The present essay was first delivered as an address before the Conservative party’s National Summer School at Oxford in July of 1957.

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Since the time of the French Revolution, a substantial proportion of the most politically conscious and active people have tended to equate Politics with Utopianism. Yet the two are, in essence, quite different. Politics I would define, in Aristotelian terms, as the art of husbandry, the technique of administering a state conceived of as being an enlarged household. It has often been said that politics involves a choice between evils or, more charitably, an acceptance of the second-best. This is because politics is concerned with very intractable material—and by that, I mean men. And it is not only men who have to be administered. It is also men who are engaged in permanent debate as to how and by whom the task should be carried out. In this sense politics is of course a struggle for power, and thus charged with an ambivalence which can hardly ever be resolved by any attempt to apportion the share of disinterested conviction and the part of the urge for power that respectively go to make a statesman and to shape a policy decision. The two are so intertwined that the cynic who can see only naked ambition and the naive doctrinaire who acknowledges only principles incarnate will prove equally wrong.

Utopianism, on the other hand, signifies that one assumes as possible (or even expects as inevitable) an ultimate condition of absolute harmony in which individual self-expression and social cohesion, though seemingly incompatible, will be combined. In other words, politics is concerned with the careful manipulation of concrete data of experience, by reference to the logic and to the limitations inherent in any given historical situation; whereas utopianism postulates a definite goal or preordained finale to history, for the attainment of which you need to recast and remold all aspects of life and society in accordance with some very explicit principle. It could be said that while starting out with the wish to secure to man the means of full self-expression, utopianism ends with a determination to impose a wholly impersonal pattern. It tends, in other words, to replace history by sociology. The tragedy is that any principle must be embodied in men. The higher the validity claimed for the objective pattern, the wider the powers and the fewer the men to whom these powers may be granted.

Before the late 18th century, the Utopian approach was confined to literary exercises—social satires and allegories—or to the life of relatively small societies or sects of extreme exaltés. Then it won dominance, or at least wide currency, on the continent of Europe and became there, in a variety of ways, the common denominator of socialist, communist, and kindred schools of political thought. Why did this change take place when it did?

In the first place, because in the age of absolutism or of government by hereditary privileged groups, those at the helm were concerned primarily with keeping order and upholding the prestige of the country in the world; rather with preventing discontent than with making the peoples free and happy. The peoples then—it will be said—decided to shake off tutelage and be masters of their own fate and makers of their own salvation. It seems to me however that these changes and the factors that brought them about are not in themselves enough to account for the emergence of utopianism in political life.

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The decisive factor was, I think, the decline of the religious sanction, and in particular the decline of belief in the doctrine of original sin. I am not concerned with the theological validity of this doctrine, but I do believe it to contain an extremely important psychological truth. It stands for the terrific mystery summed up in the words: Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor, “I know and respect what is right, but I do what is wrong.” It teaches us that evil actions are due, not necessarily to lack of knowledge, but rather to some failure of will, some defect in the mechanism of man, some “weakness of our mortal nature.” Now once this doctrine is taken for granted, one accepts without question a clear distinction between theory and practice, between what should be and what can be, between private morality based on natural law and political morality which is vitiated by the persistence of evil in human nature, between (if you like) church and state, heaven and earth. The conclusion then is clear: that man and society will never be able to save themselves solely by their own exertions, but that grace, coming from above or outside, is needed for salvation. Furthermore, men’s unruly and weak nature requires government from above, by a God-appointed church, Divine Right of Kings, an aristocracy, or—in more abstract terms—ancient traditions, deep-seated beliefs, fixed habits.

With the ushering in of the Age of Reason there emerged and grew in intensity a belief that man was by nature good, or at least perfectible. The natural urges of man were good, and if given a free rein, would set themselves into a pattern of harmony. A rational order was calculated to insure a harmonious reconciliation of all interests. The cohesive structure of the universe was, in brief, a guarantee that if all impediments to self-expression were removed, a state of absolute justice based on the supremacy of reason could and would be achieved.

