fectly clear about this characteristic of Marx:
"He admired most of all, perhaps, that fine devo-
tion to truth as he understood it, and disregard
of popularity which marked Owen's life. Con-
tempt for popular opinion was one of his most
strongly developed characteristics. He was fond,
says Liebknecht, of quoting as his motto the de-
fiant line of Dante, with which he afterwards con-
cluded his preface to 'Das Kapital' :
'Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.' "
It is to Marx's everlasting credit that he set
the intellectual standard of socialism on the most
vigorous intellectual basis he could find. He knew
better than to be satisfied with loose thinking
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and fairly good intentions. He knew that the
vast change he contemplated needed every ounce
of intellectual power that the world possessed.
A fine boast it was that socialism was equipped
with all the culture of the age. I wonder what
he would have thought of an enthusiastic socialist
candidate for Governor of New York who could
write that *'untll men are free the world has no
need of any more literary efforts, of any more
paintings, of any more poems. It is better to
have said one word for the emancipation of the
race than to have written the greatest novel of
the times. . . . The world doesn't need any
more literature."
I will not venture a guess as to what Marx
would have said, but I know what v/e must say:
^'Without a literature the people is dumb, with-
out novels and poems, plays and criticism, without
books of philosophy, there is neither the intelli-
gence to plan, the imagination to conceive, nor the
understanding of a common purpose. Without
culture you can knock down governments, over-
turn property relations, you can create excitement,
but you cannot create a genuine revolution in the
lives of men." The reply of the worklngmen in
1847 to Cabet's proposal that they found Icaria,
"a new terrestrial Paradise," in Texas if you
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REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
please, contains this interesting objection: ''Be-
cause although those comrades who intend to
emigrate with Cabet may be eager Communists,
yet they still possess too many of the faults and
prejudices of present-day society by reason of
their past education to be able to get rid of them
at once by joining Icaria."
That simple statement might be taken to heart
by all the reformers and socialists who insist
that the people are all right, that only institutions
are wrong. The politics of reconstruction require
a nation vastly better educated, a nation freed
from its slovenly ways of thinking, stimulated by
wider interests, and jacked up constantly by the
sharpest kind of criticism. It is puerile to say
that institutions must be changed from top to
bottom and then assume that their victims are
prepared to make the change. No amount of
charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will
make a democracy out of an Illiterate people.
Those portions of i\merica where there are voting
booths but no schools cannot possibly be de-
scribed as democracies. Nor can the person who
reads one corrupt newspaper and then goes out
to vote make any claim to having registered his
will. He may have a will, but he has not used it.
For politics whose only ideal is the routine, it
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS
is just as well that men shouldn't know what they
want or how to express It. Education has always
been a considerable nuisance to the conservative
Intellect. In the Southern States, culture among
the negroes Is openly deplored, and I do not blame
any patriarch for dreading the education of
women. It Is out of culture that the substance of
real revolutions Is made. If by some magic force
you could grant women the vote and then keep
them from schools and colleges, newspapers and
lectures, the suffrage would be no more effective
than a Blue Law against kissing your wife on Sun-
day. It is democratic machinery with an educated
citizenship behind it that embodies all the fears
of the conservative and the hopes of the radical.
Culture Is the name for what people are In-
terested In, their thoughts, their models, the books
they read and the speeches they hear, their table-
talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and
scientific training, the values they appreciate, the
quality of life they admire. All conjmunltles have
a culture. It Is the climate of their civilization.
Without a favorable culture political schemes are
a mere imposition. They will not work without
a people to work them.
The real preparation for a creative states-
manship lies deeper than parties and legislatures.
S06
REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
It Is the work of publicists and educators, scien-
tists, preachers and artists. Through all the
agents that make and popularize thought must
come a bent of mind Interested In Invention and
freed from the authority of Ideas. The demo-
cratic culture must, with critical persistence, make
man the measure of all things. I have tried again
and again to point out the Iconoclasm that Is con-
stantly necessary to avoid the distraction that
comes of Idolizing our own methods of thought.
