Liberty: Incorporating "Four Essays on Liberty"

POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Anyone desiring a quiet life has done badly to be born in the twentieth century.

L. Trotsky¹ i

Historians of ideas, however scrupulous and minute they may feel it necessary to be, cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern. To say this is not necessarily to subscribe to any form of Hegelian dogma about the dominant role of laws and metaphysical principles in history - a view increasingly influential in our time - according to which there is some single explanation of the order and attributes of persons, things, and events. Usually this consists in the advocacy of some fundamental category or principle which claims to act as an infallible guide both to the past and to the future, a magic lens revealing 'inner', inexorable, all-pervasive historical laws, invisible to the naked eye of the mere recorder of events, but capable, when understood, of giving the historian a unique sense of certainty - certainty not only of what in fact occurred, but of the reason why it could not have occurred otherwise, affording a secure knowledge which the mere empirical investigator, with his collections of data, his insecure structure of painstakingly accumulated evidence, his tentative

This article was written in 1949 at the request of the editor [Hamilton Fish Armstrong] of the American journal Foreign Affairs, for its mid-century issue. Its tone was to some extent due to the policies of the Soviet regime during Stalin's last years. Since then a modification of the worst excesses of that dictatorship has fortunately taken place; but the general tendency with which the issue was concerned seems to me, if anything, to have gained, if not in intensity, then in extent: some of the new national states of Asia and Africa seem to show no greater concern for civil liberties, even allowing for the exigencies of security and planning which these States need for their development or survival, than the regimes they have replaced. [1969] ¹ [Untraced.] approximations and perpetual liability to error and reassessment, can never hope to attain/

The notion of 'laws' of this kind is rightly condemned as a species of metaphysical fantasy; but the contrary notion of bare facts - facts which are nothing but facts, hard, inescapable, untainted by interpretation or arrangement in man-made patterns - is equally mythological. To comprehend and contrast and classify and arrange, to see in patterns of lesser or greater complexity, is not a peculiar kind of thinking, it is thinking itself. We accuse historians of exaggeration, distortion, ignorance, bias or departure from the facts, not because they select, compare and set forth in a context and order which are in part, at least, of their own choosing, in part conditioned by the circumstances of their material and social environment or their character or purpose - we accuse them only when the result deviates too far from, contrasts too harshly with, the accepted canons of verification and interpretation which belong to their own time and place and society. These canons and methods and categories are those of the normal rational outlook of a given period and culture, at their best a sharpened, highly trained form of this outlook, which takes cognisance of all the relevant scientific techniques available, but is itself not one of them. All the criticisms directed against this or that writer for an excess of bias or fancy, or too weak a sense of evidence, or too limited a perception of connections between events, are based not upon some absolute standard of truth, of strict 'factuality', of a rigid adherence to a permanently fixed, ideal method of 'scientifically' discovering the past wie es eigentlich gewesen,[35] in contrast with mere theories about it, for there is in the last analysis no meaning in the notion of 'objective' criticism in this timeless sense. They rest rather on the most refined concepts of accuracy and objectivity and scrupulous 'fidelity to the facts' that obtain in a given society at a given period, within the subject in question.

When the great romantic revolution in the writing of history transferred emphasis from the achievements of individuals to the growth and influence of institutions conceived in much less personal terms, the degree of 'fidelity to the facts' was not thereby automatically altered. The new kind of history - the account of the development, let us say, of public and private law, or government, or literature, or social habits during some given period of time - was not necessarily less or more accurate or 'objective' than earlier accounts of the acts and fate of Alcibiades or Marcus Aurelius or Calvin or Louis XIV. Thucydides or Tacitus or Voltaire were not subjective or vague or fanciful in a sense in which Ranke or Savigny or Michelet were not. The new history was merely written from what is nowadays called a different 'angle'. The kinds of fact the new history was intended to record were different, the emphasis was different, a shift of interest had occurred in the questions asked and consequently in the methods used. The concepts and terminology reflect an altered view of what consti­tutes evidence and therefore, in the end, of what the 'facts' are. When the 'romances' of chroniclers were criticised by 'scientific' historians, at least part of the implied reproach lay in the alleged discrepancies in the work of the older writers from the findings of the most admired and trusted sciences of a later period; and these were in their turn due to the change in the prevalent conceptions of the patterns of human development - to the change in the models in terms of which the past was perceived, those artistic, theological, mechanical, biological or psychological models which were reflected in the fields of enquiry, in the new questions asked and the new types of technique used, to answer questions felt to be more interesting or important than those which had become outmoded.

The history of these changes of 'models' is to a large degree the history of human thought. The 'organic' or the Marxist methods of investigating history certainly owed part of their vogue to the prestige of the particular natural sciences, or the particular artistic techniques, upon whose model they were supposedly or genuinely constructed; the increased interest, for example, both in biology and in music, from which many basic metaphors and analogies derived, is relevant to the historical writing of the nineteenth century, as the new interest in physics and mathematics is to the philosophy and history of the eighteenth; and the deflationary methods and ironical temper of the historians who wrote after the war of 1914-18 were conspicuously influenced by - and accepted in terms of - the new psychological and sociological techniques which had gained public confidence during this period. The relative dominance of, say, social, economic and political concepts and presuppositions in a once admired historical work throws more light upon the general characteristics of its time and for this reason is a more reliable index to the standards adopted, the questions asked, the respective roles of 'facts' and 'interpretation', and, in effect, the entire social and political outlook of an age, than the putative distance of the work in question from some imaginary, fixed, unaltering ideal of absolute truth, metaphysical or scientific, empirical or a priori. It is in terms of such shifts in the methods of treating the past (or the present or the future), and in the idioms and catchwords, the doubts and hopes, fears and exhortations which they expressed, that the development of political ideas and the conceptual apparatus of society and of its most gifted and articulate representatives can best be judged. No doubt the con­cepts in terms of which people speak and think may be symptoms and effects of other processes - social, psychological, physical - the discovery of which is the task of this or that empirical science. But this does not detract from their importance and paramount interest for those who wish to know what constitutes the conscious experience of the most characteristic men of an age or a society, whatever its causes and whatever its fate. And we are, of course, for obvious reasons of perspective, in a better situation to determine this in the case of past societies than for our own. The historical approach is inescapable: the very sense of contrast and dissimilarity with which the past affects us provides the only relevant back­ground against which the features peculiar to our own experience stand out in sufficient relief to be adequately discerned and described.

The student of the political ideas of, for example, the mid- nineteenth century must indeed be blind if he does not, sooner or later, become aware of the profound differences in ideas and terminology, in the general view of things - the ways in which the elements of experience are conceived to be related to one another - which divide that not very distant age from our own. He understands neither that time nor his own if he does not perceive the contrast between what was common to Comte and Mill, Mazzini and Michelet, Herzen and Marx, on the one hand, and to Max Weber and William James, Tawney and Beard, Lytton Strachey and Namier, on the other; the continuity of the European intellectual tradition without which no historical understanding at all would be possible is, at shorter range, a succession of specific discontinuities and dissimilarities. Consequently, the remarks which follow deliberately ignore the similarities in favour of the specific differences in political outlook which characterise our own time, and, to a large degree, solely our own.

ii

The two great liberating political movements of the nineteenth century were, as every history book informs us, humanitarian individualism and romantic nationalism. Whatever their differences - and they were notoriously profound enough to lead to a sharp divergence and ultimate collision of these two ideals - they had this in common: they believed that the problems both of individuals and of societies could be solved if only the forces of intelligence and of virtue could be made to prevail over ignorance and wickedness. They believed, as against the pessimists and fatalists, both religious and secular, whose voices, audible indeed a good deal earlier, began to sound loudly only towards the end of the century, that all clearly understood questions could be solved by human beings with the moral and intellectual resources at their disposal. No doubt different schools of thought returned different answers to these varying problems; utilitarians said one thing, and neo-feudal romantics - Tory democrats, Christian Socialists, Pan- Germans, Slavophils - another. Liberals believed in the unlimited power of education and the power of rational morality to over­come economic misery and inequality. Socialists, on the contrary, believed that without radical alterations in the distribution and control of economic resources no amount of change of heart or mind on the part of individuals could be adequate; or, for that matter, occur at all. Conservatives and socialists believed in the power and influence of institutions and regarded them as a necessary safeguard against the chaos, injustice and cruelty caused by uncontrolled individualism; anarchists, radicals and liberals looked upon institutions as such with suspicion as being obstruc­tive to the realisation of that free (and, in the view of most such thinkers, rational) society which the will of man could both ^conceive and build, if it were not for the unliquidated residue of ancient abuses (or unreason) upon which the existing rulers of society - whether individuals or administrative machines - leaned too heavily, and of which so many of them indeed were typical expressions.

Arguments about the relative degree of the obligation of the individual to society, and vice versa, filled the air. It is scarcely necessary to rehearse these familiar questions, which to this day form the staple of discussion in the more conservative institutions of Western learning, to realise that however wide the disagreements about the proper answers to them, the questions themselves were common to liberals and conservatives alike. There were, of course, even at that time isolated irrationalists - Stirner, Kierkegaard, in certain moods Carlyle - but in the main all the parties to the great controversies, even Calvinists and ultramontane Catholics, accep­ted the notion of man as resembling in varying degrees one or the other of two idealised types. Either he is a creature free and naturally good, but hemmed in and frustrated[36] by obsolete or corrupt or sinister institutions masquerading as saviours, protec­tors and repositories of sacred traditions; or he is a being within limits, but never wholly, free, and to some degree, but never entirely, good, and consequently unable to save himself by his own wholly unaided efforts; and therefore rightly seeking salvation within the great frameworks - States, Churches, unions. For only these great edifices promote solidarity, security and sufficient strength to resist the shallow joys and dangerous, ultimately self- destructive, liberties peddled by those conscienceless or self- deceived individualists who, in the name of some bloodless intellectual dogma, or noble enthusiasm for an ideal unrelated to human lives, ignore or destroy the rich texture of social life, heavy with treasures from the past - blind leaders of the blind, robbing men of their most precious resources, exposing them again to the perils of a life that was 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'.[37]Yet there was at least one premiss common to all the disputants, namely the belief that the problems were real, that it took men of exceptional training and intelligence to formulate them properly, and men with exceptional grasp of the facts, will-power and capacity for effective thought to find and apply the correct solutions.

These two great currents finally ended in exaggerated and indeed distorted forms as Communism and Fascism - the first as the treacherous heir of the liberal internationalism of the previous century, the second as the culmination and bankruptcy of the mystical patriotism which animated the national movements of the time. All movements have origins, forerunners, imperceptible beginnings: nor does the twentieth century seem divided from the nineteenth by so universal an explosion as the French Revolution, even in our day the greatest of all historical landmarks. Yet it is a fallacy to regard Fascism and Communism as being in the main only more uncompromising and violent manifestations of an earlier crisis, the culmination of a struggle fully discernible long before. The differences between the political movements of the twentieth century and the nineteenth are very sharp, and they spring from factors whose full force was not properly realised until our century was well under way. For there is a barrier which divides what is unmistakably past and done with from that which most characteristically belongs to our day. The familiarity of this barrier must not blind us to its relative novelty. One of the elements of the new outlook is the notion of unconscious and irrational influences which outweigh the forces of reason; another the notion that answers to problems exist not in rational solutions, but in the removal of the problems themselves by means other than thought and argument. The interplay between the old tradition, which saw history as the battleground between the easily identifi­able forces of light and darkness, reason and obscurantism, pro­gress and reaction; or alternatively between spiritualism and empiricism, intuition and scientific method, institutionalism and individualism - the conflict between this order and, on the other hand, the new factors violently opposed to the humanist psychol­ogy of bourgeois civilisation is to a large extent the history of political ideas in our time.

Tennyson's 'Parliament of man^M - which was the staple of all progressive thought and action in the nineteenth century, and indeed of much in the century before it? The language of the great founders of European liberalism - Condorcet, for example, or Helvetius - does not differ greatly in substance, or indeed in form, from the most characteristic moments in the speeches of Woodrow Wilson or Thomas Masaryk. European liberalism wears the appearance of a single coherent movement, little altered during almost three centuries, founded upon relatively simple intellectual foundations, laid by Locke or Grotius or even Spinoza; stretching back to Erasmus and Montaigne, the Italian Renaissance, Seneca and the Greeks. In this movement there is in principle a rational answer to every question. Man is, in principle at least, everywhere and in every condition able, if he wills it, to discover and apply rational solutions to his problems. And these solutions, because they are rational, cannot clash with one another, and will ulti­mately form a harmonious system in which the truth will prevail, and freedom, happiness and unlimited opportunity for untram­melled self-development will be open to all.

The consciousness of history which grew in the nineteenth century modified the severe and simple design of the classical theory as it was conceived in the eighteenth century. Human progress was presently seen to be conditioned by factors of greater complexity than had been conceived of in the springtime of liberal individualism: education, rationalist propaganda, even legislation were perhaps not always, or everywhere, quite enough. Such factors as the particular and special influences by which various societies were historically shaped - some due to physical condi­tions, others to socio-economic forces or to more elusive emotional and what were vaguely classified as 'cultural' factors - were presently allowed to have greater importance than they were accorded in the over-simple schemas of Condorcet or Bentham. Education, and all forms of social action, must, it was now thought, be fitted to take account of historical needs which made men and their institutions somewhat less easy to mould into the required pattern than had been too optimistically assumed in earlier and more naive times.

Nevertheless, the original programme continued in its various forms to exercise an almost universal spell. This applied to the right no less than to the left. Conservative thinkers, unless they were concerned solely with obstructing the liberals and their allies, believed and acted upon the belief that, provided no excessive violence was done to slow but certain processes of 'natural' development, all might yet be well; the faster must be restricted from pushing aside the slower, and in this way all would arrive in the end. This was the doctrine preached by Bonald early in the century, and it expressed the optimism of even the stoutest believers in original sin. Provided that traditional differences of outlook and social structure were protected from what conserva­tives were fond of describing as the 'unimaginative', 'artificial', 'mechanical' levelling processes favoured by the liberals; provided that the infinity of 'intangible' or 'historic' or 'natural' or 'provi­dential' distinctions (which to them seemed to constitute the essence of fruitful forms of life) were preserved from being transformed into a uniform collection of homogeneous units moving at a pace dictated by some 'irrelevant' or 'extraneous' authority, contemptuous of prescriptive or traditional rights and habits; provided that adequate safeguards were instituted against too reckless a trampling upon the sacred past - with these guarantees, rational reforms and changes were allowed to be feasible and even desirable. Given these safeguards, conservatives no less than liberals were prepared to look upon the conscious direction of human affairs by qualified experts with a considerable degree of approval; and not merely by experts, but by a growing number of individuals and groups, drawn from, and representing, wider and wider sections of a society which was progressively becoming more and more enlightened.

This is a mood and attitude common to a wider section of opinion in the later nineteenth century in Europe, and not merely in the West but in the East too, than historians, affected by the political struggles of a later or earlier period, have allowed. One of the results of it - in so far as it was a causal factor and not merely a symptom of the process - was the wide development of political representation in the West, whereby in the end all classes of the population in the succeeding century began to attain to power, sooner or later, in one country or another. The nineteenth century was full of unrepresented groups engaged in the struggle for life, for self-expression, and later for control. Their members included the heroes and martyrs and men of moral and artistic power whom a genuine struggle of this kind brings forth. The twentieth century, by satisfying much of the social and political hunger of the Victorian period, did indeed witness a striking improvement in the material condition of the majority of the peoples of Western Europe, due in large measure to the energetic social legislation which transformed the social order.

But one of the least predicted results of this trend (although isolated thinkers like Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Herzen and, of course, Nietzsche had more than an inkling of it) was a decline in the quality of moral passion and force and of romantic, artistic rebelliousness which had marked the early struggles of the dissatis­fied social groups during their heroic period, when, deeply diver­gent though they were, they fought together against tyrants, priests and militant philistines. Whatever the injustices and miseries of our time - and they are plainly no fewer than those of the immediate past - they are less likely to find expression in monuments of noble eloquence, because that kind of inspiration seems to spring only from the oppression or suppression of entire classes of society.[38]There arrives a brief moment when, as indeed Marx with much insight pointed out, the leaders of the most articulate, and socially and economically most developed, of these suppressed groups are lifted by the common mood and for a moment speak not for their own class or milieu alone, but in the name of all the oppressed; for a brief instant their utterance has a universal quality.

But a situation where all or nearly all the great sections of society have been, or are on the point of being, in at any rate the formal possession of power is unfavourable to that truly disinterested eloquence - disinterested partly at least because fulfilment is remote, because principles shine forth most clearly in the darkness and void, because the inner vision is still free from the confusions and obscurities, the compromises and blurred outlines of the external world inevitably forced upon it by the beginnings of practical action. No body of men which has tasted power, or is within a short distance of doing so, can avoid a certain degree of that cynicism which, like a chemical reaction, is generated by the sharp contact between the pure ideal, nurtured in the wilderness, and its realisation in some unpredicted form which seldom con­forms to the hopes or fears of earlier times. It therefore takes an exceptional effort of the imagination to discard the context of later years, to cast ourselves back into the period when the views and movements which have since triumphed and lost their glamour long ago were still capable of stirring so much vehement idealistic feeling: when, for example, nationalism was not felt to be in principle incompatible with a growing degree of internationalism, or civil liberties with a rational organisation of society; when this was believed by some conservatives almost as much as their rivals, and the gap between the moderates of both sides was only that between the plea that reason must not be permitted to increase the pace of progress beyond the limits imposed by 'history' and the counterplea that La raison a toujours raison, that memories and shadows were less important than the direct perception of the real world in the clear light of day. This was a time when liberals in their turn themselves began to feel the impact of historicism, and to admit the need for a certain degree of adjustment and even control of social life, perhaps by the hated State itself, if only to mitigate the inhumanity of unbridled private enterprise, to protect the liberties of the weak, to safeguard those basic human rights without which there could be neither happiness nor justice nor freedom to pursue that which made life worth living.

