THE NATURE OF HUMAN SOCIETY SERIES

Editors: Julian Pitt-Rivers and Ernest Gellner

THOUGHT AND
CHANGE

Ernest Gellner
-

Professor, Department of Sociology

London School of Economics
and Political Science

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

 The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 37
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London W.I, England

© t 964 by Er;1est Gellner

All rights reserved

First published in the United States of America I 96 S

Printed in Great Britain

 To
Bertrand Russell
 Acknowledgements

I am very much indebted to Mrs H. Frankiss, Mrs M. McLeod,

and Miss K. Phillips for generous secretarial assistance ; to many
colleagues at the L.S.E. for stimulation, but particularly to Tom
Bottomore and, later, Ron Dore, with whom I conducted a
seminar on related subjects, and to the students who attended it ;
to John Hajnal, Paul Stirling, and Nicolas Thompson, who have
read the book in typescript and made many valuable suggestions,
most of which have been incorporated. None of the people men­
tioned can of course be held responsible for what I say.
 CONTENTS

I TIME AND VALIDITY I

The Arrow of Time, I - Progress, 3- The Episode of Pro­
gress, 4 - The World-growth Story, 9- The Charm of the
World-growth Story, I .2 - Its Defects, IS - The Moral
Objection, 2.I - Less Immoral but more Inconsistent, .26-
Nos Ancetres, les Gaulois, 27-Piety Towards a Moribund
Doctrine, 2.9

2 THE NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT 33

The Philosophy of Politics, 33- The Sociological Heir, 34-
The Episode of Progress, 40

3 METAMORPHOSIS so
The Concept of Transition, 50 - Preparing for Previous
Wars, 64-A Specific Transition, 68-Flight into Vacuum,
73

4 THE USES OF THOUGHT 82

Ethical Theories, 82- The Platonic Model, 84- The Advice
of Polonius, or the Hidden Prince, 86 - The Dream of the
Bureaucrat, 90 - The Way of Residue, 92 - The Supreme
Target, 94- The Rail, Ioo- Conclusion, IOI

5 THE USES OF DOUBT I0 3

World without Bifurcation, I03- The Pure Visitor, I05 -
Sour Grapes, no- The Virtue of.Contingency, II3- A
Separation of Powers, I 20

6 THE STUFF OF CHANGE I26

Evolutionist, or Transitional?, I 26- A Matter of Stages,
I3I-The 'Weberian' Theory of Marxism, I36-An Exercise
in Induction, I39- The Hope and the Fear, I44
 TH OUGHT AND CH ANGE

7 NATIONALISM 1 47
Cold Reason against the Dark Gods, I 47-The Contingency
of Nationah'sm, I50- Structure and Culture, I53- End as
a Man, I57-A Model, I64-Qualijications, I7I-A System
of Locks, I75
8 KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIETY 179
The Limits of Meaning, I79- The Timeless Ones, I 8I- As
it is Written, I94 - The Word, I98 - The Sorcerer's
Apprentice, 204 - Culture, Truth and Logic, 20 8 - The
Ego and the Id, 2 I I

9 CONCLUSION 218
INDEX 223
The light dove, cleaving the air in its free flight, and feeling its
resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in
empty space.
IMMANUEL KANT, Critique of Pure Reason

The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so

great, that . . . a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is war­
ranted in the use of any expedients.
JOHN STUART MILL, On Liberty

Dnesn£ generace ma vie dumyslu,

Nestrafi ve vezi, strasi V prumyslu.
VOSKOVEC WERICH, Rub a Lie, 1 93 6
(Our generation has more ingenuity,
It haunts ,not castle towers, it haunts industry.)
Czech satirical song
 C H A P TER ONE

TIME AND VALIDITY

The Arrow of Time

Men generally have a view of the nature of their society. They
also have views concerning what validates the society's arrange­
ments. The two things, image and validation, never are and can­
not be wholly distinct.
Societies exist in time. Notoriously, the ways in which various
societies conceive them selves to be situated in time, differ a good
deal. The way in which time and its horizons are conceived is
generally connected with the way the society understands and
justifies itself. A society can possess a world-creation story, in
which the creation of the world and the foundation of the society
itself are tied up : the cosmic and the social foundation-stones
may be identical or both may be invoked to validate the moral
order. A society may live in the anticipation of the ending of time
and conceive of its value as a preparation for that termination.
Often, it may live against an unchanging temporal horizon, like a
train crossing a featureless landscape. Despite motion, every­
thing remains the same : only the stable internal relations of com­
partments to each other are of interest.
For instance : the famous first ascent of the Matterhorn, on
July 1 4, 186 5 , ended in a disaster in which four men perished and
three survived. Of the three survivors, one was an Englishman,
Whymper, and the other two were local peasants, Taugwalder
father and Taugwalder son. The survivors were of course often
interrogated about the event, especially as there was a question of
the allocation of blame. When Taugwalder-the-son himself
became old, and his father was no longer alive, he sometimes
became rather confused : he appeared to think that he himself was
Taugwalder-the-father at the time of the first ascent in �865.

l
 T H O U G H T AND C HANGE

This confusion has been attributed to senile feeble-mindedness on

his part. But quite a different explanation would promptly occur
to a social anthropologist.
After all, in the line of Taugwalders there had always been
fathers (with beards, etc.) and sons (without beards, etc.). At the
time of the adventure, there was an old one, with beard, and a
young one, without beard. Much later, an old one - with beard­
was interrogated about the episode : naturally, he identified with
the old bearded one, the one who was such at the time of the
episode. It would have been absurd for him to identify with a
young beardless one, for by now there was another and (for us)
' different ' young one, and he himself (now) was the ' old one ' .
There had always been an old and a young one, and the old one
now was identical with the· old one of any other time, for all
times are alike. Whether Zermatt life really was timeless in this
way in the nineteenth century, I cannot say ; but it is not im­
plausible. In some tribes, for instance, the ' depth ' of genealo­
gies (i.e. the number of supposed ancestors) remains the same,
however many generations pass : identities and relationships of
the dead and of the living in a sense ' change ' (by our criteria) ;
some ancestors are forgotten, and the present generation has the
' same ' relationship to the permanently remembered founders,
etc., as had the preceding generation ; so that the pattern of
an eternal present and of its temporal horizon remain ever
the same.
But in our social perception, the passage of time is enormously
significant, and not through the shared recollection of a world­
creation or social foundation, nor through the anticipation of a
single eschatological event. The temporal horizon is not feature­
less : things change in such a manner that successive generations
are not interchangeable, but on the contrary each wears a per­
manently attached identificatory label, ensuring that it contributes
to continuous accumulation of more and more past, more and
more generations, more and more history ; and time, as in physics,
appears to have a direction definable in terms of the features of
events in time. Each genealogical layer has a permanent identity ;
and the later and the earlier systematically differ in some way
which amounts to more than just being later and earlier, and
which is morally and socially significant .
. . But, in recent years, the general character of. the temporal
 T I ME AND VALIDITY

horizon has again changed somewhat. This change is the central

theme of the present argument.

Progress
It has been said that what characterises 'modern ' thought, in
some broad sense in which some tacit underlying consensus can
be attributed to the past three centuries or so, is the idea of pro­
gress. Progress is a kind of secularised salvation, taking place in
this natural world, and which can be consummated without the
world thereby losing its ' natural ' status.
For instance : ' The idea of progress was the great discovery of
the eighteenth century. We may have changed its content, but we
can never renounce it. It gave, and can still give, meaning to a
political programme and to historical understanding.' 1
The consequence of a belief in progress, in this kind of intra­
mundane destiny on salvation, is that time ceases to be morally
-
neutral. Time could have been said to be ' morally neutral ' l.n-fhe
historic perception of a society, for whom excellence was just as
likely to be found in the past as in the future. A society can be
said to believe in progress when this symmetry does not obtain,
when there is, at the very least, some predisposition to tie up
past with bad (in one word : backward), and future with good
(progressive). An extreme version of this outlook would be one
which made the future or the direction of change wholly and
necessarily good, and at the saine time made the past or the
·

' receding ' characteristics altogether and necessarily bad. But

milder versions of this view, free both of determinism and of a
totally unqualified commendation of the direction of change,
could still be characterised as ' beliefs in progress ' .
I n some milder sense at any rate, it seems obvious that Euro­
pean thought since the eighteenth century has come to assume
the idea of progress ; and, indeed, that the idea has come to per­
meate ordinary thought and be built into lts assumptions and
language. This seems true notwithstanding some qualifications,
generally concerning self-conscious literary rather than popular
thought (e.g. romanticism of the mediaeval past, or pf a supposed
1 Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, in 'Voltaire a les Delices', New Statesman

and Nation, December 2Ii 1962.

3
 T HOUGHT AND CHANGE

noble savage; or cyclical theories of history), and survives even the

allegedly more diffused disenchantment and pessimism of our own
period. Life has come to be lived on an upward slope. The nature
of things has a bias towards improvement. Improvement is both
anticipated and required. This is sometimes an explicit doctrine,
but generally a tacit assumption, the recognition of a manifest truth,
Modern conservatism, for instance, is more characteristically the
) doctrine that change and improvement should be gradual and not
.
\..
·(· excessively fast, rather than the view that we live in a downward�
"-sloping world, and ought not jerk ourselves lest we sli:e.lower,
If this general contention is accepted, it provides us with a certain
crude dichotomy: modern progress theories on the one hand, for
which the world slopes upwards (sometimes precariously, and
sometimes unevenly, up a jagged incline but still, ultimately
�

up), and, on the other the rest. Opposed to the 'modern and
-

progress-oriented' outlook are both, on the one hand, those

characteristic outlooks of traditional societies for whom time is a
plateau, morally neutral and flat (exce.pt for possible cataclysms
at the beginning and end), and also, on the other, those un�
modern doctrines for which the cosmic story may have indeed
have an happy end, but one whose principle is extra-mundane.
(Worlds c_s>nceiving themselves as declining are of course also ex�
eluded. )(The mod�rn world is both upward-sloping, and, on the
whole, seif-sufficientJits salvation is_ef1�og_�1l()_us. That is progress,
This dichotomy between progress believers and the others is
indeed C_!��-e. In its residual category it lumps together, for
instance, both tribal pre-literate religions oriented towards local
� shrine, spirit and ancestor, and literate world religions. This
crudity would be disastrous if one's concern were a general
typology of beliefs. But it does not matter for the present pur­
poses. These do however require further refinements and dis�
tinctions within the class of 'progress beliefs '.
Progress theories can be sub�divided into three species: the
Episodic; the Evolutionist; and the neo-Episodic. These are the
distinctions we need, and this also is roughly the order in which
these speci�s of the theory appeared_ on the scene,
The Episode of Progress
The earliest are the episodic conceptions of progress which con�
ceive of progress as basically one episode, one transition from one

4
 T I ME AND VALID ITY

bad state of affairs to one good state - however large�scale or

diffuse that one episode may be. Episodic theorists did not
explicitly see themselves as being 'episodic' (and did not 1¥e the
term). They tended to take the episodic nature of progress for
granted. Indeed this 'episodic' nature only becomes manifest
when it is contrasted with its successor - Evolutionist theories,
which conceive progress as a kind of perpetual process.
. Episodic theories in general are those which conceive of some
specific occurrences as the basis_ of _society. The best known
instance of such a theory is of course the doctrine of the Social
Contract. Sophisticated versions of this theory need not take the
'episodic' aspect too literally: the episodic compact between men,
which validates their rights and duties may be conceived as tacit,
or metaphysical, as re�enacted unwittingly by each newborn
citizen as he comes to enjoy the benefits of civil society, or
enacted on his behalf by an inner, unobservable, morally better
informed doppel.ganger, etc.
An episodic conception of progress is indeed a corollary of a
view that there are two states. or conditions, one bad, one good.
The good condition may be characterised by the presence of
Reason, or Liberty, or Nature, or Law and Order, Civilisation,
etc. The bad state is characterised by their absence (or the ab�
sence of the specific characteristics valued by the theorist in
question).
Given a two�type or two-stage view of the world, GoodfBad,
BeforejAfter, an episodic view of progress and history naturally
follows. The episode may be literally an episode, or something
stretching over centuries - but it is the one story of how evil was
supplanted by or driven out by good (or how this will come to
be). This one crucial episode at the same time of course becomes
the validating myth of the social order. For conseryJ!#ves within
this species of theory, the crucial episode has generally already
occurred and is somehow latently present in the current social
order, and must be protected. For the revolutionaries, the episode
I
is yet to come, or needs to be re-enacted.
The Social Contract is a most characteristic example of an
episodic social myth. If the differentiating features of the Good
state are social order or civilisation or liberty, the contract
establishing andfor guaranteeing these is a plausible charter and
crite1'_iog_cl_��!al �.!!QJ:1()li_!ical legitimacy. It doesn't really matter
--·- -·· ··-�···�·-�·--·--,_

5
 T H OUGHT AND CHANGE

whether the contract is conceived as a genuine historic event or

not. Even, or especially if conceived as merely a symbol, .an
allegory, as something latently re-enacted, what remains sig­
nificant is that soci�ty is S�en..JJ&_:§QtrJ.ething that can be set UJ2 by
-
__

;�,_Tl gvent.
------- . �-------�--�--�-----�-------

The Enlightenment view of history as a transition from a bad

state characterised by tyranny and superstition, to a condition
free of these, one in which nature and reason find full expression,
is another example of the two-stage vision, and of the attendant
episodic conception of progress.
Of course, some pre-modern, traditional social validating
myths, unconcerned with progress, were also episodic. In this
respect, 'episodic progress ' is not differentiated from them. They
too had their crucial episodes, concerning the arrival and adven­
tures of the Founding Ancestor, the Expulsion of a Tyrant, or
the arrival of the Lawgiver, a cosmogony, or the divine inter­
vention, the final territorial settlement, etc. The episodic con­
ception of progress differs from such other episodic myths in its
secular and sober nature. The event, if not actually conceived as
still in progress, is one in which participants are men such as
those alive at present.
Moreover, the event is, for episodic progress theories, rather
abstract, un-local, universal: it justifies society as such, anywhere,
and not this or that tribe, and does not invoke specific assump­
tions, peculiar local events, etc.
There is another respect in which Episodic Progress doctrines
may seem to belong more with the pre-modern rather than the
modern class. In the case of some versions, they do not see
the whole of human history as on an upward slope, but only the
extended present- the emergence from the Middle Ages, and this
in turn as the correction of a downward slope which occurred
when classical antiquity gave way to the dark ages. This is an
outlook which sees light and reason already or even paradig­
matically embodied in at least some parts of the classical past,
and which conceives the 'progress' experienced during, say,
the eighteenth century, as a recovery of civilisation.
There are various reasons why a two-'conditions theory should
have arisen. For one obvious thing, it is a secularised and indeed
upside-down version of the preceding religious view. It is not the
intrusion of the supernatural into nature which brings (illusory)
6
 T I ME AND VAL ID ITY

salvation, but the exclusion of the superstitious belief from the

natural world in it which brings real salvation. For another, it fits in
naturally with the view of those who contrast the light of antiquity
and the eighteenth century with medieval darkness. This is the
aspect of Enlightenment thought which is a continuation of the
rediscovery of Antiquity. But in general, a two�states view follows
simply from a preoccupation with some single good, such as orderly
government, or liberty. (The thing either is or is not present.)
It is difficult nowadays - and it has been difficult for some
time - to take such episodic social theories seriously. This holds
equally for the ancient and myth�ridden ones as for the 'modern'
kind which affirm a secular progress or transformation. The
ancient ones are of course often fanciful and would strain modern
credulity; but even when they are not - and sometimes they may
be historic - it is difficult to take them seriously as grounds for
current arrangements. Does anyone in England today suppose
that he pays his taxes in virtue of the events of ro66?
But even the 'modern' ones - mainly but not exclusively
developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - do not
really make much sense. They are unacceptable because they
lack a certain sense of social complexity and growth and context,
a sense which has, rightly, become part of our mental make-up
since the eighteenth century. Take for instance the Social Con­
tract: we all of us feel that the institutions we have, the beliefs
we hold, the selves that we are, are all of them products of a long
and complex process of growth. It is somehow absurd that such
complex beings, or the complex societies of which we are part,
could be either founded or explained or validated by some neces­
sarily much simpler anterior being (or by the actions, real or
metaphysical, of such beings) standing at the very beginning of
social time or outside time altogether. The episodic theories are
not merely myths, they are bad myths. Their explanations are
too weak. They do not illuminate even when treated as parables,
for we are interested in that very process of growth which they,
being episodic, cannot help to explain.
The values of social participation, responsible government,
delegated rather than absolute authority, equality and so forth,
which were once validated with the help of episodic myths, are
by no means dead: but the myths themselves live only in the
shades, the academic limbo of the teaching of political theory.

7
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

The central weakness of the old episodic theories of progress,

their lack of sociological sophistication, of a sense of social
complexity and historic depth, hits the various forms of the
theory in somewhat different ways. Take the Social Contract
again: there is about it a kind of sociological thinness which puts
it out of the running, even as a parable or model. It supposes pre­
social men to be endowed with the characteristics we only
observe in socially formed men, at least to a sufficient degree to
enable them to set up a society - an enterprise whose complexity
seems to be under-estimated. Of course, there are also powerful
philosophical objections to the theory: in circumstances in which
the contract would be effective, it would also be redundant, and
in those in which it would be most needed, it would not be
effective. There is, in brief, a vicious regress inherent in the idea
that decent social relationships spring from a social act, a moral
prime mover. But it is mainly the sociological absurdity which
excludes the theory. Societies are not based on episodes - and
certainly not of such a simple kind.
Or consider the other important kind of episodic progress
theory - the Enlightenment view of liberation from tyranny and
superstition, with liberated men thereafter to be guided by nature
and reason, whoever these ladies be. The manifest weakness of
the rather Manichrean visions of this kind is their failure to
explain the very real evil they denounce. If man is basically
rational andfor good, why is it that the forces of darkness have
had quite such a hold over his mind and society - a hold of which
the prophets of Enlightenment are only too bitterly aware?
Their inverted theodicies, their justifications of the ways of the
illusion of God to man, are no easier for the fact that they do not
believe in God. All the difficulties faced by the old believers when
squaring a benevolent Deity with an evil world, are faced by
these new believers when squaring a benevolent nature with
maleficent superstition within it. It is all the harder to explain
why those fictions should have been allowed to be so very effec­
tively maleficent, as, on their own view, they have been. Again,
there is often a lack of sense of social interdependence, of the way
in which apparently harmful andjor absurd features may never­
theless be deeply and essentially rooted in a social order - a lack
of awareness much exploited by the conservative critics of the
Enlightenment.
8
 T I ME AND VAL I D ITY

So, one way or another, the crucial Episode was made to bear
too great a burden. The pre-Episode condition was mysteriously
credited, either with too much humanity, or with too much
unexplained evil: how did pre-social men have personalities
sufficiently formed to be capable of setting up a social order?
- or, alternatively, how did rational men fall into the darkness of
superstition and tyranny from which they required quite so
drastic a liberation?

The World-growth Story

The weakness of the early, episodic forms of theories of progress
sprang from the fact that society does not come into being
through an episode, even a protracted one: and it cannot be
either explained or validated by a model in terms of an episode.
This weakness certainly cannot be urged against the second
type of progress theory, which came in during the latter part of
the eighteenth century, and was most characteristic of nine­
teenth century thought: Evolutionist-type theories.
The Evolutionist type of theory does do justice to our sense
of historical and social complexity, to our awareness that society
cannot be conceived of as an artefact of pre-social men, and that
hypothetical pre-social men cannot be credited with the moral
and intellectual attributes which we only find in men-in-society.
Evolutionist-type theories explain and validate society in terms
of a long-term, indeed permanent and all-embracing process, and
not of a single episode (however large). The permanent process
of evolution cannot be treated as another episode, so to speak as
one which had grown to enormous proportions, and this for a
number of reasons: for one, it is not an episode within a wider
world, but becomes in effect co-extensive with the world - it is
the world. For another, we are no longer dealing with simply
two states, and a transition from the Bad State to the Good
State, but with a whole series of transitions - and what matters
now is the transition as such, its rules and criteria, the upward
progress, the striving, etc., rather than the attainment of any
one better state as such. To evolve hopefully is now much more
interesting than to arrive; indeed the arrival-point seems almost
to matter only in that it provides direction for the journey. Lessing
expressed this attitude in his imagined choice between the two

9
 T H O U GHT AND CHANGE

hands of God, one containing truth, the other the endless

striving for it. In true Evolutionist spirit, he naturally chose
the latter.
Edward Gibbon was an interesting example of a thinker poised
on the edge between the old episodic conception of progress (of
the Enlightenment variety) and a moderate version of the con­
tinuous-growth theory. The general design of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire has a two-state structure, and is con­
cerned with the contrast of the state of civilisation and that of
barbarism: indeed it is concerned with the specific problem of
understanding, and if possible counselling against the repetition
of, the tragic relapse from civilisation as a result of the event
which gives the work its title. But at the same time, in the reflec­
tions on the general causes of the changes from the one state to
the other, he also contemplates the vista which was to inspire
faith in continuous progress, and is evidently tempted by the
notion:

The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the

domestic history and tradition of the most enlightened nations,
represent the human savage naked both in mind and body. . .
From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive .. . state of
man, he has gradually r.isen . . . . His progress . . . has been
irregular and various; infinitely slow in the beginning, and
increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity . . . but it may
safely be presumed that no people, unless the face of nature is
changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.

He goes on after this passage (Chapter XXXVIII) to discuss the

types of factor which make for progress. Of the three factors
described, one, the accumulation of techniques not depending
either on rare individual genius nor on political unific:;J.tion, he
considers irreversible, and hence a kind of guarantee of con­
tinued progress.. . . David Hume was, rather similarly, capable
of both visions: in the Natural History of Religion, he fluctuates
between a unilinear theory, somewhat akin to continuous-pro­
gress, from lesser to greater rationality of belief, and a two-stage
oscillation theory (which, however, is not in his case connected
with progress, as the merits and demerits of each are balanced).
The evolutionist type of theory can be given a number of
IO
 'I

T IME AND VALIDITY I I I

names: of history as the Education of the H ym�n Race, or the

theory of World-growth, history is ell;t�leclry, Jacob's Ladder
theory, etc.
It is not easy to answer in any simple way the question
whether, or to what extent, theories of this species still underlie
or dominate social thinking. It is frequently claimed, fox in�tance,
that the belief in Progress is deaci, thatit failed. to. survive.the
holocausts of the first W9:dcl. War or. the gas.chamhera .of. tb.e
second.- The tlieory is indeed quite dead in academic philosophy,
which is nowadays superbly timeless; it is virtually dead in
sociology, which is either untheoretical or uses different kinds of
theory; and it is in formal thought only defended by very occa- \
sional biologists or historians, who generally do so with the sense )I
of being a voice crying in the wilderness.
Against this, a number of points can be urged. One - which I
do not find very persuasive - is that of the number of evolution­
ist theories, one in particular has become the official ideology of
two of the world's largest countries, and of a number of others.
This argument I do not find persuasive because·! do not believe
that it is the evolutionist element in Marxism which constitutes
its meaning or its appeal for its contemporary adherents,
A more persuasive argument seems to be that the language of.
World Growth, so to speak, has become part of much daily
speech, at quite unsophisticated levels, and not in a vacuous way
either. (And it is significant that a piece of Evolutionist Natur­
philosophie, Teilhard de Chardin'!?, can still become an outstanding
best seller.) The notion of something being progressive, of being
evolue and the associated positive and negative terms - backward,
primitive, etc. - are not merely very widely used but do have
reasonably specific meanings: there is a background picture of
men moving through - admittedly, ill-defined - stages with
rights and appropriate political organisation being dependent on
the degree of 'development' of the individual or population in
question. People believe as a matter of course, as self-evident
truths, that being literate, clean, technology-minded, mono­
gamous (perhaps), politically restrained (perhaps) but organised,
and some other features perhaps, are 'progressive ' and therefore
good, that their contraries are backward and therefore bad, and
that humanity in general moves from features of the bad and
backward kind to other features of the progressive and good
II
 T HO UGHT AND CHANGE

kind, and that a person's, or nation's location along this Jacob's

ladder is an important - perhaps the only - factor determining
its status, and perhaps his or its rights.
A loose but nevertheless not quite empty theory of this kind is,
I suspect, still believed by a very large number of people and is
built into the very language they use. Nevertheless, this type of
theory is both mistaken and on the way out: but some of its
features - including those responsible for the continued vitality
of the theory - reappear in the theory which is replacing it.

The Charm of the World-growth Story

The Evolutionist type of social theory, now due for its demise,
in its day had enormous and almost irresistible appeal, and it still
has some. It is difficult to see how anyone could, at certain times,
think about human affairs without making the image of a grow­
ing cosmos, of an all-embracing upward growth, into the centre
of his thought. The sources of its appeal can be broken up into
a number of main factors:

(1) It seemed a natural conclusion from the pattern of Western

history, which was generally treated as the history of humanity.
Western history seems to have a certain continuity and a certain
, persistent upward swing - or at any rate, so it seemed, and so it
came to be taught. Emerging from the river valleys of the Middle
East, the story of civilisation seems a one continuous and in the
main upward growth, only occasionally interrupted by plateaus
or even retrogressions: history seemed to creep gently around the
shores of the Mediterranean and then up the Atlantic coast,
things getting better and better and better. Oriental empires, the
Greeks, the Romans, Christianity, the Dark Ages (a bit of a gap
in the story), the high Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Re­
formation, the new science, the Enlightenment, the French
Revolution, industrialisation and struggle for wider social justice
.. . the familiar story, with variants especially in the later details,
stresses and anticipation; all this is extremely familiar and still
forms the background image of history for most of us. A picture
of, on the whole, continuous and sustained and mainly endo­
genous upward growth, morally, intellectually, technologically, is
inescapably and gratifyingly suggested.
12
 TIME AND VALIDITY

(2) The picture of course dovetailed with biological evolutionism,

and the victory of Darwinism seemed to clinch the matter. Two
quite independent disciplines, history and biology, provided, it
seemed, different parts of the same continuous curve. What could
be more natural and more reasonable than to extrapolate and fill
in the few gaps on the curve, gaps which surely would be filled
with time? One such gap was the one between the primates and
early man: another was extrapolation into the future. But if the
same kind of story applied from amoeba to the primates, and
from the stone age to Victorian man, it would be unreasonable to
expect - and, indeed, it would - that the intervening gap, or the
future, would not· confirm so manifest a pattern. Romantic
Nature�philosophies extending the pattern backwards to the pre�
organic story of matter, could be added if required.

(3 ) The picture also merits the name of the Education of the

Human Race Theory. One clear source of its appeal was that it
conceived the story of the cosmos, and especially human history,
in a manner analogous to the way in which middle�class people
conceive and justify their lives. The period of the belief in pro�
gress was also, notoriously, a bourgeois period. A middle�class
life is, essentially, a career. Its education already tends to be long
and marked by a self�conscious series of upward steps, and its
subsequent pattern is equally, or is intended to be, a continuous
ascension, whether in wealth or along the rungs of some hier­
archy, or both. If an individual life is validated in such a manner,
what could be more natural than that the life of mankind as a
whole, or indeed the life of a cosmos, should have a similarly
gratifying pattern? And both history and biology appeared to
confirm such an expectation.

(4) The philosophic attractions of this view were enormous. It

gave, or appeared to give, a non�transcendent and a non�episodic
account of the origin of things. The notion of an entelechy was
somehow credited to the cosmos, or at least to human history:
everything grew ·out of a preceding stage and preceding stages
contained the seed of subsequent ones. At no stage was it neces�
sary to invoke an external interference: and both the externality
of such an interference, and the fact that it was an episodic,
discontinuous interference, makes such a possibility unattractive
 T H O UGHT AND C H ANGE

to the scientific monism which replaced religion. The world­

growth entelechy makes such intrusions redundant. Whilst on
the one hand the picture fitted in with history, with its picture
of endogenous growth, on the other hand it also satisfied a
·

philosophic preconception - the idea of the unity and self­

sufficiency of nature - hostile to the idea of external, extra­
mundane interference in the world, and disinclined to allow its
invocation for purposes of explanation or validation. At the same
time, it could of course be as edifying as any religion. It is
extremely satisfying ethically. It provides a theodicy, a justifica­
tion of the ways of God - or of the god-universe - to man: the
tribulations of each step of the ladder are rewarded by the attain­
ment of the next. There is no real evil, for all oppositions, tribu­
lations, difficulties are really necessary as spurs, guides, sparring
partners for the upward-surging movement.
The problem of the relativity of belief and value is overcome,
by what might be called the Serialist solution: though values and
ideas differ, they form a continuous series, such that each later
set incapsulates, perpetuates and transcends all earlier ones. Thus
moral diversity, once a problem and embarrassment for the
seeker of ethical truth, is elegantly enlisted on the side of ethical
conviction. The same holds for conceptual relativity.
The diversification and opposition of human beliefs and norms
comes to be seen as a mere differentiation of resting points along
one path, or related paths, towards a shared and universally valid
end: indeed the diversification and opposition may be seen as
necessary aids and stimuli for progress along this path or paths.
Suffering and evil can then be explained and endowed with
meaning in a similar way; the unequal and iniquitous distribu­
tion of good fortune may again be interpreted as a necessary set
of incentives ensuring progress in this cosmic competitive
school.
Such are, in schematic and general form, the potentialities and
charms ofthe World-growth view, of seeing the history of exist­
ence or of humanity as an entelechy, as a Series of successive,
connected, continuous, and successively incapsulated States. It
also avoids a painful and implausible transcendentalism and
dualism: earlier ages of faith could invoke another world to
justify - or compensate - the goings-on of this one.· The World­
growth theory justifies this world in terms of this world.
 'riME AND VAL I D ITY

Its Defects
The corresponding defects of the cosmic or historic entelechy
stories are by now very familiar, indeed perhaps somewhat over�
stressed. They are often held to be decisive. Of these defects,
three principal types of objection are particularly relevant: the
Logical objection, the Moral objection, and the Fallacy of the
Gauls.
The logical objection can be briefly stated thus: to place
something - for instance, a social order - in a developmental
series, is not to explain it.
Or, more fully: either a 'serial' explanation is also supported
by a specification of the causal connection between the various
stages along it, and then the Series as such is virtually redundant
(for all we need is the causal connection, and the various states
connected - and the grand Series as such then becomes no more
than a list of successive conditions); or we do not possess any
knowledge of how the successive stages generate each other, and
then the grand Series is grossly insufficient. Hence it is either
redundant or inadequate. Either way, it can hardly be placed at
the centre of our explanatory and validating schema of things -
which is precisely what Evolutionism does.
Why was this point not manifest to the proponents of Evolu­
tionist theories? The point was obscured by a number of factors.
For one thing, the important theories often combined an account
of the Series as such, a specification of the alleged patterns of
growth, with doctrines concerning the mechanics of transition
from one stage to another (and also, possibly, concerning the
maintenance of a fairly stable state within each stage). Thus
Marxism, for instance, consists not merely of an account of the
five or so stages of social development, but also contains a theory,
in terms of class struggle, etc., which is intended to explain both
the transitions and the temporary relative stabilities. Darwinism,
again, fuses a theory of evolution as such (i.e. the denial of the
independent origin and of the immutability of species) with a
doctrine concerning the manner of their emergence (i.e. natural
selection). The two constituents- the story about growth, and the
explanation of that growth - tended to be fused, and this obscured
the logical inadequacy of the growth story alone.
The main factor perhaps obscuring the insufficiency of a

IS
 T H O UGHT AND C HANGE

Series as such to explain anything, is a further error which (if

error it be) is not a logical but a factual mistake: the belief that
basically it is the same kind of force which is responsible for the
upward propulsion at each stage along the great series. If this is
so - if, for instance, natural selection, the class struggle, or the
elan vital, or the dialectic, or what you will, is, with only super�
ficial modifications, the moving agency all along the line, then
it is overwhelmingly tempting to fuse the doctrine that there is an
all-embracing ever-upward-swinging Series, and the doctrine
concerning how the Series ticks, into one, psychologically almost
inseparable, belief. It is tempting, indeed natural, to adore the
Series and the underlying elan (whatever it be) with one breath:
it would in fact be weirdly pedantic to separate them. Nowadays
however, there is less temptation to consider the underlying force,
or the nature of the mechanics of change, to have been funda­
mentally similar all through the story, and contemporary bio­
logists are less inclined for instance to subsume biological and
social development under analogous or continuous explana­
tions, 1 (a change in outlook not motivated by a desire to re�
introduce extra-mundane interventions at crucial points). A
perception of the difference in the causal mechanics at various
stages, underlines the need to know what those mechanics are:
the mistaken belief in their similarity obscured the logical in­
sufficiency of specifying the evolutionary Series as such, for its
mobile principle, so to speak, became too fused in the minds of
its protagonists with the specification of the Series itself.
The matter is also confused by the fact that in answer to a
certain kind of (relatively less important) question, evolution and
generally the account of origins, (the account of the route which
led to the present situation rather than the forces impelling thr,
entity in question along the route), does offer the logically right
kind of explanation. When we can take the nature of the impel�
ling force for granted, because, for instance, we know already
what it is, we may be interested only in the way by which the
present came to be as it is. For instance, a motor-car found aban­
doned may generally be assumed to have been driven there: the
police may seek an ' explanation ' in the same sense of, first of all,
seeking the exact route that had been employed. The principles of
1 Cf., for instance, P. B. Medawar, The Future of Man (London 1 96o), esp.

Lecture 6.
 TIME AND VAL ID IT Y

the internal combustion engine are taken for granted. Similarly,

the theory of (biological) evolution is in part an answer to this kind
of 'route ' question: did species arrive at the condition they are at
by route ( I ) , by dispersal from a common starting point, or did
they - route (2) - get to their present position by being placed
there at the start and remaining stationary thereafter, a view
supported by some theology? To this kind of question, the sheer
claim of evolution, the specification of the stages passed through
on the way to the present, is (whether true or not) a logically
adequate type of answer. Similarly, the stress in the need to
explain some given historical situation may concern not so much
the forces, which might be taken for granted, or not be specific­
ally relevant, but rather the precise succession of states leading
to it.
But this is a less typical and less important focus of interest,
which arises when we think we already know, or do not care,
about the forces involved: we do know how motor-cars work, and
hence what interests us when we find a motor-car in a strange
place is not the working of its engine, which it shares with motor­
cars in unstrange places, but the route employed to get it there. In
the interesting and typical cases, however, we do not know, and
do need to know, the nature of the propelling forces: hence in
those cases, the mere specification of the evolutionary series, or
the bald assertion that such a series exists, helps us very little.
The opposition between structural andfor functional explana..;-
tions on the one hand (under one name or another), which
(
explain the mechanics of either stability or change, and genetic ,
ones on the other, which specify the ' route' taken, is of course (
familiar from the social sciences, and outside, in linguistics, \
"
biology and philosophy.1 In some cases, as in biology, the non-
genetic and the genetic theories may co-exist peaceably, and
complement each other. (It is interesting to reflect however that
real genetics is, precisely, not ' genetic ' - it is concerned more
with the mechanics of transmission and of change than with
tracing the route of development of this or that organism or
species.) In other subjects, the distinction could provide the
1 In philosophy, the opposition appears rather in the guise of the distinction

between the ' analysis ' (of concepts, propositions, whatnot) and psychologistic
(genetic) accounts. For some time, the former have been all the rage, the latter
decidedly out.
 TH O UGHT AND CHANGE

rallying ground and differentiation of schools, the moving idea of

academic revolutions.
It would be interesting to observe the whole series of (on the
whole unconnected) intellectual revolutions, in various discip�
lines, distributed in time somewhere around the turn of the
century and later, all of them favouring 'structural' explanations
i (possibly under other names) and rejecting, more or less cam�
pletely, genetic explanations in terms of 'origins'. Their general
slogan might have been - structures explain, origins do not.1
Thus the 'logical' argument against Evolutionism, against per�
ceiving, explaining and validating ourselves and our society in
terms of our position in an evolutionary series, can be seen as a
special application of the general argument. against genetic ex�
planations. This general argument is valid. 2 It is important,
however, that this should not be misunderstood: to say that
..' �'1 'structural' explanations are valid, and 'genetic' ones are in�
·1
valid, is not to say that the past is irrelevant.a The past is highly
relevant as repository of evidence - of comparative material, and
J of material concerning the conduct of (more or less) identical or,
� rather continuous, societies in other circumstances. We cannot
0 attain truth about the mechanism of a given social transition
) without knowing a good deal about the antecedent state as well
1 as the end�product one. But the past is irrelevant in the sense that
··
l the Series as such explains - and justifies - nothing.
/ The science in which the conflict between 'serial' or genetic
explanations, and proper structural ones, played itself out most
dramatically, and perhaps most illuminatingly, is social anthro�
'""
pology. 4 Systematic study of 'primitive' tribes began first in the
':.,)' 1,, hope of utilising them as a kind of time�machine, as a peep into
our own historic past, as providing closer evidence about the
. ;{i 1 The same movement exists even within psycho-analysis. One might have
'
thought that stress on the experiences of early childhood would doom psycho­
·

analysis to ' genetic ' explanations: in fact, the rival tendency asserts itself in
doctrines stressing the importance of ' here-now ' interpretations, in terms of the
therapeutic situations and relationship, rather than in terms of past events.
2 But the specific way in which genetic, ' psychologistic ', etc., theories were
replaced in philosophy by ' analysis ', was disastrous.
3 An interesting· example of a misunderstanding of the attack on genetic

explanations can be found in John Strachey's The End of Empire (1 959), p. 341 .
4 Cf., for instance, Men and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw

Malinowski, edited Raymond Firth ( 1 957).

x8
 T I ME AND VALIDITY

early links in the great Series. But real progress was achieved
when this supposed time-machine was used with redoubled
vigour but without any concern for reconstructing the past: when
the tribal groupings were studied for their own sakes and ex-
plained in terms of themselves, and not as ' survivals' from a past
supposedly even further back. J
The arguments anthropologists used in support of this kind of
' timeless' approach, which explained current tribal institutions
in terms of their. ��P-���Uill.4..1!!Y.t.JJaLl?.Up,P,QX1,_Jmd not
as survivals (still less as premonitions), were manifold, of un­
equal merit, and not always fully consistent. For instance, they
insisted that the tribal past should not be invoked to explain the
tribal present, because the tribal past simply wasn't known: and
at the same time, they tended to be t:functioi:iafi§:ts ', which meant,
roughly, that institutions were explained in terms of the contri­
butions_they made-Io-so�iaGtaliillty �c:But-to -credit a society with
·stability is to say that its past was like its present. How can one
say, as some anthropologists seemed to say almost with one
breath, that the past of a tribal society is unknown, and that it is
known to have been stable? Thus ironically, within ' functionalist'
anthropology there was covertly contained one further piece of
' speculative historical reconstruction', i.e. the doctrine, or rather
th(lJi:plTCit as_:;�iii_§E-;,�?:C��f!:�-�� · ..
But th1s contusion in the just1fying reasons did not matter.
The attitude itself was wholly valid. The objection to ' specula­
tive historical reconstruction' - which reconstructions were then,
to explain present institutions as survivals '- on the grounds of
inadequate evidence was more or less sound and not particularly
interesting. The valid point underlying it, one stressed less
clearly, was that the past as such (whether speculatively recon­
structed or soundly established, no matter) explains nothing.

�£i1s�����;!�;h
�t i�hG:��:i�i�;:.!i;�%�
i! irf{},e13} � 1\·
t
- ;t�� ilie �::·
may be. The more or less irrelevant rejection of speculative his-

1 Strictly speaking, to avoid the appeamnce of teleological explanation (and

this would indeed in the case of social anthropology be only an appearance),
one should say that each institution is explained by the way in which the func­
tioning of the other institutions keep it going, and so on, until the circle is com­
plete. When the working of a given institution is studied, it is the others that are
being explained.

I9
 T H OUGHT AND CHANGE

tory canalised interest onto the present and providing proper

structural explanations of it. The covert doctrine of stability was
a reasonable first assumption in the attempt to disentangle the
interdependence of institutions - an assumption which it was
,r1\ , 1/ Rossible later to discard. Once structural (rather than genetic or
r
(' ; '
j L.. (•,
' serialist') explanations became customary, it was easy to apply
them to social change rather than stability, to the past as well as
; '( . the present (where evidence was available) - as in fact is done
0 ,. .
nowadays. Hence the rea1 1ssue was never the past agamst the
·

<: ' .

present, 1 nor even belief in change against a kind of retro�

jected conservatism. It was between serialist pseudo-explanation
and explanations proper.
--�?.�. !his �ea�? n, tb._e_ !YP-�.-of �x� lanation fo�nd in the work of
;
_

lstructural so?1ai an�hroeolog1s��� does prov1de an acceptable

fl"iioelfor what we would wish or could accept for our own society
whereas the great nineteenth-century serialist social thinkers
have little appeal1 Sociologists are meaningful for us when, like
(Max Weber, they were concerned with the ID:echanics of a
transition, rather than some grand Series as ·sucn:-iii thinkers
s� ch as(Mart, it is the treatment of special condit�ons and transi­
. . of
twns, a'hd · not so much the grand des1gn, wh1ch remams
interest.
Thus the Series, the Great Path b� which we arrived, is not
__ �- •.

wholly withouf interest. It is of �plana!_9!Y_-.i.l!terest in those

(relatively rare and not very important) cases when the motive
force is known, but the precise path is not. It then answers the
question - by which path did this well-understood force arrive
here? But normally, and when facing the crucial questions which
in fact we do face, the path is irrelevant. When we have ascer­
tained what the various stages along it were, and what propelled
us from one to the next, the tracing of the Path itself is a mere
summary of the findings - but not their explanation. W-b&.:tL�e
have real explana!ions, th_� spec;ificf!tion ofthe pathiuedundant,
'and�\Vhen we do not, it cannot help us. This, and not the ' grand­
eur' of design, is the real logical objection to evolutionism in
sociology or social anthropology.
1 Cf. Professor I. Schapera, ' Should Anthropologists be Historians? ' in
the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. 92, July 1962. The author
defends anthropologists against the charge of a-historism: but the exclusion of
serialism is by now virtually taken for granted.

20
 TIME AND VAL I D ITY

The Moral Objection

The moral objection to the World Growth story is more familiar
thaD:Jh�J()�ical one (though the two are con���!.��?2:. Xtj�...!��!.!X.!..
the (obj��i<?.ll�!<?:!g,� m���t!?·:.�§�_:g.t11tcf global.JlJ1!�Je 9hY �<:loctrine . . )
But 1f is hard to conceive of anyone subscribing to the doctrine
without employing it as a morill premiss. Conversely, to attack
the moral use of it is to attack the doctrine itself.
The moral objection is familiar, and basically simple. It runs,
substantially - how revolting to prostrate oneself before the
alleged (global, cosmic) process or entelechyl The famous lady
who said she 'accepted the Universe' was not merely comic, but
also contemptible. This cogent point has been best argued and
popularised by Professor ��\:'!LiiL.b.is.. Qp..lizLSQd£.t.;y. .and
its Enemies (London r 945 ), in which he attacks the entelechy
' 'view ofhistory and would-be moral band-waggon jumping, the
attempt to base moral values on the alleged direction or destina­
tion of the historic process. 1
There are various ways of attacking this moral band-waggon
jumping, the attempts to equate valid morality with, ultimately,
the victorious one: for instance - just what time scale are we to
employ to discern our winner? Is it the victor of the decade, the
generation, the century? Or, alternatively: just how reliable,
simply as factual predictions, are those prognoses of victory which
are intended also to persuade morally? (Answer: not at all. In
other words, do not lose your soul in order to gain the whole world
- for you will not even receive your price. Our devils, unlike
Faust's are in fact quite incapable of delivering that with which
they would tempt us. If they could, our virtue might well falter.)
But the greatest single objection to this moral doctrine is itself
a moral condemnation: how base to prostrate oneself before a
trend, even a global and embracing one! - and moreover, to
abdicate one's freedom of judgment, by attaching one's positive
valuation rigidly to that which history (evolution, the elan vital,
Natural Selection, the Absolute Spirit, the dialectic or whatnot)
decree. Perhaps what they decree is sometimes good ; but should
1
one give them a carte blanche for all times and occasions, and
abandon the autonomy of one's judgment? ./.��
�......-===..._.,..._..,_.,..'""-,.......,.,........ ..,.�-·..-�-:-"'--��""� ·��--�··-.-- .......___ ,
'
. .. ...--��� . ·- .•,_- ,.--

A sustained attack on the logical aspect of serialism is found in th� same

1

author's The Poverty of Historicism (London r 957).

2I
 TH OUGHT AND C HANGE

Contemporary philosophers are extremely familiar with the

general form of the arguments against such abdication of one's
moral judgment, an abdication reached through the adoption of
some theory which thereafter automatically conscripts all one's
valuations in favour of this or that. (If, for instance, one adopts
the theory that the good is that and only that which furthers
general happiness, one can no longer even contemplate the ques­
tion whether general happiness is the only good, for the question
is automatically answered by the very meaning one has given to
one's terms; or if one adopts the theory that right conduct is
conduct which follows rules that one would impartially and sym­
metrically apply to all men, one can no longer wonder whether
indeed impartiality is the sum of righteousness.) But the argu­
ment acquires particular force and vividness wren directed
specifically against a genuine and tempting candidate, who comes
within some distance of really seducing us into abdicating our
moral judgment to him - a candidate as plausible as the Voice of
History, the direction of the global entelechy, the World Story.
Happily perhaps, we are indeed assisted in resisting the temp­
tation of such an abject abandon of our moral judgment, of such
cosmic appeasement, vis-a-vis the World Story (with or without
a Regisseur), by the fortunate (one hesitates, under the circum­
stances, to say providential) fact that the world story is extremely
hard to discern, and its development impossible to predict. Band­
waggon jumping is that much harder if you do not know where
the waggon is and where the devil it is going. We might recognise
necessity, if we knew what it was. But we don't. Weltgeschichte
is no Weltgericht : it is rather like one of those ever-revised purge
trials.
But it would be a grave mistake, and one sometimes committed
by contemporary academic philosophers, to despise and under­
rate this temptation . These philosophers sometimes talk as if the
temptation were simply a matter of committing a certain logical
error, the 'Naturalistic Fallacy' (the name, not very appositively,
given to this class of mistakes). But the temptation is far greater,
far more strongly rooted, than it would be were it based merely
on the tendency to commit a logical slip.
For the arguments in favour of committing the 'Naturalistic
Fallacy ', and specifically in favour of prostrating oneself before the
verdict of the global story, are themselves enormously powerful.
22
 T I ME AND VAL IDITY

Consider the dilemma: in taking our stand, in committing our­

selves to our general valuations, we can do one or two things.
We either go with the cosmic swim, or opt out. We can adopt
those values which are somehow consonant with the nature of
things, with that world-totality of which we ourselves are an
inseparable part - or, on the other hand, we can opt out, and
attempt a kind of 'inner emigration', and endeavour to pass
judgment on, and independently of, the (quite literally) whole
works. In the latter case, we shall have to claim to be bravely
unprejudiced by our inescapable membership of this world­
totality, to treat the world of which we are part as the Roman
judge treated his son. There seems to be no third possibility.
Those who commend the autonomy of moral judgment, the
logical andjor moral reprehensibleness of abdicating our judg­
ment to the nature or trend of things, are of course commending
the second alternative. But consider the enormous and indeed
comic hubris involved in this. Can we really opt out in this
manner? The world from which we would abstract and detach
ourselves has formed and made us, down to our innermost being,
including those very aspirations to independence from it, and the
possible directions our would-be independent assertion would
take. Is not our attempt at independence bound to be an illusory
one?
Those who preach the autonomy of morals, who assert that
no kind of fact prescribes our values, but that we choose (or, that
we choose) our values - who exactly do they suppose that 'I ' or
'we', responsible for this choice, to be? - and do they suppose
that this he, she or it, whatever it may be, is exempt from being
part of this world1 and subject to its forces?

1 Kant who held this kind of view, also consistently subscribed to the corollary

and believed in the existence, or at least in the necessity of supposing the exist­
ence, of such an extramundane agent of choice, The modern preachers of
autonomy do not seem to face the problem.
In the case of the Existentialists, the bland assumption of free will, the central
doctrine that we ' choose ourselves ' and our values, seems often to be a corollary
of the ' phenomenological ' method, of the idea that it is correct in philosophy to
describe things as actually experienced, rather than as abstractly re-interpreted in
e.g. science. If this method is allowed, there is no doubt that we can credit our­
selves with freedom, for there is no doubt but that we seem to enjoy it, .that we
assume and presuppose it and so to speak live it. But the trouble is that this ' lived'
concept, so to speak, may be in conflict with what we believe about the world

23
 T H O UGHT AND C HANGE

We are like a commander of a fortress hurling defiance at the

besieging enemy from the ramparts, and blithely unaware that
the whole garrison behind him is in the pay of the opponents.
Like The Man Who Was Thursday, all our fellow rebels, and
ourselves, are but agents-provocateurs of that world which we
would defy. This perhaps is the weakness of Russell's Free Man's
Worship : the defiance hurled at the extra-human world did not
fear any odds, but alas failed to consider the possibility of treason
inside.
We would not mind so much what odds we face from a hostile
or indifferent universe, but we do become bewildered to the
point of total confusion and surrender when we discover that
the enemy has wholly penetrated the redoubt, and that there is no
redoubt within the redoubt, no ultimate and safe retreat, however
small. (Much moral philosophy and theory of knowledge is in
effect the attempt to discover such a safe inner redoubt from
which the world could then be reconquered.)
The belief that neither the self nor any part of it is a secure
redoubt, is not a philosopher's worry, but a well-diffused, well­
based and indeed very sound idea, and one which must be faced
by serious thought. The failure to recognise it is a crucial weak­
ness. (This is true, for instance, of Existentialism: the doctrine of
basing values on ' ultimate commitment', ' decision', etc., is a
desperate attempt to locate one such ultimate redoubt.)
In practice, we do not treat ourselves as some kind of ultimate
and independent premiss, but on the contrary try to understand,
discount, evaluate the natural forces (psychological, social, etc.)
operating in us, to neutralise the Quislings inside through under­
standing, and then reach our conclusion subsequently. (There is
of course an inescapable regress about this procedure - who is the
' I ' who investigates, assesses, etc., the non-I forces operating in
i
n the light of abstract knowledge ; and in life as we actually live it, we do not
simply discount this abstract knowledge when it comes into conflict with what
we seem to experience : we take such conflict seriously, and rightly considet· the
possibility that the abstract knowledge is right. No epoche can extinguish it. It is
not something which can be switched on and off according to convenience.
A further trouble with the phenomenological epocM is that it is an illusion to
suppose that by ' suspending the natural standpoint ' we are left with a residue of
things as they are or as they are expedenced, as opposed to things as they are re­
interpreted by abstract notions. There is no sharp or fixed line between the two
things, and there is no pure residue left for 'phenomenological' contemplation.
 T I ME AND VAL I D I TY

me? Is he free of them? No.) In other words, we invariably and

inescapably do precisely what the evolutionist moralist recom­
mends and does systematically - we look at ourselves as natural
objects, we conclude to our values, our commitment, our iden­
tity, disregarding temporary moods, by identifying with some
more reliable permanent undercurrent of our personality, which
is only discovered by a kind of objective research. And we do
it for the same reasons which he invokes for doing it whole­
heartedly : there is no pure, extra-mundane self to do our choos­
ing and knowing for us, and a fortiori it is not identical with our
self or any given moment and mood. In view of the non-existence
of a pure and independent self, all that the ' autonomy of value '
can amount to in reality is the arbitrary apotheosis of some
mood, just as enmeshed in the world as anything else, but with­
out even the benefit of being somehow systematically based on a
proper understanding of this world, its real structure and ten­
dency. As we seem doomed to heteronomy, morally speaking,
anyway, let us at least be wedded to something which has deep
roots in this world. We only have this intra-mundane self which is
wholly part of this world, and hence if it is to do whatever it shall
do properly, it should do it in terms of the nature of this world.
This argument is enormously powerful, and in practice very
persuasive. 1 However rude philosophers may be about the
' naturalistic fallacy ', in practice not to commit is to claim the
ability to opt out of this world - a comic claim. (It is a curious
fact that linguistic philosophers, who generally pride themselves
on modesty and avoidance of philosophic hubris, commit this
particular form of it with great ease.)
The great strength of evolutionist-type moral theories is that
they accept this powerful argument and behave consistently in
the face of it (whilst the rest of us accept it when it suits us and
try to ignore it when it does not : no one ignores it altogether.)
The argument runs : we cannot jump out of our social, biological
psychological skins : we cannot in our thoughts, cognitions and
valuations opt out of this world. Hence, it goes on, we must
accept our skin, as it were, and formulate our ideas and values in
terms of it. In the end, the skin we cannot escape is the world.
Evolutionists, amongst others, accept the consequences of this
with courage and consistency.
1 It is well argued by, for instance, Professor C. H. Waddington.
 T HO UGHT AND C HANGE

In the end, it so happens that I for one do not accept the argu­
ment that as we cannot opt out of this world, our judgments must
be its judgments. ' The world' certainly speaks with no clear voice,
and perhaps it does not, morally, speak at all : and we must in the
end commit the hubris of supposing ourselves, occasionally, out­
side this world and sitting in judgment on it, notwithstanding
the fact that we also know that we are always part of it. But we
must do this with our eyes open, aware of the extreme awkward­
ness of our position, and not in the customary facile manner.
Evolutionism and similar moral doctrines are in the end mor­
ally unacceptable because we do not wish to prostrate ourselves
before the ' march of history ', ' nature ', or whatnot. But those
who do, should not be despised as mere band-waggon jum­
pers, still less as logical incompetents : they do have some good
reasons on their side.

Less Immoral but More Inconsistent

The principal charge against world-growth ethics, that it involves
a kind of prostration before some supposed trend - a charge
which is valid - nevertheless requires a certain qualification : it is
fully applicable only on the assumption that the subscribers to
the ethical doctrine in question are coherent and consistent in
their beliefs, which in fact they are not. Generally they are that
much less culpable morally, and that much less lucid logically.
The point is this : they do not, in so many words and with full
understanding of what they are doing, revere the future as good
simply because it is future, and because a value· could have no
basis other than its future global victory. They do not say bluntly
(above all not to themselves) that the good is such because it
will be victorious and for no other reason, that truth prevails
because that which prevails is truth. In some more confused way,
whilst denying moral criteria that would stand outside the global
process and presume to judge it - a denial which gives their
theory its philosophic merit - they at the same time somehow
also feel that the good will prevail because it is good. Most
theories generally contain enough in the way of conceptual
smokescreen to facilitate such doublethink. After all, the his­
toricist element in Marxism is complemented by the youthful
Schwiirmerei about ' alienation '. The classless society is right not
 TIME AND VALIDITY

merely because it is a kind of historic terminus, but also because

man will be free from 'alienation '.
Thus the charge of ' historicism ' is morally valid not so much
against evolutionists as they are, but against an ideal type of a
logically clear-minded and consistent evolutionist, who may well
be rather rare. The real specimen is less culpable morally, and
more so logically. 1
It is amusing to note how very parallel this is to the predica­
ment of the theist : is the good such because it was chosen by the
Deity to be so, or does the Deity chose it because it was, in any
case, good? The latter alternative clearly limits the omnipotence
of the Deity most drastically, whilst the former leaves us with an
appallingly arbitrary ethic. Few believers and sects - though of
course there are some - have had the tough-mindedness to accept
the arbitrariness of ethics as a corollary of the total ultimacy of
the Deity, and similarly few historicists have really embraced the
arbitrariness of value as a corollary of making this world ulti­
mate, and of not presuming, comically, to judge it from outside.2
The predicaments of evolutionism are strikingly parallel to those
of theism on this point, as they are in connection with deter­
minism.
This qualification does not invalidate the criticism of evolu­
tionist (or ' historicist ') ethics, but it does give us a juster appre­
ciation of that ethic as actually experienced by those who
accept it.

