The most extreme reflection of nineteenth-century individualism is to be found in the encyclopedic system of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Both his paternal and maternal ancestors were of a long line of English and French non. conformists, dissenters and rebels, and Spencer traces in his Autobiography (1904) his “conspicuous disregard” of political, religious, and social authority to the tradition of independence and dissent so long cherished by his family Spencer's education was informal, unconventional, and highily deficient in the more traditional studies of literature and history. His father encouraged his interest in science and technology, and Spencer became an engineer. However, he practiced his profession for but a few yeats, because he became increasingly interested in political economy, sociology, biology, and philosophy. He was a subeditor of The Economist from 1848 to 1853, and then ventured into a full- time career as a free-lance autho: As early as 1842 Spencer contributed to the Nonconjormist a series of letters called The Proper Sphere of Government, his first major publication. It contains his political philosophy of extreme individualism and laissez faire, which was little, if at all, modified in his writings of the subsequent sixty years. Spencer expresses in The Proper Sphere of Government his belief that “everything in nature has its laws,” organic as well as inorganic matter. Man is subject to laws both in his physical and spiritual essence, and “as with man individually, so with man socially.” Concerning the evils of society, Spencer postulates a “self- adjusting principle” under which evils rectify themselves, provided that no one interferes with the inherent laws of society. In discussing the functions of the state, Spencer is concerned with what the state should not do, rather than what it should do. Maintenance of order and administration of justice are the only two proper realms of government activity, and their purpose is “simply to defend the natural rights of man—to protect person and property.” The state has no business to promote religion, regulate trade and commerce, encourage colonization, aid the poor, or enforce sanitary laws. Spencer went even so far as to deny the state the right to wage war; but, as he says in his Autobiography, his “youthful enthusiasm of two-and twenty” had carried him too far in this respect. Spencer's next major publication was Social Statics (1851). In it he repeats the catalogue of functions the state should not exercise, and he adds the two novel proposals that the state abstain from regulating the currency and that it drop the postal business. Both functions could be carried on more efficiently, Spencer holds, by private competitive enterprise. Like Bentham, Spencer con- siders the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the ultimate standard of measuring conflicting social policies. Unlike Bentham, who was willing to use the machinery of Parliament and administration for the active promotion of reform and improvement, Spencer firmly believes that active interference with the natural laws of society would do much harm and little good. Spencer introduced the concept of evolution into his political and social speculations and held that the same basic law of growth and evolution pervaded the physical, animal, and human worlds. The advance from the simple to the complex is the cardinal principle that Spencer sees exemplified in the origin and624 GREAT PoctTreat THINKERS development of the earth, its flora and fauna, and, finally, in the evolution of human society. Progress consists essentially in the “transformation of the homo- geneous into the heterogeneous.” Because it pervades all nature, animate and inanimate, progress is, therefore, “not an accident, but a necessity.” Translating the newly developing concepts of biolegy into social-science terms, Spencer defines evil as the result of the “non-adaptation of constitution to conditions.” The shrub that dwindles in poor soil or dies when removed to a cold climate. is no different, in principle, from the suffering of man who is in- capable of adapting himself to his environment by means of the faculties he possesses: “Pervading all nature we must see at work a stern discipline, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.” The aged and weak animal is rightly killed by some beast of prey, and such death creates three kinds of happiness: the old animal is spared the suffering of slow and painful starvation, the younger generation can enjoy itself more fully by ridding itself of the burdensome old, and the beasts of prey derive happiness from their activity of killing off the weak and infirm animals. The happiness of humanity is “secured by that same beneficent, though severe discipline, to which the animate creation at lavge is subject: a discipline which is pitiless in the working out of good: a felicity. Pursuing law which never swerves for the avoidance of partial and temporary suffering. Spencer warns against interference with suffering for sentimental reasons because i distorts the operation of social laws even more grievously. Nature remedies incompetence and ignorance by “inconvenience, suffering, and