bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
James Madison and the Metaphysics of Modern Politics
Authors: Lawler Peter Augustine
Published: August 2009

Federalist, No. 10, argues that human beings demand that their opinions concerning their distinctive excellence be recognized as true. This recognition, however, cannot be political. The political realm cannot do justice to the “angel” in man, and the futile attempts to secure such political recognition lead to tyranny. Where does the recognition of one's own humanity occur? The Federalist does not say. Yet it must occur somewhere for political freedom to be regarded as a human good. It is essential for the perpetuation of human freedom that the account of human nature given in The Federalist, which is comprehensive enough to secure political freedom, be supplemented by an account of the human being's transpolitical dimension. Madison provides such an account in “On Property” and in the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. These two sources show that political freedom is for the performance of religious duty, which is discoverable by human beings through their conscientious use of reason and should, therefore, be understood to complete American constitutional theory.
Taking Dworkin Seriously
Authors: Brubaker Stanley C.
Published: August 2009

Ronald Dworkin's legal essays have provoked considerable commentary on the nature of rights, law, and judging. Curiously unexplored, however, is the central claim of his work: that it presents a coherent and liberal theory of law. This article examines that claim and finds that Dworkin is most successful in establishing two propositions: (1) in “hard cases” at law there are “right answers” and (2) “articulate consistency” is the appropriate method of discovering and expressing them. Neither of these propositions, however, has any essential relation to the individual rights that he admonishes us to take seriously. Moreover, the right which Dworkin takes most seriously, “equal concern and respect,” rests upon a foundation incompatible with his argument on behalf of “right answers.” Thus, Dworkin's theory of law is neither coherent nor liberal.
Christian Democracy in Italy
Authors: Einaudi Mario
Published: August 2009

The American mind has been traditionally more ready to accept the validity of political parties which tend to reflect the complexity of political and economic problems and are not based on any simple ideology. For a nation's mind is not a simple one, nor are its interests capable of simple definition. In a free society, a political party with any claim to national scope and to a lasting identification with the task of solving the particular problems of the country in which it operates, will probably be found to be a composite movement, a meeting ground where different groups bring their different attitudes, a clearing house from which compromises emerge. This is the kind of party to which the United States has grown accustomed. It satisfies an instinctive desire to avoid those clashes on a straight ideological basis which would divide the country and endanger the maintenance of the common foundation and the survival of methods of political action accepted by all.
Reforms Under Czar Alexander I: French and American Influences
Authors: Vernadsky George
Published: August 2009

The two great revolutions of the eighteenth century—the American and the French had each in turn and in its own way a profound influence not only on the history of the United States and of France, but directly or indirectly on the history of the whole world.

These two powerful currents had a common source in the French ideological movement before the Revolution. The development of American revolutionary thought was of course more closely linked to the English ideology, but there was much contact and cross influence between the English and the French philosophers. Further, the French political and philosophical literature was directly accessible to Americans without intermediary English works. We have only to mention Montesquieu and his principle of the separation of powers which serves as the basis of the Constitution of the United States. Also, the American Revolution influenced in turn political developments in France. One finds the roots of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen not only in France but in America as well.
The Present Purge in the USSR
Authors: Moore Barrington
Published: August 2009

The series of purges that began last summer in the USSR have again aroused speculation concerning the stability of the Soviet regime. Do the purges indicate that serious popular discontent exists? Do they reflect, as some have observed, a state of fright among the Communist elite? In this essay an effort will be made to ascertain the connection between the recent purges in the fields of political, economic and intellectual life and certain continuing strains and stresses in the structure of Soviet society. Our general thesis is that recent developments merely reveal the continuation of certain long-standing but not serious weaknesses in the Soviet system. The purges are only part of the general effort of the Party to strengthen its control and to deal with these strains.
Socrates′ Defense of Polytropic Odysseus: Lying and Wrong-doing in Plato'sLesser Hippias
Authors: Lampert Laurence
Published: August 2009

Plato'sLesser Hippiasasks who is the better man in Homer, Achilles or Odysseus. Socrates argues on behalf of Odysseus and his argument ultimately leads him to the conclusion that “he who voluntarily goes wrong and does what is shameful and unjust, if indeed there is any such person, would be no one else than the good man.” This conclusion is repellant to Hippias and Socrates agrees with him while insisting nevertheless that the argument requires this conclusion. But Socrates also says he “vacillates,” sometimes holding this view, sometimes its opposite. Why does Socrates argue for the superiority of Odysseus? Why does he insist on a repellant conclusion? And why does he say he vacillates? The answer to these questions points to indispensable elements in Socrates′ political philosophy.
The Madisonian Madison and the Question of Consistency: The Significance and Challenge of Recent Research
Authors: Gibson Alan
Published: August 2009

