ABSTRACT
During the Second World War and its aftermath, for all that it found Murry, a man of fifty (and old for his age), isolated already by his convictions and prepared for worst, he was to know ‘a steadily growing sense of inward security, a day-by-day growing wonder of simple human happiness in love. The thesis itself was one that Murry was to reiterate ad nauseam over the ensuing years: namely, that the root-cause of war was man’s failure to master the machine. Instead of couching it in those abstract terms, however, he concentrated on the single, concrete and crucial issue of unemployment – standing army of unemployed in every country being at once the most palpable witness to that failure and the direct agent of Hitler’s ascendancy. The moral was twofold: explicitly, that sole alternative to compulsory and brutal collectivism of the totalitarian states was a voluntary and humane collectivism, informed by a ‘conception of social discipline and social responsibility’.
