Sweeping reapportionment of state legislatures according to the principle of “one man, one vote” now seems assured. Some very clear judicial notes have been coming out of the political thicket. At least six of the justices have found that long-forbidden territory wholly congenial. To the political animals — the lions, unicorns, bears, foxes, elephants, and donkeys — we must now add Br'er Rabbit “born and bred in a briar patch.” And yet, despite the volumes of discussion, some issues in reapportionment have been inadequately discussed and invite an attempt to clear the air.

Social or political proposals of the “ideal polity,” some of which amounted to outright Utopias, came to be fairly common during the fourth and third centuries B.C. In addition to Plato's famed Republic (which is said to have been influenced in part by Hippodamus as well as by certain Pythagorean ideas) and Antisthenes' somewhat “unorthodox” social views, Diogenes of Sinope, Iambulus and Zeno the Stoic, for instance, wrote on the “ideal city.” Also, a great many treatises On Kingship, which frequently were nothing more than part of that “mirror of princes literature” which can be traced back at least to Antisthenes, were authored during the same period. But it will be noticed that these relatively early Polities, including that of Zeno, uniformly advocated a small and highly articulated city-state with extremely narrow limits and relatively limited objectives rather than a pan-humanitarian or cosmopolitan ideal. The well-known Stoic cosmopolitanism, which some scholars have called the philosophic corollary of Alexander's conquest, is definitely of later date, later even than Zeno's widely known Republic, which still adheres to the confining notions of the traditional (and fateful) Greek particularism. This, in turn, compels us to distinguish between the early Zeno who in his original dependence on early Cynic teachings apparently shared in this limited outlook, and the late Zeno, who was able to conceive the whole universe as one single great city of gods and men without distinction of race or nationality. It is safe to assume, therefore, that Zeno's Republic is one of his earliest works and perhaps his earliest.

Burke is recognized as master of a language highly figurative, full of grace and telling images. But the imagery of nonfiction prose is not so much studied as the imagery of poetry, drama, and fiction. It should be. It reveals a great deal about a thinker. I have not studied Burke's imagery to spy on his personal life, conscious or subconscious, as some students of other writers do, nor have I tried to evaluate his style. I have used it as an oblique way of getting at the meaning of some of his concepts and I think it reveals something about his place in the history of ideas, making him a stalwart of eighteenth-century ways of thinking, instead of a harbinger of the nineteenth century.

Current American problems with respect to the treatment of minority groups have led to the return to popularity of the terminology of a philosophy of inherent rights. Although in popular debates the concepts of “civil rights” and “basic rights” are used loosely, without much regard for a comprehensive jurisprudence, they recall a philosophy of law at odds with pragmatism, a philosophy whose roots go back to ancient Stoicism, and a philosophy consistently maintained and applied by a Justice of the Supreme Court, Stephen Johnson Field, during his thirty-four years on the highest court. In the currents of popular legal opinion a few decades ago, all notions of “rights” tended to be scorned by publicists in legal and political thought, in favor of the more factual studies of power and interest groups. This was done in the name of pragmatism and realism. Although such pragmatic thought continues to hold sway in the economic areas of law and politics, in the area of the law of persons there is a tension between recognition of group demands and formal, moral appeals to law and equality. And where the pragmatists and activists of a generation ago placed their hopes for progress on the flexibility of arbitration boards and administrative tribunals, the locus of hopes, power, and controversy has now shifted to the system of formal law and, in particular, to the Supreme Court. In this shift, the position of Justice Field has likewise shifted: anathema to the proponents of basing all law on considerations of economic interests, because of his “sterile formalism,” he has recently been quoted extensively by Chief Justice Warren in a crucial opinion, and if on the Court today, would be considered an “activist.”

To Most of the world, Don Luigi Sturzo is known, if at all, as an astute political thinker and as founder of the Popolare Party in Italy following the First World War. Sturzo's own political career began in 1905, when he was elected mayor of the Sicilian town of Caltagirone, in spite of the fact that he himself was a priest. As he attests, he was brought to engage actively in politics, then as well as in 1918, when founding the Popolare, because he saw that social action, which his own town in Sicily needed badly, was impotent without the necessary political action to aid in carrying out reform.

Although the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) did not officially abandon Marxism until the Bad Godesberg Parteitag in 1959, both intellectually and politically the party's ideology was revised under the leadership of Kurt Schumacher whose “passion, intellect, and will” dominated the SPD for seven years following World War II (1945–52). The final disintegration of German Marxism under Kurt Schumacher can be demonstrated by examining the three crucial elements of Marxist socialist ideology: (1) motivation for socialism, (2) theory of the socialist movement, and (3) relations between German nationalism and socialism.