ABSTRACT
When the history of our era comes to be written—if there are any survivors to write it—its tragedy may lie not in the men of destructive will whose souls were coils of wild serpents and who used the arena of history for their mortal embrace, but in the men of good will who willed the ends they sought and could not will the means to achieve them. The central tragedy of our age, in short, lies not alone in fascism; it lies even more in the liberalism which has thus far proved feckless to cope with social collapse and the fascism that follows it. Liberalism is at once an economic doctrine, a political philosophy, an intellectual attitude. The classical liberal has been greatly maligned, but mostly he has maligned himself. He has chosen to talk in terms of universal generalizations rather than of specific realities.
