From Rousseau comes most of the intellectual devotion to the State that has made the political mentality so influential in social and moral thought during the past century and a half. “I had come to see,” he wrote in his Confessions, “that everything was radically connected with politics, and that however one proceeded, no people would be other than the nature of its government made it.” And in his discourse on Political Economy, he declared: “If it is good to know how to deal with men as they are, it is much better to make them what there is need that they should be. The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man's inmost being, and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions…. Make men, therefore, if you would command men: if you would have them obedient to the laws, make them love the laws, and then they will need only to know what is their duty to do it…. If you would have the General Will accomplished, bring all the particular wills into conformity with it; in other words, as virtue is nothing more than this conformity of the particular wills with the General Will, establish the reign of virtue.”
Establish the reign of virtue! This was the moral imperative that was to capture the visions of men of good will everywhere in nineteenth-century Western Europe. But establish it how? Establish it through the sovereign power of the State! Man is born free and good, yet everywhere he lies fettered and corrupt, the product of repressive institutions. Not through kinship, class, church, or association can man be freed, for these are the very chains upon his existence. Only by entering into the perfect State and subordinating himself completely to its collective will will it be possible for man to escape the torments and insecurities and dissensions of ordinary society. The redemptive power of the sovereign State—this was Rousseau's burning slogan for the modern world.
In ancient Athens the State had come to take on this guise of community during the period following the disastrous wars with Sparta. Many a reflective mind in that dark period could see in the intensification of the political bond among individuals the sole hope for the recovery of order in the polis, for the establishment of a new stability that would forever dispense with the old, but now distracting, ties of family, class, and association. Plato was but one of the more enlightened of those who saw in the power of the State not repressive force but the very basis of moral life, the prime source of true individuality and virtue. In Plato's view, the State, properly conceived, was the most holy of sanctuaries, a refuge from the torments, frustrations, and iniquities that had come to plague Athens as the consequence of spiritual factionalism. “Let this then be the law,” declared Plato in The Laws: “no one shall possess shrines of the gods in private houses, and he who performs any sacred rites not publicly authorized, shall be informed against to the guardians of the law.” Spiritual faith and the State must be as one, else there will be incessant conflict between the two, and man will be, even as he now is, torn by uncertainty and doubt.
It is not surprising to learn from Rousseau that, of all influences upon his mind, Plato's was greatest. In the visions of both philosophers we are given a political structure that is nothing less than community itself, with all its social and spiritual anodynes. In the warming atmosphere of the benign, omnicompetent State man will be able to discard his distractive, conflict-engendering social allegiances. Then, freed of old burdens, will he find surcease from uncertainty and disquiet. He will know at last the meaning of secure status, clear function, and ineffable spiritual release. He will know these in the pure State.
After Rousseau, the State would be regarded by many men as the most implicative of all forms of association. Inevitably the charms of kinship, religion, and cultural association would pale before the brilliance of the new State. No longer would the political relationship be regarded as but one of society's bonds. It would be seen as synonymous with society, as the culmination of man's long struggle for a just social order. The new State would be more than an abstract legal framework of rights and duties. It would be community itself, the Political Community.
What is the political community? It is an idea system, and, I believe, the most potent of all idea systems in the complex nineteenth century. We shall not often find it in its fullness in the writings of any single person or in any single pattern of events in the nineteenth century. We must await the twentieth-century totalitarian State for the full realization of the idea of the political community. But we are nevertheless able to descry this system of ideas running throughout the nineteenth century in one or another form, in one or another degree of intensity. It is a kind of brooding omnipresence, giving force and direction to a variety of visions of social redemption. It touches the foundations of modern popular democracy, especially on the Continent; it gives substance and appeal to cultural nationalism; it becomes the context of the socialist movement before the century is ended; it becomes the matrix of the most successful schemes of humanitarianism; it becomes, at times, the context of Christianity itself. In a diversity of ways we see the idea of the political community making its inroads into the minds and acts of the new men of power in the nineteenth century, the men for whom power was but the other face of humanitarian redemption.
Fundamental to the political community is the belief that the normal plurality of authorities and functions in society must be supplanted by a unity of authority and function arising from the monistic State. The power of the State must become the context of the realization of all man's aspirations, even as the Church formed this context in the Middle Ages. There is, second, the view of the people, not as diversified members of social groups and cultural associations, but as an aggregate of atomized particles needing the absolute State for protection and security. Man, in this view, is a timid, insecure, and lonely being apart from his membership in the omnipotent, all-benign State. The power of the State must not be regarded as repressive force. What separates the political community from earlier forms and visions of the State is its insistence that only through absolute, unitary power can man find freedom, equality, fraternity, and virtue. Freedom becomes freedom from other institutions, freedom to participate in Leviathan. Equality is the mechanical equivalence of talents, functions, and ideas engendered by the State's leveling influence upon all other associations and statuses, and enforced by the iron mold of law. Fraternity is the bond of political brotherhood that must rule out, as its very condition, all other brotherhoods based upon interest, place, or belief. And virtue, what is it? Virtue is, in Rousseau's words, “nothing more than the conformity of the particular wills with the General Will.” Power is not power if but formed in the alembic of political imagination; it is freedom, equality, brotherhood, virtue. It is community.
Two
In practical terms, what Rousseau's ideas pointed toward was a two-fold emancipation: first, of the individual from his traditional associative chains; and, second, of the State itself from the mass of feudal customs which, everywhere, limited its real efficacy. For only by extricating the State, the ideal State, from the mass of intrusive localisms and partial allegiances descended from the past would it be possible to use its power to emancipate man from these same prejudices and entanglements. What was demanded was a revolutionary liaison between the individual and the omnipotent State. Between the challenge of atomistic individualism and the militant power of the central State, dedicated to human welfare, it would be possible to grind into dust all intermediate associations, reminders and nourishers of the despised past.
It was in a real sense a necessary affinity, for all major social movements are a combination of radical individualism and authoritarian affirmation. New structures of belief and authority cannot be introduced until human beings have been alienated, in one way or another, from the old. Hence the insistence upon individual release from old institutions and social groups, and upon man as the natural embodiment of all virtues. Hence also the emphasis upon the State as the area of reassimilation and upon political power as the instrument.
This affinity between social individualism and political power is, I believe, the most fateful fact of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It forms the very substance of the ideology of the political community; it comprehends the majority of ideas of political humanitarianism. It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth century, appearing so paradoxically, as it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see clearly the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.