Within the last twenty years, a number of scholars have challenged the prevailing “Hamiltonian” interpretation of the content of James Madison's political thought and the trajectory of his political career. This essay analyzes these contributions, placing them in the context of other interpretations of Madison and suggesting that they merit the most serious attention from political theorists. In general, my hope is to confront political theorists—many of whom hold a radically different interpretation—with this revision and to renew a discussion about the character of Madison's political thought and his place within the American Founding.
Federalism and the Founding: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Constitutional Convention
Authors: Zuckert Michael P.
Published: August 2009

The issue of federalism at the Constitutional Convention was considerably more complex than it is normally taken to have been, and most of the prevailing understandings of the settlement of the federalism issue in the Constitution suffer from failing to appreciate that complexity. There were at least six rather distinct versions of federalism “on the table” in Philadelphia; most found embodiment in one or another of the major plans before the Convention, although two of the schemas that are especially important for understanding the final Constitution have gone almost entirely unrecognized because they were not incorporated in separate comprehensive plans. Neither the older view that the Constitution's federalism is a “bundle of compromises” nor the currently popular view that it is essentially a nationalist document with some few federal reservations holds up when examined in the light of the “federalisms” at the Convention.
The Western Frontiers of Russia
Authors: Strausz-Hupe Robert
Published: August 2009

Russian foreign policy is characterized by matchless simplicity of conception and persistence of effort. By comparison the foreign policies of the Great Powers of modern times appear vacillating and ambiguous. There is in the history of Russian foreign policy no counterpart for that Hamlet-like indecision which gripped German expansionism confronted by the fateful choice between a western and eastern “orientation,” of the pull and counter-pull of British Empire commitments and continental interests, and of the contradictions between French colonial aspirations and French European policies.

Russian foreign policy is dominated by the strategic factor; its objectives, under the direction of the Czars and Soviet leaders, have remained the same: attainment of strategic frontiers and, wherever racial affinities re-enforce strategic geography, ethnographic frontiers. The principal theatre of operations is now, as it has been for nearly three centuries, eastern and southeastern Europe, and Russian policy in the Middle and Far East has been largely derivative. Only when Russia was blocked in Europe, on the Baltic and Moldavian Plains, only then did she turn to Asia. Russia exercised pressure on the Asiatic rimlands, especially on Britain's positions in southwestern Asia, in order to obtain concessions in Europe. Russian expansionism, although it harvested rich territorial gains in central and eastern Asia, did not let itself be deflected from its primary goals, to wit, Russia's strategic frontiers in the West. Indeed, it was the Russian advance upon Europe, the diplomatic set-backs of the Congresses of Vienna and Berlin and the military defeats in the Crimean War and World War I, which diverted Russia towards such secondary objectives as the Persian Gulf and the Yellow Sea.
Problems of a Bismarck Biography
Authors: Rothfels Hans
Published: August 2009

Friedrich Meinecke in his recent book onThe German Catastrophequotes a Danish friend and historian as saying to him during the Hitler regime: “You know, that I cannot love Bismarck, but in the present situation I must say: Bismarck belonged toour world.” It would be easy to contrast this nicely balanced statement with innumerable others which, in the last years, indulged in indictments of the founder of the German Reich as a “Nazi forefather” or threw him into the line of descent which is supposed to lead from Frederick IPs attack on Silesia in 1740 to Hitler's attack on Poland in 1939. Thus the myth of the “Iron Chancellor,” of the man “in high dragoon's boots” revived and, amazingly enough, the Nazi trick of appropriating “Prussianism” as epitomized in the pageantry of the so-called “day of Potsdam,” was given full credit by many of their very adversaries. But there were also the voices of those who, in a more careful and responsible way, tried to find out what links may possibly connect the beginnings with the end of the Prusso-German Reich or may point ahead from 1866 and 1871 or from 1879 to the potentialities of the Hitler regime. Meinecke's treatise is one of the finest examples of such conscientious scrutiny carried out by Germans themselves. From whatever angle this question is raised the towering and baffling figure of Bismarck undoubtedly has won a new actuality. And it can easily be understood that in the recent crisis of statesmanship and particularly in view of the disaster which Germany brought upon herself and the world, attention turned back to the man who stands for decisive changes in the external setup as well as in the intellectual and moral, the political and social climate of nineteenth century Europe.
Hating America: Bin Laden as a Civilizational Revolutionary
Authors: Snyder Robert S.
Published: August 2009

Much of the literature on September 11 focuses on bin Laden as a terrorist or on the idea of a clash of civilizations. In criticizing both, this paper instead conceptualizes bin Laden as a “civilizational revolutionary.” As a revolutionary, bin Laden has sought to topple moderate regimes in the Middle East and to reestablish the caliphate. In contrast with most other national or transnational revolutionaries, however, he has emphasized culture—militant Islamism. Nevertheless, as the literature on social revolutions suggests, bin Laden has used the big strategy of most other revolutionaries in “externalizing” regional conflicts with his attacks on the United States. But his tactic of apocalyptic terrorism has made him unique as a revolutionary.
Surrender: A Moral Imperative
Authors: Yoder John H.
Published: August 2009

