Quote:We have now outlined what I have called the three main tendencies that mark a drift toward totalitarianism. They are (1) the tendency of the government to attempt more and more to intervene, and to control economic life; (2) the tendency toward greater and greater concentration of power in the central government at the expense of local governments; and (3) the tendency toward more and more concentration of power in the hands of the executive at the expense of the legislative and judiciary.

To these I am tempted to add a fourth tendency — the pressure for a world state.

The addition of this will doubtless come as a shock to many self-styled liberals and well-intentioned idealists who would regard the establishment of a world state as the crowning achievement of liberalism and internationalism. A little examination, however, will show us that the present pressure for a world state represents a false internationalism and a retreat from freedom. It is, on the contrary, merely the equivalent on a world scale of the pressure for centralized government on a national scale. It aims to set up the coercive machinery of a world state before the world is remotely prepared in sentiments or in ideology to accept a world state. The zealots for such machinery are too impatient to study the necessary preliminaries to a world state (even assuming that a world state, which would concentrate all world political powers in a few hands, is even ultimately desirable). Such zealots for a centralized world government with coercive powers fail to recognize that if international good-will and intellectual clear-sightedness existed on the part of national statesmen, practically all the reasonable objectives of a so-called world state could be achieved without setting up such a world state. And until this good-will and clear-sightedness are achieved within individual nations, the creation of a compulsive world state would be either futile or catastrophic.

Quote:The contemporary world has gone astray, in sum, because it has sought freedom from the dangers and risks of liberty.