ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author believed that between 1848 and 1870 the intellectual climate of western society began to change. Though great corporate capitalists continued to invoke the shibboleths of liberalism when confronted by the collective demands of the workers or the hostile power of popular majorities, yet they were thoroughly imbued with the collectivist spirit through their attachment to protection and to the concentration of control. More than seventy-five years passed before the collectivist movement was dominant in actual affairs, but in this middle period of the nineteenth century it established itself in men's thought. The contemporary world is so thoroughly imbued with the collectivist spirit that at first it seems quixotic to challenge it. Though no doubt most collectivists in western countries hope to stop a long way this side of absolutism, there is nothing in the collectivist principle which marks any stopping place short of the totalitarian state.
