THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
17
entirely different from it, but the practical truth that liberation, and
especially liberation from necessity, always takes precedence over the
building of freedom because of the urgency inherent
in
necessity.
Moreover, liberation, even if successfully achieved, never guarantees
the establishment of freedom; it does no more than remove the most
obvious obstacle to it.
My second point would be that the whole record of revolutions
-if we only knew how to read it-demonstrates beyond doubt that
every attempt to abolish poverty, i.e., to solve the so-called social
question, with political means is doomed to failure and for this
reason leads into terror; terror, on the other hand, sends revolutions
to their doom. There has been not a single revolution that ever
succeeded in the most important business of revolution, the establish–
ment of a new government for the sake of freedom, except the
American Revolution which also was unique in that it was not con–
fronted with mass poverty but conducted, even then, under condi–
tions of an otherwise unknown prosperity.
From this, I would conclude that there would indeed be no
great hope that revolution and freedom could ever succeed in the
world at large, if we were still living under conditions where scarcity
and abundance were beyond the scope of human power. The
American Revolution, that is, the experience of foundation on which
the republic of the United States rests, would remain what it has
been for so long, an exception from an iron rule and an incident of
hardly more than local significance. But this is no longer the case.
Even though the difficulties standing in the way to a solution of the
predicament of mass poverty are still staggering, they are, in principle
at least, no longer insurmountable. The advancement of the natural
sciences and their technology has opened possibilities which make it
very likely that, in a not too distant future, we shall be able to deal
with all economic matters on technical and scientific grounds, outside
all political considerations. Even today, in the fully developed areas
of the West, necessity (and neither political nor humanitarian con–
siderations) is pressing us into all sorts of Point Four programs for
the simple reason that our economy produces abundance and super–
abundance in the same automatic way as the economy of the early
modern age produced mass poverty. Our present technical means
permit us to fight poverty, and force us to fight superabundance,
