Principles of western civilisation

IV WESTERN LIBERALISM 125

conception, it has come about that, to use the words of Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, ‘the State remains the sole God of the modern world.” *

But it is in Germany of the present day that the movement in modern thought, which has presented the meaning of Western Liberalism as a theory of material interests within the limits of political consciousness, has obtained the clearest definition, and already reached the inevitable stage at which it has begun to develop its own antithesis. On the one side of this movement in Germany of the present day we have the Marx-Engels theory of modern society. Hitherto general attention has been so closely occupied with the economic’ aspect of Marxian socialism that the fact of first importance connected with it has received little attention. This is that Marxian socialism is not merely, or even chiefly, an economic theory, but rather a complete self-contained philosophy of human life and society. In Marx's theories of society those fundamental assumptions upon which the principles of Democracy were, in the last resort, made to rest in the theories of Locke have completely disappeared. For there is now, to use the words of Mr. Russell, “no question of justice or virtue, no appeal to human sympathy or morality; might alone is right, communism is justified by its inevitable victory.” Marx “rests his doctrine not on ‘justice’ preached by Utopia-mongers (as he calls his Socialist predecessors), not on sentimental love of man, which he never mentions without immeasurable scorn, but on historical necessity alone, on the blind growth of productive forces, which

1 L’ Etat Moderne et ses Fonctions, par Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, p. 18.