¹ See Acton, Lord, The History of Freedom and Other Essays, ed. by Figgis, and Laurence, (London, 1909), pp. 212ff.Google Scholar, for his famous essay on Machiavelli and his influence in history.

² For a good short account of dialectic materialism, see Hook, Sidney, “Materialism,” in the Encyclopaedia of the Social SciencesGoogle Scholar.

³ See Sait, E. M., Democracy (New York, 1929)Google Scholar, passim.

⁴ See Lewis, Wyndham, The Art of Being Ruled (New York and London, 1936), pp. 117ff.Google Scholar

⁵ See Eötvös, Baron Joseph, Der Einfluss der Herrschenden Ideen der 19. Jahrhunderts auf den Staat (Leipzig, 1854), Erster Teil, p. 47Google Scholar: “Das Prinzip absoluter Gleichheit kann nur durch eine absolute Staatsform realisiert werden, ob man diesen Absolutismus durch eine immer wieder neu vom Volke ausgehende Gewalt oder durch die auf einmalige Uebertretung der absoluten Gewalt des Volkes an einem Individuum oder eine Körperschaft ausgeübt werde, ob nur die Despotie im Gewande des Communismus oder in jener Formen auftrete…” According to Spengler, “effective communism is authoritative bureaucracy.” Spengler, Oswald, The Hour of Decision, trans, from the German (New York, 1934), p. 129Google Scholar.

⁶ The communist denies that there is any real freedom in capitalist society for those who are not part of the exploiting group. Since the class struggle is the irreconcilable conflict of divergent points of view, there is no difficulty in the denial of freedom to the capitalistic oppressors once the proletariat has assumed power. See Lenin, N., The State and Revolution (London, 1919), p. 91Google Scholar.

⁷ See y Gasset, José Ortega, The Revolt of the Masses, trans, from the Spanish (New York, 1932)Google Scholar; Babbitt, Irving, Democracy and Leadership (Boston, 1924)Google Scholar. Civil liberty as an ideal loses much of its value if one rejects the rationalistic assumption that man is a creature with inherent and reasonable rights. To assume at least in part that man is a factor of objective historical circumstances denies the basic foundations of the conception of freedom. See Sorel, Georges, Reflections on Violence, trans, from the French (London, 1914), p. 116Google Scholar, for the statement that before the democratic era it was held that the state was good and wise and hence it was a crime to hinder it, while under liberalism it has been believed that the free citizen makes the better choice.

⁸ See, in general, Shepard, Walter J., “Democracy in Transition,” in this Review, Vol. 29, pp. 1ff. (1935)Google Scholar. It should not be forgotten that liberty in the eighteenth century served a revolutionary purpose—the assurance of freedom to those who worked to destroy the order of society as it existed. Perhaps many of those today who cry most loudly for civil freedom would be among those who would most abuse their power should they attain their ends. To Spengler, for instance, liberty is the means used by nihilism to level society. Cf. Spengler, Oswald, The Hour of Decision, trans, from the German (New York, 1934), pp. 106ff.Google Scholar

⁴ Civil and political freedom has been associated with the rise to power of the bourgeoisie. Public opinion is a force which sprang logically from the universalism of middle-class conceptions. In turn, the decline of bourgeois influence has the broadest implication as the decline of civil liberty and the belief in the generic idea of public opinion. Cf. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Reflections on the End of an Era (New York, 1934)Google Scholar, passim. With Pareto, it may be suggested that a critical semi-revolutionary literature weakens the decadent élite more than it strengthens the outsiders. The attack on the bourgeoisie today may, therefore, be debilitating to middle-class interests rather than a tonic to the proletariat. See Pareto, Vilfredo, Les Systèmes socialises (2nd ed., Paris, 1926), Vol. 2, pp. 36–37Google Scholar.

¹⁰ The development of youth organizations in Russia, Italy, and Germany is ample evidence of the effort toward revaluation of political and social thinking. No one seems to deny the effectiveness of these devices in controlling what the rising generation is going to think. See, for example, Schneider, H. W. and Clough, S. B., Making Fascists (Chicago, 1929)Google Scholar. Hocking, W. E., Man and the State (New Haven, 1926), p. 160Google Scholar, stresses the internal character of the moral impact of the state on the individual. The state is not external only, as the idealists urged, for “to say that the state has no concern with the motives of action, whether of crime or of obedience would appear to be as untrue to fact as to say that a captain would have no concern whether the deference of the members of his company was sincere, so long as the military forms were observed.” Hocking notes (loc. cit.) that those who make the state purely external fail to show how external conditions promote morality at all. See ibid., pp. 95–96, 157ff.

¹¹ Cf. Merriam, C. E., Political Power (New York and London, 1934), p. 183Google Scholar. He states: “Embedded in the poverty of power lies much of the liberty of the world, safe from the hand of the aggressor who would take it away.”

