the other with no equivalent outlay of energy gained its

possession and enjoyment. In concerning itself solely with the distribution of things and in disregarding the fact that justice is a relation involving both things and persons, the classic theory was plainly at fault. Moreover, in ignoring the part played by persons in justice, it nullified the democratic postulate of their equality. Yet despite its acknowledged deficiencies, the task of amending the traditional theory has proved extremely troublesome — chiefly because when the relations of persons are brought into the problem, difficult questions as to the measurement of psychic attributes arise. Everything in relation to justice has its price. That is, everything capable of being transferred from one person to another has a certain exchange value and is capable of being told off in terms of an equivalent. While money serves as the physical counterpart usually accepted for rating things, it has often to stand for things not physical. Psychical factors such as want, need, patience, enterprise, and skill enter into trade no less than the material commodities themselves. And though these contributions can be correlated with money in a rough and ready

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way, they cannot really in the last analysis be reduced to a physical denominator or accurately measured in terms of it. Compare, for instance, the value of an acre of undeveloped land in a frontier community with that of a good pair of shoes. Both, we may suppose, sell in the open market for the same amount. Yet the one comes straight from the hand of nature, whereas the other is the product of toil and skill. What, we may ask, is their just price? And can their values by any device be fairly judged equal? The economist says that they can by the law of supply and demand. Values, he holds, are measured by wants; and if the demands are equal, the values are equal. Thus in a region where land is plentiful and manufactures scarce, shoes and acres may conceivably bring the same price. For the less there is to be had of a thing that people want, the more they will give to get it. " B u t , " counters the social reformer, "supply and demand is a purely factual criterion dependent upon accident and circumstance. As such it has nothing to do with the notion of a fair price computed in accordance with ideal justice and the general welfare." The penalty of criticizing things as they are is the necessity of offering some counter-remedy. In the history of reform many different bases of economic reward have been proposed, none without its difficulties. Goods should be apportioned to persons in respect of their needs, according to one view ; since where one receives more than he is capable of using and another less, the social balance is upset. To each according to his work, is another famous criterion; to each according to desert, or, again, to every one according to his capacity. In particular, the labor theory of value has been urged as a basis for social justice. In the eyes of its socialistic exponents, "labor is the sole source of wealth"; and therefore labor alone gives one a right to economic recompense and to have one's needs respected. Accordingly the claims of the idler and social parasite may justly be disregarded. But at the same time that toil is declared the measure of value, social need is held to outrank the claims of individual labor. While according to this view the worker is entitled to be paid for his work — since labor

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alone creates property — nevertheless, his just share is something less than the entire product of his labor. Admittedly he has earned his keep — so much as will preserve him in functional efficiency — but the surplus (no matter what his services) belongs to society. For upon society (or the socialist state) devolves not only the responsibility of maintaining public utilities and of caring for dependent groups (such as the children, aged, and insane), but of supplying the vital wants of all the workers down to the least skilled and competent. In order to insure to every worker a living wage, socialist theory has often recommended a rough equality of payment and the use of the surplus produced by the proficient workers to supply the needs of the less effective ones. Such equality of payment is justified not only by the argument from social need, but by the familiar claim that the inequalities of wealth arising from private profit are the great source of human misery. 2 If it be true that the inequities of society arise out of the success of some in converting the surplus values of production to their own uses — as against the unsuccess of others — a remedy for such ills might be found in the abolition of differential rewards and private profit altogether, permitting each worker instead to receive only so much as could be had by all the rest. But here the principle of evaluating persons and things on the basis of labor ("To each according to his work") is cut across by the demand for economic equality and the elimination of private gain. As a result, the conception of a just wage as something earned by, and owed to, the worker as commensurate with his services is sacrificed to the notions of group need and social utility. We shall not pause to develop the familiar critique of the labor theory of value : a critique which would take the form of showing not only that there are many things having worth that have not had labor expended upon them, but that labor is an 2

In a society in which labor was compulsory and in which all members were required to perform the same amount, it seems logical that all should receive the same remuneration. Equal pay and equal work would appear as the twin pillars of economic equalization while justice would consist in the "equal right of each to an equal share in the products of labor."

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unsatisfactory term for social measurements, covering as it does both psychical and physical exertions, both laborious intentions and material accomplishments. Not merely air, sunlight, water, but mental qualities like thrift, foresight, and judgment, are accounted valuable without any relation to labor. As for work itself, it is estimated very differently, depending on the weight allowed to conscientious effort, "going through the motions," vital cost, or actual output. For that matter there is no evidence that all work is of value either intrinsically or socially. The carving of Biblical texts on a peach seed or the large-scale production of women's cotton hose in the present state of fashion which prefers silk would seem to be cases in point. As these illustrations show, economic values are much less plausibly connected with labor than with desire. For where there is no desire for objects they remain without worth to the community, no matter how useful or how laboriously produced. At bottom the real objection to the gospel of labor on the democratic view is precisely the same as would be raised against any scheme of social reconstruction based upon placing a premium upon some particular empirical quality: namely, that the inevitable result of selecting certain traits of human nature as a basis for reward to the exclusion of others would be the creation of a new aristocracy — for instance, of a privileged working class. Democratic theory is not unaware of the difficulty of estimating psychical traits, of assessing their worth by any uniform, graduated scale. So long as they remain apparently qualitative and immeasurable, it seems wiser for the state to stick to counting heads and the formal treatment of its members, leaving the hierarchy of values to a struggle of the capacities themselves. For the choice of one or more qualities as the basis of valuation inevitably sacrifices others, and although this may be necessary upon occasion in practical life, the state should avoid doing violence by arbitrary suppression or preferment to the full development of human talents. Accordingly, democracy refuses to place an official premium upon work, need, wealth, or birth, anticipating that an oligarchy of the favored character would result.

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Along with the rejection of work as the supreme value goes the denial of various corollaries, such as compulsory labor, the penalization of idleness, and vocational representation. Once one has questioned the dogma of labor as a social duty superseding all others, or grown skeptical of economic success as the controlling law of history, one is less likely to be convinced of the desirability of forced labor and the mobilization of industrial armies. Industrial efficiency has been called the false religion of our age. Certainly its attainment, if bought at the sacrifice of the joys of free, unregimented living, would seem too costly. Again, if labor cannot be fairly measured, it is useless to try to enforce the equal liability of all to labor. Perhaps even the relative division of society into a laboring and a leisure class may not be as absurd as at first appears. In an age of specialization in which each must do one thing only to perform it well, a class of specialists in consumption (scholars, critics, sportsmen, patrons of literature, music, and science), connoisseurs who cultivate the fine edge of appreciation through a lifetime spent in the enjoyment of a special taste, might do more to encourage production of high quality in different fields than could ever be achieved through free-for-all consumption by the undiscriminating many. In this sense the consumer's role, envisaged as the function of upholding standards of public taste and elevating the quality of the demand, might well be worthy of respect — and not merely labeled parasitic. It may even be ventured that idleness is not a crime. Certainly some of the most gifted and original characters of every age (among artists and inventors) have embraced virtual starvation rather than work under a merely economic behest. As for the work they preferred to do, that being of a rare, unusual kind and at the furthest remove from physical toil has often had its value unrecognized for generations. But more than anything else, perhaps, the displacement of men by machines and the consequent dwindling need for labor has invalidated the argument for labor as the keystone of society. As the burdens of civilization are shifted to the forces of steam, gas, electricity, the contribution of labor-power becomes of less and less account.

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Yet in the course of its rejection of work as the standard of valuation, the democratic outlook is squarely faced with the issue: Is equalization of economic rewards requisite for social justice? While the doctrine of "equal pay and equal work" has up to the present never been strictly carried through by socialism, some such tenet seems implied in its denial of private profit and promise of economic equality. According to socialist theory, justice seems to require not only equal pay for equal work, but the payment of approximately equivalent wages to all who give diligent, full-time service to the community. In principle, a high government official ought to receive no more than a factory worker or farmer. 3 Since all functions are alike indispensable to the welfare of society, all who labor to perform them ought to be compensated alike. Such wholesale leveling of remunerations, it is argued, would aid in placing men in the positions for which they are best suited by eliminating many misfits who through ambition to elevate themselves in the social scale chose careers for which they had no aptitude. With the equalization of benefits, invidious comparisons of professions as "higher" and "lower" would tend to disappear. Not only would manual toil be dignified to the level of mental toil, but special aptitude and diligence would be seen to be required for success in many hitherto unsuspected fields. The weight of Proudhon's words would be realized; that "capacity has no common standard of comparison; the conditions of development being equal, inequality of talent is simply speciality of talent." Thus the struggle of capabilities would be eliminated along with its fierce competitive counterpart, the economic struggle for 3 Turning from theory to practice, it is interesting to observe that in recent years Russian communism (under Stalin) has been retrenching more and more on the policy of economic equalization. Though government officials still receive extremely modest salaries and though private profit is still legally penalized in various ways, graded wages, piecework, and differential rewards according to the quality of the achievement are officially approved. Strong efforts are being made to enlist the "material interest" of the worker in increased production by promising better pay for those who do better work. Personal gain is appealed to as an incentive. And since the institution of personal property has not been abolished, but rather real property (particularly property in land), there is still scope for accumulation for the individual of active bent.

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existence. In place of the incentives furnished under the old order by the hope of pecuniary profit as the return for special endeavor, the plan offers as a substitute the satisfaction of work well done in the service of the community. But to the democratic critic who perceives that work is not all equal, and who may not feel that the worker's retention of the surplus value of his labor is necessarily unjust (even though his fellow's needs are unsatisfied), this scheme of a dead level of subsistence eked out by equal pay for unequal work seems anything but equitable. The notion of a living wage and no more to each irrespective of services upsets the ideal of a perfect balance in exchange— in which the amounts given and taken are equivalent. Here they are not, at least in respect of persons, since commensurate rewards do not fall to those who do most in the community. Clearly there is a lack of balance in a system in which the individual is penalized for not working, yet receives no special compensation for working well. Two incompatible elements in the conception stand revealed: on the one hand, the idea that there should be an exact correspondence between a service and its payment and, on the other, the demand for the equalization of wages paid to all workers in society. Finally, the proposal to abolish private property must be scrutinized by democratic theory. If, as we have argued, the retention by the worker of a surplus from his labor be allowed as just, then the institution of private ownership and individual gain would seem to be readmitted. Yet this is precisely what many theoretical socialists will not allow. For them the complete socialization of profits and property is essential to economic justice. So long as the individual is permitted to possess and control goods in his own right, they contend, he will use them primarily for his private ends as against the interests of society. Moreover, under the present system of inheritance those who gain possessions are allowed to pass them on to their descendente, thus endowing them with special advantages for amassing more property. So the old logic of "to him that hath" works itself out with the resultant concentration of goods in the hands of a smaller and smaller group, while as the reverse side

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of the picture the poor get poorer and their numbers increase at an accelerated rate. What could be more inequitable than such a system, rooted in inequalities of exchange in which the profit of one is the loss of another, and culminating in an aristocracy of wealth pyramided upon an industrial slavery in which labor is oppressed and idleness exalted? To this indictment, despite its occasionally misplaced complaints, no fair-minded thinker can fail to give heed. In many respects the charge rings true, although the claim that every profit entails a loss and that society is rapidly approaching a proletarian level appears against the facts. Nevertheless, it may well be asked: Why has democracy permitted the hereditary privileges of wealth to go unchecked so long after it has exposed and suppressed aristocracy in other forms? Clearly its principle of equality of opportunity by implication condemns social arrangements which allow certain persons to enjoy benefits to which others are denied access. Yet few can deny that the profit-and-loss system has such a side. Thus business enterprise that flourishes on low-paid wage labor, while the employer pockets the surplus, can have little said for it from any standpoint of social equity. Even the well-worn defense of it that allots the employer the whole credit for the undertaking — for the initiative, money, skill, in short for everything save the laborer's gross physical efforts — derives its plausibility from antecedent injustices of the social system. For even granting that there is this great discrepancy between the contributions of capital and labor, which is doubtful, such inequality arises more from the system of inheritance than from anything for which the participants are themselves responsible. That is to say, in the majority of cases the employer has inherited his riches and his opportunities for self-advancement just as the employee has inherited his poverty and lack of these things. Yet plainly the individual cannot fairly be held accountable by society for his good or bad fortune in the matter of birth. Rather, social justice should seek to cancel out hereditary privileges of descent and estate, permitting each to receive and invest only what he himself has earned.

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The non-inheritance of acquired characters, we m a y say, was good democracy long before it was good biology. T h a t is, democracy sought to prevent successful individuals from transmitting advantages gained b y them in their lifetime to their descendants by suppressing hereditary aristocracy. Perhaps in time hereditary private property may be similarly judged inequitable. The event seems quite possible. Y e t even so, the complete socialization of wealth need not follow. Indeed, the likelihood of the latter in a democracy seems far less probable. For democracy is essentially individualism rather than socialism. And individualism demands property both for reward and self-expression. Toward correction of the wrongs of the present system, certain suggestions m a y be offered. T o begin with, the institution of hereditary private property m a y be granted undemocratic, and its gradual abolition recommended. This seemingly drastic proposal would be tempered, however, b y recognition of the fact that such a program could not be justly carried out so long as society makes no adequate provision to guarantee its members against economic insecurity. After all, so long as the individual remains almost totally unprotected b y society, the demands of natural affection in the family to provide for the needs of its members (especially the weak, immature, or defective) cannot be gainsaid; individual sentiment here rightly does what it can to repair the deficiencies of social justice. A t the same time, it cannot be denied that the individual's action in disposing by gift to others of property which he has earned, but they have not, rests on an antecedent injustice. Wherever goods are given without an equivalent value returned, there is a disturbance of the social equilibrium. And wherever governments allow their citizens to transmit their estates at death (or b y gift during life) to other individuals, la main morte of hereditary privilege is permitted to work out consequences favorable to economic aristocracy. It would seem better if property at death should revert to the state, by whom it might be managed or else redistributed to private hands b y sale. Further, the institution of a living wage paid by the state,

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insuring to the individual a minimum of subsistence or a small nucleus for creative enterprise, is here proposed. Though obviously costly, the expenses of such a plan might be met in large part with the proceeds received from the reversion to the state of private property at death, the idea previously suggested. What this comes to is the substitution of social for individual inheritance. It also represents an attempt to correct the evils arising from private property without destroying what is good in it and suppressing personal profit. While such a plan would seek to place in all hands nearly the same materials of opportunity, insuring to all alike a minimum (irrespective of their labor or idleness, success or failure), it would not undertake to equalize the economic return of men's efforts or to prevent some from earning more than others. That is, while it would prevent the ultimate tragedy and shipwreck of individuals in the industrial system, and keep them standing on their own feet (rather than lodged in institutions or receiving a special charity dole), it would nevertheless permit the economic order to remain an open order, an exploratory field for the testing of individual capacity and effort. The payment of what might be called a civic wage to citizens (whether workers or not) is plainly justified in a system in which human rights take precedence over functional and property rights. A t the same time, private profit, in the sense of special economic rewards for special achievement, should also be recognized as equitable, and the field kept open for its encouragement. In other words, republicanism must still defend the open as against the closed economic order proposed by various social paternalisms. It does not wish to assume the wholesale direction of the ownership, wages, and management of industry, nor does it wish to legislate the equalization of payments in all transactions. Nevertheless, this does not exclude the possibility that, as occasions arise, the democratic state may see fit to adopt measures of economic control to mitigate injustice, such as the abolition of inheritance, the establishment of labor's right to a share in the profits of industry, a civic wage, and the public ownership and management of certain projects.

