Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

10

outbreak of war frustrated their plans, and Mitrinovié decided to escape to England to avoid being conscripted into the Austrian army.

During the war he worked for the Serbian Legation in London and moved among cultural circles in this country. In 1920 and 1921 he wrote a long series of articles under the title ‘World Affairs’ in The New Age, a leading political and literary weekly journal of the time, edited by A. R. Orage. In these articles he maintained that real peace could never be achieved so long as the races, nations, religions and all the other separate groupings of mankind each fought in an isolated way for domination in what they considered to be their own particular interest. He saw as the only solution to this problem the conception of the world as an organic whole with every race, nation, religion or other grouping recognised as a function within this world-whole. The proper interpretation of the valid function of each would have to be agreed equally by those particularly concerned and by all the others. This process of creating an organic World Order Mitrinovié saw as a long and difficult process in which all races, nations, religions, classes, societies and individuals would ultimately have to be involved. But the realisation that it is the only rational solution to the world’s problems could be immediate, and would be the start of a new era.

The New Age was the most important journal at that time for radical political thought, and supported both Guild Socialism and Social Credit. Mitrinovi¢ met many of the leading contributors, and in 1926 himself became associated with a group of them known as the Chandos Group. Though he did not attend all their meetings he was the chief inspirer of their thinking. With some of them he gave the impulse for the formation of the New Europe Group, a British initiative for European federation, of which Sir Patrick Geddes was the first President. He felt, however, that before effective political action could be achieved in this country a new attitude towards social problems was necessary. He believed that this required a study of psychology and the application of its principles both to the social and political problems of the day and to the relationships between those persons who wished to bring about social change. Adler’s psychology appeared to him to be the most significant on account of its primary concern with the relationships of the individual in society and the whole problem of the struggle for power.

In 1927, with the agreement of Dr. Alfred Adler, Mitrinovié founded the English Branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology (The Adler Society) in London at 55 Gower Street. He and others lectured extensively on psychology and related subjects. However, some members of the