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pulsion (power) square with a process (progress) which operates to lib–
erate the individual?
The immediate source of Becker's confusion is the view of power
as a thing in itself out of any context, as a pure capacity detached from
the uses to which it is put. Becker does not see that the ability to write
or to strike fire is not in itself an element of power; these become so
only when they serve as instruments of control.
The inadequacy of this approach is significant, for it reaches back to
a weakness in all Becker's thinking, to some extent to a weakness in the
thinking of his whole generation of historians. Becker was one of those
so dominated by the conception of historical relativism as to lose en–
tirely the ability to establish meaningful discriminations. It may be as
he claims, for instance, that "Totem, Moira, Gods, God" are simply
different names assigned in different epochs to the "influences that make
life abundant." But if that is all, is social change any more than termi–
nological?
I cannot see how one can judge progress without accepting an
absolute toward which progress moves; and the absolute Becker shuns
absolutely. "My ethical and moral judgments," he says, are "no more
than the system of my limitations." The eighteenth century men had a
fixed picture of the goals toward which their inevitable trends led.
Without entirely rejecting those goals, the men of Becker's generation
had lost confidence in them; they had no wish to recreate the world in
their own image. Then only the inevitable trends were left, and man
shrank to helplessness, passive passenger on a train of events to a des–
tination that did not matter.
Oscar Handlin