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From the democratic standpoint, the function of the state in promoting economic justice is much like that of an umpire in a game. The umpire's business is to see that the game gets off to a fair start and that the conditions of fair play are maintained throughout. This means that the participants are admitted as far as possible on equal terms and that the rules are enforced on all alike. Here the state seeks not only to guarantee an equality of chances, but that each shall take his chance. The latter element certain forms of paternalism largely rule out. Instead, they seek to call off the game when they see certain players getting worsted, to remove the element of risk and loss — as well as the fruits of victory. To us this seems to rob the contest of zest and sparkle. Life is, and should be, in our eyes, just taking one's chances along with everybody else. The game must be allowed to work itself out, must be played to the finish; and the players must stand up like men to take the consequences of their playing for good or ill. The umpire cannot be allowed to intervene whenever someone appears to be winning from someone else, to cancel the score and make them start over. The most that fairness demands is that all be given a fair ßtart (by canceling so far as possible antecedent inequalities), and that the rules bear equally on all and be uniformly enforced. The democratic postulate of men's equality does not mean that their works are equal or are to be equally rewarded. It is as impossible to believe factually in the parity of men's work as in the parity of their brains or muscles. What the doctrine really imports is that the state in its treatment of citizens shall not take cognizance of these differences. To "judge not" is here the higher civic justice. When, for instance, a citizen by his initiative raises large crops on a tract of land, the state surely ought not to deprive him of the surplus of good fortune which he has won by his efforts. To do so would be to deny payment where payment is due; while to reduce his reward to the level of that of his less energetic neighbors would be to destroy his faith in civic justice as allowing a commensurate return for work well done.

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On the other hand, justice is not, as Sidgwick held, gratitude universalized, the paying for social benefits on the part of the community. It is nothing so simple as society's compensation to its workers to keep them working. For the state cannot even detect by its rough-and-ready methods those who make a creative contribution to its life; while the really great services are precisely those that cannot be paid for. "Nothing," as Mill well said, "is so worthless in the eyes of the unoriginal as originality." To the masses of men, the efforts of scribblers, daubers, and inventors fiddling endlessly with models must always seem valueless. This being the case, it appears wiser for the state to retain its negative, impersonal attitude toward the individual, which is not really one of indifference or complacency with things as they are so much as an attempt to avoid mistakes through prejudgment, and to keep the way clear for the appearance of varied and unusual types. In other words, the primary duty of the state would seem to be to remove handicaps, to free men's abilities for their fullest expression, and to do this in the same measure for all. It is more important for the state to secure men's lives at the outset against accidents of environment and heredity than for it to concern itself with the bestowal of rewards exactly commensurate with individual achievement. Having as far as possible equalized conditions at the start (by compulsory education, health service, a living wage), democracy would prefer to leave its members to work out their own destinies through a match of wits, strength, and endurance. The state remains the guardian of chances and possibilities. But, considering the difficulty of measuring psychic worth, it is content for the most part to keep its hands off, trusting that in a fair field the qualitatively best men will get to the top by force of unaided merit. It is the old problem: Which is more essential to justice, the aiding of the weak or the strengthening of the strong, the removal of handicaps or the posting of prizes, the refusal to differentiate among persons (treating all alike), or differential treatment for social betterment? Certainly the former seems negative as compared with the latter. Yet one may well feel, as I am

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arguing that one is required to by democratic theory, that in social justice it is more important to avoid prejudging individuals by placing a premium upon certain qualities favored by society's self-interest than it is to try to insure that special meritoriousness shall be requited. Where society becomes too positive and detailed in its instructions, it usurps the role of God-on-earth, regimenting man's life from one end to the other. Such absolute paternalism properly arouses protest, whether it appears under the guise of the sovereign nation state or Marxian communism, because it robs the individual of the adventure of living, of his right to pit his forces against an unfaked world, in which the cards are not all stacked, even with beneficent intent. For when the state attempts to mold the individual into a tool of society, it maims the free expression of originality and inevitably depreciates the contribution of the more marked, independent characters who resist the social stamp. So, in the end, having in our discussion of justice rejected economic criteria (such as need, work, wants) as finally sufficient, we return to a more negative, political view as fundamental.

CHAPTER Vili NUMERICAL AND PROPORTIONAL JUSTICE is more unfortunate or more common in discussions of justice than the spirit of compromise. Like the well-meaning gentleman who boasted himself a subjective theist but an objective atheist, writers on the subject are continually unwittingly withdrawing on the one hand what they have asserted on the other. While, for instance, "equality of consideration" serves very well to characterize the subjective attitude of the just man, it is negatived as a formula if coupled with the objective treatment of persons as unequal. Yet the tendency to regard talent, wealth, or birth as a special reason for inequalities of distribution goes very deep in human nature, with the result that few treatises on justice fail to recommend it. Indisputably such an attitude has the authority of a great tradition running at least as far back as Aristotle. Justice, it is agreed, has to do with the allotment of something to persons according to precepts of equality. Yet upon closer inspection two very different kinds of equality are found to be embodied in the ideal of the equitable. Because justice is essentially comparative, involving both something distributed and persons to whom the distribution is made, it requires at least four terms. For a thing can hardly be divided into less than two shares or for less than two people. Moreover, decision as to how much of the thing is to be alloted a given individual depends upon the answer to the question, how much, comparatively speaking, of a person he is. In brief, justice involves a question of persons, the issue of their equality or inequality. Of the two basic notions of justice pervading thought, one maintains their strict numerical equality. According to this view, the fairest way to judge persons is as so many units devoid of relevant differences. Each individual counts, but counts no NOTHING

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more nor less than every other ; hence the shares of whatever is to be distributed (power, office, honor) are to be apportioned alike. That is, there must be a strict one-to-one correspondence between persons and portions in number and amount ; one man to receive one share, on the assumption of the equality both of men and shares. In the division of power in voting this practice is widely followed. On the other hand, the equivalence implied in justice may be construed as one of proportion rather than of round numbers. If the size of the share to be alloted an individual depends on how much of a man he is, the estimate of persons is obviously highly important. For though justice demands that equal persons be equally rewarded, it no less requires that unequals shall fare unequally. Nor is it difficult to suppose that men are unequal and to devise some rough-and-ready scale for rating them differentially. When this is done, a second and divergent type of justice appears. According to it, one man may be justly regarded as five times as valuable as another, and therefore as entitled to receive five times as much of whatever is being dispensed. Thus, if an army officer is worth five times as much to the service as a private, he should receive five times the private's compensation. If the private receives $500, the officer should receive $2,500. Now while this may look superficially like inequality, if we go below the surface (say the exponents of proportional justice), we find here reciprocity in proportion. Since the comparative worth of these men is 5 to 1, the just expression of their relation is 5:1 : : 2500:500. Here the product of the means equals the product of the extremes. Though neither persons nor shares are the same, an equality is realized in their ratios. Qualitative differences between individuals, rather than their numerical identity, are basic; and the reward assigned a man is determined by the amount that he possesses of some chosen attribute. In political and legal theory numerical justice has unquestionably played an important part. In the eyes of republican constitutions, for instance, no citizen is held to rank higher than another; while in representative assemblies members share

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a parity of voice. Votes are counted, not weighed; nor has the practice of proportional voting ever gained much ground. Again, because citizens are said to enjoy the same rights and duties, all are entitled to hold office, own property, receive police protection, marry, emigrate; and are alike subject to taxes and liable (one sex at least) for military service. Similarly the citizen's rights to the benefits of judicial process and to judgment by his peers are safeguarded, albeit imperfectly. In theory it makes no difference that the plaintiff in a suit is poor and friendless, while the defendant is rich and powerful; since the law is no respecter of persons and looks only to the injury. Yet in practice legal equality is exceedingly difficult to maintain, the disparities of fortune serving again and again to tip the scales in favor of the rich man, irrespective of his responsibility for harm. But it would be a mistake to say that such acts passed uncensured in a democracy. Public sentiment is repeatedly roused to protest such practices. The failures of enforcement are rather due to the confusion of the popular mind by a maze of issues than to any lack of moral resentment. Publics are slow to discriminate, and the very communities, for instance, that would no longer accept as just the decision of a judge who imposed twice as long a sentence upon a negro as upon a white man for the same offense, might fail to notice the same injustice as between a poor man and a rich one defended by high-priced counsel, or to observe the irony of the sentence "fine or imprisonment," which in the case of the poor man carried no real alternative. The distinction between numerical and proportional justice is really that between the formal and the empirical views of human nature. Whereas the one argues that, since men are numerically equal they should share alike, the other, starting from men's obvious empirical disparities, reasons that they should be rewarded according to the precise degree of their inequalities. Both agree that justice implies uniformity of treatment. Their crucial difference arises over the question whether men are to be assumed equal. While the proportional view is ready to interpret the issue hypothetically and to allow that

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"if and when persons are discovered to be equal, they are to be equally rewarded," this lip-service to the democratic principle is often coupled with a professed failure to find equals and recourse to discriminatory practices. In permitting the assumption of basic human disparity, the proportional view leaves the way open for dividing men into classes and the assignment of benefits accordingly. Here the ideal of "each for one" is displaced by that of "rendering to each his due" according to rate. The rough-and-ready treatment of men, irrespective of differences, on a per capita basis is no longer accounted equitable, true fairness being held to require the closest discrimination of persons in order to adjust rewards to specific worths. Empiricists, irrespective of their differences, almost always adopt the proportional view of justice. As realists facing the facts, they cannot deny that nature has made men unequal in every respect. Even Marx rejects the democratic gospel of "equal rights" on the ground that men are of very different size, strength, talent, age, and power. Even in the capacity for labor he recognizes their disparity, for some are old, others young, some are weak, others strong.1 Accordingly, the imposition of the same amount of labor upon all and the restriction of payment to the equivalent of the work performed, he holds, would make for severe hardships and inequity. Thus the society foreseen by Marxism in its advanced phase would not enforce identical amounts of labor and reward upon its members. Allowing for the diversity of human wants and powers, benefits and burdens would be assigned differently. All that fairness requires is that remuneration be proportional to need. Yet no one will judge his wants entirely for himself; in large part the group will do it for him. If he is weak, the problem will be how much is necessary to put him on his feet; while if he is able and energetic, the question is how to put him in the way of performing some strategic social function. Individual rights will be eclipsed in favor of the group, and a man's need determined by how much he is capable of using profitably to society. In contrast to this, democracy embraces numerical justice as 1

Critique of the Gotha Programme, pp. 30f.

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the heart of its outlook. In proclaiming the doctrine of equal rights its patent meaning is identical rights, and not the proportional adjustment of claims to suit social convenience. To be sure, democracy often has recourse to proportional estimates; yet it resorts to such practical differential ratings only reluctantly, in the full consciousness that for it such hazardous discriminations must always be superimposed upon the basic assumption of the equality of persons, the similarity of their treatment, and the parity of the opportunities to be afforded them by the state. While it may be practically necessary in administering the tangled web of human relations to grade and rate individuals proportionally, treating one man as worth many times another in certain respects, this is not in democratic theory the deepest wisdom, and needs to be supplemented by the more universal and disinterested notions of numerical justice. Men are to be treated as equal as regards their whole natures, despite their disparity in specific capacities and in actual achievement. To their being, if not to their doing, we owe the same respect. The state, in contrast to a host of lesser institutions directed to this or that side of human nature, devotes itself to the protection of the whole man. Its business is to guard the potentialities of human life without discrimination, and to oppose with ail its force the efforts of man's special interests to escape bounds and to set themselves up as the arbiters of social life. For although man taken in his several aspects is indeed consumer, producer, worshipper, warrior, and many other things, when one of these capacities is capitalized by the state at the expense of others, distortion results; and with it the neglect and suppression of talents that do not fit the prescribed type. In the previous chapter the question was raised as to how governments could establish a uniform rating for traits like work, need, capacity. Attributes like these containing so large, a psychic element could hardly, it appeared, be reduced to extensive magnitudes without doing violence to their characters. To be sure, a certain amount of success has been obtained in