Without an unrelaxing effort to center the mind
upon human uses, human purposes, and human
results. It drops Into idolatry and becomes hostile
to creation.
The democratic experiment Is the only one that
requires this wilful humanistic culture. An ab-
solutism like Russia's Is served better when the
people accept their Ideas as authoritative and
piously sacrifice humanity to a non-human pur-
pose. An aristocracy flourishes where the peo-
ple find a vicarious enjoyment In admiring the
successes of the ruling class. That prevents
men from developing their own interests and
looking for their own successes. No doubt
Napoleon was well content with the philosophy
of those guardsmen who drank his health before
he executed them.
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS
But those excellent soldiers would make dismal
citizens. A view of life In which man obediently
allows himself to be made grist for somebody
else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for
the work of self-government. You cannot long
deny external authorities In government and hold
to them for the rest of life, and it is no accident
that the nineteenth century questioned a great deal
more than the sovereignty of kings. The revolt
went deeper and democracy In politics was only
an aspect of it. The age might be compared
to those years of a boy's life when he becomes
an atheist and quarrels with his family. The
nineteenth century was a bad time not only for
kings, but for priests, the classics, parental auto-
crats, indissoluble marriage, Shakespeare, the
Aristotelian Poetics and the validity of logic. If
disobedience Is man's original virtue, as Oscar
Wilde suggested, it was an extraordinarily vir-
tuous century. Not a little of the revolt was an
exuberant rebellion for its own sake. There were
also counter-revolutions, deliberate returns to
orthodoxy, as in the case of Chesterton. The
transvaluation of values was performed by many
hands into all sorts of combinations.
There have been other periods of revolution.
Heresy is just a few hours younger than ortho-
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REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
doxy. Disobedience Is certainly not the discovery
of the nineteenth century. But the quality of it
is. I believe Chesterton has hold of an essential
truth when he says that this Is the first time men
have boasted of their heresy. The older rebels
claimed to be more orthodox than the Church,
to have gone back to the true authorities. The
radicals of recent times proclaim that there Is no
orthodoxy, no doctrine that men must accept with-
out question.
Without doubt they deceive themselves mightily.
They have their invisible popes, called Art,
Nature, Science, with regalia and ritual and a
catechism. But they don't mean to have them.
They mean to be self-governing In their spiritual
lives. And this intention is the half-perceived
current which runs through our age and galvanizes
so many queer revolts. It would be interesting
to trace out the forms It has taken, the abortive
cults It has tried and abandoned. In another
connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of
syndicalism. It would not be difficult to find a
similar assertion In the feminist agitation. From
Mrs. Gilman^s profound objections against a
"man-made" world to the lady who would like to
vote about her taxes, there Is a feehng that woman
must be something more than a passive creature.
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS
Walter Pater might be quoted in his conclusion
to the effect that "the theory or Idea or system
which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of
experience, In consideration of some Interest Into
which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory
we have not Identified with ourselves, or what
Is only conventional, has no real claim upon us."
The desire for self-direction has made a thou-
sand philosophies as contradictory as the tempera-
ments of the thinkers. A storehouse of Illustra-
tion Is at hand: Nietzsche advising the creative
man to bite off the head of the serpent which
Is choking him and become "a transfigured being,
a light-surrounded being, that laughed^' One
might point to Stirner's absolute Individualism or
turn to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of
every man with his catalogue of defects and vir-
tues. Some of these men have cursed each other
roundly: Georges Sorel, for example, who urges
worklngmen to accept none of the bourgeois
morality, and becomes most eloquent when he
attacks other revolutionists.
I do not wish to suggest too much unanimity in
the hundreds of artists and thinkers that are
making the thought of our times. There Is a
kind of "professional reconciler" of opposltes
who likes to lump all the prominent rebels to-
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REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
gether and refer to them affectionately as **us
radicals." Yet that there is a common Impulse
in modern thought which strives towards au-
tonomy is true and worth remarking. In some
men it Is half-conscious, In others a minor in-
fluence, but almost no one of weight escapes the
contagion of It entirely. It Is a new culture that
is being prepared. Without it there would to-day
be no demand for a creative statesmanship
which turns its back upon the routine and the
taboo, kings and idols, and non-human purposes.
