Guglielmo Ferrero (1871,1942) and the Bi-Polar World

Abstract

UGLIELMO FERRERO was, by training and long practice, an historian. After years devoted to the lasting riddles of Rome's greatness and subsequent decline, he turned his attention to the causes of stress and struggle in contemporary civilization. A reflective spirit, already in his middle years he had revealed an interest in the character and contrasts of European and American culture. But it was the rise and easy triumph of Fascism in Italy-his own exile and consequent experience as professor in Geneva, where he observed Swiss democracy, the sad inadequacy of the League of Nations, and the grim threat and brutal performance of Hitlerism-which drove him to examine the yet more fascinating riddle of the transformation, the decline, and the potential elimination of Western society. He found the great locus of modern issues in the French Revolution, and in the preceding social and intellectual movements. The French Revolution had been long germinant, indeed. But it erupted suddenly. From it there emerged a new conception of legitimacy in government, namely, consent. This challenged the ancient monarchical-aristocratic concept, dominant in Europe since the Middle Ages. In its course, however, the Revolution gave rise to the practice and theory of a substitution of force (symbolized and illustrated in the career of Napoleon) for any concept whatsoever of legitimacy. Another revolution, called commercialindustrial, led to a dominance of things, thereby accentuating the difficulty of overcoming force by genuinely institutionalizing the new legitimacy as a moral idea. It was, moreover, the so-called Reaction, the Restoration in France and the settlement at last achieved by the Congress of Vienna, insofar as these embodied the principled statesmanship of Talleyrand, which gave some promise of solving the issues bequeathed. Talleyrand endeavored to create a stable peace and order, whereunder the new legitimacy of consent would be the effective instrument of adjustment. But his design was not followed by his fellows, who lacked his enlightenment, while the reaction against Reaction likewise rejected his insight. Ferrero was essentially conservative, and so necessarily liberal. He espoused a constructive statesmanship. He endorsed the sustained practice and quietly insistent preaching of Talleyrand. To Ferrero, Talleyrand was not a turncoat driven by expediency and self-interest. Rather, he