The two great liberating political movements of the nineteenth century were, as every history book informs us, humanitarian individualism and romantic nationalism. Whatever their difference- --and they were notoriously profound enough to lead to a sharp divergence and ultimate collision of these two ideals-- they had this in common: they believed that the problems both of individuals and of societies could be solved if only the forces of intelligence and of virtue could be made to prevail over ignorance and wickedness. They believed, as against the pessimists and fatalists, both religious and secular, whose voices, audible indeed a good deal earlier, began to sound loudly only toward the end of the century, that all clearly understood questions could be solved by human beings with the moral and intellectual -resources at their disposal. No doubt different schools of thought returned different answers to these varying problems; utilitarians said one thing, and neo-feudal romantics-- Tory democrats, Christians Socialists, Pan-Germans, Slavophiles --another. Liberals believed in the unlimited power of education and the power of rational morality to overcome economic misery and inequality. Socialists, on the contrary, believed that without radical alterations in the distribution and control of economic resources no amount of change of heart or mind on the part of individuals could be adequate; or, for that matter, occur at all. Conservatives and Socialists believed in the power and influence of institutions and regarded them as a necessary safeguard against the chaos, injustice, and cruelty caused by uncontrolled individualism; anarchists, radicals, and liberals looked upon institutions as such with suspicion as being obstructive to the realization of that free (and, in the view of most such thinkers, rational) society which the will of man could both conceive and build, if it were not for the unliquidated residue of ancient abuses (or un-reason) upon which the existing rulers of society --whether individuals or administrative machines--leaned. so heavily, and of which so many of them indeed were typical expressions.
Arguments about the relative degree of the obligation of the individual to society, and vice versa, filled the air. It is scarcely necessary to rehearse these familiar questions, which to this day for in the staple of discussion in the more conservative institutions of Western learning, to realize that however wide the disagreement about the proper answers to them, the questions themselves were common to Liberals and Conservatives alike. There were, of course, even at that time isolated irrationalists--Stirner, Kierkegaard, in certain moods Carlyle; but in the main all the parties to the great controversies, even Calvinists and ultramontane Catholics, accepted the notion of man as resembling in varying degrees one or the other of two idealized types. Either he is a creature free and naturally good, but hemmed in and frustrated1.2 by obsolete or corrupt or sinister institutions masquerading as saviours, protectors, and repositories of sacred traditions; or he is a being within limits, but never wholly, free, and to some degree, but never entirely good, and consequently unable to save himself by his own wholly unaided efforts; and therefore rightly seeking salvation within the great frameworks-- states, churches, unions. For only these great edifices promote solidarity, security, and sufficient strength to resist the shallow joys and dangerous, ultimately self-destructive, liberties peddled by those conscienceless or self-deceived individualists who, in the name of some bloodless intellectual dogma, or noble enthusiasm for an ideal unrelated to human lives, ignore or destroy the rich texture of social life heavy with treasures from the past-- blind leaders of the blind, robbing men of their most precious resources, exposing them again to the perils of a life solitary, brutish, nasty, and short. Yet there was at least one premiss common to all the disputants, - namely the belief that the problems were real, that it took men of exceptional training and intelligence to formulate them properly, and men with exceptional grasp of the facts, will-power, and capacity for effective thought to find and apply the correct solutions.
These two great currents finally ended in exaggerated and indeed distorted forms as Communism and Fascism--the first as the treacherous heir of the liberal internationalism of the previous century, the second as the culmination and bankruptcy of the mystical patriotism which animated the national movements of the time. All movements have origins, forerunners, imperceptible beginnings: nor does the twentieth century seem divided from the nineteenth by so universal an explosion as the French Revolution, even in our day the greatest of all historical landmarks. Yet it is a fallacy to regard Fascism and Communism as being in the main only more uncompromising and violent manifestations of an earlier crisis, the culmination of a struggle fully discernible long before. The differences between the political movements of the twentieth century and the nineteenth are very sharp, and they spring from factors whose full force was not properly realized until our century was well under way. For there is a barrier which divides what is unmistakably past and done with from that which most characteristically belongs to our day The familiarity of this barrier must not blind us to its relative novelty; One of the elements of the new outlook is the notion of unconscious and irrational influences which outweigh the forces of reason; another the notion that answers to problems exist not in rational solutions, but in the removal of the problems themselves by means other than thought and argument. The interplay between the old tradition, which saw history as the battle-ground between The easily identifiable forces of light and darkness, reason and obscurantism, progress and reaction; or alternatively between spiritualism and empiricism, intuition and scientific method, institutionalism and individualism--the conflict between this order and, on the other hand, the new factors violently opposed to the humanist psychology of bourgeois civilization is to a large extent the history of political ideas in our time.