I confess to having read Sidney Hook’s new book1 with disappointment I admire some of Professor Hook’s earlier publications and also several chapters of this book. I believe, moreover, that I share many of the practical political conclusions of his present volume and perhaps also some of the fundamental judgments in which these conclusions are rooted. I respect in Mr. Hook a clear-spoken, tireless opponent of Soviet Communism. But I do not find that his new book constitutes a substantial contribution to the analysis of contemporary politics, or a step forward in the philosophy of democracy, or a serious examination of the roots of government in the United States.
Mr. Hook’s new book set me to recalling the sad career of an entirely different book, Stanvac in Indonesia, 2 one of a series entitled “United States Business Performance Abroad.” The Stanvac volume was prepared by a considerable professional staff as part of a general effort to demonstrate to foreign, poorer countries the benefits they could derive from investments by progressive American business. But the book omitted decisive issues (profit return, the non-participation of Indonesians in management, etc.), and it was consequently regarded by Indonesians as a phony. It added up only to Americans saying to other Americans what both—speakers and listeners—already knew, or rather thought they knew. Similarly, it seems to me that in Mr. Hook’s new book, and especially in “Part One: Studies in Democracy,” we have an American democrat talking to other American democrats. Does this talk reach down to fundamentals? Does it deal with what is really determinative? Would what is being said carry conviction to an outsider, or appear to him to come to grips with problems he found difficult? Or would such an outsider feel rather that he had been tendered only a repetition of stale formulas?
Mr. Hook identifies democracy with the principle of “freely given consent.” He finds two important truths at the basis of democracy: “. . . first, that men are responsible; and second, that they are sufficiently rational to know when and where the shoe pinches and when and where not.” These two considerations, he says, exclude democracy in insane asylums and institutes for the feeble-minded.
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By the Canals of Jakarta (or the waters of Babylon), we may consider these truths and discuss their adequacy for the foundation of government. “Well,” says my Indonesian (or Iraqi) friend, “what Mr. Hook says is interesting. I have read him carefully. Our people would, of course, know when a shoe pinches—when they have shoes. But that is not our problem. We have economic (and other) problems, which call for measures much more complicated than those to ease the pinching of a shoe. The consequences of alternative choices will, in some cases, not be felt for years. Our people are unable to judge such far-reaching alternatives. Talk to them, and you will see. They cannot begin to understand the terms of these problems. I have read, in your Western political science, that people who cannot judge of measures can still judge of men, but I do not feel the force of your Western epigrams. I am not confident that I have any rational ground for believing that our people can judge the qualities of the alternative political leaderships that might compete here for a popular vote. And I wonder whether most of humanity is not nearer to the position of our people than to what you say is the political capacity of the people of the United States. How can you be so confident in recommending democracy to one and all? Espousal of democracy is a conventional gospel with which you warm yourselves at home, but have you considered your responsibility for the disappointments it may bring in other countries?
“It seems to me also that your Mr. Hook wrongly minimizes the extent to which the stability of government in the United States is the result of a general social consensus, achieved in your democratic society but, to a considerable extent, outside the processes of government. When you once divided deeply, over the freeing of the Negro slaves, the mechanism of what Mr. Hook calls ‘the strategic freedoms’ broke down. Then you had four years of civil war. I know that democracy is a technique for achieving agreement, but it, in turn, rests on a measure of agreement. It is, of course, formally true that, if only you agree on the technique of getting decisions, you don’t have to agree on the outcome. But that is merely like saying that people can ride on the same bus even if they wish to get off at different places. The places must not be too different—or else they have to set a value on bus riding beyond that of getting to their destinations. Now, our people have no special historic attachment to political democracy; they regard it quite instrumentally. They reject it, if it doesn’t promptly yield the things they want. That may reflect immaturity, lack of long-sightedness, but I must live out my life with the people I have—though I hope they will change.
