The American Anarchy Democracy In An Era Of Bigness

7383

Hie
American

Anarchy

Other books by Lionel Gelber:

THE RISE OF ANGLO-AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP (1938)
PEACE BY POWER (194*)
REPRIEVE FROM WAR

Democracy

in an Era of Bigness

the
American

by LIONEL GELBER

Copyright 1953, by Lionel Gelber
Manufactured in The United States of America by H. Wolff

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 53-9524

Contents

CHAPTER

Preface vii

I The Revaluation of Man 3
II Bigness and World Order * 22

III The Pre-Emption of Power * 56

IV The Depreciation of Merit * 88
V Democracy and Error 112

VI Foreclosure and Dissent * 140
VII The Projection of America 176
VIII Man Against Man 191
Index 203

Preface

A book, like the vicarious Puritan suitor, should speak
for itself. A word may nevertheless be said here about
the point from which this one starts. The case for de-
mocracy as a way of life has been enhanced by the ex-
ample of its foes. We are on the right track. The pur-
pose of the writer is, however, to scan afresh those
elements in a mass society which make the fulfilment
of democracy fall short of its promise.

The approach attempted is that of one whose main
concern has been with questions of war and peace. Phi-
losophers and theologians, lawyers and economists, his-
torians and political scientists, sociologists and social
psychologists have, by their analyses of the home front,
shed light on the workings of democracy. Yet one ma-
jor test is how it handles or mishandles its international
relations. And it is as a student of these that this ob-
server was led to set down his impression of the Amer-
ican scene as a whole.

Nor does he confine himself to it. As goes the United

vii

States, so, in the middle years of the twentieth century,
goes the civilized West. Political aspects of the modern
crisis were dealt with by the writer before, during, and
since the second world war in three previous volumes;
on basic issues he stands now where he has always stood.
And so far as these pages restate his views, the object is
to show what, within the nature of a free social order,
served to weaken the defense of our free world order.
In the end this is a book not only about American
trends but about that wider crisis which is the crisis of
humanity.

LIONEL GELBER

New York,
Spring,

the
American

Anarchy

CHAPTER

The Revaluation
of Man

At the heart of liberty there is moral conviction. Be-
fore men could win freedom they had to believe not
only that they can be but that they ought to be free.
Many are the threads of modern liberty, but by
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they had been
gathered together and woven into the social fabric of
our time. The impelling force of those earlier years was
a revaluation of man: an upward estimate of his attrib-
utes and his capacity to shape his own destiny; a new
sense of his almost limitless potentialities if he were al-
lowed fully to develop. In the twentieth century these
first fine careless raptures have petered out. For the age
is challenged by a devaluation of man. If liberal ideas
had not been at a discount, or could not have been de-
based in their social application, the totalitarian recoil
from them would have been less formidable. To most
newly emancipated countries of the Orient a liberal
philosophy of undevalued man is still alien; in the Oc-
cident authoritarian regimes have not revalued man

4 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

but have devalued him still further. And even in the
democracies of the West much that purports to revalue
may do the reverse. How and why that happens is the
theme of these pages.

In domestic affairs, as in world politics, the issue of
liberty is the issue of power: to curb arbitrary power
through responsible power. But responsibility is more
than a question of method. Legal and constitutional in-
novations may drastically refashion the pattern of
power; in its modified form the contest of power pro-
ceeds. Nor does it entail only the classic confrontation
between the individual and the State. Government bu-
reaucracies, subject as they are to a democratic chain of
command, may be less irresponsible than other bureauc-
racies which characterize a large-scale society. But wher-
ever there is collective power institutional, corporate,
cooperative, official or voluntary, public, semi-public, or
private the problem of control arises.

The issue, then, is not one merely of freedom against
organization. That antinomy is, in both the national
and the international sphere, too simple and too stark.
Between the individual and society the union has al-
ways been indissoluble. But as the individual is revalued
and society grows more complex this relationship al-
ters. We cannot have liberty unless we organize to
promote and protect it. Yet the more we combine the
more difficult it is to guard against the social irresponsi-
bility that inheres within organization itself.

Nor is control or lack of control over the instruments
of production all that affects the community. Not every
consumer is a producer, but every producer is also a con-
sumer. And as social well-being is diffused, the individ-
ual becomes more and more aware of this. In a mass
society consumption may not only be personal and pri-
vate but in some areas will be shared in common; con-

The Revaluation of Man 5

trol or lack of control over its instruments is therefore a
matter that cannot be omitted from any democratic
reckoning. A Marxian analysis would revalue man in
terms of class; a doctrine of race, such as Hitler ex-
pounded, denies that man can be revalued at all. A
large-scale democracy may espouse concepts that are
broader than the one and more humane than the other.
For it, as for them, organization remains the vehicle of
history.

The will to freedom may be a moral impulse. But
without man's intellectual liberation it could not be
canalized and set to work. Science and technology might
need some moral content; the open mind is neverthe-
less still a prerequisite of the open society. Copernicus
in the sixteenth century, Galileo and Newton in the sev-
enteenth, did not just signalize the rebirth of ex-
perimental science; as free objective inquiry was under-
taken it cleared the ground for man's revaluation. We
know now that man is unable to increase his powers for
good without increasing his powers for evil. Yet until
science struck a liberal note even the struggle for na-
tional and religious freedom constituted a clash of one
sort of closed mind with another. During the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries the open mind could at last
tackle the closed mind boldly and in force; the spirit
of the age was sanguine enough to promise it a wide
triumph at an early date. But the totalitarian reversion
of the twentieth century exposed that pledge as prema-
ture and curiously naive. For the closed mind reasserted
itself in new and more terrible fanaticisms; open-mind-
edness, harassed unexpectedly at home, has had to de-
fend itself to the utmost abroad. The war of the open
against the closed mind which the nineteenth century
deemed itself on the verge of winning is, on either front,
still far from won.

6THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

The open mind suffers, moreover, from the defects of
its virtues. Liberalism may have been its main cham-
pion in public affairs; yet that, by its own mentality, is
bound to be more handicapped than its adversaries. For
the open mind is in fact many-minded; to be divided
in mind is to be indecisive in policy. The liberal tradi-
tion which democracy at its best enshrines tentative,
relativist, tolerant fetters by its own self-critical nature
even as it sets loose. In an age of dynasts without dynas-
ties, the dynamism of single-mindedness has been mostly
on the other side.

Before it can ascertain where it is going from here,
democracy must first ask how it got where it is. When
Communist ideologues anticipate the collapse of the
West from its own inner contradictions, they pay an un-
intended tribute: in a graveyard all is unanimous. But
such contradictions as afflict our system do not corrode as
grievously as those which pervade their own. If democ-
racy falls short, it falls short of a target it itself erected.
Only in the light of liberal expectations can liberal fail-
ures be appraised.

It may have been during the Renaissance and the
Reformation that Europeans began to scrutinize their
world and themselves with a fresh eye. An era of dis-
covery, this was, however, one also of rediscovery. To
Biblical aspiration and Greek thought what Matthew
Arnold would call Hebraism and Hellenism any-
body might now have recourse. Rome had furnished or-
der and law. The Greeks, with their devotion to reason
and beauty, with a concept of justice which would in the
abstract render to each his due, bequeathed to the West
one of its two main civilizing legacies. But their vision
of society was a static, unprogressive one; for them the
Golden Age of humanity lay in the past. That men are
all equal in the sight of God it was for the Prophets of

The Revaluation of Man 7

Israel to proclaim. No doctrine would ever be as revo-
lutionary as this; out of it sprang the twin ideal o peace
and social justice for each and all alike the Messianic
notion of a better life here on earth in the future. To
those who cherished that notion, existence had a pur-
pose; righteousness among men stemmed from the
moral governance of the universe. They did not drift
rudderless upon uncharted seas.

As moral imperative and scientific method interacted,
man could slowly be revalued. But persecuting theolo-
gies were themselves an obstacle. Luther and Calvin in
rebelling against a single center of religious authority
had, to their discomfiture, started something, in their
own and other spheres, which they could not fin-
ish. Capitalism, already under way in medieval Catho-
lic Europe and with Jews among its forerunners, would
get a fillip from Protestant activity. Yet first wars of
religion had to be halted lest Europe bleed itself to
death. When Church and State were sundered, toler-
ance could supervene; a concomitant of military stale-
mate, the sway of the open mind would thus rest upon
considerations of power. That brute truth was, how-
ever, obscured by the fortunate ascendancy of countries
in which liberal ideas were to flourish. And for ignoring
it the twentieth century itself would pay an exorbitant
price.

Meanwhile in England the common law, a limited
monarchy, and the supremacy of Parliament had
reached a point sufficient to inspire John Locke and
those of other lands who borrowed from him. What it
deemed to be man's natural rights the Enlightenment of
the eighteenth century would codify. Since the Middle
Ages the individual had been coming more and more to
the fore; Bacon and Descartes set in train the idea of
progress. And now in its optimism the eighteenth cen-

8 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

tury would exalt Reason, Progress, and the inalienable
Rights of Man. It was these which the American and
French Revolutions invoked and tried to implement.
Divine Right, as vouchsafed by the Creator, seemed to
be passing from the ruler to the ruled.

But as outworn authority was shaken off, would in-
dividualism become anarchic? At what stage, if any, did
freedom for the self become inimical to the freedom of
others? The Industrial Revolution would be the eco-
nomic counterpart of all that was revolutionizing poli-
tics. What occurred is familiar enough. Adam Smith,
Jeremy Bentham, and the utilitarians of the nineteenth
century added to Whig principles of civil and religious
liberty the notion that for each man to pursue his own
economic self-interest would result in the greatest good
of the greatest number. Through the mechanism of the
market system there was a self-equilibrating harmony;
in enterprise, in government, and in the expression of
ideas, freedom connotes an absence of restraint. In in-
dustry and commerce, as in other domains which were to
be liberalized, a new middle class had for three centuries
been stirring; such economic individualism would be
the capitalist rationale. Success was the reward of com-
petition; any, unimbued with the profit motive, who
could not buy cheap or sell dear, might be trampled un-
derfoot; the Rights of Man became the rights of eco-
nomic man. From the dour rationalism of Machiavelli
and Hobbes to the grim romanticism of Nietzsche there
had been philosophers who depicted life as a struggle
for power. And with Darwin that view would appar-
ently soon have stamped upon it the imprimatur of sci-
ence.

But each man for himself and the devil take the hind-
most could scarcely be esteemed by its victims, young
and old, as an axiom of liberty. Marring the country-

The Revaluation of Man g

side, the dark, satanic mills of the early industrialists
also disfigured the moral landscape. Social Darwinism
coincided with second thoughts about the social valid-
ity of economic liberalism. The sort of conflict to which
it portrayed men as implacably doomed ran as did the
population theory of Malthus and the wage theory
of Ricardo counter to Victorian optimism; post-
Darwinians perceived that economic alleviation must
also be allowed to evolve. And to their support science
itself would afterwards rally. For contemporary biolo-
gists aver that the instincts of man are more altruistic
than predatory, more cooperative than combative.

Yet as society advances from the primitive to the
modern and from the individualistic economy of the
nineteenth century to the large-scale collectivities of the
twentieth, it is the incidence of competition that is
changed rather than the thing in itself. The terrain
shifts; the competitive battle is resumed. Great causes
and great principles would never have been served at
all if there had not always been some to serve them
selflessly. But the number of such devotees is, in any
one era, invariably a small one. And against them
there is often group tyranny to demonstrate that the
social and the selfish may go together. As the economy
alters, the worst excesses of the old individualism are
mitigated. But to it, and to its dissemination of risk
capital, mass and class alike now owe inestimable bene-
fits. And as its bad features are jettisoned can its good
ones be retained? If they are not, the wheels may still
turn as they have in the Soviet Union. But under them
will lie crushed much that was best, politically and in-
tellectually, in individualism itself.

The ameliorative trend has, of course, been a two-
fold one. The lot of the worker, thrust into the de-
humanizing travail of urban industrialism, had to be

10 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

improved and the system's own drastic fluctuations some*
how ironed out. Social unrest brought collective bargain-
ing in its train and recognition of trade unions with
better conditions of work, shorter hours, higher wages.
Concurrently there are social insurance schemes, hous-
ing programmes, public health services, public educa-
tion, public works, public assistance, nationalized enter-
prises, a plethora of boards to administer and mediate.
And the heavier taxation through which such a welfare
state is financed may by itself signalize a redistribution
of wealth. Yet in the viability of the welfare state, capital
also has a major stake. For under industrialism not only
are men at the mercy of the machine the machine itself
has been at the mercy of the trade cycle.

It would have been anomalous for an epoch of in-
vention to endure stoically a self-regulating economic
mechanism that did not regulate. Too severe had been
the depressions which entailed bankruptcy for the en-
trepreneur and reduced earnings for his employees or
raised for them the hideous specter of unemployment.
Socialism had long agitated for a radical transforma-
tion of the entire economy. Keynes argued while Frank-
lin Roosevelt and Harry Truman tried to prove that
capitalism might by itself yet correct its own unruly
gyrations. In recent years, however, war and rearma-
ment have done most to keep the pumps primed. Nor
will State intervention, from the standpoint of responsi-
bility and control, be the same in a democracy as it is
in a dictatorship. The salient fact is that industrial so-
ciety, whether free or unfree, cannot do without a vast
amount of it.

The circle had been completed. The inventions of
man date from the dim mists of antiquity. But as
they proliferated in the new individualistic atmosphere
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the material

The Revaluation of Man * n

foundations of modern society were recast. Laissez jaire
had repudiated mercantilism; yet even where the State
dispensed with subsidies or tariffs, it backed private
interests in foreign trade and overseas colonization.
Now, however, State intervention had as its object the
prosperity not of any one segment of the community
but of the populace as a whole. Under middle-class
guidance there had been no such general solicitude.
Only through the State could the individual himself be
protected from the social ravages of economic individ-
ualism.

That he might also want to be protected from a gov-
ernment which yet protects him would, in the twenti-
eth century, be one phase of the liberal dilemma. In
illiberal societies the techniques of industrialism fasten
the yoke of the State upon the individual more harshly
than ever. For despotic power which standardizes po-
litically can therewith standardize economically and so-
cially; through mass production, based on laborsaving
devices and the division of labor, it is rendered thor-
oughgoing, total. Wherever there is uniformity in tools
and regularity in their use, the scale of organization
may, irrespective of regimes, be enlarged. And even in
representative democracies the safeguards of law cannot
prevent organization thus enlarged from becoming a law
unto itself.

When, moreover, standardized techniques permeate
the whole of life, life itself is wont to be standardized.
The drudgery of labor in an office or at a conveyer belt
may not be irremediable; nor, from ancient galley slave
to feudal serf, has it been peculiar to industrialism. But
to relieve monotony is not to ensure the flowering of
individuality; an enforced standardization may as mass
leisure pursuits reveal only be converted into an un-
enforced one. Autonomy of taste and independence of

12 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

outlook will be hard to cultivate in any standardized
culture; the predicament of the individualistic springs
from the character of large-scale democracy itself. For
it is only through the ramified technology of modern
industrialism that its nonprofit, collective undertakings
governmental, professional, vocational, philanthropic,
educational can operate. And the more man is reval-
ued, the more does his existence also depend upon or-
ganization of that sort. In a totalitarian State all is or-
ganized; in a free society all may organize. Yet nowadays
this, too, is a freedom which can itself only be ob-
served within an intricate framework already organized.
What the individual may or may not do on his own
under these circumstances is, in practice, as much a cri-
terion of liberty as any legal right which might nomi-
nally be his.

It is through large-scale organization that a marriage
is achieved between the mass and the machine. Nor
does this conjuncture take place merely where man is a
producer and consumer of industrial goods and serv-
ices: it occurs wherever men are linked purposively to-
gether. The group may be a natural or spontaneous
aggregation; to organize is to formalize and acquire an
aim. Where formerly room was scant, the many can
thus participate functionally within a single fold. And
wherever organizational techniques permit the individ-
ual to have a voice in wider affairs, they are a bedrock
of democracy.

Organization may employ and emulate the machine.
Between the two there is, nevertheless, an intrinsic dif-
ference. Objectivity is the hallmark of invention and
science; the machine, as an agent not of life but en-
ergy, is wholly impersonal. Organization, though it ex-
tends beyond any one person, may, however, be in-

The Revaluation of Man 13

wardly as subjective as it is outwardly objective.
Whether it humanizes or dehumanizes, whether it binds
men together willingly or manipulates them unwill-
ingly, it is human in context, sentient rather than in-
animate in its stresses and strains. Toward morality the
machine is neutral, passive, motionless until set in mo-
tion; since others must govern its use it can have no
ethics of its own. But organization, while devoid of life,
yet contains life; its use may be determined by an in-
terior as well as an exterior power. A machine for men,
it is likewise one of men. And as such it enlarges their
virtues or frailties and reflects some of its own.

History, from the days of Babylon, Egypt, and Rome,
has been replete with the annals of bigness. Yet, with-
out contemporary organizational techniques, bigness
could not so basically and so universally condition our
epoch. Social customs and legal systems have long sought
to banish anarchy from the relations between man
and man, between man and the community, between
the lesser community and the greater; democracy would
attempt to reconcile liberty and order. But in the twen-
tieth century a further organizational dimension has
emerged; and on that new social plane, order and lib-
erty must again be reconciled. Man since his early days
has hit upon devices that yield a power over Nature
which surpasses his own and which is quite detached
from himself. Multiplying that power incalculably,
technology not only creates but requires a more com-
plex mass society. A liberal like Louis Brandeis might
deplore bigness because it eliminated competition be-
tween small business units; because it made for the de-
cline of the nineteenth-century entrepreneur and the
predominance in the twentieth century of huge deper-
sonalized agglomerations. By organizing against organi-

14* THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

zation, these would be regulated. But then the regula-
tory institutions of democracy itself might take on a
similar organizational hue.

Though the issues go beyond government, its own
limitations illustrate their nature. Government cannot
legislate for every phase of modern collective action.
But even if it could, how deep will its writ penetrate?
Legal justice may lay the groundwork for social jus-
tice to liberate politically and render more secure eco-
nomically. Yet wherever there is large-scale organiza-
tion, governmental or nongovernmental, power will be
concentrated in the hands of a few. Against its abuse,
democracy, in certain areas, does no doubt erect safe-
guards. But so ambivalent is magnitude organized that
the very instruments of social justice might in effect
be wielded unjustly. To revalue man in the mass and
yet devalue him as an individual would be for liberal-
ism to attain its goal and yet miss it.

It is, moreover, this Sisyphean element in human in-
stitutions that marks off the Victorian effort to estab-
lish a free society from our own. Nineteenth-century
liberals had faith in progress; in the twentieth century
it is the antagonists of progress who have had the ar-
dor of faith. At its most sanguine the nineteenth cen-
tury realized how far from Utopia it was; invention and
science were intimating, however, that Utopia itself
might not be an idle dream. Darker views about man
and his prospects did not lack exponents. Yet in so
buoyant an age even skepticism often indicated no bar-
ren mood of negation but liberal openness of mind.
Aware as it was of the human animal's competitive im-
perfections, it yet assumed that he is perfectible. And
that assumption was the source of its optimism. Receiv-
ing justice, man himself, alone or in the mass, would
be just. Careers, in the Napoleonic phrase, were open

The Revaluation of Man 15

to talent. Merit, by dint of capacity or diligence, would
gain its due reward.

And that concept is the pith of democracy. Politi-
cally its liberal foundations are an equality of civil lib-
erties in the courts of law, in the choice of government;
in an array of freedoms speech, press, religion, assem-
bly through which these are upheld. Economically
its postulate has been an equality of opportunity in
carving out a career, in earning a livelihood. Yet in such
matters aristocracy also subscribes to an ideal of justice;
with an eye to excellence its proponents had, ever
since Plato, advocated the rule of the best. But democ-
racy retorts that the best can emerge only if all have
the same chance to develop. Competition, in other
words, should not be unfair competition; it must not be
weighted against those who neither inherit nor enjoy
any extraneous advantage. Socially it took liberalism al-
most a century to grasp how unjust a one-sided individ-
ualism could be to other individuals. But neither is
large-scale organization disposed to mete out justice
with an even hand. For what satisfies the average may
omit or overwhelm any who deviate from the norm. Yet
it is the nonaverage, the exceptional, the individualistic
who render society meaningful. Self-fulfilment is sound
liberal doctrine but not when it is achieved at the ex-
pense of others. During the nineteenth century the
pendulum swung too far in one direction. The oppo-
site danger is what large-scale democracy now faces.

The nineteenth century believed with the rustic
Thoreau that if you could make a better mousetrap the
world would beat a path to your door. When business
profit or direct utility is involved and patent monopo-
lies or vested interests do not intervene so arcadian a
result may still occur. But otherwise it does this less
and less.

l6 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

Responsibility between governed and governing is the
democratic nexus that of free individuals responsible
to themselves, to others, to an accepted moral code. Yet
such is the impact of large-scale organization that it in-
tensifies both responsibility and irresponsibility. So ir-
responsible a mass society as the totalitarian State is
rendered feasible by it; without its techniques the more
socially responsible welfare State could not function.
But organized magnitude introduces a degree of irre-
sponsibility, private and public, corporate and group,
which can impair democracy itself. This is the case,
moreover, throughout a free society; and less almost in
government than elsewhere. It is as though a structure
alters in texture as it grows in size; changing the scale,
as Lyman Bryson remarks, changes the institution. And
a collectivized age is an institutional one. Wherever
there is large-scale enterprise, the control which is tight-
ened at one level becomes more elusive at another.

Mass production by lowering unit costs and, as re-
turns increase, by inviting capital investment, may facil-
itate a higher standard of living: it is the economic
base of man's revaluation. But while that is a liberal
aim its accomplishment is not unremittingly or inevita-
bly liberal. Mass production, with the assembly line
as its emblem, may first have worked its spell in the
United States where circumstances were ripe and pro-
pitious. When a unified Germany next went in for it,
she was gingerly toying with a representative system of
parliamentary government. But with her later, with Im-
perial Japan, and subsequently with the Soviet Union,
the march of invention would show itself to have been
technically a forward one and politically backward.
Large-scale organization may spread social benefits. Be-
tween it and a free society, however, there is no indig-
enous or necessary correlation.

The Revaluation of Man 17

And that is why, even in politically responsible sys-
tems, there are spheres of action which, by being organ-
izationally irresponsible, undermine broad democratic
controls. In the West socialist and capitalist doctrines
may, under varying party labels, oppose each other; the
tactics and composition of rival armies tend to be alike.
For the profit motive evokes only one sort of competi-
tive urge; the counters change but the game is the
same. Wherever there is institutional power, and not in
government alone, the struggle for it between persons
and groups will be as potent as ever. Liberty is more
than holding at bay the monstrous regiment of com-
missars. As between free and unfree societies, bigness
by itself must impose organizational resemblances.
They differ qualitatively. Yet as they approximate each
other quantitatively, the qualitative gap may narrow.

Breaking old authoritarian chains with one hand, lib-
eralism had thus been forging subtle new ones with the
other. Large-scale dictatorships strive to populate the
Western world with devalued men, moral robots, politi-
cal automatons; the weapons liberalism provided they
turn upside down to extirpate liberalism itself. But
though modern democracy is supposed to foster diver-
sity, the mass standards it itself elicits are an organiza-
tional echo of the totalitarian recession toward the uni-
form society and the conforming individual.

Not that the mediocrity which ensues is identical in
every large-scale system. The easygoing validity of rep-
resentative democracy has been enhanced since the
nineteenth century by the savage ferocity of militant
alternatives. And yet the cause of man's revaluation had
long passed from the comparatively idyllic stage which
visualized it merely as a simple divorce by the individ-
ual from the ruling power. Democracy to Rousseau sig-
nified the General Will. Burke, however, had been

l8 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

shocked by the spectacle of the French Revolution and
against the mass he defended, as a shield for the indi-
vidual or the minority, a patrimony of law and custom.
But not only is the conflict between individual and col-
lective rights transformed by large-scale organization.
Privilege itself makes a fresh bow.

The mission of liberalism was in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries to throw off controls. In the twen-
tieth century it has been to decide which, as they are
restored, would be just and which unjust. But is power,
as its loci shift, always amenable to control? Liberty had
once been regarded as an absence of restraint; today's
restraints were designed to preserve wider liberties. So-
cial liberalism and democratic socialism have diverged
over who should own the means of production; now
the question is one of how to plan and what. Employ-
ers, moreover, had held political power through eco-
nomic power. Employees through the voting franchise,
through collective bargaining and the ability through
strikes to withhold labor would counteract with politi-
cal power to acquire economic power. Large-scale organ-
ization thus strengthened democracy socially. By the
same token, where there was no tradition of freedom, it
socialized tyranny.

Between the closed economy and the closed mind the
regressive tie has, in the twentieth century, been pro-
found. On the continent of Europe democratic social-
ism derives a great deal from past statist benevolence.
But Hitler's totalitarian polity did not only incorporate
the social accomplishments of the Weimar Republic;
paternalism was a heritage of that Prussian military
state which Bismarck modernized. So also with Soviet
Russia and Communist China where industrialism is
reorganizing territories in which man has long been
devalued. For there, as elsewhere, large-scale reform,

The Revaluation of Alan 19

when liberal antecedents are lacking, ceases to be pro-
gressive. The totalitarian state, Left or Right, has been
but an extreme example of how retrograde are the
uses to which may be put the most contemporaneous of
social mechanisms. Britain, less steeped than her con-
tinental neighbours in Marxian ideology, might do
more than they to socialize herself and do it without
abandoning parliamentary democracy. But that was not
because she had stumbled upon a magic formula others
can adopt for solving the liberal dilemma of liberty
versus authority, private initiative versus State endeavor.
It merely demonstrates how puissant among so homo-
geneous and civilized a people is a free nation's fidelity
to freedom. For if organization is the vehicle of history,
history is the key to history itself.

Conservatism with a flair for power that was inbred
had sensed the liberal dilemma from the outset. Satis-
fied with things as they are, it raised eyebrows at lib-
eralism's self-satisfaction over things as they were going
to be. But to attain office, as the franchise was ex-
tended, votes had to be attracted; it also went reform-
ist. Social services were more akin to a rural squire-
archy's conception of noblesse oblige than the arid
middle-class individualism of the early liberals; in Brit-
ain, at any rate, Disraeli and Shaftesbury presented
Tory doctrine with warmth and sympathy. But conserv-
atism everywhere still put the accent, in the vein of
Alexander Hamilton, on property rights; still held that,
as the State intervened on behalf of the little man
against big aggregations of corporate power, it should
make haste slowly. Economically where liberalism stood
fifty years ago conservatism stands today.

In its attitude toward social reform conservatism has,
however, been schooled against rebuff. As between rul-
ers and ruled, it had a foot in both camps. To it Lord

2O T H E AMERICAN ANARCHY

Acton's famous liberal aphorism came therefore as no
surprise; in its bones it always felt that power, irrespec-
tive of persons, party, station, class, or race, tends to cor-
rupt. Taking a gloomier view than liberalism of man's
innate goodness, conservatism had never expected as
much of him. Little as it knew, at the high noon of
liberal credulity, about Freud and his probings of the
subconscious, it would not have been aghast to learn
that the rational is less propulsive than the irrational
or that the ego, now dormant, now alert, so thoroughly
colors much of what we do. The more completely lib-
eral optimism was confounded, on both the domestic
and foreign scene, the more would conservative pessi-
mism be endorsed.

Nowhere is justice, whether for the one or the many,
continuous, automatic, self-generating. Yet the illusion
that it might be did more to paralyze liberalism
than all the fury of its foes. Events abroad have been
but a lurid exaggeration of tendencies at home. The
physical ruin that would be the consequence of air-
atomic warfare is not only related to the moral ruin
which German mass crematoria and Russian slave
camps symbolize. Political irresponsibility in the demo-
cratic world which paved the way for the second Ger-
man war and its dire sequel is an outgrowth of the
moral irresponsibility that dwells in every large-scale
society. The cult of Reason in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries had dispelled mystiques only to beget
one of its own. The votaries of progress, though evil
abounded, could look forward and look with confidence.
The twentieth century, observing how organized mag-
nitude in the wrong hands may simply maximize evil,
has lost confidence in itself and dreads to look forward.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that thun-
derous JefEersonian phrase, must have seemed, amid the

The Revaluation of Man 21

social crudities of early industrialism, a goal incredibly
remote. Yet liberalism did make amends for what was
done at its behest. As a political party, its banner is
unfurled less and less. A catalytic process, its revalua-
tion of man would stand in contrast to the organized
credos whether of class, race, or nation of totalitarian
determinism. But if another brand of determinism is
itself latent in large-scale organization, then large-scale
democracies will also languish in its insidious grip.

The attitude of modern democracy toward the indi-
vidual owes much to Biblical concepts of a free moral
order. Yet the mechanism of man's revaluation is a mor-
ally lifeless mass technology. The Victorians took for
granted that, into its dry bones, revalued man might
himself breathe a semblance of his own sovereign moral
life. That was easier said than done. For the nostrils of
organized magnitude draw breath but never its own;
blow fire but not through spontaneous combustion.
Without science men could scarcely have been revalued.
Yet in secularizing the age it has left them with id-
eological fevers rather than moral passion. Drained of
moral content, justice itself may falter. And where the
techniques of organized magnitude augment irresponsi-
ble power, there will be fewer inner moral checks to
mitigate its abuse.

CHAPTER

Bigness and
World Order

Between as within nations the prospects of liberty in
the twentieth century have been and will be decided by
a ceaseless struggle between responsible and irresponsi-
ble power. If the nineteenth century's revaluation of
man fell short, it was because nowhere more than in
the international sphere had it overestimated man him-
self. Through large-scale organization the nation-State
could be welded now into a more efficient unit. But
integration there entailed disintegration elsewhere. An
interlocking world, which the machine seemed to unite,
was in fact disunited by the very magnitude it had the
technical means to organize. Totalitarian systems would
illustrate how irresponsible power might be consoli-
dated nationally. Internationally the democracies them-
selves were remiss in organizing together on any large
scale their own power for peace. And for the follies of
the twenties and thirties they would in the fifties still
pay a heavy price. Overorganized where, for the sake
it should not have been, the world was

Bigness and World Order 23

under-organized where such neglect was the supreme
irresponsibility.

During the nineteenth century overseas countries
shared more and more with Europe itself the center of
the stage. From Napoleon Bonaparte I to the Emperor
William II there were no global wars. Yet in Europe
and America, in Asia and Africa, thousands died on the
field of battle. Many of these local wars were wars of
conquest. But the Italians, the Americans, and the Ger-
mans also waged wars of national unity though wars of
conquest and wars of unity were, for the Germans, one
and the same. Not everywhere would national uprisings
be crowned with success. But liberalism cherished an
individuality whose values were national as well as per-
sonal. It therefore hailed the national cause as its own.

It was in for a rude awakening. For nationalism be-
came absolute and thereby illiberal when State and race
were identified. National freedom was a progressive
aim. Within one sovereign fold, however, racial minori-
ties would, like other minorities, ask that their rights
be respected; a pluralistic nationalism as the nucleus
of a relative internationalism was the principle that lib-
erals espoused. Nor could men be revalued in the Occi-
dent without also being revalued in the Orient. In Asia,
in Africa, as in Latin America, the quest for a better
life was incited by the growth on other continents of
large-scale industrialism. Searching for raw materials
and preferential markets, the economy of the West ac-
celerated the crass exploitation of underdeveloped lands
and colonial territories. Domestically a ruthless indus-
trialism was to have put upon it the brakes of social
reform; so also there would be native resistance to eco-
nomic imperialism. Meanwhile as nations vied commer-
cially with each other the nineteenth century saw in
their rivalry a guarantee of freedom. A pre-established

24 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

Benthamite harmony of interests would maintain peace
abroad as it sustained liberty at home.

Nor was such a hypothesis a strictly pecuniary one to
be justified in terms of pounds, shillings, and pence.
Technology might serve morality. By bringing peoples
into touch with each other, not only would freedom of
trade be more lucrative for all concerned; understand-
ing, a balm rather than an irritant, might be engen-
dered between them. For if death is the great leveler,
war is the great devaluer. When victory counts more
than life itself, the human personality can no longer be
sacred. War organizes each side at the expense of the
individual; liberalism wished to organize all sides at
the expense of war. And yet as the scale of war was en-
larged not only did it involve the strength of nations
rather than the resources of cities or princes; not only
did it devalue more individuals, combatant and non-
combatant, than ever before. Suddenly its major stake
was the entire revaluation of man himself. For the de-
mocracies could always purchase a peace of surrender:
but, with their power gone, they would forfeit their
way of life. How to curtail war and yet preserve free-
dom has thus been the paramount issue of world or-
ganization. It is one, moreover, about which liberals
themselves were calamitously irresolute.

Looking at the progress of invention, the develop-
ment of continents, the march of science, they said that
war did not pay. And that was so for countries which
merely wanted to keep what they already possessed. Not
until the middle of the twentieth century did the miser-
ies of defeat induce second thoughts among peoples
who had never subscribed wholeheartedly to this lib-
eral thesis. And even among them exhaustion sjiould
not be confused with conversion.

Prodigious had been the yield of peaceful enterprise

Bigness and World Order 25

since the Industrial Revolution. To ameliorate the hu-
man lot seemed to be the really serious business of an
enlightened society. War as an interruption was, for
those who were content with their place in the sun or
whose sun had set, worse than war as waste. Yet the
victor, to whom belonged the spoils, did not emerge
from war's havoc empty-handed. In the United States,
wars of independence and reunification bore liberal
fruit and so, until the advent of Fascism, did those of
Italy. Nor had the United States, like Italy in Africa,
furthered herself hemispherically or oceanically with-
out the threat of force or its actual use. To Germans
and Japanese war in the liberal era was to be as re-
munerative; only Russia, having wounds to lick, would
bide her time. It took the English-speaking peoples four
centuries to spread around the globe; Germans and Jap-
anese, with their national self-idolatry, fancied they
could catch up and overtake them in one fell swoop.
Without conflict in 1866 and 1870 the Reich would
never have been unified. The brief continental hegem-
ony it attained through the wars of 1914 and 1939 was
a proud feat a near success on each occasion. With
their cities razed, their frontiers cracked and sliced up,
the resurgent West Germans may now only sell them-
selves to the highest bidder. Even as a makeweight their
views about the utility or disutility of war can still be
vital.

Upon that question it is the Soviet Union which to-
day has the last word. And for Russia, too, the ebb and
flow of two German invasions, the Japanese menace,
and the minor campaigns of the twenties might have
demonstrated that war does not pay. Yet never have
her own boundaries been so distended, never has her
warlike power stretched so far.

Freedom at home, peace abroad, might thus be de-

26 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

sired by some peoples less than other things. To re-
value men who themselves inherit the values of the
West is in itself a herculean task. But not all cherish in
common or have been conditioned by these values; not
all, even where their moral values are ostensibly the
same as ours, exhibit in history the moral fiber to stand
up and affirm them. National self-interest and the uni-
versal interests of mankind would, in a view typical
of the nineteenth century, coincide. They did, in fact,
nothing of the sort. In the twentieth century organized
magnitude so enlarges irresponsible power on a na-
tional scale as to render world affairs more unstable
than ever before. The nineteenth century insisted upon
the right of each State to its own sovereignty. But,
and despite liberal doctrine, there was no invariable
correlation between the individual freedom of States
and the individual freedom of their subjects. As some
countries organized for democracy others organized
against it, and in organizing against it they would, in a
deeper global sense, organize against any liberal organ-
ization of man.

It is, then, between the exercise of irresponsible
power at home and the impact of such irresponsible
power abroad that there has been the one certain corre-
lation. Patriotism, through large-scale techniques, facili-
tates a psychic merger of the mass and the nation; per-
sonal liberty was not missed when, for many, another,
emotionally more satisfying, freedom could be asserted.
As the Russians moved from nineteenth-century Tsar-
ism to twentieth-century Communism their chance to
strike a blow for individual rights did not last long.
The fault may or may not be theirs. The submissive-
ness they have displayed allowed them to be organized
not only against their own freedom but against the free-
dom of others. They might have preferred liberty; with

Bigness and World Order 27

them, as with the Germans, there has seldom been time
to ascertain what, under less adverse circumstances,
their preferences would be. In every great democracy,
as in most small ones, liberty was never conferred but
achieved. And those who have achieved it can only
take those who have not as they find them.

When the Germans demolished the European balance
of power, the way was clear for the Soviet incubus. And
for their flight from responsibility in the domestic
sphere, their ensuing exercise of irresponsible power in-
ternationally, they had less excuse than the Russians
themselves. Germans, unlike the latter, were not out-
side the orbit of the West; from much that had opened
the European mind since the fifteenth century they did
not dwell in Muscovite seclusion. Nor did the French
Revolution or the abortive democratic revolutions of
1848 pass them by; for the social reforms of nineteenth-
century industrialism they were in the van. Yet even
these were paternal rather than liberal in origin. So re-
nowned a German exponent of man's revaluation as
Kant himself had, like Luther before him, preached
obedience to the State; while others developed genuine
representative government, the well-drilled Prussian ab-
solutism would receive its Bismarckian rationale in the
pages of HegeL For large-scale organization under the
aegis of an industrialized, unified Germany the ominous
pattern was set.

Fortified through the repulse of liberalism in Ger-
many herself, German national power would recur-
rently vanquish liberalism elsewhere. The wars of 1914
and 1939, with their dire aftermath, were the gauge of
its effect; in the twentieth century no other single fac-
tor would so thrust back and debase the free civiliza-
tion of the West. Under Hitler the German mass did
not only burst open the sluice-gates through which

28 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

could pour the Russian hordes; Western Europe may
never regain the pre-eminence it had enjoyed since the
Middle Ages. For where man is devalued through ir-
responsible power at home, there resides irresponsible
power to devalue him still more abroad.

