Wordgems - Wealth & Economics: F.A. Hayek: Totalitarians in our Midst

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Wealth & Economics:

F. A. Hayek's
The Road to Serfdom

Totalitarians in Our Midst

"When authority presents itself in the guise of organization, it develops charms fascinating enough to convert communities of free people into totalitarian States."

THE TIMES (London)

PROBABLY it is true that the very magnitude of the outrages committed by the totalitarian governments, instead of increasing the fear that such a system might one day arise in more enlightened countries, has rather strengthened the assurance that it cannot happen here.

When we look to Nazi Germany, the gulf which separates us seems so immense that nothing that happens there can possess relevance for any possible development here. And the fact that the difference has steadily become greater seems to refute any suggestion that we may be moving in a similar direction.

But let us not forget that fifteen years ago the possibility of such a thing's happening in Germany would have appeared just as fantastic, not only to nine-tenths of the Germans themselves, but also to the most hostile foreign observers (however wise they may now pretend to have been).

As suggested earlier in these pages, however, it is not the present Germany but the Germany of twenty or thirty years ago to which conditions in the democracies show an ever increasing resemblance.

There are many features which were then regarded as "typically German" and which are now equally familiar in England, for instance, and many symptoms that point to a further development in the same direction. We have already mentioned the most significant-the increasing similarity between the economic views of the Right and Left and their common opposition to the liberalism that used to be the common basis of most English politics.

We have the authority of Mr. Harold Nicolson for the statement that, during the last Conservative government, among the back-benchers of the Conservative party "the most gifted . . . were all socialists at heart"; and there can be little question that, as in the days of the Fabians, many socialists have more sympathy with the Conservatives than with the Liberals. There are many other features closely related to this.

The increasing veneration for the state, the admiration of power, and of bigness for bigness' sake, the enthusiasm for "organization" of everything (we now call it "planning"), and that "inability to leave anything to the simple power of organic growth," which even von Treitschke deplored in the Germans sixty years ago, are all scarcely less marked in England now than they were in Germany.

How far in the last twenty years England has traveled on the German path is brought home to one with extraordinary vividness if one now reads some of the more serious discussions of the differences between British and German views on political and moral issues which appeared in England during the last war.

It is probably true to say that then the British public had, in general, a truer appreciation of these differences than it has now; but while the people of England were then proud of their distinctive tradition, there are few of the political views then regarded as characteristically English of which the majority of her people do not now seem half-ashamed, if they do not positively repudiate them.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the more typically English a writer on political or social problems then appeared to the world, the more is he today forgotten in his own country. Men like Lord Morley or Henry Sidgwick, Lord Acton or A. V. Dicey, who were then admired in the world at large as outstanding examples of the political wisdom of liberal England, are to the present generation largely obsolete Victorians.

Perhaps nothing shows this change more clearly than that, while there is no lack of sympathetic treatment of Bismarck in contemporary English literature, the name of Gladstone is rarely mentioned by the younger generation without a sneer over his Victorian morality and naive utopianism. I wish I could in a few paragraphs adequately convey the alarming impression gained from the perusal of a few of the English works on the ideas dominating the Germany of the last war, where almost every word could be applied to the views most conspicuous in current English literature.

I shall merely quote one brief passage by Lord Keynes, describing in 1915 the "nightmare" which he found expounded in a typical German work of that period: he describes how, according to a German author, "even in peace industrial life must remain mobilised. This is what he means by speaking of the 'militarisation of our industrial life' [the title of the work reviewed].

Individualism must come to an end absolutely. A system of regulations must be set up, the object of which is not the greater happiness of the individual (Professor Jaffe is not ashamed to say this in so many words), but the strengthening of the organised unity of the state for the object of attaining the maximum degree of efficiency (Leistungsfahigkeit), the influence of which on individual advantage is only indirect.

This hideous doctrine is enshrined in a sort of idealism. The nation will grow into a 'closed unity' and will become, in fact, what Plato declared it should be -- 'Der Mensch im Grossen.' In particular, the coming peace will bring with it a strengthening of the idea of State action in industry . . . . Foreign investment, emigration, the industrial policy which in recent years had regarded the whole world as a market, are too dangerous.

