THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY
2S1
remains essentially collectivist. As W. Arthur Lewis, the British liberal
Socialist economist, puts it in "his brilliant book
The Principles of Eco–
nomic Planning,
"The central issue in the discussion of planning is
not whether there shall be planning but what form it shall take, and in
particular whether the state shall. operate through the price mechanism
or in supercession of it." But Mannheim not only was incapable of
formulating a question so directly and concretely; he just did not
seem to see the basic importance for political freedom of indirect, New
Deal-Keynesian controls (planning by inducement) as against centrally
imposed, quantitative, physical controls (planning by direction).
This faith in central planning spills over into the larger field of in–
tellectual freedom. Social science research, he blandly suggests, "through
intelligence tests, interviews, expert observation of physical and mental
development and dispositions, and expert guidance of vocational choices,"
could resolve the paradox of freedom in a planned world. Freedom,
in other words, becomes only the appreciation of necessity.. (It is this
kind of thing which makes Popper spit out, "Once a Hegelian, always
a Hegelian.")
"Democratically decided principles," Mannheim adds, must be ac–
cepted, and
fundamental revision will only be forthcoming when a new start seems
necessary. Even so, certain circles in society will continue to discuss the
fundamentals of life, religion and society. Such discussions will have their
place in a democratically planned social order. There will be provision
for discussion, though no license will be granted for destructive action
or sabotage of co-operation whenever it pleases the objector.
I hope I am not wrong in feeling that the last sentence has a distinctly
ominous ring.
For all Mannheim's unmistakable earnestness and good will, his
book remains fuzzy, vague and intolerably verbose on too many of the
crucial questions of the middle way-and particularly on a range of
questions to which Popper brings bracing and iconoclastic good sense.
But at one point-and, indeed, at a point which provokes Popper to
specific criticism-Mannheim is on the track of something important.
That is on the question of the reliability of the individual will; it is
the old problem whether knowledge of the good is enough to make us
act to attain the good.
Neither Popper nor Mannheim are very clear on this issue. But
Mannheim had a deep
if
foggy feeling that social science is being con–
stantly deflected by the factors of self-interest which creep into social
theory. "Knowledge and will or the rational element and the range of the
irrational," he once put it, "are inseparably and essentially intertwined."