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“I am puzzled also as to how Mr. Hook can fail, in writing about your American government, or any other government, to emphasize the significance of the two critical factors of political leadership and administrative professionalism. What is a modern government without these? The Communists seem to have pre-empted the emphasis on the role of leadership in depth, and nobody gives proper emphasis today to administrative professionalism in government—unless it is the British. Mr. Hook says, I know, that we are making ‘a claim to infallibility’ if we regard ourselves as better capable than the mass of our people of choosing a general economic program. He is wrong. We make no claim of infallibility; we think ourselves only probably less in error than those who know nothing about the matter.
“You tell me there is inevitable partiality in any judgment I make of myself and, therefore, in the judgment I make that I am qualified for political leadership, or that my friends are qualified. Very well, I try to guard against partiality. I can guard myself still further, and relinquish politics altogether. I could go into education and leave politics to the less fastidious. They won’t organize government on the basis of ‘freely given consent.’ At best, any consent will be manipulated; in part, it will be coerced. As you know, in our country, elections are not ‘held’; they are ‘made.’ Do you suggest that I slink away? Leave the political field to others?
“I remember your John Stuart Mill saying somewhere that, at some stages in human development—and he is not talking about insane people or the feeble-minded, as Mr. Hook does—there is nothing feasible for a community except ‘. . . implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.’ Perhaps that is our condition. Maybe the Russians are decisively ahead of us in the capacity to choose their political leaders; their Peter the Great came two and a half centuries ago, but our Sukarno (or Kassem) has come only now. Even in England a hundred years ago (and more recently), did not the stability and success of government derive not only from democracy but also from the continuity of British social allegiances, which led people to choose their representatives primarily from a single traditional governing class? We have no such continuous allegiances.
“In all your talk about democratic societies, I think you overemphasize their activity, forgetting their passivity. Man is not a vegetable, but neither is he always an alert, active, creative personality. Are you not exaggerating the importance of ‘freely given consent’ in your total social process? Such acts of consent are, for you, the grains of salt that give savor to the whole mixture. But your people don’t participate in politics actively, the way the citizens of an ancient Greek city did. In fact, I understand your political parties are little more than lifeless shells, so far as any daily participation of the ordinary citizen is concerned.
“I admire what Nehru has achieved with parliamentary government in India, but I do not know how much of his accomplishment is due to specially gifted leadership, a British-trained administrative class, or other things we don’t have. The Indians have not made much progress toward real equality of opportunity. More people starve on their streets than on ours—though their wealthy people frequently call themselves socialists.
“We do not turn our backs on democracy; we favor a good deal of what we think it means. We are against the arbitrary inequalities of status, opportunity, and income which are the inheritance of centuries in our country. We wish our people were all capable of participating, freely and actively, with some understanding, in public affairs. I would like to find a way to more democracy in our country. I would like some suggestions of what we can do politically to help ourselves go forward in these next years. But Mr. Hook’s formulations of the problems of government do not help me, with his men that are responsible and his pinching shoes.”
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Mr. Hook has not spoken to my fancied Indonesian or Iraqi (though there are passages in his book that indicate such an intention). He has not even lifted the veil of that problem. And on political democracy for more advanced societies, Mr. Hook has said almost nothing that Hans Kelsen did not write thirty years3 ago or even Henry Sidgwick seventy years4 ago. (I beg the translation from Kantian positivism or critical Utilitarianism into American pragmatism.) And though it is no disrespect to Mr. Hook to compare him with those great predecessors, the comparison also reflects no advance. A 20th-century theory of government that bends itself to the plough must speak to honorable and sincere men in Warsaw as well as in Washington, in Calcutta as well as in Chicago. Mr. Hook does not.
Where Mr. Hook does join with the political thought that prevails in most of the world is in calling himself a socialist. Yet, like many of our contemporaries who call themselves socialists, Mr. Hook avoids endorsement of a program of public ownership of the means of production and distribution. He explains the principles of his own socialism, thus: “. . . no man should be a spiritual valet to another, . . . irrespective of the way any man earns an honorable living he should be treated with the same dignity accorded to any other, and . . . his material conditions of life should be such as to enable him to achieve his full growth as a human being. This, together with the specific programs necessary to realize it, is what I mean by socialism.” (My italics.)
