Of all the philosophies of freedom in modern Western society, the most generally accepted and the most influential has been individualism. Whether with respect to economic, religious, or intellectual autonomies, the dominant assumption has been that the roots of these freedoms lie in the individual himself. The philosophy of individualism is based on a belief, Ramsay Muir has written, “in the value of the human personality and a conviction that the source of all progress lies in the free exercise of individual energy.”
No fault is to be found with the declared purposes of individualism. As a philosophy it has correctly emphasized the fact that the ultimate criteria of freedom lie in the greater or lesser degrees of autonomy possessed by persons. A conception of freedom that does not center upon the ethical primacy of the person is either naive or malevolent. We have seen how another conception of freedom, the one that finds freedom in conformity to the General Will, in participation in collective identity, is the root of the totalitarian view of freedom and order. Any freedom worthy of the name is indubitably freedom of persons.
But from the unquestioned ethical centrality of the person it does not follow that the philosophy of individualism, as we have inherited it from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is equally valid. For individualism is more than an ethic, historically; it is also a psychology and an implied theory of the relation between man and his institutions. And most of our difficulties with the philosophy of individualism at the present time come from our unconscious efforts to make the ethical aspect of individualism remain evocative when we have ceased to hold to the psychological and sociological premises of this philosophy.
Secular individualism of the eighteenth century arose on the basis of an image of man very different from the image prevalent in contemporary thought and action. And, as a philosophy, it existed in and was given unrecognized reinforcement by a social organization, the fundamentals of which no longer exist.
When the basic principles of modern liberalism were being formulated by such men as Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Jefferson, the image of man luminous in the philosophical mind was an image constructed out of such traits as sovereign reason, stability, security, and indestructible motivations toward freedom and order. Man, abstract man, was deemed to be inherently self-sufficing, equipped by nature with both the instincts and the reason that could make him autonomous.
What we can now see with the advantage of hindsight is that, unconsciously, the founders of liberalism abstracted certain moral and psychological attributes from a social organization and considered these the timeless, natural, qualities of the individual, who was regarded as independent of the influences of any historically developed social organization. Those qualities that, in their entirety, composed the eighteenth-century liberal image of man were qualities actually inhering to a large extent in a set of institutions and groups, all of which were aspects of historical tradition. But, with the model of Newtonian mechanics before them, the moral philosophers insisted on reducing everything to human atoms in motion, to natural individuals driven by impulses and reason deemed to be innate in man.
Given this image of man as inherently self-sufficing, given the view of institutions and groups as but secondary, as shadows, so to speak, of the solid reality of man, it was inevitable that the strategy of freedom should have been based upon objectives of release and the emancipation of man from his fettering institutions. The philosophy of individualism, in short, began with the Christian-Judaic stress upon the ethical primacy of the person; but from that point it became a rationalist psychology devoted to the ends of the release of man from the old and a sociology based upon the view that groups and institutions are at best mere reflections of the solid and ineffaceable fact of the individual.
What was born in the eighteenth century and confirmed, as it seemed, by the French Revolution, was carried full-blown into the nineteenth century. Whole systems of economic, religious, and intellectual freedom were founded on the assumption that the essence of human behavior lies in what is within man, not in what exists between man and his institutions. All the basic manifestations of society—altruism, sympathy, economic gain, and the like—were held to be mere unfoldings of certain deeply rooted drives born in man and presided over by his sovereign reason.
The rationalist dichotomy of man and society was crucial to the ends of the liberal reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How else could the moral imperatives of emancipation be fulfilled except by the premise of man's fundamental separateness and his self-sufficiency? The demands of freedom appeared to be in the direction of the release of large numbers of individuals from the statuses and identities that had been forged in them by the dead hand of the past. A free society would be one in which individuals were morally and socially as well as politically free, free from groups and classes. It would be composed, in short, of socially and morally separated individuals. Order in society would be the product of a natural equilibrium of economic and political forces. Freedom would arise from the individual's release from all the inherited personal interdependences of traditional community, and from his existence in an impersonal, natural, economic order.
