In the course of the last few years the intellectual classes of the West have been giving voice to doom-laden prophecies about Western civilization, lamenting (or rejoicing at) the decay of “capitalism,” denouncing (somberly or gleefully, as the case may be) the weakness and corruption of “democratic” government. Such warnings have not been confined to publicists and commentators. They have also figured in the writings of novelists primarily interested not in public distempers but in private confusions and intimate disasters. Thus, in a recent novel, Au delà de cette limite votre ticket n’est plus valable (“Ticket not valid beyond this point”), Romain Gary draws the picture of an aging man of affairs who finds himself the victim of business and sexual worries. The hero’s intimate crisis is presented as the analogue and reverberation of the crisis of the Western economy, touched off and made manifest by the oil embargo and the great increase in oil prices following the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973. Another recent novel, Muriel Spark’s The Takeover, dealing with the affairs of a very rich woman and the various crooks who cheat her, presents the oil crisis of 1973 as a climacteric in the life of the West: “a complete mutation not merely to be defined as a collapse of the capitalist system, or a global recession, but such a sea-change in the nature of reality as could not have been envisaged by Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud.”

To judge by these two examples, public events in the early 70’s, through some ominous quality they are thought to possess, have conjured up a threat not only to a society and a way of life, but also to the very core of being, a threat which imaginative and intelligent writers have tried to convey through the medium of their fictions. What these events are is not in doubt: not only the Arab-Israeli war and the oil embargo, but also Watergate; the coup d’état in Portugal which bade fair to result in a Communist regime In Lisbon, and which did in fact hand over Mozambique and Angola to clients of the Soviets; Britain in the throes of an inflation which looked as though it was being deliberately used to destroy a society hitherto stable, prosperous, and well-governed; the pitiful debacle in Vietnam; and the horror in Cambodia. Truly, it seemed, in these last few years, as though it were “closing time in the gardens of the West.”

The particular expression of despondency I have just quoted, however, was not elicited by the disasters of the early 70’s but was rather a reaction to earlier disasters, those of the 30’s and of World War II. Its author, Cyril Connolly, was oppressed with the decadence and futility of Western society, which greed and philistinism were destroying. Indeed, a defeatist mood, we may suspect, was then, and is now, justified and made plausible not only by public events which are catastrophic enough, but also by the widely prevalent theory that the crisis of “capitalism” is at hand, that the system is a gigantic “self-destruct” mechanism which finally has to explode.

It is worth recalling that the earlier prophecies derived their plausibility from the terribly attractive simplifications of a Marxist doctrine which offered one grand and unique explanation for a large number of disparate phenomena. May the similar forebodings of the 70’s ultimately have for their basis the same doctrine, which today more than ever is without serious rival as the opium of Western intellectuals?

The catastrophes which have befallen Western interests in the early 70’s—the oil cartel and the ruinous rise in oil prices, the debacles in Vietnam and Angola, the government-manufactured inflations—may, of course, precipitate other catastrophes, and may in the end prove mortal. But whatever the outcome, these misfortunes are by no means linked to one another, and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be seen to exemplify the “contradictions” or the “crisis” of “capitalism.” Thus, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 was one in a series of wars which began in 1948. The oil cartel and the rise in oil prices were the outcome of geography, of increased demand for oil (which betokens prosperity rather than crisis), of improvident energy policies in Western countries, and of pusillanimity in negotiation with the oil states since at least 1970. The young Portuguese officers who carried out the coup d’etat of April 1974 may themselves—as Marxists—have believed in the “crisis of capitalism,” but it is clear that neither Portugal nor its colonies was in the throes of such a “crisis”; in the colonies guerrillas armed and trained by Communist powers and harbored by African states forced the Portuguese government to commit resources and troops in long-drawn-out hostilities, and this resulted in the politicization and radicalization of army officers.¹

To mention these events and their attendant circumstances is immediately to see how disparate they are, and how useless to explain them are these ominous general causes, which yet engender forebodings of dissolution and disaster. For deceptive as they are,

                    all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the
    Edgware Road.

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“Features of the press,” indeed. For the latest example we may turn to a long “conversation” with George F. Kennan which appears in the September Encounter (the conversation, conducted by George Urban, bears the title “From Containment . . . to Self-Containment”). Kennan, it is true, seems quite innocent of the Marxism which, at whatever remove and however indirectly, ultimately dictates the belief that “capitalism” has reached a stage in the West which must end in political collapse. But his arguments reveal the same grandiose ambition to conjoin social trends and political calculations. Thus, Kennan says that he does not “think that the United States civilization of these last 40-50 years is a successful civilization.” He is increasingly “persuaded that the Industrial Revolution itself was the source of most of the bewilderments and failures of this modern age.” The West is “honeycombed with bewilderment and a profound sense of internal decay.” America has nothing to teach the world, and “[we] must confess that we have not got the answers to the problems of human society in the modern age.”