The philosophical foundations of these liberal beliefs in the mid- nineteenth century were somewhat obscure. Rights described as 'natural' or 'inherent', absolute standards of truth and justice, were not compatible with tentative empiricism and utilitarianism; yet liberals believed in both. Nor was faith in full democracy strictly consistent with belief in the inviolable rights of minorities or dissident individuals. But so long as the right-wing opposition set itself against all these principles, the contradictions could, on the whole, be allowed to lie dormant, or to form the subject of peaceful academic disputes, not exacerbated by the urgent need for immedi­ate practical application. Indeed, the very recognition of inconsis­tencies in doctrine or policy further enhanced the role of rational criticism, by which, in the end, all questions could and would one day be settled. Socialists for their part resembled the conservatives in believing in the existence of inexorable laws of history, and, like them, accused the liberals of legislating 'unhistorically' for timeless abstractions - an activity for which history would not neglect to take due revenge. But they also resembled the liberals in believing in the supreme value of rational analysis, in policies founded on theoretical considerations deduced from 'scientific' premisses, and with them accused the conservatives of misinterpreting 'the facts' to justify the miserable status quo, of condoning misery and injustice; not indeed, like the liberals, by ignoring history, but by misreading it in a manner consciously or unconsciously calculated to preserve their own power upon a specious moral basis. But genuinely revolutionary as some among them were, and a thor­oughly new phenomenon in the Western world, the majority of them shared with the parties which they attacked the common assumption that men must be spoken and appealed to in terms of the needs and interests and ideals of which they were, or could be made to be, conscious.

Conservatives, liberals, radicals, socialists differed in their inter­pretation of historical change. They disagreed about what were the deepest needs, interests, ideals of human beings, about who held them, and how deeply or widely or for what length of time, about the method of their discovery, or their validity in this or that situation. They differed about the facts, they differed about ends and means, they seemed to themselves to agree on almost nothing. But what they had in common - too obviously to be fully aware of it themselves - was the belief that their age was ridden with social and political problems which could be solved only by the con­scious application of truths upon which all men endowed with adequate mental powers could agree. The Marxists did indeed question this in theory, but not in practice: even they did not seriously attack the thesis that when ends were not yet attained and choice of means was limited, the proper way of setting about adapting the means to the ends was by the use of all the skill and energy and intellectual and moral insight available. And while some regarded these problems as akin to those of the natural sciences, some to those of ethics or religion, while others supposed that they were altogether sui generis and called for altogether unique solu­tions, they were agreed - it seemed too obvious to need stating - that the problems themselves were genuine and urgent and intelli­gible in more or less similar terms to all clear-headed men, that all answers were entitled to a hearing, and that nothing was gained by ignorance or the supposition that the problems did not exist.

This set of common assumptions - they are part of what the word 'Enlightenment' means - were, of course, deeply rationalistic. They were denied implicitly by the whole romantic movement, and explicitly by isolated thinkers - Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Baude­laire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. And there were obscurer prophets - Buchner, Kierkegaard, Leontiev - who protested against the prevailing orthodoxy with a depth and originality which became clear only in our own time. Not that these thinkers represent any one single movement, or even an easily identifiable 'trend'; but in one relevant particular they display an affinity. They denied the importance of political action based on rational considerations, and to this extent they were rightly abhorred by the supporters of respectable conservatism. They said or implied that rationalism in any form was a fallacy derived from a false analysis of the character of human beings, because the springs of human action lay in regions unthought of by the sober thinkers whose views enjoyed prestige among the serious public. But their voices were few and discordant, and their eccentric views were ascribed to psychologi­cal aberrations. Liberals, however much they admired their artistic genius, were revolted by what they conceived as a perverted view of mankind, and either ignored it or rejected it violently. Conserva­tives looked upon them as allies against the exaggerated rationalism and infuriating optimism of both liberals and socialists, but treated them nervously as queer visionaries, a little unhinged, not to be imitated or approached too closely. The socialists looked on them as so many deranged reactionaries, scarcely worth their powder and shot. The main currents both on the right and on the left flowed round and over these immovable, isolated rocks with their absurd appearance of seeking to arrest or deflect the central current. What were they, after all, but survivals of a darker age, or interesting misfits, sad and at times fascinating casualties of the advance of history, worthy of sympathetic insight - men of talent or even genius born out of their time, gifted poets, remarkable artists, but surely not thinkers worthy of detailed attention on the part of serious students of social and political life?

There was (it is worth saying again) a somewhat sinister element dimly discernible from its very beginning in Marxism - in the main a highly rationalistic system - which seemed hostile to this entire outlook, denying the primacy of the individual's reason in the choice of ends and in effective government alike. But the worship of the natural sciences as the sole proper model for political theory and action which Marxism shared with its liberal antagonists was unpropitious to a clearer perception of its own full nature; and so this aspect of it lay largely unrecognised until Sorel brought it to life and combined it with the Bergsonian anti-rationalism by which his thought is very strongly coloured; and until Lenin, stemming from a different tradition, with his genius for organisation half instinctively recognised its superior insight into the irrational springs of human conduct, and translated it into effective practice. But Lenin did not, and his followers to this day do not, seem fully aware of the degree to which this essentially romantic element in Marxism influenced their actions. Or, if aware, they did not and do not admit it. This was so when the twentieth century opened.

iv

Chronological frontiers are seldom landmarks in the history of ideas, and the current of the old century, to all appearances irresistible, seemed to flow peacefully into the new. Presently the picture began to alter. Humanitarian liberalism encountered more and more obstacles to its reforming zeal from the conscious or unconscious opposition both of governments and other centres of social power, as well as the passive resistance of established institutions and habits. Militant reformers found themselves com­pelled to use increasingly radical means in organising the classes of the population on whose behalf they fought into something suffi­ciently powerful to work effectively against the old establishment.

The history of the transformation of gradualist and Fabian tactics into the militant formations of Communism and syndical­ism, as well as the milder formations of social democracy and trade unionism, is a history not so much of principles as of their interplay with new material facts. In a sense Communism is doctrinaire humanitarianism driven to an extreme in the pursuit of effective offensive and defensive methods. No movement at first sight seems to differ more sharply from liberal reformism than does Marxism, yet the central doctrines - human perfectibility, the possibility of creating a harmonious society by a natural means, the belief in the compatibility (indeed the inseparability) of liberty and equality - are common to both. The historical transformation may occur continuously, or in sudden revolutionary leaps, but it must proceed in accordance with an intelligible, logically connected pattern, abandonment of which is always foolish, always Utopian. No one doubted that liberalism and socialism were bitterly opposed both on ends and in methods: yet at their edges they shaded off into one another.[39] Marxism is a doctrine which, however strongly it may stress the class-conditioned nature of action and thought, nevertheless in theory sets out to appeal to reason, at least among the class destined by history to triumph - the proletariat alone can face the future without flinching, because it need not be driven into falsification of the facts by fear of what the future may bring. And, as a corollary, this applies also to those intellectuals who have liberated themselves from the prejudices and rationalisations - the 'ideological distortions' of their economic class - and have aligned themselves with the winning side in the social struggle. To them, since they are fully rational, the privileges of democracy and of free use of all their intellectual faculties may be accorded. They are to Marxists what the enlightened philosophes were to the Encyclopaedists: their task is to free men from 'false consciousness' and help to realise the means that will transform all those who are historically capable of it into their own liberated and rational likeness.

But in 1903 there occurred an event which marked the culmina­tion of a process which has altered the history of our world. At the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party held in that year, which began in Brussels and ended in London, during the discussion of what seemed at first a purely technical question - how far centralisation and hierarchical discipline should govern the behaviour of the Party - a delegate whose name was Mandel'berg but who had adopted the nom de guerre of Posadovsky argued that the emphasis laid by the 'hard' socialists - Lenin and his friends - upon the need for the exercise of absolute authority by the revolutionary nucleus of the Party might prove incompatible with those fundamental liberties to whose realisation socialism, no less than liberalism, was officially dedicated. He insisted that the basic, minimum civil liberties - 'the sanctity of the person' - should be infringed and even violated if the party leaders so decided.¹ He

nineteenth century into socialism in the twentieth is a complex and fascinating subject of cardinal importance; but cannot, for reasons of space and relevance, even be touched upon in this short essay.

¹ According to the official account of the proceedings (I owe this information to Chimen Abramsky's expert knowledge), Posadovsky said:

The statements made here for and against the amendments seem to me not mere differences about details, but to amount to a serious disagreement. There is no doubt that we do not agree about the following fundamental question: Must we subordinate ourfuture policies to this or that fundamental democratic principle or principles, recognising them as absclute values; or must all

was supported by Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russian Marxism, and its most venerated figure, a cultivated, fastidious and morally sensitive scholar of wide outlook, who had for twenty years lived in Western Europe and was much respected by leaders of Western socialism, the very symbol of civilised 'scientific' thinking among Russian revolutionaries. Plekhanov, speaking sol­emnly, and with a splendid disregard for grammar, pronounced the words 'Salus revolutiae suprema lex.'¹ Certainly, if the revolution demanded it, everything - democracy, liberty, the rights of the individual - must be sacrificed to it. If the democratic assembly elected by the Russian people after the revolution proved amenable to Marxist tactics, it would be kept in being as a Long Parliament; if not, it would be disbanded as quickly as possible. A Marxist revolution could not be carried through by men obsessed by scrupulous regard for the principles of bourgeois liberals. Doubt­less whatever was valuable in these principles, like everything else good and desirable, would ultimately be realised by the victorious working class; but during the revolutionary period preoccupation with such ideals was evidence of a lack of seriousness.

Plekhanov, who was brought up in a humane and liberal

democratic principles be subordinated exclusively to the objectives of our party? I am quite definitely in favour of the latter. There are absolutely no democratic principles which we ought not to subordinate to the objectives of our party.' (Cries of 'And the sanctity of the person?') 'Yes, that too! As a revolutionary party, striving towards its final goal - the social revolution - we must be guided exclusively by considerations of what will help us to achieve this goal most rapidly. We must look on democratic principles solely from the point of view of the objectives of our party; if this or that claim does not suit us, we shall not allow it.

Hence I am against the amendments that have been offered, because one day they may have the effect of curtailing our freedom of action.

Plekhanov merely dotted the 'i's and crossed the 't's of this unequivocal declaration, the first of its kind, so far as I know, in the history of European democracy. [Posadovsky's remarks appear on p. 169 in Izveshchenie o vtorom ocherednom s"ezde Rossiiskoi Sotsialdemokraticheskoi Rabochei Partii (Geneva, 1903), and on p. I 8 i in both Protokoly s'ezdov i konferentsii Vsesoyuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (B): vtoroi s"ezd RSDRP, tyul'-avgust 1903 g., ed. S. I. Gusev and P. N. Lepeshinsky (Moscow, 1932), and Vtoroi s"ezd RSDRP, iyul'-avgust 1903 gada: protokoly (Moscow, 1959).]

¹ 'The safety of the revolution is the highest law': ibid., p. 1 82. The erroneous 'revolutiae', which appears in Plekhanov's notes, and in the 1903 and 1932 volumes cited in the previous note, has been replaced by the correct 'revolutionis' in the 1959 edition: see 1932 ed., p. 182, note . Ed.

tradition, did, of course, later retreat from this position himself. The mixture of Utopian faith and brutal disregard for civilised morality proved in the end too repulsive to a man who had spent the greater part of his civilised and productive life among Western workers and their leaders. Like the vast majority of Social Demo­crats, like Marx and Engels themselves, he was too European to try to realise a policy which, in the words of Shigalev in Dostoevsky's The Devils, 'starting from unlimited freedom [arrives] at unlimited despotism'.¹ But Lenin (like Posadovsky himself) accepted the premisses, and, being logically driven to conclusions repulsive to most of his colleagues, accepted them easily and without apparent qualms. His assumptions were, perhaps, in some sense, still those of the optimistic rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the coercion, violence, executions, the total suppression of individual differences, the rule of a small, virtually self- appointed minority were necessary only in the interim period, only so long as there was a powerful enemy to be destroyed. They were necessary only in order that the majority of mankind, once it was liberated from the exploitation of fools by knaves and of weak knaves by more powerful ones, could develop - trammelled no longer by ignorance or idleness or vice, free at last to realise to their fullest extent the infinitely rich potentialities of human nature. This dream may indeed have affinities with the dreams of Diderot or Saint-Simon or Kropotkin, but what marked it as something relatively novel was the assumption about the means required to translate it into reality. And the assumption, although apparently concerned solely with methods, and derived from Babeuf or Blanqui or Tkachev or the French Communards - or, as is quite likely, from Marx's own writings in i 847-5 i - was very different from the practical programme set forth by the most 'activist' and least 'evolutionary' Western socialists towards the end of the nineteenth century. The difference was crucial and marked the birth of the new age.

What Lenin demanded was unlimited power for a small body of professional revolutionaries, trained exclusively for one purpose, and ceaselessly engaged in its pursuit by every means in their power. This was necessary because democratic methods, and the attempts to persuade and preach used by earlier reformers and rebels, were ineffective; and this in its turn was due to the fact that

' Dostoevsky, The Devils, part 2, chapter 7, section 2.

they rested on a false psychology, sociology and theory of history - namely the assumption that men acted as they did because of conscious beliefs which could be changed by argument. For if Marx had done anything, he had surely shown that such beliefs and ideals were mere 'reflections' of the condition of the socially and economically determined classes of men, to some one of which every individual must belong. A man's beliefs, if Marx and Engels were right, flowed from the situation of his class, and could not alter - so far, at least, as the mass of men was concerned - without a change in that situation. The proper task of a revolutionary therefore was to change the 'objective' situation, that is, to prepare the class for its historical task in the overthrow of the hitherto dominant class.

Lenin went further than this. He acted as if he believed not merely that it was useless to talk and reason with persons precluded by class interest from understanding and acting upon the truths of Marxism, but that the mass of the proletarians themselves were too benighted to grasp the role which history had called on them to play. He saw the choice as being one between education, the stimulation among the army of the dispossessed of a 'critical spirit' (which would awaken them intellectually, but might lead to a vast deal of discussion and controversy similar to that which divided and enfeebled the intellectuals), and the turning of them into an obedient force held together by a military discipline and a set of perpetually ingeminated formulae (at least as powerful as the patriotic patter used by the tsarist regime) to shut out independent thought. If the choice had to be made, then it was mere irresponsi­bility to stress the former in the name of some abstract principle such as democracy or enlightenment. The important thing was the creation of a state of affairs in which human resources were developed in accordance with a rational pattern. Men were moved more often by irrational than by reasonable solutions. The masses were too stupid and too blind to be allowed to proceed in the direction of their own choosing. Tolstoy and the populists were profoundly mistaken: the simple agricultural labourer had no deep truths, no valuable way of life, to impart; he and the city worker and the simple soldier were fellow serfs in a condition of abject poverty and squalor, caught in a system which bred fratricidal strife among themselves; they could be saved only by being ruthlessly ordered by leaders who had acquired a capacity for knowing how to organise the liberated slaves into a rational planned system.

Lenin himself was in certain respects oddly Utopian. He started with the egalitarian belief that with education, and a rational economic organisation, almost anyone could be brought in the end to perform almost any task efficiently. But his practice was strangely like that of those irrationalist reactionaries who believed that man was everywhere wild, bad, stupid and unruly, and must be held in check and provided with objects of uncritical worship. This must be done by a clear-sighted band of organisers, whose tactics - if not ideals - rested on the truths perceived by elitists - men like Nietzsche, Pareto or the French absolutist thinkers from Maistre to Maurras, and indeed Marx himself - men who had grasped the true nature of social development, and in the light of their discovery saw the liberal theory of human progress as something unreal, thin, pathetic and absurd. Whatever his crudities and errors, on the central issue Hobbes, not Locke, turned out to be right: men sought neither happiness nor liberty nor justice, but, above and before all, security. Aristotle, too, was right: a great number of men were slaves by nature, and when liberated from their chains did not possess the moral and intellectual resources with which to face the prospect of responsibility, of too wide a choice between alternatives; and therefore, having lost one set of chains, inevitably searched for another or forged new chains themselves. It follows that the wise revolutionary legislator, so far from seeking to emancipate human beings from the framework without which they feel lost and desperate, will seek rather to erect a framework of his own, corresponding to the new needs of the new age brought about by natural or technological change. The ^value of the framework will depend upon the unquestioning faith with which its main features are accepted; otherwise it no longer possesses sufficient strength to support and contain the wayward, potentially anarchical and self-destructive creatures who seek salvation in it. The framework is that system of political, social, economic and religious institutions, those 'myths', dogmas, ideals, categories of thought and language, modes of feeling, scales of values, 'socially approved' attitudes and habits (called by Marx 'superstructure') that represent 'rationalisations', 'sublimations' and symbolic representations, which cause men to function in an organised way, prevent chaos, fulfil the function of the Hobbesian State. This view, which inspires Jacobin tactics, though not, of course, either Jacobin or Communist doctrines, is not so very remote from Maistre's central and deliberately unprobed mystery - the supernatural authority whereby and in whose name rulers can rule and inhibit their subjects' unruly tendencies, above all the tendency to ask too many questions, to question too many established rules. Nothing can be permitted which might even a little weaken that sense of reliability and security which it is the business of the framework to provide. Only thus (in this view) can the founder of the new free society control whatever threatens to dissipate human energy or to slow down the relentless treadmill which alone prevents men from stopping to commit acts of suicidal folly, which alone protects them from too much freedom, from too little restraint, from the vacuum which mankind, no less than nature, abhors.

Henri Bergson had (following the German romantics) been speaking of something not too unlike this when he had contrasted the flow of life with the forces of critical reason which cannot create or unite, but only divide, arrest, make dead, disintegrate. Freud, too, contributed to this; not in his work of genius as the greatest healer and psychological theorist of our time, but as the originator, however innocent, of the misapplication of rational psychological and social methods by muddle-headed men of goodwill and quacks and false prophets of every hue. By giving currency to exaggerated versions of the view that the true reasons for men's beliefs were most often very different from what they themselves thought them to be, being frequently caused by events and processes of which they were neither aware nor in the least anxious to be aware, these eminent thinkers helped, however unwittingly, to discredit the rational foundations from which their own doctrines derived their logical force. For it was but a short step from this to the view that what made men most permanently contented was not - as they themselves supposed - the discovery of solutions to the questions which perplexed them, but rather some process, natural or artificial, whereby the problems were made to vanish altogether. They vanished because their psycholog­ical 'sources' had been diverted or dried up, leaving behind only those less exacting questions whose solutions did not demand resources beyond the patient's strength.

