bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Catholics and the Civic Order: Parish Participation, Politics, and Civic Participation
Authors: Leege David C.
Published: August 2009

Renewed interest in the relationship between religion and politics in the United States and widespread discussion of recent pastoral letters adopted by the American bishops, especially those dealing with disarmament and the economy, have drawn attention to the political values of American Catholics. After a brief historical review of the political experiences of American Catholics and of the roles social theorists accord religion in political life, this article addresses three concerns: (1) in a nation of joiners, does parish participation reinforce civic participation? (2) are there patterns in the connection between religious values and political values? and (3) do parishioners feel that church leaders should offer teachings on personal morality and sociopolitical questions and, if so, should the teaching be accorded special respect? The primary basis for empirical generalizations is a sample of 2667 active, parish-connected non-Hispanic Catholics.
The Presidential Elections
Authors: Kerwin Jerome G.
Published: August 2009

Under the French Third Republic it was customary for candidates for the presidency to make no statement concerning their aspirations to high office. It would have destroyed all chances had they revealed a cherished conviction on any vital public question. Now and then exceptions occurred. So firmly established, however, did the custom become, that a politician's silence on problems of the commonwealth spoke eloquently of his intentions. If he attended the opening of schools and hospitals, the conferring of official honors, and like occasions and indulged in harmless specimens of rhetoric, his aspirations were undeniable. He stood above the noise and confusion of everyday political strife, thus showing his outstanding qualifications for an office that, theoretically at least, existed in a non-partisan world of its own.
Friendship and the Circumstances of Justice According to Aquinas
Authors: Porzecanski Daniel Schwartz
Published: August 2009

The facts about friendship (objections a-d) used to support the view that the circumstances of justice are displaced by the circumstances of friendship (the Inverse Proportionality thesis) are, in Aquinas's own understanding of friendship, either not true —(a), (b), (d)—or (in my own view) irrelevant to the Inverse Proportionality thesis—(c).

Aquinas's theological view that there is no merit without (or “outside”) charity can also be expressed non-theologically: when two persons are separated by a wide gap, the actions of the inferior do not lay just claims on the superior unless the inferior is a friend. The inferior's actions become effective in entitling him to just deserts only when proportional equivalence between the superior's and the inferior's actions becomes possible. Proportional equivalence obtains only when the inferior's actions are seen as the common actions of both friends. An action is common to two persons when neither of the persons is merely a part or tool of the other, both cooperate freely, and both share reasons. Friends' actions are common actions.

It must be stressed that this reading of Aquinas's view does not lend support to the notion that friendship takes precedence over justice (“you only have justice if you have friendship first”). In this reading, Aquinas believes that, in the transition from a superiorinferior relationship to a relationship between partners, friendship and the possibility of just interaction arise concomitantly.
Problems of Western Europe
Authors: Wall Bernard
Published: August 2009

The following pages are based on the last six months of 1948 which the writer spent in England, France and Italy. During this period Marshall aid had begun to bear certain fruit. On the other hand the international situation, already bad at the opening of the period, had deteriorated cumulatively as time passed. The Berlin deadlock, a symbol of the will of East and West, continued as before; and not even the beginning of a solution was reached at the United Nations assembly in Paris in die autumn. All over Europe people were preoccupied widi the economic crisis; but also by the direat of a new war. A military committee composed of Great Britain, France and Benelux was formed in the autumn under the chairmanship of Marshal Montgomery. There remained problems about this committee's effectiveness as well as about the extent to which other proposals for Western union were practicable at present. While in each country in Western Europe common people and politicians are talking more about union than ever before, in practice separatist tendencies in each shrunken western nation are still at work and travel to, or independent contact with, neighboring countries is a far more difficult business today than it was in 1939.
State Sovereignty: Alexander H. Stephens' Defense of Particularist Federalism
Authors: McClosky Herbert
Published: August 2009

The debate over the nature of American federalism did not end, as is so frequently maintained, with the victory of die North in the Civil War. Indeed, it is inconceivable that a conflict of such proportions could ever; be reconciled as readily in the intellectual sphere as in the military. For at least three decades following the termination of that struggle, scholars, jurists and publicists continued, with a fervor and prolixity rivalling that of the pre-war debates, to explore the issues and constitutional questions associated with nullification, secession and the locus of sovereignty in the American Union. The great bulk of this post-war writing on federalism was the work of the victors and tended, therefore, to express “nationalist” or “dual federalist” interpretations. Despite an atmosphere hostile to the dissemination of theories that continued to view the states as sovereign bodies, defenses of particularism continued to appear. Among these was the treatise on constitutional history produced by Alexander H. Stephens.
The Nuremberg Trial: A Legal Analysis
Authors: Leonhardt Hans
Published: August 2009

