This essay takes its bearings from an epistolary dialogue between Arthur de Gobineau and Alexis de Tocqueville about the contours of modern politics. Their dispute illuminates in a remarkable way the theological-political problem that suffuses the emergence of modern politics and, as a consequence, provides a helpful frame of reference for understanding several contemporary controversies bearing on the relationship between religion and liberal democratic politics. Moreover, their correspondence casts new light on the underpinnings of Tocqueville's thought. The frankness of this exchange together with the relentless character of Gobineau's arguments, provoke in Tocqueville an articulation of the larger context within which he understands modern politics and, in so doing, reveals an important, though largely neglected, intellectual framework that informs much of his published work.

Bicameralism is traditionally considered necessary to the principle of the limitation of power and, as such, a key feature of the liberal constitutional state. Yet the history of the French Revolution reveals that this has not always been the case and that bicameralism's relationship to liberal constitutionalism is more complex than is traditionally assumed. This article will discuss how the Abbé Sieyès, one of the founding fathers of modern constitutionalism, rejected bicameralism not only because it was contrary to the revolutionary principle of equality, but also because it did not actually succeed at limiting power. Even worse, bicameralism would threaten the constitutional system by forcing the legislative power into procedural impasses that would eventually open the way to despotism. Putting Sieyès's claims in historical perspective, the paper aims to offer some historical nuance and insights into bicameralism's relationship to liberal constitutionalism.

The highest function of criticism is to stimulate an author to think harder, to go further, to reconsider, and, possibly, to try again. At times, often unwittingly, author and critic join in a species of tacit collaboration. I regard Stanley Michalak's generally helpful critique of A Study of Future Worlds in this spirit.

The overall ambition of world order studies has been to work out an intellectual framework useful for understanding and acting upon the great global challenges of our time—the menace of large-scale warfare, the scandal of large-scale poverty, the outrage of acute injustice, the dangers of environmental decay, and the burden of inhumane and/or ineffectual governance at all levels of social organization (from family to planet).

Machiavelli's Prince has been interpreted and appraised from a wide range of points of view. Attitudes have run all the way from unqualified admiration for the Princes compelling frankness and republican patriotism to shock and hatred for its obvious moral relativism. The Prince has been condemned as a piece of political opportunism, an expression of the philosophy of the antichrist, and a contributing factor to the political morality of both Napoleon and Hitler. On the other hand, it has in modern times been praised as a forthright assessment of the morality of sixteenth-century Italian political life and/or the first manifestation of a new science of politics.

Disorder is a constant theme in John Calvin's political work. Calvin describes politics as a chaotic arena, precariously held together by contending forces. However, few who write on Calvin recognize how disorder shapes his political reflections. Calvin analyzes disorder by tracing it to unfaithfulness, the failure to acknowledge God's goodness. Created in the image of God, human beings reject divine goodness ungratefully, plunging themselves into sin. In leaders, this unfaithfulness produces pride and mistrust which create conflict within and among political communities. In groups, unfaithfulness spawns cruelty, leading violent mobs to kill the innocent and denigrate the image of God. By exploring mob and political violence, Calvin draws attention to those forces sustaining order. Natural sensibilities, conscience, and divine providence restrain the worst excesses in human beings.

For Dewey education is the growth of mental powers, where “growth” has no fixed content but involves the increasing harmonization of individuals with society. That harmonization must respect the uniqueness of each person and his capacity for intelligence. Education aims to develop a model democratic society, which Dewey sees as similar to an ideal community of scientific inquirers. That comparison is highly questionable, however. Dewey's curricular emphases include science, geography, history, literature, and fine arts, the last two of which promote a greater appreciation for all of human life—provided society is not too separated into classes. Related to social division is what he considers the false problems of epistemology, with its separation between mind and world. But Dewey's failure to think more rigorously about the relation of philosophy to science makes his philosophy a poor bulwark against postmodernism.

