BOOKS OF THE DAY The Good Society (Professor E. H.
Carr) Personality. Parade (John Sparrow) .. The Once " New Deal_" (D. W. Brogan) An Amiable Dictatorship (Honor Croome) Leon Blum (Francis Genn) . . • • • - • • • • • . 1152 1152 1152 1153 1153
Charles Darwin (A. J. Ayer) .. • • Marshal Ney (Edmund Blunden) Short Stories (Graham Greene) ..
Tenderness in Two Moods (Kate O'Brien)
• •
1154 1154 1155 1156
THE SEARCH FOR UTOPIA
By E. H. CARR
IN these days of specialised knowledge, it is just as well that somebody should from time to time survey the whole field of political, economic and social thought and action in the endeavour to .discover where we have come from and whither we are bound. Mr. Lippmann is the latest adventurer to make this attempt from the slightly detached viewpoint of trans- Atlantic Liberalism. He is, above all, an honest and uncom- promising thinker. His dislike of the tyrannies of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini does not make him tender to the tyranny of M. Stalin ; and his dislike of all three does not make him like American Big Business any better. He does not say much about the, New Deal. But what he does say reveals no great partiality for that either.
Mr. Lippmann's thesis is that the world at large took the wrong turning when it abandoned Liberalism for collective organisation as the economic form of human society. For the totalitarian States he seems to have no hope—except that they should collapse from within or be destroyed from without. But for the rest of us there is still time to turn from the error of our ways, and find salvation in a return to the Liberal principles of .our great-grandfathers—in particular, the principle of the division of labour in a free exchange community and the principle of the consumer's choice as the determining element in production. The renascence of Liberalism in this sense Mr. Lippmann believes, indeed, to be inevitable. Specialisation must win in the end ; and he accepts the argument of Dr. Von Mises, whom he quotes on several occasions, that the problem of demand can never be solved under a planned economy. It will not be a return to " latter- day" Liberalism, which began to go astray in Herbert Spencer's day through a fallacious and unimaginative worship of laissez- foire. What is wanted is an enlightened Liberalism which will " insure and indemnify against its own progressive develop- ment " and solve social problems " by the readjustment of private rights rather than by public administration." This is the essence of " The Good Society."
Mr. Lippmann's argument leads him down many by-ways, where he often has stimulating things to say, but where we have not space to follow him. It is difficult, however, to regard his main thesis as anything but a rather unfortunate piece of thinking backwards. Seeking Utopias in the past is a strangely out-moded pursuit. History does not double back on its tracks ; and the way out of our troubles is more likely to be found in a forward advance through the present phase of planned col- lectivism than in a return to the point where our ancestors are alleged to have gone wrong seventy or eighty years ago.
There seem, moreover, to be some rather important fallacies lurking in Mr. Lippmann's argument. His cardinal assumption is that the admitted failure of " latter-day " Liberalism to meet social needs was an incidental error due not to the doctrine itself, but to a misinterpretation of it.
Here Mr. Lippmann does more than justice to Liberalism, and less than justice to the last generation of Liberals, who stretched the economic doctrine of Liberalism to breaking-point in the endeavour to mitigate the social consequences of its rigid '-application. The big combine with its monopolistic pretensions meant the death of economic Liberalism. Perhaps Mr. Lippmann is right in thinking that the law permitting the incorporation of limited liability companies was the beginning of the trouble. But all this is mere sentimental yearning for a supposedly idyllic and innocent past. Given modern industrial and financial development, the vices of Liberalism were inherent in the doctrine, not in the men who applied it ; and Mr. Lippmann's return to Liberalism will not work unless it includes a return to President Roosevelt's " horse-and-buggy " epoch.
The Good Society. By Walter Lippmann. (Allen and Unwin. zos. 6d.) This fundamental weakness of Mr. Lippmann's position emerges clearly enough from his attempts to draw up a con- structive programme—what he calls the " agenda of Liberalism." How is the " readjustment of private rights " which he postu- lates to be effected except by a Planning Board, or a Director of National Economy, or a National Recovery Administration— all of them, on Mr. Lippmann's hypothesis, equally obnoxious incursions of bureaucracy into the field of private enterprise ? His ideal Liberal State " seeks to protect men against arbitrari- ness, not arbitrarily to direct them." But is this not a distinc- tion without a difference ? Protection in one aspect means direction in another ; and you can have neither without bureau- crats. Nor does the word " arbitrary " help. What looks like freedom to a Rockefeller will seem " arbitrary " to Mr. Lippmann ; and Mr. Lippmann's freedom will seem " arbitrary " to Herr Hitler. The strength of classical Liberalism is that it did provide an absolute criterion of non-interference by the State in economic activities. Once abandon that criterion —and everyone, including Mr. Lippmann, agrees that it must be abandoned—and you find yourself in the realm of " protec- tion," " planning " and " arbitrariness." You will not escape from it by playing upon words.
There is another difficulty which Mr. Lippmann—in common, it should be said, with most American and English writers—refuses to face. If the market must be recognised as " the sovereign regulator of the specialists in an economy which is based on the highly specialised division of labour," we may well reach the conclusion that all the textiles in the world should be manufactured in Lancashire and all the motor-cars at Detroit, while wheat should be grown nowhere but in Russia and the Argentine, and fruit canned only in Italy and Spain. Liberal economics would not have shrunk from this logical conclusion. The modern world thinks differently, and has invented " economic nationalism " in order to escape from it. But the significant point is that, just as nineteenth-century Britain denounced that " protection " which was the sole obstacle to her world-wide commercial supremacy, so nowadays Great Britain and the United States join in denouncing the protective barriers of " economic nationalism " thrown up against them by economically weaker nations. If Great Britain and America want to get rid of these barriers, the first step is to set the example themselves. But the second, and equally important, step is to disabuse the weaker nations of the pre- vailing suspicion that when we say that " economic national- ism " is bad, what we really mean is that it is bad for us.
What then remains of Liberalism ? Not a system, not a doctrine, but a tradition of " freedom," which would perhaps better be defined as " toleration," or " give-and-take." It is, I think, this tradition which makes democracy workable in the United States and in Britain, and not in Germany or Russia. So far, Mr. Lippmann is right. But this tradition was made a living one by a long course of historical development in which all countries have not shared. Mr. Lippmann's cast of thought is legal rather than historical. He advances the characteristic American view of the authority of law. Liberalism, he declares, replaces " the supremacy of men over men " by " the supremacy of law over men "—though the notion of law as a disembodied spirit existing independently of men who make and apply it should have been effectively discredited by the recent history of the Supreme Court. Democracy will survive, not because of the abstract merit of its doctrines, not because it makes law supreme over men (heaven forbid !), but because there arc in certain countries men whose traditional habit of thought leads them to adapt it, imperfectly but practically, to changing economic conditions. The most disquieting symptom of the present time is the number of people in Great Britain and America who think that the right way to save democracy is to abuse other forms of government.
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