A Preface to Politics

by Walter Lippmann

THE MAKING OF CREEDS

My first course in philosophy was nothing less than a summary of the important systems of thought put forward in Western Europe during the last twenty-six hundred years. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration--we did gloss over a few centuries in the Middle Ages. For the rest we touched upon all the historic names from Thales to Nietzsche. After about nine weeks of this bewildering transit a friend approached me with a sour look on his face. "You know," he said, "I can't make head or tail out of this business. I agree with each philosopher as we study him. But when we get to the next one, I agree with him too. Yet he generally says the other one was wrong. They can't all be right. Can they now?" I was too much puzzled with the same difficulty to help him.

Somewhat later I began to read the history of political theories. It was a less disinterested study than those sophomore speculations, for I had jumped into a profession which carried me through some of the underground passages of "practical politics" and reformist groups. The tangle of motives and facts and ideas was incredible. I began to feel the force of Mr. John Hobson's remark that "if practical workers for social and industrial reforms continue to ignore principles ... they will have to pay the price which short-sighted empiricism always pays; with slow, hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable false starts and backslidings, they will move in the dark along an unseen track toward an unseen goal." The political theorists laid some claim to lighting up both the track and the goal, and so I turned to them for help.

Now whoever has followed political theory will have derived perhaps two convictions as a reward. Almost all the thinkers seem to regard their systems as true and binding, and none of these systems are. No matter which one you examine, it is inadequate. You cannot be a Platonist or a Benthamite in politics to-day. You cannot go to any of the great philosophers even for the outlines of a statecraft which shall be fairly complete, and relevant to American life. I returned to the sophomore mood: "Each of these thinkers has contributed something, has had some wisdom about events. Looked at in bulk the philosophers can't all be right or all wrong."

But like so many theoretical riddles, this one rested on a very simple piece of ignorance. The trouble was that without realizing it I too had been in search of the philosopher's stone. I too was looking for something that could not be found. That happened in this case to be nothing less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics. It was the old indolence of hoping that somebody had done the world's thinking once and for all. I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which would contain the whole of life, be as reliable as a table of logarithms, foresee all possible emergencies and offer entirely trustworthy rules of action. When it seemed that no such system had ever been produced, I was on the point of damning the entire tribe of theorists from Plato to Marx.

This is what one may call the naïveté of the intellect. Its hope is that some man living at one place on the globe in a particular epoch will, through the miracle of genius, be able to generalize his experience for all time and all space. It says in effect that there is never anything essentially new under the sun, that any moment of experience sufficiently understood would be seen to contain all history and all destiny--that the intellect reasoning on one piece of experience could know what all the rest of experience was like. Looked at more closely this philosophy means that novelty is an illusion of ignorance, that life is an endless repetition, that when you know one revolution of it, you know all the rest. In a very real sense the world has no history and no future, the race has no career. At any moment everything is given: our reason could know that moment so thoroughly that all the rest of life would be like the commuter's who travels back and forth on the same line every day. There would be no inventions and no discoveries, for in the instant that reason had found the key of experience everything would be unfolded. The present would not be the womb of the future: nothing would be embryonic, nothing would grow. Experience would cease to be an adventure in order to become the monotonous fulfilment of a perfect prophecy.

This omniscience of the human intellect is one of the commonest assumptions in the world. Although when you state the belief as I have, it sounds absurdly pretentious, yet the boastfulness is closer to the child's who stretches out its hand for the moon than the romantic egotist's who thinks he has created the moon and all the stars. Whole systems of philosophy have claimed such an eternal and absolute validity; the nineteenth century produced a bumper crop of so-called atheists, materialists and determinists who believed in all sincerity that "Science" was capable of a complete truth and unfailing prediction. If you want to see this faith in all its naïveté go into those quaint rationalist circles where Herbert Spencer's ghost announces the "laws of life," with only a few inessential details omitted.

Now, of course, no philosophy of this sort has ever realized such hopes. Mankind has certainly come nearer to justifying Mr. Chesterton's observation that one of its favorite games is called "Cheat the Prophet."... "The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else." Now this weakness is not, as Mr. Chesterton would like to believe, confined to the clever men. But it is a weakness, and many people have speculated about it. Why in the face of hundreds of philosophies wrecked on the rocks of the unexpected do men continue to believe that the intellect can transcend the vicissitudes of experience?

For they certainly do believe it, and generally the more parochial their outlook, the more cosmic their pretensions. All of us at times yearn for the comfort of an absolute philosophy. We try to believe that, however finite we may be, our intellect is something apart from the cycle of our life, capable by an Olympian detachment from human interests of a divine thoroughness. Even our evolutionist philosophy, as Bergson shows, "begins by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living things in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it has just told us, makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can illuminate the world."

This is what most of us do in our search for a philosophy of politics. We forget that the big systems of theory are much more like village lamp-posts than they are like the sun, that they were made to light up a particular path, obviate certain dangers, and aid a peculiar mode of life. The understanding of the place of theory in life is a comparatively new one. We are just beginning to see how creeds are made. And the insight is enormously fertile. Thus Mr. Alfred Zimmern in his fine study of "The Greek Commonwealth" says of Plato and Aristotle that no interpretation can be satisfactory which does not take into account the impression left upon their minds by the social development which made the age of these philosophers a period of Athenian decline. Mr. Zimmern's approach is common enough in modern scholarship, but the full significance of it for the creeds we ourselves are making is still something of a novelty. When we are asked to think of the "Republic" as the reaction of decadent Greece upon the conservative temperament of Plato, the function of theory is given a new illumination. Political philosophy at once appears as a human invention in a particular crisis--an instrument to fit a need. The pretension to finality falls away.