The old order of industry, which is dying to-day, is based on Profit; and the new Germany of the twentieth-century Power without consideration of Profit is to make an end of that system of Capitalism, which came over from England one hundred years ago." Except that no English author has yet to my knowledge dared openly to disparage individual happiness, is there a passage in this which is not mirrored in much of contemporary English literature? And, undoubtedly, not merely the ideas which in Germany and elsewhere prepared totalitarianism but also many of the principles of totalitarianism itself are what exercises an increasing fascination in many other countries. Although few people, if anybody, in England would probably be ready to swallow totalitarianism whole, there are few single features which have not yet been advised by somebody or other.

Indeed, there is scarcely a leaf out of Hitler's book which somebody or other in England or America has not recommended us to take and use for our own purposes. This applies particularly to many people who are undoubtedly Hitler's mortal enemies because of one special feature in his system.

We should never forget that the anti-Semitism of Hitler has driven from his country, or turned into his enemies, many people who in every respect are confirmed totalitarians of the German type. [footnote: Especially when we consider the proportion of former socialists who have become Nazis it is important to remember that the true significance of this ratio is seen only if we compare it, not with the total number of former socialists, but with the number of those whose conversion would not in any case have been prevented by their ancestry. In fact, one of the surprising features of the political emigration from Germany is the comparatively small number of refugees from the Left who are not "Jews" in the German sense of the term. How often do we not hear eulogies of the German system prefaced by some statement such as the following with which at a recent conference an enumeration of the "features of the totalitarian technique of economic mobilization which are worth thinking about" was introduced: "Herr Hitler is not my ideal-far from it. There are very pressing personal reasons why Herr Hitler should not be my ideal, but. . ."]
No description in general terms can give an adequate idea of the similarity of much of current English political literature to the works which destroyed the belief in Western civilization in Germany and created the state of mind in which naziism could become successful.

The similarity is even more one of the temper with which the problems are approached than of the specific arguments used-a similar readiness to break all cultural ties with the past and to stake everything on the success of a particular experiment. As was also true in Germany, most of the works which are preparing the way for a totalitarian course in the democracies are the product of sincere idealists and often of men of considerable intellectual distinction.

So, although it is invidious to single out particular persons as illustrations where similar views are advocated by hundreds of others, I see no other way of demonstrating effectively how far this development has actually advanced. I shall deliberately choose as illustrations authors whose sincerity and disinterestedness are above suspicion.

But though I hope in this way to show how the views from which totalitarianism springs are now rapidly spreading here, I stand little chance of conveying successfully the equally important similarity in the emotional atmosphere. An extensive investigation into all the subtle changes in thought and language would be necessary to make explicit what one readily enough recognizes as symptoms of a familiar development.

Through meeting the kind of people who talk about the necessity of opposing "big" ideas to "small" ones and of replacing the old "static" or "partial" thinking by the new "dynamic" or "global" way, one learns to recognize that what at first appears sheer nonsense is a sign of the same intellectual attitude with whose manifestations we can alone concern ourselves here. My first examples are two works by a gifted scholar which in the past few years have attracted much attention. There are, perhaps, few other instances in contemporary English literature where the influence of the specific German ideas with which we are concerned is so marked as in Professor E. H. Carr's books on the Twenty Years' Crisis and the Conditions of Peace. In the first of these two books Professor Carr frankly confessed himself an adherent of "the `historical school' of realists [which] had its home in Germany and [whose) development can be traced through the great names of Hegel and Marx." A realist, he explains, is one "who makes morality a function of politics" and who "cannot logically accept any standard of value save that of fact."

This "realism" is contrasted, in truly German fashion, with the "utopian" thought dating from the eighteenth century "which was essentially individualist in that it made the human conscience the final court of appeal." But the old morals with their "abstract general principles" must disappear because "the empiricist treats the concrete case on its individual merits."

