THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

CHAPTER THE SECOND
SEEKING ASSOCIATES
1

I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits

of party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy.

Regarding the development of the social and individual mental

hinterland as the essential thing in human progress, I passed on

very naturally to the practical assumption that we wanted what I may

call "hinterlanders." Of course I do not mean by aristocracy the

changing unorganised medley of rich people and privileged people who

dominate the civilised world of to-day, but as opposed to this, a

possibility of co-ordinating the will of the finer individuals, by

habit and literature, into a broad common aim. We must have an

aristocracy-not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose-or

mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more clearly when I

look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910.

I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.

I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and

the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and

finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far

beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively

invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale

than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very

much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys.

We must believe, therefore, that it CAN develop such a training and

education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here

my peculiar difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If

humanity at large is capable of that high education and those

creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and

more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and

leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot

be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of

humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has

become my general conception in politics, the conception of the

constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful

people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people,

amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-

conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic

culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the

development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the

spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary

needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human

interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and

acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and

redirected by literature and art…

But now the reader will understand how it came about that,

disappointed by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and

disillusioned about the representative quality of the professed

Socialists, I turned my mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big

people, the wealthy and influential people, against whom Liberalism

pits its forces. I was asking myself definitely whether, after all,

it was not my particular job to work through them and not against

them. Was I not altogether out of my element as an Anti-? Weren't

there big bold qualities about these people that common men lack,

and the possibility of far more splendid dreams? Were they really

the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the possible

new braveries of life?