468
GEORGE
LlCHTHEIM
ment, and an academic critique of society which increasingly represents
the intelligentsia's rejection of the modem world. Does it follow that
socialism as such has lost its relevance? Not if the term is understood in
its original sense, as the vision of a planned society taking the place of an
unplanned one. There is little doubt that the Saint-Simonians would feel
at home in our world. What has been shaken is the confidence that the
new industrial order would be mastered by the collective action of the
actual producers: the workers. With a slight exaggeration one may say
that Europe-East and West-has by now almost completed the road
leading from Utopia to technocracy. No one any longer doubts the
feasibility of a socialist order. What has become doubtful is its demo–
cratic and egalitarian character. It is an open question whether this
situation represents a temporary defeat, a permanent dissolution of
the union between socialism and democracy, or the germ of a stable
compromise whereby the working class will permit itself to be led by the
technical intelligentsia., and the latter will incorporate labor's traditional
democratic and syndicalist aspirations within its own political conscious–
ness. I am inclined to think that such a compromise is the best one can
hope for. The alternative presumably is some form of corporate
authoritarianism.
In saying all this one is of course making some quite large and
possibly unwarranted assumptions about the probable future course of
development, as well as about the upheavals of the past half century
which have landed us on the threshold of the new society. These as–
sumptions, which I am not going to defend but shall simply take for
granted, include the following:
( 1) Our age has seen the collapse of the unregulated market
economy and the bourgeois society built upon it. The resulting gradual
changeover to a planned and state-controlled economy is the counterpart
of the more dramatic upheaval in Russia and Eastern Europe which-for
ideological reasons-goes under the name of "Communism."
As
for the
ancient cultures about
to
enter upon the process of modernization, they
have before them two different "models" between which to choose.
It is going to depend very largely upon accidental political factors which
of these alternatives-or what eccentric combination of traits taken from
both-they decide to adopt. In all probability, most of these countries
will go through a "national-socialist" phase, though it need not be as
totalitarian as is currently the case
in
China.
(2) In our own Western or Atlantic world (I abstract from the
subordinate quarrel between "Atlanticists" and partisans of an auto–
nomous Europe) the dominant feature of the post-liberal age, i.e., the