The doctrine of original sin was denounced as a conspiracy by forces of exploitation and oppression. It was held to be an important argument in favor of the claim that the people are in need of superiors to keep them down. Repressive policies, it was said, diverted the energy of the natural impulses into channels of anti-social perversion, which strengthened still more the pretensions of the ruling orders.

With the decline of religious faith the problem which the prophet defined in the Bible, “Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?” received a new interpretation. Before, the question could be considered on the transcendental plane: one had the assurance that the account would be settled in the hereafter, in another place. Once religious belief was undermined, however, the evils and injustices of this life could no longer be regarded as merely temporary or temporal; therefore, they ceased to be tolerable, and men began to put their faith in the achievement of perfect justice and the settling of accounts in this world, not the next.

It is true that the right of resistance to temporal rulers is very ancient, and that tyrannicide has often had the vehement approval of theologians. But from the late 18th century onward, all this took on a completely new character. Men now rose in arms, not to burn, kill, and ravage in a kind of elemental chagrin, but to effect in society some revolutionary transformation; not to correct a specific social evil, but to abolish evil itself. Every riot or rebellion seemed to be accompanied by a bell tolling for the Day of Judgment; and when the Industrial Revolution began to overwhelm an unprepared society with unprecedented problems, it was seen not as a period of transient crisis but as an apocalyptic hour.

Men had been taught that they had a right to expect happiness forthwith, and a series of great technological discoveries seemed to have created instruments to ease man’s toil and to satisfy his needs, while industrial organization and division of labor appeared to foreshadow a high degree of social cohesion. Instead of fulfilling these hopes, the Industrial Revolution seemed at first to produce nothing but evil: bondage to the machine, wretched misery, and recurrent crisis. It was as if the intentions of nature to bring salvation had been wilfully perverted by the intervention of some evil design. And the conclusion suggested itself that a forceful intercession was required to frustrate the evil forces and to lend a hand to destiny to take its predetermined course.

The tragic paradox of utopianism has been that instead of bringing about, as it promised, a system of final and permanent stability, it gave rise to utter restlessness, and in place of a reconciliation between human freedom and social cohesion, it brought totalitarian coercion.

There is a 19th-century story of an Englishman inquiring at a public library for the text of one of the French constitutions and being told, “We do not keep periodicals here.” The fact that within twenty-five years France experienced a succession and variety of regimes, coups, and revolutions, destroyed the sense that there were certain things that could be taken for granted, accepted as permanent facts of life. Hence the luxuriant crop of Utopian blueprints, social and constitutional, presented as though the whole slate had been wiped clean, as though you could start from scratch. Hence also the terrible instability of political life and the violence of political warfare. For utopianism is based upon the assumption that reason alone—not habit, or tradition, or prejudice—can be the sole criterion in human affairs. But the end of this assumption is that reason, like mathematics, must command universal consent, since it has sole and exclusive truth. In fact, reason turns out to be the most fallible and precarious of guides; because there is nothing to prevent a variety of “reasons” from cropping up, each claiming sole and exclusive validity, and between which there can be no compromise, no arbiter except force. To put it in another way: utopianism postulates free self-expression by the individual and at the same time absolute social cohesion. This combination is possible only if all individuals agree. All individuals, however, do not agree. Therefore, if you expect unanimity, there is ultimately no escape from dictatorship. The individual must either be forced to agree, or his agreement must be engineered by some kind of fake plebiscite, or he must be treated as an outlaw, or traitor, or counter-revolutionary subversive, or whatever you will.

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The great Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt, a grim prophet of doom and not a very charitable person, pointed out how the notion that men were perfectible apart from the grace of God, and that Utopia here on earth was possible and almost inevitable, was bound to produce arrogantly presumptuous attitudes. Before this, men had felt that life was, to some extent, a sacrifice; certainly it demanded a spirit of service and duty. From now on, they began to think first and foremost, and sometimes exclusively, not of their duties but of their rights, not of what was due from them, but of what was due to them. They demanded a larger share, a “fair” share, an equal share; and since the quantity of things which can be distributed is limited, those whose expectations were disappointed were consumed by bitterness and envy and frustration. Hence, the decline of belief in the religious doctrine of original sin and the rise of belief in the secular doctrine of the rights of man, far from having produced happiness, in fact engendered misery, since it encouraged appetites that could never be satisfied.

