The Prelude to Authority

Crises in political synthesis are not without precedent. They must have occurred from time to time since the emergence of coherent political society. Indeed, any sharp divergence between commonly accepted ethical standards and temporal conditions is likely to produce a crisis in régimes. The last great debate in the West on the destiny of politics occurred in the later years of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries. The issue was formulated in terms of the basis of authority, just as it is at the present time. At that time, liberalism, with its uncertain conception of political organization, faced the old and tried historical authorities founded on the feudal and the divine conceptions of earthly power. Such men as Edmund Burke, von Haller, and the thinkers of the German historical school fought their losing battle against the tides in liberalism which seemed to them most pernicious. The new capitalism gathered into its fold the hunger for liberty and for the destruction of the arbitrary in government, but our crisis today rests on the fact that this capitalism and its multitudinous social implications are, in the minds of many, becoming unequal to the task of running the world as it is.