A world which the machine might bind together is
thus one which it can also split asunder. Does this mean
that our industrial environment makes the mass more
aggressive than its primitive ancestors; that the tools
which would revalue man have merely brutalized him?
What it does signify, in the light of modern commu-
nications and long-range weapons, is that there have
been no changes in man himself commensurate with the
changes in his surroundings. Ethically he is much the
same, technically he is not. With what he can do he
leaps ahead; between technological gallop and moral
jog-trot the distance is lengthened rather than reduced.
And that cleavage is all the more pronounced when, as
a social technique, large-scale organization advances on
an ever broader front. Through it the power of man
over man extends. But even where he would control
that power, the control is always less than the power
itself.

And that is why a world which has shrunk techni-
cally can yet be one that seems too big. The more in-
tricately its units are organized, the more do they slip
out of control. Totalitarian government may constitute
a revulsion from all that is best in our free society.
But the primordial had steadily lurked near the surface
of civilization everywhere. Capitalism has not only ex-
ploited; its methods have themselves been exploited by
modern dictatorships, whether Communist, Fascist or
Nazi, for purposes that were anticapitalist. What rend-
ers a totalitarian system iniquitous is not merely the

Bigness and World Order 29

evil to which it slides back but the massive social power
which organized magnitude puts at its disposal.

Moral autarchy has, in other words, been the pre-
cursor of autarchic ferocities in other domains. The
Benthamite concept of an automatic harmony of inter-
ests, never fully applicable anywhere, may be entirely
obsolete in a collectivized, large-scale society. But Com-
munism, Fascism, and Nazism are not a direct conse-
quence of its internal breakdown; these ideologies rip-
ened in countries where there had been, even less than
in the democracies of the West, a free market economy
or genuine representative government. How large-scale
techniques could distort as they fulfilled liberal aspira-
tions, modern democracies were to perceive. Their mis-
use, when adopted by traditionally illiberal societies,
would imperil liberal societies as well.

If liberalism had not made headway in achieving re-
sponsible power, it might never have so misconceived
the role of power itself. Its own world order the nine-
teenth century mistook for a natural order. Yet in that
international sphere there was, even less than in the
domestic sphere, a self-regulating Benthamite harmo-
nization of national interests. A favorable European bal-
ance of power and the pervasive seapower of the pre-
dominant British were, for a productive century, global
stabilizers. Since Napoleon I their function had, how-
ever, been not automatic but contrived. World war
came again in 1914 when the new, large-scale power of
the Germans could organize itself and its own group to
overthrow these two stabilizers of liberal order. It was
resumed in 1939 because one of them, the European
balance of power, had not been maintained. Collective
security sought between world wars to effectuate the re-
valuation of man. But in democratic countries the rule

30 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

of law is based on consent; only through the prepond-
erant power of the many can the recalcitrant few ever
be coerced. Before that occurred in world affairs, how-
ever, there had to be some explicit consensus about
the foundations of world order. It remained implicit
among the law-abiding until, in final crises, first princi-
ples were recalled. There could therefore be no con-
sent for an organization of power to which the lawless
would submit or through which they might, in good
time, be brought to heel.

The problem of peace is the problem of order. But
what kind of order shall we have? that is the crucial
question. The answer to it has so far been found
through disorder, the disorder of war. The conflict be-
tween order and disorder is, nevertheless, not one
merely between those who, discarding violence, would
organize for peace and those who, preferring to take
the law into their own hands, would organize for war.
It may no doubt be reduced by the awful simplifica-
tions of war to that stark, final contrast. And among
aggressive Powers there has, it is true, been a cult of
war for war's sake. Yet their ruling elements, the saber-
rattlers of Potsdam and Vienna before 1914, the dema-
gogues of Rome and Berlin before 1939, the militarists
of Tokyo until Pearl Harbor, the masters of the Krem-
lin today, have also meant it when they talked peace.
But what each side has demanded is peace on its own
terms.

All strive for peace. It is the nature of the peace
over which they fight. Peace could always be had by
the West, but on terms such as the Central Powers
would have stipulated in 1914, the Axis group in 1939,
or the Sino-Soviet bloc today. These we reject, and
wars break out when aggressors fancy that they are cap-
able of imposing them on us. For what we want is not

Bigness and World Order * 31

only peace but peace with freedom. The democracies
have twice had their world order belatedly to defend;
their adversaries have had one to establish. By com-
parison with that of the Nazis the Prussian concept may
not seem so repugnant to observers like Mr. George
Kennan though Hitler did no more than press it to
its logical conclusion. But, given a wider scope, it, too,
in its time and place, was quite unbearable. And so
would be that world order which Communist ideology
adumbrates. Yet if present dangers are acute, it is be-
cause of what former enemies destroyed as much as be-
cause of what future ones may do.

The paradox of international anarchy is, then, that
order has been the objective of all contestants. No-
body, that is, has sought disorder as an end in itself.
Yet twice in the twentieth century there has been dis-
order on a large global scale and in every breast the
fear lurks that a third, worse holocaust impends. For
disorder flows from an organized attempt to recast so-
ciety on an illiberal model, from the refusal of free
peoples to be thus pushed around. But in this clash of
motivation there is a curious anomaly. It will be re-
membered how in national histories the battle of free-
dom against tyranny is often depicted as a struggle be-
tween order and liberty. In world affairs the same
antithesis occurs. For when free peoples will not knuckle
under, it is they j^ho become the agents of disorder and
tyrant Powers the artisans of order.

Ultimately it is not things seen but things unseen
which comprise the stakes of power. The ideology of
aggressors tells us what their world order would be like.
The ideology of democracies is the moral source of our
own. Between precept and performance the gap may,
alas, be wide. But free societies do conserve moral val-
ues without which there is no impetus for the enlarge-

32 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

ment of liberty itself. And so far as these can be ex-
tended globally, the quest of democracies is for a world
order that will also be a moral order. Not that between
international and domestic affairs any exact analogy is
possible. But to vindicate its use of power a free world
order must refresh itself at the springs of its own free-
dom.

This interaction of the moral with the political gains
in emphasis as the United States becomes the mainstay
of the West. The Spanish-American war has been de-
scribed as her "great aberration." A greater, converse
aberration was the recurrent failure of the American
people to grasp world issues before irreparable dam-
age had, as by 1917 and by 1941, been wrought. For
neglect of these was not in their basic tradition but con-
trary to it. So far as the eighteenth century could dis-
cern the nature of a moral order in public affairs, the
United States was, by her fundamental documents, dedi-
cated to one. But that their free order at home relied
upon a free order abroad, the Founding Fathers real-
ized better than many of their twentieth-century de-
scendants. They understood the role of power; divid-
ing it constitutionally, they could not let it go against
the nation internationally. They had cut themselves off
from George III; Jefferson and Madison perceived, nev-
ertheless, that the maritime power of Britain and the
territorial safety of the United States were bound up
together indissolubly. Only through British command of
the seas could the Monroe Doctrine itself command re-
spect. Yet as nineteenth-century Americans reforged
their union in the fires of war and proceeded to build
unmolested on this continent a free large-scale society,
their own dependence on a free world order was lost
from sight.

How this happened is a secret to nobody other than

Bigness and World Order * 33

some who compose historical works on American for-
eign affairs. From Napoleon I to the Kaiser Wilhelm II
the British were so successful in keeping open the sea
lanes that world order could be taken for granted.
Americans immersed themselves in their own contests
of power; they forgot the primacy of power in world
politics because, for formative years, they were too ef-
fortlessly the complacent beneficiaries of benevolent
oceanic power. They never grew accustomed to doing
their share. Conscious of their own moral heritage, they
waxed indignant at the immoral policies of European
countries but admitted no connection between moral or-
der and any organized world responsibility of their
own.

As the twentieth century dawned the Anglo-American
aspect of American world security was, however, plain
to John Hay. And Theodore Roosevelt sensed it when,
so as to ensure a Russo-Japanese equilibrium in the
Far East, he also intervened in the gravest European
crisis before 1914. Among American statesmen these
were the first moderns. In hemisphere relations, those
with Canada and Latin America, their realism was the
sort Americans condemned in others. In global affairs
it was the sort the United States should have embraced
but would not.

And even after World War I she still spurned it.
From errors in statecraft Woodrow Wilson was not ex-
empt. But he may be credited with going one step fur-
ther when he pioneered permanent American guaran-
tees to France and to the League of Nations so that
a favorable system could be maintained. His endeavor
to convert American ideals of moral order into a
broader concept of world order provoked the ridicule
of Clemenceau and the demurrers of Lloyd George.
They and their countries were, nevertheless, willing to

34 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

give his notions a try; it was Americans themselves who
would not back up ideas rooted as deeply in the na-
tion's past as the isolationist escapism to which they
reverted. The world of George Washington had van-
ished. When the United States reneged on Wilsonian
commitments, she proposed to pick up where he left off.

If Britain and France, France more than Britain,
had not spilled their best blood in 1914-18, the point
would not still be so crucial. But from the Pyrrhic vic-
tory of those years neither fully recovered. On them
had reposed the power foundations of a liberal world
order; but they, too, fell apart when the United States,
again heedless of what she owed to it, would not join
them in upholding it. From the League of Nations
she abstained altogether. And she complained when
these others, their hands full elsewhere, did not enforce
against the aggression of Japanese in China the Wash-
ington Treaties which she herself had sponsored. To-
gether Britain, France, and the United States were pre-
ponderant in 1919; by 1939 they had improvidently cast
to the winds all that had been purchased with so much
sorrow and sacrifice twenty years before. The English-
speaking peoples cultivated the ever vengeful Germans,
the French were piqued thereby into courting the un-
ruly Italians. Within modern democracies the liberal
dilemma was to arise from the equivocal nature of large-
scale organization itself. Abroad it sprang from the in-
capacity of the free to organize at all. On the domestic
scene you could invoke goodwill but exercise power, in
the world arena you could invoke power but only exert
goodwill.

The resort to goodwill did not, however, obviate the
world contest of power. What it did was to transfer the
initiative from responsible power which internationally
was disorganized to irresponsible power which, undis-

Bigness and World Order 35

turbed, was permitted to reorganize itself. Where, in
its open-mindedness, liberal goodwill went astray was,
between the wars, in imagining that what it meant by
justice, others Germany in foreign policy, Russia in
domestic policy also meant. Because they hated war as
the antithesis of their principles, liberals were left by
the victory of the West in 1918, by their own costly
success in war, with a debilitating sense of guilt. Soon
Germans and Russians were deemed more sinned
against than sinning; the way to make a juster peace
was to unleash forces that would again deprive us of
peace entirely. Toward the revaluation of man the Ger-
mans had not gone as far as the peoples of the West.
For many in the West the premise of policy was that
they had and have.

The vanquished, in attempting to reverse the verdict
of history, would thus have as accomplices the victors
themselves* Conservatives were to appease; it was lib-
eralism, the Center and the Left-Center, which first
sapped the moral bases of the 1919 settlement. Warlike
ideologies it abhorred; willing to wound, it was afraid
to strike. For to maintain power internationally you
have to acknowledge its realities, and these revalued
man in the twentieth century was sure he had out-
grown. War in 1914 upset the more optimistic precon-
ceptions of the age; the puzzled, erratic behavior of
liberalism afterwards may have been a last, stubborn
endeavor to reaffirm them in circumstances it had not
anticipated. It was preoccupied with organized magni-
tude at home; the threat to peace of large-scale tech-
niques, as employed elsewhere by illiberal regimes,
caught it off guard. Arms as such were denounced by it
as the cause of war. Wedded to a postulate of universal
justice, to an order of reason which automatically ful-
fils itself, liberalism was reluctant to admit that free

g6 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

nations are only as strong as the armed preponderance,
actual or potential, which they themselves organize.
Measures beyond a modicum o defense were suspected
during critical years of being solely a malodorous plot
hatched by arms manufacturers intent upon lining their
own pockets. Those who declared that, in a world of
large-scale power, democracies without a specially or-
ganized counteracting power would be themselves over-
powered, incurred the wrath which every society reserves
for any who have the temerity not only to be right but
to be right before their time.

The two major conflicts of the twentieth century did
not come because both sides were equally prepared for
them. The total force which eventually would arrest
aggressors was not organized at the outset; war might
have been averted, or wrought less harm, if it had. The
United States held the balance. of power in 1917-18;
in 1914 she was not only unarmed but uncommitted. If
she had done earlier what she did later, the general
peace might never have been shattered. And as then, so
it was in Hitler's day. No one can honestly aver that
British, French, or American preparations caused war
in 1939; it was their paucity and not their amplitude
which fanned Axis presumption. And unpreparedness in
arms was but the mirror of unpreparedness in policy.
Most conservatives did not consider militant German-
ism a danger. Liberals, perceiving the danger, contin-
ued to hug their illusions. The Germans could reckon
in 1939 with Russian and American neutrality: the pre-
ponderance of power which defeated the Axis eventu-
ally might have deterred it initially.

Hitler, as an organizer of large-scale despotism, had
his Nazi concept of world order. And until the democ-
racies recalled the power bases of their own they could
not resist him. Nor can anv in their midst, first on the

Bigness and World Order 37

Left and then on the Right, who delayed that recol-
lection the appeasers, the isolationists, the pacifists,
the native Fascists expiate their error by frenetic coun-
sel on the Soviet issue. For Europe is devitalized today
because the West was not adequately organized yester-
day. The presence of Allied armies, financial aid from
North America, the air-atomic power of the United
States, and the mutual arrangements of the Atlantic
pact may have bolstered her up; by herself she is no
counterpoise to Soviet expansion. Pressure from Europe
having slackened, with Japan vanquished and China
Sovietized, Russia has, besides, never had so little to
obstruct her in the Orient.

To the realities of power, the democracies have tard-
ily awakened. And what they must now avoid is not a
doctrine of power but an application of any such doc-
trine that might be as impercipient. To questions of
world order Americans in particular have been unalert
because, as the United States throve behind ocean bar-
riers, her main frontiers, land and sea, would, by the
twentieth century, be under friendly rule. Rugged in-
dividualism characterized American economic thought
long after organized magnitude in corporate affairs had
transformed American society. In matters of world or-
der it persevered even longer. For the United States
there have, since Pearl Harbor, been no free rides. But
she is paying all the more at present because she paid
less than others in the past.

Toward Russia, as toward Germany, open-mindedness
in the West smoothed the path for those who were foes
of the open mind. Assailed by doubts over their own
society, liberals accorded illiberal dynamisms the bene-
fit of the doubt. Wrongs which others had inflicted on
these two countries must account for wrongs which they
themselves inflict: redress the former and the latter will

42 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

some in the West who attributed world war to the in-
ner need of monopoly capitalism to expand. For it is
not through capitalism but through the military im-
perialism of nondemocratic nations that the twentieth
century has thrice been robbed of its birthright.

If democracy had had a better start in Russia, her
new large-scale despotism might not have been spared
liberal censure. In Italy the parliamentary monarchy of
Cavour would crumble from within; in Germany the
Weimar Republic reposed not on popular German as-
sent but on Allied opposition to the inveterate militar-
ism of the Hohenzollerns. In Tsarist Russia, however,
a decrepit feudalism, without any intervening period of
substantial industrialization, had long been riding for a
fall. Revolution there would have a genuine claim upon
the moral sympathy of the West. And it passed over
into a counter-revolution on the Left before counter-
revolution on the Right elsewhere exposed the variant
labels of large-scale tyranny, whether on the Left or the
Right, as being a distinction without a difference.

The Russian Revolution was greeted in 1917 as a be-
lated phase of the nineteenth-century movement toward
the revaluation of man. But when the party-State swept
constitutional procedures away, or bent them to its will,
every other freedom, individual and economic, had
been extinguished. The democracies have not fully
grasped the effect of organized magnitude on them-
selves; that by it a credo of universal mass benevolence
might be turned upside down was even harder to com-
prehend. The techniques of irresponsible power in all
totalitarian regimes were the same; all gleaned foreign
support, whether on the Right or the Left, by masking
an ideology of power behind the power of ideology.
But to liberal opinion the ideology on which the Soviet
Union laid stress still seemed a frantic, lopsided version

Bigness and World Order 43

of Western revolutionary idealism rather than a frigid,
premeditated attempt to annul it. Since the defeat of
Axis power, for which Russian armed power was in-
dispensable, nothing fresh has been divulged about the
social mechanics of Communist large-scale organization.
But it has again been shown that, given abroad the
same free hand that it enjoys at home, irresponsible
power must, by the nature of its being, behave irre-
sponsibly.

Yet by examining the social order of the Soviet Un-
ion we can perhaps descry in a clearer light some fea-
tures of our own. Without a reign of terror its sov-
ereign cabal would be hamstrung; their own deviations
from doctrine have nevertheless been as conspicuous as
those of the host they themselves have purged for hav-
ing deviated. In discrepancies between word and deed,
democracies are not alone; the latter, however, can deal
with them openly. For ideologues would fit humanity
into Procrustean interpretations of history as rigorous as
they are neat; somehow history, with all its myriad con-
tingencies humanity, by the good within it as well as
the bad eventually thwarts them. The growth of
big industrial aggregations under large-scale capitalism
would, so Marx thought, reduce workers to a single
proletarian level. But such a tendency did not alarm
him: it might facilitate the expropriation of an ever
smaller owning class and hasten thereby the advent of
that which he desired, the classless society. His labor
theory of value was, moreover, designed to suit this pro-
gram. For Marx argued that only physical work created
values that warrant economic recompense or rather
that no one kind of effort is worth more than another.
Yet by disparaging the intelligence, by bracketing to-
gether muscular and mental exertions, an equalitarian
concept of value was in fact as destined to devalue man,

44 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

and rob him of his deserts, as the most unbridled com-
petitive individualism.

The remedy would be worse than the disease. Priv-
ilege and profit might be banished from a classless so-
ciety. But so also would the contribution of a middle
class, and no modern economy could do without one.
The emergence of the middle class may have gone hand
in hand with the rise of capitalism. Yet it will have its
counterpart even when capitalism is modified or abol-
ished. For wherever society becomes organizationally
more complex, there must be some who plan and di-
rect, manage and mediate. The larger the scale of that
society, and whether it be democratic or totalitarian,
capitalist, semicapitalist, or anticapitalist, the greater
the necessity for precisely such a class.

By Soviet criteria, those of Stalin and Malenkov
even more than those of Lenin and Trotsky, Marx
might never have deemed himself a Marxist. For Rus-
sia he expressed little but disdain; he envisaged, as a
crucible in which his equalitarian ideas should be tried
out, a country that was less backward economically. Yet
in being unindustrialized, Russia could begin the So-
viet experiment with the social terrain comparatively
uncluttered; in the wake of the Romanoffs what mostly
had to be deposed was an upper class notoriously para-
sitical. Yet in Russia, too, modern technology would
require differential rewards. For human skills are un-
equal, and, so that a mass society of organized magni-
tude could function, disparate incentives were reintro-
duced. Not that class distinctions had been jettisoned in
Russia for top party members. But to set and keep go-
ing the large-scale apparatus of a mass society, Russia's
masters discarded the Utopian notion: from each ac-
cording to his ability, to each according to his need. A
new middle class, nonproletarian, professional, technical,

Bigness and World Order 45

administrative, came forth, and from it the party ruling
class drew its own recruits.

The bourgeoisie is dead, long live the bourgeoisie. A
Soviet middle class would, of course, not work in the
same atmosphere or have the same goals as the inde-
pendent entrepreneurs of nineteenth-century capitalism.
But elsewhere, too, bourgeois activity and initiative has
been shifting in the twentieth century from the pri-
vate and personal to the corporate and collective, the
governmental and institutional. For organized magni-
tude elicits its own inner mode of operation; and it
does so irrespective of the constitutional difference be-
tween a dictatorship and a democracy. Spiritually and
politically these are opposed; in large-scale techniques
they gravitate toward each other. Can a democracy re-
main spiritually and politically responsible, if organized
magnitude renders it administratively irresponsible?
The framework of power alters. The part played by
those who exercise power within it will decide the issue.

Now as before the role of the bourgeois is the gauge
of liberty. In the democracies it was the middle class
which extracted such Whig reforms as would permit a
wider enfranchisement. In the Soviet Union a middle
class has also proved necessary; owing its privileges to a
servile State, it itself must, however, also be servile. Not
that class lines have formally crystalized in Russia. The
emergence of a new class there exemplifies rather the
social diversification which, through sheer occupational
multiplicity, ensues in every large-scale society. For the
same reason, and contrary to Marx, Russia, though a
dictatorship, could not be one of or by the proletariat.
Nor in welfare democracies does his concept of a class
war cover the conflicts of power, collective and indi-
vidual, public and corporate, to which they are actually
prone; still less does it account for the tensions that

46 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

envelop any totalitarian system. For the State does not,
as Marx predicted, wither away. In a modern dictator-
ship it swallows up the whole of society instead.

And when that occurs there lies concealed, behind an
outer facade of impassive, rock like stability, an even
greater instability. Political and economic power are
fused and this eliminates any latitude for give and
take between them. Corrective pressures of the one
upon the other within the community become joint
disciplinary pressures upon the community. Peaceful
change being thus stamped out, change when it comes
cannot be peaceful. Socialism in Britain, with its ethical
presuppositions and its Fabian tactics, never subscribed,
like its continental counterparts, to the doctrine of class
war. Yet its enactments have not only been more radi-
cal than any adopted elsewhere in the West; the process
of social revolution was electoral, legislative, nonvio-
lent. For to the latent coercive power which dwelt in the
majority, the non-Socialist minority bowed. Such con-
sent implied, however, that, whenever the tide turns, a
similar concurrence will be forthcoming from the other
side. Yet where there is no political check on economic
power, a total organization of large-scale power is re-
sponsible to nobody but itself. And in repressing vio-
lence it breeds violence since through violence alone
can the dissident obtain redress.

War, moreover, may be an outlet to drain off such
unrest. The defense of hearth and home can thus be
canalized by an absolute regime in its own defense. Ide-
ologically the Marxist spearhead may have been the
power of dialectic. Politically the Soviet will is imposed
through the dialectic of power. And in the end it is the
temptations of power which heighten the world contest
of power: a power that is irresponsible at home is lured
on inexorably to pursue ever more glittering prizes

Bigness and World Order 47

abroad. Nor is it a coincidence that peoples who may be
most dazzled by them are those who have themselves
rated martial values above the revaluation of man.

Not that they have always been in a position to
choose between glory and liberty. In the struggle for
the latter the few might look to none but themselves;
about martial values, which combined obedience at
home with valor abroad, rulers and ruled could be in
easier agreement. Consent in a free society permits
that accommodation between majority and minority
which is the gist of democratic union. But Adolf Hitler
was not the first to evoke a popular mass consent which
would solidify union at the expense of democracy. For
the hand that wields the lash may, above all, also fur-
nish bread; to an empty stomach freedom is not partic-
ularly appetizing. Between wars the Soviet Union at-
tracted liberal opinion not just because it and the
democracies had the same enemies. The world slump
during those years shook to its marrow the economic
system of the West. Amid the anxieties of the time many
wondered whether, in providing the mass with eco-
nomic security, the Russian Communists had not, per-
haps, unearthed the secret of social justice. Where
equality is a necessity and liberty a luxury, the latter, it
was felt, should await its turn. But that in a totalitarian
society its turn is less and not more likely to materialize
had yet to be understood.

Benevolent despotism is now new. Coupled with
twentieth-century large-scale organization, it becomes a
social tyranny utterly without precedent. By means of
this, Russia's agrarian economy would be further indus-
trialized; yet most Soviet technology had to be borrowed
from the free societies of the West. An equalitarian
mass security was established on a low, drab economic
level; for its maintenance there would be drawn from

48 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

Russia's own national heritage the method of enforce*
ment through insecurity: government by purge. Insep-
arable from the system, terror has thus been on as
large a scale as the system itself. And because of that,
any voluntary element of popular consent may droop-
and wane. Resignation to the inevitable, which is what
a totalitarian system can extort, will have the same
broad, mass result.

Here, moreover, foreign dangers, real or trumped up,,
can mend a rift between regime and people. For Rus-
sia the real dangers had vanished in 1945; she could no
longer be caught in a German-Japanese vise. Unreal
dangers were therefore fabricated. As a matter of fact,
if Russia had demobilized her huge standing armies, it
would have been harder for her to fling a network of
intimidation over her smaller neighbors. And further-
more, her war-battered economy might, despite the
goads of irresponsible power, have dissolved in chaos. It
has, on the contrary, had full employment. But the
Nazis, with their prewar mobilization of the large-scale
German economy, could also boast of that; and, as the
Sino-Soviet threat spurs on our own rearmament, so can
we. Yet what we do in freedom the Russians do with-
out it and against it. Economic security for the mass is
based on other insecurities, at home and abroad, which
the Kremlin itself aggravates.

There has, then, been no Communist Golden Rule
to improve upon a capitalist rule of gold. Economic
well being, as diffused by a totalitarian mass equality, is
spread thin; what is equal on that one, bleak plane is,
besides, all the more unequal on every other. The de-
mand of the French Revolution for liberty, equality,
and fraternity reverberated far and wide; and just as in
the West liberalism would afterwards have to reject lib-
erty without equality, so in the East an equality with-

Bigness and World Order 49

out liberty must be anathema to it. For the equality
which liberalism endorsed was not the equality of hel-
ots, but an equality in political rights, an equality
before the law; the quintessence of democracy is equal-
ity of opportunity rather than such a stark equality in
the mass as a dictatorship of the one, the few, or the
many clamps down on the individual. A totalitarian so-
ciety could not grant that ultimate liberty which is
equality of opportunity and still be totalitarian. But so
is equality of opportunity the final test of liberty in
large-scale democracies, and it is not a test in which
they themselves get full marks.

Everywhere in fact the revolutionary fervors which,
since the fifteenth century, have made the modern
world are, like a tidal wave, beating back upon it.
Peace and freedom being an endless quest, the dilemma
of liberalism, whether in domestic or international af-
fairs, is as perpetual. The Victorians felt that they had
either found correct solutions or, through scientific in-
quiry, could eventually discover them. What we are now
learning is that most social or economic solutions are
themselves inconclusive; that liberalism as the principle
of the open mind must instead be an incessant search
for better ones. The human predicament is that hidden
obstacles loom up as each milestone is passed and that
as one frontier is reached another unfolds. The revalua-
tion of man is a liberal aim which influences modern
democracies through a number of avenues; absolutist
credos in the twentieth century exert popular appeal
precisely because, with their readymade answers, there
is nothing provisional about them. As the apostle of the
open mind, liberalism can appraise no doctrine, not
even its own, uncritically. For where the totalitarian be-
lief is in its doubt of freedom, the democratic belief
is in the freedom to doubt.

50 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

From neither society, the liberal and the illiberal, is
conflict absent* But in the warrior cult of Fascists and
Nazis and in the class war of Soviet Communism there
is a change of venue; for arduous intellectual effort by
each person they substitute the mentally effortless and
psychologically comforting objectives of mass combat.
Magnitude is thus organized to devalue rather than re-
value man. Its yoke may be heavy; the pain of thought
is one burden from which man is relieved. For between
dictatorship and democracy the difference here is plain.
In the one all are subject to the decisions of power, in
the other each has some power of decision.

And so by the middle of the twentieth century many
of the more generous hypotheses of nineteenth-century
politics had wilted and lost their bloom. Between na-
tional and international affairs the interaction is con-
tinuous and profound. Liberalism, being addicted to
reason in the former, was slower to detect unreason in
the latter. At home it became a pursuit of goals the
reconciliation of individual liberty and social justice
which can never fully be won; that world politics were
also an ever-recurrent duel it was loath to admit. A
dissolvent of the status quo in domestic affairs, it dis-
paraged the status quo elsewhere. Yet these were not
the same. At home there was an order of freedom to
be enhanced; abroad, lest worse befall, it was only
through the defense of a stable world order that im-
provement itself would be feasible. Between 1919 and
1939 the "have" nations retreated gratuitously before
the "have nots." From Manchuria to Ethiopia and from
the Rhineland to Danzig not more but less justice was
done.

And now Russia muddies the waters by her misuse of
these terms. She still preens herself upon being the

Bigness and World Order 51

champion of the "have nots" in the domestic affairs of
other countries; of the wretched multitudes who, in an
unjust social order, are trodden under foot. Playing that
role, she would disrupt world order and commit inter*
national injustice in the name of a social justice which
itself merely socializes injustice; ranking among the
principal "haves," she is, with her Chinese ally, more
expansive than most "have nots." The Nazis pursued
global power through a particularist ideology, the Com-
munists through a more universal one. But the perver-
sion of liberal ideas under either auspices shows how,
in international as in national affairs, that which does
good can also do harm.

Large-scale organization as adopted by Germans and
Russians, Japanese and Italians is a clue to the inter-
national anarchy of the twentieth century. Employed by
some peoples for the revaluation of man, it has been
employed by others for his devaluation. The Victorians
in their optimism had thought that everyone would wel-
come self-government and that this, externally and in-
ternally, must, by itself, be a panacea for the ills of the
body politic. But the liberal ideal contemplated both
national freedom and representative democracy. When
the emphasis is on sovereignty at the expense of democ-
racy, liberalism itself is debased.

The two subjections of Czechoslovakia may have il-
lustrated that a well-balanced democracy which is geo-
graphically vulnerable must also be buttressed by the
support of other Powers. Underdeveloped countries,
however, reveal internal weaknesses that might under-
cut any preconcerted external support, even if this were
mutually acceptable. Self-government, liberalism has al-
ways contended, is better than good government. Yet
bad government in liberated territories as exposed as

52 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

those of the Middle East, East Asia, or Southeast Asia
not only bedevils their own national security; it saps the
outer ramparts of our entire free world order.

Given time, such countries might learn to fend for
themselves. But, as in the case of China, they may not
be given time. History explains their quandary; it also
explains why in other lands, too, technology has been
like some modern chronometer moving anticlockwise.
The contrast between France and Germany is, in this
paramount respect, illuminating. The French were the
first in Europe to experiment with a mass society the
democracy of the Revolution, the dictatorship of both
Napoleons. And after her two defeats, in the 1870*5 and
in the 1940*5, it was representative self-government to
which France reverted. But among Germans, democracy
has twice been more involuntary in origin. The Wei-
mar Republic was, and the Bonn Republic is, a con-
stitutional relic of foreign conquest. Yet a lasting democ-
racy must be the fruit of political self-conquest, that
widespread awareness of civic responsibility in a citi-
zenry without which paper safeguards against irresponsi-
ble power will be of scant avail. For among nations, as in
Nature, the apple never falls far from the parent tree.

And that this is so Russia also exemplifies. Revolu-
tion smashed the mold of the Tsarist autocracy; large-
scale organization refashions it there on traditionally
Russian lines. The Russian people themselves may not
be enamored of total duress by irresponsible Communist
power; if they were, there would have been no neces-
sity for the sanguinary farm collectivization, the slave
labor camps, the permanent terror. Yet from the freeing
of the serfs and the Duma's momentary flicker to the
downfall of Kerensky in the midst of military chaos and
political upheaval, the Russian people were unable to
do for themselves what others in the West had done.

Bigness and World Order * 53

Not that all in Europe can boast of mature democratic
behavior; unlike the Italians under Mussolini and the
Germans under Hitler, the Russians under Lenin were,
at least, dragooned again without advance notice. And
indeed what many Germans lamented afterwards was
the failure of the Nazis in war rather than a national
tradition from which, in a large-scale society, such a
regime could stem.

Modern democracy is the struggle to make organized
magnitude serve a democratic purpose. But among peo-
ples whose democratic purpose has been feeble, other
stubborn continuities would, within a larger frame-
work, resume their predominance. And what liberalism
did not realize in time was what the impact of all that
might be on our free world order; dissevering the
shackles of the past at home, it was tripped up in
foreign affairs by history from behind. Russian exiles
may attribute the plight of their country to Communist
ideology alone, to a plot by a Leninist camarilla whose
tentacles were fastened upon a helpless land in an hour
of military defeat and social collapse. There, as else-
where, large-scale organization has enabled irresponsible
power to be more intensively irresponsible. But while
regimes alter, expansionist policies are bequeathed by
one to the other. Russia's subjugation of alien nation-
alities did not begin with the Soviet regime. And if
some day it were replaced by a confederated represent-
ative democracy, that might not suffice, despite emigre
agitation, to keep these within the Russian fold.

Toward Germany even more, liberalism had, for two
decades, glossed over the awkward facts of historic con-
tinuity. The West would be cornered in the forties be-
cause during the thirties it deceived itself about the
substantial popular assent which, whatever the regime,
always nourished German imperialism; because it re-

54 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

garded Nazism as a fortuitous aberration rather than an
authentic phase. So, too, with the Soviet Union today
national power which a conspiratorial band seized and
organizational techniques which it enlarged are the
means through which a Russifying totalitarian system
maintains its sway. But if it makes history, history also
made it.

Moral responsibility underlies political and social re-
sponsibility. Where nations develop the former they
cannot forever be deprived of the latter; they re-
gain freedom because, even when conquered, they do
not in their hearts really lose it. But others, conquering
or conquered, do not lose it because they have never
had it. This does not condemn them forever to be, by
some dark, implacable fate, what they always have been.
A penchant for absolutism is not racially inborn; sci-
ence demonstrates that national differences are not bio-
logical. But while this is reassuring in the long run, it
makes no difference in the short run whether a denial
of liberty or threat to peace has been culturally or eth-
nically conditioned. Measures to stave off disaster must
be taken in either case. And they will not be, if the
anthropological capacity of people to change is treated
as political evidence that they have already done so.
History foreshortened is history ignored.

Between the wars the English-speaking democracies,
in their attitude toward Germany, missed that point.
Thinking they had but to be open-minded, they them-
selves were the ones who reopened the dikes. Liberal
hopes would be falsified because modern techniques
will fortify despotism as well as liberty. Yet propensi-
ties toward despotism that are pretechnological have
eased the task of twentieth-century despotism itself. For
parallel to the revaluation of man there has been a self-
devaluation one in which the individual compensates

Bigness and World Order 55

for his own lack of personal responsibility, willing or
unwilling, with a collective overvaluation of his group,
race, nationality or country. Nor is it only in dictator-
ships that he does this. But when things like that occur
in democracies it contravenes all that is best within
them. They are the imponderables of every totalitarian
society.

Disparities in outlook did not matter so much when
their strategic consequences were less far-reaching. Now
nothing matters more. During the nineteenth century
liberal influences transformed the West. But large-scale
organization has since altered the global circumstances
under which they can work themselves out. In adjusting
itself to that new situation, our free world order was
tragically slow. And so also in American life, as the set-
ting for democracy is enlarged, democratic rights are
modified. The manifestations of this may be social and
economic. In the end the problem of liberty is, like the
problem of peace, a moral problem.

CHAPTER

3

The Pre-Emption
of Power

As between freedom and tyranny in the twentieth cen-
tury, large-scale organization has played no favorites.
But not only does it serve the one as well as the other;
its sheer complexity obviates direct, simple controls.
Technically it has made possible mass democracy; of
man's revaluation it is, in actual practice, the medium.
Yet it takes as it gives. Responsible power is what keeps
society free; the more organized magnitude extends, the
less responsible does its power become. Totalitarian
dictatorship dams up explosive human impulses of
which democracy would make constructive use. Repress-
ing anarchy at home, its road to world order lies
through anarchy abroad. American democracy, on the
other hand, would dispel anarchy abroad; but at
home it has reduced economic anarchy only to have
other forms of anarchy emerge. Nor are they the sort
that would have satisfied Proudhon and Kropotkin. For
organized anarchy, as the child of institutional ir-

The Pre-emption of Power 57

responsibility, diminishes liberty when it is supposed to
be on the increase.

A mass society functions through large-scale units. In
a modern democracy, however, the limits drawn be-
tween them and the state are only one of the criteria of
freedom. The exercise of power within these large-scale
collectivities, whether they be public or semipublic, pri-
vate or semiprivate, how each one runs itself, may be as
much a gauge of man's revaluation as the ballot box or
the amount of social reform registered on the statute
books. For the general energy that organization stores
up may be employed in interests that are far from gen-
eral. And when that happens, large-scale power which
is socially irresponsible may confound all the nicely
calculated lore of a politically responsible democracy.
Organizational manipulation facilitates the manipula-
tion of men. And when men are manipulated, whether
as individuals or in the mass, they have been devalued.

If the sum is greater than its parts, so is its capacity
for weal or woe. Every nation or State has its own leg-
acy of law and custom. But while these can do without
any particular individual they are, ultimately, each sus-
tained by individuals. For the latter are like members
elected at staggered intervals one-third every two years
to the American Senate; they retire or die off but not
all at the same time. And as they in their careers over-
lap, so is there a continuity in the life of the nation or
State one which seems to endow it with an organic
will of its own. Dismissed by Hobbes, overstressed by
Rousseau, this unbroken sequence, historically fragile
and therefore socially precious, was cherished by Ed-
mund Burke as the pith of civilization itself. From
Hegel to Hitler extreme theories of the organic State
have, in their mysticism, been incompatible with liberal
eifforts rationally to achieve a wider freedom. Yet the

58 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

nation does not exist apart from the living, the dead,
the unborn of whom it is, has been, and will be com-
prised; nor does any other community or social group-
ing that endures. Each in his generation contributes to
the whole, and its stamp he bears or reflects even if
he would cast it off.