Thus, in Bentham's terms, the fundamental cement of society would be provided not through institutions but through certain “natural” and “sympathetic” identifications of interest arising in almost equal part from man's instinctual nature and from his sovereign reason. What Bentham was later to invoke as an “artificial” identification was, to be sure, the strong, sovereign State. But, for Bentham as for all the Utilitarians who followed him, the role of the State was conceived essentially as a kind of impersonal setting for the free play of personal interest. It might be a strong State. Indeed, as we have seen, the power of the State becomes very great in Bentham's philosophy. But whatever its omnipotence, the major function of the State consists, for Bentham, in the eradication of all the interdependences of society inherited from the past that act to repress the atomic, presocial instincts and reason of the individual. Between Ben-tham's political theory and his psychology of the individual there was the closest affinity. They are two sides of the same coin.
“It is not strange,” George P. Adams trenchantly observes, “that this self-discovery and self-consciousness of the individual should have steadily mounted higher as the environment of individuals more and more takes on the form of an impersonal, causal, and mechanical structure. For the mobility and freedom of the individual can be won only as he becomes detached from his world; his world becomes separated from him only when organized and defined in objective and impersonal terms.”1
Here, of course, the role of the new State was influential in men's conception of the individual units of society. If all authority becomes objectified, externalized, that is centralized, in the increasingly remote and impersonal State, the consequences to the primary forms of authority with which man has traditionally and subjectively identified himself are pro found. They cease to be important. Their moral virtues are transferred, as it were, to him, even as their historic authorities have been transferred to the State.
The conception of society as an aggregate of morally autonomous, psychologically free, individuals, rather than as a collection of groups, is, in sum, closely related to a conception of society in which all legitimate authority has been abstracted from the primary communities and vested in the single sphere of the State. What is significant here is that when the philosophical individualists were dealing with the assumed nature of man, they were dealing in large part with a hypothetical being created by their political imaginations.
By almost all of the English liberals of the nineteenth century, freedom was conceived not merely in terms of immunities from the powers of political government but, more significantly, in terms of the necessity of man's release from custom, tradition, and from local groups of every kind. Freedom was held to lie in emancipation from association, not within association.
Thus in what is perhaps the noblest of individualistic testaments of freedom in the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty, there is the clear implication that membership in any kind of association or community represents an unfortunate limitation upon the creative powers of the individual. It is not Mill's definition of individuality that is at fault. This is matchless. The fault lies rather in his psychological and sociological conception of the conditions necessary to the development of individuality.
Mill is generous in his praise of localism, association, and the “smaller patriotisms” when he is discussing administrative problems of centralization. But in matters pertaining to the nature of man and motivations he is too much the child of his father. For him as for the elder Mill, individuality is something derived from innate qualities alone and nourished solely by processes of separation and release.
Two
What we have learned under the guidance of studies in modern social psychology, with the dismaying spectacle before us of enlarging masses of insecure individuals seeking communal refuge of one sort or another, is that the rationalist image of man is theoretically inadequate and practically intolerable. We have learned that man is not self-sufficing in social isolation, that his nature cannot be deduced simply from elements innate in the germ plasm, and that between man and such social groups as the family, local group, and interest association there is an indispensable connection. We know no conception of individuality is adequate that does not take into consideration the myriad ties which normally bind the individual to others from birth to death.
As an abstract philosophy, individualism was tolerable in an age when the basic elements of social organization were still strong and psychologically meaningful. In fact, whatever its theoretical inadequacy, the philosophy of individualism may be said to have had a kind of pragmatic value in an age when the traditional primary relationships were, if anything, too strong, too confining. Today, however, the philosophy of individualism lacks even pragmatic justification. For the prime psychological problems of our age, the practical problems that is, are those not of release but of reintegration.
All the testimony of contemporary sociology and psychology joins in the conclusion that individuality cannot be understood save as the product of normatively oriented interaction with other persons. Whatever may lie neurologically embedded in the human being, the product of physical history, we know that a knowledge of man's actual behavior in society must from the outset take into consideration the whole stock of norms and cultural incentives which are the product of social history. The normative order in society is fundamental to all understanding of human nature. “The normative order,” writes Kingsley Davis, “makes the factual order of human society possible.”2 We do not see, think, react, or become stimulated except in terms of the socially inherited norms of human culture.
But the normative order of values and incentives is itself inseparable from the associative order. Culture does not exist autonomously; it is set always in the context of social relationships. Only thus do the ends and patterns of culture make themselves vivid and evocative to human beings. And we have learned that with the dislocation of the social relationships which immediately surround the human being there occurs also a disruption of his cultural or moral order. Hence, as we have seen, the calculated destruction, in totalitarian countries, of the tangible social structures of human life. For, with the obliteration of these, the task of normative nihilism is made easy.
