martyrdom on barricades and battle-field and gallows; their gaze is set upon a political and social other-world, and dry sober criticism seems base, impious, worthy of death.
But for this very reason documents like the Contrat Social and the Communist Manifesto are engines of highest power in the hands of forceful men who have come to the top in party life and know how to form and to use the convictions of the dominated masses.[1]
The power that these abstract ideals possess, however, scarcely extends in time beyond the two centuries that belong to party politics, and their end comes not from refutation, but from boredom — which has killed Rousseau long since and will shortly kill Marx. Men finally give up, not this or that theory, but the belief in theory of any kind and with it the sentimental optimism of an eighteenth century that imagined that unsatisfactory actualities could be improved by the application of concepts. When Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries defined and blended the various kinds of Classical constitution so as to obtain a wise and beautiful resultant, all the world listened, and Plato himself tried to transform Syracuse in accordance with an ideological recipe — and sent the city downhill to its ruin.[2] It appears to me equally certain that it was philosophical experimentation of this kind that put the Chinese southern states out of condition and delivered them up to the imperialism of Tsin.[3] The Jacobin fanatics of liberty and equality delivered France, from the Directory onward, into the hands of Army and Bourse for ever, and every Socialistic oubreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism. But when Cicero wrote his De re publica for Pompey, and Sallust his two comminations for Cæsar, nobody any longer paid attention. In Tiberius Gracchus we may discover perhaps an influence derived from the Stoic enthusiast Blossius, who later committed suicide after having similarly brought Aristonicus of Pergamum to ruin;[4] but in the first century B.C. theories had become a threadbare school-exercise, and thenceforward power and power alone mattered.
For us, too — let there be no mistake about it — the age of theory is drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism all arose between about 1750 and 1850. That of Marx is already half a century old, and it has had no successor. Inwardly it means, with its materialist view of history, that Nationalism has reached its extreme logical conclusion; it is therefore an end-term. But, as belief in Rousseau's Rights of Man lost its force from (say)
- ↑ P. 18, et seq.
- ↑ For the story of this tragic experiment, sec Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., § 987, et seq.
- ↑ See p. 417. The "plans of the Contending States," the Tchun-tsiu-fan-lu, and the biographies of Sze-ma-tsien are full of examples of the pedagogic in interventions of "wisdom" into the province of politics.
- ↑ For this "Sun-state" formed of slaves and day-labourers see Pauly-Wissowa, Realencycl., 2, 961. Similarly, the revolutionary King Cleomenes III of Sparta was likewise under the influence of a Stoic, Sphærus. One can understand why "philosophers and rhetors" — i.e., professional politicians, fantastics and subverters — were expelled again and again by the Roman Senate.