Three
It was the French Revolution, following hard upon Rousseau's clamant prophecy, that served to translate so many of the adjurations of the Social Contract into hard administrative reality and to bring forcibly to the attention of intellectuals throughout Europe the new perspective of redemption through political power. However minor Rousseau's influence may have been upon the causes of the Revolution, his influence upon the course of the Revolution became great. “Hitherto,” wrote Sebastien Mercier in 1791, “the Social Contract was the least read of all Rousseau's works. Now, every citizen broods over it and learns it by heart.”1
The tremendous value of the Social Contract to the men of the Revolution lay, first, in its extraordinary flexibility. It could serve the authoritarian demands of the Revolution as easily as it could provide an apologetics for the corrosive individualism of the early phases. But its greatest value lay in its ingenious camouflaging of power with the rhetoric of freedom, and in its investment of political power with the essence of religious community. Rousseau had succeeded in spiritualizing the political relationship and, in so doing, had removed the State conceptually from the ordinary realm of political intrigue and force. “How are you to know a Republican?” asked Barere late in the Revolution. His answer to his own question might have been taken from the chapter on the Civil Religion. You will know him when he speaks of his country with “religious sentiment” and of the sovereign people with “religious devotion.”2
Treatments of the French Revolution fall, generally, into one of two major categories. The Revolution is regarded as the work primarily of individual freedom, or it is regarded as the work of collective power. But the Revolution was both, and each of these aspects must be seen as contributing profoundly to the other. Apart from the emancipation of masses of human beings from the social structures of the old regime, the extraordinary increases of political power that become so noticeable in the final phases of the Revolution are scarcely intelligible. And, similarly, it is only in the context of the Revolutionary government's early impact upon such structures as church, guild, class, and family that we may see the effective conditions of the new individualism in France. Both elements of the Revolution, the socially free individual and the omnipotent nation, are vividly apparent from the very start. The stress upon individual rights that is to be found in the first two articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man is succeeded, in the third and sixth articles, by a clear insistence that the nation is the source of all sovereignty and that law is the expression of the General Will. But whether from the point of view of the natural rights of the individual or of the celebration of the collective nation, the position of all loyalties and values intermediate to individual and State is made precarious from the outset.3
Rousseau had written that it is the force of the State that alone achieves the liberty of its members. Revolutionary legislators took this literally, and the liberty of the individual became the prime justification for the powerful legislative attacks upon old values, old idea systems, and old associations. The same temper of mind that led them to the release of Jews from the ancient ghetto led them also to seek the release of millions of others from the guilds, the Church, the patriarchal family, class, and the local community.
To this militant libertarianism was added an equally militant rationalism. The passion for geometrical symmetry, inherited from Cartesian philosophy, drove them beyond a reform of the currency system, beyond a standardization of weights and measures, to a rational standardization of the very units of men's social and political life. If men were to be made free and wise, there had to be an enforced obliteration of old memories and prejudices embedded in traditional associations and institutions. The calendar had to be reformed, with new names for days and months, in order to remind the people of their emancipation from the old. It was necessary to establish a new educational system and office of propaganda that people might be emancipated, in Rousseau's words, from the prejudices of their fathers. Above all, new unities of law and social function were needed to replace those inherited from the hated Middle Ages. If man was to be put in full possession of natural faculties, he had to be made free of the associations that fettered him and, equally important, placed in new associations that would nurture his emerging rationality and goodness. The rational State, with its own new subdivisions, had to become man's chief area of membership.
Hence the early destruction of the guilds. Hence the prohibition of all new forms of economic association. “Citizens…must not be permitted to assemble for their pretended common interests. There is no longer any corporation within the State; there is but the particular interest of each individual and the general interest.”
Charitable societies were declared illegal. “It is the business of the nation,” declared Le Chapelier, “it is the business of the public officers in the name of the nation, to furnish employment to those who need it and assistance to the infirm.” Literary, cultural, and educational societies were also bannedm for, declared one of the legislators, “A State that is truly free ought not to suffer within its bosom any association, not even such as, being dedicated to public improvement, has merited well of the country.”4
We observe also the profound changes made in the structure and functions of the family. The legitimate family was conceived, like the State itself, as a small republic, not as a monarchy. Ideals of equality and liberty must prevail there as in the larger society. The oft-written protests of the philosophes against paternal authority, as one of the chief barriers to intellectual progress, had their effects on legislators of the Revolution. Paternal authority and the indissolubility of marriage were both declared “against nature and contrary to reason.” Marriage was designated a civil contract and numerous grounds of divorce were made available. Strict limitations were placed upon the authority of the father, and, in all cases, the authority of the father was declared terminated when the children reached the age of twenty-one. New property laws were directed against the corporate character of the family, and the partage forcé was enjoined, thus preventing the perpetuation of family property in aggregate and insuring the equal division of property among all the children.
In this way, too, was the Church dealt with, for of all structures of traditional society it was the Church that was most feared and hated by rationalists and politiques. In the name of liberté the Revolution suppressed all perpetual monastic vows and abolished all independent religious orders. Charitable and educational functions of the Church were discontinued, and property was confiscated. Relationships of status and bond, of whatever type, were terminated by political decree, in order that individuals might be released from priestly tyranny. Bishops and priests were compelled to give up all rights and privileges, and even distinction of dress, and at one point it was decided that such functionaries must be elected to office like regular governmental officials.
Profession, class, the historic commune, the universities, and provinces, all alike came under the atomizing consideration of the legislators of the Revolution. The sovereign aim was the conversion of all collectivities into the individuals who composed them, all social statuses into the natural rights and abilities presumed to underlie them. “France,” proclaimed Sieyes, “must not be an assemblage of small nations each with its own democratic government; she is not a collection of states; she is a single whole, made up of integral parts; these parts must not have each a complete existence of its own, for they are…but parts forming a single whole.”5
“The transition of an oppressed nation to democracy,” declared the Committee of Public Safety, “is like the effort by which nature arose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a people whom you wish to make free, destroy its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.”6 There are few examples in history that match the Revolution in its individualization of ranks and associations, in its forced liberation of masses of human beings. It is one of the most explosive outbursts of individualism in the whole history of the world.
