Does the phenomenon which occurred during the last decade and has been loosely called the “New Catholic Left” include the Catholic Worker movement? Leaders of the Catholic Peace movement, civil rights activists and proponents of social justice in many instances have actively participated in the Catholic Worker movement or have at least been in contact with its followers. Yet, upon studying the Catholic Worker, a seeming paradox arises: the ideology of the Catholic Worker is a product of neither the American Left nor of liberal Catholicism but, rather, of the European Right. The ideology of the Catholic Worker, which is presented in the “Easy Essays” of Peter Maurin, is understandable only in the context of reactionary French Social Catholicism and allied movements. It is in the consequent repudiation of most of those ideas which were developed during the Enlightenment and became the basic presuppositions of American economics, politics and society that the radicalism of the Catholic Worker lies.

From the end of the religious wars to the First World War, the modern state system was kept together by the intellectual and moral tradition of the Western world. That tradition imposed moral and legal limitations on the struggle for power on the international in a certatin measure, maintained order in the international community and secured the independence of its individual members. What is left of this heritage today? What kind of consensus unites the nations of the world in the period following the Second World War?

African Socialism represents the most comprehensive doctrinal and programmatic attempt to deal with the complex problems of the African continent. During the second decade of the second half of the twentieth century, in the effort to deal with those problems, African Socialism established itself as the ideological rationale for mass movements of solidarity in Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Guinea, and Mali. Outside the immediate confines of these countries, the influence of African Socialism has been impressive. Even countries as traditionally conservative as Ethiopia and Liberia have had to acknowledge its existence and in some cases adopt at least its vocabulary.

John Adams was unique among the Founding Fathers in that he actually read and took seriously Machiavelli's ideas. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, Adams quoted extensively from Machiavelli and he openly acknowledged an intellectual debt to the Florentine statesman. Adams praised Machiavelli for having been “the first” to have “revived the ancient politics” and he insisted that the “world” was much indebted to Machiavelli for “the revival of reason in matters of government.” What could Adams have meant by these extraordinary statements? The following article examines the Machiavellian ideas and principles Adams incorporated into his political thought as well as those that he rejected. Drawing upon evidence found in an unpublished fragment, Part one argues that the political epistemology that Adams employed in the Defence can be traced to Machiavelli's new modes and orders. Part two presents Adams's critique of Machiavelli's constitutionalism.

From the beginning, the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933, has challenged the cherished beliefs of American citizens, many of whom have been more than willing to accommodate religious faith and social concerns to the economic imperatives of American capitalist society. Whether criticizing child labor, the exploitation of blacks, and anti-Semitism during the thirties or protesting the treatment of migrant workers, the Vietnamese War, and the nuclear arms race in the sixties and seventies, the Catholic Worker has consistently adopted controversial positions on contemporary social issues and has challenged Americans to think through the implications ofpublic policy.

The title of this lecture is not entirely of my own choosing. I do not like very much the term political theory; I would prefer to speak of political philosophy. Since this terminological question is not entirely verbal, I beg leave to say a few words about it.

John Stuart Mill's commitment to empirically based inductive logic shapes the political substance of his theory, limiting his ability effectively to make the argument he wishes to make. The Subjection of Women is presented as a test case in which Mill wishes to argue for the justice and utility of the emancipation of women. His efforts are thwarted by his inability to argue from anything but an empirical basis, grounding his evidence in historical data which serve both to stereotype women's “good” qualities and to judge women's potential by what is observable from an admittedly unjust history.

The essay reviews respected feminist analyses of Mill with an eye to establishing the natures and limitations of the various perspectives. It briefly discusses Mill's System of Logic which provides a detailed example, in pure form, of the methodological problems he faces in the Subjection. The essay then considers the method and content of The Subjection of Women, arguing that the shortcomings of Mill's political analysis are the result of his efforts to cling to an impossibly “pure” empiricist methodology.

Socrates was not only a paradigmatic philosopher; he was also a paradigmatic citizen according to some contemporary political theorists—paradigmatic for his moral integrity and his political practices of dissent and noncompliance. What is perhaps most exemplary about Socrates, according to some commentators, is that his citizenship was “purely secular,” relying upon no sources of authority beyond the naked moral self. The present article challenges this dominant view of Socratic citizenship by examining Socrates′ relationship to the oracle at Delphi and the mysterious divine sign that frequently turned him away from certain civic activities. Arguing that these sources of authority affected Socrates′ practice of citizenship in significant ways, the essay presents a picture of Socrates that is at once truer to the texts to which these secular views appeal and more instructive for contemporary theorizing about citizenship.

Recent scholarship has yielded a great deal of information on Cicero's De officiis; this essay, however, seeks to move beyond information about the work in favor of an interpretation of Cicero's intention in writing it. To this end, the essay analyzes the genre and intended audience of De officiis, the allegedly Stoic teaching contained in it, and the puzzle presented by its crucial third book. The understanding of Cicero's intention that emerges from these investigations is then briefly compared with Cicero's teaching in De finibus. Theessay ultimately claims that De officiis should be interpreted as advocating a sort of Stoicism for the unphilosophical even while urging the views of the Peripatetics on the more sophisticated.

