Hamilton Fish Armstrong, retiring editor of the influential quarterly, Foreign Affairs, writes in its fiftieth anniversary issue: “Not since we withdrew into comfortable isolation in 1920 has the prestige of the United States stood so low.” Lest his judgment be construed as political rhetoric, it should be noted that Armstrong has been an advisor to both major political parties. And if anyone doubts that there is cause for this critique, he need only consider the following: the United States, which in the 1940's and 1950's had an “automatic majority” in votes at the United Nations, has learned in the 1960's what it means to be outvoted in this same assembly. Americans, who during and after World War II trumpeted the cause of anticolonialism and the end of aggression, are today condemned as imperialists and aggressors. And while we have been heralded since 1946 as the most powerful nation in the history of the world, a tiny and divided nation among the less developed of Southeast Asia has fought us to a standstill. Is it any wonder Armstrong can write of the decline of America and point to the loss of our prestige in the world? Or that Hans Morgenthau can say: “America no longer sets an example for other nations to emulate; in many respects it sets an example of what to avoid”

The period from roughly 1830 through the 1860's saw the growth of one of the most exotic intellectual movements ever to take root in American soil. Led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England transcendentalists mounted an attack on the social, intellectual, religious and political beliefs which their fathers, not to mention their contemporaries, had blandly held to represent the ultimate of humanwisdom. If the American of the mid-twentieth century sometimes exhibits a distressing fondness for a public recital of national sins and shortcomings, the inhabitants of nineteenthcentury Boston revealed an enviable capacity for regional, if not national, self-congratulation. They surely would have agreedwith Dr. Pangloss that this was the best of all possible worlds, and why not? Was there not good reason to believe, as Oliver Wendell Holmes was later to suggest, that Boston was the Hub of the Universe?

In one of his New Yorker short stories, Donald Barthelme introduced a character named Francesca, a young woman who was a Robert E. Lee freak. Whenever she was with Thomas, the protagonist of the story, Francesca babbled on endlessly about Lee's Lost Order No. 191, or the tactics of Pickett's Charge, or the Confederate government's failure to resupply Lee's army at Amelia Court House. Even Francesca's eyes were Confederate-gray, reflecting “a lifelong contemplation of the nobility of Lee's great horse, Traveller.” However, as the anomie which usually engulfs Barthelme's characters overtook her, Francesca was finally forced to admit that “ ‘Lee was not without his faults.… Not for a moment would I have you believe that he was faultless.’ ” Thomas roused himself to ask, “ ‘What was his principal fault?’ ” To that, Francesca offered a one-word reply: “ ‘Losing,’ she said.”

On April 5, 1917, the day before Congress declared war, James Cardinal Gibbons stated in the name of the Catholic hierarchy:

In the present emergency it behooves every American citizen to do his duty and uphold the hands of the President … in the solemn obligations that confront us. The primary duty of a citizen is loyalty to country. This loyalty is exhibited by an absolute and unreserved obedience to his country.

Today the term political theory has two main meanings. It means the study of great thinkers who have, more or less systematically or polemically, written on matters political. This is the sense in which the term has been used in this century, down to the “behavioral revolution.” We shall adhere to that usage. Since the “behavioral revolution,” the term has also come to mean a theory, or theories, formal or axiomatic in structure, on subjects political but not traditionally dealt with by political theory in the first sense. This kind of political thought we shall call formal (political) theory.

Serious historical inquiry is inevitably at odds with the idea of providence in history. To such inquiry providence is an unnecessary and frustrating hypothesis. For somewhat different reasons, including embarrassment about triumphalism and presumption in the past, modem theologians rarely speak of providence. Nevertheless, what men have made of providence has had a considerable role in making and viewing history. Here then my concern is with the ways of men to God.

There exists a substantial body of revolutionary analysis focused on those elusive objective conditions that permit rebels to rise with some hope of success. There is, of course, no more a general consensus on how to begin an insurrection than on how to prevent one. At one extreme there exist the more simpleminded adherents of Règis Debray who have suggested that a small band of the brave, a foco, may alone spark an insurrection against an oppressive regime. At the other are those reluctant rebels who insist on so extensive a roster of assets that the moment to rise continues to recede into the distant future. Still within the middle ground conditions have sufficiently encouraged some so that, possessed of a just cause and hopeful of ultimate victory, the armed struggle has been launched. As a result in southern Africa and Latin America, on Mindanao and in the Basque country of Spain, there are insurrections under different banners. Some appear close to victory and others on the verge of disaster, a few are little more than the disorderly residue of past hopes and others scarcely begun. For all a crucial question remains how to escalate the initial thrust. An insurrection may begin as the act of an urban conspiracy, spring from the operations of a rural foca, evolve out of the spontaneous rising of the masses; but unless the moment is ripe any insurrection can flicker out in the recriminations of exiles or be interned with the dead. And, perhaps, no set of potential rebels have had as much experience and as little luck in identifying the moment to strike as the Irish. Yet, the news from Northern Ireland indicates that this time they must be doing something right—or the British something wrong.