The major war criminals Goering, Hess, von Ribbentrop, and others were sentenced by an international military tribunal in Nuremberg for certain crimes or groups of crimes which had been formulated prior to the trial in a charter signed in August, 1945, by the representatives of the United States, France, Britain, and Russia. In the Charter of the International Military Tribunal adopted in London three major categories of delinquency had been set up dealing with crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Crimes against peace were to consist of acts such as planning, preparing, initiating or waging a war of aggression in violation of international treaties or participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of the foregoing. War crimes were to consist of violations of the laws or customs of war and were to include, among others, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor, ill-treatment of prisoners of war, killing of hostages, and wanton destruction of cities not justified by military necessity. As crimes against humanity were to be considered such acts as exterminations, enslavement, deportation of any civilian population before or during the war or any kind of persecution if the latter had occurred in execution of or in connection with any other crime under the jurisdiction of the tribunal.
The Philosophy of Existence: Plato's Gorgias
Authors: Voegelin Eric
Published: August 2009

“War and battle” are the opening words of the Gorgias, and the declaration of war against the corrupt society is its content. Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric, is in Athens as the guest of Callicles, an enlightened politician. It is a day of audience. Gorgias receives visitors and is ready to answer all questions addressed to him. Socrates, accompanied by his pupil Chaerephon, calls at Callicles' house in order to see the great man. The ultimate motif of the battle is not stated explicitly but indicated, as so frequently with Plato, through the form of the dialogue. Gorgias is somewhat exhausted by the stream of visitors and the hours of conversation, and he lets his follower Polus open the discussion; Socrates leaves the opening game to Chaerephon. The battle is engaged as a struggle for the soul of the younger generation. Who will form the future leaders of the polity: the rhetor who teaches the tricks of political success, or the mystic-philosopher who creates the substance in soul and society?
Democratic Dialectics
Authors: Roelofs H. Mark
Published: August 2009

In the modern, extant world of practical history, the dominant “democratic” tradition splits sharply into three, often hostile strands. These strands are liberal democracy, social revolutionary democracy, and participatory democracy. Especially for analytical purposes, it is important to see these strands as distinct sharing only the vaguest general commitment to government by and for broad reaches of the population (thedemos). However, the three strands, for all their differences—and hostilities—should be seen historically as standing in profound and significantdialecticalrelationship with each other. In this light, liberal and social revolutionary democracy are opposites in an antithetical tension that is increasingly extreme. Participatory democracy will then appear as a third term, a still emerging synthetical response arising out of attempts to resolve the tension between the two earlier democratic variants, and clearly showing marks of its inheritance from them.
Confucianism with a Liberal Face: The Meaning of Democratic Politics in Postcolonial Taiwan
Authors: Ling L. H. M. , Shih Chih-yu
Published: August 2009

Neither cultural conversion to Western liberalism nor resort to local traditions such as Confucianism adequately deals with the hybrid nature of democratization in a postcolonial context. With its assortment of Chinese, Japanese, American, and Taiwanese hegemonic legacies, Taiwan offers a case in point. Its version of democratic politics operates across three contending normative domains: liberal political institutions, Confucian rationales for power, and Taiwanese nativist/nationalist sensibilities. Some may despair at this “distortion” of the (Western) liberal democratic ideal. We suggest, alternatively, that the contentious and unstable nature of liberal politics in Taiwan may render its polity more open-ended and organic, with simultaneous potential for both authoritarianism and democratization.
On the Meaning of Contemporary Atheism
Authors: Maritain Jacques
Published: August 2009

I Should like to consider in this essay one particular aspect of the present spiritual crisis—namely, contemporary atheism and its inner meaning, Such a topic, the meaning of contemporary atheism, involves very deep and intricate problems. I do not pretend to dogmatize about them; the views that I shall offer are somewhat tentative views, which originate in a desire to look for the hidden spiritual significance of the present agony of the world.

