Cosmopolitanism of the old type
is a slain hallucination. Capital in our time is not content to be a
patriot, it is a Jingo. As to labour, if we turn to its politics we find
Herr Bebel declaring that the German socialist is first of all a German,
and Mr Ramsay MacDonald pledging his adherents to support any war
necessary for the assertion of English prestige. If we turn to its
theoretical sociology we find the national idea rehabilitated and
triumphant.
Such intellectual reconstructions do not, as a rule, begin in England,
or find in English their characteristic formulae. Mr Blatchford might
indeed be cited, but it is in the brilliant literature of German Social
Democracy that the most scientific expression of the new spirit is to be
sought. Truly Marx has been indeed translated. His abstract and
etiolated internationalism has been replaced by the warm humanity of
writers like, say, David or Pernerstorfer. The principle of nationality
is Vindicated by the latter in a noble passage. I quote it from
Sombart's "Socialism and the Social Movement.
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