Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/42

 28 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Napoleon, the new scourge of God, was a child of the Revo- lution in every sense, and did even more than the republic had succeeded in doing for the complete destruction of the rights and liberties and social order which had already suffered so many and grievous lesions. The intellectual, social, and economic disruption of Christendom was now complete. The lower classes, which once were as self-respecting and coherent as any other, had been reduced to a shapeless mass — "the masses," as the modern phrase goes — a sort of sociological pulp or pus, and remained utterly isolated from the so-called " classes," which were now distinguished and cemented together chiefly by mere material wealth.

In the meantime, by Quesnay and Adam Smith and others, the "dismal science" had been created — a political economy that utterly ignored the ethical principles which are the very basis of all human society. Against this classical system of social-economic liberalism, as well as against the whole existing order, or rather disorder, of society, a twofold reaction has taken place during the present century, under the pressure of a situa- tion that was becoming unbearable.

Liberalism, the system which, under one or another of its protean forms, has dominated Europe and America for nearly two hundred years past, represents an extreme individualism, limited only by the principle of the absolutely unlimited authority of the state. Those who, while otherwise dominated by liberal ideas, are strongly impressed by the existing evils, have usually sought a remedy in the further exaggeration of one or the other of these features, both of which, from a Catholic point of view, are pernicious in the extreme. The anarchists wish to reorganize society on the basis of pure individualism ; while the collectivists seek to enlarge the sphere of state despotism so as to make it coin- cident with the whole industrial, economic, and social life of the whole people. The former are the successors of the barbarous northern tribesmen and of the robber-barons of the Middle Ages ; and the latter carry forward, in a new form, the traditions of the Roman Caesars and of the Henrys and Frederics of mediaeval