That this short way with the troubled and the perplexed, which underlay much traditionalist, anti-rationalist right-wing thought, should have influenced the left was new indeed. It is this change of attitude to the function and value of the intellect that is perhaps the best indication of the great gap which divided the twentieth century from the nineteenth.

v

The central point which I wish to make is this: during all the centuries of recorded history the course of intellectual endeavour, the purpose of education, the substance of controversies about the truth or value of ideas, presupposed the existence of certain crucial questions, the answers to which were of paramount importance. How valid, it was asked, were the various claims to provide the best methods of arriving at knowledge and truth made by such great and famous disciplines as metaphysics, ethics, theology and the sciences of nature and of man? What was the right life for men to lead, and how was it discovered? Did God exist, and could his purposes be known or even guessed at? Did the universe, and in particular human life, have a purpose? If so, whose purpose did it fulfil? How did one set about answering such questions? Were they, or were they not, analogous to the kind of questions to which the sciences or common sense provided satisfactory, generally accepted, replies? If not, did it make sense to ask them?

And as in metaphysics and ethics, so in politics too. The political problem was concerned, for example, with establishing why any individual or individuals should obey other individuals or associa­tions of individuals. All the classical doctrines which deal with the familiar topics of liberty and authority, sovereignty and natural rights, the ends of the State and the ends of the individual, the General Will and the rights of minorities, secularism and theocracy, functionalism and centralisation - all these are various ways of attempting to formulate methods in terms of which this fundamen­tal question can be answered in a manner compatible with the other beliefs and the general outlook of the enquirer and his generation. Great and sometimes mortal conflicts have arisen over the proper techniques for the answering of such questions. Some sought answers in sacred books, others in direct personal revela­tion, some in metaphysical insight, others in the pronouncements of infallible sages or in speculative systems or in laborious empirical investigations. The questions were of vital importance for the conduct of life. There were, of course, sceptics in every generation who suggested that there were, perhaps, no final answers, that solutions hitherto provided depended on highly variable factors such as the climate in which the theorist's life was lived, or his social or economic or political condition, or that of his fellows, or his or their emotional disposition, or the kinds of intellectual interests which absorbed him or them. But such sceptics were usually treated either as frivolous and therefore unimportant, or else as unduly disturbing and even dangerous; in times of instability they were liable to persecution. But even they - even Sextus Empiricus or Montaigne or Hume - did not actually doubt the importance of the questions themselves. What they doubted was the possibility of obtaining final and absolute solutions.

It was left to the twentieth century to do something more drastic than this. For the first time it was now conceived that the most effective way of dealing with questions, particularly those recurrent issues which had perplexed and often tormented original and honest minds in every generation, was not by employing the tools of reason, still less those of the most mysterious capacities called 'insight' and 'intuition', but by obliterating the questions them­selves. And this method consists not in removing them by rational means - by proving, for example, that they are founded on intellectual error or verbal muddles or ignorance of the facts - for to prove this would in its turn presuppose the need for rational methods of philosophical or psychological argument. Rather it consists in so treating the questioner that problems which appeared at once overwhelmingly important and utterly insoluble vanish from the questioner's consciousness like evil dreams and trouble him no more. It consists, not in developing the logical implications and elucidating the meaning, the context or the relevance and origin of a specific problem - in seeing what it 'amounts to' - but in altering the outlook which gave rise to it in the first place. Questions for whose solution no ready-made technique could easily be produced are all too easily classified as obsessions from which the patient must be cured. Thus, if a man is haunted by the suspicion that, for example, full individual liberty is not compatible with coercion by the majority in a democratic State, and yet continues to hanker after both democracy and individual liberty, it may be possible by appropriate treatment to rid him of his idee fixe, so that it will disappear, to return no more. The worried questioner of political institutions is thereby relie^{ved of his} burden and freed to pursue socially useful tasks, unhampered by disturb­ing and distracting reflections which have been eliminated by the eradication of their cause.

The method has the bold simplicity of genius: it secures agreement on matters of political principle by removing the psychological possibility of alternatives, which itself depends, or is held to depend, on the older form of social organisation, rendered obsolete by the revolution and the new social order. And this is how Communist and Fascist States - and all other quasi- and semi- totalitarian societies and secular and religious creeds - have in fact proceeded in the task of imposing political and ideological conformity.

For this the works of Karl Marx are certainly no more respons­ible than the other tendencies of our time. Marx was a typical nineteenth-century social theorist, in the same sense as Mill or Comte or Buckle. A policy of deliberate psychological condition­ing was as alien to him as to them. He believed that many of the questions of his predecessors were quite genuine, and thought that he had solved them. He supported his solutions with arguments which he certainly supposed to conform to the best scientific and philosophical canons of his time. Whether his outlook was in fact as scientific as he claimed, or his solutions are plausible, is another question. What matters is that he recognised the genuineness of the questions he was attempting to answer and offered a theory with a claim to being scientific in the accepted sense of the term; and thereby poured much light (and some darkness) on many vexed problems, and led to much fruitful (and sterile) revaluation and reinterpretation.

But the practice of Communist States and, more logically, of Fascist States (since they openly deny and denounce the value of the rational question-and-answer method) has not been the train­ing of the critical, or solution-finding, powers of their citizens, nor yet the development in them of any capacity for special insights or intuitions regarded as likely to reveal the truth. It consists in something which any nineteenth-century thinker with respect for the sciences would have regarded with genuine horror - the training of individuals incapable of being troubled by questions which, when raised and discussed, endanger the stability of the system; the building and elaboration of a strong framework of institutions, 'myths', habits of life and thought intended to pre­serve it from sudden shocks or slow decay. This is the intellectual outlook which attends the rise of totalitarian ideologies - the substance of the hair-raising satires of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley - the state of mind in which troublesome questions appear as a form of mental perturbation, noxious to the mental health of individuals and, when too widely discussed, to the health of societies. This is an attitude, far removed from Marx or Freud, which looks on all inner conflict as an evil, or at best as a form of futile self-frustration; which considers the kind of friction, the moral or emotional or intellectual collisions, the particular kind of acute mental discomfort which rises to a condition of agony from which great works of the human intellect and imagination have sprung, as being no better than purely destructive diseases - neuroses, psychoses, mental derangements, genuinely requiring psychiatric aid; above all as being dangerous deviations from that line to which individuals and societies must adhere if they are to march towards a state of well-ordered, painless, contented, self- perpetuating equilibrium.

This is a truly far-reaching conception, and something more powerful than the pessimism or cynicism of thinkers like Plato or Maistre, Swift or Carlyle, who looked on the majority of mankind as unalterably stupid or incurably vicious, and therefore concerned themselves with how the world might be made safe for the exceptional, enlightened or otherwise superior minority or individ­ual. For their view did at least concede the reality of the painful problems, and merely denied the capacity of the majority to solve them; whereas the more radical attitude looks upon intellectual perplexity as being caused either by a technical problem to be settled in terms of practical policy, or else as a neurosis to be cured, that is, made to disappear; if possible without a trace. This leads to a novel conception of the truth and of disinterested ideals in general, which would hardly have been intelligible to previous centuries. To adopt it is to hold that outside the purely technical sphere (where one asks only what are the most efficient means towards this or that practical end) words like 'true', or 'right', or 'free', and the concepts which they denote, are to be re-defined in terms of the only activity recognised as valuable, namely the organisation of society as a smoothly working machine providing for the needs of such of its members as are permitted to survive. The words and ideas in such a society will reflect the outlook of the citizens, being so adjusted as to involve as littk friction as possible between, and within, individuals, leaving them free to make the 'optimum' use of the resources available to them.

This is indeed Dostoevsky's utilitarian nightmare. In the course of their pursuit of social welfare, humanitarian liberals, deeply outraged by cruelty, injustice and inefficiency, discover that the only sound method of preventing these evils is not by providing the widest opportunities for free intellectual or emotional develop­ment - for who can tell where this might not lead? - but by eliminating the motives for the pursuit of these perilous ends, by suppressing any tendencies likely to lead to criticism, dissatisfac­tion, disorderly forms of life. I shall not attempt here to trace historically how this came to pass. No doubt the story must at some stage include the fact that mere disparity in tempo and extent between technical development and social change, together with the fact that the two could not be guaranteed to harmonise - despite the optimistic hopes of Adam Smith - and indeed clashed more and more often, led to increasingly destructive and appar­ently unavenable economic crises. These were accompanied by social, political and moral disasters which the general framework - the patterns of behaviour, habits, outlook, language, that is, the 'ideological superstructure' of the victims - could not sustain. The result was a loss of faith in existing political activities and ideals, and a desperate desire to live in a universe which, however dull and flat, was at any rate secure against the repetition of such cata­strophes. An element in this was a growing sense of the greater or lesser meaninglessness of such ancient battle-cries as liberty or equality or civilisation or truth, since the application to the surrounding scene was no longer as intelligible as it had been in the nineteenth century.

Together with this development, in the majority of cases, there went a reluctance to face it. But the once hallowed phrases were not abandoned. They were used - robbed of their original value - to cover the different and sometimes diametrically opposed notions of the new morality, which, in terms of the old system of values, seemed both unscrupulous and brutal. The Fascists alone did not take the trouble to pretend to retain the old symbols, and while political diehards and the representatives of the more unbridled forms of modern big business clung half cynically, half hopefully, to such terms as 'freedom' or 'democracy', the Fascists rejected them outright with theatrical gestures of disdain and loathing, and poured scorn upon them as the outworn husks of ideals which had long ago rotted away. But despite the differences of policy concerning the use of specific symbols there is a substantial similarity between all the variants of the new political attitude.

Observers in the twenty-first century will doubtless see these similarities of pattern more easily than we who are involved can possibly do today / They will distinguish them as naturally and clearly from their immediate past - that hortus inclusus of the nineteenth century in which so many writers both of history and of journalism and of political addresses today still seem to be living - as we distinguish the growth of romantic nationalism or of naive positivism from that of enlightened despotism or of patrician republics. Still, even we who live in them can discern something novel in our own times. Even we perceive the growth of new characteristics common to widely different spheres. On the one hand, we can see the progressive and conscious subordination of political to social and economic interests. The most vivid symp­toms of this subordination are the open self-identification and conscious solidarity of men as capitalists or workers; these cut across, though they seldom even weaken, national and religious loyalties. On the other, we meet with the conviction that political liberty is useless without the economic strength to use it, and consequently implied or open denial of the rival proposition that economic opportunity is of use only to politically free men. This in its turn carries with it a tacit acceptance of the proposition that the responsibilities of the State to its citizens must and will grow and not diminish, a theorem which is today taken for granted by masters and men alike, in Europe perhaps more unquestioningly than in the United States, but accepted even there to a degree which seemed Utopian only thirty, let alone fifty, years ago. This great transformation, with its genuine material gains, and no less genuine growth in social equality in the least liberal societies, is accompa­nied by something which forms the obverse side of the medal - the elimination, or, at the very best, strong disapproval, of those propensities for free enquiry and creation which cannot, without losing their nature, remain as conformist and law-abiding as the twentieth century demands. A century ago Auguste Comte asked why, if there was rightly no demand for freedom to disagree in mathematics, it should be allowed and even encouraged in ethics or

' I95°- the social sciences.' And indeed, if the creation of certain 'optimum' patterns of behaviour (and of thought and feeling) in individuals or entire societies is the main goal of social and individual action, Comte's case is unanswerable. Yet it is the extent of this very right to disregard the forces of order and convention, even the publicly accepted 'optimum' goals of action, that forms the glory of that bourgeois culture which reached its zenith in the nineteenth century and of which we have only now begun to witness the beginning of the end.

VI

The new attitude, resting as it does upon the policy of diminishing strife and misery by the atrophy of the faculties capable of causing them, is naturally hostile to, or at least suspicious of, disinterested curiosity (which might end anywhere), and looks upon the practice of all arts not obviously useful to society as being at best forms of social frivolity. Such occupations, when they are not a positive menace, are, in this view, an irritating and wasteful irrelevance, a trivial fiddling, a dissipation or diversion of energy which is in any case difficult enough to accumulate and should therefore be directed wholeheartedly and unceasingly to the task of building and maintaining the well-adjusted - sometimes called the 'integ­rated' - social whole. In this state of mind it is only natural that such terms as 'truth' or 'honour' or 'obligation' or 'beauty' become transformed into purely offensive or defensive weapons, used by a State or a party in the struggle to create a community impervious to influences beyond its own direct control. This result can be achieved either by rigid censorship and insulation from the rest of the world - a world which remains free at least in the sense that many of its inhabitants continue to say what they wish, in which words are relatively unorganised, with all the unpredictable and consequently 'dangerous' consequences that flow from this; or else it can be achieved by extending the area of strict control until it stretches over all possible sources of anarchy, that is, the whole of mankind. Only by one of these two expedients can a state of affairs be achieved in which human behaviour can be manipulated with relative ease by technically qualified specialists - adjusters of conflicts and promoters of peace both of body and of mind, engineers and other scientific experts in the service of the ruling group, psychologists, sociologists, economic and social planners and so on. Clearly this is not an intellectual climate which favours originality of judgement, moral independence or uncommon powers of insight. The entire trend of such an order is to reduce all issues to technical problems of lesser or greater complexity, in particular the problem of how to survive, get rid of maladjust­ments, achieve a condition in which the individual's psychological or economic capacities are harnessed to producing the maximum of unclouded social contentment compatible with opposition to all experiment outside the bounds of the system; and this in its turn depends upon the suppression of whatever in the individual might raise doubt or assert itself against the single all-embracing, all- clarifying, all-satisfying plan.

This tendency, present in all stable societies - perhaps in all societies as such - has, owing to the repression of all rival influences, assumed a particularly acute form in, for example, the Soviet Union. There, subordination to the central plan, and the elimination of disturbing forces, whether by education or repres­sion, has been enacted with that capacity for believing in the literal inspiration of ideologies - in the ability and duty of human beings to translate ideas into practice fully, rigorously and immediately - to which Russian thinkers of all schools seem singularly addicted. The Soviet pattern is clear, simple and deduced from 'scientifically demonstrated' premisses. The task of realising it must be entrusted to technically trained believers who look on the human beings at their disposal as material which is infinitely malleable within the confines revealed by the sciences. Stalin's remark that creative artists are 'engineers of human souls'[40] is a very precise expression

' Stalin used the phrase 'engineers of human souls' in a speech on the role of Soviet writers made at Maxim Gorky's house on 26 October 1932, recorded in an unpublished manuscript in the Gorky archive - K. L. Zelinsky, 'Vstrecha pisatelei s I. V. Stalinym' ('A meeting of writers with I. V. Stalin') - and published for the first time, in English, in A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928-39 (Basingstoke and London, 1991), pp. 128-31: for this phrase see p. 131 (and, for the Russian original, 'inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush', I. V. Stalin, Sochineniya (Moscow, 1946-67), vol. 13, p. 410). Ed.

of this spirit. The presence of something analogous in various Fascist societies, with intuition or instinct substituted for science, and cynicism for hypocrisy, are equally clear for all to see. In Western Europe this tendency has taken the milder form of a shift of emphasis away from disagreement about political principles (and from party struggles which at least in part sprang from genuine differences of outlook) towards disagreements, ultimately techni­cal, about methods - about the best ways of achieving that degree of minimum economic or social stability without which arguments concerned with fundamental principles and the ends of life are felt to be 'abstract', 'academic' and unrelated to the urgent needs of the hour. It leads to that noticeably growing lack of interest in long- term political issues - as opposed to current day-to-day economic or social problems - on the part of the populations of the Western European continent which is occasionally deplored by shocked American and British observers, who mistakenly ascribe it to the growth of cynicism and disenchantment with ideals.

No doubt all abandonment of old values for new may appear to the surviving adherents of the former as conscienceless disregard for morality as such. If so, it is a great delusion. There is all too little disbelief, whether conscienceless or apathetic, in the new values. On the contrary, they are clung to with unreasoning faith and that blind intolerance towards scepticism which springs, as often as not, from an inner bankruptcy or terror, the hope against hope that here at least is a safe haven, narrow, dark, cut off, but secure. Growing numbers of human beings are prepared to purchase this sense of security even at the cost of allowing vast tracts of life to be controlled by persons who, whether consciously or not, act systematically to narrow the horizon of human activity to manageable proportions, to train human beings into more easily combinable parts - interchangeable, almost prefabricated - of a total pattern. In the face of such a strong desire to stabilise, if need be, at the lowest level - upon the floor from which you cannot fall, which cannot betray you, let you down - all the ancient political principles begin to vanish, feeble symbols of creeds no longer relevant to the new realities.

This process does not move at a uniform pace everywhere. In the United States, perhaps, for obvious economic reasons, the nine­teenth century survives more powerfully than anywhere else. The political issues and conflicts, the topics of discussion and the idealised personalities of democratic leaders are more reminiscent of Victorian Europe than anything to be found on the Continent now.

Woodrow Wilson was a nineteenth-century liberal in a very full and unqualified sense. The New Deal and the personality of President Roosevelt excited political passions far more like those of the battles which raged round Gladstone or Lloyd George, or the anti-clerical governments at the turn of the century in France, than anything actually contemporary with it in Europe; and this great liberal enterprise, certainly the most constructive compromise between individual liberty and economic security which our own time has witnessed, corresponds more closely to the political and economic ideals of John Stuart Mill in his last, humanitarian- socialist phase than to left-wing thought in Europe in the 1930s. The controversy about international organisation, about the United Nations and its subsidiaries, as well as the other post-war international institutions, like the controversies which in the years after 19 i 8 surrounded the League of Nations, are fully intelligible in terms of nineteenth-century political ideals, and therefore occupied far more attention and meant much more in America than in Europe. The United States may have disavowed President Wilson, but it continued to live in a moral atmosphere not very different from that of Wilson's time - the easily recognisable black- and-white moral world of the Victorian values. The events of 1918 preyed on the American conscience for twenty-five years, whereas in Europe the exalte atmosphere of 1918-19 was soon dissipated - a brief moment of iUumination which in retrospect seems more American than European, the last manifestation in Europe of a great but dying tradition in a world already living, and fully conscious of living, in a new medium, too well aware of its differences from, and resentful of, its past. The break was not sudden and total, a dramatic coup de theatre. Many of the seeds planted in the eighteenth or nineteenth century have flowered only in the twentieth: the political and ethical climate in which trade unions flourished, for instance, in Germany, or England, or France, contained as elements the old, familiar doctrines of human rights and duties which were the common property, avowed or not, of almost all parties and views in the liberal, humanitarian, expansionist hundred years of peace and technological progress.

