All politics are governed by human desires.  The materialist theory of history, in the last analysis, requires the assumption that every politically conscious person is governed by one single desire—­the desire to increase his own share of commodities; and, further, that his method of achieving this desire will usually be to seek to increase the share of his class, not only his own individual share.  But this assumption is very far from the truth.  Men desire power, they desire satisfactions for their pride and their self-respect.  They desire victory over rivals so profoundly that they will invent a rivalry for the unconscious purpose of making a victory possible.  All these motives cut across the pure economic motive in ways that are practically important.

There is need of a treatment of political motives by the methods of psycho-analysis.  In politics, as in private life, men invent myths to rationalize their conduct.  If a man thinks that the only reasonable motive in politics is economic self-advancement, he will persuade himself that the things he wishes to do will make him rich.  When he wants to fight the Germans, he tells himself that their competition is ruining his trade.  If, on the other hand, he is an “idealist,” who holds that his politics should aim at the advancement of the human race, he will tell himself that the crimes of the Germans demand their humiliation.  The Marxian sees through this latter camouflage, but not through the former.  To desire one’s own economic advancement is comparatively reasonable; to Marx, who inherited eighteenth-century rationalist psychology from the British orthodox economists, self-enrichment seemed the natural aim of a man’s political actions.  But modern psychology has dived much deeper into the ocean of insanity upon which the little barque of human reason insecurely floats.  The intellectual optimism of a bygone age is no longer possible to the modern student of human nature.  Yet it lingers in Marxism, making Marxians rigid and Procrustean in their treatment of the life of instinct.  Of this rigidity the materialistic conception of history is a prominent instance.

In the next chapter I shall attempt to outline a political psychology which seems to me more nearly true than that of Marx.

II

DECIDING FORCES IN POLITICS

The larger events in the political life of the world are determined by the interaction of material conditions and human passions.  The operation of the passions on the material conditions is modified by intelligence.  The passions themselves may be modified by alien intelligence guided by alien passions.  So far, such modification has been wholly unscientific, but it may in time become as precise as engineering.

The classification of the passions which is most convenient in political theory is somewhat different from that which would be adopted in psychology.