Power and Responsibility, by Romano Guardini (Regnery, $3.00).
Limiting the meaning of “power” to the reasoned direction of force, Guardini laments the subversion of the individual’s private energies in the anonymous, collectivist, total organization of modern society. The preliminary analysis is excellent. But midway in his meditations, Guardini begins nervously to disown the dark vision he has called up. In tired cliché, he argues that all ages seem periods of decline to those who live through them. Thus having modulated into the modern key, he predicts that the age of diffused and disguised responsibility will call up an entirely “new man,” answering the challenge of impersonal system with the assertion of his own power. By some pseudo-Darwinian dynamics, man will suffer an historical transformation. But this age—which is supposed to be the cause of a new man’s assertiveness—is itself only the expression of the new man’s failure, the symptom of man grown submissive, rejecting responsibility, huddled in crowds and plastic to a totalist politics.
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