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PARTISAN REVIEW
dice. Secondly there are those arguments which assert that the prin–
ciples of the Left are wrong because they lay claim to, or presuppose
further principles that themselves lay claim to knowledge that, in the
nature of circumstances or perhaps in the very nature of things, we
do not or cannot possess. Arguments of the first kind assert that
there is a better kind of knowledge than that claimed by the liberal
about what society should be like, and so collectively might be known
as the Argument from Knowledge: arguments of the second kind
assert that the knowledge claimed by the liberal about what society
should be like can't be as good as he thinks it is, and so collectively
might be known as the Argument from Ignorance. The third kind
of argument employed by the Right is that which, while not ex–
pressly finding fault with any of the individual principles of the
Left, asserts ,that taken as a set they are clearly inconsistent: the
point being of course that of any pair of incompatible propositions,
at least one member must be false. Arguments of this form might be
known as the Argument from Incompatibility.
The third argument is at once the simplest, the most acceptable,
and the least effective. It is an undeniable fact that within any of
the more familiar sets of left-wing principles conflict can break out:
as, for instance, between Liberty and Equality. The point can be
made not only by abstract reasoning, by consideration of imaginary
cases and extreme situations, but by appeal to actual historical evi–
dence: indeed by some terrible dialectic-which seems always to give
grim
pleasure to the Right- History often enough overtakes Logic,
so something devised in the study as a merely hypothetical case soon
turns into a headline in a newspaper. But too much can easily be
made of this point.
If
it is to be a conclusive argument against the
principles of the Left, then it must do more than show merely that
these principles are incompatible in the ordinary sense of the term:
namely, that on not every single issue are the deliverances of all the
principles bound or even likely to be unanimous. For incompatibility
in this weak sense is surely just what we should expect to find holding
between the different rules or principles constitutive of any moral
system worthy of serious attention, of any code of behavior large
enough for human beings to live by. And not merely what we should
expect to find, but what we do find: the principles of '89-"Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, those three noble but incompatible ideals," as
