In St. Thomas and the Gentiles I tried to define the obligations of perennial philosophy in the twentieth century. Philosophy may be perennial, but its work changes according to the cultural conditions in which the philosopher lives and thinks. In its Greek beginnings, philosophy arose out of the dialectical efforts of Plato and Aristotle to clarify and order the welter of opinion. They struggled not only with the sophists to divide the line between knowledge and opinion; but they also moved in the realm of opinion to distinguish the true from the false; and, in their patient consideration of pre-Socratic thought, they both tried, though differently, to convert right opinion into knowledge by making it evident to reason. Although the result of their work was the establishment of philosophy as a body of knowledge, founded on principles and developed by demonstrations, we must not forget that, in their day, the mode of their work was primarily dialectical. In saying this I do not overlook the demonstrative or scientific achievements of Plato and Aristotle; but those must be regarded a secondary, for the first work of pioneers is to stake out the land, to clear away the brush, to prepare the soil, and to dig for firm foundations Only thereafter can a city be planned, buildings raised, and interiors decorated The Platonic dialogues certainly reveal an intellectual pioneer at work; but no less do the so-called “scientific” works of Aristotle, for they are primarily records of exploration and discovery. Rather than orderly expositions of accomplished knowledge, they are, not only in their opening chapters but throughout, dialectical engagement with adversaries, wrestlings with the half-truths of error and opinion in order to set the whole truth forth.

Let us think of the human being, not in an abstract and general way, but in the most concrete possible, the most personal fashion. Let us think of this certain old man we have known for years in the country, —this old farmer with his wrinkled face, his keen eyes which have beheld so many harvests and so many earthly horizons, his long habits of patience and suffering, courage, poverty and noble labor, a man perhaps like those parents of a great living American statesman whose photographs appeared some months ago in a particularly moving copy of a weekly magazine. Or let us think of this certain boy or this girl who are our relatives or our friends, whose everyday life we well know, and whose loved appearance, whose soft or husky voice is enough to rejoice our hearts. Let us remember—remember in our heart—a single gesture of the hand, or the smile in the eyes of one we love. What treasures on earth, what masterpieces of art or of science, could pay for the treasures of life, feeling, freedom and memory, of which this gesture, this smile is the fugitive expression? We perceive intuitively, in an indescribable not inescapable flash, that nothing in the world is more precious than one single human being. I am well aware how many difficult questions come to mind at the same time and I shall come back to these difficulties, but for the present I wish only to keep in mind this simple and decisive intuition, by means of which the incomparable value of the human person is revealed to us. Moreover, St. Thomas Aquinas warns us that the Person is what is noblest and most perfect in the whole of nature.

THE WARS with which we are concerned in the present study are those which had their beginning with the American wars of Independence and in Europe with those of the French Revolution, after-wars followed by the Napoleonic campaigns. From that time up to the present—a period of more than a century and a half—all the wars waged by states and peoples called civilized, though differing from one another by reason of military technic, by reason of political and moral motives, by reason of extent and importance, have had certain characteristics in common, which from the sociological point of view enable us to group them together. For that reason, we call them all modern wars.

The Extraordinary prosperity of the Western peoples in Europe and America at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the eve of the first World War, was reached after a long series of efforts which began at about the time Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452. In contrast to the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a period of prosperity in most districts of continental Europe. The Middle Ages drew to a close in the midst of great movements of discovery, colonization, and economic progress.

Numerous books and articles dealing with the disaster of France have already been published in this country. Most of them are not limited to the recording of facts; their main concern is to explain this bewildering event: the sudden collapse, after so brief a struggle, of such a power as the French Republic. Although the explanations differ largely from one another, on the ground of a diversity of experiences, sources, political preferences and prejudices, most writers have commonly a tendency to emphasize the part played, in France's defeat, by the individual mistakes of military chiefs and political leaders.

No country within the Western orbit offers to foreign thinkers such an ambiguous and enigmatic aspect as does Germany. There is no end of books and articles wrestling with this problem.