In an introductory part I shall try, first, to analyze briefly the various kinds of atheism we might have to deal with, in order to characterize more accurately contemporary atheism.
Solovyev and the Meaning of History
Authors: Munzer Egbert
Published: August 2009

At Easter, 1900, Solovyev published a revised version of his Three Discussions and prefaced it with these words:: “Even in this amended form, I still feel numerous defects in the work. But not less felt is the distant image of pale death which quietly advises me not to put off the publication of this book to an indefinite and unsure date.” He thus proved to be a good prophet even in regard to his own life. A few months later, on the 31st of July, 1900, he died.
The Reports of the Hoover Commission
Authors: Heady Ferrel
Published: August 2009

In late May of this year the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, commonly known as the Hoover Commission, submitted its concluding report to the Congress. This was the nineteenth in a series of reports released at intervals beginning early in February. The relatively brief individual printed reports of the Commission were accompanied by appendixes containing the most important substantiating evidence garnered from an estimated total of two and a half million words contained in studies made for the use of the Commission.

This documentary output contains the results of the most extensive study ever made of the problem of executive reorganization in the federal government. The Commission on Organization, created by act of Congress in the summer of 1947, started under the most auspicious circumstances, was liberally supplied with appropriations for its work, and has enjoyed widespread public interest in its recommendations. With a distinguished membership drawn from public and private life, from the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, and from both major political parties, the Commission was given an extremely broad assignment by die Congress.
Political and Distributive Justice in the Political Science of Aristotle
Authors: Mathie William
Published: August 2009

The modern science of politics has agreed with Thomas Hobbes that government must be based on the rejection of Aristotle's belief that claims to rule might be judged and accepted on their substantive merit as a matter of justice. The present essay examines the premodern approach as found in Aristotle's treatment of the question of regimes in the Politics. It is argued that the interpretation of Aristotle's discussion that understands him to distinguish right and deviant regimes as these are in the interest of ruled or rulers respectively and to seek a resolution of the conflict between claims to rule as a kind or instance of distributive justice is belied by a close reading of his Politics and Nicomachean Ethics and collapses distinctions crucial to Aristotelian political science.
Thirty Years of the Soviet Regime
Authors: Gurian Waldemar
Published: August 2009

When Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party, was appointed by the second all-Russian Soviet Congress as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars in November 1917, neither he nor his adversaries believed that the new regime would last very long. Trotski tells how a conservative Russian officer helped to defend Petrograd against the advancing troops of the counter-revolution because he hated liberals and democrats and did not believe that the Bolsheviks could stay in power. And Lenin was very proud when he could announce that the Bolshevik regime had lasted longer than the abortive Parisian Commune of 1871.
Labor Legislation in the United States: The Background and Growth of the Newer Trends
Authors: Abell Aaron I.
Published: August 2009

The current trend toward conservatism in American politics is most pronounced in the field of labor relations. This should occasion no surprise in view of the well-known fact that legislation in behalf of labor was die essential and constant element in New Deal liberalism. In keeping with the “American way” of swinging the political pendulum periodically from liberalism to conservatism and back again, the present Congress enacted the Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Relations Act with the aim of curbing the power of union labor so succesfully enhanced by the New Deal. The bitter controversy attending die passage of die Act and the unrelenting and all but unanimous opposition of organized labor and many of its friends to die continuance of the law underscore die paramount importance of labor questions in the country's maturing economy. Other phases of labor legislation are indirectly involved in the present reaction: health insurance, and increased coverage and more generous benefits under the Social Security and Fair Labor Standards Acts. Though diese supplements are badly needed, they fail to arouse general enthusiasm in the climate of opinion that now prevails.
Britain and the Crisis
Authors: Wall Bernard
Published: August 2009

It seems impossible to sort out where all the many strands in British life are leading just now, or to forecast the political future of the country. Too much depends on outside influences. There is the world-wide question of the future of relations between America and Russia. There is the question of what way continental Europe will turn in the next year or two. There is the appalling complication of the economic crisis. The political situation at home and abroad is still a fluid one.

Some American readers may have read a “London Letter” by Arthur Koesder to the Partisan Review which appeared some months ago. Koestler, with all his ability for penetrating and destructive criticism, called England an island of “virtue and gloom.” This is an impression many people now get when they compare England with continental countries in many ways far worse off, such as France or Italy.
The Greek Crisis — Its Constitutional Background
Authors: Black Cyril E.
Published: August 2009

Ever since the liberation of Greece over a century ago, the central issues in Greek public life have been the political unification of all Greek-speaking peoples, questions of domestic, social and economic policy, and the elaboration of a satisfactory constitutional regime.

