BOOKS OF THE WEEK Political Realities POLITICAL discussion (when it
rises above the level of gossip or goes beyond the events of last week) has, for a long time, been bedevilled by abstractions. When it escapes vulgar realism, it becomes the exploration of the necessary relations between a collection of abstract nouns: Democracy, Imperialism, Communism, Capitalism, National- ism, Freedom, Revolution, Reaction and the rest. And in shuffling these cumbersome pieces of mental furniture about, we first raise the dust and then complain that we cannot see. Half of human activity becomes incomprehensible to us, and the rest is miscoliceived. Any- one, therefore, who bids us desist and recalls us to concrete, if less imposing, realities, though he must appear to speak out of turn, may perhaps hope for a hearing. And when he does so with the vigour, the wit and the learning which Professor Brogan has at his disposal, the performance may be expected to attract even those who yearn for the merry din of the feast to which the ideologues invite us.
The Price of Revolution is a tour de force. In the present gloom of political 'discussion a searchlight would dazzle us ; Professor Brogan has illuminated the scene brilliantly, but with a diffused light. He wastes no time criticising the current abstractions ; when they appear insufferably inflated he punctures them in a footnote. His main enterprise is to throw into our dream,world the precipitant of precise and detailed knowledge, and in this manner to transform-it into a world of concrete activities and their probable Consequences.
The range of Professor Brogan's information and the readiness of his learning are now proverbial, and here the range and readiness are displayed in all their brilliance. But there is something more ; there is coherent argument and there is imagination. Hitherto, Pro- fessor Brogan's readers might be forgiven for thinking that, while hiss knowledge was catholic, his sympathetic understanding was fully in play only when he was writing about his native place—the Clyde- side. But in The Price \ of Revolution there is a well-informed imagination at work over a remarkably wide range of situation.
Professor Brogan does not claim-to illuminate the whole con- temporary situation. His theme is the history and significance of violenf change (political and technological) in the modern world ; and this theme is explored literally from China to Peru. His thesis is that for about the last hundred and fifty years we have been living in an age of revolution; but that we have not yet adapted ourselves to this circumstance. We have not accustomed ourselves to count- ing the cost of violent change ; our political book-keeping has not kept pace with our political activity. And we are further handi- capped because our present political habits of mind were formed in a period of about two generations (immediately before 1914) when it seemed probable that the era of violent change was, for the time being, over—with the consequence that our present expectations are out of touch with political realities.
A variety of conclusions emerge. All government is expensive, what we call good government is still beyond the :means of the greater part of the world, but violent and revolutionary, political methods are particularly costly and remarkably uneconomical. Their cost is to be counted not merely in the good that they destroy (that is often exaggerated), but in the very elementary goods (such as order and decency) which they endanger, and in the displacements in society which they cause, displacements which can be very little foreseen and which go on revealing themselves for generations after the event. And the uneconomical character of revolutionary remedies is revealed in their inefficiency: every revolution promised more than it was able to achieve, and what survives a revolution is often the more odious features of the ancien regime. But the costly and uneconomical character of revolution (when it is considered in all its concrete detail and not merely in the abridged form in which it appears in the mind of the revolutionary) should not lead us'to suppose that men are not on occasion prepared to pay the price : it should lead us to make a greater effort in the exceedingly tricky business of political book-keeping. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute to Professor Brogan the intention of persuading us to any precise course of action. Her knows what he dislikes in our situation, and he can recognise what is hostile to the kind of society he thinks desirable ; he does not hedge on these matters, but he is not disposed to cry over spilt milk. His main concern is that we should not be deceived about our situation. His hopes are not high and his expectations are not great. We have every prospect of remaining for some time to come in an era of revolutions and their costly consequences ; "peace; in the old sense, is probably out for a generation." But, then, he knows also that life is nowhere, and never has been, couleur de rose, and that what we consider to be valuable—" freedom," flexibility of government and so on—are known and desired by only a small minority of the world's population. And having a firm grasp on these simple truths, he is able to avoid the contemporary habit of exaggerating our situation into a kind of cosmic tragedy—a Predicament. For Professor Brogan it is simply a situation, perhaps a dilemma, more properly a "pass," to be observed and understood in its all too human and historical proportions. In short, The Price of Revolution is to be welcomed and applauded as a piece of political thinking which manages to avoid the two opposed vices of most current political thinking—starry-eyed abstraction and vulgar realism. Politics are presented to us here neither as the pursuit of Utopias nor as mere fixing," but as not being deceived about our situation and doing our best in almost unendurably " interesting " circumstances. One could wish that the proof-reading had been a little more exact and that the publisher had been a little less niggardly in the matter of type and paper. But It is a book which has no difficulty in surviving such circumstantia:
Previous page