I do not doubt that Mr. Hook’s formulation of his own socialist position is generously meant But it seems to me to have the mellifluous tone of a college commencement speech together with the unmeaningful content familiar in that kind of address. There is nothing substantive in Mr. Hook’s statement that would be rejected by Harold MacMillan, Gamel Abdul Nasser, or Nelson Rockefeller. Socialism is not to be distinguished from other public positions today (if ever) by its moral ideal, but rather by its specific economic and organizational programs for the realization of that ideal. Mr. Hook espouses no such particular programs, but points out that he supports whatever programs may be found necessary. He lays stress on the present scope of public economic responsibility in the United States—but surely appreciation of American realities does not constitute an espousal of socialism. Mr. Hook also expresses, in very general terms, a preference for “partial planning” and for the deliberate reservation of some areas of economic activity to private enterprise. After that, he would test every proposed step of socialization “by its probable consequences on the democratic life of the community.” Except for a little different emotional color, neither Mr. MacMillan nor Mr. Rockefeller would disagree substantially with that. But, of course, emotion is something that weighs. I do not expect to see Mr. Hook stepping forward any minute as a Rockefeller Republican or, if he were qualified by nationality, as a British Conservative! It would nevertheless appear that for Mr. Hook the symbol of socialism is today litle more than a valued reminiscence and a cherished piety. Yet it remains important, and particularly so for Americans, to remember that an affirmative attitude toward the symbol of socialism is something Mr. Hook shares with most of mankind.
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Though Mr. Hook’s stand for “socialism” seems loose and permissive, on the question of “democracy” he shows a desire to be more severe and exclusive. I understand his impulse. I too have gritted my teeth on hearing the Communist dictatorship described as the true democracy or the people’s democracy. But we must discard any idea of progress in the language of this matter. “Democracy” has now become an affirmative symbol in almost every country. The official spokesmen of nearly every government proclaim that they have eliminated some inequality or prejudice and publicly congratulate themselves on being the real democrats. It is profitless to complain. Democracy is not a word from any science. Its copyright is not the possession of any one author, still less of any society. No one has the warrant of history, of political theory—or even of plain good manners—to insist that the word be employed only as he finds most useful, accurate, or meaningful. This word is a weapon, and no enemy will offer it in unilateral disarmament!
Professor Palmer identified three persons who gave early modern popular use to the words “democracy” and “democrat,” in a favorable sense: Thomas Paine (1791), Maximilien Robespierre (1794), and the later Pope Pius VII (1797). The three will not be claimed with equal avidity by all modern democrats! Robespierre set the dominant tradition of those Frenchmen who called themselves democrats through 1848, and it would be arguable that Lenin has as much claim to him as has Mr. Hook. For Tocqueville (1835), democracy is equality of political and social status, and he recognizes both democracy with political liberty and democracy without political liberty. The latter usage will undoubtedly seem strained to Mr. Hook; he has not hesitated to teach the language of democracy to the Stalinites, but will he teach it to Tocqueville also?
John Stuart Mill’s Representative Government (1861) is not infrequently claimed as a classic exposition of policital democracy; Mill advocated plural voting up to the point where the plural voters have as many votes as all other persons. If we reject all these, where will we find authority for our verbal purity? Better that we should be content to recognize the many colorings of involvement, the diversities of value and intent that all go by the same word.
