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The Romantic Factor in Modern Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Ernest Barker
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Extract

One of the marks of our times is a new eruption of the personal. Systems and institutions of politics are clouded over. The impersonal principles on which these systems and institutions depend are still more deeply obscured. Men turn for their inspiration to the living flow of personality. Some leader who has burst from hidden and elemental depths commands a passion of personal loyalty. Leadership has always been a great factor in the history of human communities. The deification of the ruler was the cement of the Hellenistic monarchies and of the Roman Empire which inherited their tradition. It may seem a strange atavism that we should now be apparently recurring, in the twentieth century, to a similar practice. But there are exigencies of contemporary life which explain the new vogue of leadership, and there is a tide of contemporary thought which leads on to the current doctrine of the emergent leader.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 11 , Issue 44 , October 1936 , pp. 387 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1936

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References

page 389 Note 1 Two Sources of Morality and Religion (English translation), p. 82.

page 390 Note 1 Two Sources of Morality and Religion (English translation), p. 68.

page 390 Note 2 Ibid., p. 79.

page 390 Note 3 Ibid., p. 82.

page 390 Note 4 Ibid., pp. 241 and 266.

page 392 Note 1 In Bergson the myth belongs to the field of religion. The intellect of man, representing to itself the facts of death and chance, and being dismayed by these intellectual representations, evolves intellectual counter-representations, by means of “a myth-making function” with which it is furnished, in order to arm itself against its own discoveries and to nerve itself for continued activity. This is the origin of the various form of religious myth. But the myth-making function, though it works with exceptional force in the realm of religion, continues its myth-making work in other realms and in different forms (op. cit., p. 168). Sorel can thus assume the operation of this function in the form of the myth of the general strike, by which the leaders of the working class insure and nerve themselves and their followers for the difficulties of the future. Pareto similarly invents a theory of myths, or “enthusiastic derivations” (drawn from social facts, but transcending those facts, and based on sentiment rather than reason, so that they assume the form of religions), by which men insure themselves against the mere calculations of inductive reason and nerve themselves for the leap in the dark. The connection of the idea of the myth with that of the leap is subtly explained by Bergson (op. cit., pp. 167–8): it is more obvious in the theories of Sorel and Pareto.

page 393 Note 1 The Tibetans recognize their Grand Lama only by external marks. The Western leader is known by the inward marks of his will and force, and the fruits of his achievement.

page 396 Note 1 Ernst Troeltsch, in a lecture of the year 1922, translated in an appendix to the author’s translation of Gierke’s, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, vol. i, p. 213.Google Scholar

page 396 Note 2 Larenz, K., “Die rechts- und staatsphilosophie des deutschen Idealismus und ihre gegenwarts Bedeutung” (in Staatsphilosophie, a part of Abt. IV des Handbuchs der Philosophie), p. 168.Google Scholar

page 397 Note 1 “A true theory of politics must begin by doing homage to moral obligations” (Kant, Perpetual Peace, Appendix I).

page 398 Note 2 Larenz, K., op. cit., p. 145.Google Scholar