In other words, nothing but expediency matters, and we are even assured that "the rule pacta sunt servanda is not a moral principle." That without abstract general principles merit becomes solely a matter of arbitrary opinion and that international treaties, if they are not morally binding, have no meaning whatever does not seem to worry Professor Carr. According to Professor Carr, indeed, although he does not explicitly say so, it appears that England fought the last war on the wrong side. Anyone who re-reads now the statements of British war aims of twenty-five years ago and compares them with Professor Carr's present views will readily see that what were then believed to be the German views are now those of Professor Carr, who would presumably argue that the different views then professed in this country were merely a product of British hypocrisy.

How little difference he is able to see between the ideals held in this country and those practiced by present-day Germany is best illustrated by his assertion that "it is true that when a prominent National Socialist asserts that 'anything that benefits the German people is right, anything that harms them is wrong' he is merely propounding the same identification of national interest with universal right which has already been established for English-speaking countries by [President] Wilson, Professor Toynbee, Lord Cecil, and many others." Since Professor Carr's books are devoted to international problems, it is mainly in that field that their characteristic tendency becomes apparent. But from the glimpses one gets of the character of the future society which he contemplates, it appears also to be quite on the totalitarian model.

Sometimes one even wonders whether the resemblance is accidental or deliberate. Does Professor Carr, for example, realize, when he asserts that "we can no longer find much meaning in the distinction familiar to nineteenth-century thought between 'society' and 'state,"' that this is precisely the doctrine of Professor Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi theoretician of totalitarianism and, in fact, the essence of the definition of totalitarianism which that author has given to that term which he himself had introduced?

Or that the view that "the mass production of opinion is the corollary of the mass production of goods" and that, therefore, "the prejudice which the word propaganda still exerts in many minds today is closely parallel to the prejudice against control of industry and trade" is really an apology for a regimentation of opinion of the kind practiced by the Nazis? In his more recent Conditions of Peace Professor Carr answers with an emphatic affirmative the question with which we concluded the last chapter: "The victors lost the peace, and Soviet Russia and Germany won it, because the former continued to preach, and in part to apply, the once valid, but now disruptive ideals of the rights of nations and laissez faire capitalism, whereas the latter, consciously or unconsciously borne forward on the tide of the twentieth century, were striving to build up the world in larger units under centralized planning and control." Professor Carr completely makes his own the German battle cry of the socialist revolution of the East against the liberal West in which Germany was the leader: "The revolution which began in the last war, which has been the driving force of every significant political movement in the last twenty years . . . a revolution against the predominant ideas of the nineteenth century: liberal democracy, national self-determination and laissez faire economics."

As he himself rightly says, "it was almost inevitable that this challenge to nineteenth-century beliefs which she had never really shared should find in Germany one of its strongest protagonists." With all the fatalistic belief of every pseudo-historian since Hegel and Marx, this development is represented as inevitable: "We know the direction in which the world is moving, and we must bow to it or perish." The conviction that this trend is inevitable is characteristically based on familiar economic fallacies-the presumed necessity of the general growth of monopolies in consequence of technological developments, the alleged "potential plenty," and all the other popular catchwords which appear in works of this kind.

