force of modernity. No less richly diverse, literature and the arts reXected
a powerful burst of the imagination. But although the promise and the achieve-
ments have been grand, the risks and the disasters have been apocalyptic. On
the one hand, such triumphs of the free mind as the increase of the wealth of
nations, the spread of civil liberties, and the victories of medicine over infectious
disease; on the other hand, such disasters as the social injustice of industrialization,
the rise of communism and fascism, the outburst of total war, and the invention of
weapons of mass destruction. The present nuclear threat to human life on this
planet is a product of modernity. The consequences, intended and unintended, of
the process of modernization set in motion by liberalism have been tragically
ambivalent.
In the liberal order, therefore, the task of those humanly devised incentives and
restraints on human action which we call political institutions is to release the
power of the free mind while reducing the risks of its exercise.
- 2 The City of Reason
By the time I came to Harvard in the fall of 1938 , I was aWerce anti-communist,
a fervent New Dealer, a devotee of Emerson, and ready to try to put it all
together. Finding a bit to my surprise that I was expected to write a dissertation
for a Ph.D., I launched myself, with the audacity known only to graduate students,
on a defense of liberalism against the totalitarian threat. The dissertation,
completed in 1943 , was not published until after the war in 1949 under the title,
The City of Reason. In essence the book was a restatement of the political theory
of philosophical idealism, descending from Hegel and set out by the British and
American idealists such as T. H. Green and Josiah Royce. To say a word along
these lines was woefully old-fashioned and academically incorrect at that
time, when logical positivism with its view of science as the only kind of truth
dominated philosophical thinking. On this score I was put at ease by the fact that
the two current thinkers on whom I mainly depended, Alfred North Whitehead
and John Dewey, were in no sense hostile to science. Whitehead, the more
systematic of the two, presented what he called ‘‘a philosophy of organism.’’ It
had two themes: on the one hand, a theory of ‘‘creative advance,’’ postulating the
autonomy of the human mind, and, on the other hand, a theory of ‘‘social union,’’
asserting the ‘‘real togetherness’’ possible for individuals. Hunches and hypotheses
derived from the work of these two authors will appear in the account of my
empirical study of the institutions of free government. At a very abstract level, the
two themes of creative advance and social union state the philosophical back-
ground of the following two sections of this chapter, ‘‘Liberal Democracy’’ and
‘‘Liberal Nationalism.’’
696 samuel h. beer