Nos Ancetres, les Gaulois

This (third) objection to Evolutionist, many-stage continuous
and endogenous pictures of progress, is of a quite different order
1 Popper in his admirable attack notices this inconsistency or ambivalence

specifically in connection with Marx, but treats it rather psychologically : we

are given a picture of a Marx who doctrinally is an historicist, but in his heart
of gold underneath, emotionally a moralist. This may be so : but the interesting
thing is that the ambiguity and ambivalence is generally built into the evolution�
ist theory itself - it generally contains logical devices for admiring the real for
being rational, as well as the rational fo.r being real. This is not something which
only arises in the context of the individual psychology of the holders of the doc­
trine. Cf. R. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Kart Marx (1961), pp. 16 and 17.
2 A splendid example of tough-minded consistency on this point it G.
Plekhanov's The Role of the Individual in History, reproduced in P. Gardiner
(ed.) Theories of History (1959). See esp. p. 143·

27
 T H O U GHT AND CHANGE

from the preceding logical and moral objections. It is a more

straightforward, factual objection ; the world no longer looks as if
progress were either continuous or endogenous.
It is said that in the French colonial empire, elementary
education, like other things, was centralised and homogeneous.
Hence children in outposts of empire used textbooks similar to
those used in Lille or Dijon. Apparently one of the elementary
textbooks spoke of ' our ancestors the Gauls ' . . . ahd thus little
Berber, Senegalese; Malagasy or Tahitian children solemnly
repeated : ' Our ancestors the Gauls . . . '
Well, their ancestors were not the Gauls : the exportation of an
European textbook, itself inherent in the colonial situation, led
to the assertion of a blatant falsehood. Similarly, the rather
parochial nineteenth-century evolutionist theories, and the basis
of their appeal, are not exportable to the majority of mankind, its
non-Western part. But today the world is intellectually one
world: what appeal can there be in a theory which, from the
viewpoint of the majority, does not even look true? For Victorian
European man, surveying the magnificent and providential sweep
of the past, from the amoeba via the primates and savages to
himself, it was plausible to recognise that the whole thing was
the progress from nothingness or unicellular existence, by dialec­
tical growth or natural _!l�l�9!ion (according to variant}; to him­
self; and above all,- to recognise that the whole thing was an
entelechy, that the seed of each development was contained in
the preceding stage.
But the most important thing at present happening to the
majority of mankind (i.e. its ' underdeveloped ' part) is the
diffusion of industrialisation and all it implies. But this event
blatantly is not something the seed of which was locally present :
it is the consequence of an external impact. Indeed the problem
is generaJly
- the lack of such local seeds. Hence if the event is
accepted or welcomed or desired, this valuation cannot be justi­
fied along the lines of evolutionist philosophy, as the fulfilment
of an inner destiny. If valued, as generally it is, it must be valued
for other reasons.
In other words, an important and essential part of the world­
growth story and of the way it provides validation, is simply
not applicable to the experience of the majority of mankind ­
and to suppose otherwise is to be guilty of a kind of European

:z8
 T I ME AND · VAL I D I TY

parochialism, excusable perhaps in the nineteenth century, but

downright silly now.

Piety towards a Moribund Doctrine

Evolutionism - the splendid vision of a one, all-embracing, ever­
growing world, its meaning and justification contained within
itself and its own growth, with our tasks, roles, duties all corol­
laries of the one grand story - is moribund. Invalid logically,
invalid morally, 1 and incompatible with the salient �facts of the
contemporary social world - need more be said?
It is important to remember the merits of this moribund doc­
trine. The profound appeal of its moral philosophy has already
been stressed : it springs from the reluctance to adopt a pre­
sumptious morality which would judge the world of which we
are part, as if we were not - which would make the world con­
demn itself through one of its own mouths.
The doctrine as a whole springs ultimately from a refusal to
bifurcate the totality of being - an attitude we may share and
certainly cannot easily reject. Traditional societies notoriously
tend to validate their own arrangements in terms of such a
reduplication,2 in terms of another world which one validates and
compensates for this one.
If Durkheim is to be believed, a bifurcation between the sacred
and the profane is the central characteristic of religion. But for
one reason or another, the conception of the world as bifurcated
1 In giving an account of its moral untenability, I have concentrated on the

type of objection most familiar in the philosophic sterling area - the impossi­
bility of equating all moral value with anything specific, such as the direction
of evolution, on the grounds that this would preclude the possibility of even
querying that thing itself.
In the wider world, existentialism has been at least as influential in under­
mining world-growth ethics. Its point could be summarised thus : ultimately
the individual cannot shift the responsibility for his choices onto some global
story, for in the end, it is he who chooses to accept that story (and thus, in­
directly, its attendant ethic).
In substance, this point is identical with the ' naturalistic fallacy ' argument of
the academic philosophers. Only the prose styles - purple passages in one case,
pedantry in the other - differ.
2 There is a tribe in West Africa whose name for itself and its own members
is simply ' the visible ones ' - as opposed to the invisible ones who also form part
of the social world.
 THOUGHT AND C HANGE

or discontinuous, or as transcendentally reduplicated, has been in ·

decline over the recent centuries. Admittedly, the religious view
of the world has not been formally abjured except in Communist
states : nevertheless, its hold has declined sufficiently for men
to seek validation of the social order and of morality within this
world rather than in intimations or revelations from another.
But within the flux and uncertainties, the rivalries and opposi­
tions and complexities of this world, where is one to seek the
firm base, the premiss on which one can rest, the criterion to
which one may apply? It somehow became increasingly more and
more difficult to rely either on the transcendent or on some firm
necessary truth within this world. (Necessity within this world
was often previously seen as the sharp edge of another world
impinging on it.)
Two alternative bases were found : the ego, and the totality. If
nothing outside the world, and nothing about or in this world, can
inspire trust and comfort, one can shift one's confidence either to
oneself, or to the unitary totality of things. What is available is
either a kind of brave, self-reliant individualism, which trusts
nothing and no one outside, but uses its own self as a kind of
fixed point or anchorage, a starting point and touchstone ; or
alternatively, a kind of pantheism, which abolishes the bifurca­
tion between the sacred and necessary and profane or con­
tingent. (Already in the seventeenth century, these two alterna­
tives were represented by its two most important philosophers,
Descartes and Spinoza.) Both these alternatives represent a kind
of flight from the arbitrary and the asymmetrical : past dogma­
tisms may possess these characteristics (and sometimes seem
indeed to be definable in terms of them) : but a doctrine which is
to survive criticism, cannot.
The former alternative, which does not closely concern us
here, might be called the doctrine of the Pure Visitor. The self as
knower is conceived as a kind of pure visitor to this universe,
stripped - or stripping itself - of all intra-mundane acquisitions
and prejudices, so as to inspect, dispassionately and without fear
or favour, what it has found in this world. Cartesian doubt wa,s
itself this kind of cognitive quarantine, ensuring that the visitor
should look at what he finds here with a vision untainted by
previous local gossip. This is the great epistemological tradition
in modern philosophy : it has obvious affinities with modern

30
 T I M E AND VAL I D ITY

individualism in politics and economics and a certain atomisation

of modern life. The great British empiricists took over this
tradition from Descartes, and turned the pure (and somewhat
solitary) visitor, on his cognitive Cook's tour of this world (in
blatant defiance of St. Augustine's saying that life is not a spec�
tacle but a predicament) into a being of sensation and feeling
rather than of ratiocination. They also atomised the Pure Visitor
hims elf.
This alternative does not concern the present argument
directly. The one which does is the abrogation of the bifurcation
of being, by deifying the cosmos (or naturalising the Deity). In
its Spinozistic, rather static and stoic form, this was not destined
to have a very wide appeal. But it was to have a very profound
appeal and suggestiveness when, towards the end of the eigh�
teenth century, the notion of perpetual endogenous progress,
of history as a permanent upward strife and movement, as the
Education of the Human Race, came to pervade the intellectual
atmosphere. Men could become history�intoxicated, as Spinoza
had been God-intoxicated.
This surely is the secret of Hegel. Those who, from Schopen­
hauer to Popper, have detested Hegel, tend to see nothing but
fraud in the impact of a thinker, whose style appears capable of
degenerating into a kind of pseudo-logical mumbo-jumbo. But
mumbo-jumbo or not, these metaphysical clouds have an outline
just clear enough, at any rate, to facilitate our projecting on to
them an image of the world enormously satisfying to men who
(a) are unwilling to seek the meaning of the world outside it, or
in some rigid permanent bifurcation within it, who have a sense
of the exhaustive unity of the world, and who (b) see the human
history in which they are involved as a fairly continuous and
endogenous progress. From the latter part of the eighteenth cen­
tury onward, conditions (a) and (b) must have been satisfied by
the state of mind of an increasing number of men. In other words,
Hegel's metaphysics provide a splendid parable, as it were, for a
way of seeing the world - as unitary and progressing - which was
in any case attractive. It is this, rather than some fantastically
skilful and successful piece of philosophic Hochstaplerei, which
explains the impact of Hegel, so puzzling to his enemies. To say
this is not necessarily to commend either pantheism or the
entelechy view of history : but given that these two visions do
 T H O U GHT AND CHANGE

have their attraction to men, it is at least not mysterious why

they should embrace, at a time when these are specially tempting,
a doctrine which blends them both.
It is interesting that Hegel blended not merely pantheism with
historicism (i.e. with the entelechy view of history), but that he
also fused the two principal philosophic ways open since the
seventeenth century as foundations for thought - the pantheistic
(or unity-of-nature or of science way), and the epistemological
ego-centred one, which finds its security not in some privileged
fact but in the subject of knowledge itself. For the Hegelian,
entelechy is ' idealist ' in the sense that this self�developing ecto­
plasm which animates and which indeed is the world, is yet also
somehow a kind of mind, albeit depersonalised, and thus also
descended from Descartes's thinking substance and Hume's con­
geries of sensation. 1
It i s part of the general argument of this book that world­
growth stories will not do : not only the Hegelian, but equally the
other versions, more closely connected with some science and
less metaphysical, such as the Marxian or Darwinian ones, and
the other versions found in sociology. They will not do because
entelechies are pseudo-explanations ; because trends do not
dictate norms, even if trends were clearly discernible, which they
are not ; and because to the newly emancipated majority of man­
kind, history does not even look like an entelechy. But, all the
same, one should have some sympathetic understanding for the
world-growth stories : they provided a stirring answer to a real
question.
1 The Hegelian projective cloud of course also accommodates and stimulates

other insights - such as the role of conflict and cataclysm in social development,
or the falsity, epistemologically and sociologically, of atomism and individualism,

32
 C H A P TE R T W O

THE NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT

The Philosophy of Politics

In our time, a social order is valid, has rightful claims on the
loyalty of the members of the society, under two conditions :
(a) It is bringing about, or successfully maintaining, an indus­
trial affluent society. 1
(b) Those in authority are eo-cultural with the rest of the
society. (This formulation, and the ugly word ' eo-cultural ' , are
employed to convey the condition of satisfying nationalism,
without however employing its own language and implicit
assumptions.)
A social order (or form of government) which fails to satisfy
either of these conditions is very unlikely to retain the loyalty of
its members or citizens. A social order which does satisfy these
two conditions is very likely to survive, irrespective of whatever
other defects, theoretical or practical, it may have (unless, of
course, it is destroyed from the outside).
The present argument contains two central contentions : one,
that this relatively simple political philosophy contains the con­
ditions which in fact underlie and dominate most of actual con­
temporary politics ; and two, that this political philosophy is also
correct. Certain qualifications are indeed necessary, in as far as
the conditions specified, industrialisation and nationalism, do not

1 Or, in the somewhat misleading language of the economists, that it is con­

ducive to economic growth. This language is misleading in as far as it suggests

that what is at stake is something quantitative, a rate or speed or quantity of
accumulation of goods. Ultimately, what is at stake is something qualitative - a
transition between two fundamentally different forms of life.

33
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

exhaust the criteria one cah and should apply, even though they
do constitute their central and necessary part. 1

The Sociological Heir

If this account of our underlying effective political theory,
globally shared, is correct, it has the interesting consequence that
the heir of ' classical ' political theory is now sociology. It is socio­
logy which is concerned with the understanding of that process,
which is now central to validating, or even conceptualising
society. What matters here is not so much the jejune official
textbook definitions of sociology, but the real problem which
inspired, and gave life and relevance to, the theories of the classi­
cal sociologists. 2 Sociology was born of the attempt, since the
eighteenth century, to understand the fundamental transforma­
tion of society, a transformation which has since become in­
creasingly more drastic and more manifest,3
It has often been observed of late that political theory - reflec­
tion on human society in terms of which we orient ourselves - is
moribund. This is largely true, as far as formal academic thought
is concerned. Yet it is not the case that we either can or do or
wish to, or could, dispense with some kind of general under­
standing of our social predicament and dilemmas, 4 still less that
1 In other words, two claims are made, one factual, one moral : that these

conditions do underlie contemporary politics, and that they should. Of these, the
former seems to me much less questionable than the latter. Modesty of course
forces an author making two claims to contemplate also the possibility that both
are false. The combination which seems to me the least likely of the four - to
exhaust the range of possibilities - is that the factual claim concerning the con­
temporary world sho1.1ld turn out to be false, whilst the normative one should
be true.
If it is true that this philosophy underlies contemporary politics, whilst the
philosophy itself is not true, or valid, it will still have been a worthwhile exercise
to attempt to pin it down and formulate it explicitly for examination.
2 Cf., for instance, Professor S. N. Eisenstadt, Moderniza tion: Growth and
Diversity (Indiana University 1 963), or Professor Charles Madge, Society in the
Mind (1964).
3 The claim that sociology has inherited the role of ' political theory ' - of

providing the basic social image and at least the conceptual tools employed for
social validation, if not the validation itself - is not to be misinterpreted as some
simpliste doctrine to the effect that a ' normative ' job can be taken over by a
' positive' science.
4 Cf. Bryan Magee, in New Society, January 10, 1 963.

34
 THE NEW S O C IAL CONTRACT

we are not very disoriented ; or that our general orientation could

take place in the simple-minded manner - ' ascertain facts, then
decide ' - sometimes envisaged. It is rather a matter of finding a
model, a set of general concepts, which highlight the general
features and issues of the situation which we had previously felt
in a more confused way to be relevant. 1 Such a model may or
may not prejudge issues but it is unlikely to be wholly neutral.
But what is important is that these models or sets of concepts,
if they are to seem in the least relevant and persuasive, must
spring from a substantive, well-informed, systematic and sophis­
ticated awareness of how societies in fact function and change, an
awareness of the types of interdependence that exist between
institutions, of the alternatives and combinations which are
available, and from a sense of social structure - in brief, they
must be sociological. It is almost impossible to take the over­
simple models of traditional political theory seriously. As the
sociology embedded in classical political theory is too childish,
we must rather seek our guidance in the philosophy embedded in
more adequate sociology. (If that philosophy has its own defects,
those, at any rate, are easier to remedy.)
Disciplines may sometimes rise into prominence primarily
because, in given circumstances, they happen to provide the
canvas on which the image of man is, at the time, most naturally
drawn. In the twentieth century, the essence of man is not that
he is a rational, or a political, or a sinful, or a thinking animal, but
that he is an industrial animal. It is not his moral or intellectual
or social or aesthetic etc., etc., attributes which make man what
he is j his essence resides in his capacity to contribute to, an d to
profit from, industrial society. The emergence of industrial
society is the prime concern of sociology.
The interesting thing about this essence of man is that, as
1 To this extent, I wholly agree with Sir Isaiah Berlin's essay, in Peter Laslett

and W. G. Runciman (Eds,) Philosophy, Politics and Society (x 962). But un­
fortunately Sir Isaiah's programmatic resuscitation of political thought is as
unlikely to be effective as was Mr. H. Weldon's similarly programmatic elimina­
tion of it which it is intended to replace and which it strangely resembles.
Subjects are not killed by alleged demonstrations of their logical impossibility,
nor revived by similar demonstrations of their viability. Where Sir Isaiah's essay
fails is that it remains largely at a formal, philosophical level. There are times
when it is not enough to preach the need to try to understand the world - when
one must actually try substantively to understand it.

35
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

usual, it exists both in actuality and in potentiality. One part of

the world consists of societies which are industrial ; the other of
people whose main characteristic is their capacity of becoming
such. Populations are under-developed not because they are
necessarily worse off than they have been : they are such in
virtue of the awareness that they might be industrialised.
It is implicitly recognised that the basis of power; the criterion
of social institutions and arrangements and policies, is the
establishment and the running of an industrial system. Virtue,
salvation, the good life, consent, the general will, and the rest -
those once fashionable criteria - though they may survive in
textbooks, when used in real life are merely near vacuous labels
attached to quite different criteria and questions. 1 These are -
how to become industrialised, and just what to do with an indus­
trial society when one has it. The paradigm of a founder of a
state, of a Father of the nation, is no longer the ancestor, or
conqueror, divine visitor, hero or lawgiver : it is the liberator­
developer, the Ataturk figure. (Liberators who do not modernise
or modernisers who do not liberate, are not eligible as symbols of
an acceptable order.) There are now very nearly only two kinds
of politics, and very nearly only two kinds of issue (disregarding
the quite unique and sui genert's issue of surviving at all) : there
are the politics of getting industrialised, and there are the politics
of affluence. There are the issues of just how to get there, and
the issues of choosing the criteria for disposing of the new powers
whe.n one is there : the issues of becoming and those of being.
There is also, admittedly, the issue of how much liberty is
possible at either stage. (This indeed is a concern whose roots
may be quite independent. Still, its relevant current formulations
are those against the background of industrialism or industrialisa­
tion.)
All this is, perhaps, an exaggeration. Nevertheless, it is as near
to truth as , any such simplifications can be, and moreover, it is
not far removed from what very many people feel about the
world they live in, with different degrees of articulateness. This
is also the most interesting reason behind such popularity as
1 Gibbon observes somewhere that a spirited nation will prefer freedom in
poverty to a more comfortable subjection. ' Their poverty secured their free•
dom . Today, such an antithesis is meaningless. No movement of liberation
• . '

separates independence from the aspiration to ajjluence.

 THE NEW S O C IAL C O NTRACT

sociology now enjoys : it is felt to be the region which contains the

questions that matter. No doubt there are periods or circum­
stances when the human capacity of salvation and perdition, or of
mental health and disease, or of order and anarchy, or of know­
ledge and its limitations, are the first questions that spring to
mind - and il;l such contexts, theology or psychology or politics
or philosophy may enjoy a prestige independent of the actual
merits of their practitioners. The same is now true of sociology
(and to say this is not to say that its practitioners lack merit -
only that the magic their words possess is independent of that
merit).
When industrialisation had happened only once, those who
had been through it tended to confuse it with what may have
been accidental or once-only concomitants of its first occurrence.
Now, the repetitions provided by new combinations of circum­
stances, and the attempt to understand and facilitate the process
in new places, also throws light on its earlier occurrence in the
West.
By comparison, subjects other than sociology have tended to
let these questions go by default, either by naively treating indus­
trial man as a kind of universal man (thereby of course becoming
incapable of saying anything about becoming such), or by ignor­
ing the relevant characteristics altogether. The main body of
economic theory, for instance, ·tends to take for granted the
institutional, psychological and evaluative framework whose very
conditions of emergence, and whose final forms, are just what
is most problematical. But the work of a Myrdal on becoming
(industrialised), or of a Galbraith on being, consist in the main of
showing that what really matters are those features which used
to be swept under the carpet of ceteris paribus, or hidden in
unquestioned assumptions. Or again, the best known ethical
theory, Utilitarianism, has become irrelevant because its basis,
actual human wants, is something which may well have to be
ignored or violated during the process of becoming, and some­
thing which becomes a manipulable val'iable, not a fixed datum
(and hence again not capable of providing the crucial independent
premiss), in the state of being.
As for classical political theory, its central question - the basis
of political order as opposed to anarchy - is now replaced (despite
the Congo crisis) by an interest in the bases of industrial society

37
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

as opposed to pre-industrial society. Order as such seems either

,( r
'\J'-'
.·
less difficult or less crucial than it seemed, for instance, to
Hobbes in the seventeenth century. It is not the mythical tran­
sition from the jungle to social contract which is of interest, but
the observable transition from the politics of the field or pasture
to the politics of the factory. It is not the hump of power, but
that of wealth, the overcoming of which is the crucial episode in
the establishment or validation of a social order. (But we are still
left with the question of how to retain or acquire liberty whilst
overcoming the hump . . . whichever one it is.)
It is ironic however that at a time when the old questions of
politics are dated, some of the theories, and not the best ones at
that, find a curious applicability. There is a type of theory which
locates a Real Man or Will or whatnot inside the metaphysical
bosom of actual people, and equates both their own fulfilment,
and the attainment of a just social order, with the emergence of
this incapsulated wonder. (The defects of this kind of theory are
obvious - the values presupposed in specifying the hidden good
self, in those cases when this paradigm is clearly specified at
all, may if valid be stated on their own without being presented
as attributes of a prince-in-disguise ; and if not valid, gain no
real additional strength by being so presented.)
Yet this theory does at present find application in the political
life of a very large portion of humanity ; it is not the actual
present worldly aims or moral intimations of tribesmen, peasants
and shanty-town dwellers which provide the basis for the politi­
cal life of their countries ; it is the as yet unrealised industrial and
affluent man hidden inside each of them and struggling to get
out, who does.
Again, there is the type of theory which attributes the right
to govern to those possessing wisdom. Abstractedly formulated,
this theory has little appeal in our time, when theories of know­
ledge are egalitarian and modest, not allowing much scope
either for differential wisdom, or for a form of insight which
would carry a guarantee of political rightness. All the same, this
theory too, in fact describes the actual politics of a large portion
of mankind. This was, at one stage of the Congolese crisis, made
into an explicit institution. Rule by Graduate-Student-Kings
was only an unusually explicit formulation of a principle of
government tacitly recognised by all those in the state of becoming
 THE NEW SO C I AL CONTRACT

industrialised. For them, the division into two nations, of those

who have and those who have not tasted the new wisdom, is
p erhaps deeper than was once the separation of rich and poor
in the West.
But whilst these theories could be borrowed from politics, the
real content which gives them current applicability is drawn from
sociology. Thus the incapsulated good man is not Integrated or
Blessed or Rational man, it is the user of machine tools or of
office equipment and the beneficiary of affluent living ; and the
specialised possessors of political wisdom are not those endowed
with metaphysical insight or Grace or Reason, but those possess­
ing diplomas from the schools of industrialised societies.
Basically - though in an imperfect world all kinds of make­
shift devices and compromises may be tolerated - power rightly
belongs to the possessors of the new wisdom, and the new wisdom
is the gateway to the emergence of a rightly ordered soul and a
rightly ordered state. The new wisdom is in the possession of
those who have acquired diplomas from the schools of societies
which are themselves already (in the appropriate sense) well
ordered, i.e. ind1.1strialised. For a Platonist, in the literal old
sense, there was notoriously the problem of how to break out of
the vicious circle - only a good society could produce a good
soul, but only good souls could produce a good society. What
could one do if one had neither? The rather feeble solution
offered was that, very rarely, regenerate souls, such as Socrates,
emerge even in non-regenerate societies. In the modern world, . 1 · , 1
the solution has turned out to be somewhat different : once by Z\\
some miracle one society has become industrialised endogen­
ously, others can become such by emulation. Torche s can be lit,
passed on, and spread the light to others. Right souls can be
formed in a good society - individuals taken out of non-industrial j
countries and educated in the institutions of the developed ones
- after which it may only be a matter of the best amongst these
finding themselves in the crucial position in their own countries
at the proper time.
Thus the politics of Transition provide, at long last, concrete
exemplification for schemata which, hitherto, had been in the
main metaphysical, vacuous devices for advocating, insinuating
or presupposing this or that value. Now the reverse is true :
certain quite concrete values are given, namely, the features and

39
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

conditions of industrialism, thanks to the manifest and in practice

uncontested superiority of industrial life over pre-industrial ; and
hence those once vacuous schemata are illuminated by the facts.
Politics is the rule by the Wise - i.e. those who have access to the
tribal magic of industrial society and can initiate their own tribes
into it ; and politics is also the emergence of the Real and Rational
from the merely manifest and not-so-good ; in concrete terms, in­
dustrial men are struggling to emerge from non-industrial ones.

The Episode of Progress

The effective conviction of our time was summed up as the
doctrine that a social order is made valid by conducing to or
maintaining to an industrial society, plus the fact that its mem­
bers share a common ' nationality' .
An alternative way o f formulating this contention is to say
that the diffusion of industrialism, carried out by national units,
is the dominant event of our time.
This is an ' episode ', however large and fundamental it may be.
It is an episode in the ph_ilosophically relevant sense that it is
an event in a wider world : literally and conceptually, it is not
co-extensive with that world.
This has important consequences - especially if it is accepted
that this one crucial episode is at the centre of social thought and
valuation. If progress is an episode, a transition from one definite
state of affairs A to another state B, it is possible to base moral
thought on the notion of progress without indulging in some
kind of mystical and dangerous pantheism, without becoming
history-intoxicated, without one's values and concepts becoming
quite so inebriatingly cosmic. One is dealing with something very
big - but not quite so unmanageably big.1
This also has the agreeable ethical consequence that in working
out the moral implications of that one fundamental transforma­
tion, there is no longer the temptation - or the logical necessity -
to recognise, revere and accept the global trend. In the case of the
global entelechy story, this necessity followed, not so much from
1 A part of Kant's doctrine of the sublime was that our consciousness of sub­

limity arose from our awareness of something too large for our concepts. The
all-embracing cosmic entelechy of the evolutionists was sublime in precisely this
sense. Cf. The Critique of Judgment.
 THE NEW S O C IAL CONTRACT

the great and overwhelming power of the forces contemplated, as

from the consideration that we could not meaningfully conceive
ourselves as standing outside and passing judgment. We cannot,
of course, altogether ' stand outside ' the present transformation
either -:- we cannot look at industrialisatio.n through the eyes of a
member of a newly discovered tribe in central New Guinea � but
we are, easily, rich enough in concepts to know how to place
industrial civilisation in a wider context of alternatives, etc. Here,
then, is no vestige nor a suspicion of comic hubris. When
contemplating this, we are not gazing at something which com­
pletely embraces us and pervades us, something without a
possible contrast, which is us and which we cannot escape : we
are, on the contrary, looking at a specific thing. It is a very big
thing indeed, but still, a thing amongst others.
This is important. If one turns this fundamental transforma­
tion into the starting point of one's thought - as one does and
should - one does not face (or not so drastically) the problems
which did face the earlier Progress beliefs, the secular philo­
sophies of world-growth : the dilemma between either revering
the Trend of Things, equating freedom with the ' recognition of
necessity ' , etc., or on the other hand having to aspire to the comic
pretension to judging the world-as-a-whole from an extra­
mundane vantage point. To accept, or not to accept the Universe
was, one way or the other, comic ; but to reflect critically upon
industrialisation, its conditions, forms, implications and alter­
natives, is not.
Philosophically, the neo-episodic picture has some interesting
and, perhaps, attractive traits. Like the old episodic stories or
myths, it does not expand to fill out the whole universe : 1 hence
1 The traditional episodic world-myths were sometimes incoherent in this

respect. The totality was explained in terms of something which was both part of
it and not so. If the world is held up by an elephant standing on a tortoise, where
on earth is that tortoise standing? David Hume, in The Natural History of
Religion, has much fun with such incoherences in the Greek myths, in which
the first of the Gods is later found to have ancestors after all. The Book of
Genesis is not free from such difficulties when the descendants of Adam and
Eve seem to find spouses in the wider world, Professor I. Schapera reports
interesting re-interpretations of it by African converts who notice this inco­
herence, and conclude that some unmentioned incest must have occurred and
that this was the real key to the story. Instead, had they but possessed such
vocabulary, they might have concluded that the white man was given to ' pre­
logical thought ', free of the law of non-contradiction.
 TH O UGHT AND CHANGE

it speaks of something, i.e. the great transition, that can meaning­

fully be looked at from the outside. (There is some outside left
from which to look.) On the other hand, the myth or crucial
picture does not borrow its values or their support from some­
thing outside itself: no Other world is invented to buttress the
norms of this one. In this respect, the neo-episodic picture
resembles that of the Evolutionists.
This then is the third, the ' neo-Episodic ' way of conceiving
progress, and the one which now effectively underlies social
thought. It has various, and to my mind, decisive advantages over
the previous two kinds, the (old) episodic and the global­
entelechy types - including, incidentally, the advantage of being
concerned with something that really happens, and the advantage
of already in fact pervading the contemporary social conscious­
ness. It has the advantage over the entelechy stories, that it is
concerned with a concrete episode, however large, rather than
with the totality of things. But at the same time, the neo-episodic
outlook takes note of - indeed, it concentrates on - those very
facts which had, above all others, inspired Evolutionism ; the
sense and perception of rapid, cumulative change, somehow
pointing or seeming to point in some one direction. Those very
changes which originally suggested Evolutionism, which was
indeed an extrapolation from them, are the very stuff of that
ctucial Episode which, on the present argument, is the vety
proper starting point of social thought : thus, in a way, they are
now elevated to an even higher dignity than they enjoyed within
the Evolutionist schema. One of the principal characteristics of
Evolutionist philosophy was its habit of extrapolating backward
and forward : noting the rapid and upward rate of change in the
historic present, it extended the curve backward - to the amoeba,
to inorganic matter, to some primaeval particle, to Nothing -
and forward, to some remarkable though intramundane con­
summation. By this, in a way, it deprived the remarkable con­
temporary phenomena of their uniqueness : they were merely
the contemporary little segment of a long curve whose general
features were similar throughout and which they illustrated, but
not perhaps in any outstandingly special or idiosyncratic way.
This indeed was one of the roots of Evolutionism ; the surren­
der to the temptation to extrapolate from a currently very steep
curve, and by doing so encouraging excessive and millenarian
 THE NEW S O C IAL CONTRACT

expectations for the future. The neo-Episodic outlook is free of

this : the consummation of industrialism will in a variety of ways,
be a very good thing, but it will not be the millennium, the resolu­
tion of all contradictions, the evaporation of all error, etc. Again,
there is no need to think back to the amoeba to explain (say) the
sixteenth century, or indeed to hanker after subsuming both
under some shared pattern.
But the new outlook also has a great and manifest superiority
over the old Episodic social philosophies, a superiority it shares
with Evolutionism ; it does have a sense of the complexity of
social phenomena and of growth, a freedom from any temptation
to use, however allegorically, a myth which suggests that a social
order can be born of a relatively simple act or fiat or agreement
or liberation. In brief, it possesses both the advantages of old
episodic theories - that it is concerned with a specific episode,
and is not inebriated with the Totality - and those of world­
growth stories, the recognition of the inadequacy of simple
episodes. It has of course an enormous and manifest advantage
in that the episode is, in this case, something which really hap­
pens and ' can be investigated : industrialisations, unlike social
contracts, do occur, It thus possesses the merits of each and the
defects of neither.
It is interesting that the superiority of the neo-episodic con­
ception over the perpetual-Jacob's-Ladder one can be established
both empirically and a priori. Empirically, it seems fa1· more
natural now to view history as a . succession of plateaux, inter­
rupted by steep, near perpendicular cliffs - by the dramatic and
profound transformations. There was the neolithic revolution,
and there is the industrial one, and the sociology of either must
be concerned primarily with change ; but the sociology of the
societies on the intervening plateau may tend to be ' functional­
ist ' and be concerned primarily with the manner in which they
maintained themselves in relative stability. Even when con­
cerned with changes within them (sometimes dramatic ones),
there can still be no presumption that these undulations on the
plateau are somehow premonitions of the cliff to come, that these
changes are somehow contributions, preparations, dress­
rehearsals for the major change which is to come. This - the
fact that history is now far more plausibly seen as a succession
of cliffs and plateaux without any underlying, so to speak,

43
 T H O U G H T AND CHAN GE

geological connection explaining an overall slope - is the empirical

argument in favour of the neo-episodic rather than the con­
tinuous theory of progress.
There is however also the cogent a priori consideration.
Suppose (unlikely though it is) that the empirical argument did
not apply, that history, even when freed from any European
parochialism, did present a picture of a fairly steady gradient,
with a fundamentally similar explanatory mechanism respon­
sible for changes throughout. It would still not be the case that,
when facing and involved in a specific transition at a given time,
say ours, that it would be sufficient simply to invoke the Series
as a whole, or its persistent underlying causal factor, in order
either to understand or to justify the current transformation. To
say this is to re-invoke the point that Evolutionism is logically
mistaken in supposing that to place something in a series is to
explain it. For it would still only be a contingent (though sur;.
prising, indeed, amazing) fact that the same factor (rationality,
class conflict, the machinations of a world spirit, a dialectic, an
elan vital, or natural selection, or whatnot) had been operating
throughout, notwithstanding the extreme variegation in the raw
material (from mutations in unicellular organism via the dis­
covery of agriculture to the building of dams and steel works)
which it had to encounter along its long route.
This point, which applies at the level of explanation, applies
with at least equal force at the level of justification. I refuse to
justify a change in my moral ideas - let us say, on the subject
of economic or educational or sexual or penal principles - on the
really rather preposterous grounds that the amoeba did it too :
that the change in question is somehow analogous, exemplifies
the same principles or illustrates the work · of the same force or
tendency, as some change undergone by the amoeba when it
became something else. The amoeba may be, for all I care,
viciously competitive, or on the other hand sweetly inclined to
Mutual Aid. This is a matter of great concern to biologists, and
above all to other amoebas, but not to contemporary moralists.
The essence of Evolutionism was a kind of moral and socio­
logical equivalent of mathematical induction : let it be shown
that if a property applies to stage n, it must also apply to stage
n plus 1 ; and let it be shown that it does apply to some given
stage ; it then follows, that it applies to the whole series following

44
 THE NEW S O C IAL CONTRACT

on that stage. But the premiss allowing the inference from n to

n plus I simply does not happen to be available in either ethics
or sociology.
It is of course possible that the force of the logical argument
against serialism, the denial of sociological and moral equiva­
lents of mathematical induction, would not be so apparent, were
it not for the fact that at present, the step-like nature of history
is so very evident. It is perhaps the extreme steepness of the
current step, its remarkable discontinuity with preceding history
for the larger portion of mankind, which has also directed our
interest to the step-like and crucial Neolithic Revolution. What
interests us is that which the present steep step does not share
with the preceding plateaux (even if it were gently inclined).
The acceptance of the view that the neo-Episodic conception
of progress is what underlies current social perception, helps to
solve what otherwise seems a paradoxical and contradictory
feature of the contemporaty wodd - the fact that we both do and
yet do not ' believe in ptogress '. Notoriously, the classical philo­
sophies of progress are out of fashion and seem inelevant : but
equally and most emphatically life is lived ' on a slope ', there is a
general demand of sustained improvement, based on the belief
that this is possible, and somehow a human prerogative, and that
failure to satisfy this requirement is socially pathological. The
paradox is not difficult to resolve: we do believe in a specific
kind of ptogress, in the possibility of achieving a full and general
industrial society, untarnished by remaining slums, in various
senses, sutviving from the ttansitional and traditional societies.
But we do not believe that the total world history is the con­
tinuous story of a collective and total tedemption, nor are we
even patticularly concerned with that watered-down version of
the older faith in ptogtess, the ' perfectibility of man ' .
T o put this anothet way : the acceptance of the commended
view - or rather its explicit recognition, fot we are atguing that
this view already petvades our social consciousness - enables us
to avoid the dilemma between millenarian expectations on the
one hand and a certain kind of fashionable philosophic consetva­
tism on the other. The strong point of this kind of conservatism,
expressed fot instance in the writings of Professors Oakeshott
and Talmort, is precisely its critique of millenarian expectations,
tending to absolutism in politics, a critique summed up in the

45
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

famous assertion 1 that ' in political activity . . . there is . . .

neither starting-place nor appointed destination ' ; that the aim of
' political education ' is to prevent us from embracing ' the
illusions ' such as that in social life there is anywhere ' a destina­
tion to be reached or even a detectable strand of progress '.
The doctrines castigated - ' strand of progress ' (i.e. one persist­
ing over time) and a ' destination ' - are precisely those of the
evolutionists, the ' destination ' being that millenarian expecta­
tion of some kind of moral consummation which is a corollary
of the ' strand of progress '. (When one insists on extrapolating
from a strand which points upwards, anrl. which does so at an
increasingly steep angle, the increasing rate of progress can
hardly avoid pointing to heaven.) With the rejection of these
doctrines one may well feel sympathy. What is totally unaccept­
able, to the point of utter weirdness, and argues a strange blind­
ness to the modern world, is the apparent corollary of the denial
of the ' destination ' view - the idea that somehow social life is
always much of a muchness, that our political life is not lived on
an upward incline, that we cannot or should not invoke the
criterion of progress. Such a pessimism is quite unnecessary, and
wilfully shuts its eyes to the fact that for the great majority of
mankind, current politics is a transition from the certainty of
poverty, short life, insecurity and brutality, and the strong likeli­
hood of tyranny, to a condition containing the near-certainty of
affluence and at least the reasonable possibility of security and
liberty. Again, the specific and ' episodic ' interpretation of pro­
gress enables us to do justice to this manifest truth, without at
the same time leading us to embrace the notions either of a
persistent ' strand ' or of an absolute ' destination ' .2
1 Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays .(London 1962),
pp. 1 27 and 1 3 3 •
2 Oakeshott's philosophy actually seems t o contain two incompatible doc­
trines : one, the permanent much-of-a-muchness of political life, in view of the
absence of harbours, destinations and anchorages, and two, the view that things
have been persistently getting worse, since the diffusion of the ' Rationalist '
poison, i.e. the expectation of social knowledge and moral criteria independent
of and transcending the specific tradition to which it is to be applied, a poison
whose origin can be variously dated four, eight, or sixteen centuries ago. . . .
(Curiously, one of the main props of the Oakeshottian argument is identical
with that of the Evolutionists - the impossibility of moral and cognitive tran­
scendence. But in their case, it was the ultimate totality that one could not,
plausibly enough, transcend. In his case, it is any one of an indefinite number of
 THE NEW S O C IAL CO NTRACT

Another influential and similar recent attack on the ultimate

' destination ' doctrine nur mit ein bischen anderen Worten is
- -

that of Sir Isaiah Berlin, in Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford

19 5 8). Again, one may well sympathise with his attack on the
idea that some total synthesis, some complete moral consum­
mation is possible or even conceivable (and that it would - and
this is relevant for his purposes - justify constraint, in as far as
its achievement, by any means, would represent a true liberatl.on,
in that ' positive ' sense of liberty which he rejects). Such a
synthesis or dissolution of all contradictions, is of course the
equivalent of the ultimate destination or harbour rejected by
Oakeshott. Personally, I feel no sympathy for that notion : the
idea of an ultimate synthesis in which all cakes are both eaten and
kept has little to commend it. Generally it is a by-product of
missing the point of the alternatives which have to be faced. Yet
Berlin's argument, which is presumably intended to be a politically
relevant attack on doctrines amongst which Marxism is the most
important, is also strangely beside the point. How many of the
intellectuals in transitional countries, who are the only real floating
voters in the ideological conflict between Marxism and liberalism,
(Berlin presumably neither expects to convince the Russians, nor
feels the need to sustain the faith of the Americans), are swayed
or tempted by the notion of some such absolute synthesis? How
many have even given it a thought? (Have the Russians?)
In as far as they are tempted by Marxism and flirt with it, as
many of them do, the attraction is quite other, and. has nothing
to do with the deficiencies of Hegelian-type moral philosophy.
' traditions ', which are left undefined, either in specific cases or in principle -
with all the opportunity for arbitrary and convenient application of the doctrine
which this allows and encourages.)
The notorious weakness of this philosophy is of course that this rather
homogenous (if negative) view of all politics - never inspired by genuine, inde­
pendent knowledge - makes it impossible to comment usefully on that specific
and fundamental transformation which, on the present argument, constitutes the
essence of current political experience : science and industrialisation. It is ironic
that this philosophy shares this weakness with one of the few surviving Evolution­
ists, Professor M. Ginsberg, to whose thought it is otherwise diametrically
opposed. Ginsberg's insistence on characterising social evolution in terms which
are by him intended to apply to the whole of social evolution - terms amongst
which ' rationality ' appears to be the main one - makes it hard for him to say
much specifically about that current transformation which really concerns us .
Cf. Morris Ginsberg, The Diversity of Morals (London 1956).

47
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

The attraction in so far as it is intellectual, has to do with

Marxism as a doctrine concerning the specific social transforma­
tion of industrialisation, indeed as a recipe for it - in other
worQ.s an (often tacitly) bowdlerised and selectively re-interpreted
Marxism. The mistake is - if contemporary relevance was intended
for Berlin's argument, which I think it was - to see Marxism as
it actually historically existed, an Evolutionist doctrine, and not
as it now really affects the minds of men, as an Episodic one.
Another dilemma avoided by the explicit recognition that we
are concerned pre-eminently with progress, but only of the
specific, episodic kind, is that between ' Western parochialism '
and the cyclical doctrines of history (leaving aside the false view
that we see and should seek no pattern in history at all - the
' much�of-a-muchness ' view). Evolutionist doctrines were and
are European-parochial, in their habit of seeing the particular
cumulative story of the West1 as the growth, the education of the
human race. Whatever defects the cyclical doctrines had, this one
was not amongst them : thinkers such as Spengler or Toynbe.e
were never tempted by variants of the view that Tahitian or
Senegalese children had Gauls for their ancestors. Indeed the
appeal of cyclical doctrines, apart from sometimes providing for a
kind of pessimistic self-titillation, was precisely the range of their
horizons, their (much vaunted incidentally) freedom from acci­
dental parochialism. But the price paid for this - price implicit in
the very notion of cyclical history, and a price sometimes paid
with conscious enthusiasm - was the denial of uniqueness to
our own time. For various quite obvious reasons - type of tech­
nology, size of population and organisation, and the nature of the
problems engendered by this - our time is in fact blatantly
unique. The denial of this is perhaps too great a price to pay for
escaping the parochial nature of Evolutionist progress theories.
Again, the episodic notion of progress allows us to retain this
uniqueness, by giving us, rightly, a kind of horizontal variant of
it, in time, without wrongly claiming it in some kind of vertical
i.e. geographic or cultural sense.
1 As Professors C. Levi-Strauss and Raymond Aron have stressed, Western

history is not the only ' cumulative ' one : for instance, Amerindian history may
lend itself to a remarkable ' growth ' picture. The parochialism could take various
forms : simple neglect of non-Western history, or the view that it is a slowed­
down re-play of it, or the view that it has got stuck and become static.
 THE NEW S O C IAL C ONTRACT

The argument is that the mainstream of modern thought has

gone through three stages, characterisable as differing ways of
conceiving progress, and that we are at present in the third of
these stages (and that this stage represents the true view - a view
which, like any self�congratulatory opinion, is indeed open to
suspicion). But as a simple historical account, this story needs
considerable correction and elaboration. If it were accurate, in
this simple form, one would expect the contemporary intellec­
tual scene to be full of protagonists of the neo-Episodic view,
busy destroying and replacing the addicts of Global Growth. But
a survey of, for instance, current and recent issues of philosophi­
cal journals would reveal that nothing, or virtually nothing, of
this kind is actually taking place.
Evolutionist preoccupation in fact went out of philosophy
some time about or after the turn of the century. They were
replaced, not by ' neo-Episodic ' ones, in the present sense, but
by styles of thought which were curiously and often weirdly
timeless. Their timelessness is responsible for much of the un­
reality and irrelevance of recent thought. It was shared by various
otherwise superficially disparate schools. These styles of thought
are of some interest, especially as symptoms of their age. 1
Hence, when the neo-Episodic vision finally did crystallise, it
was formulated without the aid of professional, self-conscious
philosophy. It emerged and is emerging in the language of
sociologists, political commentators, applied economists, inter­
national civil servants and others : the central term of the new
language came to be ' underdevelopment ' , initially a euphemism
for ' backwardness ', but a backwardness conceived no longer in
terms of some persistent, moral-intellectual Jacob's Ladder, but
in terms of the one specific transition. The new perspective also
manifested itself in other ways : the shift of attention to socio­
logists such as Max Weber who were primarily concerned, not
with overall ' development ', but with the one specific develop­
ment, that of modern society ; the tendency to be concerned with
those aspects of Marxism relevant to this one transition, and to
ignore its Evolutionist aspects ; and, recently and most charac­
teristically, the concern with the notion of industrial society,
and its antithesis, to the detriment of other classifications,
oppositions and alternatives.
1 See below, Chapter VIII.

49
 C H A P TE R T H REE

METAMORP H OSIS

The Concept of Transition

There is a celebrated story by Kafka in which a man wakes up
one morning to find himself a monstrous beetle. The story high­
lights the perhaps uncontroversial idea that a metamorphosis of a
man into a beetle raises considerable problems, moral ones,
problems of self-identity and self-image. A man-into-beetle
cannot happily draw on the moral, conceptual, emotional re­
sources of either man or beetle : the convictions, forms of life,
traditions, intimations - in whichever medium you care to see
your philosophy expressed - of men or beetles are denied him.
This is an obvious point. Itis of course relevant if, as is claimed,
a specific, but fundamental metamorphosis is both the reality, and
the dominant myth, of our time. ·

The conceptual and moral problems facing a being-in-transi­

tion do not depend on the direction of the metamorphosis :
nothing hinges on the fact that it is one of our kind, a man, who
is transformed into the alien beetle. The reverse process would
give rise to similar problems, though it might excite our sym­
pathy less (which, if so, is not to our credit). In fact, the crucial
transformation of our time is one of beetles (i.e. relatively alien
beings and societies) into men (i.e. forms of life akin to our
own).
The general consequences of a metamorphosis are both
obvious and well known : a disorientation and bewilderment, a
sense of chaos and contradiction, and an attempt to restore some
kind of order and directiop. The very world seems determined to
haze us. Under favourable circumstances, this situation can lead
to the attempt to set up systematic criteria for what should
and should not be admitted into the restored order, to identity

so
 META M O R P H O S I S

regained. This happens to be the principal origin of philosophy.1

Philosophy is orientation, in a chaos or vacuum.
Strictly speaking, philosophic Angst, the sense of a complex
yet cold and indifferent world, which underwrites no values and
provides neither clarity nor certainty, is something which does
not logically presuppose a metamorphosis, either for its truth or
for its perception. A penetrating or unusually anxious mind could
perceive the outer coldness and weightlessness even when shel­
tered by the warm atmosphere of a fixed way of life and being.
The outer universe is cold and things in it are weightless : it holds
no comfort for men or beetles. But in their habitual lives, both
men and beetles are surrounded by their respective atmospheres,
reinforcing the illusion of a meaningful universe, humanly or
beetle-wise, and one in which men or beetles do have a comfort­
able gravity. So, in practice, it generally takes the atmospheric
disturbance or a metamorphosis to bring home such truths. A
stable order, social or personal, can generally be relied upon to
obscure the bleaker ultimate truths. Mauvaise foi, the supposition
that our shared illusions and values have a firmer cosmic founda­
tion than they possibly can have, is the natural and perhaps
desirable condition of mankind. 2
Thus the bleak truths, in some ultimate sense perhaps ever
true, become practical and pressing concerns only in states of
transition, when the identity of the believer-and-agent is uncer­
tain, when the ballasts and dogmas, however unwarranted, that
are built into any stable identity, have become unavailing. It is
this condition which generates concern with issues concerning
1 There is a contrary and incredible (but in fact recently much believed)

doctrine that philosophy, the attempt to set up general criteria, is somehow

pathological and springs from a misunderstanding of language (according to
Wittgenstein and his followers), or of knowledge as such (according to Professor
M. Oakeshott and his followers).
2 This ought of course to be somewhat of a problem for an ethic opposed to
such ' bad faith ', unless this ethic intends to castigate the majority of mankind
and of human societies - which is unlikely, not so much because the Existential­
ists who uphold it may not wish to take on such odds, but because they also
claim not to dictate any one commitment and hence not to exclude any. This
position is difficult to maintain, as most historic commitments in fact also incor­
porate the illusion that they are something more than a mere commitment - the
illusion (if such it is) that they are the recognition of an objective truth. Hence
they, at least, would seem to be excluded. Yet at the same time the philosophy of
free commitment also claims not to prejudge its direction.
 THOU GHT AND CHANGE

knowledge and values, and which makes such concerns in­

escapable.
Of course, the insights gained during a transition may be
retained and preserved subsequently : a post-transition man or
beetle may thereafter live with the knowledge, treasured or
feared, that no identity is secure. It could happen again. One
might even wish it to happen again, or at least to retain the possi­
bility of it. Indeed, the avoidance of a rigid identity, the willing­
ness to contemplate and sometimes embrace new possibilities,
may itself become a value and a central one, and one which men
can find appealing : the idea of an ' open society '. But for the
present, it is not such voluntary, deliberate and reasonably con­
trolled openness that concerns us : it is the involuntary, dramatic
and largely uncontrolled openness of a society undergoing a
transformation.
In metamorphosis, fixed identity is lost - and ' identity ' of
course embraces picture-of-world values, crucial concepts,
priorities, tools, connections - all those things which, if only they
were retained, could help one to jerk oneself back into a fixed self.
This situation constitutes the very paradigm of a moral problem.
Interesting moral crises are not those in which the question is
simply whether individual or group will or will not succeed in
maintaining or attaining some given and assumed standard - a
kind of moral weight-lifting - but those in which the aims or
criteria, the identity of the solution, are themselves in serious
doubt.
This situation is not always well understood. A large propor­
tion of moral philosophies and psychologies insist on seeing it
from the outside, ex post as it were, from the viewpoint of the
crisis overcome, the transformation completed, the correct or
ultimate or preferred identification determined.
To do this is of course to prejudge the issue faced by the person
or society in transition. The very language employed by such
theories to characterise the transformation-situation covertly pre­
judges the question : employing beetle-language or man-language,
they prejudge the very issue faced by the unfortunate man-into­
beetle. The theories describe the situation to the sufferer, in
man-concepts or in beetle-concepts, as the case may be, and then
proceed to point out - somewhat pained that anyone should fail
to see anything so obvious - that the Way Out, the direction of
52
 METAMORP H O S I S

salvation or cure or whatnot, is quite obvious, that all that is

re quired is a determined heave in this or that direction and the
problem can be overcome. Yes : given man-language or beetle­
language, the answer generally is obvious. Languages have norms
built into them. But the choice of the language, the general con­
cepts in terms of which the situation in itself is to be character­
ised, is precisely what is sub judice in a crisis situation. That
happens to be just what makes it a crisis situation.
A hostile observer of these theories - religious, philosophic,
political, psychiatric - may suspect that the way in which they
miss the point, the manner in which they prejudge the issue by
the very language in which they proffer their help, is semi­
deliberate : they wish to pre-judge the issue. After all, if their help
is accepted they gain a convert : and their patent cure has a better
hope of acceptance if incapsulated in the very language which
claims, dispassionately, to diagnose the situation, than if it were
peddled overtly, as a solution which is itself in doubt. If built into
the very language, if made into a corollary of its crucial concepts
or of its picture of the outer world or of both, the salvation can
come to the sufferer as something he ' discovered for himself' . It
comes as an inner and spontaneous revelation and, as such, is
far more persuasive, and more lasting, than if it had been offered
him from the outside, from a source as yet unsanctified by his
own vision. (Later, when he has faith and the faith includes
reverence for the given fount, that very fount can further
reinforce his belief: but it would be tactically unwise for an
outer source of truth to display itself too much before it has
acquired its charisma.)
Of course, not all philosophies, theologies, etc., do commit this
sin of including a set of answers at the end of the book, or worse,
at the start, of giving us a set of programme notes when we are
supposed to be observing or un9ergoing a metamorphosis. Some
do not : some do it in part and not in another, being less than clear
about this matter, or even vacillating between the desire to
describe the experience honestly and to proselytise for their own
way of terminating it. But it is perhaps symptomatic of our con­
dition that the thinkers who now appeal to us most are those not
given to pre-judging, who, in at least one of their moods, com­
municate the feel of transition from within, and not from a
subsequent terminus. The thinkers who attract us are not these

53
 T H O U GHT AND CHANGE

standing, rock-like, on some firm position, but those who have

had the skids put under them, and who display some skill and
honesty in describing this condition.
For reasons indicated - one must use some language, with its
inherent vantage point and presuppositions - it is difficult, per­
haps impossible, to communicate a transition, a genuine uncer­
tainty of vision, directly : the language employed contradicts that
which has to be said. Hence those who succeed in communica­
ting this, tend to do so by means of self-directed irony, by saying
something and then also indicating why that something is also
unacceptable, by getting involved in regressive arguments until
we catch on to the principle which generates them and the way
in which they are inescapable - as does the hero of Dostoevski's
splendid Notes from Underground, a work which communicates
this matter superbly. What makes, for instance, certain later
passages of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals so moving is that we
are watching a man knowingly, with superb lucidity, approaching
the middle point on the way to some new beetle-hood, to some­
thing alien to his starting point, and seeing his world disintegrate
around him : Nietzsche attacks and rejects a certain kind of ethic
in the name of honesty and truth, but also sees full well that the
high valuation of honesty and truth which impels him to it is
itself part of that ethic. The element of hysteria in the writing is
due to a kind of frantic and self-defeating urge to speed - he
must saw off the branch before, as a result of his own endeavours,
it has broken off under him.
The philosopher who, of course, particularly owes his fame to
his insight into the state of transition without pre-judgment is
Kierkegaard. His view was basically that we are ever in this
condition, in that the pre-judging we do is still done by us
without basis, in the neither-man-nor-beetle state, and that full
humanity lay in seeing this ; those who did not see this, were
simply under an illusion. At the same time, however, he corn­
mended Christianity - a religion which for many others, at any
rate, has seemed to be a solution, a stable condition. The reason­
ing is somewhat odd : Christianity is so inherently paradoxical
and thereby intellectually offensive, that it can never be embraced
except in a tense, ' transitional ' kind of way. But just that is the
huma1;1 condition. Hence, somehow, Christianity, presumably in
virtue of accentuating the human condition, was true. One

54
 METAMOR P H O S I S

obvious trouble with this position is of course that there are

many creeds absurd enough to accentuate the human condition
for their believers. Another difficulty is that this view can hardly
be identified with the Christianity of most Christians. A large
number of Christians have traditionally supposed that positive
proofs, justifications, of one kind or another, from miracles
to the ontological proof, were available and relevant to their
belief.
The real irony of the modern Kierkegaard fashion is of course
that he set out to make things harder, and in fact succeeded in
making them breath�takingly easy. He set out to make them
harder in reaction to Hegel and the modernist theology of his
time, which maintained that traditional Christianity was some�
how identical with a philosophically demonstrable and rational
philosophy (its own) ; that it was quite acceptable, indeed man�
datory, for post-Enlightenment man : so that there was no need
for any strain or tension between belief and what it was demon�
strably :reasonable to believe. Reason, it appeared, validated
Faith : Reason turned out to be the butterfly to the chrysalis of
faith. Kierkegaard, on the contrary, maintained that it was never
easy ; either in general, the human situation being what it is, or
for Christians in particular, Christianity being what it was ; (and
therefore, by that curious tacit additional inference, Christianity
was true). The modern reading of this has of course been - as
everything is always a matter of ' commitment ', you are quite free
to commit yourself in the direction in which your inclination,
family or national background, or whatnot, lead you.1 What had
started as a demonstration of difficulty (in contrast to the facility
of Hegel) ended as a demonstration of ease (in contrast to other
modern doctrines, which had the temerity to suggest that arbit­
rary and ill�founded beliefs ought not to be embraced).
The Hegel against whom Kierkegaard was reacting also had a
fine sense of what a transition was like : the ' dialectic ', etc., may
be mumbo-jumbo as formal logic, but it is a most suggestive
metaphor or parable for the whole succession of men-into-beetles
(or vice-versa) transformations which make up European his­
tory, the specific way in which something emanating from and
yet rejected by the man turns into the beetle that replaces him,
1 Cf. W. W. Bartley's brilliant The Retreat to Commitment, Alfred A. Knopf

(New York 1962).

