TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 581
national politics that had been made dramatically manifest when the
United States had found herself compelled to become a belligerent in
two world wars in succession.

Looking back in A.D. 1952 over the history of the United States since
the Declaration of Independence, an historian could see in retrospect
that, on the political plane, the United States' long-protracted en-
deavour to keep out of the arena of Western international power politics
had been a losing battle. Since A.D. 1941 the United States had become
more deeply implicated in international politics than the Thirteen
Colonies had been before they had severed their political connexion
with Great Britain; and, while the question whether isolation was any
longer a practical possibility was being answered for the American
people in the negative by the force majeure of world-shaking events, the
question whether Isolationism was a morally legitimate ideal was being
answered in the same sense by the American people themselves in a
national debate between the respective advocates of a policy of isolation
and a policy of co-operation with like-minded peoples abroad for the
establishment and maintenance of a world order. This domestic con-
troversy in the United States was momentous for the oecumenical
prospects of the Western Civilization, as well as for the national pro-
spects of the United States herself.

The issue on which the American people had to take a decision had
been ventilated, soon after the close of the Second World War, in a
public discussion of the verbal question whether the twentieth century
of the Christian Era should be described as *the American Century' or
as 'the Century of the Common Man'; for in spite of their brevity
these two competing 'slogans'1 brought out the essence of the issue
when they were pitted against one another. Both slogans alike were
inspired by the national American ideal of exorcizing the class-conflicts
of the Old World by creating a classless society on a middle-class
footing; their difference lay in a diversity between their respective con-
ceptions of the range of the geographical field in which the endeavour
to translate this ideal into an accomplished fact could and should be
made; and even on this point the difference was not an irreconcilable
discrepancy between incompatible programmes but was no more than
a difference of emphasis. Yet a disagreement that was not irreconcilable
was nevertheless crucial, for it raised the question whether the American
ideal of creating an Earthly Paradise in a New World could and should
be pursued within the political frontiers of the United States in isolation
from the rest of the Oikoumen£t or whether it was neither morally right
nor practically possible to draw the limits of the New World that was

The original field of the competition in which these two slogans had been coined had

' *

coined (in an article published under this title in The New York Times, 4th March, 1941,
pp. 14-15) by Mr. Harry Luce, who was one of the most successful living incarnations
of a traditional American spirit of capitalist enterprise. *The Century of the Common
Man* had been coined (in a speech delivered at a 'Free World' dinner in New York on
the 8th May, 1942), in reply to Mr. Luce's challenging slogan, by Mr. Henry A. Wallace,
a leading champion of 'the New Deal* who had carried a traditional American spirit of
liberal idealism to lengths at which this had eventually cost him the loss of his chance of
being nominated as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States on the Democratic
Party's ticket.