Since Greece received at the time of its liberation only a small share of the lands which it considered to be Greek, its foreign policy has always had this goal: the unification under the political sovereignty of the national state of all the territories in the Eastern Mediterranean region where Greek-speaking inhabitants predominate. By the acquisition of the Ionian Islands in 1863, Thessaly in 1881, and Crete, die Aegean Islands, Southern Epirus and Southern Macedonia in 1913, the greater part of this task had been accomplished on the eve of the first World War.
Marx and the Modern City: Public Life and the Problem of Personality
Authors: Ellison Charles E.
Published: August 2009

In recent years many scholars have contributed to the development of Marxist analyses of urban political economy. At the same time, a smaller number of social and political theorists have examined Marx's political theory and identified his theory of public and private life as a central component of his politics. Too often, Marxist analyses of urban political economy do not fully incorporate Marx's political theory. Analyses of Marx's politics, on the other hand, tend to overlook the dimensions of the modern city which illuminate his theory of public and private. This article brings together Marx's urban theory and political theory and suggests that they are, in fact, very much intertwined.
Reagan and That Unnamed Frenchman (De Tocqueville): On the Rationale for the New (Old) Federalism
Authors: Zuckert Catherine H.
Published: August 2009

In his 24 September 1981 television address presenting the argument for a second round of budget cuts, President Reagan concluded by citing an old authority:

More than a century ago a Frenchman came to America and later wrote a book for his countrymen telling them what he had seen here. He told them that in America when a citizen saw a problem that needed solving he would cross the street and talk to a neighbor about it and the first thing you know a committee would be formed and before long the problem would be solved. And then he added, “you may not believe this, but not a single bureaucrat would have been involved.”
On the Naturalness and Lawfulness of the Natural Law: A Few Remarks on Ernest Fortin's Doubts
Authors: Goerner E. A.
Published: August 2009

It has often been noted that opponents of the doctrine of natural law sometimes claim that it is no accident that its principal elaborators and defenders have been Christians who attempt to forge a doctrine that harmonizes reason and revelation, nature and grace. But, the argument goes, natural law theorists achieve that harmony by claiming that reason knows things about nature that wise and reasonable nonbelievers fail to see there. So it is interesting to see one who is a believer and, at least in appearance, a defender of the doctrine of natural law admitting the validity of the nonbeliever's objection, at least on one major point.
European Recovery: the Longer View
Authors: Galbraith J. K.
Published: August 2009

There was a time, not many years in the past, when it was taken for granted that Americans had little interest in problems much beyond their borders. No one seriously argues this to be so today. But while we have mastered our disinclination to think of problems that are distant in space we have still a strong aversion to problems that are distant in time. So far as it is ever permissible to generalize on questions of national temper — and it is not an exercise to my taste — we are still a rather short-sighted people. The Congress of the United States, which in this as in other respects is an only slightly distorted mirror of national character, can and does rise to emergencies. It has rarely shown capacity to foresee and to forestall crises. I should guess that it has not done so because the American people are not inclined to foresee and to forestall trouble.
The Consequences of the Currency Reform in Western Germany
Authors: Sauermann Heinz
Published: August 2009

Followingmilitary collapse both in 1918 and in 1945 Germany presented two economic phenomena indicative of the destruction of economic life. In the twenties an open inflation occurred. For a relatively short time German money lost its value and purchasing power. This period of a completely open inflation was limited by a currency reform of a particular kind. Instead of cancelling the money in circulation the volume of money was increased by introducing a new stable money, the so-calledRentenmark. At the same time, the old money in circulation had been devaluated at the rate of one billionth of its face value. This controlled monetary experiment as well as the preceding huge inflation have found a place in the history of money. On account of the undoubted success of the devaluation experiment in 1923, the opinion seems to prevail that a devaluation is the best, if not the only way to reform the currency.
The Argentine Question: The War Stage
Authors: Pattee Richard
Published: August 2009

The Argentine question became a veritable cause célèbre during the months before the conclusion of hostilities and has continued its turbulent way down to the present time. An avalanche of tendentious interpretations and speculation has obscured the issue and distorted the facts. There are several definite stages in the evolution of die Argentine problem. There is die internal one, widi reference to the type of regime set up under Pedro Ramirez, Edelmiro Farrell and President Juan Domingo Perón. There is the war period, during which the tugging and heaving had to do primarily with active collaboration by the Buenos Aires government with the United Nations, and there is the later period, in which we still find ourselves, when the role and place of Argentina in inter-American life is the fundamental issue.
England in 1946
Authors: Wall Bernard
Published: August 2009