55
 T H O U GHT AND CHANGE

etc. But of course in the end, Hegel seems a Prejudger, despite his
sense of what it was like to undergo a metamorphosis, of the fact
that it is an endogenous process : the series of transitions did add
up to a coherent story, the former contained the seed of the
latter, the latter completed, consummated the former. Thus the
story as a whole provided justification and meaning for every
crisis within it. Thus, in the end, the uncertainty and crises
were merely apparent - though not for the participants - for a
final solution awaited the struggle and was inherent in it. But
if the participants saw this, the metamorphoses would no longer
be really critical for them : but if they were not real and critical
for them, the process would cease. Thus a terrible double-think
is necessary for any Hegelian : he must look at crises both from
the inside, without prejudging, and from the outside, with pre­
judgment. It is all rather like Pirandello's Six Characters in
Search of an Author we are, impossibly, asked to be characters
-

and co-authors all at once . 1

Even Kant had a fine sense o f what metamorphosis involved -
at a more individual, less weltgeschichtlich level than Hegel. Super­
ficially, this may seem a surprising contention : Kant, the
rationaliser of the rigid, stable, Protestant, puritan conscience.
But the Categorical Imperative is only superficially a puritan
myth. The point about the Categorical Imperative was that it
provided a motivation unsullied by any mundane, ' human '
desire. But why was such a ' pure ' motive so dear to him? Not, in
the main, because our actual desires were so unacceptable (they
weren't so hot either, but let that pass) : it was, notoriously,
because they were causally determined, and hence entirely con­
tingent, entirely at the mercy of what causal laws happened to
apply in this world, and what initial conditions happened to set
them off. Hence, if you identified yourself with your mundane
aims and desires, your identity was entirely contingent and
ephemeral, entirely at the mercy of causal accident : you quite
literally could not call your soul your own. If, on the other hand,
your main principle of conduct was inspired by a ' pure ' principle ,
1 George Santayana tells the fascinating story of the vacillations of the

American Hegelian, Josiah Royce, concerning the sinking of the Lusitania. As a

Hegelian, he had to see that it was a necessary step in the dialectic generating
American self-assertion in response to the German. . . . In the end, he signed a
protest none the less.
 METAMOR P H O S I S

extra-mundane, quite independent of any empirical accident of

this world, you did at least have a self you could call your own,
however difficult it then became to explain the cohabitation
and intercourse of this pure self with the trousers-wearing, tax­
paying, walk-indulging, etc., self in any normal sense. (For
Descartes, the self was a premiss ; for Kant a premiss was the self.)
Kant certainly did not accept metamorphosis, the possibility that
in the end we do live precariously between identities, etc. : his
moral philosophy is designed to obviate this clearly perceived
danger. But the efficiency with which it is designed for this
very purpose shows that he knew the vertigo involved in this
condition. No fixed Categorical Imperative, only contingent
aims - and you do not know who you are or may be : therefore,
argued Kant, the Categorical Imperative.

* * *

These modern philosophies, however, which in one aspect or

another display a sense of ' transition ', of the fact that general
issues arise in a pressing form when our personal or social
identity is in doubt, and therefore cannot be solved by appealing
to that identity - these insightful doctrines are not typical of
belief-systems in general. Most of these are Prejudgers - they
characterise our troubles in a language which incorporates a
solution, and which the language in question endows with a
spurious authority - and they thereby provide a facile solace , 1
From the viewpoint o f theories which do s o covertly prejudge
the issue (by describing a situation of transition as it appears
from the viewpoint of a transition completed and a firm identity
achieved) there has always been a certain paradox and difficulty :
it is, after all, the unregenerate who have to choose the path to
regeneration, those without Grace who have to be ready to receive
it, those with the wrong kind of soul who have to wish for the
healthy state, those in the throes of neurotic delusion who must
1 Some systems of thought are ambiguous, and offer two possible interpreta­
tions, one given to Prejudgment, one not. (This ambiguity too can be functional.)
Thus, people have read Hegel as an ' histodcist ' doctrine, providing a ready­
made solution in the form of a historical rail leading from one state to the next ;
but equally, his immanentism, denial of dualism, and of doing history in advance
of the event, can be invoked in support of another, non-prejudging, interpreta­
tion.

57
 T H O U G H T AND C H ANGE

choose to go to the psychiatrist (and one of the dght school), those

in the throes of alienation who must remove the scales from their
eyes, and so on. It is indeed truly providential that this should
happen at all, for it contradicts the initial hypothesis : those who
are separated from the saving truth, those who are under the
domination of the lower parts of their soul, those who lack the
proper insight into themselves, etc., are just the kind of person
whom one should not trust to desire salvation at all, and still less
(and more important) to identify the right brand of it.
This paradox beset Plato's philosophy and many saving or
therapeutic faiths since. It arises from this sad fact : that it is
always the unregenerate who have to recognise that correct path,
from the recognition of which, ex hypothesi, their unregenerate
selves debar them : it is the beetk that must choose to become
man whilst it is still more than half beetle. As it stands, this prob­
lem is insoluble, though the strangest doctrines exist for the
purpose of evading it. But the problem is merely the obverse of
the fact that many theories do indeed describe transitions, the
crises of identity, from outside, from the viewpoint of the crisis
overcome and a firm identity attained. 1
Had they not prejudged the nature of the regenerate soul, they
would not have needed to assign the task of choosing and tread­
ing the path to it to the unregenerate soul (for no one would yet
have been classified as such).
The prejudging of issues in this way is wrong. The vantage
point (or rather lack of one) of a being-in-transition is philo­
sophically the correct position : the world is correctly perceived
not through the vision of men or beetles, but through the doubts
of men-into-beetles. This is merely a way of saying - but,
1 It is curious that the sincere sceptic Hume wrote moral philosophy in such
a way, and it makes it difficult to read this part of his work without embarrass­
ment. Though he based valuation on feeling, and was committed to a view of
feeling as fairly volatile, and certainly not as tied very rigidly to any object, he
nevertheless identified with his own moral convictions with vigour and without
perceptible anxiety. He commends the humane and urbane values which he
favours, and angrily comments on the rival ' monkish ' virtues, with the tone of a
man whose vantage point is fixed and secure. In the theory of knowledge, he is
not like this : he is fully aware of his own oscillation of identity between the
backgammon-playing realist and the reflective phenomenalist, the man who
thinks things are as they seem, and the beetle who has shown that they are not.
Had Hume shown the same honesty and self-knowledge in ethics, which showed
in logic, he would have been that much more lovable.
 METAMORPH O S I S

perhaps, a good way of saying '- that nothing, and particularly not
the values and categories we have (and are), is ultimately exempt
from questioning or can be guaranteed against the result of
questioning. The universe, or the laws of logic, are indifferent to
the norms of men and beetles, and will underwrite neither. A
stable form of life can obscure this or make this less than an
immediate, pressing matter. There is perhaps no reason why we
should not seek such more comfortable forms of life, human or
beetle-like, and in fact, we do seek them collectively and individu­
ally : for though there is no absolute resting place in this world,
no solution endowed with necessity and cosmic backing, no
wholly reliable Summum Bonum, there are available, with some
effort and a great deal of luck, fairly comfortable resting places
which will do instead, which interpose some illusion between us
and the darkness outside. There is no reason why we should flee
such comforts when they happen to be within our reach, out of
some misguided loyalty to the bleak truths that are obscured or
softened by them : but there is no reason either why we should
not, when in the comfort of relatively stable self-identification,
remember the bleak truths of transition and occasionally air
them. Indeed, after certain transitions, such airing may be both
likely and desirable.
The error committed by the prejudging creeds, which by their
very language presuppose and prejudge that manhood or beetle­
hood is the norm, is one which, in a certain way, we can hardly
help committing. It is not merely that the attraction of a comfort­
able identity is too great, in those happy cases when we have the
good luck to be exposed to its temptation : the difficulty is more
fundamental than that. It is that we cannot but speak some
language, we cannot but adopt some vantage point, even if only
to express a doubt or to recognise an uncertainty. For this reason,
the numerous philosophies which perceived and stressed the
need not to prejudge, promptly also proceeded to commit the
error they decried. The need not to prejudge by the very
language employed, is only a way of formulating a point stressed,
in various ways, by a number of otherwise divergent philo­
sophers - Hume, Kant, G. E. Moore, the Existentialists and the
Logi�al Positivists included. But all these tend also to commit
the error they castigated.
The need not to prejudge, as stated earlier, is most familiar in

59
 T H O U GHT AND C HAN GE

academic philosophy under the misleading name, given it by

G. E. Moore, of the ' Naturalistic Fallacy ' 1 - the point that it is
fallacious to define value as some concrete X, with the conse­
quence that one cannot then question the value of X itself - for
one's very definition prohibits it. (This is simply a pedantic way
of saying that one's language must not prejudge one's values.)
But Moore went on, promptly, to commit the fallacy which he
had just rechristened : within his system, it is impossible to
question whether a certain alleged entity, a ' non-natural quality ',
is or is not good, for it is claimed by him that this quality is what
' good ' means. (The fact that this entity does not exist only
makes it harder to pinpoint the error - but it does not mitigate
it.) In various ways, the other philosophers also commit it : it
is impossible for them to query, in the various cases, whether that
which is approved by the detached observer or the majority, or
that which is a case of rational self-direction, or whether a
fact-and-value separating language (if such is possible), or that
which is consciously known to be ' chosen ' rather than accepted
as given - is really to be approved. In each case, the very language
employed to assert the ' autonomy of value ' (this itself is one of
the various formulations), itself also smuggles in and prejudges
at least one value.
This point could also easily be made against the present
formulation. What the present argument has in effect done is to
credit a kind of moral truth to ' transitions ' , i.e. to the type of
sceptical, hesitant perception which characterises transitions,
which in turn is defined in terms of genuine doubt, and lack of
fixed identity, in terms of being neither m5tn nor beetle, 2 Philo­
sophically, this formulation may be no better, or worse though
perhaps less pedantic, than some of the others.
It does, however, have considerable advantages for the present
purposes : ' identity ' , ' transition ', in the sense defined to suit the
argument, have also, at the same time, some resemblance to
social realities. Reasonably stable social orders have a fixed

1 Cf. Principia Ethica (1903).

2 The argument is circular, though not viciously so. Roughly, everything can
be questioned. A fixed identity is one whose very nature, as it were, exudes this
or that normative conviction. Transitions are states in which fixed identities are
lacking. Therefore, in transitions the truth - that everything is open to question
- is perceived. Q.E.D.

6o
 METAMORPH O S I S

identity, collective and individual self-images, which emit, andjor

contain, norms and styles of perceiving and valuing, and within
them these cannot or need not, for practical purposes, be ques­
tioned. Transitional states on the other hand, by definition, lack,
and need, such amenities. The conscious attempt to acquire
them, to determine them, and do so with some good reason and
not arbitrarily, is philosophy. Hence this way of formulating the
' autonomy of value ' at least high-lights the connection between
philosophy and social reality.
The regressive criticism - that this formulation itself too
commits the ' Naturalistic Fallacy ' - that it, too, prejudges, can
of course be re-applied : the very language employed seems to pre­
judge certain issues, issues which in fact it would be legitimate
to raise. The very language employed appears to value doubt
higher than certainty, for the state of transition is described as
somehow open to truth, whilst a stable identity obscures it. May
not someone legitimately challenge this very valuation and pic­
ture? Someone might, for instance, most plausibly challenge it
thus : what we have here is a perfectly familiar, indeed stale
romanticism, a plea for moral Wanderlust as against social roots,
for bohemianism against the philistine, for doubt and quest as
against achievement, etc., in brief, a mystique of Hamletism, only
one sociologically expressed in terms of societies rather than
individuals, hence a kind of mystique of collective Hamletism .
This is nothing, the contemptuous critic might go on, but some
old nineteenth-century romanticism. tarted up with the language
of sociology. (Not a bad point, at that.) But - and this is his
specifically philosophical objection - the high valuation of doubt,
the low valuation of certainty, the suggestion that moral cer­
tainty is specious and the by-product of artificial insulation, of
an ultimately arbitrary identity endowed with an aura of being
more than arbitrary, all this is built into the very language : so
once again, an issue which is open to doubt or discussion has
been prejudged by the categories employed.
Yes. In one sense, there is no escaping this charge, or some
variant of it. One must use some language to give even a sceptical
account of the moral situation, and this language, like any
other, will prejudge something. (I leave aside the alternative of
not speaking, and peddling ineffable truths, which prejudges
even more.) All one can do is be aware of this situation and be

61
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

ready to take one step further back and examine, if necessary,

those assumptions which one's initial mode of expression pre­
judged. For instance, it is argued that the ' prejudging ' type of
philosophy, which analyses a Hamlet situation in terms which
already presuppose that it has the ' correct answer ', is wrong,
and that the correct standpoint of a philosophy is always as from
a transition, from the vantage point of a doubtful identity . 1
But whilst I d o believe this - that the ' prejudgers ' are wrong,
and the transition-vantage-point correct, I do not particularly

1 This I also believe to be the essence of Existentialism (if this is not a para­

doxical phrase). Curiously, modern Existentialists seem to make a cult not so

much of the vacillating transition as of the ' decision ' and its subsequent main­
tenance. I think, however, that this must always be read as the cult of a decision­
which-remembers-its-origins, in doubt and choice, and does not uphold an
illusion of an extremely given fact, or validation.
It is easy to see, incidentally, how the ' reg�;essive ' criticism applies to Exis­
tentialism : the merit of a commitment which is ' chosen ' and which as it were
ever remembers this, is that it is honest, free from illusion. But why, if all values
are so chosen, could one not also ' choose ' illusion, mauvaise foi? The very
language of Existentialism prejudges at least one choice, and presents at least
one value as somehow inherently given.
There is an interesting and related wealmess in some kinds of Existentialism,
connected with the commendation, in Sartre, for instance, of authenticity. An
' authentic ' X is, it appears, a man who wills himself to be an X, freely, and with­
out the illusion of X-hood being some brute and contingent and externally given
fact - where X is some possible human role or characterisation. (Cf., for instance,
J. P. Sartre, Rejlexions sur la Question Juive, 1 954). No doubt, one can embrace
one's role or roles joyfully, or one can do it shamefacedly and see them as an
external burden. But: many, perhaps most, human roles, have as an integral
part of themselves that they seem something given. Social facts are, as Durk­
heim said, like things, and roles are social facts if anything is. It is also true that
in modern times, which are both sophisticated and highly transitional, we often
see them not as things but as options, and that when nevertheless, thing-like,
they prove hard to budge, we may resent them. But to commend ' authenticity '
is implicitly to condemn the large number of roles which have ' inauthenticity '
built into them. There is a regress here too : Sartre advises Jews to be such
' authentically ', to will themselves or whatnot. Could one not also accept
authentically, the more complex role of minority-member-not-wishing-to-be­
such? And so on? Anything can be ' authentic ', even self-rejection. ' Authenticity '
and ' bad faith ' are inherently slippery concepts.
And it would be quite wrong to suppose that such self-rejection, built into the
very self-image and identification, can only occur in highly sophisticated com­
plex societies such as ours. I happen to know a tribe, as ' primitive ' as they
come, which has similar ambivalence and irony built into its own conception of
itself, and clearly expresses it in its legends.
 METAM ORPHO S I S

wish t o use the very language I employ to hoodwink or browbeat

anyone into agreement, to prejudge one more thing. I employ
this language because I must use some language, and this one will
convey the required meaning more quickly than any other. If,
however, someone wishes to challenge the assumptions built into
this language, then those assumptions will be discussed, not
simply treated as the rigid rules of the game.1 In fact, reasons
will be given - for what they are worth - for the adoption of this
viewpoint.
There is also the more specific and less philosophical objec­
tion - that what is being offered is a sociologically rehashed
romanticism. But in fact, this is not so. The ' sociological ' part
is acceptable, but not the romanticism - or only with qualifica­
tions. What is recommended is not the mid-point between
humanity and beetle-hood, the point where both possibilities
seem open and neither is imperative, where neither internally
imposes itself: it is not vaunted as the new ideal, the only morally
honourable vantage point. Lack of identity could through habi­
tuation, I suppose, become a new kind of identity, a new source
of strength (and this kind of romanticism does exist), though I
suppose in doing so it would at the same time betray its prin­
ciples : anyway, it is not commended. (Philistinism is much more
my line. ) On the contrary, I am all in favour of comfortable
identities, of being a man or a beetle, with all the comfortable
circles reinforcing the human or beetle form of life, if one is
lucky enough to have such a secure identity available. My roman­
ticism is quite limited. It asserts merely that sometimes, for
objective reasons, a stable identity is not available ; that in those
cases philosophic questioning is liable to emerge, as a means of
devising criteria for assessing one's general aims (which, ex
hypothesi, no longer emanate from one's self, there no longer
being such a thing) ; that this is the vantage point for philosophy,
not only because this is its de facto origin, but above all, because
any other viewpoint, which prejudges issues precisely by starting
from some fixed identity, quite misses the point of the question
and hence is worthless as an answer (though sometimes the ques­
tioner may not see through this) ; and that when we philosophise,
1 Of course, one cannot really escape the regress : for this willingness to step

back when challenged, itself in turn prejudges one value - namely, the desir­
ability of such a liberal willingness to examine assumptions. And so on . • • •
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

when we think generally in happily, blessedly non-transitional

situations, it is still a good thing to retain a memento, not mori,
but of the chaos and void which was the real starting point and
which ought never to be wholly exorcised.

Preparing for Previous Wars

There is a well-known complaint made of military authorities,
that they prepare not for the coming but for the previous war.
An analogous and more contemporary observation is that econ­
omists understand the last, but not the present, economic crisis.
Now the important thing to observe is that for many and
probably most societies, preparing for the last war is the correct
way of preparing for the next - for the next war will be very
much like the last. In games with very stable rules (i.e. in those
in which a new rule is introduced only rarely), it is a sound policy
to study the past games and the past performances of one's own
side and of the opponents. Contexts such as these could be
described as ' inductive ' : there is a reasonable amount of straight­
forward repetition, and the individuals or groups living in such
contexts in fact do argue from past instances to the future, in a
rather crude and straightforward way.
The assumption of such a stable context is built into what is pro­
bably the most widely invoked justification of democracy. In the
past, democracy generally had to be defended against the advo­
cates of rule by ' the best'. The champions of democracy did not in
general challenge the assumption of the unequal distribution of
human wisdom, but rather its relevance to the ultimate basis of
power : to the ultimate social control of decision-taking. Their
argument was admirably summed up in the Periclean dictum that
not everyone can initiate a policy, but everyone can judge it.
Can they? I certainly cannot. Any issue in the modern world,
for instance, has repercussions in a number of fields, each one
of which requires an high-powered expertise for its comprehen�
sion. The experts whom one knows generally impress one by
their lack of expertise in fields other than their own, notwith­
standing the crucial importance of cross-implications. Naively,
one may suppose those at the Top who take decisions are poly­
mathic supermen, somehow qualified to assess the many-sided
implications of their decisions. Acquaintance with any of them
 METAMORP H O S I S

dispels such illusions. (I leave aside the theory that whilst they
are not expert in any overt, conscious, demonstrable way, they
or some of them have access by a private line, ' intimations ', to
a reservoir of powerful political wisdom, ' tradition ' . The reser�
voir-and-pipeline theory presupposes, for such little plausibility
as it has, the inductive�repetition method of filling that reser­
voir - which is just what is under discussion.) In the modern
world, it is truer to say that almost anyone can initiate a policy,
but no one can judge it.
It is arguable either that the system only works because any de­
cision is better than none, even though the decisions are made in
the dark, or that the system in fact does not work any better than
would one in which decisions were taken on some random method.
Now this is quite different from the stable context of some
simpler societies - not because (say) a tribesman has an anthro­
pologist's undetstanding of his own society (though he may have
this sometimes), but because he can, in those ateas of life where
he chooses to do so, argue from past instances. He knows that
X made a good chief, and that Y did not ; that priest Z is a good
atbitratot, etc. The type of issue which arose under the chief­
tancy of X, and of Y, was virtually certain to be similar in kind :
it is possible to argue from performance in one case to perform­
ance in another. Crude induction is an usable procedure.
In our kind of world, and in any transitional situation, it is not.
What follows from this ? Certainly not some kind of obscurantist
doctrine to the effect that explicit, clearly formulated knowledge
is irrelevant to social action. On the contrary, explicit and highly
abstract knowledge enters into the current social transformation
twice ovet : it is itself one of the main, ptobably the main, agent
of that transformation (in othet words, science is the chief single
factor in this ttansfotmation), and secondly, we ate pethaps
within some measurable distance of really understanding that
ttansformation itself. Some aspects and details of it we undet­
stand already : the social sciences are not wholly impotent.
But it does follow that the ptoper understanding of a transition
involves a deeper and more abstract undetstanding than one based
crudely on atgument ftom past instances. Born of more absttact
and effective knowledge, this ttansformation is also an incentive
to it. Rules of thumb become worthless. Explanatory models,
though of course ultimately checked against experience must be of
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

the kind which allow great diversity in successive phenomena.

This impossibility of simple induction, of reliance on repeti­
tions, accentuates the disorientation already implied in the lack
of firm moral identity which is part of the definition of a transi­
tion. The resulting confusion and insecurity inescapably impel
the organism in transition to seek some kind of conceptual
anchorage, a starting point from which to recapture some degree
of order. This shows that the obscurantism which condemns such
' rationalism ' is misguided twice over : 1 for one thing, in transi­
tional situations, the pursuit of explicit criteria is not wilful or
pathological, but inevitable ; and the alternative offered, the
reliance on conventional wisdom named ' tradition ' , is worthless,
for the only reason for supposing the reactions built into a
' tradition ' to be sound, is a stable environment and a repetition
more or less of the situations and problems which had formed
that tradition - which is precisely what does not obtain during a
fundamental transformation.
In primitive societies and even in the literate urban but pre­
industrial civilisation, life is bounded by seasons and genera­
tions : though changes occur which vitiate assumptions based on
the past, such changes are, almost by definition, exceptions. In
transitional situations, they are, by definition, the rule. It is only in
transitional situations that it is really true. that men learn nothing
from history : they cannot. They have to invent sociology instead.
This rapidity of change is not merely an external matter, as if
one were floating down some rapids on a river passing through
a bewildering succession of different landscapes : it is a more
inward and fundamental thing. It is rather a consequence of the
fact that the rules of the game themselves are constantly under­
going transformation : the framework, which in stable contexts
is taken for granted, is itself something which is at stake within
the game it is supposed to govern. Modern history is rather
like a football cup in which only the first round was played
as soccer ; the second round is played as rugby, the third as ice­
hockey, etc.2 The outcome of each round modifies the game itself.
1 Cf. M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London 1 962).
2 This is one of the reasons why applications of the notion of natural selection
to history are so misguided. ' Natural Selection' can only select when the criteria
are applied more or less consistently over a period of time, even if the severity
of their application varies.

66
 METAM O R P H O S I S

This non-repetitive nature of fundamentally transitional situ­

ations has other interesting consequences. The conventional
theory and justification of democracy assumes repetition not
merely in order to allow the majority to judge that which the
wise or the enterprising have proposed : it also assumes repetition
in order to give time to the tolerated majority to take over when,
after some Lesson of Experience, it has become the majority. But
in transitions there is no ' next time ' : by the time the next round
has come, the identity of the game, of the participants, and of the
issues has changed.
' Power ' is not something usefully considered in the abstract :
it is better to speak of this or that power, the ability to control the
decision over this or that alternative. (This point is often made
about ' freedom' - less often about ' power '.) The crucial power
in transitions is the power to decide which turning to take,
being at the wheel at the big and rare road-forks : generally, these
turnings are only approached once, and the decision determines
just what subsequent road-forks, if any, will be available. But if
some crucial road-forks generally only appear once, there is no
seasonal or generational repetition, which would allow the oppo­
sition to reverse the mistake made ' last time '.
This is one of the factors - perhaps the most important one -
helping to explain the ' illiberal ' or ' undemocratic ' tendencies in
transitional societies. It is the nature of the situation, and not
necessarily some ruthlessness, intolerance or greed of the par­
ticipants, which determines that the game is played for the high­
est stakes and that no replay is allowed. In stable contexts, one
can play for marginal advantages, and accept defeat, tolerate
opposition, and refrain from pushing every advantage to the
utmost, in the knowledge that tomorrow is another day. In transi­
tion, tomorrow is not another day : it is an other day, altogether.
He who is in control now will mould that tomorrow, and hence
control now is incomparably more valuable than the quite spur­
ious hope of a later ' turn '. Rival politicians in transitional societies
like to think of each other as the local Kerensky. The knowledge
of this inescapably ' escalates ' the stakes of politics, and brings it
close to a kind of total politics in which nothing is barred. 1
1 It is inherent in the nature of con:(lict as such that it should ' escalate ', for it

is always in the interest of the loser to draw one further weapon from the
armoury. It is virtually the definition of a social order that it contains some
 THOU GHT AND CHANGE

Democracy and liberalism assume, as has often been pointed

out, a kind of consensus and stability over time, as well as over
space. Indeed Burke said something of this kind about societies
in general. But the compact or partnership between past and
present cannot but be brutally broken in a transition.

A Specific Transition
But current social thought is not in terms of transition as such,
but of a specific transition : industrialisation (including, of course,
modernisation of agriculture). Hence in addition to the features
pertaining to transitions as such, our concern must be with those
arising from the nature of industrialisation.
The most important thing about this transition is that it is
one-way : beetle into man, but never man into beetle. To this
extent, a non-differentiating relativism, extended to all paths as
well all positions, embracing all directions under an equalising
cloak, simply cannot apply nowadays. This patl.l can be trodden
in one direction only. It is like one of those cogged mountain
railways which ensure that the carriages will not slip back :
movement is possible in one direction only.
Leaving metaphors, societies can choose industrialism from a
pre-industrial situation (and generally do when they have the
choice) but not vice versa. For all practical purposes, this is an
absolute datum. There may be - indeed, there are - ample un­
certainties about just when and how various societies undergo
the transition to industrial society : but there can be no serious
doubt about their doing so some time, and that time not too
irrelevantly distant. We may view traditional societies with nos­
talgia or disgust : be enchanted by their beauty, or revolted by
their cruelty. It doesn't matter : they no longer present a viable
alternative. Any social reasoning must take place within the
framework of this one predictive certainty : 1 b',lt this one pre-
mechanisms for preventing escalation, for restraining conflict. In a sense, tran­
sitional societies can come close to ceasing to be societies, precisely for this
reason. This is a kind of equivalent, in terms of power, of the fact that intellec­
tually, everything is in flux in a transition.
1 This argument, as well as many others in this book, is within the assumption

that there will be no major nuclear disaste1' with an attendant complete break­
down.

68
 METAMORP H O S I S

dictive certainty, by narrowing the range of social possibilities,

does greatly facilitate such reasoning. And, even if the pre­
diction were not factually certain, it would still provide a good
basis for social philosophy, because the desirability of its fulfil­
ment is also not in serious doubt. In other words, we are here in
the rather fortunate, and rather unusual, situation of knowing
with practical certainty both that something will happen (though
not just when and how) and that it is good .
I n general, I do not believe i n any such providential tendency
for the Real and the Rational to coalesce. The universe, or even
its human segment, is designed neither for our convenience, nor
for our edification. It is what it is, God knows why, and if the
values we have, or choose, are not wholly and permanently
frustrated by the nature of things, we can consider ourselves
extremely lucky. I for one am profoundly suspicious of those
philosophers who discover that, by some profound and provi­
dential mechanism, our best and deepest aspirations and the
basic structure of things are somehow congruent. (What really
underlies such claims is generally a mechanism, profound or
other, of quite a different kind - a set of logical devices in the
thinker's system, which ensure the appearance of this providential
result. The two basic ploys consist either of doing violence to our
values or to the world.)
But despite my tendency to scepticism about providentially
optimistic philosophies, in this one specific area I believe that
the Real and the Rational do happen to converge. Industrialisa­
tion is good, and industrialisation must happen. Industrialisation
is good on independent grounds ; but it is also good in virtue of
being inevitable. To this extent, the present argument is ' his­
toricist ', it abjectly prostrates itself before what it holds to be
predetermined, a cosmic or at any rate global trend. In those
cases (which are rather rare) when some social - or other -
development is known with adequate certainty to be inevitable,
it is better to adjust oneself to it and learn to like it rather than to
condemn it. This pattern of moral reasoning - the recognition of
necessity - may find application much more seldom than thinkers
such as Spinoza or Plekhanov supposed, because, at any rate in
social matters, the things we really know to be necessary are few :
nevertheless, it does find application sometimes, and this is one
of these times.

6g
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

But one may prostrate oneself before this specific transition -'
in the sense of treating it as a given premiss, rather than something
sub judice - in part also because it is good independently, for
fairly obvious reasons. It is better that men should be well pro­
vided for materially, so much so that they need not slaughter
each other from sheer scarcity ; that they should live their full
span rather than die painfully of disease ; that they should be in
control of the natural forces surrounding them rather than at
their mercy ; in possession of some real understanding rather
than at the mercy of superstition ; and have a rich variety of
experience open to them, rather than be constrained by need into
narrow channels. The question is - why should this transition be
considered to be historically neces.sary? How could one claim to
be in possession of the knowledge necessary in this sphere?
The mechanics which ensures the necessity of the transitio n
seems to me quite simple. Its crucial premiss is simply that men
in general will not tolerate a brief life of poverty, disease, pre­
cariousness, hard work, tedium and oppression, when they
recognise that at least most of these features can be either
obviated or greatly mitigated. The initial condition is simply that
it should become obvious to men that it is feasible, and not too
difficult, to overcome the pre-industrial human condition. This
initial condition is now globally satisfied : the one secret is out, as
Sir Charles Snow has pointed out, and most men know this, and
those few who do not, in New Guinea, or the Andean highlands
or the J ebel Akhdar of Oman or wherever they may be, soon will. 1
1 In general, I do not believe that social causation is so simple : the crucial

factor is more often some feature of social organization, rather than some
psychological prime mover such as the unwillingness of men to accept unneces­
sary poverty. But in this special case, though the actual working out of the process
is varied and complex, the prime mover is probably as simple as this.
It can be said that it is not an awareness of the possibility of radical improve­
ment, but the normal mechanics of power which are principally responsible
for the transition. Techniques confer power, and everyone is forced to emulate
the techniques on. pain of standing defenceless before his rivals. The techniques
then start a chain-reaction of unintended effects which destroy such previous
equilibrium as may have existed, Thus it is not a ' fair ' (tacit) global referendum
which has decided on the striving for industrialisation and affluence but an
(unwittingly) ' rigged' one : those who opt out, or pursue change ineffectively,
are eliminated, rendered powerless if not physically destroyed. This is a referen­
dum in which all those who vote No see their votes, or indeed themselves,
destroyed.
 METAM ORPH O S I S

It took quite a time. for this possibility to become obvious : the

first industrial revolution, the achievement of industrial society
in one part of the world, did not by itself suffice to disseminate
the idea, for various reasons. The power of industrial nations
was often misunderstood, by themselves as well as others, and
attributed to all kinds of irrelevant factors, virtues and divine
favours rather than industrialism ; the early stages of industrial
society, indeed even subsequent ones until after the second
World War, were not always attractive enough to seem worth
emulating ; and it took a number of derivative industrial revolu­
tions to demonstrate that men of any colour, any climate, and of
diverse social organisations, can all bring it off. But now, all this
has become obvious : everyone knows it can be done, and that it
is worth doing. Hence, it will be done.
Thus the present historicism is not really as bad as one might
fear. I am not suggesting that History has issued a categorical
imperative - industrialisation will occur. It is rather a hypo­
thetical imperative, but one in which the hypothesis is beyond
serious doubt : if men prefer to be comfortable, healthy, live out
their full span, and so forth, rather than hungry, precarious, and
disease-ridden, then they will adopt the means towards that end,
once the identity of those means becomes manifest.
If one attempts to centre all social thought on the one point of
industrialisation, two further objections are likely : (a) the plaus­
ible-seeming objection that there are other things in the world
besides industrialisation, and that a model based primarily on it
cannot do justice to the variety and complexity of things ; and
(b) the Pig argument : industrialisation, rate of annual growth,
standard of living, are preoccupations and standards fit for pigs.
Consider (a) : ' industrialisation ' is a term which can have a
No doubt there is an element of truth in such a picture. But in the dis­
organisation produced by the chain-reaction (which may indeed have been
initiated by pursuit of power rather than of improvement), the diffused awareness
of the possibility of radical and general improvement does become genuinely
important. This becomes particularly tme in an age of nuclear military power,
in as far as (or as long as) outright military aggression on a large scale is in­
hibited, and political conflict (including ' indirect aggression ', which requires
local support) becomes the main agency of power. Political conflict must then
lead to competitive improvement, and advertise the possibility and desirability
of the great transformation. It becomes the carrier of the ethic of this-worldly
salvation.
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

prosaic ring. Yet the features which differentiate the world · of

pre-industrial men from those of developed countries are far
deeper than mere wealth alone, or the presence of steel mills,
electricity, and so forth.
What is at issue is something far bigger : a wholly new balance
between being and knowing. Post-industrial societies are not
merely societies ecologically quite distinct from all other earlier
ones ; they are differentiated by the type of knowledge which is
at their disposal and by the role it plays in society and life. The
type of knowledge available to industrial societies is qualitatively
so superior1 to any others that it hardly deserves to be classed
under the same name : and this kind of knowledge is both the
source and the fruit of ' industrial ' organisation. Industry is,
essentially, the ecology of a society possessed of science. Science,
essentially, is the form of cognition of industrial society. Pre­
industrial societies are not without cognition ; but it is of quite
a different kind, and not of comparable power.
Hence to say that philosophy is about industrialisation 2 - which
is true - is not to utter an odd paradox, strangely reducing, and
extending, the scope of a certain kind of thought. It can be
reformulated, and interpreted to mean that it is an attempt to
understand the nature, emergence, alternatives and implications
of the kind of knowledge on which our society is based, and of
that society itself. It then perhaps no longer sounds either narrow
or paradoxical.
The apparent paradox can be made to seem less odd by thus
reformulating it : philosophy is the kind of intellectual re­
orientation that is attempted in a transition (always assuming
that an intellectual attempt to cope with this condition is made
at all). It requires serious doubt and an attempted re-validation
or re-assessment of our knowledge. But of all transitions, the
replacement by industrial society of its predecessors, crudely
lumped together as ' traditional ', is incomparably the most im­
portant; it is also the one in which we are involved : it is the one
affecting all mankind, and in a drastic manner ; it is the one whose
principal agent is knowledge, and amongst whose consequences
there is at the very least the possibility of self-comprehension.
1 There are of course various more or less fashionable theories which chal­

lenge such a high valuation of science ; these theories will be discussed later.
2 Or, if you like : philosophy is about the failure of 1789.
 META M O R P H O S I S

(Other transitions in general led men merely from one kind of

inebriation to another.) At the same time, by stressing industrial­
isation, one gives one's concern with the new ecology of know­
ledge an historical anchorage and concreteness.
The Pig argument against concern with industrialisation has a
long and amusing history. It was used against John Stuart Mill
and Utilitarianism, the argument being that a philosophy of
happiness was only fit for pigs. Mill aptly commented that it
seemed that it was those who raised this objection who betrayed
a somewhat piggish conception of humanity and the forms its
happiness may take. (In substance, this reply remains valid.)
Later, it was sometimes heard, in the days of maximum economic
suffering and inequality, as a reprimand by the rich, directed
at the complaining poor. Today, the argument has been inhel'ited
by people of smaller stature. They matter less than did either
puritanic devotees of the stern voice of duty, or the rich of pre­
Keynesian and pre-affiuent days who feared the materialistic
envy of the less fortunate. It has been inherited in the main by
various groups of cultural entertainers who fear being left high
and dry by the changing currents of knowledge.
Thus the claim that the correct basic model, the underlying
pattern (in terms of which we do and should think about society),
is a specific transition, a metamorphosis, must be defended in two
directions : against the older World-growth theory, already dis­
cussed, and against the Timeless Ones, the theorists for whom
change and time and temporal horizons are morally irrelevant.
These latter again fall into two classes : there are those who
adopt their position with full knowledge of what they are doing,
who consciously and deliberately refuse to prostrate themselves
before Change, etc. ; and those whose Olympian elevation above
temporal concerns is quite unselfconscious.

Flight into Vacuum

It is customary to talk of morals in transition. My view is rather
that our morals can find a basis, in as far as they can find one
at all, in the transition itself. It is useless to seek a foundation in
the axioms of beetle-hood or manhood, for we are no longer
beetles, and the nature of manhood, happily, is not rigidly deter­
mined, It is in understanding transition (as such, in general),

73
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

and in understanding the specific transition which is our concern

and destiny, that we arrive at such premisses of our moral
judgment as are available to us - for what they are worth : at
some knowledge of the necessities and contingencies which
surround us, of the range and nature of available alternatives.
It is in this sense that philosophy is primarily ' about indus�
trialisation ' . Philosophy, in the sense of critical examination of
fundamental concepts and assumptions (a platitude, this), is only
relevant in transition (or, conversely, when it is relevant and
taken seriously, we are ipso facto in a transition). But : the trans­
formation generally referred to as ' industrialisation ' is the one
transition resulting from. the widespread, sustained and effective
application of knowledge to life. Thus this transition alone, of all
the countless possible ones that communities could or did under­
go, really gives an opportunity for a genuine and sustained cog­
nitive turning-upon-oneself, for a self-conscious and in some
way free self-moulding, based on actual understanding and
control. (Insights were possible and did occur in other transi­
tions - but they were hopelessly precarious, and were in due
course swamped.) Som.e of the plethora of knowledge (and
leisure) which is inherently involved in the current transition,
may spill over and become available and used for social self­
understanding. There is of course no guarantee that this will
happen, but at least it may happen. In the past it could not
happen, or only very briefly and precariously. We now do live
on an ' upward slope ' , not in the sense that the future must be
in this respect better, but that it may be. 1
1 There is of course a sense in which the question concerning ' what philo­

sophy is about ' is trivial and uninteresting. If it is interpreted as a question

concerning the subject matter of a given set of books or articles classified as a
given subject by librarians, or as the professional preoccupation of men classi­
fied in university calendars as holding posts in certain departments, it follows
that ' philosophy ' can be about anything, or indeed nothing, and often is. But
I prefer it to mean general thought about man, society, and their place in the
world, and thought of the kind which takes least for granted. It is a (welcome)
corollary of this definition that such thought can only be terminated by dog­
matism and repression, and never by supposed limits to knowledge, language or
whatnot : for sceptical conclusions in these fields (which may frequently be the
correct ones), are still conclusions. Concerning ' philosophy ' in some other
sense, e.g. as a supposedly self-contained discipline with a place supposedly
parallel to other subjects in university curricula, no confident pt·edictions can be
made, and the question is of negligible interest.

74
 META-MORP H O S I S

The position of moralising in recent thought has been a

curious one. Philosophers have indulged themselves in countless
sermons against sermonising. Indeed, this seems to have been
one of their favourite occupations. The alleged moral impotence
of their subject has been a matter of curiously vociferous pride
and didacticism.
In fact, the arguments that can be raised in support of the
general view that no indicative assertion can have normative im­
plications, and the specific one that philosophical ones cannot, are
indeed fairly powerful. Briefly : it is indeed difficult to see how one
could arrive at a ' prescriptive ', ' normative ', or otherwise com­
mendatory claim, without the normative content being already
somehow contained (perhaps covertly) in the premisses of that
claim.
The arguments on the other side, however, are at least as
powerful. Their most persuasive formulation (at least to me), is,
alas, negative : it does not positively demonstrate how normative
conclusions can be established without circularity. It merely
shows (cogently) the absurdity inherent in the contrary doctrine,
in the supposition of morally neutral descriptions of the world,
or of morally neutral philosophies. This reductio ad absurdum, at
least, is available : moral neutrality is an absurdity. Of this at
least there can be no doubt : and from this we can proceed to
argue, rather more diffidently, that as neutrality is absurd, moral
argument must be possible. (There is, alas, a gap between the
demonstration of the absurdity of the antithesis, and the con­
fident assertion of the thesis.)
Ironically, the principal premiss for the reductio ad absurdum
of the notion of ' moral neutrality ' is a doctrine widely held
amongst adherents of recent philosophic fashions - the doctrine
of the impossibility of a ' perfect language '. Moral neutrality
would be possible if there existed a ' perfect language ' , in which
the pure facts of the world could be recorded without prejudice.
Neutrality would then consist of not going beyond these facts,
and of not going beyond this sober language which is content to
record them. Moral commitment on the other hand would con­
sist of going further, of adding moral evaluations.
The model employed by some philosophers, and many others
influenced by them, suggests that we can add values to facts, or
refrain from adding them, as we add milk to tea. This popular

75
 T H O U GH T AND CHAN GE

model quite obscures the fact some values are inescapably built
into any language we care to employ to characterise and con­
ceptualise things, if only the exclusion of the values built into .
alternative terminologies. (It is true that we can also add addi­
tional value commitments : most languages also contain so to
speak, ' free floating ' evaluative terms, which can be employed
to praise the objects of those notions that do not already have the
praise or blame built into them.)
But there cannot be such a morally pute language. Using this
language, rather than that, cannot but further some purpose
rather as against another. Every language has its opportunity cost.
Using the language of physics to describe and explain the
behaviour of matter, excludes the language of animism. It also
excludes that of ' common sense ' . They serve different and some­
times incompatible purposes. The language of physics is incom­
parably more powerful predictively and leads to great control.
On the other hand, it is clumsy, redundant and perhaps un­
workable for purposes of ordinary daily manipulation (in the
literal sense). Neither physics nor (our) common sense are usable
for purposes of invoking the processes of nature to underwrite
social arrangements, to symbolise social groups and allocate
tesponsibilities, and settle disputes - as the language of animism
can be used. 1
1 A few years ago (and perhaps even now), such a denial of the very possi­

bility of ' neutrality ' would have provoked the following reaction from many
philosophers : but the term ' neutrality ' has a use, and anyone denying that it
can ever be applied correctly must simply have some mistaken preconception
of what ' neutrality ' must be (a preconception probably inspired by some over­
simple model of meaning, perhaps transferred uncritically from some other
kind of concept). If only he would consider that and how ' neutrality ' is in fact
used, he would come to realise that neutrality simply means the ldnd of thing
or context to which it is applied.
Yes : ' neutrality ' does have a use. It is a notion which can be applied within
games or activities in which the rules are fairly clear and stable. It is certainly
both reasonable and intelligible to expect judges or referees to be impartial and
neutral : within the context of the rules of a given game, a referee can indeed be
neutral. But he cannot be neutral if the rules themselves are sub judice and under­
going change. Or again, in a country in which there is no accepted authority or
legal system, such as for instance the Congo during the crisis period, no one can
interfere in a ' neutral ' manner, fot· anything that is done must favour some
party at the expense of another, and there are no rules (other than rival, con­
tested ones) which could legitimate the intet·vention as being in favour of those
unique and neutral rules.
 METAMORP H O S I S

What follows from this argument (which seems to me wholly

cogent)? It doesn't really dispose of the rival argument, the proof
available on the other side - that no moral conclusion can be
reached which is not already incorporated in the premisses, thus
begging the question. It cannot dispose of it, but it must some­
how live with it. If both arguments are cogent, there would seem
to be an antinomy : thought cannot be normative (except in a
circular manner), and thought must be normative (because there
can be no neutral vantage point). This is precisely how things stand.
The situation is really this. We are thrown into the water in
the middle of the sea. These philosophers then tell us that they
know of a proof which demonstrates that swimming is impossible.
Well, yes, there is such a proof. I too have read Hume. Moreover,
I have no desire to try to refute him. 1
But it so happens that we must swim, and we do seem at
times to achieve something which at least has something like
the same effect. Moreover, there is another consideration : those
philosophers who make so much noise about the proof of the
impossibility of swimming, are then found using it to recommend
some alternative activities of their own - such as attending to
tradition, or exorcising our doubts by looking at language, etc. -
activities which really are quite farcical and impossible (and which
also c onstitutes a kind of surreptitious swimming). Better try and
swim. We have no choice. Must implies can (more than ' ought '
does).
So, there is indeed no neutrality ; there is no one who can really
claim to have a neutral, above-the-battle, standpoint, observing,
recording, but not evaluating - for his evaluation is already
implicit in the concepts, the language, in terms of which he
observes and records. (His failure to use some other language
constitutes the exclusion of the values built into that other
language, and the preferential selection - perhaps unwitting - of
those built into his own language.)
O nce this is fully realised, once it is clearly seen that any
Philosophy is precisely analogous to a game in which all rules are themselves
at stake, or a country in which no authority or legal system is accepted. In
philosophy, by definition, there are no unquestioned rules ; hence the notion of
' neutrality ' can have no application.
1 For Bertrand Russell once expressed approval of the view that there is a
special and low circle in hell, reserved for all those who attempt to refute Hume.
Here we certainly have, for once, a plausible and appealing piece of theology.

77
 THOUGHT AND C H AN GE

standpoint contains a (possibly implicit) valuation, it follows that

we must strive to choose between the various possible vantage
points (as we cannot escape them altogether) as best we can - as
indeed we must, for there is no alternative. If no non-circular
deductive validation of one position as against its rivals is avail­
able, this may be sad. It may also be held to be a source of joy
rather than sadness : if such a proof were available, it would
make the moral life a matter of mere deductive skill, without
choice or excitement. Be that as it may : if that is how things are,
we must make do with something less than a proof in the full
sense. As J. 8. Mill observes, 1
If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula,
including all things which are in themselves good, . . . the
formula . . . is not subject of what is commonly understood by
proof. . . . (But) There is a larger meaning of the word proof.
. . . Considerations may be presented capable of determining
the intellect either to give or withhold its assent. . . .
What is the logic, if any, of these less-then-deductive proofs,
these considerations ' capable of determining the intellect ' ?
The following answer may do : languages, ways of categorising
the world, differ both in the purposes they serve, and in their
degree of truth, the amount of sensitivity, precision, predictive
and controlling power they display. The principal way in which
values can now enter (in as far as they enter ' rationally ' at all), is
as fellow-travellers, second-class, of new ways of conceiving the
world, new ways which impose themselves by their superior
truth, accuracy, and controlling and predictive power. The
Platonic picture, of moral truth wedded and equal to cognitive
truth, indeed indissolubly fused in ideasjnorms with it, illumi­
nating all else, is false. So is the picture, popularised by logical
positivism, of this union ruthlessly and totally dissolved, with
morals in a wholly independent, and apparently quite anarchic,
realm of their own.
� J, S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter I. It is a curious fact that despite these

words, which could not be clearer, Mill has been credited by G. E. Moore and
his followers with trying to establish the equivalence of Good and the Utilitarian
formula as a deductive truth, a corollary of an analytic equivalence - notwith­
standing ample and conclusive evidence in the spirit and the letter of the text
to the contrary. One must suppose they just assumed, on no evidence whatever,
that he was engaged in their own genre of philosophy.
 METAMO R P H O S I S

It is absurd to suppose that any factual picture, and any set of

descriptive concepts, is equally compatible with any set of
values. 1 In order, for instance, to apply the values associated with
feudalism or with Hinduism, it is necessary to be able to Classify
people with conviction into estates or castes : a valuation pre­
supposes a classification, and the classification is not merely the
valuation itself rewritten in other words, but assumes some objec­
tive differentiation. The erosion of this differentiation, or of the
belief in it or in the doctrines sustaining it, makes the valuation
unworkable.
This form of reasoning does not, perhaps, get us very far. It is
possible for a determined Quixote to act in terms of values not
corresponding to any external reality, values whose factual
assumptions are blatantly false. (Though on the other hand, it is
significant that we can generally distinguish such romanticism
from realistic valuations.) Moreover it would be argued, our
society is notoriously rich in valuations not statable in the language
employed in serious attempts to know and understand the world,
but only in language artificially preserved for the sake of those
very valuations. Yet these values survive : such inconsistencies
are very common, they have their uses, and it does not seem to be
difficult to sustain the doublethink they require.
There is no solution for this particular problem. (We could
only invoke consistency as a stick with which to beat the addicts of
doublethink : but to do so would be to assume one further value -
consistency itself - in an argument intended to support, and not to
presuppose, values. And what is worse, ' consistency ' in any
strict sense would not get us very far : we should need something
rather more loose, ' coherence ' , and this notion, which in fact has
been used by well-intentioned moralists for this purpose, is so
loose that it can be pulled in any direction, and becomes worth­
less.) But there is a certain consolation here : the problem of
compartmentalised thinking will arise least, precisely in those
cases when there is a genuine attempt at re-thinking, a genuine
uncertainty and ' transition ' . A viable system, whether of per­
sonal beliefs or a shared ideology, may contain much double­
think, and generally does, but in so far as it is viable, it is unlikely
to attempt a ' transvaluation of values ' anyway. If and when it is
1 Cf. an interesting discussion of this issue in W. G, Runciman, Social Science

and Political Theory (1 963).

79
 THOU GHT AND CHAN GE

impelled into doing so, it will also be less respectful of the now
creaking elements within itself. Thus, providentially (for once)
one obstacle to thought tends to lapse just in those very cases
when thought is called for.
Thus moral truths can be hoped to come in, lamely and in­
securely, in the baggage of new outlooks on the world and human
society. This is as much as we can hope - and in any case, as
much as we shall get. This, incidentally, is the general form of
the argument of this book : an attempt to sketch out the general
features of our situation, so as to employ it for an assessment no
longer bound by archaic or simple-minded models. The indi­
vidual items amongst these features are generally platitudinous.
(For instance : total, cosmic evolution is irrelevant. So are the
surviving norms of once stable and isolated ways of life, which
have lost their stability and insulation. But the transition to
' industrialisation ' may be taken for granted, etc.)
There cannot be any serious doubt about the emergence of a
New Knowledge, on the ' cognitive ' (as opposed to ' normative ')
front : indeed its emergence and application is the main factor in
the transformation we are undergoing. This knowledge also
extends, if less securely, to the human sphere. Our revaluations
can be ' rational ' in the light of it : is any other sense of ' ration­
ality ' conceivable?
It is not being argued that the new outlook does or can in some
unique way dictate some set of values, still less that it is itself
infallible. It cannot : this is perhaps a happy feature of it. It does
perhaps strictly eliminate some norms - always assuming, pre­
cariously, consistency. It was an illusion of the earlier stage of
the transition, of the Enlightenment, that a new order would
engender, or be engendered by, a complete new coherent and
unique outlook, rather like the synthesis it was replacing, only,
this time, the right way up.1 There is an alternative and even
greater illusion. There is the supposition that, in the new stage,
man will emerge into a new and total light, beyond any social or
epistemological restrictions on his knowledge and values, and
freely know things as they are and be or choose himself as he
wishes : pre-history overcome, ' alienation ' dissolved like a malig­
nant but now powerless cloud, man remains, naked and pure in
1 Cf. for instance Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Cen­

tury Philosophers (Yale University Press 193 z).

8o
 METAMORPHOSIS

his full glory. 1 These illusions are one of a whole family to which
earlier thought was prone - the illusion of the sustained steep
gradient, of a millenarian consummation, of the necessarily
endogenous and inescapable nature of progress, of the main­
tenance of the pre-revolutionary solidarity of those opposed to
the old order, etc.
Nothing of the sort is being suggested. The transition is not
from illusion to ultimate truth, but from illusion to controlled
doubt and irony. One of the striking features of the post-transi­
tion condition, of which we can now have some inkling, is that
the new order does not generate or sustain some new total and
closed outlook ; and because it fails to do so, and because societies
do need banners, they retain something or other they preserved
from the pre-transition period or picked up during the transition,
and maintain it - but with something very far short of total con­
viction.
But it is not these nominally retained ideologies which concern
us here. What does concern us is the pattern of thought available
when we seriously consider alternatives : and this is the con­
templation of those half-implications and total exclusions, of
those now-revealed ranges of possibilities, implicit in the new
and more powerful understanding of the world and ourselves.
1 For an interesting discussion of ' alienation ' see H. B. Acton, The Marxist­

Leninist Theory of Religion, in Ratio, Vol. I, No. z (December 1 958), p. 1 34.

81
 C H A P TE R F O U R

THE USES OF THO U GHT

Ethical Theories
Important ethical theories tend to be built round, not ordinary
and specific value-loaded terms, names for daily roles such
as agriculturalist, lawyer, manufacturer, etc., but around the
value-suggestiveness of very formal, categorical or near-cate­
gorical terms such as ' aim ', ' rule ', or ' virtue '. It is possible to
build ethical theories around substantive terms with specific
empirical content (e.g. ' the warrior'), but a theory of this kind
will have a correspondingly specific, narrow premiss, and be
open to an obvious objection from anyone not sharing it. ('And
what if I do not wish to have the virtues of a warrior? ') Such
specific premisses may be used by religious doctrines, which,
though they may wish to appeal to everyone, can allow themselves
a specific content in as far as its general applicability is trans­
cendentally guaranteed. Thus, a Christian may define morality
as the Imitatio Christi, a Muslim as the observance of the ways of
the Prophet and his Companions, etc.
But this will not do for ethical theories composed in and
addressed to milieu which are not firmly committed to some
religious loyalty. Ethical theories1 of this kind must somehow
have an universal premiss, for they wish to appeal to everybody :
they cannot or do not wish to restrict their appeal to those who
wish to be gentlemen, or good socialists, etc. The universality of
premiss is obtained by taking some notion which is in effect
all-embracing, a category of conduct or character so to speak.
There are various notions of this kind : aim, virtue, rule, role,
1 I do not distinguish between ' analyses ' of ethical concepts and the actual

commendations of given values - a distinction, much favoured by recent

philosophers, which is untenable.
 THE USES OF THOUGHT

are examples. Any conduct can perhaps be subsumed under the

notion of the pursuit of an aim, an exemplification (or failure to
exemplify) a virtue, an observance of a rule (or the breaking of
it), the fulfilment of a role, and so forth. All these concepts are
all-embracing, or very nearly so, or may plausibly be thought of
as 1uch.
Characteristically, ethical theories take their starting point
from such notions : the question is formulated in a way such that
if the answer is found and accepted, it is an answer for everyone.
What is the nature of virtue? What is the supreme aim of human
existence? What is the rule of good conduct? And so forth. The
generality of the notion in terms of which the question is formu­
lated ensures that, if there is a demonstrable or at least per­
suasive answer, that answer will seem valid universally.
It should not be assumed that for this reason, ethical theories
are necessarily vacuous. Some certainly are : a good deal of per­
suasive reasoning is vacuous, with the vacuousness camouflaged
with greater or lesser skill. But not all ethical theories are
vacuous. The point is that some of the models invoked are better
than others. There is a contemporary doctrine (Wittgenstein's)
to the effect that philosophic systems arise through the (allegedly
mistaken) re-interpretation of some whole species of discourse
(e.g. the ethical) in terms of some simple model. This may be
true. They can arise in this way. The doctrine goes on to say
that such an imposition of a simple model is generally or always
a mistake, and that truth is to be sought in seeing through the
model, abandoning its use, and returning to the complexity and
diversity of actual usage. This is false. Philosophy is indeed
inspired by simple models, but some of these models are meri­
torious and illuminating. Some are not. The fact that they are
models is irrelevant, though almost any model is better than
mishmash.
For instance, it is one of the central contentions of this book
that the model referred to as the transition is applicable and
illuminating, a good premiss for moral reasoning, whilst the
rival models are wrong and misleading. (The main rival models
are, of course, on the one hand the static picture of man or
society, as having a given definite and discoverable identity, and
on the other hand the Cosmic Growth model, of a permanent
progression from nothing to a kind of total consummation.) But
 T H O U G H T AND CHAN GE

it is worth exammmg some of the main models customarily

employed in ethical theory.