It is, of course, possible that these sweeping statements are, all of them, true. What is by no means clear is why they should be thought to require the political conclusions which Kennan proceeds to draw from them. There is, he asserts, “very little merit in organizing ourselves to defend from the Russians the porno shops in central Washington,” and it is “grotesque” to spend so much energy to save a decaying and bewildered West from Russian domination. Again, Kennan affirms, an “absolutely certain ecological and demographic disaster is going to overtake this planet within the next, I would say, 60-70 years,” and compared with this inevitable death sentence Soviet control over Western Europe would be only “a minor catastrophe.” Perhaps not even that:

A couple of years ago, in the course of our usual summer cruise in the Baltic, my family and I put in at a small Danish port which was having a youth festival. The place was swarming with hippies—motorbikes, girlfriends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise—it was all there. I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town.

Let us suppose that mankind is doomed to perish in some remote or near future. May a country base its present policy toward a rival, and a potential enemy, on such remote and misty speculations? Is Soviet society innocent of industrialism? Why are these exhortations addressed to the United States alone? Will not the calamity affect all mankind? And if all states become convinced that universal disaster is in the offing, can Kennan be sure that discord will then be stilled, and wars banished? The “absolutely certain” disaster he foresees has to do with demography and ecology—that is, population, and resources and their exploitation. May it not occur to the rulers of some state to exterminate all the inhabitants of a set of rival states, and thus at one stroke obtain easement from military, and demographic, and ecological threat? For, after all, there are in the world today states for whose rulers thinking about nuclear warfare is not, automatically, to think the unthinkable. Or consider the hippies, the hideous hippies whom Kennan met on his Baltic cruise. One cannot possibly doubt that, as he says, “one company of robust Russian infantry” would know how to deal with them. But before one’s mind lie the opulent and sophisticated societies of which these hippies are the dregs, the rude products of luxury—to use an expression of Hegel’s: what, one cannot help wondering, would the robust Russian infantry do to them, in the process of driving the hippies out of town? (Fears of this kind Kennan dismisses as unrealistic, because the Russians “can’t run an agricultural system that really works” and “can’t adequately house their population.” Similar shortcomings, we may remember, afflicted the early Arab conquerors, Ghengis Khan, and Attila.)

It is evident from Kennan’s language that he thinks there is a straightforward connection between worth and power. America, he tells us, has “nothing to teach the world”—hence his advocacy of “a gradual and qualified withdrawal from far-flung foreign involvements.” And this simple moralism is reinforced by the belief in an unproblematic relation between society and politics, between, for example, the state of Soviet housing and Soviet readiness for war; or between the prevalence of “porno shops” in Washington and the maintenance of American power in the Mediterranean. The confusion, though not identical, is similar to that which sees behind the multitude of disparate events which take place in the world a presumed “crisis of capitalism” by which wars, revolutions, and other distresses are ultimately explained. These judgments, one might say, are the product of a peculiarly bookish outlook on the world. They depend, for their power to convince, on the acceptance of a long chain of speculation about the character of an economy or a society: speculation which, necessary to the academic enterprise as it must be, is yet always precarious and doubtful, and unfit to serve as a guide for practical action and political decision. But the prestige of academics in the modern world, and particularly in America, is such that economic and sociological disquisitions have come to be looked on as the indispensable foundation on which all serious political debate must rest.

An example of this tendency is a volume entitled The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission.² According to a statement on the title page, the Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973 by private citizens of Western Europe, Japan, and North America to study, and seek solutions to, problems common to these regions. The present report is the work of a Task Force on the Governability of Democracies which was set up in the spring of 1974, and which reported a year later. The members of the Task Force were Michel J. Crozier, director of the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Paris; Samuel P. Huntington, professor of government at Harvard; and Joji Watanuki, professor of sociology at Sophia University, Tokyo. They have each contributed a chapter, respectively, on Western Europe, the United States, and Japan; in writing their papers, the three authors enjoyed the benefit of consulting an eminent body of (mostly academic) experts.