But we must not lose sight of the context of this individualism. The rise of masses of legally autonomous individuals, free to devote their talents to whatever they chose, is but one aspect of a picture which includes also the development of the collective power of the State in France. The individualist aspects of the Revolution are inseparable from the augmentation of State power, which was largely the result of the reduction of other social bodies. The decree of the Committee of Public Safety given above was concluded by the statement: “The State must therefore lay hold on every human being at his birth and direct his education with powerful hand.” Only through force could freedom be born.
The real power of political government increased during the Revolution to a point scarcely dreamed of by earlier kings. There is nothing strange in this. It is obvious that any assemblage of people will more willingly suffer the passage of authority from their private associations into the hands of the central government when a pervasive ideology supports the view that such a government is but administering powers always, in theory, revocable by the people. As Ostrogorski has written, such a regime “has on its side the maximum of brute force and moral force. Every law is supposed to be made with the assent of the humblest of citizens, and the citizen who obeys the laws and the custodians of them appears to obey only himself…. The fiction of spontaneous assent is thus added to the reality of the most formidable external constraint which can be exerted, constituting in society a power of intimidation from which no one escapes, and to which everyone can fly for refuge.”7
Four
There is, moreover, the mounting attraction of political power when all other forms of association have been destroyed or weakened. If the individual is prevented, by law or public opinion, from participating in ordinary associations, and if he feels, as men commonly do, the need to belong to something larger than himself, he will seek close membership in the one association that is open to him. In France, before the eighteenth century had ended, this association was the State, and the government overlooked no means by which to bind the people ever more closely to itself. “The Republic,” declared a revolutionist in 1794, “must penetrate the souls of its citizens through all the senses.” Hence the declaration by such men as Le Pelletier and Robespierre that the State must have primacy of claim upon the young. Hence the meticulous care in designing an educational system that would be financed and directed by the government and made compulsory for all children in France. Hence the incessant emphasis upon the singleness and unity of French culture.
What the spectacle of the Revolution emphasized to many minds in the decades following it was a truth known to every great political leader from Cleisthenes to Napoleon. The State that would become powerful must become identified with the people; it must become absolutely identified. The State becomes powerful not by virtue of what it takes from the individual but by virtue of what it takes from the spiritual and social associations which compete with it for men's devotions.
It is in these terms, indeed, that the phenomenon of nineteenth-century nationalism becomes intelligible. All serious students of nationalism are agreed that, in its contemporary form, nationalism is the child of the French Revolution. There is nothing strange in this fact. During the Revolution, as we have seen, there occurred a general sterilization of associative allegiances that were not of the State, a subtle transmutation of social statuses into political status, and a general assimilation of human purposes and devotions into the single structure of the people's. State. The loss of older statuses could not help but turn men's eyes to the status of citizen. The loss of older memberships could not help but be followed by a growing willingness to make the State itself the primary area of association. “A State becomes a nation,” A. D. Lindsay has correctly written, “when instead of its members being primarily divided between sovereign and subjects, government and citizenship become a common task, demanding not passive citizenship but active cooperation from all.”8
The modern State is not the offspring of the nation. It is far more correct and relevant to say that the nation is the offspring of the State. Nationalism, in the form that has become triumphant in the last century and a half, is no mere development, as is so often argued, of folk ties of tribe, locality, or region. Doubtless the emotional elements which earlier populations found in kinship and region, in local community and church, have been transferred, so to speak, to the nation. But the logical continuity of symbolic transference should not be made the basis of assuming any continuity of social development in this instance. Modern nationalism, as a state of mind and cultural reality, cannot be understood except in terms of the weakening and destruction of earlier bonds, and of the attachment to the political State of new emotional loyalties and identifications.9 It cannot be understood, that is, apart from those rents and clefts in the traditional structure of human loyalties, caused by economic and social dislocation, which left widening masses of human beings in a kind of psychological vacuum. And it cannot be understood except in terms of the ever more hypnotic appeal exercised by the political association in the hands of men who saw the State as the new and final enclosure of human life and purpose.
In many governments of nineteenth-century Europe there were politicians and philosophers who, in their desire for military and national unity, were willing to pay at least a considerable part of the equalitarian and humanitarian price that was involved. It was thus not always easy to tell from the appearance of a specific social reform whether it had been motivated by basically humanitarian or military-nationalist motives. The abolition of the servile status of the peasant, the limitation of economic powers of the Church, the reduction of traditional class differences, the widening of the electorate, and the amelioration of the economic plight of the people—these were measures that served not merely the purposes of the equalitarian and the humanitarian but the purposes also of the nationalist.
How could the kind of military power be achieved that had made the Revolutionary armies the scourge of Europe as long as the government was remote and indifferent to popular aspirations? The medieval Church had been strong because of what it did for its members. The State must do no less. The medieval Church had sought to bind man spiritually as well as economically, culturally as well as politically, into an undiversified unity of membership that would leave nothing outside it. The State must similarly seek to make itself the harmonious coordinator of all human interests, being no less sensitive to the economic, the charitable, the communal, and the symbolic needs of the people.
Thus Fichte, in the addresses he gave at Berlin after Napoleon had humbled the Prussian people, made unquestionably clear the relation that must prevail between a government and its people if the government would be powerful. The State must assume humanitarian and educative functions; it must create a meaningful ethical bond between itself and the people. In every previous system of government, Fichte declared, “the interest of the individual in the community was linked to his interest in himself by ties, which at some point were so completely severed that his interest in the community absolutely ceased.” What is now necessary is “to find an entirely different and new binding tie that is superior to fear and hope, in order to link up the welfare of her whole being with the self-interest of each of her members.” This new tie would be the State based upon the people, the political community, successor to the Church in its inclusion of all human needs, desires, and hopes. If only we have the will to create such an order, Fichte concluded, we shall be able to produce “an army such as no age has yet seen.”10
The motives behind the vision of the nation-community could vary from militarism to humanitarianism to those of what Matthew Arnold in England called sweetness and light. For in the structure of the political State, properly conceived, Arnold could see the only real hope for the cultural redemption of Western society. For a long time the “strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell,” but now “the modern spirit has almost entirely dissolved these habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself…is becoming very manifest.” What, then, “if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there? We want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous classes, checks, and deadlock; culture suggests the idea of the State.”11
In France it had been demonstrated that the State can become powerful by its emancipation of human beings from competing allegiances and by its absorption of functions formerly resident in other associations. It had been demonstrated that equalitarian legislation could have as its signal consequence the leveling of all authorities which interposed themselves between a people and government and which, by their existence, perpetually challenged the influence of government.
