THE
POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY
245
becomes fanatical, but it casts the livid color of its own insanity upon
nature at large. A strained holiness, never without its seamy sides, ousts
honorable virtue, and the fear of so many enemies becomes the greatest
enemy of the soul. No true appreciation of anything is possible without
a sense of its
naturalness,
of the innocent necessity by which it has as–
sumed its special and extraordinary form. In a word, the principle of
morality is naturalistic. Call it humanism or not, only a morality frank–
ly relative to man's nature is worthy of man, being at once vital and
rational, martial and generous, whereas absolutism smells of fustiness as
well as of faggots.
Sidney Hook
THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY
THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES. By Karl R. Popper. Princeton
University Press. $7.50
FREEDOM , POWER AND DEMOCRATIC PLANNING. By Karl Mann–
heim. Oxford University Press. $5 .00
Our century has been a protracted exercise in social frustra–
tion: we cannot seem to construct a society which meets the needs of an
industrial age. First laissez-faire liberalism failed; then collectivism
failed even more abysmally. Today our "enlightened" social thinkers,
having swung with rash violence from one extreme to another, are
mostly engaged in the hopeful attempt to devise a foolproof compromise
by which the "freedom" of liberalism would somehow be merged with
the "security" of collectivism.
It is well to remember that the notion of the compromise is relatively
new. Either-or thinking dominated the social field until early in the
1930's: either society was individualist or it was collectivist; and,
if
a
socialist party came to power in a capitalist economy, it had no choice
but to play the game according to capitalist rules. Thus in England a
Labor government tried to fight the depression through the orthodoxy
of deflation; and in Germany a Socialist economist like Fritz Naphtali
could write in 1930, "I don't believe that we can do very much, nor any–
thing very decisive, from the point of view of economic policy, to over–
come the crisis until it has run its course."
The New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt made the first effective as–
sault in a large-scale industrial economy on the either-capitalism-or–
socialism style of thinking. At the time, of course, critics of both the
right and the left regarded the New Deal as an unstable compromise,
doomed either to move forward into collectivism or backward into
collapse: in this period Kerensky was generally considered to be the
