A New Political Philosophy

The question of all questions is: Can politics be rationalized? An affirmative answer to this controversial question would not take us very far unless rationalism was different from the metaphysical concept of reason. To replace the teleology of Marxist materialism by an appeal to the mystical category of reason would not be an advance.

The cognate question is about the relation of politics and morality: Must revolutionary political practice be guided by the Jesuitic dictum - the end justifies the means? The final sanction of revolution being its moral appeal - the appeal for social justice - logically, the answer to the latter question must be negative. It is very doubtful if a moral object can ever be attained by immoral means. In critical moments, when larger issues are involved and greater things are at stake, some temporary compromises in behavior may be permissible. But when practice repugnant to ethical principles and traditional human values are stabilized as the permanent features of the revolutionary regime, the means defeat the end. Therefore, communist political practice has not taken the world, not even the working class, anywhere near a new order of freedom and social justice. On the contrary, it has plunged the army of revolution - proletarian as well as non-proletarian - in an intellectual confusion, spiritual chaos, emotional frustration, and a general demoralization.

To overcome this crisis, the fighters for a new world order must turn to the traditions of humanism and moral radicalism. The inspiration for a new philosophy of revolution must be drawn from those sources. The nineteenth-century radicals, actuated by the humanist principle of individualism, realized the possibility of a secular rationalism and a rationalist ethics. They applied to the study of man and society the principles and methods of the physical sciences. Positive knowledge of nature - living as well as inanimate - being so much greater today than a hundred years ago, the radical scientific approach to the problems of man's life and interrelations is bound to be more successful. Today, we can begin with the conviction that it is long since man emerged from the jungle of ''prehistory,'' that social relations can be rationally harmonized, and that therefore appreciation of moral values can be reconciled with efforts for replacing the corrupt and corrosive status quo by a new order of democratic freedom. A moral order will result from a rationally organized society because viewed in the context of his rise out of the background of a harmonious physical universe, man is essentially rational and therefore moral. Morality emanates from the rational desire for harmonious and mutually beneficial social relations.

Man did not appear on the earth out of nowhere. He rose out of the background of the physical universe, through the long process of biological evolution. The umbilical cord was never broken: man, with his mind, intelligence, and will, remains an integral part of the physical universe. The latter is a cosmos - a law-governed system. Therefore, man's being and becoming, his emotions, will, ideas are also determined: man is essentially rational. The reason in man is an echo of the harmony of the universe. Morality must be referred back to man's innate rationality. Only then man can be moral, spontaneously and voluntarily. Reason is only sanction for morality which is an appeal to conscience, and conscience in its turn is the instinctive awareness of, and reaction to, environments. In the last analysis, conscience is nothing mystic or mysterious. It is a biological function, as such mechanistic, on the level of consciousness. The innate rationality of man is the only guarantee of a harmonious order, which will also be a moral order, because morality is a rational function. Therefore, the purpose of all social endeavor should be to make man increasingly conscious of his innate rationality.

Any effort for a reorganization of society must begin from the unit of society-from the root, so to say. Such an effort to develop a new philosophy of revolution, on the basis of the entire stock of human heritage, and then to elaborate the theory and formulate the principles of the practice of political action and economic reconstruction, therefore can be called radicalism.

Radicalism thinks in terms neither of nation nor of class; its concern is man; it conceives freedom as freedom of the individual. Therefore, it can also be called New Humanism, new, because it is humanism enriched, reinforced and elaborated by scientific knowledge and social experience gained during the centuries of modem civilization.

Humanism is cosmopolitan. It does not run after the utopia of internationalism, which presupposes the existence of autonomous national states. The ideal of One World, or a world government, is not compatible with the continuation of national states. The one makes of the other a pious desire or wishful thinking. A cosmopolitan commonwealth of free men and women is a possibility. It will be a spiritual community, not limited by the boundaries of national states - capitalist, fascist, communist, or of any other kind - which will gradually disappear under the impact of cosmopolitan humanism. That is the radical perspective of the future of mankind.