HISTORY AND THE PROBLEM OF POWER
203
expression of an underlying idea. Most historians refused to admit even
that limited function and regarded power merely as an obstacle inter–
posed by interested parties to hold up the relentless operations of funda–
mental forces. So, to Marx power was the instrument by which an old
ruling class resisted the inevitable and provoked counter-action by its
successor. A somewhat similar attitude was characteristic of the liberal
writers who accepted Lord Acton's dictum on power as corruption.
For those optimistic generations the problem involved no real dif–
ficulty. History dealt with a process of inevitable progress in the past,
of unlimited progress in the future. Power was irrelevant or incidental.
The matter was by no means so simple when Carl Becker con–
sidered it in 1935. Becker's personal articles of faith still included the old
beliefs in "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Humanity, Toleration, Reason."
Yet his strong, skeptical mind could certainly not write power off as un–
important in a year in which he could see unfolding the consequences of
one world war and the chain of events that would produce another,
to say nothing of the spread of totalitarianism across Europe. Yet was it
possible to make these admissions as to the role of power and still to
retain faith in progress? That was the question to which Becker an–
nounced he would address himself in his Stanford lectures, reprinted in
this volume with an enlightening biographical preface by Leo Gershoy.
The answer takes the form of a retrospective view of man's past on
earth. Becker sees four grand periods in human history,-the first, some
450,000 years to the discovery of fire, the second, the 50,000 years to the
invention of writing, the third, the 5,000 years to the discovery of mag–
netic force, and the fourth, in the midst of which we still live, the ten
centuries since. This perspective leaves room for optimism of a sort.
Becker has every expectation that such progress as is observable in the
past will continue in the future, indeed at an accelerating rate, and
will soon bring us to the point at which technology-the ability to use
matter-of-fact knowledge-will cover all human relations.
That this facile scheme should come from a man of Becker's in–
tellectual sophistication is disappointing. The argument is tautological,
proceeds by assertion and arbitrary definition. Becker establishes the
character of his periods by their turning points, in each case an important
expansion of "power," the uncovering of new potentials which in turn
leads to an expansion of intelligence. In this usage, power has no con–
nection with compulsion; it is merely the "capacity of men to do some–
thing, whether in the mental or the physical realm." Adrift in this foggy
definition, Becker conflates in his discussion a wide variety of disparate
phenomena and never gets to face his key question: how does com-
