To Avoid misunderstanding, I should note at once that my point of view is here not that of the mere logic of ideas and doctrines, but that of the concrete logic of the events of history.

From the first point of view, that of the mere logic of ideas and doctrines, it is evident that there are many possible positions other than the “pure” positions which I shall examine. One might ask theoretically and in the abstract, what value these various positions have. That is not what I plan to do. In a word, my point of view is that of the philosophy of culture, and not that of metaphysics.

We who are a part of the civilization that has developed in Europe since the eleventh century and in America since the sixteenth, are living in a world many times richer in material comforts than any before in history. We are living in a world where people are more confused about the nature of the moral and the intellectual virtues than they have been since the Dark Ages, possibly since the last century of the Roman Empire. Few are capable of recognizing those who practice these virtues. It is fashionable to deny that there can be any firm criteria for judging between good and bad private conduct, between good and bad philosophy or art, teaching or statesmanship.

It is a Common heritage of English and American liberals to denounce state absolutism, to deny it as regimentation, paternalism, etc. etc. Indeed, Englishmen and Americans have always been inclined to adopt a condescending attitude towards other traditions which seemed to exalt state power. French and German, Russian and Italian tendencies have in turn been pictured as “naturally” inclined toward state “absolutism,” and when anyone in rebuttal mentioned Hobbes or Bentham or Austin, the “exceptional” position of these thinkers has been emphasized. Still, can there be any question that the idea of the state as an ultimate source of authority has been as strong in Great Britain as anywhere? For reasons which will become plainer in the course of the argument, English-writing thinkers have accordingly been in the vanguard of those who sought to construct the “state” as the “highest” of all human communities, thus following out the Aristotelian heritage. In spite of all the titter-tatter about national character, muddling through and the rest, the fact remains that Britain has provided us with the most radical, deep-laid expositions of an “absolute” state. This much admitted, one might add that the limited state also has found eloquent and epoch-making exponents in English-speaking lands. In short, the whole gamut of modern political philosophy has been most thoroughly expounded in English.

The title of my paper, I hasten to say, is intended to be noncommittal. It does not mean that there has been a marriage between agrarianism and politics, or even anything approaching a love affair. Yet perhaps this explanation is superfluous. It is obvious that there is not a close working-relationship between current politics and the theory of agrarianism. That condition is the subject of my discussion. The politics of agrarianism has not been denned or has been poorly defined. This paper is simply an attempt to locate the source of the difficulty.

“THEORIES of Government!” exclaims Thomas Carlyle in the early pages of The French Revolution. “Such has been, and will be; in ages of decadence. Acknowledge them in their degree; as processes of Nature, who does nothing in vain; as steps in her great process.” The social theorist of today takes more seriously than Carlyle the existence of ideology, for ideology is an expression of spiritual unrest in the face of history-making issues. In turn, ideology itself becomes a problem, and we are led to examine its nature. Especially is this true today, which is a time of passionate affirmation of ambiguous positions rather than the observation of political behavior.

There is great significance in the recent renaming of the Siegfried line, Germany's line of fortifications in the West. By the will of the Fuehrer, the western fortification is now called Limes. The new name is obviously intended to imply something very specific, otherwise it would not have been chosen.

“Limes”, a Latin word meaning “borderline”, is a word of great significance in Roman as well as German history. The term was first used by the Roman conquerors to signify the line of fortifications which, after many setbacks, they built around the northernmost reaches of their realm. The Roman Limes enclosed what today is die greater part of Bavaria, the rest of Southern Germany, Switzerland and the Rhinelands. Started under the Roman Emperor Domitian in 83 A.D. and finished in the Second Century, the fortifications signified that the Roman impetus of expansion had reached its limit. It meant a consolidation of the earlier conquests against Teutonic invasion from the North and East.

For a long, long time I had a picture of Mussolini in my office. I was not a Fascist, not even an Italophile, but for me as for many other Europeans, Mussolini represented a very characteristic type in the evolution of mankind: a beneficent adventurer beginning in anarchy and becoming die saviour of spiritual values. At least I so fancied. The picture was a reproduction of a drawing by Toorop, the Javanese-Dutch artist, who had painted the Italian Dictator without ever seeing him, just as he had painted the face of an apostle or a visionary.