The Platonic Model

By the ' Platonic ' model I mean ethical reasoning which pro­
ceeds from the fact that many terms in any language are general
terms, and that these terms serve not merely to class things
together, but also to set them a standard. Consider the terms
' gentleman ' , ' apple ', ' brick ', or ' court of law ' . These expres­
sions subsume, each of them a number of phenomena, men,
fruit, certain physical objects, or certain social institutions : but
over and above that, they also set a standard, and men, fruit,
objects or institutions failing to attain those standards will be
denied the appropriate appellations, and the rights or prestige
going with it. An ungentlemanly man, an undersized fruit, a
crumbled brick, an improperly conducted trial, will all either be
denied the appellation altogether, or only with qualifications
which imply a failure to conform to the criteria, and which really
imply that the object is only potentially one of its kind, that it
might have been classed with the others had some blemishes
been obviated or had they never appeared. The classification
incorporates a norm.
The main point about Platonism, in this sense, is that it is
excellent sociology and virtually worthless philosophy. It is
excellent sociology in as far as this is indeed the principal manner
in which societies convey and instil their values : they are built
into the very concepts of daily use, they are inhaled with each
verbal breath. There is of course the qualification that, in the case
of complex societies certainly, and in the case of simpler ones very
probably, 1 there are value-ambiguities and alternatives present in
the language. But within this qualification, the ' Platonic ' picture,

1 There is a certain stereotype of tribal life, found for instance in K. Popper's

work, which makes it free of moral questions in the sense of doubts about a code
or decision as between rival codes. I have myself worked in a tribal society
which is ' structurally ' of a very simple kind, and moral dilemmas of this kind -
choice between alternative sets of values - not only occurred, but were for
certain reasons an essential part of local life.
This point does not perhaps undermine the usefulness of the ideal-type of
'tribal closed society '_, in Popper's sense, as an ideal type, and it does not
 THE USES OF T H O U GHT

the doctrines of forms and ideas, does provide a good insight

into the actual working of moral codes and of languages. It
brings out that a language contains or rather is itself (at least
one) code.
But its sociological suggestiveness is at the same time also an
index of its philosophic uselessness. Moral problems arise when
codes are in conflict, or when a code is in doubt. It is then quite
beside the point to extract some commandment or value pre­
viously incapsulated in a concept or a form of speech : this merely
establishes that it was so incapsulated, but not that it is valid, or
that it is not inferior to some rival, or that it has not rightly been
subjected to doubt. Of course languages, with their incapsulated
values, are ' forms of life ' - but this is just what makes us query
them, for forms of life are legion and some are better than others.
Plato's position was of course in one way more complete than that
of his successor Wittgenstein, for the latter thought that showing
language was a form of life somehow settled some questions,
whereas Plato backed up this appeal by the doctrine that one
form of life, one set of norms incapsulated in universals, have
some kind of transcendent backing. (Wittgenstein thought that
the total impossibility of any external backing for a linguistic
custom was itself a kind of validation, by excluding the bases of
criticism at the same time : his Platonism was nominalistic.)
One should add that of course actual historic Platonism con­
tains modes of argument other than the ' Platonism ' specified
here (though of course it does also . contain this) - such as argu­
ments from the nature of ' virtue ' or arguments from the Hidden
Prince (to be discussed). Actual philosophies are seldom exem­
plars of one pure logical type only.
All languages illustrate the kernel of sociological truth in
Platonism (the obverse, as it were, of its philosophic falsehood) ;
but there are certain conditions which one might suppose, a
priori, to be favourable to Platonism as a conscious and elaborated
theory. These conditions would be those of that quite long period
of human history between the full development of writing and the
achievement of near-universal literacy in industrial society. The
undermine the argument which employs that ideal type; but for the factual
record, it should be noted that it is most questionable whether tribal society
is indeed generally ' closed ' in the tequired sense. Cf. I. J arvie, Revolution in
Anthropology, Appendix (1 964).

ss
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

societies of this period are typically characterised by the existence

of a scribe class, and by a tendency to endow the written word, or
some of it (the Book), with holiness. There is a certain shift from
embodying the holy in the totem, the shrine, the sacred place,
and a tendency to locate it in the Word mysteriously abstract
-

and universal, yet preserved, captured, guarded in its written

form. A mystique of this kind of course favours the scribe as
against the thaumaturge operating directly on nature or spirits,
and the scribes have interest in favouring a platonic metaphysic
of the world concept against their free�lance spirit-manipulating,
illiterate rivals.
In practice, however, a platonic metaphysic, in the narrower
sense of a mystique of the concept, has flourished much less than
one might have expected. What has flourished rather more is a
metaphysic of the independently existing and normative proposi­
tion existing independently and normatively, yet accessible to
-

humanity in its written form. Doctrines of ' Natural Law ', or

Islamic theology-jurisprudence, are obvious examples. The
reason why this type of doctrine has had more appeal than platon­
ism in the narrower sense seems fairly obvious : individual con­
cepts, words, are too loosely circumscribed in their implications,
especially the crucial normative ones, to be very useful for a social
ethic with any reasonably determinate content. An order of
scribesjpriests who merely possessed a list of normative concepts,
would leave too much room for disagreement and innovation : it
is hard in practice to be sure just what it is that a ' real ' gentleman,
officer, Christian, Muslim, national man, party militant, scholar,
humanist, Rotarian, boy scout, etc., etc., will or will not do. The
shining norm must be reinforced and made precise by specific
statements, and this is what in fact happens. Thus platonism has
played a part in history more in the form of a cult of propositions
(' Natural Law ', Koranic law, etc.), than in its original form of
an apotheosis of concepts.

The Advice of Poloniust, or the Hidden Prince

Doctrines of this form are one of the most permanent favourites
in philosophy. They appear over and over again, and are also
em bedded in ordinary speech and thought. The basic idea is
1 ' • • • to thine own self be true' • . .

86
 THE USES OF T H O U GHT

simple and elegant. Inside each evil or indifferent man, there is a

good man struggling to get out. Good conduct is conduct per­
formed by the successfully emerging good inner self; other forms
of conduct are attributable to the evil or indifferent outer crust.
Goodness or morality can be equated with that which is desired
and would be performed by the inner self. This inner self is
somehow more genuinely, more intimately identical with our­
selves than is the regrettable outer shell.
The appeal and attraction of the doctrine is obvious. It
possesses an attractive and gratifying answer to an otherwise most
awkward question - why be moral at all? The answer is simple :
being moral is in your own true interest, or in the interest of
your true self. Being moral is not some kind of external imposi­
tion (which would be difficult to justify), but on the contrary the
liberation, the fulfilment of your innermost self, your most selfy
self, really.
Under this general form, a wide diversity of theories can of
course be found, diverse in the way in which they identify the
inner kernel of man. For instance, it used to be common to
identify the true man with reason, whilst inclinations, base
sensuality, etc., were the outer obstacles to the emergence of the
tme man. On the other hand, more recently there has been a
vogue (particularly in literature) for the very opposite identifica­
tion, in which the true man is found in the deep, dark, genuine,
instinctual urges, and it is the outer enemy who is cold and
cerebral. An observer hostile to the Hidden Prince theories
might remark, unsympathetically, that those who advocate these
attitudes might tell us, simply, that they are in favour of cere­
bration and hostile to fornication, or vice versa, as the case may
be, and stop wasting our time, and their own, with the rhetodc of
true and false selves a la Polonius. Also, the factual premisses
built into these theories are . often suspect. One sympathises with
the princess in the cartoon, who observes to the giant toad, 'And
how do I know you will turn into a Prince if I kiss you? '
An interesting recently revived variant of the theory is that of
the young Marx, in which the hidden self is, rather obscurely,
defined in terms of free creative activity or ' work ' , as opposed
to constrained work imposed by an ill-understood, autonomously
functioning social structure, which has escaped the control of
the men who form part of it. Or again, psycho-analytical ethical
 T H O U GH T AND C HANGE

theories, or for that matter assumptions, tend to be formulated

in terms of the Hidden Prince model, and this is particularly
stressed in the recent ' existential psycho-analysis ' current of
thought.
The idea of a ' true self' need not be vacuous. Kantian moral
philosophy, for instance, has this form (or to be precise, this is
one of its central themes) : the true and moral self is the rational
part of oneself, in a specific sense defined by the theory. But his
theory has extremely powerful and interesting reasons for identi­
fying the ' true self' in the way it does, reasons rooted in the
Kantian theory of knowledge. All other parts of the self are not
available for such identification, in so far as they are unfree,
contingent, dependent on blind and rigid causal factors ulti­
mately leading outside the self (in any sense) altogether, and thus
ultimately beyond all responsibility, and hence beyond identifica­
tion. Only the rational part (granting the argument) is available
for self-identification.
Or again, in a post-Darwinian era it has become unplausible to
see man as a fallen angel, and much more plausible to see him
as a complex monkey, and the attractiveness of the self-identi­
fications with what used to be the ' lower ', ' animal ' parts of
oneself springs in part from this.
The Hidden Prince lends himself to some magnificent syn­
theses of moral and political theory. The hidden self and its
natural wishes can be equated not merely with the demands of
morality, but also with the requirements of society and of the
rightful state. In this popular version, the theory then also fully
explains and justifies political obligations : the obligation to pay
taxes, obey judges, and if necessary fall in battle, are explained
simply as the wishes of one's truest self, which, happily, is also
identical with a self which is fully in harmony with society. At
this point, there is a significant variant available : the true self
may be equated with the socially integrated self, given society
is as it actually is ; or, alternatively, only with the good, true
society which may itself stand in that same relation of non­
identity to the actual society, as the true self often also stands to
the actual self. It is of course very important to decide between
these two variants, for one of them leads naturally to a conserva­
tive political theory and to support of the status quo, of the actual
political authorities, and the other to the advocacy of revolution.
88
 THE USES OF THOU GHT

In either version, the theory does, regrettably, lend itself to

giving meaning and plausibility to the notion of ' forcing a man
to be free ', and this aspect of the theory has of late come in for
much unfavourable comment. 1
The major problem facing Hidden Prince theories is of course
the principle of discriminating between the true and good
hidden identity and the rest of the, often most regrettably, mani­
fest self; and, connected with this, the problem of finding the
magical formula, or the suitable princess, for releasing the ·

Hidden Prince from his bondage.

One much favoured way of distilling the true essence of man
from his available manifestations is through the notion of har­
mony. The underlying idea is that the various drives, aspects,
aims or whatnot, of human nature can be welded into a har­
monious unity, that the conflict between apparently exclusive and
irreconcilable values or purposes is unnecessary and a product of
error and illusion, and that true knowledge should enable one to
satisfy all one's inner claims. This view also has a manifest
appeal : in a way, all the Hidden Prince theories gratifyingly leave
us with a world without real conflict, in which morality is equated
with one's true self-interest ; but these ' harmony ' variants do so
doubly, for they even refrain from condemning any element in
the human make-up. All the elements are good, all manifest
parts of human nature also belong to the Prince, and apparent
evil is due merely to ignorance andfor wrong relationships be­
tween the constituent parts, whilst each individual part is, in
itself, good. Those tender-minded souls who like to see the ways
of the world to man justified can naturally find pleasure in such a
doctrine, which obviates the scandal of evil. Adherents of this
type of doctrine are generally very proud of what distinguishes
them from views such as Kant's, which require exclusion of parts
of the self from full inner citizenship, so to speak - a kind of
moral amputation. The Harmony theorists are proud of not
being, in this pejorative sense, moralists, censors, amputators,
but of being instead the prophets of ' integration ' , etc.
In fact, their doctrine is very close to vacuousness. ' Harmony '
is itself far from a neutral term, or one endowed with a precise
1 Cf., for instance, Sir Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford 1958), or

his ' From Hope and Fear Set Free' (the Presidential Address to the Aristotelian
Society, 1963).
 T H O U GHT AND. C HANGE

and independent meaning : the way in which elements A, B and

C are ' harmonised ' in a human life or a society (or, for that
matter, the way in which these elements are identified and
abstracted from the continuum of reality), depends on the values,
priorities, moral schemata which are cloaked under each particu­
lar vision of ' harmony ' . Hence ' harmony ', far from being some
kind of independent standard for sorting out values, only
receives any concrete content as a consequence of some deter­
minate specific set of chosen values.
Recent moralists who have specialised in advising us to seek
and/ or fulfil our ' true identity ' , and who have generally expressed
themselves in a psychiatric idiom, have tended to be guilty of
assuming, rather easily, the existence of a true identity for each
being, there to be discovered ::tnd liberated. Their recipes for
discovery and liberation tend to be woolly and circular.

The Dream of the Bureaucrat

Life can be conceived not merely as the pursuit of an end, or the
fulfilment of a role or destiny, but also as the exemplification of a
rule or rules. For any action we perform, we can envisage some
rule (perhaps more than one), of which it is the exemplification or
execution. This is, perhaps, as legitimate a model of human con­
duct as any other. It is of course not true to say that we all
obsessionally mutter rules to ourselves, as we go along, or even
that even those of us trained in verbal explicitness could always
specify a plausible rule when challenged : nevertheless, it is true
to say that when human beings act, there are generally some con­
siderations present to their minds which are relevant to that
action, but for which the action would not be performed. These
considerations can be made explicit, and then constitute a kind
of rule. It is then plausible to argue that the agent is in some way
committed to performing the action whenever the same con­
siderations apply, and also (more questionably) to wish to see the
same action performed by anyone else in analogous circum­
stances.
Though this is a plausible and perhaps an ever applicable
model, it is of course not the only possible one, nor one that can
be equally appealing to all men. For illiterates, the reduction of
life to formulae may be less than meaningful, and for romantics,

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 THE USES OF THOU GHT

it may be horrifying. But for a literate believer in a scriptural

faith, and particularly one belonging to a tradition relying on the
individual conscience rather than external social pressures - such
as the Pharisaic, Protestant or puritan-Muslim traditions - it
may make · good sense. Kant, of course, conceived of morals in
these terms. Right conduct was the observation of rules, wicked­
ness their violation - essentially, the making of exceptions. More�
over, the rules are justified not by something outside themselves
(what their observance is conducive to, for instance) but by the
sheer fact that they are rules : regularity itself becomes a value,
indeed the paramount value. (Implausibly, the assumption seems
to be that of any given set of alternatives, only one can be
systematised into an exception-less system.)
Of course, this model will appeal not only to scripture­
orientated conscientious believers, but also to bureaucrats.
Within a bureaucratic organisation, the individual should act or
refrain from acting in a systematic and orderly manner, in
accordance with what stated and known rules prescribe : indeed
it is plausibly argued that such organisations are only possible
if staffed by men who understand and respect this ideal, and that
some of the difficulties experienced by transitional societies
spring precisely from the staffing of bureaucratic organisations
with non-bureaucratic personnel. 1 Bureaucracy may require this
ethos, but it is unlikely to have been the first to engender it : thus
we can see Kant as a living philosophic illustration of the
Weberian thesis that it was protestantism which unwittingly
helped to bring about the kind or rationality required by the
modern world - as a bridge between protestant conscientiousness
and bureaucratic precision.
In contemporary philosophy, the rule-ethic has been revived
by Mr. R. M. Hare, 2 a somewhat untypical thinker combining a
linguistic meta-philosophy with much moral earnestness ; further
combined, apparently, with the rather questionable view that the
rules-model is the one for ethics, and that it is somehow elicited
from language, and that it is nevertheless binding and self­
validating. (The fact that this prejudges, excludes, the possibility
of a moral condemnation of rule-bound conduct itself is hardly
1 Cf., for instance, the discussion of this in London Ph. D. thesis by L. Tiger,

1963, on ' Bureaucracy in Ghana. The Civil Service '.

, 2 Notably in The Language of Morals (Oxford, 1 95�).

9l
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

given adequate consideration.) It is interesting that Kant, though

deeply wedded to the ' rule ' images of human conduct, never­
theless did not hold it to be self-validating in this way. Its hold
over us (according to him) springs from something quite other :
any rule-less behaviour on our part must spring from contingent,
accidental motives, which might well be other if the contingent
empirical world were different, and which consequently are not
worthy of our identifying with them. Our capacity for conceiving
generalisations and respecting rules, on the other hand, could
not (he believed) be contingent in this way, and was totally dis­
continuous with nature, it was the manifestation of an autonomous
Reason, and hence was a worthy refuge for our identity. Rules are
the way to a non-accidental identity. (Later, in Kierkegaard or
Dostoevski, one finds precisely the opposite argument - only
actions or choices not justified by any rule are truly the work of ' a
self'.) Thus the Kantian version of the rule-ethic is not merely
free of the muddles of linguisticism, the belief that it is somehow
moral language that is at issue, but also far more interesting,
as being combined with a version of the Hidden Prince model ­
indeed with one of its outstanding non-circular applications.

The Way of Residue

This is not so much a model or style of thought on its own, as
a supplementary method attached to others, notably to the
Hidden Prince style of argument. It is an additional device of
great influence, interest and much contemporary relevance.
The basic procedure is this : the Hidden Prince (or the ideal
hidden under reality, whether conceived of as a pattern of per...
sonality or of anything else), is not characterised positively or
specifically. What is so characterised is some evil, some obstruc­
tion which prevents the emergence of the ideal pattern. It is
assumed that the nature of this ideal is manifest and that there is
but one, and that it will leap to the eye without further inquiry or
query, once the scales have fallen off our eyes. A good deal of the
moral reasoning associated with psycho-analysis, for instance, has
precisely this form : ' neurosis ' or something of the kind prevents
a patient - or, indeed, therapist - from perceiving reality, from
seeing self and world as they truly are. Remove the obstacles, the
unwittingly self-imposed obscuring veils, and truths remain,
 THE USES OF THOU GHT

accessible, in their stark nakedness. Only tacit reasoning of this

kind can explain and justify, for instance, the curious and insti�
tutionalised practice of training people to be therapists primarily
by making them undergo psycho�analysis themselves. This
practice can only make sense on the assumption that the objec�
tive data - both factual and normative - which are to guide
action are easily available, or can in some meaningful sense be
' freely chosen ' once the inner obstacles are removed : and whilst
this removal is necessary, little or no training is required on
top of this for the apprehension of those relevant data. In one of
the few exegesis of the moral and philosophical meaning of
psycho�analysis which reach any level of philosophical sophistica�
tion, Mr. Money�Kyrle's Man's Picture of the World, 1 an argu­
ment of this form is put forward explicitly.
Or again, the camouflaged Wittgensteinian recommendations
(of conceptual rather than moral norms, but the former generally
also carry the latter), have precisely this form. So has one of the
moral philosophies which can be extracted from Marxism : the
man or society who will emerge when alientation or estrange­
ment is overcome is not characterised positively. Apparently,
there will be no doubt concerning his nature, nor about its merits.
Perhaps, indeed, non-alienated man will have many forms and
will be able freely to choose and alternate2 between them. This
liberalism, built into the final eschatological stage of Marxism
(but not, alas, the earlier ones), does not of course really obviate
the problem of identifying the Hidden, non�alienated Prince,
in so far as there must be some limits which cannot be trespassed
without incurring a restoration of alienation. What these limits
are is not clear : one suspects that, if they were to be worked out,
they might end by resembling the criteria of liberty as set out
by the bourgeois J. S. Mill. But there is no point in speculating :
1 Duckworth (London 1 961), see esp. Chapter I.
2 One of the few characterisations of him we do possess makes it clear that he
will not suffer from specialisation and the division of labour, that he will not have
a role socially imposed on him, but will be a hunter, fisherman, shepherd and
critic at various times of day, according to inclination. (Cf. German Ideology,
Lawrence and Wishart (London 1938), p. 22.) Let it not be said that the notion
has no empirical content at all. For it follows that the nearest real approximation
to non-estranged man is, rather surprisingly, the English stockbroker with his
house in Sussex: financier at midweek, and often hunter, fisherman, cattle­
breeder and critic, at freely chosen times, during a long week-end.

93
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

one cannot do so with the theology of other people's beliefs. The

relevant point is that, for such Marxism, it appears that it is
enough to diagnose and obviate alienation : once this evil spell is
removed, the liberated prince will look after himself, and there
appears to be no need to think about his values or nature.
The use of the Residual Method is obvious.. In the case of
each of the doctrines specified, there is a self·imposed and -
apparently - honoured reluctancy to pass judgments of value.
(In the case of Marxism and psycho·analysis, this is because
' science ' does not, it is thought, pass judgments of value ; in the
case of linguistic philosophy, it is because philosophy does not do
so, being, it appears, concerned with ' concepts ' and ' language '.)
. An overt value�judgment, such as a specification of a human ideal,
would be a blatant contradiction of one of the doctrine's own and
most cherished beliefs, and it would be difficult to justify. Hence
if the norm is smuggled in, as the obverse, the residue, of an evil
which is merely diagnosed in an apparently cold clinical manner,
it then seems that no normative position has been assumed.

The Supreme Target

Another extremely important model of human conduct runs as
follows : after all, human action always (variants : generally, often)
has a goal. Aristotle, who in ethics had a fine flair for saying the
obvious, pointed out that a marksman who sees the target
clearly stands a better chance of striking it. Hence should not
ethics consist of a clear specification of our proper aims ? (Com­
pare the method discussed earlier, that of the Hidden Prince,
which in effect sees the correct method as the specification of our
proper role. Of course, the two approaches can be combined, for
roles are characterised by the aims of their possessors. To some
extent, the two approaches can be inter�translatable : our aim
may be the fulfilment of a given role, or a role may be that of a
successful pursuer of a given aim.)
And more than this : are not some aims spurious? - in the
sense that when attained, they prove not to be desirable after
all? So we must eliminate such deceptive targets. And would it
not simplify all moral issues if there were one overriding goal ;
perhaps the one surviving when all precarious and deceptive ones
have been eliminated, or perhaps one of which all others are only

94
 THE USES OF T H O U GHT

the secondary, derivative aims, or perhaps one which is a fine

synthesis of all other, intrinsically desirable goals? Indeed the
discovery and specification of such an overriding and all-embrac­
ing aim would greatly simplify the problems of conduct, for as
long as there is a multiplicity of targets, however lucidly the
marksmen perceives them, his lucidity does not help him to
assign priority to any one of them. But if the marksman's percep­
tion can discern not merely targets, but also the hierarchy, the
ultimate unity of targets - if, in other words, there is but one
criterion - then we should really have the problem beat.
Many philosophers have indeed formulated their question
concerning ethics in this form. Being in the dark, as we are, they
sought not a path but a guiding light in the distance.
Of the many forms of the Summum Bonum philosophy, one is
of far greater contemporary relevance and interest than all the
others : Utilitarianism. Historic Utilitarianism, in the tradition of
Bentham and the Mills, is a very special kind of Summum Bonum
theory and one to my mind supremely attractive. Its tough­
mindedness, empiricism, and freedom from donnish artificiality,
mark it off from so much subsequent moral theory. The univer­
salism, empiricism, and practical relevance, all central to the
formulation of the theory, mark it off from most other theories
of the same logical species.
The central argument of Utilitarianism can be summarised as
follows : values ,are not capable of formal proof, in the ordinary
sense . 1 Nevertheless, our choice of aims is not so arbitrary that
no reasons of any kind could be adduced for the preference of
some values over others. Here, empiricism is, in effect, invoked :
what fact, other than that we prefer something in the actual
experience of it, can sensibly be invoked in support of valuing it?
Note : the tie-up of ' desirability ' and ' being desired ' is not
( God help us) an ' analysis ', but a corollary of a plausible and
persuasive, though not formally demonstrable, empiricist atti­
tude that nothing can sensibly be credited with any characteris­
tic ( desirability, audibility, or any other) , unless a basis for
attributing it can be found in some experience.2 Hence, the
1 Cf. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter I.
2 After all, the general empiricist position of Mill and his predecessors was no
secret. How was poor Mill to foresee that a Moore and his followers should be
possible? � that his perfectly clear argument should be misinterpreted as a

95
 T H O U GHT AND C HANGE

crucial premiss in determining our values must be - what do we

in fact, in experience, prefer?
This in a way is the core of the Utilitarian argument : what
should our values be, given ( 1 ) the aim-means model of conduct,
in other words the pursuit of targets, and (2) an empiricist philo­
sophy which precludes the attribution of anything without some
experiential warrant. Answer : the aims must be selected by
experience. (And to say that an aim is favoured by experience, or
experientially, is simply a roundabout way of saying that it is
desired.) This argument may not have the formal properties of a
syllogism, but, given the two premisses, it is fairly persuasive.
The insistence that our values must be such as are experientially
warranted (or in English : that we should value things we really
desire), is not quite the whole of the Utilitarian doctrine. There
are two further important steps : the equation of what we actually
desire with happiness, and universalism - the requirement that
each of us individually should value morally that which serves
the real desires of us all.
The first of these steps presents no problem whatever, in a
sense. The identification of that which is desired for its own sake
with happiness is established with a rigour that has never been
surpassed, and no doubts whatever may be entertained on this
score by any sane person. The two things are necessarily identical
because they have been defined in terms of each other. There is
no harm in this : nor does it get us any further. The non-vacuous
content of Utilitarianism springs from its empiricism. The
' happiness ' which embraces anything we happen really to want
for its own sake doesn't add anything, but it does usefully
remind us of the empiricist starting point. On the other hand, it
certainly does no more than this.
The universalism is harder to prove. In fact, it cannot be
' prove d ' or justified at all. The best way to reconstruct Utilitar­
ianism such as J. S. Mill's in a manner true to its spirit is, I

theory about the actual meaning of the word ' good '? And note that, on top of
everything else, those who make an unwarranted fuss about the real meaning
of words, get it quite wrong. It is perfectly good English to say that Brigitte
Bardot is desirable, which she is, To say this is not to say, as Moore would
have, that she is ' worthy of being desired ', a question which has not been much
considered, It means that she is desired. Thus the argument from the actual
meaning of words, which is in any case irrelevant, supports Mill and not Moore.
 TH E USES OF T H O U GHT

believe, this : the universalism was simply part of his terms of

reference, and not something sub judice in the argument. In the
argument (concerning the ' proof' of Utilitarianism) he assumes
goodwill on the part of the reader : the problem is - given (our)
goodwill, 1 what shall the content of our ethics be? This problem
then receives an excellent answer, which is neither vacuous nor
without weighty justification.
In the normal course of events, valuation is built into the very
concepts we have of things : we do not go about experientially
' tasting ' objects identified by means of evaluatively colourless
concepts. In so far as utilitarian psychology maintains or suggests
the other picture, that of our conduct being accompanied by con·
stant readings on an inner hedonic thermometer, it is false -
though this perhaps doesn't matter for the ethical theory. In this
sense - values come to be incorporated in the objects to which
they are attached - objectivism is sociologically true. But values
can be detached and re-allocated, there is nothing which binds
them to things necessarily : and philosophical objectivism is false
in claiming that there is . .
Utilitarianism acquires its genuine, non-vacuous content from
its empiricism, by contesting any of the many forms of objec­
tivism (and such objectivism is, explicitly or tacitly, part of the
creed of most societies). The significant corollary of such ob­
jectivism is that if an evaluation is attached to an object, it always
should or must be, that the values not built into concepts cannot
be prised away.2 Utilitarianism, on the other hand, commends
1 When dealing with the motivational ' sanctions ' of moral conduct, he no

longer makes such an assumption. The $anctions are intended to work in any
case, whether goodwill is present or not (though one of the factors invoked,
reassuringly if we believe him, is precisely the alleged tendency for social good­
will to augment) : but the proof only works if goodwill is assumed, for it is not a
proof of why we should be moral at all, but of why the content of our morality
should be utilitarian, given that we have a morality at all.
This kind of separation of roles between proof and sanction implies a certain
kind of dualism - in fact it suggests or presupposes two kinds of dualism :
inside each man, that between feeling and reason (and of course Mill inherited
this from Hume) ; and in society, it tacitly implies the distinction between a
benevolent and expert civil service who need reasons, and the rest of the popu­
lation, who need sanctions. Certain kind of utilitarian social reform ' from
above ' has of course worked precisely in this manner.
2 There is a pedantic sense in which Utilitarianism can also be treated as an
' Objectivism '. But this is not relevant here.

97
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

constant reassessment, a constant shaking-up of the tie-ups

between characteristics and evaluations in the light of fact -
without respect for existing associations. Of course (and contrary
to the mistaken psychology of the utilitarians) neither pleasure
nor happiness are some kind of inner sensation-accompaniment,
the readings on an inner thermometer : these words are just ways
of conveying that we like something, and add nothing to that
liking. The utilitarian commendation to re-assess everything in
terms of happiness - which as it stands may be a tautologous,
vacuous recommendation, amounting to no more than choose
what you like by what you like - amounts however in practice to
a most non-vacuous recommendation of revaluations-without­
prejudice, a transvaluation of values in the light of what contri­
butes to general contentment.
It amounts to a commendation of a ' transvaluation of values '
(but tacitly retaining universalism), based on an exclusive con­
cern with nourritures terrestres, but without hysteria or romanti­
cism, and also, indeed, without psychological perceptiveness or
a fundamental reconsideration of the model of humah conduct.
It made it easy to change specific values, and suggested that this
be done in the light of mundane considerations only. It thus
provided an excellent intellectual accompaniment and en­
couragement of, though not much of a real explanation for, the
social change of the industrial revolution. (It fails to be much of
an explanation because the early stages of industrialisation bring
little happiness, and the later stages make it manipulable, and
hence not an independent premiss.) Later, Nietzsche commended
a more dramatic transvaluation, based not merely on the formal
exclusion of extramundane moral premisses, but also on an effec­
tive reconstruction of the image of man associated with them,
It is of course well known that historic utilitarianism was con­
nected with social change. But the connection is not just a his­
torical one : it is also a logical one. There are various reasons why
utilitarianism is well suited to periods of social change, but one
of them is that, under a camouflage of one seemingly interesting
but in fact vacuous recommendation, there is another and
genuine recommendation : re-consider your values, and do not
trust the fact-value connections inherited from the past.
In so far as utilitarianism fails, it is not for the reasons gener­
ally credited in the textbooks, which are negligible. Its effective
g8
 THE USES OF T H O U GHT

failures are due to other reasons : for one thing, our aims, satis­
factions, are not in general the hard data which the utilitarian
model required that they should be. 1 The utilitarian model is
this : given our aims (which are given by our desires, by what
would make us happy), and given the facts, which determine
which aims a,re attainable, and at which price, and which are
compatible with each other, the moral answer follows.2 But un­
fortunately, the aims are not simply given. We have considerable
and constantly increasing control over them. This being so - the
aims themselves being a dependent and manipulable variable, so
to speak - they cannot really be invoked to give us determinate
ethical answers. The indeterminacy of the aims would transmit
itself to the reasoning as a whole. For we can frequently influence
our own future desires, or those of other people ; it is not merely
a matter of the means of mass persuasion, but of the fact that
social policy and education forms certain kinds of people with
certain kinds of satisfactions, and it is the (independently agreed)
desirability of certain kinds of people (e.g. literate, industrial)
which determines that the desires of such people should come
into being, rather than vice versa. From the utilitarian viewpoint
this is topsy turvy, but that is how it is.
This is the real �nd effective failure of Utilitarianism in a
modern context (and not the hackneyed and irrelevant objections
abounding in the academic literature of the first half of this
century) : the more we approach a situation in which the attain­
ment of the really given and obvious ends becomes easy (this
generally means : the avoidance of the obvious sufferings of
·

hunger, illness and generally those arising from shortages and

ignorance), and thus become a relatively smaller part of the area
in which weighty decisions have to be taken, the more we are
also dealing with alternatives in which our ' real desires ' are not
given, by experience or anything else. On the contrary : the situ­
ation of technological power which enables us so easily to satisfy
the needs which really are ' given ' by nature, also enables us

1 There is another important weakness of the theory, connected with the

logical complexity of our aims : but it is not essential to discuss it here.

2 Unfortunately, there do remain some unsolved problems concerning the
proper rate of discount of satisfactions distant in time, of discounts for un­
certainty, and inter-personal comparison and summation. But these do not
concern us here.

99
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

to manipulate our own experience, to form ourselves, so that we

enjoy or abhor these or those additional boons, When the content
of ' experience ' , the ' pleasurable ' or other tonality of this or
that, is itself something under our control, a controlled variable,
it cannot, through this very fact, play the role of ultimate
arbitrator which is assigned to it in the Utilitarian scheme.
There is a sad irony concerning the inapplicability of Utili­
tarianism : in traditional society, habitual associations are more
or less sacrosanct and the experiential reassessments are for­
bidden or discouraged. Transitional contexts, on the other hand,
do have an overwhelming aim - ' development ' , ' industrialisa­
tion ' - but this aim, in the transitional period, notoriously
involves such massive suffering that Utilitarianism must, in
effect, be sinned against rather than observed. In post-transi­
tional societies, the actual experiential distribution of satis­
factions is no longer something given and thus cannot be invoked
to solve the problems that remain, which arise precisely from the
manipulability of experience, and must generally concern the
direction of its manipulation.
We have no given targets any more than we have given
identities. Utilitarianism most creditably rejected given identi­
ties, on the social or individual level, but wished to help us
forge new, ever-renewable ones in terms of what we really liked.
This solution is not really available : the new anchorage itself
turns out to be a floating bank of seaweed.

The Rail
There seems to be at any rate one way of demonstrating an
' ought ' conclusion from an ' is ' premiss : if it can be shown that
some course of action is inevitable, it follows that it should be
performed . . or, if you wish, that it is irrelevant whether it
•

' should ' or not. ' Must ' implies ' ought ' . A necessary develop­
ment either demonstrates, or makes redundant, an obligation.
It hardly matters which way one cares to put it.
The ethical argument which proceeds from the ' recognition of
necessity ' has been much analysed and has come in for a good
deal of obloquy of late, as cowardly, bowing to blind forces
instead of combating them, etc. These objections are quite
sound, but it should be noticed that the effective objections to
 THE USES OF T H O U GHT

historical band-waggon jumping presuppose (in the main

rightly) one thing - that the historical predictions about the
trends that are to be accepted as necessary, are in fact rather
shaky. (This is indeed generally the case.) Suppose for a moment
that some such prediction, messianic or pessimistic as the case may
be, really were reliable and certain : would there then be any point
in promulgating values which were at variance with what iron
necessity permitted? I fear not. Happily the case is hypothetical.
The situation is this : the question of general determinism (' the
future is predetermined ' , but without specification of either the
pattern or the laws determining it) is an open one. The argu­
ments in favour of it may be strong, but are not conclusive. The
case for specific historical determinism, i.e. doctrines which claim
not merely that the future is predetermined, but also tells us just
how, is very feeble. No specific determinism is anywhere near
the level of certainty - to put it mildly - to force us into adopting
a historicist ethic, to become ' free ' by ' recognising necessity '.
The deduction of the obligatoriness of some line of conduct
from its inevitability happens to be one of the styles of thought
adopted by modern moralists, whether owing to the logical
erosion of the alternatives, or a spontaneous infatuation with the
idea of necessity : the actual historic forms of this argument are
sometimes combined with reasoning in other styles (e.g. the
emergence of a new necessity-adoring Hidden Prince).

Conclusion
Ethical theories are built around certain and basic and simple
models. (The same is true of theories of knowledge.) To say this,
however, is not in any way to ' unmask ' ethical theories : on the
contrary. There have been various recently fashionable philo­
sophies which have maintained that such general models are ever
wrong, that the task of philosophy is to neutralise them, by
uncovering their source, be it in our bewitchment by language, 1
or in the anxious desire of inexperienced rulers to have their
nerves steadied by an ideal, and to return to the concrete mani­
fold reality from which those models were mistakenly abstracted
or which they are wrongly supposed to cover.
1 Cf. an account of this by Professor S. Hampshire in David Hume. A Sym·

posium, ed. D. F. Pears, p. 5 ·

IOI
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

Nothing could be further from the truth : the allegedly solid

reality is crumbling and dissolving under our feet. The need to
restore order from some at least relatively stable and abstract
vantage point, is not pathological (linguistically or socially), but
inescapable. If it be a disease, it is an inescapable one. It is
aggravated, not alleviated, by an affected nonchalance and in­
difference, or a strange mystique of mishmash, of dealing with
cases ' each on their own merit ', without a general orientation.
Attending to our social (and conceptual) situation may perhaps
be nur fuer Schwindelfreie : but it is even less suited for som­
nambulists.
The various general models available are not all equally suit­
able or applicable. Some fit our situation, some do not ; some are
internally dishonest, and some are not. The Advice of Polonius,
the doctrine of the Hidden Prince, tends in general to be worth­
less : the valid element in the appeal of Existentialism lies pre­
cisely in the fact that it starts from the denial of a fixed given
identity. Classical Utilitarianism is a noble (clean, honest and un­
trivial) doctrine, quite unlike the mincing affectation which some­
times passes for philosophy : its inapplicability in toto must be a
source of regret. In the long run, no aims/targets are given us, or
only such as are becoming too easy to constitute the centre of our
preoccupation : but in the shorter run, there is plainly one over­
riding aim. There is no need to express it in excessively abstract
terms such as ' happiness '. We can describe it concretely. Given
the manifest possibility of a world in which people do not starve
or want or die prematurely, and in which they are at least not
obliged to slaughter and enslave each other, that world must be
attained. (The reasoning which underlies one's liberal values -
the desire that, in the attainment of the aim, the doors of possibility
should not be shut upon us, individually or collectively - is more
complex.) The model of the rail complements the conclusion of
the utilitarian one : what may be seen, in the first person as it
were, as a moral obligation, can also be seen, for all practical
purposes, as an external, objective necessity, a consequence of
the determination of others not to accept less when so much is
materially available. Thus we are far from incapable of dis­
criminating between such models - and indeed we have no
choice but to do so.

102
 C H A P T E R F I VE

THE USES O F D O UBT

World without Bifurcation

In traditional society, the characteristic way of underwriting
social arrangements was by a kind of transcendental reduplica­
tion of them, which provided them with a charter and authority.
Amongst sociologists, it was above all Durkheim who explored
the general features of this type of thought. Marx didn't like this
bifurcation - it was part of his not wholly coherent idea of
' alienation ' - and looked forward to its disappearance, already
foreshadowed, it appears, in the ' unity of theory and practice '
of his own doctrine. Durkheim, on the other hand, approved of
it, considered it to be at the very root of our capacity to think
at all, and looked forward merely to a rejuvenated form of it. As
an account of the actual faiths of either pre-literate societies or
of pre-industrial literate civilisations, it may be an over-simpli­
fied picture, and later work has explored more fully their real,
concrete manifestations : but it is an adequate approximation for
present purposes.
This validation by reduplication could be named either the
Mirror or the Balance theory of faith. The objects of belief
re-duplicate the empirical social world, but they also compen­
sate for its deficiencies. The two roles are only superficially in
conflict.
Rightly or wrongly, philosophic thought has, since the Middle
Ages, been to a large extent a systematic erosion of this type of
belief. It is not necessary to argue here whether this was a justified
development - only to discuss its implications and consequences.
In one sense, we are already free of ' alienation ' : for although
Bifurcation or Reduplication faiths are still with us, they are not
very seriously invoked in the settlement of disputes that really
103
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

concern us. (On the contrary : it is this-worldly preoccupations

and doctrines which generally, and rather openly, now give
such content and conviction to transcendent belief as they
still possess.) When the type of faith disappears or becomes
too weak to justify the foundations of a social order, what can
replace it?
There are two principal alternatives. One is that the reverence
once felt for the Shadow, or Supra-Real world, should transfer
itself to the totality of the now Singular world. The ultimate
Totality is a worthy object of reverence : pantheists have always
felt this. The second alternative is that the ultimate authority,
and the Noumenal, should disappear in the opposite direction,
into the individual self, into the ultimate subject. Either way, the
external bifurcation into the Sacred and the Profane goes : in one
case, the Sacred grows to embrace everything, and in the other, it
shrinks to a hard kernel within oneself.
The pantheist solution in its pure form has had no particular
appeal to modern man (though I suppose post-mediaeval
Western society has had its reasonable, but not disproportionate
share of those moved by the pantheist vision). On the other hand
it has had a most remarkable appeal and appositeness when the
Totality is endowed, like a successful career, fortune, or enter­
prise, with Growth, and when its ethical suggestiveness, its
manner of underwriting social arrangements (or for that matter,
revolutions) operates through this notion of Global Growth. This
intellectual phenomenon was discussed above, at length.
The alternative solution - the shrinking of the ego to a hard
ultimate kernel which provides the basis, or at least the touch­
stone, for everything - is worthy of consideration . 1 It might
suitably be called the Crusoe tradition : Marx already observed
that Robinson was a favourite character with the economists,
but he is present even more in the backs of the minds of philo­
sophers, even if they did not so frequently invoke him by name.
The fittingness of the Crusoe myth to an individualistic age
need hardly be stressed.
1 Santayana singled out this phenomenon in his Egotism in German Philo­

sophy ( 1 9 r 6). The stress on a particular connection between this approach and
German thought seems unjustified : from Descartes to contemporary Existen­
tialism or Logical Positivism, it seems a strand shared by the various national
intellectual traditions of the West.

104
 THE USES OF D OU B T

The Pure Visitor

The Ctusoe myth enters philosophy mainly (but not exclusively)
in the form of an epistemological orientation, a great stress on
the theory of knowledge, as opposed to ontology or metaphysics.
Indeed the most prominent characteristic of post-Cartesian
philosophy is precisely that it is now epistemology which does
the job of metaphysics (or of transcendent faith). The manner in
which this is done can best be observed at the very start of the
tradition, with Descartes. The self is used as a kind· of ultimate
redoubt of certainty. All else, all that is not contained within the
final private island of consciousness, is treated with suspicion and
reserve - and with good cause, for tht: old doctrines had proved so
mutually contradictory and unreliable, despite the appalling con­
fidence of their upholders, that it became necessary to give them a
fresh security check, lest they be agents of the malevolent daemon.
It is important to notice the real function of Crusoe : it is not
so much that Descartes started with a preconception in his favour,
an unreasonable demand for total certainty and a misguided
belief that this was to be found within the self: he started, rather,
with a perception of the total unreliability of all doctrine, and the
consequent need for some kind of vetting, some kind of quaran­
tine in which the doctrines possibly infected with error could be
examined. Without such a quarantine, there could never be
intellectual progress : for the doctrines, methods or assumptions
in terms of which we eliminate or check on doctrine, might well
be just as fallacious, or indeed more covertly and perniciously
fallacious, than the checked doctrine itself. Without some such
reliable quarantine - so the Crusoe argument runs - one could
never liberate oneself from error.
The difficulty of setting up a quarantine, of isolating error, is
of course that of finding some reliably pure material or method of
cleansing : for if the place of isolation is as contaminated as the
suspected sufferers from the plague, it cannot be of much help. 1
What is worse, everything really does seem contaminated. The
plague of error is disastrously pervasive.
1 Spinoza was acutely aware of this difficulty, though he supposed he had an

answer. He used a different metaphor - that of the hammer. (It takes a hammer
to make a hammer - therefore hammers seem impossible.) Cf. Tractatus de Intel­
lectus Emendatione.

105
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

It is here that Crusoe becomes essential. He enters as, not a

deus (at least, not at first), but as a homo ex machina. He at least
is uncontaminated : he has passed through the fire of total doubt,
and has come through. He can subsequently (or so Descartes
hopes) take object after object, concept after concept or inference
after inference, and in his guaranteed aseptic pincers he can
separate the true from the false, without - and this is what
matters - re-infecting the true.
This purity was not to be had easily. Notoriously, Crusoe had
to be a tabula rasa as far as this world went, cognitively virginal.
In the Cartesian version he could attain it by passing through the
purifying fire of doubt, which left him with uncontaminated
ideas. In the later version of the British empiricists, he had to
divest himself of all concepts, and strip to the bare perceptual
skin. This conceptual strip-tease, as these things go, was in
practice never quite complete.
The whole epistemological tradition, central to modern
philosophy, amounts to a kind of pursuit or identification or
cleansing of a Pure Visitor to this world, who could subsequently
inspect the world without having been or being corrupted with
it - so that his judgment, at least, was valid. He appears of
course in various forms, in an intellectualist one with Descartes,
a sensationalist one with the British thinkers. He can of course be
invoked not only for knowledge, but also (notably in Kant) for
ethics.
In this tradition, epistemology did the work of metaphysics : it
was metaphysics. 1 What certainty, ultimate validation, was now
available, came not from outside, the Other, the Transcendent,
but from within, from that which the Pure Visitor brought with
him. The mere content of knowledge, which might come from
outside, was precarious and contingent : but this no longer
mattered, for nothing much-was based on it. The real foundation
was the manner of knowing itself. In Kant, this is quite overt and
obvious, but it is equally true of the empiricists : non-apriorists
though they might be about the content of sensation, they pro­
vided a safe and non-contingent basis in their picture of the
knowing and feeling ego itself (even although Hume, for in­
stance, was under the impression, wrongly, that he had estab­
lished empiricism itself in an empirical fashion).
1 Cf., for instance, R. P. Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (1963).

I06
 T H E USES OF D O U B T

Thus metaphysics in the full sense, putative claims to certain

and transcendent knowledge of the Other, had been eliminated
from the mainstream of philosophy for a long time, 1 even if the
epistemological tradition which replaced it had certain crypto­
metaphysical traits.
In his later (Existentialist) form, the Pure Visitor becomes less
pure, less epistemological and less comfortable. He is ' thrown
into the world ' and has been forcibly reminded that the world is
not a spectacle but a predicament, and that he cannot extricate
himself from the mud. Thus he no longer aspires to total purity,
but only to keeping his pride. Stuck in this world, he will not be
beholden to it, he will not borrow his values - they, his final
commitment, remain his own.
Of course, we all know now that the Pure Visitor is an im­
possibility : indeed, we are reminded of this very often. Witt­
genstein attacks him in the opening passages of his Philosophical
Investigations ( 1 9 5 3), with special reference to language and St.
Augustine. The Augustinian theory of language, as naming pre­
existent things, does indeed presuppose a pure visitor who had
learnt to identify objects (in effect : speak) in some other world,
and then learns our concepts as a kind of foreign language. In
fact, as Wittgenstein rightly points out, we learn our language by
learning to live with, and in it. The destruction of the linguistic
variant of the Pure Visitor is rightly at the start of Wittgenstein's
work, for it is a crucial premiss for his other and more question­
able conclusions.2
Of course, the Pure Visitor is an impossibility. (We were never
pute : there is a kind of conceptual equivalent of infantile
sexuality.) The supposition that he represents in any way an
account of the actual genesis of our knowledge of the world, is
1 Hegelianism is only apparently an exception to this. Hegel's appeal lies
precisely in the fact that he fuses the subjectivist, no-bifurcation tradition, with
the pantheist-world-growth theme. The Fichte-Hegel ego does not gi'ope after
some Other: it rolls its own. (On top of that, the Hegelian one is collectivised
and somehow incorporates the whole of a cultural tradition within itself.)
Or again, overt contemporary metaphysicians on the Continent tend to be
rooted in the ' phenomenological ' tradition, which really goes back to Descartes,
and consists of trying to scrutinise one's own conceptual skin.
2 This sociological attack, as it were, on the Pure Visitor is in no way original.
It:was stated with great clarity and force by Durkheim, though for some reason
he is never credited with it by contemporary philosophers.

107
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

absurd. He does not even represent a plausible or possible

aspiration : we cannot divest ourselves of our conceptual clothing
and stand bare and receptive to the world ' as it really is ', for we
can only perceive and categorise the world through some system
of concepts, some particular setting of our sensibility. All this is
indisputable, and I have no desire to revive the Pure Visitor,
much as I revere his memory.
What I do wish to stress is the necessity and validity of the
job which the Pure Visitor was invented to do - the attempt at
systematic and general decontamination, of conceptual quaran­
tine, an attempt necessary in conditions of general plague. This
is our condition. Sometimes we cannot but strive for a general
revaluation, with premisses as untainted as we can make them.
This is generally forgotten, or openly denied, by those who
reject the myth of the Pure Visitor. Those who reject him, are
mistaken in also rejecting the enterprise on which he was en­
gaged, which can, and sometimes must, be carried on without
taking the myth itself seriously.
This mistake assumes two forms. In the extreme version, it
runs as follows : because the Pure Visitor is an absurdity, because
we cannot divest ourselves of our conceptual clothing, therefore
we must accept it in its totality. As there is no pure, naked vision
in terms of which we could judge it, there is no reason for which
we could reject even some part of it. 1 Therefore, languages,

1 This doctrine can be found in the general formulation of Wittgenstein's

philosophy. Even if it is the case, as some defenders of that philosophy claim,

that this general position is corrected and amended in the special applications
of it, this does not really help, for these specific emendations are then inevitably
in contradiction with the general philosophy itself (not in virtue of accidental
summary formulations of it, but in virtue of those premisses which alone give
it any plausibility at all). Either language is a law unto itself (because there can
be no other), or it is not: and if not, the criteria by which it is to be judged -
however rarely - must be formulated and defended; and they cannot themselves
be extracted from the actual working of language. (But such independent criteria
have been excluded . , .) Alternatively, we must accept a total relativism : each
language is a law unto itself. (They must also be conceived as self-sufficient and
never other-directed morally, so to speak - all this in blatant contradiction to
the real global situation.) Wittgensteinianism cannot evade or deal with this
fork.
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London 1958), has correctly
extracted this apotheosis of ' forms of life ' from Wittgenstein and bravely and
openly embraced the implications of the latter alternative.

xo8
 THE USES OF D OU B T

forms of life, cultures, must be embraced in their totality, and

never judged from the outside.
The less extreme variant of this philosophy arises as a conse�
quence of realising the enormity committed by the extreme
version. Certainly - the argument runs - corrections are possible,
sometimes necessary. But there can be no general criterion to
sanction them - for the notion of such a general criterion is based
on some myth such as that of the Pure Visitor. The need for the
corrections can only be seen and justified in each concrete
instance, ' on its own merits ', etc., etc.
This variant is now much more widely held than the extreme
one, and it is also far more noxious. The extreme one was so
extreme that it was hardly ever held seriously outside the philo�
sopher's study : in application, it was too preposterous. (Ironi­
cally, it was those very philosophers who always stressed that the
doctrines held inside the study must be scrutinised by the
standards obtaining outside it, who themselves embraced a
doctrine only tenable inside.) The milder variant, which corn­
mends that bridges should only be crossed when arrived at,
abstractness avoided, etc., etc., is seemingly sensible enough, and
pliable enough, to be entertained seriously, and is in fact very
fashionable. 1
What, in reality, does this amount to? A commendation o f an
ethical and epistological mishmash, of an endless multiplicity of
uncoordinated and unlisted principles, which can, in fact, be
invoked and counter-invoked to defend or condemn anything.
The much-vaunted, cautious, piecemeal method must in practice
mean mishmash. Why this rather than that? Certainly, this is just
how ' forms of life ', cultures, do really work : real societies,
traditions, ways of life are not coherent axiomatic systems, they
contain inconsistent and multiform elements, and the incon­
sistencies and diversifications are sometimes even essential to
their working. When a social or intellectual system is viable and
works passably, and when indeed no general revaluation or re�
thinking is required, then indeed this is just how it works, and
this is how it often resolves its conflicts and difficulties. But :
1 Cf., for instance, Professor S. Hampshire, in the New Statesman, February

8, 1963. Professor Hampshire has also on other occasions commended this non­
generalising thesis (which, indeed, is correctly deduced from the premisses of
recently fashionable philosophy).

109
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

when such a system breaks down and undergoes a transition,

when every element in it is suspect and needs to be decon­
taminated before it can be used, we need a general criterion,
unpolluted by the plague. If we then try to use the ' each case on
its merits, etc.' approach, we only move in circles, and sink
deeper into the morass. One thing that is no use to us at all is the
arbitrary, intuitive, ad hoc pulling out of some close-to-hand bit
of the mishmash, and its application, with the apology that ' each
case needs to be judged on its own merits ' . The need for a general
criterion is inescapable - and considerations can be adduced that
will ' determine the intellect to give its assent ' to this criterion
rather than another. The Pure Visitor may be a myth, but the
myth was at least a way of expressing one such criterion.

Sour Grapes
There is one form of p�ogress which consists of discovering how
to treat something which has hitherto been an obstacle, so that it
becomes a positive advantage. It was thus perhaps that the first
navigators hit upon the idea of turning water, an obstacle, into a
highway.
Something of this kind has been happening in modern thought.
It is characteristic of traditional thought that it endeavours to
buttress values with certainties : values are shored up by con­
fident assertions that the world is of such and such a nature. Loss
of confidence, or loss of the conviction altogether, then also
undermines belief in the validity or appositeness of the values.
The waters of doubt undercut the bank of faith, and when in
the end it crumbles, the moral structures erected on it fall with
it.
One discovery of modern thought has been that the corrosive
waters of doubt can, surprisingly, also provide a basis for values.
There is a whole class of doctrines which, however divergent in
other respects, do share just this characteristic - that a doubt or
ignorance, not a claim to knowledge or certainty, provides the
crucial premiss for a normative argument. The most important
specimens of this type of theory are perhaps liberalism and exis­
tentialism : the type of liberalism which preaches toleration on
the grounds that none can be sure enough where truth lies to
suppress any possible source of it, and the kind of existentialism
I IO
 THE USES OF D O U B T

which asserts that no doctrine can give us knowledge of our

essence or identity, which on the contrary remains, necessarily,
unfixed and indeterminate. (Originally, Existentialism was the
reformulation of religious Faith as a corollary of general seep�
ticism.)
The type of liberalism which argues for the toleration of all
views from the premiss that we cannot be sure where truth will
be found in the end, is open to the taunt that it does not favour
liberty as such, but only as a corollary - and, what is worse, a
corollary which would lapse if truth ever came to be known for
certain. One answer to this taunt is that, in a sense fortunately,
there is no danger that truth will ever be securely known. The
inaccessibility of a truth secure enough to warrant suppression of
rival views is not a contingent, but a necessary fact. It is not
based on consideration of what kind of information we happen
to possess, but on an a priori consideration of what kind of
knowledge could conceivably be in our possession. The grapes
are not merely sour, but their sourness is guaranteed.
The ethics of liberalism, in this sense, is indeed an ethic of
sour grapes, and of reliably sour grapes : we do not possess cer­
tainty and therefore we must be tolerant, and we can be certain
that we shall never possess certainty. Certainty enters only as a
negative epistemological thesis. We cherish this negative cer­
tainty, which ensures eternal openness, ever new possibilities.
Anything else would give us claustrophobia.
The formulation of liberalism in terms of ' openness ' (in
Popper's sense), seems to me to have great advantages over its
classical formulation in terms of freedom within the limits of
non-interference with the freedom of others. The central objec­
tion to the classical formulation is a certain lack of sociological
realism. Men's lives are ruled by a wide variety of constraints
other than manifest, externally imposed compulsions. The key
notions of social scientists, such as ' culture ' or ' social structure ' ,
are mainly ways o f summing u p the all-embracing and per­
vasive way in which our social environment moulds our life, our
thought, our being. It does not even make sense to wish our­
selves free of these pressures : a man would not be freer if, per
impossibile, he were lifted out of his social-moral milieu (what
would there be left of him?), any more than his body would be
freer by being taken outside atmosphere and gravity.
Ill
 T H O U G H T A N D CHANGE

The classical liberal picture tacitly assumes a kind of residual

non-social man, a self-sufficient island, and proceeds to define
liberty in terms of non-interference with this private redoubt,
a minimal island territory. This of course will not do : there is no
such redoubt. Our most intimate thoughts - thought, after all, is
a favourite candidate for the ultimate privacy of self-hood and
independence - can only live by assuming the forms of a lang..,
uage, by employing concepts and assumptions which, as we have
been so much reminded of late, are not of the individual's own
making but are taken over from the shared store of a linguistic
cultural community. And so it is. But, of course, this implies no
reverence for that community.
The advantage of formulating liberalism in terms of openness
(and generally without taking the Pure Visitor myth literally)
derives from the fact that this data presupposes no such unrealis­
tic ultimate redoubt of the ego. It allows - as is the case - that
even, or especially, the ultimate recesses of our being, are socially
formed. It merely requires that it be feasible that sometimes we
should be able to tinker with the social organisation and culture
which forms us ; 1 it defines liberty as an attribute of societies
which tolerate and facilitate peaceful reassessments and reforms.
The mystery of how people succeed in attaining any original
ideas as premisses of reassessment or reform, of course remains :
but one is spared having to assume that each man does or can
live a private residual life which could be free from social
interference. 2
It so happens that I warmly subscribe to the ethic of open­
ness : what gives life value and attraction seems to me precisely
the fact that the future is open, that endless possibilities remain
for exploration, that our lives and society, concepts and values
and forms of experience, are not congealed. The requirements of
liberalism and openness, combined with the requirements of
industrialisation and affluence - the requirement that men should
not unnecessarily live lives of poverty, disease and early death -
1 Of course, even this formulation is not resistant to a general determinism,

which then covet·s the attempts at tinkering as well. But it does survive a recog­
nition of the pervasive way our lives and personalities are tied up with the social
context in which they occur.
2 The fact that informal social influences in any case pervade us as air per­
vades our houses, is of course no reason whatsoever for preferring or also
tolerating formal influences, e.g. from a police state.

