“THEORIES of Government!” exclaims Thomas Carlyle in the early pages of The French Revolution. “Such has been, and will be; in ages of decadence. Acknowledge them in their degree; as processes of Nature, who does nothing in vain; as steps in her great process.” The social theorist of today takes more seriously than Carlyle the existence of ideology, for ideology is an expression of spiritual unrest in the face of history-making issues. In turn, ideology itself becomes a problem, and we are led to examine its nature. Especially is this true today, which is a time of passionate affirmation of ambiguous positions rather than the observation of political behavior.

HEGEL'S philosophy of freedom and Comte's philosophy of progress have one trait in common, in spite of the basic differences in their starting points. Although Hegel's panlogistic dialectics and Comte's sociological scientism present various levels and antagonistic tendencies of philosophical thought, they share the same indifference concerning the philosophical and structural problems of human existence. While Kant was aware that the basic questions of philosophy referred to the fundamental elements of human life, these new synthetical systems of the historicity of the race did not care about the character and the nature of the human being. They helped to bring to the fore that tendency in thought which was described as the autonomous movement of a universal principle of determination, spiritual or naturalistic, in the process and as the meaning of history. In these philosophical and sociological systems man is only the tool and the actor (the Roman persona in the literal sense) in the self-realization of a universal principle, inherent in the process of society. Thus, human action and attitudes are predetermined by the principles that represent die pseudo-religious meaning of the historical development. So far as this is true, human personality, as centered around the actuality of freedom, spontaneity, responsibility, no longer exists. The hybris of Hegel and Comte to make die dynamic institutions “concrete universals” and to suppress the concreteness of individuals is one symptom of the human situation in the modern world. Slowly developing since the sixteenth century, this situation is completely realized in these philosophical systems that proclaim the immanence of life, the reality of a universal principle of determination and the weakness and frailty of the human personality. This trend of thinking got supremacy in philosophical and scientific modes of investigation, in particular in the powerful stratification of positivist and of empiricist methods in the social sciences. The discovery of Historicism and of Sociologism is the logical result of this basic position. It expresses correctly the stage of consciousness in which man realizes the demonry of the world of institutions which, although his very own achievement, is becoming emancipated from man and developing autonomously like the forces of nature.

WESTERN Europe—what we may call the Roman world—is an wessential unit. The nations that go to make it up share a common culture. They have no cause either to despise or to quarrel with other nations. Yet their first business is to preserve unity among themselves and to show a common front to the rest of the world. In unity lies their security, whereas, if they quarrel among themselves, the true victory goes neither to the one group nor to the other of quarrelling Europeans but to the tertius gaudens outside Europe who profits from their divisions.

THE PENDULUM of dynamic subjectivism swings from a faithful, dreamy, or thoughtful absorption in the world to an aggressive, defiant protest against the world. German history proves it abundantly from the days of the Cimbers and Teutons to the days of the Reformation and up to our present age. Or is it a mere accident that German thinkers formulated that man is obsessed by the will to the infinite, or, as Nietzsche put it: “that man could not tolerate God to be unless he be himself God?” We may well ask if Luther was not expressing a German truth by his word that the soul finds his way to his door by swaying to and fro. Is it a mere accident that dialectic philosophy and dialectic theology were made in Germany and actually acquired reputation only there? Is it not a characteristic self-analysis to assert with Hegel that religion and thought develop in permanent self-contradictions and antagonism and move by such antagonisms to ever higher and higher forms? Is it not a distinctly German appreciation and interpretation of history to say that it is nothing but a sequence of wars? The German mind evidences a clear imperialism interrupted by periods of a self-forgotten devotion to the world, but even in the imperialistic phases there remains some of this self-forgotten devotion—just as in the selfforgotten devotion there surges some of this imperialism. A wellbalanced equilibrium obviously is very hard to attain; it does not even lie in the intention of the German mind because it would entail the recognition of and submission to an ontological order, to form and law.

IT IS a painful paradox that the defeats suffered by the democratic myth abroad have coincided with the rise of a critical realism toward democratic institutions at home. No trend is more marked in contemporary American political science than that of comprehending the polity in terms of “pressure groups” competing for control. Such atomistic segregation inevitably minimizes the essential function of a firmly established ideological framework. Without it, the state is limp; allegiance is reduced to considerations of material satisfaction, changing with demand and supply; individual freedom lacks a dedication to superindividual objectives.

A FEW YEARS AGO, hardly an important or good book about the human problems of the land was appearing. Now, to judge by the books and articles, we see that a new and very intelligent interest has been awakened. Publications are devoted to homestead and subsistence projects, such as Ralph Borsodi's and Monsignor Ligutti's, to the great and lasting agrarianism of the South, to an outright decentralization, to cooperatives as affecting rural and suburban life, and especially to the effective and democratic cooperatives of Nova Scotia.