The integrity with which a thinker, a political decision-maker, or a society can claim to hold to the just war tradition depends upon the readiness to draw and to implement the consistent negative conclusion, when the honest application of the classical “just war” criteria renders a negative reading on the justifiability of a given (or contemplated) military enterprise. The most qualified just war thinkers stated this conclusion firmly in the 1950's, but others have not pursued the theme with equal consistency.
Was Leo Strauss Wrong about John Locke?
Authors: Stone James R.
Published: August 2009

Was Leo Strauss wrong about John Locke? Surely that he was has been the consensus among historians of political thought, though their reasons are sometimes at variance. The Cambridge school, influenced by the work of John Dunn, interprets Locke's work in the light of the Calvinism in his family background. Though attacked by spokesmen for the Church of England, Locke quickly gained admirers among dissenting clergy, for his psychology, his politics, and of course his program for religious toleration, and the proponents of the Calvinist interpreta tion explain why: His discourse closely tracks the theological language of his Calvinist contemporaries. Richard Ashcraft, meanwhile, sought to restore Locke's reputation as a revolutionary by investigating his role in English politics under the Restoration, albeit at the price of reducing the Two Treatises to a tract for the moment. James Tully would likewise save him from the charge of being a capitalist apologist, insisting Locke merely offered a defense of Whig landholding, with the responsibilities as well as the privileges embedded in the English law of estate. All these interpretations dismiss or disregard Strauss's account of Locke as an atheist in the mold of Hobbes and Spinoza who succeeded by his mastery of the art of esoteric writing in concealing his unbelief; as the most successful, because most prudent, proponent of the modern doctrine of natural rights, which revolutionized politics around the world; and as the theorist who prepared the way for modern capitalism by his vigorous defense of unlimited acquisition.
Nietzsche's Honest Masks: From Truth to Nobility Beyond Good and Evil
Authors: Kirkland Paul E.
Published: August 2009

This article argues that Nietzsche uses a rhetorically modern appeal to enact the self-overcoming of modernity and the aim of enlightenment. It demonstrates how Nietzsche aims to move his readers from a prejudice in favor of truthfulness, by appearing to radicalize that aim, to a new measure of nobility. In contrast to some who present Nietzsche's styles as the means to convey a dispersion of meanings, this article argues that, designs his writing to move his age. He adopts the prejudices of his time inBeyond Good and Evil, his mature “critique of modernity” in order to demonstrate the self-overcoming of those prejudices. Beyond merely questioning the value of truth, Nietzsche evaluates by the measure of psychological strength, and describes the character of nobility beyond good and evil and beyond truth and falsity.
The Fluidity of Neutrality
Authors: Koppelman Andrew
Published: August 2009

The political ideal of neutrality toward conceptions of the good is unsustainable at the extremely abstract level proposed by some liberal theorists. Neutrality is nonetheless a valuable political ideal. One of the many ways that government can go wrong is to take a position on some question that it would, all things considered, be better for it to abstain from deciding. The classic example is the question of which (if any) religion is true. The idea of neutrality holds that government ought to avoid this pathology.
Ideas in France: 1939 to 1945
Authors: Marrou H. I.
Published: August 2009

In September, 1939, the war caught the French in a state of political uncertainty and intellectual confusion. Considered generally, they were poorly prepared for the terrible trial awaiting them. The approaching war was less a national war with clearly defined territorial or economic objectives than a great ideological crusade. Now, ideologically, it found the French divided and uncertain.

From the political point of view, the normal operation of the governmental processes of the Republic had not functioned since February 6, 1934, the date of the Riots with their Fascist tendencies; the great élan for moral and political as well as social reconstruction, which in June, 1936, had carried the political parties of the Left to power, combined as they were in the Popular Front, soon bogged down into impotence and ended finally in a lamentable failure.
The Prospects for International Law
Authors: Schwarzenberger Georg
Published: August 2009

International law has survived astonishingly well the host of ingenious horoscopes cast regarding its future by magi in many lands. Some have been prophets of gloom and have prognosticated its impending breakdown. Others have purported to see a constellation of circumstances which promised an unexpectedly bright future for the weakling in the laws family. Yet when, at times, such astrologers appear in groups, it is not sufficient to explain their emergence in terms of individual psychology; for, like the phenomenon which they analyze, they themselves are very much the product of their environment. Allowing for exceptional types, they fall into two categories which are fairly closely related to the cycles of pre- and post-war periods. For the sake of brevity, and without disrespect, they may be named the “pre-war” and “post-war” schools.
The Totalitarianism of Thomas Arnold
Authors: Nicholls David
Published: August 2009

