THE FUTURE
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occupations to the higher realms of thought, the atmosphere becomes
perceptibly thinner and the traveler needs a constant supply of
oxygen to restore his mental faculties. The air has to be fed into his
system by political scientists and sociologists who somehow manage
to combine professional expertise with an awareness of relevant
changes in the material environment.
It
is in this intermediate range,
midway between politics and philosophy, that one encounters concepts
such as "technocracy," "bureaucratization" or "the industrial revolu–
tion." The latter term indeed is pretty old, having emerged in the
eighteen thirties and forties out of the complex of ideas and preoc–
cupations which also gave rise to the schools of Saint-Simon and
Comte, to the early socialist movement and to the Marxian doctrine
of class conflict. The world still lives on the intellectual heritage of
this eruption, most of which took place in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century. Currently it is the fashion to assert that we have
outgrown these ancestors, but the writers prominent in holding this
view are foremost in employing the above-mentioned vocabulary,
so that one does not quite see what exactly it is that we are supposed
to have left behind: unless it is the more democratic and libertarian
aspects of nineteenth-century socialism. Moreover, the same theorists
(I had almost described them as "ideologists") who are so positive
in affirming that traditional socialism is outmoded appear quite in–
nocent of any notion that the same fate has overtaken the classical
liberal system, of which socialism was and is the theoretical and
practical counterpoint. To hear them one would think that it was
possible for socialism to disappear while leaving its old antagonist
quite unaffected. This seems to be another variant of the belief that
capitalism would be perfect if only there were no proletariat. Un–
fortunately capitalism is defined by the existence of a proletariat, so
that if one wants to get rid of the latter, one has to transcend the
social nexus which produces it. I apologize for recalling these truisms,
which until recently few people would have questioned, though they
might have doubted the practical feasibility of the operation.
It
is
only the academic industry of Marx-baiting-a minor though flour–
ishing by-product of the Cold War- that obliges one to rehash these
elementary verities.
There exists, however, an alternative line of reasoning which
undercuts both the traditional liberal and the conventional socialist
