Twentieth-Century Capitalism and Socialism: the Present State of the Anglo-American Debate

Abstract

LIBERALISM, wrote Herzen in a famous sentence, is not the doctor, it is the disease. Within our own generation that doubt has entered the liberal citadel itself and both of its major champions, the American liberal and the British socialist, have been driven into a re-examination of their major assumptions of thought. On the American side, the resurgence of Conservatism as a respectable philosophy, on the British side a growing dissatisfaction with the less attractive aspects of a welfare-society founded upon administrative Fabianism both of them reinforced by a deep suspicion (as Orwell's popularity is symptomatic) that classical Liberalism by-passed too easily the moral issues of power and authority has given rise to a search for new doctrinal outlines. There is a new emphasis upon the theme of social order and consensus, in itself a natural outcome of war: in that sense, the spirit of the age is to be compared with that of Augustan England, which was prepared to pay any price to prevent the repetition of the religious wars of the previous century. In England, the emphasis has become an intellectual preoccupation with the secular Establishment as a whole; in the United States it has become an effort to confer intellectual validity upon the dominant institutions the churches, the business corporation, the entertainment industries of the society, and an effort, beyond that, of the American intellectual to forego the tradition of his willing isolationism classically embodied in The Education of Henry Adams. If, indeed, America refused to listen to Adams in the Gilded Age, it listens almost religiously to his successors, so that the social scientist enjoys a contemporary prestige that almost amounts to a Chinese bureaucratization of his function. The outcome of all this is an Anglo-American literature of social and political science that throws interesting light upon the condition of the Western intelligentsia at mid-century. The literature, of course, must be seen within the framework of the social revolution of the times. Both Conservative and Republican have maintained intact the essential changes, respectively, of the Labour and the New Deal regimes, so that in the American case the radical sentiment has had to go to the edges of the American society the Puerto Rican problem, the issue of the American Mexican, the Negro case to satisfy its drive, while in the English case a book like Professor Cole's Post-war Condition of Britain catalogues a welfare state so extensive that it has to be compared with the same author's 'Condition of Britain of 1937 for the full scope of the