Professor Carr is not an economist, and his economic argument generally will not bear serious examination. But neither this nor his belief characteristically held at the same time, that the importance of the economic factor in social life is rapidly decreasing, prevents him from basing on economic arguments all his predictions about the inevitable developments or from presenting as his main demands for the future "the reinterpretation in predominantly economic terms of the democratic ideals of 'equality' and 'liberty"'! Professor Carr's contempt for all the ideas of liberal economists (which he insists on calling nineteenth-century ideas, though he knows that Germany "had never really shared" them and had already in the nineteenth century practiced most of the principles he now advocates) is as profound as that of any of the German writers quoted in the last chapter. He even takes over the German thesis, originated by Friedrich List, that free trade was a policy dictated solely by, and appropriate only to, the special interests of England in the nineteenth century. Now, however, "the artificial production of some degree of autarchy is a necessary condition of orderly social existence." To bring about a "return to a more dispersed and generalized world trade . . . . by a `removal of trade barriers' or by a resuscitation of the laissez faire principles of the nineteenth century" is "unthinkable." The future belongs to Grossraunzzuirtschaft of the German kind: "The result which we desire can be won only by a deliberate reorganization of European life such as Hitler has undertaken"! After all this one is hardly surprised to find a characteristic section headed "The Moral Functions of War," in which Professor Carr condescendingly pities "the well-meaning people (especially in English-speaking countries) who, steeped in the nineteenth-century tradition, persist in regarding war as senseless and devoid of purpose," and rejoices in the "sense of meaning and purpose" which war, "the most powerful instrument of social solidarity," creates. This is all very familiar-but it was not in the works of English scholars that one expected to find these mews. Possibly we have not yet given enough attention to one feature of the intellectual development in Germany during the last hundred years which is now in an almost identical form making its appearance in the English-speaking countries: the scientists' agitating for a "scientific" organization of society. The ideal of a society organized "through and through" from the top has in Germany been considerably furthered by the quite unique influence which her scientific and technological specialists were allowed to exercise on the formation of social and political opinions. Few people remember that in the modern history of Germany the political professors have played a role comparable to that of the political lawyers in France. The influence of these scientist-politicians was of late years not often on the side of liberty: the "intolerance of reason" so frequently conspicuous in the scientific specialist, the impatience with the ways of the ordinary man so characteristic of the expert, and the contempt for anything which was not consciously organized by superior minds according to a scientific blueprint were phenomena familiar in German public life for generations before they became of significance in England. And perhaps no other country provides a better illustration of the effects on a nation of a general and thorough shift of the greater part of its educational system from the "humanities" to the "realities" than Germany between 1840 and 1940. [footnote: I believe it was the author of Leviathan who first suggested that the teaching of the classics should be suppressed, because it instilled a dangerous spirit of liberty!] The way in which, in the end, with few exceptions, her scholars and scientists put themselves readily at the service of the new rulers is one of the most depressing and shameful spectacles in the whole history of the rise of National Socialism.

It is well known that particularly the scientists and engineers who had so loudly claimed to be the leaders on the march to a new and better world, submitted more readily than almost any other class to the new tyranny. [footnote: It will suffice to quote one foreign witness: R. A. Brady, in his study of The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, concludes his detailed account of the development in the German academic world with the statement that "the scientist, per se, is hence, perhaps, the most easily used and 'coordinated' of all the especially trained people in modern society. The Nazis, to be true, fired a good many University professors, and dismissed a good many scientists from research laboratories. But the professors were primarily among the social sciences where there was more common awareness of and a more persistent criticism of the Nazi programmes, and not among the natural sciences where thinking is supposed to be most rigorous. Those dismissed in this latter field were primarily Jewish or exceptions to the generalisations made above, because of the equally uncritical acceptance of beliefs running contrary to Nazi views. Consequently the Nazis were able to 'co-ordinate' scholars and scientists with relative ease, and hence to throw behind their elaborate propaganda the seeming weight of the bulk of German learned opinion and support."]

The role which the intellectuals played in the totalitarian transformation of society was prophetically foreseen in another country by Julien Benda, whose Trahison des clercs assumes new significance when one now re-reads it, fifteen years after it has been written.

There is particularly one passage in that work which deserves to be well pondered and kept in mind when we come to consider certain examples of the excursions of British scientists into politics.

It is the passage in which M. Benda speaks of the "superstition of science held to be competent in all domains, including that of morality; a superstition which, I repeat, is an acquisition of the nineteenth century. It remains to discover whether those who brandish this doctrine believe in it or whether they simply want to give the prestige of a scientific appearance to passions of their hearts, which they perfectly know are nothing but passions. It is to be noted that the dogma that history is obedient to scientific laws is preached especially by partisans of arbitrary authority. This is quite natural, since it eliminates the two realities they most hate, i.e., human liberty and the historical action of the individual."

We have already had occasion to mention one English product of this kind, a work in which, on a Marxist background, all the characteristic idiosyncrasies of the totalitarian intellectual, a hatred of almost everything which distinguishes Western civilization since the Renaissance, is combined with an approval of the methods of Inquisition.

