Abstract

The world today is divided not only by conflicting interests and ambitions, but also by rival conceptions of freedom. It is often pointed out that whereas the Anglo-American liberty, won chiefly through victories of dissenting religious sects, was mainly attentive to the rights of minorities, the French conception, owing much to Rousseau's theory of the General Will, and to the drastic course of revolution, put the emphasis on the sovereignty of the people and majority rights. In England the battles for freedom were won, not on the barricades, but in Parliament, and not wholesale but bit by bit. However much the West may have ironed out in practice the discordance between these rival conceptions, the impact on the twentieth century has been momentous; for Hegel took over Rousseau's General Will. Marx and Engels adopted Hegel, somewhat inverted, and the Soviets built on Marx and Engels. This lineage of theory, as Edward Hallett Carr has pointed out, provides a background and a rationale for the Soviet emphasis on political solidarity and unanimity, and the corresponding neglect of individual and minority rights. For the backward and colonial nations today the Soviets, therefore, represent the ideal of popular unity to carry out large-scale economic plans, which usually require a drastic break with the past and new leaders; whereas the United States symbolizes economic aid with competition and opposition rights upheld.