RomanCatholicism in the United States has produced able leaders among its clergy and laymen during the first decades of the twentieth century, but most of them seem to lack the lustre and verve of the Catholic leaders during the waning decades of the nineteenth century. The lay leadership which produced John Gilmary Shea, William J. Onahan, Henry F. Brownson, Patrick V. Hickey and Henry Spaunhorst had strong backing from such clergymen as James Cardinal Gibbons, John Ireland, John J. Keane, Bernard McQuaid, and Michael A. Corrigan. But the intellectual leader of American Catholicism during the late nineteenth century was John Lancaster Spalding, Bishop of Pepria, and the twentieth century Catholicism has not produced his counterpart.

In 1891 W. E. H. Lecky wrote a topical essay in which he observed ”that the kind of interest which belongs to Irish history is curiously different from that which attaches to the history of England and tothat of the great nations of the continent.… It is an invaluable study of morbid anatomy.” Irish history is indeed the study of sickness but of an induced, not a natural sickness. While Lecky's diagnosis for Ireland's malade historiqueleaves much to be desired, he was able to isolate a singularity of Irish history which should command more than the limited attention of interested historians. Irish history since 1691 is more than the tragic chronicle of ”the Pope and the potato,” it is the record of one of the most persistent legislative efforts ever undertaken to change a people. The magnitude of that effort makes the history of the Irish Penal Code a profitable field of study for all students of the behavioral sciences.

Much has been written about Locke's Second Treatise, but still, I believe, the book's main line of argument has been left unclear. Some concepts need more prominence — the duty to preserve mankind, the right of war, and private judgment; others need less — consent, majority rule, and property. Locke's aim was not to show that political obligation rests upon consent: that is assumed without argument. What he set out to prove is that there are certain limits to political obligation which not even consent could set aside.

This article asks why new protest movements have recently emerged in Western Europe by focusing on the British postwar race and anti-nuclear movements. Contrary to “subjective” propositions which have attributed their emergence to inter-generational value change, this article instead proposes a “structural” explanation. It is argued that the failure of the major British political parties to articulate citizen concerns on a number of salient issues has generated extra-party initiatives whose willingness to “voice” citizen anxieties primarily explains their popular support. Once in existence, these groups further politicize the conflict over public policy through various unconventional activities.

Wallace K. Ferguson, the noted Renaissance scholar, once wrote that history must be seen through the eyes of the one writing it. He went on to say that, “since history is in this sense created by the historian, and he, in turn, is the product of his age and environment, history varies from generation to generation and must be constantly reinterpreted.” It is with this thought in mind that we will undertake a reexamination of the role of the Arctic in Canadian-American relations.

In recent years the Arctic has become a region of growing significance for both the United States and Canada after decades of marginal interest bordering on neglect. It is this article's position that Canadian foreign policy, concerning the Arctic regions to the north of her mainland, has consistently from 1880 to 1970 been based upon a perception of potential threats, which in fact never existed. Furthermore, such a perception has been based in part upon the unsettled nature of international law in the Arctic and the effect of certain environmental factors, labeled as domestic sources of foreign policy in Dale Thomson and Roger Swanson's Canadian Foreign Policy: Options and Perspectives. The article, then, shows how Canadian foreign policy in this issue-area illustrates the Sprout's paradigm of perception in decision-making. According to this paradigm, “what matters in policymaking (and, of course, in analysis thereof) is how the human policymaker (or group) perceives, interprets and responds to the environing conditions and events.”

Of the many fascinating episodes that punctuate the diplomatic history of World War II, few have intrigued scholars more than the secret Balkan spheres-of-action agreement worked out by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Josef Stalin at the Anglo-Soviet conference (British code-named TOLSTOY) held in Moscow in the autumn of 1944. It was late in the evening of 9 October. In his first encounter with Stalin since the meeting of the Big Three at Teheran in 1943, Churchill, believing “the moment … apt for business,” appealed to the Soviet dictator to “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans.” Specifically, he went on, “We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don't let us get at cross-purposes in small ways.

