Books: Democracy’s New Order

CONDITIONS OF PEACE—Edward Hallett Carr—Macmillan ($2.50).

This book is an exciting and penetrating look at the causes and probable consequences of World War II. As such, it takes its place beside James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution and Prof. Nicholas John Spykman’s America’s Strategy in World Politics. Less abstractly theoretical than Burnham’s book, not as rigidly realistic as Spykman’s, Conditions of Peace is the work of a new type of political mind —the Leninist of the Right—the conservative who has fortified his position in a revolutionary world by mastering the theory and tactics of the revolution. Since 1941 Edward Hallett Carr has been one of the chief editorial writers of the London Times. He brings to the task of planning a decent, lasting peace the practical experience of 20 years in the thick of British diplomacy and statecraft.

Carr clearly saw the social revolution coming and believes that World War II is part of it. But his quiet, lucid revolutionary outlook upon the world of today is not hooked up with Communism. Indeed, British pinks sniff at Carr of the Times as a “self-appointed critic of Marxism.”

Carr’s purpose in writing Conditions of Peace is to help public opinion in the U.S. and Britain to understand the revolution which we face “whether we like it or not.” Says he: “The defense of democracy, like other negative aims, is dead and barren. The challenge of the revolution can only be met by redefining and reinterpreting democracy in a new and revolutionary sense.”

What’s Wrong with Demos? Diagnosis is often half the cure, and some of EditorCarr’s most brilliant chapters are strictly diagnostic. He believes that erstwhile “liberal democracy” (the kind in which most U.S. and British citizens imagine they still live) is being replaced by “mass democracy.” Mass democracy is distinguished by overwhelming popularity and prestige of the chief executive (Roosevelt, Churchill); by the growing weakness of Congress or Parliament; by a tendency of the executive and the masses to interact directly via radio and straw polls over the heads of electoral bodies.

Mass democracy is also a state of affairs in which “propertyless non-taxpaying wage earners” (who probably now hold the balance of power in most elections) have become a unique class “whose relation to the state is primarily that of beneficiaries.” Dryly Author Carr adds that as yet mass democracy is still on trial.

Liberal democracy, according to Carr, is dead. Originally a democracy of property owners, it was given purposeful meaning by the ceaseless, dynamic pursuit of progress; but it had grave faults.

Liberal democracy became inert and the masses apathetic (except to benefits received from the state) largely because the little man saw or sensed that monopolistic forces of production had obtained by influence a whip hand over the state and over himself, no matter how he voted.

Nevertheless, the politically influential forces of production are by no means simply those of monopolistic capital. They are also those of monopolistic labor, the unions. “In recent years it has become clear that capitalism and trade-unionism stand and fall together. Both share in the profits of production, and represent the producer interest against the consumer and the taxpayer.”

Therefore, when the world was hit by depression, in democratic countries “the fatal mistake was made of attempting to tackle the problem from the angle of the producer. . . . The crowning absurdity was reached of governments subsidizing producers to produce goods which they then paid them to destroy.”

War—The Way Out. Small wonder that the voter, the consumer, the little man decided there must be something basically wrong with democracy and glanced about the world uneasily for a way out. Author Carr asserts that in the U.S. and Britain the bewildered, apathetic little man has thus far found this way out only in war. “It is useless today,” he writes, “to condemn the economic consequences of large-scale war because it is destructive of accumulated wealth. This is not the main consideration, so long as it mitigates the evils of unemployment and inequality. . . . War is at the present time the most purposeful of our social institutions; and we shall make no progress towards its elimination until we recognize, and provide for, the essential social function which it performs. . . .”

This purposefulness can be recaptured after World War II by reviving the Christian idea of equality which capitalism rejected.

Thus humanity must not try to get “back to normalcy” after World War II as it did after World War I. “The only stability attainable in human affairs,” says Carr, “is the stability of the spinning top or the bicycle. . . . The survival of democracy depends on its ability to establish control over those economic forces which have hitherto defied its authority.”

Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin. Perhaps the neatest job of analysis and persuasion in Conditions of Peace is Author Carr’s presentation of “the accidental, but remarkably close, parallel between the role of Napoleon and that of Hitler.”

“Just as Napoleon exploited the demand for liberty and equal political rights expressed in the French Revolution, so Hitler exploits for his purposes the demand for social equality and equal economic rights expressed in the Bolshevik Revolution. . . . Hitler has consummated the work, which Marx and Lenin had begun, of overthrowing the 19th-Century capitalist system.

“The overthrow of Hitlerism will not restore the 19th-Century capitalist system any more than the downfall of Napoleon restored feudalism. . . . It was the defeat, not the victory, of Napoleon which secured the ultimate triumph of the revolution whose ideas he had so effectively, though perhaps unwittingly, disseminated. . . . Hitler, like Napoleon, has performed the perhaps indispensable function of sweeping away the litter of the old order. . . . The revolt against liberal democracy, once set in motion by the Russian Revolution . . . was successively taken up by Mustapha Kemal, by Mussolini, by Pilsudski, by Salazar, before it was generalized by Hitler and extended all over the continent of Europe and over much of Latin America. A movement of these dimensions and of this extent is a major revolution.” But the New Order, Carr believes, will be built by other hands and other methods.

Peace by Revolution. Author Carr devotes some two-thirds of his book to diagnosing the present “revolution” and its projection into a future bright for the consumer. Then he gets around to the peace. It would be a frightful disaster, he believes, for World War II to wind up at an orthodox peace conference, with all small countries like Czecho-Slovakia restored to their former frontiers, Germany justly punished and the world streamlined with some such legalistic brassiere as Union Now.

This idea is essentially the antithesis of those which Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill put into their Atlantic Charter last year. When Roosevelt and Churchill—striking examples of Carr’s thesis that chief executives grow in power under mass democracy—met off Newfoundland to draw their first charter of war aims, they promised to restore “sovereign rights and self-government . . . to those from whom it has been taken by force.” Did the two striking examples of mass democracy not understand its principles?

Europe, says Carr, should have had its network of frontiers battered down long ago, and merely because the job has been done by totalitarians is no reason why it should be undone by the United Nations in their hour of victory. Six years is the minimum period which Professor Carr can imagine that post-war Europe will require for its economic and social rehabilitation. Then, with Europe integrated within itself and with the world at large, the drawing of frontiers, Carr feels, may become little more than an amicable adjustment among national vanities.

Author Carr wants Germany occupied (like the rest of Europe) probably for years by Allied Nations forces, and guided by a European Planning Authority which “must from the outset represent, and be felt to represent, the interests of ‘Europe’ as a whole and not of any one section of it. . . . The European Planning Authority must from the outset reject the principal of differentiated standards of living. Living standards have become one of the most crucial issues in international politics and will constitute what Woodrow Wilson called the acid test of our sincerity.”

The obvious weakness of Conditions of Peace is the fact that Author Carr constantly purports to take a world view while drawing his facts and conclusions largely from Europe and the U.S. But his book is a must if for no other reason than that it gives a remarkably clear glimpse into the type of political and social thinking being attempted these days by many of the brain-trusters around Churchill and their opposite numbers around Stalin and Roosevelt.