So inextricable are their ties that the morality of the
individual and the morality of the group must, in prin-
ciple, be one and the same. A few may have a higher
or more impeccable sense of justice than their fellows.
But there is usually first a common ethical heritage out
of which abstract private codes may flow. And though
justice is the touchstone of individual rights, it concerns
more than individuals; it is real for them only when it
has a concrete application within or between societies.
And where these societies are free, large-scale tech-
niques step up the dangers of a dualism which would al-
low the group a morality less strict than that of indi-
viduals. For liberty may suffer as some individuals gain
ascendancy within the group and make its power sub-
servient to their own. Behind a facade of organizational
immunity lurks personal irresponsibility. Moral man
and immoral society is, in Reinhold Niebuhr's phrase,
thus too stark a confrontation. The eternal human
drama of the good and the bad may be rehearsed in
the individual breast; society is the stage on which it is
enacted. And while society hands morality down it has
none of its own. If man alone is moral, only man can
be immoral. Organized power within a large-scale so-
ciety is therefore neutral. Yet so far as it enables men to
be more rather than less unaccountable, it also tempts
them to its misuse.

Organized magnitude does not, however, merely en-
large the sphere of temptation. The advent of indus-
trialism coincided with a decline in that traditional mo-

The Pre-emption of Power * 59

rality through which temptation might be withstood.
The group has always expressed a mutuality of needs
and wants; large-scale organization systematizes some
groups and establishes others. But while it accentuates
the interdependence o men in the economic, social, and
political aspects of their lives, the new groupings it elic-
its are, like itself, mechanical; to the natural relation-
ships of family, clan, church, neighborhood, club, vol-
untary association it adds other more synthetic, less
personal ones. Since the earliest days of urban indus-
trialism, men have been cut off in their daily work
from accustomed moorings. And when they are thus
uprooted, the silver cord of responsibility between
themselves and others may be broken. Yet a contrary
and concurrent trend has also been very important.
Even as religion ebbed, its message of social justice in-
spired, for the reform of large-scale society, more ele-
vated concepts of public responsibility. The industrial-
ism in which men were tools to be exploited and cast
aside could furnish the techniques of man's revaluation.
Nor in retrospect should we bewail too nostalgically
or idealize overmuch what has been left behind. The
mass of men, as Thoreau recalled, have always lived
lives of quiet desperation; and Hobbes, who depicted
their existence as poor, nasty, brutish, and short, also said
it was solitary. Bonds were closer in preindustrial so-
ciety, but upon its hewers of wood and drawers of wa-
ter the burdens were infinitely more onerous; and then
there were class shackles on the merchant and the arti-
san, disabilities for women, the mistreatment of chil-
dren, the race dominance, the religious persecutions. It
was because of these severities that the New World, with
all its hardships, proved so strong a magnet; without
them there would have been no impetus for the reval-
uation of man. Yet in an age of craftsmanship, the pre-

6o THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

industrial worker could take personal pride in finished
products that were his own; might feel himself, despite
other gross inequalities, less like a cog in a machine. It
is, however, not very remarkable that he should thus
have been more at home in his particular surroundings.
The narrower the horizon, the easier is it anywhere to
be fulfilled. For organized magnitude exacts a heavy toll.
Not that we can, on balance, regret the eclipse of a so-
ciety that was richer and more gratifying principally
for the few. What tantalizes is its replacement by one
in whose enlarged structural limits ordinary human
limitations pose new problems of power.

Politically, too, large-scale techniques might emanci-
pate with one hand and yet foster with the other a cov-
ert enslavement. The appeal of modern dictatorships to
a disoriented mass did, at any rate, come when workers
had been alienated from their work and the individual
from a more cohesive environment. Yet here again this
merely accentuated pre-existing national tendencies.
The cry may have gone up for a return to a more or-
ganic society. Hitler exploited large-scale techniques to
restore through force Teutonic folk solidarity; the So-
viet Communists would reintegrate the Russian econ-
omy by similar methods. Nor could either have done
much else: having willed the end, they had to will the
means. For in no other manner can the social conse-
quences of a technological order with its aimlessness,
its despair, its anomie be reversed. A large-scale society
might, in other words, be organic and undemocratic or
democratic and inorganic. The organic and the demo-
cratic, however, will not mix. Plato, who had only a
small city-State for which to prescribe, sensed that; his
preference was for the organic rather than the demo-
cratic. We in turn cannot share his taste, if we would
stay free. Nor is there any one single thoroughgoing

The Pre-emption of Power 61

cure, such as he propounded, for the ills of organized
magnitude. The ills remain.

In an industrial society the same organizational proc-
ess which uproots men spiritually bands them together
again in other combinations economically. Deracinated
vertically, they are, as it were, regrouped without roots
horizontally. Mass production erects new foci of eco-
nomic power; through similar large-scale techniques the
State power regulates these for the common welfare
and establishes social services of its own. The State does,
of course, do more than this. It is a hub of national
loyalties; and as other social ties are loosened, the mass
relies on it emotionally as well as functionally. Coercing
under law, the democratic State shelters the individual
from lawless intimidation. What it will not do is pro-
tect him from intimidations that are lawful yet unjust.
And these may not only be its own. The problem of
liberty is not merely one of a contest of power between
organized groups and the organized State, nor even one
of civic rights for the individual within that State. Jus-
tice must nowadays also be found on an institutional
plane; it is a question likewise of whether power is
exercised responsibly or irresponsibly within the organ-
ized group itself. How to get a footing in such a unit,
how to keep it, and how to improve upon it, is, for the
individual, all-important. Here, as much as in the legis-
lature and the court, is freedom's crucial zone.

The issue is one of control within large-scale organ-
ization, the degree to which power is scattered or cen-
tered within it. And, since corporate capitalism is the
pioneer of organized magnitude in the Western world, a
glance at it may shed light on the underlying rela-
tionship between democracy and technology. That it
has been divorcing ownership from control is apparent.
But in so doing it not only strikes at its own heart. It

62 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

demonstrates how, throughout our large-scale society, it
is organizational control rather than wealth or legal
rights that provides basic power. For noncapitalist or
even anticapitalist undertakings may differ from it in
ideological aspiration. Administratively they have all
borrowed a collectivized leaf from the capitalist book.

The cleavage between ownership and control is one
that Thorstein Veblen detected early in the century.
The corporate revolution which ensued Messrs. Berle
and Means were to survey and dissect. And to combat
absentee ownership, Congress passed the Securities Ex-
change Act under which better methods of proxy vot-
ing were laid down. Yet here, as elsewhere, divide and
rule is a secret of power. Not that this has been a strat-
agem peculiar to capitalism; but organizationally the
corporate revolution is, for all brands of democracy, a
portent. Limited liability in personal obligation may
have facilitated the financial development of corporate
capitalism. Limited liability in moral obligation per-
meates every sort of large-scale endeavor.

Dramatic in effect but undramatic as it unfolds, the
capitalist revolution has been masked recently by the
decorous behavior in the welfare State of corporate cap-
italism itself. Schemes of its own furnish more and
more security, social and psychological, for its employ-
ees; nowadays it is less apt than large-scale labor to
outrage public sensibilities. The fundamentals of the
situation are unaltered and familiar the dispersion of
stock and its dependence on market fluctuations; the de-
tachment between owners and the physical plant; the
passivity of stockholders each with holdings as diverse
as they are fractional; the ingenious devices of law
through which a nonowning minority acquires control.
For legality may underpin what is, in equity, unjust.
Yet all that would be less baffling if the principle by

The Pre-emption of Power * 63

which it is governed were clear. When, however, there
is neither majority will nor financial stake the exercise
of power over huge segments of the economy becomes^
by every liberal concept of democratic order and every
conservative one of private property, inexplicable. Or-
ganized anarchy is the upshot. And corporate capitalism
as its first exemplar may even pass the pragmatic test
with flying colors it works. Yet so far as an institu-
tional pattern is thus set for the multifarious activities
of a large-scale society, the question is not that it works
but how.

If the corporate revolution results in legalized irre-
sponsibility, this manifests itself in the authority en-
joyed by directors who with or without proxies rep-
resent so much less than they control. And then under
them is a body of executives whose day-to-day adminis-
trative transactions predetermine long-range policy; who
can thereby gather the reins into their own hands. More
and more, however, it is from top management that
the Board fills its ranks. Ingrown, recruited with care,
self-perpetuating, corporate oligarchies, directorial and
managerial, exert, at any rate, an irresponsible power
over employees which, save fay the faintest kind of
apostolic succession, they themselves received from no
responsible power. And in their attitude toward stock-
holders, the nominal owners and their own ostensible
employers, the corporate power they appropriate is no
less irresponsible. For they, rather than spokesmen for
stockholders, decide what amount of earnings it is in
the interest of control to allot. Nor is it deemed odd
when they, the reigning bureaucrats of corporate cap-
italism, are numbered among those who condemn gov-
ernment interventions through which democracy might
be bureaucratized.

Credit for profits made is taken by the dominant ex-

64 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

ecutive group, and so it is not considered high-handed
of them to dispose of these as they see fit. Whether any
other directorial assortment might have done as well
must, of couse, be utter conjecture. They may take ad-
vantage of their fortuitous power; they would never
have obtained this without the capital risks which in-
vestors undertook at the outset. More illuminating is
the occasional glimpse of a clash between stockholders
and the self-appointed custodians of their property. For
when one flares up the directors, as they point to the
prosperity of the enterprise, can often wear an air of
injured innocence. So also among benevolent despots
the yardstick was, after all, not the good accomplished
but whose interest in a showdown came first.

The possessing class are thus in the throes of a self-
dispossessing process which they themselves cannot ar-
rest. John Locke and Thomas Jefferson had concepts of
property which the Industrial Revolution knocked into
a cocked hat. But when nineteenth-century capitalism
put property rights above human rights, it too had to
be curbed. And whenever socialist legislation so curbs
property rights that human rights are curtailed, the
damage to the community will also be heavy. But when
a corporate revolution undoes both property and hu-
man rights that is, personal rights within the sphere of
property it moves in its totalitarian overtones from the
revolutionary to the counter-revolutionary, from the re-
valuation to the devaluation of man. Materially such an
economy may still offer substantial benefits. As long as
it leaves room for varied types of enterprise, it is more
flexible than a wholly socialized one. And while in each
company the investor does not choose who is to manage
his property, he may at least still choose between com-
panies. Yet profits for stockholders become less and less
the objective of corporate capitalism. They are that by-

The Pre-emption of Power 65

product of solvency through which an enterprise is kept
going and expands a responsible means of which one
major end, the power of directors and management, is
an irresponsible one.

Other by-products are not to be minimized. When
it facilitates higher living standards, mass employment,
or the distribution of stock to a wider public, corporate
capitalism is democratically inclined. But large-scale or-
ganization hinges in any mass society, and irrespective of
ideology, on mass employment. So, too, with a wider
dissemination of stock to parcel it out in numerous
small lots among a larger number of owners is to leave
the latter as unorganized as ever and merely to aug-
ment further the organizational power of those in con-
trol. And that is still so when pension and insurance
funds, foundations, endowments, open-end investment
trusts, purchase big blocks of stock. For these, whether
managed more responsibly or less, are subject them-
selves in their own investments to the same disabilities
as the general public. Over the centuries the growth of
democracy and the rise of capitalism were two facets of
a single liberal trend. But now what might have been
a democracy of owners is, for two-thirds of American
industrial wealth, based neither on private ownership
nor democratic representation as these two terms are
normally understood.

The figures at which corporate executives set their
own salaries might, in this context, seem to be a com-
paratively minor element. But they are organizationally
symbolic. The larger and more intricate corporate cap-
italism becomes, the more it needs the best ability it
can muster. Yet its intricacy and size would impede the
discovery or training of such ability even if the search
for it were, beyond a certain competitive stage, genu-
inely disinterested. Opportunity cannot, when executive

66 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

groups put their own interests first, be as open as they
say it is. Theoretically, remuneration should be a mor-
ally well-grounded personal incentive; in fact, it gen-
erally indicates no due economic reward but corporate
control. Nor is this impression lessened by the immense
noncontributory pensions accorded executives and tax-
preferred options for the purchase of stock.

In affairs of State posts of infinitely greater impor-
tance command nothing like the same recompense.
Democratic governments err, of course, in the opposite
direction; their chief servants are ludicrously underpaid.
But the disparity between ministerial and administra-
tive salaries in government, and executive salaries in
corporate business, is nevertheless a token of the differ-
ence between responsible and irresponsible power. The
public resented profiteering when most enterprise was
still under the personal direction of its owners. Yet
where ownership is divorced from control and stock is
widely distributed, the burden of excessive salaries is
not the only one that corporate executives impose;
they also juggle expense accounts to provide themselves
with private luxuries reminiscent of an older capital-
ism. The latter, however, was more intelligible as a
system as long as there could be a relatively free ascent
up the ladder of opportunity. But when management
corporations kick the upper rungs out of that ladder, in-
itiative dwindles and capitalism spurns its liberal ori-
gins.

Usually the decline of competition is regarded as the
most conspicuous sign of this. But in a large-scale so-
ciety the attention paid to the conflict of corporate versus
individual business must not obscure the struggle for
freedom in other collectivized areas of organized magni-
tude. Corporate capitalism under the Sherman and Clay-
ton anti-trust laws is, moreover, far from being a total

The Pre-emption of Power 67

monopoly; small and middle-sized undertakings other
than family farms do still have considerable leeway.
The tendency is, however, toward competition between
the new products of a few big established enterprises
rather than that of many firms in an open marketplace.
Only bigness, as David Lilienthal points out, can afford
the research and distribution facilities to develop these
and put them across; yet when lesser businesses pros-
per chiefly as supply auxiliaries or service dependents
of giant technological feudatories they exist not by a
public right but on private sufferance. The result may
be more varied goods, cheaper products, a higher mass
standard of living. But it is also to sugar-coat that para-
dox of organized magnitude in which there is an indirect
loss of competitive freedom as well as direct social gain.
Such, however, are the defensive advantages of big-
ness that American capitalists go unchallenged when
they exhort their European counterparts to abandon re-
strictive practices and, in a free semicontinental mass
market, let fresh energies flow. Their counsels of em-
ulation, nevertheless, not only overlook historic dissimil-
itudes; what these also ignore is that, as between the
two main sectors of the Atlantic world, economic differ-
ences are those of degree rather than kind. For
legalized irresponsibility does not merely distort prop-
erty rights. It subordinates to itself vast segments of
the public domain. Walton Hamilton has shown how
government by commission and administrative agency,
how rate fixing in rail and air transport, how public
franchise and patent license, constitute an imperium in
imperio; a corporate estate within a democracy, upheld
by the courts, whose liberal principles it contravenes.
Not that this is racketeering; it has or gets the law on
its side. Yet racketeering is after all only doing without
law what legalized irresponsibility does with and

68 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

through it: the employment by private interests of or-
ganizational prerogatives which do not belong to them
but upon which they have procured a prior lien.

And so the twentieth century witnesses a precapital-
ist concept of the organic revived in an ultracapitalist
dress. For as expounded by Peter Drucker the enter-
prise is a goal in itself; it embodies a corporate value
which omnipotently transcends the individualistic val-
ues from which capitalism sprang. Thereby, too, its con-
trolling beneficiaries can temper the realities of irre-
sponsible power with a collectivized romanticism their
rationale being one of self-elected trustees who work
more for the common good than their own. And that
they do render a service is indubitable. They are no so-
cial parasites, no lilies of the field who toil not neither
do they spin. Spin they do and, ultimately, in a moral
void. For the authority they exert is derived from oth-
ers but is accountable to nobody. Success as the justifi-
cation of their power is the old Machiavellian philoso-
phy reasserted in a new organizational garb.

Not that corporate capitalism has an absolute author-
ity to exert. But neither is its mandate a democratic
one. Monopoly in a free society is seldom complete;
oligopoly, its usual guise, is when a few rather than one
dominate the market. For within it there may be coun-
tervailing power a term adapted by J. K. Galbraith
from the study of world politics: large-scale organiza-
tion of one sort calling into existence, as between cap-
ital and labor or buyers and sellers, another. Nor are
there only outer regulative sanctions which the general
public, as voters and consumers, might also impose
through government and across the counter; the inner
limits of corporate efficiency furnish brakes upon ca-
price. Yet of these two monitors, the inner and the
outer, the inner one is indirect. And in any authority,

The Pre-emption of Power * 69

as direct inner deterrents shrink, an interior margin of
moral irresponsibility develops. Corporate capitalism
may be perfectly legal. But it does not have that legiti-
macy of power through which old-fashioned autocracy
governed. Elsewhere in a large-scale democracy legiti-
mate power itself will often be exercised in an irre-
sponsible manner. The prerequisite of responsible power
is nevertheless that it be legitimate.

Socialist critics, Marxian and non-Marxian, visualized
social justice as a shift from the private to the public
ownership of industry. No economy, capitalist, social-
ist, or communist, will correspond with fidelity to its
ideological blueprints. And now what matters in both
Communist Russia and the corporate sector of Amer-
ican capitalism is not ownership at all that of the peo-
ple in general or of proprietors in particular but who
acquires control. It is therefore of the utmost signifi-
cance that these two antipodal ideologies, though antag-
onistic in everything else, operate through the mass
technology of large-scale organization. The control of
irresponsible by responsible power is, in the province
of government, the mission of modern democracy. But
where, in a mass society, the democratic State consists
of bigger and bigger aggregations of semi-autonomous
power, it does not suffice that they be outwardly law-
abiding. For the hiatus between ownership and control
which corporate capitalism exemplifies is, as an admin-
istrative dichotomy, characteristic of all organized mag-
nitude. The twentieth-century corporation may be its
prototype. But wherever there is large-scale organization,
there is a split between responsibility and control,

One caveat may be entered. In nonprofit enterprise,
when administrative authority is assigned through the
normal procedures of representative democracy, it is no
usurpation of power. From national government to lo~

70 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

cal utilities, from the TVA to the Atomic Energy
Commission and the Armed Services, from research
foundations to schools, colleges, universities, hospitals,
museums, churches, voluntary movements, the creden-
tials of organizational man are mostly legitimate ones.
But in corporate capitalism ownership is not decisive
for control. Is the mere legitimacy of institutional
power elsewhere much more likely to prevent its abuse?
For the corporate revolution is but one aspect of what,
in Kenneth Boulding's phrase, is a wider organizational
revolution. As an investor, man might prosper and yet
be devalued. So also for the citizen, an increase in col-
lective well-being may be accompanied by a decrease in
individual rights.

Large-scale organization, by revamping the social or-
der, transforms the instrumentalities, economic and po-
litical, of liberty itself. Soviet Russia was but the last
to discover that, despite its doctrine of the classless so-
ciety, a whole new middle class is required for mass
production and mass exchange. But neither is the mid-
dle class, in the large-scale society of the West, what it
once was. The independent entrepreneur, whether a
substantial industrialist or a small tradesman, may still
be very much in evidence. As typical of the bourgeois
now is an employee making his sedulous way up the
salaried echelons of some ramified, co-optive hierarchy.
For against mammoth agglomerations it is not only
more difficult for the individual to compete with a busi-
ness of his own low interest rates and high taxation
also reduce the savings which once furnished private
capital. Enterprise there may still be, but it tends to be
within an administration already established. Similar or-
ganizational motivations develop, moreover, among the
officialdom of profit and nonprofit undertakings alike.

The Pre-emption of Power 71

And where formerly men of initiative could promote
themselves they must, today, be promoted.

Human energies in a large-scale society are deflected
into organizational grooves. Men are thus brought to-
gether; they are also set apart. For, in factory and office,
technology erects occupational barriers. The division
of labor may thereby result in classes insuperably redi-
vided and again subdivided from each other; in an
abridgement of opportunity which falsifies one of the
chief postulates of democracy itself. So, too, there is
danger that within each such occupational compartment
a preclusive power may be exercised irresponsibly by
insiders against outsiders, or by one group of insiders
against another, for control. And as organizational man
thus pursues his interests he will be found in every
class and caste of the economy wherever in fact
there are organized units of common action. Liberal
hypotheses may be eclipsed when he lays his hands on
top corporate power. But these are subject, on every
plane of large-scale democracy, to the organizational
vicissitudes of legalized irresponsibility.

The modern welfare State is inconceivable without
the statutory foundation that organized labor has gained
for itself. But upon it, as upon capitalist enterprise, the
effect of large-scale techniques is also a far-reaching one.
The internal governance of trade unions may now be
hierarchical; organizationally they, too, further stiffen
up the very social order which they themselves render
less unjust. Mass unemployment involves the entire econ-
omy; but to alleviate anxiety about jobs, and to prevent
needless dismissals or harsh discipline, collective bar-
gaining has done much. Some branches of corporate
industry have, moreover, added their own network of
social security severance pay, retirement pensions, in-

72 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

surance and sickness schemes. And as benefits from these
accrue, workers hesitate to waste them. They therefore
fear transference to other, even better, jobs.

Nor is such a trend confined to a more fortunate sec-
tion of employees. To seek contentment in their sta-
tion, once basic organizational safeguards have been
achieved, is a widespread tendency among the rank and
file. The mobility of labor, like fluidity between classes,
is one of the hallmarks of a free economy. But workers
themselves may so exercise their collective power as to
induce social immobility. Stakhanovism is the admission
of Communist ideologues that without differential re-
wards the lower tiers of the Soviet economy will slow
down. No democracy could approve, except in grave
war emergencies, of any speed-up so intense. Yet work-
ers frown upon more relaxed ones, too: upon piece-
work, upon most incentives for a personal effort beyond
collective minimum wage guarantees.

Jobs may thereby be prolonged, hazards to health and
safety avoided. But here, as with labor's traditional an-
tagonism to technological change, is no momentary ap-
prehension which might later be allayed. An issue is
raised that runs deep throughout large-scale society.
When the wages of the less skilled or less diligent are
leveled up to those of the more skilled or more dili-
gent, it is the latter who get less and the former who
get more than their deserts. Not that trade unionism
is alone in erasing differentials. But through it a good
deal comes organizationally out into the open that, even
when more flagrant, is elsewhere half concealed. For
large-scale power, in making all uniform, can drag down
as well as lift up. The self-interest of the class or group
may be to stabilize and consolidate; that of the vigor-
ous to push ahead. Yet often, too, organizational man
constitutes a third category one in which the collec-

The Pre-emption of Power 73

tive inertia of the organized mass is exploited to ad-
Vance purposes of his own. And if the rights of others
are thereby overridden, the revaluation of man may in
that context also be undone.

The more sheltered the pool, the more stagnant its
waters. Large-scale organization does not call for the
same personal attributes as the smaller competitive en-
terprise. The latter needs employees who are always on
their toes; the former, more often than not, would be
vexed by them. A corporate business may be protected
through its cartel agreements from an ever-bracing
threat of bankruptcy. And once the annual budget of a
nonprofit institution that of a government department,
for example has been passed, one of its worries will
be to ensure expenditure for all items and ensure it
within the period specified. For where power is collec-
tivized, the mores themselves become organizational.

So, too, the conflict between competition and mo-
nopoly, which bigness produces, is social as well as eco-
nomic. At all events the organized individual is not as
free as he would seem to be if within, as between, or-
ganized entities competition is unfair. Deadwood, under
the competitive conditions of nineteenth-century indi-
vidualism, had to be pruned away remorselessly. Now
the structure of organization invites deadwood itself to
block fresh growth. Competition, for the individual as
for the enterprise, thus remains. But it supplants what,
in the broadest sense of the term, might be regarded
as market criteria by organizational ones. Vocationally,
at least, the freedom of the individual revolves around
an interior rather than an exterior center of gravity at a
time when the stakes of interior power have also been
enlarged.

The struggle between the closed and open shop re-
flects a wider struggle throughout large-scale society

74 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

for security through organization to further collec-
tive rights without damaging those of the individual.
Yet in craft unions, by keeping low the number of ap-
prentices, by excluding new members or expelling old
ones, a self-constituted aggregation can quite legally de-
cide rudimentary freedoms for others: the sort of job
they may have, who might or might not employ them,
the kind of life they are consequently to lead. And that
law confers organizational power to circumvent the law
itself is again demonstrated by the plight of racial and
religious minorities. Even where fair employment prac-
tices are stipulated, industrial and craft unions have,
like public and private enterprise, been reluctant to
adopt them. But favoritism alone could render any
large-scale system inflexible. Profit-sharing schemes and
nontransferable pension rights do not only bind person-
nel to their present jobs; any newly employed who may
reap benefits from them are selected, as far as possible,
from among relations and friends. Organizational priv-
ilege would thus deny to the outsider opportunities
upon which nonowning insiders had themselves by hap-
penstance stumbled.

Nor does organized self-government only concern ac-
cess to the industrial machine. In the theater, among
musicians, none may defy it; it enables liberal profes-
sions to raise standards and yet put their own selfish
group interests first. From corporate executive circles to
the trade union itself, a free society has been transformed
into a latter-day guild system, rigid, interwoven, tightly
knit. And the organizational paradox of large-scale
power is thus made clear. Being monopolistic it is prone,
within as without, to grave misuse. Only through its
techniques, as enforced by law, can a mass democracy
nevertheless operate.

Organized magnitude will subject even responsible

The Pre-emption of Power * 75

power to legalized irresponsibility. Internally, for ex-
ample, large-scale labor may still be more democrat-
ically controlled than large-scale capital. Yet it might
take common action which is the reverse of democratic.
For trade unions could all jurisdictional disputes be
settled can only represent their own membership. At
best their representation of society is therefore a frag-
mentary one; they have no mandate for it ever law-
fully to be anything else. And that is how, when the
whole of society is temporarily crippled or permanently
weighed down by their demands, they may, in the
assertion of a just right, wreak injustice.

The right to strike, as the ultima ratio of collective
bargaining, is a democratic freedom. Employees can ex-
ercise through it an organized power to redress inequal-
ities between themselves and the organized power of
each employer. The latter, however, may not be a mo-
nopolist. In the sphere of organized pressure, trade un-
ions, alone or with others, must strive for monopoly as
the condition of their utility. Recognizing this, more-
over, large-scale industry often gives them a voice in the
management of production itself. And while that may
not be in accord with Marxian theory, it is not neces-
sarily democratic in principle either. For to neither
party is the public weal a primary consideration.

Lest they be crushed between these two big mill-
stones, smaller entrepreneurs have, for the sake of fair
trade, also had to organize themselves. So, too, in the
farming community there are price-fixing and scarcity
devices under governmental auspices. The inefficient as
well as the efficient may thus be bolstered up; that,
however, is one upshot of large-scale organization, with
or without the benison of law, everywhere. But farmers
unlike labor in its particular sphere or corporate cap-
ital with its patent and other monopolies cannot debar

76 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

anyone from the pursuit of agriculture; and if they
were to withhold from the market, for long rather than
short periods, the products of their toil, they would be
ruining their own capital investment. When agrarian or
urban entrepreneurs organize, they have a material in-
terest to preserve. Like organized professions and voca-
tions, large-scale labor has only its skill and services to
sell.

Workers are, nevertheless, consumers as well as pro-
ducers. They will therefore think twice before letting
the strike weapon wreck the economy. They may pause,
too, over fellow trade unionists such as those, for in-
stance, of the building trades who make housing so
costly that, where subsidized projects do not suffice,
wage earners themselves cannot be properly housed. As
long, however, as the balance of advantage lies with
them as organized workers rather than as unorganized
consumers, what they lose on the swings they gain in
the roundabouts. Nor is it merely with some or against
others that men in a large-scale society are organized.
For it renders the humanly impossible, that they might
even be organized against themselves, technically pos-
sible.

This, at any rate, seems to happen when individuals
cannot, as independent personalities, square the unor-
ganizable in their beings with whatever has collectively
to be organized. For modern functional groups those
of business, labor, and agriculture, of government and
other nonprofit enterprise might, in a large-scale so-
ciety, hold each other at bay; as between giant institu-
tions, they can thus maintain for themselves an equilib-
rium of freedom. But the liberty of the individual is
not assured unless he has a fit place in one of these
groups. He cannot stand up to any of them as an equal;

The Pre-emption of Power * 77

only within one of them can he, as a rule, stand at all
On what terms will they make room for him?

In a cartelized economy it is man, above all, who
may be cartelized. So far as organized magnitude en-
larges his opportunities he is revalued; but when these
are curbed irresponsibly his freedom will shrivel up.
And more than one liberal premise of the modern dem-
ocratic State may thereby be impaired. For it alone
among competing groups is supposed, in the general in-
terest, to exert coercive power. In fact, when autono-
mous functional groups wield over the citizen the power
of economic life or death, their coercive powers, allo-
cated by law or shouldered voluntarily, are more real
to him than those exercised by the State itself. And
while the latter may, through legislation and adminis-
trative decrees, narrow the group's own range of dis-
cretionary power, a partial control will scarcely guaran-
tee impartial justice. Between the immobile State of
totalitarian organization and the social inelasticities of
the West, the differences are still profound. But they
will be so less and less if, while resisting tyranny ideo-
logically, we do not also foil subjugation through tech-
niques.

In public affairs representative democracy arranges
for responsible power to control irresponsible power.
Yet its own governmental processes are themselves hin-
dered by organizational phenomena. And these are
more noteworthy in the United States because she is
technologically so pre-eminent. Nor was her political
system, which antedates mass industrialism, as well de-
signed for democratic control as its enthusiasts aver.
Responsibility being dispersed under an eighteenth-
century division of powers, it can also be shirked. In a
parliamentary system, unitary powers obviate deadlock

78 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

between Legislature and Executive; where powers are
sundered, there may be more check than balance. And
it is this structural defect which has quickened the pro-
pensity of Congress to investigate, through committees
of inquiry, matters which might otherwise be sifted in
the continuous give-and-take of full parliamentary de-
liberation. Irresponsibility in the probe of abuses is the
outcome of a political system which, in the relationship
of Legislature and Executive, is itself unresponsible.

Constitutional procedures may be an institutional
mold through which the politics of the present are pre-
determined by the ideas of the past. But as the old
shapes the new, the new reshapes the old. Operational
differences between large-scale governments and de-
spite national variations are thereby effaced; in an age
when public administration is so all-important, these
resemble each other administratively more and more.
Through lobbies, influence, or the necessities of the case,
organizational monopolies might, in a large-scale society,
be underwritten by law. But even where it is intended
that government itself should keep the upper hand, the
legislature is unable to spell out a grant of power in
every minute detail. Authorizing more than it could
oversee, it cannot control all that it authorizes. Legalized
irresponsibility begins at the fount of legality.

It is, however, not unlimited. A specific authoriza-
tion may confer wide latitude; within every public
administration there is a tug-of-war between organiza-
tional interests and inwrought constitutional controls.
Where power is legitimate, as among government serv-
ants, it can still be mishandled. But such political re-
sponsibility as legitimizes even the marginal power of a
cabinet minister or high official is what corporate man-
agement lacks. Junior permanent officials, moreover,
have, as in ancient China, to pass civil service examina-

The Pre-emption of Power 79

tions. Many candidates are thus selected on grounds of
:apacity alone. Nevertheless, if they seek advancement,
it is sometimes still helpful, once the threshold of the
:ivil service has been crossed, to belong to the right
Dolitical party.

Then, too, every administration can, in recruiting
Dersonnel, interpret set rules to suit its own conven-
.ence. Organizational patronage might thus supplement
5r wholly supplant party patronage. And even if no
rtires are pulled, even if rules of appointment are not
;uspended during emergencies of war or peace, a public
Bureaucracy will still contrive to perpetuate itself in its
)wn image. For seniority may be invoked to block the
promotion of the able; conversely, it might be flouted
vhen some less qualified favorite is preferred. Not that
jovernment bureaucracies differ in this respect from
hose of other large-scale institutions. But the latter can
>e a law unto themselves: more hidebound when it
>leases them or less circumscribed than government
mreaucracies by civil service rules. The stamp of large-
cale techniques is, however, everywhere the same. Bu-
eaucracy, inside or outside government, can exert a col-
ective power which is not its own for purposes which
rganizationally are.

The organizational revolution is, then, more deep-
eated than any managerial one. The latter would pre-
uppose a centralization of control. In Soviet Russia, as
n Nazi Germany, there has been such a centralization.
r et in Communist countries the new managerial class
.oes not control the State; the State, under a camarilla
f party chieftains, controls it. Still less in large-scale
emocracies does organizational man, when he has a
ollectivized power to manipulate, succeed in manipu-
iting the entire State; he is harder to control, but so is
:. For organized anarchy denotes a free society in

80 * T H AMERICAN ANARCHY

which, as controls are multiplied, there is more need
and less chance of controlling them responsibly.

A democracy, without cooperation among its own cit-
izens, can neither make laws nor enforce them. A see-
saw between the cooperative and the competitive is in
fact that which keeps it free. The competitive, in the
age of classical liberalism, was overdone; modern lib-
eralism sought to bring the two into some juster rela-
tionship. But a large-scale order alters both the com-
petitive and the cooperative, or, rather, from it both
re-emerge in fresh proportions. A world of science and
technology rests upon the open mind that faculty of
the trained intelligence through which men school them-
selves into an attitude of objectivity. Common processes
elicit a common approach in which an objective temper
is common to all. The spirit, however, in which men
work together may be less objective than the methods
employed; though the common task is an impersonal
one, they will not treat their own interests impersonally.
These may evoke a collective defense against a threat,
real or imagined, from outside the organization. Yet
what is thus protected in common might itself simul-
taneously be the prize of an interior contest for power.
Ambition, jealousy, prejudice, the animosity of rivals
are neither banished nor attenuated by technical dis-
ciplines and cooperative exigencies. In any organized so-
cial mechanism, as the personal subdues the impersonal
and harnesses it to its private will, the lesser power ac-
quires the greater. For the contemporary mind is di-
vided; within it the grandly objective and the crassly
subjective dwell side by side. The most cooperative of
milieus will thus contain tensions as competitive as they
are disguised. And the higher they crop out on the or-
ganizational pyramid, the more social power they in-
volve.

The Pre-emption of Power 81

Men will, of course, sink their own differences so as
to compete in common against other groups or under-
takings. And they do the same when the collective
power of the entrenched is mobilized against third
parties who seek entry or opportunity. The competitive
is still uppermost as any one person or faction obtains
inner control of a wider segment of institutional power,
public or private. For large-scale organization super-
sedes the individualistic by the cooperative only to ex-
tend to some individuals or to smaller groups within
bigger ones an unearned increment of organizational
power.

North America has thus also been having its social
revolution. But it is not the one envisaged by many rad-
ical thinkers. For within democracies a change in the
control of property is no assurance of democratic con-
trol. The nineteenth-century entrepreneur had to carve
out his own authority for himself; at his buccaneering
worst a still nascent technology would delimit the scope
of his ventures. And the most adventitious power may
be redeemed when it is a palpable one that can be
identified, defined, assayed, and measured. As for the
heirs of the old-time capitalist, estate and gift taxes
pare down economic privilege bequeathed through any
mere accident of birth. Today, however, organizational
privilege connotes a species of pre-empted power with
little of such traditional ballast. For it is nepotism with-
out inheritance, a system of connections without the
nexus of responsibility.

There is accident here, nonetheless, and design also
through which the fortuitous can be consolidated. An
initial lodgment in a going concern or an existing in-
stitution may derive from either accident or design;
the competitive achievement of interior control is sel-
dom an accident. And while the incidence of privilege

SO'THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

which, as controls are multiplied, there is more need
and less chance of controlling them responsibly.

A democracy, without cooperation among its own cit-
i/ens, can neither make laws nor enforce them. A see-
saw between the cooperative and the competitive is in
fact that which keeps it free. The competitive, in the
age of classical liberalism, was overdone; modern lib-
eralism sought to bring the two into some juster rela-
tionship. But a large-scale order alters both the com-
petitive and the cooperative, or, rather, from it both
re-emerge in fresh proportions. A world of science and
technology rests upon the open mind that faculty of
the trained intelligence through w r hich men school them-
selves into an attitude of objectivity. Common processes
elicit a common approach in which an objective temper
is common to all. The spirit, however, in which men
work together may be less objective than the methods
employed; though the common task is an impersonal
one, they will not treat their own interests impersonally.
These may evoke a collective defense against a threat,
real or imagined, from outside the organization. Yet
what is thus protected in common might itself simul-
taneously be the prize of an interior contest for power.
Ambition, jealousy, prejudice, the animosity of rivals
are neither banished nor attenuated by technical dis-
ciplines and cooperative exigencies. In any organized so-
cial mechanism, as the personal subdues the impersonal
and harnesses it to its private will, the lesser power ac-
quires the greater. For the contemporary mind is di-
vided; within it the grandly objective and the crassly
subjective dw T ell side by side, The most cooperative of
milieus will thus contain tensions as competitive as they
are disguised. And the higher they crop out on the or-
ganizational pyramid, the more social power they in-
volve.

The Pre-emption of Power 81

Men will, of course, sink their own differences so as
to compete in common against other groups or under-
takings. And they do the same when the collective
power o the entrenched is mobilized against third
parties who seek entry or opportunity. The competitive
is still uppermost as any one person or faction obtains
inner control of a wider segment of institutional power,
public or private. For large-scale organization super-
sedes the individualistic by the cooperative only to ex-
tend to some individuals or to smaller groups within
bigger ones an unearned increment of organizational
power.

North America has thus also been having its social
revolution. But it is not the one envisaged by many rad-
ical thinkers. For within democracies a change in the
control of property is no assurance of democratic con-
trol. The nineteenth-century entrepreneur had to carve
out his own authority for himself; at his buccaneering
worst a still nascent technology would delimit the scope
of his ventures. And the most adventitious power may
be redeemed when it is a palpable one that can be
identified, defined, assayed, and measured. As for the
heirs of the old-time capitalist, estate and gift taxes
pare down economic privilege bequeathed through any
mere accident of birth. Today, however, organizational
privilege connotes a species of pre-empted power with
little of such traditional ballast. For it is nepotism with-
out inheritance, a system of connections without the
nexus of responsibility.

There is accident here, nonetheless, and design also
through which the fortuitous can be consolidated. An
initial lodgment in a going concern or an existing in-
stitution may derive from either accident or design;
the competitive achievement of interior control is sel-
dom an accident. And while the incidence of privilege

82 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

is modified thereby, privilege still persists. For upon
\\hat nthcrs have started it erects for itself a legalized
ouneiNhip ot nonrmning privilege. And if this is
empire-building, it is the organi/ational imperialism of
those for uhom actual occupancy is the decisive occupa-
tional warrant.

