The Ideal of Human Unity Preface to the First Edition   The chapters of this book were written in a serial form in the pages of the monthly review, Arya, and from the necessity of speedy publication have been reprinted as they stood without the alterations which would have been necessary to give them a greater unity of treatment. They reflect the rapidly changing phases of ideas, facts and possibilities which emerged in the course of the European conflict. The earlier chapters were written when Rus

Chapter XXX   The Principle of Free Confederation   THE ISSUES of the original Russian idea of a confederation of free self-determining nationalities were greatly complicated by the transitory phenomenon of a revolution which has sought, like the French Revolution before it, to transform immediately and without easy intermediate stages the whole basis not only of government, but of society, and has, moreover, been carried out under pressure of a disastrous war. This double situation led inevitably to an unexampled anarchy and, incidentally, to the forceful domination of an extreme party which represented the ideas of the Revolution in their most un

Appendixes   The two pieces that follow are connected with The Ideal of Human Unity and War and Self-Determination. Appendix I is a note Sri Aurobindo wrote during the 1930s or 1940s with reference to a proposed solution of international problems on the basis of principles put forward in The Ideal of Human Unity. Appendix II consists of a fragment found in a notebook containing miscellaneous writings by Sri Aurobindo. It appears to be a draft for the opening of an essay like those included in War and Self-Determination. It is clear from its content that it was written not long after the end of World War I, perhaps in 1919.