Ebook: Problems of Socialist England

FOREWORD

FEW things are harder than to preserve, in a time of practically chronic crisis, a sense of perspective. Passengers travelling at full speed on a highly unsafe switchback are not likely to carry the principles of engineering firmly in their minds, nor are the headlong development of political and economic events and their interaction likely tQ appear in their true proportions and relationships to those whom they most closely affect. On the other hand, the outsider who proverbially sees most of the game is apt to ignore just those things which seem most important to the players ; he may have an Olympian, long-run rightness, but so far as present feeling-tones and immediate stresses are concerned, he is quite likely to be maddeningly wrong-and consequently unconvincing. To achieve at once the objectivity of a historian and the sense of actuality of a participant is a very rare feat indeed.

M. de Jouvenel unmistakably accomplishes it. His study of postwar England, its ideals, its economic and intellectual bases and problems, its personalities, its atmosphere and colour, recognizably shows what Englishmen have themselves seen and experienced. He does a reporter's job, an interpreter's job, extremely well. But M. de Jouvenel is not only a reporter and interpreter; he is also a distinguished political theorist and student of, history, and so his descriptions and his analyses are lit and deepened by a more than contemporary significance. In narrating and clarifying the particular problems of Socialist England, he casts a light on the crisis of Western democracy, on the problem of power as its effective exercise passes from the hands of an oligarchy, subject only to periodical electoral checks, to those of an as yet imperfectly educated, and inconsistently motivated; popular majority. For this majority he has nothing but sympathy and good will, and a guess at his politics would put them well to the left of centre. But the slogans of the Left have for him only a symptomatic interest. He has no axe to grind. One can think of many members of the Government to whom reading this book would do a power of good, but it would be no less admirable on an Opposition reading list. If the spirit which informs Problems of Socialist England were to become general, the problems would indeed remain, but the prospects for their solution would be most notably improved.

GEOFFREY CROWTHER
Editor of The Economist