death.” Tf such penalties seem harsh Speucer suggests that in reality they produce happi- ness, because society as a whole benefits from the elimination of the unfit, and the “survival of the fittest” (a phrase coined by Spencer and adopted by Darwin) ensures a constant improvement of the quality of the human race. To relax or suspend the stern discipline of nature slows the progress of society toward the stage in which it will be composed only of those who are well adjusted to their environment, in which the over-all equilibrium between man and his surround- ings will be one of static repose. Those who are ill-adapted to their conditions of existence are on trial -“If they are sufficiently complete to live, they da live, and it is well they should live. If they are not su‘ficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.” Viewing the nature of the state in evolutionary terms, Spencer is little inter- ested in forms of government, such as the traditional distinctions of monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies. The two main forms of state and society, accord- ing to Spencer, are the military state and the industrial state. The military state is the early form of social organization, primitive, barbarian, and geared to Permanent readiness for war. The individual is no more than a means to an end set by the state: victory in war. Society is rigidly organized, and every individual ‘occupies the place assigned to him by the exigencies of militarism and authori- tarian government. Status is the characteristic principle of the military society, and there is little mobility between classes and groups. Spencer defines the mili- tary state as one in which “the army is the nation mobilized while the nation is the quiescent army.LIBERALISM—OLD AND NEW 625 Showing unusual foresight long before total war was a reality, Spencer understood the impact of war on society as a whole; although his analysis of the military state refers to an early stage of society, it anticipates with remark- able accuracy the developments of the twentieth century. In the military state, Spencer says, the military chief is likely to be the political leader, and he keenly perceived the inner relations between militarism and despotism. Chauvinism, m, and imperialism are the ideological inspiration of the military state, and the task of its ecclesiastical body is to teach obedience and discipline as primary civic virtues. The economic activities of the industrial classes are sub- ordinated to the military needs of the state, and the purpose of the economy is not to increase personal happiness through greater material welfare but to enhance collective power through successful conquests. There is considerable cooperation in a military state, but it is enforced and involuntary. Because the security of the state is the primary objective of all public action, there is little room for individual liberty, unorthodoxy, or experimentation. As the military state expands its territory and achieves peace and stability over a long period of time, it gradually evolves into the industrial type of state and society. The latter is in every respect the opposite of the military state. Contract rather than status determines the position of the individual in society, ag well as his opportunity to move upward or downward. The way of life in the industrial state and society is based on voluntary cooperation, and the tendency is toward the gradval eli-tination of coercion in all its forms. Spontaneity, di- versity, variety, and nonconformity characterize the industrial society with its emphasis on the value of the individual as the supreme end of government. The purpose of the industrial society is to assure the maximum liberty.and happiness of its members, whereas the purpose of the military society is to increase its power by rigid regimentation at home and imperialist conquest abroad. In re~ lation to other nations, the industrial society is pacific, eager to exchange the products of labor rather than to acquire wealth by force. Members of the in- dustrial society are therefore antimilitarist, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan, and humanitarian. Free trade within and between nations is the formula of the dustrial society, whereas economic nationalism is the ideal of the military state. The progress from the military to the industrial society meant for Spéncer a simultaneous progressive diminution of government, because government is no more than “proof of still-existing barbarism.” The more men learn to Gooper- ate on a peaceful, voluntary, nonexploiting basis, the closer they approximate the ideal of the industrial state and the less they need government, which will eventually wither away. Spencer did not see that modern industrialism itself produced a new kind of predatory ruthlessness, and that the individual can be reduced to the status of a means rather than an end, regardless of whether the idol that devours him is Glory or Wealth. Spencer failed to see in nineteenth- century capitalism the robber-baron type, whose primary virtue was ruthless nilitancy rather than peaceful cooperation, Yet when Spencer's idealization of industrialism is