“Thus the England and the Germany of the liberal age represent two extremes of social formation. On the one side a society which has grown up and is daily maintained by the spontaneous conformity of its members—on the other side a social chaos which from time to time produces wonderful flowers of individual development and then relapses into the dullness of the herd, held together by the mechanical forces of the state.”*
This was a comment by Adolf Löwe (later Adolph Lowe), who came to Britain -- or as he consistently refers to it in his book, "England" -- in the mid-1930s from Germany for reasons that I probably don't have to explain.
In case there should be any misunderstanding, he's praising Britain (sorry, England) in the passage I quoted, which appears in his 1937 book The Price of Liberty. (He became a naturalised British subject in 1939.)
To Löwe, the English capacity for "spontaneous conformity" was a model for facing the need to balance freedom and order in the world of the new mass society.
From a little earlier in his book.
“When I landed in England three years ago, with my German background everything which happens naturally here at first seemed to me like a chain of grotesque paradoxes. … It was only gradually that I succeeded in finding the common denominator which gives these paradoxes coherence. This forced me to cast about for some of the historical factors which have moulded this peculiar social form. From here a road suddenly opened up to a certain insight into the significance of the English social order for the future. This must even be understood in a double sense: not only of England’s own further development, but especially of her value as an example for a new Western civilisation.”**
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* Adolf Löwe, The Price of Liberty: An Essay on Contemporary Britain (3rd edn., London, 1948 [1937]), 26.
**Ibid., 10.
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