The Good Society

Walter Lippmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351482073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Good Society is a critical text in the history of liberalism. Initially a series of articles published in a variety of Lippmann's favorite magazines, as the whole evolved, it became a frontal assault against totalitarian tendencies within American society. Lippmann took to task those who sought to improve the lot of mankind by undoing the work of their predecessors and by undermining movements in which men struggle to be free. This book is a strong indictment of programs of reform that are at odds with the liberal tradition, and it is critical of those who ask people to choose between security and liberty.The Good Society falls naturally into two segments. In the first, Lippmann shows the errors and common fallacies of faith in government as the solution to all problems. He says, "from left to right, from communist to conservative. They all believe the same fundamental doctrine. All the philosophies go into battle singing the same tune with slightly different words." In the second part of the book, Lippmann offers reasons why liberalism lost sight of its purpose and suggests the first principles on which it can flourish again.Lippmann argues that liberalism's revival is inevitable because no other system of government can work, given the kind of economic world mankind seeks. He did not write The Good Society to please adherents of any political ideology. Lippmann challenges all philosophies of government, and yet manages to present a positive program. Bewildered liberals and conservatives alike will find this work a successful effort to synthesize a theory of liberalism with the practice of a strong democracy. Gary Dean Best has provided the twenty-first century reader a clear-eyed context for interpreting Lippmann's defense of classical liberalism.The Good Society is the eleventh in a series of books written by Walter Lippmann reissued by Transaction with new introductions and in a paperback format. As

Book III
The Reconstruction of Liberalism

IX
The Great Revolution and the Rise of the Great Society

1 The Outlawry of War by the Modern Conscience

THE modern revival of total wars has occurred in an age when almost all men feel intuitively that wars are a monstrous anachronism. This marks a revolutionary change in the human outlook. For not until the nineteenth century did men in the mass come to regard war as utterly irrational and immoral. There had been protests by minor religious sects; during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was some effort to limit the scope of wars, and there was an increasing amount of more or less academic speculation about schemes for perpetual peace. But pacifism as a general human conviction affecting the practical conduct of governments is something new in western civilization.

Only a hundred years ago, for example, the citizens of London felt they were honoring Lord Chatham when they erected a monument bearing the inscription, written by Burke, that under his administration “commerce for the first time” had been “united with, and made to flourish by war.” To-day, when men hear Mussolini saying that “war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it,”¹ — when they hear Hitler saying that “in everlasting battles mankind has achieved greatness; in everlasting peace it would be doomed to destruction,”² — they are not much less startled than if they heard eulogies on chattel slavery and the exposure of newborn infants. For though all nations still prepare for war, and though most of them still pursue policies that cause wars, war as an instrument of national policy has been outlawed in the conscience of modern men.

So radical a change in human feeling is not likely to have been the result of sudden enlightenment and spontaneous good will. For modern wars, once begun, are as savage as any that men have ever fought; there is then no reason for thinking that the modern revulsion against war is due to a change in human nature. Nor can this revulsion be ascribed to a general recognition that modern weapons are terrifically destructive. As a matter of fact, the physical devastation of modern wars is usually exaggerated. For while guns and bombs and gas do maim, kill, and destroy on a great scale, the capacity of a modern nation to repair the damage is also very great. The devastated regions in the battle areas of the World War were reconstructed in a very few years, and while, humanly speaking, the individual dead are irreplaceable, their numbers are soon replenished.

We come closer to the truth when we remember that in the Great War more human beings were maimed and killed by disease and famine than by weapons, and that this maiming and killing continued for years after the armistice. Moreover the destruction of property in battle was a very small part of the destruction of wealth. Germany and Britain, for example, were never invaded by a hostile army; yet in both countries the capacity to produce wealth was deeply impaired, and still is, by the dislocation of the markets and the sources of supply to which their economies had been adjusted. The havoc of a modern war is infinitely deeper and more far-reaching than the casualty lists and the devastation of the war zone. The irreparable damage only begins when the whole nation is mobilized and the war is carried to the civilian population by blockade and by aerial bombardment. The lasting damage is caused by the war itself when it ruptures and dislocates the economy to which all the belligerents belong.

