october 1932 Of Liberty Benedetto Croce Volume 11 • Number 1 The contents of Foreign Affairs are copyrighted.©1932 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this material is permitted only with the express written consent of Foreign Affairs. Visit www.foreignaffairs.com/permissions for more information. FOREIGN AFFAIRS Vol. 11 OCTOBER, 1932 No. 1 OF LIBERTY By Benedetto Croce we BETWEEN the orderly Europe that used to know and the distracted Europe of today is fixed the great gulf of the World War. We remember the old Europe with its ease riches, its flourishing trade, its abundance of goods, its of sense we see new ? life, its bold of security; today the Europe impoverished, discouraged, crisscrossed with high tariff walls, own too each nation occupied solely with its affairs, distraught to pay heed to the things of the spirit and tormented by the fear worse come. once of to Gone is the gay international society the or com pride of Europe's capitals; extinct, almost so, is the old of munity thought, art, civilization. How many astounding changes there have been in frontiers and in political relationships! In the place of the Germany of the Hohenzollerns we see the Ger man Republic; Austria-Hungary has been dismembered and cut up into new states; French sway has been reestablished over the provinces lost in 1870, and the Italian frontiers now include the unredeemed territories and extend to the Brenner; Poland has been reconstituted; Russia is ruled, not by the Tsars but by the Soviets; and the United States has become a dominant factor in European policy. we to Yet if pass from externals essentials and try to identify the forces now at we soon two controlling work, discern that these so Europes, dissimilar in appearance, have continuity and homo we out a geneity. When leave superficial impressions and make careful we the same analysis detect characteristics in both, though in the Europe of today they have been exaggerated by the war. same same are The proclivities and the spiritual conflicts there, though aggravated by the general intellectual decay which was to a war be expected after which counted its victims by the millions, accustomed its survivors to violence, and destroyed Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Foreign Affairs ® www.jstor.org 2 FOREIGN AFFAIRS the habit of critical, constructive and concentrated mental labor. Nationalistic and imperialistic impulses have seized the vic are torious nations because they victors, and the vanquished because they are vanquished; while the new states add new na new to tionalisms, imperialisms the list. Impatience with free in to or stitutions has led open masked dictatorships, and, where not to dictatorships do exist, the desire for them. Liberty, which the war was a or at a before faith, least routine acceptance, has now men even departed from the hearts of if it still survives in an certain institutions. In its place is atavistic libertarism which more ever than ponders disorder and destruction, gives rein to and and sterile extravagant impulses, produces spectacular works. Indifferent and contemptuous, its followers scorn meditative a reverent and loving labor, labor with affection for the past a and courageous mastery of the future. They scorn actions which spring from the heart and speak to the heart, speculations which on a hold the germs of truth, history based realization of all that man has achieved by painful struggle, poetry which is beautiful. name Under the of socialism, communism had already been introduced into the political life and institutions of Europe be war. fore the Now it has reappeared, crude and disruptive. Lib as eralism it ridicules something naively moralistic. Like atavism, a into which it often blends, this communism is sterile thing that art: to kills thought, religion and seeking subjugate them to its own purposes, it can only destroy them. All the distortions and decrepit sophistries of historical materialism have reappeared in as were the current opinions and theories of the day if they new man a and full of promise, although any with slight knowledge of criticism and the history of ideas passed judgment upon them long have taken on an air of and ago. They novelty modernness merely because, although originally introduced by Europe to Russia, now come out are more they of Russia; if anything they immature and shallow than ever; but in this age of unprecedented callow ness and crudity they gain unprecedented credence. Catholicism, war to new moreover, which before the sought draw strength from the forces of irrationalism and mysticism, has been gathering once into its fold many weak and bewildered souls. Thus again is heard that chorus of pessimism and decadence which echoed through pre-war literature, this time announcing the decline of race western civilization and of the human itself. According to OF LIBERTY 3 to these prophets it is about to sink back the level of beasts after to man. having failed reach the estate of All these are facts, and it is useless to deny them or to say that are they true only of certain people in certain countries. Like the are common to situation from which they spring they all Europe are and all the world. And since they facts, they must have a function to fill in the of the human and in so development? spirit cial and human progress if not as direct creators of new values, at as resources then least and stimuli for the deepening and broad ening of old values. This function, whatever it may be, will be understood and described only by the future historian. He will as a we have before him completed story the movement in which are now involved and its subsequent developments. We cannot understand it or even attempt to describe it as a whole because we are we part of it. Being in it, moving with it, can, it is true, observe and understand many of its aspects, but that is all. us And what practical moral is there for each of in the fact that we cannot know the future? This: that we must take part in on not waste our what is going about us, and forces in the contem we plation of the unknowable, that must act, to the degree that our each of us can, as conscience and duty command. Those who in disregard of the ancient admonition of Solon strive to under a stand and judge life "before it is finished," and who lose them on selves in conjecture and surmise, should be their guard lest a snare a these digressions into the unknown prove set by bad demon to them from their " keep goal. a Not history of the future" (as the old thinkers used to define a prophecy), but history of the past which is summed up in the we our present, is what need for work, for our action. And what we need most at the moment is to examine, or at least to review, are those ideals which generally accepted today. We must dis cover to or or whether they contain the power dissolve surpass correct the ideals which we ourselves hold; so that thereafter we or our may change modify ideals, and in any event reestablish a them upon surer, sounder foundation. a The ideal of transcendental system of truth, and, corollary to a on it, of system of government from high, exercised on earth a a by vicar and represented by church, has not yet acquired the intellectual proof which past ages found it to lack. Like all obvious statements one runs this the risk of seeming ungenerous. None the a less, it is fact that the spiritual impulse which has prompted many 4 FOREIGN AFFAIRS or to persons to return to Catholicism take refuge in it (or in similar a if less venerable and authoritative havens) is merely craving, a amid the turmoil of clashing and changing ideals, for truth that is a some cases fixed and rule of life that is imposed from above. In a itmay have no nobler basis than fear and renunciation, childish terror in the presence of the perception that all truth is absolute and at the same time relative. But a moral ideal cannot conform to the needs of the discouraged and the fearful. Nor can a moral ideal conform to the purposes of those who are drunk with action for action's sake; for action thus conceived a leaves only nausea, profound indifference toward all that has an stirred the human race, and incapacity for objective work. Hu manity has drunk deep of nationalism and imperialism and the as taste of them is already bitter gall: invent amariorem feile. Those who love action for its own sake still rage on. But where is their are serenity of soul, their joy in life? The best of them enveloped mass are raw in gloom; the great of them merely and stupid. Communism, it is the fashion to claim, has passed from theory to and is inRussia. But it is practice being ?applied being practised not as communism but in with its inner contradiction ? keeping as a form of autocracy, as its critics had always predicted would are even be the case. Under it the people of Russia denied that faint breath of freedom which to obtain under the they managed " autocracy of the Tsars. The abolition of the State, that transition to from the r?gime of necessity the r?gime of liberty" about which Marx has not taken Communism has not theorized,? place.