SOURCE: "Graham Wallas' New Individualism," in Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1, March, 1958, pp. 14-32.

In the following essay, Mack follows the development and influence of Wallas's political thought.

As he walked with Lowes Dickinson in Cambridge one day, Graham Wallas suddenly stretched his hand out as if trying to seize something, and asked, "Don't you sometimes feel that the solution of the problem of democracy is just there, almost within reach, if only you could see more clearly and grasp more firmly?" Dickinson's eyebrows arched ironically.¹ What was Wallas looking for? Did he find it? Or was he a Don Quixote of political science, off on a chivalrous but outmoded mission? Was he seeking the impossible?

In 1908 Wallas published Human Nature in Politics, one of the first books to warn of the monster political force that could spring from manipulated mass opinion and of the small part played...