The main current of the nineteenth century does, of course, survive into the present and especially in America, Scandinavia and the British Commonwealth; but it is not what is most characteristic of our time. For in the past there were conflicts of ideas; whereas what characterises our time is less the struggle of one set of ideas against another than the mounting wave of hostility to all ideas as such. Since ideas are considered the source of too much disquiet, there is a tendency to suppress the conflict between liberal claims to individual political rights and the patent economic injustice which can result from their satisfaction (which forms the substance of socialist criticism) by the submersion of both in an authoritarian regime which removes the free area within which such conflict can occur. What is genuinely typical of our time is a new concept of society, the values of which are analysable not in terms of the desires or the moral sense which inspire the view of its ultimate ends held by a group or an individual, but from some factual hypothesis or metaphysical dogma about history, or race, or national character, in terms of which the answers to the question what is good, right, required, desirable, fitting can be 'scientifically' deduced, or intuited, or expressed in this or that kind of behaviour. There is one and only one direction in which a given aggregate of individuals is conceived to be travelling, driven thither by quasi- occult impersonal forces, such as their class structure, or their collective unconscious, or their racial origin, or the 'real' social or physical roots of this or that 'popular' or 'group' 'mythology'. The direction is alterable, but only by tampering with the hidden cause of behaviour - those who wish to tamper being, according to this view, free to a limited degree to determine their own direction and that of others not by the increase of rationality and by argument addressed to it, but by having a superior understanding of the machinery of social behaviour and skill in manipulating it.

In this sinister fashion has Saint-Simon's prophecy about (in Engels's paraphrase) 'replacing the government of persons by the administration of things'i finally come true - a prophecy which once seemed so brave and optimistic. The cosmic forces are conceived as omnipotent and indestructible. Hopes, fears, prayers cannot wish them out of existence; but the elite of experts can canalise them and control them to some extent. The task of these experts is to adjust human beings to these forces and to develop in them an unshakeable faith in the new order, and unquestioning

¹ Engels in Anti-Duhring (1877-8): Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke

(Berlin, 1956-83), vol. 19, p. 195. Cf. 'Lettres de Henri Saint-Simon a un

americain', eighth letter, in L'Industrie (1817), vol. i: pp. 182-91 in Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin (Paris, 1865-78), vol. 18.

loyalty to it, which will anchor it securely and for ever. Conse­quently the technical disciplines which direct natural forces and adjust men to the new order must take primacy over humane pursuits - philosophical, historical, artistic. Such pursuits, at most, will serve only to prop up and embellish the new establishment. Turgenev's naive materialist, the hero of his novel Fathers and Children, the 'nihilistic' scientist Bazarov, has finally come into his own, as Saint-Simon and his more pedestrian follower Comte always felt sure that he would, but for reasons very different from those which seemed plausible a century ago. Bazarov's faith rested on the claim that the dissection of frogs was more important than poetry because it led to the truth, whereas the poetry of Pushkin did not.

The motive at work today is more devastating: anatomy is superior to art because it generates no independent ends of life, provides no experiences which act as independent criteria of good or evil, truth or falsehood, and are therefore liable to clash with the orthodoxy which we have created as the only bulwark strong enough to preserve us from doubts and despairs and all the horrors of maladjustment. To be borne this way and that emotionally or intellectually is a form of malaise. Against it nothing will work but the elimination of alternatives so nearly in equal balance that choice between them is - or at least appears to be - possible.

This is, of course, the position of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: he said that what men dreaded most was freedom of choice, to be left alone to grope their way in the dark; and the Church, by lifting the responsibility from their shoulders, made them willing, grateful and happy slaves. The Grand Inquisitor stood for the dogmatic organisation of the life of the spirit: Bazarov for its theoretical opposite - free scientific enquiry, the facing of the 'hard' facts, the acceptance of the truth however brutal or upsetting. By an irony of history (not unfore­seen by Dostoevsky) they have formed a pact, they are allies, and today are often indistinguishable. Buridan's ass, we are told, unable to choose between two equidistant bundles of hay, starved to death. Against this fate the only remedy is blind obedience and faith. Whether the refuge is a dogmatic religious faith or a dogmatic faith in social or natural science matters relatively little: for without such obedience and faith there is no confidence and no hope, no optimistic, 'constructive', 'positive' form of life. That the disciples of those who first exposed the idolatry of ideas frozen into oppressive institutions - Fourier, Feuerbach and Marx - should be the most ferocious supporters of the new forms of 'reification' and 'dehumanisation' is indeed an irony of history.

vii

One of the most fascinating and disquieting symptoms of this trend is to be found in the policy of the great philanthropic foundations of the West. The criticism of these institutions most frequently made by both European and American observers is that their aims are too crudely utilitarian: that instead of seeking to support the pursuit of truth or creative activity as such (basic research, for example, or artistic activity) they are dedicated to the most direct and immediate improvement of human life conceived in crudely material terms - physical well-being, solutions to short- term social and economic problems, the manufacture of prophy­lactics against politically 'undesirable' views, and so on. But these charges seem to me misconcei_ve:!. The efforts of the celebrated and munificent bodies engaged ifl this type of activity rest, I am convinced, on a genuine and disinterested desire to serve the deepest interests of mankind, and not merely its material needs. But these interests are all conceived almost entirely in therapeutic terms: tensions (within or between individuals or groups or nations) that need to be released, wounds, conflicts, fixations, 'phobias' and fears, psychical and psychophysical abnormalities of all sorts which require the aid of specialised healers - doctors, economists, social workers, teams of diagnosticians or engineers or other masters of the craft of helping the sick and the perplexed - individual and collective sources of practical wisdom of every kind.

To the degree to which such suffering exists and can be treated by the applied sciences - genuine physical or mental sickness, poverty, social and economic inequality, squalor, misery, oppres­sion, which men and money, experts and equipment can cure or alleviate - such policies are, of course, entirely beneficent and their organised support is a great moral asset to an age and a country. But the reverse of this coin is the tendency - difficult to avoid, but disastrous - to assimilate all men's primary needs to those that are capable of being met by these methods: the reduction of all questions and aspirations to dislocations which the expert can set right. Some believe in coercion, others in gentler methods; but the conception of human needs in their entirety as those of the inmates of a prison or a reformatory or a school or a hospital, however sincerely it may be held, is a gloomy, false and ultimately degraded view, resting on denial of the rational and productive nature of all, or even the majority of, men. The resistance to it, whether in the form of attacks on American 'materialism' (when it springs from a genuine, if naive, and often crude form of altruistic idealism) or on Communist or nationalist fanaticism (when it is, more often than not, a misconceived, over-pragmatic search for human emancipa­tion), derives from an obscure realisation that both these tendencies

which spring from a common root - are hostile to the develop­ment of men as creative and self-directing beings. If men are indeed such beings, even this tendency, overwhelming as it seems to be at present, will not, in the end, prove fatal to human progress. This circular argument, which is, in essence, that of all critical rational­ists - of Marx (at any rate in his youth) and Freud as well as Spinoza and Kant, Mill and Tocqueville - if it is valid, offers some ground for a cautious and highly qualified optimism about the moral and intellectual future of the human race.

viii

At this point it might be said that the situation I have described is not altogether new. Has not every authoritarian institution, every irrationalist movement been engaged upon something of this kind

the artificial stilling of doubts, the attempt either to discredit uncomfortable questions or to educate men not to ask them? Was this not the practice of the great organised Churches, indeed of every institution from the national State to small sectarian estab­lishments? Was this not the attitude of the enemies of reason from the earliest mystery cults to the romanticism, anarchistic nihilism, surrealism, neo-Oriental cults of the last century and a half? Why should our age be specially accused of addiction to the particular tendency which formed a central theme of social doctrines which go back to Plato, or the sect of the medieval Assassins, or much Eastern thought and mysticism?

But there are two great differences which separate the political characteristics of our age from their origins in the past. In the first place, the reactionaries or romantics of previous periods, however much they might have advocated the superior wisdom of institu­tional authority or the revealed word over that of individual reason, did not in their moments of wildest unreason minimise the importance of the questions to be answered. On the contrary, they maintained that so crucial was it to obtain the correct answer that only hallowed institutions, or inspired leaders, or mystical revela­tion, or divine grace, could vouchsafe a solution of sufficient depth and universality. No doubt an order of importance of questions underlies any established social system - a hierarchical order the authority of which is itself not open to question. Moreover, the obscurity of some among the answers offered has in every age concealed their lack of truth or their irrelevance to the questions which they purported to solve. And perhaps much hypocrisy has traditionally been necessary to secure their success. But hypocrisy is very different from cynicism or blindness. Even the censors of opinion and the enemies of the truth felt compelled to pay formal homage to the vital importance of obtaining true answers to the great problems by the best available means. If their practice belied this, at least there was something to be belied: traitors and heretics often keep alive the memory - and the authority - of the beliefs which they are intent on betraying.

The second difference consists in the fact that in the past such attempts to obscure the nature of the issues were mostly associated with the avowed enemies of reason and individual freedom. The alignment of forces has been clear at any rate since the Renaissance; progress and reaction, however much these words have been abused, are not empty concepts. On one side stood the supporters of authority, unreasoning faith, suspicious of, or openly opposed to, the uncontrolled pursuit of truth or the free realisation of individual ideals. On the other, whatever their differences, were those supporters of free enquiry and self-expression who looked upon Voltaire and Lessing, Mill and Darwin, even Ibsen as their prophets. Their common quality - perhaps their only common quality - was some degree of devotion to the ideals of the Renaissance and a hatred of all that was associated, whether justly or not, with the Middle Ages - darkness, suppression, the stifling of all heterodoxy, the hatred of the flesh and of gaiety, of freedom of thought and expression, and of the love of natural beauty. There were of course many who cannot be classified so simply or so crudely; but until our own day the lines were drawn sharply enough to determine clearly the position of the men who most deeply influenced their age. A combination of devotion to scien­tific principles with 'obscurantist' social theory seemed altogether unthinkable. Today the tendency to circumscribe and confine and limit, to determine the range of what may be asked and what may not, what may be believed and what may not, is no longer a distinguishing mark of the old 'reactionaries'. On the contrary, it comes as powerfully from the heirs of the radicals, rationalists, 'progressives' of the nineteenth century as from the descendants of their enemies. There is a persecution not only of science, but by science or at least in its name; and this is a nightmare scarcely foreseen by the most Cassandra-like prophets of either camp.

We are often told that the present is an age of cynicism and despair, of crumbling values and the dissolution of the fixed standards and landmarks of Western civilisation. But this is neither true nor even plausible. So far from showing the loose texture of a collapsing order, the world is today stiff with rigid rules and codes and ardent, irrational religions. So far from evincing the toleration which springs from cynical disregard of the ancient sanctions, it treats heterodoxy as the supreme danger.

Whether in the East or West, the danger has not been greater since the ages of faith. Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday; loyalties are tested far more severely; sceptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behaviour, if they do not take care to identify themselves with an organised movement, are objects of fear or derision and targets of persecution for either side, execrated or despised by all the embattled parties in the great ideological wars of our time. And although this is less acute in societies traditionally averse to extremes - Great Britain, say, or Denmark or Switzerland - this makes little difference to the general pattern. In the world today individual stupidity and wickedness are forgiven more easily than failure to be identified with a recognised party or attitude, to achieve an approved political or economic or intellectual status. In earlier periods, when more than one authority rules human life, a man might escape the pressure of the State by taking refuge in the fortress of the opposition - of an organised Church or dissident feudal establishment. The mere fact of conflict between authorities allowed room for a narrow and shifting, but still never entirely non-existent, no man's land, where private lives might still precari­ously be lived, because neither side dared to go too far for fear of too greatly strengthening the other. Today the very virtues of even the best-intentioned paternalistic State, its genuine anxiety to reduce destitution and disease and inequality, to penetrate all the neglected nooks and crannies of life which may stand in need of its justice and its bounty - its very success in those beneficent activities - have narrowed the area within which the individual may commit blunders, and curtailed his liberties in the interest (the very real interest) of his welfare or of his sanity, his health, his security, his freedom from want and fear. His area of choice has grown smaller not in the name of some opposing principle - as in the Dark Ages or during the rise of the nationalities - but in order to create a situation in which the very possibility of opposed prin­ciples, with all their unlimited capacity to cause mental stress and danger and destructive collisions, is eliminated in favour of a simpler and better regulated life, a robust faith in an efficiently working order, untroubled by agonising moral conflict.

Yet this is not a gratuitous development: the social and economic situation in which we are placed, the failure to harmonise the effects of technical progress with the forces of political and economic organisation inherited from an earlier phase, do call for a measure of social control to prevent chaos and destitution, which can be no less fatal to the development of human faculties than blind conformity. It is neither realistic nor morally conceivable that we should give up our social gains and meditate for an instant the possibility of a return to ancient injustice and inequality and hopeless misery. The progress of technological skill makes it rational and indeed imperative to plan, and anxiety for the success of a particular planned society naturally inclines the planners to seek insulation from dangerous, because incalculable, forces which may jeopardise the plan. And this is a powerful incentive to 'autarky' and 'socialism in one country', whether imposed by conservatives, or New Dealers, or isolationists, or social democrats, or, indeed, imperialists. And this in its turn generates artificial barriers and increasingly restricts the planners' own resources. In extreme cases this policy leads to repression of the discontented and a perpetual tightening of discipline, until it absorbs more and more of the time and ingenuity of those who originally conceived it only as a means to a minimum of efficiency. Presently it grows to be a hideous end in itself, since its realisation leads to a vicious circle of repression in order to survive and of survival mainly to repress. So the remedy grows to be worse than the disease, and takes the form of those orthodoxies which rest on the simple puritanical faith of individuals who never knew or have forgotten what douceur de vivre, free self-expression, the infinite variety of persons and of the relationships between them, and the right of free choice, difficult to endure but more intolerable to surrender, can ever have been like.

The dilemma is logically insoluble: we cannot sacrifice either freedom or the organisation needed for its defence, or a minimum standard of welfare. The way out must therefore lie in some logically untidy, flexible and even ambiguous compromise. Every situation calls for its own specific policy, since 'out of the crooked timber of humanity', as Kant once remarked, 'no straight thing was ever made'.[41] What the age calls for is not (as we are so often told) more faith, or stronger leadership, or more scientific organisation. Rather is it the opposite - less Messianic ardour, more enlightened scepticism, more toleration of idiosyncrasies, more frequent ad hoc measures to achieve aims in a foreseeable future, more room for the attainment of their personal ends by individuals and by minorities whose tastes and beliefs find (whether rightly or wrongly must not matter) little response among the majority. What is required is a less mechanical, less fanatical application of general principles, however rational or righteous, a more cautious and less arrogantly self-confident application of accepted, scientifically tested, general solutions to unexamined individual cases. The wicked Talleyrand's 'Surtout, Messieurs, point de zele'[42] can be more humane than the demand for uniformity of the virtuous Robespierre, and a salutary brake upon too much control of men's lives in an age of social planning and technology. We must submit to authority not because it is infallible, but only for strictly and openly utilitarian reasons, as a necessary expedient.

Since no solution can be guaranteed against error, no disposition is final. And therefore a loose texture and toleration of a minimum of inefficiency, even a degree of indulgence in idle talk, idle curiosity, aimless pursuit of this or that without authorisation - 'conspicuous waste' itself - allow more spontaneous, individual variation (for which the individual must in the end assume full responsibility), and will always be worth more than the neatest and most delicately fashioned imposed pattern. Above all, it must be realised that the kinds of problems which this or that method of education or system of scientific or religious or social organisation is guaranteed to solve are not eo facto the only central questions of human life. Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. It is from intense preoccupation with these ends, ultimate, incom­mensurable, guaranteed neither to change nor to stand still - it is through the absorbed individual or collective pursuit of these, unplanned and at times without wholly adequate technical equip­ment, more often than not without conscious hope of success, still less of the approbation of the official auditor, that the best moments come in the lives of individuals and peoples.

HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY

done his work too well. For Comte's views have affected the categories of our thought more deeply than is commonly sup­posed. Our view of the natural sciences, of the material basis of cultural evolution, of all that we call progressive, rational, en­lightened, Western; our view of the relationships of institutions and of public symbolism and ceremonial to the emotional life of individuals and societies, and consequently our view of history itself, owes a good deal to his teaching and his influence. His grotesque pedantry, the unreadable dullness of much of his writing, his vanity, his eccentricity, his solemnity, the pathos of his private life, his dogmatism, his authoritarianism, his philosophical fallacies, all that is bizarre and Utopian in his character and writings, need not blind us to his merits. The father of sociology is by no means the ludicrous figure he is too often represented as being. He understood the role of natural science and the true reasons for its prestige better than most contemporary thinkers. He saw no depth in mere darkness; he demanded evidence; he exposed shams; he denounced intellectual impressionism; he fought many metaphysical and theological mythologies, some of which, but for the blows he struck, might have been with us still; he provided weapons in the war against the enemies of reason, many of which are far from obsolete today. Above all he grasped the central issue of all philosophy - the distinction between words (or thoughts) that are about words, and words (or thoughts) that are about things, and thereby helped to lay the foundation of what is best and most illuminating in modern empiricism; and, of course, he made a great mark on historical thinking. He believed in the application of scientific, that is, naturalistic, canons of explanation in all fields: and saw no reason why they should not apply to relations of human beings as well as relations of things.