allowed for, his insight into the fundamental difierence between the military and industrial state is of lasting importance, Around 1900, when the world seemed to be moving in the« GREAT POLITICAL THINKERS direction of expanding world trade and free government, when even the tradi- tional military despotisms of Russia and Germany made their bows to constitu- tional government, Spencer's distinction between the military and the industrial state may have appeared little more than an interesting historical hypothesis, inspired by old-fashioned liberalism, In the second half of the twentieth century, Spencer's basic distinction throws a great deal of light on the political behavior of states. The intimate relation between the internal structure of the state and its foreign aims and policies has been amply demonstrated in this century by the aggressive wars waged by totalitarian military states against free nations, Where the production of wealth has been the predominant objective of a nation, its recard as a member of the world community has, on the whole, been less ag~ gressive and rapacious than that of nations whose internal organization has been thoroughly militarized and regimented for the attainment of power and glory. Spencer's hypothesis about the nature of the state has therefore little to do with the controversy of capitalism versus socialism. The basic issue is not, as Spencer thought, wiio owns the means of production, but what their social pur- pose is: more wealth and happiness for the individual members of society (the ideal of both democratic capitalism and socialism) or greater power of the state through conquest and expansion (the objective of both fascist capitalism and totalitarian communism). Spencer thought that private enterprise without inter- ference from the state is thé best guarantee of internal and international peace, and he saw in socialism a return to the preindustrial type of military society. He did not distinguish between democratic socialism and revolutionary, totalitarian communism, but used the two concepts interchangeably. Tn 1884 Spencer published four essays in the Contemporary Review, sub- sequently assembled in book form under the title, The Man versus the State. It is his most famous work on politics and still the most influential statement of the philosophy of irreconcilable laissez faire. In the first essay, “The New Tories,” Spencer attacks the English Liberals for abandoning their historical individ- ualism in favor of social reform and the welfare state, According to Spencer, English Conservatives, like conservatives generally, are the historical descend- ants of the principles of militancy and status, whereas the English Liberals, like liberals generally, stem from industrialism and contract. Spencer also noticed that economic individualism, abandoned by Liberals, was more and more adopted by Conservatives, so that the roles of both parties came to be the opposite of what they had originally been. Spencer thus foresaw that the British Conserva- tives would become the party of economic individualism and free enterprise, whereas the Liberals would increasingly accept public control of the economy. ‘The second essay of The Man versus the State is “The Coming Slavery.” In it, Spencer reiterates his belief that the laws of society must not be inter- fered with by artificial political measures, that it is both futile and harmful to interfere with the beneficent process of the survival of the fittest, and that inter- ference with natural selection lowers the standards of society as a whole. Spencer specifically states that all human suffering ought not to be prevented, because much of the suffering is curative, and prevention of it is prevention of a remedy.” Spencer stresses the tendency of officialdom and official regulations to increaséLIDERALISM—OLD AND NEW 627 ER ee AD Rew 7 in a geometrical ratio to the power of resistance of the regulated citizens. People get more and more accustomed to the idea that the state will take care of them, and thus they lose the spirit of initiative and enterprise. The growth of popular suffrage represents a danger, according to Spencer, inasmuch as the various parties, in order to capture the popular vote, find they have to outbid each other in promises of more social welfare. Spencer predicted that social-welfare programs would eventually lead to socialization of the means of production, and “all socialism is slavery.” Spencer defines a slave as a person who “labors under coercion to satisfy another's de- sires.” Under socialism or communism the individual would be enslaved to the whole community rather than to a particular master, and “it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society.” Spencer says that the existence of democratic government would not prevent the despotic character of socialism, and he maintains that officialism will always work differently from the way it may be intended to work. The concentration of great economic power in the hands of the bureaucracy would inevitably lead to political despotism. Spencer’s basic objection to socjalism is his feeling that institutional changes cannot abolish the difficulties created by the nature of man, and