In St. Thomas and the Gentiles I tried to define the obligations of perennial philosophy in the twentieth century. Philosophy may be perennial, but its work changes according to the cultural conditions in which the philosopher lives and thinks. In its Greek beginnings, philosophy arose out of the dialectical efforts of Plato and Aristotle to clarify and order the welter of opinion. They struggled not only with the sophists to divide the line between knowledge and opinion; but they also moved in the realm of opinion to distinguish the true from the false; and, in their patient consideration of pre-Socratic thought, they both tried, though differently, to convert right opinion into knowledge by making it evident to reason. Although the result of their work was the establishment of philosophy as a body of knowledge, founded on principles and developed by demonstrations, we must not forget that, in their day, the mode of their work was primarily dialectical. In saying this I do not overlook the demonstrative or scientific achievements of Plato and Aristotle; but those must be regarded a secondary, for the first work of pioneers is to stake out the land, to clear away the brush, to prepare the soil, and to dig for firm foundations Only thereafter can a city be planned, buildings raised, and interiors decorated The Platonic dialogues certainly reveal an intellectual pioneer at work; but no less do the so-called “scientific” works of Aristotle, for they are primarily records of exploration and discovery. Rather than orderly expositions of accomplished knowledge, they are, not only in their opening chapters but throughout, dialectical engagement with adversaries, wrestlings with the half-truths of error and opinion in order to set the whole truth forth.

Numerous books and articles dealing with the disaster of France have already been published in this country. Most of them are not limited to the recording of facts; their main concern is to explain this bewildering event: the sudden collapse, after so brief a struggle, of such a power as the French Republic. Although the explanations differ largely from one another, on the ground of a diversity of experiences, sources, political preferences and prejudices, most writers have commonly a tendency to emphasize the part played, in France's defeat, by the individual mistakes of military chiefs and political leaders.

Hitlerism is not the creation of a single individual, the personal creation of Hitler: it is a mass phenomenon. Nor is it the necessary result of a determined economic system, since we see individuals in the most dissimilar countries, who are “converted”: rich and poor, industrialists and farmers, intellectuals and army men. The enumeration of the more or less immediate historical causes of Hitler's success, such as Eternal Germanism, the Versailles Treaty, inflation, the fear of Bolshevism, the Dictator's personality, the defects of the democracies, the complicity of big business, does not suffice to explain why they have all converged to the same result. Viewing the breadth and depth of the phenomenon, these heterogeneous “causes” seem to play the part of mere pretexts, of catalyzing agents determined, orientated and carried along by the phenomenon itself—which, therefore, still remains to be explained.

The philosophy of the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalistic industrialism ushered in the age of the masses. The one represents a social philosophy which undermined the traditional relations between state and society, and in addition, the well-established forms of precapitalistic society; the other brought in the machine and large-scale enterprises both leading to the formation of masses in our modern society. A sort of a natural process seemed to be in operation here; suddenly, called forth by nobody and wanted by nobody, the masses appeared. They grew with breath-taking rapidity. No sooner did they make their appearance than the first danger signals were hoisted. Primarily they came from representatives of the declining order, protagonists of the ancient regime such as, to mention a few, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Alexis de Tocqueville. Adam Mueller and Gentz among the romanticists sounded the same warnings. Somewhat later they were joined by such diverse representatives of bourgeois humanism as Wilhelm Bensen, J. Burckhardt, Spengler, and Sombart. The new, masses are visualized here as the forces undermining all cultural and religious institutions and values. At last even the very beneficiaries themselves of the new order became concerned about the social consequences of the machine-age. Thomas R. Malthus and John Stuart Mill expressed this concern very strongly; however, they saw in the masses not so much a necessary concomitant of an individualisticmachine- age and of materialistic progress as the effect of an irrational behavior of the “poor” with regard to marriage and child-bearing.

Bureaucracy may mean many things. So may dictatorship. Until Sulla, the technique of dictatorial interludes provided the Roman republic with a convenient form of political catharsis to relieve the constitutional framework from the strain of military exigencies. Greek depotism was not the style of Caesar; Richelieu's gouvernement personnel was not an imperialist version of Cromwell's Commonwealth. Less compelling still are the parallels between Latin America's “strong man” regimes, Japan's “new structure” à la Konoye, and the one-party systems of National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia. It is the totalitarian formula alone to which we intend to address ourselves —dictatorship built upon the masses.