Proudhon once remarked—and Cortéz eagerly took up the idea—that in the Western world all great intellectual and moral issues derive, fundamentally, from theological sources. In the past, and even today, Western thought has received and is receiving a tremendous impetus from the secularization of religious and theological doctrines. The Christian doctrines of salvation, of the kingdom of God, of the visio beatifica in a Paradise of happiness and perfect concord, have always led men not only to envision but even to plan an earthly millenium. With the rise of anthropocentric humanism the theological bases of these conceptions were swept away. Man and his powers superseded them. Man, endowed with reason, freedom and a desire for happiness, was made the focal point of history and of nature.

The totalitarian state appeared as a state engaged in war. In the World War, for the first time in the twentieth century, the total reserves of national strength were concentrated in one great effort to destroy the enemy. The war was not the concern of the mobilized armies alone. It engaged the whole nation. “It was no longer possible (in the World War) to determine at what point the strength of the civilian population passed into the strength of the army and navy.” The army and the people constituted a single unit and as such they conducted the war. As a unit they faced their threatening opponent, who presented a similar common front. “The fighting ability of the forces at the front was conditioned by the fighting ability of the people at home.”

HEGEL'S philosophy of freedom and Comte's philosophy of progress have one trait in common, in spite of the basic differences in their starting points. Although Hegel's panlogistic dialectics and Comte's sociological scientism present various levels and antagonistic tendencies of philosophical thought, they share the same indifference concerning the philosophical and structural problems of human existence. While Kant was aware that the basic questions of philosophy referred to the fundamental elements of human life, these new synthetical systems of the historicity of the race did not care about the character and the nature of the human being. They helped to bring to the fore that tendency in thought which was described as the autonomous movement of a universal principle of determination, spiritual or naturalistic, in the process and as the meaning of history. In these philosophical and sociological systems man is only the tool and the actor (the Roman persona in the literal sense) in the self-realization of a universal principle, inherent in the process of society. Thus, human action and attitudes are predetermined by the principles that represent die pseudo-religious meaning of the historical development. So far as this is true, human personality, as centered around the actuality of freedom, spontaneity, responsibility, no longer exists. The hybris of Hegel and Comte to make die dynamic institutions “concrete universals” and to suppress the concreteness of individuals is one symptom of the human situation in the modern world. Slowly developing since the sixteenth century, this situation is completely realized in these philosophical systems that proclaim the immanence of life, the reality of a universal principle of determination and the weakness and frailty of the human personality. This trend of thinking got supremacy in philosophical and scientific modes of investigation, in particular in the powerful stratification of positivist and of empiricist methods in the social sciences. The discovery of Historicism and of Sociologism is the logical result of this basic position. It expresses correctly the stage of consciousness in which man realizes the demonry of the world of institutions which, although his very own achievement, is becoming emancipated from man and developing autonomously like the forces of nature.

WESTERN Europe—what we may call the Roman world—is an wessential unit. The nations that go to make it up share a common culture. They have no cause either to despise or to quarrel with other nations. Yet their first business is to preserve unity among themselves and to show a common front to the rest of the world. In unity lies their security, whereas, if they quarrel among themselves, the true victory goes neither to the one group nor to the other of quarrelling Europeans but to the tertius gaudens outside Europe who profits from their divisions.

This paper has a twofold intention.

The first is to discuss the problem of political parties, — their justification and status, — in a society which requires political democracy as the set of political institutions appropriate for the government of men living under modern social and economic conditions. (By these modern conditions I mean such things as the economic forms of production and distribution in the industrial era; the organization of labor in relation to economic enterprise; the intensity and extensity of communication among men living in geographical separation and, consequently, the physical enlargement of the civic association; the approximation to universal education; the spread of literacy, etc.) There are two points to be noted here:

(1) That modern society is or tends toward a democracy in its physical and economic conditions, whether in a given instance its political forms are outwardly democratic, as in France, England and the United States, or anti-democratic, as in Italy, Germany and Russia.

(a) Not only does Russia publicize its claim to being democratic and make constitutional efforts in that direction which are, of course, at once vitiated by the persistence of its totalitarian regime; but even Germany and Italy give an appearance of democracy, — though they abominate the thought and word, — an appearance which is a reverse and distorted image. Thus, by the pressure of propaganda and the exercise of brutal force, the rulers of Germany and Italy try to make it appear that they have a mandate from the people for their policies.

