TOO BIG
Sia.-1 agree with Mr. Dwight MacDonald's view in his otherwise quite flattering review of my book The Breakdown of Nations, that the idea of a determinist world is 'repulsive. However, my philosophy is not determinist. True, I say that virtue and vice are reflexes of an external condition—the size of society. But I also emphasise (p. 47) that 'we have both the intelligence and freedom of action to determine the physical conditions producing our responses.' It is the same with a person losing con- trol of himself under the influence of a given quantity of liquor. Though deprived of his freedom of action, this does not mean that he has come into this position a's a helpless victim of alcoholic determinism. Yet, once he is drunk, his behaviour becomes completely predictable. And so it is with a society once it has reached what I have called critical size. But no determinism commands a society to reach this size.
The philosophy I have woven around this concept may still be nonsense. But far from predicting with it 'the historical future in any but the vaguest terms,' I have given in my last chapter, The American Em- pire, such a detailed picture of things to come that to my distress quite a few of them have become reality between the delivery of my manuscript and its publication. One of these predictions or, rather, deductions from the concept of critical social size produced the exact sequence of the Suez interven- tion, added after the event in a footnote on p. 38, but published by the New York Times on September 19, 1956, many weeks before it happened.
Since the whole purpose of my book was to out- line the structure of a political world in which the individual could live according to his free will rather than the impersonal forces of modern mass societies, I hope you will permit this clarification of the cen- tral point of my book to which my friendly reviewer seems to have given an interpretation which is neither in accordance with my philosophy nor with what I have written.—Yours faithfully,
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