I I2
 THE USES O F D O U B T

seem to me to be the two bases of any contemporary political

assessment. (Happily, the two are not necessarily in conflict.)
To what extent can this additional value be supported by
argument? Not very much, I fear. There are of course certain
standard arguments which can be and are invoked. It can be
said - correctly - that any society which becomes ' closed ' , which
freezes some doctrine or value, only does so at the cost of false­
hood, for no doctrine can possess the kind of certainty claimed
for it. This point can be put in an Existentialist way : to treat
one's own self-image and identification (or one of a whole society
to do this) as given, as some kind of objective fact, is to commit
mauvaise foi, to treat that which is in some sense contingently
chosen as being necessary and given. But these arguments, valid
though they are in a sense, will only have cogency for those who
have previously espoused as their prime value a respect for a
certain kind of truth - for not treating as certain that which is
not, for not endowing with objective and given status that which
properly lacks it. We have no way of compelling people to sub­
scribe to such values. Indeed, historically and sociologically, such
values are minoritarian, and probably have to be. Most societies
have overrated the certainty of their own beliefs : and the sup­
position that one's social role, persona, self-image is something
given rather than something chosen, is the natural and normal
condition of humanity. In fact most of the roles people enact
contain as integral parts of themselves the idea of necessity,
imposition, vocation. It is not clear whether a society where this
·

were otherwise could function.

We do however have a certain consolation for this undemon­
strability of our liberal values. It is of their essence that they
should not be demonstrable, we can say : if they were, they
would, ipso facto, lose that openness which is their chief merit.
We come back to the essential Sour Grapes element in a liberal
ethic ; we cannot prove, but then, our delight is precisely in a
world in which nothing is really fixed, and everything open to
question. We must make a virtue of contingency.

The Virtue of Contingency

The ethical models which do happen to be relevant in our time
and are applicable, partially at least, it is argued, include the Rail
I I3
 THOUGH T AND CHANGE

and the ' Hypothetical Imperative ' (target) type : the view that
certain things are good because inevitable, and some others
are such because they are means to things whose desirability
cannot in practice be doubted (i.e. wealth, health and longevity
rather than their opposites.).
Their application gives us as corollaries the two crucial and
central values of our time - the attainment of affluence and the
satisfaction of nationalism. 'Affluence' means, in effect, a kind of
consummation of industrial production and application of
science to life, the adequate and general provision of the means
of a life free from poverty and disease : ' nationalism ' requires, in
effect, the attainment of a degree of cultural homogeneity within
each political unit, sufficient to give the members of the unit a
sense of participation . 1
The two logical paths along which one can reach these two
conclusions, which in any case are hardly of staggering original­
ity, are not independent of each other : nor are these two modes
of reasoning very distinct from the general schema of the argu­
ment of this book - the attempt to see what conclusions are
loosely implicit - nothing, alas, is implicit rigorously - in a lucid
estimate of our situation.
These two data or limitations on further argument do not by
any means uniquely determine either the final form of industrial
society, or the path of its attainment. This is perhaps fortunate :
it is gratifying to feel that doors remain open. The difficulties stem
perhaps from the fact that they are too open, philosophically. If
we look back at the logical devices men have employed to provide
anchorages for their values, we see how very unsatisfactory they
are : these seeming anchorages are themselves but floating sea­
weed. The notion of arguing from given desires and satisfactions
(as in Utilitarianism), from the true nature of man (as in the
diverse variants of the Hidden Prince doctrine, such as Platon­
ism), from a global entelechy, or the notion of harmony, etc., are
all pretty useless, generally because they assume something to be
fixed which in fact is manipulable. But our needs are not fixed
(except for certain minimal ones which are becoming so easy to
satisfy as to pose no long-term problem). We have no fixed
essence. The supposed anchorage turns out to be as free-floating
1 The specific meaning of these points concerning nationalism is discussed

below, in Chapter VII.

 THE USES OF D OU B T

as the ship itself, and usually attached to it. They provide no

fixed point. That which is itself a variable cannot help to fix the
value of the others.
This point has been obscured in the past by the fact that,
though it was true in theory, it was not so in practice : human
needs, the image of man, etc., were not changing very rapidly,
still less were they under human control.
This openness, combined with a striking shortage of given
premisses for fixing its specific content, gives some of us at any
rate a sense of vertigo when contemplating the future of mankind.
This vertigo seems to me somehow both justified and salutary.
Once it was much in evidence : in a thinker such as H. G. Wells,
futuristic fantasies were at the same time exercises in political
theory. Today, science fiction is a routinised genre, and political
theory is carefully complacent and dull - and certainly not, what­
ever else might be claimed for it, vertiginous. But whilst it is as
well to be free of messianic hopes, it is good to retain some sense
of vertigo.
This openness itself provides the clue to one additional, over­
riding value - liberty, the preservation of open possibilities, both
for individuals and collectively. The reasons which can be
offered in support of it are, alas, less than wholly cogent : ( r ) The
Philosophic Sour Grapes (already discussed) : if we possessed a
good proof of our central value, we would ipso facto be less free.
It is of the essence of freedom that it should be freely chosen (a
consolation?). This proof is fairly sound as far as it goes. Sour
Grapes proofs are quite common in philosophy, and consist of
demonstrating that not being able to prove this or that is as good,
or better, than being able to do so, for if we had a proof, the
existence of that proof would itself corrode the thing proved. As
Kant observed in a similar context, we cannot comprehend this,
but can only comprehend its incomprehensibility. It would be
idle to deny (though philosophers often try to kid themselves)
that Sour Grape proofs are a bit disappointing. Secretly, we
should be rather pleased if a proof turned up, after all.
(2) Openness, liberty, is of the essence of that New Knowledge
which brought the new world into being and sustains it. This
provides a kind of guarantee of the preservation of liberty. This
argument is weak, unfortunately. An intellectual separation of
power, permitting liberty in (say) technology but not elsewhere�
I I5
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

seems, regrettably, feasible. What is true of the first occurrence

of scientific and technological breakthrough - that it requires
freedom - is not necessarily true of the subsequent cumulative
ones.
( 3 ) Liberal societies, being more adaptable and pliable, have
better chances of survival than illiberal and consequently rigid
ones. This is a factual argument and like all of its kind, is at the
mercy of facts. Facts have not pronounced clearly on the issue.
It is worth noting that arguments (2) and (3 ) are in conflict
with argument (1) : if reasons would weaken the case (argument x )
we ought not also surreptitiously try to provide a few.
(4) There is a certain rather metaphysical consideration, owing
much to Kant, though in other ways alien to his spirit. The very
fact that most of our other aspirations are biologically or socially
conditioned, and are becoming manipulable by us at will, makes
it difficult to identify with them wholeheartedly. This leaves us,
for full identification, only those aims or values untouched by
such contingency. Knowledge and its pursuit, and the free
exploration of the possibilities of this universe and of life, at
least look like candidates for such a status. A form of life which
excluded or froze them, seems to me inherently inferior to one
which retains them. (It seems to me hard not to consider this an
' objective ' evaluation, just as it seems to me difficult not to con­
sider the specification of most other values, in as far as these are
tied to our accidental constitution, as ' subjective ' . When based
on a sound appreciation of that constitution, they may of course,
in that much more limited sense, be perfectly reasonable.) Thus,
ultimately, free cognitive and other exploration seems an inde­
pendent value, where others are merely conditional.
This reasoning is too abstruse and perhaps too questionable to
have much appeal. I put it on record because I find it (perhaps
for idiosyncratic reasons) persuasive ; but I am not suggesting
that others should find it similarly tempting. 1
1 The similarity with Kant resides in the exclusive valuation of liberty as the

one intrinsic good, independent of our accidental and manipulable constitu•

tion (and hence, incidentally, as suitable for invocation when a metamorphosis
has deprived us of such a fixed constitution - though Kant did not contemplate
this possibility explicitly). Kant is widely credited with the view that ' goodwill '
is the only intrinsic good - for no better reason than that he happens to say so
at the beginning of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. But by the end
of that fascinating book, it becomes plain that the hold such ' good willing ' has

I I6
 THE USES OF D OU B T

( 5 ) There is one further argument which can be invoked in

defence of liberty. This is a reason which cannot claim to be per­
suasive for someone who does not even accept that freedom is a
desirable thing at all, amongst others ; but it may well carry
weight with that very substantial portion of humanity which
admits it to be one of a plurality of goods, and whose possible
doubts about freedom are really a matter of allocating priorities
between it and the others. (In practice, this argument may well
be the most important.) The argument is this : tyranny is, ulti­
mately, a far graver danger than poverty. The two great currents
of social thought brought into being by the earlier stages of the
great transition are liberalism and socialism. The former is pre­
occupied with the defence of liberty against tyranny, the latter
with the prevention of poverty in the face of exploitation. Al­
though the sociology of liberalism (i.e. the doctrines concerning
the alleged consequences of laissez-faire) is sillier1 than that
over us is a corollary of its being the manifestation - for Kant - of non-con�
tingent valuation.
The difference between this argument and Kant's, both in the letter and spirit,
is of course that Kant could only conceive of freedom, non-contingency, as tied
to ' rationality ' and somehow very rigid.
1 Just when is the Hidden Hand, progress or harmony as a spontaneous by­

product of unco-ordinated wills, supposed to be effective? In traditional

societies? The anthropologists are incomparably closer to the truth with their
' functionalist ' doctrine to the effect that its various institutions reinforce and
maintain each other. (Only, from the contemporary viewpoint, what was once
seen as a providential ' functional ' equilibrium, now appears as a set of vicious
circles hampering improvement.) During the first and only real Wirtschafts­
wunder, the first industrialisation? Such a view would ignore the fact that on that
occasion, the Hidden Hand was aided and guided by a most providential set of
favourable circumstances, explored by historical sociology, circumstances which
certainly cannot be generalised and treated as the natural or common condition
of man. Or during the imitative industrialisation? In order, perhaps, to refrain
from hastening the process and mitigating the misery and human injustice
inherent in it, should we increase the political instability attendant on it, and
increase the likelihood of breakdown, and ignore the manifest need of co­
ordinated effort? Or perhaps in the post-hump affluent society, to maximise the
public squalor, deprive ourselves of the fruits of the new power to make some
sense of our environment, and to pander to a now quite pointless and archaic
acquisitiveness of some?
But it is not merely the sociology of laissez-faire liberalism that is silly.
Leaving aside the weird psychology which underlies the argument that only the
' free market ' can ' maximise satisfactions ' or whatnot, there is also some very
odd philosophy. Latter-day apologists of laissez-jaire liberalism like to strike the
 T H O U GHT AND CHANGE

associated with the socialist tradition, or on the other hand its

central value - liberty - is sounder, i.e. a more important p re­
occupation, precisely because it is more precarious. The problem
of poverty is only acute in the short run (which, certainly, is no
consolation to those suffering from it) : in the longer run, it does
not seem serious. In the long run (if there is a long run at all) we
shall all be affluent. 1 (One is tempted to invert Malthus and
observe that technological advance makes resources grow geo­
metrically, whilst population growth becomes at most arith­
metical.) On the other hand, the destiny of liberal institutions
seems sadly precarious. In societies not yet past the hump of
industrialisation, their sacrifice may be justifiable : but when
distributing one's sympathy between industrialised societies, the
presence of liberal institutions must surely be the overriding
consideration.
To say this is of course not to say that existing liberal affluent
pose of philosophic enlightenment : they alone have emerged from the Middle
Ages, whilst others are still in thrall to mediaeval ' realism ' implicit in notions
such as a just price or wage, as opposed to a supposedly more empiricist deter­
mination of such things by supply and demand, etc. Covertly and unwittingly,
it is these latter-day liberals who are the crypto-mediaevalists, who make the
' realist ' assumption that certain things, which in fact are man-made, are
inscribed into the very Nature of Things. What in the Nature of Things makes
the market-determined price the right one? Value being man-made, can we not
choose our own criteria and mechanisms? Or again : these liberals are not con­
sistent enough to be anarchists and call for total abrogation of political action by
centralised agencies. The ring has to be held (and it is even admitted, nowadays,
some services must be provided). But where, in the Nature of Things, do we
find (as they tacitly assume we do) the delimitanon of rightful state action? That
delimitation too is man-made, and is not dictated to us.
In the cold war, the United States were hampered by their (partly nominal)
adherence to some such liberalism. It cancelled out, as the Soviet Union was
similarly hampered by its commitment to Marxism. Or perhaps one should say
that both sides were committed to the folklore of their ideologies.
It is agreeable to reflect that, in some kind of less than fully explicit way, this
is very widely appreciated. There is an encouraging lack of willingness to fight
for either . left or right ideals. Behind the Iron Curtain, men may be willing to
fight for liberalisation, but not for the restoration of capitalism, and in transi­
tional societies, the Marxists are interested in the growth-promoting, ideological
and organisational aspects of Marxism, but not in its utopian, millenarian ones.
1 This also provides some grounds for hope for liberty. We are not exactly

moving from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom - but perhaps
from the politics of terror tp the politics of mass bribery. That is quite enough to
be thankful for.

I I8
 THE USES OF D OU B T

s ocieties are things of great beauty, and warrant complacency.

They aren't, and they don't. The surviving areas of poverty and
underprivilege are obscene precisely because they are not so
totally unnecessary. No one could claim that these societies are
models of equality. No one could claim that important decision
in them is not often at the mercy of social mechanisms based on
archaic principles, without adequate attempts to rethink those
principles. As affluence approaches, however, inequality be­
comes less and less a matter of unequal consumption, and more a
matter of unequal access to education, prestige, and power.
Wealth may then cease to have any meaning as a means towards
greater consumption and become primarily a means of prestige
and power. Notoriously, consumption itself becomes a means of
prestige rather than an end. No one has as yet provided any very
clear picture of how power could be diffused more equally in an
industrial society. Until this is done, we cannot but prefer a
society in which the rich (i.e. those who control industry) have
to bribe, marry, corrupt, bamboozle, persuade, infiltrate, etc.,
those controlling other crucial positions in society, to one in
which they don't need to do any of these things, because they
happen to be identical with them. 1 Similarly, we cannot but pre­
fer a system in which rival cliques of potential power-holders are
at least bound to solicit the votes of an electorate possibly bam­
boozled by mass-media, to one in which the bamboozling is not
even necessary to elicit a deluded consent but only occurs as l'art
pour l'art.
Of course, one might look at the transformation of capitalism2
and the tendency towards thaw and liberalisation in Marxist
societies, as somehow one process, or facets of the same process,
as the maturing of industrial society and its liberation from the
contrasted and rival one-sided, over-rigid institutions and ideo­
logies which, in various places, gave birth to it. One hopes that
profound structural changes aid and safeguard the improvements.
But it does seem that the humanising of capitalism, what one
may call the KeynesjGalbraith/Titmuss aspect of Western society,
is a good deal less precarious than the thaw is in the East.
This set of arguments, not fully consistent with each other,
1 Cf. Raymond Aron, ' Social Structure and the Ruling Class ', British

Journal of Sociology (1950).

2 Cf. C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (1 956).
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

and at widely divergent levels of abstractness, does not, alas,

amount to a rousing manifesto for liberty. The very disparate­
ness of the arguments may worry one : any one of them alone
might have sounded more convincing than their conjunction,
One must heed Kant's warning against supporting one's values by
a mishmash of arguments, which weaken rather than reinforce
each other. But if the arguments one can muster do not match up
to the degree of one's conviction, it is perhaps as well to confess it.

A Separation of Powers
There is a sense in which political theory (or at least the general
acceptance of a true one) is impossible. I have in mind not the
fashionable and feeble doctrines which rule it out either because
they exclude evaluation, or because they exclude social explana­
tion. There is a more specific reason.
The main political experience of humanity, within our present
horizon, is the transition. But : given the concepts, beliefs, values,
of pre-industrial society, it is impossible to construct in their
terms a so-to-speak anticipatory theory of the transition, a theory
which would explain, justify and guide it in advance. On the
contrary, given the characteristic beliefs of pre-industrial
societies, much of what happens either during the process, or at
the consummation of industrialisation, must appear damnable,
heretical, immoral, treasonable, and often simply inconceivable.
This is something we cannot go into with our eyes wide open, for
until it happens, we do not have the eyes to see it. It is virtually
a tautology that the transition cannot be peaceful and srtwoth,
and that it must at some stage involve treason and violence : for it
must involve transfers of authority which cannot be validated,
and which can scarcely be conceived, in terms of the concepts
of the ancient order.
In the later stages of the transition, it is however possible to
attain some degree of understanding of what has collectively
befallen us, sorting out fate and will, recognising necessities and
making our choices. But it is doubtful whether this understand­
ing can ever become a collective faith.
The first step is, perhaps, the elimination of certain illusions.
These were two great illusions : the permanency of transition
(called ' Progress '), or its culmination in a millennium, a final
1 20
 THE USES OF D O U B T

synthesis of all values. In fact, the transition does not necessarily

embrace all aspects of life, and its does not stretch backwards
and forward.
Marx observed somewhere, concerning nineteenth-century
revolutions, that they had two stages, the nice and the nasty.
In the nice stage, all the enemies of the old regime combine in a
united, harmonious progressive front. In the nasty stage, they
fight it out for succession, and their differences become manifest.
Something of the same kind also happens at the logical, theoreti­
cal level, and poor Marx himself stayed in the ' nice ' stage. There
is an early stage of ' progressive ' theories when all objections to
the ancien regime fuse in a grand harmony of anticipation and of
condemnation of all that is inadequate in the past. Thus, in the
philosophy of the Enlightenment, there were found side by side
quite inconsistent ideas, which still tend to haunt the progressive
and enlightened outlook : thus, for instance, there is both deter­
minism (making for p ermissiveness, in opposition to the old
punitive system and its broad assumptions of responsibility) and
insistence on treating men as autonomous, and deserving of
autonomy from guidance and authority. Or again, there is both
insistence on liberalism and on democratic participation (in
opposition to the old authoritarian hierarchies), and insistence on
rule by experts (as opposed to the old habit of deciding issues
without proper scientific assessment and guidance). 1 But whereas
stupidity and authority (the ancient mixture) are compatible,
freedom and real knowledge (which alas seems to imply defer­
ence to experts) are not so easily fused. As long as the enlighten­
ment is in opposition, it can embrace such contradictory ideas
with only logical (and hence quite bearable) discomfort : but once
in power, decisions have to be made, and one (often valuable)
thing sacrificed for another (even more so). The millennia!
expectations are of course just this anticipation of some total
solution in which all values are satisfied and nothing essential lost.
The transition, which is the basis of current political life, needs
to be protected both from its friends and from its enemies, both
from those who would exaggerate its importance and from those
who would minimise it. No ancien regime can enter the rapids
with its eyes fully open : for this reason, there can be no valid
political philosophy ex ante, so to speak. This social contract, the
1 Cf. K. Minogue, The Liberal Mind (1963).

I2I
 T H O U GHT AND CHANGE
endowment of humanity with effective knowledge and wealth,
cannot be entered upon with a lucid mind. It cannot but be
entered upon in a confused manner, half-involuntarily, with
premonitions and anticipations which do not mature into a
proper understanding until after the compact has been achieved,
the cape rounded.
But it is interesting that, in a sense, no valid political philo­
sophy is really possible ex post either. There is no real foresight,
but hindsight will not be honoured either. This is in contra­
diction of the millennarian illusion, the expectation of some total
consummation or liberation.
This anticipation can have two forms (sometimes confused
with each other). One is the expectation that the post-transition
society will possess some determinate ideology, fitted to its
nature, corresponding to the somewhat schematised manner in
which earlier history ' stages ' had their characteristic outlooks.
(For instance, some thinkers of the Enlightenment might anti­
cipate a kind of inverted Catholicism, with Nature in place of the
Deity.) Alternatively, as in the metaphysical parts of Marxism,
there can be the anticipation of a period altogether beyond all
ideology, one in which truth will appear pure, in which reality
will stand bare and unmediated by any distorting prism : just as,
in the Marxist social eschatology, there will be no fixed roles, so,
apparently, awareness of things will not be cramped by any style of
viewing, any fixed system of concepts, flny determinate viewpoint.
The two kinds of expectation, which one might call the socio­
logical and the messianic, can co-exist in a fused or confused way.
Thus it may be supposed that Marxism itself will be the ideology
of society subsequent on the termination of ' pre-history ' and at
the same time that this outlook will be limitlessly permissive to
de-alienated man.
But it seems unlikely for at least two reasons, that post­
transition society will generate such an outlook, one somehow all
of a piece with its social order, in the manner in which the medieval
world-picture, for instance, is supposedly congruent with the
society that produced it. These two reasons are, first, an episte­
mological one, and second, a sociological one.
The epistemological consideration is this : it was a mistake of
the Enlightenment, and its nineteenth-century revolutionary
successors, to suppose that science was rather like a religious

!:42
 THE USES OF D OU B T

synthesis - only truer and free of invocation of the extra-mun­

dane. In fact, science is radically and qualitatively different. Its
manifest and regrettable characteristics - regrettable from the
viewpoint of those yearning for a cosy and meaningful universe -
include not only the now well-advertised essential incomplete­
ness (the picture is never settled and permanently reliable), but
also a kind of amorality, one might even say a moral dullness. It
does not reveal a nature that rewards virtue and punishes vice,
and in whose terms virtue and vice can be defined (in brief a
kind of decapitated version of the old Deity). There is no such
lady. It reveals a world that supplies no morals, which at best
indicates possibilities and excludes some others. No closed,
meaningful, reliable cosmos emerges.
The second, sociological consideration is this : it is very
unlikely that there should be revolutions, such as would estab­
lish new official faiths, in post-transitional, ' affiuent ' societies.
The danegeld available to buy off discontent is too great. Vested
interests, if not in the established order, then at least in avoiding
violent cataclysms, are far too widely diffused. For this reason
the ideology with which a society has passed the hump of transi­
tion is likely to remain its nominal doctrine, thereafter : indeed it
is likely to become, locally, the symbol of that overcoming of the
painful hump, of the achieved satisfactory order which is now the
true ' social contract ' . It seems as unlikely that the West will
repudiate its formal religious faiths, as that the Russians should
disavow Marxism. The effective content may be eroded, becom­
ing ever more selective, symbolic, ' spiritual ' , etc. As time
recedes from the nineteenth century, Marxism, for instance, as
a slowly moving glacier, still carries with it a heavy moraine of
the nineteenth-century science that was contemporaneous with
it own birth, which was embedded in it, and which can become
increasingly embarrassing - just as the glacier of Christianity
carries background beliefs of the Near East of the time of its
foundation. Marxism too will have, indeed does already have, its
de-mythologisers, and generates its levels of interpretation and
sophistication. There are indeed striking similarities between
the intellectual activities of post-Thaw communist philosophers, 1
1 These antics can go very far indeed. I have heard,.on two separate occasions,
two distinguished Polish ' Marxist ' philosophers expound the following device
for avoiding clashes between the faith and possible evidence : Marxism presents

1 23
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

and the attempts made by modernist theologians to re-interpret

their faith in such a way that it cannot come into conflict with
anything at all. (Extreme sophisticated fundamentalism achieves
the same end, by a route only slightly different from extreme
theological liberalism. It also brutally disconnects Faith from
what one really and normally believes. )
A thoroughgoing intellectual reform, which would eliminate the
' moraine ' is ever inconvenient, and generally far more so than the
awkwardness of retaining this or that currently embarrassing piece
of intellectual moraine. Far better to play it down, to ignore it,
to concentrate on parts of the doctrine which at the moment
sound sensible (in a rich ideology, one can always find something).
The inconvenience of thorough revisionism are that the levels of
sophistication move at unequal speeds, the flow of the glacier is
not the same in all its parts, and an adjustment suitable for one
part will place a strain on another. Moreover, as the Christians
have found, the modernism of one generation is doubly dated in
the next. What seemed an elegant restatement on a par with the
latest, sharpest intellectual fashions, will share all their discovered
faults some decades later, and the modernist then labours under
a double burden. Better far to stand one's ground firmly.
There is also the not inconsiderable factor of communal pride.
The leadership and the banners under which a society passes
through the transition are also those under which it attains dig­
nity, pride, equality with others. Why should it repudiate its
time of glory?
Thus the epistemological and the sociological considerations
reinforce each other. The results of science, unlike traditional
mythologies, are poor in moral suggestiveness ; and they provide
little positive incentive to repudiate altogether the outlook which
does provide some meaningful picture. Yet, systematic revision
is awkward, perilous and pointless.
At the same time, the more or less archaic meaningful picture,
disregarded sufficiently to cause little friction with the effective
beliefs about the world, is yet not altogether ignored : apart
a general picture too abstract to be empirically tested, and therefore it is per­
missible to hold it. Variant : it is a method, and methods, as is well known, do
not prejudge results, therefore results and the method may ever co-exist. How
very reminiscent of sophisticated religious faith. Shades of Marx! - this is a
long way from the ' unity of theory and practice'.

1 24
 THE USES OF D O U B T

from its symbolic significance, its expression of historic con­

tinuity and moral community, it can also be on occasion used,
selectively, in partial support of values and practices. 1
Thus, far from there being a new synthesis, there tends to be
in modern society a dualism (sometimes pluralism) a division of
labour, between on the one hand symbolic, unifying ideas, com­
munal banners, which once were full-bloodedly cognitive, but
whose cognitive import is now shrouded in semi-deliberate
ambiguity ; and on the other hand, the cognitively effective but
normatively not very pregnant or insistent beliefs about the
world. This division of labour has manifest advantages : nor­
mative beliefs so ambiguously held are less likely to lead to
persecution. 2
It is interesting to observe that contemporary Christianity
and Judaism, according to a brilliant observer such as Herberg, 3
have acquired precisely those virtues (though Herberg does not
see them as such), which in the eyes of an eighteenth-century
observer such as Hume, or even a nineteenth-twentieth-century
one such as Frazer, they lacked in contrast with the faiths of
classical antiquity : they have now become civic religions, in­
culcating primarily devotion to the values of the community in
which they exist (rather than a selfish and anti-social concern
with personal and extramundane salvation) ; and they are held in
a manner which allows complete toleration of rival objects of
worship. Similarly, though, there may be little to suggest that the
S oviet state will wither away, there may be some hope that
Marxism itself will do so. It may yet come to occupy the kind of
modest place in Russian national pride, patriotism and disbelief,
as do traditional faiths in the life of other nations.
1 Cf. an interesting discussion of related issues by Bernard Williams in

' Democracy and Ideology ', Political Quarterly, October 1 96 r .

2 Some countdes are o f course less far advanced i n this direction than others.

But Marxist thinkers such as, for instance, Kolakowski, are in effect doing what
they can to take 1\tlarxism along a path analogous to that trodden for Chris­
tianity by theologians such as Tillich.
3 W. Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (New York 1955, 1 96o),

! 25
 CHAPTER SIX

THE STU FF OF C HANGE

Evolutionist or Transitional?
There is at least one1 official belief, inscribed in the banners of
' whole societies, that comes some way towards incorporating the
transition into the official Founding and Justifying Myth of these
societies : Marxism.
For this reason Marxism is still probably the best starting
point for the understanding of the modern world. Not because
its doctrines are true - on the contrary, it is probably truer
to say that by listing its propositions and negating the lot,
one obtains an acceptable sketch of the modern world - but
because, on the whole, the questions it poses are the correct
ones. This is of course true of its sociology, and not of the
preposterous eschatology, the Hegelian schwiirmerei of the young
Marx.2
1 It might also b e said that the American Constitution in fact incorporates

one of the variants of the Old Episodic notion of progress, specifying those self­
evident truths which define, or whose recognition defines, the Good condition
amongst the two possible human conditions, the state of affairs which validates
social arrangements and authority. But the official American ideology or self­
image incorporates this as only one amongst a number of elements : the edited
survival of older religions is another. Hence this ideology would not be a pure
example of the ' progress ' outlook. Much the same holds of those many imitative
constitutions, rather less revered or respected by those who live under them,
dispersed over the world and deriving from the American and French revolu­
tions.
2 This distinction remains valid even if one accepts the thesis, brilliantly
argued for instance in Professor Tucker's Philosophy and Myth in Kart Marx
(Cambridge 1 961) that Marx's later work is but the concrete fulfilment of the
earlier philosophical intuition.
If this is so, what does it prove? Marx's youthful intoxication bears credit to
his generosity, ardour, metaphysical imagination, to a sensitivity to the sacred
 THE STUFF OF CHANGE

In terms of the dichotomy suggested above, between the

Evolutionist and New Episodic styles of social thought, Marxism
is, in a way, on the borderline. Formally, it would seem to be an
Evolutionist doctrine, with many of the defects of that type of
theory (including an European parochialism). Any official formu­
lation of Marxism has to go through the rigmarole of Five Stages,
starting with the harmless nonsense about primitive communism
and ending with the quite pernicious nonsense about a final
stage of society in which, apparently, freedom does not need to
be safeguarded by institutional checks.1
But it is not the unwieldy Five Stages as such, calling for
endless adjustments, exceptions, lumpings-together of diverse
social forms (nor the silly anthropology or the preposterous
eschatology) which endow Marxism with its merit and its interest�
The merit of Mandst sociology is concentrated in its account of
two particular inter-stage transitions (in terms of its own count of
stages), that between ' feudalism ' and ' capitalism ' and the one
between ' capitalism ' and the subsequent condition. 2 Its doctrine

flame within him, and less so perhaps to a severe critical or sceptical spirit - but
this hardly matters. Having expressed the opposition between things as they
were and as they ought to be, in Hegelian terminology, and having turned this
upside-down as requiring an understanding of the real world, the important
thing is that he thereupon devoted himself to the real understanding of that
world. Once inspired by that initial vision, he at any rate did not, unlike some of
those who have recently with joy rediscovered that early vision, turn to pseudo­
sociologising and indulgence in cloudy concepts. On this subject, see interesting
observations in the Introduction to Karl Marx : Selected writings in Sociology and
Social Philosophy, edited by T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (London 1956), esp.
pp. :zo et seq. See also George Lichtheim, Marxism (London 1 961), p. 36.
1 I leave aside the interesting question of the place of the unilineal stages
theory in Marxism, and the extent to which it was from the start equipped to
deal with branch line, circular or reverse-direction traffic, etc. The suggestion
which can be read into K. A. Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism (New Haven 1 957),
that the ill-fitting category of 'oriental society ' was deliberately suppressed from
an early stage from a kind of anticipatory desire not to embarrass Stalinism,
would seem to credit the founding fathers of Marxism with far too much
cynicism and sociological foresight. at the same time. Cf. also George Lichtheim,
' Marx and the "Asiatic Mode of Production ".' St. Antony's Studies, No. 1 4,
1 963 .
2 Whereas the followers tacitly concentrate on this aspect of Marxism, the

opponents can do it overtly. Thus the· ' Non-Communist Manifesto ' of W. W.

Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (1 960), deals with five ' stages ',_ but
these only nominally present an antithesis to the ' stages ' of Marxism. All five

1 27
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

on these matters may not be true, but it is by no means mani­

festly or wholly false : no mean achievement for a sociological
theory over a century old, concerning issues which are a burning
concern to many, and where material is rich and has accumulated
at an amazing rate.
The first thing to note is that Marxism is quite free from one
major defect of Evolutionist theories, of the sociological doctrines
which look upon history as the Education of the Human Race :
Marxism does offer an account both of the internal mechanics of
the ' stages ' it invokes, and of the mechanics of the transitions.
The ' Education of the Human Race ' theorists have to view the
world growth they postulate as the Bildung of some conscious
spirit or spirits : and they tend to degenerate either into a noxious
kind .of metaphysics (a biography of some kind of supt·a-personal
Cosmic Ghost), or into psychologism, the supposition that the
social changes with which we are concerned are in general changes
in the rationality or whatnot of individual men.
In other words, in Marxism under the superficial facade of an
' Evolutionist ' theory, we have in reality a methodologically
sound theory which attempts to explain a social order, or a num­
ber of such orders, and to explain the transitions from one such
order to another, in terms of the organisation of the societies
concerned.
The second merit of Marxism is of course that it has correctly
singled out the starting point from which our self-understanding
and our validation of any social order must now proceed - the
transition of industrial society - even if it has wrongly split it
into two sub-parts, of which one is merely a contingent, and the
other a speculative accompaniment of it - into ' capitalism ' and
' socialism ' .
Technically, it is also possible to see Marxism a s a special kind
of Episodic theory, as some have seen it of late : as the account of
the one transition from ' prehistory ' and ' alienation ' to the
liberation of man. To see it in this manner is of course to go
against that which gave Marxism its significance for most men,
supporters or opponents, in the past ; moreover, it is to do
Marxism a considerable disservice, by ignoring that which is
valuable in it - its sociology, concerned with happenings within
are really concerned with one transition, and not, like the Marxist quintet, with
the total history of the race.
 THE STUFF OF CHANGE

' prehistory ' - and concentrating on that which is not, its social
metaphysics and eschatology. Unkindly, one might say of the
recent revival of the notion of ' alienation ' : it suited some
intellectuals in affluent societies who, unable to say that the
workers were starving, could at least say that they were alienated,
whatever the devil this meant. Alternatively, if Marxist socio­
logy, though meritorious, is false, and Marxist politics bank­
rupt, let us turn to Marxist metaphysics! Those other intellec­
tuals beyond the Iron Curtain, who use the notion in an attempt
to humanise and liberalise their societies, and who from pru­
dence or conviction prefer to do so with the help of a slogan
borrowed from the Church Fathers of the local orthodoxy, are
naturally worthy of more respect and sympathy.
Of course, ' alienation � is not wholly devoid of meaning,
though what meaning it does have is neither clear nor coherent.
A number of notions is mixed up : the first, a simple, straight­
forward ' taking away ' - the worker has the fruit of his labour,
or a large part of it, taken from him. The second means some­
thing roughly corresponding to Durkheim's notion of ' anomie ' :
it happens to the worker in a social order which he does not
understand, which treats his labour as a commodity, and him as
as thing, and in which his work ceases to have any meaning for
him. Thirdly, it means something like ' social structure ' , a social
order which, though produced by the actions of men, neverthe­
less acquires a hard reality of its own and exercises inexorable
constraint over them.
The histotical genesis of the concept has been much explored.
Its logical function within the thought of those who use it, how­
ever, deserves some comment. It is a bit like Original Sin, in
explaining, or summing up, why it is that men do not and
cannot easily embrace that salvation which would otherwise be
theirs . l
The tacit argument seems t o be this : once upon a time, when
men rebelled against a tyrant, they merely replaced him by a new

1 Marx stands to Hegel as the Enlightenment stood to Catholicism. In both

cases, something is stood on its head. But in the historically earlier case, the
inverted system is itself static, and individual superstition replaces sin as the
explanation of the unnecessary evil of this world. In the latter, dynamic versions,
the hindrance to salvation has to become something tied up with the total social
process, and not an inte!lect1,1al mistake located in the individual.

1 29
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

King who, they hoped, would not be tyrannical. Later, it occurred

to them that they did not need a King at all, and some of them
became republicans. Later still, the sociological sophistication of
men such as Marx taught them that it was not evil individuals,
but a social system as such, which oppressed them. The next
step in the Argument - and this is where the disastrous mistake .
occurs - is to say : just as having no personal ruler at all is better
than merely exchanging one for another, so having no social
structure at all, no imposition of roles and of division of
labour, etc., is better than merely exchanging one social order
for another.
Alas, it does not follow. Whilst having no personal ruler at all is
a meaningful alternative to having either good or bad kings, having
no social structure at all is not a meaningful alternative to having
either a good or a bad one (and least of all in an inescapably com­
plex and large industrial society). The idea of an unstructured
society is of course not merely a bad sociological fantasy, an ideal
type useless either for explanation or as a moral norm, but it is
also politically harmful. lt leads to the disastrous view that the
Kingdom of Heaven on Earth has no constitution. 1 Possessing no
structure, it cannot, naturally, have structural checks and
balances either. If then, contrary to ideological expectation, the
Kingdom of Heaven turns out to possess some structure after
all, it may find itself lacking in institutional devices for checking
and remedying such defects as that unforeseen structure may turn
out to have, and lacking in concepts for the understanding of its
own predicament. It may be permissible to imperil liberty f01· the
sake of fighting poverty, which has a real and tragic meaning :
but not for the sake of ' alienation ' , which does not.
Of course, the concept of ' alienation ' may sometimes be
better than nothing : but it is hardly a sharp tool of social analysis
or criticism.2 If freedom from alienation requires, amongst other

1 Cf. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology ( x 96 r), Chapter r s .

2 I t is, on the contrary, one of those charming notions, not uncommon in
philosophy, which shuttle-cock between a factual and a normative employment.
If we ask for some kind of defence of the moral content, we are told that Marx­
ism is not Utopian, that the concept is sociological, realistic. If we look for its
factual content, we are told that, really, its significance is moral. Thus a vacuous
morality and a vacuous sociology can take in each other's washing. Of course,
one can imagine a society in which economic pressure is reduced to a minimum,
 THE STUFF OF CHANGE

things, that we should clear-sightedly understand our society,

rather than be victims of ill-understood institutions coated by
ha�y concepts, then the concept of ' alienation ' itself would seem
to be an obstacle to the realisation of this ideal.

A Matter of Stages
Marxism is of relatively little interest in its accounts of the ' early'
stages within its scheme. Its anthropology is a piece of petrified
dogma, carried along in the glacier of the Marxist tradition, far
from the temporal strata where it once had its proper home. More
could perhaps be said in favour of Marx's own treatment of
classical antiquity, and a good deal more for his treatment of
the ' suppressed ' alternative line, of the cupboard-skeleton of
'Asiatic society ' . 1 A very great deal can be said in favour of a
' Marxist approach ' in a loose general sense, i.e. a stress on social
structure, on conflict between the component parts of it, and of
the influence of ecology and the division of labour on that
structure. But all in all, one does not think of (say) classical
antiquity or primitive tribalism as crucial testing grounds for
Marxism, nor, conversely, do one's thoughts run primarily to
Marxism when one is concerned with understanding thos.e
phenomena. The relevance or vitality of Marxism as an outlook
is hardly.connected with such areas of interest.
It is connected with areas describable, in its own terms, as the
transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the transition from
capitalism to the subsequent condition - and, of course, with the
understanding of the internal mechanics and general characteris­
tics of these three succeeding ' stages '.
In its own terms, there is a progression of the form ABC, A
being feudalism, B capitalism, and C socialism. Current concern,
then, is with A and B and C, and above all with the transitions
A B and B C. Hence, one might conclude, quite a large segment
of the original evolutionist story, in its Marxist variant, remains
of interest.
but not one without any stable expectation about the behaviour of one's fellow!
What would it be like to live with men fluctuating wildly and unpredictably
between being hunters, fishermen, critics, etc. ? Is there not, once again, a naive
and extreme individualism built into Marx's eschatology?
1 Cf. K. A. Wittfogel, op. cit., and G. Lichtheim, Marxism, Part IV, Chapter z.

I3I
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

But this is still a wrong formulation, and one retaining too

much of nineteenth-century Marxism. We are not interested in
two separate transitions, and three socio-historic conditions
separated by them. We are interested in one transition only, and
hence in two, very generally defined, conditions, one on each of
the shores. Of course, on the second, later shore, we find (at
least) two alternative possibilities ; in terms of the schema, we are
interested in the transition from A to B-ar-C. (This isn't quite
correct yet, either, for the earlier shore also has alternatives :
A-or , , . ' Underdeveloped ' societies vary considerably in social
kind, from complex literate and urban pre-industrial civilisations
to congeries of tribal societies bound together only by a colonial
conquest. Yet, great though this range is, it is still one kind of
transition, however variegated the ' shores ' that it connects.)
In so far as we are concerned with B-or-C, with capitalism-or­
socialism, as the second shore that is to be reached, we need one
word or concept to refer to this set of alternatives : and of course
we do have it and use it - ' industtial society ' . The fashionable
suggestion or supposition that capitalist and communist societies
are ' converging ' is in part due to a kind of optical illusion : 1 it is
not merely that two things may be growing more alike, it is also
that they seem a good deal more alike, when what interests us
most is the difference between both of them and something
removed from them both far more than each is from the other. 2
As long as there existed only one industrial society, the
Western, and it was also a society based on individual ownership
and enterprise, it was natural to conflate the two characteristics
under one notion, ' capitalism ', and the influence of Marxism on
socialist movements no doubt encouraged this fusion of ideas. 3
1 Cf. S. Andreski, Elements of Comparative Sociology (1964), Chapter 24.
2 This concern with industrial society as such, and its alternatives, rather than
with the capitalism/socialism opposition, is in a way a return to the thought of
the early sociologist, Cf. T. Bottomore, ' The Ideas of the Founding Fathers ',
Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, Tome I, No. I, 1 960.
3 The extent to which this conflation is built into Marxism illustrates, ironi­

cally, how non-materialist it is, in its insistence on defining a type of social order
by its type of ownership. rather than its technology. If technology determined
the ' relations of production' one would assume that the correct taxonomy would
proceed from it. But perhaps this ' social ' classification is not incompatible with
Marxist ' materialism ' ; its ' materialism ', like the dialectic, is one of the mys­
teries of the system, and is never made quite clear. One !mows it to be superior
to earlier forms of materialism, and to be somehow connected with human
 THE STUFF OF CHANGE

The first non-Western industrial society to emerge, Japan, did

not make the perpetuation of this outlook too difficult, 1 nor did
the enclaves of industrialism exported under the colonial system.
Ironically and notoriously, what made the conflation of
capitalism and industrialism difficult to sustain, in the long
run, was precisely the political success of a movement that had
made Marxism into its holy writ. There is a kind of inverse
relationship between the success of Marxism as an ideology and
as a prediction. Marxist revolutions occurred not as reactions
to the miseries of industrialism, but in order to bring them about.
The historic role of Marxism seems to be not to lead societies
out of the crises of industrial society, but to help them to pass
over the big hump of industrialisation.2 Marxism supposed that
it was the historic role of capitalism to diffuse industrialism, and
of Marxism itself to liberate man from its shackles. At present
it looks rather as if it were the historic role of Marxism to diffuse
industrialism, and of capitalism to engender those institutions
which, if they survive, will preserve some liberty under industrial
organisation.
The first time it happened that a Marxist revolution took place
in a backward society, this seemed something singular, odd,
exceptional, and calling for special explanation. (Trotsky appealed
to the fact that although Russian industry was small in com­
parison with the country as a whole, such as did exist was con­
centrated and ' developed ' in the sense of consisting of large
units.) By now it is fairly clear that it is not the collectivist in­
dustrialisations, but the first individualist one, that was unusual.
(Industrialisation, like sex but more genuinely so, is rather special
the first time.) With hindsight, this is not s�trprising : it is not
surprising that a total innovation should have occurred un­
wittingly on its first appearance, but that it should be deliberate
practice, activity, etc. But does it include the contention that the type of tool
determines the type of social relationship? If so, it still does seem odd that a
type should be defined not by its tool (industrial production) but by its form of
ownership (capitalism).
1 R. Dore, ' Japan as a Model of Economic Development', Archives Euro­

peennes de Socologie, 1 964.

� As A. Mclntyre put it : ' Lenin and the Russian people borrowed the phrase­

ology, the emotions and the illusions of Marxist-Leninism as trappings for their
own revolution. ' P. Leslett and W. G. Runciman (Eds.), Philosophy, Politics and
Society, Second series, 1 962.

1 33
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

and imitative on subsequent occasions - once the advantages and

powers it bestows have become manifest. It is not surprising,
given the radical innovations that were involved, that the first
occurrence should have been the unintended fruit of individual
work, and of a class tending towards a liberal ideology which re­
stricts governmental interference, and which is powerful enough
to resist it.·

But, once the opportunities, the enormity, and also the dangers
and difficulties are appreciated, it is far more plausible that the
effort should be inspired and supervised, from above. Who is to
wait for the operation of the Hidden Hand? It is in the main con­
spicuous by its absence. There are of course examples of entrepre­
neurial and commercial skill in the ' underdeveloped ' world. But
they generally have an opportunist air, and little power to inspire
emulation. Contemporary Lebanon, or Hong Kong, do not
remind one of the seventeenth-century Dutch republic. No
aspiring Peter the Great is likely to visit them in order to learn
their technological or administrative tricks : he is far more likely
to go to semi-collectivist Israel.
There is something amusing by now about that episode late
in Marx's life when he became involved, through contacts with
the Russian revolutionary movement, with the question of
whether Russia too must pass through the ' capitalist stage ', or
whether some short cut might be allowed her. From kindness or
caution, he refrained from giving a clear pronouncement. He
did observe that Russia was fortunate and might perhaps avoid
the terrible capitalist stage, if it took ' the finest chance ever
offered by history to a people ', 1 and thus cut an evolutionary
corner. Today, kindness or optimism are not required to say
that this particular corner can be cut. On the contrary, kindness
or optimism is required to express the hope that a society may be
allowed not to cut it : will India make it? Can any large transi­
tional country turn the hump without authoritarianism? Can the
new order emerge thanks even to a generously subsidised and
encouraged Hidden Hand, can it emerge spontaneously from the
womb of the old order (as Marxism had taught it would) ?
This and the other ironies of Marxism are by now very
1 The letter in which this phrase occurs is quoted in Marx and Engels : Basic
Writings on Politics and Philosophy, edited by L. S. Feuer (New York 1 959),
P· 439·

134
 THE STUFF OF CHANGE

familiar. The correct political behaviour of the revolutionary is

to wait for the ripe moment in advanced societies? On the con�
trary, Marxism is embraced by the impatient, in backward
societies, in order to break out of vicious circles of stagnation
which otherwise grip such societies. It leads them to behave in a
markedly Utopian manner. Are advanced societies driven to
economic imperialism? There are constant complaints that they
do not export enough capital to the underdeveloped world.
Capitalist countries without empires prosper, and those which
cling to them are the poor-white nations like Portugal, themselves
underdeveloped. 1 Empires can also be lost in the state of absence
of mind, and without ill effects. Workers have nothing to lose but
. . . the T.V. set, etc.? Capitalism contains the seed of its own
destruction? It seems, on the contrary, to lead to a social struc�
ture which dampens all revolutionary ardour. Proletarians have
no country? It is nationalists above all who flirt with Marxism.
Formal freedom is worthless without substantive freedom? The
means of achieving substantive freedom are relatively well
understood, it is the ensuring of formal political freedom which
is tricky. The revolutions, which initiat<: rather than follow
development, lead to anything rather than class�less and state�
less societies ; their role seems to be to throw up an effective class
and build, for a change, ali. effective state machine, one replacing
those alleged ' committees of the bourgeoisie ' (which, if that is
what they were, would have been sacked by any self-respecting
bourgeoisie long ago ) . As for the state withering away : Leninism
appears, on the contrary, to provide a regrettably well-adapted
rationale for that concentration of power in the industrial­
military complex which threatens industrial society. Develop­
ment is characteristically post-revolutionary, not pre ; collective,
deliberate, and imitative, and not individualist, unconscious and
1 This is a truth which took some time to sink in. The British, it is true,

divested themselves of the Empire as they had acquired it, in a state of absence
of mind. The remarkable thing about this decolonisation was how little neurosis
or melancholia seems rampant even in Bournemouth or Cheltenham. For the
French, it came more painfully. It took a series of ghastly wars, plus perhaps a
burst of ptosperity at home, to persuade a sufficient part of the officer corps that
the relevant model was not the spectre of Spain (ex-imperial, poor and weak)
but West Germany (ex-imperial, rich and strong). But the Algerian war had
to drag on, it was said, because of the malaise de l'Armee. Seldom has a war
been fought for such a strange end : the collective psychotherapy of an officer
class.

1 35
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

endogenous . 1 Development has in fact become the conspicuous

display of the age. There is no cause to deplore this : for reasons
of morale, development, like justice, must be seen to be done as
well as being done. It is a good thing that current standards of
competitive international prestige should be, at least in part,
enlisted for such useful ends. The danger is rather that plans of
conspicuous development remain a dead letter. As an aftermath
of 1 7 8 9 , the world became, and still is, littered with democratic
liberal constitutions which are often a dead letter, and it is possible
some Five Year Plans may come to acquire a similar status.
Revolutions do not occur in developed societies, now that
capitalism has gone through its Counter-reformation : this gives
us something greatly to be thankful for, namely affluent societies
with strong liberal traditions. (The gratitude for affluence-with­
liberty is of course no reason whatever to be complacent about
remaining problems, such as shocking frictional poverty, con­
centrations of power, wasteful allocations of resources.) At the
global level, the emancipation or incorporation of the majority of
mankind presents problems perhaps analogous to the erstwhile
incorporation of the total population in the electorate. ' We must
educate our masters ' turned out to be wrong, or at any rate
incomplete : enriching them was what did the trick. This time,
everyone knows it. That it should be done and will be done is not
seriously in doubt : how fast, and how painfully, are the questions ­
and whether it be done in a manner such that liberty, a scarcer
commodity in the long run than wealth, can be preserved or ex­
tended. (In the long run liberty is scarcer - because more pre­
carious - than wealth, for in the long run we are all affluent. But
for the comfortable ones to make this point to the poverty-stricken,
without the qualification about the long run, is an affront.) As for
the thinker - his job is plainly to try to help by understanding the
world, not to change it. It now changes much faster than he can
write. His direct assistance in changing it is really rather redundant.

The ' Weberian ' Theory of Marxism

Neither the specific Marxist theory of historical stages, nor the
general socialist supposition that a change of the form of control
of property is the key to a just social order - the historicist and
1 Cf. S. M. Lipset, Political Man (196o), p. 94·
 THE STUFF OF CHANGE

the moral arguments, respectively - are really relevant to the con­

temporary appeal of Marxism in transitional societies. Those
may be the reasons offered, but they are not the real ones.
Suppose that the Weberian theory of the role of Calvinism -
as forming a type of personality ideally suited for capital accumu­
lation - had come to be formulated, and widely diffused, not at
the time when in fact it was, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. We might then perhaps have found people embracing
Calvinism not so much from conviction concerning the tenets
internal to it, as in the hope that such a conversion would lead to
riches for themselves or at least for their offspring.
The attraction of Marxism today is precisely of this kind, In­
tellectuals of transitional countries care little whether Marxism
offers an accurate account of European history, whether its
economics is archaic, its concepts metaphysical or its eschatology
absurd : all charges of this kind might be proved without, for all
that, diminishing the appeal of Marxism. 1 These intellectuals are
interested in Marx rather in the spirit of Coue. They are inter­
ested in it as an ideology which might best steel them and their
countries and their elites for the ardours of the road to indus­
trialisation. Marxism is not intended for the overcoming of the
ills of industrialism : its role is to bring them about. Marxist
revolutions precede, and do not follow, industrial development.
One can well imagine future historians debating whether or
not an ideology - Marxism - was or was not necessary for massive
industrialisation, as twentieth-ce,ntury historians argue whether
or not Calvinism was a precondition of the emergence of capital­
ism.2 Counter-examples will be cited - cases of countries which
developed without Marxism, or failed to do so with it - as his­
torians now cite Scots Highlanders or Hungarian aristocrats who
were Calvinist without becoming capitalist, or Italian merchants
who were capitalist without being Calvinist, etc. ; and these
examples will be explained .away as well as invoked, the original
thesis refined and elaborated, etc. In a sense, the debate has
already begun : for it is this question more than any other, which
is, with differing degrees of clarity, present in the minds of the
floating voters of the Cold War.
Some of the analogies between Marxism and Calvinism are
1 Cf. D. G. MacRae, Ideology and Society ( r 96r), Chapter XVI.
2 Cf. T. B. Bottomore, Elites and Society ( 1964), pp. 94 and 102.

1 37
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

striking : the determinism combined, not with passive acce ptance,

but on the contrary with firm political action ; the puritanism,
single-mindedness and so on. It is indeed plausible to suggest
that Marxism does for collective, national, imitative industrial­
isation that which, on the Weberian thesis, Calvinism did for the
individualist endogenous emergence of capitalism.
If this were to be so, this might be a sad conclusion indeed for
those of us who fear the illiberal tendencies both of Marxism and
of Marx-inspired societies (the two things need not be identical,
of course), and who value liberty. The best consolation available
here would be probably that once the ' Weberian ' truth - if such
it is - about Marxism is known, then those who are attracted by
it are, even consciously, attracted by its ideological properties
rather than its doctrinal content. This being so, they are quite
capable of adapting the crucial features of Leninism - a firm party
vanguard, organisation, discipline, a revolutionary ideology - with­
out necessarily affiliating to the central Marxist church as such.
For one reason and another - for instance, owing to the pattern of
international alignments - it may not be convenient for the ruling
group in this or that transitional country to affiliate itself firmly :
indeed many of them prefer not to do so, in the interest of greater
freedom of manoeuvre. But they can take over the ideological secret
without affiliating. Nationalisms are prone to such compromises.
Marxism is of course a danger to liberty not merely because
the Marxist dominant church is well organised and strives to
impose orthodoxy, but also for reasons internal to the doctrine
itself. There is a general feature of it - its modernity of idiom.
One of the things which contributes to the political harmlessness
of ideologies inherited from pre-industrial periods is that their
doctrines and styles of thought are so implausible as to make it
difficult for persecution to take place in their name. (I should not
for one moment rule it out as impossible, but it is at least less
likely.) Their survival depends on a tacit concordat, within
individual souls as well as within society at large, by which they
refrain from demanding to be taken too seriously.1 Religious
1 This has disadvantages as well as advantages. It makes it difficult for them

to stand in the forefront of moral reform (and indeed, they tend to follow suit
rather than initiate) ; for when so many manifest implications of the doctrine
are quietly ignored, who is to single out this or that implication of the moral
doctrine, however obvious, for new implementation?
 THE STUFF OF C HANGE

persecution proper tends in our age to take place only in fairly

underdeveloped countries. The doctrines which are capable of
inspiring persecution in industrial societies, such as Communism
or Fascism, may be false, but they are at least expressed and con­
ceived in a modern idiom, and can be embraced by modern man
without an inhibiting sense of archaism.
Thus the very plausibility of Marxism - the fact that, whilst
not true, its concepts are not wildly archaic, its doctrines not
wholly implausible - is a danger to freedom : it is a doctrine
which can be held with the kind of seriousness which leads to
persecution.