Dr. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby school, was perhaps one of the most consistent totalitarians of the nineteenth century — he constitutes almost a pure type of totalitarianism and for this reason alone it is worth taking a look at his political ideas. He was also a good man — in certain respects a great man — and a study of Arnold's ideas will remind us that totalitarian theories are not always set forth by wicked men, but are often the conclusions of good ones. Two other reasons for examining Arnold's ideas may be mentioned; in the first place he had a considerable influence on a generation of Englishmen, as headmaster of Rugby; second, he is generally believed to have been a liberal, and it will I hope be clear from what follows that his was one of the most illiberal systems of politics ever set forth by English writers.
The Roots of Contemporary Nihilism and Its Political Consequences According to Nietzsche
Authors: Pangle Thomas L.
Published: August 2009

This essay is meant to help prepare a confrontation with the philosopher who is the most penetrating and thoroughgoing opponent of liberal democratic civilization. Nietzsche characterizes the modern democratic spirit, in all its forms, as “decadence.” This decadence he understands, however, as the final, catastrophic emergence into broad daylight of a previously hidden historical process which has been unfolding in all Western history: the “nihilism” of Athens and Jerusalem, of scientific rationalism and Judeo-Christian monotheism. Nietzsche understands himself as the thinker through whom this process finally attains self-consciousness. Now by Nietzsche's own testimony,Thus Spoke Zarathustrais the published writing in which his mature philosophy finds its fullest expression. YetZarathustra, because it comprises the “Yes-saying part” of Nietzsche's project, because in it “the eye is spoiled by the tremendous need for seeing far,” possesses a “remoteness” that makes it the most difficult to approach of all his finished works (cf.EH, p. 1141). It seems to presuppose, rather than supply, an account of how Nietzsche understands the cultural crisis to which Zarathustra is responding. My purpose here is to attempt to gather from Nietzsche's diverse pronouncements a synoptic, consistent statement of his critique of the West.
Rawls and a Shrinking Liberty of Conscience
Authors: Murphy Andrew R.
Published: August 2009

John Rawls claims that his system of political liberalism represents the “completion and extension” of liberty of conscience, a grand solution to the problem of religious diversity that accompanied liberalism's emergence in the early modern world. I argue that such a claim cannot withstand historical scrutiny, that Rawlsian liberalism instead represents aretreatfrom the commitments that drove liberal tolerationists. Rawls's political liberalism forces individuals with non-mainstream comprehensive doctrines either to change the doctrine to fit Rawls's conditions of publicity; to manufacture a “public” justification for comprehensively derived political stances; to seek to change the parameters of public debate through, for example, civil disobedience; or to advance comprehensively derived views only so long as public reasons follow in due course. The first two of these solutions run counter to the historical development of liberty of conscience, and the third fails due to Rawls's pervasive emphasis on stability. The fourth misrepresents the nature of moral reasoning and comprehensive doctrines themselves. In conclusion, I argue that underlying Rawls's liberalism is a belief-action split that has historically suppressed religious liberty and, more troubling, a type of repression that undermines the very notion of comprehensive doctrines.
Citizenship and Socrates in Plato'sCrito
Authors: Rosano Michael J.
Published: August 2009

Plato'sCritoarticulates the problem of political obligation by clarifying the paradoxical relation between Socratic philosophy and citizenship embodied in the relationship between Socrates and Crito. Scholars obscure the dialogue either by taking the arguments Socrates gives to the laws of Athens as his own reasons for obeying the law rather than as agents of Crito's edification or by severing Socrates from the laws while misunderstanding Crito's significance to political obligation. Socrates bolsters Crito's commitment to civic virtue and the rule of law while revealing their parameters and the self-sufficiency of Socratic philosophy by implicitly raising the issue of voluntary injustice. The tension between Socratic philosophy and citizenship shows the need to view Socrates' defense of citizenship in the light of his defense of philosophy.
The “Separation” of Religion and Polities: The Paradoxes of Spinoza
Authors: Fradkin Hillel G.
Published: August 2009

Benedict Spinoza is the first philosophical proponent of liberal democracy. In his Theologico-Political Tractate he calls for the liberation of philosophy from theology and for the subordination of religion to politics. Though Spinoza may have not influenced the American Founding Fathers directly, both the clarity and the paradoxes of his arguments are perhaps the best guide to understanding better the present-day conflicts over religion and politics in the United States. Spinoza's insistence on the prerogative of the political sovereign to exercise absolute authority in the sphere of moral action necessarily complicates religious values. But the “inconveniences” resulting from liberal democracy are justified in terms of justice.
The Constitution of Religion
Authors: Tushnet Mark
Published: August 2009

