Most of the recent attempts to demonstrate the poverty of liberalism and political realism have accepted the realist interpretation of violence with few reservations. For example, few political theologians, theologians of hope, and theologians of revolution have reconsidered or modified this component of the realist perspective even as they have tried to dismantle realism. It is now time to splash what Holmes called “cynical acid” on this assumed orthodoxy, especially but not only in Protestantism. The pacifist perspective on war and violence deserves a hearing which this stacked jury of realists and their critics have refused to grant. This refusal results in part from Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of pacifism, widely considered even by pacifists to be trenchant and compelling.

Since the time that man first began recording his excursions into mortal combat with his fellow man, he has evidenced an acute need to justify destruction and killing. This justification has usually taken the form of condensing the reasons for the struggle to a few simple issues which again usually has served to reduce the contention to a straightforward and clear-cut duality between friend and enemy, the enemy being of course wrong, evil or obstructive, while the nonenemy was on the side of right or possessed a destiny which must be fulfilled even at the expense of an otherwise harmless and indifferent adversary. What justified violent action against another group was, therefore, a comparative evaluation in terms of value priorities or normative criteria which would lead to the conclusion that violent action ought to be taken against the other party. The criteria employed can normally be seen to be of two kinds: we might call them internal and external.

The task of sketching the history of liberalism, though modest, is for methodological reasons difficult. For we stand before the question of whether there is even such a thing as liberalism as a clearly definable subject and whether this subject, should it not be clearly definable, can have a history. We touch here upon a general methodological problem. Toynbee, for example, opens his great work with the question whether England has a history; he concludes that the English nation as a society is so closely related to the society of Western civilization that one cannot write an English history without going into the entire history of Western civilization. It is in this sense that there arise the questions of how liberalism is to be delimited and whether it has a history. And they arise more acutely because the case of liberalism is much more complicated than that of England. For even if some phases of English history, for example the Reformation, can be dealt with only in relation to the general European history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, still there are long periods of isolated, specifically English history. In the case of liberalism, a narrowing of the subject to national societies — German, French, English or American — is hardly justifiable. For all the regional phases of liberalism are only parts of a common Western movement; and furthermore, this movement can only with difficulty be isolated from other movements which run parallel with it in time.

As the years pass, the Northern Ireland Troubles appear to have become institutionalized at an intolerable but apparently irreducible level of violence. There appears no light at the end of the tunnel, and no firm evidence that the center can hold. The bridges between a divided society have long been reduced to rubble. The Provisional IRA appears capable, even eager, to continue a campaign of guerrilla attrition damned as self-defeating, immoral, and bloody-minded by all concerned including the Official IRA. In return Protestant gunmen have opened the season on Catholics, all guilty of treason in some form, all enemies of British Ulster. And the British Army remains a tempting target even at times to the Protestant militants.

Ever since Leo Strauss and C. B. Macpherson, at almost the same moment, challenged the received view of Locke with their novel interpretations of his political philosophy, the question of how Locke wrote, and therefore of how he is to be read, has been prominent in most discussions of Locke. Strauss brought the issue to the fore by arguing the thesis that Locke engaged in “esoteric writing,” that is, that he intentionally said things he did not believe and sometimes withheld things he did, for the purpose of securing both his own safety and the greater likelihood of success of his philosophic project. Needless to say for so bold a claim, the Strauss thesis has not gone unopposed. Sharp issue has been taken both with the claim about Locke's esotericism and more substantively with the philosophic position Strauss attributes to Locke. It is clear that the two issues are intimately connected: the kind of “Locke” one finds depends to a very great extent on the kind of hermeneutical principles one adopts in approaching his work.

I was born on July 30, 1905, in Seneca, Illinois, a village of about a thousand people located on the Illinois River 70 miles southwest of Chicago. My father, Elmer L. Ellis (d. 1945), was not a Catholic, but my mother, Ida C. Murphy (d. 1955), was, and so my brother and I were reared Catholics. I had an unexceptional childhood in circumstances that were neither rich nor poor, and which were marked, it now seems to me, by an unusual degree of security. So far as I can now recall I never experienced the inferiority complex from which many Catholics suffered because of their religion. It may be, indeed, that many Catholics of my parents' generation exaggerated the persecution they feared rather than experienced because of their religion.