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registering muscular contractions on a scale and in arranging manifestations of a trait in an order of intensities. But at best these gradations are only vaguely quantitative, telling us that one is more or less than another, but not how much. Just as it is absurd to regard a severe pain as a sum of little pains, so it seems no less ridiculous to regard an energetic craftsman or capable inventor as several mediocre, uningenious workmen rolled into one. Human attributes cannot as yet be reliably regarded as made up of units that can be added or subtracted with any presumption of accuracy. The difficulty of obtaining any uniform measurement of intensive magnitudes, or of finding an empirical quality fairly representative of man's nature, points, in democratic eyes, to the superior wisdom of counting heads and of formal treatment. If need were made the chief basis of reward in a society, for instance, the able would be saddled with the inefficient. Allotment according to wants, by relinquishing the special recompense of industry and achievement, would destroy the incentive to creative effort. For where the bestowal of benefits is based mainly on man's nature as a consumer, it is to be expected that the least productive members of the state — the idle, intemperate, and infirm — will claim to need most. Such a system would put a premium on social liabilities and sacrifice the special aptitudes of the strong in bolstering up the weak. On the other hand, a society which placed all emphasis on man as an economic producer, and rewarded only those who labored, would be no less unjust. Children and invalids, even artists and scientists, would fare badly save as private charity intervened to support those officially declared worthless. Where distribution is made conditional upon economic success, ruthless elimination and great disparities of fortune are inevitable. The description of justice as compensation in proportion to capacity appears no less unsatisfactory. Though presumably locating value in intelligence rather than in appetite or will, it leaves uncertain whether a man's ability is to be gauged by what he is thought potentially able to do (as rated by mental tests, et cetera) or by his actual achievements. Needless to say,

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the assessment of unrealized aptitudes is the most hazardous form of psychic measurement. Yet if potentialities are not included in capacity, the concept becomes scarcely distinguishable from work or successful accomplishment. Capacity also leaves vague the type of function to be esteemed — though presumably destructive propensities like aptness for theft would be rejected in favor of more socially serviceable talents. To each according to desert, would seem to localize worth in the moral fiber of a man. A deserving person would be one praiseworthy at least for his strenuous effort of will. Yet many would protest any scheme to narrow value so as to exclude reward for involuntary acts. Spontaneous virtue and inherited merit, they might urge, are no less worthy of official recompense than conscious effort. Did not Darwin suggest that as kleptomania is inheritable, so virtue may be also? While many would agree that intentional, voluntary services ought to be more highly rewarded than unintentional, accidental ones, they might also hold that the expression of many valuable traits lies largely outside the control of will (intellectual and artistic talents, for example), although their worth is doubtless enhanced if joined to persistence of character. Considering this, desert would seem to them too narrow a basis of reward. But since the selection of a single attribute as the measure of value sacrifices other sides of man's nature, the adoption of a combination of standards by the state might seem the best solution. Suppose that work, need, capacity, and meritoriousness were all taken account of in estimating the benefits to be assigned to citizens. What would be the result? To begin with, some comparative rating of degrees of want and merit, labor and aptitude, would have to be worked out. Few would qualify on all counts. Yet how proportionately should the state reward, for instance, the unscrupulous but successful producer of economic goods as compared with the talented artist who rarely used his talents, or as compared with the "deserving," wellintentioned person who made a botch of everything? Here the objections urged against the criteria separately would return to plague them collectively.

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As for those who lump all qualities together, making "personality" the basis of value, they hardly fare better. Though rightly refusing to identify a man with the mere sum of his manifestations (striking their colors to the truism of the distinction of the whole from its aggregated parts), personality for them tends to become a pure X, a mysterious unknown, nothing specifically denotable. Yet because (unlike the others) they still leave room for the stubborn aseity of selves, forbearing to reduce their reality to terms of some skeletal yardstick, they deserve some praise. Nevertheless, the mere privacy of the ego does not, as they would like to think, establish its uniqueness, any more than its incompressibility into the sum of its empirical qualities proves its worth infinite. Yet just this, that each individual as unique is incomparable and invaluable, is what personalists wish to maintain. Practically, of course, their doctrine sheds no light on what constitutes a fair division of burdens and rewards. In the face of political crises, however, personalists may be forced to take a stand, in which case the sole alternative that seems open to them, consistent with their denial of human measurability, is either a kind of solipsistic anarchism (treating each independently as a one-man society) or democracy (allowance of men's formal equality and their control by numerical methods). The chief objection to the proportional theory is its frequent use of dubious empirical classifications to defend existing conditions. By restricting justice to uniform treatment and accepting without criticism the given social framework, proportionality can be used to justify any kind of government. But mere uniformity of treatment is not enough to constitute justice. For a superficial impartiality may be superimposed upon the most oppressive social order ; and unvarying consistency of behavior falsely urged as an argument against challenging the postulates of any system. Thus the liberal spirit of many English peers may be urged as a reason against abolishing the House of Lords, or the integrity of military tribunals made an argument for courtmartialing civilians under dictatorship. A not dissimilar attitude is sometimes concealed in the view that

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"equality of consideration" is sufficient to constitute justice. Though so far as it goes the phrase fairly describes the intention of the just man — to give as much attention to one as to another of the parties in a dispute — it is not always enough to prevent judges from treating persons very unequally. For, quite apart from the observance of a meticulous impartiality in the conduct of à CBIS6J άι judge may have rooted preconceptions that men of wealth, birth, or fame ought to be rated more highly than others, in which event his subjective equality of attention will not insure equality in his objective estimates. The failure of qualified judges to assume the strict equality of persons may go far to perpetrate injustice, even while they are according them equal consideration under the rules of evidence. The belief that justice requires only that a law shall bear equally on all denoted by it betrays a similar error. For instance, this fallacy is committed if it is argued that because the requirements for membership in the United States Senate are the same for all incumbents (viz., in respect to age, citizenship, and residence), therefore these requirements are just. For while uniform provisions and equitable administration are undoubtedly necessary to the fairness of a law, the question whether the qualifications specified are themselves just is no less involved. It is not enough that offices should be open to all to whom they are open on the same terms; the query whether these terms themselves are equable — both to those included and to those excluded from their scope — cannot be evaded. Whether the presuppositions upon which the system is founded are just is the crucial issue. The basic element in political justice, in our view, is equality rather than differential treatment and proportional reward. For the emphasis in justice falls upon what is common in humanity, upon the insight that the lot of each is logically determined by that of all the rest. Upon this basis alone appropriate requital becomes possible. It is more important that none should be sacrificed than that either the strong or the weak should be strengthened, more important that the majority should be encouraged than that a chosen minority should re-

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ceive special benefits. At the same time it has to be recognized that, even though all be allowed equal opportunities, not all will take advantage of them. Admittedly there are some for whom equal opportunity will do no more than spectacles for a blind man. Yet the state's obligation is plain: whoever is capable of using advantages must not be denied them. Even though some do not take their chance, the communal responsibility will have been discharged. But what of the nature of injustice? This problem must not pass unheeded. If justice is a form of the equal, is injustice a kind of inequality? And does its righting involve an attempt to restore the social balance? Something of the sort would seem to be the case, according to the classic theory. Thus in criminal justice (where the question of injustice and its correction is most pressing) if one man delivers a blow and another receives it, or if one steals money from another, the first may be said to enjoy a "profit" and the second a "loss" — though the terms are not strictly appropriate. The business of the judge in administering the law is to right the balance by the penalty he inflicts — which is conceived as so much subtracted from the evildoer's profit and returned to the injured party. Thus, if X and Y are the principals in a suit, and if Ζ is the sum stolen from X by F (or the injury inflicted upon him), the duty of the judge is to take Ζ or its equivalent from the offender and to return it to the loser, thereby restoring the equilibrium. Of course the relations are far more complicated than this simple schema suggests. For one thing there is no mention here of the graded scale of penalties corresponding to offenses of different gravity for which provision is made by society. At first sight it may seem strange that democracy, which so resolutely refuses to incorporate an official measuring-scale for rewarding good deeds into its scheme of the equitable, should nevertheless adopt one for the punishment of injustice. The cases are different, however; rewards and punishments are not parallel in their relation to the equitable. Democracy seems quite consistently within its rights when it refuses to take cognizance of, or to post prizes for, the doing of good, yet es-

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tablishes detailed penalties for the commitment of evil. Justice, the spirit of tolerance, prescribes equality; nevertheless it cannot permit intolerance (persecution and favoritism) to be exercised against it for its suppression. Where injustice is done, justice is overruled; hence the state must intervene to prevent the destruction of the value it prizes. Though one of the duties of democracy is to keep men free from enslavement to a rigid hierarchy of social values, when equality is upset it has a different duty. For there can be no correction of injustice without an effort to gauge the restitution necessary to correct the unbalance in accordance with an established scale of requitals. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to suppose that the tables of punishments used in modern societies (involving fines, damages, imprisonment, compulsory labor, even death) throw any detailed light upon justice. For the most part such scales are the mere circumstantial outgrowth of custom, usefulness, and local feeling. In the present state of knowledge the correlation of penalties with offenses cannot be held to express reliable scientific findings; nor can their particulars be said to reflect any unanimity of moral sentiment. In all details the sanctions are utilitarian. Thus horse-thieving in pioneer communities was often a capital offense, rated as worthy a severer penalty than homicide. Yet where the stringency of the environment called forth such a code, little was to be said against it. In communities in which the theft of a man's horse was likely to lead to his death by starvation in some remote and barren spot, the equivalent of the theft might perhaps justly be death to the offender; whereas under different conditions of life, the same penalty would be flagrantly inequitable. In discussions of criminal justice diverse methods are recommended for the rectification of wrong-doing. On the subject of punishment, for instance, the attitudes of psychology and penology seem often to diverge widely from those of law and philosophy. Yet there is a partial truth in either side which tends to correct the other. There is, moreover, a wide diffusion and interpénétration of views. Yet it is not difficult to separate

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out the leading conceptions of punishment and to contrast the deterrent, restorative, and restitutional theories. According to the deterrent view, punishment is regarded as simply a preventive of socially disapproved acts. From the standpoint of utility or social expediency, penal justice is concerned primarily with communal welfare. The prosperous survival of the group requires it from time to time to restrain, imprison, or even execute individuals whose activities threaten the security of the family, property, or the state. In such cases however, the infliction of penalties is justified solely by social utility ; there can be no pretense of an a priori moral or intellectual sanction. According to this view, the only reason criminals should be made to suffer for their crimes is that the severity of their treatment may serve in future to deter both them and others from repeating their example. To put the antisocial individual out of the way is simply good riddance of bad rubbish from the standpoint of society. To be sure, questions as to "born criminals" and the existence of criminal hereditary strains have not been settled. And it is unfortunate that the offenders have to be made to suffer; but this disadvantage is more than compensated by the balance of pleasures over pains in the happiness of the majority rendered secure of life, limb, and property through the detention and discomfort of a small minority. Since the world is not perfect, the complete adjustment of society is impossible. Still, an approximation to it is reached in the good of the greater number, although the price of this larger welfare is the constraint or extermination of a few unruly members. The question of freedom, of whether the individual is responsible for his acts, is essentially beside the point. Whatever the cause, if a man is a social menace, a continuous threat to orderly society, he must be repressed. Whether he be sent to the lunatic asylum or the electric chair raises no great issue for social expedience. There is no a priori reason why a judge should not exact the death penalty for a crime committed in a fit of insanity. Such a man is a public menace, likely to remain so the rest of his life. If sent to an asylum, he will prove an

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expensive burden to the community; while his execution will both protect and relieve it. To reply that the benefits of the latter course will be offset by the harm done public sentiment by brutalizing it is not necessarily conclusive. Many feel that the inclination of mob emotion to the sentimental mollycoddling of worthless and defective characters offers a far greater threat to the destruction of social values. If the issue is properly understood, it is said, capital punishment need not make men callous and bloodthirsty. The question to be settled is whether the accused committed the act. If he did, let the deed carry its penalty with it. By so doing society avoids at any rate the greater miscarriage of justice of placing the burden upon the innocent. For when society penalizes the worthy with heavy taxes for the support of the worthless, it does just that. Thus the deterrent view emphasizes society as the injured party and its welfare as the prime concern in contrast to the restorative theory which centers on the criminal as the persecuted victim and makes society the real offender. In either case little is said of justice as an equilibrium, for the reason that all weight is laid upon one party to the transaction. According to the restorative outlook, the business of criminal justice is the reformation and welfare of the offender. The duty of the state is to rehabilitate and care for him in every possible way, without thought of exacting repayment for his past acts. For what is done is done. There is no sense in trying to right wrongs by making the offender pay back some sort of equivalent of the loss he inflicted. Since no one can recall the past or restore the dead to life, it is useless, it is said, to make the murderer endure a living death on the false assumption that he can thereby somehow make restitution to somebody for his deed. Rather the state should seek to cure him of his mental or physical disorder and at the same time should look into the conditions that surrounded his act. For a crime is an infallible sign of communal maladjustment, evidence that something is wrong with the system of society in which it occurs. It offers an occasion for the scientific diagnosis of social institutions as well

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as of the individuals involved. For the rectification of injustice has a purely remedial aim. In this view, the criminal is more sinned against than sinning; and his crime an indictment of the state. The community is really to blame; its duty is therefore to make reparation to the misguided member who, through having been denied his birthright in one way or another, finds himself at war with the group. He must be reëducated socially, redintegrated mentally, and, above all, taught a trade. For crimes against property form a great proportion of offenses, and the restoration of economic security to the offenders would in most cases prevent future misdeeds. After all, there is nothing ultimately sacred about private property. Human rights are far more important. It is unjust that society should ruin men's lives by penalties simply because they have exercised their instinctive acquisitiveness in ways contrary to the accepted rules of the game — particularly so when deeper consideration often shows that some unfairness of the social system initially deprived these men of their chance at honest acquisition and drove them to use anti-social means to gain a share of what should rightly have been theirs to enjoy. If justice is giving each his due, certainly the social outcasts, the disinherited members of the community, deserve a double share of public consideration. For the commission of a crime is the result of individual frustration, suffering, and unrest ; it is a symptom of injustice somewhere in the general scheme of things. That the shoe pinches is obviously not the fault of the foot, but of the make of the shoe; similarly the fault of crime lies with the society that produces it. To attempt to correct these conditions by causing the unfortunate offenders more suffering (under the illusion that punishment does good) only places the blame where it does not belong and multiplies the transgressor's anti-social truculence. For pain as such is evil; and no less barbarous than physical torture are its refined mental forms. Nothing is more cruel than the bottling-up of men in penal institutions with no normal outlet for their energies. Denied all chance to function as active, responsible members of the community, what wonder that perversion and psychic disintegration set in. Instead of

