7. Modern Totalitarianism: Russian Communism

Some political analysts place fascism at the extreme right of the political spectrum, Communism at or near the extreme left. This classification has been much favored by Marxist writers who believe that fascism is the last desperate effort of embattled capitalism to stave off the proletarian victory. Doubtless, Communist writers are aware of the value in some circles of the leftist label with its overtones of progress, freedom, and the general welfare. We have already noted the origin of the terms Left and Right in the French Revolution when they were used to distinguish between the advocates of change and the more conservative. Survival of these labels into a later age with vastly different problems and proposals has not helped clarify political thinking. It may already have occurred to the thoughtful reader that to classify Nazism as a near relative of conservatism creates as many difficulties as it solves. Similar difficulties attend the classification of Russian Communism as a party of the Left. [excerpt

6. Ian T. Ramsey

In view of the requirement of verifiability that is demanded by certain philosophical schools, there seems little justification for what are conventionally recognized as theological statements. Certainly no one man has yet succeeded, except perhaps to his own satisfaction, in expressing religious notions in such language and in verifying by such a method that universal consent is gained for the validity of his system. If the charm of empirical verification is not invoked, then for some minds there is little reason to say anything. Obviously, given such rigid requirements for securing a sympathetic audience, theological discussion may find itself standing tongue-tied in the wings while logic and empiricism dominate the stage. But faced with the possibility of the eventual demise of theology, an effort is made to translate religious experience into intellectual terms which are acceptable to these critics. [excerpt

2. An Agricultural Revolution

While capitalism was making rapid strides toward dominating English industry, changes were taking place in agriculture which made it more efficient and productive, and which prepared it to be fitted eventually into the industrial capitalistic pattern. Actually, changes in the direction had been occurring in English agriculture since the revival of trade discussed in earlier chapters. [excerpt

5. The Search for Meaning

It is possible to draw certain parallels between the West\u27s present predicament and similar periods of radical change and the dislocation of values, and so to suggest that this sort of thing has happened before, that man has always come our of such situations and landed on his feet, that history is basically cyclical, and that there is no need to be unduly alarmed about our contemporary situation. While it is possible to make a very convincing case for this argument, there are three major factors which are new today. Thanks to our past territorial expansion and new techniques of communication, there is no area of the Western World whose ideas and institutions have been unchanged, Today\u27s changes are immediately carried to all parts of the world. Thus there are no longer any isolated areas to which people can go to escape change and its consequences. Also, thanks to the same means no classes in society are immune from these changes. Whereas in earlier centuries such changes affected only minority groups and limited areas, now they affect all groups and all areas. And further, as we have already noted, this combination of factors, plus the size of our institutions and their competition with one another, have served to increase the rate of change. These three new factors have helped to make our contemporary crisis both more widespread and penetrating than the others which Western Civilization has experienced. [excerpt

1. The Advent of Modern Democracy

Everywhere there was a strong tendency to modify the concepts of political liberalism into a justification of democracy. By and large, this was not the result of the creation of a completely new political theory. The advocates of democracy tended to justify their doctrine with natural-rights theories from the Enlightenment, with a utilitarianism reminiscent of John Stuart Mill, with deductions drawn from the romantic glorification of the individual, or with appeals to the record of the United States. In general, they took over the concepts of the middle-class liberalism of the nineteenth century. However, the very logic of the liberal position in an increasingly industrialized world forced democrats to advocate the removal of many of those limitations on popular participation in government which liberals earlier had thought necessary. With victory apparently in sight in the years 1871-1914, democracy can be studied through its acts, in the difficult task of putting into practice under widely divergent conditions those general concepts which had been forged in an earlier age. In the process strongly egalitarian institutions were developed which became identified with democracy in the minds of most Westerners. It is in the observations of this process that we can test the definition of democracy as government responsible to the will of the people. [excerpt

2. The European Balance of Power, 1500-1789

The years between 1500 and 1789 were characterized by keen rivalries, at first primarily dynastic but later national in nature, as one state after another sought to establish its hegemony on the continent of Europe. Some powers, such as Spain and Sweden, declined. Others, such as Prussia and Russia, appeared for the first time as states to be reckoned with. Especially after about 1600 European diplomats, jealous of the relative position and security of their own countries, thought in terms of maintaining a balance of power, to prevent any one state or bloc of stats from dominating the Continent. This idea, like the practice of diplomacy, has been traced to the Italian city-states, whose leaders in the fifteenth century strove to prevent any one of their number from achieving a position from which it could control Italy. [excerpt

XVII. The Transformation of Liberalism and Nationalism, 1871-1914

In the first half of the nineteenth century liberalism and nationalism were key concepts of the major political and economic movements within Western Civilization, As has been explained in the preceding chapter, by the end of the century new radical movements — socialism, syndicalism, and anarchism — had supplanted them on the extreme left of the political spectrum. By 1914 this new Left was a significant factor in many countries. However, it was still a minority movement and, for most people living in the Western World between 1871 and 1914, nationalism and liberalism were more important in determining the texture of politics. Even many conservatives now compromised with them. That these were not the same liberalism and nationalism which had been the watchwords of reform half a century before should not be surprising because the world in which they operated and often conquered had also changed. [excerpt

6. Schiller and Romanticism

To define romanticism is to attempt something which the romantics themselves insist cannot be done. But we can try to identify and then describe it, first pointing out what it is not. One stable element in romanticism has been its consistent rejection of its opposite, classicism. While no great piece of art has ever existed which did not contain elements of both romanticism and classicism, the partisans of these two different points of view have insisted that different emphases made it great. Where classicism emphasised analysis, objectivity harmony, wholeness, meaning, and discipline, romanticism stressed synthesis,subjectivity,disharmony, individuality,suggestiveness. and spontaneity. [excerpt

3. Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) seldom left his native city, Copenhagen, and, except for two brief visits to Berlin, never left Denmark. The externals of his life were rather ordinary for the son of a wealthy hosier. He always employed at least one servant and dressed in the best of fashion, but his death found him with the last of his income in his pocket. He was a lonely man seeking only one or two intimate friends, passing the daily pleasantries with everyone, but warding off with his masterful use of irony most of those who tried to befriend him. When he asked for and received the ridicule of a local scandal journal, his slightly twisted frame — he had an injury of the spine — became his trade mark because of the journal\u27s cartoons. [excerpt

1. International Anarchy (1900-1918)

It is probable that most people, if asked to list the characteristics of the Western World in this century, would place at or near the top of their list something about international rivalries. Curiously enough, a similar poll conducted in Europe and North America in 1900 would likely have given equal prominence to the idea that the world had entered a period of increasing international amity. [excerpt