The Atomic Theory of Society

Extract

In few affairs is political wisdom so put to the test as in the treatment of institutions that are growing old. Age in these cases has little to do with mere antiquity: the forms of social life are subject to no set term of years. It is a matter of continuing adaptability. Some institutions, like the British monarchy, possess this attribute in an astounding degree. Others, like the House of Lords, betray a hardening of the arteries that bodes ill for their survival in times of rapid change. For the speed of social change affects not only their physical and conceptual environment; it acts also upon, and through, the temper of the politicians and the public. In such periods society will sometimes administer a sudden coup de grâce to its more recalcitrant institutions, abolishing at one stroke both the abuses they have inflicted and the garnered wisdom they enshrine. The loss involved in these moments is seldom evident until long after, when it has to be made good ab ovo.

To such moods the Gallic genius is peculiarly liable; and it was in one of them that the French crashed open the gates of the nineteenth century and nailed the atomic theory of society to the lintel. “There are no longer any guilds in the state, but only the private interest of each individual and the general interest. No one may arouse in the citizens any intermediate interest, or separate them from the public weal by corporate sentiment.”