Until recently, Manoilesco's confident prediction could easily be dismissed as yet another example of the ideological bias, wishful thinking and overinflated rhetoric of the thirties, an événementielle response to a peculiar environment and period. With the subsequent defeat of fascism and National Socialism, the spectre of corporatism no longer seemed to haunt the European scene so fatalistically. For a while, the concept itself was virtually retired from the active lexicon of politics, although it was left on behavioral exhibit, so to speak, in such museums of atavistic political practice as Portugal and Spain.

Many poor and oppressed people wish to leave their countries of origin in the third world to come to affluent Western societies. This essay argues that there is little justification for keeping them out. The essay draws on three contemporary approaches to political theory — the Rawlsian, the Nozickean, and the utilitarian — to construct arguments for open borders. The fact that all three theories converge upon the same results on this issue, despite their significant disagreements on others, strengthens the case for open borders and reveals its roots in our deep commitment to respect all human beings as free and equal moral persons. The final part of the essay considers communitarian objections to this conclusion, especially those of Michael Walzer.

Defining judicial independence as the ability of courts to make decisions in the short term without regard for the preferences of officeholders, this article empirically examines the conditions under which judicial independence is and is not likely to be found. Nine periods of intense congressional hostility to the Supreme Court are identified and Court reactions are chartered along a continuum from pure independence to total subservience. Examination of the historical record highlights five key factors related to independence and shows that judicial independence existed in only three of the periods. In the remaining six periods, the Court either refrained from hearing certain cases, issued opinions more in line with congressional preferences, or reversed itself. The article rejects the hypothesis of judicial independence, concluding that in times of congressional opposition to the Court, only under special conditions identified in the analysis will it retain its independence.

The following considerations have grown out of a study of the origins, the elements and the functioning of that novel form of government and domination which we have come to call totalitarian. Wherever it rose to power, it developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country. No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination. Present totalitarian governments have developed from one-party systems; whenever these became truly totalitarian, they started to operate according to a system of values so radically different from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms with, or judge, or predict its course of action.

This paper examines what is involved in using comparative methods within political theory and whether there should be a comparative political theory subfield. It argues that political theory consists of multiple kinds of activities that are either primarily “scholarly” or “engaged.” It is easy to imagine how scholarly forms of political theory can be, and have been, comparative. The paper critiques (not rejects) existing calls for the creation of a comparative political theory subfield focused on the study of non-Western texts. Comparative political theory needs to explain why it is not merely expanding the canon to include non-Western texts and why a certain non-Western text is “alien,” thus justifying the moniker comparative. Ten discrete theses are presented that argue that the strongest warrant for an engaged comparative political theory is the first-order evaluation of the implication of the contestations of norms, values, and principles between distinct and coherent doctrines of thought.

Revolution ushered in the modern world, but modernity has killed it. Scholars who examine the causes or contributing conditions of revolutions focus either on structure, agency, or ideas, yet an analysis of each perspective reveals that the alleged causes or conditions have declined or been eliminated. In spite of capitalism's global crisis in the late 1990s, the spread of liberalism and other factors should make revolutions unlikely to occur.

It is argued that, in contrast to traditional interpretations, Morgenthau's theory of international politics is primarily concerned with the normative, and that, in contrast to revisionist accounts, the moral theory he generates is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition of moral thought. Morgenthau adopts an Augustinian, rather than Hobbesian-Machiavellian, moral framework, reconciling cosmopolitan principles with a recalcitrant reality by representing their relationship as a dialectical tension. This leads him to develop a practical morality which emphasizes the continued application of cosmopolitan imperatives to action, mitigated by a consequentialist orientation which demands that they be applied cautiously and always adapted to circumstances. This generates a political morality which reconciles the imperatives of morality and national survival by asserting that, while the national interest must be protected, it must always be subjected to strict moral limitations. It is therefore concluded that his approach ultimately culminates in a traditional, Judeo-Christian, nonperfectionist ethic.

On any list of the most penetrating and least deceived political theorists of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville must be ranked high. Few others perceived the dangers both of egalitarianism and of racial thinking; of secular religions as well as of state churches; of historical determinism, as well as of those other explanations which equally well undermine responsibility by attributing everything to mere chance or to the appearance of exceptional individuals. Tocqueville insisted upon the obligation of free men to determine by empirical investigation just what are the genuine alternatives confronting them. By his own effort to perform this task, he made a classic contribution to the study of the relationships between social organization and political institutions.

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.

Rational choice theory is the prevailing point of view in political science today. It serves as the paradigm by which political behavior is explained and the parameters of research and publication defined. Whether it deserves its exalted status is much debated. Its advocates see it as a victory of science and reason over prejudice and irrationality, and as a major contribution to the “intellectual flourishing” of the discipline (Booth, p. 1). Some critics see it as failed science. Others fear it as successful propaganda. The works reviewed here are representative of this range of assessments. Read individually, each offers a competing image of the role rational choice theory plays in political science. Read together, they constitute a dialogue that tells the story of the contemporary discipline and its relationship to the object of its study.