The possession of power in a large-scale society is
tints not confined to the power of possessions. Organ-
i/ed magnitude separates these two from each other;
upon the positions created for those who move in and
take over, the social order of modern America con-
fers an honor which formerly went to men of quite
another caliber. Prestige, as has been discerned by
C. Wright Mills and other recent critics, is commen-
surate with organizational rank. To acquire that rank
is a supreme objective; and when an individual can
find no fit place within a large-scale enterprise or in-
stitutional group, he becomes virtually an economic out-
cast. To obtain a toehold is, however, but to surmount
the first such hazard. The individual will not go far if
he falls afoul of persons or groups who have organ-
izationally pre-empted power. Nor can he be confident
afterwards of getting a better opportunity elsewhere.
Across the democratic promise of an open society shad-
ows cast organizationally will be long ones. As centers
of authority expand in size they shrink comparatively in
numbers. And above a certain level there may be to-
ward personnel a freemasonry of the ascendant which
ensures that any who offend in one quarter are black-
listed in most.

Institutional taboos are thus not only coterminous
with the enlarged scale of social organization. So also are
the pains and penalties visited upon any who have the
audacity to violate them. For the twentieth century,
which exhibits the paradox of poverty amid plenty, dis-

The Pre-emption of Power 83

plays another of the same genre: the more regulations
are devised justly to redistribute power within the State,
the more is the lone individual at the mercy of or-
ganized forces which he individually cannot withstand.

A society to which individualism gave birth is one in
which individualism dares less and less to declare itself.
Annies, with their hierarchical codes of drill and obedi-
ence, demonstrate how any tightly organized collective
movement will regiment and make all conform. Bigness,
though it boasts of looking in its rising executives for
initiative and imagination, puts a premium upon qual-
ities that cancel these out. Technical aptitudes they
should have; spiritually, if he knows on which side his
bread is buttered, organizational man must devalue
himself. And this is so even when the common purpose
to be executed is an altruistic one, when the majority
of its executants are themselves altruistic. Always there
will be some who seek to master any association, pri-
vate or public, in the interests of one or a few. In the
most nonpolitical of aggregations there is inevitably a
complaint of "politics." And usually it is a well-founded
one. For as large-scale organization concentrates power,
so is inaugurated the struggle to capture it. So also in-
dividuals who are above or beyond that battle may,
even though good at their jobs, be passed over. For in
a stratified society each must back and be backed by his
own inner organizational nucleus a group, a coterie, a
clique. In every large-scale enterprise whether it be a
business corporation, a trade union, a government de-
partment, any institutional staif the unaffiliated is the
most vulnerable of men.

A mass society which metes out justice on a larger
scale than ever before can, through its own remedial
techniques, do injustice. Not that organizational man
is at heart a man of ill-will. Behind the system's co-

#4 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

operative facade he is as kindly as its underlying com-
petitiveness permits; and the rapier, where he and his
to-\tnikm toil cheek-by-jowl, is, as a weapon, handier
than the bludgeon. The prospect of survival or success
within a tolletthity, big or small, is what must govern
his moods, his manners, his conformities the degree to
which he is, or is not, morally responsible. And the ma-
terial security it provides can accentuate his psychic in-
security. For often it is his own organizational future
that he is afraid to jeopardize when, in the presence of
injustice done another, he holds his tongue. Within as
between coteries there will be feuds, intramural in-
trigues. A pre-emptive system enables an inside group
of noncompetitors, or a cluster of competitors who can
in the mutual interest yet collaborate, to summon com-
petitively against outsiders a common organizational
power.

And where the closed mind thereby gets control, the
damage inflicted upon wider liberties may be substan-
tial. When buried away in small or isolated localities,
the parochial mentality, with its fears, hatreds, and sus-
picions, was relatively disorganized. Today, through or-
ganizational techniques, it can be enlarged to a pro-
vincialism which is militant, delocalized, and highly
extensible. And when this is cast, unobstructed, on a
bigger screen there is in the main no light and shade
but only those deceptive monochromes which serve
half-truths better than truth itself.

A standardized ethos would in any case have been the
result of a large-scale environment based on standard-
ized techniques, one which raises the standard of life
through the standardization of its units and products.
Though a tool for the physical revaluation of man, the
machine is devoid of human values. Those therefore
who attend it or are attuned to it, those who organiza-

The Pre-emption of Power 85

tionally fit into a social pattern at once so repetitive
and yet so lifeless, must themselves have less respect for
the human personality. The machine may liberate the
mass from the ancient thralldoms of manual labor; mo-
notony for workers can, in both office and factory, be
reduced by refinements and further invention. But it is
far from evident that a higher, widespread, material
standard generates a less commonplace one. For the
cultural vapidity of our time is not merely a problem
of how leisure shall be used and for many leisure still
is scant. It is also one of the epoch's wholesale adjust-
ment to the uniform matter-of-factness of large-scale
technology. Democratically a man may consider himself
as good as his neighbor and believe in letting the best
man win. But in the equalitarian atmosphere of a
mechanized society, the best man is he who is the same
as all other men.

The institutional attachments of organizational man
are too artificial for him to imbue them with the senti-
ments or solidarity of the clan. Fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany tried to fuse the large-scale with the primi-
tive; all that their frenzies revealed was that the deval-
uation of man can thereby be organized more thor-
oughly than his revaluation. Yet in free societies, too,
he is as gregarious an animal as ever. And as their
ways of life are standardized, what organizational man
does is to standardize even the natural expression of his
social instincts. Quite innocently and without ulterior
motive, it is proper that he join service clubs and play
games with others. In so doing, however, he often
wishes to prove that he is no organizational misfit but
a regular fellow: one of the boys who will never go
against the stream or march out of step. For to suit the
common mold may be the condition of his acceptance
by the group; the path to preferment is the beaten

86 T H E AMERICAN ANARCHY

path. And in a large-scale society a Philistinism such as
this may not only be a matter of habit or taste. So as
to bo favorably regarded, it is a competitive necessity
to ape and trim.

Nor is the conformist drift a question merely of
compliance or dissent on current public issues. Among
the politically minded it may come to that; freedom of
expression (restricted anyway, as will be seen, where
there is organized anarchy) cannot flourish when the
climate is adverse. But social conformity is, in a large-
scale culture, embedded deep. What engenders it is an
awe of authority that is strictly organizational; compul-
sions, more covert than overt, which enhance timidity
among the political and nonpolitical alike. Nor when
he asserts himself inexpediently is the group maverick,
the individual who lacks any organizational support of
his own, deemed a hero but a fool. For he who exposes
himself to its reprisals, society seldom forgives: to trou-
ble its conscience is to be the worst of all troublemak-
ers.

The wheel may thus go a full circle. The liberal
nineteenth-century ideal of unintimidated independence
has, in twentieth-century American democracy, been
yielding to organizational constraint. The alienation of
the modern individual, how he is socially uprooted,
might be deplored. More serious is the degree to which
in large-scale undertakings the like can employ organi-
zational power to deprive the unlike of rights which,
lest man be devalued, must be within the range of all.
Totalitarian policy has been to abolish or subordinate
to the absolute State every association in which dis-
sidents might combine to resist its fiat. But a plural
society riddled with an organizational exclusiveness,
whether formally legalized or informally observed, can-
not be a genuinely free one either. For democracy, pit-

The Pre-emption of Power 87

ting against total power a totality of human powers,
should aim at the all-inclusive. To be sovereign and
free, a people must have a system that, directly or in-
directly, is responsible to it. But when in a large-scale
democracy the loci of organizational responsibility are
themselves hard to fix, power within it will still be ir-
responsible.

CHAPTER

The Depreciation
of Merit

It is through the principle of merit alone that man's
revaluation can be carried out. And for him to be re-
warded justly, that is in consonance with the quality of
the talent expended or the effort made, each individual
has to have approximately the same chance as everyone
else to show what he can do. In the collectivized econo-
mies of the twentieth century, and whether the auspices
be capitalist or socialist, this entails for the many a
leveling up, for the few a leveling down. Yet for the
individualistic the problem of freedom is thereby still
far from solved. For, as large-scale organization flattens
out one set of social inequalities, another springs up.
St. Matthew's parable of the buried talents was a lesson
against sloth. A pastoral age might cast the inept into
outer darkness. But in a large-scale society, when the
quantitative throttles the qualitative, merit, as a dy-
namic of democracy, is itself depreciated.

The concept of a career open to talent may be
traced back to Plato. Yet he did not propound it as the

88

The Depreciation of Merit 89

core of a democratic system; nineteenth-century liberal-
ism could think of it in no other terms. And will the
large-scale societies of the twentieth century now sus-
tain that liberal doctrine? For they put Plato into re-
verse; as they look after that which is common to all,
they overlook that which is unique in some. From a
Nietszchean worship of the great man there has, of
course, been a revulsion; the modern vogue in biogra-
phy is one set not by Thomas Carlyle but by Lytton
Strachey. Yet Lewis Mumford, seeking to rehumanize
the conduct of life, reminds us what civilization owes to
a Solon, a Confucius, a Buddha, a Moses, a Jesus, a
Mahomet to the advent of a universal personality. For
history has been an amalgam of ideas at work, forces
in motion, and exceptional men through whom, at de-
cisive junctures, events do turn one way or the other.

In our own time the Mussolinis, the Hitlers, the Sta-
lins have, by their resemblance to conquerors of the
past, represented the obverse side of that medal. Yet
it is no less true that, without figures as outstanding as
a Churchill or a Roosevelt, our free world order might
also have been overcome. What, moreover, has been
significant about each of the totalitarian dictators is not
that he differs from the mass but that he has been so
authentically one of it. What, in war and peace, is as
significant about the best champions of democracy is
that the abler they are the less are their gifts merely
those of the people they lead. And whether the realm
be that of high politics or creative achievement in other
fields, this lesson is vital. A large-scale society that cuts
everyone down to size will be left with size and little
else.

Yet not all social scientists lament the depreciation
of merit. Stuart Chase approves of some who would
have men hew to the average. And then David Ries-

<)0 * T If E AMERICAN ANARCHY

man has depicted peer group norms which shape
American middle-class conformities: a nonindividual-
istic society worried about individual relationships;
one that is susceptible to novel influences in leisure pur-
suits and yet, in its preoccupation with these, is, at an
hour of world crisis, oddly self-enclosed. Less reassuring
is the somber portrait of white-collar stratification
painted by C. Wright Mills, And while this is the struc-
tural consequence of a large-scale system, it is more
than that. Big business would, for instance, comb col-
leges and universities for bright young recruits. Yet it
itself not only requires institutional conformity in its
own executives; it has the insolence to ask that wives
and families also toe the mark. More serious still is it,
though, when personnel directors, in both public and
private undertakings, boast of xveeding out lone wolves
at every level as if these, too, do not have lives to live.

A society of Tadpoles and Tapers may be the price of
large-scale cooperation. But it costs some more than
others and especially where it discriminates in the
sphere of age, race, and religion. For then there is noth-
ing its victims can do to avert a harsh, organizationally
predestined fate. The most chameleonic will be impo-
tent; and for robust independence the guerdon of defi-
ance is double jeopardy. In no zone are the liberaliz-
ing instrumentalities of organized magnitude employed
more illiberally.

A concentration of power centralizes control. Organ-
izationally, however, it also decentralizes its own con-
trols. The larger the organization is, and whether pub-
lic or private, the more must routine administration,
down successive layers of hieratic authority, be dele-
gated. Responsibility, in brief, is diffused and being dif-
fused can ultimately be evaded. Nor is this organiza-
tional escapism a question merely, as between the

The Depreciation of Merit 91

centripetal and the centrifugal, of large-scale mechanics;
among those concerned, it is one also of will. To let
George do it is the occupational disease of organiza-
tional man; for where it is prudent to conform, the
circumspect, the astute, the adroit will all alike play
safe. When power is limited, responsibility has a pre-
cise locus; as power expands, responsibility may be
shifted back and forth. Outwardly determinist, organ-
ized magnitude is yet inwardly indeterminate.

The problem of control is further complicated w T hen
one large-scale organization becomes officially depend-
ent upon another. State business undertakings in North
America have, more or less, been in the province of
transport, public utilities, or industrial defense. The net
of nationalization is spread by the British more widely.
And State profit-making enterprise in Britain is nomi-
nally as responsible to the British public as private cor-
porations to their own stockholders. Even less often than
the latter, however, can the electorate register a spe-
cific opinion about any particular one of their compa-
nies; when the government which supervises public cor-
porations is voted in or out of office the polls have
spoken on its stewardship of other, vaster issues. But
now organized welfare stretches out internationally; and
there, for the delegation of power, the supranational
tugs empirically at the administrative leash of the po-
litically sovereign. The combined boards of the wartime
Allies set precedents in functional cooperation. United
Nations agencies and activities, organs of European and
Atlantic unity, tread the same path. All would fortify a
free world order; and federalists of one international
stripe or another urge them to go further and faster.
But to keep power administratively responsible is diffi-
cult in a large-scale democracy. It will not be easier as
democratic processes are superimposed internationally.

tfj> * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

As an example of organizational ambiguity, so charac-
teristic a device of large-scale endeavor as the commit-
tee may be cited. Legislative committees and commit-
tees of inquiry as set up by representative bodies or in
conjunction with them do not, as a rule, have adminis-
trative or managerial duties to discharge. But where,
in public and private undertakings, a committee does
exercise such power the manner in which it proceeds
should be scrutinized. An appointed committee is, of
course, more likely to be hand-picked than an elected
one. And the goal it seeks is a common denominator
of agreement. It is likely therefore to be selected from
the colorless, from those amenable to any who are or-
ganizationally in control. Meeting behind closed doors,
a committee may become a discreetly privileged sanctu-
ary for ascendant coteries or groups. With it as an in-
ner fulcrum of power, a larger organized power can be
moved.

The picture is not all dark. Committees vary in im-
portance. Where the members of one are personally un-
committed, its very impersonality may conduce to deci-
sions that are unbiased. And those of corporate business,
when executive self-interest is not directly engaged, do
have a yardstick in profit and loss, dollars and cents,
for whatever they advise or do. No telltale gauge of
that sort can, however, be applied to institutional com-
mittees those of government officials, national and
local boards, university trustees and faculties, hospital
administrators and staffs, or of any organization in which
a nonprofit collectivized power has been delegated ad-
ministratively. Altruism is a potent force, and so is
high-minded public service. Some will risk a good deal
to go to bat for others, or for a dissentient view, when
the treatment of a man or a measure is not on a basis
of merit. But human motives are mixed, and in an

The Depreciation of Merit 93

organizational society those thrive best who adapt them-
selves to it. He who fights and runs away will, how-
ever, not only live to fight another day. He may lose
the fighting habit.

Not that institutional committees always shun respon-
sibility. There may be occasions when they are so com-
posed as to welcome it. Nevertheless when they do
shoulder responsibility for policies adopted or for in-
stitutions in whose name they deliberate or act, it is not
a direct, intimate, personal one. For the more a large-
scale unit belongs to everybody, the more it belongs to
nobody. It pulls men up by the roots but can have none
of its own. And where the decisions which govern it
are anonymous, so is the moral responsibility for them.
What on its merits is just may organizationally have no
merit. And that is why committee members, jealous of
private or professional reputations, would long hesitate
to assent openly to much which, in closeted sessions
and behind a screen of collective anonymity, they do
or condone. For downright incompetence committees
may be disbanded; unless a dereliction is financial,
none is accountable for it individually. Large-scale
power can, through the device of a committee, be dele-
gated democratically. But the gist of democracy is that
all who are fit may bear responsibility and that all who
are responsible should be held responsible. So far as
responsibility can be dodged through committees, a
contrivance devised for responsibility becomes in itself
an irresponsible one.

Especially in the world of education should note be
taken of the degree to which organizational interests
outweigh others. That the principle of merit may be
depreciated where there is competition for money or
power is, while a grave matter, not wholly surprising.
When education, with all its cloistered virtues, also

94 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

flouts that principle, no cooperative pursuit will be im-
mune. As a main custodian of man's revaluation, its
business is one not of things but of the mind; in that
contemplative sphere, above all, competition is free
only when merit is the arbiter. Yet in a mass democracy
higher education has had to be developed on a com-
mensurate scale. And here again organized magnitude
runs true to form.

In colleges and universities a few who devote them-
selves to study and research might earn more elsewhere.
Most fare as well as they could have done in other vo-
cations. And though the stipend is modest, they are al-
lowed a scope for self-expression which should in the-
ory make that sacrifice worth their while. But for the
overworked majority such academic compensation is, in
an inflationary era, an ever-receding goal; and they
have, moreover, the same competitive hurdles to sur-
mount as in any other large-scale endeavor. To get a
post, to hold on to it, to achieve promotion, to attain
objectives that are institutional rather than intellectual
organizational man is actuated on the campus by in-
centives much the same as his fellows off of it. And if
he is petty or irascible, other professionals can at least
afford books, leisure, travel, and recreation which he
needs no less than they. A modicum of economic se-
curity may, after straitened years, be gained through ad-
vancement in rank. But whatever he learned in a tense
organizational scramble uphill, he cannot unlearn over-
night.

The problem of academic freedom is deemed nowa-
days to be one of liberty for Left-wing opinion at a
time when the Communist menace has given reaction
a new lease on life. And in faculty affairs the strain
thus produced will last as long as the East- West crisis
itself. But there is also an internal problem of aca-

The Depredation of Merit * 95

demic freedom and it is one in which some of the
Right may not frown upon individualism among their
colleagues as severely as some of the Left; one, more
frequently, in which orthodox and heterodox are po-
litically quite inapposite as labels. For pressure to con-
form ideologically might come from above; socially it
emanates from within the academic group itself. Schol-
arship and science have tended to draw on a genteel
class with tastes as simple as its income has been smalL
A few with loftier antecedents may, at older universi-
ties, be groomed or selected for top posts; and when
these are wedded to native ability the principle of
merit receives a lucky fillip. But for most its recogni-
tion is less conveniently facilitated. What is not ac-
corded them, they, when they have any appointive
power, will not be eager to accord. For a job is a job,
and an undertaking dedicated to nonmaterial values can
still be pervaded by a low-charged materialism, a class
consciousness which is scarcely conscious of itself. As a
social bond, inverted snobbery also has an old school
tie and it is not a piece of neckwear.

In professional jealousy there is, of course, nothing
new. And from it none of the arts is exempt. But the
exercise of organizational power lifts personal rivalries
to a larger plane; and it adds a dimension of its own.
Medicine, for example, is as noble a pursuit as any.
Yet when it is organized in professional associations,
public hospitals, and teaching departments, the same
competitive struggle for institutional control will be
waged there as elsewhere. Less than others, however,
can organized medicine ignore merit indefinitely. For if
it did, the effect upon the well-being of society would
be felt concretely and at once by all.

Generally speaking, however, the influence of educa-
tion is slow and indirect. And when, as organized, it

96 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

must work through delegated powers, it has two strikes
against it. Head administrators, engrossed in activities
typical of their large-scale culture fund raising and a
sleepless attempt to keep themselves or their institu-
tions in the public eye have passed on the selection of
faculty personnel to faculties themselves. And such an
assignment may circumvent the intervention of trus-
tees who would appoint for reasons other than compe-
tence. But what guarantee is there that faculties them-
selves will not also be irresponsible?

This query is all the more germane at a time when
top university officers are seldom equipped to under-
stand a great deal that goes on around them. In a so-
ciety with organizational values the position they hold
is presumed automatically to instil wisdom. To their
obiter dicta solemn heed is paid therefore by the press;
but few, when elevated to administrative office, have
contributed to ideas or learning as much as colleagues
who linger perforce in the shade. Perhaps the notion is
that the less you know of your own field the more
comprehensive will be your view of every field; per-
haps knowledge as such is, even for organized educa-
tion, not a primary requisite. Years ago, at any rate, the
eminence of a head educator lay in the caliber of the
men he would search for, acquaint himself with, and
recommend. But university presidents have now re-
nounced what was once for them a major task. And
when organizational power is delegated first to deans
and then down to departmental chairmen and staff
committees, a democratic concession to workers' self-
government seems to have been made. An academic
salient of bureaucratic irresponsibility can just as read-
ily be established. For there, as elsewhere, ruling cote-
ries may wield the collective institutional power so as to
fortify their own. Academic freedom, like freedom of the

The Depreciation of Merit * 97

press, can be demanded by those who want it for them-
selves but are less disposed to share it with others.

Organized magnitude, by diffusing power, impedes
action. Yet Janus-faced, it also enables things to get
done while personal responsibility for them is side-
stepped. When large-scale institutions assert that they
are looking for good men, that often means outsiders
whose candidacy will be congenial to insiders. In con-
tentious fields which bear upon war and peace, for in-
stance, differences of opinion cover events since before
the turn of the century; departmental power has long
been apt to discover merit in those whose views coin-
cide with its own or, better still, have deferentially
had none to express. Nor will a newcomer who wishes
intellectually to break loose be safe in doing so until
his tenure is confirmed; until he, also, is permanently
ensconsced. For academic and editorial chairs are alike
in this: they may adorn a liberal profession even as, in
their exercise of organizational power, they are illib-
eral. And that, too, is why over some contemporary is-
sues a gulf has on occasion yawned between the best
thinking and organized teaching.

For the independent scholar and scientist the contest
of power in a large-scale society is more and more an
unequal one. Over the centuries the universities took
their cue from him and his academies; but now it is
only in a collectivized structure that he himself can ei-
ther function professionally or earn his daily bread. Nor
will he be sure of the reasons for either outright re-
jection or a disheartening nonadvancement: there may
be vanquished but, organizationally, no admitted vic-
tors. As far, however, as science delves into processes
rather than opinion, nonconforming intellectuals might
serve it with less personal risk. Its alliance with big-
ness is not always to its own ultimate advantage. In

gH T I! E AMERICAN ANARCHY

laboratory research the cooperative tends to be para-
mount; yet that, too, without fresh innovating ideas,
might run dry. And this danger grows as government,
the armed services, the super-corporations mobilize sci-
ence. For specific applied projects are their concern and
not the general enrichment of knowledge.

In every sphere the creative depends upon the un-
trammeled individual Gian-Carlo Menotti has observed
how, in American music, the conductor rates above the
composer. Yet this is characteristic of a large-scale so-
ciety which, by itself, has neither time, capacity, nor
inclination to evaluate merit. The interpreter does not
only mediate in a popular idiom or through mass me-
dia; when publicized he lends the stamp of authority
and thus becomes a well-rewarded expositor of ideas
which others, comparatively unrewarded, have, by the
sweat of their brow, worked out. Genius, like the wind,
bloweth where it listeth. But the first-class is also rare.
Without it there could be no living tradition of in-
tellectual freedom receptive to genius itself; none to
cultivate the soil and keep it fertile so that on it the finest
seeds will take root and, in due season, burst forth. Yet
large-scale society attaches more importance to the posi-
tion than the person. It is not therefore what he says but
where he says it from that counts.

On behalf of the open mind, against the anxieties and
rancors of the era, the learned world purports to stand
firm. And very often it does. But the exalted pro-
nouncements of university pundits about broader re-
sponsibilities cannot banish large-scale irresponsibility
from within their own institutions. To smile at the an-
tics of the herd is for intellectuals, academic and non-
academic, a cherished indoor sport. Yet organizational
power may enable them to run with a smaller herd
against the nonconforming individual even as they

The Depreciation of Merit * 99

themselves scoff at bigger ones. And if intellectuals
would thereby depreciate merit, more can scarcely be
expected of those whose pretensions are less.

The nineteenth century conceived of progressive so-
cieties moving, in the Victorian accents of Sir Henry
Maine, from status to contract. Man is revalued as the
hard crust of privilege and custom dissolves; mutual
compacts to which he could now subscribe would aug-
ment and not curtail liberty. But totalitarian systems
exhibit how intensively, through modern techniques,
retrogression might also be organized. And even in
large-scale democracy, while the individual has moved
toward a voluntary freedom of contract, he may be con-
stricted by countervailing rigidities of organization un-
der which he is reduced again to a status that is invol-
untary. For the machinery of organized magnitude can
not only be manipulated by vested institutional inter-
ests. Even where the competitive element does not en-
ter, as when age factors are considered impersonally, it
is capable of a mechanical discrimination which does
immense social harm.

Seniority, when it reposes solely on a pre-emption
of power, may, by cramping opportunity, violate some
of the most vaunted canons of liberal democracy. But it
is seniors among insiders, rather than seniors as such,
who are thus favored; large-scale organization, when it
takes on new workers, can in fact be exceedingly unjust
toward older applicants. Medical authority does not en-
dorse mandatory rules that retire employees at sixty
and sixty-five. But common sense rebels when job seek-
ers over forty are told that they are too old by employ-
ers who are themselves over forty. Nor does the argu-
ment avail that workers on the threshold of middle age
may be more mature or more reliable than their jun-
iors. For the predicament of such outside applicants is

100* THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

sharpened by the nongovernmental pension schemes un-
der which older jobholders are themselves retired. The
door is shut on latecomers because there will not subse-
quently have accrued to their credit a sufficient backlog
ol premiums. Irrelevant in hiring an employee is his
own indhidual merit, much less the well-being of a par-
ticular enterprise or institution. For here, too, is a dele-
gation of power, but one to formulas an abdication of
responsibility to actuarial indices and half-baked the-
ories about chronological age.

Pension schemes are a humanitarian feature of social
security in the large-scale society of the twentieth cen-
tury. They have an opposite effect when they victimize
some so that others will benefit. The social wastage in-
curred by mass unemployment is the worst phase of an
economic slump. But then all, at least, are, or may be,
in the same storm-tossed boat. For institutionalized hu-
man wastage there is no such consolation. Morally noth-
ing can be as stultifying as organizational techniques
which would devalue man by casting him on a scrap
heap for extraneous, predetermined reasons which have
little to do with the state of general employment or the
suitability of the individual himself.

And as with large-scale discrimination on grounds of
age so also with large-scale discrimination on grounds
of race. In folklore the early bird catches the worm;
but folk antipathies would first have him belong to the
right flock. Under modern liberalism the trend has
been toward racial emancipation; the mechanics of big-
ness, however, may conversely be used for the organiza-
tional manipulation of prejudice. The color bar in the
United States has, for millions of her Negro citizens,
converted the American dream into a racial nightmare.
Even where their civil liberties are sustained at the
polls and in the courts* even when minimal fair em-

The Depredation of Merit 101

ployment practices can be legally enforced, their civil
rights are sparse. For vocationally most of them still
languish in semibondage. And to their upgrading, when
they are employed as unskilled labor, trade unions may
be as opposed as any.

Exceptions do, no doubt, occur. Employment and ed-
ucational opportunities have, of late, undergone some
improvement. Engineers being in demand, large cor-
porations recruit Negro engineers on the same basis as
others. And occasionally the guilty conscience of a free
society will extol what some Negroes have accomplished
as if to reassure itself about the fair chance denied the
rest. Because of his simple origins, however, the Negro
is held down rather than thrown back. If he were to be
accepted as an individual on his merits, he would be
contributing as an equal to Western culture for the first
time. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, affects a Cauca-
sian people who have long been civilized. When large-
scale democracy makes Jews unwelcome, it is discrimi-
nating against an ancient community which is one of
its own main progenitors. Frequently the segregation
which Negroes encounter is ostracism through brute
force, actual or potential. Against Jews the pressures
nowadays are more subtle and as such more typically
organizational.

In Eastern Europe and Moslem lands the persecution
of Jews has been endemic. But in the democracies of
the West their citizenship is unimpaired, their eco-
nomic rights formally unabridged. How anti-Semitism
can disrupt and contort so enlightened a country as
France, the Dreyfus case exhibited at the close of the
nineteenth century. And today in Russia with her
Communist satellites State activity and mass attitudes
do not only reveal anti-Semitism again at work; it dif-
fers from that of Tsarist times since, in courting Ger-

1O2 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

man fa\ or and wooing Arab sentiment, it may become
an item of Soviet foreign policy. Germans, at once so
modern and yet so barbaric, were the ones, however,
who signalized Nazi conquest by employing the tech-
niques of large-scale organization systematically to deci-
mate in cold blood the historic Jewries of continental
Europe. Yet in free societies also there persists a polite,
norrviolent discrimination against Jews; unavowed and
unremitting, it is one which freezes them out even as
room for them is found. Jews have lived in Western
Europe as long or longer than inhabitants of majority
stock; the ancestors of some who migrated from Eastern
Europe to the freedom of Western Europe and the New
World had previously fled from the West. And here,
during the liberal heyday of private initiative, social
barriers may still have been high; to a decent economic
opportunity, nevertheless, the road seemed open. But
now, with the corporate revolution of the twentieth
century, control of enterprise is more organizational
than individual. Even industries like motion pictures,
which were established by Jews, are passing under the
control of others. From control of the principal cor-
porate industries of organized magnitude they do not,
however, have to be nudged. No such control ever was
theirs.

That, of course, is contrary to popular legend. But
then so also is the current divorce between ownership
and control. The Jewish minority has at best never had
wholehearted acceptance; and whatever alters the dis-
tribution of power can impinge upon its economic pros-
pects adversely. When Jews, at any rate, discover that
numerous avenues of employment and advancement are
blocked or narrowed for them sooner than for others,
they are thrust into trades or professions where the in-
dividual can still be self-employed. Edged away from the

The Depreciation of Merit 103

center of economic and social power, they are thereupon
castigated for overcrowding spheres on the circumfer-
ence which remain. Not that all who would take up
such vocations are permitted to prepare for them. Jews
usually have greater difficulty than others in getting ad-
mitted to private colleges and universities. In medicine
a quota system regulates the number of Jewish students
who may enter. In some other professions the prejudice
of clientele might render it foolhardy for Jews to gam-
ble on a protracted and laborious training.

Where a large-scale society is responsible Jews will be
treated accordingly, where it is irresponsible their his-
toric vulnerabilities come into play. There are no phys-
ical indignities to be borne. As proprietors of small or
even substantial middle-sized undertakings Jews in busi-
ness face the same competitive situation as others; as
employees elsewhere their opportunities on certain
white-collar planes, while frequently circumscribed, are
adequate. But a fractional democracy is a frustrating
one. And Jews feel this especially since the prophetic
tradition of Judaism and Christianity is the moral core
of liberal idealism itself. The legacy they inherit and
their own racial insecurities may have put Jews in the
vanguard, intellectual and political, of collectivizing re-
form. And it would be but another irony of large-scale
organization if the movement some of them thus es-
poused were now to backfire upon the Jewish commun-
ity as a whole. For social justice is never complete; the
same cooperative techniques which render it more wide-
spread can also systematize a relative injustice. Organ-
ized magnitude does not only fan from within competi-
tive tensions and group monopolies. So far as these are
vented in terms of race prejudice, the scale of such ani-
mus may thereby also be enlarged.

A free society in which civil liberties are observed

104 ' THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

while civil rights are infringed is not an entirely free
one. It is a democratic imperative that a clear abuse of
power by the State must be called to account; but other,
critical sectors of large-scale democracy are administra-
tively unaccountable. Voluntary undertakings artistic,
philanthropic, public affairs that appeal to a common
citizenship will, in making their bid for a broad alle-
giance, take Jews into their councils. A contrary drive,
such as the anti-Semitism of social clubs and Society,
should not be pooh-poohed it is symptomatic of how,
when the financial or public support of the Jewish com-
munity is not needed, organizational power tends spon-
taneously to express itself. No fair employment legisla-
tion, even where there are jobs for Jews, ensures that
they will be promoted on their merits. But when tech-
nical aptitudes are scarce, eligible Jews may not be dis-
criminated against; there might, on the lower and mid-
dle tiers of institutional power, be jobs for them.
Control is in a category of its own. And where control
is irresponsible democracy cannot be less so.

The absence of Jews from control, from the top ad-
ministrative sancta of large-scale society, might not af-
fect many individuals. But it again raises the question of
whether opportunities and rewards in a mass democracy
are what they are proclaimed as being. Peripheral privi-
lege is bestown; crumbs from the high table will be
better than a starvation diet. Populous Jewish commu-
nities have voting power in key metropolises of the
United States; American Jews therefore find the path to
most kinds of political or judicial office, up to the Cabi-
net and the Supreme Court itself, a less rugged one.
The reform of medical education in the United States
and Canada owed much to a report by a Jew associated
with a noted philantropic foundation; another similar
institution appoints a Jew who was an Ambassador to

The Depreciation of Merit 105

one of its important posts. Some are established by
Jews; a few appoint Jews to their boards of trustees.
Yet anti-Semitic barbs within the halls of Congress itself
attended the career of the Jew who had been at the
hfead of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Atomic
Energy Commission; dislodged, he has admired bigness
more than it admires him. So also an American Jew
becomes Master of an old Oxford College no compara-
ble academic honor having ever been conferred on any
of his origin at home. And even if it had, one swallow
nor, at well-spaced intervals, two or three does not
make a summer.

The facts of institutional life are evident. On the di-
rectorial and managerial layers of top organizational
power that of basic corporate industries, the largest
banks and insurance companies, most of the leading
universities Jews, by tacit agreement, do not rank.

Ability is needed at the apex of large-scale society more
than elsewhere. But enough of it will not come forth
unless it is recognized and allowed proper scope. The
principle of merit is one which the elite of organiza-
tional power, bland, shrewd, pontifical, are prone to
laud. The vulgarity of the fanatic and the intolerance of
the zealot they would despise. But the example set by
them is not what they intend; men of reason, they nev-
ertheless demonstrate more plainly than their subordi-
nates the moral fissures within organizational man every-
where. For with them, as with others, word and deed
do not always mesh. Having conformed so as to attain
power they do not, in the framing of institutional pol-
icy, stop being conformist. And when its own would-be
proponents let the principle of merit go organizationally
by default, it suffers not from any direct blow but from
attrition through acquiescence. Yet they can do little
else; if there were more scrupulous respect for insti-

1O6 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

tutional justice, they themselves might not be where
they are. Until nerves of power are touched, top execu-
tives will nowadays exhibit a considerable breadth of
view. The open mind itself may thus furnish a liberal
cloak behind which privilege is steadfastly entrenched.
Inner monopoly is the child of outer monopoly. The
bigger the team, the more necessary is it to inspire
teamwork. But teamwork can cover a multitude of sins
and everything depends on the nature of the game, on
who enforces the rules, and on who is calling the sig-
nals. The problem of competition is, then, not one
merely of private initiative in an oligopoly of corporate
Titans; not one only of public incentives when the econ-
omy is half socialized or at least supervised by the wel-
fare State itself. Where organizational acceptability is
for each person the price of livelihood or career, there
can be an unfair competition more pervasive and more
inexorable than any displayed hitherto in the domain of
markets or supplies. In enterprise or ideas the essence
of nineteenth-century liberalism was individual risk.
Against danger, whether of war or peace, the twentieth
tentury does not only collectivize its precautions; fewer
are disposed, save in armed combat, to go out .by them-
selves and meet it. So also it is the noncontroversial
figure who may be all things to all men: to deviate
from the norm somewhere is to be estranged every-
where. The secret of power in a large-scale unit is to
go along with one's fellows even as one would master
them.

Men and measures cannot be assayed responsibly, that
is on their merits, where control is irresponsible. Ac-
cording to Adam Smith there was an invisible hand
which expedited the market transactions of a free econ-
omy. And large-scale society also has an invisible hand

The Depredation of Merit 107

but it is one that can manipulate as well as liberate, one
which serves the organizational power of some before it
conveys wider benefits. Not that this is a premeditated
plot in the style of melodrama; insiders are themselves
caught up in a collusive social process the moral implica-
tions of which they may not quite realize. It is taken for
granted that they will draw upon the collective strength
as their own. So merged in their outlook are personal
interests and institutional prerogatives, that they can rig
with the most proprietary of airs a power to which they
may belong but which does not belong to them. Or*
ganized magnitude, as distinguished from feudalism or
precorporate capitalism, substitutes in place of property
a property of place. Incumbency is all.

Rules of seniority may not only be a hierarchical sanc-
tion but, like so much else in a large-scale society, be-
come morally equivocal. Squatter's rights, though an
accident to begin with, are irradiated somehow with vir-
tue. Those employed first in an enterprise or institu-
tion, when they have but to wait for the ripened fruits
of organizational privilege to fall into their laps, will not
work harder; others, less fortunate in their timing,
might sink into despair, since between proficiency and
advancement there is no logical connection. Yet priority
of tenure, while unjust to some, is just to others. After
years spent in any undertaking, public or private, a
man's future should be secure. Those on the middle
rungs may be protected thereby from the capricious
above as well as the overambitious below. Nor will a
politic novice, once he has made his way into any closed
circuit of power, stick out his neck or step on organiza-
tional toes. The sycophant achieves seniority in turn by
ingratiating himself with his seniors; the mediocrity,
displaying no sharp competitive threat, gets the appro-

108 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

bation ot his peers. To the principle of merit devotion
will be avowed by every ideological hue on the spec-
trum of democracy and even by some that are not
democratic. On no current topic is the cleavage between
rhetoric and reality so deep.

In the welfare State two streams of social obligation
converge. The first is a spiritual one of genuine altru-
ism derived from the profoundest religious sources of
Western civilization. The second is the practical sym-
pathy elicited when, like the Puritan witnessing another
led to the gallows, all feel that there, but for the grace
of God, go I. Seers and sages have long wanted to do
something for the reform of society; technology pro-
vides the means. But such is the interaction between
every large-scale mechanism and man's own fallible na-
ture that, at a certain point, self-interest will foster apa-
thy rather than concern. Irresponsibility leaves the vic-
tim of organized magnitude whether it be public or
private, socialist or capitalist bewildered and helpless;
helplessness is also the apologia of its buck-passing bene-
ficiaries. A system of pre-emption might be too vast, too
intricate, for even the most powerful to unravel or rec-
tify; heads are shaken and hands washed as a single
gesture of mock resignation. Yet they cannot abandon a
system which they did not make but which makes them
what they are: if they would stay the course they must
run the race as others run it. For organized magnitude
does not only modify the relationship of the individual
to society. It revives old moral problems in a new set*
ting.

