GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 795
arises, the views of the man in the street are entitled to
receive as much weight as those of the expert; moreover,
on this particular issue the issue of expenditure on educa-
tion in relation to the need for economy the man in
the street may well take a different line from the economic
expert and profess himself, with Macaulay, unable to
believe that "what makes a nation happier and better
and wiser can ever make it poorer". Thus the apparently
innocuous doctrine, that in a democracy the community
should prescribe
the ends and the expert determine the
means, results in practice only too often in conferring a
charter upon the expert to impose upon the community
under the name of means, ends upon which it has had
no opportunity
of pronouncing judgment; and this danger,
it is arises
suggested,
because in a modern community
so-called means frequently reveal themselves on examination
to be not means at all, but ends masquerading as
means. The conclusion is, not that the expert should not
be consulted and used by a democracy, but that vigilance
is lest his
required, employment should become a pretext
for foisting upon the community measures which it has
not willed.
THAT THE GENERALLY SUPERIOR PERSON is
NOT ENTITLED BY VIRTUE OF HIS SUPERIORITY
TO Go VERN . (') The argument against permitting those
who are of a
possessed general unspecified superiority to
govern because they are superior, is quite simply that there
is no means of determining their superiority. Nietzsche
held that superior men were distinguished by their will
to power. In Germany they are distinguished by virtue
of their membership of the Nazi, in Russia by virtue of
their membership of the Communist, party. But in the
absence of such automatic criteria how, we may ask,
are the claims of superior persons to superiority
to be made
out save by the self-assertiveness of the claimants? In
practice,
as I have already suggested,*
the rivalries of the
*See Chapter XVI, pp. 658-660.