The greatest single lesson to be drawn from the social transformations of the twentieth century, from the phenomena of individual insecurity and the mass quest for community, is that the intensity of men's motivations toward freedom and culture is unalterably connected with the relationships of a social organization that has structural coherence and functional significance. From innumerable observations and controlled studies we have learned that the discipline of values within a person has a close and continuing relationship with the discipline of values supported by human interrelationships. “Only by anchoring his own conduct…in something as large, substantial, and super-individual as the culture of a group,” wrote the late Kurt Lewin, “can the individual stabilize his new beliefs sufficiently to keep them immune from the day to day fluctuations of moods and influences of which he, as an individual, is subject.”3
The intensity of personal incentive, whether in the context of psychiatric therapy or in the day to day life of the normal human being, tends to fluctuate with the intensity of meaningful social relationships. This is what we have learned from studies of motivation in learning, from studies of character formation, and from observation of personal morale in all kinds of stress situations. This is what we have learned, through the researches of such men as Elton Mayo and F. J. Roethlisberger, about the performance of individual workers in industry. Between the vitality of incentives to production and the vitality of the worker's informal social relationships in the workroom of the factory there is a crucial relationship.4
So too, in the recent war, it was made clear that the combat effectiveness of military units and, conversely, the incidence of combat fatigue and neurosis, had much less to do with the calculated indoctrination of “why we fight” values than with the solidarity and sense of relatedness to others in the military unit itself. Whatever the individual soldier's greater or less comprehension of, and devotion to, the purposes of the war, whatever the degree of hatred of the enemy in the breast of the individual soldier, what he actually fought on and was spiritually supported by was his sense of relatedness to others in his platoon or company. It was this concrete association, nourished by innumerable stimuli, that made combat and privation tolerable when belief was weak and understanding unclear.5
The philosophy of individualism, John Dewey wrote a generation ago, “ignores the fact that the mental and moral structure of individuals, the pattern of their desires and purposes, change with every great change in social constitution. Individuals who are not bound together in associations, whether domestic, economic, religious, political, artistic, or educational, are monstrosities. It is absurd to suppose that the ties which hold them together are merely external and do not react into mentality and character, producing the framework of personal disposition.”6
As we have learned from the recent literature of the concentration camp and from studies of uprooted and displaced persons, moral conscience, the sense of civilized decency, will not long survive separation from the associative ties that normally reinforce and give means of expression to the imperatives of conscience. Separate man from the primary contexts of normative association, as the nineteenth-century individualist enjoined in effect, and you separate him not only from the basic values of a culture but from the sources of individuality itself.
All of this, I repeat, is well enough known at the present time in the literature of sociology and social psychology. Yet there remains a curious inability to recognize the implications of what is known when we come to deal with such matters as cultural, economic, and religious freedom. We continue, too many of us, to deal with practical problems in these areas and to interpret in terms of perspectives created originally on the basis of certain premises regarding the nature of man which have by now been largely repudiated. It is as though we continued to hold tenaciously to a derived proposition in geometry long after we had discarded the axioms upon which it could alone rest.
Three
Much of the argument of the individualist with respect to the nature of freedom derives from the apparent fact that the most intellectually creative ages in history have been ages of the widespread release of individuals from ties of traditional values and relationships. Ages of cultural achievement, great periods of economic prosperity, and epochs of religious awakening have been interpreted as periods of extreme individualism.
The birth of new ideas, of art forms, of technologies, the discovery of new sources of wealth, all of this has behind it—so the argument runs—the individual escaping his social group, his class, family, and community. Such relationships may give security but do not excite the imagination. Great ages of intellectual achievement are always ages of disorder, for the displacement of moral and social cohesion is but the reverse side of the release of the creative individual. To read the funeral oration of Pericles, the speeches in the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists, or the essays of Francis Bacon, is to be put in touch with a vision of the illimitable vistas that lie before men who have emancipated themselves from tradition, and who have struck off the restrictive ties of binding social relationships. In the fact of a separation between the individual and authority has commonly been found the secret of the cultural freedom and prosperity of the world's great ages.