A large-scale society must technically be a cooperative
one. But egoistic purposes which once had to be served
through private devices can, through it, now also be
served institutionally. What technology does is to endow

The Depreciation of Merit 109

competitors with gratuitous modern instruments of col-
lective power. Social power could neither be organized
nor extended without machines. Fundamentally the con-
test of power is as ever a contest of men.

And because it is such a contest we cannot, as Rein-
hold Niebuhr has suggested, hold the unit to a less
stringent code of behavior than the individual. For or-
ganized magnitude may, in the last analysis, only be a
dominant person or group of persons technologically
writ large. Moral yardsticks, where the temptations of
power increase, should therefore be stronger and not
weaker. One law for the rich and one law for the poor
is the nadir of legal justice: one ethic for man and an-
other for organizational man would permit large-scale
organization to get inwardly more out of control than
it is. Moral irresponsibility may be the upshot of struc-
tural irresponsibility. Rather than accord formal recog-
nition to so anarchic a dualism, a wise morality will
seek unremittingly to bridge the discretionary gap which
yawns between the self-regarding and the truly disinter-
ested. Organizational phenomena conduce to organiza-
tional hypocrisy. Yet, for man and for groups of men,
morality, like justice, must be one and indivisible. To
waive this basic, unitary axiom is to release collective
power from such inner personal deterrents as may still
restrain it. Candor about existing social discrepancies is
better than cant. Yet, lest it degenerate into utter cyni-
cism, the observer will insist not only upon what is but
upon what ought to be. Man himself could never be
revalued if what ought to be had not goaded him on
from what was and from what, no less, still may be*
Moral protest alone can never redeem a large-scale
system which even standardizes its own double stand-
ards. But this might at least prevent the fundamentals

110 -THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

of a free society from being obscured. For saying one
thing about the principle of merit and doing another,
modern democracy could, moreover, also damage itself
technically: it may organize against every danger except
dry rot. Unlike nineteenth-century individualism, which
crushed many or pushed them to the wall, the spirit of
the age acknowledges a wider social responsibility: ad-
ministratively, however, collective enterprise, public
and private, is more and not less irresponsible. Victor-
ian liberalism, in caring for those at the bottom of so-
ciety, proved cruelly inadequate; yet by kindling the
belief that there is always room at the top, it was, for
any who were resolved to get on in the world, a super-
lative exercise in morale. Not that to the pinnacle,
whether one of class or office, career or wealth, more
than a few could ascend. But as long as competition
seemed fair, or as long as the economy appeared suffi-
ciently flexible to give the venturesome a chance, the
broad trend was not inequitable; reform would expand
rather than abbreviate opportunities. But when it is the
venturesome whom large-scale organization penalizes,
they themselves do not only lose heart: the juices of
progress evaporate* Democracies are exhorted to stand
fast against totalitarian inroads. Yet to resist illiberal so-
cieties with intelligence, they must have faith in their
own.

Organized anarchy and moral anarchy are brothers
under the skin. An order of privilege, being inequitable,
cannot be a moral order; and where there is no moral
order man is devalued. Large-scale organization, in a
world at peace, could offer the second half of the twen-
tieth century a more abundant life than humanity has
ever known. Yet social justice in a technological era
should not only raise the minimal subsistence levels of

The Depreciation of Merit * 1 1 1

the mass. It must, in Browning's phrase, still encourage
a man's reach to exceed his grasp if his aim is a good
one. For without freedom to do that he may, as his lot
is bettered, not really be free at all.

CHAPTER

Democracy and
Error

War, said Clemenceau, is too serious a matter to be en-
trusted to the generals. So also a large-scale democracy is
too serious a matter to be entrusted to experts even
though, without their technical skill, it would falter,
grind to a halt, and collapse. The leadership of those
whose talents are such as to command a following may
be either democratic or undemocratic, politically respon-
sible or irresponsible. A good deal rests here on a peo-
ple's own will to freedom; upon whether a tradition of
liberty, or a popular hankering for it, is strong enough
to shape the course of events. But in the realm of gov-
ernment there is another, coordinate, sphere of leader-
ship to be considered: that of officials whose prestige,
while organizational, is derived from special training;
and that of public men, politicians and intellectuals,
whose influence on opinion is presumed to have a simi-
lar expert genesis. Among electors and elected the ama-
teur and the layman must, in a democracy, still have the
final say. But before that stage arrives much in his own

Democracy and Error 113

outlook, or in the actual conduct of affairs, may have
been decided for him.

Under modern conditions the political expert is a
technician who, whether his province be big or small,
has been educated for his job. Education and leader-
ship are therefore related inextricably. That we must
educate our masters was a famous cry in nineteenth-
century England as the masses were given the vote. A
democracy which revalued man could not proceed with-
out universal literacy. Yet literacy itself, contrary to the
sanguine expectations of nineteenth-century liberalism,
is no assurance that minds will be open and freedom
cherished; the Germans, from the middle of the nine-
teenth century to the middle of the twentieth, were but
the first to show how a nation could be both literate
and illiberal. And even if education is taken to be some-
thing beyond literacy, it consists mostly of a training
that is vocational or technical. Yet there is no moral
anchorage through techniques only a vaster spread of
sail.

That the mass, literate or illiterate, is untrustworthy
some thinkers have always argued: from Plato to San-
tayana the solution advocated has been rule by an elite.
And what happens to lucubrations such as theirs in a
large-scale society the Soviet Communists, the Italian
Fascists, the German Nazis have amply demonstrated.
Kings, in the Greek Utopia, might at least have been
philosophers. As engineers, which is what Thorstein
Veblen proposed, their latter day reincarnation would
have put efficiency above justice. To bring these two to-
gether, to unite technical progress with moral enlight-
enment, may be the inmost quest of modern democracy.
But where overspecialization is accompanied by moral
ignorance, the expert himself is bound to be irresponsi-
ble, And where he is that, as he often was in misjudg-

114* THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

ing world issues between the wars, he is even technically
inept.

The era of bigness, with the national and the inter-
national so interdependent, requires an expert leader-
ship which might handle and advise upon the enlarged
scale of public affairs. To preserve peace, or win a war
when it comes, is still the cardinal task of government.
By the same token the political role of the technician
in a modern democracy can, over and above routine ad-
ministration, be appraised through the specialized qual-
ities he contributes to the making of foreign policy.

The revaluation of man testifies to a sense of moral
order: a free world order is both a manifestation of
great imponderables and the political framework within
which they can operate. Their further development is
hampered, however, by the effect abroad of the moral
anarchy which organized anarchy fosters at home. As a
producer in a large-scale society, the worker on an as-
sembly line, the office clerk, or the store employee can
discern little meaningful relationship between his labor
and the product as a whole. But so also, at critical turn-
ing points in our free world order, most Americans
lacked, as citizens, any instructed comprehension of
wider duties and global interests. To lock the stable
door after the horse is stolen, as nowadays must often
be done, may protect other livestock. But where were
the watchmen when a keen vigil might have saved all?
The marriage of science and bigness in an air-atomic
age conferred upon some physicists and chemists a tech-
nical power which, in its planetary repercussions, has
been superorganizational. But we must still reckon with
the key role of intellectuals who, as publicists or politi-
cians, have traded upon their expertness in the conven-
tional fields of democratic governance and opinion,
Atomic spy revelations and malfeasance by junior di-

Democracy and Error * 115

plomatists indicate how, from within the official setup oi
a large-scale society, the scale of treachery may also be en-
larged. Yet to betray the West it was not necessary to
traffic in administrative secrets or in those of nucleat
fission. For that had already been done, and in plain
view, by unofficial intellectuals, as well as by isolation-
ists and appeasers with official connections, whose coun-
sel between the wars predisposed the free peoples ta
lower their guard. Error is not treason. But when organ-
ized magnitude renders either co-extensive with society
itself, it can scarcely afford more of one than the other.

Like every mystique, that of the expert arises from
fear of the unknown. For he does not only summon uf/
the marvels of technology; without him none can
plumb its mysteries. Yet this is a worship of power
rather than that respect for merit which was the moral
pith of nineteenth-century liberalism. Outsiders may be
overwhelmed and insiders bewildered by large-scale or-
ganization; those within it who exercise control must
themselves rely on others who can keep the machinery
up to date and well oiled. For the mechanics of a mass
economy the ministrations of the technician were never
more essential. To its politics his contribution has come
under a cloud.

Nineteenth-century optimism about the engineer, the
specialist, the expert survived the first world war. It
chilled abruptly after a second one in which the savage
Teutonic debasement of science exhibited how large-
scale techniques could at once bless mankind and be its
most stupendous curse. For we are made facile and yet
barbarized by that stress in modern education on know-
how rather than ideas, on that knowledge of things
which is knowledge without thought or thought without
principle. Totalitarian society is frightening not only
because it resurrects past tyrannies; it shows how me-

Iir>THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

chanics which the mind begat can also expedite a new
obscurantism which would stamp out the mind's own
autonomy. Today in Russia even the arts are enslaved.
But humanism has likewise had its defections. Some
creative artists, from Richard Wagner to Ezra Pound,
have freely set themselves against the revaluation of
man. Irresponsibility \vith them, however, did not get
far; it, like old-fashioned tyranny, was circumscribed by
its medium. Klaus Fuchs, his confederates and accom-
plices, had no power other than knoxvledge; yet as birds
of ill omen they were more than traitors. The fruits of
secret research on the largest cooperative scale were
what they transmitted to the East. To the West they
demonstrated how the inner perils of organized magni-
tude could match those outer ones which atomic dis-
coveries themselves first luridly dramatized. For here,
too, knowledge was power power over the well-being
of other men, self-willed, politically illiterate, morally
vacuous, physically illimitable.

The disaster potential of a single episode like that
has never before been so high. But great, too, was the
harm wrought by political experts whose own irrespon-
sibility, with or without organizational manipulation,
rendered more acute the prewar irresponsibility of the
English-speaking democracies in world affairs. Nor are
these the career diplomatists who have been so often a
butt of criticism. For the public service, which legalizes
any institutional irresponsibility among permanent gov-
ernment bureaucrats, also hems it in and rings it round
by formal safeguards. What has to be scrutinized is the
politically less inhibited role of unofficial experts or of
experts whose government service may be temporary.
First, however, there may be a few additional comments
upon the part played by the official as such.
Technical proficiency is not his sole bureaucratic ad-

Democracy and Error 117

vantage. For even where this is scant he can always en-
sconce himself within a redoubt of indispensability.
With the experience which officials accumulate, others,
could they get it, might do as well; what outsiders are
denied is continuity of knowledge. In government, in
every kind of large-scale organization, public or private,
there are secrets of policy and knacks of procedure to
which access is restricted. Technical byproducts of col-
lective power, these are transmuted by organizational
man into his own specialized private power. For by
cold-shouldering rivals, inside or outside, he shields
whatever is technically familiar to himself alone and
thereby augments the dependence of the whole under-
taking upon experience he has gained in its service.
The unattached professional, however, must sink or
swim in less secluded waters; he does not compete un-
der conditions as sheltered as the career official nor with
resources that are so fully pre-empted. Organizational
privilege may, through their group associations, be at
the disposal of lawyers, physicians, and other profession-
als who are not institutionally employed. But in every
bureaucracy, public or private, it is his grip on large-
scale power which is the technician's main capital asset.
This does not mean that as a government servant he
is politically irresponsible. Democracy would never en-
dure if he were. But bureaucratic irresponsibilities stem
from administrative functions; and the problem is to
prevent these from encroaching upon the paramount
sphere of elected representatives themselves. For the
civil service does not, after all, merely implement, irre-
spective of party complexion, legislative enactments and
the purposes of the Executive: in a large-scale society
its daily operations must unavoidably also create policy.
Between administrative exigencies and any set rules of
political neutrality, officials are perpetually torn. Yet

Il8 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

only through so incessant a tension can democratic lib-
erties be maintained. If such correctives had been more
potent within the German civil service, it might have
done less to deliver the Weimar Republic to ultrana-
tionalism and the Nazis. It has been condemned for an
ideological amorality which would serve every sort of
regime. More heinous w r as the fact that, while ostensibly
neutral between parties, it took the anti-Weimar side
and thereby did much to hasten the downfall of the en-
tire system. In a genuine democracy, official neutrality
rules can, when applied to unofficial spheres, be over-
done.

As large-scale organization, governmental and nongov-
ernmental, recruits trained personnel it removes them
from partisan and controversial warfare, from domains
in which as men of thought and men of action they
might also be needed. Atrophy of the political muscles
may, among nongovernmental employees, ensue. Cor-
porate business and private or semipublic institutions
do let their experts serve in government as administra-
tive officials. But only the top rank is free otherwise to
take a stand on current issues. Most nongovernmental
employees, so as to preserve their own organizational
futures, would be chary of political differences with any
above or around them who in hiring and firing, in pro-
moting and passing over, possess organizational power*
To ride herd is a prerequisite of success in a mass so-
ciety. But it is not only in strictly organizational affairs
that the individual conforms. His citizenship is reduced
by them to the second class, he is in some degree po-
litically emasculated.

Overstimulation is, on the contrary, what can afflict
government experts. For these are so situated organiza-
tionally that they might interpose their own wills in
transactions for which legislators are elected and minis-

Democracy and Error ng

ters chosen. Organizational power is derived by them
from the administrative structure; but it is also the lat-
ter which confines them behind the scenes. A growing
segment of the intellectually vigorous must thus keep
silent when vital questions are debated publicly. This
does not presage that all will be quiet on every official
front. But civil servants, though they tug and pull, can
never lead out in the open. Bottled up institutionally,
officials only have organizational outlets for energies
which would expand beyond them.

The career servant of government is, however, not
the only expert in the public affairs of a large-scale so-
ciety. Unofficial experts hold a watching brief in the
general interest against both elected and permanent of-
ficials. And since there are no formal credentials, any-
body may regard himself, or be regarded, as an expert.
But some intellectuals writers, editors, scholars, lectur-
ers, broadcasters, politicians, drawn from many disci-
plines do make a special bid for leadership on grounds
of specialized knowledge. And as an opinion-forming
element in a free society they should be less irresponsi-
ble than any other since greater weight is attached to
their words. These words, moreover, reverberate all the
further when they carry with them an institutional au-
thority; when uttered by a person who is deemed sapi-
ent not because of what he, in himself, may be but be-
cause of the post he has organizationally chanced to
occupy. Yet if, from an orderly long-range point of view,
such mislead, censure is sporadic and not always well
directed; positions in most cases stay intact and so does
prestige. Maturity in the individual is a capacity for
looking both fore and aft. But it is harder to find this
in a collective body where, as the scale of action is en-
larged, responsibility is diffused. Nor do spectacular
postwar attempts by Congressional committees to ferret

1 20 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

out Communists from government, or stage political in-
quisitions on events in East Asia, ensure that the irre-
sponsible will eventually be brought to heel. For crime
may be punished in the courts. Against impolicy there
is no law.

And if we would search for impolicy in our time, it
did not begin at Teheran and Yalta. For those who sit
in judgment might recollect that in our generation free-
dom sold itself down the river when the victors of 1918
let uar recur at all; that their own party affiliations
should make them the last and not the first to cast
stones. In no zone more than this has large-scale democ-
racy revealed moral and political irresponsibility. Yet
from Versailles onward a host of experts, official and
unofficial, had been sounding the alarm. But others
who misstated world issues helped, by softening up the
West, to precipitate the second German onslaught. Of
that dire event the enfeeblement of Western Europe,
the Eurasian predominance of the Soviet Union, are the
catastrophic sequel. And as far as Americans were to
blame for it, they were not the pre-atomic agents of
Communist Russia but, like their appeasing counter-
parts in Britain, patriotic citizens of unimpeachable re-
spectability.

After 1919 the United States contracted out of that
free world order to whose restoration she had, with
others, just lent herself. Psychologically her contribution
to disorder was as profound. Barely scratched by war,
she had let down partners who were maimed physically
and spiritually. There was scarcely a mistake made by
them during the next two decades which they did not
attribute to the lack of assistance from their rich, erst-
while associate. Americans still scolded them about the
higher global moralities; the great moralizer became, by
her abstention, the great demoralizer. And the United

Democracy and Error

States demoralized not only through her negative be-
havior. Positive American influences were also destruc-
tive.

For mischief may not only be done by a cold intellec-
tualism devoid of moral responsibility. Moral responsi-
bility without intellectual responsibility can, by virtue
of its ethical attractions, mislead even more. Americans
had always inveighed against those power foundations
of our free world order which were not all that they
should be; the realities of power which, nevertheless,
still made possible a free world order were somehow un-
mentionable. In the Occident the revaluation of man
had been impeded by economic injustice; in the Orient
it also ran up against colonialism and the exploitation
of colored races by white. After 1914, however, human-
ity moved forward under the shadow of forces, Teutonic
and Slavonic, which could only decivilize. And as per-
fectionists in the West found excuses for these, the free
world was discomfited and confused.

Between the wars when Britain ruined herself by al-
lowing a strong Germanic power to be revived she re-
ceived much encouragement from across the Atlantic. In
England John Maynard Keynes had, as an expert,
warned against the economic consequences of the peace;
yet quite as devastating were to be the intellectual con-
sequences of Keynes himself. And then, later, Arnold
Toynbee may have been so full of past and future civ-
ilizations that, in current writings on the Nazi threat to
our own, he could do little more than reflect the mood
of the hour. Even after Poland had been overrun
E. H. Carr was hailed for several volumes in which the
Victorian architects of German power were given a pat
on the back and Munich itself would be approved as a
near-example of peaceful change.

From the outset there had, among Americans, been

122 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

sympathetic vibrations. The German revisionist school
came into fashion; in the books and journals of the pe-
riod the aggressors of 1914 would be treated as no worse
than the other belligerents; they therefore could hardly
be reproached for attempting to expunge Versailles and
get their own back. Napoleon may have lost the battle
of Waterloo on the playing fields of Eton. Recent his-
tory as expounded at Harvard and Yale was, with its
Anglophobe and Germanophile undertones, more likely
to embolden a conqueror than give him pause. The
open mind may thus have been open but not to its own
defense; and an echo of that epoch can still be detected
in M r. George Kennan's exposition of American foreign
policy in the twentieth century. A free world order
which did not understand the foundations of power on
which its own freedom reposed could not act in unison
to keep them in good repair. But popularizers would
not take up a point neglected by scholars. What paved
the road to war? No fundamental conflict of world order
but lesser disputes, nationalist or imperialist, as fo-
mented by bankers and munition makers and of little
moment therefore to the United States herself.

Alger Hiss, in a generation of large-scale tragedy, was
a minor figure. But if he is symbolic of anything it is,
as an official, of a personal irresponsibility which was
more than organizational and one which seems to have
been nourished by the intellectual irresponsibility of his
age. It may, at any rate, be significant that Hiss em-
barked on his career in public affairs through so demor-
alizing an international venture as the Nye Munitions
Inquiry of the United States Senate. American neutral-
ity laws which followed did much to wreck the peace
and, but for Rooseveltian glosses before Pearl Harbor,
might, until too late, have paralyzed our free world or-
der irretrievably. Yet, on the subject of war origins, the

Democracy and Error 123

isolationist propaganda behind that legislation served
the anticapitalist doctrine of Moscow as well as the
strategic designs of Berlin. For here, as elsewhere, ex-
tremes of Right and Left would meet.

This is not to acquit some financiers, some industrial-
ists, some cartelists with their legal technicians and
their pliant appointees among government officials, at
home and abroad of culpability in reviving the Ger-
man menace. But it is not a long jump from corporate
irresponsibility in national affairs to the irresponsible
exercise of that domestic power in international affairs:
more incongruous were the bedmates it found among
critics of capitalism itself. Reinhold Niebuhr writes
about the irony of American history. The supreme
irony, however, is when misconceptions of history form
the stuff of history. As if to justify its rejection by the
United States, expert voices among the English-speaking
peoples did not only assail the moral validity of the
1919 peace settlement; the pre-Nazi effort of German
nationalists to reverse the verdict of 1918 was acceler-
ated by self-demoralization in the camp of the victors.
Publicists and public men rated the moral claims of its
antagonists above, or the same as, those of our free
world order. Psychological warfare had thus done its
work for Germany before major hostilities again broke
out.

Fixing the spotlight on the peace treaties was, after
1919, to the interest of the vanquished alone those
which proved unenforceable being modified in practice
anyway. The damage wrought by the warmakers and
not the compromises reached by the peacemakers was
what had weakened the economy of Europe. And it is
such further debility, Pelion piled on Ossa, which has
since provided Russia with current opportunities again
to expand. As free peoples had, despite the brave Gene-

124 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

van experiment, been dissuaded from organizing effec-
tually for peace, so were their foes nerved thereby to
organize for war. The threat of renewed disorder in the
fifties stems from the disorder that the preponderant
English-speaking democracies themselves failed to regu-
late in the twenties and thirties.

In the public affairs of a society which depreciates
merit, past performance and present influence are not
necessarily correlated. If experts have organizational
power academic, political, editorial their mistakes
will not be held against them; if they possess little or
none, their judgment may go unheeded even though it
has been vindicated rather than discredited by events.
After the atomic spy disclosures in Canada, the United
States, and Britain, the dangers of betrayal from within
to the Soviet Union should not be minimized. But what
about those insistent demoralizers, again wearing a man-
tle of expertness, who, in the decisive years of the late
thirties and early forties, did more to immobilize our
free world order than any wretched domestic Commu-
nist prior to the ghastly traffic in atomic plans and re-
search? Nor is the question they raise the same as that of
the ex-Communist. For what they did emerged, as it
were, from inside the fold, from within the bosom of the
family itself.

The mettle of leadership would not be so difficult to
assess if some clear boundary could be demarcated be-
tween the strictly political and the strictly technical. But
in foreign affairs, at least, the dividing line is more and
not less blurred than ever before. The problem for de-
mocracy is therefore not only that of the technician who,
as an official adviser or expert negotiator, manipulates
power and can yet organizationally eschew responsibil-
ity- In coping with issues of war and peace, on which
everything else depends, the public man, whether in or

Democracy and Error * 125

out of office, must nowadays himself have some of the
technician's skill. And as the expertness of the official
and the politician overlap, so, in a mass society, are
large-scale techniques a cloak for both. Not that these
alone are a source of irresponsibility. But they blend
with others and, through sheer organizational extent,
render them more potent.

If largeness of view had been a concomitant of large-
scale power, the mid-century crises of our free world or-
der might have been averted. But those who led, after
1919, in its self-impairment w r ere men long accustomed
to corporate irresponsibility. Conservatism in Britain
was dominated by industry and finance rather than the
aristocrat and the squire; by the Baldwins, the Neville
Chamberlains, and the City of London rather than by
the Churchills, the Edens, the Cranbornes. So also
business in the United States would be represented by a
Harding, a Coolidge, a Hoover, and a Taft, Yet it w r as
the Republican Party itself which, at the turn of the
century, had harbored not only politicians as mean-
spirited as Henry Cabot Lodge but others, like John
Hay and Theodore Roosevelt, with more wide-ranging
concepts. Trade and commerce among the English-
speaking peoples set the balance sheet above any power
balance. Nor could opponents on the Left have been
more statesmanlike since they put social services before
rearmament and made allowances for enemy demands
even as, unarmed, they boggled at conceding all of them.
In an epoch of self-demoralization the sentimental fed
the crass.

Though the variants of American isolationism were
many, their effect, from Left to Right, was similar. The
tendency may now be, with the radical Right under Sen-
ator McCarthy baiting the conservative Right under
President Eisenhower, to give all sections of the latter a

126 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

clean bill of health. By the nineteen fifties, however, the
fundamentals of American foreign policy had been set-
tled; it is the record of earlier years which must be con-
sulted for any evaluation of subsequent claims. In the
noninterventionism of Senator Vandenberg there seemed
to be an old-fashioned homespun quality; Charles Beard,
though he otherwise deprecated the parochial in poli-
tics, had it too. Democracy, moreover, is a political sys-
tem in which all may change their minds. But it is only
a private person who should be free to do this with "im-
punity; leadership, being constantly on trial, is some-
thing else again. A large-scale society might, on other
questions, be inured to irresponsibility; in the matter of
its own self-preservation, there is no safe margin.
Grounds for public confidence, if they cannot always be
moral, must, at least, be practical ones; it is the starkest
expediency which has, however, been the most inexpedi-
ent. Senator Taft, who opposed Atlantic measures to
withstand Russia as he had opposed those against Hitler
and Hirohito, would not broaden his view until after
the issue was decided. But since Pearl Harbor, many
former isolationists have, as politicans and as experts,
been living down the harm they once did. And if it is as
easy for them, in their public careers, to have been
wrong as to have been right, so may it be for others.
Bad qualifications, by a Gresham's Law of leadership,
drive out good.

After Pearl Harbor there was no point in the isola-
tionist activities of men like Senator Vandenberg. Still
less could John Foster Dulles persist with prim apologet-
ics for German dynamism with slight foreshadowings
of what, had the Nazi war gone otherwise, might have
turned into a collaborationist approach. Not to climb op-
portunely on the internationalist bandwagon of the new
era would have been poor politics. Politically indispen-

Democracy and Error 127

sable, too, were the Republican votes which Senator
Vandenberg was afterwards to garner in the Senate for
Administration bills. Seldom had the fiber of leadership
in a large-scale democracy been tried as during the pre-
carious days of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Yet then, as France
fell and Britain tottered, America First and the Com-
munist Party marched together in the same direction.
And as saboteur of a free world order, America First
stuck it out from the Nazi invasion of Russia to the
Japanese assault on Hawaii six dire months longer than
its erstwhile comrades-in-arms. But some of those who
deemed the United States immune have, such is organ-
izational power, since enjoyed a curious immunity.
They might, as latter-day paladins of the free world, as-
sert themselves emphatically. If their own cosmic mis-
judgments had once prevailed, there would be no free
world order for us now to defend.

And it is from this angle that the rise of John Foster
Dulles should be surveyed. It was as party technician
that, in the new bipartisan epoch, he would win his
spurs. But, as an expert on international affairs, he had
revealed at their most crucial testing-time the gravest
inexpertness. His appointment as Secretary of State il-
lustrated how merit in techniques, organizationally
conceived, can yet depreciate merit. Mr. Dulles was no
champion, during its grimmest years, of our free world
order. And if American power is to be vivified by moral
force, the United States should have spokesmen who> in
freedom's cause, have never vacillated.

In a democracy men possess the right to make their
own mistakes. But when these involve their fellows, the
latter must protect themselves. A free society bears the
cost of honest error as the price of freedom. When, how-
ever, its very survival has been imperiled, a lax attitude
toward irresponsibility is in itself irresponsible. For er-

128 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

tor in leadership there are no legal penalties; political
ones should, in a mature democracy, be therefore more
surely enforced. Over the converted sinner Heaven re-
jokes most. But even in the Church he is more likely to
become a saint than a bishop.

It is, however, not only former isolationists whose in-
dividual irresponsibility has capitalized on large-scale ir-
responsibility. These, despite past inexpertness, may be
reinstated as experts. Former Communists, whether of
the Stalinist or Trotskyite dispensation, are accepted as
experts not in spite of but because of past inexpertness.
Merit, as a yardstick, is thus turned upside down; and
cults of the renegade further cheapen democratic values.
Not that ex-Communists admit to political incompe-
tence. If they did, they could never cash in as experts on
major issues of war and peace. For them it is their god
rather than its votaries who failed; theirs is the injured
pride of the misled rather than the contrition of the
misleading. But to have been the one disqualifies as
much as to have been the other, and in fact they fre-
quently were both.

The case against the ex-Communist resembles that
against the pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi elements of Amer-
ica First. Yet none identified with organized isolation-
ism served the interests of our free world order; where,
however, these synchronized with those of the Soviet
Union, Communists would oscillate on the side of the
angels. At its inception America First was thus the more
inimical: its influence, far surpassing any possessed by
American Communists, did much, when freedom itself
hung in the balance, to keep America aloof. But in la-
ter years, while Communist infiltration of the State De-
partment should not be exaggerated, there can be no
doubt of what the West lost and the East gained by
Soviet atomic espionage. In this only a few Communists

Democracy and Error 129

were directly engaged; many had deemed it best to re-
nounce their Party allegiance before it occurred, What
happens, nevertheless, when they do win out when
their organizational apparatus is merged with the organ-
izational apparatus of the State may be seen in every
captive nation of the Soviet orbit.

Morally and ideologically, ex-Communists cannot box
the political compass and still pose as mentors whose
counsel their intended victims should accept. For years
they did not only misrepresent the character of Russian
society; at the drop of a hat in the Kremlin they would
have disrupted our own. Yet former Stalinists and Trot-
skyites have made so good a thing out of a dubious past
that to challenge their capacity for responsible judgment
is itself deemed irresponsible. Such inside knowledge as
they have could be imparted quietly; as students of the
Soviet economy and Russian methods there are more re-
liable experts. Ideological racketeers may propagate the
myth that as ex-Communists they are now the most
trustworthy of anti-Communists. But they still play Rus-
sia's game when they divert the attention of a democ-
racy from other crucial issues to make it take sides in
what is nothing less than a civil war in a political under-
world.

And that is the standpoint from which should be
considered the question of whether Mao Tse-tung,
threading his way through the labyrinths of the State
Department, marched to Peking across the Potomac. Or-
ganizationally pro-Soviet influences did what they could
in Washington, as in Ottawa, when, during the sec-
ond world war, any issue of war aims and the coining
peace arose. The problem is whether the postwar cam-
paign against them, as waged by former comrades, has
not since been blown up for personal rather than public
reasons; whether the supporters and colleagues of ex-

130* THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

isolationists, who themselves wrought damage, can with
no compunction join ex-Communists as the outraged
guardians of the national interest. For such is the rela-
tion of diplomacy and power that even the most ada-
mantine resistance to Mao Tse-tung by every American
government official could not have made much dif-
ference for long.

What are the facts? Though Japan had been defeated
by the United States, it was Russia who, after 1945,
reaped in the Far East the fruits of victory; Eurasian
and expansionist, she could resume that ascendancy on
the mainland of East Asia from which the Japanese dis-
lodged her forty years before. In the long run only a
massive full-scale American invasion of the region might
have buttressed Chiang Kai-shek or, as Theodore Roose-
velt had desired, established a Far Eastern equilibrium.
The fate of China was sealed when, while the United
States rushed pell-mell to bring the boys home, Russian
armies stayed intact; when the American people, for one
last delusive interlude, fancied that they could maintain
peace by potential rather than actual power. And in
Korea the subsequent enforcement of the United Na-
tions Charter taught the United States that her pre-
occupations do not cease when her occupations are
abandoned.

Illicit machinations in the State Department had to be
unearthed. But as compared with atomic espionage,
there is little evidence that these seriously affected the
course of events. Nobody has intimated that the talons
of Alger Hiss stretched to Downing Street; yet Winston
Churchill, as well as Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roose-
velt, took part at Teheran and Yalta. So also with the
development of policy in the Far East the same brute
circumstances, geographic and strategic, as eventually

Democracy and Error * 131

permitted Russia to lord it over Prague would underpin
Mao Tse-tung at Peking. American power in being, suit-
ably deployed, might, here or there, have altered that
grim picture nothing else could. But these realities, as
ex-Communists and ex-isolationists get themselves into
the act, tend to be obscured.

Foreign policy, above all, must be framed against a
rich background of full acquaintance with the vital in-
terests of a free world everywhere. And about these it is
grotesque that ex-Communists, any more than ex-Fascists
or former Nazis, should presume to speak. Leadership
against a new threat to the West devolves properly upon
those who, whether on the Right, the Left or the Cen-
ter, have today nothing to retract from yesterday. And
good judgment, being personally as well as democrat-
ically responsible, must be its earmark. Ex-Communists,
if they had possessed this, would never have been what
they were; nor can the sincerest of recantations trans-
form a man's nature. Humiliated, unbalanced, obsessed,
the vocal among them are still impelled by that abso-
lutist temper which they once found so fascinating in
Communism itself; any concern they now feel for West-
ern democracy is colored by a score they have to settle
with a cause which let them down or which it had be-
come prudent to desert. About Communists in sensitive
areas, Americans may be perturbed. What they do not
realize is the extent to which posts now held in univer-
sities and trade unions, on editorial staffs and as book
reviewers, by former Trotskyites and ex-Stalinists ena-
bles some of them to take in each other's intellectual
washing and thereby cleanse themselves. Addicted to the
relentless in casuistry and dialectic, habituated to work-
ing in clandestine networks of cells and cabals, they are
adept at organizational techniques through which dis-

132 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

sentient views can either be boycotted or maligned as
suits the neurotic pattern of their own political reha-
bilitation. Fanaticisms alter. Mentalities do not.

Pre-atomic Communists, Trotskyite and Stalinist, may
thus lay bare their souls and yet not tell all. Others who
ill-served our free world order, the pro-German de-
moralizers, the former America Firsters, are criticized
less than their critics. Yet for their moral amnesty it is
Hitler's heirs in the Kremlin whom they have most to
thank. And it would be less disquieting if in each of
these quarters, on the Right as well as the Left, self-
exculpation had not turned so brazenly into self-
righteousness. For it, too, thinks the whole world is
mad save thee and me, John John's own sanity being
noted as a matter of doubt. And in so irrational an at-
mosphere the only guilty ones could soon be those who
have nothing to explain away.

Irresponsibility in the defense of our free society has,
then, had, during the twentieth century, no one source.
But without the irresponsibility which a large-scale
structure facilitates there would have been less leeway
for the irresponsible in opinion and leadership. States-
manship is not only wisdom in public affairs: it is wis-
dom in time. When political experts go amiss they are,
however, more loath afterwards than other men to eat
their words: judgment entails foresight, and to acknowl-
edge a lack of it would be for technicians to disparage
their own wares. As palliation of intellectual ignominy
they therefore contend that everybody, or almost every-
body, was wrong; if all are leveled down to the same
plane of mediocrity, fewer competitive differentials of
merit have to be recognized and accorded their due.
Then, too, there are those who, having ignored or mis-
construed the lessons of history, excuse such ilTeSpOnsi-
hv savincr that nrm* nrmr nnlv fiisfrrvrv itc^lf ran

Democracy and Error 133

decide; by postponing all assessments, that is, to a later
date when they no longer have any immediate bearing.
But history is sheer antiquarianism unless it illumines
the past in the present; here and now; in yesterday's
future which is today as much as in today's future which
is tomorrow. Without perspective there can be no vision.
Yet it is this for which a technically trained generation
is educated least of all. In an age of technology the ex-
pert is long on his own speciality, short on its relation
to everything else. Organizational relationships may give
him power. A corresponding responsibility will, in the
deeper unrelatedness of organized anarchy, be far to seek.
Not that an exact clairvoyance in public affairs is pos-
sible. It is the architect, the engineer, the craftsman who
can see ahead more clearly: controlling his own ma-
terial, he exercises judgment within precise, technically
well-defined limits. And the experimental scientist in
his laboratory, the medical practitioner as he treats his
patient, the surgeon as he operates on him, must be
able to do the same. So also for large-scale planning in
the modern State, there will be prediction founded on
systematic economic research. Yet here social controls
may be organized to ensure that the envisaged result is
not wholly left to chance. World politics are, however,
destitute of any single, overriding control. The limits
for valid prediction will therefore be as precise or im-
precise as international anarchy itself. Yet we invite
chaos when we throw in the sponge and despair entirely
of charting our global course in advance. Irresponsible
leadership may, as a plea in extenuation, strike a fatal-
istic note: that since events are unforeseen, what it did
was the best that could be done. But the fatality is in a
large-scale order which conduces to the irresponsible
not in the events themselves. Nor, in matters of war
and peace, should too much -be made of the thesis that,

1 34 * T H E AMERICAN ANARCHY

when they are foreseen, it is the prediction itself which
shapes events to a predicted end. For if this were so, to
warn against a danger would be to bring it about.

On so cardinal an issue as the advent of war in 1939,
for instance, all the turns had been called. No crystal
ball was necessary to perceive that, with the forces then
in play, there might be a Nazi-Soviet pact which could
again put Europe at the mercy of Germany; or that, in
any final crisis, Anglo-American unity would, to preserve
our free world order, be forthcoming. A calculation of
national interests and international probabilities can be
gleaned from history; what history cannot do is make
certain that there will be those with power or influence
who may digest its lessons wisely that to these attention
will be paid. Dictatorships have one leadership principle,
democracies another. But when among the latter there
was a breakdown in leadership, there was a breakdown
in peace itself.

An expertness that is sound will predict soundly. In a
mass society, however, the first-class is suspect, conform-
ity the road to organizational success. In one of human-
ity's darkest hours the wartime conjuncture of Churchill
and Roosevelt was a stroke of miraculous good fortune.
Yet Churchill only became a prophet with honor in his
own country when it was in the most desperate straits
when indeed little but honor remained. Nor would
Roosevelt, though in office, rise to full stature until after
the blow had fallen. And by then the Russian alliance
alone could redress the strategic balance. But what the
war proved had been plain before the war. Separately
the English-speaking peoples might be the puppets of
uncontrollable forces. In unison they could direct events
or, at least, prevent them from getting out of hand.

