grounded in the institutions and customs of the English, of the
American, and of the French Revolutions. Under different and sometimes
clashing forms these doctrines have left a determining imprint upon
all theories and actions both social and political, of the XIX and XX
centuries down to the rise of Fascism. The common basis of all these
doctrines, which stretch from Longuet, from Buchanan, and from
Althusen down to Karl Marx, to Wilson and to Lenin is a social and
state concept which I shall call mechanical or atomistic.

Society according to this concept is merely a sum total of
individuals, a plurality which breaks up into its single components.
Therefore the ends of a society, so considered, are nothing more than
the ends of the individuals which compose it and for whose sake it
exists. An atomistic view of this kind is also necessarily
anti-historical, inasmuch as it considers society in its spatial
attributes and not in its temporal ones; and because it reduces social
life to the existence of a single generation. Society becomes thus a
sum of determined individuals, viz., the generation living at a given
moment. This doctrine which I call atomistic and which appears to be
anti-historical, reveals from under a concealing cloak a strongly
materialistic nature. For in its endeavors to isolate the present from
the past and the future, it rejects the spiritual inheritance of ideas
and sentiments which each generation receives from those preceding and
hands down to the following generation thus destroying the unity and
the spiritual life itself of human society.

This common basis shows the close logical connection existing between
all political doctrines; the substantial solidarity, which unites all
the political movements, from Liberalism to Socialism, that until
recently have dominated Europe. For these political schools differ