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When G. D. H. Cole came to the end of a laborious and dedicated life, he had published six volumes of A History of Socialist Thought5 as well as some three dozen other books. With respect to information, Cole was outstandingly qualified to write this history; it is unlikely that more than a handful of other men will ever have read so widely in the literature of socialism. Moreover, Cole was notably fair-minded; no reader of these heavy volumes can fail to see that he tries constantly to give sympathetic understanding to every variety of socialism—if not always to socialism’s enemies! Cole came to public questions from philosophy; social ideas, for him, were not merely to be apprehended, with all possible empathy, but also to be analyzed, evaluated, accepted, or rejected. Many of his evaluations seem to me well considered. Yet his history will, I believe, be consulted rather than read, and it will not be the truly authoritative source for much except some episodes in the development of British socialism. The six volumes contain hundreds of pages of commonplace material. He only occasionally pressed analysis home, and, when he did, the results were rarely novel. He is almost unfailingly sensible, but he does not stimulate with the new perceptions of a truly creative historian. Nobody ever got a new pair of eyes from reading Cole.
Cole first came to public attention about 1913, as a proponent of Guild Socialism, in rebellion against what he called the “bureaucratic collectivism” of the Webbs, Shaw, and other Fabians. The Webbs, he said, supported only “a discreetly regulated freedom,” and Shaw “fundamentally, did not care a button about democracy.” Cole was, like them, first of all a socialist—an enemy of the prevailing regime of private property and a proponent of collective or public ownership of the means of production and distribution. In this, he never changed: though he came eventually to be profoundly repelled by the tyranny, brutality, and obscurantism of Soviet Communism, he would not join with any non-socialist in opposition to any Soviet policy or action. First things first, and no contaminating company! But Cole called himself also a social pluralist. (Not that he was one of those socialists who find the plurality of preferences usefully expressed through a market mechanism. Indeed it seemed to me—when listening to him lecture, twenty-five years ago—that he regarded “price,” “market,” and “competition” as three especially dirty words.) He saw a meaningful freedom only in a society based on national guilds.
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His Guild Socialism begins with a rejection of mere parliamentary democracy. General representation, he holds, is a delusion; no man can be represented generally by another. But plural representations, each for a specific function, make sense. In particular, occupational representation is significant—and the closer to daily life the more significant. Men spend most of their waking lives at work. That is where democracy is important, in the individual workshop, factory, or farm. There men are either free or enslaved: whether or not they can vote once every four or five years is of much less importance. True democracy is workers’ democracy, the control over the individual production establishment by its workers “with hand and brain.” This is the first stage in Cole’s thinking.
After the democracy of the individual establishment, comes the joinder of all workers belonging to a single industry in one national guild—one of steel workers, another of building workers, etc. All the guilds in the nation form “a partnership,” operating by mutual consent, none overruling any other, none coercing another. What will prevent the guild of the steel industry from raising the price of steel? What will prevent the guild of the building workers from raising the price of construction? Cole avoided answering such questions. He deliberately sets up the classic economist’s dilemma of the indeterminacy of price under oligopoly. Having created numerous Golems in the form of national guilds, he concludes that these monsters will live in peace with one another. Cole called this design industrial democracy, and it remained, apparently, his libertarian socialist creed to the end.
At the time of writing his history, Cole acknowledged that Guild Socialism was dead everywhere—except, he said (in his last volume, signed December 1957), in the Histadrut in Israel. He notes this exception twice, though entirely without particulars. The facts are, of course, quite otherwise. Neither the Israeli kibbutz nor the Histadrut factory embodies Guild Socialist principles. The kibbutz is not an occupational establishment; it is a self-contained local community. It involves just that unifying of all immediate social experience in a single community that Cole was most concerned to fragmentize into pluralistic, functional representations. On the other hand, the individual Histadrut factory is not controlled by the workers in that particular enterprise; organized in a trade union, the workers confront their particular factory management in much the same way as workers confront management in the New York subway system. The guild is nowhere.
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For fifty years Cole was an active intellectual figure in the British socialist movement. He read everything about socialism that he could lay hands on, and he gradually built up a very wide circle of acquaintances among socialists all over the world. What, after all this experience, did he come to regard as being of the essence of socialism? Three things.
