THE NEW LAISSER FAIRE
Sta,—Mr. Seebohm Rowntree's article on ." The Manager's Function " raises questions of a deeper kind, to which neither he nor Mr. James Burnham appear to give any consideration. The doctrinaires of the new school of Economic Fatalism are in the full flood of their baneful activity ; and it is high time for the philosophers and theologians to bestir themselves. If the unproved assumptions and irrational theories of this school are not examined and exposed, they may gain credence for want of criticism ; and we shall have returned to the exploded doctrines of Hume and Adam Smith.
" Inevitability " is the dominant note of this new gospel ; " gradualness " has, however, given place to speed as the new social structure appears on the horizon and gathers momentum. " All the evidence at our disposal indicates that the development will continue, will in fact, proceed at a rate much speedier in the future than that of the past, and that the transition will be completed." The function of homo sapiens in the face of these " inevitable " developments is apparently reduced to that of an impotent and resentful spectator ; in fact, we are advised to take our medicine quietly, and to cultivate an attitude of docile empiricism towards events and movements which we did not initiate and which we are powerless to alter or control.
If the intelligent spectator. asks, Are not events which take place within the Human Order caused by the operation of human wills, planned by human minds, and shaped in accordance with human desires ? Who, then, is the architect of this " New social structure " ? Who are the persons responsible for the initiation, control and acceleration of this economic process ? Mr. James Burnham appears to solve these problems by producing a god—an Abstraction defined as " the inevitable pressure of economic facts." What these facts are, and how " facts " are able to generate and exert pressure is left to the imagination.
So it would seem that the fallacies of philosophic Naturalism, having been driven from the Cosmos by the labours of Kant, Ward, Sorley and Pringle-Pattison, have found a new home within human society. In an industrial and mechanical age, the Common Man is invited to join Hume's bucolic prototype as a spectator ab extra—not only of " the works of Nature," but of the inscrutable operations of some deus ex machina, who is at work within the Human Order in the task of shaping the Brave New World. Is it possible to attach a symbolic significance to the bombing of Konigsberg—the home of the Categorical Imperative ?
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