This doctrine was not original, and by his time growing somewhat out of date; the writings of Vico had been rediscovered; Herder had transformed the concepts of nation, society and culture; Ranke and Michelet were changing both the an and the science of history. The notion that human history could be turned into a natural science by the extension to human beings of a kind of sociological zoology, analogous to the study of bees and beavers, which Condorcet had so ardently advocated and so confidently prophesied - this simple behaviourism had provoked a reaction against itself. It was seen to be a distortion of the facts, a denial of the evidence of direct experience, a deliberate suppression of much of what we knew about ourselves, our motives, purposes, choices, perpetrated in order to achieve by hook or by crook a single, unitary method in all knowledge. Comte did not commit the enormities of a La Mettrie or a Buchner. He did not say that history was, or was reducible to, a kind of physics; but his conception of sociology pointed in that direction - of one complete and all-embracing pyramid of scientific knowledge; one method; one truth; one scale of rational, 'scientific' values. This naive craving for unity and symmetry at the expense of experience is with us still.

II

The notion that one can discover large patterns or regularities in the procession of historical events is naturally attractive to those who are impressed by the success of the natural sciences in classifying, correlating, and above all predicting. They conse­quently seek to extend historical knowledge to fill gaps in the past (and, at times, to build into the limitless gap of the future) by applying 'scientific' method: by setting forth, armed with a metaphysical or empirical system, from such islands of certain, or virtually certain, knowledge of the facts as they claim to possess. And no doubt a great deal has been done, and will be done, in historical as in other fields by arguing from the known to the unknown, or from the little known to the even less known.¹ But whatever value the perception of patterns or uniformities may have in stimulating or verifying specific hypotheses about the past or the future, it has played, and is increasingly playing, another and more dubious role in determining the outlook of our time. It has affected not merely ways of observing and describing the activities and characters of human beings, but moral and political and religious attitudes towards them. For among the questions which are bound to arise in any consideration of how and why human beings act and live as they do are questions of human motive and responsibility.

In describing human behaviour it has always been artificial and over-austere to omit questions of the character, purposes and motives of individuals. And in considering these one automatically evaluates not merely the degree and kind of influence of this or that motive or character upon what happens, but also its moral or political quality in terms of whatever scale of values one con­sciously or semi-consciously accepts in one's thought or action. How did this or that situation arise? Who or what was or is (or will be, or could be) responsible for a war, a revolution, an economic collapse, a renaissance of arts and letters, a discovery or an invention or a spiritual transformation altering the lives of men? It is by now a familiar story that there exist personal and impersonal theories of history. On the one hand, there are theories according to which the lives of entire peoples and societies have been decisively influenced by exceptional individuals¹ - or, alterna­tively, doctrines according to which what happens occurs as a result not of the wishes and purposes of identifiable individuals, but of those of large numbers of unspecified persons, with the qualification that these collective wishes and goals are not solely or even largely determined by impersonal factors, and are therefore not wholly or even largely deducible from knowledge of natural forces alone, such as environment, or climate, or physical, physio­logical and psychological processes. On either view, it becomes the

' Indeed, the very notion of great men, however carefully qualified, however sophisticated, embodies this belief; for this concept, even in its most attenuated form, would be empty unless it were thought that some men played a more decisive role in the course of history than others. The notion of greatness, unlike those of goodness or wickedness or talent or beauty, is not a mere characteristic of individuals in a more or less private context, but is, as we ordinarily usc it, directly connected with social effectiveness, the capacity of individuals to alter things radically on a large scale.

business of historians to investigate who wanted what, and when, and where, in what way; how many men avoided or pursued this or that goal, and with what intensity; and, further, to ask under what circumstances such wants or fears have proved effective, and to what extent, and with what consequences.

Against this kind of interpretation, in terms of the purposes and characters of individuals, there is a cluster of views (to which the progress of the natural sciences has given a great and growing prestige) according to which all explanations in terms of human intentions stem from a mixture of vanity and stubborn ignorance. These views rest on the assumption that belief in the importance of the motives is delusive; that the behaviour of men is in fact made what it is by causes largely beyond the control of individuals; for instance by the influence of physical factors or of environment or of custom; or by the 'natural' growth of some larger unit - a race, a nation, a class, a biological species; or (according to some writers) by some entity conceived in even less empirical terms - a 'spiritual organism', a religion, a civilisation, a Hegelian (or Buddhist) World Spirit; entities whose careers or manifestations on earth are the object either of empirical or of metaphysical enquiries, depending on the cosmological outlook of particular thinkers.

Those who incline to this kind of impersonal interpretation of historical change, whether because they believe that it possesses greater scientific value (that is, enables them to predict the future or 'retrodict' the past more successfully or precisely), or because they believe that it embodies some crucial insight into the nature of the universe, are committed by it to tracing the ultimate responsibility for what happens to the acts or behaviour of impersonal or 'trans- personal' or 'super-personal' entities or 'forces' whose evolution is identified with human history. It is true that the more cautious and clear-headed among such theorists try to meet the objections of empirically minded critics by adding, in a footnote or as an afterthought, that, whatever their terminology, they are on no account to be taken to believe that there literally exist such creatures as civilisations or races or spirits of nations living side by side with the individuals who compose them; and they add that they fully realise that all institutions 'in the last analysis' consist of individual men and women, and are not themselves personalities but only convenient devices - idealised models, or types, or labels, or metaphors - different ways of classifying, grouping, explaining or predicting the properties or behaviour of individual human beings in terms of their more important (that is, historically effective) empirical characteristics. Nevertheless these protestations too often turn out to be mere lip-service to principles which those who profess them do not really believe. Such writers seldom write or think as if they took these deflationary caveats over-seriously; and the more candid or naive among them do not even pretend to subscribe to them. Thus nations or cultures or civilisations, for Schelling or Hegel (and Spengler; and one is inclined, though somewhat hesitantly, to add Toynbee), are certainly not merely convenient collective terms for individuals possessing certain char­acteristics in common; but seem more 'real' and more 'concrete' than the individuals who compose them. Individuals remain 'abstract' precisely because they are mere 'elements' or 'aspects', 'moments' artificially abstracted for ad hoc purposes, and literally without reality (or, at any rate, 'historical' or 'philosophical' or 'real' being) apart from the wholes of which they form a part, much as the colour of a thing, or its shape, or its value are 'elements' or 'attributes' or 'modes' or 'aspects' of concrete objects - isolated for convenience, and thought of as existing independ­ently, on their own, only because of some weakness or confusion in the analysing intellect.

Marx and Marxists are more ambiguous. We cannot be quite sure what to make of such a category as a social 'class' whose emergence and struggles, victories and defeats, condition the lives of individuals, sometimes against, and most often independently of, such individuals' conscious or expressed purposes. Classes are never proclaimed to be literally independent entities: they are constituted by individuals in their (mainly economic) interaction. Yet to seek to explain, or put a moral or political value on, the actions of individuals by examining such individuals one by one, even to the limited extent to which such examination is possible, is considered by Marxists to be not merely impracticable and time- wasting (as indeed it may be), but absurd in a more fundamental sense - because the 'true' (or 'deeper') causes of human behaviour lie not in the specific circumstances of an individual life or in the individual's thoughts or volitions (as a psychologist or biographer or novelist might describe them), but in a pervasive interrelation­ship between a vast variety of such lives with their natural and man-made environment. Men do as they do, and think as they think, largely as a 'function of' the inevitable evolution of the 'class' as a whole - from which it follows that the history and development of classes can be studied independently of the biographies of their component individuals. It is the 'structure' and the 'evolution' of the class alone that (causally) matters in the end. This is, mutatis mutandis, similar to the belief in the primacy of collective patterns held by those who attribute active properties to race or culture, whether they be benevolent internationalists like Herder who thought that different peoples can and should admire, love and assist one another as individuals can and do, because peoples are in some sense individuals (or super-individuals); or by the ferocious champions of national or racial self-assertion and war, like Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Hitler. And the same note, sometimes mild and civilised, sometimes harshly aggressive, is heard in the voices of all those upholders of collectivist mystiques who appeal from individual to tradition, or to the collective consciousness (or 'Unconscious') of a race or a nation or a culture, or, like Carlyle, feel that abstract nouns deserve capital letters, and tell us that Tradition or History (or 'the past', or the species, or 'the masses') is wiser than we, or that the great society of the quick and the dead, of our ancestors and of generations yet unborn, has larger purposes than any single creature, purposes of which our lives are but a puny fragment, and that we belong to this larger unity with the 'deepest' and perhaps least conscious parts of ourselves.1 There are many versions of this belief, with varying proportions of empiricism and mysticism, 'tender'- and 'tough' -mindedness, optimism and pessimism, collec­tivism and individualism; but what all such views have in common is the fundamental distinction on which they rest, between, on the one hand, 'real' and 'objective', and, on the other, 'subjective' or 'arbitrary' judgements, based respectively on acceptance or rejec­tion of this ultimately mystical act of self-identification with a reality which transcends empirical experience.

For Bossuet, for Hegel, for Marx/ for Spengler (and for almost all thinkers for whom history is 'more' than past events, namely a theodicy) this reality takes on the form of an objective 'march of history'. The process may be thought of as being in time and space or beyond them; as being cyclical or spiral or rectilinear, or as occurring in the form of a peculiar zigzag movement, sometimes called dialectical; as continuous and uniform, or irregular, broken by sudden leaps to 'new levels'; as due to the changing forms of one single 'force', or to conflicting elements locked (as in some ancient myth) in an eternal Pyrrhic struggle; as the history of one deity or 'force' or 'principle', or of several; as being destined to end well or badly; as holding out to human beings the prospect of eternal beatitude, or eternal damnation, or both in turn, or neither. But whatever version of the story is accepted - and it is never a scientific, that is, empirically testable theory, stated in quantitative terms, still less a description of what our eyes see and our ears hear - the moral of it is always one and the same: that we must learn to distinguish the 'real' course of things from the dreams and fancies and 'rationalisations' which we construct unconsciously for our solace or amusement; for these may comfort us for a while, but will betray us cruelly in the end. There is, we are told, a nature of things, and it has a pattern in time: 'Things and actions are what

extreme forms these views contradict each other; in their softer and less consistent forms they tend to overlap, and even coalesce.

Or, some prefer to say, Engels.

No one has demonstrated this with more devastating lucidity than Karl Popper. While he seems to me somewhat to underestimate the differences between the methods of natural science and those of history or common sense (Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science seems, despite some exaggerations, to be more convincing on this topic), he has, in his The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, exposed some of the fallacies of metaphysical 'historicism' with such force and precision, and made so clear its incompatibility with any kind of scientific empiricism, that there is no further excuse for confounding the two.

they are,' said a sober English philosopher over two centuries ago, 'and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?'[43]

What, then, must we do to avoid deception? At the very least - if we cannot swallow the notion of super-personal 'spirits' or 'forces' - we must admit that all events occur in discoverable, uniform, unaltering patterns; for if some did not, how could we find the laws of such occurrences? And without universal order - a system of true laws - how could history be 'intelligible'? How could it 'make sense', 'have meaning', be more than a picaresque account of a succession of random episodes, a mere collection (as Descartes, for this very reason, seems to have thought) of old wives' tales? Our values - what we think good and bad, important and trivial, right and wrong, noble and contemptible - all these are condi­tioned by the place we occupy in the pattern, on the moving stair. We praise and blame, worship and condemn whatever fits or does not fit the interests and needs and ideals that we seek to satisfy - the ends that (being made as we are) we cannot help pursuing - according to our lights, that is, our own perception of our condition, our place in 'Nature'. Such attitudes are held to be 'rational' and 'objective' to the degree to which we perceive this condition accurately, that is, understand where we are in terms of the great world plan, the movement whose regularities we discern as well as our historical sense and knowledge permit. To each condition and generation its own perspectives on the past and future, depending upon where it has arrived, what it has left behind, and whither it is moving; its values depend on this same awareness. To condemn the Greeks or the Romans or the Assyr­ians or the Aztecs for this or that folly or vice may be not more than to say that what they did or wished or thought conflicts with our own view of life, which may be the true or 'objective' view for the stage which we have reached, and which is perceived less or more clearly according to the depth and accuracy of our under­standing of what this stage is, and of the manner in which it is developing. If the Romans and the Aztecs judged differently from us, they may have judged no less well and truly and 'objectively', to the degree to which they understood their own condition and their own very different stage of development. For us to condemn their scale of values is valid enough for our condition, which is the sole frame of reference we have. And if they had known us they might have condemned us as harshly and, because their circum­stances and values were what they inevitably were, with equal validity.

According to this view there is nothing, no point of rest outside the general movement, where we or they can take up a stand, no static absolute standards in terms of which things and persons can be finally evaluated. Hence the only attitudes correctly described, and rightly condemned, as relative, subjective and irrational are forms of failure to relate our judgement to our own truest interests, that is, to what will fulfil our natures most fully - to all that the next step in our inevitable development necessarily holds in store. Some thinkers of this school view subjective aberrations with compassion and condone them as temporary attitudes from which the enlightenment of the future will henceforward preserve man­kind. Others gloat exultantly or ironically over the inevitable doom of those who misinterpret, and therefore fall foul of, the inexorable march of events. But whether the tone is charitable or sardonic, whether one condemns the errors of foolish individuals or the blind mob, or applauds their inevitable annihilation, this attitude rests on the belief that everything is caused to occur as it does by the machinery of history itself - by the impersonal forces of class, race, culture, History, Reason, the Life-Force, Progress, the Spirit of the Age. Given this organisation of our lives, which we did not create, and cannot alter, it, and it alone, is ultimately responsible for everything. To blame or praise individuals or groups of individuals for acting rightly or wrongly, so far as this entails a suggestion that they are in some sense genuinely free to choose between alternatives, and may therefore be justly and reasonably blamed or praised for choosing as they did and do, is a vast blunder, a return to some primitive or naive conception of human beings as being able somehow to evade total determination of their lives by forces natural or supernatural, a relapse into a childish animism which the study of the relevant scientific or metaphysical system should swiftly dispel. For if such choices were real, the determined world structure which alone, on this view, makes complete explanation, whether scientific or metaphysical, possible could not exist. And this is ruled out as unthinkable, 'reason rejects it', it is confused, delusive, superficial, a piece of puerile megalomania, pre-scientific, unworthy of civilised men.

The notion that history obeys laws, whether natural or super­natural, that every event of human life is an element in a necessary pattern, has deep metaphysical origins: infatuation with the natural sciences feeds this stream, but is not its sole or, indeed, its principal source. In the first place there is the teleological outlook whose roots reach back to the beginnings of human thought. It occurs in many versions, but what is common to them all is the belief that men, and all living creatures and perhaps inanimate things as well, not merely are as they are, but have functions and pursue purposes. These purposes are either imposed upon them by a creator who has made every person and thing to serve each a specific goal; or else these purposes are not, indeed, imposed by a creator but are, as it were, internal to their possessors, so that every entity has a 'nature' and pursues a specific goal which is 'natural' to it, and the measure of its perfection consists in the degree to which it fulfils it. Evil, vice, imperfection, all the various forms of chaos and error, are, on this view, forms of frustration, impeded efforts to reach such goals, failures due either to misfortune, which puts obstacles in the path of self-fulfilment, or to misdirected attempts to fulfil some goal not 'natural' to the entity in question.

In this cosmology the world of men (and, in some versions, the entire universe) is a single all-inclusive hierarchy; so that to explain why each ingredient of it is as, and where, and when it is, and does what it does, is eo ipso to say what its goal is, how far it successfully fulfils it, and what are the relations of co-ordination and subordi­nation between the goals of the various goal-pursuing entities in the harmonious pyramid which they collectively form. If this is a true picture of reality, then historical explanation, like every other form of explanation, must consist, above all, in the attribution to individuals, groups, nations, species of their proper place in the universal pattern. To know the 'cosmic' place of a thing or a person is to say what it is and does, and at the same time why it should be and do as it is and does. Hence to be and to have value, to exist and to have a function (and to fulfil it less or more successfully) are one and the same. The pattern, and it alone, brings into being, and causes to pass away, and confers purpose, that is to say, value and meaning, on all there is. To understand is to perceive patterns. To offer historical explanations is not merely to describe a succession of events, but to make it intelligible; to make intelligible is to reveal the basic pattern - not one of several possible patterns, but the one unique plan which, by being as it is, fulfils only one particular purpose, and consequently is revealed as fitting in a specifiable fashion within the single 'cosmic' overall schema which is the goal of the universe, the goal in virtue of which alone it is a universe at all, and not a chaos of unrelated bits and pieces. The more thoroughly the nature of this purpose is understood, and with it the pattern it entails in the various forms of human activity, the more explanatory or illuminating - the 'deeper' - the activity of the historian will be. Unless an event, or the character of an individual, or the activity of this or that institution or group or historical personage, is explained as a necessary consequence of its place in the pattern (and the larger, that is, the more comprehensive the schema, the more likely it is to be the true one), no explanation - and therefore no historical account - is being provided. The more inevitable an event or an action or a character can be exhibited as being, the better it has been understood, the profounder the researcher's insight, the nearer we are to the one embracing, ultimate truth.

This attitude is profoundly anti-empirical. We attribute purposes to all things and persons not because we have evidence for this hypothesis; for if there were a question of evidence for it, there could in principle be evidence against it; and then some things and events might turn out to have no purpose and therefore, in the sense used above, be incapable of being fitted into the pattern, that is, of being explained at all; but this cannot be, and is rejected in advance, a priori. We are plainly dealing not with an empirical theory but with a metaphysical attitude which takes for granted that to explain a thing - to describe it as it 'truly' is, even to define it more than verbally, that is, superficially - is to discover its purpose. Everything is in principle explicable, for everything has a purpose, although our minds may be too feeble or too distraught to discover in any given case what this purpose is. On such a view to say of things or persons that they exist is to say that they pursue goals; to say that they exist or are real, yet literally lack a purpose, whether imposed from outside or 'inherent' or 'innate', is to say something not false, but literally self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. Teleology is not a theory, or a hypothesis, but a category or a framework in terms of which everything is, or should be, conceived and described.

