Les possibilités sociales de la guerre

Severally and collectively mankind always builds better or worse than it knows. Even in the most successful enterprises aims and results do not wholly coincide. In executing our immediate purpose we have to use forces which are outside our intent. Once released, however, they continue to operate, and they bring with them consequences which are unexpected and which in the end may quite submerge the objects consciously struggled for. Such an immense undertaking as the present war is no exception. The will to conquer describes the immediate aim. But in order to realize that the end all sorts of activities are set going, arrangement made, organizations instituted, as incidental means. After they have been called into being they cannot be whisked out of existence merely because the war has come to an end. They have acquired an independent being and in the long run may effect consequences more significant than those consciously desired. If, for example, one takes a cross section through the warring countries at present, one finds a striking rise in power of the wage-earning classes. Through the necessities of war, their strategic position in modern social organization has been made clear, and the Russian Revolution has brought the fact to dramatic self-consciousness. Is it not conceivable that some future historian may find this consequence outweighing any for which the war was originally fought? If it is the unintended which happens, a forecast of the consequences of the war seems doubly futile, for it is hard enough to disentangle even the professed aims in such a manner as to make them precise and definite. Yet it is possible to see some of the forces which have been released by the war. Through fixing attention upon them, we make some guess about the future in it's larger outlines. the first result which I see is the more conscious and extensive use of science for communal purposes after the war.…