The World's Iron Age

THE ‘iron’ of this title is approximately that of the phrase ‘blood and iron.’ Mr. Chamberlin’s thesis is that ’the First World War imposed a brutal and irrational stamp upon social changes which might otherwise have come about in a peaceful and orderly way’; that ‘it ushered in a period of ever-widening violence, an era of unreason to replace the predominantly rationalist age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’ The conquerors, he points out, were not England, France, and the United States, but three obscure men named Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler, soon to become ‘the leaders of Europe’s revolt against civilization’ and the major prophets of the world’s new iron age of barbarism. Being a historical thesis, this commits Mr. Chamberlin to writing history. No reader of his former books, or even of his work as foreign correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, needs to be told that he has a very eminent and rigorously honest talent for setting large sequences of events in historical perspective with the least imaginable sacrifice of basic truth to the necessary simplification in the interest of lucidity.

First he gives his argument the broad base of a general conspectus of Europe in transition from the liberal-rationalist age to the totalitarian. Then he particularizes the story seriatim on a larger scale for Russia, Italy, Germany, and the Far East, by no means suffering his reader to forget the recent omens of the anti-liberal drift in France, England, and our own country — a drift accelerated by the Second World War. Finally he returns to the smaller scale, the faster pace, and the larger view, in order to face without overmuch optimism the questions, first, how the future is to reconcile the liberty of individuals with the collectivizing necessities of an industrial era, and, second, how it is to reconcile the sovereignty of nations with the necessities of politico-economi corganizations for world peace.

Odds and ends of the text, revised from the point of view of July 1941, are left high and dry by the collapse of Hitler’s early winter offensive in Russia and by the unforeseen manner of our own involvement. But nothing that has happened impairs the searching truth of his brilliant historical chapters, and nothing that is likely to happen affects the painful and terrifying relevance of the questions he asks of the future.

W. F.