First, all socialists, he said “. . . take their starting point from the recognition of the key importance of the ‘social problem’ and from the belief that men ought to take some sort of collective or associative action to deal with it.” By this criterion, socialism differs from all doctrines whose emphasis is exclusively—or perhaps even primarily—on individual effort, self-cultivation, individual sobriety, individual skill, and individual abstinence (including, as in Malthus, abstaining from having children). It is perhaps only an aberration, but an intelligible one, that socialism tends to be hostile both to personalist religion and psychoanalysis: they are regarded as seeking remedies in too individual a direction. Socialism emphasizes, in contrast, that society must reorganize itself properly.
Second, all socialists hold that something is basically wrong in the economic organization of non-socialist societies, a wrong related to the key institutions of property and competition. This bad organization affects both the distribution of incomes and the conduct of production. Private ownership of property results in a distribution of opportunity and income that is unjust and, at the same time, deprives society of great human potentials. The competitive struggle for daily bread is harsh and strident, demeaning if not debasing. Moreover, the private competitive order is not an efficient producer. The businessman has an eye only for his own profit; many possible social benefits go unregarded because the individual entrepreneur can not count on reaping a profit from them. Again, because businessmen’s profit expectations fluctuate, the whole competitive order is violently unstable. Matters could be much improved by reconstruction of the whole system of private property (Proudhon) or by more public planning (Saint-Simon).
Third, socialists tend, according to Cole, to be “. . . deeply distrustful of ‘politics’ and of politicians, and [to believe] . . . that the future control of social affairs should lie mainly, not with parliaments or ministers, but with ‘the producers,’ and that, if the economic and social sides of men’s affairs could be properly organized, the traditional forms of government and political organization would soon be superseded, and a new world of international peace and collaboration would replace the old world. . . .” Here we are approaching the idea that, in a socialist society, there would be “no governing of men but only the administration of things.” The same thought comes through in the doctrine of “the withering away of the state.”
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Clearly, with respect to Cole’s first criterion, socialists performed an important service. They did not need to convince Plato and Aristotle, nor perhaps fundamentally even Adam Smith. But they did need to convince many people. When their “social” emphasis is understood as relating to economic affairs and as a matter of emphasis rather than exclusion, their point of view is now common ground. It can no longer serve as a basis of differentiation.
The contrary is true of Cole’s second criterion. The roles of private property and of competition continue to be profoundly contested issues in all societies in which any political contest remains possible. Even socialists do not hold identical views about these issues in all countries; diverse circumstances make for diverse policies. But socialists can be distinguished generally by their persistent desire to minimize the role of private property as a source of income; by their negative and challenging demeanor towards private property as a source of power; by their sympathetic attitude toward public and collective ownership of productive activities; and by their conviction that the dictates of the market are not an adequate substitute for public policy and economic control. Commonly these distinctions hold; where they no longer do, socialism has become another crude symbol—not without importance, but lacking specific content in regard to public policy.
What seems most unfortunate is that any socialist—or any other reasonable person—should be identifiable by Cole’s third criterion. There lies illusion. To employ Hans Kelsen’s trenchant phrase, the state is nor-mativen Zwangordnung, a normative coercive order. All three elements are unavoidable—norms: rules, regulations, laws; an order: parent and child, student and school, worker and enterprise, passenger and carrier, elector and elected—a system of social relationships existing prior to the wills of the individual parties; coercive: involving penalties (including denial of benefits) for non-performance. How could it be otherwise? The limited supply of material means, the limitless character of desires, partiality in self-judgment, impulses toward domination and exploitation, the need for organization in every division of labor—all these make the state, with its regulation, its prescribed order, and its coercion a permanent aspect of the life of man in society. They have a poverty-stricken, miserable conception of the varieties of human experience who believe that the relationships of consent and coercion, in the state, are everywhere the same. But we cannot live in society without coercion. This matter should not be an issue between sensible socialists and non-socialists. The state we shall have always with us.
