POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Political philosophy in the 20th century Nineteenth-century European civilization had been the first to dominate and pervade the whole world and to create a new self-sustaining productivity in which all eventually might share. But, as Saint-Simon had pointed out, this civilization had a fatal flaw. The rule of law, accepted within the politically advanced states, had never been achieved among them. Heavily armed nations and empires remained in a Hobbesian posture of war, and classical and medieval ideals of world order had long been discarded. Within states, also, laissez-faire capitalism had exacerbated class conflicts, while the decline of religious belief had undermined traditional solidarity. And in 1914, when a general European war broke out, the peoples, contrary to the hopes of cosmopolitan revolutionaries, rallied behind their national governments. When the victorious powers failed to promote world order through the League of Nations, a second global conflict followed, during which were developed weapons so destructive as to threaten life everywhere. In the aftermath of these catastrophes and the worldwide revulsion they occasioned, not least against the European colonial powers, three mainstreams of mid-20th-century political philosophy may be discerned. In liberal-constitutional states, with modified, managerial capitalism and various degrees of public welfare, a political pragmatism has emerged, still maintaining the Aristotelian distinction between the rule of law and government by consent, on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. Second, there has been a reaffirmation of religious or quasi-religious values appealing to conscience and the inner man, expressed persuasively in Existentialist writings. Third, revolutionary ideas have also developed, most of them along Marxist lines. Other revolutionary doctrines appeal to anarchist traditions and are elaborated with neo-Marxist and neo-Freudian insights. Within these categories many shades of opinion are expressed, and only a sampling of representative views is presented here. Political pragmatism The first, pragmatist approach probably has been most powerfully asserted in the United States and Great Britain. The American writer Lewis Mumford, for example, has advocated a militant humanism, defending people against the alienations of megalopolitan life and attacking mechanization and materialism. Like the Greek philosophers and like Tocqueville, whom he admires, Mumford declares, In the end, all our contrivances have but one object; the continued growth of human personalities and the cultivation of the best life possible. The American philosopher and educationist John Dewey, on the other hand, sought to counteract the dehumanization of industrial mass society by a freer form of education, liberating the personality. Both these writers criticize the existing structure of society and its modified capitalism, but try to work within it. Another humanist, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, was more radical. Russell carried into political philosophy an aristocratic individualism, campaigning for toleration, sexual freedom, compassion, and common sense. He broadcast elite values to a mass society and attacked materialism, crass bureaucracy, and war. He twice went to prison in pacifist protest and was obsessed with the universal menace of nuclear weapons. He denounced warlike political theories: Remember your humanity, he said, and forget the rest. On political tactics often inept, Russell won wide influence as a man of principle, concerned to adapt archaic institutions to the changed environment of mankind. The Austrian-born British philosopher Sir Karl Popper has demonstrated the pretensions of the 19th-century determinist philosophies such as those of Hegel and Marx, while an English historian and philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin, has ridiculed the idea of a supposedly objective march of history. Berlin also rejects the Marxist belief that all values are conditioned by the place men occupy on the moving stair of time. Marx, he points out, was as romantic as Hegel in envisaging a world which moves from explosion to explosion in order to fulfil the great cosmic design. Moral values, he insists, are not just a subjective gloss unworthy of consideration on the great hard edifice of historical construction. No single formula can be found, Berlin argues, whereby the various objectives of men can be harmoniously realized. There are many human goals, which may well be in conflict with one another. This empirical, pluralist, and liberal political philosophy has much in common with the approach of the Frenchman mile Durkheim and the Englishman Graham Wallas, both founding fathers of modern sociology. Statesmen and political philosophers, they contend, should not play the part of prophets but rather confine themselves to investigating social patterns and the ideas that are part of them. Ways might thus be found of promoting the survival and vitality of a given society in its particular setting. Graham Wallas was concerned to adapt constitutional societies by consent. He wanted to nationalize many essential means of production, including transport and communications, and through increased taxation strengthen social democracy by greater economic and social equality. He was not a revolutionary but a reformer, who understood the precariousness of civilization and the dangers of nationalism, which could only bring, he prophesied, centuries of warfare and regression. He advocated a worldwide and constitutionalist scientific humanism, inspired by the idea of the solidarity of the whole species, for the master task of civilized mankind is to promote the conditions leading to the good life. Other political sociologists who accepted the established order did not expect to improve it. The Italian Vilfredo Pareto, and Gaetano Mosca, a Sicilian-born lawyer, set themselves not to state what they wanted but to record what occurs in society. Pareto's Mind and Society (1916) is an elaborate, quasi-mathematical classification of nonlogical political myths. Its form is daunting, but its insights are penetrating, especially a hilarious dissection of Rousseau's General Will, of which, Pareto concludes, the intrinsic logico-experimental value . . . is zero. Ranging sardonically over history, Pareto insists that elites will always manipulate society, power merely shifting from one set of rulers to another. Mosca, in The Ruling Class (1939), analyzed how political myths are exploited. He also concluded that elites everywhere are bound to rule and that the least bad government occurs when abuse of power is checked by legal means; that is, by the rule of law. Mosca admired the liberal constitutionalism of the 19th century, although he was aware of its precariousness and limitations. He argued that there is no total explanation of history, which has always been the unpredictable outcome of competing and interacting interests. One thing is certain, nevertheless: in various forms there will always be a struggle for predominance. Mosca's views, more clearly set out than Pareto's, have a salutary realism. The American philosopher and critic James Burnham also analyzed shifts of power. In The Managerial Revolution (1941) he propounded a theory of bureaucratic revolution: the rulers of the new society, the class with power and privilege, will be the bureaucratic managers of super states. In The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom (1943), he reinterprets Machiavelli and cites Mosca as a modern Machiavellian. Following Pareto's idea of the circulation of elites, he asserts that, when a ruling class becomes inadequate, frivolous, or bored, loses confidence in itself and its myths, and becomes irresolute in deploying necessary force, new elites are bound to take overas in the managerial revolution of the 20th century.