An Exercise in Induction
A grave defect of the once-only, European-parochial, per­
petual-progress way of interpreting the transition, is that it
tends to fuse and confuse a number of very distinct sets of
features :
( r ) Characteristics specific to the first transition.
(�) Characteristics specific to the European tradition.
(3 ) Characteristics of any transition.
. (4) The characteristics of its completion.
It will be a long time before we can fully sort this out : even
the ' Western ' transformation is far from played out, and the
others are in relatively early stages. Nature, or history, has not
been too kind in providing neat experimental situations, adequate
premisses for Arguments by Elimination. Nevertheless, we can
make some headway in this direction : and a good deal is already
achieved if we are aware of the problem, if we refrain from the
naive . conflations which used to be customary.
One obvious set of errors which has only recently come to be
widely recognised as such, is the assumption that the liberalism
which accompanied the first instance of fundamental economic
growth, would accompany all. It is not surprising that the first
instance of it should have been accomplished without the sup­
port of, or in opposition to, the central power and the dominant
values of the society in which it occurred. The remarkable fruits
were not foreseen : the ideology which was at the root of the
economic behaviour which produced them, did not envisage

1 39
 T H O U G H T AND CHAN GE

them. The fruits were unintended. The first and only real
Wirtschaftswunder was also necessarily a windfall. But once the
fruit was known and recognised, and it has become manifest
that it can be produced in all places, the aspiration for it becomes
incorporated in official ideologies and can well become part of the
aims of central power. Collective effort is in general more
efficacious than individual competition - the ideology of laissez­
faire notwithstanding. Individual effort is only superior in
some circumstances - such as, for instance, when the thing re­
quiring to be done simply will not be done collectively. (Also, it
may be important in certain areas, such as agriculture and cer­
tainly in hotel-keeping . . . )
Here again, there seems to be a neat antithesis. Liberalism
grossly overrated the growth-engendering capacities of liberty,
just as Marxism overrates the easy availability of liberty in some
millenarian stage. Of course, the superiority of central direction
need not be overstated : central control is necessary for the over­
coming of the hump, economically and politically, but this does
not in fact necessitate total abolition of private property, judicial
independence, and all checks on the arbitrariness of power.
Initially, of course, there was no question of doing it collec­
tively because there was no question of doing it knowingly at all :
the possibility that it could be done - that quite so radical an
improvement of the human condition was feasible through
human effort - wasn't present to men's minds, at any rate
sufficiently to lead to collective effort. (When the process was
centrally assisted in the ' second wave ' in Europe, it still re­
sembled the first occurrence sufficiently closely not to lead to a
revision of the basic picture.)
Those thinkers who hoped for, encouraged, or commented on
the general growth of European society were divided in their
identification of the central factor responsible for that growth -
the key to human advancement. The main candidates for being
such key positions were of course science and liberalism. Now it
may well be true - it probably is true - that liberalism was indeed
the condition of the first emergence both of science and of
growth : but in general, the key is plainly science and technology,
coordinated effort, and not (alas) liberty. This may rightly be a
source of regret - but it is so. Science and technology do of
course in turn have their social preconditions - resources, a

J 40
 THE STUFF OF CHANGE

certain amount of social discipline, an adequate supply of suit­

ably trained people - but general liberty, and still less economic
liberty, does not seem to be amongst these necessary pre�
conditions.
There is of course another reason, apart from the superior
efficacy of collective action, which makes liberalism an im�
probable social form during rapid economic growth. Notoriously,
the ' hump ' of growth is eminently painful : human misery and
dislocation lead to maximum political instability and explosive�
ness. Through what seems to have been a lucky combination of
circumstances, the first country to industrialise avoided a major
revolution during the actual period of maximum change (as did
the United States) : but it is unlikely that other countries could
be so fortunate and escape both a strengthening of authority and
a revolution. The opportunities for political revolution under
transitional conditions are too well known to remain unex­
ploited. During something inherently so painful, what hope is
there for government by consent? It seems almost a contradiction.
If liberty is not favoured by transitional circumstances - con­
trary to older beliefs which supposed that the free were ever
more efficient and powerful than the unfree, which alas is not
true - one may at least hope that it will be favoured by the con�
ditions subsequent to the successful achievement of economic
development. Whether indeed this will be so, no one, presum­
ably, is at present in a position to say. There are considerations
both ways : which way they weigh most, or indeed whether they
come down on the same side under all or most circumstances, we
can hardly tell. A favourable consideration is this : one root of
oppression - but one only - is scarcity of resources, the advantage
which concentration of power confers on power-holders in con­
ditions of scarcity. When scarcity no longer obtains - and this
is so, by definition, when economic development is successful -

this factor, at any rate, disappears. When it becomes so easy to

bribe populations, why should one terrorise them?
A consideration on the other side is the consequences of
modern industrial organisation. Laissez-faire liberals supposed
that economic freedom led to liberty, because they had in mind
the model of a large multiplicity of competing units, with the
consequent diffusion of power. But modern industry - irrespec­
tive of the formal political-legal order within which it may
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

exist - seems to lead to large units : the model which does apply,
alas, is rather like Wittfogel's image of ' hydraulic ' societies :
large-scale organisation with the inevitable consequence of cen­
tralised bureaucracy. When technology makes terror so easy,
why should one refrain from it? What factors can be relied on to
check it?
And we simply do not know to what extent liberty depends on
the historical preconditions, on the type of tradition and society
which happens to have existed prior to development. It would be
rash to say that this is of no consequence at all. A good deal,
again, may depend on the way in which development occurs.
We do not know, and this, above all, we should find out : and
certainly it cannot be done by argument alone.
One general observation which it does seem possible to make is
that the virtues of achievement and the virtues of enjoyment are
not identical, and indeed that they are probably incompatible.
The character an individual or society must possess in order to
attain the satisfactory condition, does not closely resemble the
character required for best enjoying it. The question tends to
be - is there an optimal combination, over time, which maximises
the virtues required for the one imperative achievement, and
which yet leaves behind as little in the way ofobstructions when
the time of enjoyment comes? Conventional wisdom, wh�ther of a
left- or right-wing kind, may when the time comes be all too well
protected by well-entrenched interests and social tp.echanisms.
The incompatibility between the virtues of achievement (or
survival) and those of enjoyment presents itself nowadays in a
form quite distinct from that of the past. One of the profoundest
social philosophies elaborated in a pre-industrial society was that
of Ibn Khaldun. In essence, it boiled down to this : there is a
tragiC antithesis between the virtues of civilisation and the social
virtues. (Plato believed something similar.) The former flourished
only in cities : the latter only in tribes. Tribes could conquer
cities, found new dynasties, give civic spirit to the city and
acquire civilisation themselves : but the inherently unstable
balance between the spirit of cohesion and that of urbanity
would become upset again in the process, and the pointless,
cyclical process would repeat itself. Ibn Khaldun was wrong in
generalising this pattern : but for a wide range of societies, he was
substantially correct.
 THE STUFF OF CHAN GE

Modern societies do not face the dilemma in this form. They

do not face the problem of the limes, of a Blad Siba, a Land of
Dissidence behind the ramparts of urban and urbane order, con­
taining barbarians ready to irrupt at a suitable opportunity.
However lacking in social cohesion or martial spirit, techno­
logical superiority now makes civilised man immeasurably
superior to barbarians. (Also, he could pay any necessary Dane­
geld and not feel the cost.) Gibbon already noticed this, with a
surprise verging on incredulous nervousness. (After all, a tribal
army did march on London in his lifetime.) If the circular des­
tiny analysed by Ibn Khaldun now applies at all, it applies in
rather a novel form : later industrialisers, closer to the cohesion­
engendering ardours and disciplines of the painful hump period,
,
and hence endowed with much less demanding populations (no
social order can reverse the trend to higher consumption and sur.,.
vive, but some can be far less advanced along it than others), may
be in a position to devote a higher proportion of national income
to military technology than their more advanced rivals.
The real intellectual significance of the political life of ' under­
developed ' countries for the West is that, for the first time, we
now possess anything like a valid mirror for self-understanding. 1
As long as only one instance of the great transition was available,
it was in practice almost impossible to distinguish the charac­
teristics of the West, which were not essential to the transition,
from those which were essential, and so forth.2 No wonder that
the process was, at that period, frequently confused with the
Second Coming, the self-knowledge of the cosmic soul, the Vic­
tory of Virtue on Earth, the end of pre-history, the total liberation
of man, the fulfilment of rationality, etc. Something enormous
was plainly happening, but as it was difficult to pick out just
what, words failed one.
1 For a complete and characteristic misunderstanding of why the politics of

India and Iraq, of Ghana and Indonesia, are, or at the very least ought to be, at
the very centre of political thought, see Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in
Politics and Other Essays (London 1962), esp. p. 332.
2 It would of course be quite wrong to suppose that after the second, or third,
or nth, transition, all subsequent ones will again resemble each other. On the
contrary, it is rather likely that those transitions that will take place after tran­
sitional societies become themselves a global minority, will in turn radically
differ from the preceding ones. It is then that the notion of a global ' welfare
state ' may become applicable.
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

But the repetition of the process does give us the opportunity

of understanding it concretely, and without the old vacuous ver­
biage, and of seizing its real fatalities, options, 1 opportunities and
dangers. We are in the situation of a seventeenth- or eighteenth­
century political philosopher, invited to witness the drawing up
of a social contract. It is folly to refuse.

The Hope and the Fear

Much of the argument has had the following form : the speed,
and above all the radical nature of change, intoxicated many of
the thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading
them to extrapolate, in one way or another, from the direction
of current change as they understood it, in a way such as to
anticipate some secular millennium, some total consummation.
This has been well explored by Professor J. L. Talmon, 2 and
castigated by many. The present argument has been, in effect,
that whilst it is correct to refuse to see the changes in which we
are still involved, and which have now gripped the non-European
parts of the globe, as some kind of secular Second Coming, it is
also mistaken, and just as harmful, not to recognise the crucial
and unique character of those changes. Complacency and
ostrichism are at least as misguided as messianism, and locally
somewhat more common.
But the premisses of this argument are only partially correct,
in so far as they suggest that all those who were intellectually
concerned with the social transformation around them were
seduced into ecstatic, starry-eyed anticipation of the end of pre­
history, the liberation of man, or whatnot. On the contrary, many
of the commentators who have left us their Weltgeschichtliche
Betrachtungen were nervous, sceptical or downright pessimistic.
Fear of the Revolt of the Masses, of ' democratic totalitarianism ',
of the coming of the machine, of the new Caesarism, of the moral
consequences of the corrosion of faith, the disenchantment of the
world, etc., all these abound. Amongst the prophets, there was
anticipation of hell as well as of heaven.
1 Cf. an admirable essay by Raymond Aron on ' The theory of development

and the historical interpretation of the contemporary era ', an unpublished

UNESCO paper dated October 28, 1 960.
2 Political Messianism, the Romantic Phase (x96o).
 THE STUFF OF CHAN GE

A firm refusal to identify the transition, big enough though it

is, with the life story of the global totality, should free us from
some of the excessive fears as well as from the metaphysical
hopes. In fact, we do not know much of the potentialities of
industrial society, for freedom or for other values.
Pascal compared the human condition to that of a man in the
condemned cell. Few famous observations can ever have been
quite as foolish as this. The human situation is most conspicu­
ously unlike that of the condemned man. Characteristically, the
condemned man is in a situation of most unusual clarity (' which
concentrates the mind marvellously ') and some physical com­
fort. He knows exactly what his end will be, and when it will
come : in the meantime, he is offered most unenviable facilities
for contemplation and for reaching some kind of personal
' solution ' or acceptance of his predicament, if such a thing exists.
Human life is totally unlike this. The end may be certain, but
not its date or manner. In the meantime, there is constant
opportunity, indeed necessity, for seeking postponement of the
verdict and for improving one's condition. These activities do
not concentrate one's mind marvellously at all, but they do take
one's mind off the end. (Pascal quite mistakenly thought that this
was their real motive. On the contrary, the opposite seems true,
and the contemplation of wider vistas and of our sad ultimate
destiny may as often be motivated by the desire not to see too
clearly one's more mundane involvements and humiliations.)
These ends - postponement, improvement - can or could
however only be attained at the cost of other men. So, if we must
have a comparison, it cannot be the condemned cell (at least in
a state under the rule of law in which condemned men are treated
humanely), but something like Auschwitz : you can live a little
longer and a little better, provided you are very lucky and are
willing to participate in the degradation and extinction of your
fellows.
In fact, the moral codes of pre-industrial societies, even when
they contain any more generous aspirations (I leave aside those
tribal outlooks which would give most of us claustrophobia), are,
inevitably, frauds. Their sincere fulfilment is scarcely compatible
with either survival or social acceptance. Their reputed near­
attainment qualifies a man for sanctity, a kind of exemplary
moral Stakhanovism, which in the nature of the case must

1 45
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

remain exceptional - and the alleged instances of it would

probably not stand up to much genuine scrutiny.
The moral significance of the transition is of course that soon,
human nastiness will become a matter of choice rather than
necessity. We do not know what other factors - inherent in the
social organisation of industrial society, or, perhaps, in the human
psyche - may operate in that regrettable direction nonetheless :
we ought to find out. But we do at least know that the dire
material imperative of nastiness is on the way out. Nastiness,
hitherto necessary, will henceforth be contingent. This is a good
deal less than the total consummation of the messianic thinkers ;
but it is at least much more than the Goetterdaemmerung of the
pessimists.
 C H A P TE R S E VEN

NATIONALISM

Cold Reason against the Dark Gods

Marxism contained the anticipation of the decline of nationalism.
So did nineteenth-century liberalism. One can easily reconstruct
the image which lay behind such expectations.
Tribal totem poles, exclusive and inward-turned, regional or
ethnic loyalties - these were all very well for savages. But how
could they coexist with reason and enlightenment? Above all,
how could they coexist with the sharing of the benefits of inter­
national trade, of an international division of labour, benefiting
all? Trade flows across frontiers : the life of the intellect ignores
frontiers : and with the progress of learning, wealth and industry,
the prejudices and superstitions and fears which engender fron­
tiers would decline. Productive societies would replace predatory
ones ; industrial societies would replace military ones. Truth
would no longer seem different on the two sides of the Pyrenees,
etc.
The Marxist version of this is of course different and somewhat
more sombre. The bourgeoisie might well have cause to remain
national. It had built up the national state in its alliance with
ruling houses against the aristocracy : and it would remain tied
to those national states when its economic optimism proved to
be unfounded, when over-production forced it to ultimately
unavailing rivalries and national restrictive practices and
competitive expansion. Marxism does not share, of course,
the doctrine of a pre-established harmony as a consequence
of free trade, and the expectation of a sustained bourgeois
nationalism follows from the anticipation of the difficulties of
late capitalism.

1 47
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

Nevertheless, nationalism was doomed. It was to be overcome

not in the harmonious shared interest of an international division
of labour, but in the terrible melting pot of the industrial pro­
letariat. The anonymous workers, their labour a coldly negotiated
commodity, socially disinherited by the communities of which
they were a part, torn from their roots and not allowed by the
system in which they were caught to grow new ones, had no
nationalities. They could be expected to have national loyalties
less even than prisoners can be expected to develop a feeling of
loyalty towards their prison. It wasn't merely that they were
exploited : for the exploited can develop a loyalty towards their
exploiters. But unlike a prison, which at least has a certain con­
tinuity and stability, industrial workers were forced to be mobile
and rootless : their labour a homogeneous and undifferentiated
commodity, they could have no local associations, let alone
loyalties, as little as a mass-produced object can be a diffe,rentia­
ting part of a local tradition.
There is very little point in rubbing in, at this stage, the falsity
of these expectations. On · the contrary, there is some point in
reminding oneself how very reasonable such expectations were.
Sometimes one suffers from hindsight, and supposes that if
one had lived in the earlier period, one should not have fallen
into this or that illusion of the period in question. No such sense
of hindsight haunts one on this point. The error of expecting
a decline of nationalism seems so well based, so persuasive,
that it seems quite clear that one would have taken part in
it. And there are still some elements of truth to be recovered
from it.
But there is some point in castigating certain ghastly yet still
well-diffused errors concerning nationalism - errors shared by
many among both the friends and the enemies of nationalism.
The erroneous picture is as follows : those who had heralded
the decline of nationalism, had underestimated the power and
hold of the dark atavistic forces in human nature. They over­
estimated the power of reason. They operated with a shallow
psychology, one which saw man as finding his gratification in
pleasure, or in acquisition, or on the other hand, in human
brotherhood and a rational good life. (There were two variant
shallow psychologies in the early nineteenth century : a cynical
one, hedonistic, and an idealistic one, expecting the best of man.
 NA T IONAL I S M

Both these pictures could b e used a s premisses b y those who

ignored or underestimated the Dark Gods. Of course, these
unfortunate naijs lived before Freud showed us, etc., etc., etc.).
But man is not built around an inner thermometer, measuring the
amount of pleasure or happiness, with a kind of permanent con­
cern to maximise its readings : nor on the other hand is he a
potential angel, fully gratified by living in some rational, humani­
tarian order. ( This much, incidentally, is true. The very con­
templation of these various possibilities, if undertaken seriously,
is enough to give one violent accidie. The recorded experience of
J, S . Mill or Dostoevski is eloquent.)
Man is, instead, the prey of his Dark Gods. (So the story
continues.) The Apollonian illusions of the Enlightenment and
its heirs are unmasked, and Dionysian reality stands revealed.
Life and Reason are opposed. Without the Dark Gods, life is
grey : its mainspring is broken, its sources dry up (though
possibly saved by the ' life-enhancing' variant of Eng. Lit.). So
back to life, and begone cold Reason. The history of the twen­
tieth century testifies, apparently, to the re-emergence of the
Dark Gods from their home in the bloodstream or in the intes­
tines. (Romantic authors disagree about the precise physiological
habitat of the Dark Gods.) These dark atavistic gods include,
apparently, the call of ethnic or territorial loyalty.
Thus the conflict over nationalism in the human soul is seen
in rather Kantian dualistic terms, as a tug of war between reason
and passion. The picture goes back, at the very least, to the
Dreyfus affair. 1 Those who oppose nationalism hope that Reason
will prevail, aided perhaps by Student Exchange Schemes, the
British Council, foreign holidays, re-written history textbooks
and au pair girls. Those who favour nationalism, on the other
hand, hope that a grey cosmopolitanism and a false bloodless
ethos will not submerge the true sources of vitality, and they trust
that the old Adam will out.
This picture, which is so widely diffused amongst both the
friends and the enemies of nationalism, seems to me utter non­
sense (even when it occasionally includes some sensible premisses
- such as the importance of the human need to belong, to identify,
and hence also to exclude.)

1 Cf., for instance, H . Tint, The Decline of French Patriotism ( r964).

 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

The Contingency of Nationalism

The central mistake committed both by the friends and the
enemies of nationalism is the supposition that it is somehow
natural. A man has a ' nationality ' just as he has a height, weight,
sex, name, blood�group, etc., and the supposition that this is so
in the nature of things is embodied in countless questionnaires,
which inquire after nationality as they do after name, marital
state, etc. Secondly, as he has this thing called nationality, he will
generally wish to be in the same political unit as those sharing
that nationality, and in particular he will be anxious that those
wielding power in that political unit shall be of the same ' nation­
ality ' as he is. Thirdly, this is a legitimate, commendable
requirement.
Thus the doctrine of nationalism can be split into three prin�
cipal components. One is a piece of philosophical anthropology :
men have ' nationality ' as they have a nose and two eyes, and this
is a central part of their being. The second is a psychological
contention : they wish to live with those of the same nationality,
and above all resent being ruled by those of another one.1 The
third is an evaluative contention, and adds that this is rightly so.
These assumptions are so much part of the air we breathe2
that they are generally taken for granted quite uncritically. Those
who are opposed to nationalism, generally mean by this only that
they are opposed to expansionist excesses, to violence and
domination, and they desire national loyalty to be complemented
and superseded by an international order and rule of law. But
this, commendable though it may be, leaves the nationalist
picture untouched, though it strives to ' go beyond it'.
The truth is, on the contrary, that there is nothing natural or
1 Cf., for instance, M. Ginsberg, Nationalism : a Reappraisal (Leeds 1961),

p. 3 1 .
2 For instance, even H . Trevor-Roper's brilliant Jewish and other Nationalism
(London 1 962), still explains the emergence of the ' secondary ' nationalisms
(i.e. those other than the ' historic ' Austrians and Hungarians) of the Habsburg
empire, in terms of what was necessary for Czechs, Jews, etc., if they were to
survive as Czechs, Jews, etc. No doubt it is indeed true that to achieve this end,
these nationalisms required to be elaborated. But the fundamental problem is
still - why should men have become particularly concerned about the ethnic
rubric under which they survive? (Czechs who settled in Vienna, or Chicago,
and in due course became Austrians or Americans, did not find this fate un�
bearable.)
 NAT I O NAL I S M

universal about possessing a ' nationality ' ; and the supposition

that a valid political criterion can only be set up in terms of it,
far from being a natural or universal one, is historically an oddity.
But : there are undoubtedly overwhelmingly powerful factors in
the contemporary and recent social conditions which do make these
suppositions, in those particular conditions, natural and probably
irresistible. The theoretical problem is to separate the quite
spurious ' national ' and ' natural ' justifications and explanations
of nationalism, from the genuine, time- and context-bound roots
of it. Within the limitations of a certain context, the philosophico­
anthropological, the psychological and the ethical premiss may
indeed be granted : nationality is (in that limited sense only) a
necessary condition and attribute of man, a touchstone of the
boundaries of political units, and rightly so.
An excellent starting point for the discussion of nationalism is
Mr Elie Kedourie's brilliant Nationalism (London x g6o). The
book argues, rightly in my view, that nationalism is logically
contingent, i.e. that it has none of the naturalness attributed to
it, that it does not spring from some universal root ; and it also
goes to imply, I think, that it is sociologically contingent, and
possesses no necessary roots even specifically in our own time.
(This I believe to be an error.) Its opening sentence really con­
veys its attitude : ' Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. ' An accidental inven­
tion of certain thinkers : we might well have been without it. 1
1 The book also contains a third and more specific thesis, concerning the his­
tory of ideas and their diffusion and political impact. This thesis credits Kant,
and the place he ascribes to ' self-determination ' in ethics, with the ultimate
paternity of nationalism. That was the evil seed which spread and multiplied,
particularly in a south-easterly direction, and in the pt·ocess needlessly destroyed
otherwise quite viable political institutions, such as the Habsburg and Ottoman
empires. From Kant to Kassim, from Koenigsbet·g to Kuwait. . . .
This specific thesis seems to me mistaken, quite apart from the heavy burden
it places on the role of an idea. The specific meaning self-determination had for
Kant lent and lends itself to individualism and/or internationalism, but hardly
to a cult of national cultures. The residual Kantian personality which ' determines
itself', which is ' autonomous ', is quite stripped of such contingent cultural
characteristics as make up nationality. It is undistinguishable from other men,
let alone other nationalities. Kedourie might no doubt reply that this deficiency
was amply made up by later writers in the romantic tradition. No doubt : but to
do this they had to go against Kant and what was characteristically Kantian.
But there is an element of truth in the charge, from Kedourie's viewpoint,
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

There are various ways of bringing home to oneself that,

contrary to the current preconception, nationalism is not some­
thing obvious, natural, manifest. What are the political units for
most of human history? Small tribal or village units ; city states ;
feudal segments loosely associated with each other or higher
authority ; dynastic empires ; the loose moral communities of a
shared religion. How often do these political units coincide with
those of ' nations ' , i.e. linguistic and cultural boundaries? Seldom,
. certainly only in a minority of cases, and then accidentally.
Tribal or city-state units are generally much smaller than the
linguistic-cultural area : there are almost always other tribes,
other city states, speaking the same language and possessing
similar customs. The political unit seldom as it were expands to
the cultural ceiling, it seldom fills out the linguistic area. Empires,
on the other hand, do not stop (why should they?) when they
reach those boundaries. They generally incorporate a mul­
tiplicity of linguistic-cultural groups. The political and the cul­
tural unit only coalesce in cases when the cultural unit is very
small (when a small tribe really has a language and culture unto
itself), or on the other hand, when the geographical limits to
which an empire can expand are at the same time the limits of a
culture ; but more frequently, the two frontiers diverge. More­
over, there is nothing to indicate that men have found tl}is
divergence either inconvenient or unnatural.
When ' nationalities ' are mixed up horizontally in a_ given
political system, as sometimes happens in feudal conditions,
the language and culture of the partners is a matter of consider­
able indifference to them : the lord may be concerned with the
peasant's delivery of produce, the peasant with protection and
freedom from oppression, but neither spares much thought for
a matter as trivial as the other's speech and accent.
And more than this : most dynasties are of foreign origin. It is
generally far more acceptable to have an outsider at the top, than
to submit to the rival party (clan, baron, or whatnot). Indeed it
is generally a condition of having someone at the top at all, that
against Kant. Kantianism was one of a whole class of doctrines, characteristic
of the Enlightenmep.t, which undermined the traditional attitttde to politics ; and
nationalism is one of the styles to emerge when that traditional attitude crumbled.
A small share in a collective guilt can perhaps be credited to Kant, if collective
guilt is to be allowed : but not, I should have thought, a specific guilt.
 NAT I ONALISM

he should not be one of the competing local powers. (This,

rather than foreign conquest, may be the main cause of the
' foreign ' origin of dynasties.) And when foreigners are not avail­
able to rule, they must be invented. For instance, the only rule
recognised by anarchic Berber tribes, the last white tribesmen of
the West, is that of holy lineages. These are, in fact, as much of
Berber ' nationality ' as the non-holy tribes over whom they pre­
side. But they are endowed with spurious alien genealogies and
treated as external, so that submission to them should be possible.
Thus the requirement that the ruler be of the same ' nation ' is
not something natural, something the violation of which promptly
generates resentment and discontent : quite the reverse. (The
requirement of foreign ruler can even overlap with modern
nationalism and its contrary principle, as when the liberated
Greeks invite a German or Danish prince to help ' terminate
dissension amongst them '.)
Life is a difficult and serious business. The protection from
starvation and insecurity is not easily achieved. In the achieve­
ment of it, effective government is an important factor. Could
one think of a sillier, more frivolous consideration than the ques­
tion concerning the native vernacular of the governors ? Hardly :
and men have seldom had time or taste for such curious frivolity.
The question they have in the past asked is rather like that
commended at the end of Kedourie's book : whether ' the new
rulers are less corrupt and grasping, or more just and merciful'.
But something has happened in the modern world - something
far more weighty than the lucubrations of German thinkers
about the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -
which has made the question about corruption and mercy seem
relatively frivolous, and the once frivolous question about the
language or culture of rulers, paramount.

Structure and Culture

Social anthropologists distinguish between the ' structure ' and
the ' culture ' of a society. The fact that, for instance, property
passes in the male line and that co-operating groups are deter­
mined by agnatic descent, are facts concerning the structure of a
society ; the fact that membership of a group is signified by
wearing a certain kind of cloth, and that marital status is re-

I53
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

flected in the manner of taking part in collective dances, is part

of the culture of the society in question.
· Small, simple, ' primitive ' societies generally have a highly
developed ' structure ' , i.e. individuals are ascribed roles (often
conceived in kinship terms) which determine and circumscribe
their activities and relationships to others : fairly little is left to
choice and fan:cy. At the same time, they have a highly developed
' culture ', i.e. the social position and relationships will tend to be
richly symbolised in manner, conduct, ritual, dress, and so forth.
In other words, there is no incompatibility between ' structure '
and ' culture ' (and, I should add, no one has claimed that there is).
But (and here I rashly and speculatively go beyond what is
fairly uncontroversial) : there is a kind of inverse relationship
between the importance of structure and culture. In a highly
structured society, culture is not indispensable. Where relation­
ships are fairly well-known (because the community is small, and
because the types of relationship are small in number), shared
culture is not a precondition of effective communication. In the
stable, repetitive relationship of lord and peasant, it matters very
little whether they both speak (in the literal sense) the same
language. They have long ago sized each other up : each knows
what the other wants, the tricks he may get up to, the defences
and counter-measures which, in the given situation, are available,
and so on. The same holds for other relationships of this kind.
An extreme and striking example is that of a roving Red Indian
band in the Brazilian jungle, reported by Professor C. Levi­
Strauss, a band formed by the fusion of two smaller groups,
neither of which even understood the other's language. Given
the smallness of the total group, and the simplicity of the prob­
lems and situations facing it, this absence of linguistic communi­
cation did not apparently prevent it forming an effective co­
operating group.
Modern societies are not quite as lacking in structure as they
are sometimes depicted. Bureaucracy is the kinship of modern
man, and the intricacy of bureaucratic terminologies, relation­
ships and symbols can rival the kin network of even the most
complex Australian aboriginal tribe, and is not lacking in ritual
reinforcements, etc. Nevertheless, one's position in these net­
works, or indeed in the quite extensive kinship network (in the
literal sense) which, contrary to stereotype, do sometimes exist
 NAT I O NAL I S M

in modern societies, are somehow not of the essence of one's

personality (or at any rate, not yet). In the wider society, as
opposed to the more specific organisations within it, a man is a
man, and is not fully identified with his role, and can if he wishes
divest himself of his roles, or at any rate of some of them, as of
an overcoat : the wider society lacks either legal or ritual sanc­
tions for enforcing them. (It may have economic ones, but these
operate in a loose and diffuse ' statistical ' way, and leave the
illusion, and quite often the reality of free choice.) The rigid
ascription of roles takes place within organisations, but men are
fairly free to choose and change their organisations.
In other words, a very large proportion of one's relationships
and encounters - in fact, they are more frequently encounters
rather than relationships - are ephemeral, non-repetitive, and
optional. This has an important consequence : communication,
the symbols, language (in the literal or in the extended sense)
that is employed, become crucial. The burden of comprehension
is shifted from the context, to the communication itself: when
interlocutors and contexts are all unfamiliar, the message itself
must become intelligible - it is no longer understood, as was the
case in traditional societies, before it was even articulated - and
those who communicate must speak the same language, in some
sense or other.
Hence culture becomes of utmost importance - culture being,
essentially, the manner in which one communicates, in the
broadest sense. In simple societies culture is important, but its
importance resides in the fact that it reinforces structure - the
style of being and expression symbolises, underlines the substance,
the effective role, activities, relationships. In modern societies,
culture does not so much underline structure : rather, it replaces it.
This truth has another aspect. In simpler societies, a man
possesses droit de cite in virtue of occupying a given niche in the
social structure. This occupation comes first : a kind of general­
ised citizenship comes second, and is a consequence of it. To be
a member of the tribe, you must first be a member of one of its
clans ; and to be a member of the clan, you must first be a member
of one of its lineages or families. No meaning can be attached to
membership of the larger group that is not preceded by member­
ship of the sub-group. The membership of the nuclear groups
can be acquired in various ways - generally by birth, but Qften
155
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

also by adoption, by some ritual act which incorporates an

individual. ' Culture ' is neither necessary nor sufficient : if incor­
porated by birth, the individual is of course likely to be ' of the
same culture ' as his fellows, having been reared with them ; but
if incorporated in other ways, he may or may not be culturally
similar. His failure to be similar does not necessarily exclude
him, if the group is nevertheless willing or constrained to incor­
porate him ; his similarity, on the other hand, also confers no
rights on him, and he cannot in virtue of it demand to be admitted.
I once knew a Mr X who strikingly illustrated this point. X
was a typical Muslim name - let us say, Mr Abdallah. Mr
Abdallah however was an American - 100 per cent so. He was
the son of a Berber acrobat who had got to America with a circus,
and of an American woman who became his wife. Mr Abdallah
was born and brought up as an American, and his culture was
completely American : he spoke only English, some not very good
French, and no Arabic or Berber. By profession he was a script
writer with a film company.
His father (now deceased) had, however, once revisited his
home region, and the fact that he had a legitimate son in America
was known ' at home '. Fairly late in life, the 100 per cent Ameri­
can Mr Abdallah, made a pilgrimage to his father's home, partly
from sentiment, partly from intellectual curiosity, partly because
his father had left some valuable property, notably land and houses.
The structural rigidity of traditional society displayed itself to
the full. As Mr Abdallah's identity as the son of his father was
not disputed, all the rights and duties inherent in his inherited
niche in the small southern Moroccan tribe, were ascribed to
him as well. The property rights he could perhaps have defended
in terms of the modern national legal systems anyway : but he
was also credited with others, unenforceable by the modern
courts, such as rights to brides (his parallel patrilateral cousins).
Yet, culturally, he was in no sense a Berber : to an anthropologist
he would have been useless (other than as an illustration of the
separability of structure and culture) : on the contrary, it was he
who turned to an anthropologist for advice concerning the tribal
background in which he had a place, if he chose to occupy it.
But in modern society, man does not possess citizenship in
virtue of prior membership of some organic sub-part of it.
He possesses citizenship - if he possesses it at all - directly.
 NAT I O NA L I S M

Technically, he has it in virtue of a document such as a passport,

or in virtue of having other documents on the strength of which a
passport (or suitable identity card) would be issued to him if he
applied for it. But this is only the legal, technical aspect of the
matter. Legal, merely technical citizenship, can diverge from
real, ' internalised ' , emotionally-felt membership, such as, above
all, is unambiguously recognised by others. 1 Such cases are,
notoriously, causes of inner strain at best, more often of outward
friction as well, and sometimes worse. The real citizenship, which
only receives its ratifications from passports, etc., is of course a
matter of ' culture ' , of similarity in the tone of being, so to speak,
of the manner of behaviour and expression, etc.
One part (though not the whole) of the explanation of national­
ism lies here. If citizenship, effective membership, ' belonging '
but also, less sentimentally, effective enjoyment of rights, depends
on culture, it follows that loyalties will also be expressed in terms
of it. This explanation is not circular : nationalism hasn't created
the situation in which culture defines groups and provides the
criterion in which membership and loyalty can be expressed. It
is, on the contrary, a consequence of this situation obtaining
independently. And why does this situation obtain? A part of the
answer has already been indicated : the erosion of the given,
intimate structures of traditional society, an erosion inherent in
the size, mobility, and general ecology and organisation of in­
dustrial society, or even of a society moving in this direction. 2 If a
man is not firmly set in a social niche, whose relationship as it
were endows him with his identity, he is obliged to carry his
identity with him, in his whole style of conduct and expression :
in other words, his ' culture ' becomes his identity. And the
classification of men by ' culture ' is of course the classification by
' nationality '. It is for this reason that it now seems inherent, in
the very nature of things, that to be human means to have some
nationality. In our particular social context; it is inherent in the
nature of things.

End as a Man
The negative reason for the importance of culture has been indi­
cated : the erosion of structure. If man is not held in place by a
1 Cf., for instance, Ruth Glass, Newcomers. The West Indians in London (x96o).
2 Cf., for instance, Lucy Mair, New Nations (x963).
1 57
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

set of fairly stable relationships, his essence is no longer his social

position - for he no longer has a stable one - but his manner of
conducting himself; he has to carry his identity with himself: his
style is his ' culture ' , and this is now essential to his identity.
But this is only the negative reason. There is also a positive
one.
Consider the following : an isolated human being, brought up
outside humanity in Tarzan fashion, grows up (assuming he
survives at all) into something far more like an animal than a
human being. It takes a social environment, and not merely the
biological minimum required for physical survival, to make a
man. But : the size and complexity of the social context required
for the production of an acceptable specimen of humanity has
changed radically of late.
An isolated family was probably never quite adequate, though
it may on occasion have produced passable ' human beings ' :
but in general, the minimal unit capable of producing a good
recognisable specimen was probably something roughly of the
size of a village. The kind of specimen a village produced, the
human brand as it were, is what we refer to as ' culture ', and what
in our time is naturally referred to as ' nationality ' . Thus, a Greek
village can produce a little Greek, a Nuer village can make new
Nuers, a Bedouin encampment can produce little Bedouin, etc.
Note : it is however awkward to say that (for instance) a French
village can produce a Frenchman. Can it? It can certainly pro�
duce a French peasant, who is a kind of Frenchman. But a
Frenchman without qualification?
Village-size social units are no longer competent to produce
fully life-sized human beings. A Nuer village can still produce a
Nuer, but it is incapable of producing an effective Sudanese
citizen, i.e. one capable of profiting fully from his technical
Sudanese citizenship. Villages in general do not have the re­
resources to produce anything but second-class, merely potential
citizens. The manufacture of a human being requires more than
the resources of family and village, it requires the resources of
an educational system. The fragment of an educational system
that is present in the village cannot be sustained by the village.
At a pinch, villages can bear the cost of erecting and maintaining
school buildings, and they could even pay the schoolmaster's
wages ; but they could not conceivably train him or bear the cost
 NAT I O NA L I S M

of the whole machinery required to produce and reproduce the

teacher in turn.
The minimal requirement for full citizenship, for effective
moral membership of a modern community, is literacy. This is
the minimum : a certain level of technological competence is
probably also required. Only a person possessing these can really
claim and exercise his rights, can attain a level of affluence and
style of life compatible with current notions of human dignity,
and so forth. But only a nation-size educational system can pro­
duce such full citizens : only it has the resources to make men
of the raw biological material available, resources large enough
to keep in being a sufficient number of specialists, of the second­
order teachers and intellectuals necessary to produce the ground­
level teachers. For this reason, something roughly of the size of a
' nation ' is the minimal political unit in the modern world (i.e.
one in which universal literacy is recognised to be the valid
norm). Time was, when the minimal political unit was deter­
mined by the preconditions of defence or economy : it is now
determined by the preconditions of education. 1
But : an educational system must operate in some medium,
1 It is of course possible for nominally independent political units to exist in

a. kind of educationally parasitic way. But the present argument is not really
undermined by the existence of Monaco or Andorra. Once, it used to be a cliche
common in discussions of democracy, that democracy was easily conceivable in a
state of the size of classical Athens or the Geneva remembered by Rousseau, but
thatit is hard to practise it in large modern territorial states. Suddenly, one no longer
encounters this perception. It is sometimes said that Yoruba cities resemble those
of classical Greece in their structure. The Nigerian Ministry of Education has
sent no request for Professors of Classics, to act as technical advisers on how to
reproduce a Periclean Age. It is hard to take a very passionate, practically
relevant interest in what could or could not be done in old Athens or Geneva.
Suddenly, it is taken for granted that a large, territorial modern state is a pre­
condition of any kind of social order currently acceptable.
The point is, of course, that apart from the slightly embarrassing matter of
slavery, and the lower material standard of living (which one might accept), the
Greek miracle was far too precarious to tempt emulation today. We might wish
for the miracle, but not at the price of such precariousness. A modern society
yearns for the security springing from the affiuent contentment of its citizens.
This is perhaps a weakness of a work such as Popper's Open Society and Its
Enemies, in as far as its image of ' the transition ' is too much inspired by the
Greek miracle. There may have been many breakdowns of tribal societies, most
of them not very fertile, and all precarious. They can hardly now provide us
with our crucial myth.

1 59
 THOU GHT AND CHANGE

some language (both in the literal and the extended sense) ; and
the language it employs will stamp its products. If the educational
machinery is effective, its products will be, within reason, sub­
stitutable for each other, but less readily substitutable for those
produced by other and rival machines. Of course, high-powered
specialists can still move across educational frontiers : a Werner
von Braun is employable internationally, irrespective of whether
he can catch on to allusions in English or Russian literature. But
in general, when the tasks to be performed are not such as require
the highest, rarest and genuine skills (when allowances are made)
they tend to be such that they can only be acceptably performed
by a person formed by the local educational machine, using the
same idiom as the organisation within which the post is located.
The conditions in which nationalism becomes the natural
form of political loyalty can be summed up in two propositions :
( I ) Every man a clerk. (Universal literacy recognised as a valid
norm.) (2) Clerks are not horizontally mobile, they cannot
normally move from one language-area to another ; jobs are
generally specific to clerks who are produced by some one par­
ticular educational machine, using some one particular medium
of expression.
Condition (2) cannot of course be invoked to explain national­
ism, for to do so would be circular : in a way, it is a restatement of
a crucial aspect of nationalism itself, which is that intellectuals
have ceased to be a substitutable commodity, except within the
range of any given language or culture. But the importance of
(I) - of the fact that only education makes a full man and citizen,
and that education must be in some linguistic medium - has
been curiously neglected, obvious though it is. It explains why
nationalism can and does move such broad masses of humanity.
Men do not in general become nationalists from sentiment or
sentimentality, atavistic or not, well-based or myth-founded :
they become nationalists through genuine, objective, practical
necessity, however obscurely recognised.
The contrast for a situation in which conditions ( I ) and ( 2)
obtain is, of course, a social order such as that of medieval
Christendom, or Islam up to the recent impact of modernism :
in those conditions, clerks are, and are meant to be, a sub­
class of the total society, for there is no need, aspiration, or
possibility of making co-extensive with society at large ; and at
x 6o
 NAT I O NALISM

the same time, clerks are horizontally mobile, at any rate within
the frontiers of the script-and-faith within which they are
literate. A Muslim lawyer-theologian, literate in written Arabic,
or a medieval clerk with his Latin, is employable, and sub­
stitutable for another, throughout the region of his religion.
Inside the religious zones, there are no significant obstacles to
the freedom of trade in intellect : what later become ' national '
boundaries, present no setious obstacles. If the cletk is com­
petent in the written language, say Latin or classical Arabic, his
vemacular or odgin is of little interest ; it doesn't mattet whether
it is one of the languages derived from the written one, say a
Romance language ot a spoken form of Atabic, or whether it is
quite Ulll'elated to it - say a Teutonic ot Betber dialect.
Such a world, howevet, has been teplaced by one in which
' national ' boundaries constitute a very serious frontiet to clerkly
mobility and substitutability, and in which the clerk as such
disappears, every man being literate - either in fact or in aspita­
tion, this aspiration however being treated with utmost serious ­
ness both by authorities and populations.
There is a certain obvious connection between the two features
of the modern situation : if every man is a clerk, it is a great help
if the language in which he is literate is identical with, or at least
fairly close to, the vemaculat in which he was reared in the
family context. Continuity between the idioms of home and
school facilitate the task of education. A specialised clerkly class
can be expected to master a special clerkly language - indeed it
has a strong incentive in this direction, in so far as the additional
difficulty helps both to restrict entty and greatly augments the
mystery and prestige of the occupation. But when a total popu­
lation achieves ot approaches literacy, the restriction and the
prestige become inelevant, and the proximity of the languages
of writing and of daily speech become an advantage. This point
does, however, call for a qualification. The facilitation of literacy
through the use of a vernacular no doubt favoured ' nationalist '
tendencies in Europe : for instance, it is clearly easier to tum
Hungadan into a written language than to teach all Hungarian
peasants Latin. But in extra-European contexts, the vemaculats
are often too numerous and diversified, without any one of them
having a manifest predominance, to be used as the literate
. language. If one of them were arbitrarily selected, no advantage

161
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

would be gained - for most of the population would still suffer

from a bifurcation between the language of school and home ....,
and an additional serious disadvantage would be incurred, in so
far as the selected vernacular would lack the conveniences of an:
old-established literate idiom (availability of technical vocabu­
laries, a body of technical literature, etc.). It would be rash to
predict precisely what will happen ultimately in these cases, and
indeed there is no reason to suppose that the same thing will
happen in each case. (The range of alternative is : the arbitrary
elevation of one of the vemaculars into the language of a national
educational system, tuming it into a literate language ; the bor­
rowing of a literate language from a colonial power, with the
advantage of taking over a language already equipped with all
modem linguistic conveniences, but a disadvantage in terms of
national pride ; or the borrowing of a pre-existing non-European
literate language, or regional lingua franca, such as Arabic or
Hausa or Swahili.) In these cases, it can be supposed that the
tendency towards the congruence of the languages of home and
school will operate in the opposite direction, the language of
school ultimately also pervading the home. This process is of
course not unknown in Europe : the present reasonably neat
linguistic blocks of Eastem Europe, replacing the earlier com­
plicated patchwork, are due to such a process (when they are
not due to actual forcible transfers of population).
The connection between nationalism and the situationin which
fully human men can only be made by educational systems, not
by families and villages, underlines an amusing fact - the inverse
relationship between the ideology and the reality of nationalism.
The self-image of nationalism involves the stress of folk, folk­
lore, popular culture, etc. In fact, nationalism becomes important
precisely when these things become artificial. Genuine peasants
or tribesmen, however proficient at folk-dancing, do not gener­
ally make good nationalists. It is only when a privileged cousin
of the same lineage, and later their own sons, and finally even
their own daughters, all go to school, that the peasant or tribes­
man acquires a vested interest in the language that was employed
in the school in which that cousin, son or daughter were educated.
(Should a rival nationalism prevail - i.e. a nationalism centred on
a language other than that of the school in question, and possibly
hostile to it - much of the valuable investment in the kinsman's
 NAT I O NA L I S M

education might well be wasted.) Ein Zollverein ist keine Heimq,t,

but an educational system and its medium of instruction. The
famous Three Generations law governing the behaviour of
immigrants into America - the grandson tries to remember what
the son tried to forget - now operates in many parts of the world
on populations that have not migrated at all : the son, who ardu­
ously acquires a new idiom at school, has no desire to play at being
a tribesman, but his son in turn, securely urbanised, may do so.
The pre-existing genuine folk cultures are of course not totally
irrelevant to the operation of nationalism. If a nationalism crys­
tallises around language X, the peasants speaking various
demotic versions of X do of course form the natural and pre­
ferred catchment area for the nationalism in question. But in
practice, nationalist leaders and organisations have seldom if
ever been very fastidious about this. Although they discern the
simple, robust, noble virtues primarily in X-speaking peasants,
they do not really object to incorporating Y- or Z-speaking
peasants, provided their sons can be X-ified : indeed, the leaders,
once in charge of a state machine, do not object to employing
forceful persuasion when canalising rustics, previously lacking
in national consciousness or even tempted by a ' wrong ' one,
into the right national trough. In brief, they are perfectly happy
to poach on each other's natural catchment areas.
So far, the argument - starting from the erosion of local all­
embracing social structures and the consequent importance of
culture, and from the role of educational systems and the lingu­
istic media in which they operate in forming acceptable human
beings - has taken us some of the way towards a schematic
explanation of nationalism : these factors explain why in general
(abstracting from local complications) modern loyalties are
centred on political units whose boundaries are defined by the
language (in the wider or in the literal sense) of an educational
system : and that when these boundaries are made rather than
given, they must be large enough to create a unit capable of
sustaining an educational system. In other words, we have
explained why modern loyalty-evoking units are not very small
(local, like tribal, feudal or classical units), and why they are
cultural units. But we have not really explained the upper limit
of these units : the curious fact that loyalty-engendering units are
often smaller than those of pre-existing faiths-civilisations (e.g.
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

Islam, Christendom), notwithstanding the fact that these wider

civilisations, where they exist at all, would provide a convenient
prefabricated ' shared ' language. In other words, we have not
explained the divisive aspects of nationalism, as opposed to its
unifying tendency.

A Model
Consider any arbitrary pre-industrial ' empire ', a largish terri­
tory under one ultimate political sovereign. (The model can
accommodate, with possible minor modifications, both a con­
tinuous, land-mass empire, and one separated by seas, of the
' colonial ' type.) The chances are that (a) the territory comprises
a multiplicity of languages ; (b) that notwithstanding nominally
unique sovereignty at the centre, there is in fact a certain diffu­
sion of power, a multiplicity of local, semi-autonomous power
centres. The semi-autonomous centres guard their measure of
independence thanks to the difficulties encountered by any
attempts at really effective centralisation in pre-modern con­
ditions : but in turn, they are probably the best means of con­
trolling the rural populations of the backwoods. In this set-up,
language is not an important issue. The language privileged at
court may not be identical with the one privileged in religion (e.g.
as in Ottoman Turkey) ; and there may be a multiplicity of both
vertical, regional, and of horizontal (occupational, estate, religious)
groupings, all of which are of direct concern to people : ' culture '
as such however is not, even though the membership of existing
groups may and generally will express itself in ' cultural ' form.
Now consider the possible forms of the impact of modernity on
such a society : increase in the proportion and in the importance
of literacy, consequent on the transfol'mation of economic life ;
greatel' mobility of various kinds ; the emergence of an industrial
proletariat ; and above all, the fact that one of the languages -
perhaps the language of the old heartland of the empil'e - has
become the language of the modern Ol'ganisations, of the new
industrial, governmental and educational machines. The local
structures are being el'Oded. 1
l It is interesting to high-light this point by reflecting on the notoriously

unworkable constitution of post-Independence Cyprus. What made it unwork­

able is the autonomy of the two communities, with their power of veto over
 NAT I ONALISM

This much has already been indicated above : and these factors
already imply that henceforth, identification, loyalty and effec­
tive citizenship depends on literacy and education in the one
favoured language. But the factors indicated so far only suggest
that there will be a rush for the acquisition of this particular
passport to full citizenship, accompanied by a sentiment of
loyalty conceived in terms of it. But why should there also be
new divisive nationalism? - why should some territories, and in
extreme cases even territorially discontinuous populations,
decide to opt for a new citizenship other than that of the one
privileged language (and henceforth, ' nation ') on the territory of
the ancien regime? It cannot be stressed enough that the answer is
not that the language in question, and hence its ' nation ' , is not
really their own. This is also true of the many, the very many,
who do adopt a new language and style of being. Changing
one's language is not the heart-breaking or soul-destroying busi­
ness which it is claimed to be in romantic nationalist literature.
Highlanders in Glasgow become Anglophone, Berbers in Marra­
kesh become Arabophone, Czechs in Vienna, etc., etc., etc. ; if
switching of language were the only problem, no new divisive
nationalism need ever arise.
The reason isn't really far to seek. Sometimes the entry into
the dominant nation is very difficult, or almost impossible
(though not owing to a difficulty in learning a language, literally) ;
sometimes, even if it is possible, it seems or is advantageous to
set up a rival ' nation ' of one's own instead. There is a type of
superficial reason why it is sometimes difficult : it is difficult to
change basic cultural traits (i.e. consider the requirement that an
Algerian had to abjure Muslim personal law to become a French­
man), and it is impossible to change one's pigmentation, in cases
changes. It is amusing to reflect that the running of an incomparably larger
political unit, in the same region of the world - the Ottoman Empire - was per­
fectly possible on the basis not of two, but of even more autonomous cultural
(religious) units, milets. Indeed, such units not merely presented no obstacle to
the functioning of the state, they were the very basis of its functioning. What
had changed? It is not that the Cypriots of today are more ferocious and in­
tolerant than all other Middle Easterners, including their own grandfathers, had
been in the past. It is rather that the role of a modern government and its per­
vasive and multiform activities, the radical changes it effects in daily life, are
such that they are no longer compatible with autonomous sub-communities of
the milet kind.
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE
.
where the nation to be ' entered ' is defined partly in terms of
colour. But these factors are themselves consequences rather than
causes. There is nothing in the nature of things which decrees
that a viable large political unit must contain only members of
the same kind of pigmentation, any more than it requires simi­
larity in the colour of hair or eyes. And even nations which
subsequently made a fetish of colour, such as the Boers, did not
find it difficult at earlier stages to incorporate ' colour '.
Industrialisation and modernisation notoriously proceed in an
uneven manner. Just as notoriously, it is the early stages, the first
few generations, of these processes which cause the greatest
disruption, the greatest misery, and which provide the maximum
opportunity for political revolution and for the re-thinking and
re-drawing of loyalties. This ghastly tidal wave does not hit
various parts of the world simultaneously : on the contrary, it hits
them successively (though of course not in any neat and orderly
succession). Essentially, nationalism is a phenomenon connected
not so much with industrialisation or modernisation as such, but
with its uneven diffusion. The uneven impact ofthis wave generates
a sharp social stratification which, unlike the stratifications of past
societies, is (a) unhallowed by custom, and which has little to
cause it to be accepted as in the nature of things, which (b) is
not well protected by various social mechanisms, but on the
contrary exists in a situation providing maximum opportunities
and incentives for revolution, and which (c) is remediable, and is
seen to be remediable, by ' national ' secession. Under these
circumstances, nationalism does become a natural phenomenon,
one flowing fairly inescapably from the general situation.
Consider the tidal wave of modernisation, sweeping over the
world, in a devastating; but untidy flood, aided or obstructed by
pre-existing currents, deflected or canalised by the rocks and
sandbanks of the older social world. Suppose it passes, in suc­
cession, territories A and B, where both these are initially under
the same sovereignty (suppose both, for instance, to be parts of
our hypothetical empire). The fact that the wave hit A first and
B later, means that at the time when dislocation and misery are
at their height in B, A is already approaching affluence or, in
Rostow's phrase, the period of mass consumption. B, politically
united with A, is a slum area of the total society comprising both
A and B. What happens to the men originating from B ?

1 66
 NAT IONAL I S M

Here two alternatives must be considered : is B fairly homo­

geneous culturally with A or not? Suppose first of all that it is
so. The men of B, less educated, more ' backward ', more recently
torn from the land or its traditional equilibrium, will provide the
lower ranks of the proletariat of the total society A-&-B ; but
being reasonably similar to the more ' advanced ' and privileged
workers of A, it would be difficult to exclude them wholly from
the advantages gained by workers from A: some of these perks
will spill over. Their exclusion from the moral community, their
material disinheritance, will not be complete. Moreover, their
potential leaders, including the small group of those from B
possessing advanced education, will have no particular difficulty
in rising up within A-&-B . . So, all in all, it is likely that region
B, though discontented, will remain within the larger society,
either awaiting the moment when the high tide of prosperity
reaches it as well, or anticipating events by large-scale migration.
But suppose instead that the men of B are fairly radically
differentiated from those of A : that they can easily be picked out
in the street - in virtue of pigmentation, or deeply rooted and
religiously sanctioned customs, say. Their situation is corre­
spondingly worse : far less, if anything, of the benefits accruing
to the more ' advanced ' proletariat, spills over to them. Above
all, their discontent can find ' national ' expression : the privileged
are manifestly different from themselves, even if the shared
' nationality ' of the under-privileged men from B starts off from
a purely negative trait, i.e. shared exclusion from privilege and
from the ' nation ' of the privileged. Moreover, the men from B
now do have leaders : their small intellectual class probably can­
not easily pass into A, and even if it can, it now has an enormous
incentive not to do so ; if it succeeds in detaching B-land, by the
rules of the new national game, in which intellectuals are not
substitutable across frontiers, it will have a virtual monopoly o f
the desirable posts i n the newly independent B-land.
Why should it have been difficult for the low proletarians from
B to be incorporated, at least on the level of their native-A fellow
workers, in A-land? In general, advanced lands do not have any
interest in sharing their prosperity with the ill-trained latest
arrivals. The solidarity of the working class is a myth. The
tomatoes thrown in Algiers at Monsieur Guy Mollet, to bring
home to him the need for an illiberal policy, were not thrown
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

by members of the aristocracy, nor even, I believe, of the haute

bourgeoisie. In cases when, however, the new entrants in the
industrial world aren't markedly distinguishable from the older
ones, they cannot really be excluded - it is not practically
feasible. This is where culture, pigmentation, etc., become im­
portant : they provide means of exclusion for the benefit of the
privileged, and a means of identification, etc., for the under­
privileged. Distance, seas to be crossed, can serve as well to
reinforce chromatic or cultural differences. Nationalism is not
the awakening of nations to self-consciousness : it invents nations
where they do not exist - but it does need some pre-existing
differentiating marks to work on, even if, as indicated, these are
purely negative (i.e. consist of disqualifying marks from entry to
privilege, without any positive similarity between those who
share the disqualification and who are destined to form a new
' nation '). This incidentally shows how mistaken Rostow is, in a
way, in crediting ' reactive nationalism ' with the crucial role in
economic development. 1 This observation needs to be turned
upside-down. It is the need for growth which generates national­
ism, not vice versa.
The two prongs of nationalism tend to be a proletariat and an
intelligentsia. The proletariat is in general morally uprooted, but
it need not always be literally uprooted, i.e. physically removed
from its previous rural habitat. For instance, the beginnings of
the Algerian national revolution were in the Aures mountains,
amongst villagers least removed, in a superficial sense, from the
traditional tribal order, who had remained in their old area, and
who were geographically furthest removed from the modern
urban and industrial centres. Yet, as Germaine Tillion showed,
they were disrupted by a kind of sociological action at a distance :
they were, in her expressive phrase, clochardisees.2 Yet this kind
of phenomenon should not lead one to generalise and suppose
that ' the peasants ' must always constitute the ' vanguard ' of such
movements, and that the industrial proletariat proper has been
' bribed ' and has ' sold out ', an idea that can be part of a general­
ised mystique of the Tiers Monde such as can be found, for
instance, in the works of the late Frantz Fannon. For instance,
no-one bribed the literally uprooted inhabitants of the Moroccan '
1 W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge r 96o).
2 Germaine Tillion, L'Algerie en I957 (Paris r 957).

x 68
 NAT I O NAL I S M

bidonvilles, and it was they who effectively carried out the

struggle for national independence.
In general, both an intelligentsia and a proletariat is required
for an effective national movement. Their fates diverge after the
achievement of national independence. For the intellectuals,
independence means an immediate and enormous advantage :
jobs, and very good jobs. The very numerical weakness of an
' underdeveloped ' intelligentsia is its greatest asset : by creating
a national unit whose frontiers become in effect closed to foreign
talent (except in ' advisory ' short-term capacity), they create a
magnificent monopoly for themselves. For the proletarians, on
the other hand, independence must in the short run bring dis­
illusion : the hardships are not removed, indeed they are likely
to be increased by the drive for rapid development and the fact
that a national government can sometimes afford to be harsher
than a foreign one.1
It is worthwhile elaborating slightly the notion of an ' in­
telligentsia ' . 2 This should be treated as a separate sociological
category, and certainly not confused with intellectual classes in
general. Pre-literate societies have their thaumaturges, witch­
doctors, etc. , and sometimes whole lineages or castes of them ;
literate civilisations have their priestly andjor clerkly classes or
estates. But an ' intelligentsia ' is something different, and a
phenomenon essentially connected with the transition. An intelli­
gentsia is a class which is alienated from its own society by the
1 Of course this model is merely the simplest case. More complex variants are

possible. For one thing, the tidal wave can hit various groups at different times
despite the fact that they are located in the same territory : the pre-existing
culture and/or social organisation of various groups makes some of them far
more adaptable, far readier to profit from modernisation or social change, than
others. Or again, a group may have motives for secession, for hiving off or even
for seeking a long-lost territory, not because it is less fitted to operate in a
modern context, but because it is more fitted to do so. A minority group more
successful in adaptation than the host majority, or the host political authority,
may excite jealousy and covetousness, find itself the scapegoat in the crises which
accompany social change, and have no option but to seek its security in a new
nationalism, even if individual members of such a group have no economic
incentive in this direction.
2 Cf. T. B. Bottomore, Elites and Society (1964) ; Hugh Seton-Watson,

Neither Peace nor War (1 960), pp. 164 et seq. ; Edward Shils, The Intellectual
between Tradition and Modernity (The Hague 1961) ; R. Dore, Education in
Tokugawa Japan, to be published.
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

very fact of its education. This p recisely is the condition of

' transitional ' societies : what is implicitly or explicitly admitted
to be the best of education - in fact, western-type education - at
the same time makes its recipient incapable of believing, feeling,
acting in the traditional manner. (He may occasionally go through
the motions, as it were, if he achieves a kind of double sophistica­
tion : men may go in for T. E. Lawrence-like charades in their
own societies.) Transitional societies are societies which have
ceased to be viable, subjectively and objectively : their norms can
no longer be effectively internalised, and their external arrange­
ments can no longer be sustained' - either through the direct
impact of modern institutions, or through the sheer ' demonstra­
tion effect ' of a measurelessly richer and more powerful alien
world. Education, in such a context, is in effect the accentuation,
acceleration, of this perception, and the equipment of its posses­
sor with a means of more clearly conceiving, and working
towards, an alternative.
It is this of course which differentiates an intelligentsia from
the priestly and clerkly castes of non-transitional societies. There,
the beliefs and skills of the clerks in fact support and sustain the
society in question - indeed they tend to endow it with a scholas­
tic rigidity. The skills and faiths of the intelligentsia, on the other
hand, entail a rejection. As indicated, the intelligentsia are of
course a remarkable example, in the real world, of philosopher­
kings : they know, and even their rivals in some way know, that
they and only they are fit to rule. Their fitness is due to the
power of their minds to penetrate, not an extra-mundane ' Platonic '
reality, but a reality at any rate external to their own societies,
a reality more or less exemplified by more developed societies and
revealed by the education borrowed or imitated from them.
The phenomenon of an ' intelligentsia ' of course followed the
wave of modernisation on its outward movement. Its first clear
exemplification was the thinkers of the Enlightenment - the
Westernisers of the West itself, chez soi, before they could really
be called ' westernisers ' and before the term ' intelligentsia ' was
coined. The wave moved to the marchlands of Europe, and
notably Russia, in the nineteenth century, and to the tiers monde
in the twentieth. 1 Superficially, they always face the crucial
1 Cf., fot instance, R. Bendix, ' Social Sttatification and the Political Com­

munity ', Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, Tome I, No. 2 (r 96o).

