ABSTRACT
A Discussion of the axioms and postulates of liberal democracies need not aim at the majesty and elevation of a treatise on the philosophy of government, to be put on the lofty shelves of libraries along with Plato’s Republic and Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois. Nor should it. For its object is not so much to rebuild the foundations of the art of government as to criticize the ideas which circulate in modern democracies and which, in most cases, are to the principles laid down by political philosophers what depreciated paper currency is to gold. Whatever our preferences and opinions as to the way a community should live, whatever our political ethics, countries live their own way, i.e. they obey the laws of their own political organisms. The should-be in politics is, at best, but one of the factors which go to the shaping of the is, or rather, of the will-be. Collective life is a natural phenomenon which has its own laws. A scientific study of it could be attempted as a branch of psychology. While other provinces of nature were lost to the scholastics and theoreticians and came under the sway of humbler but more powerful empiricists, collective human life remained, and still is, to a great extent, in undisputed possession of the philosophers, who apply to it their favourite preconceptions. Such preconceptions enter, like everything else, into the general flow of collective life. They are not, therefore, altogether ineffective. They act on some of the human units which go to the making of society, yet they add but little to the knowledge of the facts of that collective life which they aim at regulating. Not till a natural science of collective life has been created, a science more closely connected with psychology and even with physiology than with ethics or law, not till such a science has found its Newton and its Einstein, can we expect to enter into a really human era of history, an era in which collective life evolves—or tries to evolve—according to reason. Till then, collective life will drift along as animal or mineral life, in utter passivity and ignorance of the laws which govern it.