Between the partisan of social justice and the exponent of national collective power there thus arose a genuine, if mutually repugnant, affinity. The aims of humanitarianism required the obliteration of institutional authorities descended from the past within which men were manifestly unequal and unfree. But the aims of the nationalist required exactly the same obliteration. Whether in the equalitarian interest of the General Will or in the authoritarian interest of the General Will, what was demanded was the removal of the intermediate associations which acted as barriers to national equality and national authority alike. Only thus could there be created a new culture to replace present anarchy, a new order to replace growing lawlessness, and a new community to fill the rapidly forming spiritual vacuum.
Five
The Revolution was distinguished by the triumph of the political relationship and of man's political status over all other relationships and statuses in society. Thus the term “citizen” reached a degree of prestige that threatened all older titles of status in society, and political functionaries enjoyed a new merit. There were many conflicts and resistances, of course. The edicts and enthusiasms of Paris were not easily communicated to other parts of France. But we may say, nevertheless, that the most momentous aspect of the Revolution, in psychological terms, was its systematic depreciation of all the statuses that had characterized traditional French society, and its calculated celebration of the personal qualities and statuses that arose from man's membership in the political order. Not economic man, nor religious man, but political man was, in a very important sense, the key figure of the Revolution.
It was the political habit of mind that became compelling in the nineteenth century. One of the most curious conceptions of the nineteenth century in modern writing is that it was the century of the natural economic order, laissez faire, and the weak State. In actual fact the State achieved a position of power and direction in human affairs that was unprecedented in European history. Even in England the full advent of industrialism was accompanied by an increase in political law and administration greater, during the decades of the thirties and forties alone, than anything known earlier.12 Industrially, morally, educationally, and philanthropically, the State became the indispensable context of men's thinking and planning.
Especially was this true on the Continent. There, in the minds of a constantly growing number of reformers, socialists, unitary democrats, and other tacticians of humanitarianism, the liberative power of the State, revealed so dramatically by the Revolution in France, assumed many guises.
In power lay popular unity. But this was an old reflection. What was now so exhilarating was the realization that in political power lay, also, equality, virtue, justice, and freedom itself: To use the absolute, centralized power of the State against religious and economic tyrannies—was this not a transcendent way of making men good and free? All of this Rousseau had argued brilliantly. All of this had been demonstrated to the admiring gaze of the nationalist, the democrat, and the humanitarian alike, by the incomparable Revolution. Whatever else the Revolution may be, in the various perspectives of historical interpretation, it would be folly to overlook the fact that it was power— power in a form hardly known since the days of Caesar and his admiring multitudes.
“After the Revolution,” Lord Acton has written, “the purpose of the continental governments formed on that pattern is not that the people should obtain security for freedom, but participation in power.” The characterization is apt, but it is highly important to see that, for a growing number of intellectuals and politicians, and even for the masses themselves, such participation in power, with its attendant properties of centralized administration, carried with it implications of joyous release. Of all the subtle alchemies of thought performed by Rousseau and by the guiding spirits of the Revolution, the subtlest and the most potent was the conversion of absolute power into the illusion of mass freedom.
What was new, and profoundly exciting, was the sense of achieving freedom through absolute identification with the will of the majority, a will expressed relentlessly and single-mindedly by the government. During the Revolution freedom had come to mean, increasingly, the freedom not so much of individuals taken singly or in small groups but of the whole people. The emancipation of the entire people from the tyrannies exercised by church, class, family, and local custom—this was the most potent and revolutionary conception of freedom. And the key to the reality of this conception of freedom lay in the centralizing, absorptive work of governments. When Robespierre announced to the National Convention that the will of the Jacobins was the General Will, he could have cited Rousseau in support of his position. After all, were not the Jacobins motivated by justice? Were they not dedicated to the common weal, to virtue. Were they not, in Rousseau's words, “well-intentioned”? And who else but Rousseau could have prepared the minds of the Convention to accept credulously Robespierre's ringing declaration that the “government of the Revolution is but the despotism of freedom against tyranny”?
This conception of mass participation in power, with its corollary of mass power as mass freedom, has proved to be the most revolutionary of all political doctrines in the modern world. If the power of government is but the reflection of the will of the masses, or, rather, of the interests of the masses, and if the General Will is merely a means of forcing individuals to be free, then does it not follow, as the Jacobins held, that every increase in governmental authority, every increase of political—at the expense of religious, economic, and kinship—authority is, ex hypothesi, an increase in real freedom for the people?
Hardly less significant was the conception, born also of Rousseau and the Revolution, of the equalitarian properties of power. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this conception was to become a redemptive vision of escape from all the social and cultural inequalities inherited from the past. The belief in the natural equality of human beings was an old one. What Rousseau and the legislators of the Revolution added to it was the view of the State as the indispensable means for the recovery of equality that had been lost in the dark ages of the past.
By its inroads upon the authorities of church, class, and local community the popular State would liberate men—liberate them not only from the oppressions of traditional society but from its intolerable hierarchy. Much of that imagined natural equality which had been lost through the rise of property, the patriarchal family, and ecclesiastical institutions would be restored to man merely through the power of the State used to emancipate men from their historically given statuses.
But even more fascinating than the vision of equality through release from old authorities was the vision of equality through participation in power— the same participation that would also confer freedom. If all power in society were transferred from the plurality of traditional institutions, institutions in which individuals had grossly unequal degrees of participation, to the single structure of the State, and if the State were conceived as identical with the people, then it followed that in terms of the exercise of power in society each individual would be equal to every other individual. Rousseau had described this process in his Social Contract. In a State of ten thousand people each person would be a subject, but he would also be one ten-thousandth of the sovereign, fully equal to all other men in his possession of authority. And if, in the transfer of functions and authorities from family or guild to the State a man lost his own traditional authority over children or employees, he would not mind since he would be but transferring the rights and duties from an older status to his new status of citizen.
It is this envisagement of power as equality that goes far to explain the appeal the growing tendency toward administrative uniformity and standardization had in many parts of nineteenth-century Europe. The European State had always been, as we have seen, a potentially revolutionary force in this direction. The struggles between king and the feudal authorities arrayed against him had been won, and the victories consolidated, through legal and administrative standardization. But everything that had taken place along this line in earlier centuries was as nothing compared to the spread of administrative uniformity in the nineteenth century. And much of the explanation for this lies in the impetus given by the revolutionary conception of State power as the work of freedom and equality.