It is perhaps of the nature of wars that they should hasten developments endemic in a society and bring to pass in a few short years what would also have happened under conditions of peace, but in a much longer span of time. This at least has been in some measure the effect of the recent war on Great Britain's position in the world. It is now apparent and generally recognized that the situation of privilege if not domination which was the lot of the English people from the time before the Seven Years War—or from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards—has come to an end. Perhaps this change in England's position has been recognized for some while in the United States. On the other hand Americans have perhaps never realized the striking contrast in the past between the standard of living and the stability and security of this island and that of the larger continental countries and centers of force—France and Germany.
Making the United Nations Work
Authors: Wright Quincy
Published: August 2009

The United Nations is a transitional organization. It includes in its structure aspects of several types of world organization. The privileged position of the great powers suggests that it is a world empire governed by these powers.

The broad principles stated in the preamble and the first two articles providing for pacific settlements of disputes, forbidding aggressive wars, requiring cooperation in suppressing such war, encouraging international cooperation, and protecting the domestic jurisdiction of all states suggests that the United Nations may rely primarily on moral principles. The fact that there are five great powers, each with a veto vote on the use of sanctions, suggests that the success of the organization depends upon maintaining a balance of power among these states. Finally, the provisions concerning human rights and cooperation for human welfare through the Economic and Social Council, together with the important position given the International Court of Justice, look in the direction of world federation.
The Wasteland of William Blake
Authors: O'Malley Frank
Published: August 2009

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.
Newman and the Spiritual Crisis of the Occident
Authors: Karrer Otto
Published: August 2009

Newman's is perhaps the most illustrious religious mind in the modern Anglo-Saxon world. Exactly half of his long life (1801–1890) was devoted to the Anglican Church, the other half to the Catholic. However clear and unequivocal his conversion, his intellectual position is nevertheless the same in both periods. The sources of his inner life stem from the revelation of the Eternal, which came to him when he was fifteen years old and never left him his whole life long. His philosophical thinking is influenced by English empiricism that involves an attitude of restraint concerning intellectual speculation. It is in conformity with the English love of the concrete, of the individual-personal element and, with due respect to the spirit of tradition, of Christian freedom. And even though Newman's theology is rooted in ancient Christian tradition, his missionary conscience is directed towards the future, towards the spiritual conflicts of the twentieth century. Their unfolding he sensed with astonishing prevision. Just as his sermons and writings are divided almost equally between the two periods of his life (with the exception of perhaps one decade at the height of his career, in which he saw himself doomed almost to inactivity because of tragic misunderstandings), so his life's work has become the common possession of all Christendom, first, in his native land and, then, increasingly in other countries. For what Newman has to say actually concerns the whole Christian world.
Descent to the Cave
Authors: Andrew Edward
Published: August 2009

Considerable controversy in recent decades has centered on the question of why the philosopher in Plato's Republic would condescend to participate in politics. The traditional view is that philosophers rule from a general obligation to the city in which they live, a specific duty to the kallipolis which educated them or an acknowledgement of “the rule of reason as the primary and natural imperative.” However, if the ultimate happiness of the philosopher consists in a contemplative life divorced from politics, then the justice of the city which demands that philosophers rule conflicts with the psychic harmony of the individual philosopher. The analogy between justice in the state and in the individual soul breaks down as justice in the state demands functions of the philosopher for which he has no inclination or expertise. The just rule of reason is possible for individuals but impossible for states, unless philosophers can be required to meet their obligation to rule.
Theoretical Foundations of World Government
Authors: Cook Thomas I.
Published: August 2009

ItIs incumbent on the advocate of World Government to show first that it is desirable, and secondly that it is possible. Initially, he has to prove that it is in accord, rather than incompatible, with the dominant ethical traditions of humanity. Because largely by reason of industrialism the values of Western civilization are profoundly influential in the world today, he must indicate its special relevance as a culmination of the Western tradition. He must then demonstrate that the psychological and sociological needs of contemporary man can best be satisfied by such government, and that men's wants and feelings are not irrevocably opposed to it. Similarly, he must make it clear that, whatever be the superficial oppositions, established folkways and mores do not constitute an insuperable barrier to its achievement. Finally, it is incumbent on him to point out how the constitutional and governmental issues raised in its establishment may be met.
Hegel's Discovery of History
Authors: Smith Steven B.
Published: August 2009

