There had been some advances, to be sure, since
Aristotle. There were a few newspapers, and there were books, better
roads perhaps, and better ships. But there was no great advance, and
the political assumptions of the Eighteenth Century had essentially to
be those that had prevailed in political science for two thousand
years. The pioneer democrats did not possess the material for
resolving the conflict between the known range of man's attention and
their illimitable faith in his dignity.
Their assumptions antedated not only the modern newspaper, the
world-wide press services, photography and moving pictures, but, what
is really more significant, they antedated measurement and record,
quantitative and comparative analysis, the canons of evidence, and the
ability of psychological analysis to correct and discount the
prejudices of the witness. I do not mean to say that our records are
satisfactory, our analysis unbiased, our measurements sound. I do mean
to say that the key inventions have been made for bringing the unseen
world into the field of judgment. They had not been made in the time
of Aristotle, and they were not yet important enough to be visible for
political theory in the age of Rousseau, Montesquieu, or Thomas
Jefferson. In a later chapter I think we shall see that even in the
latest theory of human reconstruction, that of the English Guild
Socialists, all the deeper premises have been taken over from this
older system of political thought.
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