As legal scholars know, the constitutional law of religion is a mass of intellectual confusion. The author argues that the confusion results from the tensions between the liberal and republican traditions of American public life. He points out that the liberal tradition — the one that predominates in our law and political theory — is incapable of developing “a concept of politics into which religion would comfortably fit,” in part because of liberalism's hostility toward religion. He concludes by “suggest[ing] some ways in which a reconstituted law of religion” — rooted in the republican tradition — might provide a better accommodation between the interests of believers and nonbelievers. This essay appeared originally inThe Connecticut Law Review(Vol. xx). The editors are grateful to Professor Tushnet andThe Connecticut Law Reviewfor permission to reprint it in this special issue.
The Christian Right in Twentieth Century America: Continuity and Change
Authors: Wilcox Clyde
Published: August 2009

Although there has been substantial academic interest in the New Christian Right, to date there has been little effort to place it in a larger historical context. There have been three waves of fundamentalist Christian Right activity in this century, and there are a number of similarities between the contemporary organizations and earlier ones. The contemporary fundamentalist Right, however, is a more sophisticated political movement than its predecessors, with an expanded issue agenda and more widespread public awareness. More recently, a pentecostal Right has begun to become active in politics. For a number of historic reasons, this pentecostal Right may have greater potential to unite conservative Christians than does its fundamentalist counterpart.
Leo Strauss on Maimonides' Prophetology
Authors: Patch Andrew
Published: August 2009

Leo Strauss's “political” interpretation of Maimonides′ doctrine of prophecy is well known, as is his claim that theGuide of the Perplexedhas two fundamentally different teachings: a literal teaching, and a more radical philosophic teaching. This essay attempts to show that, in Strauss's view, Maimonides′ doctrine of the prophet as philosopher-statesman belongs to the former only, while according to the latter, prophecy (revelation) simply does not exist. It does so by showing that, in Strauss's view, Maimonides indicates that the preconditions he lays down for the existence of prophecy—in particular, the combination of intellectual perfection with extreme asceticism—cannot possibly be met. It attempts to explain, moreover, why in Strauss's view Maimonides denies the existence of prophecy: namely, because irrational moral opinions are an essential cause of all so-called prophecy.
Arendt and the Modern State: Variations on Hegel inThe Origins of Totalitarianism
Authors: Tsao Roy T.
Published: August 2009

Hannah Arendt'sThe Origins of Totalitarianism(1951), unlike her later books, is centrally concerned with the nature and fate of the modern state. The book presents a series of political pathologies – antisemitism, imperialism, tribalism, and totalitarianism – that Arendt regards as the result of failures in the state's dual mission to integrate diverse social groups into a single body politic, and to uphold the uniform rule of law for all. Her underlying conception of the state bears a striking, though unacknowledged affinity to that of Hegel. Like Hegel, moreover, she argues that citizens' mutual recognition of one another's human rights, as mediated through state institutions, is an indispensable condition for full human self-consciousness and agency. Her version of this argument is developed first through an excursus on the origins and effects of racism among Europeans living in Africa, and then through an analysis of the unique plight of stateless refugees.
Money and the Degrees of Being: A Note on English Heraldry
Authors: Fitzsimons M. A.
Published: August 2009

“Heraldry in this reign [Edward III] received the highest polish: in future times it was more gorgeously attired; but with its simplicity it lost its greatest merit.“ Change or progress which the world hails as warmly as it yearns for the permanent and the familiar has disordered and corrupted all hierarchies of men. Mediaeval society may be given an intellectual formulation which is a marvel of order. The peasant toils, the noble fights and the clerk prays. But the clashing reality hastily reveals how uncomprehensive the division is. Where is the merchant or the fortunate adventurer? If the nobleman must be endowed with lands and wealth as a mark of his station and to afford him the leisure for war, what is the status of the merchant who has profitably held the wolf of avarice by the tail? If wealth is a mark of position, does the possession of an adequate supply of silver marks, involving power as it does, also bring with it position? Over the centuries it always has, although society has often urbanely pretended that high degree went only to wealth grown old or has saved itself from vulgarity by insisting that gentility went only with land (which was purchasable).
Pessimism and the Revolutions of 1848
Authors: Gottfried Paul
Published: August 2009

Historians have long argued that an intimate connection exists between the failure of Europe's liberal and, in France at least, radical agitation of 1848 and the spread of pessimistic values during the following two decades. György Lukacs, inThe Destruction of Reason, has treated this point at some length. He ascribes the rising popularity throughout the 1850's of Arthur Schopenhauer, the most systematic and erudite interpreter of pessimistic thought, to “a purely bourgeois form of irrationalism.” The defeat of the revolutions of 1848 had left many Germans politically frustrated. What resulted was an “ideologically altered situation” in which Schopenhauer “suddenly grew famous and supplanted Feuerbach as the ideological leader of the (German) bourgeoisie.” Moreover, French capitalists, frightened by the workers' revolt that took place in Paris during June, 1848, helped to give pessimism its “international effect.” Indeed they knew its world despair for what it actually was, “an indirect apology” for their own economic interests.
Constitutional Dictatorship in the Atomic Age
Authors: Rossiter Clinton L.
Published: August 2009

How shall we be governed in an atomic war? Who will make the decisions for defense and survival, and what compulsions will support their peremptory execution? What will be the measure of our cherished liberties? In all the vast literature of atomic energy and the atomic bomb there appear no clear answers to these distressing questions.

