Conditions of Peace

THIS is a challenging book. In depth and range of thought, in capacity for taking the long view, in attractive vigor and richness of style it suggests comparison with J. M. Keynes’s “Economic Consequences of the Peace.” But Keynes could only write a pessimistic epilogue on a peace settlement that settled nothing; his compatriot, Professor Carr, has composed a reasonably optimistic prologue to the world order that will follow the present war.

Not content, to analyze the diseases of modern society, he proposes concrete and realistic remedies. Public opinion in the United Nations recognizes much more clearly what we are fighting against than what we are fighting for. Most attempts to remedy this discrepancy have been conspicuously unsuccessful. Professor Carr, a British diplomat turned professor who is the author of some brilliant works on the early Russian revolutionaries, Herzen and Bakunin, has gone as far as any publicist on either side of the Atlantic in filling this large ideological gap. He furnishes blueprints for the kind of new world which Vice-President Wallace and others have been depicting in much vaguer and more evangelical phrases.

The author is not afraid to follow his boldest ideas to their logical conclusions. He is emphatically convinced that we are in the midst of a contemporary revolution “against the three predominant ideas of the nineteenth century: liberal democracy, national self-determination and laissez-faire economics.” Hitlerism is a wrong and perverted expression of this revolution.

But the need of our time, according to Professor Carr, lies in the lethargy of democracy. In its lack of a fighting faith he sees the root of the tragedy of the epoch between the two wars. He would now reinterpret liberal democracy in terms of the social service state. Instead of trying to create either strategic or meticulously just frontiers, he would set up a type of world economy in which frontiers would be of minor consequence. Instead of laissez faire economics, based on the idea that the general good is best satisfied if everyone tries to become rich, he would give economics a moral aim in raising national well-being internally and internationally.

Professor Carr puts substance into his frequently reiterated idea that we should seek positive, rather than negative goals, when he says: —

To prevent war we must create a new order; to reduce armaments we must build a common pool of armaments for a common purpose; to remove trade barriers we must plan international trade; to cure unemployment we must organize men for the fulfilment of urgent and necessary tasks.

In a work packed full of novel ideas, forcefully expressed, the reader naturally puts down a few questioning notes. Professor Carr is perhaps too confident of the ability of a wartime economy to serve the much more complicated needs of peace. He may underestimate the depth and permanence of the wounds which the totalitarian revolutions have left in the body of European culture and civilization. He overrates the tragedies of unemployment and rather singularly underrates the tragedies of war and violent revolution. And the world after the war may be far too irrational to listen to his reasonable suggestions for peace and world order.

All his comments on European international relations and on the aims and limitations of British policy are based on thorough information and penetrating judgment. Writing with typically British cool objectivity, in the heat of the struggle, he defends Germany against accusations which seem to him exaggerated or unhistorical. He wants an army of relief sent into Germany with the army of occupation. He rejects as unwise and impractical all plans for dismembering Germany or holding it in a state of subjugation. He looks forward to ultimate British-German coöperation, especially economic, for the good of both countries, and of Europe.

W.H.C.