We do not wish to consider here such an extreme case and shall take a work which is more representative and which has achieved considerable publicity. C. H. Waddington's little book under the characteristic title, The Scientific Attitude, is as good an example as any of a class of literature which is actively sponsored by the influential British weekly Nature and which combines claims for greater political power for the scientists with an ardent advocacy of wholesale "planning."

Though not quite so outspoken in his contempt for freedom as Mr. Crowther, Dr. Waddington is hardly more reassuring. He differs from most of the writers of the same kind in that he clearly sees and even emphasizes that the tendencies he describes and supports inevitably lead to a totalitarian system. Yet apparently this appears to him preferable to what he describes as "the present ferocious monkey-house civilization."

Dr. Waddington's claim that the scientist is qualified to run a totalitarian society is based mainly on his thesis that "science can pass ethical judgment on human behavior" -- a claim to the elaboration of which by Dr. Waddington Nature has given considerable publicity.

It is, of course, a thesis which has long been familiar to the German scientist-politicians and which has justly been singled out by J. Benda. For an illustration of what this means we do not need to go outside Dr. Waddington's book.

Freedom, he explains, "is a very troublesome concept for the scientist to discuss, partly because he is not convinced that, in the last analysis, there is such a thing."

Nevertheless, we are told that "science recognizes" this and that kind of freedom, but "the freedom to be odd and unlike one's neighbor is not . . . . a scientific value."

Apparently the "harlot humanities," about which Dr. Waddington has to say many uncomplimentary things, have gravely misled us in teaching us tolerance!

That when it comes to social and economic questions this book on the "scientific attitude" is anything but scientific is what one has learned to expect of this kind of literature. We find again all the familiar clich�s and baseless generalizations about "potential plenty" and the inevitable tendency toward monopoly, though the "best authorities" quoted in support of these contentions prove on examination to be mostly political tracts of questionable scientific standing, while the serious studies of the same problems are conspicuously neglected.

As in almost all works of this type, Dr. Waddington's convictions are largely determined by his belief in "inevitable historical tendencies" which science is presumed to have discovered and which he derives from "the profound scientific philosophy" of Marxism, whose basic notions are "almost, if not quite, identical with those underlying the scientific approach to nature" and which his "competence to judge" tells Dr. Waddington are an advance on anything which has gone before.

Thus Dr. Waddington, though he finds it "difficult to deny that England now is a worse country to live in than it was" in 1913, looks forward to an economic system which "will be centralized and totalitarian in the sense that all aspects of the economic development of large regions are consciously planned as an integrated whole."

And for his facile optimism that in this totalitarian system freedom of thought will be preserved, his "scientific attitude" has no better counsel than the conviction that "there must be very valuable evidence about questions which one does not need to be an expert to understand," such as, for example, whether it is possible "to continue totalitarianism with freedom of thought."

A fuller survey of the various tendencies toward totalitarianism in England would have to give considerable attention to the various attempts to create some kind of middle-class socialism bearing, no doubt unknown to their authors, an alarming resemblance to similar developments in pre-Hitler Germany.

If we were concerned here with political movements proper, we should have to consider such new organizations as the "Forward-March" or "CommonWealth" movement of Sir Richard Acland, the author of Unser Kampf, or the activities of the "1941 Committee" of Mr. J. B. Priestley, at one time associated with the former.

But, though it would be unwise to disregard the symptomatic significance of such phenomena as these, they can hardly yet be counted as important political forces. Apart from the intellectual influences which we have illustrated by two instances, the impetus of the movement toward totalitarianism comes mainly from the two great vested interests: organized capital and organized labor.

Probably the greatest menace of all is the fact that the policies of these two most powerful groups point in the same direction.

They do this through their common, and often concerted, support of the monopolistic organization of industry; and it is this tendency which is the great immediate danger. While there is no reason to believe that this movement is inevitable, there can be little doubt that if we continue on the path we have been treading, it will lead us to totalitarianism.

This movement is, of course, deliberately planned mainly by the capitalist organizers of monopolies, and they are thus one of the main sources of this danger. Their responsibility is not altered by the fact that their aim is not a totalitarian system but rather a sort of corporative society in which the organized industries would appear as semi-independent and self-governing "estates."

