This [volume, The Great Society] is a welcome sequel and complement to that most original and stimulating book Human Nature in Politics. Mr. Wallas is easily the most instructive of our present writers in political theory. This book is as full of enlightening obiter dicta, of passages of shrewd observation and of ripe wisdom, as was his earlier work. It is also more important as essaying a much greater task. Human Nature in Politics was mainly negative in its result. It showed remorselessly how the optimistic democratic theory of the early nineteenth-century Radicals was vitiated by their intellectualism, by their neglect of the part played in man's nature by half-conscious emotional forces, easily exploited for evil ends. No doubt the author held out a hope that if we all became converted to his passionate belief in the importance of psychology we might escape the dangers he had so convincingly described, but his grounds for encouragement were not persuasive. For it was difficult not to be struck by the fact that the insight into politics of which the book showed so much, had almost nothing to do with the study of psychology and everything to do with Mr. Wallas's own wisdom and experience.

In this book Mr. Wallas has essayed the more constructive work at which the earlier book only hinted, and tried to show more definitely what psychology can do for us.

He begins with a picture of the problem created by the existence of what he calls 'the Great Society,' showing how the transformation of the external conditions of civilized life by the inventions of the last hundred years have produced a political situation which is 'without precedent in the history of the world,' how for all our inventions the dominant fact of modern politics is the insecurity of the Great Society and the general failure of mankind to control the conditions they have themselves created. 'We feel that we must reconsider the basis of our organized life because without reconsideration we have no chance of controlling it.' If only this book makes the average man who cares about politics face the problem of civilization as Mr. Wallas has done, it will have done a great service.

The book is 'written with the practical purpose of bringing the knowledge which has been accumulated by psychologists into touch with the actual problems of civilized life.' It may be advisable, therefore, to leave unnoticed the many incidental subjects on which Mr. Wallas touches and consider the main subject of his book, the importance of psychology for politics. The book is divided into two parts. In the first we have an account of the psychological characteristics of the ordinary individual man, which aims at showing us the material from which political organization is formed; in the second a discussion of political organization with a view to asking how it can be better adapted to the facts of human psychology. Actually I think there are two main questions which Mr. Wallas is discussing, though he does not always distinguish them clearly. He begins by presenting us with his psychological account of the ordinary individual with his capacities and his needs, and then asks (1) how fitted are these capacities to solve the problems of 'the Great Society,' and (2) how far does 'the Great Society' satisfy man's ordinary needs.

The first point to be made is that Mr. Wallas follows the method of Hobbes. He begins by examining the nature of the ordinary individual man, assuming that that can be considered by itself, and then asks how men with natures such as he has described can be organized in Society and what Society will do to help them. We have been accustomed to look on this procedure as the typical mistake of the individualist. Mr. Wallas is in some sense an individualist in political theory. He thinks that the State should be described as an organization rather than as an organism; he does not believe in the existence of a common will or consciousness distinct from the wills of the individual members of the State. 'The Organized Will of a modern society only comes into existence as a result of the formation of difficult and always imperfect social machinery.' He has no belief in the psychology of a social self, and little patience with all the pretentious nonsense which has been talked about crowd psychology by Le Bon and others. Yet there can be little doubt that his individualism is justified and necessary. Human nature is not, of course, independent of Society, but nevertheless it remains very much the same through all changes of political organization. The new conditions of life are continually calling for new responses, but the new responses cannot be organic. The process of organic development is much too slow. Human nature is much the same now as it was a hundred or five hundred or a thousand years ago; political problems are quite different; and the new situation must be met not by organic change but by organization. The fact, then, that human nature is infinitely more stable and slow to change than political conditions is a vital fact for the politician which most 'organic' theories of Society neglect, which further justifies us in regarding typical human nature as the material out of which political organizations are made, whose needs are the end such organizations should serve. Knowledge of the ordinary human being then is the foundation-stone of politics. Any political schemes which ignore his limitations are foredoomed to failure, as any that do not serve his happiness are useless.

This position is, I think, fundamentally sound, and it is obviously, as over against all 'organic' and 'common consciousness' theories of the State, very important. Its connexion with psychology is clear if we can from psychology learn what are the enduring elements of human nature. Mr. Wallas holds that we can. For as we are looking for permanent and inherited characteristics, we should be able with the help of physiological psychology to distinguish these 'dispositions,' as Mr. Wallas calls them, from acquired or improvised ways of behaving. Mr. Wallas here bases himself on the study of 'instincts' which has been projected by Mr. Shand and Dr. MacDougall. These dispositions form our political material and their functioning is necessary to happiness. Most of the unhappiness of modern Society is due, Mr. Wallas thinks, to 'baulked dispositions,' and the great problem of Society is to give them free play in an environment totally different from that which produced them. The greater part of the book consists of chapters dealing with dispositions, habit, fear, pleasure-pain and happiness, love, hatred, 'taking a lead' and 'following a lead,' and thought. Most of what Mr. Wallas has to say in these chapters is very instructive, but we doubt whether it is really as certainly based on scientific psychology as he makes out. But that doubt depends on what Mr. Wallas would deem a more serious impiety, the doubt whether any psychology can be scientific in the sense that there can be any classification of 'dispositions' which is not guided by the purpose which these are to serve. A discussion of this point would make this review of inordinate length, and in any case this criticism in no way detracts from the extreme value of Mr. Wallas's work.

In the second part of the book, which is on the whole the more interesting, I think it can be shown that Mr. Wallas's reliance on psychology has led him into a definite error. He is considering three different kinds of organization, and adopts as the basis of his classification the division of the three forms of consciousness, Cognition, Conation, and Feeling. If he was anything like as well read in modern philosophy as he is in modern psychology, he would have had to take notice of the very serious criticism which has been directed, particularly by Croce, against that tripartite division. One thing that criticism has made clear, viz. that Feeling, however it is to be understood, cannot be regarded as co-ordinate, or as Mr. Wallas would say, 'in the same plane with' Cognition and Conation. He distinguishes three kinds of organization—the organization of thought, of will, and of happiness. The distinction between a thought and a will organization in politics is most important, and Mr. Wallas has some most instructive things to say on the subject. But surely it is obvious that he is wrong in talking of an organization of happiness in the same sense. In the first two members of his division thought and will are what is organized, in the third happiness or feeling is the end or purpose of organization. Take Mr. Wallas's own illustration: 'The Organization created by a Shop Hours Regulation Bill aims primarily at securing a feeling of comfort among those employed in retail trades. It is therefore predominantly a Feeling Organization, or, as I shall call it to avoid ambiguity, a Happiness Organization.' But such an organization organizes thought or will in order to provide happiness, and all thought and will organizations have the same end. The criticism may seem pedantic, but it is important, first, because it shows the danger of building too confidently on psychological distinctions, and secondly, because if Mr. Wallas had recognized that the consideration of purpose is distinct from the consideration of material, he would have recognized more generously than he does that though happiness depends on the satisfaction of certain 'dispositions,' it is not merely constituted by such satisfaction and must be considered less from the standpoint of psychology and more from that of philosophy.

It remains that this is a work of classical importance in political theory, the most noteworthy publication since Green's Principles of Political Obligation.