Several authorities have meditated wisely upon the particular problems of domestic government in the atomic age. Robert E. Cushman has pictured the challenge of atomic energy to our traditional concepts of civil liberty; Arthur Bromage has admonished state and local public administrators to decentralize or die, and Senator Wiley has done the same for the national government; Bernard Brodie and Hanson Baldwin have warned of the inadequacy for atomic warfare of our present defense and mobilization plans. Yet no one seems to have outlined the over-all pattern that the American government would assume in the event of atomic war or indicated the workable adjustments that we might undertake now to prepare our constitutional system for this dreadful contingency. This neglect may well be just another symptom of our apparent decision (arrived at through indecision) to ignore the bomb and, like Mr. Lincoln, “confess plainly” that events control us. Since we refuse to contemplate the horrors of atomic war, we likewise refuse to imagine the sort of government that such a war would force us to adopt.
Father John's Nationalism
Authors: Kohn Hans
Published: August 2009

Among the German nationalists of the Napoleonic period none had a stronger influence on the practical manifestations of Germannationalism than Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Father Jahn as he was called. He was born in 1778, in the Mark Brandenburg; in the spirit of a new Prussian nationalism, he wrote in 1799 a book on the promotion of patriotism in the Prussian realm,1 which he opened with the characteristic quotation:
Local Self-Government in Late Qing: Political Discourse and Moral Reform
Authors: Lee Theresa Man Ling
Published: August 2009

This article is a study of the concept of local self-government (difang zizht) in the context of reform efforts from 1898 to 1911. Of the institutional changes proposed, local self-government rapidly gained much support among China's educated elites. The author explores the reasons behind much enthusiasm for self-government institutions by analyzing the works of two key reformists, Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929). While the reformist approach to local government indicated the continuing influence of thefengjian(feudal) tradition on the one hand, and the reformist notion of citizenship was suggestive of the Neo-Confucian conception of self-cultivation on the other, the article argues that the reformist thought on local self-government represents an important step in moving China beyond an imperial political order.
The Economic Road to War
Authors: Nef John U.
Published: August 2009

Little more than four decades separated the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 from the first World War of 1914–1918. In terms of material welfare, upon which the economists helped to fix attention, these were the most successful decades in history. In 1650 there were apparently something like half a billion inhabitants of this planet. During the forty-five years from 1870 to 1914 nearly half a billion were added. Population increased by almost as large a number in a generation and a half as it had increased during untold generations separating Adam from Newton. In the wealthier countries of Western Europe (Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Germany and France) and in North America, the real income per person gainfully employed has been estimated to have improved seventy-five percent or more, while the hours of work were substantially reduced. In the United States the per capita output of the manufacturing industries grew nearly four times over. Professor Tawney has explained that, “during the greater part of history, the normal condition of the world has been one of scarcity. … But, as a result of the modernization of production and transport, first in Great Britain, then on the continent of Europe and in North America, then in parts of the Far East, mere scarcity ceased, after the middle of the nineteenth century, to be, except in the last, the haunting terror which till recently it had been.”
U. S. Foreign Policy and the Balance of Power
Authors: Strausz-Hupe Robert
Published: August 2009

International politics, like nature, is a system of processes. There are no simple causes and effects of historical developments. The record of the past tends to determine the present — until circumstance intervenes. Peoples, like individuals, are at the mercy of what is called chance, and an apparently meaningless combination of circumstances may frustrate the culmination of long-developed tendencies. Tendency is conservative of past forms, and circumstance may appear formless, but their balanced interplay is the source of novel forms. It is only within the frame of reference of these three terms — tendency, circumstance and novelty — that forecasting future developments can derive its warrant from an exact science of prediction. The basic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is the central issue of world politics. Sir Halford Mackinder's celebrated theorem — the juxtaposition of the continental empire of Eurasia and the Oceanic Powers, and the contest over the vast rimland interposed be-between the “heartland” and the littoral of Eurasia — is today as brilliant a summation of the world strategic problem as it was forty years ago when it was first propounded.
The Political Theory of the New Democratic Constitutions
Authors: Friedrich C. J.
Published: August 2009

The revolutions of 1640 and 1789 were carried forward with a positive enthusiasm for freedom. The drama and the failure of each revolution were dominated by this fact; each revolution provided the stage for long-drawn-out struggles to write a constitution. Each produced a crop of such constitutions; and eventually a dictator emerged to carry out by force the authority that could not be arranged by cooperation. But the lesson of the struggle for constitutional freedom was not lost; the idea of the rights of man was not dead. In England, in France, this impulse produced constitutional systems in the course of the next generation; and these systems remained.
On the Origins of the Autonomous Russian Church
Authors: Denissoff Elie
Published: August 2009