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prisons, what the state needs is psychiatric institutions and industrial schools in which social misfits may be rehabilitated for a healthy, self-supporting life. The learning of a trade should be made pleasant; hope should displace fear, and virtue be rendered attractive. In this view, there is little belief in the value of suffering, not only because positive conditioning with rewards is thought to be more effective, but because biology is held to have refuted the traditional theory of punishment. In establishing animal determinism, science has destroyed belief in human freedom and with it belief in punishment as expiation for an act committed by a free moral agent. Hence crime, it is argued, is to be treated without any assumption of moral responsibility, as a purely socio-medical phenomenon. A third view of penal justice roundly scored by both utilitarian and reformatory theorists centers in the idea of restitution. According to its opponents, this theory makes justice simply an expression of the retributive emotions of the lower animals. Naturally a brute, if struck, strikes back; or repays kindness with kindness. When you beat a dog, he snarls at you; if you stroke him, he wags his tail. In the case of primitive men the sentiment of retaliation found expression in blood revenge, tribal feuds, and the lex talionis. The root of the matter was the impulse to "get even," to strike back, to do to the other as he had done to you, which, abstractly stated, involved the idea of negative repayment. A man thirsted to inflict on his enemy literally the same injury he had received: the loss of a tooth for a tooth. Thus man's natural pugnacity, vindictiveness, and impulse to reprisal found vent in primitive "justice." Of course, as civilization developed the human mind became aware that knocking out one's enemy's tooth or that of his tribesman did not restore one's own; while such exactions of revenge gave emotional satisfaction, they were otherwise unprofitable. An effort to make them more profitable led to the substitution of the wergild or payment of a commodity or monetary equivalent for the injury. Even more the growth of powerful nation states; put an end to blood feuds and tribal retaliation. The maintenance of justice was taken over by the new governments; and

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the satisfaction of injuries became an issue between the community and the individual rather than between the offender, the injured party, and his relatives. Y e t still, these opponents maintain, the idea of repayment in kind and the thirst for bloody reprisal lives on, so that society's punishment of the criminal today is little more than a glorified gladiatorial show indulged in to gratify powerful sadistic impulses. Isolation, ostracism, mental suffering (leading almost inevitably to functional derangement) are still for human beings the most dreaded of penalties. In these terms society still ruthlessly pays back those who have defied it, and while claiming to have outgrown the barbarism of physical torture substitutes more subtle forms of cruelty. But to those who embrace the restitutional theory, this genetic account seems insufficient. Granting, as we must, that modern institutions of penal justice had their origin in blood revenge and the mitigation of private warfare through the rise of governments strong enough to suppress feudalism, nevertheless, we must remember, the origin of a thing is not its essence. Just as science, though it originated in magic, is not magic, so justice, we should maintain, though it grew out of blood revenge, is not retaliation. Rather, the history of civilization reflects how man separates out and finally comes to appreciate what was all along implied in his basic attitudes and impulses. Slowly he drags to light the meaning of blood revenge — the claim to reciprocity — and discerns its warrant and function in the social pattern. Although to understand a thing is to control it, so long as it is merely felt, it controls us. While the impulse to retaliation has at first all the hit-or-miss blindness of emotion, through being understood it is gradually freed of personal prejudice and discerned as a principle of impartial reciprocity. Y e t even in its earliest expressions as blood revenge, in the desire to get even, to square accounts by rendering blow for blow, the germ of the idea of equality and reciprocity is clearly present. According to the restitutional view, punishment is exacted as payment for a debt because the offender is regarded as owing

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the equivalent of what he took (life, limb, or property) as compensation to the injured and society. Not to the injured party merely, be it noted, because the relation is no longer between private persons but between the accused, John Doe, and the people. Again, the punishment is held to be justified primarily in relation to some past act of the accused which has earned it, and not simply in terms of future consequences to himself or society. It is only because the person receiving it has committed an injustice that he is asked to make social repayment. Indeed, to those who hold this view the previous theories, which justify punishment wholly by its future reference to the welfare of the offender or the group, seem to obliterate all distinction between a penalty paid by the guilty and the suffering of the innocent for some prospective good. Justice centers in a relation of equality, whether it be commercial, political, or penal. Always there must be a balance between persons and things, values given and received, debit and credit, rights and duties. But if this is the case, principles of reciprocity and compensation ought to be frankly enforced by society. What men sow, let them reap — both in individual and group action. Usually, of course, it is obvious that when the social equilibrium is upset, someone pays — if not the debtor, then the creditor; if not the guilty, then the innocent. But today, the critics object, we do not know who is guilty. The web of natural causes being so vast, how can we hold any mere man to blame? Even if we insist on overlooking soil, climate, tools, heredity, and the other material factors, what absurd pretense to single out an individual as the criminal! If anyone, society is the real culprit. . . . But here irresponsible sentimentalism and a fog of bewildering theories threaten to becloud the issue. To admit that the facts are complex, we should protest, is not to despair of analyzing them, any more than to allow that society is often a partner to crime burdens it with complete criminal responsibility. In attempting to punish society for our acts we rival in absurdity the savage who flays the homicidal tree or King Canute rebuking the waves. Certainly laxness and emotional susceptibility

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in enforcing the law will not make men law-abiding. For where connection is denied between agents and their acts, nobody can be held accountable. If individuals are not answerable, neither is the group, since society is nothing apart from the behavior of its members. According to the restitutional view, suffering remains an essential ingredient of the criminal's reconstruction. For punishment means requital of a loss, and in making an equivalent return to society for the injury he has inflicted, the offender should suffer a comparable privation. Often only by being made to feel what it is like — by being himself deprived of what he wants — can his injustice be brought home to him and the desire to make reparation awakened. While his imprisonment ought to be productive of work and education in a trade and thus beneficial to himself and society, it should also make him recognize in the first person what a loss such as he inflicted means. To learn the moral lesson of treating others as one would be treated is of prime importance. Atonement, as religion knows, is often the gateway to wisdom; and painful discipline may work great good. If the offender can be made to appreciate the verdict of society in the spirit in which it is meant, he may accept his enforced lesson cheerfully as his amende honorable. Instead of being brutalized by it, he may find it the means of personal restoration, and once his debt to society is paid, he may feel freed of stigma just as the debtor who has canceled his debt again enjoys good credit with his fellows. Today the most practical suggestions for the treatment of crime come from restorative and deterrent penology. The deterrent approach to crime offers methods of social prevention. Recreational facilities, athletics, boys' clubs, public works, unemployment insurance, better police, and liquor control are all ways to make its occurrence less likely. The restorative view, on the other hand, attacks crime as a medical problem, suggesting diagnosis and treatment for psychopathic persons who run amuck in our complex modern system. Here the criminal is regarded as a "patient" deserving the greatest share of society's

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sympathetic efforts. Means of detecting obscure disorders like dementia praecox and paranoia are suggested, together with an elaborate technique for rehabilitating those broken by economic strain, bad environment, or defective heredity. Yet neither of these outlooks, it would seem, gets behind the empirical facts to the principles at the heart of justice as does the restitutional theory. For only restitutional justice looks on community life as a give-and-take among equals bound by common rights and duties. To maintain these values, it sees, requires a perpetual struggle. Society has to defend them by enforcing laws and penalties. And just as the maintenance of social justice is deliberately imposed by rational beings upon themselves, so the burden for its violation is also to be treated as a free act of individual accountability. If virtue is voluntary, it is argued, vice must be also. Such is the assumption of criminal law. But today our growing knowledge of psychiatry is narrowing the range of persons held to be capable of normal, responsible action, and increasing the percentage of those classified as abnormal and irresponsible in the community; so that the institutional care of the latter promises to be an increasingly oppressive burden to society. Yet unless the state is to abandon the distinction between normal and abnormal and to welcome the participation of bedlamites as equals, it must continue to hold accountable members of the group adjudged rational and to strengthen moral responsibility by appropriate laws and penalties. Thus uniformity in the administration of criminal law must be upheld as against those who plead for complete individuation of punishment. For the abrogation or lightening of penalties from considerations other than justice undermines the state. While it is true that no two persons or circumstances are ever exactly alike (any more than any two cases of the law of gravitation are ever precisely similar), nevertheless their likenesses may so far outweigh their differences as to render the latter insignificant. Legal award of the same penalty for the same offense (under approximately equal circumstances) seems the only safeguard against arbitrary favoritism. Where the public

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sees one sentence passed today by the court, and another tomorrow for a similar offense, it rightly concludes that injustice has been done. Predictability and reliable enforcement are the bulwark of respect for law. True, mistakes are made in all human undertakings. But a greater amount of justice will be done by abiding by the law than by making exceptions. "If you return good for evil," asked Confucius, "with what will you reward good? " Having debased the coinage of value, what way remains of distinguishing merit from demerit or of appropriately compensating either?

CHAPTER

IX

THE INFLUENCE OF THE MACHINE FEW miracles approach in strangeness the birth of the machine, that many-handed monster, half beast, half god, surpassing man and his collective energies in countless ways. Today the creature outdoes its master; for the skill transferred, the work multiplied by it, transcend its author's powers. Man is dwarfed in the presence of his own creations: a puny forked creature lost amid the towers and catacombs, the rushing engines and encircling networks, that are the children of his brain. Though sheer manpower may have built the Pyramids, it could hardly raise the modern skyscraper; no mere muscular exertion could enable men to fly; no forest of scribal pens produce the current books and newspapers. Not alone men's muscles but their minds seem outstripped by the forces unleashed by them. For not merely does the manual laborer see his stature dwindling in the modern world, but the clerk, the calculator, the artist, and craftsman all find themselves outpaced, their skill rendered largely superfluous by mechanisms. And small wonder: no reckoner can rival the tireless certainty of the adding-machine ; no copyist the output of the printing-press; no handicraftsman compare in unflagging precision with electrically-driven lathes, planes, and cutting contrivances. Not only are things better done on the whole by machines — with greater fineness, exactness, regularity — but they are done in vaster quantities at less physical and vital cost. As processes become more automatic, the machines almost run of themselves. For the artisan, the computer, the laborer, the power age substitutes the operator or engine-tender. His task of feeding, starting, stopping, regulating the speed of some mechanism, is one that with slight training could be performed by almost anybody. Such indeed is the designer's goal: to con-

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struct engines so simple, so fool-proof that a child could run them — the logic of the process being to free the machine from dependence on man while increasing his dependence upon it. Undeniably there is something terrible and strange in the spectacle of man enslaving himself to his own creations. Yet what of it? some may ask. Civilization is to be had only at a price. What if the displacement of workmen by machines is degrading to the laborer as laborer, rendering his status of less and less account? This only means that eventually his class must disappear. But as one value sinks, another rises. An economy saving of labor must inevitably be prodigal of something else; as the personal factor declines, the new impersonale — science, power, and engineering skill — will be exalted. Admittedly part of the picture is cold and hard. With the waning prestige of common sense, life seems given over to artifacts. Individual effort must often lose hope in the face of a system so massive, inhuman, and unyielding. Yet if such are the dictates of knowledge and circumstance, there can be no turning back. The discard of the old lay tradition and of untechnical ways of doing things must be accepted as the price which modernism exacts of its converts. After all, in an age that has suffered the stuffy complacencies of common sense and discerned in its rule-of-thumb practices the outworn utilities of a vanished era, why should not machines usurp the center of the stage? Certainly these scientific mechanisms embody the perfected fruit of man's inquiries, all that has withstood the most carefully devised logical and empirical tests. Why longer trust as authority that mixture of hoary tradition and crude workability sanctified by past generations under the name common sense? To be sure, it reflects the everyday Ufe of everyday people, the practical world of give-and-take. Yet when we accept things at their face value for unaided perception, our results are often negatived by more scrupulous thought and patient analysis. Though admittedly common sense receives our allegiance the larger portion of our waking Uves, while the world of science commands our confidence only temporarily by a kind of technical pose, the inertia of social

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habits can hardly claim to be as reliable as the discoveries of physics and experimental technique. Granted, such things as torques, hydrocarbons, fields of force, energy, and quanta will always seem bizarre to the plain man. Men and things I have seen, he will say, but these strange abstractions of science I have not seen. Nevertheless, he finds to his surprise that he can count on the one with as great assurance as upon the other. For science works miracles; it makes the desert bloom; it enables us to guide and predict. Today with the servicing of life given over more and more to inhuman forces and mechanisms, interest is shifting from untechnical to technical experience. Abstract physical energies, not persons, fit us for our daily round. As man's reliance on these forces extending beyond his common-sense world grows, his peculiar attachment to the outlook of everyday life inevitably weakens. Doubts invade his mind. He can no longer urge its privileged ontological status with the same old assurance. Commitment to the new machines, which have added so many fresh qualities and vistas to his world, means abandonment of the old, safe parochial geography of common sense. Inevitably embarkation for the new means departure from the old. It means farewell to the unquestioning trust in immediate appearances, personal views, the intuitions of unreflective living; and their replacement by the remote, long-range values of scientifically trained intelligence. If the term revolution is broad enough to be used of any profound change in the Ufe and thought of peoples, by which some old store of practices is replaced by new ones — without any special implication of violence, bloodshed, or cataclysmic suddenness, then indeed the spread of power mechanisms may be called a revolution; indeed a series of them, since the expansive force of the ideas centering in mechanism is still turning the world upside down, creating not only new industrial and social alignments, but a new cosmology whose scale of values we are just beginning to formulate. Starting in pure science, the radical intellectual ferment that produced the machine first explored the fields of celestial and

