s hitherto been the
inevitable social basis. If that is so, then the new ways of living may
not simply impose themselves in a growing proportion upon the Normal
Social Life, but they may even oust it and replace it altogether. Or
they may oust it and fail to replace it. In the newer countries the
Normal Social Life does not appear to establish itself at all rapidly.
No real peasantry appears in either America or Australia; and in the
older countries, unless there is the most elaborate legislative and
fiscal protection, the peasant population wanes before the large farm,
the estate, and overseas production.

Now most of the political and social discussion of the last hundred
years may be regarded and rephrased as an attempt to apprehend this
defensive struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing novelty and
innovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who
participate. And it is very largely a matter of temperament and free
choice still, just where we shall decide to place ourselves. Let us
consider some of the key words of contemporary thought, such as
Liberalism, Individualism, Socialism, in the light of this broad
generalisation we have made; and then we shall find it easier to explain
our intention in employing as a second technicality the phrase of The
Great State as an opposite to the Normal Social Life, which we have
already defined.

Sec. 2

The Normal Social Life has been defined as one based on agriculture,
traditional and essentially unchanging. It has needed no toleration and
displayed no toleration for novelty and strangeness. Its beliefs have
been on such a nature as to justify and sustain itself, and it has had
an intrinsic hostility to any other beliefs. The God of its community
has been a jealous god even when he was only a tribal and local god.
Only very occasionally in history until the coming of the modern period
do we find any human community relaxing from this ancient and more
normal state of entire intolerance towards ideas or practices other than
its own. When toleration and a receptive attitude towards alien ideas
was manifested in the Old World, it was at some trading centre or
political centre; new ideas and new religions came by water along the
trade routes. And such toleration as there was rarely extended to active
teaching and propaganda. Even in liberal Athens the hemlock was in the
last resort at the service of the ancient gods and the ancient morals
against the s