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Élie Halévy, who died in 1937, was, in my opinion, a fine-tempered and subtle historian. His two specialties were the history of England in the 19th century and the history of socialism. His few essays on the development of socialist thought are enough to suggest our great loss in his not having lived to write the connected history of socialism which he had planned. But Halévy made a major error of analysis and forecasting in his last essays, written just before his death. In them he concluded that the outbreak of another great war—which he saw coming—would result in the establishment, in all the major democratic countries, of a practical “war socialism”; that unity demanded during war would give this socialism an authoritarian character; and that this socialism of the Caesars, once erected, would, in all probability, endure.6 Right in some elements, he was yet wrong in his general vision. He made an error shared by many.
All the major democratic war combatants did build up what might be called a “war socialism” or a “war corporatism.” But authoritarian control of political organization and expression was not generally instituted. Opposition was not suppressed in England even during the time of greatest danger, and there was no demeaning, panicky concern over the enemy within. In the United States, we did not hold up as well. In what Professor Corwin called “. . . the most drastic invasion of the rights of citizens of the United States by their own government that has thus far occurred in the history of our nation,” we carried out a frightened, forced evacuation of our Japanese-American citizens, and, to quote Professor Eugene Rostow, “One hundred thousand persons were sent to concentration camps on a record that wouldn’t support a conviction for stealing a dog.” Still, the Japanese-American case was not characteristic: in general, the American people had substantially as much civil and intellectual freedom during World War II as they commonly enjoy at other times. Traditional freedoms were generally sustained also in other democratic countries that did not come under enemy occupation. In this respect, Halévy was quite wrong.
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Where he was, however, more profoundly wrong—and, with him, a great body of enlightened opinion—was in forecasting that “war socialism” would prove durable or, at least, lay a durable base. The contrary has proven true. Socialism has had its postwar victories, as well as defeats, but the victories have nowhere grown out of the perfecting and stabilizing of the wartime administration. On the contrary, war socialism has everywhere been dismantled. The association of socialism with war controls, and with the austerities of the immediate postwar, has even been a powerful force in undermining the acceptance of peacetime socialism in most democratic countries.
Simultaneous with the demolition of the wartime control apparatus has come an economic expansion, in industrially advanced countries, that partisans are already describing as one of the great, dynamic periods in the growth of capitalism. Let us disregard the years 1945—53. They benefited, first, from the ease of setting records in a period of reconstruction and, second, from the post-Korean arms boom. But, even since 1953, expansion has not abated. We, in the United States, are less sensitive to the reality of this matter because the American economy has been among the more modest beneficiaries of this expansion. In most other industrially advanced countries, the progress has been great, and its effect on the climate of political opinion drastic. In many countries, the socialist parties have lost a substantial part of their public support and are, at least for the present, floundering badly.
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What are the large economic facts? Let us limit ourselves to the six years from mid-1953 to mid-1959 and to industrial production alone. Japan then leads the parade. Its manufacturing production rose by about 125 per cent. In Germany, Austria and France, industrial production increased by about two-thirds. Italy lagged a little, with an increase of over one-half. In Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Australia and Canada, the increases ranged from about 30 per cent to 40 per cent. Only in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States were the six-year increases as little as 20 per cent. The sense of poverty was nowhere eliminated—only some professors and advertising men saw their countries as “affluent”—but poverty was less oppressive. Simultaneously, the influence of the socialist parties declined.
In Western Germany, the Social Democrats came gradually to the conclusion that espousal of their historic socialist position would leave them permanently in the political wilderness. They took to praising where they had blamed and denying where they had affirmed. They developed a new party program, expressing esteem for private property and respect for religion, indicating lack of interest in general nationalization, trying to identify themselves only as more equalitarian, more welfare-minded, more peace-minded, than Adenauer. Socialism was soft-pedaled, if not entirely abandoned.
