Freedom and civilization / by Bronislaw Malinowski.

  • Bronisław Malinowski
Date:
1944
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Freedom and civilization / by Bronislaw Malinowski. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the use of morphine and cocaine and also of certain excesses such as alcohol from which we ourselves abstain only occasionally and fitfully. While therefore humanity is still divided by national barriers which, if separated from political instrumentalities, would do no harm to anyone, it is united in its fundamental interests of common security, prosperity, hygiene and the prevention of crime and disease, and in the spread of scientific knowledge, and of elementary legal and ethical principles. We can therefore formulate the basic principles of post-war reconstruction or, better perhaps, the ideal towards which the future construction of humanity, political, economic and cultural must move, albeit gradually. The fullest cultural autonomy must be granted to all nationalities, races and other minorities. Political sovereignty must never be associated with nationhood, since this produces the dangerous explosive of nationalism. Indeed, politi¬ cal power, insofar as it is centralized, must be vested in a hierarchy of federal units. Starting from local autonomy, it must proceed through administrative provinces, states and regional federations to a world-wide superstate. We claim therefore full national sovereignty for each cultural group. Each such group is entitled to the complete exercise of all the rights and privileges of nationhood. Live as you like, do what you want according to your own way of life, to the traditions, » customs and habits inherited from your ancestors. Such liberty has no dangers to it. The only liberty which must be curtailed politically, that is, by centralized force, is the liberty of attacking others, of meddling with the affairs of neighbors and of impos¬ ing ethnocentric egoisms upon the outside world. There is one more generalization to be stated. We have seen that the two principles of organization, that for peace and that for war, are largely independent. The peaceful phase and aspect
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