German history presents sufficient justification for the existence of an enigmatic dualism within the nation. To begin with: Germany is that country in Europe through which a line of profound cultural demarcation runs. The Limes Germanicus (cf. my articles in this Review, July and October, 1939) signified the borderline of Roman conquest and Roman cultural penetration. Within this line Mediterranean civilization took undisputed hold both during the Roman Empire and throughout the middle ages, in the latter period mediated by the Church. The lands farther to the East and North became christianized hundreds of years later than the lands around the Danube and Rhine valley. Often the christianization of the East was pushed forward by force of arms. Riehl, Nietzsche, Ricarda Huch and others have remarked that, to all appearances, the christianization of the German North and East was only superficial, a thin veneer over a basically heathen reality; of late H. Rauschning expressed his concern over the quick disappearance of the Christian faith and ethics among the Northern German peasants after Nazism came to power, and the prophets of the “German Faith” today spread the suggestion that the Northern German peasant never was a Christian.

This title calls for an examination of political intervention in a certain field from the viewpoint of ethics. Social action can mean action by a social group or action for a social group or action both by and for a social group. Most frequently the term is used to designate action or activities for social groups which are in some kind of need. The need is not always physical nor does it always imply a degree of want equivalent to destitution. The needy social group may require education rather than physical sustenance and it may already be in possession of a decent minimum of living. “Political intervention” means activity by the state whether the intervention be legislative, administrative or judicial. “Ethics” means ethical principles rather than an ethical treatise. As a code of principles and rules ethics has quite as direct an application to political actions as to the actions of individuals. In other words, a given instance of political intervention in the field of social action is either right or wrong. And the test or criterion of right and wrong is found in man's rational nature, adequately considered; that is, in his constitution and essential relations. From this formulation it is possible to derive all the particular rules of right conduct and the appropriate judgments upon the moraliy of particular actions.

TO MAKE a fresh start, let us ask about the meaning of pleasure as a criterion of preference. Precisely what does the student mean when he says that he prefers A to B because A pleases and B displeases, or because A pleases him more than B?

The student may be somewhat bewildered by this question, for he has already told us that such judgments as “A pleases me more than B” are equivalent to saying “I like A more than B.” In fact, he confesses, much of the discussion we have had so far has seemed to him to consist in making verbal substitutions of this sort. We started out by admitting that the fact of preference was equivalent to the judgment of “A-better-than-B-for-me” and that in turn became equivalent to two other forms of statement: “A pleases me more than B” and “I like A more than B.” What has been gained by saying the same thing over and over again in different words? Pleasure and displeasure, it would seem, do not explain the fact of preference; far from explaining it, the fact of being pleased (or displeased) seems to be identical with the fact of preferring (or not preferring).

One thing the student says is false, but one thing is true. The falsity arises from his failure to remember that something was gained by introducing the notion of pleasure into our discussion.

“CHINA AND JAPAN must be good friends and, even though hostilities exist between them now, will become good friends in the long run. … We belong to the same race and we use the same language. Our philosophy, ethics, literature and other cultural aspects of our civilizations are the same. …” Thus wrote, for an American journal, Iwao Okai, University of Chicago student of international affairs, some weeks after the renewed outbreak of hostilities near Peking in the summer of 1937. In thus expressing himself Mr. Okai was but repeating theories, from time to time, inculcated in the youth of his native land — theories, the value of which, groups of his countrymen have attempted, on occasion, to impress upon their Chinese neighbors by means, alternately, of honeyed words and bribery, of bullets and bombs.