Hegel's philosophy of history is conventionally regarded as a part of his mature “system of science.” And so it is. What is less frequently understood, however, is that this philosophy grew out of or can at least be understood as an attempt to come to terms with a crisis in the tradition of modern natural right.
The Erosion of the Function of Political Parties in the Post-Liberal State
Authors: Moody Peter R.
Published: August 2009

Jimmy Carter's farewell address deplored the pernicious influence of “single-interest” groups in America. These are said to harm the two-party system, which is already in trouble in any case. Such groups are not interest groups in the classical liberal sense, but are more like unusually narrow mass movements.
Voltaire: History Unexemplary and en Philosophe
Authors: Fitzsimons M. A.
Published: August 2009

The victims of the wars of religion and persecution had their revenge in the growth of a temper indifferent to the claims of particular churches. There were others too who, adopting ancient materialisms, rationalism or the outlook of physical science, rejected theology and abandoned religion altogether. For both, the Enlightenment meant a polemic against the Christian churches, as well as Judaism, and the articulation of new beliefs. Since religions touched in different degrees all spheres of life, the battleground included philosophy, morality and history. Superstition and persecution were the themes of Enlightened church history. God's hand, if there was a God, might direct history in some ultimate way, but not by direct intervention. As there was no “sacred history,” the meaning of history or, at any rate, a way of looking at history, had to be sought anew. After the first quarter of the eighteenth century, this task attracted a remarkable and numerous response, to which the Romantic period added the dense and challenging Idealist philosophies of history. The philosophes, the gurus of Enlightenment, presented history's meaning as not in the past but to come, as salvation from the irrational and the brutal, presented it with a clarity as misleading as it was persuasive.
Maritains's Philosophy of Education for Freedom
Authors: Ward Leo R.
Published: August 2009

Jacques Maritain began his theory of education by supposing that the child is made for freedom, that formal education on all levels, rightly conceived, is essentially aimed at truth and that the achievement of truth in areas such as philosophy, science and art progressively helps to make us free. The child is made to know. This means that he is made for a spiritual conquest of all nature. He is made also to love God and man, and this means that he is made for a conquest of himself. These simple statements were basic.
James Madison and Religious Equality: The Perfect Separation
Authors: Weber Paul J.
Published: August 2009

One of the marks of any generation's scholarship is its desire to examine the ideas of important historical figures in the light of contemporary concepts and concerns. One of the marks of a truly significant historical figure is his or her ability to inform and stimulate successive generations as each grapples with the salient issues of its own times. This scholarly dialectic has its dangers and its satisfactions. One danger lies in the temptation to carve one's own interpretation of historical writings immutably into the concrete issues of one's own times, dismissing as secondary or historically idiosyncratic, those ideas which do not answer the needs or fit the intellectual categories of that time. A second danger is that of early obsolescence. The satisfaction of the scholarly dialectic, on the other hand, lies in the discovery of solid foundations in the past for the concerns of the present. This is particularly important when the historical figure in question is one of the nation's Founders, for here the solid foundation supports not only a historical interpretation but can legitimate constitutional interpretation as well.
Benedetto Croce and the Dilemmas of Liberal Restoration
Authors: Roberts David D.
Published: August 2009

The challenge of fascism led Italy's most distinguished philosopher, Benedetto Croce, to focus on the condition of the philosophical foundations of liberalism. Partly as a result, Croce became a central figure in the liberal opposition to fascism, and when, in the early 1940's, it became possible to envision the reconstruction of a liberal political order in Italy, he had no choice but to play a major role, even though he was seventy-seven years old in 1943. Largely because of Croce's direct involvement, the ensuing debate over political priorities brought to the surface, to an unusual degree, major questions about the intellectual underpinnings of liberalism. Croce had been seeking to bring liberal theory up to date, with some promising results, but his immediate practical preoccupations during the 1940's diluted the force of his argument, so the contribution which he could have made to a modern recasting of liberalism, both for Italy and for modern culture in general, was not appreciated. Instead, Croce's stance contributed to tensions that quickly caused Italian liberalism to fragment — and to shrink — and of course the resulting weakness has been crucial to postwar Italian history. On the European level as well, the new liberalism he had in mind never fully coalesced, and thus in part, liberalism has been widely considered passé among European intellectuals.
International Economic Justice and the Guaranteed Minimum
Authors: Douglass R. Bruce
Published: August 2009