It was the genius of Churchill and Roosevelt to re-
fashion the very circumstances which 'had aligned them

Democracy and Error * 135

in leadership together. And neither, it may be recalled,
could, with their superb personal talents, be deemed an
average man. The imprescient leadership of average
men was, in fact, what had let our free world order rat-
tle so needlessly down to the brink of catastrophe. As a
patriot, Churchill must have been heart-stricken when
his gloomiest prognostications were fulfilled; as an ex-
pert who understood history before he made it, little
could take him by surprise. And only a society which
still bred the exceptional might produce leaders who,
in saving it from its enemies, would save it from itself.
On what, then, does the reputation of experts de-
pend? One innate difference between those w r ho are oc-
cupied with public affairs and those who follow other
professions is in the incidence of surveillance. Organiza-
tional phenomena may, throughout a large-scale society,
depreciate merit. Yet where, for example, scholarship or
science have original work to exhibit, this will, at least,
have to undergo the scrutiny of other scholars or scien-
tists. As a matter of fact in every learned profession the
skill of members must thus pass muster before fellow
specialists. But where they have professional contacts
with individuals who are not part of the profession, it is
these which determine at last how a professional man is
regarded. A surgeon who is maladroit, a lawyer who is
obtuse could not disguise his deficiencies for long. For
each bears a direct responsibility to the person who con-
sults him; his experience as a technician is the cumula-
tive result of tangible satisfactions accorded particular
clients or patients. In public affairs, however, the satis-
faction which has to be given is a general one; tangible
though they are, the responsibility for them is so dis-
persed as to be intangible. And now as large-scale enter-
prise governmental, institutional, corporate absorbs
trained experts, these acquire the same organizational

136 'THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

incentives as laymen themselves. Many are still kept
alert professionally by love of the work for its own sake.
Other, more concrete, stimuli are the need of most.

Democratic leadership, though it draws on expert pur-
suits, is distinguished from learned professions in a
number of additional respects. The former has a sphere
which co-extends with that of the entire social order;
the latter function within bounds set by themselves.
Even where the responsibility of learned professions is
at its most personal and direct, each discipline maintains,
neat and inviolate, the arcana of specialized knowledge.
A mass democracy, however, as it gathers everybody
within its embrace, must strive perpetually to surmount
barriers between the expert and inexpert. Organiza-
tional man as a civil servant or party stalwart may play
his cards close to his chest. The leader whose appeal is
to public opinion or the votes of the public must talk
to the people in the language of the people. For poli-
tics touches their lives all the time, learned professions
only some of the time. To the ordinary citizen public
affairs may thus be deceptive: made to seem less re-
calcitrant than they are, they annoy and disillusion
when their full intricacy appears. And indeed this mood
was one element in that post-Wilsonian demoralization
of the English-speaking peoples which, with isolation-
ism and appeasement, would culminate in the second
world war. Simple panaceas were not feasible overnight.
Responsibility for world order was therefore abjured al-
together.

Many of the ills by which humanity is beset may be
written in the stars and concealed from it beforehand.
But statesmanship is the art of sorting out the remedi-
able from the irremediable. The mid-century plight of
our free world order, flowing from evils that were fore-
seen and could have been forestalled, was not inevitable.

Democracy and Error 137

Nor has what happened disproved the liberal credo
that men, by opening their minds and applying their
intelligence, can in common revalue themselves and re-
shape their destiny. What it does prove is that a mass
democracy may, through its own social techniques, allow
itself to become the creature rather than the master of
events. And even if organized magnitude did not make
for the irresponsible use of large-scale power, a free
society w T ould be handicapped by a lag between predic-
tion and fulfilment. For it is this delay which enables
political leadership to escape the consequences of its
own folly. A surgeon or lawyer has, as it were, to de-
liver the goods on the spot. In public affairs there is
often an interval during w T hich an issue tends to grow
stale or alters circumstantially. When it does come to a
head, those who mishandled it or misinformed opinion
about it are covered, in their incompetence, through the
passage of time. A bored, forgetful, or uncomprehending
populace is, by then, too engrossed in other questions to
keep the record straight.

Mass publicity in a mass society caters to this mass
amnesia. Marx may have said that religion is the opiate
of the people; it is mass propaganda that totalitarian
movements, Communist, Fascist, and Nazi alike, have
employed first to convulse and then, rendering docile,
benumb. Not that large-scale publicity has the field, in
a modern democracy, to itself; the obvious physical fact
is, nevertheless, that above its clamorous suasions the
still, small voice gets less and less chance to register. In
opinion industries the accent of organized magnitude
has been on the brash, the strident, and the sensational.
Political leadership, also seeking out the mass, soon
learned that to establish a reputation it, too, must be
seen and heard incessantly; that how this is done mat-
ters less than being sure it is done; that volume and

138 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

reiteration, rather than a consistent expertness, are what
count. Stereotyped familiarity with a name is so impor-
tant for intervention in public affairs that, even when
obtained in another, quite disparate, sphere, it ranks
above any relevant specialized capacity. From Charles
Lindbergh to some of the more literate stars of stage
and screen there has been a transferred access to the
public mind which is as irresponsible as it is vast. As if
by some medieval alchemy which would transmute base
metal into gold, the influence of the inexpert is, through
the organized magic of mass publicity, itself made ex-
pert.

Not that popular idols are deemed omniscient. They
would lose half their charm if they were. For people
may not wish their heroes always to be vindicated in
judgment. Excellence, by contrast with one's own in-
adequacies, can be, and often is, a strain; relief may be
had in the huddle of the group, the conformity of the
mass. The artificer of large-scale publicity, in working
up public reputations, must realize that the mass of
men, dimly conscious of their defects, are beguiled and
consoled by leaders who share many of these with them.
For man in the aggregate, pulling others down to his
own level, would devalue himself; and it is frequently
in spite of himself that he has to be revalued. "I told
you so," is the most unendearing of admonitions. For
with that reminder the public, as if in a glass darkly,
perceives, shudders, and recoils from its own torpid im-
age, its own inferiorities, its own infirmities, its own ir-
responsibility.

A large-scale order is the province of experts, and only
through expert leadership can it continue safe and free.
In each of the major crises of the twentieth century
such leadership has, ultimately, emerged; yet if it had
done so sooner, if there had been more of it in time,

Democracy and Error 139

humanity might have learned from one ordeal how to
spare itself another. Mass democracy, with whatever in
an organized anarchy that is ambivalent, still stands for
the principle of merit. When nothing less may suffice,
qualified leadership comes, at last, into its own. But a
more ample supply will not steadily be available if, in
the day-to-day business of society, the pressure is all the
other way.

CHAPTER

6

Foreclosure and
Dissent

"It ain't so much peoples* ignorance that does the
harm," said Artemus Ward, "as their knowin' so much
that ain't so." The truth may, in the Biblical phrase,
make you free. But over what truth is men have always
pondered, wrangled, and fought. The corrective proc-
esses of free communication enable that conflict to be
waged lawfully and within a stable order. In govern-
ment and thought they are the pivot of any democracy;
upon them liberalism has therefore insisted. But in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries its task was ideolog-
ically a less subtle one than that which it now faces. For
then reform and privilege were frank in their confron-
tation; though they were out to throttle each other, their
political vocabulary was the same. Today we utter the
same words to mean quite different things. If truth is
the first casualty of war, it fell wounded in the struggle
of 1914-18 and has never recovered. The civilized West
defends its revaluation of man; but the Nazis, with their
mass plebiscites, and the Communists, with their peo-

Foreclosure and Dissent 141

pies' democracies, have employed the language of lib-
erty to destroy liberty itself. Yet within our own house-
hold, too, democratic values are inverted by some to
whom free expression is a stock in trade.

The imbalance which large-scale organization brings
everywhere in its train is also imported by it into the
realm of opinion. The classic philosophers of free ex-
pression were not alone in stirring up a static society;
without them, however, innovation might have had a
still harder row to hoe. They envisaged conditions of de-
bate that w^ere politically more just; but the techniques
they contemplated had not gone as yet beyond the in-
vention of the printing press. As truth grappled with
falsehood it would not, averred John Milton, be put to
the worse in a free and open encounter; Thomas Jef-
ferson wanted to leave undisturbed even those who
sought to dissolve the American Union or change its
republican form, so confident was he that reason might
safely combat error. John Stuart Mill realized, neverthe-
less, that truth, having temporarily been suppressed,
would have to be rediscovered later* When Holmes and
Brandeis upheld the notion of a free marketplace of
thought, they were restating liberal principles of indi-
vidual initiative and the open mind which the nine-
teenth century had bequeathed to them the faith that,
in ideas as among persons, merit, undepreciated, will
triumph.

In the modern economy, however, it is large-scale
rather than small-scale undertakings which have the
power to compete. Less and less is there a self-regulating
exchange o goods and services: so also in the market-
place of thought, as the range of communication has ex-
panded, freedom for unorganized opinion contracts. Man
is devalued unless he possesses an unobstructed access to
the flow of ideas. Yet the bigger the mass untutored or

142 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

lethargic the more these have to be selected or simpli-
fied. And when they are selected or simplified to further
a particular rather than a general interest, even the
clash of ideas is manipulated. Totalitarian government
may have to resort to the calculated mendacities which
treat white as black and black as white. Yet in a de-
mocracy, too, free expression is cramped by opinion
techniques which, making all white or all black, omit
every nuance between.

Liberty in a mass society is maintained through the
action and counteraction of one organized pressure upon
another. Constitutional safeguards remain; brokerage be-
tween large-scale interests leaves a margin of unorgan-
ized freedom. And it is here that there will still be scope
for individual bent or idiosyncrasy. In the politics of
modern democracies, for instance, the lobby has incurred
odium because of the sinister influence it can exercise.
Yet it may call forth others whether in a public or pri-
vate interest and so far as it does an equilibrium of
power might be established. Political parties themselves
illustrate the general situation. In English-speaking de-
mocracies candidates and platforms endeavor to recon-
cile diverse tendencies, sectional and economic, while on
the continent of Europe it is these which parliamentary
blocs would crystalize. Under the European system a
variety of views can be enunciated even though the
unity of the nation is riven; the party system among the
English-speaking peoples protects national unity but the
ordinary citizen has less opportunity to do more than
choose between large-scale alternatives. Not that it
would be illegal for him to submit to others an alter-
native of his own. In an oligopoly of opinion, however,
it is harder and harder for an individual view, without
organized backing, to get itself heard. Large-scale in-
strumentalities which are themselves monopolistic thus

Foreclosure and Dissent 143

become the chief means for that exchange of ideas
which, properly conducted, would be the antithesis of
monopoly.

A democracy to be well rounded must be well in-
formed. And that is why opinion industries, though they
deal in imponderables, are for it the most basic of all.
But in the middle years of the twentieth century there
has not only developed an organizational foreclosure
of the self-regulating market for free communication.
World crisis has also made information media less
punctilious about keeping it open. An organizational
tightening-up is thus accentuated by an ideological one.
For every nation the war of ideas is an important phase
of the global contest; upon the United States its im-
pact is all the greater because her world role is so new.
Never before has she been in the van. No longer aloof
internationally, Americans must inevitably be less de-
tached from global affairs ideologically.

Accompanying the rise of large-scale organization, the
problem is a deeper one than any presented by the ap-
pearance on North American soil of the Soviet evangel.
This, nevertheless, has complicated it. For Communists
would exploit that free market of ideas to whose obliter-
ation they themselves are dedicated. If the United States
had but to cope with sabotage on the German model of
1914-18, there would be less ground for alarm. Since
then, however, the Fifth Column, paid or unpaid, has
become an organizational weapon for the strategic paral-
ysis of every democracy. The atomic spy trials in Canada,
Britain, and the United States revealed how far espion-
age can penetrate when pro-Soviet ideologues burrow
governmentally with or without benefit of party; that
the Communist Party itself would stop at nothing was
now incontrovertible. And that is why its infiltration of
unofficial key institutional posts information media,

146* THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

At the liberal premise of an open mind and a fair
forum for all, commissars scoff as much as any gauleiter.
The servile genuflections of the tamed artist, the tram-
meled intellectual, the caged scientist are outward and
visible signs of how under Communism the soul of man
is devalued. But in a democracy it is not only the law
and the courts which must uphold any marketplace of
thought. To have a right of free communication without
an adequate chance of fulfilling it can be tantamount
to having no right at all. For as large-scale organization
transforms opinion industries, they exhibit the same
structural irresponsibility as other big corporate and col-
lectivized endeavors. Yet in them such irresponsibility is
compounded when its effect, by virtue of their overall
function, is upon the entire social order. For it is but a
step from technical irresponsibility to irresponsible at-
titudes toward public questions; from freewheeling or-
ganizational power, confined within the enterprise, to its
organized extension, promotional and preclusive, over
the free exchange of ideas.

Here, as elsewhere, the marketplace breaks down
when those who control factors of production may,
thereby, also control factors of consumption. Free ex-
pression is the touchstone of other freedoms. And in an
organized anarchy competition is as acute as ever. But
since this is within groups and between large-scale in-
terests, it is their spokesmen who dominate the ex-
changes and not any who, in the classic liberal tradition,
may have something of their own to say.

Politically, every lawabiding citizen is still as free as
ever to enter the marketplace of thought. Economically,
as information media are concentrated in fewer and
fewer hands, he may be debarred. Independent opinion,
if it is to rise above the din of mass instrumentalities,

Foreclosure and Dissent * 147

requires suitable outlets of its own. But these seldom pay
their way. Costs are such that newspapers, magazines,
books, the theater, motion pictures, radio, and televi-
sion must couch their appeal to as wide an audience as
possible. And that in turn accelerates monopolistic
trends which push out from spheres of taste to those of
public policy.

Mass media, it may be contended, do not sweep all
before them. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, could so
dramatize himself and his program that, at critical junc-
tures, he was repeatedly re-elected over press opposi-
tion; and Harry Truman, though much less charismatic
as a leader, also defied it successfully in the presidential
election of 1948. But to the public ear, office and party
had given them a large-scale access of their own before
other large-scale interests tried to unhorse them. Dwight
Eisenhower, with his greater fame and on a fair consid-
eration of the issues, might still have won in 1952. Dis-
quieting, nevertheless, were the excessive campaign costs,
the ability of the victors to purchase more time than the
losers on radio and television, the inability of the latter
thus to counteract a one-sided coverage by most daily
newspapers and some popular magazines.

Communication is foreclosed when serious views can-
not be disseminated because they have no prior organ-
ized backing. Nor will the problem be solved by reduc-
ing campaign expenses by permitting all candidates to
frank their mail and by prescribing additional unpaid
time on radio and television. Some who cannot now af-
ford to stand might thus be enabled to do so and un-
savory political bargains, as the price of financial sup-
port, be thereby eliminated. But though an equalization
of campaign opportunities could be arranged, other per-
ennial inequalities for those who are not candidates per-

148 T H E AMERICAN ANARCHY

sist. Freedom is not only in listening to politicians but
in so speaking out that, above and beyond large-scale
interests represented by them, they too will listen.

The theory of a free marketplace assumes that who-
ever has the capacity may set up shop for himself. But
in opinion industries this is no longer practicable even
for those with substantial resources so exorbitant is the
overhead for production and distribution, so huge are
the sums wanted for capital investment. Everywhere the
tendency is for old units to combine rather than for
new ones to emerge. Liberty in this domain has never
meant that you must furnish your adversary with a ros-
trum. But what it does predicate is that, for the indi-
vidual who wishes to have one, there will always be
room. When dissent can neither be expressed through
existing organs nor establish a mouthpiece of its own, it
is the existing organs that hold sway. Before organized
magnitude had recast opinion industries the chief dan-
ger to free expression lay outside the press. In authori-
tarian societies it still does. Today, however, in large-
scale democracies the boot is on the other foot. Freedom
of the press in an oligopoly of opinion is what the press
asks for itself but is organizationally less willing to ac-
cord. Liberalism in the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury must therefore revise an historic aim and seek
freedom of utterance in spite of the press as well as
through it.

Yet among information media, as in other aspects of a
mass society, organized magnitude brings great benefits.
Circulation needs may induce many to stoop to the low-
est common denominator. Fault in the newspaper field
especially has been found with chain ownership, one-
paper towns, the influence of advertisers and special in-
terests. But when use is made of the better newsgather-
ing services the facts can be conveyed inexpensively to

Foreclosure and Dissent 149

areas of opinion that would otherwise not obtain them.
And if mass media knit together a mass democracy, it
is mass advertising which renders mass media profita-
ble. Without this manufactured commodities could not
be marketed in large numbers; there would not be that
ultimate product of mass production as high a standard
of living. But here, too, the organizational instrumental-
ities which revalue man can also devalue him. A press
lord may be high-minded, radio commentators or syn-
dicated columnists might be experts with a deep per-
sonal sense of social responsibility. They are made func-
tionally irresponsible through a lopsided privilege in
public discussion which they, and they alone, so inor-
dinately enjoy.

Many who have a large-scale apparatus at their dis-
posal are, moreover, neither high-minded nor morally
responsible. And power such as theirs is peculiarly in-
sidious when, as in radio and television, opinion media
are anyhow natural monopolies. Upon ear and eye in
the relaxed intimacy of hearth and home, mass sugges-
tion can be soft-spoken as well as loud. Until of late
audiences had to be built up slowly, painfully, and un-
der physically delimited modes of communication. But
today when large-scale techniques maximize a far-flung
intrusiveness, there is a plenitude of advantage with a
minimum of effort.

Radio and television may, when misused, thus do
more than newspapers to cripple or distort any fair pub-
lic exchange of ideas. For comment which is verbal has
to be caught on the wing, and attention given to it can-
not be given elsewhere. Publications, however, do not
evaporate; they may be perused and compared when
convenient. To counter tendentious comment on the air,
another viewpoint would have to be expressed on the
same broadcast or telecast or under analogous conditions.

150 'THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

Nor do intermittent set debates with invited guests
erase organizational prerogatives. The topic that ought
to be discussed might not always be selected; those tak-
ing part may not be the best qualified to do so. Yet par-
ticipants will at least have been conceded that demo-
cratic imperative, the right to talk back. From day to
day, week to week, and month to month, however, it
is the steady rain that soaks. The Tower of Babel had
no rules of parliamentary procedure but neither, amid
the clamor of tongues, did it have any technological
means of so amplifying a few voices above all the rest.
Yet among newspapers, too, there is large-scale irre-
sponsibility and its ambit is also vast. The dispatches
which they publish from their own correspondents or
from news agencies (and abbreviations of which may
be broadcast or telecast) endeavor to report rather than
persuade. The syndication of the so-called column is,
however, in a different category because as a thorough-
fare of opinion the traffic it bears is so predominantly a
one-way traffic. Within its immense orbit it spins, not
unlike some radio or television commentaries, pontif-
ical, hollow in timbre, gigantically resounding, overleap-
ing every natural barrier to human communication. An-
cient social moorings may have slackened in the life of
modern urban man; information media tend more and
more to cap for him, in the domain of opinion, an ex-
istence governed throughout by delocalized power. Many
newspapers themselves come under absentee ownership.
Yet whatever the ownership, each has its own local com-
munity to serve. And where there is objection to the
views of staff correspondents or to an editorial policy,
these may, at any rate, be rebutted subsequently on the
same or an adjoining page although here, also, an edi-
tor, having the last word, will always decide for himself
whether and how to print even a letter of dissent. But a

Foreclosure and Dissent * 151

syndicated columnist can, like a chain broadcaster or tel-
ecaster, editorialize to his heart's content, and only his
peers in large-scale power may have a proper chance to
reply. ^

For in a free society where mass techniques must be
employed so as to withstand mass techniques, the pri-
vate individual is not technologically equipped to argue
back. When he himself has been misrepresented, he can-
not be certain that suits for slander or libel will redress
injury by getting the actual facts known; newspapers
wishing to discourage such proceedings may not pub-
licize those that are held. Nor, more generally, can the
critic of a syndicated columnist retort with an article or
letter of refutation whenever one should, in fairness, be
published. Each separate newspaper which reproduced a
particular column would have to be tracked down and
space in it procured; to cross swords with a syndicated
columnist an antagonist must have a system of distribu-
tion as sure and as multifarious as his own. For large-
scale techniques and instantaneous circulation bestow on
the syndicated columnist so huge a public, and thereby
so disproportionate a power over opinion, that every
dispute with him is hopeless from the start.

'/ am Sir Oracle,

And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!'

The danger to free expression is, then, that the mass
market will nullify any open marketplace of ideas. Yet
where there is a smaller coverage one also develops
wherever, that is, publications adopt large-scale methods.
External evidence of irresponsibility will not, for in-
stance, be as manifest in media which spurn the taste of
the multitude; internally these are put, through organ-
izational techniques, in a similar manipulative class.

152* THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

Among newspapers and magazines the caprice of pub-
Ushers has often been described; the larger their un-
dertakings, however, the less can they keep all the reins
within their own hands. Ownership and control may in
some corporate branches of the opinion industry not
formally have been divorced; organized magnitude still
confers upon insiders privileges which are as fortuitous
as they are far-reaching. Organizational man as executive
and editor can pre-empt on behalf of himself, his coterie,
or his group a social mechanism of arbitrary large-scale
power which, by his own unaided efforts, he himself
could never have devised. But in opinion industries ir-
responsibility of that sort is worse than in others be-
cause the degree of free expression which is thereby
facilitated or foreclosed may determine the viability of
all democratic freedoms.

In ideas, as in business enterprise, the concept of an
open marketplace is derived from the liberal principle
that merit, forging ahead, can win out that the odds,
when uneven, will not be so immutably. Large-scale or-
ganization, however, sets up a disequilibrium of com-
petitive opportunity which, within the province of opin-
ion, outsiders can seldom undo; through it, by a kind of
social geometric progression, disparities are increased
rather than reduced between those who own or have ac-
cess to mass instrumentalities and those who do not.
Everywhere in a large-scale democracy a more just equal-
ization of economic opportunity is tempered by organi-
zational inequities that contravene the principle of
merit. But among information media irresponsibility
is felt beyond their own precincts; impalpable as
opinion itself, it is limitlessly prehensile. And while
most free citizens of a modern democracy would resist
a frontal attack on their liberties, they will not band to-
gether against an erosion which is surreptitious, hard to

Foreclosure and Dissent 153

discern or pin down, indefinable in detail but cumu-
latively definite. For magnitude giveth and, like the
Almighty, magnitude taketh away.

The vulgarizers among opinion industries are thus
not alone in irresponsibility. Media whose exterior good
taste is irreproachable may, as pillars of the marketplace,
also be weak reeds to lean upon. Nor could the stylis-
tically irresponsible flourish if the gravitational pull of
the mass were not a downward rather than an upward
one. It has, for example, been found that British radio
listeners, whose schooling was never more than elemen-
tary, are unresponsive to any sort of educational pro-
gram; they wish to be entertained in their own fashion
and not enlightened in that of anybody else. And yet in
insisting upon such norms the mass confuses itself. For
only shock treatment can arouse it. Public issues have
to be pitched at it episodically, with no logical sequence
of cause and effect, coming whence and going none
knows whither. Yet for understanding there must be per-
spective and for perspective there must be background,
history. Mass media cannot, by their nature, provide
these. And in its own nature the mass would have for
them neither the patience, the leisure, nor the will.

It is nowadays through large-scale reiteration that
ideas are, as in assembly-line manufacture, communi-
cated and put across. The open mind has, through sci-
entific method, created a mechanized society; and in this
mass media will be a boomerang if, while concentrating
power, they distract from powers of concentration. For
large-scale organization does not only fortify the interior
conformities of the group; exterior conformities are ren-
dered by opinion industries simultaneously pervasive.
Ideally, the better a society is organized the better
should be the chance for the well-organized mind. In
fact, organization which is social rather than mental

* THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

people from the necessity of thinking for them-
selves. For here, as elsewhere, man may be devalued in
the domain of intangibles even as large-scale tangibles
revalue him socially. And when that occurs his entire
revaluation can be falsified.

Foreclosure may be one means of manipulating opin-
ion. But it is not the only one. For while its opposite,
disclosure, is an essential of the open marketplace there
are circumstances when even this can be politically ir-
responsible. Over international affairs foreclosure might
enable interested parties to shape the course of public
discussion; by the wrong kind of disclosure the demo-
cratic conduct of foreign policy will, nevertheless, also be
hobbled. What purports to inform may likewise misin-
form; and when that involves national attitudes on war
and peace the boundaries between liberty and license
have been crossed. The question is whether a democ-
racy serves its own interests when a vital sector of gov-
ernment must operate in a glass house and on a large-
scale sounding board. For year after year public men,
who are themselves wont to denounce foreign espionage,
voluntarily divulge State secrets matters of arms and
strategy so as to figure in the headlines and reverberate
in the broadcasts. Not for nothing have the arts of ad-
vertisement gone further in the United States than else-
where. Fear of Communist transmission belts has ren-
dered her apprehensive about entering into confidential
commitments with some of her allies. But more of the
latter fear those leakages in American public life which
demonstrate that a demagogic overpublicized loyalty can
be almost as damaging as unpublicized disloyalty. So also
government officials, terrorized by the manner in which
a few Congressional investigations have been held, re-
frain from recording their advice with candor lest this

Foreclosure and Dissent * 155

afterwards be dug out to their own detriment and that
of their country.

It is as it should be when a marketplace of ideas is
buffeted by all the winds of doctrine. But at a time
when foreign and domestic problems interact as they do,
the difficulty is not merely one of ideological conflict.
Nor is it simply one of distinguishing between what
the recklessly self-glorifying -would publicize and what
governmental information a democratic society is en-
titled to get. The issue raised is none other than that of
closed versus open diplomacy.

The mass media of every large-scale society have the
organized capacity to inflame or calm the populace, to
provoke friction between peoples or assuage it. In a to-
talitarian dictatorship this, however, is done uniformly
and by decree from above. In a modern democracy some
play with fire, others seek to extinguish it. Hostile prop-
aganda across the frontiers will, in a mass era of psy-
chological warfare, rise and fall with the temperature of
world politics as a whole; attempts in the United Na-
tions to outlaw it by a separate and specific treaty are
therefore doomed to futility. For differences between
sovereign countries are not the same as those within
them. Yet the same manipulative techniques may be
used by special pleaders to incite when they should tran-
quillize and to muffle when they should speak out. The
Assembly and the various Councils of the United Na-
tions would never accomplish anything if there were no
mutual concessions previously extracted in private. Some
of their failures, contrariwise, may be ascribed to wilful
attitudes by governments which publicity at home might
have overcome. And opinion industries are responsible
when they recognize where there must and where there
must not be full disclosure. For international affairs a

1 ;/ THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

free marketplace, neither overweighted by organized
pressure nor kept uninformed, is one in which a demo-
cratic balance is struck.

It there ^ere fewer analogies between national and
international government, disenchantment over the lat-
ter might have been less rife. After the first world war,
with the founding of the League of Nations, men were
the dupes of their own liberal hopes; they almost fan-
cied that to air quarrels was to heal them. And again
in 1945, many expected that under the United Nations
the public opinion of a peace-loving world would be
mobilized on behalf of the weak against the strong;
through it the strong might acknowledge a power
stronger than power itself. But mass media which hasten
the attainment of that goal are so constituted that they
can also hinder it. When princes and autocrats possessed
irresponsible power, secret diplomacy was more irre-
sponsible in objective than in method; open diplomacy,
on the other hand, can pursue even the most responsi-
ble of objectives irresponsibly. For diplomacy may be
too open if it degenerates into a bid for the applause of
the galleries at home; if the appeal on all sides is to the
intransigent nationalism of the mass. Without give-and-
take there can be no diplomacy; but this is ruled out
when every transaction is publicized as it is negotiated.
The menace of civil war has not hung over twentieth-
century democracies nearly as often as that of interna-
tional war. Yet this would have been the case if the
rough-and-tumble of domestic politics matched hazards
in the international sphere. One day the latter may be
no more dangerous than the former. But national sov-
ereignties will have to be abolished before that halcyon
time and their place taken by one overriding, well-
integrated world State.
The League of Nations did not, after all, collapse be-

Foreclosure and Dissent 157

cause diplomacy between the wars was less open than
had at first been anticipated. It never recovered from
the reluctance of the United States to join. From it,
moreover, the three chief aggressors of the period
Japan, Italy, and Germany would not only depart later
with little more than a reprimand; those on both shores
of the Atlantic who, together, could preserve a free
world order without war did not unite until much al-
ready had been lost through war. The League and other
collective agencies did not correspond to the configura-
tions of world power; if Geneva bumbled, the utmost
publicity there could not stop the rot. The ends of peace
were plain. The power to enforce them lay elsewhere.
And then after 1945 th$ debacle of the West in East
Asia was bruited about. Over another crucial issue, the
abrupt switch in American policy toward Germany, a
more studied reticence hovered. Its potential conse-
quences were never fully publicized before that por-
tentous change had been speeded up beyond recall. Mass
media, so eager on occasion to expose, promoted this
fateful volte face unquestioningly; Congress, which ex-
amines everything else, proceeded on the unexamined
hypothesis that Germany's interests would lie with the
West. And so the American public could not be warned
that in the long run German nationalism, as revived
through the Bonn Republic, had most to get from Mos-
cow; that, in the absence of East-West agreement, land
and brethren in Soviet clutches can be repossessed
through another Russo-German agreement; that in fos-
tering the restoration of an industrially powerful West
German State the bipartisan policy of the United States
might itself have played into Russia's hands. World War
III can result from such irresponsibility, and if it does
this may be proof that a manipulated large-scale de-
mocracy, being selectively informed, is not really an in-

! V* * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

formed out*. But the proof will again have come too late.
Opinion industries, like government itself, thus ivaver
between foreclosure and disclosure. It is not enough
therdore that mass media watch each other and that
qmernnient also be watched. It is as important that
\5irus independent of them all should be heard. For a
diplomacy which may be treated or mistreated in accord-
ance with the interests of mass media is, to those who
reject organized conformities, not an open one either.
War and peace is the major issue of the twentieth cen-
tury; and open diplomacy can be the most democratic
of procedures if citizens are apprised generally of what
goes on, if new r departures in policy are fully debated.
Yet when proposals, prior tp submission for approval,
are being negotiated, there should not be the sort of
publicity which makes diplomacy itself impossible.

That, at any rate, is why a large-scale intrusion may be
only less irresponsible than a deliberate overemphasis
or a manipulated blackout International assemblies and
world conferences which government representatives at-
tend are not, after all, exact replicas of a Parliament, a
Congress, or a Chamber elected by its own people. For
in these an Administration relies on party support to
pass its measures; in a body such as the United Nations,
however, various organs have specified powers but there
is no Executive with an assigned initiative. Sovereign
members act on their own or in blocs, other than the
Soviet, of their own choosing; alignments, shifting back
and forth, have to be rearranged afresh for each sepa-
rate decision. The vicissitudes of diplomacy cannot, for
information purposes, thus be handled in the same way
as news on the home front. Nor, until complete, are
the transactions of government there always publicized.
Woodrow Wilson may have stipulated open covenants

Foreclosure and Dissent 159

openly arrived at. Yet, as a steward of the democratic
process, he himself, in domestic affairs, did not, since
he could not, arrive openly at open covenants.

Disproportion of power renders the marketplace inop-
erative. One-sided publicity is therefore a mode of de-
bate almost as undemocratic as no publicity whatsoever.
And since this is so there is a case against, as well as
for, that mass spotlight whether published, broadcast,
or telecast which darkens as it illumines. Open diplo-
macy is, moreover, a liberal concept and it is one that
may likewise be balked by those oratorical crudities in
which, as they repudiate democratic principles, Nazis,
Fascists, and Communists have indulged. If only by
contrast, nevertheless, these bear witness to the lasting
practicality of diplomatic etiquette and the courtesies
of protocol. For as safeguards of today's negotiation and
tomorrow's accommodation they are no outw r orn relics
of a bygone age. What can serve peace is neither the de-
corum of the past alone nor, by itself, the mass informa-
tion technique of the present, but some judicious blend
of the two.

Whenever public issues are discussed, the conditions
of debate will govern its character. And this is so of
domestic as well as of international affairs. Controls in
opinion industry may be no more irresponsible, they
may even be less, than in others of a large-scale society.
In no other single one does a structural irresponsibility
have so widespread and so immediate a social effect.
Newspapers, radio, and television, by the sheer volume
of their daily coverage, can do most to make or mar a
free marketplace of ideas. But motion pictures encroach
upon their domain, and then there is the publication of
books and periodicals which has yet to be considered.
Common, however, to the staffs of all mass media is a

lGo*11!E AMERICAN ANARCHY

hard-boiled demeanor one which is induced by an or-
gani/ational power that extends beyond the organization
itself.

A large-scale society that is depersonalized for the
many may be o\erpersonalized for the few. Once upon
a time no man was a hero to his valet. Nowadays, with-
out the techniques and technicians of mass publicity, he
can scarcely be a hero at all. What tells is manipulated
pressure fame in one province, be it apposite or inap-
posite, being exploited in another. Not that all Big
Names, so typical of organized bigness, are undeserving
of further promotional renown. But even where there is
merit, it is often used for purposes that depreciate the
principle of merit itself. Old World snobberies of
birth and origin may be deemed out of date and
undemocratic. Yet how much better is the taste of a
commercialized Society which, with less polish than
glitter, revolves around Broadway and Hollywood, the
chic parfumeurs and couturiers, the smart saloon rather
than the brilliant salon? For when an aristocratic tradi-
tion was secure it could fuse love of money with con-
tempt for trade and had no need to publicize itself. The
Big Name snobbery, which mass media now fan and
foment, is as caste-conscious. Open by reason of birth, it
is as closed to most values other than its own.

To overvalue the Big Name is to devalue all other
names. For, as with every snobbery, what matters is who
says it and not by whom it has already been or may
again best be said; in opinion industries, as everywhere
else in a large-scale society, what impresses is institu-
tional rank, authority through affiliation. This, or some
prior fanfare, is therefore an automatic short cut to a
hearing. And as he runs information media a burden is
lifted, through the ready-made indices of Big Name la-
bels, from organizational man. For when he does not

Foreclosure and Dissent 16 1

have to go beyond them, there is no other criterion by
which he must pick and choose. An organizational
power which is itself not based on merit will scarcely
take pains operationally to observe that principle. Yet
the less it does the less, in an oligopoly of opinion, is
free communication free.

Not that large-scale interests have it all their own
way. Freedom of the press might, in practice, be a mo-
nopolistic freedom to foreclose and manipulate. When,
however, a covert abuse of power becomes flagrantly
overt, others will still affirm their sense of outrage. For
some opinion industries are not only larger than life;
when morally irresponsible they might envenom the
social order itself. And that is why an anti-Semitic film
such as Oliver Twist provoked an uproar and had to
be toned down; why there were protests over the cine-
matic whitewash of the Nazi generals Rommel and
Rundstedt and thereby of an inveterate German mili-
tarism. It was through similar mass media that Hitler
himself deployed his mass campaign for the devaluation
of man. To spike their guns is not therefore to curtail
freedom but to preserve the freedom of those who have
at their command no equal means of wholesale, large-
scale rejoinder.

Media that prey upon youthful susceptibilities have
especially to be guarded against, and it is, above all, to
defend the young that general regulations for radio and
television have been devised, that motion picture and
television industries have their own self-regulating codes.
How well each of them discharges its task is a moot
point; and so also is the question of whether children
need to be similarly protected from comic books and
cheap magazines. Adult books and the theater do not, on
the other hand, exert uniform simultaneities of organ-
ized mass influence. Theirs is the province of the mature;

1 f2 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

censorship in that domain derogates from the lib-
em of the individual as much as a lack of it in the do-
main of the immature. And this should be remembered
by every element which seeks to impose a minority in-
terest rather than preserve a minority right. For to
demand tolerance and not sustain it is to weaken the
fabric of democracy itself.

Government censorship of books, whether it be local,
sectional, or national, is, of course, no new hurdle to be
surmounted. Less dramatic but more devastating is that
unofficial censorship of books which, by its very nature,
resides within a large-scale society. Book publishers,
poised between author and public, deal in singularly in-
dividualistic products. Less adaptable than others to or-
ganized magnitude, their branch of the opinion industry
has, significantly, been more loath than the rest to aban-
don its traditional open-mindedness. Literature, in any
marketplace of ideas, must conserve and revitalize. But
for the publication of books, as for everything else, the
marketplace has been recast. And when books are de-
signed to attract the mass they will have the traits of
their kind. It was, after all, not the philosopher but the
court jester who stood at the foot of the throne.

The relatively poor sale of serious books in North
America has been a severe indictment of secondary and
college education throughout the length and breadth of
the continent. So far as these deal with world politics
a democracy can be anxious over its own fate and yet
disinclined to probe below the surface of events. A ma-
nipulated treatment of public issues by mass media
could be circumvented through the circulation of books
that deviate from one or other dominant trend. But
they do not sell and are not read precisely because
they themselves have behind them neither an organ-
ized pressure nor potential group backing or are some-

Foreclosure and Dissent 163

how unpalatable to those, whether on the Right, the
Left, or the Center, which exist. Not that there is al-
ways a bed of roses for the undissenting to lie upon: it
is the trivial, the semiescapist, and such fare as mass
recreational media purvey, which stay as often in pos-
session of the field. The manifold increase in costs of
book publication would alone compel publishers to give
the public more of what it wants: as between their own
solvency and an author's nonconformity they have
little choice. Nor is this merely a damper upon free
expression. The destiny of our free xvorld order hinges
on American leadership. Over this one topic the quality
of discussion is therefore of unprecedented importance.
But that quality will only be as high as an educated
public, parrying large-scale foreclosure, tries to make it.

It is, then, books of ideas that have less and less
chance of being published. Educational texts, vocational,
technical, and scientific treatises are always in demand.
Nonfiction of a descriptive sort may even be displacing
fiction in popularity; soft cover and paper reprint houses
can spread works of entertainment and established clas-
sics, ancient and modern, far and wide. Against books
which fit into none of these categories, or which diverge
from current group trends, the cards are stacked. Nor is
the atmosphere improved by the vogue, with its com-
mercialized stress on Big Name celebrities, of book clubs
and best sellers. For a sheeplike uniformity in reader-
ship may ensue. Against the sounding brass of organ-
ized pressure the unorganized whisper in vain.