Two principal facts dominate the history of Moscow in the second half of the fifteenth century: the winning of independence, and religious emancipation. On the one hand, Moscow shook off the secular yoke of the Tartars and became a State; on the other hand, the Russian Church withdrew from the guardianship of the mother Byzantine Church. Religious aspirations and the awakening of a national consciousness were then intimately bound together and strengthened each other by the interplay of their mutual influences. But, while the Moscow principality was consolidating itself and realizing its desire for political autonomy, the religious situation remained indecisive for a much longer time. The Russian soul felt itself abandoned and ill at ease with the ecclesiastical independence that came to it with the fall of Byzantium. Opposing currents divided popular opinion, and diverse influences sometimes had the most unexpected consequences. We have tried to unravel some of these currents and some of these influences in the pages that follow.
Lamennais
Authors: Gurian Waldemar
Published: August 2009

The history of the Catholic Church includes men who, after brilliant services to the Church, died outside her fold. Best known among them is Tertullian, the apologetic writer of the Early Church; less known is Ochino, the third vicar-general of the Capuchins, whose flight to Calvin's Geneva almost destroyed his order. In the nineteenth century there were two famous representatives of this group. Johann von Doellinger refused, when more than seventy years old, to accept the decision of the Vatican Council about papal infallibility. He passed away in 1890 unreconciled, though he had been distinguished for years as the outstanding German Catholic theologian. Félicité de la Mennais was celebrated as the new Pascal and Bossuet of his time before he became the modern Tertullian by breaking with the Church because Pope Gregory XVI rejected his views on the relations between the Church and die world. As he lay deathly ill, his niece, “Madame de Kertanguy asked him: ‘Féli, do you want a priest? Surely, you want a priest?’ Lamennais answered: ‘No.’ The niece repeated: ‘I beg of you.’ But he said with a stronger voice: ‘No, no, no.
Commerce, Virtue, and Politics: Adam Ferguson's Constitutionalism
Authors: McDowell Gary L.
Published: August 2009

Adam Ferguson was one of several moral philosophers who contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment, a period aptly described as one of “remarkable efflorescence.” The works of Ferguson and his fellow Scotsmen — Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid — were widely distributed, seriously read, and vigorously debated during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The greatest contribution of this Scottish school to the history of political thinking was the refinement of the idea of commercial republicanism, the synthesis of modern notions of polity and economy.
Letter and Spirit: The Political Ethics of the Rule of Law Versus: The Political Ethics of the Rule of the Virtuous
Authors: Goerner E. A.
Published: August 2009

In recent years there has been a surprising turn in the discussions by moral philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, and economic theorists, or at least those economic theorists concerned with distribution. After years of treating justice as a value and, therefore, not an object for scientific investigation, it has become necessary to grapple once again with widely argued and mainstream claims that it is possible to articulate and defend, on the basis of reason, a substantive concept of justice with major consequences for politics, constitutional and statutory law, as well as public policy.
Bishop John Lancaster Spalding and the Catholic Minority (1877–1908)
Authors: McAvoy Thomas T.
Published: August 2009

RomanCatholicism in the United States has produced able leaders among its clergy and laymen during the first decades of the twentieth century, but most of them seem to lack the lustre and verve of the Catholic leaders during the waning decades of the nineteenth century. The lay leadership which produced John Gilmary Shea, William J. Onahan, Henry F. Brownson, Patrick V. Hickey and Henry Spaunhorst had strong backing from such clergymen as James Cardinal Gibbons, John Ireland, John J. Keane, Bernard McQuaid, and Michael A. Corrigan. But the intellectual leader of American Catholicism during the late nineteenth century was John Lancaster Spalding, Bishop of Pepria, and the twentieth century Catholicism has not produced his counterpart.
The Crisis in the Polish Communist Party
Authors: Ulam Adam B.
Published: August 2009

Just as the Russo-Yugoslav dispute was reaching its climax, and before the meeting of the Cominform, which issued a detailed condemnation of the Yugoslav Party, a plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party took place. What happened at this plenum of June 3, 1948 is known to us, not directly but from many accounts given at the August 31—September 3 plenum. At the June meeting Secretary General of the Party and Deputy Prime Minister of Poland Gomulka-Wieslaw, (Wieslaw was the party name of Gomulka during the war and it is used throughout the debate), delivered the main report, ostensibly an “historical analysis” of the character of the Polish working class movement. In his speech Gomulka took as the basis of Polish Socialism the tradition of the fervently nationalistic Polish Socialist Party, and condemned the internationalist and Pro-Russian Social Democratic Party of Poland, and by implication as well the pre-1938 Polish Communist Party of which the Workers' Party was supposed to be a continuation in everything but name.
Freedom and Authority: The Ancient Faith of Locke's Letter on Toleration
Authors: Windstrup George
Published: August 2009