he attacks the view that “by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show them= selves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden in- stints.” In his third essay, “The Sins of Legislators,” Spencer deplores the spread of government activity in social and economic areas. Progress is the result of the desire to “increase personal welfare,” and not the product of governmental regulation: “It is not to the State that we owe the multitudinous useful inven- tions from the spade to the telephone; it was not the State which made possible extended navigation by a developed astronomy ; it was not the State which made the discoveries in physics. chemistry, and the rest, which guide modern manu- facturers ; it was not the State which devised the machinery for producing fab- rics of every kind, for transferring men and things from place to place, and for \istering in a thousand ways to our comforts.” Legislators must understand the laws of society before they meddle with them, and Spencer particularly charges legislators with confusing family ethics with state ethics, In the family, generosity is the guiding principle, and benefits received have little or no relation to merit. In the state, Spencer maintains, the ruling principle ought to be justice, according to which there is a proportioning of benefits to merits, ‘as throughout the animal world.” The intrusion of family ethics into state ethics is a dangerous interference with the laws of nature and society, and is slowly followed by “fatal results.” The poverty of the incapable, the sufferings of the imprudent, and the shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong are the decrees of a farseeing benevolence, and Spencet sees his doctrine of society confirmed by Darwin’s principle of “natural selection.” He defines government as “begotten of aggression and by aggression,” and he writes that it continually betrays its aggressive nature. even if it apparently seeks to miti-628 Gear rorrrrcay ruiNKeERS gate suffering, because in the end such relief of suffering is cruelty rather than kindness: “For is it not cruel to increase the sufferings of the better that the sufferings of the worse may be decreased?” ‘The last essay of The Man versus the State is “The Great Political Super- stition.” In the past, Spencer says, the great political superstition was the divine right of kings. In the present it is the “divine right of parliaments.” Spencer attacks the doctrine of sovereignty as propounded by Hobbes and rejects the claim of popular majorities for unlimited authority as being inconsistent with the inalienable rights of the individual. Spencer also rejects the Benthamite doctrine that individual rights are created by the state and reverts to the Lockean notion that they precede the state. In particular, Spencer emphasizes that “prop- erty was well recognized before law existed.” The state does not create rights but merely formally sanctions and better defines “those assertions of claims and recognitions of claims which naturally originate from the individual desires of men who have to live in presence of one another.” ar from being created by the state, rights stand in inverse relation to it. As the state grows, status and slavery grow with it, The recognition of rights begins when “militancy ceases to be chronic and governmental power declines.” Spencer concludes The Man versus the State with the final reminder that government is not a divine institution but a committee of management, and that it has no intrinsic authority beyond the ethical sanction bestowed on it by the free consent of the citizens: “The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of kings. The function of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers of parliaments.” Spencer's political ideas hardly changed between 1842, when he published his Proper Sphere of Government, and 1903, the year of his death. The constancy * of his political thought in the face of a rapidly changing social and economic scene explains why the same ideas that were the last word in radical individual- ism in the eighteen-forties had become the ne plus ultra of orthodox conservatism by 1900, Although Spencer's influence declined in England, it steadily grew in the United States. Just as John Locke dominated American political thought in the eighteenth century’ by supplying the rationale of government based on con- sent, Spencer dominated American social philosophy of the latter part of the nineteenth century by supplying the rationale of laissez faire. The period was one of tremendous industrial expansion in the United States, and Spencer's ideas of laissez faire and the survival of the fittest by natural selec- tion appealed to businessmen and industrial entrepreneurs who themselves had gone through the hard school of ruthless competition, in which no quarter was asked or given. Spencer supplied businessmen with the comforting thought that the survival of the fittzst was not only a principle of political or economic cor servatism but a universal law that pervaded nature as well as human society. L,- Tinking economic laissez faire with progress, Spencer assured the wealthy classes that competitive capitalism