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The considerations which prompted the Trilateral Commission to form the Task Force are set out by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former director of the commission, in an introductory note. Brzezinski begins by asking, “Is democracy in crisis?” and then goes on:

This question is being posed with increasing urgency by some of the leading statesmen of the West, by columnists and scholars, and—if public opinion polls are to be trusted—even by the public. In some respects, the mood of today is reminiscent of that of the early 20’s, when the views of Oswald Spengler regarding “The Decline of the West” were highly popular. This pessimism is echoed, with obvious Schadenfreude, by various Communist observers, who speak with growing confidence of the “general crisis of capitalism” and who see in it the confirmation of their own theories.

What, then, does the Task Force say: is democracy in crisis? We find that it does agree with the “Communist observers” that democracy is indeed in crisis, and also that this has to do with something very much like those observers’ notion of the “general crisis of capitalism.” At the very outset of their study, the members of the Task Force quote some “acute observers” in support of the view that the future for democracy is bleak. One of these is Willy Brandt; in his estimation, “Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a politburo or a junta will not make that much difference.” We do not know on what ground or evidence this expression of despair is based. The Task Force refers to the rediscovery of the fifty-year Kondratieff cycle. According to this theory 1971, like 1921, marks the beginning of a period of economic depression in the industrialized capitalist world which will not come to an end before the close of the century. The argument here is that the politics of the 70’s and the 80’s will therefore be as disastrous as the politics of the decades between the two world wars proved to be. Such a line of reasoning not only asserts a direct connection between economics and politics, but also clearly postulates that economics governs political developments.

The Task Force does not commit itself to these precise theories, but it does clearly take for granted the existence of such a connection. “The viability of democracy in a country,” it emphasizes, “clearly is related to the social structure and social trends in that country”; or, more pointedly, “political democracy requires economic growth.” The statement seems at first sight clear, indeed obvious; but it is really quite puzzling. Democracy, we take it, is a form of government in which authority to rule is deemed to be derived from the governed. As such, it is compatible with a multitude of social structures and social trends. But what the Task Force means by democracy—in a usage that is now quite prevalent—is more than a government deriving its title to rule from the governed. By democracy the authors of this book mean also “regular elections, party competition, freedom of speech and assembly.” But if they mean all these things by democracy, our puzzlement is, if anything, increased, for why then do they also say that a “social structure in which wealth and learning were concentrated in the hands of a very few would not be conducive to democracy”? All the world knows that 18th- or 19th-century England, in which wealth and learning were concentrated in the hands of a few, had regular elections, party competition, and freedom of speech and assembly.

Our perplexity is not diminished as we get deeper into the report. We read in Michel J. Crozier’s chapter that after World War I the need for order in Western Europe was met “by recourse to the Fascist and Nazi regressions,” but that such a “setback” is not likely today; and this is because today there is “no strong will, no sense of mission, no real dedication to fight for the restoration of an earlier moral order,” because “there is not so much will to fight for capitalism or even for free enterprise. No strong movement can be expected therefore,” he declares by way of conclusion, “from a right-wing ‘reactionary’ background.”

What seems to be put before us here is a simple and familiar Marxist schema, according to which “capitalism” and “free enterprise” belong to a bankrupt and moribund—a “reactionary”—epoch, which only “regressions” like Fascism and Nazism attempt, though foolishly and in vain, to revive. This may please the “Communist observers” of whom Brzezinski speaks, but it sheds no light on the “crisis of democracy.” Mussolini and Hitler did not fight in the cause of “free enterprise,” and their movements, far from being “regressions,” were (like Bolshevism) something fairly novel in European history. Here again we see confusion promoted and clarity confounded by these grandiose tableaux in which society, economy, and politics are made to perform in unison before our dazzled eyes.

Consider again—to take another instance—Samuel P. Huntington’s chapter on the United States. According to him the “basic” point in American politics today is this: “The vitality of democracy in the United States in the 1960’s produced a substantial increase in government activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority.” What this statement seems to mean is that there was an increase in public expenditure on “welfare,” and that certain policies and actions by the government (Vietnam, the draft) aroused vehement opposition. But in fact there is no visible connection between the increase in welfare expenditures and the decline in confidence which the government’s conduct of foreign policy produced, nor is there any logical link to be discerned between these phenomena and “the vitality of democracy,” since such vitality would have been equally compatible with a decrease in welfare expenditures and with support for a government’s foreign policy. Huntington, moreover, speaks as if democracy, “participation,” and egalitarianism necessarily go together. This of course is the cant of the age, and one might have hoped it would not have been accepted. For democracy—which concerns the source of government authority—entails nothing about participation, which relates to the way in which government is carried on; and it does not imply that the members of a democratic polity are, or ought to be, equal.

