400
GEORGE LlCHTHEIM
intellect.
If
this is excluded, we have to resign ourselves to the
conclusion that technology and civilization are on a collision course
for which apparently no one is responsible.
II
It
is a commonplace that there is today widespread fatalism with
regard to the probable outcome of the nuclear race between the major
powers (not to mention the minor ones who are just beginning to
enter the game). This mood clearly does not depend upon the
acceptance of anything worth being called a "philosophy of history."
On the contrary, it feeds upon lack of confidence in a discernible
direction of the historical enterprise. Contemporary liberalism no
longer disposes of philosophical categories which transcend the im–
mediate experience of a society given over to technological rationali–
zation. This loss of perspective is hailed as intellectual maturity. The
sinful attempt to think about history in philosophical terms having
been abandoned-at any rate by the empiricist school, which today
is virtually synonymous with academic liberalism in the Western
world-the policymakers and the public are left with a set of purely
pragmatic doctrines which do not amount to more than an injunction
to "muddle through."
As
for the Soviet camp, there is no need to
describe its disarray, consequent upon the discovery that the "march
of history" is taking the world ever further from the union of Marxist
theory with the practice of a revolutionary proletariat destined to
reshape society. Liberalism and Communism in fact have both run
aground, and it is precisely this stalemate which enables their spokes–
men to score polemical points at each other's expense. In this respect
the current intellectual situation is a faithful mirror of "coexistence"
in the sphere of politics. Coexistence is of course preferable to suicide,
and tolerance to the sort of mindless abuse that was still the fashion
a few years ago. But there is little to
be
gained from an armistice
which merely helps to petrify the erstwhile combatants in the postures
they took up at the start of a contest which has now clearly ended in
a draw.
If
these frozen positions are to be transcended,
it
will be
necessary to go behind the assumptions from which liberalism and
Marxism originally branched off. My purpose here is to suggest