was not only in harmony with universal laws but was also in the interest of the general welfare. Business found in Spencer's biological and scientific system a substitute for the lost religious inspiration, and Spencer ism became a total view of life rather than a mere social or political theory. WithLIBERALISM —oL, the aid of Spencerism, opposition to social reform appeared no longer as class egotism but as the defense of the true principles of social evolution and progress When Spencer visited the United States in 1882, he was immensely im- pressed by its industrial power, and in his Autobiography he records his con- viction that “the United States will very soon be by far the most powerful nation in the world.” One of Spencer's closest American friends was Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, and during his triumphal tour of the country Spencer saw many other successful businessmen and leaders of conservative thought. Yet the restlessness and strain of American life perturbed him, and before he de- parted for England he declared that the future ‘“‘has in store a new ideal, differ- ing as much from the present ideal of industrialization as that ideal differs from the past ideal of militancy.” His earlier dream that industrialism was the utopia now gave way to the dawning realization that the human cost of industrialism was perhaps higher than he had thought. Spencerism died as a vitalizing philosophy in the United States after the tum of the century, just as it had died in England a generation earlier. Going first through the experience of the Industrial Revolution, England early showed the reactions to industrialism as a way of life, and popular protest increasingly mounted against the human misery and degradation that industrialism produced together with greater happiness and welfare. Spencerism was a mood that fitted the early phase of ruthless, competitive capitalism of the robber-baron type. As soon as that phase had passed in England and, later, in the United States, as soon as the naive belief in free enterprise as a law of nature was replaced by critical inquiry into its operation as a man-made system, Spencerism lost its vitality and appeal. Yet, though the extreme positions of Spencer’s laissez faire were aban- doned, much of his thought had imperceptibly permeated the world of liberal capitalism, As long as pecuniary incentives, competition, and individualism are hailed as positive social values, some elements of Spencerism will continue to survive, albeit Spencer's philosophical system as a whole may have outlived its usefulness. Spencer’s appeal to the English Liberals to return to their original individ- ualism remained unheeded, and he correctly foresaw that the Conservatives would become the defenders of economic individualism. In that paradoxical change of parts the Liberals remained the heirs of their tradition of liberty de- spite their acceptance of more government, and the Conservatives embraced the doctrine of economic liberalism and laissez faire when this doctrine became the socially more conservative one. Spencer failed to see that the issue of more versus less state intervention in economic affairs was essentially one of means and not of objectives, and that laissez faire could be progressive, dynamic, and revolu- tionary at one time (say, in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century), and conservative, stagnant, and sterile at another time (as in the late nineteenth or twentieth century). The decline of the prestige of economic individualism and laissez faire was not due to anticapitalist propaganda but to the changing eco- nomic facts in the last hundred years. ‘One of the main assumptions of laissez faire was that of harmony and equilibrium: if all individuals pursued their own good, they would thereby, in0s GREAT POLITICAL THINKERS the end, also promote the general good. The assumption of economic harmony ‘out of competition was later buttressed by the wider generalization, popularized by Spencer and Darwin, that the whole universe was ruled by the law of the survival of the fittest, and that natural selection was not only a theory of evolu- tion but of progress. Interference with the economic activities of individuals by public bodies appeared, in the light of Spencerism, economically unsound as well as an outright obstruction of morals and progress, ‘The assumptions of laissez faire rested on two unstated social conditions: first, a distribution of wealth and income that, while by no means equal, neverthe- less was equitable enough to prevent a widespread sense of acute injustice; second, an economy that was comparatively free from long and severe crises and depressions. As long as both of these conditions existed to a substantial degree, the doctrine of economic individualism was anchored in a substratum of fact front which it could derive nourishment and life. But as capitalism expanded and grew, it undermined the two social conditions on which the acceptance of laissez faire by the public largely rested: the originally substantial equality of wealth and income was increasingly replaced by concentration of capital and—even more significantly—control of business. Monopolies, trusts, and