In his interesting book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, K. R. Popper has recently held up to us once again the rationalist's view of the problem of freedom as it manifests itself in cultural achievement. Like many before him, Popper sees the great age of Athens in the fifth century B.C. and the modern Renaissance in Western Europe as ages of “individualism.” What is central to Popper is the vision of a society in intellectual ferment, in persistent critical self-analysis, and in a perpetual outburst of individual expression. These are ages, he argues, recently released from the dead hand of tradition, membership, and tribalism. For Popper the greatness of Athens was at its very apogee when the Sophists and Socrates, among others, were declaring their relentless hostility toward all forms of moral or social inter dependence. Such nihilistic declarations were of a piece, Popper seems to believe, with the effective psychological conditions that underlay the whole efflorescence of genius in the drama, in art, philosophy, sculpture, and architecture in Athens of the fifth century B.C. In all of these spheres the cake of custom, the net of the past, was being broken, and man, absolute man, emerged to make his contributions.
The rationalist argument is a plausible one and inevitably attractive to all who find the greatest repressions of society to lie in the smallest and most personal of interdependences. But it raises certain difficulties.
We readily grant that it is the freedom of persons which is crucial in any period of intellectual achievement. Great works of art or literature are not created by anonymous organizations. They are the concrete results of personal performance. But from the obvious centrality of the person in intellectual or cultural achievement it follows neither that such achievement is the sole consequence of innate individual forces, nor that it is the result merely of processes of separation. We may grant that there is, in the achievement of any great work, whether it be a painting or a treatise in metaphysics, a relatively high degree of detachment in the mind of the artist or philosopher. But this does not justify our emphasizing only the psycho logical and social facts of individuation which the rationalist has made central in his interpretation.
We are not justified in disregarding the profoundly important interdependences between the artist and his city, his locality, his religion, or the various other communal influences that give his work its inspiration and direction. The greatness of Athenian tragedy may have been the consequence, in considerable degree, of an increasing detachment which made it possible for an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, or Euripides to dramatize the great moral problems of their time. But these tragedies were also the consequence of profound and deeply evocative relationships with the communal contexts of Greek religion, kinship, and the community. To emphasize one set of psychological facts at the expense of the other is small contribution to that total picture of the conditions of cultural achievement which we seek.
The case of rationalist individualism would be stronger as an explanation of cultural achievement in the world's great ages if there were not every reason for applying the term “individualistic” even more surely to those ages which, by universal assent, must be regarded as ages of cultural decadence and morbidity. If individual detachment and release are the crucial elements of cultural achievement, we should expect to find a constant increase in the quality of the Athenian culture that extended beyond the age of Pericles into the age following the Peloponnesian Wars. In any tangible sense of the word, this was the age of moral and social “individualism.” This age, which Sir Gilbert Murray, Rostovtzeff, and Glotz have described for us in such melancholy fashion, was assuredly an age of individualism, measured in terms of the individual's release from the constraints and symbolism of the past. But it was increasingly an age of cultural sterility, of “failure of nerve,” of philosophical morbidity. It is also pertinent to observe that this was an age of mounting political despotism.
Neither personal freedom nor personal achievement can ever be separated from the contexts of community. These are the contexts not of mechanical restraint but of the incentives and values that men wish to express in enduring works and to defend against wanton external aggression. This is not to deny the role of the individual, nor the reality of personal differences. It is assuredly not to accept the argument of crude social determinism—which asserts that creative works of individuals are but the reflection of group interests and group demands. It is merely to insist on the fundamental fact that the perspectives and incentives of the free creative mind arise out of communities of purpose. The artist may alter these, reshape them, give them an intensity and design that no one else has ever given them or ever will give them, but he is not thereby removed from the sources of his inspiration.