As equality has come to dominate the postliberal era, so virtue was earlier supplanted by liberty. However tentatively, events in many countries suggest a serious erosion in the consensus for equality. Critics of the egalitarian mind-set are achieving a new respectability. Conservative recommendations are hardly uniformly accepted, but they are now heard and, increasingly, countered on practical rather than theoretical grounds. Whether this marks a real revolution, it is at least temporarily popular to question equality in public.
On the Normative Structure of Action: Gewirth and Habermas
Authors: White Stephen K.
Published: August 2009

Recently Alan Gewirth has attempted to establish a universally valid foundation for ethics and politics by means of analyzing the “normative structure” of action and what that necessarily entails for any agent. By “normative structure”he means that by virtue of which certain “evaluative and deontic judgments on the part of agents are logically implicit in all action” (pp. 25–26). These judgments, leading finally to a supreme moral principle, are part of what is “conceptually necessary” to being an agent. Anyone who resists making these judgments is guilty of “selfcontradiction” and thus a diminution of his claim to be a rational being (pp. 44, 48).

Although Gewirth considers his approach to be a novel one, it infact exhibits some interesting parallels with the approach of the German philosopher andsocial-political theorist, Jiirgen Habermas. The latter has not written a systematic work on what he calls “communicative ethics,” but he has laid out its basic components. As with Gewirth, the foundation of this ethics lies in a certain “normative force” implicit in action. While there are such similarities of approach between the two theorists, they differ in the specific analyses they offer of action and of what constitutes an agent's claim to rationality.
The Formation of the Marxian Revolutionary Idea
Authors: Voegelin Eric
Published: August 2009

The Marxian idea of the great proletarian revolution that will end the pre-history of mankind and inaugurate its true history sprang into public effectiveness through the Communist Manifesto. Well known as is the progress of this idea after its formulation and publication of 1848, we know comparatively little about the process of its formation in the preceding decade. The main cause of this unsatisfactory state must be sought in the fact that the materials for a study of the genesis of he idea have been completely available only since 1932. In the meantime, the monographic literature on the subject has clarified many details; but a comprehensive study is still a desideratum.
Mores, “The First National Socialist”
Authors: Byrnes Robert F.
Published: August 2009

The principal obstacle to the success of Edouard Drumont's campaign against the Jews in France following the enormous success of La France juive in 1886 was his inability to elaborate a program which could tie effectively “the revolutionary worker and the conservative Christian.” Antisemitism served as a binding force, but Drumont was not so successful in his use of that weapon as Hitler later was in Germany. Most French Socialists by 1891 or 1892 had clearly rejected antisemitism, and by 1892 as well many conservatives had become frightened by the apparent radical aims of the antisemitic campaign. Even those Catholics who were still supporters of Drumont when Captain Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 were followers of Drumont only because no other party or group could attract them.
Friedrich Naumann: A Mirror of Wilhelmian Germany
Authors: Shanahan William O.
Published: August 2009

Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919) was born into that generation of Germans whoseWeltanschauunghad begun to accommodate an emerging world of science, technology, nationalism, and power politics. When he entered upon university studies in 1879 the Reich had been established, the German industrial revolution was well under way, and the scientific-historical outlook had begun to replace philosophy as the prevailing national temper. These historical currents were presently gathered into his powerful intellect, bent upon understanding itself and the times. This quest mirrored in an extraordinary way the political tendencies and intellectual moods of Wilhelmian Germany. All of its foibles and conceits, its doubts and ambition were freely exhibited in Naumann's writing. A prose style outstanding in modern German letters for its clarity and easy grace facilitated Naumann's task. Few works in German on political subjects share the literary qualities of Naumann's prose; his personal archive of Wilhelmian times can yield pleasure as well as secrets to the historian.
Mr. Justice White and the Rule of Reason
Authors: Dishman Robert B.
Published: August 2009

The “rule of reason” remains after almost forty years the most curious obiter dictum ever indulged in by the Supreme Court of the United States. Mistaken though it was in its basic assumptions, the rule nevertheless persists as the Court's standard for construing the Sherman Act. This is not to say, as some critics have said, that the rule has seriously hampered the Department of Justice in enforcing the antitrust laws. We have it on the authority of Thurman Arnold that without the rule die Sherman Act would be “unworkable … because every combination between two men in business is in some measure a restraint of trade.” The rule, he has said, “has the effect of preventing the antitrust laws from destroying the efficiency of diose combinations that are actually serving, instead of exploiting, the consumer.” The fact remains, however, that in adopting the rule the Court erred in at least two respects: first, in applying a test of reasonableness where in the early cases at least none was called for and, second, in basing that rule on a misunderstanding of the common law. For the first of its sins the Court has been scolded many times; for the second, it has received surprisingly litde criticism.