Six
Unquestionably, the most dramatic and far-reaching event of the Revolution was the coup d'etat of the 18 Brumaire.13 For it was this seizure of power and the justification following it that laid the basis for the modern rise of the belief that in one man, rather than in any representative body, the real interests and desires of a people are best given expression. Here, too, we are dealing with an idea which, in its essentials, is an old one. The fateful Napoleonic Idea of the nineteenth century is closely related to the ancient Athenian conception of the tyrant and has an even closer connection with the role of Caesar before the masses in the Rome of the first century B.C.
But it is important to see the close relation between the Napoleonic Idea of the nineteenth century and the whole developing conception of the political community with its emphasis upon the political masses, collectivization of power, and centralization of administration. Far from there being any conflict between the idea of one man as the supreme ruler and the idea of the political community, based upon the whole people, there was, in truth, an almost inevitable affinity of interest.
Once the political community was accepted as the highest of all forms of existence, once political virtue was regarded as the most exalted of all forms of virtue, the next problem was that of discovering the technical means of achieving and securing the political community from its enemies. We have already seen the appeal which lay in administrative uniformity and centralization. To revolutionary legislators and to all their disciples in the following century the forces of evil were represented by the plurality of authorities and memberships which lay outside the realm of the rational State. Reform could proceed only as reason does itself, through a rigorous exclusion of all elements not pertinent to the central objective.
Inevitably the idea of the One acquired fresh appeal for all political rationalists. “To be as One” has echoed down through the centuries from Plato's time. That which promotes unity, system, and simplicity has ever had its transcendent appeal to the rationalist as well as to the mystic. Centralizing, unitary systems of classification have been as deeply involved in Western systems of political action as they have in systems of metaphysics. Despite the manifest pluralism of the universe and the diversity of society, only rarely have philosophers and statesmen made this pluralism and diversity the perspectives of their thought and policy. Much oftener have philosophers sought some one substance or factor from which all else could be deduced and to which it could be related for meaning.
In nineteenth-century political thought one of the most important developments is the conversion of the ideal of oneness into new techniques of centralization. If the interests of a political population could safely be entrusted to five hundred men, why not to one hundred, to fifty, to ten men? Why not, indeed, to one man who, by his virtue and devotion to the whole of the people, could be depended on to interpret and give actuality to the will of the people in a way that no cumbersome parliamentary system could? Political government and its bureaucracy were already accepted by the majority of political rationalists as the indispensable means of liberating vast populations from the dead hand of the past. All that was necessary was that such governments remain constantly in touch with the real will of the people.
But here was the stumbling block. For the real will of the people was, as Rousseau had warned, frequently difficult to ascertain. It was not equivalent to the mere “will of all.” The real will, the General Will, was more elusive and fundamental. Frequently the General Will of a people was not apparent even to the people themselves.14 It could only be inferred by a government devoted to the welfare of the people and concerned with the people in their collective reality and their political oneness.
But how could a government be in touch with the collective reality of the whole people when it was itself composed of representatives of mere sections of the whole? There was also the inevitable obstruction provided by the existence of paid, permanent political functionaries, men who must necessarily come to lose respect for, and even knowledge of, the will of the people. It was thus argued by more than a few politicians and ideologists that popular welfare is more often hindered than helped by ordinary parliamentary processes. Parliamentary government too often becomes government of special and local interests. It is asking too much to suppose that the man who represents only a few hundred square miles, or the bureaucrat who acts as a trained expert in some specialized capacity, can be depended on to represent the real interest of the whole of the people. Moreover, representative government was, as Rousseau himself characterized it, feudal, and hence to be distrusted. Genuine sovereignty cannot be represented; it can only be expressed.
Here was where the dramatic accession to power of the first Napoleon provided a tantalizing example. Napoleon had come to power, in his own words and in the recognition of large numbers of the people, not to destroy but to fulfill the Revolution. Through his own acumen, through his willingness to act quickly and decisively, and through the subtle interplay of interest that he created between himself and the people, he had come to appear as the very embodiment of the real will of the French masses. And his roots in popular allegiance were deep. Between him and the people, as between Caesar and the Roman masses, there had developed a bond and a mutual understanding that could never have been matched by the cumber some processes of parliamentary representation. Because of this bond the work of governmental reorganization, the rationalization of law, and the achievement of humanitarian gains for the masses had been made relatively easy. Granted that Napoleon had frequently been ruthless in his extermination of dissent, that he had sought upon occasion to make the writing of history and literature serve the ends of his rule. But what was this against the fact that he had represented faithfully the General Will?
Robert Michels has ably described this whole point of view under what he calls “Bonapartist ideology.” “Once elected, the chosen of the people can no longer be opposed in any way. He personifies the majority, and all resistance to his will is antidemocratic. The leader of such a democracy is irremovable, for the nation, having once spoken, cannot contradict itself. He is, moreover, infallible, for ‘l’Elu de six millions de suffrages exécute les voluntés du peuple, it ne les trahi pas. ‘It is reasonable and necessary that the adversaries of the government should be exterminated in the name of popular sovereignty, for the chosen of the people acts within his rights as representative of the collective will, established in his position by a spontaneous decision. It is the electors themselves, we are assured, who demand from the chosen of the people that he should use severe repressive measures, should employ force, should concentrate all authority in his own hands. One of the consequences of the theory of the popular will being subsumed in the supreme executive is that the elements which intervene between the latter and the former, the public officials, that is to say, must be kept in a state of the strictest possible dependence upon the central authority, which, in its turn, depends upon the people. The least manifestation of liberty on the part of the bureaucracy would be tantamount to a rebellion against the sovereignty of the citizens…. Bonapartism does not recognize any inter mediate links.”15
Thus the same affinity that had developed between the political processes of power and the goals of humanitarianism developed with greater intensity between the latter and the fascinating vision of one man, equipped, like Rousseau's Legislator, with courage and insight and virtue. “The great soul of the legislator,” Rousseau had written, “is the only miracle that can prove his mission.” Some may doubt and scoff, but “the true political theorist admires…the great and powerful genius which presides over things made to endure.”