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terrestrial mechanics, and only later applied itself to the problem of constructing implements to do useful human work. Even then prudential, self-centered motives won a slow victory over speculative interests. Perpetual motion contraptions died a hard death before work was fairly begun on boring machines, engine lathes, and steam hammers. The turning point in the great drama was of course the invention of the steam-engine, which by producing uninterrupted rotary motion provided the world with an immense new source of power. Wind, water, compressed air, chemical and electrical energy, were likewise harnessed and lent their aid to human labor. Analysis of the structure of machines familiarly divides them into three parts : power-supplying devices, means of transforming and transmitting energy, and, lastly, instruments for applying this motion to the object it is designed to affect. In a mechanism like the motorcair, for instance, the driving force appears in the internal-combustion engine with its gasoline spray and spark from the electric motor; the transmission agencies in the rods and pistons set in motion by the exploding hydrocarbons; while the apparatus for converting this motion to the job in hand is found in the gears and shafts connecting the piston-rods with the road-wheels of the car. So varied and prolific has been the growth of mechanisms since their first great successes in the eighteenth century that it is difficult to mention even the most important of them. Yet no peculiarity of religion, race, or speech distinguishes one people from another today more sharply than does their use or disuse of machinery and its products. In agriculture the tractor, the threshing machine, the steam plow, and the gasoline pump have wrought radical, far-reaching changes. In construction work such things as steam cranes, cement mixers, electric drills, pneumatic hammers, acetylene torches, riveting machines, and road layers have created a new builder's world. Traction problems are solved by steam and electric railroads, by motor car and aeroplane; the work of publication accomplished by means of radio, films, linotype machines, while the variants of wireless and telephone achieve instant communication. In the

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home the electrification of heating, lighting, refrigeration, and cooking has transformed domestic economy. In business, registry and computation are done by cash registers, mechanical brains, and calculating machines. As for industry the number of machines used in manufacturing implements, textiles, foodstuffs, and furniture is too great to be enumerated. Drawing their power from steam, gasoline engines, or electric motors, complex chains of contrivances are engaged in cutting, planing, weaving, riveting, and other familiar operations. The tactics of modern manufacture turn on separating production into many operations assigned to different hands. Such analytic division of work and the confinement of each man to a single task makes for immensely increased savings and quantity. Yet the credit for this devolves not upon the workmen who produce the goods but upon the ingenious mechanisms that make them possible. To these the worker is unquestionably sacrificed. Often the machines are linked in series, while the articles are passed along by a conveyor belt from one man to another till the process culminates in the finished product. In all this the workman's place becomes that of a mere stopgap in a line of automatic processes, his function being minimized to the endless repetition of some simple task that disregards his creative powers. Whatever his human skill might have contributed has already so far as possible been anticipated and incorporated in the dies and molds of the machine; thus removing from the operator both responsibility for the quality of his product and the opportunity to exercise his ingenuity upon it. As for the task of deciding what types of commodity are to be manufactured, that is reserved for a special designing and planning staff. All that is required of the tender of the mechanism is quick eyes and fingers, the power of swift, plastic movement, and the endurance to repeat motions unfalteringly thousands of times. Here youthful inexperience is at a premium for its freshness and adaptability, while training and seasoned service may prove fatal handicaps. Since ingrained habits cannot be unlearned with the same ease that new machinery can be designed, there is

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a rapid turnover among the more experienced men, and the working life of the operative often ends at forty. No one will deny that this minimization of the workmen's function, his reduction to a semi-automatic link between machines (to be removed as soon as invention can replace him), the routination of his job to the point where he is finally rendered unfit for anything else — no one will deny that this is the crying waste of the present system. And until industrialism corrects this condition, there can be no question but that the worker is inadequately paid by society for his services. But if differentiation is the means, integration is the end in the factory system. The pieces of each product must fit together into a perfectly coordinated whole. Threads of bolts and nuts must correspond, toothed gears must fit like clockwork, piece must dovetail into piece down to the smallest detail, if the assembled article is to function as a unity. Hardly more amazing than this exact adjustment of parts manufactured separately is the capacity of machines to turn out precisely similar editions of the same model. If a manufactured article is broken, the maker can by this means supply a duplicate of the missing piece. This system of producing commodities both in whole and in parts stereotypes of one another is known as standardization or the manufacture of interchangeable parts. Originating in the fact that the products of a single machine-mold are necessarily alike, its advantages in matters of repair and mass output have proved incalculable. Yet against its benefits are to be weighed disadvantages. In a society which relies on the repetitive processes of machines, a tendency to wearisome sameness seems inevitable. Things will follow stock patterns, and even though the patterns be good, fresh diversity may be stifled. Where markets are swamped with endless editions of homogeneity, taste grows banal, dull, and indiscriminate. Especially in democracies where a tolerant hand is extended to everything, the public, weary of seeing things so nearly alike, comes to take them as all alike. Small wonder that it bungles the task of selection, and, faced with a profusion of articles, comes often to mistake the worst for the best.

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Despite all this, practical urgency favors standardization. In the field of staple commodities, quite obviously variety is not always a value; on the contrary, the multiplication of kinds is often merely wasteful and confusing. There is no reason, for instance, why the community should manufacture five thousand styles of hammers, stoves, blankets, or typewriters. On the contrary, efficiency plainly dictates a reduction in the number of types. Similarly, there is good reason for classifying foodstuffs into a limited number of groups of designated quality. By grading and sorting meats, milk, eggs, cereals, et cetera, the community gains the protection of public definition and in many cases of government inspection. By standardizing canned goods it is assured of reputable brands of reliable quality. Needless overstocking in trade can also be avoided, while the resulting simplification and predictability help the consumer to know in advance what there is to choose from and to make a more judicious selection. Yet what the public still needs to learn in the field of staples is that the urge to difference just to be different (as expressed in the fluctuations of current fashion) tends far less to originality than to economic anarchy. This is not to deny that variety and uniqueness have their place in aesthetic and non-utilitarian objects. Curios, articles of scientific and artistic interest, the sphere of so-called luxuries, mark the field of personal taste and the limits of standardization. Here individual differences and singularity have real value. It is to be hoped that ces superflus si nécessaires will always remain to gratify the aesthetic tastes of even the humblest and to inspire the gifted to creative effort. The value of their diversity, however, is not so much in the pure dissimilarity of the articles as in the wider range of appeal which a varied assortment will have for different types of persons. Just as it takes all kinds to make a world, so it seems to require a great wealth of visible types to awaken in diverse individuals a sense of the beauties in that world. While few would deny that the permeation of scientific methods into practical life has made for progress, no such general agreement exists as to the effects of the machine. Yet

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the machine has become the analogue and dominant model of industrial life. The new ideal seems to be to have the business system and the individuals composing it as nearly like machines as possible. The same minimizing of intake and maximizing of output, and the same unvarying responses to remote control are demanded of both. Even the individual worker comes to ape the machine, seeking to reproduce in his habits its unfailing speed and regularity. Intercourse becomes cursory and routine. No one really knows his neighbor. For in a system that substitutes multiple contacts with machines for human contacts, ties of mutual sympathy decay while no new bond arises in its place to unite those nominally engaged in a common enterprise. The danger of such a life is that it becomes a hollow shell of reflexes from which genuine intelligence and interest have fled. With the growing mechanization of life goes a continual altering of the cosmic expanse. As the range of man's scientifically aided perceptions widens, things take on new shapes and forms. Especially in our unmatched glimpses of the world at high speeds under the wizardry of unchained mechanical and electrical forces, the novelty of the new outlook appears. Unexpected success has crowned man's ingenious devices for viewing events as they might appear to an observer in an atom or on a remote planet. Nor has he done half badly in his attempts to see the world with the eye of the hawk, the fish, the tortoise, or as no organism has ever seen it by inventing new instruments of mechanical design. Yet the upshot of this urge to chart the atom and the nebula, to escape the ordinary bread-and-butter outlook, and to hew to new frontiers of being can only be, we have argued, the abandonment of the predilections of common sense. The localisms and prerogatives of untechnical experience must be foregone; it must be plainly seen that the whole achievement of modern civilization belies the dogma that only what is given, felt, and had in daily life is basically real. Not only has invention pushed the barriers of sense farther and farther back, but it has enabled man to construct sounds, pictures, motions like those of nature through machines of his own creation. Since he has unveiled through his technical arts

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new realms of diverse scale and rich variety, no reason exists why man should remain so gingerly in his confidence of all but the everyday world. Divested of all metaphysical and scientific prepossessions, of course he has no way of proving the one more real than the other. The shadowy common-sense perceptions of the denizens of Plato's cave are no more substantial, lifelike, and trustworthy than those of the modern who spends his life amid the sights and sounds of the motion-picture theater. In either case there is no criterion in immediate experience by which to distinguish simulacrum from more basic reality. The mere fact that we know how the world of motion-picture shapes and sounds is built up, while we do not fully grasp the mechanism of common sense, proves little. Certainly it does not establish the reduction of the first to the second. But there is no distinction without a difference, especially without a difference in relations. Given elementary sensa, the fact that with knowledge of the how, why, and wherefore, of pattern and arrangement we can create a new world by introducing new relations into them shows plainly the connection and inferability of one from the other. Moreover, man's success in creating mechanisms for the production of sights and sounds (with which common sense so largely coincides) and his transmutation of these qualities from simpler mechanistic elements, strongly suggests the derivation of common sense from some antecedent scientific realm. Science we are coming to suspect may well be right, and the most trustworthy phases of experience may be those whose aloofness and remoteness of scale are beyond the attention of human beings save after long training in technique. For it is scientific objects, and not those of daily life, that remain least expugnable to the refinements of analysis and undisturbed at the end of our investigations. But if this is so, it is no longer possible to believe that the unaided perceptions and concrete experience of laymen can furnish us with even the barest reliable outline of our world. One of the profoundest influences of the machine has been the inclusion of man in the picture of a mechanistic universe. Today astronomy, biology, and physics are said to be putting man in his place. Viewed in a vast context of energies and

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forms, down appalling vistas of space and time, his significance shrivels to a casual point. Gone are his autonomy and originative pretensions, lost in an overwhelming network of physical powers. Man appears but a tool of circumstance, a tardy precipitate of his surroundings. What status is subordinate enough for this ephemera, this midge, this inefficient engine in the vast workshop of being? Views of this sort are salutary correctives of a shortsighted humanism. Yet they can hardly be taken as man's final or best knowledge about the world. For if man's scientific insight is but the weak chemical glow of a sensorium on a minor planet, we are faced with a paradoxical disparity between the feebleness of the source and the far-flung range of events which it claims to disclose. What possible credence can attach to this puny creature's tale of its efforts to absorb the creative process? Assuredly the part cannot engulf the whole; nor can this fretful speck of dust traverse and sensibly examine more than the barest fraction of the macrocosm. Yet, despite these difficulties, mechanomorphism reigns in cosmology quite ais if there had been no centuries of struggle against specious analogies, one-sided views, and "morphisms" of all sorts. In a world of machines even wisdom is reduced to a record of physical contacts. Precisely this is in fact the substance of the new stimulus-response theory of knowledge. The human organism and its mental life are described as reflex mechanisms reacting to the impacts of bodies on end organs. Yet if knowledge is purely sensory contact, it is powerless to reach beyond the given and devoid of transcendent implications. It affords no news of the possible, the relational, the non-existent, of what lies beyond perception. For organisms experience only their stimulations and responses; hence whatever is beyond, independent of, or apart from these bodily processes cannot be known to subsist. In short, if stimulus-response is true, transcendence is false; nor can the two be wed by any trick of epistemic ingenuity. Naturalism, we conclude, makes knowledge impossible in so far as it makes truth and insight wholly functions of contact

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action and sensory acquaintance. For if the world as we know it is through and through a product of our organic make-up and receptors, and if there is no way in which these deliverances can be supplemented by some more independent mode of insight, we have indeed to admit that the sum of our wisdom is but animal vapors and local reflexes, and that we never really reach — as science pretends — beyond our organic interactions to grasp objective relations of a cosmic and not merely homocentric character. No theory is stronger than the props it rests on. Accordingly, the mechanist's account of how man arrives at his view of the world must be closely examined.1 As has been said, he assumes a physical-contact theory of knowledge, presupposing without proof an antecedently real environment, whose impingement upon the organism (whose existence is also presupposed) gives rise to the intra-organic knowing experience. What is more important, there is no way of knowing the extra-organic stimuli save through the intra-organic responses; yet the problem of understanding the nature of the stimuli is the problem of understanding the external world held to be their source. Mechanistic descriptions of the genesis of human knowing are founded almost wholly on principles borrowed from animal learning — human awareness being regarded as simply a more complex case of the animal mind. The organic responses, which are the locus of knowing, are described as chains of motor-affective behavior that once released by a stimulus run their course automatically. Not merely subsequent circumstances, but the stimulus itself, are shown to be often quite irrelevant to the reaction. For responses seem capable of being arbitrarily conditioned, of being set off by occasions to which they bear no likeness or relevance, save perhaps a mistaken reference as producers of pleasure or pain. A bear, for instance, it is shown, if put on a hot floor will alternately pick up his feet. If a musical accompaniment be at the same time introduced, a cross-connection will eventually be established between the bear's auditory 1 Cf. Marie C. Swabey, Logic and Nature (New York: New York University Press, 1930), ch. II.

