which they believed less subject to earthquakes, or they would turn their cities into impregnable bomb shelters.
The compounding of improbabilities is so great in this projected return to an earlier economy that we call it an economic impossibility.
But even suppose the economically “impossible” happened? How could this agrarian economy be stabilized? The free market would still exist. Small commercial enterprises would exist. The human inventive spirit would not remain dormant. New needs would spring up as effects of existing manufacture and as causes of expanding manufacture. There would be wage labour. It would be legally free. The demand for it would make itself felt in the offer of more money than could be made on the farm. An expanding market for the products of industry would be set up. An industrial revolution would begin again. The small cities would become large cities. In short, the agrarian economy would be booming on its way toward industrial capitalism once more.
Left to itself, the social relationships between human beings would acquire, if not the same, then a similar character to that they had when the call for a return to the past was sounded. That is an illustration of what is meant by a historic-economic necessity.
But the system would not have to be left to itself! Have we not admitted that a historic-economic necessity is not absolute? True, but in that case, all sorts of controls and restrictions on the glorious freedoms of the agrarian economy would have to be enforced. Those who were so fearful of the encroachment of the State on the freedoms of advanced capitalism would have to encroach just as much on the freedom of the agrarian society in order to prevent it from developing in the way it historically did develop. The philosophy and practice of democracy would be sacrificed for a standard of living which would be lower than the existing standards, and far lower than the potential living standard of an industrialized culture that has not yet lost its democracy.
5. We turn now to the present situation in which the problem is to preserve the democratic way of life, as described in the previous chapter, in an industrial economy moving toward collectivism. This illustration is more topical. If the cultural and political horrors of collectivism as practised in totalitarian countries of the world were the inescapable concomitants of