The influence of this attitude on the writing of history from the epic of Gilgamesh to those enjoyable games of patience which Arnold Toynbee plays with the past and future of mankind - and plays with exhilarating skill and imagination — is too familiar to need emphasis. It enters, however unconsciously, into the thought and language of those who speak of the 'rise' and 'fall' of States or movements or classes or individuals as if they obeyed some irresistible rhythm, a rising or falling wave of some cosmic river, a tidal ebb or flow in human affairs, subject to natural or supernat­ural laws; as if discoverable regularities had been imposed on individuals or 'super-individuals' by a Manifest Destiny, as if the notion of life as a play were more than a vivid metaphor.¹ To those who use this figure history is a piece - or succession of pieces - comical or tragical, a libretto whose heroes and villains, winners and losers, speak their lines and suffer their fate in accordance with the text conceived in terms of them but not by them; for otherwise nothing could be rightly conceived as tragical or comical; no pattern - no rules - no explanation. Historians, journalists, ordi­nary men speak in these terms; they have become part and parcel of ordinary speech. Yet to take such metaphors and turns of phrase literally; to believe that such patterns are not invented but intui­tively discovered or discerned, that they are not only some among many possible tunes which the same sounds can be made to yield to the musical ear, but are in some sense unique; to think that there

' I do not, of course, wish to imply that metaphors and figures of speech can be dispensed with in ordinary utterance, still less in the sciences; only that the danger of illicit 'reification' - the mistaking of words for things, metaphors for realities - is even greater in this sphere than is usually supposed. The most notorious cases are, of course, those of the State or the Nation, the quasi- personification of which has rightly made philosophers and even plain men uneasy or indignant for over a century. But many other words and usages offer similar dangers. Historical movements exist, and we must be allowed to call them such. Collective acts do occur; societies do rise, flourish, decay, die. Patterns, 'atmospheres', complex interrelationships of men or cultures are what they are, and cannot be analysed away into atomic constituents. Nevertheless, to take such expressions so literally that it becomes natural and normal to attribute to them causal properties, active powers, transcendent properties, demands for human sacrifice, is to be fatally deceived by myths. 'Rhythms' in history occur, but it is a sinister symptom of one's condition to speak of them as 'inexorable'. Cultures possess patterns, and ages spirits; but to explain human actions as their 'inevitable' consequences or expressions is to be a victim of misuse of words. There is no formula which guarantees a successful escape from either the Scylla of populating the world with imaginary powers and dominions, or the Charybdis of reducing everything to the verifiable behaviour of identifiable men and women in precisely denotable places and times. One can do no more than point to the existence of these perils; one must navigate between them as best one ^can.

exists the pattern, the basic rhythm of history - something which both creates and justifies all that there is - that is to take the game too seriously, to see in it a key to reality. Certainly it is to commit oneself to the view that the notion of individual responsibility is, 'in the end', an illusion. No effort, however ingenious, to re­interpret that much-tormented expression will, within a teleologi- cal system, restore its normal meaning to the notion of free choice. The puppets may be conscious and identify themselves happily with the inevitable process in which they play their parts; but it remains inevitable, and they remain marionettes.

Teleology is not, of course, the only metaphysics of history; side by side with it there has persisted a distinction of appearance and reality even more celebrated but of a somewhat different kind. For the teleological thinker all apparent disorder, inexplicable disaster, gratuitous suffering, unintelligible concatenations of random events are due not to the nature of things but to our failure to discover their purpose. Everything that seems useless, discordant, mean, ugly, vicious, distorted is needed, if we but knew it, for the harmony of the whole which only the Creator of the world, or the world itself (if it could become wholly aware of itself and its goals), can know. Total failure is excluded a priori, for at a 'deeper' level all processes will always be seen to culminate in success; and since there must always exist a level 'deeper' than that of any given insight, there is in principle no empirical test of what constitutes 'ultimate' success or failure. Teleology is a form of faith capable of neither confirmation nor refutation by any kind of experience; the notions of evidence, proof, probability and so on are wholly inapplicable to it.

But there is a second, no less time-honoured view according to which it is not goals, less or more dimly discerned, which explain and justify whatever happens, but a timeless, permanent, transcend­ent reality, 'above', or 'outside', or 'beyond'; which is as it is for ever, in perfect, inevitable, self-explaining harmony. Each element of it is necessitated to be what it is by its relations to the other elements and to the whole. If the world does not appear to manifest this, if we do not see actual events and persons as connected with each other by those relations of logical necessity which would make it inconceivable that anything could be other than it is, that is due solely to the failure of our own vision. We are blinded by ignorance, stupidity, passion, and the task of explana­tion in science or in history is the attempt to show the chaos of appearances as an imperfect reflection of the perfect order of reality, so that once more everything falls into its proper place. Explanation is the discovery of the 'underlying' pattern. The ideal is now not a distant prospect beckoning all things and persons towards self-realisation, but a self-consistent, eternal, ultimate 'structure of reality', compresent 'timelessly', as it were, with the confused world of the senses which it casts as a distorted image or a feeble shadow, and of which it is at once the origin, the cause, the explanation and the justification. The relation of this reality to the world of appearances forms the subject-matter of all the depart­ments of true philosophy - of ethics, aesthetics, logic, of the philosophy of history and of law and of politics, according to the 'aspect' of the basic relation that is selected for attention. But under all its various names - form and matter, the one and the many, ends and means, subject and object, order and chaos, change and rest, the perfect and the imperfect, the natural and the artificial, nature and mind - the central issue, that of Reality and Appearance, remains one and the same. To understand truly is to understand it and it alone. It plays the part which the notion of function and purpose plays in teleology. It alone at once explains and justifies.

Finally there is the influence of the natural sciences. At first this seems a paradox: scientific method is surely the very negation of metaphysical speculation. But historically the one is closely inter­woven with the other, and, in the field of which I speak, shows important affinities with it, namely, the notion that all that exists is necessarily an object in material nature, and therefore susceptible to explanation by scientific laws. If Newton was able in principle to explain every movement of every particular constituent of physical nature in terms of a small number of laws of great generality, is it not reasonable to suppose that psychological events, which consti­tute the conscious and unconscious lives of individuals, as well as social facts - the internal relationships and activities and 'experi­ences' of societies - could be explained by the use of similar methods? It is true that we seem to know a good deal less about the subject-matter of psychology and sociology than about the facts dealt with by physics or chemistry; but is there any objection in principle to the view that a sufficiently scrupulous and imaginative investigation of human beings might, one day, reveal laws capable of yielding predictions as powerful and as precise as those which are now possible in the natural sciences? If psychology and sociology ever attain to their proper stature - and why should they not? - we shall have laws enabling us, at least in theory (for it might still be difficult in practice), to predict (or reconstruct) every detail in the lives of every single human being in the future, present and past. If this is (as surely it is) the theoretical ideal of such sciences as psychology, sociology and anthropology, historical explanations will, if they are successful, simply consist in the application of the laws - the established hypotheses - of these sciences to specific individual situations. There will perhaps be 'pure' psychology, sociology, history, that is, the principles them­selves; and there will be their 'application': there will come into being social mathematics, social physics, social engineering, the 'physiology' of every feeling and attitude and inclination, as precise and powerful and useful as their originals in the natural sciences. And indeed this is the very phraseology and ideal of eighteenth- century rationalists like Holbach and d'Alembert and Condorcet. The metaphysicians are victims of a delusion; nothing in nature is transcendent, nothing purposive; everything is measurable; the day will dawn when, in answer to all the painful problems now besetting us, we shall be able to say with Leibniz, 'calculemus',¹ and return the answers clearly, exactly and conclusively.

What all these concepts - metaphysical and scientific alike - have in common (despite their even vaster differences) is the notion that to explain is to subsume under general formulae, to represent as examples of laws which cover an infinite number of instances; so that with knowledge of all the relevant laws, and of a sufficient range of relevant facts, it will be possible to tell not merely what happens, but also why; for, if the laws have been correctly established, to describe something is, in effect, to assert that it cannot happen otherwise. The question 'Why?' for teleologists means 'In pursuit of what unalterable goal?'; for the non- teleological metaphysical 'realists' it means 'Determined unalterably by what ultimate pattern?'; and for the upholders of the Comtean ideals of social statics and dynamics it means 'Resulting from what causes?' - actual causes which are as they are, whether they might have been otherwise or not. The inevitability of historical processes, of trends, of 'rises' and 'falls', is merely de facto for those who believe that the universe obeys only 'natural laws' which make it

' 'Let us calculate': e.g. Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1875-90), vol. 7, p. 200. Condorcet, in particular, had the same attitude.

what it is; it is de jure as well - the justification as well as the _expl_anati_on - for those who see such uniformity as not merely _something given, brute fact, something unchangeable and unques­ti_onabl_e, but as patterns, plans, purposes, ideals, as thoughts in the mind of a rational Deity or Universal Reason, as goals, as aesthetic, _self_-fulfilling wholes, as metaphysical rationales, theological other­worldly justifications, as theodicies, which satisfy the craving to know not merely why the world exists, but why it is worthy of _exi_st_ence; and why it is this particular world that exists, rather than some other, or no world at all; the solution being provided in terms of values which are either somehow 'embedded' in the facts themselves or 'determine' them from some 'transcendent' height or depth. All these theories are, in one sense or another, forms of de­terminism, whether they be teleological, metaphysical, mechanistic, religious, aesthetic or scientific. And one common characteristic of all such outlooks is the implication that the individual's freedom of choice (at any rate here, below) is ultimately an illusion, that the notion that human beings could have chosen otherwise than they did usually rests upon ignorance of facts; with the consequence that any assertion that they should have acted thus or thus, might have avoided this or that, and deserve (and not merely elicit or respond to) praise or blame, approval or condemnation, rests upon the presupposition that some area, at any rate, of their lives is not totally determined by laws, whether metaphysical or theological or expressing the generalised probabilities of the sciences. And this assumption, it is then maintained, is patently false. The advance of knowledge constantly brings new areas of experience under the sway of laws which make systematic inference and prediction possible. Hence we can, if we seek to be rational, praise and condemn, warn and encourage, advocate justice or self-interest, forgive, condone, make resolutions, issue orders, feel justified remorse, only to the degree to which we remain ignorant of the true nature of the world. The more we know, the farther the area of human freedom, and consequently of responsibility, is narrowed. For the omniscient being, who sees why nothing can be otherwise than as it is, the notions of responsibility or guilt, of right and wrong, are necessarily empty; they are a mere measure of ignor­ance, of adolescent illusion; and the perception of this is the first sign of moral and intellectual maturity.

This doctrine has taken several forms. There are those who believe that moral judgements are groundless because we know too much, and there are those who believe that they are unjustified because we know too little. And again, among the former there are those whose determinism is optimistic and benevolent, and those whose determinism is pessimistic, or else confident of a happy ending yet at the same time indignantly or sardonically malevolent. Some look to history for salvation; others for justice; for venge­ance; for annihilation. Among the optimistic are the confident rationalists, in particular the heralds and prophets (from Bacon to modern social theorists) of the natural sciences and of material progress, who maintain that vice and suffering are in the end always the product of ignorance. The foundation of their faith is the conviction that it is possible to find out what all men at all times truly want; and also what they can do and what is for ever beyond their power; and, in the light of this, to invent, discover and adapt means to realisable ends. Weakness and misery, folly and vice, moral and intellectual defects are due to maladjustment. To understand the nature of things is (at the very least) to know what you (and others who, if they are human, will be like you) truly want, and how to get it. All that is bad is due to ignorance of ends or of means; to attain to knowledge of both is the purpose and function of the sciences. The sciences will advance; true ends as well as efficient means will be discovered; knowledge will increase, men will know more, and therefore be wiser and better and happier. Condorcet, whose Esquisse is the simplest and most moving statement of this belief, has no doubt that happiness, scientific knowledge, virtue and liberty are bound as 'by an indissoluble chain',[44] while stupidity, vice, injustice and unhappi- ness are forms of a disease which the advance of science will eliminate for ever; for we are made what we are by natural causes; and when we understand them, this alone will suffice to bring us into harmony with 'Nature'.

Praise and blame are functions of ignorance; we are what we are, like stones and trees, like bees and beavers, and if it is irrational to blame or demand justice from things or animals, climates or soils or wild beasts, when they cause us pain, it is no less irrational to blame the no less determined characters or acts of men. We can regret - and deplore and expose - the depth of human cruelty, injustice and stupidity, and comfort ourselves with the certainty that with the rapid progress of our new empirical knowledge this will soon pass away like an evil dream; for progress and education, if not inevitable, are at any rate highly probable. The belief in the possibility (or probability) of happiness as the product of rational organisation unites all the benevolent sages of modern times, from the metaphysicians of the Italian Renaissance to the evolutionary thinkers of the German Aufklarung, from the radicals and utilit­arians of pre-revolutionary France to the science-worshipping visionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is the heart of all the Utopias from Bacon and Campanella to Lessing and Condorcet, Saint-Simon and Cabet, Fourier and Owen, culminat­ing in the bureaucratic fantasies of Auguste Comte, with his fanatically tidy world of human beings joyfully engaged in fulfil­ling their functions, each within his own rigorously defined province, in the rationally ordered, totally unalterable hierarchy of the perfect society. These are the benevolent humanitarian prophets - our own age has known not a few of them, from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and Anatole France and Bernard Shaw to their unnumbered American disciples - generously disposed towards all mankind, genuinely seeking to rescue every living being from its burden of ignorance, sorrow, poverty and humiliat­ing dependence on others.

The other variant of this attitude is a good deal less amiable in tone and in feeling. When Hegel, and after him Marx, describe historical processes, they too assume that human beings and their societies are part and parcel of a wider nature, which Hegel regards as spiritual, and Marx as material, in character. Great social forces are at work of which only the acutest and most gifted individuals are ever aware; the ordinary run of men are blind in varying degrees to that which truly shapes their lives, they worship fetishes and invent childish mythologies, which they dignify with the title of views or theories in order to explain the world in which they live. From time to time the real forces - impersonal and irresistible - which truly govern the world develop to a point where a new historical advance is 'due'. Then (as both Hegel and Marx notori­ously believed) the crucial moments of advance are reached; these take the form of violent, cataclysmic leaps, destructive revolutions which, often with fire and sword, establish a new order upon the ruins of the old. Inevitably the foolish, obsolete, purblind, home­made philosophies of the denizens of the old establishment are knocked over and swept away together with their possessors.

For Hegel, and for a good many others, though by no means all, among the philosophers and poets of the romantic movement, history is a perpetual struggle of vast spiritual forces embodied now in institutions - Churches, races, civilisations, empires, national States - now in individuals of more than human stature - 'world-historical figures' - of bold and ruthless genius, towering over, and contemptuous of, their puny contemporaries. For Marx, the struggle is a fight between socially conditioned, organised groups - classes shaped by the struggle for subsistence and survival and consequently for the control of power. There is a sardonic note (inaudible only to their most benevolent and single-hearted fol­lowers) in the words of both these thinkers as they contemplate the discomfiture and destruction of the philistines, the ordinary men and women caught in one of the decisive moments of history. Both Hegel and Marx conjure up an image of peaceful and foolish human beings, largely unaware of the part they play in history, building their homes, with touching hope and simplicity, upon the green slopes of what seems to them a peaceful mountainside, trusting in the permanence of their particular way of life, their own economic, social and political order, treating their own values as if they were eternal standards, living, working, fighting without any awareness of the cosmic processes of which their lives are but a passing stage. But the mountain is no ordinary mountain; it is a volcano; and when (as the philosopher always knew that it would) the inevitable eruption comes, their homes and their elaborately tended institutions and their ideals and their ways of life and values will be blown out of existence in the cataclysm which marks the leap from the 'lower' to a 'higher' stage. When this point is reached, the two great prophets of destruction are in their element; they enter into their inheritance; they survey the conflagration with a defiant, almost Byronic, irony and disdain. To be wise is to understand the direction in which the world is inexorably moving, to identify oneself with the rising power which ushers in the new world. Marx - and it is part of his attraction to those of a similar emotional cast - identifies himself exultantly, in his way no less passionately than Nietzsche or Bakunin, with the great force which in its very destructiveness is creative, and is greeted with bewilder­ment and horror only by those whose values are hopelessly subjective, who listen to their consciences, their feelings, or to what their nurses or teachers tell them, without realising the glories of life in a world which moves from explosion to explosion to fulfil the great cosmic design. When history takes her revenge - and every enrage prophet in the nineteenth century looks to her to avenge him against those he hates most - the mean, pathetic, ludicrous, stifling human anthills will be justly pulverised; justly, because what is just and unjust, good and bad, is determined by the goal towards which all creation is tending. Whatever is on the side of victorious reason is just and wise; whatever is on the other side, on the side of the world that is doomed to destruction by the working of the forces of reason, is rightly called foolish, ignorant, subjective, arbitrary, blind; and, if it goes so far as to try to resist the forces that are destined to supplant it, then it - that is to say, the fools and knaves and mediocrities who constitute it - is rightly called retrograde, wicked, obscurantist, perversely hostile to the deepest interests of mankind.

Different though the tone of these forms of determinism may be - whether scientific, humanitarian and optimistic or furious, apocalyptic and exultant - they agree in this: that the world has a direction and is governed by laws, and that the direction and the laws can in some degree be discovered by employing the proper techniques of investigation; and moreover that the working of these laws can only be grasped by those who realise that the lives, characters and acts of individuals, both mental and physical, are governed by the larger 'wholes' to which they belong, and that it is the independent evolution of these 'wholes' that constitutes the so- called 'forces' in terms of whose direction truly 'scientific' (or 'philosophic') history must be formulated. To find the explanation of why given individuals, or groups of them, act or think or feel in one way rather than another, one must first seek to understand the structure, the state of development and the direction of such 'wholes', for example, the social, economic, political, religious institutions to which such individuals belong; once that is known, the behaviour of the individuals (or the most characteristic among them) should become almost logically deducible, and does not constitute a separate problem. Ideas about the identity of these large entities or forces, and their functions, differ from theorist to theorist. Race, colour, Church, nation, class; climate, irrigation, technology, geopolitical situation; civilisation, social structure, the Human Spirit, the Collective Unconscious, to take some of these concepts at random, have all played their parts in theologico- historical systems as the protagonists upon the stage of history. They are represented as the real forces of which individuals are ingredients, at once constitutive, and the most articulate expres­sions, of this or that phase of them. Those who are more clearly and deeply aware than others of the part which they play, whether willingly or not, to that degree play it more boldly and effectively; these are the natural leaders. Others, led by their own petty personal concerns into ignoring or forgetting that they are parts of a continuous or convulsive pattern of change, are deluded into assuming that (or, at any rate, into acting as if) they and their fellows are stabilised at some fixed level for ever.

