Proposed Roads to Freedom

<p>The attempt to conceive imaginatively a better ordering of human society than the destructive and cruel chaos in which mankind has hitherto existed is by no means modern: it is at least as old as Plato whose Republic set the model for the Utopias of subsequent philosophers. </p><p><br></p><p>Whoever contemplates the world in the light of an ideal whether what he seeks be intellect or art or love or simple happiness or all together must feel a great sorrow in the evils that men needlessly allow to continue and if he be a man of force and vital energy an urgent desire to lead men to the realization of the good which inspires his creative vision.</p><p><br></p><p>It is this desire which has been the primary force moving the pioneers of Socialism and Anarchism as it moved the inventors of ideal commonwealths in the past. In this there is nothing new. What is new in Socialism and Anarchism is that close relation of the ideal to the present sufferings of men which has enabled powerful political movements to grow out of the hopes of solitary thinkers. </p><p><br></p><p>It is this that makes Socialism and Anarchism important and it is this that makes them dangerous to those who batten consciously or unconsciously upon the evils of our present order of society.</p>