But they are as short-sighted as were their German colleagues in believing that they will be allowed not only to create but also for any length of time to run such a system. The decisions which the managers of such an organized industry would constantly have to make are not decisions which any society will long leave to private individuals.

A state which allows such enormous aggregations of power to grow up cannot afford to let this power rest entirely in private control. Nor is the belief any less illusory that in such conditions the entrepreneurs will be long allowed to enjoy the favored position which in a competitive society is justified by the fact that, of the many who take the risks, only a few achieve the success the chances of which make the risk worth taking.

It is not surprising that entrepreneurs should like to enjoy both the high income which in a competitive society the successful ones among them gain and the security of the civil servant. So long as a large sector of private industry exists side by side with the government-run industry, great industrial talent is likely to command high salaries even in fairly secure positions.

But while the entrepreneurs may well see their expectations borne out during a transition stage, it will not be long before they will find, as their German colleagues did, that they are no longer masters but will in every respect have to be satisfied with whatever power and emoluments the government will concede them.

Unless the argument of this book has been completely misunderstood, the author will not be suspected of any tenderness toward the capitalists if he stresses here that it would nevertheless be a mistake to put the blame for the modern movement toward monopoly exclusively or mainly on that class. Their propensity in this direction is neither new nor would it by itself be likely to become a formidable power. The fatal development was that they have succeeded in enlisting the support of an ever increasing number of other groups and, with their help, in obtaining the support of the state.

In some measure the monopolists have gained this support either by letting other groups participate in their gains or, and perhaps even more frequently, by persuading them that the formation of monopolies was in the public interest. But the change in public opinion, which through its influence on legislation and judicature has been the most important factor to make this development possible, is more than anything the result of the propaganda against competition by the Left.

Very frequently even measures aimed against the monopolists in fact serve only to strengthen the power of monopoly. Every raid on the gains of monopoly, be it in the interest of particular groups or of the state as a whole, tends to create new vested interests which will help to bolster up monopoly. A system in which large privileged groups profit from the gains of monopoly may be politically much more dangerous, and monopoly in such a system certainly is much more powerful, than in one where the profits go to a limited few.

But though it should be clear that, for example, the higher wages which the monopolist is in a position to pay are just as much the result of exploitation as his own profit, and are just as certain to make poorer not only all the consumers but still more all other wage-earners, not merely those who benefit from it but the public generally nowadays accept the ability to pay higher wages as a legitimate argument in favor of monopoly.

There is serious reason for doubt whether even in those cases where monopoly is inevitable the best way of controlling it is to put it in the hands of the state. If only a single industry were in question, this might well be so. But, when we have to deal with many different monopolistic industries, there is much to be said for leaving them in different private hands rather than combining them under the single control of the state.

Even if railways, road and air transport, or the supply of gas and electricity were all inevitably monopolies, the consumer is unquestionably in a much stronger position so long as they remain separate monopolies than when they are "co-ordinated" by a central control. Private monopoly is scarcely ever complete and even more rarely of long duration or able to disregard potential competition. But a state monopoly is always a state-protected monopoly-protected against both potential competition and effective criticism.

It means in most instances that a temporary monopoly is given the power to secure its position for all time-a power almost certain to be used. Where the power which ought to check and control monopoly becomes interested in sheltering and defending its appointees, where for the government to remedy an abuse is to admit responsibility for it, and where criticism of the actions of monopoly means criticism of the government, there is little hope of monopoly becoming the servant of the community.

A state which is entangled in all directions in the running of monopolistic enterprise, while it would possess crushing power over the individual, would yet be a weak state in so far as its freedom in formulating policy is concerned. The machinery of monopoly becomes identical with the machinery of the state, and the state itself becomes more and more identified with the interests of those who run things than with the interests of the people in general.

The probability is that wherever monopoly is really inevitable the plan which used to be preferred by Americans, of a strong state control over private monopolies, if consistently pursued, offers a better chance of satisfactory results than state management. This would at least seem to be so where the state enforces a stringent price control which leaves no room for extraordinary profits in which others than the monopolists can participate.