What the variants of either of these attitudes entail, like all forms of genuine determinism, is the elimination of the notion of individual responsibility. It is, after all, natural enough for men, whether for practical reasons or because they are given to reflec­tion, to ask who or what is responsible for this or that state of affairs which they view with satisfaction or anxiety, enthusiasm or horror. If the history of the world is due to the operation of identifiable forces other than, and little affected by, free human wills and free choices (whether these occur or not), then the proper explanation of what happens must be given in terms of the evolution of such forces. And there is then a tendency to say that not individuals, but these larger entities, are ultimately 'respons­ible'. I live at a particular moment of time in the spiritual and social and economic circumstances into which I have been cast: how then can I help choosing and acting as I do? The values in terms of which I conduct my life are the values of my class, or race, or Church, or civilisation, or are part and parcel of my 'station' - my position in the 'social structure'. Nobody denies that it would be stupid as well as cruel to blame me for not being taller than I am, or to regard the colour of my hair or the qualities of my intellect or heart as being due principally to my own free choice; these attributes are as they are through no decision of mine. If I extend this category without limit, then whatever is, is necessary and inevitable. This unlimited extension of necessity, on any of the views described above, becomes intrinsic to the explanation of everything. To blame and praise, consider possible alternative courses of action, accuse or defend historical figures for acting as they do or did, becomes an absurd activity. Admiration and contempt for this or that individual may indeed continue, but it becomes akin to aesthetic judgement. We can eulogise or deplore, feel love or hatred, satisfaction or shame, but we can neither blame nor justify. Alexander, Caesar, Attila, Muhammad, Cromwell,

Hitler are like floods and earthquakes, sunsets, oceans, mountains; we may admire or fear them, welcome or curse them, but to denounce or extol their acts is (ultimately) as sensible as addressing sermons to a tree (as Frederick the Great pointed out with his customary pungency in the course of his attack on Holbach's System of Nature)}

¹ Determinism is, of course, not identical with fatalism, which is only one, and not the most plausible, species of the vast determinist genus. The majority of determinists seem to maintain that such distinctions as those between voluntary behaviour, or between acts and mechanical movements or states, or what a man is and what he is not accountable for, and therefore the very notion of a moral agent, depend on what is or could be affected by individual choice, effort or decision. They hold that I normally praise or blame a man only if, and because, I think that what occurred was (or might at any rate in part be) caused by his choice or the absence of it; and should not praise or blame him if his choices, efforts etc. were conspicuously unable to affect the result that I applaud or deplore; and that this is compatible with the most rigorous determinism, since choice, effort etc. are themselves causally inevitable consequences of identifiable spatio-temporal ante­cedents. This (in substance the classical 'dissolution' of the problem of free will by the British empiricists - Hobbes, Locke, Hume and their modern followers Russell, Schlick, Ayer, Nowell-Smith, Hampshire etc.) does not seem to me to solve the problem, but merely to push it a step further back. It may be that for legal or other purposes I may define responsibility, moral accountability etc. on some such lines as these. But if I were convinced that although acts of choice, dispositional characteristics etc. did affect what occurred, yet they were them­selves wholly determined by factors not within the individual's control (including his own motives and springs of action), I should certainly not regard him as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. In such circumstances the concept of worth and desert, as these terms are now used, would become empty for me.

The same kind of objection seems to me to apply to the connected doctrine that free will is tantamount to capacity for being (causally) affected by praise, blame, persuasion, education etc. Whether the causes that are held completely to determine human action are physical or psychical or of some other kind, and in whatever pattern or proportion they are deemed to occur, if they are truly causes - if their outcomes are thought to be as unalterable as, say, the effects of physical or physiological causes - this of itself seems to me to make the notion of a free choice between alternatives inapplicable. On this view 'I could have acted otherwise' is made to mean 'I could have acted otherwise if I had chosen', i.e. if there were no insuperable obstacle to hinder me (with the rider that my choice may well be affected by praise, social disapproval etc.); but if my choice is itself the result of antecedent causes, I am, in the relevant sense, not free. Freedom to act depends not on absence of only this or that set of fatal obstacles to action - physical or biological, let us say - while other obstacles, e.g. psychological ones - character, habits, 'compulsive' motives etc. - are present; it requires a situation in which no sum total of such causal factors wholly determines the result - in which there remains some area, however narrow, within which choice is not completely

To assess degrees of their responsibility, to attribute this or that consequence to their free decision, to set them up as examples or deterrents, to seek to derive lessons from their lives, becomes senseless. We can feel ashamed of our acts or of our states of mind, or of theirs, as a hunchback may be ashamed of his hump; but we cannot feel remorse: for that entails the belief that we not only could have acted otherwise, but also could have freely chosen to do so. These men were what they were; and so are we. They acted as they acted; and so do we. Their behaviour can be explained in terms of whatever fundamental category is to be used, whereby history is reducible to a natural science or a metaphysical or theological schema. So much we can do for them, and, to a more limited degree, for ourselves and our contemporaries. This is all that can be done.

Yet we are adjured, oddly enough, by tough-minded determin- ists, in the very name of the scientific status of the subject, to avoid bias; regular appeals are made to historians to refrain from sitting in judgement, to remain objective, not to read the values of the present into the past, or of the West into the East; not to admire or condemn ancient Romans for being like or unlike modern Amer­icans; not to denounce the Middle Ages because they failed to practise toleration as it was conceived by Voltaire, nor applaud the Gracchi because we are shocked by the social injustices of our time, or criticise Cicero because of our own experience of lawyers in politics. What are we to make of such exhortations, or of the

determined. This is the minimal sense of 'can' in this context. Kant's argument that where there is no freedom there is no obligation, where there is no independence of causes there is no responsibility and therefore no desert, and consequently no occasion for praise or reproach, carries conviction. If I can correctly say 'I cannot help choosing thus or thus', I am not free. To say that among the factors which determine the situation are my own character, habits, decisions, choices etc. - which is, of course, conspicuously true - does not alter the case, or render me, in the only relevant sense, free. The feeling of those who have recognised free will as a genuine issue, and are not deceived by the latest efforts to interpret it away, turns out, as so often in the case of major problems which have plagued thoughtful men in every generation, to be sound as against philosophers armed with some all-conquering simple method of sweeping troublesome questions out of sight. Dr Johnson, as in other matters affecting common-sense notions, here, too, seems to have been guided by a sound linguistic sense. It does not, of course, follow that any of the analyses so far provided of the relevant senses of 'can', 'freedom', 'uncaused' etc. is satisfactory. To cut the knot, as Dr Johnson did, is not to untie it.

perpetual pleas to use our imagination or our powers of sympathy or of understanding in order to avoid the injustice that springs from an insufficient grasp of the aims and codes and customs of cultures distant from us in time or space? What meaning has this, save on the assumption that to give moral praise and blame, to seek to be just, is not totally irrational, that human beings deserve justice as stocks or stones do not, and that therefore we must seek to be fair, and not praise and blame arbitrarily, or mistakenly, through ignorance, or prejudice, or lack of imagination? Yet once we transfer responsibility for what happens from the backs of individuals to the casual or teleological operation of institutions or cultures or psychical or physical factors, what can be meant by calling upon our sympathy or sense of history, or sighing after the ideal of total impartiality, which may not indeed be fully attainable, but to which some come nearer than others? Few are accused of biased accounts of geological changes or lack of intuitive sympathy in describing the effect of the Italian climate upon the agriculture of ancient Rome.

To this it may be answered that even if history, like natural science, is satisfaction of curiosity about unalterable processes - merely disfigured by the intrusion of moral judgements - we shall attain a less adequate grasp of even the bare facts unless we have some degree of imaginative insight into ways of life alien, or little known, to us. This is doubtless true; but it does not penetrate to the heart of the objection brought against historians who are accused of prejudice or of colouring their accounts too strongly. It may be (and has doubtless often been said) that Gibbon or Macaulay or Treitschke or Belloc fail to reproduce the facts as we suspect them to have been. To say this is, of course, to accuse the writers of serious inadequacy as historians; but that is not the main gravamen of the charge. It is rather that they are in some sense not merely inaccurate or superficial or incomplete, but that they are unjust; that they are seeking to secure our approval for one side, and, in order to achieve this, unfairly denigrate the other; that in dealing with one side they cite evidence and use methods of inference or presentation which, for no good reason, they deny to the other; and that their motive for doing this derives from their conviction of how men should be, and what they should do; and sometimes also that these convictions spring from views which (judged in terms of the ordinary standards and scales of value which prevail in the societies to which they and we belong) are too narrow; or irrational or inapplicable to the historical period in question; and that because of this they have suppressed or distorted the true facts, as true facts are conceived by the educated society of their, or our, time. We complain, that is to say, not merely of suppression or distortion, but of propagandist aims to which we think this may be due; and to speak of propaganda at all, let alone assume that it can be dangerously effective, is to imply that the notion of injustice is not inoperative, that marks for conduct are, and can properly be, awarded; it is in effect to say that I must either seek not to praise or blame at all, or, if I cannot avoid doing so because I am a human being and my views are inevitably shot through with moral assessments, I should seek to do so justly, with detachment, on the evidence, not blaming men for failing to do the impossible, and not praising them for it either. And this, in its turn, entails belief in individual responsibility - at any rate some degree of it. How great a degree - how wide the realm of possibility, of alternatives freely choosable - will depend on one's reading of nature and history; but it will never be nothing at all.

And yet it is this, it seems to me, that is virtually denied by those historians and sociologists, steeped in metaphysical or scientific determinism, who think it right to say that in (what they are fond of calling) 'the last analysis', everything - or so much of it as makes no difference - boils down to the effects of class, or race, or civilisation, or social structure. Such thinkers seem to me commit­ted to the belief that although we may not be able to plot the exact curve of each individual life with the data at our disposal and the laws we claim to have discovered, yet, in principle, if we were omniscient, we could do so, at any rate in the case of others, as precisely as the techniques of scientific prediction will allow; and that consequently even that minimum residue of value judgement which no amount of conscious self-discipline and self-effacement can wholly eliminate, which colours and is a part of our very choice of historical material, of our emphasis, however tentative, upon some events and persons as being more important or interesting or unusual than others, must be either the result of our own 'ineluctable' conditioning, or else the fruit of our own incurable vanity and ignorance; and in either case remains in practice unavoidable - the price of our human status, part of the imperfection of man; and must be accepted only because it literally cannot be rejected, because men and their outlooks are what they are, and men judge as they do; because they are finite, and forget, or cannot face, the fact that they are so.

This stern conclusion is not, of course, actually accepted by any working historian, or any human being in his non-theoretical moments; even though, paradoxically enough, the arguments by which we are led to such untenable conclusions, by stressing how much narrower is the area of human freedom, and therefore of responsibility, than it was believed to be during the ages of scientific ignorance, have taught many admirable lessons in restraint and humility. But to maintain that, since men are 'determined', history, by which I mean the activity of historians, cannot, strictly speaking, ever be just or unjust but only true or false, wise or stupid, is to expound a noble fallacy, and one that can seldom, if ever, have been acted upon. For its theoretical accept­ance, however half-hearted, has led to the drawing of exceedingly civilised consequences, and checked much traditional cruelty and injustice.

III

The proposition that everything that we do and suffer is part of a fixed pattern - that Laplace's observer (supplied with adequate knowledge of facts and laws) could at any moment of historical time describe correctly every past and future event, including those of the 'inner' life, that is, human thoughts, feelings, acts - has often been entertained, and very different implications have been drawn from it; belief in its truth has dismayed some and inspired others. But whether or not determinism is true or even coherent, it seems clear that acceptance of it does not in fact colour the ordinary thoughts of the majority of human beings, including historians, nor even those of natural scientists outside the laboratory. For if it did, the language of the believers would reflect this fact, and be different from that of the rest of us.

There is a class of expressions which we constantly use (and can scarcely do without), like 'You should not [or need not] have done this'; 'Need you have made this terrible mistake?'; 'I could do it, but I would rather not'; 'Why did the King of Ruritania abdicate? Because, unlike the King of Abyssinia, he lacked the strength of will to resist'; 'Must the Commander-in-Chief be quite so stupid?' Expressions of this type plainly involve the notion of more than the merely logical possibility of the realisation of alternatives other than those which were in fact realised, namely of differences between situations in which individuals can be reasonably regarded as being responsible for their acts, and those in whieh they can not. For no one will wish to deny that we do often argue about the best among the possible courses of action open to human beings in the present and past and future, in fiction and in dreams; that historians (and detectives and judges and juries) do attempt to establish, as well as they are able, what these possibilities are; that the ways in which these lines are drawn mark the frontiers between reliable and unreliable history; that what is called realism (as opposed to fancy or ignorance of life or Utopian dreams) consists precisely in the placing of what occurred (or might occur) in the context of what could have happened (or could happen) and in the demarcation of this from what could not; that this is what (as I think L. B. Namier once suggested) the sense of history, in the end, comes to; that upon this capacity historical (as well as legal) justice depends; that it alone makes it possible to speak of criticism, or praise and blame, as just or deserved or absurd or unfair; or that this is the sole and obvious reason why accidents, force majeure - being unavoidable - are necessarily outside the category of respon­sibility and consequently beyond the bounds of criticism, of the attribution of praise and blame. The difference between the expected and the exceptional, the difficult and the easy, the normal and the perverse, rests upon the drawing of these same lines.

All this seems too self-evident to argue. It seems superfluous to add that all the discussions of historians about whether a given policy could or could not have been prevented, and what view should therefore be taken of the acts and characters of the actors, are intelligible only on the assumption of the reality of human choices. If determinism were a valid theory of human behaviour, these distinctions would be as inappropriate as the attribution of moral responsibility to the planetary system or the tissues of a living cell. These categories permeate all that we think and feel so pervasively and universally that to think them away, and conceive what and how we should be thinking, feeling and talking without them, or in the framework of their opposites, psychologically greatly strains our capacity - is nearly, if not quite, as impracticable as, let us say, to pretend that we live in a world in which space, time or number in the normal sense no longer exist. We may indeed always argue about specific situations, about whether a given occurrence is best explained as the inevitable effect of antecedent events beyond human control, or on the contrary as due to free human choice; free in the sense not merely that the case would have been altered if we had chosen - tried to act - differently; but that nothing prevented us from so choosing.

It may well be that the growth of science and historical knowledge does in fact tend to show - make probable - that much of what was hitherto attributed to the acts of the unfettered wills of individuals can be satisfactorily explained only by the working of other, 'natural', impersonal factors; that we have, in our ignorance or vanity, extended the realm of human freedom much too far. Yet the very meaning of such terms as 'cause' and 'inevitable' depends on the possibility of contrasting them with at least their imaginary opposites. These alternatives may be improbable; but they must at least be conceivable, if only for the purpose of contrasting them with causal necessities and law-observing uniformities; unless we attach some meaning to the notion of free acts, that is, acts not wholly determined by antecedent events or by the nature and 'dispositional characteristics' of either persons or things, it is difficult to see why we come to distinguish acts to which responsibility is attached from mere segments in a physical, psychical or psychophysical causal chain of events - a distinction signified (even if all particular applications of it are mistaken) by the cluster of expressions which deal with open alternatives and free choices. Yet it is this distinction that underlies our normal attribution of values, in particular the notion that praise and blame can ever be justly (not merely usefully or effectively) bestowed. If the determinist hypothesis were true, and adequately accounted for the actual world, there is a clear sense in which, despite all the extraordinary casuistry which has been brought to bear to avoid this conclusion, the notion of human responsibility, as ordinarily understood, would no longer apply to any actual, but only to imaginary or conceivable, states of affairs.

I do not here wish to say that determinism is necessarily false, only that we neither speak nor think as if it could be true, and that it is difficult, and perhaps beyond our normal powers, to conceive what our picture of the world would be if we seriously believed it; so that to speak, as some theorists of history (and scientists with a philosophical bent) tend to do, as if one might (in life and not only in the study) accept the determinist hypothesis, and yet continue to think and speak much as we do at present, is to breed intellectual confusion. If the belief in freedom - which rests on the assumption that human beings do occasionally choose, and that their choices are not wholly accounted for by the kind of causal explanations which are accepted in, say, physics or biology - if this is a necessary illusion, it is so deep and so pervasive that it is not felt as such.[45] No doubt we can try to convince ourselves that we are systematically deluded;[46] but unless we attempt to think out the implications of this possibility, and alter our modes of thought and speech to allow for it accordingly, this hypothesis remains hollow; that is, we find it impracticable even to entertain it seriously, if our behaviour is to be taken as evidence of what we can and what we cannot bring ourselves to believe or suppose not merely in theory, but in practice.

My submission is that to make a serious attempt to adapt our thoughts and words to the hypothesis of determinism is a fearful task, as things are now, and have been within recorded history. The changes involved are very radical; our moral and psychological categories are, in the end, more flexible than our physical ones, but not much more so; it is not much easier to begin to think out in real terms, to which behaviour and speech would correspond, what the universe of the genuine determinist would be like, than to think out, with the minimum of indispensable concrete detail (that is, begin to imagine) what it would be like to be in a timeless world, or one with a seventeen-dimensional space. Let those who doubt this try for themselves; the symbols with which we think will hardly lend themselves to the experiment; they, in their turn, are too deeply involved in our normal view of the world, allowing for every difference of period and clime and culture, to be capable of so violent a break. We can, of course, work out the logical implications of any set of internally consistent premisses - logic and mathematics will do any work that is required of them - but this is a very different thing from knowing how the result would look 'in practice', what the concrete innovations are; and, since history is not a deductive science (and even sociology becomes progressively less intelligible as it loses touch with its empirical foundations), such hypotheses, being abstract models, pure and unapplied, will be of little use to students of human life. Hence the ancient controversy between free will and determinism, while it remains a genuine problem for theologians and philosophers, need not trouble the thoughts of those whose concern is with empirical matters - the actual lives of human beings in the space and time of normal experience. For practising historians determinism is not, and need not be, a serious issue.

