Christopher Dawson lived through a tumultuous time in the history of the West, and indeed in the history of humanity. It is enough to think of the difference in character between the age into which he was born (1889) and the world as it was in 1970, when he died.
As an undergraduate with his friend E.I. Watkin, he watched with great concern the outbreak of the First World War. But it was the events leading up to the Second World War, and its subsequent development, that compelled him to write his major political works: Religion and the Modern State (1936), Beyond Politics (1939) and The Judgement of the Nations (1942). Later works such as The Crisis of Western Education reflect his continuing concern with the socio-political situation of his age.
Beyond Politics
The rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1930s was a major cause for concern for the free nations of the world. Dawson, however, did not see the situation as a black and white conflict between democracy and fascism, but as a struggle between a humane individualism and a state-centred totalitarianism.
For him, totalitarianism is the idea that the State is an end in itself; he saw it in fascism and in communism, but he also saw it in the forces of uniformity and mechanization which were beginning to make themselves felt in Western democracies.
Thus, for Dawson, the way to combat totalitarianism was to focus on “a turning of the human mind from the circumference to the centre”, in other words to return to the spiritual roots of culture, without which the plant of civilization would wither and die, cut off from the source of all social and intellectual vitality.
As he stated in The Judgement of the Nations, “…the forms of violence and aggression that threaten to destroy our world are the result of the starvation and frustration of man’s spiritual nature.” Therefore, the solution lies neither in the competitive individualism of capitalism which leads to social disintegration, nor in Marxist socialism with its denial of the transcendent, but in re-introducing the spiritual into life through non-political institutions.