What Livingston Lowes has written on the creative process in his Road to Xanadu is relevant here. “‘Creation,’ like ‘creative,’ is one of those hypnotic words which are prone to cast a spell upon the understanding and dissolve our thinking into haze. And out of this nebulous state of the intellect springs a strange but widely prevalent idea. The shaping spirit of Imagination sits aloof, like God, as he is commonly conceived, creating in some thaumaturgic fashion out of nothing its visionary world…. [But] we live, every one of us—the mutest and most inglorious with the rest—at the center of a world of images…. Intensified and sublimated and controlled though they be, the ways of the creative faculty are the universal ways of that streaming yet consciously directed something which we know (or think we know) as life. Creative genius, in plainer terms, works through processes which are common to our kind, but these processes are superlatively enhanced.”7
Only in the modern European world, and largely under the influence of romantic intensifications of the individualist hypothesis, has there arisen in popular form the myth of the artist as solitary, lonely, and dependent for his genius only upon what he spins from his inner consciousness. The notion that artistic achievement is always connected in some degree with rootlessness and alienation, that art itself is asocial, has been singularly effective in disguising the actual contexts of creative imagination.8
Not by setting up an imaginary release from communities of belief and purpose do we look into the springs of intellectual creativeness and freedom. The free artist, scientist, or teacher is always, in some degree, involved in the contexts of communication and association. His may be a detached position; he may be the recipient of impulses sent out from a variety of fields; he may live, more than do most of us, toward the periphery of his community and thus be in more sensitive nearness to other communities. But what is crucial to the creator is not release or separation, not inward withdrawal, but imagination feeding upon diverse social and cultural participation. For the artist as for all of us the sense of creative freedom demands an environment that is concrete and plural in its cultural manifestations.9
Four
Nor does economic freedom rest upon the lone individual. It never has. But because some of the principal problems of early nineteenth-century economic development were provoked by the persistence of certain rigid social structures, a whole ideology of economic freedom arose on the basis of the eighteenth-century atomistic view of man. Society was envisaged by the classical economist as being, naturally, an aggregate of socially and culturally emancipated individuals, each free to respond to the drives that lay buried within his nature. Economic freedom would be the result, it was declared, of the same conditions that produced economic equilibrium: masses of autonomous, separated individuals, a minimum of social constraint of any kind, and a reliance upon the automatic workings of the free market.
But here too we are in the presence of the typical failure of the rationalist to recognize the social memberships of men in society and the dependence of human motivations upon these memberships. What we observed in an earlier chapter regarding the social contexts of economic motivations has as much pertinence to the problem of freedom as it does to the problem of order.
There is indeed a sense in which the so-called free market never existed at all save in the imaginations of the rationalists. What has so often been called the natural economic order of the nineteenth century turns out to be, when carefully examined, a special set of political controls and immunities existing on the foundations of institutions, most notably the family and local community, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the essence of capitalism. Freedom of contract, the fluidity of capital, the mobility of labor, and the whole factory system were able to thrive and to give the appearance of internal stability only because of the continued existence of institutional and cultural allegiances which were, in every sense, precapitalist. Despite the rationalist faith in natural economic harmonies, the real roots of economic stability lay in groups and associations that were not essentially economic at all.10
Most of the relative stability of nineteenth-century capitalism arose from the fact of the very incompleteness of the capitalist revolution. Because large areas of Europe and the United States remained predominantly rural and strongly suffused by precapitalist relationships and desires, a large measure of national stability coexisted with the rise of the new industrial cities and the new practices of manufacture and commerce. Through ingenious processes of rationalization this institutional stability was converted by the economic rationalist into an imaginary equilibrium of the market place. The struggle of man against man, the individual striving for gain and success, the conversion of real property into shares of industrial wealth, unrestrained competition, and complete freedom of contract—all of this, it was imagined, had in it the materials of stability as well as freedom.
But there has never been a time when a successful economic system has rested upon purely individualistic drives or upon the impersonal relationships so prized by the rationalists. There are always, in fact, associations and incentives nourished by the non-economic processes of kinship, religion, and various other forms of social relationships.
Unfortunately, it has been the fate of these external institutions and relationships to suffer almost continuous attrition during the capitalist age. First the guild, the nucleated village, and the landed estate underwent destruction. For a long time, however, the family, local community, tangible property, and class remained as powerful, though external, supports of the economic system which the rationalists saw merely as the outcome of man's fixed instincts and reason. But, in more recent decades, as we have already seen, even these associations have become steadily weaker as centers of security and allegiance. Modern rationalization and impersonalization of the economic world are but the other side of that process which the Hammonds called the “decline of custom” and which we may see as the dislocation of certain types of social membership. The result, as Joseph Schumpeter wrote a decade ago, “shows so well that the capitalist order not only rests on props made of extra-capitalist material but also derives its energy from extra-capitalist patterns of behavior which at the same time it is bound to destroy.”11 And in this whole process the directive role of the political State becomes ever greater.