The development of nationalism during the past century and a half is increasingly recognized as one of the major phenomena calling for careful study by historians. To comprehend all the implications of this growth, the interrelations of the political, cultural and, in particular, linguistic forms of nationalism must be investigated. This is especially necessary in the case of separatist movements—the efforts of subject peoples to achieve political independence. The motives and aims of cultural and political nationalism are not always identical. The two may exist together or apart; they may develop coevally or one may precede the other. In parts of Switzerland and to some extent in Wales, cultural and linguistic distinctness and homogeneity endure without political separation. When separatist forces, both political and cultural, develop coincidentally, the question arises as to the relative strength of the two factors. In the case of the modern Irish state, now scarcely twenty years old, a common culture existed long before political statehood established itself. It was partly because of the reëmphasis early in this century upon Ireland's ancient civilization, a civilization which included a different language, that sympathy for her political aspirations was aroused. Ireland's consciousness of her Gaelic past, her golden age, survived six centuries of assault when she was deprived of political power. In the knowledge of distinctive speech of her own, in the remembrance of cultural preeminence during Europe's Dark Ages, and in the possession of tangible relics, the Irish people kept alive their sense of unity after repeated rebellions failed.

Hitlerism is not the creation of a single individual, the personal creation of Hitler: it is a mass phenomenon. Nor is it the necessary result of a determined economic system, since we see individuals in the most dissimilar countries, who are “converted”: rich and poor, industrialists and farmers, intellectuals and army men. The enumeration of the more or less immediate historical causes of Hitler's success, such as Eternal Germanism, the Versailles Treaty, inflation, the fear of Bolshevism, the Dictator's personality, the defects of the democracies, the complicity of big business, does not suffice to explain why they have all converged to the same result. Viewing the breadth and depth of the phenomenon, these heterogeneous “causes” seem to play the part of mere pretexts, of catalyzing agents determined, orientated and carried along by the phenomenon itself—which, therefore, still remains to be explained.

The last four or five decades have been a period of increasing tension and insecurity throughout the world, especially among the Western peoples. Pessimism, cynicism, and despair have gained the ascendancy over most of Europe; uncertainty and lack of confidence over much of the United States. It would be natural for businessmen and for social scientists, who measure civilization mainly in terms of real income or the volume of industrial production, to attribute this tension and discouragement to the slowing down in the rate of industrial progress, to the material crisis of the twentieth century.

The question has repeatedly obtruded itself in the past four years whether the recent legislation intended to prevent employer denial of collective bargaining to employees necessarily leads to a degree of government control over labor representation previously unknown in this country. In facing this question there is no implication that government control over worker organization was intended. The purpose behind the legislation was undoubtedly to prevent interference by employers with the organization of workers and refusal by employers of collective bargaining. Nevertheless, the entrance of the government into the field to prevent employer interference with worker representation has apparently led also to the curtailment of the freedom of the workers in this sphere.

DURING that period in which Louis Napoleon enjoyed the reputation of being the Sphinx of Europe (a reputation to which the Austrian ambassador ironically referred: “they called his words silly before he had achieved political power; now they say they are oracular”), the events which called forth perhaps his most sphinx-like behavior, were those connected with the Roman Question. The President Bonaparte who had taken it upon himself to be his uncle's nephew, must have considered the example given by the first Emperor of the French, who expelled the Pope, united Italy, and made Rome the second city of his Empire. But now in 1849 Louis Napoleon had come to be accepted by Europe not as a revolutionary, but as the man who put an end to revolution. And however he may have been tempted to revert to his youthful emulation of the other's revolutionary program, and in spite of the fact that, in his personal feelings, he was little predisposed in the Pope's favor, still his attitude toward Rome was of necessity influenced by the fact that it seemed impossible to maintain supreme power in France without the support of the conservative (French) Catholics. Thus, considerations of French inner policy made for an alternation of the ancient rivalry between France and Austria for the hegemony of Italy and for influence over the Roman court. Indeed there were those in France who went so far as to speak of the common interests that Paris and Vienna shared in Rome: now that Pius, welcomed only a few years ago as “papa angelicus,” as the national pope, had been forced to flee to Gaeta (the possession of the Napolitan “Re Bomba”), the conservative powers of Europe should unite to restore him.