Yet, inapplicable as it may be as a theory of human action, specific forms of the deterministic hypothesis have played an arresting, if limited, role in altering our views of human responsi­bility. The irrelevance of the general hypothesis to historical studies must not blind us to its importance, touched on above, as a specific corrective to ignorance, prejudice, dogmatism and fantasy on the part of those who judge the behaviour of others. For it is plainly a good thing that we should be reminded by social scientists that the scope of human choice is a good deal more limited than we used to suppose; that the evidence at our disposal shows that many of the acts too often assumed to be within the individual's control are not so - that man is an object in (scientifi­cally predictable) nature to a larger degree than has at times been supposed, that human beings more often than not act as they do because of characteristics due to heredity or physical or social environment or education, or biological or physical characteristics, or the interplay of these factors with each other and with the obscurer factors loosely called psychical characteristics; and that the resultant habits of thought, feeling and expression are, at least in principle, as capable of being classified and made subject to hypotheses and systematic laws as the behaviour of material objects. And this certainly alters our ideas about the limits of freedom and responsibility. If we are told that a given case of stealing is due to kleptomania, we protest that the appropriate treatment is not punishment but a remedy for a disease; and, similarly, if a destructive act or a vicious character is ascribed to a specific psychological or social cause, we decide, if we are con­vinced that the explanation is valid, that the agent is not responsible for his acts, and consequently deserves therapeutic rather than penal treatment. It is salutary to be reminded of t^^^rowness of the field within which we can begin to claim to be free; and some would claim that such knowledge is still increasing, and the field still contracting.

Where the frontier between freedom and causal laws is to be determined is a crucial practical issue; knowledge of it is a powerful and indispensable antidote to ignorance and irrationality, and offers us new types of explanation - historical, psychological, sociological, biological - which previous generations have lacked. What we cannot alter, or cannot alter as much as we had supposed, cannot be used as evidence for or against us as free moral agents; it can cause us to feel pride, shame, regret, interest, but not remorse; it can be admired, envied, deplored, enjoyed, feared, wondered at, but not (save in some quasi-aesthetic sense) praised or condemned; our tendency to indignation is curbed, we desist from passing judgement. 'Je ne propose rien, je ne suppose rien, je n'impose rien .. . j'expose,' said a French writer proudly, and such exposition meant for him the treatment of all events as causal or statistical phenomena, as scientific material, to the exclusion of moral judgement.

Historians of this persuasion, anxious to avoid all personal, above all, all moral, judgements, tend to emphasise the immense predominance of impersonal factors in history, of the physical media in which life is lived, the power of geographical, psychologi­cal, social factors which are not, at any rate consciously, man-made, and are often beyond human control. This does tend to check our arrogance, to induce humility by forcing us to admit that our own outlook and scales of value are neither permanent nor universally accepted, that the over-confident, too complacent, moral classifica­tions of past historians and of their societies sprang all too obviously from specific historical conditions, specific forms of ignorance or vainglory, or from particular temperamental traits in the historian (or moralist), or from other causes and circumstances which, from our vantage-point, we perceive to belong to their own place and time, and to have given rise to interpretations which later seem idiosyncratic, smug, shallow, unjust and often grotesque in the light of our own standards of accuracy or objectivity. And, what is even more important, such a line of approach throws doubt upon all attempts to establish a definitive boundary between the individual's free choice and his natural or social necessitation, and does this by bringing to light the egregious blunders of some of those who tried to solve this or that problem in the past, and made mistakes of fact which now, all too plainly, seem due to their (unalterable) milieu, or character, or interests. And this tends to make us ask whether the same might not be equally true of us and our own historical judgements; and so, by suggesting that every generation is 'subjectively' conditioned by its own cultural and psychological peculiarities, leads us to wonder whether it might not be best to avoid all moral judgement, all ascription of responsibility, might not be safest to confine ourselves to imper­sonal terms, and leave whatever cannot be said in such terms altogether unsaid. Have we learned nothing from the intolerable moral dogmatism and the mechanical classifications of those historians and moralists and politicians whose views are now so dated, so obsolete, and so justly discredited? And, indeed, who are we to make such a parade of our personal opinions, to give such importance to what are no more than symptoms of our own ephemeral outlook? And what right, in any case, have we to sit in judgement on our fellows, whose moral codes are the products of their specific historical environments, as our own are of ours? Is it not better to analyse, to describe, to present the events, and then withdraw and let them 'speak for themselves', refraining from the intolerable presumption of awarding marks, meting out justice, dividing the sheep from the goats according to our own personal criteria, as if these were eternal and not, as in fact they are, neither more nor less valid than those of others with other interests, in other conditions?

Such advice to us (in itself salutary enough) to retain a certain scepticism about our own powers of judgement, especially to beware of ascribing too much authority to our own moral views, comes to us, as I have said, from at least two quarters; from those who think that we know too much, and from those who think that we know too little. We know now, say the former, that we are as we are, and our moral and intellectual criteria are what they are, in virtue of the evolving historical situation. Let me once more mention their varieties. Some among them, who feel sure that the natural sciences will in the end account for everything, explain our behaviour in terms of natural causes. Others, who accept a more metaphysical interpretation of the world, explain it by speaking of invisible powers and dominions, nations, races, cultures; the Spirit of the Age, the 'workings', overt and occult, of 'the Classical Spirit', 'the Renaissance', 'the Medieval Mind', 'the French Revolu­tion', 'the Twentieth Century', conceived as impersQ!l;:J.l entities, at once patterns and realities, in terms of whose 'structure' or 'purpose' their elements and expressions - men and institutions - must behave as they do. Still others speak in terms of some teleological procession, or hierarchy, whereby all individuals, countries, institutions, cultures, ages, fulfil their several parts in some cosmic drama, and are what they are in virtue of the part cast for them, but not by them, by the divine Dramatist himself. From this it is not far to the views of those who say that History is wiser than we, that its purposes are unfathomable to us, that we, or some amongst us, are but the means, the instruments, the manifestations, worthy or unworthy, of some vast all-embracing schema of eternal human progress, or of the German Spirit, or of the Proletariat, or of post-Christian civilisation, or of Faustian man, or of Manifest Destiny, or of the American Century, or of some other myth or mystery or abstraction. To know all is to understand all; it is to know why things are and must be as they are; therefore the more we know the more absurd we must think those who suppose that things could have been otherwise, and so fall into the irrational temptation to praise or blame. Tout comprendre, c'est toutpardon- ner is transformed into a mere truism. Any form of moral censure - the accusing finger of historians or publicists or politicians, and indeed the agonies of the private conscience, too - tends, so far as possible, to be explained away as one or other sophisticated version of primitive taboos or psychical tensions or conflicts, now appear­ing as moral consciousness, now as some other sanction, growing out of, and battening upon, that ignorance which alone generates fallacious beliefs in free will and uncaused choice, doomed to disappear in the growing light of scientific or metaphysical truth.

Or, again, we find that the adherents of a sociological or historical or anthropological metaphysics tend to interpret the sense of mission and dedication, the voice of duty, all forms of inner compulsion of this type, as being an expression within each individual's conscious life of the 'vast impersonal forces' which control it, and which speak 'in us', 'through us', 'to us', for their own inscrutable purposes. To hear is then literally to obey - to be drawn towards the true goal of our 'real' self, or its 'natural' or 'rational' development - that to which we are called in virtue of belonging to this or that class, or nation, or race, or Church, or station in society, or tradition, or age, or culture. The explanation, and in some sense the weight of responsibility, for all human action is (at times with ill-concealed relief) transferred to the broad backs of these vast impersonal forces - institutions or historic trends - better made to bear such burdens than a feeble thinking reed like man, a creature that, with a megalomania scarcely appropriate to his physical and moral frailty, claims, as he too often does, to be responsible for the workings of Nature or of the Spirit; and, flown with his importance, praises and blames, worships and tortures, murders and immortalises other creatures like himself for conceiv­ing, willing or executing policies for which neither he nor they can be remotely responsible; as if flies were to sit in solemn judgement upon each other for causing the revolutions of the sun or the changes of the seasons which affect their lives. But no sooner do we acquire adequate insight into the 'inexorable' and 'inevitable' parts played by all things animate and inanimate in the cosmic process than we are freed from the sense of personal endeavour. Our sense of guilt and of sin, our pangs of remorse and self- condemnation, are automatically dissolved; the tension, the fear of failure and frustration, disappear as we become aware of the elements of a larger 'organic whole' of which we are variously described as limbs or members, or reflections, or emanations, or finite expressions; our sense of freedom and independence, our belief in an area, however circumscribed, in which we can choose to act as we please, falls from us; in its place we are provided with a sense of membership in an ordered system, each with a unique position sacred to himself alone. We are soldiers in an army, and no longer suffer the pains and penalties of solitude; the army is on the march, or goals are set for us, not chosen by us; doubts are stilled by authority. The growth of knowledge brings with it relief from moral burdens, for if powers beyond and above us are at work, it is wild presumption to claim responsibility for their activity or blame ourselves for failing in it. Original sin is thus transferred to an impersonal plane, and acts hitherto regarded as wicked or unjustifi­able are seen in a more 'objective' fashion - in a larger context - as part of the process of history which, being responsible for providing us with our scale of values, must not therefore itself be judged in terms of it; and viewed in this new light they turn out no longer wicked but right and good because necessitated by the whole.

This is a doctrine which lies at the heart equally of scientific attempts to explain moral sentiments as psychological or sociolo­gical 'residues' or the like, and of the metaphysical vision for which whatever is - 'truly' is - is good. To understand all is to see that nothing could be otherwise than as it is; that all blame, indignation, protest is mere complaint about what seem\ discordant, about elements which do not seem to fit, about the absence of an intellect­ually or spiritually satisfying pattern. But this is always evidence only of failure on the part of the observer, of his blindness and ignorance; it can never be an objective assessment of reality, for in reality everything necessarily fits, nothing is superfluous, nothing amiss, every ingredient is 'justified' in being where it is by the demands of the transcendent whole; and all sense of guilt, injustice, ugliness, all resistance or condemnation, is mere proof of (at times unavoidable) lack of vision, misunderstanding, subjective aberration. Vice, pain, folly, maladjustment, all come from failure to understand, from failure, in E. M. Forster's celebrated phrase, to 'connect'.[47]

This is the sermon preached to us by great and noble thinkers of very different outlooks, by Spinoza and Godwin, by Tolstoy and Comte, by mystics and rationalists, theologians and scientific materialists, metaphysicians and dogmatic empiricists, American sociologists, Russian Marxists and German historicists alike. Thus Godwin (and he speaks for many humane and civilised persons) tells us that to understand a human act we must always avoid applying general principles and examine each case in its full individual detail. When we scrupulously examine the texture and pattern of this or that life, we shall not, in our haste and blindness, seek to condemn or to punish; for we shall see why this or that man was caused to act in this or that manner by ignorance or poverty or some other moral or intellectual or physical defect - as (Godwin optimistically supposes) we can always see, if we arm ourselves with sufficient patience, knowledge and sympathy - and we shall then blame him no more than we should an object in nature; and since it is axiomatic that we cannot both act upon our knowledge, and yet regret the result, we can and shall in the end succeed in making men good, just, happy and wise. So, too, Condorcet and Henri de Saint-Simon, and their disciple, Auguste Comte, starting from the opposite conviction - namely that men are not unique or in need, each one of them, of individual treatment, but, no less than inhabitants of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, belong to types and obey general laws - maintain no less stoutly that once these laws have been discovered (and therefore applied) this will by itself lead to universal felicity. And this conviction has since been echoed by many idealistic liberals and rationalists, technocrats, positivists and believers in the scientific organisation of society; and in very different keys by theocrats, neo-medieval romantics, authoritarians and political mystics of various kinds. This, too, is in substance the morality preached, if not by Marx, then by most of the disciples of Engels and Plekhanov, by Prussian nationalist historians, by Spengler, and by many another thinker who believes that there is a pattern which he has seen but others have not seen, or at least not so clearly seen, and that by this vision men may be saved.

Know and you will not be lost. What it is that we must know differs from thinker to thinker, differs as views of the nature of the world differ. Know the laws of the universe, animate and inanim­ate, or the principles of growth, or of evolution, or of the rise and fall of civilisations, or the goals towards which all creation tends, or the stages of the Idea, or something less tangible still. Know, in the sense of identifying yourself with it, realising your oneness with it, for, do what you may, you cannot escape from the laws to which you are subject, of whatever kind they may be, 'mechanistic', 'vitalistic', causal, purposive, imposed, transcendent, immanent, or the myriad impalpable strands which bind you to the past - to your land and to the dead, as Barres declared; to the milieu, the race and the moment, as Taine asserted; to Burke's great society of the dead and living, who have made you what you are; so that the truth in which you believe, the values in terms of which you judge, from the profoundest principles to the most trivial whims, are part and parcel of the historical continuum to which you belong. Tradition or blood or class or human nature or progress or humanity; the Zeitgeist or the social structure or the laws of history or the true ends of life; know these - be true to them - and you will be free. From Zeno to Spinoza, from the Gnostics to Leibniz, from Thomas Hobbes to Lenin and Freud, the battle-cry has been essentially the same; the object of knowledge and the methods of discovery have often been violently opposed, but that reality is knowable, and that knowledge and only knowledge liberates, and absolute knowledge liberates absolutely - that is common to many doctrines which are so large and valuable a part of Western civilisation.

To understand is to explain and to explain is to justify. The notion of individual freedom is a delusion. The further we are from omniscience, the wider our notion of our freedofl'\ and responsibil­ity and guilt, products of ignorance and fear which populate the unknown with terrifying fictions. Personal freedom is a noble delusion and has had its social value; society might have crumbled without it; it is a necessary instrument - one of the greatest devices of the 'cunning' of Reason or of History, or of whatever other cosmic force we may be invited to worship. But a delusion, however noble, useful, metaphysically justified, historically indis­pensable, is still a delusion. And so individual responsibility and the perception of the difference between right and wrong choices, between avoidable evil and misfortune, are mere symptoms, evid­ences of vanity, of our imperfect adjustment, of human inability to face the truth. The more we know, the greater the relief from the burden of choice; we forgive others for what they cannot avoid being, and by the same token we forgive ourselves. In ages in which the choices seem peculiarly agonising, when strongly held ideals cannot be reconciled and collisions cannot be averted, such doctrines seem peculiarly comforting. We escape moral dilemmas by denying their reality; and, by directing our gaze towards the greater wholes, we make them responsible in our place. All we lose is an illusion, and with it the painful and superfluous emotions of guilt and remorse. Freedom notoriously involves responsibility, and it is for many spirits a source of welcome relief to lose the burden of both, not by some ignoble act of surrender, but by daring to contemplate in a calm spirit things as they must be; for this is to be truly philosophical. Thereby we reduce history to a kind of physics; as well blame the galaxy or gamma-rays as Genghis Khan or Hitler. 'To know all is to forgive all' turns out to be, in A. J. Ayer's striking phrase (used in another context), nothing but a dramatised tautology.

IV

We have spoken thus far of the view that we cannot praise or blame because we know - or may one day know, or at any rate could know - too much for that. By a queer paradox the same position is reached by some of those who hold what seems at first the diametrical opposite of this position, that we cannot praise or blame not because we know too much, but because we know too little. Historians imbued with a sense of humility before the scope and difficulties of their task, viewing the magnitude of human claims and the smallness of human knowledge and judgement, warn us sternly against setting up our parochial values as univer­sally valid and applying what may, at most, hold for a small portion of humanity for a brief span in some insignificant corner of the universe to all beings in all places and at all times. Tough- minded realists influenced by Marxism and Christian apologists differ profoundly in outlook, in method, in conclusions, but they are at one in this. The former[48] tell us that the social or economic principles which, for example, Victorian Englishmen accepted as basic and eternal were but the interests of one particular island community at one particular moment of its social and commercial development, and the truths which they so dogmatically bound upon themselves and upon others, and in the name of which they felt justified in acting as they did, were but their own passing economic or political needs and claims masquerading as universal truths, and rang progressively more hollow in the ears of other nations with increasingly opposed interests, as they found them­selves frequently the losers in a game where the rules had been invented by the stronger side. Then the day began to dawn when they in their turn acquired sufficient power, and turned the tables, and transformed international morality, albeit unconsciously, to suit themselves. Nothing is absolute, moral rules vary directly as the distribution of power: the prevalent morality is always that of the victors; we cannot pretend to hold the scales of justice even between them and their victims, for we ourselves belong to one side or the other; ex hypothesi we cannot see the world from more than one vantage-point at a time. If we insist on judging others in terms of our transient standards we must not protest too much if they, in their turn, judge us in terms of theirs, which sanctimonious persons among us are too swift to denounce for no better reason than that they are not ours.

And some among their Christian opponents, starting from very different assumptions, see men as feeble creatures groping in darkness, knowing but little of how things come about, or what in history inexorably causes what, and how things might have turned out but for this or that scarcely perceptible, all but untraceable, fact or situation. Men, they argue, often seek to do what is right according to their lights, but these lights are dim, and such faint illumination as they give reveals very different aspects of life to different observers. Thus the English follow their own traditions; the Germans fight for the development of theirs; the Russians to break with their own and those of other nations; and the result is often bloodshed, widespread suffering, the destruction of what is most highly valued in the various cultures which come into violent conflict. Man proposes, but it is cruel and absurd to lay upon him - a fragile creature, born to sorrows - responsibility for many of the disasters that occur. For these are entailed by what, to take a Christian historian of distinction, Herbert Butterfield calls the 'human predicament' itself - wherein we often seem to ourselves virtuous enough, but, being imperfect, and doomed to stay so by Man's original sin, being ignorant, hasty, vainglorious, self-centred, lose our way, do unwitting harm, destroy what we seek to save and strengthen what we seek to destroy. If we understood more, perhaps we could do better, but our intellect is limited. For Butterfield, if I understand him correctly, the 'human predicament' is a product of the complex interaction of innumerable factors, few among them known, fewer still controllable, the greater number scarcely recognised at all. The least that we can do, therefore, is to acknowledge our condition with due humility, and since we are involved in a common darkness, and few of us stumble in it to much greater purpose than others (at least in the perspective of the whole of human history), we should practise understanding and charity. The least we can do as historians, scrupulous to say no more than we are entitled to say, is to suspend judgement; neither praise nor condemn; for the evidence is always insufficient, and the alleged culprits are like swimmers for ever caught in cross-currents and whirlpools beyond their control.