Formal works of scholarship do not, oddly enough,
have quite so hard an economic furrow to plough.
These are intended for a specialized circle and, though
they do not pay their way, their publication is fre-
quently subsidized by universities or research founda-
tions. Yet serious books, independent of institutional

1 64 T f ( E AMERICAN ANARCHY

patronage, have as great, often a greater, contribution
to make to the marketplace of thought. They cannot
piay their part if they are unread when published or
are not published at all. In an organized anarchy the
role of the creative intellectual thus becomes a more and
more ignominious one. A free society riddled with Big
Name values is, nevertheless, better than the utter
de\aluation, moral and political, with which Soviet writ-
ers purchase a hearing. The latter have honors heaped
upon them which smother by the attention given; in the
former, unless the appeal is to the taste of the mass or
the views of a particular group, there is a neglect which
muzzles through indifference. Spiritually, however, the
smothered die while the muzzled live on, and, living on,
cannot be muzzled entirely.

Information media that review books could, of course,
do a lot to buck the tide. And some are valiant in the
attempt. Most, however, ride along with waters by
which they themselves are kept afloat. Public affairs may
be their sphere. Yet they will often do less to publicize
works that could share the marketplace of thought than
to build up books that divert from it. Large-scale inter-
ests might, in an oligopoly of opinion, compete with
each other; an individual standpoint which satisfies none
of these will seldom be noticed sufficiently to catch on.
And then, too, there is not only manipulation with
works selected for review, for prominence or obscurity,
as settled media policies decree; wherever organizational
man exerts staff power, connections of his own, personal
or literary, political or ideological, may be favored. Seri-
ous books which, as a result, are shunted aside, pub-
lishers cannot afford to advertise, booksellers do not
stock or display, and people will not know about. When
free expression is not estopped at its source it is clogged
in mid-channel.

Foreclosure and Dissent 165

Magazines, however, can be taken in one's stride more
easily than books. As information media their mass in-
fluence is that much greater. And so far as they carry
reviews they are adjuncts to the world of literature; so
far as they furnish a less hasty consideration of news
and public issues they supplement other mass instrumen-
talities. But they also have a mission to perform that is
peculiarly their own. As published reading matter,
though produced at longer intervals, they are like news-
papers; less constricted by time or geography they tend,
in their distribution, to resemble the bigger hookups of
radio and television. Democracies such as Britain and
France can, through their smaller territorial expanse,
go in for national newspapers which facilitate a nation-
wide cohesiveness. The daily press of the United States
and Canada must, however, rely on a more localized
readership. Chain ownership, news services, syndicated
columns and articles may, at their worst, be very irre-
sponsible in control and effect; at their best they do
counteract a purely sectional coverage. Most general pe-
riodicals are, in content and scope, wholly delocalized.
Perused with more care than newspapers, more popular
than serious books, magazines constitute a major seg-
ment of North America's opinion industry.

As mass media their standards of taste may be those
of others in a large-scale society. But will their behavior
in the marketplace of ideas also be the same? Specialized
magazines, those whose sphere is that of a profession, a
vocation, a trade, an industry, a hobby, a religion, or a
public movement, do what they are supposed to do
within the limits they set for themselves. So also
do many whose sole endeavor is to relax and entertain.
The problem of free exchange arises from information
media that are nonspecialized in scope. For periodicals
have every right, as they foster their own particular in-

1 66 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

terest, to make a bid for general interest. But those are
irresponsible in their manipulations which, while pur-
porting to foster a nonspecialized interest, actually have
other, unadmitted aims. And as they manipulate so do
they foreclose.

Physically the modern periodical is a superb example
of mass production. But communication is streamlined
through its large-scale techniques, and where these op-
erate freedom is diminished. The most irresponsible of
newspapers may still publish material that is from agen-
cies which are objective in their reporting; if they have
no editorial stranglehold on the newsgathering source,
they cannot help but allow an undoctored modicum of
the facts to seep out. News magazines, when so disposed,
compensate for the absence of editorial columns by an
editorialized treatment of the news. Yet public issues
are handled by general periodicals in a manner as sub-
ject to organizational proclivities. And these deceive all
the more because, within the broad ambit of declared
policies, undeclared ones can so often be pursued. What
ostensibly appear as articles or book reviews inde-
pendently conceived or independently written are not
seldom camouflaged extensions of the editorial page it-
self. Contributors, that is, must conform to organiza-
tional directives or let more protean writers get the
nation's ear. And many do conform who, as between no
access to the marketplace or a manipulated one, prefer
the latter.

For here again an enlargement in the scale of en-
terprise entails irresponsibility in the exercise of power.
Magazines must compete both for readership and for ad-
vertising revenue not only with rivals in the same field
but also with rival fields such as radio, television, organ-
ized sports, and motion pictures. To increase circulation

Foreclosure and Dissent 16;

or hold their own they popularize themselves by adopt
ing newspaper devices the human interest story, th<
slice of life, the colorful style which eschews abstraci
ideas. And as a corollary of this, periodical literature
has been converted into a Mecca for those trained or
newspapers as reporters; less and less welcome are writ
ers schooled to assay public questions reflectively. Ir
depicting events and describing people the good re-
porter may be a technician of skill and integrity with
pride in his craft. Yet undue stress on merit in tech-
niques can, as elsewhere in a large-scale society, be at
the expense of merit in other respects.

The decline of the unsolicited "think piece" from out-
side contributors is but one phase of this insistence on
reportage. A Big Name may be bromidic in utterance;
ghosted or unghosted, his platitudes, being commercially
exploitable, will be seized upon. The views of others,
however, if they are to be published in current maga-
zines, must either comport with an editorial slant or not
run counter to it. On a contentious topic, over which a
specific organizational approach is desired, articles are
more and more likely to be staff-prescribed or staff-
written.

Opinion of genuinely independent origin is thereby
not only elbowed out. Preclusive editorial notions can
be foisted upon an unsuspecting, uninformed, or apa-
thetic public as spontaneous views freely submitted and
freely launched. There have been protests when digest
magazines planted material, prepared for reprint, else-
where. Yet these protests emanated from journals which
are themselves assiduous in having important "think
pieces'* tailor-made according to their own specifications-
There has in fact developed a new class of magazine
writers who have to be intellectual jacks-of-all-trades-

l68 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

men not with expert claims in the world of ideas or
policy but with a journalistic expertness which is or-
ganizationally adaptable.

These procrustean techniques owe much to the hour
in which we live, to an era of ideological warfare when
even between governments ideas are weapons. But they
are sharpened in the United States by her emergence
as the prime power of the West. Toward free expression
the easygoing temper of noninterventionist days could
not anyway have readily been maintained; organized
pressures are now playing for keeps. And so in large-
scale media, feast and famine will alternate an excess
of information on what are deemed nonessentials, a
paucity where open-mindedness would hurt. Yet maga-
zines have less excuse for their deficiencies than daily
mass prints: snap judgments and a technical one-
sidedness in presentation can both be avoided. It is the
pretense of all-inclusiveness that hoodwinks the public
most: not only how material is published but what is
omitted. That an important aspect of world affairs has
been dealt with irresponsibly one year is never acknowl-
edged the next. Yet, over paramount issues, it is not
merely their treatment which matters but their treat-
ment in time. And when a lapse is common to all, no
one periodical will confess remorse. Profferred wisdom
in retrospect and the articulations of hindsight, readers
seldom learn what, among counsels of foresight, was,
though available, excluded.

Before ideas clash in the marketplace they must be
allowed to reach it. Through the pre-empted sieve of
large-scale power, these may never get out into the
open or are, when they do, still at its mercy. The
serious-minded reader fancies that in one or another
general magazine, or among all of them, a full diversity
of current views is laid before him. But this is to be as

Foreclosure and Dissent 169

naive about an unmanaged exchange of opinion as Ben-
thamites once were about an automatic harmony of eco-
nomic interests. Whether of ideas or commodities, the
marketplace has, in the twentieth century, been trans-
formed by the same set of circumstances.

In no other industry, however, do the inner irrespon-
sibilities of bigness have as big an outer impact. Where
there is owner control, its behests, in magazines as in
newspapers, must be obeyed. But where control has to
be decentralized, insiders, by themselves or in a coterie,
can exercise a discretionary power which stretches from
organizational competition to the competition of ideas.
Nor will outsiders, independent writers who may
thereby be hushed or thwarted, dare burn their bridges
by querying staff motives or editorial good faith. They
always hope to break through; to invite the charge of
sour grapes is, in so unequal a contest, not to mend but
further offend. Yet events do not wait and it is society,
partially or belatedly informed, which, when these take
it unawares, pays the price. Especially over foreign pol-
icy is the problem of free expression the problem of
free expression for whom? Large-scale schizophrenia is
often exemplified by newspapers and periodicals, radical
and conservative alike, that denounce arbitrary power
but are themselves high-handed within their own ad-
ministrative and organizational bailiwick. For here, too,
appearance and reality are at odds. Even when opinion
industries attack privilege in others, they take privilege
great as it already is as their due.

The fact is, nevertheless, that where each does not
consider itself responsible for keeping open the market-
place, none will. Information media may have axes of
their own to grind; an oligopoly of opinion is one in
which grindstones are also monopolized. Mass periodi-
cals operate on a large scale, and their costs, like those

170 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

of daily newspapers, are commensurately prohibitive.
But not all general magazines are in that class; some
which seek a serious readership are designed for a
smaller circulation. Yet even to establish one of these
was never as unfeasible economically as it now is. A
few, as mouthpieces for themselves, have been inherited
or founded by men of means; other, nonpopular ones
weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies, and quarterlies must
look for financial support to nonprofit bodies. And
though they are thus bound to groups or institutions,
many do contrive to be editorially detached. Yet a care-
ful analysis of what such periodicals accept and reject
might reveal that their attitude is less disinterested than
it seems.

Personal and private commitments beyond those
which a magazine publicly avows will, in the nature of
things, be inexplicit. Writers who rub against these are
therefore not always in a position to know where or
how. Owner editors who will not publish views at vari-
ance with their own can do as they please more, at any
rate, than others. But when sponsors and editors are
not the same, the former delegate power to the latter;
and in sponsored magazines, as everywhere else, dele-
gated power gives oi^anizational man his innings. For
what enables him to be editorially irresponsible is that
his backers, while answerable for him, hesitate to make
him answerable to themselves. In the major crises of the
twentieth century intellectuals have, for instance, had to
stand up and be counted; editorial insiders who failed
in that test will, by their foreclosures and manipulations,
hold it against any who did not. But organizational ad-
vantage may take numerous forms. And it will do so all
die nacre when those who keep such publications going,
those by whoia institutional m semipiiblic 'ftrods are
raised or allotted, as$*mie that their duty ends there.

Foreclosure and Dissent * 171

Open-minded, they would accord editors a free hand.
But that in some hands editorial power may serve to
close rather than open a marketplace of thought is a
subtlety of argument which frequently escapes the open-
minded themselves.

Nor are journals of opinion devoted politically to the
liberal cause necessarily liberal in their editorial prac-
tices. Not that they themselves are conscious of the de-
gree to which they sail under false colors. But they also
illustrate, by their inhospitality to dissent when it is not
a brand of their own, the characteristic ambiguities of
organized power. And the cloven hoof may be detected
in the house formulas they enjoin for articles published
and often for books reviewed, the ascendancy of cliques
among staff personnel and favored contributors. The
fact is that liberalism has taken on the color of an en-
vironment which it itself did much to change. In a
large-scale society it, too, has power to implement as
well as a creed to defend. Upon the innate conformities
of the social order, moreover, are superimposed those
which world crises induce. And to these liberal publi-
cations respond with opposing conformities of their own.

It is the current fashion to speak of a Communist
line, a neo-isolationist line, a State Department line. But
when liberal organs may be said to have a fixed line,
they likewise have been converted into group instru-
ments of organized pressure. Hitherto their mission was
a double one: to maintain an open-minded exchange of
ideas while each advanced a view of its own. Yet now
the techniques of power, administrative and in pursuit
of a line, might obviate all except the line itself. Lib-
eral journalism is thus torn between two functions one
that is organizational and one that is intellectual. Today
the ideological battle is fought with passion rather than
reason. An authentic liberalism must, however, be not

172* THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

only within but above the battle. For only as it is also
above the battle can it help keep open that marketplace
of ideas on which its own life depends. Liberal organs
whose columns are closed to differing viewpoints indi-
cate how irresponsible in a large-scale order even lib-
eralism itself may become. Among the ironies of organi-
sation, this minor one is a portent.

But taking opinion industries as a whole, it is not re-
markable that human behavior should be the same in
them as in others. From a democratic standpoint, how-
ever, their role in society is a more important one and
so therefore is that of those whom they employ. Be-
tween the man of ideas and public opinion the anony-
mous, preclusive power of organizational man is inter-
posed. Being, by the nature of his techniques, a trained
and literate person, he might himself aspire to be a man
of ideas. And information media are such that he will
not only be preoccupied with the inner personal con-
flicts of organizational power; when he takes orders as
well as gives them, the outer impersonal use of that
power may go against the grain. For in opinion indus-
tries, mind and energy are not seldom devoted to the
furtherance of interests that taste or conscience would
repudiate. And organizational man, despising his job,
may not only hate himself. As he shifts upon others the
white glare of publicity, he has, as it were, to hide his
own light under a bushel.

Yet for him to kick over the traces could be quixotic.
Where merit is depreciated, his sort of white-collar ex-
pertness is, with popular mass education, never in short
supply. And perceiving that their services may thus be
purchased a dime a dozen, information media comcl^de
that, as Sir Robert Walpole said of the House
mom in fctis day, all diose mm have their pri
do not But in a tege-seaie society the teeh&kal

sion of organized power extends the range in which
moral issues arise. The ugly cynicism that permeates
editorial and other opinion sancta is not inexplicable.
The large-scale ambivalence of the industry as a whole
intensifies the organizational ambivalence of its benefi-
ciaries.

When, nevertheless, there is so much shouting at the
top of one's lungs, it is hard to believe that foreclosure
and manipulation are at work. But the din does not
come from all quarters in equal measure. Nowadays it
is through organized factions be they liberal or con-
servative, progressive or reactionary that voices tend to
be heard; and to step in turn on the toes of each rival
interest is to invite virtual exclusion from the market-
place. Not that truth, refused a free and open encounter
with error, will always succumb. But justice delayed
might be justice denied. In a large-scale democracy,
even where there is no concerted suppression, the prob-
lem is often one of being able to intervene with ideas
when they are fresh and can still do the most good. For
it is not only the marketplace which has altered; in in-
ternational affairs, for example, the tempo and span of
events no longer leaves time for sound counsel to be
spread about slowly but surely. When its full expression
is retarded, or confined to narrow circles, the public
may be misinformed and thereby misled with unwise
policies accepted and wise ones, until too late, waved
aside. That a second world war would be the outcome
of isolationism and appeasement had thus been forecast.
But in the English-speaking world a demoralizing lead-
ership was not all which proved remiss; the more in-
fluential sections of the opinion industry were hand in
glove with it. For they may have to gear themselves to
mass iiiertia. To pamder to thk is to let a conscious ir-
responsibility exploit an unconscious one.

174 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

The mass might be sluggish. But many of those who
would act if they could seem to be beating the air. In
every walk of life, before anyone can feel himself re-
sponsible, he has to have a sense of personal partici-
pation. And that, assuredly, the cooperative endeavors
of modern society ought to give. Revalued man, as old
servitudes are lifted and new securities established,
should, as never before, be the master of his fate and
the captain of his soul. Yet as bigness levels barriers of
communication and accentuates participation on one
plane, it baffles him by rendering the levers of power
ever more remote. Will they appear less so if, as Lyman
Bryson contends, the emphasis should now be on com-
munity affairs, on self-discovery, on an amateur cultiva-
tion of music and the arts? To democratize these is a
step forward. But that will not compensate for any de-
democratization in more decisive spheres.

Politically it was a postulate of nineteenth-century lib-
eralism that, accorded the franchise, an emancipated citi-
zenry would make the most of its chance to participate
in public life. But even when men are so disposed, they
are tantalized and deterred by the altered conditions of
debate; by the difficulty of competing in a large-scale
arena among large-scale interests. A group society may
visualize liberty as a just equilibrium between majority
wishes and minority rights. Yet it is an unjust one for
the unorganized individual when organized conformi-
ties, majority and minority, dominate the marketplace.

Participation in a mass democracy cannot, of course,
be the same as it was in a Greek City-State. Po-
litical representation must be deputized; institutionally,
throughout a large-scale society, there is a delegation of
control. But indirect channels can be open ones* They
are not open when opinion is so canalized that it often
ceases to be free. Yet most people, even if they were

Foreclosure and Dissent 175

cognizant of such foreclosure, would not deem it abnor-
mal. That they really enjoy vicarious rather than actual
participation is evidenced by the time-honored popular-
ity of organized sports, the voluntary numerical pre-
ponderance of many spectators over a few participants.
Yet here, nevertheless, what attracts are luck and skill.
In the game of power staged by large-scale society,
prowess that is bold, independent, or unacquiescent
may be a handicap rather than an advantage. Relegated
to the sidelines, unshackled and yet ineffectual, it might
sink into passivity and despair. Political atrophy can,
throughout the whole of society, be the upshot. And one
long habituated to this will be inert even when oppor-
tunities do occur for it to make choices of its own.

Until all soap boxes are swept away there is no po-
lice State. But neither is there an open marketplace for
free expression when large-scale stentorian devices, irre-
sponsibly controlled, would so magnify some voices as
to dwarf or drown out all others. Liberal democracy, as
it revalued man, relied too credulously on the power of
truth. Truth, in an organized anarchy, must still reckon
with power itself.

CHAPTER

The Projection
of America

Europeans, like others who have come down in the
world, may vent their spleen upon an American bene-
factor: what they resent is, au fond, the twentieth cen-
tury. The East-West schism calls into being the first
peacetime alliance between Western Europe and North
America; but this in turn may have a social impact
which will be culturally as well as strategically far-
reaching. For strength in the defense of the West entails
a unification of European economies and a speeding up
in European productivity on the North American
model and with North American assistance. Not that
Western Europeans are strangers to the machine proc-
ess; with their ideas and inventions they have, since the
Middle Ages, been its pioneers. But what they face to-
day is its outright, full-blown application to their own
society; and the prospect of that is, to many of them,
still repugnant. Twice they bore the brunt when Ger-
many used modern technology as a means for devaluing
rather than revaluing man; in the United States mate-

176

The Projection of America * 177

rial prosperity and a materialistic outlook have gone
together. Yet it is to preserve the revaluation of man, as
both Europeans and Americans conceived it, that At-
lantic unity has now been forged. And such unity can-
not be implemented to the best advantage unless, on
the European sector, cooperation which is diplomatic
and military is enlarged in other respects. But the more
Europe does things in the American way, the more will
the American way of life itself be projected.

Must this projection of America bring in its train all
the phenomena of bigness? About some manifestations
of irresponsible power, traditional and contemporary,
Europe has had nothing to learn from across the Atlan-
tic; against earlier ones the United States herself once
took shape. The question now is whether large-scale
techniques can refashion the economy of Western Eu-
rope freely and in freedom; whether, by so doing, they
will not modify other aspects of existence. A young,
amorphous society such as North America's did not
only offer room, territorial and institutional, for experi-
mentation; a new half-developed pattern of civilization
could be recast more easily than one long set. Yet the
obstacles that impede the transformation of Western Eu-
rope are physical as well as psychic. And Americans will
have to realize this, just as Europeans must understand
what is American by design and what but a sign of the
times.

When French might was supreme in Europe so was
French culture, and when Britain ruled the waves over-
sea peoples took their cue from her. During the Poac
Britannica the United States herself, though dependent
spiritually, could go her own way, politically and eco-
nomically. But interdependence in a large-scale world
does not oaiy chaage &U that: it augments evea between
free peoples the social pressure gi the leader upon the

178 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

led. American enterprise has been promoted at home
through the arts of mass persuasion, through advertise-
ment and publicity. The United States will, in any of
her endeavors abroad, be suspected therefore of trying
to proselytize; of seeking to make over in her own im-
age. Yet the objective circumstances, the stern necessi-
ties of a common Atlantic defense, do not only prompt
American influence; it is they, more than any exigent
cultural salestalk, which foster American techniques and
thus a style of life which may imitate that of North
America. Americanization is, in a superficial sense, for
export. More profoundly, free Europe might, in its so-
cial system, react to bigness as have the United States
and Canada. On the historic culture of Western Europe
the effect may be adverse. It will be worse off if its own
small-scale weakness leaves it a prey to the Soviet's large-
scale strength.

The lesson of the twentieth century is that organiza-
tion can, in both war and peace, alone withstand or-
ganization* The liberal dilemma is thereby repeated on
a world stage. A free, large-scale society provides more
security and better opportunity for man in the aggre-
gate; the sledding, for individuality as such, is rougher.
And so, when there is a mammoth oligopoly of global
power, is it also among nations. Some, where situated
by geography beyond the line of fire, may toy with neu-
tralist Third Force illusions. Others, to remain free,
have thrown in their lot with the grouping of the free.

Nor is physical annihilation in an air-atomic age the
only danger. Not since the barbarian invasions has the
culture of the West been so menaced by conquerors who
decrvilize through State policy as well as through the
havoc o war itself. Across the lentgtfe and breadth of
Europe the Germans nsder Hkkivmay feaeve employed
the methods of bigness savagdy to massacre noncombat-

The Projection of America 179

ant millions. But Russia's industrialization of captive
domains reveals a large-scale, peacetime technique of
living death; how, as distinct peoples, the enslaved may
be killed off nationally while their live energies are
harnessed for national aims other than their own. The
peasant economies of Eastern Europe have always been
socially retrograde. Yet now they are being further de-
pressed to the drab mass levels of their Soviet overlord.
And in them youth is mistaught, intellectuals liquidated.
For while a middle class is revived within Russia herself,
it is the bourgeois elsewhere who might do most to turn
satellite nations against her. That large-scale techniques
would, by their own automatic working, unite mankind
internationally was once a liberal dream. But when Hit-
ler and Stalin could, through them, denationalize the
conquered, while making their own subjects more na-
tionalistic, these had become methods to divide rather
than unite.

And with this as the threat, a renovating American
impetus serves to preserve even as it transforms, for bet-
ter or for worse, the culture of Europe. But here West-
ern Europe exhibits a paradox of its own. Restrictively
with its guilds and monopolies under government tute-
lage, its wage and currency differentials, its patchwork
of frontiers and customs duties, it itself has in fact been
overorganized. What Western Europe may now do, as it
tends to combine economically and federate politically,
is to mobilize a semicontinental defense potential on a
grander North American organizational scale. Wages
might thereby be raised, social benefits spread more
equitably, the cooperative role of trade unions be ac-
cepted less gro4|Bgly, tibe discontent allayed which
nourishes Communism itself* Bi*t many European en*-
?a||i^r;^fia^se witti tfoe fcoehniques of
^ share with

l8o*THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

their employees privilege and profit. Until these are
widely adopted, Western Europe cannot stand on its
own feet. The issue is one not of less butter or fewer
guns but of both in more abundance.

Vested interests and small-scale economic individual*
ism are, however, not all that bar an increase of produc-
tivity in Western Europe. A single mass market could
be the natural outgrowth of a political union as big and
as geographically compact as the American. Yet the eco-
nomic viability of that American union never rested on
world trade; indeed, it is just now becoming aware of
its own dependence for vital minerals on foreign sources
of supply. If Britain, France, and the other countries
of Western Europe are to feed themselves and main-
tain a higher standard of living, it is not from their
neighbors next door that they must buy raw materials
or to whom they must sell finished products but in the
four corners of the earth. The United States may urge
closer large-scale integration upon her trans-Atlantic al-
lies. But she herself hampers the disposal of their sur-
plus output through her own tariff vagaries; and they
are handicapped by the reappearance, under American
auspices, of competition from Japan. Nor, as East- West
trade contracted, did the loss of East European and
East Asian markets hasten an expansion of their indus-
trial capacity at home.

Yet half solutions for the problem of a split continent
In a split world are better than none. A further com-
plication, however, is the fact that the politics of West-
ern Europe are as awkward as its economics to fit into
the same large-scale mold. Germany has evinced the
most aptitude for mass production; France the least; and
Britain fells somewhere between the two. But now the
United States herself has financed and quickened the
postwar restoration of West German powat. France and

The Projection of America 181

Britain must therefore stick together lest, in any West
European union, the Germanic element become su-
preme. Yet Britain cannot merge her national sover-
eignty with an overriding semicontinental one unless she
relinquishes those oceanic connections which give her
strength in Europe itself. No member State may, in the
very nature of federations, have exterior ties of its own;
Britain, as a component of European union, would have
to divest herself of an Empire which belongs to her and
of a Commonwealth to which she herself also belongs.
Nor could the Anglo-American factor separately persist
one which twice saved our free world order and whose
lines must blur with so basic a realignment of forces.

Strategically though not within a European Army
Britain is already committed in Western Europe up to
the hilt, and economically she may be committed as far
as other obligations allow. But unless she takes part un-
reservedly in any full, large-scale integration of Western
Europe, the chief makeweight against Germanic pre-
ponderance would be France. And the French, with
their continental allies, cannot discharge such a role
alone. Britain, as the birthplace of the Industrial Revo-
lution, has a mass production economy in which there
are still remnants of an earlier one of specialized crafts
and handicrafts. In France, however, the artisan and
the manufacturer of luxury goods have been predomi-
nant. An Old World culture has thus persevered at the
cost of the nation's own safety her technological inferi-
ority spelling disaster in 1914 and subjugation in 1940.
Bled white by recurrent German aggressions, bearing
heavy recent burdens in IndoChina and North Africa,
France needs to reconstruct her economy and yet lacks
vigor for doing it.

But from bigness Westem Europe to shied away for
reasons ttet a*e BO mordf eepHQHik or political Thane

l82 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

are historic grandeurs for it to cherish. Culturally it is
distressed by the impact upon these o large-scale in-
dustrialism; psychologically, having lost out in other
spheres, it clings all the harder to the one in which it
can still feel superior. Western Europe, apart from na-
tive Communists, wishes to be Russified much less than
it wishes to be Americanized though the desire of West
Germans to clinch their revival might yet presage an-
other Russo-German agreement for world mastery. Most
West Europeans have no doubt of where, as between an
Atlantic revaluation and a Teuto-Slavonic devaluation of
man, they must stand. What they seek within the At-
lantic household itself is to yield to American leader-
ship only what the situation requires. But where to
draw the line, how to go forward technologically while
holding back culturally, may be no simple task. The
more the Grand Alliance prepares to resist common dan-
gers in common, the more pervasive is a resistance move-
ment against Western Europe's own chief ally.

The extrovert qualities of American culture were bet-
ter adapted than Europe's introvert ones to a mechanical
civilization. Over the centuries the United States herself
had drained off many of Europe's own more adventur-
ous spirits. An immigrant, pioneering stock; a wealth
of untapped natural resources encouraging prodigalities
of waste to these, conjoined, may be traced not only
the economic expansion of the United States but the
psychological expansiveness of her sons. To that, more-
over, can also be attributed the munificence with which
they have come to the rescue of free countries, to a
materialism that is not wholly materialistic. In the past
America has been improvident with human as well as
natural resources. Today it displays a wastefulness which
is a by-product of all lids and of its M^i standard of

The Projection of America - 183

And now to enlarge the scale o productivity in West-
ern Europe may be more nearly to approximate that
social order, with its group conformities and organiza-
tional ambiguities, which exists across the Atlantic. As,
however, new influences pass through the alembic of lo-
cal tradition they themselves might be transformed. For
it is the diversity of local tradition which Western Eu-
rope would preserve that could modify in each country
any uniform process of duplication. In Britain, long
before the economic individualism of the Manchester
School, the eccentrics, for whom she was renowned*
testified to individualistic traits which ran deep; as be-
tween group convention and personal indiscipline, her
upper and middle classes mixed a stout blend of private
independence and public solidarity. Since the second
world war, a socialized economy which raises living
standards for workers has cushioned the shock inflicted
by a drastic recession in Britain's world power and gen-
eral prosperity. But as her upper classes decline, so also
may that equilibrated national character which they
typified. Among the French of all classes, on the other
hand, individuality has often asserted itself at the ex-
pense of solidarity. More social benefits have been ac-
corded the workers of Britain than of France. And be-
cause of this there is among the latter less of an
antidote to unrest; Jacobinism, to the delight of Moscow,
simmers on. A common, semi-European approach would
have to wipe out disparities in social legislation* But it
is these very disparities which, in the meantime, prevent
some steps toward one fann being taken which* for
example* make Britain all the more reluctant to eater
the sort o Wesl European fedemtiU ti*at has beea
drafted. '

of Europe must thus

which the poiidcal, the

184 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

economic, and the cultural cannot be segregated from
each other, in which these are often simply varying fac-
ets of a single problem. But where structural resem-
blances do nevertheless appear, they are likely to over-
shadow historical differences. That, however, may not
be reproduced which, while native to the American
scene, is not inherent in bigness itself. Lawlessness, for
instance, is rendered more extravagant in the United
States by the mere size of things. Yet this is a heritage
of rustic, frontier days. Large-scale techniques permit it
to be organized more lavishly; for the worst ravages of
crime Europeans must themselves look homeward. In
that final degradation of civilized society, the totalitarian
State, America the raw has bred fewer evils than Eu-
rope the ripe, Only in Latin America has there been
dictatorship, old style and new. Yet its local tradition,
half-autochthonous and half-European, is, it may be
noted, more European than North American.

Culturally what West Europeans can probably antici-
pate from any large-scale metamorphosis of their econ-
omy is that the qualitative will shrink and the quanti-
tative hold sway. Yet it is the qualitative which nurtured
the culture of Europe and made it incomparably what
it has been. The custodians of Europe's patrimony are
the thinker, the artist, the creative scholar, the man of
letters. In a technological society, however, it is the
technical expert rather than the free intellectual who
will be taken seriously. Some men of ideas do carry
weight and express themselves on a plane of discourse
higher than that of the average. But they are a new
breed radio commentators, newspaper columnists, fig-
ures who have access to large-scale power and command
the mass prestige that goes with it.

Not that bigness, East or West, e&tubitfc an anti-
imeUectualism which mdenrajtes ike importance of

The Projection of America '185

ideas. If ruling authority in a totalitarian State had less
respect for ideas, it would not subordinate them in
such morbid detail to its own fierce will; in a large-scale
democracy, if unmanaged opinion were to the interest
of organized pressure, the marketplace of thought might
be less prone to manipulation and foreclosure. To the
potency of ideas all this may, like psychological warfare
itself, be a tribute. It is, to say the least, a very back-
handed one.

The paradox of democracy thus recurs. To keep its
liberties intact Western Europe, in alliance with North
America, must enlarge, politically and productively, the
scale of its economy. Yet it cannot assimilate the tech-
niques of bigness without these leaving their impress on
much else besides. Among intangibles thus affected, the
projection of America would differ from those German-
izing or Russifying influences which devalue man to the
extent that America's own culture differs from the Ger-
man or Russian. Cultural imperialism is not, however,
the issue which the projection of America provokes;
what ensues is an accelerated similarity of response to
increasingly similar stimuli. And that, too, is why com-
parisons between the immaturity of American civiliza-
tion and the maturity of European are stale, jejune, out
of date. The question is less one of North America
catching up to Western Europe or of Western Europe
being dragged down by North America than of the two
being implicated and transformed by socio-economic
forces to which, over the centuries, they both gave birth.

To Western Europe the projection of America is a
problem of adjustment between partners within a single
Atlantic community* la Asia the United States, as the
leader of tbe West, is the residuary legatee of bitterness
engeadared ]b$ $$g Qmg$$ stpiggle to throw off the

l86 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

might be that of a disgruntled poor relation who has
had to move from the head to the foot of the family
table; Asia's is that of those who, discovering how lib-
erty might but replace old ills by new, cannot always
distinguish friend from foe. Western Europe may have
to be reorganized as one on a larger scale; free Asia, at
once primitive and effete, with its huge space, its dense
population, its monstrous social decay, embodies, in con-
trast to the organized magnitude of North America,
magnitude unorganized. There, as in Europe, a machine
economy would dissolve treasured cultural patterns. Yet
an impoverished agrarian one merely invites fresh shack-
les from without. Vast Asian tracts may have been held
back by the heavy hand of exploiting foreigners; others
are on the verge of chaos because their social order
blocked progress. For the plight of the Orient, its own
culture is fundamentally to blame.

Two imponderables underly the revaluation of man:
first, a Judaeo-Christian tradition that asserts the invio-
lable worth of the humblest in the sight of God; sec-
ond, a heritage of reason, logic, and open-mindedness
that makes possible the rule of law in government and
science alike. At home these principles may have been
honored by the Occident more in the breach than the
observance; as it exercised suzerain power in the Orient,
it honored them still less. Yet even there such liberal
aspirations as Asia cherishes came from its contact with
the West; such democratic unity and technological
strength as the Orient possesses was brought by the Oc-
cident. And now, as modernizing techniques become
more widespread, the issue for Asia is not only
whether these henceforth are to be autonomous or, UB&-
der Sino-Smet auspices, imposed* It is also whether the
venerated religions of & culture sfceeped &*, piety ^ill*
with their scant esteem for tke iii^iYMuai, dmpede any

The Projection of America 187

Asian revaluation of man. For it is where the sanctities
themselves sanctify life that there may develop civic vir-
tue and with it in public affairs an accepted moral frame
of reference. Gandhi's spinning wheel was an old sym-
bol of new values. But the age of electronics dawns, and
these will have to adapt themselves on short notice to
that.

In Asia the era of Western imperialism was brief.
The indigenous disabilities of the Orient stem from a
vaunted otherworldliness which hallows between caste
and class the grossest social injustice; from a pride in
impracticality on which privilege, native and foreign,
battens; from disdain for the power politics of the Occi-
dent when the abuse of power by Asians themselves has
also been iniquitous. Land reform and technical assist-
ance from the West may alleviate mass poverty and im-
prove peasant health: without birth control the standard
of living in most of the Orient, as in overpopulated
Italy, must be low. Yet these concrete measures will not
alone ensure any Asian revaluation of man: the Orient
must somehow rise above its past if its future is to be
free.

In Western Europe an individualistic and humanistic
culture may now have to compromise with technological
necessities. The ancient social traditions of Asia, how-
ever, have been conformist rather than nonconformist.
In the most powerful democracy of the West there is
the sort of irresponsibility that bigness introduces;
among Europeans with little or no democratic back-
ground, large-scale organization is the chief tool of to-
talitarian irresponsibility. Can Asian peoples, as they
are modernized technically, acquire inner moral re-
sources which will keep them free politically? An
awakened Turkey has been advancing toward democ-
racy; Israel, with her social democracy, is in Asia only

l88 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

cartographically; other, greater Asian sovereignties,
India, Pakistan, Indonesia, have barely crossed the thres-
hold of independent nationhood. And the ominous fact
is that where twentieth-century techniques are adopted
wholesale by Oriental countries themselves semi-Asian
Russia, Imperial Japan, Sovietized China organized il-
liberalities may not diminish but increase.

Yet, as with free Europe so with free Asia, produc-
tivity for power will alone give it power for freedom.
As the enemy of Asia's enemies, the Russian oppressor
might still pose as a veritable St. George about to slay
the dragon of oppression. And just as he alters his dis-
guise to suit his purpose, so has the United States been
countering him with alternate instruments of policy. In
Western Europe, among her own Atlantic allies, what
she fosters is supranational organization. But in the
Orient nothing like that would be feasible. Asia's first
need is for more robust nation-States on which to build;
there it is nationalism which America espoused. Nor
are these two area policies, being regional variations on
a single global theme, inconsistent ones. Yet a point is
soon reached at which they no longer serve the same
final world objective.

The racial arrogance of the white man, and the global
crises which loosened his grip, may have expedited the
retreat of empire in the Orient. Nationalism, however,
arrived at a climax there before social organization was
ready for it. On the Indian subcontinent, as unified by
the British, there has been an uneconomic partition and
strife which is religious as well as political. The United
Slates backed the cause of Asian liberation; unbridled
nationalism in Asia works, nevertheless, to her imme-
diate detriment. For the vestigial power in the Orient
of hsr major Atlantic allies is linked with their own
productive capacity, with important strategic interests

The Projection of America 189

common to all, with that free world order of which
each is a pillar. Yet Asian countries cannot switch from
revolt against the West to identity with it virtually over-
night.

A contest of power, the world crisis is also one of
social dynamics. Those by which Western Europe is ac-
tuated are akin to North America's; what they require
is an enlargement of the scale on which they can func-
tion. But while nationalism bestirs Asia, its society has
been static; dynamics other than nationalism with which
to ward off envelopment by the Sino-Soviet bloc must
therefore be furthered. Nor is the Orient repelled by
everything Moscow has to proffer: Soviet material stand-
ards, which are so inferior in the eyes of the West, ap-
pear superior to the downtrodden of Asia and Africa.
Eventually the static totalitarian elements within Com-
munism may themselves stifle its own dynamic ones.
But until this happens the United States must not only
prop up others to hold the fort with her. The projec-
tion of America will be retarded if, within her own
mass economy, dynamic elements should ebb and wane.
Over the years it cannot impart more elan to a free
world order than it itself emits.

