436 J.-A. PEMBERTON
fear of failure. The memory of the unhappy failure of the Geneva experi-
ment, Mayoux insisted, obsessed ‘more or less consciously the builders of
today’ who feared that they too would be lead astray by the ‘vain’ pursuit
of ‘woolly’ ideals or ‘too noble ambitions’.^28
Mayoux stated that at San Francisco, people sensed that in sev-
eral of the great nations there was a ‘systematic hostility’ to everything
that had been done in the interwar period and that these same nations
were determined to sweep away all traces of that period and begin life
anew.^29 Although stating that this desire to sweep away all remnants of
the League experience was understandable, Mayoux was obviously sad-
dened by it, not least because of what this desire meant in terms of the
fate of the IIIC. As previously noted however, outside of the specific case
of the IIIC and its fate, Mayoux was concerned to see preserved what
had been the essential idea behind the interwar movement of intellec-
tual cooperation: the ‘idéal’ of enlightenment, of comprehension. At
the same time, Mayoux, in his aforementioned editorial and after having
recalled his remarks concerning the ‘réaliste mood of today,’ insisted that
an ideal of this kind can only be conceived in relation to a ‘perfect real-
ism of methods’.^30
Mayoux then proceeded to promote the ideal of intellectual cooper-
ation, albeit in a way that he hoped might invite a sympathetic hearing
in Anglo-American circles. His desire to win over Anglo-American audi-
ences to the cause of intellectual cooperation explains at least in part his
insistence on the need for a realism of methods. However, at this point
in his editorial, Mayoux ceased to use the term realism in either of the
two senses mentioned above: in the argument which he now mounted,
realism did not denote the rule of the iron fist or adopting a cautious
attitude in the face of grand schemes of social improvement. The realism
that Mayoux now invoked, as should evident, was of a methodological
character and as such it came in two forms: ‘one perhaps more French,
the other perhaps more Anglo-Saxon’.^31
The ‘more French’ form of methodological realism concerned the
‘great Cartesian tradition’ and the ‘more Anglo-Saxon’ form, the ‘great
(^28) Ibid., i–ii.
(^29) Ibid., v–vi.
(^30) Ibid., ii.
(^31) Ibid.