nineteenth century Shelley, with
no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of the
world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas and suggestions that
was known as Socialism, and more particularly its international side,
feeble as it was in creative proposals or any method of transition,
still witnesses to the growth of a conception of a modernised system
of inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of
proprietary legal ideas.

The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular writer
upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the middle of
the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, planned as an
electric-traction system is planned, without reference to pre-existing
apparatus, upon scientific lines, did not take a very strong hold upon
the popular imagination of the world until the twentieth century. Then,
the growing impatience of the American people with the monstrous and
socially paralysing party systems that had sprung out of their absurd
electoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called
the 'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in
America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thought
of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment,
education, and government, than had ever been contemplated before. No
doubt these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection upon
social and political thought of the vast revolution in material things
that had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a long time
they seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutions
than the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the
time of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds,
and it needed only just such social and political stresses as the coming
of the atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward abruptly
into crude and startling realisation.

Section 5

Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical
novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the
twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand
Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal
sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the
Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century and a half earlier.

Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of his