Only in the serene and unprejudiced regard of one man could the real will of a people be made manifest. Only to such a man could the real interests and aspirations of a people be entrusted. Only the man who represented not sections, not localities, not partial interests, but the whole of the people, the people in their mystic political oneness, would be able to save the people from the corruptions and oppressions always threatening to spring up, like noxious weeds, in the crevices of the new State. In his person, if he could but be found, lay the ultimate realization of that redemption promised by the political community.
Seven
We are familiar enough with the idea of the political community, with its elements of redemptive power, in the writings of the nineteenth-century zealots of nationalism. The names of such men as Jahn, Wagner, Mazzini, Maurras, and Treitschke come readily to mind. But the major channels of the idea of the political community are to be found in writings and movements which were not, in intent at least, nationalist at all. The idea of political power was most successfully disseminated, not by the writers who saw national power itself as the primary goal, but by those who saw in political power the sole means of realizing cherished social and moral objectives connected with popular welfare.
This is the point that is crucial. The modern State and the whole ideology of the political community have become significant, influential, not through worship of naked power but because of the promise which seemed to lie in political power for the salvation of man—for the attainment of moral goals that had eluded mankind for thousands of years. Not to the writings of power worshipers or reactionaries must we look for the source and diffusion of the ideology of the political community in the nineteenth century, but to those men who, like Bentham and Marx, were eminently rational and whose goals were the release of mankind from its long bondage to oppression, misery, and ignorance.
Thus in Bentham, despite an early repudiation of Rousseau and the Revolution on the grounds that both had elevated imaginary natural rights of individuals instead of the real interests of men, we cannot miss (at least with the guidance of Halévy's great study16) the very real influence exerted upon his thought and upon the ideas of his followers by the idea of the centralized, rational, political community. We may be inclined, on first consideration, to regard as somewhat comical and unrepresentative his expressed desires to legislate (from the recesses of his study) for all India, to be the ruler of Mexico, or to become the benevolent intellectual power behind a Continental despot. Yet the relation of these aspirations to similar aspirations on the Continent, and what is more important, their relation to the central elements of his own ethical system, makes them less comical and more representative than might at first be thought.
The State as conceived by Bentham, Halévy has written, “is a machine so well constructed that every individual, taken individually, cannot for one instant escape from the control of all the individuals taken collectively.” Here, indeed, is the essence of the General Will. But, as in the writings of Rousseau and in the speeches of the Jacobins, what is central and directive is not the primary worship of power. Rather, it is the principle, so fundamental in Bentham's political theory, that only because of the control exerted collectively is it possible for each individual to be taken individually. Only through the elevation of political power to the point where it supersedes all other powers and constraints, to the point where it becomes the sole power in men's lives, is it possible to create that scene of rational impersonality demanded by the needs of individual liberation. It is no contradiction to be reminded of Bentham's hostility to many of the existent political and administrative structures of his time, of his incessant zeal for the liberation of individual reason. Granted the supremacy of the individual in Bentham's ethics and granted also his relentless opposition to many aspects of the English State, his larger system of thought nevertheless seems unified only when we see that the prime object of his endeavors is the discovery of that political system in which such irrationalities as the common law and the rotten boroughs can be eliminated, and in which the indvidual, emancipated from all his institutional fetters, can achieve the life of perfect reason.
Quite apart from his early reflections on the possible moral achievements of political legislation, the idea of the centralized administrative State logically becomes central in Bentham's thought when he finds it necessary to supplement “natural” and “sympathetic” identifications of interest by recourse to what he calls “artificial” identification. The first two are based upon the principles of hedonistic psychology. But the third is the direct reflection of the vision of the political community, the community rationally and impersonally organized, omnipotent and monolithic. It may be true, as some unkind critic has suggested, that whereas Bentham began with self-evident natural interest he was forced to conclude with the policeman and the penitentiary. But the fact remains that for Bentham, as for Rousseau, the policeman and penitentiary were but means of “forcing individuals to be free.”
Behind Bentham's constantly developing reliance upon the omnipotent, benevolent political community lay always the vision of a society in which men would be freed from the tyrannous and stultifying traditions that had come down from the Middle Ages. Hence his almost fanatical desire to see exterminated not only the rotten borough and the function-less aristocracy but also the Inns of Court, the Church, the common law, the semi-public corporations, such universities as Oxford and Cambridge, the jury system, the parish, and even the traditional family.
The logic of his political rationalism became relentless. It even demanded that the testimony of husband against wife, of wife against husband, be admitted in legal cases. For what is the value of an immunity that is based upon mere sentiment and, more often than not, impedes the function of clear reason. His logic demanded the abolition of the jury system. How preposterous to suppose that right will ever be determined by the mere counting of votes among twelve people. Right must be determined, in legal matters as it is in mathematical problems, by the sovereignty of reason, not by custom and headcounting. And this sovereignty of reason must be made manifest by the sovereignty of the single judge, alone omnipotent, subject only to the limitations provided by his perception of the will of the whole people. Similarly, for the immunities of lawyer-client relationship, doctor-patient, and priest-communicant relationship, Bentham had nothing but contempt. Such immunities were of a piece with the whole fabric of customary observances handed down from the Middle Ages and, by their existence, constituted a barrier both to the emancipation of the individual and to the will of the people. “Every man his own lawyer,” as Halevy has pointed out, has in Bentham's theory a significance remark ably like Luther's insistence upon “every man his own priest.” The implied individualism is a reflection of the hatred for all intermediate relationships.
Centralization of administration became almost an obsession with Bentham. In his later years he saw nothing good in government that did not become focused in the mind of one man. He extended advocacy of his celebrated panopticon principle from the context of prison administration, in which it first took form, to the supervision of factories, schools, and hospitals. He compares the position of the central inspector to “divine omnipotence” and stoutly defends the garrison-like discipline as an indispensable means of liberation as well as efficiency.
With this advocacy of centralization in the light of reason went not merely a radical individualism that insisted on the release of human beings from all connecting relationships founded upon tradition, but also an emphasis upon the collective nature of legitimate power. The only recognized authority in society must be that which springs clearly from the will of the whole people, taken in their political unity. Bentham's conception of the State is as relentless in its demand as his conception of the individual. The State and its power must extend to all areas of society now covered by the network of custom and tradition. Bentham had as little use as Rousseau for the principle of division of powers and separation of function. The people must be represented by a single body, a unified legislature, which will be omnicompetent. Such a body will work tirelessly toward the extermination of all relationships and beliefs that now separate individuals from their sense of membership in the rational political order.