The philosophy of the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalistic industrialism ushered in the age of the masses. The one represents a social philosophy which undermined the traditional relations between state and society, and in addition, the well-established forms of precapitalistic society; the other brought in the machine and large-scale enterprises both leading to the formation of masses in our modern society. A sort of a natural process seemed to be in operation here; suddenly, called forth by nobody and wanted by nobody, the masses appeared. They grew with breath-taking rapidity. No sooner did they make their appearance than the first danger signals were hoisted. Primarily they came from representatives of the declining order, protagonists of the ancient regime such as, to mention a few, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Alexis de Tocqueville. Adam Mueller and Gentz among the romanticists sounded the same warnings. Somewhat later they were joined by such diverse representatives of bourgeois humanism as Wilhelm Bensen, J. Burckhardt, Spengler, and Sombart. The new, masses are visualized here as the forces undermining all cultural and religious institutions and values. At last even the very beneficiaries themselves of the new order became concerned about the social consequences of the machine-age. Thomas R. Malthus and John Stuart Mill expressed this concern very strongly; however, they saw in the masses not so much a necessary concomitant of an individualisticmachine- age and of materialistic progress as the effect of an irrational behavior of the “poor” with regard to marriage and child-bearing.

MOST MEN are content to believe that politics deals with the practical problems of the administration of the state. But the term can have a greater and wider significance. It can also mean, as it meant for Aristotle, the whole character of men's life in society. In the past as well as in the present, poets and novelists of every country have often devoted themselves not merely to the good of their art but directly and especially, in varying degrees, to the problem of the good of the state and of society. In an older England, for example, William Langland, Skelton, Dryden, Samuel Butler, Shelley, and William Morris, to mention only a few, have struck into political themes and preoccupations; and today the problem, from manifold aspects, of the relation of the individual to society has not been ignored by T. S. Eliot, J. M. Murry, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and even Mrs. Virginia Woolf, among others. And the “reform” of an afflicted twentieth-century America has engaged talents and humors as dissimilar as those of, say, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, and Maxwell Anderson. The seriousness of such people no one would question, although the agitations of a few, particularly in periods of crisis, for a specific good polity or a specific good economy sometimes interferes gravely with what should be their chief end: good art.

In the preceding sections of this essay, I have outlined a dialectical procedure whereby a doubting mind might be led to the recognition of moral truth. What has been given is the bare plot of a conversation between teacher and student. The student was, at the beginning, a skeptic about moral matters, denying the objectivity of moral knowledge, supposing that all moral judgments were a matter of opinion, entirely relative to the individual or to his cultural location at a given time and place. The teacher, by asking him to explain the undeniable fact that men exercise preference, gradually made him realize that his own criteria for preference — pleasure and quantity of pleasure — had a certain universal validity; and then, as a result of seeing the inadequacy of these criteria, the student began to understand that happiness, rather than pleasure, was the ultimate principle of moral judgments. The crucial steps in the argument were: (1) the distinction between pleasure as one among many objects of desire and pleasure as the satisfaction of any desire; (2) the enumeration of the variety of goods which are objects of human desire; (3) the point that only the totality of goods could completely satisfy desire; (4) the realization that this totality of goods, leaving nothing to be desired, is the end of all our seeking, and that everything else is sought for the sake of its attainment; (5) the conception of happiness as “all good things,” a whole constituted by every type of good, the complete good being the end, the incomplete good its parts or constitutive means; (6) the conclusion that the end, as the first principle in the practical order, is the ultimate criterion of preference, for preferor choice is exercised only with respect to means, and hence we should, in every case, prefer whatever is more conducive to the attainment of happiness.

Bureaucracy may mean many things. So may dictatorship. Until Sulla, the technique of dictatorial interludes provided the Roman republic with a convenient form of political catharsis to relieve the constitutional framework from the strain of military exigencies. Greek depotism was not the style of Caesar; Richelieu's gouvernement personnel was not an imperialist version of Cromwell's Commonwealth. Less compelling still are the parallels between Latin America's “strong man” regimes, Japan's “new structure” à la Konoye, and the one-party systems of National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia. It is the totalitarian formula alone to which we intend to address ourselves —dictatorship built upon the masses.