Now, one may write persuasively about creeping totalitarianism and, conversely, about the felicities of the free market, as Hayek and others have recently done. No one can seriously question the abstract superiority of a society in which freedom of economic choice exists compared to a society in which it does not. Moreover, only the willfully blind will fail to mark the danger to economic freedom created by increasing political controls at the present time.
But, ultimately, human institutions depend for their preservation on the strength of the allegiances which such institutions create in human beings. To divorce economic ends from the contexts of social association within which allegiance to these ends can be nourished is fatal. Not all the asserted advantages of mass production and corporate bigness will save capitalism if its purposes become impersonal and remote, separated from the symbols and relationships that have meaning in human lives.
As the vividness and meaning of the symbolism of capitalism wane, so do the human desires to maintain it. This symbolism has always been closely embodied in the social structures within which human beings have lived, structures which have had a close and determining relation to the economic ends of capitalism. Incentives to economic freedom, like those of economic production, are the product not of instincts but of social relationships and of tangible norms and institutions.
But the recent history of capitalism, especially in its vast corporate forms, has tended to weaken steadily the symbolic and the normative aspect of economic life. Schumpeter has described it well: “The capitalist process, by substituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls of and the machines in a factory, takes the life out of the idea of property…. Dematerialized, defunctionalized and absentee ownership does not impress and call forth moral allegiance as the vital form of property did. Eventually there will be nobody left who really cares to stand for it—nobody within and without the precincts of the big concerns.”12
Economic freedom cannot rest upon moral atomism or upon large-scale impersonalities. It never has. Economic freedom has prospered, and continues to prosper, only in areas and spheres where it has been joined to a flourishing associational life. Economic freedom cannot be separated from the non-individualistic contexts of association and community of moral purpose. Capitalism has become weakest, as a system of allegiances and incentives, where these social resources have become weak and where no new forms of association and symbolism have arisen to replace the old.
Put in this light is it not obvious that the rise of the modern labor union and the cooperative have been powerful forces in support of capitalism and economic freedom? Despite many businessmen's opposition to these associations, they, as Lenin and his fellow Marxists realized with dismay, actually reinforce capitalism. The labor union and the cooperative are foremost among new forms of association that have served to keep alive the symbols of economic freedom. As such, it should be remarked, they have been the first objects of economic destruction in totalitarian countries. In such associations the goals of production, distribution, and consumption can be joined to the personal sense of belonging to a social order. The individual entrepreneur, it may be observed, is less dangerous to the totalitarian than the labor union or cooperative. For in such an association the individual can find a sense of relatedness to the entire culture and thus become its eager partisan.
These and related associations are the true supports of economic freedom at the present time. Not to the imaginary motives of the individualist but to the associational realities of the labor union, the cooperative, and the enlightened industrial community must we look for the real defenses against political invasions of economic freedom. But unfortunately there are still large areas of the economy and large segments of public opinion that are inclined to treat such associations as these as manifestations of collectivism, all of a piece with the authoritarian State. The mythology of individualism continues to reign in discussions of economic freedom. By too many partisans of management the labor union is regarded as a major obstacle to economic autonomy and as partial paralysis of capitalism.
But to weaken, whether from political or individualistic motives, the social structures of family, local community, labor union, cooperative, or industrial community, is to convert a culture into an atomized mass. Such a mass will have neither the will, nor the incentive, nor the ability to combat tendencies toward political collectivism. The transition from free capitalism to forced collectivism is easy and will hardly be noticed when a population has lost the sense of social and moral participation in the former. Everything that separates the individual from this sense of participation pushes him inevitably in the direction of an iron collectivism, which will make a new kind of participation both possible and mandatory.
Capitalism is either a system of social and moral allegiances, resting securely in institutions and voluntary associations, or it is a sand heap of disconnected particles of humanity. If it is, or is allowed to become, the latter, there is nothing that can prevent the rise of centralized, omnicompetent political power. Lacking a sense of participation in economic society, men will seek it, as Hilaire Belloc told us, in the Servile State.
Five
In religion, no less than in other areas of faith and action, the desire for freedom is inseparable from the ties of close association. I do not deny that the meaning and values of religion exist ultimately in the consciousness of the individual human being alone. And it is plain in the historical record that religions die when they are allowed to become divorced from individual purposes, when the letter and the ritual become ends in themselves. So much is true, but there is nevertheless a profound relevance in those contemporary efforts, as we have seen in an earlier chapter of this book, to strengthen the associative, the symbolic, and the hierarchical aspects of modern, especially Protestant, religion.
