Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of the War

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE IDENTITY OF ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWERS As the centuries of the Middle Ages were spent in discussing, both by word and by sword, the question of the primacy of the spiritual ior tfie temporal power, so have the political thinkers of the last few decades devoted their attention to establishing the...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE IDENTITY OF ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWERS As the centuries of the Middle Ages were spent in discussing, both by word and by sword, the question of the primacy of the spiritual ior tfie temporal power, so have the political thinkers of the last few decades devoted their attention to establishing the primacy of military or economic power. The problem has been formulated by thinkers of every intellectual school, blut it has particularly interested those who have set out to seek remedies for the social injustices arising from' the abuse of power. This is, generally speaking, the manner in which the problem has been set forth: They start from the assumption that the greater proportion of men are exploited and oppressed by the remainder; and they ask whether men are exploited because they are oppressed, or whether they are oppressed because they are exploited. Those who believe that the roots of the evil lie in oppression deduce from this that not only oppression, but the exploitation (of man by man as well) would disappear with the excesses of authority; and they thus inspire the programmes of the Liberal parties of men, who call themselves Radicals, Syndicalists, or Anarchists. Those, again, who believe that the origin of injustice lies in exploitation come to the conclusion that not only injustice but also oppression, would disappear with the iniquities ofcapitalism; and they urge the supporters of the Socialist parties to concentrate their attention, in the first place at least, on the economic problem. Controversy becomes obscure when, instead of speaking of military power, which is a definite thing, it deals with political power, which is confused and composite. Political power is nowadays a mixture of spiritual power or the influence which the propagandist...