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and thermal reactions. With repetition this transference becomes fixed, so that the music alone (without the heat) is sufficient to evoke the foot-movement. When this stage is reached, the bear is said to have "learned" to dance to music. The same processes of arbitrary association and transferred response are found to be the heart of human learning. Children learn the meaning of language, for instance, by seeing certain objects over and over and at the same time hearing their names, so that they come in time to react to the spoken names as if they were the actual objects. In the same way they come to respond to the accidental concomitants of painful or pleasurable experiences as if these accompaniments were themselves the source of the pain or pleasure. The dangers of lightning make us fear thunder, while filial affection in the race is explained as a transferred reaction directed on the parent expressive of the infant's pleasure in being stroked and fed. So it goes. Not only are human responses generally confused as to their source, but their deliverances are largely self-centered, informing us far more of our intra-organic affective states than of what the world is like distinct from these. Yet the whole of human knowledge is, according to this theory, built up of such reflex arcs through associative principles. In sum, mechanistic psychology affords no means of knowing the occasion save through the responses, while these responses, according to the burden of its experimental evidence, are without any necessary relation, congruity, or resemblance to their occasions. But, having arrived at its goal of reducing mental life to reflex action, man to the animal, the organic in principle to the inorganic, naturalism finds itself in a predicament. That is, it finds itself unable to negotiate the return trip and to explain credibly how man came to be man and how he constructed a reliable picture of his world. In short, it confronts the serious problem of substantiating its own cosmic story. For having experimentally "proved" that animal reflexes are continually misled into responding to irrelevant accompaniments or substitute stimuli, naturalism cannot deny that the same deceptions may be practiced on human reflexes in our so-called knowl-

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edge of the world. Having granted that habits of behavior are built up through haphazard contiguities and transferred response, we cannot but suppose that the same principles operate throughout man's epistemic efforts. Thus the theory, caught in its own trap, is forced to appeal to itself against itself, undermining its foundations. For, once we agree to interpret the mind and its action in terms of accident, routine, and affective response, we cannot without contradiction accept its disclosures as necessary, intellectually appropriate, and extra-organically valid. If our mental life is but an agglomeration of accidental associations, we have no right to construe even its scientific dicta as trustworthy descriptions of an antecedent world. In its extremity naturalism tries to bridge the gap in knowledge between blind fortuity and relevant response by an appeal to natural selection. Time and chance, it claims, if left to themselves must in the long run produce mind from matter, reason from unreason, by the mere action of trial and error. Though admittedly the evolutionary account of the world, viewed in shortened perspective, seems to pile Ossas on Pelions of improbability and to invoke suspiciously convenient runs of luck in deriving cosmos from chaos, intelligible patterns from unintelligible ones, the difficulties (it is argued) can be smoothed out if enough time is allotted to the free play of the laws of chance. Granted sufficient time, it is urged, anything and everything can happen; and the most improbable events become not only possible but inevitable. The obvious reply to all this is that the plausibility of the theory is due to its tacit assumption of the primacy of logical over physical laws. This is the real significance of the supremacy of chance. For wherever the operation of permutations, combinations, and probability is called upon to explain the world and knowledge, the transcendence of the logical over the biological is unquestionably admitted. Even the materialist, if he remains a scientist, must give up the attempt to get behind logic and to derive the rational from the irrational, the explicable from the inexplicable. To derive reasons from that which has no reasons is as absurd as to try to get something from

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nothing (as does the creationist). Only by granting the action of principles of relevance and probability, which in the long run tend to exclude the irrelevant and improbable from events, is it possible to give a coherent account of the growth of the world. Logical form and relevant action must be allowed as conditions of being and knowledge ; yet this is precisely what the naturálist is often loath to admit. Science, unlike naturalism, is ready to allow its limitations. For science is aware that it does not subtend a complete cosmic outlook, does not include the supports it rests on, namely, the domains of logic, mathematics, and scientific method. Thus the scientist sees that when his biology and physics depict man and his world as dust amid dust, he already takes for granted a large body of doctrine undemonstrated by these sciences. Logical, mathematical laws, the technique and postulates of demonstration, though utilized by these disciplines, are neither proved nor disproved by them. Such things have to be assumed before any natural knowledge can be proved. Though essential to science, they can no more be included in its subject-matter than a picture can include its frame. What is assumed in a proof is not to be mistaken for what is proved by it. Yet to overlook this is the commonest error. Unlike naturalism, science refuses to construe everything in terms of existence or to deny the independence and priority of the categories of truth and knowledge to those of physical being. It rejects the materialistic theory of knowing which seeks to compress the criteria by which we test the probable truth or falsity of matters of fact into part of the matters of fact tested. The laws of logic or conditions of relevant acquaintance, it sees, can never really be derived from natural selection, being already presupposed in its very action. In claiming to derive knowledge from chance and physical contact, materialism is really appealing to rational system, the antithesis of blind contingency. Even in the physiology of reason, science finds it necessary to assume a transcendental element. But having reduced mind to a mode of bodily behavior, how can the materialist avoid the conclusion that his belief that all

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knowledge consists in physical conditioning is itself just a case of being conditioned to that belief? How can the theory of behaviorism be itself more than a mode of behavior among the many modes? Yet once that is admitted, naturalism seems due for a fall, having kicked away the ladder by which it ascended. For the aim of scientific knowledge of the world is not merely to give an account of how animals react to stimuli and what they take them to be, but to disclose what objects about us are. If human thought is wholly controlled by physical forces, how can thought prove that control when by its own admission it is a mere reflex or echo? If demonstration turns out to be nothing but physical compulsion of our responses, there seems no real distinction between proof and disproof, since all possible conflicting hypotheses can be substantiated in this fashion. For if existence is the final category and if we have direct acquaintance only with our intra-organic states, the distinction between truth and falsity reduces to that between the existence and non-existence of actual beliefs. Yet many mutually conflicting beliefs confront each other as equally compulsive. All unquestionably exist. Shall we therefore say that all are true? Nor is the issue to be met, as the mechanist sometimes fancies, by a shuffling compromise which identifies the mind with the body — in the current fashion of paying formal obeisance to awareness construed as a bodily function. Evidence from comparative anatomy showing the close correlation between the complexity of the nervous system and the intricacy of the brain and mentality of higher animals is usually the core of this identity theory. Yet, in our eyes, the objections to it far outweigh what can be said in its favor. Even the facts of genetic concomitance between awareness and the nervous system are far from proving an identity between them. Though one thing may be invariably accompanied by or associated with another, that does not necessarily mean that the one is the same as the other. To establish identity you must go further and show that whatever you can say about the first you can say about the second and vice versa, in the same way that whatever can be said about

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George Washington can be said about the father of this country. But, obviously, awareness cannot be identified with neural activity in this sense, since quite different vocabularies and nontransferable meanings have to be used to describe the two. Thus the color yellow, taken as awareness, is usually reported as a cheerful, expansive visual quality suggesting sunlight, but the correlative physical description is of a pupillary reflex to vibrations of light of wave-length about 0.581 micron. The inescapable fact that confronts attempts to treat awareness as a bodily function is also that, unlike other functions, it is not observable in the same way and by the same technique as the structure said to give rise to it. Whereas organisms and their behavior are open to the sensible notice of everyone equipped with the requisite training and instruments, awareness on the contrary is known only privately by a single privileged observer who stands in a peculiarly intimate relation to the phenomenon. Though anyone can watch the muscular contractions that accompany a bodily injury, only he who has the pain can feel and know what it is like. Our excuse for repeating matters so familiar is their constant neglect. Just as surely as scientific naturalists are today committed to defend the conservation of energy as the basis of physical science, they are also impelled (if they are consistent) to deny awareness all efficacy. For they deny the existence of psychic energy; hence awareness as awareness, in their view, can do nothing. The source of whatever is distinctive in human behavior springs from physico-chemical changes in the nervous system : and these changes cannot be shown to be any different for being accompanied by the shadowy halo of consciousness. Awareness persists in their eyes only as an inexplicable surd, a thing without a reason, a "function" that does not function, like the proverbial trunk without a tag or dog without a collar. At all odds, says the materialist, it must not be allowed to inject a stream of psychic energy into the closed system of physical nature. For once it be admitted that awareness can do this, nothing can prevent the insurgence of miracles, souls, and the supernatural into nature again. So consciousness re-

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mains throughout its long evolutionary history an affront to parsimony, a hollow sham, a functionless function. The way out of the impasse of naturalism, which science itself suggests, is that of relinquishing physical in favor of logical mechanism. In knowing, science concedes transcendence ; and without denying the private and subjective in awareness discerns an element of the universal and necessary in its insights, of more than empirical import. Only by presuming the adequacy of human intelligence in its relational aspect to embrace the phenomenal course of events and to pass beyond its local station, is science able to place confidence in its own results. Not painful and pleasurable feelings but the apprehension of order and quantitative relations is the clue by which science estimates experience. Unlike materialism, it does not find the essential core of knowledge in immediate contact, concrete givenness, direct presentation, and affective tone. Reliance on organic feeling is subordinated in its technique to mathematical relations, recurrent patterns, constant proportions, and the discernment of structures that as structures are not entirely reducible to the organic and inorganic. Not only is the intellectual approach given the lead by science over the affective one ; sensory contacts are definitely mistrusted unless countersigned by critical tests. To this end, ordinary modes of reaction are broken down, stretched on the rack of analysis, separated from their natural setting and accompanying satisfactions, and checked by instruments of measurement. By subjecting perception to a long abstractive discipline and the use of metrical devices, science arrives at descriptions of the world in terms of elementary units and laws that seem impossible of reduction to stimulus and response. Instead of trying to convert physiological responses and private feelings into non-physiological attributes of nature, science seeks an outlet from the circumscribing limits of the body's receptors by the use of comparison, calculation, and measurement. By such means, it believes, estimates obtained by organisms of different constitution and perspective can be¡ successfully correlated with one another, and the world viewed

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in terms of certain objective relations that hold independently of individual differences. Through careful reckoning, science claims to lay hold of certain configurations that are not mere projections of sensory response but that, irrespective of how they are approached, betray an integrity of pattern that seems inherent in the nature of nature. Indeed, the disclosure of such constant relations which obtain between the measurements of different observers in different frames and motions would seem to many to be the crowning discovery of twentieth-century science. Our conclusion is, therefore, that the narrower mechanism which construed the world through contact-action and stimulusresponse has been superseded by a broader, more logical view of mechanism in which metrical readings and deductive reckoning take rank over immediate sensory experience.

CHAPTER Χ IS D E M O C R A C Y

SOCIALISM?

FORMS of government are things distinct from economic systems, however each may react upon the other. Yet though the theory and practice of government have long been a conscious art, economic life has remained till recently largely an unconscious matter in the sense that no minds have really glimpsed or sought to guide the working of the agricultural, industrial, and commercial order as a whole. Today, however, growing awareness of the difference between the two is making for fresh inquiry into both economic and political processes in an effort to reduce the friction and deadlock that result in societies in which the one is at cross-purposes with the other. For it is becoming evident that, if general havoc is to be avoided, the framework of government and the relations of production and distribution in a community must be mutually compatible, while an even closer harmony between the two makes for great strengthening of the social fabric. Involved in all this is the question as to which phase of life is the more fundamental. Should the political organization be fashioned to fit the economic life or should the latter be made to conform to the political creed? On this point much radical thought seems equivocal, both accepting economic determinism and protesting at it; at once depicting the state as the outcome of an unbridled competitive order and confidently demanding the overthrow of the latter by political means. Yet in this very assurance that the future need not resemble the past, but that economic processes instead of being left to work themselves out in a haphazard, unsupervised manner can be controlled through political action, the claims of government are tacitly allowed preëminence. While the notion of a planned economy is combined with

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different types of state, its fusion with democracy is often called socialism. Yet the precise meaning of socialism, the object of so much praise and dispraise, is often obscure. That it implies a new policy of regulating resources, looking to a wider, less discrepant distribution of wealth, would hardly be disputed. Yet within this framework of ideas sharp divergences of theory and practice emerge, cleaving into many dissident groups thosè who call themselves socialists. To some an exactly equal distribution of income is the prime concern of socialism, to others the destruction of all individual ownership, to still others the nationalization of the land (leaving personalty untouched and some scope for private profit). For yet another group what chiefly matters is the democratization of industry, by which they mean the exertion of pressure on the industrial order to force it to yield to labor a fairer share of ownership and returns. More pervasive than any definite projects, however, is that vaguest of socialisms, which lives by the catch-word "complete socialization of life," claiming to penetrate beneath economic systems to their roots in psychological attitudes and habits of behavior. To this unremitting socialization of the springs of action we may turn, since it presumes to go further than any merely practical rearrangement of the political and industrial machinery in the interests of all. Socialization, if we accept its view, proposes a psychological even more than an economic revolution. It offers by enlightened technique to shift our center of interest from ourselves to the group, to train us to respond to communal welfare as the dominant end while subordinating ourselves as its means. And we are to arrive at this reorientation not by abstract arguments (which are said to have no lasting hold on the mind), but through persuasion by the practical benefits that accrue where self-interest is extinguished in fellow feeling for the group. By cultivating the sense of unity with others, customs may be built up that entirely de-egoize the mainsprings of action. Society becomes the supreme value, and acts are judged to have worth precisely in so far as they promote its common Ufe. The individual, since he draws his whole mental and physical suste-

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nance from the community, must (it is argued) inevitably find his happiness in promoting its welfare. Through and through, the social medium makes us what we are. Hence, as men become enlightened they must increasingly acknowledge their obligation to society and identify themselves with its interests as determining. If some old complaining echo be borne to this socialist's ears about society's existing for the individual's development and not the individual for society, he will invoke genetic sanctions to prove the identity of sociality and value. Evolutionary biology, he will say, has shown social behavior to have the greatest racial utility. Among species like man whose members are too weak to survive alone yet are strong enough to make a stand together, traits tending to corporate action have had important life-conserving worth. By a long process of elimination an unconscious protective mechanism has been built up by which human modes of conduct tend to be esteemed or disesteemed according as they promote or endanger the life of the community. Through the action of natural selection unreserved devotion to the group has become the backbone and highest value of morality. But with such genetic arguments that seek to impose the group habits of the past upon the present, democratic thought is not likely to be impressed. Apart from a natural suspicion of preachments from the evolutionary hypothesis, it holds that moral and political questions are to be settled not by historical imposition but by the deliberations of intelligence. In short, genetic arguments leave democratic thought unconvinced that the social attitude is any more admirable than the self-regarding. For the group spirit has its tyrannies, often the most difficult to escape. In crowded communities men develop a passion for conformity and the desire to force others to live as seems good to the rest. Professed efforts at improvement often express little more than the impulse to autocracy in the heart of King Mob. Far from being enlightened and progressive, the mentality of groups tends, according to psychology, to be blind and reactionary. The effect of associated consciousness is to

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heighten imitative and suggestible impulses, to exaggerate emotional traits, and to minimize the reflectiveness of individuals. One may well ask what is the value of morality by social imposition and the training of minds in a pattern if the individual's power of self-determination is thereby fettered and he fails to discover the riches of his private soul. In this way characters may be filched and human springs of action traduced to the subtlest slavery. Nor is the exploitation the less exploitation that the slaves love their chains and the despotism is professedly benevolent. Complete social regulation may indeed succeed as a receipt for wealth and prosperity, an achievement for which those who worship the things the system brings will gladly pay the price of subservience. Still, the demand of men to be men includes something more than enough to eat and wear and the obscure belief that somehow collectively they control, though personally they are regimented. Men ask for their rights and accept philanthropy only as second best. They ask to rule, not to be ruled, under a plan in which they have shared constructively, to participate in a program which they have embraced on their own conditions. Democratic thought perceives that mere collectivism or absolutism in the name of the group in no way guarantees against preferential treatment or arbitrary suppression. Too often where extreme importance is attached to the rights of the whole, the claims of minorities tend to be sacrificed. It is a mistake to suppose that the mere recognition of society as the supreme value necessarily implies the equal consideration of all alike — especially of those whose wishes run counter to the majority. On the contrary, political communities that stress solidarity show as a rule little respect for extremes or tolerance of an opposition. Why should they? The threat of the group's consolidated force, the individual's helplessness in the face of a Machtstaat, is enough to silence dissent. Dissidence, while sometimes abstractly praised as making for variety, is not practically encouraged. Instead, likemindedness, the chiming chorus or docile echo of a dictated refrain, becomes the ideal of motivation. Yet it is not hard to see that such unlimited con-