In Italy and France, the democratic socialist parties amounted to something on the day of Liberation. Now they have splintered, and all the splinters are compressed between a larger Communist party, with greater working class support, on the left, and various large groups to their right. Pierre Mendès-France has indeed recently declared himself a socialist and has joined the small Parti Socialiste Autonome. In his eloquent statement7 of adherence to the party, one may surely find much of the traditional resonance of democratic socialism: rejection of all that is merely vested and stale; concern for justice, interpreted in the light of social equality; adherence to parliamentary government, as distinguished from all dictatorships—whether of a Caesar, a party secretary, or a president; warm interest in human personalities and their improvement—through education and opportunity and over the barriers of birth and race; withal, a sense of history, of responsibility before all time and humanity, and of freedom from mere parochial interests. These things (perhaps with less passion, more gentleness, more tolerance of the old) were, however, also true of Abraham Lincoln. No matter. Mendès-France would probably now contend that Abraham Lincoln was also a socialist—but in a generation that knew not large-scale industry, modern fiscal and monetary theory, and the potentialities of planning!
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If we are to study the same developments in Great Britain, there is no better place to start than the thoughtful, comprehensive book on The Future of Socialism, published in 1956 by C. A. R. Crosland. An economist, a Labor member of Parliament, reportedly close in policy to the leader of the Labor Party, Mr. Crosland makes a most appealing, reasoned case. He finds that economic growth and efficiency are now secondary issues: “I no longer regard questions of growth and efficiency as being, on a long view, of primary importance to socialism. We stand, in Britain, on the threshold of mass abundance. . . .” The theme of “the affluent society” comes through as strongly in Britain as in the United States, though—insofar as international comparisons are possible—per capita incomes in Britain today are no higher than they were in the United States in what we are in the habit of regarding as the meager 1930’s.
Effective economic power is now, Crosland argues, already in the hands of the public authorities; further creation of state monopolies would be harmful: “Though,” he says, “it is interesting that the British Labour Party is almost the only important social-democratic party in the world in which a strong desire for wholesale nationalization still exists.” Better, he feels, that socialists should concern themselves with education and beauty: “. . . the time has come . . . for a greater emphasis on private life, on freedom and dissent, on culture, beauty, leisure, and even frivolity.” Only in one sphere does a sterner note come through—in relation to underdeveloped countries, and there he says: “. . . socialism now has more application to Britain’s relations with other, poorer countries, than to internal class relations within Britain.” In the very wording of this last statement, one may detect an admission that what is proposed for Britain internally is being defended as wise policy, but not really as socialism.
In like spirit, we find the vivacious British Universities and Left Review saying, in its autumn number, just before the 1959 election, “Without CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] supporters, Anti-Ugly protesters, African demonstrators, Free Cinema and the Society For the Abolition of the Death Penalty, we would be nowhere.” The literal truth. But not socialism. And, for private life, freedom and frivolity, the ordinary British voter did not look to the Labor party. On voting day, he chose the Conservatives, and the Labor party found itself indeed nowhere. In a country with a strong executive and a weak legislature, the Labor party is consigned to a role of marginal significance in national political life for the next five years. Yet the British party remains today of greater weight than the democratic socialist party of any other major European country.
Democratic socialism is, at least for the present, in the major countries of Europe, everywhere in dissolution.
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1 Political Power and Personal Freedom: Critical Studies in Democracy, Communism and Civil Rights (Criterion, 462 pp., $7.50).
2 National Planning Association, Washington, D. C, 1957.
3 Uber Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, 2nd edition, 1929.
4 Elements of Politics, 1891.
5 Macmillan, 1953-58, 346 pp., 482 pp., 1043 pp. (2 parts); 940 pp. (2 parts); $5.00, $6.00, $16.00, $14.50.
6 L’Ere des Tyrannies. Etudes sur le socialisme et la guerre. Paris, 1938. A cruder version of the same conclusion is to be found in J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942.
7 Les Cahiers de la République, Paris, 1959.
