"What 'practical men of affairs'
do not face up to is the fact that 'politics' today has to do with the
willful making of history. The enlargement and the centralization of the
means of history-making signify that, for better or for worse, power elites
are no longer in a situation in which their will and reason need be overwhelmed
by 'impersonal forces beyond their control'. A politics of responsibility
is now much more possible than in a society with less far-reaching and
less centralized means of power. The present fact is otherwise: A politics
of semi-organized irresponsibility prevails. But that fact ought not to
blind us to the political possibilities opened up by this great structural
change: It is now sociologically realistic, morally fair, and politically
imperative to make demands upon men of power and to hold them responsible
for specific courses of events" (The Causes of World War
III, 1958, p. 100).