Man as an End in Himself

In the lobbies and meeting halls of the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson often hears the argument of new nations that democracy is a luxury they cannot afford. Stevenson can make a good case to the contrary, as he showed last week in an eloquent address in Manhattan before the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions:

"There is precious little dignity or equality in our natural state. Most human beings have to spend their lives in utter vulnerability. All are born unequal, in terms of capacity or strength . . . and survive only through the restraint shown by more powerful neighbors. For nearly 3.000 years 'Western man' has struggled to create a social order in which weak, fallible, obstinate, silly, magnificent man can exercise his free and responsible choice.

"Whether democracy can prevail in the great upheaval of our time is a valid question. We have good reason to know how clumsy, slow, inefficient and costly it is compared to the celerity, certainty and secrecy of absolutism. But the important thing is that it has survived. The important thing is that even the absolutists masquerade as democrats; even the military and quasi-military dictatorships strive in the name of democracy to manage the public business. And all of them say that authoritarianism is only a necessary transition to democracy . . . The enemies of freedom, whatever the magnificent ends they propose--the brotherhood of man, the kingdom of saints, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs'--miss just this essential point: that man is greater than the social purposes to which he can be put. He must not be kicked about even with the most high-minded objectives. He is not a means or an instrument. He is an end in himself.

"This is the essence of what we mean by democracy--not so much voting systems or parliamentary systems or economic or legal systems (though they all enter in), as an irrevocable and final dedication to the dignity of man. In this sense, democracy is perhaps mankind's most audacious experiment.''

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