MORTIMER J. ADLER ON WORLD GOVERNMENT

Here, then, are the unquestionable propositions, referred to above, that constitute the nerve of the argument for the necessity of world civil government to preserve and perpetuate world civil peace. They are all hypothetical propositions.

1. If civil government is necessary for all civil peace in any organized community, small or large-in villages, towns, and metropolitan municipalities, and in sovereign states, either independent states or states that are members of a federal union-then civil government is necessary for civil peace in that largest of all possible communities, the global community that includes al the peoples on earth.

2. If world civil government is necessary for world civil peace, then it must also be possible to unite all the sovereign states that now exist in a federal union, in which those states would relinquish their external sovereignty (namely, their power to engage in diplomacy with one another, to engage in warfare, and to contract treaties) while retaining their internal sovereignty (as do the fifty states in the federal union that is the United States of America). The categorical proposition implicit in this hypothetical proposition asserts that what is necessary cannot be impossible.

3. If world civil government is possible, then a world cultural community must also be possible. That possibility is quite compatible with the continued existence of pluralism with regard to diverse languages and ethnic diversity in customs and conventions, in mythologies and religions, and in all matters about which reasonable men and women may reasonably disagree. The only things that now prevail which would be precluded by world government from continuing to exist are foreign policies, diplomacy, military installations and personnel, customs and immigration barriers, and the existence of persons called foreigners.