For all great wars are now civil wars. They are not battles against an alien foe but internecine struggles within one closely related, intricately interdependent community. Modern war tears apart huge populations which have become dependent upon one another for the maintenance of their standard of life — in some degree, for the maintenance of life itself. That is why modern war is so devastating to victor and to vanquished alike. That is why war can no longer be employed successfully as an instrument of national policy.³ That is why those who preach and provoke war are regarded as rebels against the peace and order of the community of peoples, and why, in attacking their prey, they arouse the encircling hostility of that whole community of nations. That is why pacifism has so recently ceased to be an other-worldly aspiration and has become the working doctrine of practical men. For it was in the nineteenth century that the self-sufficiency of nations, of local communities, and of individuals, gave way to a deep and intricate interdependence. Men found themselves living in a Great Society.⁴

2 The Division of Labor

It is no exaggeration to say that the transition from the relative self-sufficiency of individuals in local communities to their interdependence in a world-wide economy is the most revolutionary experience in recorded history.⁵ It has forced mankind into a radically new way of life and, consequently, it has unsettled custom, institutions, and traditions, transforming the whole human outlook.

No exact date can, of course, be fixed as the beginning of this revolution. It can be traced back to the close of the Middle Ages, though, of course, in the Roman world a complex exchange economy prevailed until the Dark Ages. But about the middle of the eighteenth century men of our culture first began to experience enough significant change in their daily lives to realize that they were entering a new epoch in human affairs. The realization came first of all to the people of England and Scotland, for they were the first large western communities to augment their wealth by losing their local self-sufficiency.

Yet at the beginning of the eighteenth century, even in England, the sustenance economy of the village was still the rule. While there was some interlocal and some international trade, it was unimportant in size and above all in its character, being concerned only “to a comparatively small extent with the transport of necessaries or prime conveniences of life. Each nation, as regards the most important constituents of its consumption, its staple foods, articles of clothing, household furniture, and the chief implements of industry, was almost self-sufficing, producing little that it did not consume, consuming little it did not produce.”⁶ The export trade of England in 1730 continued to be “woolen goods and other textile materials, a small quantity of leather, iron, lead, silver and gold plate, and a certain number of reëxported products, such as tobacco and Indian calicoes. The import trade consisted of wine and spirits, foreign foods, such as rice, sugar, coffee, oil, furs and some quantity of foreign wool, hemp, silk and linen-yarn as material for our specially favoured manufactures.”⁷ But it is even more significant that the internal trade of England was carried on predominantly in more or less self-sufficing districts. “The internal trade,” says Hobson, “between more distant parts of England was extremely slight.”⁸ The carriage of goods was difficult; “agricultural produce was almost entirely for local consumption, with the exception of cattle and poultry, which were driven on foot from the neighbouring counties into London and other large markets.” On the whole, industry was operated for local markets. Moreover, within the districts there was, compared with later times, relatively little specialization by individuals. The weaving industry of Norwich, for example, “was executed in the scattered cottages over a wide district.” For more than a hundred and fifty years the revolution which converted these relatively independent and self-sufficing local communities into specialized members of a great economy has been proceeding at an accelerating tempo. In the struggle for survival the less productive economy of self-sufficiency has not been able to withstand the superior effectiveness of a mode of production which specializes in labor and natural resources, and thereby promotes the use of machinery and mechanical power. In some degree the world-wide division of labor has been checked by tariffs, immigration laws, and other barriers to the movement of capital and labor. But they have only retarded the process. Inside the nations which consider themselves most civilized there are now few communities left which are in any substantial sense self-sufficing. The self-sufficing household has virtually disappeared. Some nations, taken as a whole, depend less on foreign trade than others, but none could even begin to maintain its present standard of life if it were isolated from the rest of the world.

