Suchergebnisse

THE editors of the Review of Politics have asked me to do something that is indicated by the title of this informal essay. It is something that I have long had in mind. Substantially I am asked to assess after the passage of almost twenty years the thesis laid down in The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. Ordinarily the biography of a book or of a writer's ideas had better, in good taste, be left to others. But I hope that I may be forgiven some notes on the nature of that work, because of their relevance not only to this return to the subject, but because of their relevance as well to what seems to me to be a general change in scholarly attitude toward a central problem: the place of ethics and the place of science in that study which Aristotle named by one word, Politics. It is peculiarly a pleasure to contribute this revision of a position to a journal devoted to the high cultivation of that Aristotelian conception. The distinction already achieved by the Review of Politics is in itself a witness of the changed temper of contemporary thought to a deep concern with political values.

The traditional system of international law is based on the distinction between the law of peace and the law of war. In the formative period of international law, thinkers were fully aware of the problems hidden behind this classification. Positivist writers took over these conceptions, framed against the background of a philosophical vista of society. Yet in their hands these terms lost their original significance. It is the purpose of this investigation to throw light on this process and to consider the relevance of this dichotomy into peace and war for the positivist and sociological approaches to international law.

Most economic theorists nowadays appreciate that particular theories are peculiarly relevant to particular historical situations, and gain their chief importance from this relevance. In place of one absolute set of propositions, economists are becoming accustomed to the idea that their theoretical arsenal needs to include, for example, weapons suited to conditions of approximately full employment, and different weapons suited to conditions of depression. The dependence of theory on conditions properly goes further than this. We need to ask whether our fundamental concepts are appropriate to the historical conditions of the time to which they are to be applied.

When Alexis de Tocqueville, a perceptive young French aristocrat, was thrown against the turmoil of the nineteenth century, he became a student of social structure and a political philosopher. By background he was Catholic in faith and of the nobility in outlook. But he faced revolution in France and everspreading social change in European society. An unwilling child of the French Revolution, he was led to see broad meaning behind the passing events of the political hour. This ability to extrapolate into the future the present incident permitted him to see many of the social trends which have come to tragic cacophony in the wars of the twentieth century. No one today is ashamed to read the provocative pages Tocqueville wrote, and all who read him find relevance to the present world.

When the earliest cooperative units were formed, the members seem to have assumed that the step had relevance only for themselves and only for their economic good. At Fenwick in Scotland
eleven men agreed in 1769 "to take what money we have in our Box and buy what victual may be thought Nessassar to sell for the benefit of our society." The sole end was the economic benefit of the little group. Near the close of the century, "the poor inhabitants" of Hull in England set up a cooperative mill. The harvest had been lean, and the price of flour was very high, so that the people felt "much trouble and sorrow" in their persons and families, and thought they should take every care to preserve themselves "from the invasion of covetous and merciless men in the future." They also asked the mayor to give something toward "this great enterprise."

The world as Aristotle and his contemporaries saw it was already a spent world. Its original creativeness had flowered during the sixth and fifth centuries in an outburst of discovery and invention in political and social as well as in literary fields. By the middle of the fourth century, it was the turn of the philosopher to take the results of the discoveries, and synthesize and publicize them in such a way that all the Greek communities should be enabled to work out the combination of forms of society and government best suited to their needs. The study made by Aristotle of the states of his own day maintained its authority across empire and into nationalism, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, up to the threshold of our own modern capitalistic civilization. From that time, however, a new era of inventions seems to have erected an insurmountable barrier between the old and the new, and the relevance of earlier thought for modern problems is called in question.

Recent developments in economic theory are especially rich in policy implications for a single country seeking to maximize its welfare through international trade. They make necessary a restatement of certain parts of the ancient controversy over free trade and protection; namely, those affected by the theory of employment and the theory of imperfect competition.There is little to add to the broader classical conclusions on the maximization of welfare in the world economy, or to the general, if cautious, acceptance of the infant industries argument. However, the former must be qualified in the light of the theory of imperfect competition, particularly the theory of monopsony, and the implications of decreasing costs; while the latter depends on technological considerations normally impounded in ceteris paribus even in modern value theory.The special relevance of any of these universes of discourse in terms of which international trade policy may be discussed and evaluated is itself a controversial point. If, for example, a reasonable and steady approximation to full employment is considered of paramount importance, the practical alternatives of fiscal and international policy are considerably narrowed. The most efficient allocation of resources among alternative uses may have to wait on policies for getting all available human resources into some use. At another level, the optimum allocation of resources for one country may be defined for a national real income made possible by exploiting its neighbours. It is the duty of the economist, not to ignore or to condemn these judgments, but to show how the desired ends may be achieved in practice, and to point out any inconsistencies among ends of policy simultaneously desired.