ISAIAH
BERLIN
339
the coming union of science, finance and industrial organisation, and
the replacement, in this new world of producers aided by scientists, of
what amounted
to
indoctrination by a new race of propagandists–
artists, poets, priests of a new secular religion , mobilising men 's
emotions, without which the new industrial world could not be made
to
function. His disciple, Auguste Comte, called for and predicted the
creation of an authoritarian elite to educate and control a rational , but
not a democratic or liberal, society and its scientifically trained citizens.
I will not enlarge upon the validity of this prophecy: the combination
of technological skills and the absolute authority of a secular priest–
hood has been realised only too successfully in our day. And if those
who believed that prejudice and ignorance and superstition, and their
embodiment in irrational and repressive laws, economic, political,
racial and sexual, would be swept away by the new enlightenment,
have not had their expectations realised, this does not diminish the
degree of their insight into the new paths which had opened in western
European development. This was the very vision of a rational , swept
and garnered, new order, heralded by Bentham and Macaulay, which
troubled Mill and Tocqueville and deeply repelled Carlyle and Dis–
raeli, Ruskin and Thoreau, and, before them, some among the early
German romantics at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fourier, in his
turn, together with much nonsense, thundered against the evils of trade
and industry, engaged in unbridled economic competition, tending
to
wanton destruction or adulteration of the fruits of human labour by
those who wished to increase their own profits; he protested that the
growth of centralised control over vast human groups led to servitude
and alienation, and advocated the end of repression and the need for
the rational canalisation of the passions by careful vocational guidance
which would enable all human desires, capacities, inclinations, to
develop in a free and creative direction. Fourier was given to grotesque
fantasies: but these ideas were not absurd, and much of what he pre–
dicted is now conventional wisdom.
Everyone has recognised the fatal accuracy of Tocqueville's uneasy
anticipation of the conformity and the monotony of democratic
egalitarianism, whatever may be thought of the nostrums by which he
sought
to
modify its effects. Nor do I know of anyone who would deny
that Karl Marx, whatever his errors, displayed unique powers of
prognosis in identifying some of the central factors at work in his day
that were not obvious to his contemporaries-the interdependence of
technological change and culture, the concentration and centralisation
of the means of production in private hands, the inexorable march of
