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industrialisation, the rise and vast development of Big Business, then
in its embryo, and the inevitable sharpening of social and political
conflicts that this involved. Nor was he unsuccessful in unmasking the
political and moral, the philosophical and religious, liberal and
scientific disguises under which some of the most brutal manifestations
of these conflicts and their social and intellectual consequences were
concealed. These were major prophets, and there were others. The
brilliant and wayward Bakunin predicted more accurately than his
great rival Marx the
si~uations
in which great risings of the dis–
possessed would take place, and foresaw that they were liable
to
develop not in the most industrialised societies, on a rising curve of
economic progress, but in countries in which the majority of the
population was near subsistence level and had least to lose by an
upheaval-primitive peasants in conditions of desperate poverty in
backward rural economies where capitalism was the weakest, such as
Spain and Russia. He would have had no difficulty in understanding
the causes of the great social upheavals in Asia and Africa in our own
day. I could go on: the poet Heine, addressing the French in the early
years of the reign of Louis Philippe, saw that one fine day their
German neighbours, spurred by a combination of historical memories
and resentments with metaphysical and moral fanaticism, would fall
upon them, and uproot the great monuments of western culture: "Like
early Christians, whom neither physical torture nor physical pleasure
could break, restrained neither by fear nor greed," these ideologically
intoxicated barbarians would turn Europe into a desert. Lassalle
preached, and perhaps foresaw, state socialism-the people's democra–
cies of our day, whether one calls them state communism or state
capitalism, a hybrid which Marx utterly condemned in his notes on the
Gotha programme.
A decade or so later Jakob Burckhardt anticipated the military–
industrial complexes which would inevitably control the decadent
countries of the west; Max Weber had no doubts about the growing
power of bureaucracy; Durkheim warned of the possibility of
anomie;
there followed all the nightmares of Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, Orwell,
half satirists, half prophets of our own time. Some remained pure
prophecies, others, notably those of the Marxists, and of Heine's new
philosophical barbarians who dominated the imagination of racialists
and neopagan irrationalists, were, perhaps, to some degree self–
fulfilling. The nineteenth century generated a great many other
Utopias and prognoses, liberal, socialist, technocratic and those that
were filled with neomedieval nostalgia, a craving for a largely imagi-
