LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, CLARE MARKET, LONDON,
W.C.,

_30th December 1909._




PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (1920)


This edition is, like the second edition (1910), a reprint, with a few
verbal corrections, of the first edition (1908). I tried in 1908 to make
two main points clear. My first point was the danger, for all human
activities, but especially for the working of democracy, of the
'intellectualist' assumption, 'that every human action is the result of
an intellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end which
he desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can be
attained' (p. 21). My second point was the need of substituting for that
assumption a conscious and systematic effort of thought. 'The whole
progress,' I argued, 'of human civilisation beyond its earliest stages,
has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which
enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more
successfully than we could, if we merely followed the line of least
resistance in the use of our minds' (p. 114).

In 1920 insistence on my first point is not so necessary as it was in
1908. The assumption that men are automatically guided by 'enlightened
self-interest' has been discredited by the facts of the war and the