movement fathered about seventy organized groups around the world
which enrolled hundreds of thousands of members. Nearly one
quarter of the members of the American Congress and the British
Parliament gave continuing support for years to resolutions favouring,
in principle, a world federal government. Herbert J. Muller, at the close
of his best-selling book The Uses of the Past, published in 1952, could
reach "the commonplace conclusion" that man's best hope lay in
"some kind of world federation on a democratic basis." H. Stuart
Hughes in his Essay for Our Times spoke of "the solid and now familiar
conviction that every nation must transfer the essentials of its
sovereignty to a world authority." For Norman Cousins, world
government was simply “coming”. It was inevitable. No arguments
for it or against it can change that fact”. Prominent elder statesmen,
scientists as famous as Albert Einstein, philosophers as famous as
Bertrand Russell, churchmen, civic leaders, school children: the chorus
grew until it seemed, for a brief deceptive moment, irresistible (p. 32).
Gunnar Myrdal writes in Beyond the Welfare State:
Clearly, the complete realisation of our ideals would create a world
without boundaries and without national discrimination, a world
where all men are free to move around as they wish and to pursue on
equal terms their own happiness. Politically, the implication would be a
world state, democratically ruled by the will of all peoples. Somewhere
in the religious compartment of our souls we all harbour.... this
vision of a world in perfect integration (p. 163).
Pitirim Sorokin is of the opinion that "as part of a vast ensemble of
social and cultural changes necessary for the elimination of war,
some sort of world government is indispensable.”(10) Hugh Miller of
the University of California writes:
Civilisation must recover the kinship of that association which
originally established man on Earth, and which was then temporarily
dispersed into clan and tribe and race^ ...^ Civilisation is mankind made
kin again, and kind. (The next step in man's evolution must be) a world
society embracing mankind in which all the traditional cultures are
woven into the great society of the future.(11)
Teilhard de Chardin – "a mystic, a theist, a Jesuit, a scientist, an
evolutionary humanist and a prophet of world order" – says:
There is only one way which leads upwards; the one which through
greater organisation, leads to greater synthesis and unity. (The human
consciousness must expand beyond) the broadening, but still far too
restricted, circles of family, country and race. The Age of Nations is
past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to shake off our
Political System 244