The Machinery of State
Human beings should not be frantic cogs spinning away in the Government’s factory of Progress.
1923
King George V 1910-1936
Human beings should not be frantic cogs spinning away in the Government’s factory of Progress.
1923
King George V 1910-1936
John Buchan contrasted his view of society, as a delicate ecosystem of living plants suited to a particular climate and soil, with the economic abstractions of political experts in Germany and the Soviet Union, for whom people were mere cogs and pistons in the pounding machine of Government.
WE have seen two creeds grow up rooted in these abstractions, and the error of both lies in the fact that they are utterly unhistorical, that they have been framed without any sense of the continuity of history.
In what we call Prussianism a citizen was regarded as a cog in a vast machine called the State, to which he surrendered his liberty of judgment and his standard of morals. He had no rights against it and no personality distinct from it. The machine admitted no ethical principles which might interfere with its success, and the citizen, whatever his private virtues, was compelled to conform to this inverted anarchy.*
The result was tyranny, a highly efficient tyranny, which nevertheless was bound to break its head upon the complexities of human nature. Such was Prussianism, against which we fought for four years, and which for the time is out of fashion.*
That is, an anarchy among the elite, who think they are wiser than the rest of us and have been given carte blanche to do whatever they say is for ‘the common good’. This view of Government was hardly a novelty, though: a hundred and fifty years before Buchan, Adam Smith had likened it to people playing with live pieces on a great chessboard.
Buchan’s essay was published in 1935, and with hindsight it is evident that Prussianism was already creeping back into fashion as Nazism. Buchan soon became a vocal critic of Adolf Hitler, which perhaps explains that cautious ‘for the time’. For an overview of his life and political beliefs, see John Buchan.