¹² This is true even of liberalism where liberty is a fundamental principle. Any group in a liberal society which denies the principle of liberty may be, logically, suppressed by the state. It has been suggested, for instance, that if democracy fights it can save itself from authoritarian movements (such as fascism and communism). This means, in short, the suppression of freedom of speech and political activity of certain types, as in the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and the Scandinavian countries. Cf. Loewenstein, Karl, “Autocracy versus Democracy in Contemporary Europe,” in this Review, Vol. 29, p. 593 (August, 1935)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Gray, J. L., “Karl Marx and Social Philosophy,” in Hearnshaw, F. J. C. (ed.), The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age (London, 1933), pp. 116ffGoogle Scholar. Wilde, Norman, in The Ethical Basis of the State (Princeton, 1924), pp. 6–7Google Scholar, remarks that “hardly has the religious conscience ceased from troubling than the State has had to meet a new rival for power, the struggle with which promises to surpass all others in seriousness.” This new competition is industry and the issue of economic justice.

¹⁴ At the present time, the debate on the question of property arouses more passion than that on any other theme. Because of this, any attack on the system of possession tends to be pushed beyond the frontiers of liberalism. Socialism's position in the democratic fold is, therefore, uncertain at best. If liberty is a function of security, the present insecurity or that involved in economic reorganization naturally minimizes the importance of liberty. When used for revolutionary purposes, democracy ceases in short order to be democracy. Socialism can hardly be satisfied with the reforms which planned economy will sanction, since reform usually stops at the limit beyond which further concession means the destruction of the system. It is reasonable to assume that the planned society must suppress, or tend to, those who are farther to the left. See Laski, H. J., The State in Theory and Practice (New York, 1935), pp. 245, 251, 284, 289Google Scholar.

¹⁵ According to Proudhon, Luther's thought is the first authentic negation of authority, and it was in fact a plea for the authority of reason. What is reason?, asks Proudhon. He answers by saying, “un pacte entre l'intuition et l'expérience.” Proudhon, P.-J., Oeuvres complètes: Idée générale de la Révolution aux XIX^e siècle, nouvelle edition (Paris, 1923), p. 186Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Grierson, H. J. C., in Carlyle and Hitler (Cambridge, 1933), p. 27Google Scholar, declares that men want leadership, the hero, and therefore civil liberty tends to have a short and precarious history. See Pareto, Vilfredo, Les Systèmes socialistes (2nd ed., Paris, 1926), Vol. 1, p. 301Google Scholar. Pareto here notes the A.D. 313 decree of Constantine and Licenius for religious toleration, but that soon the Christians began persecuting their religious opponents. There is (ibid., pp. 300, 106–107) a general trend toward intolerance in mass religious movements.

¹⁷ There is not much reassurance to be drawn, however, from the economic results of authoritarianism in any country, whether Russia, Italy, or Germany. Loewenstein, op. cit., pp. 591–592.

¹⁸ Koellreutter, Otto, in Grundriss der Allgemeinen Staatslehre (Tübingen, 1933), pp. 256ff.Google Scholar, notes that education in the liberal state presumes the ultimate equality between the rulers and the ruled, and that there is no stress on authority as such. On the other hand, the authoritarian state must educate for the state and for the people. There must be a conscious creation, through education, of a governing élite. In ibid., p. 260, he observes that there can be only a free press and a free opinion within “den Grenzen der Bindung an Volk und Staat.”

¹⁹ See Wells, H. G., Experiment in Autobiography (New York, 1934), pp. 691ffGoogle Scholar. An eighteenth-century view that is not dissimilar is that of the Marquis d'Argenson, who opposed the liberty to write and think, but who favored a wide range of social reforms under a regenerated monarchy and autocracy. See Mornet, D., Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (Paris, 1933), pp. 66–67Google Scholar.

²⁰ See von Mohl, Robert, Die Geschichte und Literatur der Staatswissenschaften (Erlangen, 1855), Vol. 1, p. 257Google Scholar.

²¹ Various intermediate solutions can, no doubt, be found. Senor de Madariaga has suggested, for instance, a new policy on freedom of the press. In order to attain an expression of opinion in the press that is free from the propagandist restrictions of commercial journalism, the state should financially support news organs of various shades of opinion and subsidize them in relation to the strength of their supporting movements among the citizen body. There should be no political interference, however, with the free expression of opinion. See de Madariaga, Salvador, “La Liberté et l'autorité dans lemonde moderne,” Revue Politique et Parlementaire, Vol. 158, pp. 225–242 (1934)Google Scholar. It has been said, on the other hand, that what we need is freedom from the press. If the press is assumed not to be really free, it may be that the government is just as good an agency for the control of newspapers as private corporations whose primary interest is making profit for the owners. In an individualistic society, the free press is very essential in preventing a strong program getting started. The liberal state planner must seek a solution which will combine strong leadership with the free press. See Gooch, G. P., Dictatorship in Theory and Practice (London, 1935), p. 44Google Scholar.