ABSTRACT
The social philosophy of Albert Einstein is the highest form that humanism as a philosophy has achieved in our century. The nature of humanism, its calculated incompleteness, its pronounced eclecticism, prevented Einstein from arriving at a unified statement of the issue of war and peace. Einstein moved against subjective ethical pronouncements embodied in such thinking. In so doing, he found himself unable to accept, as a number of his colleagues had, a morality which enshrined the most violent expressions of social Darwinism. Peace served as a human expression of his cosmic idealism. And for this reason the idealism of Einstein rarely tarnished. Unlike so many other political theorists, his idealism reflected a genuine humility, an almost Spinozistic intoxication before the wondrous universe. Einstein went beyond a statement of the moral dangers posed by invention and technology to the continued existence of the human race. The scientific enterprise as Einstein conceived it was a profoundly human enterprise.