At the same time, instead of serving as a challenge to nobler actions and greater humanity, the doctrine of the rights of man became a pretext for the pursuit of greater enjoyment, and nothing but enjoyment, Burkhardt thought. Governments that were not fulfilling material expectations were abolished one after another by restless peoples. This provided the opportunity for demagogues and dictators to appear on the stage, promising a new heaven and a new earth. Seeking to satisfy the material cravings which put them in power, they had to place an obsessive emphasis on higher production; and since, to achieve this, an appeal to idealism is rarely if ever enough, they had to induce people to work harder by offering them even more unequal rewards or by threatening them with very heavy punishments—in the Soviet context, stakhanovism or Siberia. Lacking such legitimacy as comes from lineage, or even from the ballot-box, they had to keep those whom they ruled together by thrills and stunts; and the most effective stunt of all, of course, is to create a war emergency, a pervasive sense of national peril.

As against the indubitable gains we have to set off the vast losses. If indeed we have achieved an unprecedentedly wide distribution of good things, mass production of shoddy standardized goods has killed the craftsman’s pride in creative achievement. The huge crowds at universities do not signify a growing thirst for learning, but a scramble for jobs and positions by a restless and dissatisfied academic Lumpenproletariat. Illiteracy has practically been abolished, but never have millions been treated to coarser vulgarity in print than now. A person may now travel more safely on the highway and be more certain of not being molested in the street after midnight. But of how little account is this higher degree of personal safety in comparison with the nightmare of total war, keeping in deadly grip the whole of mankind? We have learned to deal with epidemics and solved many problems thought previously insoluble, but the complexity of modern civilization has created problems which are too vast for the human intellect to comprehend and before which the ordinary man stands utterly baffled and wholly impotent. So much for Burckhardt’s chilling criticisms of the modern Weltanschauung, based on the denial of original sin and the unshakable faith in progress, and represented by the advent of “the masses.”

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Returning to the more strictly political sphere, we come now to the essential difference between the Utopian approach and the English conservative approach. (I think of the English conservative tradition as having two branches, a Tory branch and a Labor branch, the one a little more so, the other a little less so!) Now the English constitution, as Edmund Burke described it, is a “prescriptive” constitution, one “whose sole authority is that it has existed time out of mind.” It is really based upon habits, upon a tradition of behavior, upon ways of feeling, upon implicit, inarticulate assumptions. These are more deeply rooted than abstract principles of reason; they are more stable and therefore more predictable; and they are safer and far less likely to lead to violence because they leave room for compromise.

It has been said with a good deal of justice that in the first half of the 19th century a revolutionary situation existed in England. How was it that England not merely weathered but practically escaped the storm, and gradually readjusted her society to the new situation, whereas France was convulsed by revolution after revolution? In part, no doubt, it was because the safety valves—in pulpit, press, petition, and public meeting—were left open in England, and because the rule of law, in spite of many declamatory radical protests, really did give men a conviction that things were not arbitrary, that they knew where they stood. These conditions were unlikely to give rise to that type of messianic revolutionary experience in which the past is viewed as completely dominated by the forces of evil, and the future—which will come after a violent break—as guaranteeing a world of harmonious perfection. Neither were such conditions likely to engender the sort of mood that makes the revolutionary trustees of posterity feel that they owe no obedience to the law of the land—which they look upon as an instrument of class exploitation and absolutist rule—but only to some unwritten law of the revolutionary Utopian future.

The truth is that the thing was psychologically impossible in England. Indeed, it is amusing to read how, during the Chartist troubles in this country, some Chartists would sigh, “Oh! we are a slovenly, slow-witted people. If we could hire some fifty professional revolutionaries from France, the thing would work!” One may remember, too, how after the Chartist failure a decision was arrived at to try physical force; but then they decided to address a request to the various branches asking them to debate the point whether to use violence or not to use violence. Legality has entered into the English subconsciousness, into the English blood. It is quite hopeless to rely on the English to make a real revolution.