Inequality is still with us. For all of the talk (and worry) about the appeal of egalitarianism in modern politics, the benefits which derive from living together in organized society continue to be distributed in highly unequal ways. The reports of the death of privilege are greatly exaggerated. Some people live in opulence while others live in squalor. From birth some have secure life prospects while others survive, much less flourish, against enormous odds. Some people live comfortably well into old age, while others suffer and die from curable diseases in childhood or youth. In certain respects and in certain societies there no doubt has been some progress toward more equality, but in numerous other respects inequality persists. Indeed, it has grown.
Self and Subjectivity in Political Theory
Authors: Zetterbaum Marvin
Published: August 2009

To speak of the self is to fix one's attention inward; to speak of social and political things is to direct one's attention outward toward those with whom our life is mysteriously and often involuntarily bound. What do “they,” those fellow citizens, want from us? Shall we approach them openly, guardedly, or perhaps not at all? Shall we look away, turn inward and thus fulfill ourselves? What, precisely, is involved in responding to the others?
A Black Senator from Mississippi: Blanche K. Bruce (1841–1898)
Authors: Shapiro Samuel
Published: August 2009

Although born a slave and held in bondage until past his twenty-first birthday, Blanche K. Bruce escaped the worst cruelties of the Peculiar Institutions. He was born in a slave cabin near Farmville, the county seat of Prince Edward County, Virginia, on 1 March 1841. Youngest of eleven children born to his slave mother Polly, Bruce was an octoroon or quadroon, with light skin and Caucasian features; his father's name and race, however, are apparently unknown.
Unity and Contradiction in the Theory and Practice of International Relations
Authors: Thompson Kenneth W.
Published: August 2009

A timeless issue in the history of political thought is the relation of theory and practice. From Plato to the present, it has preoccupied political philosophers and statesmen. In the discourse, an uneasy truce has prevailed between those who view theory as a handmaiden of practice and those who maintain that the twain shall never meet. Their differences are illustrated by discussion of the classical distinction questioning whether theory and practice should be paired at all. If theory merely finds expression and can realize itself only through application in practice, it becomes something less than theory conceived of as the quest for truth.
Power and Diplomacy: The 1920's Reappraised
Authors: Braeman John
Published: August 2009

Since Pearl Harbor, American foreign policy during the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years has receivedalargely negative appraisal from historians. In the aftermath of World War II, the adherents of Wilsonian internationalism dominated the writing of American diplomatic history. The crux of their indictment of the Republican administrations of the twenties was that this country's refusal to participate in collective-security arrangements for upholding the peace was responsible for the breakdown of international order in the years that followed. If the United States had joined the League of Nations, or at the minimum cooperated with the peace-loving nations, Britain, France, and, until the illusions of the wartime alliance collapsed, the Soviet Union, against would-be or actual aggressors, the Second World War could have been avoided. Although this view has continued to have its champions, the hardening of Cold War tensions —and the accompanying disillusionment with the efficacy of the United Nations — spurred a major counterattack upon what George F. Kennan has termed the “legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems.” With the emergence of the so-called realist school came a different—though no more positive—evaluation of the role played by the United States during the age of normalcy.
Octavio Paz: The Search for Mexican Identity
Authors: Hoy Terry
Published: August 2009

The question of national identity has been a central theme in Mexican thought since the Revolution of 1910. The writings of Octavio Paz, one of Mexico's most prominent literary figures, are an important and provocative locus for this question. The contribution of Paz to an analysis of Mexican identity must be seen in the broader context of an intellectual revolution in Mexico. This began in the late 1920's and was directed against the prevailing philosophical romanticism represented by Antonio Caso and Jose Vasconcelos. This was, in part, a protest against the anti-intellectualism inherent in an “aesthetic-intuitive” approach of these writers. But it was also the demand for a philosophical perspective more relevant to an emerging Mexican nationalism already being articulated in literature and art. The writings of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset were of crucial importance in influencing Mexican philosophy towards realism. The key concept taken from Ortega was that of “historical perspectivism”: the view that reality cannot be grasped independently of the point of view from which it is being observed. Perspectives do not distort reality; they constitute it. Philosophy, then, is changed from something abstract and eternal to something concrete and historical. Ortega's historical perspectivism became the inspiration for Mexican thinkers who wished to develop a national philosophy and a concept of “Mexicanidad.”
American Conservatism and the Democratic Tradition
Authors: McCloskey Robert G.
Published: August 2009

In 1873, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court filed a memorable dissenting opinion. His brethren had upheld a state-granted monopoly against the charge that it violated the new Fourteenth Amendment. The substance of that majority judgment has never been reversed, and it stands today as one of the great milestones in our constitutional law. But the dissent of Mr. Justice Field, though unproductive as to the specific constitutional doctrine he there espoused, is, from another viewpoint, even more noteworthy. For it marks — or we can conveniently take it as marking — the point in our intellectual history at which the democratic strain in the American tradition begins its subservience to political conservatism.

