The first issue of The Review of Politics was published in 1939, the year of Hitler's attack on Poland. The new magazine, thus, appeared at the end of one historical period, the interwar years, and at the beginning of the new age initiated by the Second World War. The years, 1918–1939, were themselves years of the working out of the crisis of which the First World War was an issue. That war, inhuman in its demands and protracted shock effects, had finally been sustained by Utopian and revolutionary hopes. The continuing crisis, compounded by that war, had been intensified by the world depression as well as by the period's characteristic political responses to the crisis. Often enough, the center and part of the right preferred to believe that things had not changed and that there was no crisis. On the left, widely enchanted by the Soviet Union's cooperation with history, seen as the ruthless work of justice, there was an astonishing unconcern about human liberty and a blindness to suffering. The right, too, often surrendered itself to the fraudulent conservatism of fascism, to political salvation by violence. So, in 1939, war, notably global in scope, came again.

After father edward sorin, C.S.C, the founder, Father John A. Zahm, C.S.C, was the chief inspiration of modern Notre Dame. Zahm, in turn, dedicated one of his books on South America, written under the pseudonym “Mozans,” to his “Brothers in the Congregation of Holy Cross, James Burns and John Cavanaugh.” After Sorin these three men were the creators of the modern university and, while its buildings have multiplied and its students and teachers have increased greatly, whatever is worthwhile has been built on the foundation laid by these men. Some would give Zahm the highest honors, others like best the eloquent Cavanaugh, but the best theorist was Burns. Zahm's plans for a great Catholic university, perhaps premature but well conceived, were buried in the avalanche of conservatism that swept American Catholicism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Father Cavanaugh tried to keep Zahm's noble ideals alive during this conservative reaction and Father Bums took over for a brief period and began to correct the evils of stagnancy and to set Notre Dame again on its way to intellectual achievements. These generalities are much too sweeping and cover too many years for a brief narrative. The three years of the presidency of Father James A. Burns are the most tempting part of the story and the one least known.

Monsignor romano guardini, preeminent professor in the University of Munich, has had an enormous influence upon generations of German students and citizens. Now, after the steady and effective translation of his works during the past three decades, he has made a profound impact upon the minds and souls of young American scholars and intellectuals, changing, with the strength of conversion, their ways of dealing with knowledge, with ideas and human realities. In an article written for the twentieth-anniversary issue of The Review of Politics, I pointed out (“The Thinker in the Church: The Spirit of Newman,” January, 1959) that Guardini is a Newman type of thinker in the twentieth century. This is quite true. Certainly the range of his concerns is reminiscent of Newman's: literature (for instance, his studies of Dante, of Dostoevski, notably the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, and of Rilke's Duino Elegies): history (particularly revelation as history); subtle reflections upon theological questions as well as the critical problems of the contemporary political and social scene.

For more than a century there have been among the learned those who have tried to extend the outlook and the methods of the natural sciences to the study of man and to the behavior of human societies. Their efforts have raised issues which are of vital concern in the thermonuclear age which we have entered.

When albert camus received the Nobel Prize in 1957, he was honored for the quality of his writing and as a representative of the generation that had come of age between the two world wars. Camus did not hesitate to identify himself with this generation. He was willing to be a witness for those who had been helplessly thrust into “twenty years of absolutely insane history.” This was the generation, he said at Stockholm, that had learned to endure in an age when history was dominated by “the death instinct at work.”

Scholarly histories of the origins of the First World War began to appear within a few years of the close of hostilities. A dozen years later, the magisterial studies by Sidney B. Fay and Bernadotte E. Schmitt had appeared in this country, and comparable works had been completed by European scholars. It is now eighteen years since V E Day, but no studies comparable to Fay or Schmitt have appeared. In part this contrast is explained by the slowness with which the diplomatic papers concerning the years from 1919 to 1939 are being made available. Far more important, however, is the fact that scholars do not believe that a history of the origins of the Second World War can be written with substantial completeness from diplomatic records. In their studies of the years before 1914, Fay and Schmitt did consider subjects like nationalism and imperialism, but the thread that holds their story together is the history of negotiations between governments, and in particular the history of the European alliance system.

C. p. snow suggests that it is a short way to the grave for individual human beings, but the life of society can be made immortal. Many of the groups to which we belong, of which we are conscious, and to which we feel a sense of allegiance, such as our nation and our class, may indeed survive for centuries or longer. There is, however, one group to which we belong that need not fear immortality: our generation. If, as has sometimes been argued, it is the sense of a common destiny which unites all Frenchmen and all Germans, all members of the working class and of the middle class, surely no shared destiny is more fundamental than that of members of the same generation. These members have in common, not necessarily language or income, but the agonies and triumphs of life itself. If the ability to communicate helps to define membership in a group, surely our generation exists both as an objective reality and, in human motivations, even more important, as a personal commitment. This ability to communicate is shared by our generation, but at the same time we are cut off from other generations. Some things we can share only with others of our own age. Even if, by some quirk of fate, we should wish to evade our destiny as members of a generation, we cannot. Anyone who tries to escape from his generation is faced with cold hard reality: “You belong to it, too.… You came along at the same time. You can't get away from it. You're a part of it whether you want to be or not.”

In his monumental encyclical, Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII addressed himself to men of all religions and political allegiance. This historic message contained a forceful plea for world peace and for a public authority of world-wide jurisdiction, capable of working for the universal common good. Although Pope John recognized the merits of the United Nations and other intergovernmental agencies, he advocated the establishment of public authority “in a position to operate in an effective manner on a world-wide basis.” He emphasized that in our time “the universal common good poses problems of world-wide dimensions, which cannot be adequately tackled or solved except by the efforts of public authority endowed with a wideness of powers, structure and means of the same proportions.”

The period in American politics from Rutherford B. Hayes to William McKinley has been kicked and scuffed among historians until there is little left of its reputation. “No period so thoroughly ordinary has been known in American politics since Christopher Columbus first disturbed the balance of power in American society,” wrote Henry Adams. “One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years from 1870 to 1895 and find little but damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in results.” The impulse to spring to the aid of the underdog has brought forth champions of the cultural, literary, and technological achievements of the Gilded Age, but none to defend its political record. “Even among the most powerful men of that generation,” said Adams, speaking of the politicians, there was “none who had a good word for it.” Most historians believe that at no other time in American history was the moral and intellectual tone of political life so uniformly low nor were political contests so preoccupied with patronage.