The experience of the present century, especially in Europe, has taught us that the religions most likely to survive the manipulations of hostile governments are those that are most strongly supported by the foundations of community and clear social status. In Nazi Germany, as we have learned, the religions most deeply rooted in hierarchy and ritual proved to be the most successful in holding the faiths of their individual members and in insulating these members from the spiritual appeals of totalitarian leaders. Where visible religious ties were weak, where faith was unsupported by the sense of communal membership, where the individual alone was conceived to be the sole vessel of grace, defenses against the powerful organizational ethos of totalitarianism were too often lacking.
In the non-totalitarian West, during the past few decades, it has become apparent, I believe, that the uncertainties and tensions of our urban-industrial society are met more successfully by religions strong in the values of community and tradition than by those that seek to rest upon individual faith alone. The perennial quest for meaning, never so urgent as in our own day, cannot help but be eased by the presence of landmarks formed of clear symbols and ritual that arise out of communal tradition.
The desire for religious freedom can be no greater than the desire for religious order. Lacking a clear sense of religion as a way of life, as an area of articulate membership, of status and collective meaning, man is not likely to care for long whether he is free or not free in religious pursuits. In any event, despots have never worried about religion that is confined mutely to individual minds. It is religion as community, or rather as a plurality of communities, that has always bestirred the reprisals of rulers engaged in the work of political tyranny.
Historians who have stressed the profound social appeal of early Christianity have not erred.13 Great as was the early Church's spiritual message of hope, evocative as were its doctrines of salvation in the City of God, the remarkable successes of Christianity among the atomized masses of the Roman Empire cannot be separated from the earthly security which the tightly organized, communally oriented, Christian groups offered. The new religion of Christianity gave to its members a profound sense of social status and collective involvement as well as a burning message of deferred salvation.
During the Protestant Reformation, as we have seen, much of the emphasis upon the church visible was transferred to the church invisible, and the individual man of faith replaced the corporate Church as the repository of divine guidance. Much of the theology of Protestantism, like the theory of economic rationalism, was founded upon an assumption of the individual's inherent, indestructible stability of purpose. Because for the religious, as well as the economic, reformer the corruptions of society seemed to flow from an excess of associative membership and works, the individual alone became the summum bonum of religious life. Faith in God and incentives toward religious piety were held by the early Protestants to lie in the self-sufficing individual, even as incentives toward work were declared by the economic rationalist to be similarly embedded in the very nature of the individual. Hence, the Protestant leaders gave little direct attention to the social reinforcements of conscience and faith.
But in the contemporary world we have learned that individual faith unsupported is likely to dissolve altogether under the acids of materialism and the invasions of political power. We have learned that large numbers of nominal Christians are prone, when conditions become desperate, to forsake mere creed for mass movements that make central the values of organization and status. Even when the lure of totalitarianism is not strong, when there is no alternative collective escape, individual faith that is unsupported communally often tends to collapse into self-doubt and frustration.
“We have reached the point, ”observes Reinhold Niebuhr,“ where the more traditional and historic churches, with their theological discipline, are more successful in evoking a genuinely Christian faith than the churches which dispensed with these disciplines. American Protestantism cannot regain its spiritual vitality without seeking a better synthesis between religious spontaneity and religious tradition and discipline.”14
Equally important is the relation between religion and other forms of community. Early Protestant leaders were dealing with individuals whose basic motivations and prejudgments had been well formed by the traditional family and local community, as well as by the historic medieval Church.15 In the present world we cannot do this so easily, for, as we have seen, these unities have become weakened under the impacts of modern political and industrial history. The union of family, local community, and religion is strong wherever religion has flourished, for motivations toward religious zeal cannot be nourished by the structure of the church alone. In the contemporary world the continuing reality of religion as an integrating force will depend on the successful fusion of religious impulse and religious organization with all forms of social life that implicate the lives of human beings. However fundamental and ultimately justifying are the private devotions within religion, the success of religion among large numbers of people, like the success of any structure of human faith, depends on the degree to which spiritual creed and values are integrated with associative purposes.
