ABSTRACT
The thought of seeing history in the terms of Dominations and Powers came to me soon after I had completed writing The Life of Reason. Before the war of 1914–1918 I had set down various paragraphs or short essays on the subject. Others were included in my Soliloquies in England, written during that war; but much as the conflict occupied my thoughts from day to day, it left hardly any residuum of greater enlightenment. I soon busied myself with other things; yet sometimes a philosophical argument would ramble into reflections which, on revision, I would take out and put aside under the title of Dominations and Powers. A mass of manuscript accumulated in this way during some thirty years. There was therefore no unity of plan, no consecutive development, in my notes, although the guiding intuition remained, and became clearer and clearer with the lapse of years. Finally, however, a more vivid apprehension of the actual impact of Dominations and Powers in the political world was forced upon me by the war of 1939–1945; for I lived through it in Rome in monastic retirement, with the visible and audible rush of bombing aeroplanes over my head, and of invading armies before my eyes. Most pertinent and instructive, also, has been the experience of the after-effects of that war. The country where I was living was traversed by two foreign armies nominally friendly to it; one came to defend and the other to liberate it; and both united in pillaging it and leaving it in misery and ruins.
