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Planning and Religion. A review of The Judgement of the Nations, by Christopher Dawson; and Diagnosis of Our Time: Wartime Essays of a Sociologist, by Karl Mannheim
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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To review together Mr. Christopher Dawson’s
Neither considerations of space nor the foregoing parallel, however, is sufficient to justify considering the books together. But if we find a point upon which they converge, and consider the differences and similarities in their approach, the result – when we have to do with two writers both of great distinction, engaged in different special studies and possessing different backgrounds – may be of some profit. As the questions with which they are concerned are closely related, and the authors are quite aware of each other’s work, the point of convergence is not difficult to find. Mr. Dawson says: “Is it possible to develop a planned culture which will be free? Or does cultural planning necessarily involve a totalitarian state? . . . This is the question that Dr. Mannheim deals with in the final chapters of his book, First, that a social science such as he desiderates hardly exists as yet, though we can see its beginnings. Secondly, that the remoulding of human nature is a task that far transcends politics, and that if the State is entrusted with this task it will inevitably destroy human freedom in a more fundamental way than even the totalitarian states have yet attempted to do. Those states do, however, show us the risks of a wholesale planning which sacrifices the liberties and spiritual values of the older type of culture for the sake of power and immediate success. The planning of culture cannot be taken in a dictatorial spirit, like a rearmament plan. Since it is a much higher and more difficult task than any economic organization, it demands greater resources of powers of knowledge and understanding. It must, in fact, be undertaken in a...