Democracy in a revolutionary era: the political order today

"The ancient Greeks were the first to speak of politics as the architectonic science," writes Harvey Wheeler in his introduction to this comprehensive study of today's political order. Mr. Wheeler also accepts this definition and sees politics, in analogy to architecture, as being faced two fundamental problems: the first, to furnish the means, whose proper object is the common good, with which to weave the different strands of society into a whole; and the second, to define the relationship between individuals and the totality. "The first is the problem of world order, the second is the problem of democracy," and these are the two themes that constitute the essential problems of twentieth-century politics.
Beginning with a broad outline of the development of the political order, Harvey Wheeler goes on to compare the period of the birth of the nation-state to our own age, which is undergoing the birth pangs of the creation of a world order. As in the earlier period, the world is again faced with revolutionary upheaval. But revolutionary change, Mr. Wheeler argues, can also be a bloodless wrenching away from previous forms and ideas. Thus, in the chapters "The Scientific Revolution" and "Ideology," he traces the significant effects on the political structure brought about by the recent unparalleled progress in science and technology and by new attitudes toward traditional social goals.
The questions of revolution and world order posed by contemporary conditions are inextricably bound up with that of democracy. Mr. Wheeler views democracy as one of the most dynamic drives in the politics of development, our century's great propelling revolutionary force. As development progresses and true political communities are established, democratic institutions inevitably appear. The author shows how events in Communist Europe, as well as those in developing areas, demonstrate the existence of a "contrapuntal movement," involving technical and institutional innovation, despotism, revolution, and finally-democracy.
If democracy appears as a certain out come of the development process, world order emerges in our times as merely necessary, not inevitable. The author concludes that the old balance of power in international politics is no longer relevant: The creation of the atomic bomb has marked a drastic turning point, for war is no longer an alternative to politics and diplomacy. Despite the urgent need created by the new situation, the nations of the world are handicapped by a built-in bias against radical political innovations, which will have to be overcome by adopting new goals and beliefs. Looking toward the twenty-first century, Harvey Wheeler calls upon the world to seek universal order as an alternative to destruction, and he finds in the legal and social inventions that accompanied the age of nation-building the precedents and hope for constructing an ordered and peaceful world while maintaining cultural and ethnic diversities.