 NATIONALISM

dilemma of choosing between ' westernising ' and a narodnik ten­

dency : before the terms were invented, the ' rationalists ' were
the westernisers, and the ' romantics ' were the narodniks, of the
West itself. But the dilemma is quite spurious : ultimately the
movements invariably contain both elements, a genuine modern­
ism and a more Ql' less spurious concern for local culture, or
rather the re-employment of what had been a traditional culture
for the enrichment and the trappings of a new .e ducation-rooted
way of life, and for the provision of the defining differentiae of a
new political unit. By the twentieth century, the dilemma hardly
bothers anyone : the philosopher-kings of the ' underdeveloped'
world all act as westernisers, and all talk like narodniks. 1

Qualifications
The argument is in effect this : as the wave of industrialisation
and modernisation2 moves outward, it disrupts the previous
political units. These are generally either small and intimate
(village, tribe, feudal unit), or large but loose and ill-centralised
(traditional empires, which of course contain the small intimate
groupings as parts). It disrupts them both directly and by under­
mining the faiths and practices which sustained them. This by
itself would already lead to the formation of new political units.
But, more specifically, the wave creates acute cleavages of inter­
est between sets of people hit by it at differing times - in other
words the more and the less advanced. This cleavage and hos­
tility can express itself with partiCular sharpness if the more and
the less advanced populations can easily distinguish each other,
by genetic or rigid cultural traits. These aid discrimination and
humiliation, and thus further exacerbate the conflict. If such
differentiae are lacking, nothing happ.ens : the ' backward ' area
becomes depopulated, or a depressed area within a larger unit,
or an object of communal charity and assistance. If, however, the
differentiating marks are available - whether through distance,

1 Cf. Peter Worsley, The Third World (1 964).

2 The two are to be distinguished only as the narrower and wider aspects of
-
the same phenomenon. Industrialisation proper may be preceded - in certain
odd cases followed - by the trappings, terminology, expectations, slogans of
industrial society. A complex of such anticipatory borrowings may have almost
as much impact on a society as the thing itself.

171
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

' race ' , or cultural traits such as religion, they provide a strong
incentive and a means for the backward region or population to
start conceiving of itself as a separate ' nation ' and to seek
independence. Its intellectuals (i.e. the small minority sharing
the advanced standards of the other region) will exchange
second-class citizenship for a first-class citizenship plus great
privileges based on rarity : its proletarians will exchange hard­
ships-with-snubs for possibly greater hardships with national
identification. The importance of the ' national ' differentiation,
of what are in effect cultural definitions of group membership,
hinges on the fact that development requires, above all, educa­
tion, that is in effect education which confers real citizenship,
and that education must be in some medium, some culture, some
' language ' .
It i s interesting to note that from this viewpoint, two famous
mistakes of Marxism - the expectation of continuing or even
increasing misery of the proletariat, and the underestimation of
nationalism - are really one mistake : if the proletariat in regions
where the big wave has already passed really remained near the
starvation line, or were even increasingly pushed closer to it, then
indeed it might feel solidarity with the new recruits to industrial
misery. In fact, of course, their lot improves, and they feel little
solidarity with the new recruits. Later forms of Marxism tend of
course to stress the recruits and to discount the early ones as
privileged, ' bribed' species of proletarians. But the difficulty of
maintaining real solidarity between societies at differing stages
of industrialisation appears to hold even within the ' Marxist '
camp, as the Russo-Chinese conflict has shown.
The above theory is of course highly schematised and simpli­
fied. It is intended to capture the general underlying pattern of
modern nationalism, ,or nationalism proper. But it cannot of
course be applied to individual instances without addition of
complicating detail and possible modification. Various considera­
tions are relevant here :
(a) Discussions of nationalism tend sometimes to shift from
nationalism proper to any kind of group loyalty and sentiment.
Of course, men have always been organised in groups, and
groups only survived if they were capable of instilling, somehow
or other, some loyalty in their members. But there is nothing
whatever to be gained by confusing this extremely general,
 NAT IONAL I S M

indeed universal phenomenon, with something as specific as

modern nationalism, marked by features such as the non­
intimate, mass nature of the loyalty-evoking group, and the
definition of membership by (in effect) ' culture ', in the sense of
a kind of schooling, and the fact that membership of large anony­
mous ' nations ' is direct, and not mediated by intervening sub­
groups. This is a modern nation, and the yearning for it and the
acceptance of it as a norm, requires a specific explanation, over
and above any general theory of why men wish to or need to
belong to groups and feel loyal to them.
Of course, some pre-modern loyalty-evoking political units
have embraced populations and covered territories similar to
those which one would expect to be produced by modern nation­
alism. This is particularly true of the strong dynastic states of the
Atlantic seaboard of Europe. Do these rather different pheno­
mena, so close to ' nationalism', contradict the theory? One might
appeal to the consideration that the factors discussed in the
model of nationalism proper, already operated at least since the
Reformation. But it might be preferable simply not to class these
phenomena with modern nationalism. Or again a modern
nationalism might appear in a region in which tribal organisation
survives, as amongst the Kurds. Of course, shared culture could
always be a factor, amongst others, which might incline men in
their choice of political bedfellow : and if a strong dynastic state
grew up whose boundaries correlated, roughly (only very roughly,
in the case of both France and England) with a language and its
culture, then these things might well become the totems, as it
were, of the loyalty in question.
This exclusion may raise the suspicion that the whole theory
is tautological : it applies to the cases to which it applies, and the
others are - arbitrarily excluded. No doubt this danger exists.
But it does seem to be worth separating the modern pheno­
menon - citizenship through education, group differentiae in
terms of the language of instruction, and unmediated member­
ship of mass eo-cultural societies - from other phenomena, even
if a few of those others also make a banner of language-and­
culture. There is a clearly non-tautological element in the theory,
namely, the contention that nationalism ' proper ', as defined
above, underlies the overwhelming majority of modern ' national '
movements.

1 73
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

(b) It is not the aspirations of nations which create nationalism :

it is nationalism which creates nations. Admittedly, it may be
aided (though it need not be) by pre-existing cultural differ­
ences. In other words, it is impossible to predict with confidence,
prior to the crystallisation of this or that nationalism, just which
' nations ' will emerge. This is a consequence of the inherent
arbitrariness of the ' nationalist ' idea. Of course, cutural differ­
ences are real enough : and so is the injustice, exploitative and
inegalitarian and humiliating treatment, which in conjunction
with some such differences generates nationalism. But the world
is richer in cultural differentiations, and in systematic injustices,
than it has room for ' nations ' . It isn't always easy to tell just
which identifications and which oppositions will emerge. Some­
times it seems obvious ; sometimes this may be deceptive ; and
sometimes it does not even seem obvious.
It may seem convenient for. a theory that it should lack specific
consequences in a certain area, which could help to test its truth.
Still, the arbitrariness of nationalism was not invented in order
to make the theory harder to refute : it happens to be true any­
way. No doubt the theory is testable in other ways.
(c) Nationalism is an extremely powerfulforce in the modern
world, but it is not the only force : there are circumstances in
which the others may be stronger. For instance, a traditional
society which has weathered modernisation may subsequently
tolerate linguistic pluralism (e.g. Switzerland). Once a high level
of education is general, the argument that citizenship requires a
shared language, in the literal sense, loses its force. There is a
sense in which various kinds of Swiss ' speak the same language '
even if they do not do so in a literal sense. A speaker of Rhaeto­
Romansch, even if he speaks no other language, is not a helpless
Swiss citizen in the way in which a member of a small tribe,
ignorant of the city language, is such in a transitional society.
But it is interesting to note that some other multilingual deve­
loped societies (Belgium, Canada) are none too sure of the
wholehearted loyalty of important segments of their population.
Cultural minorities refrain from developing an effective
nationalism because they have no hope of success, either because
they are small, andfor because they enjoy material benefits under
the existing regime which they do not wish to imperil, or because
they face a central power which they know to be wholeheartedly
I 74
 NAT I O NAL I S M

determined to crush dissidence, andfor at the same time to make

concessions to regional autonomy (e.g. Soviet Central Asia).
Again, nationalisms may be untypical amongst cultural groups
living in a diaspora, and possessing an untypical occupational
structure. Such a nationalism is not assisted in its birth by
uprooted peasants : but peasants, like other things, can be in­
vented when they do not exist. 1
Just as nationalisms can be obstructed o r modified b y a special
circumstances, so also they can be facilitated (and ' distorted ' in
another sense) when nationalism becomes the norm, the habit
and the expectation, and something that power politics counts on
and ideology encourages. Thus, for instance, the easy Czech
achievement of a national state in 1 9 1 8 was not so much the fruit
of an alliance of intellectuals and proletarians (rural or urban), but
rather of intellectuals alone plus Western foreign policy. Balkan
nationalisms may have begun in non-national regional emanci­
pation of marchland barons, or in a continuation of a religious
hostility, and so forth. The list of variations could, and no doubt
should, be continued. Nevertheless the contention of the present
argument is that a certain theme, a set of characteristics, does
crucially underlie all the various forms, and that it explains why
this force is so powerful and so universal in our particular world.

A System of Locks
' The economic consequences of the size of nations '2 is, like so
many interesting issues in economics, a difficult and undecided
issue. (Like physics, economics is more or less closed to the lay­
man through being technical and counter-intuitive : unlike
physics, however, it does not repay this loss by presenting reliable
and agreed results, or indeed by being manifestly superior in its
judgments to those of the layman.) The colonial and imperial
set-up was a bit like a global version of an open field system :
each political unit was a kind of strip, starting at the centre of the
global village (i.e. in developed areas) and stretching outwards to
the badlands. As a consequence · of nationalism, political boun­
daries now run at right-angles to the previous ones : roughly
1 Always assuming that a kibbutznik can be sociologically assimilated to an

artificial peasant, rather than a member of a dedicated military order.

2 Cf. the book of that title, edited by E. A. G. Robinson (1 96o).

1 75
 T H OU GH T AND CHANGE

speaking, they are rather like a system of locks, separating areas

with diverse levels of economic development.1
By and large, this does seem a beneficient arrangement. The
vicious circles highlighted by Gunnar Myrdal,2 making the rich
richer and the poor poorer, seem to operate particularly strongly
when the rich and poor territories are within the same political
unit ; or at any rate, there are in this condition fewer means,
andjor fewer incentives, to counter-act these vicious circles. But
it is doubtful whether this can be invoked as part of the causal
explanation, other than as a minor contributing factor, in so far
as the positive perception of this truth encourages nationalism :
for this nationalism is born of the discontent of proletarians, the
genuine opportunities it offers to intellectuals, and the tie-up of
culture and citizenship consequent on the trend to universal
education and literacy.
In general, it is probably an advantage for a ' backward ' terri­
tory and a population to be incorporated in a larger empire in the
early stages : this tends to mean that a minimal economic ' infra­
structure ' , some development, and some education are provided
much sooner than they would be by local effort alone. On the
other hand, in most cases independence is a great advantage in
the later stages : releasing energies, generating enthusiasm, pro­
viding incentives and opportunities, and organising development
in terms of local rather than extraneous needs and consideration,
without a drain of talent and possibly population away from the
underdeveloped area, etc. (It is arguable that, historically, it is an
advantage if independence is won by a reasonably hard struggle,
in so far as this will forge the organisation and the awareness
necessary for the subsequent effort. An ideal fate of a ' backward '
territory might well be the following : a colonial occupation
which provides some schools and the ' infrastructure ', and under­
mines the power of the traditional and backward-looking ruling
class ; followed by a struggle for independence which generates
a united and determined leadership with a good mass organisation ;

1 This again is of course a schematic simplification. Where nationalism has

not crystallised or become effective, ' under-developed ' regions remain within
the same political unit with developed ones - e.g. the American or the Italian
South.
2 Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (London
1 95 7).
 NAT IONAL I S M

followed b y independence i n which these tools can b e used for

growth.)
But the main boon which nationalism has conferred on man­
kind, the main advantage flowing from the ' system of locks ' into
which the world is now politically divided, may well be political.
I have in mind not merely the psychological blessings conferred
by nationalism, the dignity and self-respect arising from the
elimination of second- or nth -class citizenship ; from the prefer­
ence for the condition in which men are not bossed and knocked
about by others with whom they cannot or are not allowed to
identify but by ' their own ' people instead (though all this is a
great advance) : 1 I have in mind something additional to all this.
It is sometimes supposed that it would be a great blessing for
mankind if a real world government existed. From the viewpoint
of avoiding the danger of nuclear disaster, no doubt this would
indeed be a great blessing. From certain other viewpoints, it
might well be disastrous to have world government prior to the
completion of the ' second, global phase of the industrial revolu­
tion ' .2 Suppose that, in fact, some Napoleonic nineteenth-cen­
tury figure had united the world, or alternatively, that twentieth­
century nationalism had not occurred - that the ' underdevelope d '
and underprivileged population had not conceptualised their
discontent in terms of nationalism, but had simply concentrated
on a struggle to achieve full citizenship within the existing
imperial political units.
The power-holding literate, developed populations in these
units would be faced with a terrible alternative. They could
concede such claims, remaining faithful to their democratic and
liberal professions of faith, and risk being submerged by over­
whelming numbers of people culturally alien to them. When the
English working classes received the vote, it was all very well to
say that ' we must educate our masters ' ; educating the English
working class, and - what turned out to be at least as crucial -
enriching them, was a small task indeed compared with the
present global problem of underdevelopment. It could be
1 It is interesting that differential voting qualifications are quite unacceptable :

they confirm, indeed underscore, differential citizenship. But suppression or

Gleichschaltung of parliaments is not unacceptable. An Assembly must not be
elected in a differential manner, but you can do without altogether.
2 Mr George Lichtheim's phrase.

177
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

achieved quickly enough, without political cataclysm. It is

eminently doubtful whether the global equivalent of this task
can be achieved with a similar speed and smoothness.
It is rather more likely that the fears of political submersion
and cultural annihilation would drive the privileged population
into an ultra attitude : liberalism would go by the board. The
repressive attitude would naturally generate extremism amongst
the oppressed population, and in turn appear to confirm the
fears of the privileged and so accentuate extremism amongst
them, and so forth in .a vicious circle. In brief, if a politically
united world were passing through the second, global, phase of
industrialisation, this united world might well come to resemble
the present condition of South Africa, One can hardly feel very
confident that Europeans-in-Europe, faced with a situation
analogous to the one facing settler populations - no other world
to which to retreat, and in danger of submersion - would behave
in a way markedly better than did or do the colons.
It is often deplored that liberal institutions do not seem to
export easily. A consequence of the political world system
generated by nationalism has been that the convulsions and in­
escapably centralised efforts to lift oneself by one's own shoe­
laces, economically, do not need to be re-imported into the
developed, previously imperial, territories. (The Algerian crisis
was, of course, very nearly re-imported into France.) This is a
boon : and so is, in the long run, the cultural diversification of the
world encouraged by nationalism (even if, contrary to the popu­
list ideology of the nationalists themselves, the new local cultures
in fact have as little to do with the pre-industrial local civilisa­
tions as a Caledonian Society in Birmingham has to do with a
Highland clan). As Gibbon observed about eighteenth-century
Europe, pluralism is some kind of insurance against both
tyranny and political folly;
 C H A P TE R E I G H T

KNOWLEDGE AND SOC I ETY

The Limits of Meaning

Industrial Society is not merely one containing ' industry ', large­
scale productive units capable of supplying man's material needs
in a way which can eliminate poverty : it is also a society in which
knowledge plays a part wholly different from that which it played
in earlier social forms, and which indeed possesses a quite
different type of knowledge. Modern science is inconceivable
outside an industrial society : but · modern industrial society is
equally inconceivable without modern science. Roughly, science
is the mode of cognition of industrial society, and industry is the
ecology of science.
Science is crucial to modern society ; but it has most certainly
not yet been properly digested by it. Its doctrines and methods
are not merely an inspiration, the key to plenty and to control,
but also an embarrassment and a disturbance. Roughly speaking,
belief systems of the past were stabie (generally hurling anathema
at all revisionists), ' meaningful ' in that they interpreted the world
in a manner that· made it morally palatable and acceptable to
the believer, and strove to underwrite the social arrangements of
the believers' community, including the distribution of power
and privilege within it. The scientific picture of the world lacks
these merits. It offers no guarantee of stability, it is morally
meaningless, and it respects no hierarchies.
Characteristic modern philosophies are by-products of this
situation. Both Positivism and Existentialism, for instance, are
preoccupied with meaninglessness. Superficially, this might
seem a mere case of homonym : the style and tone of the two
philosophies are so disparate as to make comparisons difficult. But
fundamentally, there is a considerable affinity : the two outlooks

1 79
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

are complementary. Both really start from the division between

the truly effectively cognitive techniques - science - and the
merely putative, questionably cognitive ' beliefs ' which ' make
sense of life ' , etc. The Existentialist sense of the meaningless­
ness, brute contingency, etc., of the world, is really a comment on
the general falsity of all the beliefs of the ' meaningful ' kind.
(The hero of Sartre's La Nausee might have found the roots of a
tree less depressingly ' given ' and contingent, if he had not
already implicitly rejected the possibility of any theistic or similar
cosmology in which the roots of the tree, like anything else,
would have their appointed place.) Positivism, on the other hand,
endeavours, in somewhat simple-minded fashion, to identify
the characteristics of genuine knowledge, and to equate their
possession with (semantic) meaning, thus consigning the morally,
aesthetically, etc., ' meaningful ' to the realm of the semantically
senseless. The vantage points of the two philosophies are dis­
tinct, but the chasm which concerns them is the same. One
attempts to offer a modern account of ' meaning ' , the other
deplores the loss of the archaic one.
But the problems engendered by science are not only episte­
mological and moral - the assessment of the new knowledge, the
status of other kinds, the vindication of values in a world re­
interpreted - but also. sociological. In one sense, of course, the
sociological problems of the consequences of science are co­
extensive with all the aspects of the general transformation of
society. That transformation is intimately connected with science,
with effective knowledge. But there are also certain more specific
issues involved : what happens to the knowledge and the beliefs
of pre-scientific society, and to the specialists and classes con­
cerned with their maintenance, in scientific society?
Very roughly speaking, pre-industrial societies are of two
kinds : tribalfilliterate, and urbanfliterate, non-industrial civili­
sations. From the present viewpoint, the former constitute no
practical problem : their institutions simply do not survive in the
modern world, other than in a symbolic or sentimental form. But
those of the literate civilisations do. If we use the term ' intelli­
gentsia ' for a clerkly class alienated from their society, because
their education forces them to anticipate a new order, we need
another term - let us say ' schoolmen ' or humanists - for a
clerkly class alienated from change because their education forces

x8o
 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C IETY

them, if not to look backwards, at least to seek rationalisations for

skills inherited from the past and questionably adapted to the
present.
The schoolmen may claim, perhaps rightly, that the functions
they perform are not mere left-overs from the past, but that they
serve universal needs, neglected by the new science, or in prin­
ciple unsatisfiable by it.
'J;'he issue of the humanists, or of the ' Two Cultures ', is
inherently important. But it also has an interesting corollary,
specifically relevant to the argument of this book. The present
argument claims that we are collectively (and rightly) exchanging
a perpetual Jacob's Ladder global vision of progress, for a con­
cern with one large but specific, crucial, and observable trans­
formation. One objection that might be raised is that this is
factually false as an account of the state of current thought.
Where, in the world of formal academic thought, in ' philosophy ',
are the retreating Evolutionists, or the advancing partisans of
concern with the great transformation? (Where indeed.) If this
intellectual change is indeed taking place, it is taking place, in
the main, outside formal philosophy, which is supet·bly timeless.
This splendid timelessness itself requires explanation. The next
section attempts to provide one. Anyone not concerned with
academic philosophy (a subject of perhaps rather limited inter­
est), and hence not puzzled by its failure to fit our scheme,
should simply ignore the next section.

The Timeless Ones

The timelessness of academic philosophy is not a new pheno­
menon, but is a persistent threat right through otherwise quite
divergent philosophical schools. The Hegelianism of Bradley,
for instance, differs from the original product, basically in the
timeless immobility of the Absolute, as Professor J. N. Findlay
has recently pointed out. Hence the sociological content evapor­
ates from it. 1 There is no light on progress and social change
1 Of course, the Hegelia:nism of a thinker such as T. H. Green had ample

moral and social, if not sociological, content - see for instance Me! Richter,
The Politics of Conscience (London 1964). Also the local Hegelians themselves
were conscious of the historical relevance of Hegel : see, for instance, W. Wallace,
Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, �nd ed. (1894), p. �Io.

181
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

here. Hegel upside-down gives us the most significant f?Ocio­

logical theory of the nineteenth century. But what would we get
from a Bradley stood on his head? 1
The same is, curiously, true o f Logical Positivism. Original,
Comtian positivism, was passionately preoccupied with the
social implications of its epistemological views, and Auguste
Comte is remembered at least as much for his typology of
societies as for his views on science and metaphysics. A high
valuation of 'positive ' knowledge, and a rejection of that which
is not, clearly has most momentous social consequences : it
implies a division of societies into those in which positive know­
ledge can flourish and those in which it is stifled, or into those
that are based on strikingly non positive beliefs (and impose
-

them on their members), and those which are not. Comte of

course proceeded to erect a typology along these lines - and in
this he was surely right, irrespective of whether or not we accept
his particular classification.
The weird thing about the modern variant of positivism (or
at least its most brilliant and influential English exposition) is its
unconcern with the social implications, and the persistent ten­
dency of its author, Professor A. J. Ayer, to deny that philosophy
has ethical or social implications. Original positivism generated,
logically enough, a kind of spirit of the Polytechnique. Local
Positivism never generated any spirit of any polytechnic, or
even, to allow for differences of terminology, of the Imperial
College of Science and Technology. Instead, it has always had
an inexpugnable aroma of Christ Church, Oxford. Arthur
Koestler wrote somewhere of reluctant revolutionaries, resem:..
bling seducers who lose their courage at the bedroom door. As
far as the infatuation with science and verification was con­
cerned, the local positivists were never observed anywhere near
the bedroom door.
A curious trait of this latter.-day positivism is this innocuous­
ness, or its striving after innocuousness. At the start, it gave
people a fright - quite rightly, too : for consider how radical a
social revolution would be involved in the careful scrutiny, from
the viewpoint of ' verification ' and ' verifiability ' , of all our ideas
and convictions. It is not necessary to proscribe them, or even
1 Answer : L. Wittgenstein's Tractatus - which of course is wholly without

sociological relevance, or any sense of change or its importance.

 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C IETY

to despise them : it would be an enormous revolution simply to

insist that their logical standing, or lack of it, be laid bare. But
the animus of verification was in practice directed mainly at
formal academic Idealism only - a movement whose ideas had
only played a minor role in national life : and this ani mus, one
· . feels, had more to do with the Victorian, stuffy, starched aura of
that philosophy, than with its lack of verifiability, which trait it
shares with other, more with it doctrines, which were never so
harassed. This positivism seemed a reluctant, and indeed a most
fortunate Samson : it pulled out a crucial pillar of the social
edifice, and the rest, unbelievably, stood firm. Indee d, this
Samson wishes it to stand firm, and is ever ready to claim that
his philosophy has no ethical or social implications.
This logically indefensible neutrality, and the general air of
timelessness, are of course the corollary of ignoring contrasts
between types of society, between the past and present, and the
manner in which they are tied up with the standing of various
kinds of knowledge within society. Conversely, a thinker given
to such a supposition of neutrality, cannot be sensitive to the
manner in which a social order is reflected in the kind of cog�
hition it honours, or to the social alternatives facing mankind.
For these thinkers, indeed, life appears to be neither a spectacle
nor a predicament.
The moral is that every theory of knowledge, and perhaps
every philosophy, is at least implicitly a classification and an
evaluation of societies. But the curious and persistent trait of
recent academic fashion has been the systematic neglect (at the
price of logica:I incoherence) of these implications. First, a
dehydrated Hegel, then a dehydrated Comte : and finally a
dehydrated Durkheim.
The striking fact that the central doctrine of Wittgenstein,
recently so fashionable, is but a restatement of Durkheim, has
strangely enough passed unnoticed. Durkheim taught1 that
neither empiricism nor apriorism could account for our concepts,
nor for the hold they have over our thought : that their true
source must be sought in the social life which forms us, in the
manner in which society inculcates and sustains our conceptual
habits . 1 Just this, nur mit ein bischen anderen Worten, was Wittgen�
'
stein's doctrine : language was a ' form of life ', and we can come
1 Cf. Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,
 T H O U GHT AND C H ANGE

to understand our concepts by seeing the role they play within

such ' forms of life ' , instead of seeking their source in sensation
(empiricism) or in something extra-human (apriorism). It is
their place in a ' form of life ' which gives concepts such validity
as they possess : they can have no other.
Durkheim was however immeasurably superior to his (quite
unwitting) follower. For one thing, he expressed himself with
elegance, clarity and relevance, and took no · refuge in a sup­
posedly ineffable difficulty of his own position. More important
still, he was fully aware of the difficulties and problems inherent
in his position : he was not for one moment tempted to think that
the ' social ' solution of the question concerning the origin and
standing of our concepts, in any way terminated the discussion.
This is a beginning, not an end. The terrible thing about Witt­
genstein was the supposition that the fact a concept was part of
a ' form of life ' (or even the perception of just what part it plays)
settles or solves anything.
A social order, a ' culture ' , a ' form of life ' , is a problem - never
a solution. Of course, if it is stable, well ' integrated ' , i.e. well
provided with self-maintaining mechanisms, it may in a p ractical
sense be a ' solution ' for those who live within its conceptual
walls, by possessing effective means of discouraging questions or
criticism. Alternatively, even if not so well endowed, it may be so
poor - literally or conceptually, and usually both - and so pre­
carious, that its members simply lack the conceptual tools and
material security to break out, or to break out into · a new order
in any substantial way superior to the old. Such has, in fact, been
the condition of mankind for most of its history. Men could
not escape the social order of which they were part, and thus
their societies were, in a most left-handed sense, solutions in
.so far as there was little or no possibility of escaping from
them.
But this, interestingly, is not our condition. We are both worse
and better off than our predecessors. There are no cosy con­
ceptual cocoons into which we can crawl back, even were we so
inclined. (The past ones weren't often quite as cosy as some
would make out, anyway.) There is no ' home ' , no status quo ante,
to which we could return. The intellectual advances of recent
centuries have corroded the inherited belief-systems beyond
1 Philosophical Investigations (1953).
 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C I ETY

recovery : the widening of horizons, the flowing together of so

many ' forms of life ' into one Babel-like and rapidly evolving
civilisation, have also made inacceptable the old local, particu­
laristic, asymmetrical faiths (except as sentimental links with the
past).
Greek philosophy, the universalistic and exclusive and
transcendent claims of Christianity, ' Natural Law ', the Reforma­
tion, the Enlightenment, 1 7 89, and the Marxist for other attempts
to provide a successful and more profound replay of it - all this is
an ineradicable part of the Western tradition : if you think all of it
away, almost nothing, and certainly nothing viable, is left. Y�t
all these elements contain the assumption that a culture, tradi­
tion, ' form of life ' , is not a law unto itself, that external norms
do exist in terms of which it is to be judged. Hence any contrary
simple-minded philosophical model, which could only be put for­
ward seriously by someone quite blind to our social and historical
realities, leads to a paradox : this ' form of life' itself contains the
important principle that it should not treat itself as its ultimate
norm. 1 Hence to invite it to do so is to make a self-contradictory
request. This is also true of other traditions : but even if it
were not, the essence of the life of ' the others ' in the world
today is the coping with an external impact which cannot be
ignored.
We are also better off than our predecessors, if ever they lived
in a self-contained system. It seems (and we can only hope this
is not an illusion) that we can in some measure fashion our
future. We do not appear to be helpless prisoners of an unintelli­
gible world.
The strange thing about the philosophy under discussion - the
recently influential philosophy of the mature Wittgenstein - is
that it implies a model of our situation which is the exact opposite
of the truth. It teaches that philosophic truth is the return to a
pre-existing status quo, a stable and viable order which we need
never have left, had we not been lured away by - a misunder­
standing of how language works. It is not, apparently, the total
transformations, social and intellectual, of the past four centuries
or·more, which have sent us in search of new norms and justifica­
tions of our beliefs and concepts : but apparently it is only the
1 Cf. ' Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition ', in K. R. Popper's Conjec­
tures and Refutations (1963), Chap. 4, p. xzo.
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

allegedly misguided belief that concepts could ever have any

justification other than their place in a · ' form of life ' , a belief
supposedly born of a misunderstanding of language. It appears,
the argument runs, that our ideas cannot have such an external
validation. The illusion that they can, must moreover be exor­
cised. In the face of such a doctrine, we can only ask - where
on earth (literally) is that conceptual home, that viable status quo
ante, that form of life, to which we are to return?
Wittgenstein's mistake was that of a man who joins a discussion
late without in any way understanding it, but is quite unin­
hibited by this, mainly because he simply has not noticed it,
Philosophy begins, roughly, because people find inherited beliefs
inadequate, untenable, etc., and because they endeavour to
replace them by less arbitrary and incoherent ones, and because,
as a next step, they endeavour to formulate and justify criteria
for such replacements or improvements. 1 All this is ignored and
implicitly denied in Wittgenstein. Instead, we get the alternative
doctrine, that people make attempts at general validations of
their principles only because they misunderstood the complexity
of their own language. This was, perhaps, an accurate account
of his own development, in so far as his own youthful views were
1 At least, it used to be the case that ' philosophers ' were thinkers who, both­
ered by some general conviction, either undermined and replaced it, or tried to
provide it with better foundations. Today, one often encounters a new geme,
which holds all belief-systems to be valid or, what amounts to the same, beyond
the reach of philosophical. criticism (and when is fundamental criticism not
' p hilosophy '? The exclusion of ' philosophical ' criticism is a thinly camou­
flaged banning of any criticism).
The trouble with this genre, practised by more than one ' school ', are mul­
tiple. For one thing, the practitione1·s strangely place themselves and their own
criteria at an Olympian height supposedly outside any belief-systems . . , , For
another, the belief systems which they would protect from misguided philo­
sophic interference are already so saturated with earlier ' philosophies ' (which
the practitioners are quite eager to castigate), that it is in effect impossible to
separate ways of life (not to be tampered with), and philosophies (tamperable).
Examples of this type of reasoning, each quite independently inspired, are Mr
P. Winch, in The Idea of a Social Science (1 958), and Mr M. Cowling, Mill and
L iberalism (1963).
Mr Noel Annan has perceptively pointed out, in connection with the last­
named book, that this style of thought involves making one's own (unstated and
fluctuating) off-side rules, which alw�ys disqualify the opponent. The opponent
sins by interfering with an ongoing tradition, but the critic's condemnation of
him, apparently does not. Cf. The Observer, December 8, 1 963.

1 86
 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C I ETY

based on the assumption of the basic homogeneity of language,

and his mature views on the denial of this assumption : but why
generalise this insight? (Others were not driven to thought
because they assumed order, but because the incoherences, the
chaos, indeed the meretricious opportunism of the various
notions we invoke ad hoc in unreflective life, nauseated them, and
led them to seek something better.)
The crucial defect of this type of philosophy is that it blinds
those influenced by it to the change society has undergone and
to the choices it faces. Its timeless horizons somehow omit the
staggering transformations of the recent centuries, and the corre­
spondingly great alternatives facing us. Issues condescendingly
described as concerning ' belief' , or Weltanschauung, are either
ignored, or treated in a weird ' neutral ' manner which makes it
appear that the most archaic piece of conceptual antiquarianism
has the same standing as serious attempts at orientation, based on
what we seriously know and believe about the world we live in.
(The doctrines revived by this antiquarianism are of course kept
alive only in an artificial and truncated form, kept apart from life
and real belief, deprived of real content.) The pseudo-neutrality
and the timelessness are mutually interdependent. The Evolu­
tionists had provided a fundamentally mistaken theory of change :
but these thinkers simply ignore it.
This type of philosophy illuminates the truth by sheer con­
trast. Our intellectual crises are born of the fact that a very
fundamental and increasingly speedy transformation has made
inherited systems of ideas non-viable. This philosophy counsels
us to return to the customary notions, and eschew the temptation
to seek some more general, independently-based ideas, as a snare
and a delusion, a misunderstanding of (for some reason) language.
It has a curious theory of language and of general questions
(i.e. philosophy) : language is a set of tools we use in the world
(which is roughly true), and general philosophic questions are
the noise made by dislocated verbal tools, or tools running idle
(which is wholly false). Philosophy, it appears, is to the proper
working of language, as funny noises are to the running of a motor­
car - they indicate that some piece is doing too much or too little.
All we need do is to find out its proper role in the mechanism, and
restore proper functioning - and the question will disappear.
The result is a, kind of Bluebird philosophy. It teaches that
1 87
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

truth is not to be sought in the tempting but perilous and decep­

tive distances, but right here under our noses, in our very homes,
in the very palm of our linguistic hand. 1 ' Language ' is inter­
preted (reasonably enough) in an extended sense, as the whole
ensemble of habits and institutions within which we use words
and which give our words their ' use ' or ' meaning ' : hence
' language ' really comes to mean ' culture '.
T hose who embrace this view, or some variant of it, are most
fortunate in being able to suppose that they have such a coherent
and viable culture to which they can return. In most cases, this
supposition is merely implicit : their model of language (and of
philosophy, as a local mal-functioning of language) entails this
supposition,. and the thinkers in question appear quite undis.,.
turbed by the glaring conflict between the supposition and our
actual social reality. But they do not generally spell it out.2 Had
they done so, some of them might at least have noticed its non­
congruence with reality. One very able thinker, Mr R. F.
Strawson, observes3 that this ' method . . . inspired a kind of
hope which was not, at the time, absurd. It was possible to
speculate . . . how long it would take to " finish off" traditional
philosophy ; . . . a lecturer could (say) . . . " Had Hume shown the
same acumen in logic . . . as he showed in morals . . . philosophy
. . . would have been over . . . sooner." ' (Italics mine.) How for­
tunate to have lived, however briefly, so near the very end of time,
of pre-history, when conceptual disturbance was to be abolished
for ever! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. It is also gratifying
1 Professor Stuart Hampshire elegantly describes this doctrine (David Hume:

A Symposium, ed. by D. F. Pears ( 1963), p. 5) : ' [Wittgenstein's] suggestion was

that we should turn attention to the justifications of belief . . . which are cus­
tomarily accepted, and not look for a rationally satisfying justification alto­
gether outside our established habits of thought : such a justification could never
in principle be found. The proper work of philosophy is purely descriptive, to
set out the linguistic facts that reveal our habits of thought, the facts that are
always overlooked when too general, rational theories of knowledge are con­
structed. We must try also to uncover the motives that prompt philosophical
theories, treating these theories as fantasies of reason, which can be understood
and, by being understood, undermined.'
2 One outstandingly interesting attempt to spell out the implicit social philo­
sophy explicitly is indeed Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science (London
1958). The argument is developed further in the same author's ' Understanding
a Primitive Society ', American Philosophical Quarterly, I 964.
3 The Times Literary Supplement, September 9, 196o, p. lx.

t 88
 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C IETY

to learn, by implication, that the idea that general questions could

be .exorcised by an examination of language, is now seen to be
absurd : but how could it ever be anything else? ·
It could only fail to be absurd to thinkers oblivious of time and
change. It is amazing to reflect that thinkers of this school are
sometimes concerned to vindicate the reality of time against
metaphysical doubts concerning it. Their ultimate appeal on
issues of this kind is to the fact that even the metaphysician who
questions the reality of time, understands what it is to miss a
train, etc. - that he knows ' how to use ' temporal concepts, and
understand the part they play in our life. I do not myself ques­
tion the mastery of train-timetable concepts, etc., on the part of
these thinkers, but seriously doubt whether they have any
understanding whatever of what it is like to live in one · century
rather than another. The unreality of time is not a paradox at all,
but rather, for them, a valid perception. Consider their pre-,
occupation with types of categories1 of discourse (ethical, reli­
gious, etc., etc.) : reading these discussions, which generally tend
to vindicate the viability of each ' category ' of discourse under
discussion, one would never guess (and the authors appear quite
unaware) that recent centuries witnessed dramatic, truly revolu­
tionary transformations in the nature and standing of several
important ' categories ' or ' types of discourse ', such as the
scientific, ethical and religious. No one would ever guess from
these writings, that there has been a scientific revolution, or that
a process called secularisation has taken place. (The general
tendency of this kind of philosophy is to assimilate those cate­
gories, concerning the nature and standing of which there is most
genuine and widespread dispute, to those other types of discourse
concerning which, perhaps, no serious or practically relevant
doubt can be entertained, such as our capacity to talk of ' other
minds '.)
This kind of philosophy reveals itself most clearly in its total
misunderstanding of the theory of knowledge. It assumes that
questions such as whether (all) our knowledge is based on
s ensations, ' sense data ', etc., could be· eliminated by careful
attention to the real linguistic role of terms such as ' seeming ',
etc. But the theory of knowledge becomes a preoccupation once
we lose faith in authorities, be it concerning the external world
1 Cf. Dr J. 0. Wisdom's observation on this in Philosophy (1959).
 T H O U G H T AND C H A N GE

or anything else. It then becomes nec.essary somehow to classify

sources of information or methods of validation, in a way which
illuminates their nature, and facilitates their assessment. If it
were shown that one particular theory aiming to do this, empiri­
cism, sins against language, and that this invalidates it, this could
not conceivably justify the abandonment of the initial question.
A full-blooded Bluebird philosophy, preaching a return to the
conceptual womb allegedly available in language, culture, is per­
haps no longer held by many. (But one should beware : like the
communist defending Stalinism in Simone de Beauvoir's Les
Mandarins, the apologists of the movement fluctuate between
saying that the views in question were never held, that they are no
longer held, and that they are true anyway.)
But the supposedly more ' cautious ' derivatives from this set
of ideas are in certain ways even more harmful than the original
position. One important development is in the direction of more
minute examination of small parts of language and their use, an
examination uncommitted apparently to the belief that there is a
viable order to be restored, or perhaps, to any general belief. 1
This philosophy finds in caution a rationale which had pre­
viously been supplied by the tool-and-rattle theory of language
and philosophy, a rationale for practices which can be summed
up as the replacement of questions such as ' How many angels can
sit on the point of a needle? ' by more progressive, determinate
questions such as ' In how many senses can an angel be said to
sit on the point of a needle? ' The new rationale really gives us a
philosophy of reculer pour ne pas sauter du tout. The recul we can
observe, but a staggering saut is only promised for the future. The
l Whether these general underlying ideas really were or were not abjured is

arguable. Thus, Professor S. Hampshire, in a philosophical obituary of Pro­

fessor J, L. Austin (Aristotelian Society Proceedings 1 96o), the leading repre­
sentative of this s1,1b-school, observes that there are ' two slightly difl:'erent
theses that can plausibly be attributed to (J. L. Austin). . . . The strong thesis
may be seen as something like an application of Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient
Reason to established forms of speech. , . . Austin would suggest that the
implied forms Principle of Sufficient Reason is to be justified as Burke justified
some other established institutions. . . . The distinctions are organically con­
nected, and the amputation of an offending part will destroy the mutual adjust­
ment, and therefore the life, of the whole.' What picture of the ' life of the whole',
of the past four centuries can a man have to suppose anything of this kind?
It is only fair to record that this account of Austin;s views, by Hampshire,
has been challenged by some of Austin's other admirers;
 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C IETY

figure of twenty or thirty years is sometimes given, before the

promised advance is to come. (Yet it is said that upper-class
education discourages self-advertisement.) This delayed con­
ceptual gratification has the consequence that no results must be
asked for right now, which is just as well. It all seems like a para­
phrase of St Augustine's famous prayer : Oh Lord, make us non­
trivial - but not yet!
The more cautious variant of the philosophy proceeds in the
direction of ever-more meticulous examination of language, ' of a
minute, literal, word-by-word kind ' 1 which is both a consumma­
tion and an ' overcoming ' of Wittgenstein's work. It is its con­
summation, for this is what he commended, even if, according to
the cautious followers, he failed to follow up his own commenda­
tion. It is also a step beyond the master, in that it claims ( ques­
tionably) to disavow the general theory (the tool-and-rattle view
of language and philosophy) which inspired his recommendation.
All this is highly relevant. Philosophies have often been guilty
of mishmash. Through lack of ability, vision, patience, rigour, or
coherence, a thinker may offer us an attempt at reasoning which,
on examination, turns out to be an uncoordinated pot pourri of
diverse principles, methods and assumptions, so rightly scorned in
ethics by Kant, and, as such, unlikely to be of interest or merit.2
But here we have a philosophy which, in its first stage, positively
commends mishmash, and in its second stage, both commends
1 Professor S. Hampshire, op. cit., page xi. Hampshire proceeds, strangely,

to claim that ' it is dishonest to pretend that linguistic analysis (of this kind)
is not revolutionary, both in intention and in effect. . . .' How can this be if
this method reveals that marvellous harmony, in which nothing may be ampu­
tated, and nothing need by added? Moreover, the minuteness preclused con­
sideration of those general criteria which, in conditions of flux and chaos, can
alone help recover our bearings. And what is one to make of the threat that
anyone who presumes to disagree, must be classed dishonest?
Or consider some other characteristic expressions of or comments on this
attitude. ' I do not want to laud present [philosophical] fashions but there is
surely a real advance in trying to go a little way certainly rather than a long way
uncertainly.' (Jon Wheatley, in Mind (1 96:1), pp. 435-6.) Or again : 'At the
other end [of the philosophic scale] is an area, cultivated assiduously and with
some success of late, in which accuracy and discrimination of detail are primary
concerns.' (P. F. Strawson, The Spectator, October x8, 1 963.)
2 ' We need only look at the attempts to deal with morality in the favourite

style. We shall find an amazing mishmash . . , the special constitution of human

nature . , . perfection . . , happiness . . . . God . . . a little of this, and a little of
that.' Immanuel Kant, Metaphysic of Morals.

191
 T H O U GH T AND CHANGE

and actually practices it . . . and which, by its very principles,

is inescapably committed to commending and practising it.
The mishmash, the timelessness, and the neutrality or pro­
testations thereof, are closely connected and reinforce each other.
The attention to minutae (even assuming it to be technically
competent, an assumption which should not be made too easily)
must naturally prevent any awareness of wider horizons, and
such an awareness is indeed conspicuously lacking. Any critical
conclusion concerning those minutae, always assuming that piety
vis-a-vis that marvellous adjustment of the (necessarily un­
examined) ' whole ' does not inhibit them, cannot but be swamped
by the inevitably overwhelming majority of minutae that were
left unexamined. It is interesting that even a philosopher who
does not altogether accept this method in philosophy, S. !-lamp­
shire, 1 when turning to social affairs, is found, altogether in the
spirit of that method, commending abstention from general
theory - in effect, mishmash.
An account of this kind of philosophy has a multiple interest.
First of all, the model it entails - a viable, fairly stable, coherent,
integrated system of ideas, our conceptual home to which we
must return after erring misguidedly in pursuit of generality, a
system requiring no justification, there being nothing outside it
that could justify it - this model is so dramatically wrong as to
1 'A Plea for Materialism ', New Statesman, February 8, 1 963. (Cf. also the

relevant comments on this by Professor J, S. Gould, in ' Fashions amongst the

Sociologists ', Twentieth Century, July I 963.) Materialism - curious usage - turns
out to mean abstention from theory. In social affairs as in philosophy, Hampshire
expresses sympathy for this rejection of general ideas. At the same time, he is
in the other work cited, strangely anxious, unconvincingly, to claim this cult
of the ad hoc for the ' revolutionary ' side, and to castigate the merely ' supposed
rebels ' who do not really threaten either ' Church or ruling party ' (or even Mr
Luce), and to unmask them as ' true conservatives'. He appears strangely
worried lest he might seem on the Establishment side.
The present argument does not intend to convey any mechanical commenda­
tion of the ' revolutionary ', or condemnation of the ' conservative '. The whole
vocabulary of terms such as ' progressive ' and ' reactionary ' is a left-over, in
ordinary speech, of what once was a coherent Evolutionist philosophy, whose
premisses however have now withered away and whose ' common sense ' echo
is most unilluminating, On the contrary, it is argued that we must re-assess our
opportunities and alternatives, and this we can most certainly only do in the
light of a general picture. The cult of ad hoc mishmash may for all I care be
' revolutionary ' (though I have known more rousing calls to revolution), but it
is certainly obscurantist.
 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C IETY

illuminate the truth by contrast. One element in the picture we

may perhaps accept : the outer darkness. There is nothing given
' outside ' to which we can appeal for validation. But the other
elements are diametrically opposed to the truth. The often non­
viable, contradictory, rapidly changing cultures in which we are
involved force us to try and think ourselves out of our predica­
ment. If it be true that we are not supplied with any really good
premisses to do it with - we must still do it as best we can. We
have no choice.
Secondly, an understanding of this philosophy throws light
on that odd phenomenon, the timelessness and irrelevance of
academic thought. ' Linguistic ' investigations are of course not
the only way in which timeless realms can be attained or fabri­
cated. In other traditions, other alternatives may be favoured.
The ' phenomenological ' method may be made to serve the same
need 1 in the Franco-German cultural common market. (It is true
it has also been fashionable to try and fuse the ' phenomeno­
logical ' style with Marxism, which should, in principle, bring it
into some kind of contact with reality. But these attempted syn­
theses have not been markedly successful, and have indeed
tended to turn the sociological element taken over from Marxism
into something aprioristic, cloudy and abstruse.)
Finally, it also illuminates, symptomatically, an important
feature of the wider social scene. This philosophy has of course
specific local roots as well as fundamental general ones. The
specific local ones are amusing rather than important. They are
connected with social mobility, and the role of higher education
in a society in which there has been an increase in equality with­
out a political and symbolic revolution. Upward ascension now
takes place mainly through education, and those upwardly
mobile must acquire the old symbols of status, which have
hardly been disturbed. In such circumstances, finishing schools
flourish. A centre of higher education, once quite peripheral to
the ruling class - a ruling class which saw itself as Romans, and
its clerks as Graeculi - suddenly acquires enormous importance :
the erstwhile peripheral outhouse suddenly becomes the main
Gateway on the road up. A temporary complacency in the wider
society is mirrored,2 indeed exaggerated, in philosophy, itself at
1 Cf. J. F. Revel, Pourquoi des Philosophes? (Paris 1 957).
2 Cf. Bryan Magee, in New Society, January IO, 1963, p. 27

1 93
 THOUGHT AND C H ANGE

the apex of a humanist education which has turned from faith

(gone) and literacy (no longer a monopoly or rarity) to social
escalation. In such circumstances, what philosophy could be
more suitable than one openly proclaiming its exclusive concern
with conceptual table-manners?
But this is merely the local, relatively accidental reason. There
is also a deeper one. Philosophy may not be the queen of the
sciences, or indeed a science at all : but it is the very apex of the
humanist disciplines. I do not mean that its practitioners are
necessarily or generally superior in ability, rigour, or scholarship
to those of other humanist subjects. But what is true is that it is
continuous with them - they are all mutually intelligible, without
very great difficulty - and that within this continuous world of
the humanities, the more general, persistent, difficult questions
count as ' philosophy '. This is not to say that a historian puzzled
by causation, a lawyer puzzled by justice, or a critic puzzled by
beauty, lift their telephone to ring up a philosopher for the
answer: they don't. But systematic attempts to deal with these
persistent questions are classed as ' philosophy ' .
This means that i f the humanities a s a whole are undergoing a
crisis or a malaise, this tends to be reproduced with a multiple
acuteness in philosophy. A kind of conceptual Acceleration Prin­
ciples operates, analogous to that discovered in economics by
Sir Roy Harrod : those industries which produce major pieces of
equipment for the rest, suffer excessively when the whole econ­
omy is depressed. And this does seem to be the case : the humani­
ties are undergoing a crisis.

As it is Written
What is ' humanist culture ' ? Essentially, culture based on liter­
acy. All human society and civilisation presupposes language as
such : but humanist or literate culture is not co-extensive with all
human society. It is distinguishable from illiterate culture on the
one hand, and from more-than-literate, scientific culture on the
other. The term ' humanist ' is of course unfortunate, and sur­
vives from the days when a concern with mundane, ' human '
literature was primarily distinguished not from either illiteracy
or science, but from theological, divine concerns. But for con­
temporary purposes, it is the literacy, and not its mundane or

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 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C IETY

extra-mundane orientation, which matters. ' Humanist concerns

now embrace the divine, Both speak the same language.
Language is the tool of trade for the humanist intellectual, but
it is far more than that. Language is, as Vico saw, more than a
tool of culture, it is culture. Who would love had he not heard of
love, asked La Rochefoucauld. And how many things would we
do altogether, if the concepts of those things were not built into
the language of our culture?
The humanist intellectual is, essentially, an expert on the
written word. One should not read this in a pejorative sense - as
if to say, an expert on nothing but words. For words are a very
great deal : the rules of their use is wound up with - though not
in any simple and obvious way - the activities and the institu­
tions of the societies in which they are employed. They embody
the norms - or, indeed, the multiplicity or rival and incom­
patible norms - of those societies.
Humanist intellectuals, as experts on words, and above all on
written words, are the natural intermediators with the past and
the future through records ; similarly, with distant parts of the
society ; with the transcendent when the Word is held to contain
the Message from it ; when the recorded word contains the rules
of conduct, they are the natural judges ; and so forth. A literate
society possesses a firmer backbone through time than does an
illiterate one. It is at least potentially capable of consistency. The
literate intellectuals become the guardians and interpreters of
that which is more than transient, and sometimes its authors.
This role was one which they once fulfilled with pride. The
notions of the Priest or the Scholar, or even the Clerk, evokes an
image which is not without dignity : for some men and some
societies, it has more dignity than any other. 1 It does not perhaps
quite possess, in some Western eyes, the romantic or melo­
dramatic appeal of the Warrior : nevertheless, its code and its
sense of mission could have as strong a hold on those who see
themselves as clerks of one kind or another, as did that of
chivalry.
1 I once listened to a Swiss professor explaining the meaning of Existentialism.
He approached it as follows. There are certain things - God, death, for instance
- in the face of which all men are equal. It matters not whether you are the mean­
est pauper, or - his finger rose to point upwards to heaven - a professor, it is
still the same. . .

rgs
 T H O U GHT AND CHANGE

But this sense of pride is conditional on the fulfilment of the

. central task of this estate, which cannot but be one thing - the
guardianship or the search for truth. If this is gone, only a shell
remains. When the age of chivalry was over, Don Quixote
became a joke. The military equipment of a knight could no
longer be taken seriously. The present question is : how seriously
can one now take the cognitive equipment of the clerk?
The answer is, alas, not very much. It varies a good deal, of
course, with the subJect matter, the milieu, the context. 1 But
giving a general answer, it is correct to say that the clerk, i.e. the
literate man whose literacy had led him to acquire good know­
ledge of the written word, an understanding of that which is
written - has now lost much of his standing as a source of know­
ledge about the world. The educated public in developed
countries turns to the scientific specialist when it wants informa­
tion about some facet of the world. It does so even in spheres (e.g.
psychiatry) where the record of the scientific specialist is not
beyond all challenge. It suffices that the scientific speciality is
part of a discipline which in turn is incorporated into the wider
body of recognised ' science ' .
The deprivation of the humanist intellectual of his full cog­
nitive status had happened fairly recently. Signs and portents, in
philosophy and elsewhere, can be traced very far back : but as a
general and widely half-recognised phenomenon, it is very new,
and has occurred within this century, and almost within the last
few decades. The magnitude and profundity of this still only half­
realised social revolution can scarcely be exaggerated. There are
still many members of the humanist culture who do not fully
perceive what has happene d : some feel it, but angrily deny it ;
others feel and know it, and react with the kind of shame which
is the lot which must befall a caste, when the basis of its identity
and its pride has been destroyed. It is for this reason that the ·
somewhat farcical, rapidly succeeding, and increasingly weird
' revolutions in philosophy ' have a genuinely serious undertow,
and one relevant to our argument. The underlying problem is
the crisis of the caste of humanist intellectuals and the crisis in
verbal knowledge, which is their defining expertise.
This crisis has a number of sources, not one. One obvious
1 One really serious exception to the cognitive down-grading of the humanist

intellectual is the field of history.