Constitutional theorists have had relatively little to say about the identity of what they study. This article addresses this inattention with a philosophical and comparative exploration of the concept of constitutional identity. Without such attention, a major preoccupation of theorists—constitutional change—will continue to be inadequately considered. The argument is advanced that there are attributes of a constitution that allow us to identify it as such, and that there is a dialogical process of identity formation that enables us to determine the specific identity of any given constitution. Representing a mix of aspirations and commitments expressive of a nation's past, constitutional identity also evolves in ongoing political and interpretive activities occurring in courts, legislatures, and other public and private domains. Conceptual possibilities of constitutional identity are, herein, pursued in two constitutional settings—India and Ireland—that highlight its distinctive features.

Giorgio Agamben's critique of Western politics in Homo Sacer and three related books has been highly influential in the humanities and social sciences. The critical social theory set out in these works depends essentially on his reading of Aristotle's Politics. His diagnosis of what ails Western politics and his suggested remedy advert to a “biopolitical paradigm,” at the center of which stand a notion of “bare life” and a purported opposition between bios and zoē. Agamben claims that this distinction is found in Aristotle's text, in ancient Greek, and in a tradition of political theory and political society stemming from fourth-century Athens to the present. However, a close reading of Aristotle refutes this assertion. There is no such distinction. I show that he bases this view on claims about Aristotle by Arendt and Foucault, which are also unfounded.

As East Asian societies struggle with the implications of modenity, the degree to which their Confucian heritage can support institutions of liberal democracy has been much debated. Recently, several authors have argued that the nations of Confucian Asia are indeed modernizing, but in the direction of “illiberal democracy”, which they see as an approach to democratic practice that takes communitarian concerns like social solidarity and political virtue into greater account than other, more liberal democratic societies do. In line with that argument, this article makes an introductory comparison of classical Confucian and contemporary communitarian thought, criticizes the view of Confucianism as necessarily authoritarian and suggests that Confucian theory and practice provides a strong and in many ways unique communitarian response to liberalism, without fundamentally invalidating those humanistic principles basic to democratic reform.

If race-thinking were a German invention, as it is now sometimes asserted, then “German thinking” (whatever that may be) was victorious in many parts of the spiritual world long before the Nazis started their illfated attempt at world conquest. Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-Europeanappeal during the 'thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been everywhere a powerful trend in public opinion. The Nazi political warmachine had long been in motion when in 1939 German tanks began their march of destruction, since—in political warfare—racism was calculated to be a more powerful ally than any paid agent or any secret organization of fifth columnists. Strengthened by the experiences of almost two decades in the various capitals, the Nazis were confident that their best “propaganda” would be their racial policy itself, from which, despite many other compromises and broken promises, they had never drifted away for expediency's sake. Racism was neither a new nor a secret weapon, though never before had it been used with this thorough-going consistency.

It is a truism, albeit a contentious one, that in the United States there is no tradition of sustained, systematic, and intellectually sound criticism of the press. The press is certainly one of our most important institutions but in serious attention it ranks slightly ahead of soccer and slightly behind baseball. The press is attacked and often vilified, but it is not subject to sustained critical analysis—not in public, and rarely within universities or the press itself.

This article explores the theme of love and the political in the thought of Hannah Arendt by examining her attitude toward such kinds of love as eros, philia, agape, cupiditas, caritas, compassio, fraternitas. Arendt generally regards love as unpolitical because of its inherent inclination to exclude the outside world. But she has shown a sustained interest in the relationship between love and the political. Arendt's concern for love is dictated by her search for a new, public, and artificial vinculum—or bond. This public bond, what Arendt calls amor mundi, is basically grounded in the notion of political friendship. I argue that amor mundi would be of more relevance, if it included not only political friendship but an element of eros as the craving for the durable world as well as two strands of agape—love of forgiveness and an enlarged neighborly love.

Under the banner of “regime theory,” the study of international relations has experienced a massive if largely unacknowledged return to law, the study of the nature, scope, and relevance of norms international politics. Regime is shorthand for forms of institutionalized cooperation in the international system. The article provides one way to assess this movement. In part I, I develop an abstract conception of constitutions as bodies of metanorms, those higher order norms that govern how lower order norms are to be produced, applied, and interpreted. I then examine the extent to which international relations theory is equipped to recognize that some international regimes are constitutional in form (part II). In part III, I propose a means of situating all regime forms, from the most primitive to the full blown constitutional, along a continuum. The central claim is that the distinction made between international and domestic society, for the most part a matter of dogma in mainstream theory, is relative not absolute.

THE Goldwater phenomenon is the great mystery of American politics. His nomination as presidential candidate by the Republican Party and his campaign for election have profoundly challenged accepted theories of American politics. Merely to enumerate some of the puzzling questions suggests how badly we need explanations.

Some critics of John Stuart Mill understand him to advocate the forced assimilation of people he regards as uncivilized and to defend toleration and the principle of liberty only for civilized people of the West. Examination of Mill's social and political writings and practice while serving the British East India Company shows, instead, that Mill is a tolerant imperialist: Mill defends interference in India to promote the protection of legal rights, respect and toleration for conflicting viewpoints, and a commercial society that can cope with natural threats. He does not think the principle of liberty is waived for the uncivilized or that the West should forcibly reshape them in its own monistic image. Mill's tolerant imperialism reflects a tension between liberty and moral development that also surfaces when Mill thinks about the scope of government in civilized societies.