gigantic enterprises created a sense of frustration and protest among the millions whose liv and very lives depended on their new masters—the impersonal corporation. As Tocqueville had predicted, the “new aristocracy of manufacturers” was as anxious to exploit the people as the old aristocracy had been, without, however, feeling the same kind of social responsibility toward those who worked for them. The second major change that undermined the general faith in the validity of laissez faire was unemployment. When millions remained out of work for years, when productive resources lay idle, men began to doubt that the economy, left - to its own laws and harmonies, actually produced the maximum general good. Capitalism originally developed as an affirmation of individual rights against the power of the state. As corporate and, later, monopolistic business created vast power aggregates within the structure of capitalism, the threatened individual tured to the state for the protection of his rights against the power of imper- sonal, bureaucratic entities, in the face of which he felt lost and helpless. True liberalism, from Locke to the present, had always insisted that the state was no more and no less than an instrument of the people: but where eighteenth-century Kberalism differed from twentieth-century liberalism was in the belief of the former that once the dominion of the state was removed, the problem of power as such was solved forever. The state would then, in fact, “wither away,” and its place would be taken by society as an association of equals, without rulers or ruled. By contrast, liberals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have Jearned that economic power can impinge as directly on the lives and liberties of the people as political power has done in the past. Liberals found themselves therefore in the paradoxical position of looking to the state—their historical enemy—for help against the new forms of economic and financial power. In Britain the “People’s Budget” of Lloyd George in 1909 introduced large-scale social legislation reflecting the changed outlook of the Liberal party. This new philosophy influenced also the Conservative and LaborLIBERALISM—OLD AND NEW ost parties and set a standard for subsequent social reforms. Tn the United States there is a direct line from Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal through Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. All these movements in Britain and the United States have three things in common: first, the belief that every human being is ‘entitled to a minimum of material well-being, such as food, clothing, and decent housing; second, the conviction that expanding living standards are possible with the existing physi- cal resources and scientific knowledge ; and, third, the acceptance of the principle that the state has the right and duty to act when private initiative fails. In the twentieth century the expansion of democracy in government through universal suffrage and education has made it possible to use the state in a way that would have been psychologically impossible for eighteenth-century liberals, who knew only government that was undemocratic, and often corrupt and inefficient. For a long time the new liberalistn acted more in response to pragmatic needs than toa dearly formulated political theory. Some liberals themselves thought that the acceptance of more public responsibility for social well-being was no more than a temporary lapse from the timeless creed of laissez faire, which described the “normal” conditions of society, whereas reform through parliamentary legis- lation and public administration was exceptional and “abnormal.” The separa- tion of politics and economics was one of the most serious legacies of the period of laissez faire, and until they could be reunited, liberalism was bound to con- tinue in a state of doctrinal frustration and ad hoc improvisation. Just as England produced, owing to her peculiar historical ciscumstances, the most characteristic representative of nineteenth-century economic individual- ism and laissez faire, Herbert Spencer, she also provided, in response to changing ‘economic conditions, a new approach to political economy and liberalism, most ignificantly expressed in the work of John Maynard Keynes’ (1883-1946) Keynes’ father was a distinguished economist and philosopher, and his mother was mayor of Cambridge. Keynes was well grounded in mathematics and classics before he entered Cambridge University, where he specialized in philosophy and economics, At the age of twenty-three he passed the Civil Service examination as the second-best candidate. He would have been first, but his worst mark was in economics, though Keynes himself was of the opinion that “the examiners presumably knew less than I did.” Keynes worked for two years in the India Office and then returned to Cambridge. During his entire life, his main interests lay in public service, on the one hand, and in teaching economics at Cambridge and editing the Economic Journal, on the other. