The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c15.s2.20

c15.s2.20

But in a strictly scientific way of looking at things the theories that have grown around democracy and socialism, technocracy and world-economy, *le marché mondial*, constitutional liberty and class-struggle are essentially the products of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,—the epochs of the first and the second industrial revolutions. These phenomena were unknown as facts of "large dimensions" in the previous epochs.⁸ It would be psychologically untenable, therefore, to bring in the philosophies of Europe from, say, Plato's *Republic* to Frederick the Great's *Anti-Machiavel* (1736) and *Das Politische Testament* (1768) into the atmosphere of present-day ideologies. For instance, in so far as a "modern" thinker like Hobbes or Bossuet and a still more modern thinker like Hegel was unused to the grammar of trade unions, syndicates, class-struggle, international proletariat and so forth, the "absolutism" or monistic idealism that is associated with their political theories can hardly be invoked to interpret what may be described as the "neo-absolutism"⁹ of today, namely, that prevalent among the thinkers of Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. One must by no means overlook the very important consideration that it is on the generation-long experience of parliamentary liberties, labour organization, democratic procedure, and international camaraderies that the professedly anti-parliamentary, anti-democratic, anti-socialistic systems of neo-capitalistic *Duce*-states or *Führerstaaten*, i.e., leader-polities and dictatorships have been reared.