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currence of sentiment may work not only against the individual's interests but against those of the group as well. For not only will the individual lose his power of independent choice in such a system, becoming a mere packhorse or yes-man in the works, but society itself (not being a person, and therefore not able to direct its affairs in person) will be compelled to entrust its affairs to leaders who often betray its interest for their own. Thus the corporate system in which the individual is eclipsed tends to unforeseen conclusions. The element denied is avenged, and the unregenerate ego grown great in the person of a dictator returns to dominate the scene. How could it be otherwise? Even those who hold that the group makes the man have to admit that in a sense the group is only a nominalistic ghost, a complex of interactions, but itself no conscious agent or selfdirecting entity. If we want a piece of work done, a plan executed, we invariably turn not to society but to a particular person or leader. Particular men I have seen, says the honest empiricist, but Society I have not seen. As dynamic centers of activity I can count on the one, but not the other. In this sense, as offering a definite locus of observed behavior and responsibility the individual remains primary and the group secondary. Unless we are to suppose that men are wholly determined by the pressure of social influences which are in turn formed by others, and so on back to Adam, we must suppose that these interactions come to a focus and receive redirection in the minds of certain individuals. These few, the leaders, being partly conscious of the forces that drive the rest unconsciously, are able to play influences off against each other to intensify or to cancel their effect. In the eyes of collectivism the primary duty of the leader is to run the social machine. In its interest he rightly chooses whatever means promises to be effective. Deception, propaganda, massed emotion may all be utilized. To the question whether such technique is justified, the answer of collectivism is affirmative. Where group concurrence and the need for unified response are at stake, any means is warranted in its opinion. But to us the answer is no less emphatically negative. Not only is

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social solidarity with its denial of the private self indefensible, but its methods no less so. It is absurd to believe that in practice ends can be independent of the means of obtaining them. Inevitably the one shapes the other. Just as honesty and mutual trust inspire the like, force begets force, and fraud, fraud. Any claim to use the latter to gain the former indicates either improbity or criminal negligence in studying the effects of violent action. The fact would seem to be that extreme social mindedness expresses as distorted and misleading a political outlook as a colossal egoism. Both the assumption " I am everything, others nothing" and its opposite, " I am nothing, others (society) everything," share a certain inapplicability to practice. While the reverse of always preferring my own interest to that of others is always preferring others to myself, the proper human equilibrium lies somewhere in between. To declare the individual nothing is as false as to declare him everything ; herein lies the error of both political egoism and altruism. "Each is something," says scientific disinterestedness studying the facts. As such, each should claim his due, striving not to prefer himself to others yet scrupulously guarding his own importance. Impartiality means logical parity; but in return for treating others as equals one rightly demands reciprocity. Even if the individual today is swamped in a vast complex of associations, there is no reason to conclude that because social influences are everywhere they are everything. Certainly the facts themselves carry no mandate that he should repudiate self-interest as a motive and lose himself in an ecstasy of social absorption. On the contrary, the very threat of being reduced to so much social putty or waxworks should rouse him to defend his confidence in himself as a source of new and underived potentialities, as a being capable of making an originative (and not merely reflexive) contribution to the world. What lends man his distinctiveness in nature is not his gregariousness so much as the scope of his reactions. Compared with other creatures, he embraces a wider time span with his superior retentiveness and foresight. He alone apparently has

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the power of responding to remote, inclusive, and non-existent objects, a capacity for universal-mindedness quite different from social-mindedness or the dog-like attachment to gregarious ends. Man's power of resisting present and particular solicitations in favor of the general reveals itself on one side as the demand for lawfulness in conduct. One finds him continually searching for precepts, rules, counsels, to guide his practice. The moral man, we should say, is not the socially-motivated man, but the principled one who sets himself a standard and tries to live up to it. He is one who seeks to distill from his own original thinking some truth about the world and to exemplify it concretely in his own life. The good life is systematically subordinated under a central aim. Universalization, too, is its test of right action. Making no exceptions, playing no favorites, is seen to be the root of equitable treatment. The unprincipled man, on the contrary, who seeks to buy off the judge, who prays to heaven for special favors, who shifts his precepts to suit his pleasure, and who while professing to obey the laws sets about to infringe them, he and none other is the offender against morality. To the laws of the state no less than to morals, universality is essential. Ideally, in Rousseau's phrase, laws are "decrees of the whole people for the whole people." Yet it is only where the citizens not merely acquiesce in the laws theoretically but support them practically that they cease to appear as fearand-threat mechanisms externally imposed, and are embraced as freely chosen provisions of the good life. There is always a very human desire to change a law when asked to obey it at personal inconvenience. Yet it is only by being willing to have done to oneself what one is willing to have done to others that self-government becomes a reality. Such impartiality is not so much an expression of sympathetic fellow-feeling for the group as an act of hypothetical substitution by which reflection tests its own generality (as when we reason that if a rule holds for any value of a variable however chosen, it holds for all values of it). This sense of the irrelevance of specificity is symbolized, one might say, in the unknown soldier's tomb found in so many

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countries since the World War. The anonymity shrouding all particularities of the name and fortune of the hero plainly directs us to the universal. In the face of ultimate issues, distinctions of time, place, personality, and rank are lost to sight. Instead, this altar to a nameless individual speaks poignantly of the generic sacrifice paid to war's madness by mankind. Y e t when man's devotion to the universal is confused with loyalty to the existent whole of society, it loses its point. Those latest utilitarians who discern morality in the socio-economic good of the greatest number, counseling only such acts as produce the maximum satisfactions upon the whole (no matter how bad the effects upon ourselves), are ethicists of a different stripe. They are the genial well-wishers, the benevolent compromisers for humanity — anything but logical rigorists. As for the practical good they look to, it is always that of "the greatest number," never that of "the total number." Approximation being the peak of their ambition, there is nothing to forbid their occasional indulgence in favoritism, exception making, or the arbitrary suppression of troublesome minorities, as seems counseled by expedience. Indeed a skeptical critic may well ask how they know in advance which course will make for the greatest good of existing society. In seeking such a course they may discover that the good of the present generation must be paid for by a loss to the next, that the Une of action that promises economic prosperity entails the greatest cultural cost, or that the price of benefits purchased for American society is the ruin and misery of Asiatics. Often philosophies of social value prefer to evade the question as to what constitutes the highest social good. They do not like to declare that they conceive it as primarily a biological, an economic, or an intellectual end. For the implications of these goals are very different. If the first, the mere increase and perpetuation of human life — a large population and a long history — becomes the objective. If the second, not simply life but the prosperous life of group sufficiency and economic adjustment becomes the mark; while the third concentrates upon art, science, culture, and the achievement of a high civilization.

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Were the first goal chosen as the greatest good, the Chinese would seem to exemplify it as the people which beyond all others has won the victory of survival, enduring politically, geographically, racially, from the most ancient times. If the second, possibly some South Sea Island tribe leading a healthy life close to nature would qualify best; while, if the last, the choice might well fall on the ancient Greeks, a people long extinct yet whose grasp of truth and whose cultural achievements remain unsurpassed. Any choice of the last would plainly prefer the universal to the existent whole of society. Of late, popular government has suffered serious inroads at the hands of its former friends. New arguments for efficiency have weaned many from democracy to the cause of dictatorship. The modern enthusiasm for quick returns, for getting things done in a large way with the minimum of delay and waste, tends to a concentration of authority that threatens the nullification of self-government. Swiftness and success in political matters, it is said, require that the many-minded public shall not inject its confusions into law-making and enforcement. Even legislative bodies are a great liability, since trained specialists, it is argued, can frame far better measures than voteseeking bands of politicians. We should have the wisdom to trust the competent few, to put a stop to the endless talk and petty obstructive tactics of popular assemblies. To this end, legislative committees, city managers, the commission form of government, and various devices for strengthening the federal heads are favored, while such things as popular lawmaking bodies, direct primaries, and the initiative and referendum are looked on with increasing distrust. Keen admiration for knowledge makes men eager to put those who know in command. Yet knowledge is not the same as wisdom, and there is danger of mistaking the detailed information of the specialist for the broad vision of the man of judgment. Again, the difficulty of finding those who know is not to be overlooked. Are they bankers, business men, statesmen, or generals? Or perchance economists and engineers? A corporate regime under the direction of experts, it is argued, charged with the

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execution of a broad social program, offers the best hope of peace and plenty. And no charge of despotic autocracy can be raised where private rights are sacrificed to the public interest. Yet precisely this remains the question. In a sense the authority of experts occupied with a coercive economy does not necessarily imply a political dictatorship. It need not employ confiscation and terroristic repression to the point of extinguishing free speech and parliamentary action. Nevertheless, we would point out, its plans are enforced by command: they originate in fiat; and the power to tax, fix prices, and control currency is the power of life and death. When a society comes to place extreme emphasis upon creature comforts, the fear of losing these things will lead it to risk the dangers of great concentration of power. It is not a pleasant sight to observe how willing men are to forfeit their most cherished rights in return for greater prosperity and security. After all, how many are there who would not rather be comfortable slaves than free men with a pittance? The answer shows how weak is the tie that binds human nature to liberty. Despite the slow undermining of belief in democracy by this newest subversive gospel, self-government is still preferred to efficient government in certain respects. Institutions like trial by jury and popular legislatures, though subject to constant attack, are still felt partially to safeguard the public in its rights. Jury trial, for instance, though often futile and wasteful, at least secures the layman a part in administering the law. It helps to keep the law in harmony with public sentiment, protects against the dangers of a party-controlled judiciary, and checks the rigidities of technical legalism. That twelve men are less easily corrupted than one man (even when the latter is carefully trained and selected) seems generally admitted to be the case. Even the likelihood of there being less narrowness and bias in the verdict of a jury than of a judge may be plausibly urged on the ground that an opinion reflecting a cross-section of the people (i.e. many men in diverse circumstances) will embody greater insight into the relative importance of the different values of life than the onesided outlook of the professional

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magistrate. Also jury trial benefits from the important principle of the cancellation of errors through a multiplication of judges. Just as in scientific experiment observation by different observers, together with the averaging of results, tends to eliminate mistakes, so in legal matters where a number of jurymen are asked to pass upon the evidence, their idiosyncrasies of feeling, perception, and opinion tend to cancel out, leading to a decision with less likelihood of error than would be the case with only a single judge. But even the best friends of democracy must admit that it lacks the swift, clean-cut execution of autocracy. Inevitably the larger number of participants in the sovereign power makes its administration more cumbersome. Still, this disadvantage is more than compensated, they would claim, by its superior advantages in distributing responsibility widely, as conducing to the greater growth and unhampering of the personalities of its citizens. For power in any form means a chance to express oneself, to fulfill one's nature; power serves as a kind of property, as a mark of reward and privilege. Whereas autocracy by entrusting it to a few tends to the super-development of a small group, democracy extends to a much larger number the chance to exercise personal judgment and responsibility. Undeniably the march of modern democracy affords many disappointments. Weak, untrained publics freed of one type of tyranny fall victim to another. Given the ballot, for instance, they use it not to their own advantage but in following the dictates of some private propaganda with tactical power to beguile them with petty threats and favors. So the crusade for selfgovernment has to be gone through over again — with the goal of a free, unhampered community leading a richly diversified life seemingly as remote as ever. Yet the fact that the pressure takes more subtle forms and that submission to autocracy is by way of the people's own choosing affords some consolation. For it was not so long ago that the right of the stronger was taken as a matter of course and force was the sole method of settling political disputes. Parliamentary government, with all its imperfections, indi-

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cates a landmark in the passage of man from violence to deliberative action. In the ancient Roman world, as Hume remarked, "it was by the sword . . . that every emperor acquired, as well as defended, his right." "The election of the senate was a mere form, which always followed the choice of the legions; and these were almost always divided, . . . and nothing but the sword was able to terminate the difference."1 Even in the modern world the substitution of discussion for force, of constitutional procedure for direct action and private will, has been secured only in recent centuries. It took England until almost the middle of the eighteenth century to learn to change its government peaceably; while the fate of earlier statesmen who lost favor and office was almost as uniformly predictable as a law of nature in its violent conclusion. Mr. Walter Lippmann has amusingly illustrated this appalling fact by quoting from a speech of the Earl of Carnarvon delivered to the House of Lords in 1678, bluntly pointing a lesson from the history of his country's leadership. "My lords," said the Earl (whose amazing frankness may have had as its source in vino Veritas), "I shall go no further back than the latter end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, at which time the Earl of Essex was run down by Sir Walter Raleigh. My Lord Bacon, he ran down Sir Walter Raleigh, and your lordships know what became of my Lord Bacon. The Duke of Buckingham, he ran down my Lord Bacon, and your lordships know what happened to the Duke of Buckingham. Sir Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Earl of Stafford, ran down the Duke of Buckingham, and you all know what became of him. Sir Harry Vane, he ran down the Earl of Stafford, and your lordships know what became of Sir Harry Vane. Chancellor Hyde, he ran down Sir Harry Vane, and your lordships know what became of the Chancellor. Sir Thomas Osborne, now Earl of Danby, ran down Chancellor Hyde: but what will become of the Earl of Danby, your lordships best can tell." '

The long struggle to arrive at decisions by the free expression of those whom the decision affects (even in such major matters as the choice of leaders) has been waged in many forms. The ever-recurring issue is that men must not be subject to laws, rulers, governments, in whose selection they have had no part. 1 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1739), bk. III, pt. II, sect. χ. » Atlantic Monthly, CXLII, 184 (August 1928).

