Abstract
THIS fourth pamphlet in the Social Science Series is a great advance in style, printing and content over the third pamphlet (“Post-mortem on Fascism”, by Moriss Richards), and in spite of a tendency to quote excessively from journalism, and himself to display some of its poorer characteristics, Mr. Spencer-Bragg has produced a more readable pamphlet than his title might suggest. He presents fairly enough some of the dangers of an uneducated or partly educated democracy in the world to-day, and his examination of the different conceptions of democracy which divide the world to-day and of the question whether a single world system in which economic democracy and political democracy co-exist is possible is reasonable. He sees such a system as the only condition upon which civilization can survive, and he appears to rest his hopes on a comparatively small number of scientifically minded persons being able to obtain mass support and approval, if not full understanding, of their outlook and policy. But while Mr. Spencer-Bragg emphasizes the need for scientific understanding of human society and for the scientific study of such problems, he shows himself strangely insensitive to values, and above all to the need for a moral and spiritual basis for world order. The materialistic outlook is rather too prominent for the author's diagnosis to be entirely convincing, and one's distrust is increased by his partiality for ideology which, somewhat prematurely as it seems to one reader, he exalts to the level of a science.
“999—Emergency!”
Arthur W.
Spencer-Bragg
By. (Social Science Series, No. 4.) Pp. 64. (London: Social Science Association, 1946.) 2s. 6d.
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B., R. “999—Emergency!”. Nature 158, 570 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158570a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158570a0