ABSTRACT
During the fateful summer of 1938 the author began writing a book in an effort to come to terms in his own mind and heart with the mounting disorder in our Western society. The expansion and development during the peaceful decades had wrought, as Graham Wallas pointed out on the eve of the war, "a general change of social scale", and that change of scale had revolutionary consequences. The consequences were disastrous and revolutionary. The democracies became incapacitated to wage war for rational ends and to make a peace which would be observed or could be enforced. The governments — which were increasingly democratic, liberal and humane— were spared the necessity of dealing with the hard issues of war and peace, of security and solvency, of constitutional order and revolution. The existing governments had exhausted their imperium — their authority to bind and their power to command.