 KNOWLEDGE A ND S O C IETY

factor is the towering superiority of science as a source of know�

ledge about the universe, with the sad consequence that the man
sensitive to the meanings of words, to their connections and in­
ferential powers, their histories and recorded alignments in
books, can no longer claim - whatever else he may still claim -
that he is, primarily and above all and more than any one else - a
knower.
But another enormously important factor, curiously seldom
noticed, is the loss of monopoly of literacy. The clerk is a nobody
not merely because he is not a scientist, but also because, in the
developed societies, everyone is now a clerk.
This is a powerful consequence of universal or near-universal
literacy, of universal compulsory education, which was not fore­
seen and has still been scarcely noticed. To understand what it
really is to be a clerk, a ' scholar ', a literate, in his full glory and
dignity, one must go to one of those many under-developed
countries where literacy is still a minority accomplishment. Not­
withstanding the fact that even there, the power and prestige of
science and technology are felt, literacy still confers the self­
respect which is the privilege of an essential, exclusive and genuine
accomplishment. The !iterates in societies when� literacy is
scarce do not need to invent or invoke complex theories about
character formation, about broad horizons, about the importance
of guarding against linguistic disorders, about communicating
with national tradition or having access to elusive social facts.
They know that they are in any case indispensable, and that is
enough.
Most . theories of knowledge are also, amongst other things, a
charter of the social role and standing of the intellectual, cog­
nitive class. On top of possessing the rare and valuable skill of
literacy, the educated man could in the past suppose himself
capable of communing with transcendent norms-ideas, or have
access to Revealed scripturally recorded truth, or be a gentleman,
or have access to classical models of urbane virtue, or be sensi­
tised to the recorded tradition of his society, to have broad
horizons, values, cultural depth, character and leadership, etc.,
etc. He could believe any number or combination of such
things, and good luck to him : what mattered in the actual run­
ning of the society was that he could read and write, and many
others could not. Whether the theories of knowledge .and of its

1 97
 T H O U GF{ T AND CHANGE

moral import were good or not once made little difference in as

far as the institution they were intended to underwrite was not
itself precarious. Now, it is.
One comic consequence of the universalisation of literacy has
been the mushrooming of doctrines concerning ineffable or
otherwise most elusive, but - apparently - enormously valuable
skills, in the keeping - it appears - of humanist intellectuals. It is
ironic that a culture, whose essence is skill with the spoken and
recorded word, explicitness, should be inclined in the end to take
refuge, when this particular skill has ceased being a monopoly, in
the ineffable. The ineffable is not so much the anticipation of the
explicit, awaiting the capture in words of an elusive perception :
it can be the ghost left behind by a lost monopoly of explicitness.
An ineffable truth may be an explicit doctrine rate.

The Word
' Humanist ' societies are bounded by tribal-customary ones on
one side and by industrial ones on the other.
Societies, which are literate but not industrial-scientific, tend
to have certain characteristics. Literacy is in such societies an
important but not an universally diffused accomplishment. Some
early scripts, may perhaps have been used primarily for accounts :
but much more commonly, writing acquires a religious, ritual,
and legal as well as an administrative significance.
The real importance of early writings was, I suspect, not the
facility it provides for communicatidn from place to place, but
from time to time. Writing confers permanency and facilitates
records. As a record of earlier or supposed earlier and authorita­
tive decisions or commandments or revelations, it has authority :
it confers authority on those who can interpret it. It records not
merely agreements between men, but between men and God, or
between societies and their past, and between societies and their
destiny. The authority that writing has in internal arrangements
- in virtue of the fact that it is a little, though not much, harder
to tamper with records than it is with memory and verbal agree­
ments - spills over onto writings as such, and on the Scribes as
such, and finally becomes the very model of moral authority.
The paradigm of literate societies are societies of the Book -

societies in which ultimate moral, legal, and cosmological

 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C IETY

authority resides in a set of writings. Long before the American

Constitution, the foundation was laid for government not of men
but of lawyers. Worship of the Book and respect for those
possessing access to it was a possibility immanent in the very
discovery of writing.
Humanist culture, as such, is the culture of the literate
specialists : and in a wider sense of the societies which harbour
them. The general features of humanist culture follow from
certain properties of language, or rather of language as it is
when torn out of its unself-conscious daily contexts and raised
to a higher degree of self-consciousness through being recorded,
through being accorded a religious significance and independence
of its own (as statements or doctrines recorded on a given page,
rather than merely as parts of ritual). Privileged formulae,
utterances, doctrines and commandments acquire a life of their
own, with which they are endowed by script, and this life is
mediated for the rest of the society by the !iterates.
What are the general properties of a culture based on this, of
a society born to a reverence for language (or for a part of what
language can convey) through having given language a life of its
own in a Script?
( I ) Such societies are haunted by the conflict between ' theory '
and ' practice ' . For quite apart from the not negligible possi­
bility that what is written is not true or valid or sensible or
attractive, there is the fact that no natural language, and perhaps
no language whatever, has the capacity of covering unambigu­
ously all possible contingencies, even within some given field.
The realities of social life are generally more complex than the
contingencies and alternatives foreseen in doctrinal, moral and
jural principles. Once these principles are revered, a society
which reveres them faces certain dilemmas : either it develops a
scholasticism, allowing its learned scribes to build up an ever�
more complex corpus of elaborations, etc., in a hopeless and
Sysiphus-like effort to catch up with the complexity of life ; or
it must resign itself, in practice, to treating the revered principles
as abstract slogans, whose effective application is a matter of
rather free interpretation.
The general principles, moral, theoretical, or technological,
tend to be rather feeble : they are formulated in the concepts
borrowed from the complexities of daily life, and the generalities
1 99
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

expressed in terms of them are usually suspect. In consequence,

the experienced practitioner, the man of action or skill, tends to
be superior, in practice, to the theoreticians, who are aware of
this, sometimes bitterly. It tends to confirm them in the suspicion
that reality is somehow intractable, if not downright con­
temptible. (Sometimes, of course, the contempt is turned in­
wards, and the theoretician denounces all theory and himself.)
The conflict between theory and practice takes many forms.
A Platonic doctrine of the corruption of this world and the per­
fection and stability of a different realm of ideas-norms, seems to
be an expression of it. Another possible consequence of it is a
sense of failure of the intellectual-reformer in practical politics :
reality is always too complex, too wicked, too refractory - ' there
is something about reality which defeats us '. In · daily life, there
is a pervasive feeling that certain things are ' all very well in
theory, but they will not do in practice' .
The nature and extent o f the conflict will o f course vary with
the society in question and the theory in question. Some societies
do rather badly in living up to the ' theory ' to which they form­
ally subscribe, and may even develop an explicit terminology for
characterising this failure : for instance, tribal societies which
embrace an universalistic scriptural religion, whose precepts they
have neither the means nor the knowledge nor, at heart, the will
to fulfill, may distinguish quite clearly and explicitly between the
Custom they do practice and the Holy Law they ought to practice.
Other societies may do relatively well. The precondition of
doing well by the Theory seems to be less that the Theory be
undemanding (which is what one should expect a priori), as that
certain other conditions be favourable. In the Western (i.e.
Mediterranean and European world and their offshoots) the
outstanding examples of an at least relative convergence of theory
and practice is to be found within the Jewish, Islamic and Pro­
testant traditions. Urban, trading populations with individualis­
tic religions can do relatively well in this matter of living up to
the Law. Their occupations make for high literacy andfor
opportunity for familiarity with the Theory : and the placing of
the burden of conformity on the individual himself, seems to be
more effective than the reliance on external sanctions found in
less individualistic faiths. It is interesting that the enormously
plausible and suggestive theory concerning the emergence of the
200
 KNOW L E D G E AND S O C IETY

industrial worlds from the pre-industrial - Max Weber's - attri­

butes a crucial importance in this emergence to a faith which is.
lived up to by its believers. In the Weberian model, the crucial
characteristic of the capitalist formed by Calvinism is that he
behaves as his faith would have him behave, and does not con­
duct himself like the incomparably more common Veblenesque
man, who rapidly transforms wealth into power and prestige. If
the theory is true, it is ironic that, in this sense, the Civilisation
of the Written Word carried the seeds of its own destruction : it
was when, for once, the Word was obeyed, that a world emerged
in which the Word was no longer respected. l ·

(2) Connected with the theory/practice tension, there is what

may be called moral saturation : it is characteristic of those learned
in the Word, whom one might generically call Schoolmen, to be
Masters of Right as well as (or more than) of Fact and Theory.
It is inherent in humanist culture, to be in a certain general
sense Platonist. It concentrates on that which is written, on
words, or concepts. The concepts it deals with are not too far
removed from those of natural language and daily life. Now it is
an essential part of the concepts of the ordinary life of societies
to have a kind of dual role : they both subsume a variety of parti­
culars under each concept, and serve as norms. The notions of
man, gentleman, judge, soldier, scholar, spade, wheel, court,
festival, etc., etc., not merely serve as means of characterising
individual instances falling under them, but also, through the
criteria. of application which are more or less loosely and clearly
1 The characterisation of the relation between ' tradition ' and ' ideology ' in

the writings of Professor M. Oakeshott does in fact apply very well to this
type of society - but to this type of society only. It conspicuously fails to apply
to contexts in which abstract knowledge has become genuinely effective (as it
has in scientific societies such as o1,1rs), and it sins by confounding such contexts
with the earlier kind. It is the generalisation of the idea, and in particular its
contemporary application, which is mistaken (in addition to the ironic fact that
the theory excludes context-free generalisations such as itself).
-

The logic of the condemnation of ration11listic ideology as a norm for society

by Oakeshott, and of generalised models as norms of language (i.e. culture)
by Wittgenstein and his followers, are strikingly similar, as Peter Winch (op.
cit.) has noticed. But there is an important difference : Oakeshott uses the argu­
ment to condemn the aspirations of 1789 (or even the British 1945 ) ; the Wittgen­
steinians have not noticed that these ever occurred.
Cf. some very apposite comments by Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics
(Pelican 1964), pp. 190 and r 9 r .

20 1
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

built into them, act as standards or norms of what is to count as

a good or acceptable man, gentleman, etc., etc., etc. The criterion
of application is also in general (not quite always) a standard of
e:x:cellence. 1
This duality of the role of language is itself by no means
accidental. Indeed it is difficult to see how a language and a
society could sepftrate these two roles over the whole range of
the concepts used.
Humanist culture, being essentially a culture of the Word, thus
has an inherent tendency towards Platonism, reflecting thereby
one o£ the most central characteristics of words - their dual role
in classification and in assessment. Nevertheless the literate cul�
ture of the Western tradition has somewhat submerged this ten­
dency, or at any rate its simplest manifestations, since its con­
quest by Christianity. Christian theology does not specialise in
embodying its values in concepts - though it does so in part - for
two reasons : one, it has inherited the Law of Moses which em­
bodies norms in rules rather than concepts, and two, the Word
became Flesh : the norm is, ideally, a concrete individual Being,
and not a concept. Christians are enjoined to practise the
Imitation of Christ, not the exemplification of a concept. But
with the secularisation of the Western World, the Platonic sub­
strata again become more manifest. Kant, and not he alone, chose
to interpret the Christian ethic in a Platonic way (in this sense).2
Thus : Humanist culture is essentially expertise in the recorded
and hence authoritative word. It is inherently ' platonist ' in that
words, concepts, embody not merely principles of classification
of things, but also norms, principles of the evaluation of things.
Humanist thought is never really far from the problem of evalu­
ation. Its attempts to identify and describe and explain are
generally also, and at the same time, attempts to assess. There is
seldom a special language of assessment : the evaluation is built
1 There are certain notorious exceptions to this generalisation, i.e. those con­
cepts characterising inherently undesirable �hings, e.g. mud. In those cases, the
criteria of applications are not also the touchstone of excellence : the most
muddy mud is not ipso facto also the best kind of mud. This point notoriously
presents a difficulty for philosophic Platonism. It does not affect the present
argument.
2 Cf. Metaphysic of Morals : ' Even the Holy One· of the Gospels must first

be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognise Him
as such.'

202
 KNOWLED GE AND S O CIETY

into the characterisation and explanation. (There are general

free-floating value-terms too, of course.) Through a kind of con­
ceptual optical illusion, the values seem inherent in a system of
concepts, a ' culture ' or ' language ' or ' form of life ' . Explicit
platonism only occurs where there is conscious assertion of the
unique validity of some set of concepts - and the reasons for this
may be naive or sophisticated.
(3) There is a further feature connected with the moral
saturation, as it were, of humanist culture : its continuity with
life. Humanist ' culture ', in the accentuated sense in which to
have it is to be extra cultivated, to be possessed of something more,
is nevertheless an extra cultivation of kinds of knowledge, kinds
of skill, kinds of ' sensibility ' which are also employable and
employed in daily life. A cultivated man need not be a pedant
nor, qua cultivated man, a specialist. All this comes out with
great sharpness in the cult of the dilettante, and the all-round man
of good sense. It is true that humanist culture may employ some
special accomplishments which create a sharp barrier between: it
and daily life (notably, the requirement of familiarity with a
dead language), but even then, though the skill is one which can
only be acquired by a specialised and selective education (that
is its point), it is a kind of skill akin to that of daily life, or, at
any rate, leisured daily life : it is familiarity with the language,
allusions, traditions and literature of a given culture, even if it
is one distinct from that of the local contemporary society. 1 The
essence of the matter is that humanist culture enriches, refines,
elaborates, etc., etc., life, but it is not radically distinct from it.
This continuity is not something in contradiction with the
earlier point that humanist culture is haunted by the conflict
between theory and practice. Its formal precepts are sometimes
hard to live up to - and perhaps never really lived up to - and its
formal doctrines may never quite apply to the world : but their
meanings are distilled from the meanings employable in daily
life. The importance of this continuity emerges best by contrast
with the discontinuity which exists between the concepts of life
and those of science.
(4) Humanist thought is cognitively feeble. This is a crucial
feature of it : the views of nature and society formulated in its
1 One may recall Justice 0. Holmes' definition of a gentleman : he need

not know Latin and Greek, but he must have forgotten them.
 THOUGHT AND CHANGE

terms are neither clear nor powerful nor universally convincing.

They symbolise an allegiance more often than they apprehend a
fact, and they provide an accompaniment for an activity more
often than they really capture its principles. They do not provide
a basis for effective manipulation of things, nor do they command
general assent outside the social context in which they arose or
gained popularity, ! This feature is clearly connected - though
not in any simple way - with the three preceding ones : with the
moral saturation, the practical ineffectiveness, and the human
warmth and relevance of its concepts.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Thus humanist thought, based on the recorded word and the
cultivation of literacy, is morally saturated, continuous with life,
haunted by the discrepancy of theory and practice ; and it is, alas,
cognitively feeble. Faust put this best :
Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin,
Und, leider! auch Theologie
Durchaus studirt . . •

Und sehe, dass wir nichts wissen Konnen!

1 What does the 'Arts ' graduate know or know how to do over and above his
literacy, native ability, and familiarity with a part of culture which, through its
continuity with life, is fairly accessible to anyone else with similar ability and
some leisure? The point about a Science graduate, however mediocre person�
ally, however undistinguished his degree, is that he possesses some genuine
knowledge and skill which, in its appropriate field, makes him genuinely useful
and very much superior to the non-specialist, however gifted. Not much
depends on his personal idiosyncrasies (except, of course, in the higher and
creative branches of science.) But in the case of the ' humanist ', almost every­
thing does depend on his personal idiosyncrasies. As teachers of 'Arts subjects '
know full well, a mediocre qualification in their own subject means almost
nothing: to get something done, they will always prefer an able man without the
qualification and training, to a less able one with it. Of course, genuine cultiva­
tion on top of real ability is a marvellous thing : but this simply cannot be
incapsulated in any prescribed course of training. In the long run, this irrele­
vance of the content of the training is demoralising. It is this, rather than the
under-remuneration of Arts graduates (as suggested by Sir Charles Snow),
which underlies much of the ' angry ' protests of the I950's. The material
rewards of ' humanists ', in a society turning so much from production to ' pro­
motion ', aren't really too bad.
 KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIETY

Science displays characteristics contrasted with these at each

point. It is cognitively powerful. The theoretician is devasta­
tingly effective in practice, and superior by far to the mere
' practical man ' ; he has no need to feel inferior vis-a-vis the old
craftsman or practitioner. He is no longer a Faustian man. There
is no humiliating chasm between theory and practice. The theory
works, and incomparably more powerfully than the ' practical '
skills. At the same time, it is profoundly a-moral. The universe
it discloses underwrites no values. 1 Truth and goodness are not
one. It is also drastically discontinuous with life and with the
concepts employed in daily life.2 Appearance and Reality diverge
sharply, and come in conflict not as a result of some mystic's
insight, but of hard sober solid work.
Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, a most prominent part
of modern philosophy, has been in large part the theory of
science, of how science works. As such, it has in the past few
centuries passed through three stages : the Unhappy, the Happy,
and the Sorcerer's Apprentice. In the Unhappy Stage, thinkers
asked, in effect - How, by what method, could we but attain real
knowledge, as opposed to the arbitrary, contradictory, unreliable
opinion which is our lot? (This was Descartes' question.) The
Happy Stage was the post-Newtonian,. the question being, how on
earth (literally) can such marvellous and reliable knowledge be
ours? (This was Kant's question.) The third stage is that of the
Sorcerer's Apprentice : given the fact that this thing does work,
most marvellously, how can we prevent it devouring us? (This
need not mean exclusively the problem of avoiding the disastrous
possible consequences of nuclear technology, but also the conse­
quences of our knowledge of the world, and ourselves, being in
terms of concepts which appear to corrode the images in terms of
1 There are apparent exceptions t o this, a s when boiling kettles are alleged to
exemplify the same principles as the coming revolution, or when mutually
devouring or co-operating animals (according to theory) are supposed to be
giving us hints concerning how to run our societies. (The Naturphilosophie of
Marxism certainly irritates Soviet scientists, and sometimes obstructs them.)
There are also theories, such as psycho-analysis, whose influence depends
precisely on the fact that they are unquestionably suggestive morally and at the
same time claim to be parts of science.
But these exceptions are merely apparent.
2 Cf., for Instance, George Stciner, ' The Retreat from the Word ', the Kenyon

Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Spring 1961.

 THOU G H T AND CHANGE

which we have hitherto seen ourselves and lived our lives.) This is an
important and most pertinent question : one must remember this,
even if some recent answers to it have been breath-takingly silly.
Thus the theory of knowledge has come to be the theodicy
of science, the justification of the ways of science to man. The
existence of a theodicy, as usual, betrays that there is a good deal
of explaining to be done. Philosophers have been eager to step
into this breach : and they had good additional cause, for in
explaining or explaining away science, they also provided
justifications for their own continued existence.
As Jean-Fran9ois Revel puts it :
L' epistemologie est devenue de plus en plus importante, depuis
que les grands renouvellements de notre vision du monde sont
operes par les sciences, naturelles et humaines, et non plus par la
philosophie. Ne pouvant plus remplacer la science, la philosophie
a voulu l'expliquer. 1
But there is more to this than the philosophers' sense of self­
preservation, though that is indeed involved.
There is a sense in which the old conflict between religion and
disbelief, profound though it seemed, was a parochial matter.
The two sides often agreed on the kind of world they lived in :
they just disagreed about one special feature of it. One side added
an Item - albeit an important one - to the cosmic inventory : the
Deity. The other side refused to countenance this addition. One
side considered the hypothesis of the Deity to be the best, or the
only, or the obligatory hypothesis, required for the explanation
of the other features of the world. The other side considered the
same hypothesis to be inadequately supported, or refutable, or
objected morally to any hypothesis being made obligatory. But
clearly, this disagreement presupposed a certain consensus about
the world which was to be explained - and, in fact, there often
was such agreement.
That particular struggle is over - partly because we are told
that the Deity has ceased to be an hypothesis at all. Just what It is
instead is obscure and varies a good deal with intellectual
fashion.2 The very idea that It should be an hypothesis is ironised
1 Pourquoi des Philosophes? (Paris 1957), p. 78.
2 Cf. W. W. Bartley, The Retreat to Commitment (1962), and A. Macintyre,
' God and the Theologians ', Encounter, September 1963,

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by the partisans of religion : the famous remark of Laplace's, to

the effect that he did not need this hypothesis, is supposed by
contemporary believers to be a bit of a joke - against Laplace.
The present conflict is in a cert.ain way far more fundamental :
for lack of a better terminology, it must be described as the
struggle between common sense and science. It is intimately con­
nected with the recently high-lighted issue of the ' Two Cultures ' .
Roughly, ' humanist ' thought i s literate, cultivated, classy,
elaborated common sense. Science (contrary to the supposition
of some thinkers of the Enlightenment, who thought it was a
kind of secular, universally accessible, superstition-free self­
revelation of the unitary world, in brief a liberated and liberating
Common Sense) is not commonsensical at all. And it is in con­
flict with common sense. This issue is more fundamental because
what is at stake is not the addition or non-addition of a divine
feature to the world, but two totally different ways of conceiving
the world and man. 1
1 Contemporary accounts of the conflict conceming religion sometimes claim

that the same is t1·ue there : that what is at issue is two total ways of seeing the
world, and not the addition, or the refusal to countenance the addition, of a
divine hypothesis. But this claim seems to me simply false. The atheist and
theist humanists see the same world, but one of them sees More.
This contention is often combined with another, to the effect that it is funda­
mentally mistaken to see science as a picture of the world we live in and of
ourselves, to attribute to its abstractions and conceptual devices and hypotheses
any ontological validity. This additional contention also seems to me wholly
false, One cannot conjure away, dispos� of the content of science, in this
facile way. As an exm1}ple of this kind of view, consider Professor J. M.
Cameron's contention (The Listener, February z8, 1 963, p. 383) that extracting
pictures of the world from scientific theories 'has nothing to do with serious
work in the sciences or in philosophy . . . .
'

There may seem superficially to be a contradiction between our insistence

that the content of scientific doctrines must be taken seriously, and the insistence
that no moral truths can be 'read off' them. In the sense in which anthropo­
morphic or quasi-anthropomorphic cosmologies endeavoured to do so, nothing
can be read off nature, or even society. But our moral and orientational thought
must be in terms of the world as we know it to be on the best evidence we
happen to have available.
Part of Professor Cameron's very typical case against taking the content of
science seriously is that its hypotheses are 'cautious and provisional', Perhaps
they are : though this point ought not be overdone, for though science seems ever
ready to relinquish past hypotheses, it appears able to avoid having to retrace
its steps altogether, and past theories are characteristically retained as special
cases or less satisfactory approximations of later ones. Still, assume them to be
 T H O U GHT AND C HANGE

There is a very genuine and serious conflict here. Just as the

politics of underdevelopment present us with a concrete applica­
tion of the doctrine of Philosopher-Kings, so we also face a new
conflict between Appearance and Reality ; one in which Reality is
no longer a figment, something ever feebler than concrete life,
a mere ghost or aspiration, but, on the contrary - reality.

Culture, Truth and Logic

It is a curious fact that few people have noticed that Professor
A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic and Sir Charles Snow's
brilliant ' The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution ' , have
an identical subject-matter. Each of these works made a great
impact in its time, but their times were not the same. Singly,
they were both influential : jointly they would have been truly
explosive. A joint reading would fuse Snow's socially relevant
formulation of the problem of science, with the youthful Ayer's
ruthless condemnation of that which is not. But, on the whole,
they are not read jointly.
The identity of subject matter is, admittedly, somewhat dis­
guised, though the disguise ought to deceive no one. Ayer's book
is basically concerned with whether and which propositions or
statements have meaning, and with sorting out the sheep from
the goats amongst, apparently, linguistic entities. Snow is con­
cerned with stressing the existence of two cultures, and saying
something about their socio-historical context - notably about
the ability of one of the two to transform the world by bringing
about the diffusion of industrialism, and the tendency of the
other to obstruct this process through a Ludditejromantic
hostility to industrial society, combined all the same with the
enjoyment of its comforts. 1
'provisional' : the rival pictures of the world are unprovisional not because they
are more reliable, but because they refuse to accept correction, or confront
reality, at all.
1 He was, as many have pointed out, a little harsh on the humanists in this

respect, forgetting the many writers who were a? intoxicated with the idea of
progress as anyone. One feels that his image of the humanist intellectual was
formed by a certain admittedly familiar type of reactionary poet. But it was
amusing to observe the anger he provoked. Humanists, somewhat pressed and
insecure these days - their culture is their fortune, poor dears - favour a line
of defence which shifts over from a recommendation of ' all-round ' education

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Of the two formulations of the problem, Snow's seems to me

by far the superior. This is not merely because the ' philosophical '
formulation is quite unnecessarily pedantic. 1
By any but a pedantic criterion, Snow's essay is as much a .
piece of philosophy as the other - one of the most important
philosophical essays to appear since the war. But the real
superiority of Snow's formulation arises from the fact that the
problem of the relation between that which is science and that
which is not, is a problem about ' cultures ', ways of life, or major
elements within ways of life, and not about some strangely
atomic and rather artificial entities such as ' propositions ' or
' statements ' or whatnot. 2
It is not these artificial atoms which can conceivably be classi­
fied as verifiable, scientific, meaningful, etc. ' Unverifiable '
formulae are embedded in the language of what is normally con­
sidered science, and ' verifiable ' ones in the mythology of ' un­
scientific ' primitives.
The artificiality of the ' atomic ' approach becomes manifest if
we imagine either (a) persuading some primitive tribesman
henceforth to eschew unverifiableju..ju propositions, or (b) cata­
loguing all the ' propositions ' of a given science with a view to
eliminating those that are ' meaningless ' .
(a) The idea o f explaining to a tribesman the ideas underlying
the Verification Principle, and the method of its application, is
not entirely fanciful. Missionaries have achieved other wonders.
In favourable circumstances it might be done. Assume the newly
positivist tribesman to be warmly disposed to the idea. Could he,
then, decide henceforth to eschew the unverifiable ju-ju, etc., and
to embark on the way of scientific knowledge? The answer is, of

(as against the narrow specialist), to the strange . but quietly made assumption
that the humanist is somehow, ex officio ' all-round ' (presumably because there
is nothing specific he knows how to do). The talk of two cultures, or of any
number of them more than one, undermines this pathetic argument.
1 In Ayer's case, stylistic elegance more than mitigated the pedantry inherent

in the modern philosopher's attempt to pretend that fundamental issues are

technical ones, and emulate the garb of a demonstrative science. This leads to
a notorious dullness which, the practitioners suppose, is a legitimate price of
rigour. Whilst the rigour is generally spurious, the dullness is altogether genuine.
2 This preoccupation remains artificial even, or especially, when those who

pursue it turns to ' ordinary language '. They never, alas, have the feel of a
Harold Pinter for the real life and context of ordinary speech.
 T H O U G H T AND CHANGE

course, No - and not merely owing to some possible s 6cial

pressure on behalf of ju-ju interests. (Assume our positivist
tribesman to be powerful and brave, and undaunted by threats.)
The ju-ju language is, of course, far too implicated in his more
objectively referential use of speech, for such an amputation to
be feasible without a more fundamental transformation which
will then affect his whole social order, and not merely his choice of
sentences. 1
(b) The history of science is rich in ideas which began their
career as quite untestable hypotheses, but became testable later.
Should the ' meaning ' of an idea depend on the stage of develop­
ment of theory, or on the ingenuity of the experimenter? Does
meaning suddenly spring into existence, when an able scientist
at last finds a way of testing a suggestive idea? Is it not more
convenient to say that it always had meaning, but that a way of
testing it was discovered (which is what in fact we do say) ?
To stress the artificiality of the linguistic atomic approach
(which admittedly is, in its extreme form, now held by very few,
perhaps by none) is of course not to say that we must treat
cultures as indivisible totalities. On the contrary, as has been
repeatedly stressed in the course of the argument, we do not
possess any neatly demarcated, ' given ' cultural totalities. But
within the many intermingling currents of behaviour and
thought, we can distinguish those which are ' scientific ' from
those which are not. Current philosophy of science does indeed
give us some guidance concerning what these scientific traits are :
testability, precise and preferably mathematical formulation,
rules of evidence and argument free from a merely local per­
suasiveness, non-circularity, cumulativeness.2 But these criteria
cannot usefully be applied to something like ' sentences ' .
An additional disadvantage o f the old-logico-positivistic way of
thinking about the division is of course that, consigning that
which is not science or does not resemble it, to the limbo of the
' meaningless ' , it can then say nothing about the denizens of that
1 Cf. E. E. Evans-Prichard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande
(Oxford 1 937).
2 An assumption which at least seems to be made by some current philosophy

of science is that the same traits characterise an incipient science, and one which
is well developed and secure. In connection with economic growth, such an
assumption is mistaken : it may well be similarly mistaken concerning cognitive
growth.

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realm, nor in any rational way discriminate amongst them -

without, of course, such an abstention being at all practicable.
Moral, etc. , judgments continue to be passed. If anything is said
about these spheres, it is the curious consignment of them to the
hands of prophets, seers, etc. (This particular line of thought has
survived amongst the thinkers who succeeded narrow logical
positivism.) But as in fact we cannot but go on thinking about
these topics, and as most of us happily do not consign them to
seers and prophets, we must think about them overtly. The
would-be abstemious thinkers do so covertly, anyway, and con­
sequently not terribly well. One issue which is of course of
outstanding interest, and which is bound to hit any advanced
industrial society, is precisely the relationship between that which
can and that which cannot be scientific, in a society in which
science has become very important.
We cannot recover those balmy days when our knowledge of
the world was so feeble that the objectivity of the world could be
prostituted for our edification, when theories could be held true
basically because they made sense of our lives and social arrange­
ments. In fact, the world is what it is, and notably, it is not a
morality play for our benefit. But conversely, we cannot adopt a
kind of total apartheid between that which we really think of the
world (science), and that which we think for moral and human
purposes. The latter must take place within the context of the
former, even if the former is no longer designed for its convenience.
The merit of the Snow formulation of the situation is that it
high-lights the fact that it is cultures, styles of thought, and not
rival species of somewhat emaciated entities (propositions, state­
ments, sentences), which here confront each other. Its incom­
pleteness lies in the failure to explore more fully the roots of the
differences between them, such as the difference in cognitive
power or in moral suggestiveness.

The Ego and the Id

The contrast between scientific and ' human ' thought occurs at
three levels. ( 1 ) The crudest and least important : in a time of
technological advance, universal literacy, religious lukewarmness
and increase in social mobility, an important task of word­
teachers, above the elementary level, is no longer writing, nor
 THOU GHT AND CHANGE

inculcating a faith, but finishing-school work, the endowment

of pupils with the largely arbitrary stigmata of desired class. It is
of course essential for this purpose that this activity be not too
openly characterised as such - which would be self-defeating -
but that instead the norms inculcated be respected as somehow
inherently valuable. Philosophic objectivism being unfashionable,
other theories such as ' conceptual clarification ' or conceptual
guardianship of ' forms of life ' can achieve this effect. 1
(2) More serious, there is the problem of a serious time lag
between the knowledge available to a society and the theories
and concepts in terms of which life is actually lived. When
the discrepancy is acute, this has a variety of unfortunate
effects, of which the invention of self-advertising theories by
possessors of archaic specialisations (such as the alleged philo­
sophically therapeutic effect of observing words) is only the most
strange.
(3) There is a kind of a 'lag ' between the concepts of life and
those of understanding which can perhaps never be overcome
(and which consequently, is not a mere time lag) : there is a
crucial difference between, for instance, the self as it is experi­
enced, lived, and as it is impersonally investigated and under­
stood. This problem is not identical with (z) , but it is connected
with it. Awareness of it is only likely to be acute when problem
(z) has also arisen : in primitive, pre-scientific societies, the con­
cepts employed for coping with the external world tend to be
such as do not conflict with seeing oneself in a ' human ' way.
Notoriously, the external world tends to be seen anthropomor­
phically. The external world is no longer seen anthropomorphi­
cally : the question now is, whether (or how much) we can still
view man, ourselves, anthropormorphically? Can we maintain a
human image of man?
Again, one of the roles of the currently fashionable philosophy
- perhaps, intellectually, its principal role - is to answer this
question affirmatively, but in an abysmally facile way. The
famous argument runs from the primacy of ordinary language,
or the reliability of common sense, or both, to the vindication of
1 The possession of private lines to something called ' tradition ' is another
example. For an amazingly frank finishing-school theory of higher education,
see the fmal chapter of M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays
(London 1 962).

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our normal way of seeing ourselves (which if!, of course, built into
' common sense ' or into ordinary language). If science is merely
an alternative language, without claims to a status superior to
common sense, or if its concepts are always derivative from those
of daily life, then of course the desired conclusion follows easily.
Such a facile defence is worthless. Concepts whose employment
leads to vastly increased control are of course ' truer ' than those
which do not, and the ordinary man, rightly disregarding his
self�appointed defenders, those defensores sensu communis, is
justifiably nervous if these more powerful ways of thought seem
in conflict with his familiar pictures of himself and the world.
It is perhaps regrettably inherent in the advancement of
knowledge, that the more we understand and control, the more
we also see how we ourselves can be understood and controlled.
The achievement of power is also the discovery of impotence.
In practice, the short-term way of handling this tends to be a
kind of habit of living at two levels at once : at one of these,
ordinary notions are suspended, and at the other, they are not.
We must most of us be familiar with the intellectually em­
barrassing lack of coherence in this respect, of so many books on
psychiatry, psychology, techniques of persuasion, etc. 1
In most of the text, the author writes about people explaining
their reactions, norms, beliefs, etc., from the outside ; yet in
the introduction and the conclusion and in his own implicit or
explicit assumptions, standards, etc., he treats himself as some­
how implicitly exempt from the type of explanation invoked in
the body of the book.2 Sometimes the authors pass this dualism
1 For instance, see William Sargent, Battle for the Mind (1 957).
2A curious attempt to deal with this kind of problem, an attempt most
characteristic of the tradition in which it occurs, is to be found in G. Ryle's
The Concept of Mind (1949), p. 3�6. The argument runs - explanations are
called for only for the exceptional, the breakdowns, but not for the normal
functioning! There is of course no conceivable reason why there should be
such a weird asymmetry. The type of reason which accounts for the break­
down must also, logically, account for the normal working.
Concerning this doctrine Mr Bernard Williams (Freedom and the Will, Ed.
D. F. Pears (1963), p. 1 17), observes correctly that it has had a ' certain cur­
rency ' and that it is ' evidently absurd '. He goes on to add that it ' may serve
the purposes of a jobbing electrician '. This seems to me to display a gratuitous
prejudice against jobbing electricians : their work presupposes a logic of explana­
tion which applies to sound and to malfunctioning cases equally, What, if
anything, jobbing electricians mutter to themselves when they find a sound

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by without comment ; sometimes they endeavour to grapple with

it. A philosophically interesting and meritorious way of trying to
deal with it was somehow to extract the new norms from the
world as now understood ; this was, in substance, the way of the
nineteenth-century evolutionism, whose ' serial ' solution was
intended to cope with this problem as well as with relativism. 1
Unhappily, this way out is no longer open.
It was irritating enough for the poet when the scientists
explained the sunset. It is considerably more upsetting for all of
us when they begin to explain us. There is a kind of duality
between the man who believes or knows, chooses and values, and
the mere phenomenon who is explained. In modern thought,
there is a kind of pursuit of the former by the latter. Once, we
were all self, not nature - indeed nature herself was self-like.
Now it is the self-proper that shrinks and disappears.
Some consolation may perhaps be derived from the reflection
that the self-proper, the self-as-it-is-to-itself, will never allow
itself to be eliminated altogether. Any theory, however much it
explains, must still be held by someone, and the assumptions and
values implicit in its holding and choosing the theory in question
cannot themselves be altogether explained in the theory itself.
Just how much consolation one should derive from this is ques­
tionable. This ever-elusive self cannot be identified with this or
that concrete disposition or ability of our concrete selves : there

piece of wiring (' No explanation required here ! ' perhaps?) is hardly relevant.
But in any case it does not matter : the linguistic philosophers who have so easily
and so surprisingly embraced the theory that the normal case calls for no
explanation, have not been recruited, I believe, from the ranks of jobbing
electricians. They were recruited from the ranks of humanist intellectuals,
debarred, in the main, from effective understanding of those genuinely strong
theories which apply to the sound and the unsound alike. This is most sig­
nificant in helping to explain why this strange theory was embraced. It is ,
precisely, characteristic of ' humanist ' thought that only the abnormal need be
explained: the explanation, for what it is worth, of the normal is already clearly
implicit in a ' form of life ', in the inbuilt expectations of the concepts of a
language. In such a system of thought, the normal requires no explanation over
and above the perception of its habitual place in the system : that is enough.
Just this, is, of course, Wittgenstein's theory of language : the normal cannot
and need not be explained, it can only be described. The abnormal (i.e. paradox,
p hilosophy) can be and is explained precisely as the by-product of an allegedly
mistaken pursuit of some independent explanation!
1 Cf. Chapter I.

21 4
 KNOWLEDGE AND S O C I ETY

will always be something with which we can identify, which is

unsullied by explanation, but that something will not be con­
stant, nor identifiable in advance. (One grave danger for those
who are anxious to preserve the anthropomorophic picture of
man is that they reify this residue of self-hood, and even seek
evidence for it, in· psychological research, or counter-examples to
mechanistic explanations, etc. - evidence which may ever turn
out to be these, but which would not give us what we want. We
do not escape mundane stuff by postulating mystical stuff. And if
it turned out to exist, it too would be susceptible to investigation,
explanation and hence depersonalisation.)
It is interesting that we cannot identify with that which is
explained and contingent : logically, we cannot. Once a thing is
explained, the burden shifts to that in terms of which it is
explained : if I know I believe this, or love that, in virtue of
some mechanism within myself, the issue facing me in future
will always be whether to further or hinder that mechanism.
Practical difficulties may deprive me of any control over it, but,
in principle, the possibility is there. Hence, the belief or the love
are no longer me, they are sub judice, and the self which sits in
judgment over them can no longer be identified with them. In
some sense, the self is that which is ever unexplained and neces­
sary : that which is explained and ·contingent ever provides it
with raw material. The court and the litigants cannot be one.
(There are of course moral doctrines which enjoin us to identify
ourselves with this or that - our instincts, or whatnot. But these
doctrines are incoherent and question-begging.)
A good part of the philosophy of the recent centuries is in fact
a dress-rehearsal for coping with this problem. This is obvious
enough in the case of Kant, for instance. The impossibility of
identifying ourselves with that which is merely contingent leads
him to postulate both the Categorical Imperative (in effect : a
non-contingent value), and a Doppelgiinger self capable of
responding to it. His most powerful argument in favour of
accepting his dual-self theory is that in our attitude to know­
ledge, we implicitly credit ourselves with such a duality anyway :
we make an exception on behalf of our cognitive claims, exemp­
ting them from extraneous explanation. 1
1 Kantian ethics is really a matter of making an exception vis-a-vis the world
-

- on our own behalf. This is ironic, for this official formulation is precisely in

21 5
 THOUGHT AND CHAN GE

Kierkegaard should really be seen in a similar light. This is

less obvious than in the case of Kant : Kierkegaard has not been
widely recognised as a predecessor of Sir Charles Snow in the
treatment of the two cultures. Nevertheless it is so. The point
about Kierkehaard (as, incidentally, about Marx) is that he
supposed that if philosophy was acceptable at all, then Hegel was
right. He may have been wrong in this supposition, but his
argument must be seen in the light of it. And his objection to
philosophy (i.e. its most perfect expression and culmination,
Hegel) was precisely that it left no room for ego, which . was
absorbed by id, by an impersonal external interpretation of it,
In his case, the id, the self-as-explained and as a part of a large
whole, was rather different from the self-as-explained that we
have now come to expect - but the objection is the same, and does
not hinge on the detail, or even the general form, of the theory
which does the explaining. This point, incidentally helps to
explain the paradox that Kierkegaard, who is essentially a
reaction to Hegel, should have been so fashionable in a period in
which Hegel counts for relatively little, and even with people
with whom Hegel counts for nothing at all. The feel and the
logic of the reaction against a general metaphysical explanation
is much the same as that against the threat of a scientific one.
These doctrines, such as Kant's or Kierkegaard's, can be seen
as mere dress rehearsals rather than the real thing, in so far as in
fact the human sciences have not progressed so much as to make
the problem acute. The problem of identification-in-the-face-of­
explanation is not as yet acute, partly for this reason, partly
because the world is still sufficiently short of blatant material
necessities : we can identify with hunger, for instance, however
much we may explain it. In the short run, we often have no
serious trouble with identification,
The present argument is of course not intended to claim that
we shall or should simply try to import a ' scientific ' way of
conceiving ourselves, to the exclusion of all others - that the
conceptual id, so to speak, should wholly replace the ego, that
terms of not making exceptions, But we are asked to make an exception, each
of us on his own behalf, vis-a-vis nature, and then as it were courteously extend
reciprocal rights to each other. We could hardly refrain from doing this, in so
far as our Doppelgiinger selves are indistinguishable from each other, and thus
can have no reason (literally) for preferring themselves to their neighbours. ,,

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we should see ourselves exclusively in a kind of third person

way. (For one thing, no coherent 1 scientific ' manner of speaking
of our concerns is available.) Nothing is further from my wishes.
The argument is merely to the effect that the cross-implications
must be taken seriously and explored. This is a negative argu­
ment, castigating (a) omnibus exclusions of scientific truths,
wholesale declarations that no implications can exist in science
for our view of ourselves, and (b) self-vaunting invention and
peddling of new and mysterious cognitive powers and skills for
' humanism ' compensating for the loss of its erstwhile mono­
polies.
Scientific-industrial society is not merely a potentially affluent
one ; it is also one in which the whole balance between being and
knowing, the ecology of existence and cognition, cannot but be
radically different from the past. We are nowhere near an under­
standing of this : but at least we can see that an understanding is
required. But philosophies given to inventing spurious vindica­
tions of what once was the human image of man, are worthless.
In the past we were aided in our self-identification by the fact
that so much was simply given us, by our ignorance and im­
potence. In their different ways, for instance, the philosophical
anthropologies of Kant or of the Utilitarians, and of many others,
take this view and presuppose a given self: in the one case a
quintessential moral nature, in the other a set of desires. But in
fact, with the progress of knowledge and consequent control, the
basic, really inescapable needs become increasingly easy to
satisfy and hence less central to life, whilst the others, under­
stood and manipulable, cease to provide a firm basis for one's
identity. Who guards the guardian? And, if more and more is
manipulable, who or what decides the ·direction of this manipu­
lation? That which is manipulable is no longer a possible candi­
date for making the choice.
Thus the growth of knowledge forces a ' trans-valuation of
values ' on us whether we like it or not (even if we had some
coherent viable outlook to which we could return, which, con­
trary to the teachings of the ostrich-philosophers, we do not).
Kant remarked on the illusion of the dove, given to supposing
that it could fly even better in a vacuum. We are forced into this
condition of a flight into vacuum, whether we wish it or not.
 C H A P T E R NINE

CONCLUS ION

General thought is not born of a misunderstanding - of anything

(least of all of language).
In traditional societies, thought is far too much the slave of
life, of the exigencies of social organisation, to attain anything but
very rare and precarious independence and truth. A real possi­
bility of understanding arises only in the course of the transition,
which is both the fruit and seed of knowledge ; the transition from
ignorance and superstition to knowledge and control, from
poverty and tyranny to wealth and at least the possibility o£
freedom. (There is also the possibility of greater tyranny : but no
one has shown it to be an inescapable doom.)
This transition also involves the corrosion of the comforting
old faiths, and the need to seek some kind of new basis. Para­
doxically, the only safe base is to be found in doubt rather than
dogmatism. The two principal foundations elaborated by the
philosophy of recent centuries, the reliance on the ultimate
redoubt of the self, and reverence for an evolving whole, are
neither of them tenable ; but each contains an element of truth.
The Crusoe tradition brings home the need for scrutiny and
doubt, and the World-Growth story the need for looking at
change rather than stability.
The transition is neither a Second Coming with a guaranteed
salvation, not a global conflagration, nor yet, being unique, can it
be assimilated to earlier events. But it is not all-embracing, nor
is it the epitome of Everything. We commit no hubris when we
attempt to view and assess it. The story has no secret design,
either benevolent or malevolent ; nor yet is it beyond under­
standing, to be managed by hunches, or by spurious philo­
sophical rehashes of archaic styles of thought. ( Ostrichism and
2!8
 CONCLUSION

complacency are a somewhat greater danger locally than millen­

arianism.)
The transition is there to be understood. In the past, thinkers
set out to understand 1 7 89 and its failure, or the industrial
revolution and its evils, or the success of science and its limita­
tions. We live at a time when we can see the interdependence of
the political, the economic and the cognitive transformations ; a
time also when transformation has gathered enormous speed and
has come to embrace the whole of humanity. Its understanding
is certainly the first task of thought. We only possess fragments of
such an understanding - enough for a reassurance that under­
standing is possible, if not for much more. But systems of
thought that are constitutionally unable even to perceive the
change, let alone to understand it, are worthless.
Evaluation based on understanding is both easier and harder
in present conditions than it was in the past. It has incomparably
more point than it ever had in the past. Moralising in the past
was a relatively sterile activity : whatever the merit of the con­
clusions, the prospects of their implementation were small.
Today, the situation is different. A fairly modest ' annual rate of
growth ' , sustained over time, can do more to alleviate human
misery than all the compassion and abnegation that past ages
could muster. Its attainment does not even call for moral heroics
or outstanding ingenuity. Achievement is manifestly possible.
It may not be comfortable to be in the position of the sorcerer's
apprentice, but it is at least preferable to the impotence and
illusions of the past.
There is of course the problem of the criteria that should guide
the use of the new power. One half of the answer to this question
is easily available. A life lived to its full length, no longer at the
mercy of disease, hunger and deprivation, and at least not posi­
tively doomed to violence and oppression, is preferable to that
which has hitherto been the social condition. There can be as
little doubt of the desirability of attaining it, as there can of
the possibility of its attainment.
The second half of the answer is much harder to obtain. The
choices facing us are far wider than those prejudged by the need
for overcoming ' the ' hump. The premisses traditionally avail­
able (where they are not vacuous, question-begging or viciously
dogmatic) have been eroded by the advance of knowledge, by the

219
 T H O U G H T AND C HANGE

transformation of that which was. given, into that which can be

chosen or rejected. There is no easy answer here, no manifest
fixed point in the vacuum. But we cannot but think about it,
and must do it as well as we can. Philosophies which would
inhibit or proscribe such thought are worthless. (In any case
they do surreptitiously and badly that which they would pro­
scribe, and which can at least be done openly and better.) The
vertiginous mnge of possibilities which constitutes the difficulty,
also provides us with a certain compensation - the exhilaration
of almost limitless opportunity.

* * *

Two quite different (and mutually opposed) objections may be

raised against the placing of ' the ' transition at the centre of our
thought. One - why should it be so important for those societies
that have already passed the hump? If one granted the premiss
of this objection - that the hump has been passed in the case of
certain societies - one may still answer : effective self-under­
standing is still only possible through understanding of the real
basis of our societies, in the light of a comparative observation of
others approaching a similar condition. That real basis of social
order lies not in salvation, tradition, consent, natural law, etc.,
in the superstitious or simple-minded models of the past, but
in that which distinguishes the ' developed ' from the ' transitional'
societies of the present.
The second possible objection is this : the model of ' the '
transition suggests a cliff that will be followed by a plateau. But
has any society yet surmounted the cliff? And, indeed, is there
any reason to suppose that the gradient will ever become any
less steep ? Is not the rate of social change accelerating through­
out the world, even, or especially in its ' developed ' part?
At a purely factual level, it would be rash to try and predict
whether indeed this is so. Considerations can be adduced on
either side. On the one hand - certainly, change is accelerating
and cumulative. On the other, it is conceivable that a point will
be reached when technology cannot add significantly either to
relative power or to well-being.
But the desirability of a ' step ' or ' cliff' model does not depend
on the extremely speculative prediction of a plateau, or the denial
 CONCL U S I ON

of the possibility that the step may be followed, without inter­

ruption, by another one, and so on. It is here that the a priori,
formal objections to ' Evolutionism ' become relevant. Sufficient
unto the century are its crises and alternatives. Even if the
gradient remains steep, its ultimate direction has little relevance
either to our self-under�tanding or our choices. In any case, the
transition from a relatively stable society, or one conceiving
itself as such, to a period of radical change, is something funda­
mentally different from continued change in a society which has
learnt to take change for granted (if that is to be our destiny). For
purposes of choice, and of com·se of understanding, the realities
that are within our range are sufficient. The really distant possi­
bilities, about which in any case we know little, do not affect our
comprehension and evaluation of the present.
Of course, there may be other reasons, which will show the
placing of the present transformation at the very forefront of our
attention to be a mistake. If it is a mistake, it is a widely shared
one : it pervades the assumptions of our real life, if not the doc­
trines of the schools. The pr,esent argument endeavours to make
our assumptions explicit, and to say that they are correct. It is
to that extent, a (collectively) self-congratulatory one : it says
that something which we tacitly believe is also true. Such an
opinion is always slightly comic. It is always absurd to say that
one stands in a position from which the world can, at last, be
seen rightly. Such a view will, no doubt justly, rebound against its
author, if and when the commended belief turns out, in the end,
to be false. But before we can see whether it is false or not, it is
as well to have that belief stated explicitly and fully.

221
I
I

I
I

I
I

I
I
 I NDEX

Acton, H. B., S 1 Galbraith, K., 37, I I 9

Andreski, S., 1 3 2 Gibbon, Edward, I o , 36, 1 4 3 , 1 78
Annan, Noel, 1 S6 Ginsberg, M., 47, 1 50
Aron, Raymond, 4S, r r g, 144 Glass, R., I 5 7
Ataturk, Kemal, 36 Gould, J. S . , I 92
Austin, J. L., 1Sg-go Green, T. H., I S r
Ayer, A. J., 1 S2, 20S
Hamletism, 6 I , 62
Bartley, W. W., 5 5 , 206
Hampshire, S., 1 0 1 , 109, 1 SS, I 90-
Becker, Carl L., So
I 92
Bell, Daniel, 1 3 0
Hare, R. M . , 9 1
Bendix, R., 170
Harrod, Sir Roy, 194
Bentham, J., 95
Hegel, G. w. F., 3 1 , 32, ss, s6, I07,
Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 35, 47, 4S, 49, Sg
1 29, I S I , 2 I 6
Bottomore, T., 1 27, 1 3 2, 1 37, 1 69
Herberg, W . , 1 25
Burke, Edmund, 6S, 190
Hinduism, 79
Calvinism, 1 37, 1 3 S , 201 Holmes, Justice 0., 203
Cameron, J. M., 207 Hume, David, 1 0, 4 I , sS, 59, 77,
Christianity, 55 97, I O I , Io6, I 25 , I S S
Comte, Auguste, 1 S2
Cowling, M., 1 S6 Ibn Khaldun, I42, 143
Crick, B., 201 Islam, S6
Crosland, C. A. R., I I 9
Kafka, Franz, so
de Beauvoir, Simone, 1 90 Kant, E., 23, 40, s6, 59, ss, S9, 9 I ,
Descartes, R., 30-2, 57, 1 04, 1 05 , 1 06, I I 5-I71 I 20, I S 0-2, 1 9 I ,
106, 205 202, 205, 2 I S , 2 I 6
Dare, R. P., 1 3 3 , 1 69 Kedourie, Elie, I S I , I 5 3
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 54, 92, 149 Keynes, J . M . , r r g
Durkheim, E., 29, I03, ro7, 1 S3 , Khaldun, Ibn, I42, 1 43
I S4 Kierkegaard, S. A., 54, 5 5 , 92, 2 1 6
Koestler, Arthur, I S2
Eisenstadt, S. N., 34
Kolakowsld, L., 1 25
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 2 I O
Evolutionism, g-r r , I S , r S , 25-7,
La Rochefoucauld, I95
42-4, 4S, 49
Laplace, 207
Existentialism, 23, 24, 59, 62, I r r ,
Lawrence, T. E., 170
I 79, I So
Leninism, I 3 5
Fannon, Frantz, 1 6S Leslett, Peter, 3 5 , I 37
Feuer, L. S., 1 3 4 Levi-Strauss, C., 4S, I 54 ·

Findlay, J. N., 1 S Lichtheim, G., 1 27, I77

Firth, Raymond, I S Lipset, S. M., 1 3 6
Frazer, Sir James, I 25 Luce, H., I 92

223
 I NDEX

MacRae, D . G . , 1 37 Sargent, William, 2 r 3

Madge, Charles, 34 Sartre, J .-P., 62, I 8o
M air, L., 157 Schapera, I., 20, 41
Marx, Karl, 20, 27, 87, 103, 104, Schopenhauer, A., 3 1
1 20, 1 2 1 , 1 29, 1 30, 1 37, 2 1 6 Serialism, 14-16, I8, 19, 20
Marxism, I I , 1 5 , 26, 3 2 , 47-9, 93, Seton-Watson, Hugh, 169
94, u 8, 123, 1 25-8, I 3 1 -4o, 147, Shils, Edward, 1 69
1 72 Snow, Sit· Charles, 70, 204, 208,
Magee, Bryan, 34, 193 209, 2 I I , 2 1 6
Malthus, R., u 8 Social Contract, 5 , 78
Mclntyre, A., 1 3 3 , 193, 206 Socrates, 169
Medawar, P. B., r 6 Spengler, 0., 4.8
Mill, John Stuart, 73, 7 8 , 93, 95, Spinoza, B., 30, 3 1 , 69, I05
96, 149 Steiner, George, 205
Minogue, K., 121 Strachey, J., I 8
Mallet, Guy, 167 Strawson, R . F. , I 88, 1 9 1
Money-Kyrle, R.E., 93
Talmon, J , L . , 4 5 , I44
Moore, G. E., 59, 6o, 78, 96
Taugwalder, P., I-2
Myrdal, Gunnar, 37, 176
Teilhard de Chardin, P., II

Nietzsche, F., 54, 98 Tillion, Germaine, r 6 8

Tint, Herbert, 149
Oakeshott, Michael, 45, 46, 47, 5 1 , Titmuss, R., I I 9
66, 143, 20 1 , 2 1 2 Toynbee, A . , 48
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 3, 1 5 0
Pascal, B., 145
Trotsky, L . , 1 3 3
Pears, D. F., 1 0 1 , x 88, 2 1 3
Tucker, R., 27, I26
Peter the Great, 134
Plekhanov, G., 27, 69 Utilitarianism, 37, 73, 95-I oo, I02,
Pirandello, L., 5 6 II4
Plato, 58, 84
Platonism, 84, 85, I I4 Vico, G., 195
Polonius, 86, 87
Waddington, C. H., 25
Popper, Karl R., 2 1 , 27, 3 1 , 84,
Wallace, W., I 8 I
I I I , 1 85
Weber, Max, 20, 49, 201
Positivism, 179, 18o, 1 82
Weldon, H., 35
Revel, J .-F., 1 93 , 206 Wells, H. G., X I S
Richter, Melvin, I 8 I Wheatley, Jon, I 9 1
Robinson, E . A. G., 104, 175 Whymper, E., I
Rostow, W. W., I 27, I68 Wisdom, J. 0 . , I89
Royce, Josiah, 5 6 Wittfogel, K. A., I 3 I , 141
Rubel, M . , I 27 Williams, Bernard, I 24, 2 I 3
Runciman, W. G., 35, 79, I 3 3 Winch, Peter, Io8, I 86, I 88, 201
Russell, B., 24, 77 Wittgenstein, L., so, 83, 85, 107,
Ryle, G., 2 I 3 Io8, I 82, r83, 1 85 , 1 86, 1 9 r , 2o r ,
214
S t Augustine, 3 1 , I07 Wolff, R . P., 106
Santayana, G., 56, I04 Worsley, Peter, 174