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As I have tried to convey, a revolution does not in modern times signify merely an uprising of protest; it means a sustained and violent effort to make all things new. I believe one is entitled to draw the conclusion from the history of the last one hundred and fifty years or so that, although utopianism preaches peace and harmony, the sort of social revolution its pursuit involves has not proved feasible without war. Complete social transformation is impossible without totalitarianism, and this is itself impossible to sustain in an atmosphere of everyday existence. Only in an atmosphere charged with peril, with emergency actual or latent, can all opponents be branded as traitors and the state’s power over persons and property be total. The French Revolution established its hold in conditions of war; the Russian Revolution was a by-product of war; the Chinese Revolution was the result of war. The 1848 revolutions, on the other hand, failed because there was no war.

This leads me to consider the problems facing us in the world today in the struggle between the Soviet Union, representing revolutionary utopianism, and the West The essence of modern utopianism is that, to be effective, it requires universality. It claims to offer a doctrine applicable to all nations and all races. It proceeds on the assumption that it cannot permanently thrive in any one country so long as it does not thrive in all. It is in a continuous state of siege against its enemies, real or imagined, from within or from outside. It assumes, as you may read in the homely sayings of Mr. Khrushchev, that what it regards as the Civitas Dei must inevitably replace what it regards as the Civitas Diaboli, and it is quite ready to give a helping hand to the predetermined processes of history.

Now, it makes all the difference in the world whether Utopians in different countries constitute, as in the 19th century, a closely connected international confraternity, or whether they constitute, as in the last thirty or forty years, a single army with its GHQ in the capital of a great power. This is so for two reasons. First, because if the GHQ is in the capital of a great power, then the national interests of that power and the ideological needs of the revolution become inseparable, and one never knows which is which. Secondly, if all the Utopians act upon the assumption that they are an army, then “theirs not to reason why” or to question the global strategy of the General Staff: they must blindly accept and fulfill orders from GHQ, however disconcerting, however incomprehensible, however wrong.

Indeed, it has hitherto been assumed by Communists that the Soviet system was proceeding on the lines of a deterministic science. It was held to be foolproof. Again and again when you pointed out to them errors or inconsistencies, they would smile at you with a maddening superiority; they were profoundly and complacently convinced that there was a science that they alone had grasped—the science of Marxism.

Two new factors have now been thrown into the situation. The first is the self-questioning that has followed “de-Stalinization”; for, if it is admitted that the regime could have been so violated, so distorted, by the arbitrary action and capricious behavior of a single tyrant, what becomes of its “scientific” character? The second factor is the emergence of “national Communism,” of the doctrine of “many roads to Socialism,” in China, in Yugoslavia, and more recently in Poland; for once this doctrine is admitted, what is left of the universalism of the ideology, the monolithic character of the movement, the unquestioned and unquestionable infallibility of the GHQ? All this may add up to a decisive breach in the fortress. It has not happened yet, because a fierce rearguard action is being fought; but may we not be witnessing a decline of revolutionary utopianism, similar to the lowering of atmosphere that came at the end of the wars of religion, when, utterly exhausted, both sides realized that continued war meant universal doom? Then “enthusiasm” became a word of opprobrium, and men turned their attention to science and the art of living.

Let me conclude on a different note. I believe that, potent though the craving for innovation may be at any given moment, ultimately the conservative instinct is the stronger. I believe, too, that a curse is besetting utopianism. While it has its birth in the noblest impulses of man, it is doomed to be perverted into an instrument of tyranny and hypocrisy. For those two deep-seated urges of man, the love of freedom and the yearning for salvation, cannot be fulfilled both at the same time. But I would utter one word of warning to those who might react against utopianism so strongly as to adopt a contemptuous, sneering attitude to human beings, to say that they are such a rotten lot that they do not deserve anything to be done for them, and to deny the possibility of constructive change and genuine progress, such as England has known from the Reform Bill to the Welfare State. Such an attitude of pessimism is unwarranted, and lacks generosity and foresight. We must try to do good—but with a full and mature knowledge of the limitations of politics. Bertrand Russell once told us, in another context, that we had to proceed in the spirit of unyielding despair; and Georges Duhamel, the famous French writer, has said: “Toutes choses sont à leur place dans ce monde misérable, même les désirs pathétiques pour un monde meilleur.”

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