Yet the revolution is by no means completed. Only in recent decades has it begun to penetrate the great populations of Asia and of Africa and of South America. It would, moreover, appear to be an irresistible revolution.

The revolution, which still engages the whole of mankind and poses all the great social issues of the epoch in which we live, arises primarily from the increasing division of labor in ever-widening markets; the machine, the corporation, the concentration of economic control and mass production, are secondary phenomena. When I say that they are secondary, I mean that the inducement to invent and install machines exists only when men have already begun to specialize their industry for a wide market. And while it is true that the machines themselves promote the specialization, the fundamental fact is that machines are not invented until labor is already specialized. The famous inventions in the English textile industry which are so often regarded as the immediate cause of the industrial revolution were made by “practical men, most of them operatives immersed in the details of their craft, brought face to face with some definite difficulty to be overcome, some particular economy desirable to make.”⁹ The process of invention became cumulative as the textile industry expanded. But it is clear enough, I think, that invention began in the one industry which was already most specialized. The same observation holds for the corporation. It did not come into general use as a form of industrial organization until the middle of the nineteenth century when the division of labor was still more advanced.

Only by recognizing the primacy of the division of labor in the modern economy can we, I believe, successfully distinguish between truly progressive and counterfeit progressive phenomena. If we are to find our way through the practical difficulties and the intellectual confusion of our time we must go back to the first principle of the economy in which we live, and fix clearly in our minds that its determining characteristic is the increase of wealth by a mode of production which destroys the self-sufficiency of nations, localities, and individuals, making them deeply and intricately interdependent.

3 The Cultural Lag

For more than a thousand years after the disintegration of the Great Society in the Roman world, the western peoples lived in small, relatively self-contained communities. To that kind of existence our traditional habits and preconceptions, our customs and institutions, have been adapted. Our social intelligence has been shaped to a mode of life which was organized on a small scale, and, in respect to the duration of any particular generation, was static. But the industrial revolution has instituted a way of life organized on a very large scale, with men and communities no longer autonomous but elaborately interdependent, with change no longer so gradual as to be imperceptible, but highly dynamic within the span of each man’s experience. No more profound or pervasive transformation of habits and values and ideas was ever imposed so suddenly on the great mass of mankind.

The whole experience of the epoch since the revolution began, from the diplomacy of the Great Powers to the subtlest and most intimate issues of religion and taste and personal relationship, has been radically affected by this transformation of the way men live. Thus there is no secular government which to-day resembles except in outward form any government of the pre-revolutionary era. Most of the governments that existed in the eighteenth century have been overthrown; some few have been peaceably reconstructed. But all of them have been fundamentally altered. State, law, property, family, church, human conscience, conceptions of right and wrong, of status, of expectation, of need, have all been unsettled. This revolution at the foundation of men’s existence has called for a stupendous readaptation of the human race to a strange and puzzling material and social environment.

The readaptation is, of course, slower than the revolutionary changes, and therefore at all times in this epoch there has been what sociologists call “a cultural lag” — that is to say, men have brought to the solution of present issues ideas and habits appropriate to a situation that no longer exists. Like passengers looking backward from the end of a swiftly moving train, they have seen only the landscape which they have already passed by. Multitudes of men have had to readapt themselves not merely to a new mode of existence but to one in which the newest situation has soon been transformed into a still newer one. It has not been easy, and the sense of spiritual confusion, frustration, and insecurity which has pervaded all of modern culture has truly reflected the misery and the difficulty of the readaptation.

Men have not known whether to bless the new order or to curse it, and whether they did the one or the other has depended upon which aspect of the revolution they chose to dwell upon. To multitudes it has brought a very great improvement of their standard of life; to others a brutal disruption of their habits. Thus to some the nineteenth century seemed a century of progress, to others a century of degradation. Ample testimony could be given to support either view. For the division of labor produced much more wealth. But it also produced a proletariat. The division of labor made men interdependent and therefore founded their prosperity on the principle of peaceable collaboration with reciprocal benefits. But it also made them dangerously insecure against those who did not collaborate.

