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• Title: Conflicts of Power in Modern Culture
• Author : Lyman Bryson
• Release Date : January 01, 2004
• Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 4480 KB

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By HANS J. MORGENTHAU

Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

ANY TRUE AND GENUINE CULTURE, I take it, has two basic qualities. On the one hand, it is able to understand the facts of life as they exist; on the other hand, it is able to transcend these facts by a spiritual conception of life. If we apply this test to our contemporary culture, we find that it fails in both respects, and it fails particularly when we apply this test to our political culture; for our civilization refuses to recognize the facts of political life, and, because of this refusal, it is unable to transcend these facts through a spiritual conception of life.

Nowhere has this peculiar quality of our civilization been more strikingly formulated than in the first sentence of Rousseau’s Social Contract: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” This statement has had a great influence upon the political thought of the Western world, and its correctness has not often been questioned. It is, however, one of the most erroneous, misleading, and distorting statements one can make about the facts of political life. The French writer and scholar Emile Faguet has very well pointed to the logical weakness of this statement by explaining through the same kind of argument the nature of cows. “All cows,” he said, “are born carnivorous, and everywhere they live on herbs.” The absurdity of the statement as applied to cows is obvious. The absurdity of the same type of reasoning as applied to human beings is less obvious, but not less existent; for it is impossible to distinguish empirically between the status in which a man is born and the status in which he lives.

Yet this erroneous statement has had very important consequences for the understanding of the realities of political life; for it has made it appear that the normal and natural state of man is freedom and that his living in chains, his living in political servitude, is only an accident, something which can be remedied and abolished by a political mechanism or a legislative device or a social reform or an economic artifact.

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