Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

INTRODUCTION 3

of Guild Socialism and Social Credit. In 1922 Orage resigned from the editorship of The New Age and left for France to work with Gurdjieff. Mitrinovié, by this time, had begun to gather around him his own circle of friends and acquaintances, and had begun to lead informal discussion groups on a wide range of subjects: philosophy, sociology, the arts, religion and psychology. In 1926 he met Alfred Adler in London and the following year he founded the English branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology, known as the Adler Society. He was also at this time closely associated with Philip Mairet, Maurice Reckitt and the other members of what became known as the Chandos Group. With some of them he provided the impulse for the formation of the New Europe Group, a British initiative for European federation, of which Patrick Geddes was the first president. The New Britain movement grew out of the Adler Society and the New Europe Group, as a movement for national renaissance based on the recognition that if the age of plenty made possible by technological development was to be realised it required a total re-ordering of society, a transformation not only of the social structure but also of individual consciousness—“Self change for world change,” as Mitrinovic phrased it. The New Britain Movement came to an end as an active public movement in 1935 after publication of the movement’s papers ceased due to lack of funds. However, a group of people remained with Mitrinovi¢ and continued to work with him. He believed that the age of hierarchical leadership had passed and that a new organic social order required a new organ of integration. He gave the term Senate to this new function. It was not to be an alien body grafted onto society to rule from above, but rather a large and loosely connected group of people who would attempt to intermediate between all the different functional groupings that would together make up the new cooperative order. In such a society the values of mutual aid and community would need to be held in dynamic tension with the values of individual freedom. Some source of guidance was necessary if such a balance was to be maintained. This was to be provided by senators. They would possess no authority other than their personal influence as members of the different groupings in society. Their function would be one of helping contending parties to view their conflict within the context of the world as a whole, to help them discover how their respective points of view might be reconcilable within a wider organic context. Mitrinovi¢ called this method “Third Force,’ implying the rejection of ‘either-or’ types of thinking in favour of an approach which he characterised as “above, between and beyond the extremes and opposites.” During the years prior to World War II Mitrinovic worked with those around him in a kind of prolonged training exercise in those