Even if this should have the effect (as it sometimes had with American public utilities) that the services of the monopolistic industries would become less satisfactory than they might be, this would be a small price to pay for an effective check on the powers of monopoly. Personally, I should much prefer to have to put up with some such inefficiency than have organized monopoly control my ways of life.

Such a method of dealing with monopoly, which would rapidly make the position of the monopolist the least eligible among entrepreneurial positions, would also do as much as anything to reduce monopoly to the spheres where it is inevitable and to stimulate the invention of substitutes which can be provided competitively. Only make the position of the monopolist once more that of the whipping boy of economic policy, and you will be surprised how quickly most of the abler entrepreneurs will rediscover their taste for the bracing air of competition!

The problem of monopoly would not be difficult as it is if it were only the capitalist monopolist whom we have to fight. But, as has already been said, monopoly has become the danger that it is, not through the efforts of a few interested capitalists, but through the support they have obtained from those whom they have let share in their gains, and from the many more whom they have persuaded that in supporting monopoly they assist in the creation of a more just and orderly society.

The fatal turning-point in the modern development was when the great movement which can serve its original ends only by fighting all privilege, the labor movement, came under the influence of anti-competition doctrines and became itself entangled in the strife for privilege.

The recent growth of monopoly is largely the result of a deliberate collaboration of organized capital and organized labor where the privileged groups of labor share in the monopoly profits at the expense of the community and particularly at the expense of the poorest, those employed in the less-well-organized industries and the unemployed.

It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.

So long as labor continues to assist in the destruction of the only order under which at least some degree of independence and freedom has been secured to every worker, there is indeed little hope for the future.

The labor leaders who now proclaim so loudly that they have "done once and for all with the mad competitive system"" are proclaiming the doom of the freedom of the individual. [footnote: Professor H. J. Laski, in his address to the Forty-first Annual Labour Party Conference, London, May 26, 1942 (Report, p. 111). It deserves to be noted that, according to Professor Laski, it is "this mad competitive system which spells poverty for all peoples, and war as outcome of that poverty"-- a curious reading of the history of the last hundred and fifty years.]

There is no other possibility than either the order governed by the impersonal discipline of the market or that directed by the will of a few individuals; and those who are out to destroy the first are wittingly or unwittingly helping to create the second.

Even though some workmen will perhaps be better fed, and all will no doubt be more uniformly dressed in that new order, it is permissible to doubt whether the majority of English workmen will in the end thank the intellectuals among their leaders who have presented them with a socialist doctrine which endangers their personal freedom.

To anyone who is familiar with the history of the major Continental countries in the last twenty-five years, the study of the recent program of the Labour party in England, now committed to the creation of a "planned society," is a most depressing experience.

To "any attempt to restore traditional Britain" there is opposed a scheme which not only in general outline but also in detail and even wording is indistinguishable from the socialist dreams which dominated German discussion twenty-five years ago.

Not only demands, like those of the resolution, adopted on Professor Laski's motion, which requires the retention in peacetime of the "measures of government control needed for mobilizing the national resources in war" but all the characteristic catch words, such as the "balanced economy," which Professor Laski now demands for Great Britain, or the "community consumption" toward which production is to be centrally directed, are bodily taken over from the German ideology.

Twenty-five years ago there was perhaps still some excuse for holding the naive belief that "a planned society can be a far more free society than the competitive laissez faire order it has come to replace." But to find it once more held after twenty-five years of experience and the re-examination of the old beliefs to which this experience has led, and at a time when we are fighting the results of those very doctrines, is tragic beyond words.

That the great party which in Parliament and public opinion has largely taken the place of the progressive parties of the past should have ranged itself with what, in the light of all past development, must be regarded as a reactionary movement, is the decisive change which has taken place in our time and the source of the mortal danger to everything a liberal must value.

That the advances of the past should be threatened by the traditionalist forces of the Right is a phenomenon of all ages which need not alarm us.

But if the place of the opposition, in public discussion as well as in Parliament, should become lastingly the monopoly of a second reactionary party, there would, indeed, be no hope left.

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