The passionate spirit of Bentham's logic died early, but the political habit of mind among English intellectuals and reformers was nevertheless given a profound stimulus by his doctrines as they were passed down through such men as Grote and Chadwick. Not a little of the actual course of administrative reform during the nineteenth century in England must be seen in terms of Bentham's stress upon political centralization and standardization, and upon the removal of social functions and authorities not proceeding clearly from the State itself. More than most countries England remained, as a whole, aloof to the charms of rational centralization in the nineteenth century, but, despite this, we can see the consequences of the ideology of the political community. We see them in the gradual reduction of the influence of the parish, of the role of the “great unpaid” in the administration of justice and charity, and of the whole of that body of custom which, by its subtle permeation of formal processes of government, had for so long made English polity the despair of Continental jurists nurtured by doctrines descended from Roman law. We see them in the creation of new administrative districts challenging for the first time in centuries the autonomy and functional importance of the older unities of class and local community. We see them concretely and symbolically in the conversion of registration of births and deaths from ecclesiastical to political responsibility. We see the consequences, finally, in the steady expansion of the English electorate during the nineteenth century, through the removal of age-old restrictions against political participation.17
Such changes were clearly in the direction of increased efficiency of governmental operation and in the humanitarian interests of the people. Most of them were of a piece with such changes as those involved in the reforms in the Poor Law and the abolition of the rotten boroughs and were manifestly on the side of welfare and justice. No one familiar with the heavy toll exacted upon family, village, and personal security by emerging English industrialism in the nineteenth century, or with the painful details of ecclesiastical and upper-class indifference to the plight of the masses, can doubt that in such changes lay a promise of future political relief which not even the trade union or the cooperative could match. All of this is clear and undeniable. But equally undeniable is the fact that even in England where the conservative forces were strongest, where the “smaller patriotisms” of village and class remained more alive than in France or Prussia, the ideology of the political community became steadily more appealing. As in France, the power of the State over its people rose in direct proportion to its services to them.
Eight
Similarly, in the writings of Karl Marx the vision of omnicompetent power in the service of human welfare becomes almost blinding. Despite the predominantly economic cast of Marx's analysis of society and his philosophy of history, there is much reason for insisting that Marx's greatest importance lies in his willingness to translate the moral values of socialism into the structure of the centralized, political power. Whatever else Marxian socialism may be in ethical and historical terms, it is plainly a significant chapter in the history of political collectivism.18
The extreme collectivism and centralization of contemporary Soviet Russia are by no means distortions and corruptions of the Marxian philosophy of power. They are clearly rooted in the ideas of strategy and tactics that Marx and Engels were led to formulate in anticipation of revolutionary demands. The anarchists and French socialists against whom Marx and his followers fought so savagely were well aware of this aspect of Marx, and the words Bakunin first applied to Rousseau—” the true founder of modern reaction”—were as often applied to Marx himself by later anarchists.
Much has been made of the asserted Marxian disavowal of the State. It has been widely supposed that Marx held the State in disdain, that he regarded it and its power as a purely transitory phenomenon, dependent wholly upon the economics of exploitation. With the disappearance of capitalist classes, there would then be no need for the anachronism of the State and its machinery. Engels declared that “the authority of the government over persons will be replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state will not be ‘abolished,’ it will wither away.” But Engels prefaces these words with the statement. “The first act of a State in which it really acts as the representative of the whole of society, namely the assumption of control over the means of production on behalf of society, is also its last official act as a State.” From this curious piece of reasoning it would appear that what disappears is not the State, in any sense that has had significance since the eighteenth century, but a special form of government. What Marx and Engels chose to label the “state” was actually a form of government that the French Revolution and subsequent nationalism had made largely obsolete—the simple vertical relation between an institutionally remote government and the people.
The unpopularity of the idea of the State, especially among the anarchists and the followers of Proudhon, led Marx and Engels, as a means of broadening their own popular following, to borrow some of the terminology of the anarchists, all the while combating vigorously both the anarchist and syndicalist movements. The “withering away of the State” was in part a terminological trick by which to steal some of the anarchist thunder and, in part, a piece of self-deception which resulted from confusion between the legal state as a centralized structure of power, and a particular form of state regarded for tactical and definitional purposes as part of the exploitative apparatus of the capitalists. As more than one student of Marx has been forced to conclude, Marx was never above letting tactical necessities influence his description of the universe itself.
Marx's own summary toward the end of the Manifesto of action to be taken and of the political significance of that action is instructive in this connection. “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeois, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.” In his list of the steps that will be a necessary part of the Revolution in “the most advanced” countries, the following are included: “Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and their improvement…. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equal distribution of population over the country…. When in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.”
If we consider the State in terms which were made perfectly familiar by Hobbes and Rousseau and in light of the institutional realities of organized political government in the nineteenth century the final words have an almost naive ring. It would appear in fact that what is terminated is not the State but merely “the organized power of one class for oppressing another”—a quite different thing. To suppose that the public power would lose its political character when all production had been “concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation” was to miss entirely the nature of the political State that was developing in Marx's own time. Subsequent socialists have been all too willing to follow the reasoning by which a powerful, centralized, “vast association of the whole nation” could be declared bereft of political character simply because, like Rousseau's General Will, it reflected in theory no domination by a privileged social class minority. Marx's goal is the political community, centralized and absolute.
The Jacobin roots of Marxian socialism are clearly observable, although for obvious reasons Marx and his followers treated the French Revolution as a climax of the bourgeois rise to power. The Jacobins may not have been socialists, but there is little to separate their more radical views of property and wealth from the views of the later Marxians. Many of the recorded Jacobin speeches express ideas that are closer to those of the Communists of 1917 than to any set of “bourgeois” aspirations. The highly centralized conception of democracy held by the Jacobins, which could justify the most ruthless governmental actions by a few individuals on the ground that they spoke for the mass, was appropriated by the Marxian socialists in their theory of the relation of the party to the masses. Democratic centralism of present-day Communism owes much to the Jacobins. All of this Lenin had in mind when he declared in his State and Revolution that Communism is the more perfect development of democracy.