It does more. It Is making the atmosphere In
which a humanly centered politics can flourish.
The fact that this culture Is multiform and often
contradictory is a sign that more and more of
the interests of life are finding expression. We
should rejoice at that, for profusion means fer-
tility; where a dead uniformity ceases, invention
and Ingenuity flourish.
Perhaps the Insistence on the need of a culture
in statecraft will seem to many people an old-
fashioned delusion. Among the more rigid
socialists and reformers it is not customary to
spend much time discussing mental habits. That,
they think, was made unnecessary by the dis-
covery of an economic basis of civilization. The
destinies of society are felt to be too solidly set
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS
in industrial conditions to allow any cultural direc-
tion. Where there Is no choice, of what Im-
portance Is opinion?
All propaganda Is, of course, a practical tribute
to the value of culture. However Inevitable the
process may seem, all socialists agree that Its In-
evitability should be fully realized. They teach
at one time that men act from class Interests:
but they devote an enormous amount of energy
to making men conscious of their class. It evi-
dently matters to that supposedly inevitable
progress whether men are aware of It. In short,
the most hardened socialist admits choice and
deliberation, culture and Ideals Into his working
faith. He may talk as if there were an Iron
determinism, but his practice is better than his
preachment.
Yet there are necessities In social life. To all
the purposes of politics It is settled, for instance,
that the trust will never be "unscrambled" into
small competing businesses. We say in our argu-
ment that a return to the days of the stage-coach
is Impossible or that "you cannot turn back the
hands of the clock." Now man might return to
the stage-coach If that seemed to him the supreme
goal of all his effort, just as anyone can follow
Chesterton's advice to turn back the hands of
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REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
the clock if he pleases. But nobody can recover
his yesterdays no matter how much he abuses the
clock, and no man can expunge the memory of
railroads though all the stations and engines were
dismantled.
"From this survival of the past," says Bergson,
*'it follows that consciousness cannot go through
the same state twice." This is the real necessity
that makes any return to the imagined glories of
other days an idle dream. Graham Wallas re-
marks that those who have eaten of the tree of
knowledge cannot forget — *'Mr. Chesterton cries
out, like the Cyclops in the play, against those
who complicate the life of man, and tells us to
eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grapenuts on
principle.' But since we cannot unlearn our
knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us to
eat caviare on principle." The binding fact we
must face in all our calculations, and so in politics
too, is that you cannot recover what is passed.
That is why educated people are not to be pressed
into the customs of their ignorance, why women
who have reached out for more than *'Kirche,
Kinder und Kiiche" can never again be entirely
domestic and private in their lives. Once people
have questioned an authority their faith has lost
its naivete. Once men have tasted Inventions
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS
like the trust they have learned something which
cannot be annihilated. I know of one reformer
who devotes a good deal of his time to intimate
talks with powerful conservatives. He explains
them to themselves: never after do they exercise
their power with the same unquestioning ruthless-
ness.
Life is an Irreversible process and for that
reason Its future can never be a repetition of the
past. This insight we owe to Bergson. The ap-
plication of it to politics is not difficult because
politics Is one of the interests of life. We can
learn from him In what sense we are bound.
"The finished portrait is explained by the features
of the model, by the nature of the artist, by
colors spread out on the palette; but even with
the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not
even the artist, could have foreseen exactly what
the portrait would be, for to predict it would
have been to produce it before It was pro-
duced. . . ." The future is explained by the
economic and social institutions which were pres-
ent at its birth : the trust and the labor union, all
the ''movements" and institutions, will condition
it. "Just as the talent of the painter Is formed
or deformed — In any case, is modified — under
the very Influence of the work he produces, so
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REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
each of our states, at the moment of Its issue,
modifies our personality, being Indeed the new
form we are just assuming. It is then right to
say that what we do depends on what we are;
but it Is necessary to add also, that we are, to
a certain extent, what we do, and that we are
creating ourselves continually."