Perhaps never before has the reality of a just and lasting peace among nations been so ardently desired and so urgently sought. This desire is inspired not so much by a hunger for the benfits of peace as it is by a horror of the consequences if peace is not achieved.

For the purpose of this survey, a population transfer is defined as the organized removal of an ethnic group from its country of residence and its subsequent resettlement in territory under the sovereignty of its ethnic homeland in which the whole is a stateconducted operation based sometimes on international agreement between two states concerned and at other times arising from unilateral action by the state of departure, with or without international sanction.

Professor Alan Gibson's insightful article contains much that is admirable. He is, in my view, correct in calling scholars' attention—particularly political scientists—to James Madison's often neglected views in his National Gazette essays and the foundational role of public opinion on all governments. In addition, Gibson asserts several claims hoping to establish Madison's credentials as a democratic theorist that should be of interest as well. Specifically, he seeks to accomplish four tasks: (1) “to clarify the enduring debate over the credibility of Madison's democratic credentials”; (2) to “examine Madison's role in justifying, popularizing, and understanding… public opinion”; (3) to “highlight some of Madison's neglected insights into democratic theory, especially his understanding of the problem of collective action, and thereby establish him as a prescient democratic theorist”; and (4) to argue the case that Madison “contributed to a developing tradition of political thought in America upon a broad-based conception of freedom of speech and on the belief that political truths best emerge from the full flow of ideas.”

While I concur with much of Gibson's position—especially his fourth, indisputable point—I also disagree with him on at least one significant position: James Madison was not a democrat.

We are living in a time when men most urgently feel the need of intellectual clarification of the social and political situation in which they stand. By no means all the great masters of social thought who have made important potential contributions to such clarification are sufficiently well known, even among social and political scientists. One of these is Max Weber who, in the English-speaking world, is known more as a sociologist of religion and a methodologist of social science than as an interpreter of the political scene. Weber's scope of interest in institutional problems, with specific reference to the modern Western world, was, however, exceedingly broad, and a substantial part of his work was centered o nthe field of political institutions, particularly in their relations to the economic order and to other aspects of the social structure.

This article explores a neglected area in political philosophy and moral economic theory: the origins of normative economic theorizing in classical Greek philosophy. That theory is a critique of the market and the acquisitive life in light of an alternative location of the economy in the oikos or household oriented towards the securing of the good life. Its core elements of the well-ordered community, the good life, and of the foreignness of economic activity to these ends are analyzed here. The article concludes with a critical appraisal of this theory, and an examination of its value for political philosophers concerned to find a non-rights based approach to the economy.

Since its publication, Eichmann in Jerusalem has provoked a storm of controversy. With a few exceptions, critics reacted to the substance of Arendt's thesis with considerable bitterness and hostility. This article argues that her detractors badly misunderstood Arendt because they were insufficiently conversant with, or unaware of, her political theory. Fundamental to this theory, articulated at length in her The Human Condition, is the crucial distinction between the public and the private. None of her critics, including those who sympathized with Arendt, have understood that her critical analysis of Eichmann's conduct and of the response of the Jewish leadership to the tragic fate that befell their people makes sense on the peculiar terrain of her political theory and particularly in terms of the public-private distinction which lies at the core of this theory.

Whether in the service of aristocratic radicalism or radical democracy, Nietzsche's political thought has most often been associated with transformation rather than limitations. This paper argues that Nietzsche offers a realism that presents politics as driven by grand aspirations and bound by tragic limitations. Nietzsche draws on Thucydides as a source for a realism that is neither reductionist nor transformative, but rather looks to the grandest of human aspirations and the limits to those aspirations. The paper analyzes Nietzsche's treatment of the character of modern idealism, the source of conflicting values, the effects of liberalism, and the consequences of democratic modernity in order to flesh out his tragic realism. Rather than advocating the tyrannical decay he expects in the short term, Nietzsche points the way to a new politics shaped by grander goals and more moderate expectations than the idealistic leveling of modernity.

Rousseau refers to the Jews in major and minor works, setting them alongside the Greeks and Romans as models for republican politics. Yet Rousseau's use of the Jewish example has been almost entirely neglected. I argue that this example, which for Rousseau stands between paganism and Christianity, plays a unique role in Rousseau's political thought. In particular, Judaism, as Rousseau presents it, surpasses Christianity in its this-worldly emphasis on compassion and justice, an emphasis that even the classical republics that are Rousseau's usual models for social and political well-being cannot match. It does so, moreover, without fostering the dogmatism that, along with Christian otherworldiness, has, in Rousseau's estimation, helped to spoil European politics.

While Isaiah Berlin considered himself principally as a political theorist in the liberal tradition, his was an unorthodox liberalism in both method and substance, rooted in the confluence of three traditions—British, Russian, and Jewish. Unlike many liberals, he wrestled with the tension between universalism and particularism, and also between individualism and communalities. He rejected all monistic approaches to morality (including liberal monism) but repudiated as well the moral relativism of much modern thought, espousing instead value pluralism. While we cannot arrive at a universally valid conception of the summum bonum, we can specify the summun malum—the great evils of the human condition. Berlin saw political theory as a branch of moral philosophy but drew political morality from political life rather than imposing it on politics. The range of goods and principles that human beings rightly prize cannot be combined into harmonious wholes in either our individual or collective existence. Some goods exclude others, and we must choose among them.