The Prospects of Political Science

Abstract

THE confidence of the Victorian age and of the Edwardian period was not as pure and undefiled as is often imagined. Thus poets were sometimes aware of man's aloneness in an alien and indifferent universe. Likewise, not a few social critics, such as Carlyle and the Christian socialists, challenged the very bases of its more facile and materialistic optimism, even though they proclaimed their own different and unshakeable belief in the essential stability of society and their hope for the betterment through enlightened leadership of modern man, who, whatever his ills and errors, was far from obsolete. The Darwinian teaching of evolution could not readily be made to buttress man's earlier concept of human dignity. Indeed, it could not even give him assurance of the final superiority on earth of the hitherto highest produce of natural selection, however much it might, through false inference, support struggle itself as a means to improvement of men and societies. In England, the putative home of settled yet quietly progressive society, the great depression of the seventies and Jevons' disturbing analysis of the withering away of a primary basis of prosperity by the depletion of England's coal, raised some question as to the future span of economic advancement, and certainly suggested a probable deceleration. Before the period ended, too, J. A. Hobson and G. Lowes Dickinson had in their several ways questioned whether the order of Europe, and indeed the whole foundations of Western culture, were genuinely secure or permanent. The discovery of myth and of the irrational, and even the glorification of irrationality by Sorel and others, betokened or created uncertainty as to the democratic way of life, and a yearning to escape the nerve-racking tensions and the frustrations of patient reasonableness, though that search became frantic only with the first dropping of atomic bombs, when tensions became well-nigh unbearable. Nevertheless, the lack of confidence in the future, first of European culture, and then of man and his society generally, already constituted a major phenomenon in the realm of thought and opinion shortly after the close of the brief Edwardian age. The shock of the first World War, the disappointment of renewed hope as the League