What I have called culture enters Into political
life as a very powerful condition. It Is a way
of creating ourselves. Make a blind struggle
luminous, drag an unconscious impulse Into the
open day, see that men are aware of their neces-
sities, and the future Is In a measure controlled.
The culture of to-day Is for the future an his-
torical condition. That Is Its political Importance.
The mental habits we are forming, our philoso-
phies and magazines, theaters, debates, schools,
pulpits and newspapers become part of an active
past which as Bergson says ^'follows us at every
instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed
from our earliest Infancy is there, leaning over
the present which is about to join it, pressing
against the portals of consciousness that would
fain leave it outside."
Socialists claim that because the McNamara
brothers had no "class-consciousness," because
they were without a philosophy of society and an
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS
understanding of the labor movement their sense
of wrong was bound to seek out dynamite. That
is a profound truth backed by abundant evidence.
If you turn, for example, to Spargo's Life of
Karl Marx you see that all through his career
Marx struggled with the mere insurrectionists.
It was the men without the Marxian vision of
growth and discipline who were forever trying
to lead little marauding bands against the govern-
ments of Europe. The fact is worth pondering:
the Marxian socialists, openly declaring that all
authority is a temporary manifestation of social
conditions, have waged what we must call a war
of culture against the powers of the world. They
have tried to arouse In workingmen the conscious-
ness of an historical mission — the patience of that
labor is one of the wonders of the age. But the
McNamaras had a culture that could help them
not at all. They were Catholics, Democrats and
old-fashioned trade-unionists. Religion told them
that authority was absolute and eternal, politics
that Jefferson had said about all there was to say,
economics Insisted that the struggle between labor
and capital was an everlasting see-saw. But life
told them that society was brutal: an episode like
the shirtwaist factory fire drove them to blasphemy
and dynamite.
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REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
Those bombs at Los Angeles, assassination and
terrorism, are compounded of courage, indigna-
tion and Ignorance. Civilization has much to fear
from the blind class antagonisms it fosters; but
the preaching of "class consciousness," far from
being a fomenter of violence, must be recognized
as the civilizing influence of culture upon economic
interests.
Thoughts and feelings count. We live in a
revolutionary period and nothing is so important
as to be aware of It. The measure of our self-
consciousness will more or less determine whether
we are to be the victims or the masters of change.
Without philosophy we stumble along. The old
routines and the old taboos are breaking up any-
way, social forces are emerging which seek au-
tonomy and struggle against slavery to non-human
purposes. We seem to be moving towards some
such statecraft as I have tried to suggest. But
without knowledge of It that progress will be
checkered and perhaps futile. The dynamics for
a splendid human civilization are all about us.
They need to be used. For that there must be
a culture practiced in seeking the inwardness of
impulses, competent to ward off the idols of its
own thought, hospitable to novelty and sufliciently
inventive to harness power.
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A PREFACE TO POLITICS
Why this age should have come to be what It
Is, why at this particular time the whole drift of
thought should be from authority to autonomy
would be an interesting speculation. It is one of
the ultimate questions of politics. It is like ask-
ing why Athens in the Fifth Century B. C. was
singled out as the luminous point of the Western
World. We do not know enough to cut under
such mysteries. We can only begin to guess why
there was a Renaissance, why in certain centuries
man seems extraordinarily creative. Perhaps the
Modern Period with its flexibility, sense of change,
and desire for self-direction is a liberation due to
the great surplus of wealth. Perhaps the ease
of travel, the popularizing of knowledge, the
break-down of frontiers have given us a new in-
terest in human life by showing how temporary
are all its instruments. Certainly placid or morose
acceptance is undermined. If men remain slaves
either to ideas or to other men, it will be because
they do not know they are slaves. Their intention
Is to be free. Their desire is for a full and ex-
pressive life and they do not relish a lop-sided
and lamed humanity. For the age is rich with
varied and generous passions.
318
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