The projection of America is an exercise in survival.
As such it is one in which the foreign and the domestic
again intermingle. That within large-scale organization
which widens opportunities, and thereby releases human
energies, is its own prime energizer; that which con-
stricts them stultifies the entire system. And the manner
in which bigness resolves this central dilemma could
well bear upon the whole vast future erf mankind. The
rise and fall of dvilizatioas may be a cycle in which the
West, too, having gone up, must, by some inexorable
Newtonjan law, also decline. But a society that posits
the capacity of mfca to determine their own fate will

* THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

only rebel against theories of a doom that is foreor-
dained: by its very act of rebellion so dark a contingency
might be averted. For one revitalizing feature sustains
it which is sui generis. Liberty regenerates itself. Mod-
ern civilization may esthetically not be as splendid as
some of its predecessors: it is, when free, less brittle.
An order that revalues man is one that is constantly
nurtured by life-giving juices of its own. But about their
ceaseless flow there is nothing automatic. Without power
the West would be crushed; unless it combats its own
structural rigidities, that power cannot lastingly be re-
plenished* Time will be on the side of democracy only
as long as it is organized for, rather than against, self
renewal.

CHAPTER

Man Against
Man

If men were incorruptible, power would not corrupt
Progress, until the era of world wars, could be visualized
as a twofold sequence: a technological one in which
great new instrumentalities of power emerged and a
political one through which these might be subjected to
responsible democratic control. What liberalism would
not foresee was that even when they had the tools and
techniques to organize for their own welfare, the more
men did with one hand the more they might undo with
the other. By standardizing materially and thereby rais-
ing the standard of living, a large-scale society permits
the individual to enjoy a better life. Less clear was it
that by so doing he would escape standardization. Ex-
tending the power of men, the machine could not be
mastered unless men also mastered themselves. The
nineteenth century, blithely cocksure, fancied it could
be like the sorcerer in the legend who unlocked, as he
pleased, and might lock up again the secrets of Nature,
More like that sorcerer's apprentice, for whom a little

19*

ig2 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

knowledge was so dangerous a thing, the twentieth cen-
tury, crestfallen, bewildered, heartsick, has no magic for-
mula to accomplish all that liberalism bade fair to do.

The conflict between individual and collective rights
could be anticipated. But a freer economy which facili-
tates the growth of corporate and institutional power
lags one step behind in making that power organiza-
tionally responsible. Interior elements of irresponsibility
tend, in a society of magnitude, to outstrip exterior con-
trol. And in appraising moral shortcomings it is this
innate factor of structural ambivalence which must be
reckoned with. Contemporary lawlessness is often attrib-
uted to anomie, to lives led without roots. Yet in a pre-
technological society men were no paragons either; the
collectivizing process that uproots them, however, also
multiplies the temptation to violate traditional codes.
A racketeering half-world, with its bribed officials and
tipped or overtipped clerks, is one in which the pettier
sort of insider vends at a price minor routine privileges
of which he can organizationally dispose. And from the
sharp corners cut by private enterprise to the chicaner-
ies of employees, from the venalities of politicians to
self-seeking intrigue among institutional bureaucrats,
from organized crime to the totalitarian menace itself
what is novel here is not human wickedness but the
scale on which, when it pre-empts power, it now may
operate. Industrialism cried out for social justice and
provided methods and means toward its achievement.
Simultaneously it expanded the scope of evil and ren-
dered it more immanent.

In openness of mind, science and liberalism are of
the same family. As an individualistic philosophy, how-
ever, the latter did not underrate the force of self-
interest. For about Man in general man may be objec-

Man Against Man 193

tive. But where the ego has its own direct interests to
be considered only a saint will be detached might, as it
were, get outside of himself. Technical innovation and
personal morality can therefore seldom be synchronized.
The first, though insentient, never stands still; the sec-
ond, as evinced by sentient man, is burdened by his
own immemorial fallibilities. Disinterested are the tech-
niques employed by the intelligence when it devises
instruments of power. In its own use of the finished
product it itself may be much less disinterested.

Recoiling against that underestimation of man which
is the essence of tyranny, liberalism on the whole over-
estimated him. Perhaps it could do nothing else. For
man may not live up to his full potentialities; he is more
likely to do this when his aim is high. Without a re-
demptive concept of moral order he could never be
revalued. And it is through large-scale techniques that,
for the mass, his revaluation can be attained. Yet or-
ganized anarchy is, in a free society, their innate re-
sult. The collective revaluation of man in terms of
moral order, the individual devaluation of man through
the processes of organized anarchy modern democracy
fluctuates between these two twentieth-century polar ex-
tremes. Society may conserve the power that is devel-
oped within it; but there are discretionary margins be-
yond law or administrative rule in which that power is
exercised, and here only private moral controls avail.
The moral code of a group or of society may be superior
to one of man at his worst and inferior to one of man
at his best. Ethical demands must be the same upon
men in their collective organized capacity as upon each
individual. For if they are not, organizational man, shel-
tered by impersonal large-scale irresponsibilities, could
be personally still more exempt A less stringent moral-

194 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

ity for society might coincide with actualities. But so
would one for man himself. Man cannot be held to
the best that is in him, if society is let off.

Not that compromise is invariably reprehensible. In
matters of war and peace a free world order has often
served liberty by an alignment with Powers that are not
free; and, as social justice is pursued in domestic affairs,
individual and collective interests must each yield some
of their rights. Expediency has, however, to be resisted
and principle kept alive every step of the way; and in
that unremitting struggle there is a task for institu-
tional religion. Yet it, too, is not immune to the back-
slidings of magnitude. Organizational man as cleric and
hierarch can display the foibles of his kind. Other black
marks against institutional religion have accumulated.
It, nevertheless, furnished noble examples of altruism
long before science and scholarship did the same. Secu-
larism, in disarming bigotry and curbing persecution,
has had to wage against them a mighty battle. But
when secularism thereby affirms the revaluation of man,
its own inner drive is a moral one. It is when organized
power loses this impulse that the secularizing becomes
totalitarian and intolerance may warp the spirit of reli-
gion itself.

Autre temps, autre moeurs. The decline of ordinary
good manners in a large-scale society is consonant with
its moral disorientation. New types forge ahead. Hitler
and his louts clothed the furor teutonicus in modern
dress; in the Soviet Union a generation of technocrats
has stepped forth more parochial in outlook and less
cultivated in taste than Russia's own pre-industrial rev-
olutionaries. But elsewhere, too, as organizational
distinctions, replace traditional ones, the greater infor-
mdity of our time is no iiiiipit^aieA |>bQ&. For a coop-
society is not always a generous oe; nor is

Man Against Man 195

good fellowship which insists on group conformity as
benevolent or as artless as it seems. Those who were
secure in an age of more elaborate courtesy could af-
ford that appreciation of merit which is magnanimity:
self-respect might be coupled with respect for the indi-
viduality of others. But organizational man, despite col-
lectivized or pre-empted securities, may still be too inse-
cure about himself and his position for ease, for breadth,
or for genuine warmth.

Nor is that surprising. In a large-scale society the
game is played without surcease and with invisible
counters: it is one in which the prize of control may
be substantial and yet lack substance; one from which
the victor carries off no concrete trophies that he him-
self might afterwards retain and possess. Opportunities
can be multiplied for some and restricted for others by
organized magnitude; as between insiders, as well as
against outsiders, the struggle for power is correspond-
ingly intense. And from the suave to the brusque, or-
ganizational man runs the gamut of civilities as part of
his competitive institutional technique. Yet as he rises
in a large-scale hierarchy, whether it be corporate or
governmental, academic or administrative, the strain of-
ten tells. What overweening ambition does, how it
causes earlier simplicities to be shed, is one of the classic
themes of literature. But latter-day Caesars feed on a
synthetic meat whose vitamins are more concentrated
than nature's own.

Liberty is not enough. For while a dictatorship may
be a society in which all are equal and yet unfree, a
democracy is not authentically one if, though free, it is
devoid of brotherhood. Pluralism is a liberal concept of
group individuality in a social order centralized for
some purposes and decentralized for others; under it,
however, personal rigfcts could still be vitiated by the

ig6 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

quest for organizational advantage of the self or the
coterie within the group. So also gregariousness may ac-
company group collaboration and yet be no more than
the pagan solidarity of the tribe or the crowd; brother-
hood, Judaeo-Christian in its undertones, would fuse
unity and diversity. Respecting the moral autonomy of
the individual, it is a spur of man's revaluation and the
crown. With its famous triune battle cry, the French
Revolution thus sounded a note that still reverberates:
not liberty alone, not equality alone, not these two as a
pair, but all three liberty, equality, and fraternity to-
gether. For liberty and equality might, as basic princi-
ples, interact upon each other. The tension between
them, when fraternity is scant, can nullify much that
they otherwise accomplish.

Discord between technology and morality may have
been anticipated. But the nineteenth century counted on
education to mediate and render less inharmonious.
That education might in fact set them further apart,
that it might turn against liberalism itself, few sus-
pected. For it was through education that, as minds
were opened, power would be humanized. Without
mass literacy there can be no mass democracy; the ma-
chinery of the latter presupposes that information media
are consulted, that ideas may be pondered as well as
exchanged, that the sense of personal responsibility will
be keen. All this does occur in a free society; unless it
did, imperfectly but sufficiently for it to function, lib-
erty would perish. Yet not only does their destination
recede as men organizationally approach it; they them-
selves are diverted from the main road through un-
charted detours and up blind alleys.

Education can, even politically, be a two-edged sword.
Against despotism it has of ten been aix ageat of revolt.
la a modem dictatorship it mstitfe acceptance of the re-

Man Against Man 197

gime and a hatred of any that are free. Orthodoxy,
secular or religious, has always tried to guard its wards
against dangerous thoughts; in the twentieth century
large-scale techniques may be employed with which, as
dissent is stamped out, uniformity can be inculcated.
And should any of the downtrodden still endeavor to
strike a blow on their own behalf, they may be pro-
scribed by the police State with the same thorough, or-
ganized ferocity. Nor, where there is a total monopoly
of power, can resort now be had to the classic street
insurrection: the oppressed must await the collapse of
the regime in war, a factional quarrel between rival
heirs, or some change in the constellation of diplomacy
along with which ideological straitjackets may be loos-
ened. Barring these eventualities, however, dictatorship
banks on the schooled docility of an indoctrinated pop-
ulace to help it keep itself in the saddle. Unlike tyr-
anny of yore, it must educate the mass, but in doing
this still serves its own purposes.

Civilization, as H. G. Wells said, may be a race be-
tween education and catastrophe. Yet in the West, too,
has not education itself done much technologically to set
on foot and heat up so precarious a contest? In world
affairs, as totalitarian power is offset by the regirded
power of the democracies, another global conflagration
may be averted. That leaves it as imperative as ever to
ask of what, in a large-scale society, education is to con-
sist; what its efficacy can be; by whom it will be handled
and administered. Why, despite its output of trained
intelligence, is society still so unenlightened? The gifted
few who blaze trails are not alone in merit; It is they,
however, who have ze$t and vision for pushing toward
far horizons. Mass mertiar--whtlir of the willingly or

bf oof*ra$ figure high among
B&t die failures of education are

198 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

due to more than the sloth of the multitude. The edu-
cated show faults in themselves for which the mass as
such cannot be blamed. '

What the dedicated are in religion the selfless may be
in art and thought, in science and scholarship. And
when they can work on their own, when they do not
have to act with or through others, organizational cross
currents will pass them by. Yet just as the morally ex-
ceptional may not be intellectually exceptional, so the
intellectually exceptional may not be morally excep-
tional. Education itself has, in a large-scale society, be-
come an enterprise of magnitude one with all the
organizational flaws of other similar, human undertak-
ings. And even science, as a branch of organized knowl-
edge, demonstrates how, within inquiries which are
procedurally disinterested, there may lurk the most pro-
found social irresponsibility. When the atomic age be-
gan, it was stunned by the effect of its own accomplish-
ments and clamored for a moral stocktaking. Yet no guilt
lay in an attempt to forestall the invention of the atomic
bomb by Nazi scientists. It is when such an extension of
power can be used against, as well as for, civilized society
that science becomes uncontrollable.

Of its own techniques the twentieth century is, more-
over, not only as much victim as beneficiary. The ear-
lier liberal faith in the inevitability of progress caused a
wishful misreading of history. In revaluing man the
moral strategy of modern democracies was a sound one;
tactically they were naive to assume that all peoples
shared the same goal. Through their own constitutions
they had long striven -to render power politically re-
sponsible. But vast power was also being generated m
organizational zones less susceptible to control and m
od^er countries where thare were not
safeguards as ^evafledl in

Man Against Man igg

itself, as the incubus of an unjust past was shaken off,
would be treated in a more scientific fashion. Yet be-
tween the enthusiasm for progress of liberal historians
and the moral nihilism of illiberal ones, the realities
called for some middle ground. These, however, would
take longer to find, or were grasped less clearly, in in-
ternational than in national affairs. Those who were
realistic about the domestic scene were often unrealistic
about world politics. And when Utopian irresponsibility
between the wars thus played into the hands of its own
enemies, liberalism reached its nadir.

To relate the old with the new seemed less necessary
when all might be rebuilt afresh. But what if it could
not? For the past lived on, the bad with the good, the
former still devaluing man, the latter pointing to his
revaluation. Liberalism did not go astray when it
sought a more rational reordering of society; it erred in
glossing over much that past and present exhibited of
man's own irrationality. Perceiving how education con-
quered this in some quarters, it was unprepared for the
conquest of education in others by the irrational. Not
that education underwent the same misuse in democra-
cies as in dictatorships. Yet training has to be technical
if a large-scale mechanism is to be operated; mass educa-
tion was bound to lay stress on that. Greater numbers
could, through it, also be developed in other ways. But
even this has not had as direct an effect as was pre-
sumed and for reasons that hamper large-scale democ-
racy in every aspect, individual and organizational, of
its existence. A free self-regulating economy and a free
self-regulating world order are, as liberal hypotheses,
both obsolete. So, too, mass education may open minds
and yet be no automatic guarantee of an open society.
Nor, in its own formal affirmations, could liberalism
escape the structural ambiguities of organized magni-

200 * THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

tude. It might, as a credo of moral responsibility, keep
its hands clean. Yet whenever it, too, employed positive
institutional techniques, these were as equivocal as any.
It still strove for a free society in which, between indi-
vidual and collective rights, there can be some just syn-
thesis; a program of power, governmental and nongov-
ernmental, invited the corruptions of power. Reforming
bigness and being commensurately enlarged in scale, it
itself became in practice less flexible, less open-minded,
less free. The bewildering illiberalities of organizational
liberalism are thus not merely those of pious frauds
the veiled intolerance of its opinion media; the disin-
genuous exercise of pre-empted power in the learned
and official worlds. They are a gauge of the administra*
tive irresponsibility which emerges whenever inner con*,
trols evade control.

Hardening of the moral arteries is the occupational
disease of every organized pressure or large-scale inter^
est. When, however, it is conservative ones which display
these symptoms they, at least, are spared the odium of
having pretended to be something that they are not.
Setting their sights low, never oversanguine about the
nature of man, they raised no great expectations of
others or of themselves.

And what, in the light of all this, shall we do tem-
porally to be saved? The ancient verities are never out-
worn, but they alone will not now suffice. Personal in-
tegrity is, as ever, a prerequisite; without judgment even
it will not get us far. For power may be mishandled by
incompetents or obscurantists who are honest; the ex-
pert or the technician is often too specialized, too intent
upon a compartmentalized sphere of his own. Experi-
ence by itself, knowledge untempered by judgment, is
ihonefore inadequate for social decisions that are com-

Man Against Man 201

prehensive and just. Ideally the more arid our technol-
ogy, the more it calls for moral imagination, a wisdom
in leadership which transcends moral responsibility it-
self. But large-scale society is not disposed to elicit or
utilize the very qualities it needs most. We shall, if his-
tory is any guide, have to settle for less.

It is from history, as a matter of fact, that may be
derived a sense of realism which will prevent us from
hoping too much or despairing too soon. The nineteenth
century thought it knew where it was going and did
not. The twentieth century knows that it does not and
wishes that it did. The more intricately society is organ-
ized the more complex is the reconciliation of liberty
and security: the equipoise these two achieve interna-
tionally will determine the future of the human race.
For technology has backfired. Did it unite all men or,
in uniting some, divide them from others more pro-
foundly? Power, through it, was concentrated in peace
but not for peace. And so the West would have to fight
a second world war before it took to heart whatever
lessons the first had taught.

Paradox in the organization of freedom may contrib-
ute to hazard in the organization of peace. But if de-
mocracy ever doubts whether it is on the right course,
a glance at totalitarian rigors will reassure it. Less reas-
suring is any self-scrutiny whose criteria of man's reval-
uation are those which democracy itself has set. Social
justice can, in a mass society, enlarge the scale of well-
being. Yet fresh corruptions of power result when
power is extended or even redistributed. Man versus the
machine remains a major isstie of the twentieth century,
the question being how to control it so that it can be
exploited in common to the common advantage. And
one phase of this question is the problem of its use by

THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

some or many against others, that in an organized ar
archy of man against man. For the terrain of freedom
may expand and change. The battle for democrat
never ends and is never finally won.

Index

Academic freedom, 93-97

Acton, Lord, 19-20

Adams, John, 145

Advertising, 149, 154, 177

Age, factor in discrimination
against workers, 90, 99-
100

Alien and Sedition Laws, 145

America First, 127, 128, 132

American enterprise, 178

American Revolution, 8

American way of life, pro-
jected through alliance
with Western Europe, 176
et seq.

Anti-Semitism, 101-105, 161.
See also Jews, Discrimina-
tion, "Quota system"

Anti-trust laws, 66

Appeasement, see Isolation-
ism, Munich

Arabs, 102

Armed Services, 70

Arnold, Matthew, 6

Arts, artists, 116, 146, 174, 184,

198

Asia^ 121, 185-189
Assembly, freedom of, 35

Atlantic pact, 37
Atomic age, 145, 178, 198
Atomic bomb, 198
Atomic Energy Commission,

70, 105

Atomic military power, 37
Atomic power, 114
Atomic warfare, 20
Austria, 144
Axis powers, 30, 36, 39, 41, 43,

'57

Babylon, 13

Bacon, 7

Baldwin, Stanley, 125

Beard, Charles, 126

Bentham, Jeremy, 8

Benthamite harmony of inter-
ests, 24, *9> l6 9

Berle, A. A., 62

Biblical concepts, 6, 21. See
also Christianity, Judaism

"Big Name" snobbery, 160-
261, 165, 167

Biologists* 9

Birth control in Asia, 187

Bismarck* 18

20J

204 -THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

Bismarckian rationale, 27

Bonn Republic, 52, 157

Book clubs, 163

Book publishing, 162-164

Book reviewers, 131, 164

Books, 159, 161

Boulding, Kenneth, 70

Brandeis, Justice Louis D., 13,
141

Britain, 19, 32, 33, 34, 36, 39,
46, 91, 120, 121, 122, 124,
i25> *3 *34 J 43 *44>
M5 !53> l6 5> *77 l8o >
181, 183, 188. See also
England, English-speak-
ing peoples

Brotherhood, necessary ad-
junct to liberty, 195-196

Browning, Robert, 111

Bryson, Lyman, 16, 174

Buddha, 89

Burke, Edmund, 17, 57

Calvin, 7

Canada, 33, 104, 124, 129, *43
165, 178

Capitalism, 8, 10, 17, 29, 42,
44, 45, 48, 61-71, 81, 88,
123

cleavage between ownership
and control, 62 et seq.

Carlyle, Thomas, 89

Carr, E. H., 121

Catholic Europe, medieval, 7

Cavour, 42

Censorship, 162

Central Powers, 30

Chain ownership of communi-
cations media, 148-151,

165

Chamberlain, Neville, 125
Chase, Stuart, 89
Chemists, 114

Chiang Kai-shek, 130
Children, control of entertain-

ment for, 161
Children, mistreatment of in

preindustrial society, 59
China, 34, 78, 130
China, Communist, 18, 37, 51,

52, 129-131, 188. See also

Sino-Soviet bloc
Christianity, 103, 108, 186, 196
Church and State, 7. See also

Religion, freedom of
Churchill, Winston, 39-41, 89,

125, 130, 134, 135
Civil liberties, 15, 59, 100, 103,

145

"Civil rights," 101, 103
Civil service, 78-79, 117-119,

136
Class shackles of preindustrial

society, 59
Class war, 21, 46, 50
Clemenceau, Georges, 33, 112
Closed and open shop, 73-74
Collective bargaining, 10, 18,

7i, 75-76
Collectivism, 4, 9, 14, 16, 18,

*9 55 7*73> 79* 80, 82-

86, 88, 106, 192, 200
Collectivization, farm, 52
Colonialism, 121
Comic books, 161
Common law, 7
Communication, 28, 140
free communication, 141 et

seq.

See also mass media
Communism, 6, 26, 28, 29, 31,

39-43> 48, 50-53. 6 9* 7*>
79, 94, 113, 124, 127, 128-

154, 159, 171, 179, 182,
189. See also Ex-Commu-
nists, Marxism, Russian
, Soviet Urition

Communists, American, 120,

128-132, 143-146. See also

Ex-Communists
Competition, 73, 80, 81, 93,

94, 103, 106, no, 146
Conformity, 17, 82-86, 90, 92-

110, 118, 134, 187, 195
Confucius, 89
Congressional committees of

investigation, see United

States
Conservatism, 19, 35, 36, 40,

41, 125, 200

Consumption, 4, 12, 76, 146
Coolidge, Calvin, 125
Cooperation, 9, 80, 81
Cooperative society, 194
Copernicus, 5
Corporate power, 19, 20
"Corporate revolution," 62 et

seq.

Corporations, twentieth-cen-
tury, 62 et seq. See also

Capitalism

Cranborne, Lord, 125
Czechoslovakia, 51, 144

Danzig, 50
Darwin, 8
Darwinism, 9
Democracy, democracies,

passim
Descartes, 7
Dictatorship, passim
Diplomacy, closed versus open,

155^59

Diso-jinimtion, go, 99-10$. See
also AatJ-$emt*OT Ne-

Disraeli,

East Asia, 52, 120, 130, 157,
180

Economic research, and large-
scale planning, 133-134

Economy of Western Europe,
176 et seq.

Eden, Anthony, 125

Editorial page, camouflaged
extensions of, 166, 167

Editors, 131, 152

Education, 93 et seq., 113, 145,
196-199. See also Non-
profit organizations, Uni-
versities

Egypt, 13

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 125,

147

England, 7, 113. See also Brit-
ain

English-speaking peoples, 34,
54, 116, 123-124, 134, 136,
142, 144, 173, 181

Entrepreneur, see Capitalism,
Middle class

Ethiopia, 50

European immigration, effect
on America, 182

Ex-Commuiiists, 124, 128-13*

Fabian tactics, 46

Fair employment practices,
joo-ioi, 104. See also Dis-
crimination, Negroes

Far East, 130

Farmers, 75-76

Fascism, s& *8 *& 40, 50* 113,

Fascists, native, $7
Feudalism, 42- See also Serfi
Fifth Column, 143

5** ***

3,

206 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

France, continued

poleon III, French Revo-
lution

Franchise, 174

French Revolution, 8, 18, 27,
48, 52, 196

Freud, Sigmund, 20

Fuchs, Klaus, 116

Galbralth, J. K., 68

Galileo, 5

Gandhi, 187

George III, 32

German revisionist school, 122

Germany, 16, 23, 25, 27, 29,
30, 34, 42, 52-54, 101-102,
113, 123, 143, 157, 161,
176, 180-182, 185. See also
Bonn Republic; Ger-
many, Nazi; Weimar Re-
public

Germany, Nazi, 20, 28, 35, 36,

37> 3$ 39* 4> 4* 48, 5i-
54 79^ 85, 102, 113, 118,

120, 121, 122, 123, 126,
127, 132, 134, 140, 144,

*57' *59> 176, 178* i94
198. See also Hitler,
Adolf; Nazi-Soviet pact

Great Britain, $ee Britain

Greece, 6, 113, 174

Hamilton, Alexander, 19
Hamilton, Walton, 67
Harding, Warren G., 125
Harvard University, 122
"Have" and "have not*' na-

tioas, 50

Hay, John, 33* 125
Hebraism, 6-7. See also Juda-
ism

Hegel 27,57
Hefierttao, 6

Hirohito, 126

Hiss, Alger, 122, 130

Hitler, Adolf, 5, 18, 27, 31, 36,
38, 40, 47, 53, 57, 60, 89,
126, 132, 161, 178, 179,

194

Hobbes, 8, 57, 59

Hohenzollerns, 42

Holmes, Justice Oliver Wen-
dell, 141

Hoover, Herbert, 125

Hospitals, 92, 95. See also
Nonprofit organizations

India, 188

Individual, 88, 89, 191
importance of, in continuity

of State, 57-58
pressure for conformity of,

in large-scale enterprise,

82-86,90
within organization, 61, 76-

77, 92-110
Individualism, 8-12, 14, 18, 23,

37, 44, 81, 82-86, 183, 192,

200

Indo-China, 181
Indonesia, 188
Industrial Revolution, 8-12,

21, 22, 25, 28, 181. See

also Industrialism, Tech-

nology

Industrialism, 58-59, 61
Intellectuals, 112, 114, 115,

119, 121, 146, 164, 170,

171, 179, 184, 198
Internationalism, 23, 50. See

also World order
Irresponsible power, passim
Isolationists, isolationism, 35-

34, 36-40, 115, 120-12$,

See

Israel, 7, 187
Italy, 23, 25* 34

5**

Jacobinism, 183

Japan, 16, 25, 30, 33, 34, 37,

41, 48, 51, 130, 157, 180,

188
Jefferson, Thomas, 20, 32, 64,

141

Jesus, 89
Jews, 7, 101-105. See also Anti-

Semitism, "Quota system"
Judaism, 103, 108, 186, 196.

Sec also Hebraism

Kant, 27

Kennan, George, 31, 122
Kerensky, Alexander, 52
Keynes, John Maynard, io>

121

Korea, 130
Kremlin, the, 30, 40, 48, 129,

132
Kropotkin, 56

Labor, 9, 10, 11, 18, 43, 62, 71,
72, 75, 76, 85, 99, 114. See
also Collective bargain-
ing, Trade unions
L&issez -fairCj, 11
Land reform, in Asia, 187
Latin America, 25, 3^ 184
Law, 29-30* 57, 80* 144, 195.

See also Common law
Lawlessness, 184

between world

Index 207

League of Nations, 33, 34, 39,

123-124, 156, 157
Lenin, Nikolai, 38, 44, 53
Leninist camarilla, 53
Liberalism, passim
Liberty, passim
Lilienthal, David, 67
Lindbergh, Charles, 138
Lloyd George, David, 33
Lobbies, 142
Locke, John, 7, 64
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 125
Luther, 7, 27

McCarthy, Joseph R., 125, 145

Machiavelli, 8

Machiavellian philosophy, 68

Machine, mastery of, 191

Machine process, in Western
Europe, 176

Machines, see Industrial Rev-
olution, Technology

Madison, James, 32

Magazines, 165-172- See
Mass media

Mahomet, 89

Maine, Sir Henry, 99

Malenkov, Georgi, 44

Malthus, 9

Man, devaluation of, 3, 14,
24, 28, 4& 51,
158* *49> *7^ 8*, 193*

199
Devaluation of

tkmal man," 83-86
Man, revaloatkm of, 3-6,
314, 17, 81-24, 27, 29,
4, 47. 49^ &i* 54, 57>

Leadership in g&vem&eat,

Manchester school, 183
Manchuria, 50

Mao Tse-tung, 129, 130, 131
Marx, Karl, 43-46, 137
Marxism, 5, 19, 43'4 6 69, 75.

See also Communism
Mass, the, 113
Mass media, 145 et seq.
Mass persuasion, 178
Means, Gardiner C, 62
Medicine, 95, 103, 133
Menotti, Gian-Carlo, 98
Middle class, 11, 19, 44, 70,

183

conformity of, 90

rise of new, 8; in Soviet
Union, 44-45, 70-71, 179
Middle East, 52
Mill, John Stuart, 141
Mills, C. Wright, 82, 90
Milton, John, 141
Minority, 18
Monopoly, 68, 73-75, 78, 142-

*43> *97

Monroe Doctrine, 32

Moral concepts, 7, 13, 21, 26,
S^SS* 54> 55> 58, 62, 105,
107, 108-110, 113-114, 121,
123, 149, 161, 193, 196,

200, 201

Moses, 89

Motion pictures, 102, 145, 147,

159, 161, 166
Mumford, Lewis, 89
Munich, 40, 121
Music, g&, 174
Mussolini, Benito, 53, 89

Napoleon 1, 23, 29, 33, 52, 122
Napoleon III, 52
Napoleonic era, 145
National differences, 54
Nationalism, & 21, 25, 26, 31,
4*> 50, 51, 157, 188, 189

Nationalization of industry, 91
Natural resources, 182
Nazism, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 40,
41, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 113,

Il8, 121, 126, 128, 131,

137, 140, 144, 159

Nazi-Soviet pact, 40, 127, 134,
144

Negroes, 100-101. See also Dis-
crimination, Fair employ-
ment practices, Racism

Newspapers, 145 et seq.
control of, 148-149

Newton, 5

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 58, 109,
123

Nietzsche, 8

Nietzschean worship of great
man, 89

Nonprofit organizations, 69-
7> 73> 92 <?* seq. 9 104, 170

North Africa, 181

Norway, 144

Nye Munitions Inquiry, 122

Official, role of, 116 et seq.
Oligopoly, 68, 142, 148, 160,

178

Oliver Twist, film, 161
Open society, an, 199
Opinion, independent, 146-

147

Opinion industries and tech-
niques, 141 et seq.

Organization, large-scale, pas-
sim

Orthodoxy, 197

Oxford University, 105

Pacifists, 37
Pakistan, 188

Parliamentary blocs, Euro-
pean, 142
Party system, 142, 158

Pax Britannica, 177

Peace settlement of 1919, 123.
See also Versailles confer-
ence, World War I

Pearl Harbor, 30, 37, 40, 122,
126

Peking, 129, 131

Pension schemes, 100

Periodicals, 159. See also
Magazines

Physicists, 114

Plato, 15, 60, 88-89, 1]L 3

Poland, 121

Political progress, 191

Political system of U.S., 77 et
seq.

Potsdam, 30

Pound, Ezra, 116

Power, responsible versus irre-
sponsible, passim

Prague, 131

Presidential campaigns, and
mass media, 147-148

Press, 147, 148-150
freedom of, 15
See also Mass media

Price-fixing, in agriculture, 75-

76

Printing press, 141
Production, 4, 12, 76, 146, 188
mass production, 16, 61, 70,

166, 179, 180-181
trade unions and manage-
ment of production, 75
Professionals, 76, 93 et seq.,

102, 117, iss-^y

in Soviet Union, 44
Proudhon, 56
Protestantism, 7
Prussian concepts of peace,

30-31
Psychological warfare, 155,

168

Public ownership, 69
Publishers, 152

Index 209
Publishing^ 145 et seq.

"Quota system," 103

Racism, 5, 21, 23, 59, 90, 100-
101, 188. See also Anti-
Semitism, Discrimination,
Negroes

Radio, 145 et seq*, 153, 166
radio commentators, 149,

150

Rate fixing, 67
Reason, 20, 141
Reformation, the, 6
Religion, 194
freedom of, 5, 7, 8, 15
"message of social justice

in," 59

wars of, 7, 188
See also Christianity, Juda-
ism

Religious persecution, 59, 194
Renaissance, the, 6
Republican party, 125, 127
Revolutions of 1848, 27. See

also Nationalism
Rhineland, 50
Ricardo, 9
Riesman, David, 89
Rights of man, 7, 8
Romanoffs, 44
Rome, 6, 13, 30
Rommel, 161
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 10, 40,

89, 122, 130, 134, 147
Roosevelt, Theodore, 33, 125,

130

Rousseau, 17, 57
Rundstedt, 161
Russia, 25, 38, 53 88. Se * also
Russian Revolution, Sov-
iet Union, Tsarism

210 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

Russian Revolution, 42, 52
Russo-Japanese equilibrium in
Far East, 33

Santayana, George, 113
Satellite nations, see Soviet

Union
Scholars, scholarship, 95-99,

184, 198
Science, 5, 7, 21, 24, 54, 97*

133. 192, 198
See also Atomic power,

Biology, Social scientists,

Technology
Scientists, 97-98, 146
Secrets, state, disclosed through

headlines and broadcasts,

154

Secularism, 194

Securities Exchange Act, 62

Seniority, 107

Serf 5,52

Shaftesbury, 19

Sherman and Clayton anti-
trust laws, 66

SinoSoviet bloc, 30, 48, 186,
189

Smith, Adam, 8, 106

Social benefits for workers, 71-

1*> 74> i79 ^3
See also Pension schemes
Social justice, 7, 14, 41, 47, 51,

59,69, 103, no, 187, 192,

194* 201

Social reforms, 27, 57
Social scientists, 89
Socialist, i% 18, 46, 64, 69,

88, i$s
Solon, 89
Southeast Asia, 5*
Scmet UsicHi, $, 16, 54, 113,

116, ifc^ 126, 128-129,

130, 15

189

Soviet Union, continued
alliance with democracies in
World War II, 39-41, 134
anti-Semitism, 101-102
atomic spies, 114, 124, 128,

143

centralization of control, 79
"champion of have nots,"

50-51
diplomacy, 39, 41

"economic well being" of,

48-49

expansion, 37-38
and Germany, 40, 157, 182
"government by purge," 43,

4 8

industrialization, 18, 179
and League of Nations, 39
liberals' attitude toward do-
mestic policy of, 35
methods of internal control,

5
middle class, 44, 45, 70-71,

179

neutrality in 1939, 36
peace talk, 30
satellite regimes, 144
slave-labor camps, 20, 52
and social mechanics of

large-scale organization,

43-47 5 1 ' 5* 60, 69-71,

i79 194

and Stakhanovism, 72
technology, 44, 47
use of social injustice to

foment international cri-
, ses, 41-42, 179, 183
and Western revolutionary

idealism, 43
after World War II, 27, 3&

48
See also Communism, Kbreso^

lin, Marxism,

Index 211

Spanish-American war, 32
Speech, freedom of, 15
Sports, organized, 166, 175
Stakhanovism, 72
Stalin, Joseph, 44, 89, 130, 179
Strachey, Lytton, 89
Strikes, right to strike, 75-76
Syndicated columnists, 149,

150, 151, 165. See also

Chain ownership

Taft, Robert, 125, 126
Technocrats, Russian, 194
Technology, 5, 12, 24, 28, 44,

52, 54> 5 6 > 6o 6l 7 1 * 7*>
77, 108, no, 114, 115, 133,
151, 176, 181, 182, 184,
187, 191, 192, 193, 196,
199, 201. See also Indus-
trial Revolution
Teheran conference, 40, 120,

130

Telecasters, chain, 150, 151
Television, 145 et seq., 166
Tennessee Valley Authority,

70, 105

Teutonic folk solidarity, 60
Theater, 74, 145, 147, 161
"Think piece," decline of, 167
"Third Force illusions/' 178
Thoreau, Henry David, 15, 59
Thought, "free marketplace

of," 141 et seq. f 185
Tokyo, 30
Tory doctrine, 19
Toynbee, Arnold, 121
Totalitarianism, passim. See
also Fascism, Nazism, So-
viet Union

Trade unions, 10, 71, 73"7^*
83, 101, 131, 144, 179. See
also Closed and open
shop, Collective bargain-
ing

Transportation, 67
Triple Entente, 39
Trotsky, Leon, 44
Trotskyites, 128-129, 131
Truman, Harry, 10, 147
Tsarism, Tsarist Russia, 26,

38, 39, 42, 52, 101
Turkey, 187

United Nations, 91, 130, 155-

156, 158

United States, 55, 86, 141, 176
"American anarchy," 56 et

seq.

American way of life, pro-
jection of, 177 et seq.
atomic espionage within,

124, 145
bipartisan foreign policy,

157

Cabinet, 104
Communist infiltration, 143-

146

Congress, 57, 62, 105, 122
Congressional committees

of investigation, 119-120,

122, 145, 154
defeat of Japan, 130
emergence as prime power

of West, 168
impact of American culture

and economy on Europe,

180-185

"irony of American his-
tory," 123
isolationism, after World

War I, 33, 34, 120-126
isolationism, as a contrib-
utory factor to World

War II, 36-40
isolationism, after World

War II, 126, 130
leadership after World War

I, 1*5

212 THE AMERICAN ANARCHY

United States, continued
leadership now, destiny of

free world hinges on, 163
leadership in Asia, 185-189
leakages in information in

American public life, 154
irnass production, 16
political system, weaknesses

in for democratic control,

77-79
and postwar restoration of

West Germany, 180
press, 165
State Department, 114-115,

127-130, 171
Supreme Court, 104
and war of ideas, 143
wars of independence and

reunification, 25
and world order, in eight-
eenth and early twentieth

centuries, 32, 33
See also English-speaking

peoples

"Universal personality," a, 89
Universities, 90, 92, 94 et seq.,

103, 131, 145
Upper class, British, 183

Vandenberg, Arthur H., 126,

127

Veblen, Thorstein, 62, 113
Versailles conference, 38, 120,

122
Vienna, 30

Wagner, Richard, 116
Walpole, Sir Robert, 172

Ward, Artemus, 140
Washington, George, 34
Washington Treaties, 34
Weimar Republic, 18, 42, 52,

118

Welfare, international, 91
Welfare state, 10, 45, 62, 71,

108

Wells, H. G., 197
Western Europe, impact of

America on, 176 et seq.
Whigs, 8, 45
White-collar stratification, 90,

103. See also Conformity,

Middle class

White Guard freebooters, 38
Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 23, 33
Wilson, Woodrow, 33-34, 158
Women, disabilities in pre-

industrial society, 59
World order, 26, 30-34, 36-37,

39* 5 1 * 52, 9 1 * H4* 121,

122, 132, 136
World trade, 180
World War I, 25, 27, 29, 30,

32-34* 35-3 6 ' 3 8 * 4i> 120,

140, 181
World War II, 20, 25, 29, 30,

32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 41, 48,

129, 134, 173, 181, 183,

201
"World War III," 157

Yale University, 122
Yalta conference, 40, 120, 130
Youth, in satellite nations,
179