Marx had as little use as Rousseau or Robespierre for the natural pluralism of society, for the difference between town and country, for localism, for autonomous association—whether religious or economic—and for the family. For Marx, as for the Revolutionary democrats and the Philosophical Radicals, differences of locality, religion, and grouping must be abandoned in favor of a rational, centralized society. The practical result, as A. D. Lindsay has written, is that society is treated by Marx as though it had but a single center. “The smaller associations within the State are treated not as subordinate forms in which the general will finds expression but as rivals to it.”
Unlike most of the classical economists, Marx was sufficiently the historian to be aware at least of the existence of the institutions of traditional society. From Hegel he derived his interest in the impact of the historical process upon social classes, communities, guilds, families, and throughout the Manifesto and in many parts of Capital there are unsurpassable descriptions of the devastating social effects the rise of capitalism had on them.
But from Marx's point of view these associative aspects of human life were in large part mere expressions of a defunct social order—feudalism. In Civil War in France he wrote approvingly of the “gigantic broom of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, which swept away all these relics of medievalism.” He was keenly aware of the influence of the traditionalists upon the social thought of his own time and wrote bitterly of the medievalism which “even donned proletarian apparel and learned the language of socialism.” Marx and Engels despised pluralism as being ineffectual and archaic. It was this feeling that led Marx, in a letter to Engels, to hope fervently for the Prussian victory over France in 1870, on the ground that by the defeat of France, the new national predominance would shift the center of gravity of socialism from France to Germany, where the theory of centralization was much stronger.
Marx's view of the socially forward nature of history led him, as the determinist, to regard with hostility the traditional affiliations of family, community, association, and religion. The historical process, for Marx, was inevitable and could only take human relationships on to newer forms. He could write with all the bitter fervor of the prophet in his descriptions of the misery of the people and the consequences of industrialism, but in the glimpses we have been given of the future order imagined by Marx, there is little room either for cultural plurality or for decentralization of authority. In terms of his philosophy of history Marx could be brilliantly aware of the pluralism of history and of the facts of social allegiances and the clash of opposed classes. He could also write some devastating descriptions of contemporary bureaucracies. But when it came to setting down even in meager form his conception of the beginnings of socialist society, he could see the future only in Rousseauian terms of “a vast association of the whole nation” and in terms of techniques of extreme politicization and centralization. With Marx the socialist movement became clearly and almost irrevocably political or national socialism.
A generation of Marxists sought ingeniously to remove from this vision of the future the grounds for the anarchists’ charges of political despotism in a new form. Thus Lenin persuasively put the initial process of socialist reconstruction in the beguiling language of natural administration. “The bookkeeping and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four arithmetical rules…. When most of the functions of the State are reduced to this bookkeeping and control by the workers themselves, it ceases to be a ‘political’ state. The public functions are converted from political into simple administrative functions…. The whole of society will have become one office and one factory with equal work and pay.”
How far such a statement reflected Lenin's real views of the administrative problems of socialism, and how far it is to be regarded as camouflage for purposes of disarming pluralist and anarchist objections to Marxian socialism, is not easily determinable. Lenin's attitude toward the local and functional associations among the Russian peasants and workers—the villages, the cooperatives, and certain forms of the trade unions movement—was far from cordial. Unlike some of the Russian socialists who sought to preserve the communalism of the village and the already established cooperative and to make the achievement of universal socialism an outgrowth of these, Lenin, like most of the Bolsheviks, took the attitude that they were legacies of medievalism and hence to be destroyed.
Whether Lenin's contempt for what he called the flabbiness of the village and for the inherent particularizing and conservative influences of such functional associations as cooperative and trade union was based upon a rationalist faith, akin to Bentham's, in the universal potentialities of administration in each individual, or whether it was based upon themes of revolutionary, despotic centralization which earlier pre-Marxian Russian Nihilists had sounded, is of no great moment here. What is important is the fact that, given Marx's conception of the practical sphere in which socialism was to be realized—the vast association of the whole nation—it was inevitable that the political complexion of Marxism, its dependence upon the techniques of centralized power based upon a presumed will of the people, would become ever more pronounced. And given also a philosophy of history that saw the future emerging as inexorably out of the present as the present had out of the past, a philosophy of history that ridiculed the possibility of altering, through morality and knowledge, the design of history, it was equally inevitable that ensuing generations of Marxists would accept the major realities of the present as, in one degree or another, the major realities of the future. Heavy concentrations of industry, mass electorates, administrative centralization, the sterilization of cultural diversities, the eradication of social autonomies, and the conversion of social authority into administrative power—all this seemed a part of historic design and as relevant to the socialist future as to the capitalist present. All that was necessary was a revolutionary coup de grâce administered to a dying class in whose hands now lay, temporarily, the control of these progressive realities.
Nine
The nineteenth century has been called the Century of Great Hope. Innumerable historians have characterized its dominant qualities in the words of progress, democracy, freedom, and the liberation of reason from the shackles of superstition and ignorance. There is no need to quarrel with any of these characterizations. The nineteenth century was each and all of them. But it was something else, too, something that touched upon and, in one way or another, involved all of these moral values, something that we are only now beginning to understand clearly.
It was the century of the emergence of the political masses: masses created in widening areas by the processes of social destruction bound up with the increasing penetration of political power into all areas of society; masses created by the impact of a factory system that, in the essentials of its discipline, frequently resembled the military State itself; masses devoid, increasingly, of any hope for relief from the established, traditional institutions of society—family, church, and class.
Between the State and the masses there developed a bond, an affinity, which however expressed—in nationalism, unitary democracy, or in Marxian socialism—made the political community the most luminous of all visions. In it lay salvation from economic misery and oppression. In it lay a new kind of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In it lay right and justice. And in it, above all else, lay community.
What gave the vision of the political community added brilliance was the fact that so many of its elements—rational centralization of authority, the mass electorate, equality, political participation, unity, and so forth—could seem to be the elements of inexorable progress. Diversity, localism, regionalism, administrative decentralization—were not these the central elements of the despised Middle Ages, elements that were, as Michelet once insisted, being expunged remorselessly and eternally by the beneficent hand of Progress? All that did not serve the interests of the emerging new State, its unity and centralization, could be treated scornfully as unrealistic, as unprogressive, as an outcropping of the past. “Reactionary” and “Utopian” became, in equal degree, the appropriate epithets for all the ideas that did not begin with recognition of the historic inevitability of the political community and its dominant values.