Thus the revolution has been marked by an endless series of disconcerting paradoxes. There was progress and poverty. There was democracy and insecurity. There was the interdependence of nations and their fiercely competitive imperialism. There was legal equality and social inequality. There was a great moral enlightenment which abolished slavery and caste, enfranchised men and women, purged and elevated the treatment of criminals, provided schools and universities open to all, liberated conscience and thought from the censorship of authority. And, on the other hand, there were the newly rich who were far less attractive lords of creation than the nobility whom they supplanted; there were the multitudes in the great cities, uprooted from the soil, deprived of their ancestral traditions, without significance to dignify their lives or faith to console them.

In the fullest sense of the term, the industrial revolution is a revolution. It is the general revolution of which the specific revolutions from Cromwell’s onward have been incidents. The accelerated phase of the revolution has now lasted for approximately five generations, and while for short periods in favored places there has been some tranquillity, it is certain that it will take many more than five generations to complete the revolution. In much more than half the world the displacement of the self-sufficient economy has just begun. That displacement will continue. No Gandhi can withstand this tide in men’s affairs. Nothing can prevent the whole of mankind from being drawn out of its ancestral isolation into the world-wide economy of interdependent specialists. For the new mode of production is incomparably more efficient in the struggle for survival. The men who adopt it not only grow wealthier than those who do not, but they overrun and dominate those who do not. So the revolution will continue. But since it requires not only an alteration of the economy but a readaptation of human nature and of usage, it will be a long time before men have caught up with their changing circumstances and have acquired the necessary knowledge to remake their habits and their institutions accordingly.

4 The Collectivist Counter-Revolution

And therefore, as the revolutionary transformation proceeds, it must evoke resistance and rebellion at every stage. It evokes resistance and rebellion on the right and on the left — that is to say, among those who possess power and wealth, and among those who do not. The movement of the left is socialistic and tends logically toward communism. The movement of the right, composed of men of property in alliance with statesmen and soldiers, operates through economic nationalism, preemptive imperialism, corporate monopoly, and becomes in its extreme and desperate form what is now called fascism. Though these two movements wage a desperate class struggle, they are, with reference to the great industrial revolution of the modern age, two forms of reaction and counter-revolution. For, in the last analysis, these two collectivist movements are efforts to resist, by various kinds of coercion, the consequences of the increasing division of labor.

In order to demonstrate this thesis, it will be necessary to remind ourselves of the first principles of the new economy which men have begun to practise on a large scale during the past hundred and fifty years.

It is not, as was the ancient economy, regulated by custom. That is to say, wealth is no longer produced by men who inherit from their fathers a plot of land, their station in society, their occupation, or a tradition of craftsmanship. In the modern economy, not only is the occupation of each man much more highly specialized, but, what is more significant, his choice of occupation and his success in practising it are regulated not by established usage but by fluctuating prices established in very extensive markets. The ancient economy may be said to have been one in which production was carried on for use.¹⁰ Men produced directly for their own consumption, or at least for the reasonably fixed and well-known needs of a few regular and identified customers. In the modern economy the personal motive of production is profit — that is, to sell the article for more than it has cost; goods are consigned not to the producer’s own household or even to regular and identified customers, but to a distant and impersonal market.

The prices which a man’s products fetch in those markets determine whether he will prosper or fail — that is to say, whether he has invested his labor and his capital successfully. The market is, therefore, the sovereign regulator of the specialists in an economy which is based o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• BOOK I. THE PROVIDENTIAL STATE
• BOOK II. THE COLLECTIVIST MOVEMENT
• BOOK III THE RECONSTRUCTION OF LIBERALISM
• BOOK IV THE TESTAMENT OF LIBERTY
• Index