The choice of a date is indeed somewhat arbitrary. A profound change in the national consciousness does not occur overnight, and the revision of the American ideology diat Field's dissent proclaimed was not yet complete in 1873. But Field was a child of his times, and he spoke with the voice of the new generation. His rambling discourse, with its moral overtones, is evidence that a new era in American political thinking had dawned.
The Background of the Soviet-Yugoslav Dispute
Authors: Ulam Adam B.
Published: August 2009

The conflict between Stalin's Russia and Tito's Yugoslavia is reminiscent of a quarrel between two old friends whose long intimacy serves only to make their dispute all the more violent and ultimately irreconcilable. Certainly the reaction of the Yugoslavs has followed a familiar pattern: at first, complete incredulity that their old friends and protectors should take a minor dispute centered around a few personalities and a few administrative problems as the opening of a great campaign to proclaim Tito and his collaborators traitors and to call for the destruction of their regime. Then, as the hope of reconciliation vanished (this hope was evident, at least on the Yugoslav side, during the first few months of the dispute), both sides began to recall those moments of strain which at the time of mutual admiration had appeared as only minor dissonances, but now upon reflection, were seen as the first clear signs of the other side's brutality or treachery.

The Partisans fought during the war for their own country but they also fought with a fanatical devotion to the Soviet Union. Apart from the Communist persuasion of their leaders the fact that the Soviet Union was meeting the main fury of German attacks and that it stood as the main defender of the Slavic nations, against Germany's aggression, created an atmosphere in which the slightest criticism of Yugoslavia's great ally would have been inconceivable. Even a few months after July 1948, Tito in his speech to the 5th Congress of the C.P.Y.
The Imperialist Character
Authors: Arendt Hannah
Published: August 2009

Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India; the former was originally the hardly conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened, whereas the latter was a consequence of that administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt at the same time to be hopelessly their inferiors and in need of their special protection. Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow man and no people for another people.
Romanticism and the Rise of German Nationalism
Authors: Kohn Hans
Published: August 2009

Romanticism though in its beginning little concerned with politics or the state, prepared the rise of German nationalism after 1800. It was an aesthetic revolution, a resort to imagination, almost feminine in its sensibility; it was poetry more deeply indebted to the spirit of music than the poetry of the eighteenth century had been, rich in emotional depth, more potent in magic evocation. But German romanticism was and wished to be more than poetry. It was an interpretation of life, nature and history—and this philosophic character distinguished it from romanticism in other lands. It was sharply opposed to the rationalism of the eighteenth century; it mobilized the fascination of the past to fight against the principles of 1789. In that indirect way romanticism came to concern itself with political and social life and with the state. It never developed a program for a modern German nation-state, but with its emphasis on the peculiarity of the German mind it helped the growth of a consciousness of German uniqueness.
The Soviet Concept of Democracy
Authors: Timasheff N. S.
Published: August 2009

The cold war—now aggravated by shooting war in Korea, —is being waged on many fronts. One of these fronts is ideological, reflecting the incompatibility of the social ideals of the opponents. The ideological war is being conducted in many ways; and among the weapons used by the foe there is perhaps none more irritating to the Americans than the assertion that the Soviets enjoy real democracy while American democracy is but a ridiculous fake.

From the very first day of their rule over Russia the Soviet leaders have insisted that their democracy is the best, or the highest ever achieved in history. This insistence they have made both before and after the enactment of the Stalin Constitution (1936)—in other words, both when their democracy excluded from the exercise of political rights the members of the former “bourgeoisie” and its servants (for example, clergymen and Tsarist policemen), and after their shift to universal suffrage.
On Soviet Philosophy
Authors: Bochenski I. M.
Published: August 2009

The first thing one must understand in order to grasp the nature of Bolshevism is its philosophical character. There are, of course, other factors which contributed to the formation and which influence the activity of the Party; but the Party considers itself as acting in the name and for the sake of a philosophical creed. That is why philosophy is considered an overwhelmingly important matter in the contemporary Soviet Union. As this point is often overlooked by Westerners (who are still very much influenced by the positivistic tradition), it is useful and necessary to substantiate it.