The works of Kliuchevskii, from the Boyar Council of Old Russia and studies of saints and historians to the five-volume Course of Russian History, advanced philosophy of history, even though he thought creating such a view impossible. In the judgment of Russia's most influential historian, neither intellectuals nor rulers nor liberals nor conservatives determined the course of events. Instead, the endless interaction of constantly shifting elements gradually produced change, helping every period in a nation's past to ripen into its successor. Almost invisible changes within the economy, social groups, and administration and the gradual growth of Western influence over centuries constituted the steps that determined Russian history's slow flow. Kliuchevskii never read Marx and Marxist thought did not affect him, but he awakened many to the role of economic forces and helped prepare for some Russians' acceptance of Marxism.

Communitarian thinkers have counterposed their views to those of liberalism as providing a more adequate basis for a political morality—a morality that deals with issues relevant to a political unit, such as liberty, equality, and fairness. Communitarians face the difficulty that the common understandings they rely on to back up a political morality are not easy to find in the form they need. This is because social units fracture along various lines, giving rise to diverse and often conflicting discourses. Where, despite such fractures, common understandings emerge as a result of either desperation or the manufacture of consent, they do not seem appropriate as a basis for a valid political morality. To avoid the weaknesses of communitarianism, it is not necessary to abandon the importance of social context for political morality. Instead, one can make use of a social theory that stresses social divisions in order to lay the base for political morality. A political morality appropriate to a group can be developed on the basis of the interests associated with such divisions.

Book 4, chapter 8, of the Social Contract, on civil religion, presents a puzzle. According to Rousseau, no state has ever been founded that did not have religion as its base. But which religion? Christianity is not an option. Paganism is not an option. Monotheistic theocracy is not an option. What does that leave? By a process of elimination, we are left with an Enlightenment religion of tolerance and mutual forbearance, which even readers sympathetic to Rousseau (or perhaps especially readers sympathetic to Rousseau) might say is no religion at all. I argue that Machiavelli and Hobbes share Rousseau's fundamental concern, which is that the otherworldly aspirations of Christianity are subversive of political requirements, but each of them thinks he can solve the problem by “de-transcendentalizing” Christianity: Machiavelli, by treating the papacy as if it were a pagan institution; Hobbes, by reinterpreting the New Testament as if it were the Old Testament. The article examines why Rousseau rejects the Machiavellian and Hobbesian solutions to his problem, and why he has no solution of his own to offer.

Scholars often link the emergence of welfarism and socialism to a loss of religious faith. Yet an examination of the beliefs of secularists who had lost their faith suggests that the loss of faith did not result in an emotional need that social reformism sometimes met. Nonetheless, an examination of welfarists and ethical socialists such as T. H. Green suggests that there was an intellectual or rational link between faith and social reformism. Here many Victorians and Edwardians responded to the dilemmas then besetting faith by adopting immanentist theologies, and this immanentism often sustained a moral idealism that inspired various social reformers.

During the past several years, radical right-wing populist parties have made impressive electoral gains in a growing number of West European countries. Their dramatic surge to political prominence has obscured the fact that these parties hardly form a homogeneous party group. Generally, it is possible to distinguish between neo-liberal and national populist parties. Both types of parties are a response to the profound economic, social, and cultural transformation of advanced societies interpreted as a transition from industrial welfare to postindustrial individualized capitalism. National populist parties are primarily working-class parties which espouse a radically xenophobic and authoritarian program. Neoliberal parties appeal to a mixed social constituency and tend to stress the marketoriented, libertarian elements of their program over xenophobic ones. Rather than being mere short-lived protest phenomena, radical right-wing populist parties are a reflection and expression of new political conflicts created by the transition to postindustrial capitalism.

The term common good has been used in so many ways that it would be difficult to find any political thinker, however individualistically oriented, who has not, in one form or another embraced it. The classical definition, formulated in the Middle Ages on the basis of Aristotelian principles, referred to a good proper to, and attainable only by, the community, yet individually shared by its members. As such the common good is at once communal and individual. Still, it does not coincide with the sum total of particular goods and exceeds the goals of inter-individual transactions. Once the idea of community lost its ontological ultimacy (mainly under the impact of nominalist thought), a struggle originated between the traditional conception of the community as an end in itself and that of its function to protect the private interests of its members. Eventually the latter theory prevailed and, after it became reinforced by resistance movements against repressive national government policies, it led to a doctrine of individual rights as independent of society. The intellectual and moral pluralism of recent times has made theorists reluctant to attribute any specific content to the notion of a common good. At a time when national communities face an increasing integration with one another in a world of dwindling resources, such a privatization seems inappropriate. The article argues for a restoration of an idea of the common good which incorporates individual rights without separating them from their social context.