Although it seems sad that intelligent creatures can be so childish, I believe that the wish to be called radical and regarded as belonging to “the Left” is a further cause of the treachery to civilization of many liberals. It is not concrete goods or values they are defending, but a name, and a status corresponding to it, in the hierarchy of political emotions.

Since Stalin’s death it has become necessary to find a new focus for our hostility to the unscrupulous and inhuman behavior of the Communists. I wish it might be focused on the real cause of the trouble: Marxism. Much force of argument is wasted among Western intellectuals through a wish to exempt Marx from responsibility for this return to barbarism. Realpolitik in the evil sense was certainly not born with Marx. But the peculiar thing we are up against, the casting aside of moral standards by people specializing in the quest of ideal human relations, was born with Marx.

It was natural that idealistic people who had ceased to believe in heaven should think up some bright hope for humanity on earth. That, I think, more than any objection to “capitalism,” accounts for the spread of the socialist dream, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. During the nineteenth century, “capitalism” so-called raised the real wage of the British worker 400 percent; the average real wage of the American worker rose, between 1840 and 1951, from eighteen to eighty-six cents an hour. A good fairy could hardly have worked faster.

Those who cling to socialism often say that we who have let go are suffering from shock at the murderous outcome of Lenin’s seizure of power in a backward country. Having never backed Lenin, they are immune to this hysterical reaction and are calmly awaiting the emergence of socialism in its proper time and place. It is true that the horrendous results of Lenin’s experiment in state control—and no less Hitler’s—have influenced our judgment. They have reminded us of certain hard facts of human history that in our infatuation with an ideal we had forgotten.

One of the unconscious mistakes of Socialists was to imagine that there is a beatific end, or any end at all, to human history. In the Utopians this was excusable, for they were naively setting out to build an earthly paradise for man, and the idea could hardly occur to them that, once it was built, there was anything to do but live in it.

A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom, I think, of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory. Although few seem to realize it, Marxism rests on the romantic notion of Rousseau that nature endows men with the qualities necessary to a free, equal, fraternal, family-like living together, and our sole problem is to fix up the external conditions. All Marx did about this with his dialectic philosophy was to change the tenses in the romance: Nature will endow men with these qualities as soon as the conditions are fixed up.

Almost everyone who cares earnestly about freedom is aroused against the Communists. But it is not only the Communists, it is in a more subtle way the Socialists who are blocking the efforts of the free world to recover its poise and its once-firm resistance to tyranny. In Italy, by voting with the Communists, they ousted De Gasperi’s strong and wise government, and they are keeping his successors weak through the menace of similar action.