Six
Despotism never takes root in barren soil. When, in the first century, the Emperor Augustus decreed that an image of himself should be placed upon the hearth, along with the images of the sacred Lares and Penates, thus extending the symbolism of the State to the very roots of domestic society, he was taking a step that would never have been feasible a century or two earlier when Roman society was organized in terms of the solidarity of the family. Only because, during the century preceding the triumph of Augustus, the basic social unities of the Roman community had become weakened under the harsh impact of war and economic distress was it possible for this political invasion of the household to take place. The entrenchment of Imperator Caesar divi filius Augustan, in the privacy of individual consciousness is a fact understandable only in light of the creation of masses of socially “free” individuals. Despite our admiration for the cultural effects of the emergence of the individual during the Augustan age of letters, we cannot help but see the relation between this growing intellectual and moral individualism and the incessant centralization of political power.
Nor can we help but see the same fatal combination of individualism and political power in the modern era. The inadequacy of individualism as a theory of freedom lies plainly written in the conditions we see spreading in the Western world today: on the one hand, enlarging masses of socially “free,” insecure, individuals; on the other, the constant increase in the custodial powers of a State that looms ever larger as the only significant refuge for individuals who insist upon escaping from the moral consequences of individualism. The value of the dignity of man is perhaps more vocal today than it has ever been, but the plain fact is that the means of reinforcing this value seem ever more remote. As a philosophy of means, individualism is now not merely theoretically inadequate; it has become tragically irrelevant, even intolerable.
It is absurd to suppose that the rhetoric of nineteenth-century individualism will offset present tendencies in the direction of the absolute political community. Alienation, frustration, the sense of aloneness—these, as we have seen, are major states of mind in Western society at the present time. The image of man is decidedly different from what it was in the day of Mill. It is ludicrous to hold up the asserted charms of individual release and emancipation to populations whose most burning problems are those arising, today, from moral and social release. To do so is but to make the way of the Grand Inquisitor the easier. For this is the appeal, as we have seen, of the totalitarian prophet—to “rescue” masses of atomized individuals from their intolerable individualism. Once partially in the communal State, men will not leave it to walk into a moral and social vacuum.
The longing for community which now exists as perhaps the most menacing fact of the Western world will not be exorcised by incantations drawn from the writings of Bentham, Mill, and Spencer. No theory of freedom in our age will be either effective or relevant that does not recognize the present centrality of the quest for community.
Seven
It would be calamitous, however, if the creative, liberal purposes of individualism were to be lost because their social contexts and psychological requirements are incapable of renewal. The individualist has been right in his insistence that genuine freedom has nothing to do with the nervous exhilaration that comes from participation in the crusading mass, nothing to do with acquiescence before a General Will. He has been right in his contention that real freedom is bound up with the existence of autonomies of personal choice among clear cultural alternatives. Above all, the individualist has been right in his stress upon human privacy.
“All freedom,” wrote Lord Acton, “consists in radice in the preservation of an inner sphere exempt from State power.” The political mystic may boggle at this, but the proposition is, when amended to include any type of power, political or other, irrefutable. Both freedom and the desire for freedom are nourished within the realization of spiritual privacy and among privileges of personal decision. Apart from these, any structure of authority becomes almost limitless in its scope.
But to recognize the role of privacy and the importance of autonomies of choice is to be forced to recognize also the crucial problem of the contexts of privacy and personal choice. For man does not, cannot, live alone. His freedom is a social, not biologically derived, process. We are forced to consider, as I have argued in this chapter, the indispensable role of the small social groups in society. It is the intimacy and security of each of these groups that provide the psychological context of individuality and the reinforcement of personal integrity. And it is the diversity of such groups that creates the possibility of the numerous cultural alternatives in a society.
In dealing, however, with the role of the small social group in society, we are inevitably brought face to face with the problem of the distribution of power in society. For, in the same way that the social group forms the context of the development of personality, the larger structure of authority in society forms the context of the greater or lesser significance possessed by the small social groups. Social groups, I have argued, thrive only when they possess significant functions and authorities in the lives of their members. When all functions and authorities are consolidated in the State, as is true in totalitarian Russia and was true in Germany under Hitler, the role of the autonomous social group is destroyed. We cannot deal adequately with the social group, in short, without taking into consideration the system of political power within which it exists. Here we must turn our attention to the political framework of democracy.