IN THE DESERT
425
the shadow Qf the Grand Old Man waits on Churchill's round face and
empty phrases: we live even now anachronistic lives under a regime that
grants more individual liberty than it can afford. In such soil, out of
such weakness in the state, there
is
likely to spring a
Fascism of lihe
intellectuals,
remote from a mass basis, expressive chiefly of a deep
emotional discontent with the pattern of the intellectuals' own lives.
It is !the germ of this emotional discontent that permits the ideas of the
Duke of Bedford to find m·ore or less sympathetic consideration in some
English magazines. English individualist intellectuals welcome any writ·
ing, whatever its nature, that seems to promise them a future that is not
shadowed by an authoritarian Communism; and the fact that they appear
side by side with professed Fascist sympathisers does not worry them;
they would appear side by side with Communists too, but the Com–
munists won't let them!
The English intellectuals' movement towards Fascism presents itself
in many forms, all of which profess an extreme anti-rational point of
view: a dotty mysticism, belief in the "reality of life", "helier', even,
in the soil or the soul.
It
would not be just or appropriate to mention
names: hut it will be obvious* that a conscious exaltation of the power
of myth, a deliberate obsession with the "romantic" and religious as .
opposed to the reasonable and logical,
any
victory of rhetoric over good
sense, is finally a score for reaction. But this movement towards Fascism
is by its very nature vague and unclear, its protagonists are agreed only
in their anti-rationalism. (What is called in
PARTISAN REVIEW
"The New
Failure of Nerve" applies perfectly to the English intellectual scene.)
There is no such technical approach to Fascism here as is made in James
Burnham's
The Managerial Revolution.
It
is
typical of our liberal (hut
still anti-rational) intellectuals that they should applaud the intelligence
of Burnham's book and totally fail to realize its implications: for there
is one step only between thinking, as Burnham does now, that the
managerial revolution is regrettable hut inevitable, and thinking that it
is inevitable and therefore desirable; and it will require an inhuman
detachment on Burnham's part not to take that step towards Fascism.
Fascism: for German Fascism
is
(if we accept Burnham's thesis) one
form that the managerial state may take:' but it can take no form that
is not totalitarian and that will not worsen the living conditions of
men in the countries where it comes to power. Burnham's case is a sad
one: that a man with so much vigour and intelligence should move from
a Marxist position to one
in
which a totalitarian regime is regarded
as "inevitable" leaves one with the gloomiest reflections. The sudden
abnegation of responsibility in the assumption that men cannot or will
not make.
a~y
collective movement to avoid their Fate is shocking:
English intellectuals, as they have never committed themselves as far as
Burnham, as indeed many of them have never committed themselves at
all, have no such responsibility to deny, no problem to solve. They do
*It must be understood that I do not claim to apeak "objectively": "Qbvious"
to
people who start from my premises.
