ABSTRACT
The waging of war must be authoritarian and collectivist. The question the authors must now consider is whether a system which is essential to the conduct of war can be adapted to the civilian ideal of peace and plenty. Individual oligarchs might, of course, be held accountable for breaches of the law just as generals can be court-martialed. The search for security and a rational society, if it seeks salvation through political authority, ends in the most irrational form of government imaginable — in the dictatorship of casual oligarchs, who have no hereditary title, no constitutional origin or responsibility, who cannot be replaced except by violence. Because a planned society must be one in which the people obey their rulers, there can be no plan to find the planners: the selection of the despots who are to make society so rational and so secure has to be left to the insecurity of irrational chance.
