Functional socialism

ON SWEEPING OUR OWN DOORSTEP 23

personal, is a thing round which associations of men —professional, technical, manual—cluster. Personal rights recede before “the primacy of things”. Duty—itself an indefinite function—is greater than the individual; function, in its wide sweep, is greater than subjective right. But it speedily becomes evident that, not only must we realize the primacy of function, we must also realize that one function is socially more valuable than another, and that in the national task of co-ordinating our functional activities, we cannot proceed until we have evolved what de Maeztu terms “a definite table of values to uphold the functional doctrine”. He places them in this order:

(1) The final or supreme values are moral satisfaction, scientific discovery and artistic creation.

(2) The instrumental value, par excellence, is man and his associations and institutions.

(3) The instrumental values for the instrument man are those which may be called by the name of economic values: power, wealth, pleasure, etc.

de Maeztu proceeds: ‘“The reason why it is impossible for me to accept any other scale of values, or to change the order of this scale, is not difficult to explain. It is thought out in such a way that the first category of values includes the second and third; the second includes the third but not the first; the third does not include the first or second. It is not possible for men to realize morality, science and beauty if there are no men, and if men do not possess such economic values as are necessary for their subsis-