XI
LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY
A. THE PROBLEM
(I) THE STATE OF THE QUESTION
\ T 7HEN the writer was planning the present Study in the summer of
VV a.d. 1927, he saw that he would have to grapple with the problem
of the respective roles of Law and Freedom in human history before
he could attempt to win a Pisgah sight of the prospects of the Western
Civilization. Yet in the winter of a.d. 1928-9, when, with that ulterior
objective in mind, he was drafting his notes for eventually writing the
present Part, he was conscious that the fateful question then still seemed
academic to most people in Western countries that had been either neutral
or on the winning side in the World War of a.d. 1914-18. In the June
of a.d. 1950, when, after a seven-years-long interruption extending over
the years 1939-46, he at last reached this point in the writing of the
book, he found himself working in a new atmosphere that was decidedly
more congenial to his theme.
By the year a.d. 1950 the survivors of a generation of Westerners that
had fought two fratricidal world wars in one lifetime had emerged from
the second of these unprecedentedly destructive conflicts of a traditional
military kind only to find itself engaged in a 'cold war' which was neither
less arduous nor less critical for being less barbarous than a twice-
played military overture in which the encore had surpassed the first per-
formance; and these disillusioning and disquieting experiences had
brought about, in most living Western souls, a revolutionary change of
feeling and outlook. By this time, most Westerners had become aware
that their own civilization was in danger of coming to grief; and reflec-
tion had then reminded them that this was, after all, no novel prospect
in an historical arena in which most, if not all, other human societies of
the same species had come to grief already. The living generation in the
West was, in fact, beginning to look at the facts of History as these pre-
sented themselves to the naked eye, instead of continuing to peer at this
formidable spectacle through smoked glasses inherited from its grand-
parents; and, in the light of luminous facts which they were at last
allowing themselves to see, they were asking themselves questions that
would have shocked their grandparents if these could ever have dreamed
of formulating them.
The generation of Homo Occidentalis that had already been in its
dotage in a.d. 1914 had been the latest generation to hold, with an
unquestioning faith, a dogma which, by then, had been serving for a
quarter of a millennium as the gist of a Late Modern Western Man's
mechanically desiccated and peptonized religion. This fallaciously com-
fortable doctrine was that the Western Society could see ahead of it an
unbroken vista of progress towards an Earthly Paradise, and that its