If The Crisis of Democracy cannot be said to enlarge, or to enhance the clarity of, political discourse—quite the contrary—does it at least have anything to report about current conditions in the regions with which it deals? Its main message seems to be that in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, a quarter of a century’s prosperity has brought its own discontents. “In all three Trilateral regions,” the Task Force affirms in the introduction, “a shift of values is taking place away from the materialistic, work-oriented, public-spirited values toward those which stress private satisfaction, leisure, and the need for ‘belonging and intellectual and aesthetic self-fulfillment.’” Expectations have escalated, and their possible—probable—disappointment will create problems, all the greater by reason of the encouragement which governments of all shades have given to the idea that they have it in their power to insure perpetual prosperity for everyone.

The crisis which is the subject of this book, then, is not so much a crisis of democracy as one of prosperity. Yet far from being a new academic discovery, the notion that prosperity spoils people and makes them difficult and flighty is a piece of immemorial wisdom: “Yeshurun waxed fat and kicked,” as Deuteronomy puts it, and Dryden, centuries later, echoes the theme:

God’s pampered people, whom, debauched with
   ease,
No king could govern nor no God could please.

For such murmurings and discontents there may in truth be no efficacious remedy, except, ultimately, the harsh, impersonal one of scarcity and privation. To put it in the language favored by the Task Force: “The new values may not survive recession and resource shortage.” Political science does not seem to have a universal or general recipe to offer to rulers who are faced with such problems. It may tell them to learn, if they can, from their mistakes, and to try and play it by ear—an ability which may have atrophied from reading too many books, and deferring too much to academics.

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In what the Task Force proposes, however, we catch a hint of something distinctly more ambitious, and in its ambitiousness distinctly dirigiste. The introduction declares that the new values—private satisfaction, leisure, etc.—“pose an additional problem for democratic government in terms of its ability to mobilize its citizens for the achievement of social and political goals and to impose discipline and sacrifice upon its citizens in order to achieve those goals.” In the conclusion the Task Force similarly laments that a sense of purpose, hitherto supplied by religion, nationalism, and ideology, is now in short supply. Crozier much admires the strength of European Communist parties, and goes so far as to say that they are “the only institutions left in Western Europe where authority is not questioned,” that “their machine has remained extraordinarily efficient,” and that there is now “no other institution in Europe, not even the state bureaucracies, that can match the Communist parties’ capabilities in this domain.”

Such remarks indicate clearly enough the drift of the book. The Task Force does not believe that the duty of government is to maintain the conditions in which citizens may pursue and realize their own various, spontaneous, self-chosen purposes. It seems, rather, to believe that survival requires governments to prescribe and direct the activities of their citizens. Crozier demands of West European governments nothing less than “a basic mutation in their model of government and their mode of social control.” What precisely do these aspirations entail? The answer is not in doubt. The Task Force, for instance, believes in strong well-organized trade unions. The reason? Because otherwise “the formulation and implementation of a national wage policy become impossible,” and the authority of the government is weakened. Again, the Task Force lays it down that the control of inflation and the promotion of economic growth must have top priority; governments must establish a minimum floor of guaranteed subsistence for all citizens; and specific measures toward these ends must be devised by “economists and planners.” “Political democracy,” the authors sagely conclude, “requires economic growth; economic growth without inflation depends upon effective democratic planning.”

What, we may wonder, is the value of these unqualified, categorical assertions and prescriptions, and by what authority are they made? It is clear that such statements cannot have a basis in historical, or political, or economic science. For do we not know that a “national wage policy” devised and imposed by government, simply because it must sooner or later break down, must also bring the authority of government into disrepute? And as for planning, promoting economic growth, and controlling inflation, can all these imperatives be simultaneously obeyed? Will they not hamstring one another? Have we not seen how many governments have come a cropper on these alleged imperatives, and should we not have been invited to consider the thought that perhaps governments can do very little, that the very attempt by them to do so much may in fact make them fit to do even less?

Doubts of this kind, doubts which are not easily stilled, lead in their turn to other doubts. For we find ourselves asking whether there has not been altogether too much of this kind of exercise, and all to the detriment of the public weal? Whether academics have any special qualification to engage in them? Whether public men are wise to pay so much attention to these heavy disquisitions? And whether they should not allow themselves to entertain—if only for a minute—the thought that three workingmen discoursing of public affairs in a bar may perhaps display more clarity, shrewdness, and common sense?

¹ Such an outcome, we may add, is by no means inevitable, for the Algerian war fostered in the French army attitudes at the very opposite of those found among the Portuguese officers: the army which brought de Gaulle to power in May 1958 was vehemently opposed to a surrender in Algeria such as their hero, only four years later, was to engineer.

² New York University Press, 220 pp., $12.00.