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Thus the gradual drift from autocratic to autonomic forms, from bludgeon to ballot, where it has occurred, has been in the direction of fuller parliamentarism. Closely bound up with this development is the modern partysystem, whose virtue despite its shortcomings is to rest the case for political issues on orderly, non-violent electioneering. After all, a balanced view of public affairs reveals that there are a few measures whose achievement is of such transcendent importance as to justify violent tactics disruptive of the unity of the common life. Party government is a technique for peaceful concurrence, its concern being to create two (or possibly three) alternative groups representing different sections of opinion, strong enough to carry on the government at need. Though rivals, these opposing groups must be capable of an amicable rapprochement, able to submerge their differences for the common good and to abide by the decision of the majority at elections. Under party government a sporting spirit (at once less grim, more generous, half-playful) replaces the die-hard ruthlessness, the appeal to direct action, and the bitter posture of war that holds between men with irreconcilable differences. It is seen that for the achievement of any permanent harmony there must be a willingness to Uve and let live, to abide by the fortunes of the game win or lose. Where such working arrangements break down, there is a return to intransigence and an uncompromising divergence of views. Parties break up into small factions of fanatical devotees; the whole technique of settling questions by conference, arbitration, and voting based on mutual trust disappears; men return to dictatorship and the rule of force. But if parliamentarism is to continue and is to mean anything, individualism must survive. Whether this is possible is an open question. For today age-old tendencies to conformity are reinforced by new mechanical agencies. One may well ask what possibility remains for the development of original powers in a society whose productive system sacrifices individuation to vast quantitative output of a cheap, homogeneous sort. Inevitably the forces of commerce are invading the precincts of per-

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sonality. Artificially induced desires are among the invading sappers and miners that destroy the fortress of human independence. Insistent presentation of catchpenny ideas, ingenious gewgaws, absorb men's attention. Day in and out we are pounded with their solicitations. All our time seems given over to combatting or complying with the tyrannous demands of advertising. We are conquered through imitation by enemies who in the guise of marketing their wares convert us none the less completely to their uses. One of the patent effects of quantity production is to weaken the power of discrimination. In an environment largely without distinctions, men make few distinctions. By taking the bad along with the good, they eventually lose the power of knowing worth when they see it and respect for superiority altogether. The much-praised tolerance or liberalism of the modern mind is often no more than thick-skinned insensibility, a lack of perception of differences. Your true ego, on the contrary, remains always an aristocrat, entrenched, solitary, challenging things for himself, no mere echo of the group. But, brought to the bar of popular science, whose sole formula at present is social conditioning, and plunged in the excited purlieu of the crowd, its fate is sealed in advance. No words exist in these languages even to state the case for its uniqueness as the guardian of romantic aloofness and the fountainhead of creativity. In so far as individualism signifies piggishness, pomposity, exclusive self-seeking, it may well be attacked. Yet it may equally well be defended as expressing the fact that society is composed of units and that only as these units remain selfreliant, assertive, and responsible in their own right, does the group become so. Strong societies are made of strong individuals. Where citizens are corrupt, governments are no less so; in this sense the people get the government they deserve. Yet one of the commonest mistakes of the day is to reverse this argument, laying all sins at the door of society. The social offender is excused or even encouraged to break the law, at the same time that society is bitterly scored for his lapses. As a private person he is absolved in the name of group liability, on the

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ground that his character and behavior have been formed throughout by group influences. Yet here the logic falters. For if the individual is a social reflex, so is society on the same assumptions. The moral of environmentalism is that everything is made what it is by its present and past surroundings. Accordingly, our present society, no less than the individual, must have been formed in turn by its social and historical context, by a pattern of influences derived from the modes of life of our remote ancestors. It would be therefore to place the blame where it does not belong to hold the present social order responsible for misadjustments and cramping institutions that are simply the outgrowth of customs of a long series of vanished social groups. The upshot of the argument is to hold nobody responsible, and the final bankruptcy of all claims to accountability. For if the individual is made by his group, and his group made in turn by the pressure of other groups in the historical order, we seem launched on a regressive search for determining agents that cannot stop short of Adam. The lesson still unlearned by those who explain man as a social precipitate is that self-direction begins at home. If acts are not attributed to the persons from whom they proceed, allocation of responsibility becomes hopelessly confusing. For the effect of group compulsion upon men's lives is both little understood and limitless in its ramifications. This is not of course to say that the individual is wholly responsible for his acts or that he should bear the entire weight of their consequences. Society is jointly hable. But at least we should remember that ordinarily the social offender, since he is judged by the code of his group and held accountable only for those acts that deviate from its common way of life, has his indebtedness to the group largely taken account of. But what of the future if the claims of personality be preempted? Without pride of subjectivity surely unrelieved regimentation will hold sway. Yet nobody wants an ant-minded world. Presumably egoism must be kept alive, if only to keep the springs of variety and invention flowing. The new problem

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for individualism is how to combine independence of mind with objectivity, how to create strong, original types that are at the same time free of arrogant pretensions of "being somebody." The attitude of the scientist may be instructive here. For the scientist as scientist is nobody, in the sense that in the vigorous, disinterested search for facts he is forgetful both of self and others. Only nature and the knowledge of it are to him important; while the private and exclusive element is reduced to its lowest terms. Perhaps in time this temper may be more widely diffused and social institutions be brought under the strictures of the scientific attitude. If so, the great practical test of the scientific method will have come: whether it is possible for men, where their private interests are at stake, to draw conclusions that run counter to their personal preferences? The issue becomes acute in the question of private property. If inquiry should disclose that the centralization of wealth in private hands acts as a constant threat of derangement and friction to the economic order, would human impartiality be strong enough to reorganize its distribution? Admittedly the public retains the power, if not the will, to change the economic system. Yet the impulse for exclusive possessions seems almost the heart of the egoistic sentiment. But if science is able to demonstrate that a widely distributed income makes for a healthy circulation of work and goods in society while concentrated wealth brings general stagnation and suffering, men may be roused to set limits to private gain. Where social sympathy and moral idealism have failed in the crusade, scientific analysis enlightened and convinced by sober facts may yet succeed; and the impasse of rival interests be resolved through the force of economic arguments. Obviously our discussion has neglected the formulae for socialism with which this chapter began. This neglect is due partly to the feeling that a detailed choice must be left to those who face situations at first hand, and partly to the fact that the issues have been broadly examined already. For instance, the proposal of extreme socialism to abolish private property altogether has been plainly rejected in our discus-

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sions of communism and of justice (chapters iii and vii) as undemocratic. The selfhood of the ordinary man today is aptly summed up in the phrase of a contemporary as "I own, therefore I am." Nothing is more natural than that the run of mankind, having no marked gift for creation in the arts, science, or invention, should turn to those readier fields of achievement — the trades, crafts, agriculture, and commerce — as scope for their powers. In the use and disposal of concrete material goods: houses, land, commodities, the average man finds his chief satisfaction. His natural bent is to gratify his organic needs, and he responds very indifferently to the remote, long-range values represented by art and pure science. Yet within his more concrete domain he betrays the same drive to creation as the artist or poet, spending himself untiringly in the production of goods. Naturally, too, he expects his return; not in some supernal vision or undying fame, as does the artist, but in the satisfaction of having what he materially wants. Whether he gets it depends in large part on how far the goods he works with are under his control, how far, in a word, they may be called his property. There can be no doubt that in the free production of something according to his own ideas a man realizes his individuality. Pride, self-reliance, new capacities, are awakened in creating for oneself and in having one's powers recognized by others. Where, on the contrary, the output of the individual is predetermined by group dictation, the springs of personal ingenuity often cease flowing. The zest in making, using, and disposing of goods dies out in large measure when things must be done by rule under outside discipline. Though admittedly there is nothing sacred in any particular form of private property, the acquisitive impulse seems as broad as the impulse to satisfy desire. In fact, most activity with a conscious end in view seems to be of this sort. Hence it is no surprise to learn that the majority of crimes committed in the world are crimes against property. Nor can the fault be laid at the door of some particular economic system, since the effort to gratify desire, which is as wide as human nature,

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almost always involves appropriating something for enjoyment by excluding others from it — in essentials the seizure of property. Thus even in primitive groups holding goods in common such offenses as the stealing of a wife or the unlawful eating of the totem (which turn on the interference with others' desires for the sake of one's own by seizure of an object) have many earmarks of a violation of property. Yet undoubtedly questions regarding property are aggravated at the present time. Industrial societies seem to have reached the zenith of an age of acquisitiveness and consumption. With billions of products tumbling forth from machines, man's desire for them rises to peculiar intensity. Having becomes the heart of existence. For having makes the plain man feel important, grants him the illusion of being somebody. The kind of man there is most of well knows that he is no Shakespeare or Newton. Indeed he feels slight need of achievements such as theirs compared with the driving urge of his nature toward such humble goods as apparel and entertainment. Running a car, for instance, curiously transfers the sense of power from its unflagging motor to his expanding selfhood; good clothes increase his stature before the world and promote the consoling fiction that a man's essence is his appearance. It is well enough to say that in some future social order other sides of his nature will be developed. Perhaps they may, especially along the lines of sport, artistic appreciation, and philanthropy. Yet just because he is the natural, the mediocre man, it seems unlikely that he will diverge far from the satisfaction of generic needs and the creation of useful commodities. Certainly at the present time the ordinary man, even when free of economic anxiety and equipped with higher education, still finds his major interest in getting and spending; while some occasional success in the field of sport or business suffices to flatter his ego and his sense of achievement—albeit a success only in the ars minima bordering the appetites. The fact that modern democracy confronts the problem of property beyond all else is no cause for surprise. It is not merely because the unfavored classes, awake at last to their depriva-

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tion and suffering, are roused to demand their rights, not merely that machine commodities require armies of consumers to enjoy them, but because democracy means control by the middle range of the population. Nor is it simply an accident that these persons are mainly concerned with practical ends. In all probability their preoccupation reflects not only immediate need but a long process of selection of those human beings most interested in livelihood and continuance. If our conclusion is right, personal property must remain not only to satisfy the craving for self-expression and the exclusive demands of consumption, but as a means of special reward for special exertion so that the idle and industrious shall not fare alike. Yet admission of it is compatible with recognition of its manifold evils under existing systems, and the urgent need to right them by a variety of far-reaching measures which may well include social insurance, democratization of industry, abolition of inheritance, and even nationalization of land. Unquestionably, democratic societies are today demanding a far greater socialization of their economic life. And to us democracy seems compatible with socialism in all its forms save those, like the psychological and the communistic, which totally eclipse the individual by denying the self-regarding impulse and its objectification in possessions.

INDEX

INDEX Advertising, 9,123-124,130,224 Anarchism, 86-87, 91 Aristotle, 173 Art, 126-128, 132 Bell, dive, 51 Capacity, 165, 177-179 Carnarvon, Earl of, 222 Chance, 4, 205-206 Civic wage, 168-169 Communism, 34, ch. iii, 99-100 Confucius, 192 Consistency, logic of, 14, 69-72, 75-76, 95 Darwin, 105, 179 De Morgan, Α., 19 Dialectical process, 14,63-64, 95 Dictatorship, ch. iv, 215,219-220 Economic interpretation of history, 38-48 Engels, F., 46 Equality, 18-19,23, 75-76, 94,157-160, 162,165,170,173-177,181,189 Evolution, 48-50, 64 Experimentalism, 50-52, 65 Fascism, 98-100 Fictions, eh. vi Films, 127-129, 131, 200-201 Freedom, 153-156 Galileo, 35, 36, 85 Hegel, 63, 64, 69, 71, 98 Hobbes, 16 Hume, 222 Identity, 18, 75-76 Individualism, 75, 223-224

Industrialism, 34, 84, 91-92, 97,105 Injustice, 182 Jefferson, T., 84 Jury trial, 220-221 Justice, 15, 82, 90, chs. vii-viii Kant, 120-121 Kepler, 35 Labor, division of, 83-84, 93-94; theory of value, 161-165 Laws, 217 Lenin, 60, 63-69, 86-91 Liberty, 79, 94, 106, 108-109 Lippmann, W., 125, 131, 222 Locke, 76 Logic, 14, 69-76, 95 Lowell, A. L., 29-30 Machine, 12, 33, 36-37, 83-85, 97, ch. ix Majority, 25-26 Marx, K , 59, 61, 63-64, 66, 70-71, 86, 89-90,93,149,158,176 Materialism, 58-59, 66-68 Measurement, 13, 53, 142 Mill, J. S., 171 Millikan, R. Α., 35 Naturalism, 5, 48, 202-210 Nature, state of, 77-78, 80-82 Need, 176-178 Newton, 36, 44 Number, 16, 19-20, 27, 173-174 Organism, state as, 101-104 Parliamentarism, 26, 79, 95, 221-223 Parmenides, 72 Person, 17-18, 160, 180

234

INDEX

Phenomenalism, 66-67 Plato, 82, 93, 126, 137, 149, 201 Postulates, eh. vi Probability, 21-25,49, 205-206 Progress, 60, 149-153 Propaganda, 9,112 f., ch. ν, 215 Property, 58-60, 158-159, 166-169, 226-229 Proudhon, 158, 165 Publicity, 15, ch. y. Punishment, theories of, 182-192 Quantity, 11, ch. i, 36-37,133 Quantity production, 12-13, 33, 83 Radio, 127-132 Rationalism, 11-12,209 Rationalization, 3, 69, 85-87, 111-112 Representation, 25 Rights, 78, 175 Rousseau, 76, 93, 217

Russian constitution: of 1923, 78, 144; of 1936, 78 Sampling, 25, 29-30 Science, 3-4, 9-10,12-13, 17, ch. ii, 7677,112,132,139,142,195, 200, 226 Social compact, 77-78 Socialism, 87, 89, 159, 162, ch. χ Spinoza, 16 Stalin, 165 Standardization, 34, 53-54, 84, 199 Statistical methods, 21 f., 56, 104^105 133-136 Stephen, J. F., 82 Swabey, M. C., 203 Time, 48-49, 72-75 Tolstoy, 84 Trotsky, L., 60, 65 Truth, 68 Wulf, T., 49