The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of HistoryPartridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Philosophy
The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of History
Partridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Education; History -- Philosophy; War
Radical socialism that threatens to throw political power into the
hands of a political class, or of any social or economic class,
bolshevism which Dillon (speaking of Russia especially) says is doomed
to failure because of its sheer economic impossibility, any plan which
tends to concentrate authority in any class is threatening to our
future. The democratic spirit must hold fast against the rising tide
from the lower classes, just as it has been obliged to contend against
autocracy. Democracy has on one side to assimilate aristocracy, and
not overturn it. So it resists the rise of the proletariat, not to
turn this force back, even if this were possible, but to control it.
It is precisely because of the deep movement of the people--the world
revelation and the world revolution, as Weyl calls it--that we must
make all political institutions flexible and adjustible, and also
throw into the balance all the powers of education and thus save
democracy from itself.
These dangers to democracy are not to be taken too lightly. Democracy
indeed faces two dangers. Hobson in "Democracy After the War" has
stated one of them. He says that the war will result in no easy
victory for democracy, for the system of caste and bureaucracy is very
likely to become fixed. Democracy therefore must be worked for, and to
that end there must be a union of all types of reformers. We must play
off the special interests against one another, says Hobson, work for
industrial democracy, educate the people. On the other hand there is
that danger from the rising of the masses which Weyl heralds. This war
underneath and after the war is as Weyl sees it, the war of the poor
and exploited against all the exploiters. These elements are at heart
antagonistic to government. Democracy, if all this be true, is neither
well defined as an idea nor well established in the world. An unjust
and privileged class above and an unwise and uneducated class beneath
threaten it. But the case seems by no means hopeless. Indeed the
remedies and the way of escape seem in a general way plain. Political
changes on one side and political education on the other must become,
we should suppose, the order of the day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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