Among the members of the post-war generation, this ambitious, perceptive elite is aware of two disturbing and compelling realities. The first is the peril to mankind implicit in a continuance along its present disaster course of war, with its inescapable counterpart, social dissolution. The second is the possibility that out of the wreckage and rubble of an outmoded cultural pattern, a mature, chastened, more experienced, more consciously purposive generation will arise, possessing the wit to see the necessity of creative advance, and the wisdom to guide the pioneers of humanity along the difficult and dangerous path that they must follow if they are to reach the land of purpose and promise.
Current frustrating experience with the breakdown of western civilization, coupled with historical precedents, confront the present generation of mankind with a compelling challenge and a unique, precious opportunity. The challenge arises out of experiments with particular civilizations and with civilization as a way of life. Our analysis of this situation leads to only one possible conclusion: Repeated experiments with civilization unmask it as a way, not of life, but as a cycle of rise, expansion, maturity, decline and certain death.
The challenge is emphasized by the failure of reforms and reformers of civilization to make changes in structure and function sufficient to meet the challenge of the birth-maturity-death cycle. Nor has it been possible for western civilization to take advantage of the drastic changes and challenges arising out of the current world revolution.
Man's top negative priority at the present moment is to reject the wiles, the temptations, the mortal conflicts and the annihilative destruction which have disrupted and decimated civilized society during the past six thousand years and reached their apex in the Great Revolution of 1750-1970. These experiences prove beyond the shadow of doubt that this pattern of human collective life is inadequate to meet the present and future needs of the human family.
Man's top positive priority is the present-day occupancy of the planet Earth by 3,700 million human beings who wish to survive, to utilize and conserve the natural habitat and to improve the social environment. Within narrow limits, almost all members of the human family want to live and to help other humans to do likewise. Multitudes of human beings, particularly among the youth, want to enjoy outward looking, satisfying, productive, creative lives. They also want those near and dear to do the same thing.
What steps must they take in order to realize their hope and fulfill their aspirations?
Broadly speaking, they must pick their way warily through the maze of artifacts, gadgets and gimmicks produced by human ingenuity during the current world revolution. Most of them are superficial and time consuming. A few are fundamental. They are of the utmost importance as implements to human advance. Taking what advantage they can of recent innovations, avoiding dead-ends and illusion leading to rainbows, the more sensitive and more competent segments of mankind must close ranks and move upward and onward to a new level of culture. The chief instrument available for such an enterprise is the twentieth century version of the political state. The bourgeois revolution was achieved through the developing, evolving political state. The political state is the binding force that held scattered fragments of the human family together during the stresses and strains of the current revolution in science and technology. It is the political state that must be depended upon to resist the fragmentating forces of a disintegrating western civilization, to preserve the social structure and administer human society through the transition from civilization into the structure and functioning of the new social order which is presently supplanting civilization.
Through Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism, the feudal state, here and there, step by step, was replaced by the bourgeois state as the chief structural building block of western civilization. The bourgeois revolution, in various parts of Europe, lasted for several centuries; the process was well under way by 1450. As lately as 1945 feudal pockets remained in Eastern Europe.
An even more profound transformation of European society is made in the course of the Great Revolution of 1750-1970. The transformation is in its early stages. During the process, the political life of Europe-in-transition will be administered by the political institutions of the bourgeois state, together with the closely related state patterns of socialism-communism which have come into being during the present century.
During this transition the bourgeois state itself has evolved. At the outset it was a revolutionary force devoting its energies to the elimination of feudal institutions and practices and replacing them by the institutions and practices needed for the advancement of bourgeois interests.