THE NEW LEVIATHAN.
THERE has always been a lingering flavour of Mr. Bernard Shaw about Signor Mussolini. And now we have him writing a long article on a theme which Mr. Shaw. expressed in a phrase when he remarked that everybody was heartily tired of democracy. Mus- solini calls this thing of which people are tired Liberalism. Mr. J. A. Spender, who answered him in last Saturday's Westminster Gazette, calls it Liberty. But they all mean the same thing—they all mean a particular attitude of mind the development of which we, at any rate, think of as particularly associated with English history.
Signor Mussolini calls his article " Force and Con- sent," and these are some of the things he says. We quote from a translation kindly sent to us by a dis- tinguished Englishman in Italy :- " Liberalism is not the last word—the final formula of the case of government. In this most difficult and delicate art, which works upon the most refractory of material, in a perpetual con- dition of movement, because it deals with the living and not the dead—in the political art there is never the Aristotelian unity of the time, the place, and the action. Men have been more or less successfully governed in a thousand different ways. Liberalism was the criterion and the method of the 19th century—not a stupid century, as Daudet proclaimed it. Centuries are not stupid or intelligent, but stupidity and intelligence alternate in a greater or less degree in any century. Liberalism, which as a method of government was good for the 19th century, for a century, that is, dominated by two essential features like the development of capitalism and the affirmation of the sentiment of nationality, is not necessarily suited to the 20th century, which already fore- shadows characteristics very diverse from those which gave individuality to the preceding century. Facts are more important than books, experience than doctrine. The big experiments of the post-War period—actually perceptible to our eyes, indicate the defeat of Liberalism. In Russia and in Italy it has been demonstrated that government can be carried out independently of or in opposition to ideal Liberal conceptions. Communism and Fascism are both outside Liberalism.
In what, after all, does the Liberalism consist for which to-day all the enemies of Fascism display such fervour ? Is Liberalism universal suffrage and all that that is associated with ? Does it mean keeping a Chamber in permanent session in order to present the indecent spectacle which has disgusted everybody ? Does it mean giving a few the liberty to destroy the liberty of all Does it mean a free hand for those who proclaim their hostility to the State and work actively to demolish it ? "
Signor Mussolini then points out that liberty is not an end but a means. As a means it needs to be con- trolled. " Has there ever," he asks, - "been in history a government based exclusively on popular consent which- renounced the use of force- of any kind ? Such a
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government never has existed and never will. Consent is in itself mutable. It can never be absolute. It cannot always endure. No government ever existed which made all its subjects happy. What- ever solution you may give to any problem you will—even if you participate in divine wisdom—inevitably create a category of malcontents. If it be axiomatic that every provision of govern- ment must create some malcontents, how will you prevent dis- content from overflowing and constituting a danger to the State ? You will only, prevent this by force ; by concentrating a maximum of force ; by using this force inexorably, when it becomes necessary. Take away force from any government and leave it nothing but its immortal principles, and your government will be at the mercy of the first organized group which determines to overthrow it. Now Fascism throws all these invertebrate theories into the pit. When a group or a party is in power it is obliged to make itself strong and defend itself against all and sundry. It is a truth patent to all whose eyes are not blinded by dogmatism that men are getting tired of liberty. They have had an orgy of it. Liberty to-day is not the chaste and austere virgin for which the genera- tions of the first half of the last century fought and died. For the youth who are standing in the twilight dawn of new history, enter- prising, restless and keen, there are other words which exercise a much greater fascination, and these are hierarchy, order, dis- cipline."
The kernel of Mr. Spender's answer to this is con- tained in these words :- "Conservatives who are tempted to exult over the defeat of Liberalism in the 20th century' had better, therefore, reflect that the new principle which is to be substituted for it cuts both ways. It justifies the shooting of Bishops and bourgeois as easily as the forcible suppression of Radicals and Socialists, and the real dictator—as history shows—will do either or both as the circumstances require. When once you cut loose from liberty you must fly to force, and then very quickly all criteria of right and wrong, all standards of public interest and public policy, and everything else that may conflict with the cardinal aim of keeping yourself in power become a dissolving dream. Liberty is really at the bottom of it all. It is the claim of the community to a permanent consideration surpassingthe interests of a particular ruler or Government, and t acknowledgment by the ruler or Government that it is the servant and not the master of the com- munity. Get away from this, and politics becomes a blind struggle of adventurers. The adventurers will use very fine phrases about it, and some of them may conSince themselves that they are real saviours of society, but all of them have the community by the throat." - Probably in practice this is quite true, but as a matter of fact it does not answer Signor Miissolini's point. Mr. Spender's words rest on the assumption that to secure liberty for the individual without infringing the liberty of other individuals is . the sole possible ideal for political action, and that any action taken without this ideal in view can spring only from the self-interest of an adventurer. But of course it was not Signor Mussolini who denied this doctrine, but a greater mind than his, and an English mind at that. Hobbes once and for all defined the objects of government when, in the first part of The Leviathan, he made a psycho- logical study of the basic impulses that underlie human nature, and in the second part showed that the object of government was sufficiently to curtail the translation into action of the impulses of the individual to obtain for him that amount of security which will enable him to live a civilized life. This is really what Signor Mussolini means. In other words, in the general rack and ruin of society that has come as the result of the War, men are not so much tired as frightened of liberty. They feel that governments based on nineteenth century principles do not sufficiently curb the brute desires of the individual which have been liberated by war. They are willing to sacrifice more of their liberty of action in order to buy greater security and other things thought desirable. This is why Signor Mussolini was not afraid to link his name with that of Lenin. They are both experimenters. .
Let us agree at once with Mr. Spender that this is a retrograde step, or rather it is a sign of the relapse into more primitive conditions that human society has undergone since the War. To deplore it is natural ; but it is idle not to recognize that mankind—though not in this country, we are thankful to say—in accepting its Lenins or its Mussolinis, is taking what seems a natural remedy for a disaster that has
already occurred.
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