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GEORGE LICHTHEIM
approach, and thus deserves to be taken seriously.
It
may be con–
veniently summarized by saying that bourgeois society has in fact
disappeared, that the class struggle is over, and that the more ad–
vanced Western countries have entered a stage to which the nine–
teenth-century categories no longer apply. Capitalism and socialism
are to be regarded as rival subspecies of what is called "industrial
society," and the problem facing us-at any rate in the West, where
the industrial revolution has been more or less completed-is to work
out the appropriate political and intellectual concepts suitable to the
post-bourgeois age.
As
for the so-called Communist countries, their
particular form of state-controlled planning appears in this perspective
as a mere variant of the "technocratic" society of the future. Lastly,
the backward region:. of the globe are seen as the battleground of a
contest in which nothing more (or less)
is
at stake than the form of
industrialization. In the long run, so it seems, the whole world will
present pretty much the same picture.
I have considerable sympathy with this analysis. I only wish its
exponents could bring themselves to agree that it subverts the con–
ventional assumptions of liberalism as much as those of communism.
It really is no good trying to pretend that one can have one without
the other, or that classical liberalism may yet triumph in the long
run. On the "technocratic" assumption, liberalism and communism
are both threatened, in their theoretical formulation as well as in
their "existential" hold over their followers, and it may not be long
before these traditional antagonists are obliged to form a defensive
alliance against the common enemy: the technocracy and the ideo–
logists of scientism who are busy putting the new viewpoint across.
This viewpoint will, of course, be described as "socialist." Indeed it
is so described by the Soviet theorists, as well as by the more leftwing
planners and "technocrats" in Western countries, and by the radical
nationalists in backward societies on the threshold of industrialization.
We are all socialists now. Just as in the nineteenth century it was com–
mon form for even the most benighted autocrats to employ the lan–
guage of constitutional liberalism, so today every regime intent on
modernization tries to be in tune with the socialist fashion. The more
retrograde the country, the more up-to-date the terminology. It is
partly a matter of catching up and skipping the intermediate stages.