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Keynes was the principal representative of the British Treasury. He resigned because he disagreed with the reparations policy of the Allied Powers, and he wrote a short book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which made him at once world-famous. In the years between World Wars I and II, Keynes concentrated on his scholarly activities at Cambridge but did not lose touch with practical affairs, In addition to his heavy duties of writing, editing, and teaching, Keynes found time to serve as chairman of a major insurance company, run an investment company, take an important part in the furthering of the arts, organize a dis-632 GREAT POLITICAL THINKERS tinguished ballet, and build a new theater. Starting out with no means of his own, he amassed a considerable fortune, most of which he used for the endowment of the arts in Great Britain. During World War IT, he served again in the Treasury, and as the war proceeded, he became the chief architect of Britain’s ong-term financial plans and policies. He rendered his last service to his country by negotiating the American Loan in 1945 and 1946, and he was one of the principal authors of the two new agencies for international monetary and eco- nomic cooperation, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. During World War II, Keynes enthusiastically supported the movement to bring the arts to the people; he became chairman of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, and later of the Arts Council. He married a famous dancer, a star member of the former Russian Imperial Ballet. In 1942, Keynes was given a peerage, and some of his speeches in the House of Lords, particularly on the American Loan, made history. Politically, Kevnes never ceased to be a Liberal, although he knew by the middle twenties that the Liberal party would never again be in a position to form a government. In a speech in 1926 (at the Manchester Reform Club, Febru- ary 9, 1926), Keynes described his political credo as follows: “The political prob- Jem of mankind is to combine three things: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice, and Individual Liberty. The first needs criticism, precaution, and technical knowledge; the second an unselfish and enthusiastic spirit which loves the ordi- nary inan; the third, tolerance, breadth, appreciation of the excellencies of variety and independence, which prefers, above everything, to give unhindered opportunity to the exceptional and to the aspiring. The second ingredient is the best possession of the great party of the Proletariat. But the first and third re- ‘quire the qualities of the party which, by its traditions and ancient sympathies, has been the home of Economic Individualism and Social Liberty.” In The End of Laissez-Faire (1926 ; reproduced here in its entirety), Keynes clearly indicated where the new liberalism differed from the old. The very title of his book, The End of Laissez-Faire, suggested that Keynes considered the philosophy of laissez faire a thing of the past. He demonstrates the historical and philosophical roots of economic individualism and laissez faire, and traces their long hold on thought and action to their “conformity with the needs and wishes of the business world of the day. They gave full scope to our erstwhile heroes, the’ great business men.” The faith in laissez faire vanished together with the faith in the Captain of Industry, the Master-Individualist, and we “grow more doubtful whether it is he who will lead us into Paradise by the hand.” Yet the rejection of laissez faire did not lead Keynes to accept socialism as an alternative, primarily because socialism seemed to him to be committed to another dogma: that of state control and operation of the economy, just as laissez faire was committed to the dogma of no state interference in the economy. Keynes distinguishes services that are technically social from those that are technically individual. The state should not meddle in activities that are already performed by individuals, though it could perform them a little better, but do only those things that at present are not done at all. Keynes cites three areas inG34 GREAT POLITICAL THINKERS w arre ye eee a Eee pe et Pie copaureatse OU icAUyn Rey RES ARLENE cs baie REALGM ae Chee at suigipannesnce sate sale sh ish yg oe shine cae oft nabta ggg conte nea the tragitignah methods Qo es Paina as en, in tell irl ata ea o is Ree. an ge Sah peste eabecate ae a a sis He m i ecentyainic a ce a Can Iypet fh i ae uo ae hci é Naat ii Pa Be ie Kn oe en Ee alana activity in cr caren cele TK liza! tu Lment, jae face iy ey os ae i ie ae a 5 athe {e oe ee a ny os aie" ce Ra See ce fickly « “ines a itself as a pioneerit ef Et wi fy a ec ie Ae ACEI Be ae ae = a het a a ae ahs a he ea o ee Wa nig! . emer mie ae ia nee ey Jae “yt . is nomi ae ae a ae at oe anh ihe en ‘fd employ- cies RG 8 le i es Pipe a a a ne ce OnE ee ‘ i ue Ph are (aeretors ae to eb lou gale Restate te oe Manne aa ae s i ae ae i: ee RA URC E RA DESI Mgr ae a aoe at nod ee ae iat EET ee ee Ee ree Se ALO ORL ne inequality ‘Looking beyond ste range of government activity as outlined in The End of Laissez-Faire, Keynes maintains in his General Theory that in principle only experience can show how far the state should go in ensuting full employment by