Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

4 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

personal and interpersonal skills and attributes which would be required of potential senators.

In 1976 I received a letter from one of the people who had been involved with Mitrinovic during this period. He explained,

We believed that those who were to help in founding the social state must start with an absolute personal commitment to one another; must be prepared to pool their wealth in the widest sense of the term, including sharing responsibility for one another's lives and problems; and finally must be prepared to speak openly and frankly with one another, in declaring their own mind and will and appreciating and criticising others. So they would form a group in which both the widest diversity of individuality and a real sense of equality and community would exist together; in which there could be both the continuity of a collective and the continual change which arises from the free working of individual initiative. Such a group would have no fixed formal organisation but would always be flexible.

Success and failure in such an endeavour cannot be measured, but we entered into it with great dedication and we had our share of both. Much of the time we lived in different houses, though there were houses where some of us lived together a life in common.

Mitrinovié died in 1953. The following year a charitable trust, the New Atlantis Foundation, was formed for the purpose of maintaining the archives of the different initiatives with which Mitrinovié was involved, holding meetings and issuing occasional publications on various aspects of Mitrinovic’s thought. The small group of people who run the Foundation were all involyed with Mitrinovic in the 1930s and remained together until his death, and have continued to share their lives together since that time. The letter | received in 1976, the first time I had ever come across the name of Mitrinovié, was from one of their number. He had read my books on communes and alternative communities in Britain and felt that there was much in Mitrinovi¢’s thought and work that was relevant to the contemporary quest for a new social order based on the insight that true socialism can be achieved only by people who are themselves true ‘inner socialists.’ Hence the origins of this book. It represents an attempt to convey something of the life, thought and work of a man who, although possessed of great abilities and formidable intellectual energy and imagination, is virtually unknown. In his home country of Yugoslavia he is mainly renowned as one of the intellectual and political leaders of the pre-World War I revolutionary youth; a mysterious figure who, for some unfathomable reason, deserted the liberation struggle and became embroiled in mystical esoteric circles in England.