In the treatment of my topic, I shall begin with the human person and go on from there to the question of ownership of material goods. This will be done in the deep conviction, which accords also with the best philosophical tradition of 2,000 years, that the institution of ownership must be theoretically derived and must take its practical cues from the human person, and not vice versa. If there is one supreme characteristic of our modern civilization in this regard, it is the fact that we have turned this matter quite around. Our civilization has given the supreme position to ownership, whether public or private, and has made the person quite subservient in practical life to this supposedly highest of all individual and social values. By modern civilization I mean the general dominant trend of human events in our Western world during the past four centuries or so, which was in some regards a trend away from the general Christian tradition of thought and life that existed progressively for much over a thousand years before what is technically known as the modern era of history began.

When a ruler inherits authority he inherits a responsibility for ordering the relations of living people whom he has not created himself, and therefore has not formed with a view to the order that he conceives as most suitable. Moreover he inherits an existing order in which the relations of the members of that society operate. That order, the result of a long historical process, has itself conditioned the people who live within it to suit its requirements, and those people have themselves given to it a certain mode which they, wittingly or unconsciously, have evolved as best suited to give them the conditions that they desire.

Administrative organization, if at all the product of thought, reflects primarily the need for a rational division of labor. Purpose must be translated into functions. Functions must be mapped out in terms of individual working units devoted to specific tasks. The ensuing specialization, however, is not without undesirable concomitants. Inevitably, confinement to one set of operations has a stifling effect, differing only in degree, on those virtually prisoners of the office structure. Perspective narrows, initiative weakens. Day after day the same general formula is enacted, the same questions are raised, the same points are checked. An outsider bold enough to inquire into concrete considerations underlying the fixed pattern must be prepared for surprises. He will have to be satisfied all too often with the slipshod reply, reproachful or sarcastic: “It has always been done this way.” The answer is not only pathetically inadequate. It also reveals that the formative idea which once guided the design for action has lost its hold. Routine perpetuated by sheer habit is at best a makeshift. It may keep things going temporarily, but it is certain to cramp the conduct of business under changing conditions. Moreover, thoughtless reliance on techniques once acquired results necessarily in a corresponding measure of intellectual unemployment. When precedent is sacred, minds go idle.

The reputation of a lady is seriously endangered if she ‘goes out’ to get a husband instead of waiting for one. Similarly, a bank is not supposed to run after the customers. During the nineteenth century when high standards of bank liquidity were generally accepted, and respectability was one of the essentials of banking success, waiting for the customer became a fundamental principle of banking practice, especially in Great Britain. Of course, ladies did not always live up to Victorian standards even in the Victorian Age; nor did banks, and since 1881 the Bank of England has gone out of its way on more than one occasion. But this was regarded as an irregular behavior, rarely acknowledged in public; the London market referred to the “hidden hand” whose transactions were not given statistical publicity. Since the War, many standards have changed; in 1922 the Federal Reserve System officially introduced the terms “open-market operations” and “open-market policy” which have since attained international circulation and the rank of major, if not fundamental, methods of monetary and credit management.

THE PENDULUM of dynamic subjectivism swings from a faithful, dreamy, or thoughtful absorption in the world to an aggressive, defiant protest against the world. German history proves it abundantly from the days of the Cimbers and Teutons to the days of the Reformation and up to our present age. Or is it a mere accident that German thinkers formulated that man is obsessed by the will to the infinite, or, as Nietzsche put it: “that man could not tolerate God to be unless he be himself God?” We may well ask if Luther was not expressing a German truth by his word that the soul finds his way to his door by swaying to and fro. Is it a mere accident that dialectic philosophy and dialectic theology were made in Germany and actually acquired reputation only there? Is it not a characteristic self-analysis to assert with Hegel that religion and thought develop in permanent self-contradictions and antagonism and move by such antagonisms to ever higher and higher forms? Is it not a distinctly German appreciation and interpretation of history to say that it is nothing but a sequence of wars? The German mind evidences a clear imperialism interrupted by periods of a self-forgotten devotion to the world, but even in the imperialistic phases there remains some of this self-forgotten devotion—just as in the selfforgotten devotion there surges some of this imperialism. A wellbalanced equilibrium obviously is very hard to attain; it does not even lie in the intention of the German mind because it would entail the recognition of and submission to an ontological order, to form and law.