Thomas Paine is customarily regarded as a pamphleteer, rhetorician, and polemicist rather than a significant political theorist. This article takes the philosophical content of Paine's thought seriously and argues that his account of property rights constitutes a distinct contribution to theoretical debates on the subject. Drawing on Paine's Agrarian Justice and other writings, this article shows that his theory of property defends a libertarian concern with private ownership that contains within its logic an egalitarian commitment to the redistribution of resources. Paine's justification of property is distinct from that of various other important figures in the history of ideas (including Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke) and represents his simultaneous commitment to foundational liberal values of individual freedom and moral equality.

As equality has come to dominate the postliberal era, so virtue was earlier supplanted by liberty. However tentatively, events in many countries suggest a serious erosion in the consensus for equality. Critics of the egalitarian mind-set are achieving a new respectability. Conservative recommendations are hardly uniformly accepted, but they are now heard and, increasingly, countered on practical rather than theoretical grounds. Whether this marks a real revolution, it is at least temporarily popular to question equality in public.

During the first years of the American federal republic, Europe was being overrun by French revolutionary forces and ideas. Nation after nation had fallen to the revolutionaries–first weakened by propaganda and subversive organizations, then subdued by soldiery, finally converted into subordinate allies. Watching these successes, some Americans feared that the Atlantic was too narrow to keep revolutionary arms and ideology away. Indeed, the ideology seemed already to permeate the country.

American relations with the successful French nation had become tense and strained shortly after France and Britain went to war in 1793. Many people thought the country had been needlessly endangered by mismanagement of our foreign relations in such a way as to antagonize an otherwise friendly French government. Others thought the United States had been imperilled by too great a toleration of pro-French and revolutionary elements among us, who concealed diabolical designs against American security underneath their very vocal admiration for liberty, equality, and fraternity.

In recent years, several writers using the new political economy or public choice approach to political analysis have sought to improve our understanding of bureaus, bureaucrats and governments and, in some cases, to suggest ways in which their behavior might be “improved” in the public interest. The public choice approach to public administration rejects the so-called sociological or traditional political science approaches with their alleged Parsonian, Weberian, Marxist, historical, institutional or organic biases and limitations in favor of an individualistic, deductive, noninstitutional analysis, which is thought to be more cogent, more fertile in testable hypotheses, more genuinely theoretical and more relevant in terms of reform. Here the view is taken that the pathos of the public choice approach to public administration consists in this: that public choice advocates by virtue of their methodology are fated to “lose” consistently on questions of administrative reform and prescriptive efficacy, even while contributing, potentially importantly, to the scientific understanding of nonmarket, usually public, organizations or “bureaus.”

In an oft-neglected section of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas undertakes a detailed, point-by-point comparison of the political regime prescribed by the Mosaic law with the teachings of the then recently translated Politics of Aristotle, thereby comparing the perspectives of faith and philosophy on political issues such as rulers, property, citizenship, and families. Because it organizes political affairs in light of the divine, Thomas concludes that the polity of the Old Testament is in fact the answer to the question concerning the best regime. Despite Christianity's view of the Mosaic law as abrogated, Thomas attempts to salvage the political wisdom of the Old Testament by arguing that the Mosaic regime can still serve as a guide for Christian political thinkers.

Martin Heidegger's rectorate (1933–1934) was characterized by an incontestable involvement with Nazism. However, neither the rectorate, nor Heidegger's ambitious project for the transformation of the university within which it was embedded, was reducible to Nazism. Indeed, Heidegger's project to transform the university dates from his earliest lecture courses at Freiburg University in 1919 and was a hallmark of his thinking long before the rise of Nazism. That project was itself linked to the long-standing dispute in German academia over the role of the university in the modern world, which involved such thinkers as Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Despite the entanglement with Nazism, which stamped his rectorate, Heidegger's thinking about the university as a site for the transformation of human existence is especially pertinent today.

There are seventy states in the world that are not formally aligned with either of the great power alliance systems, Western or Soviet. With varying degrees of precision, each state defines its foreign policy in terms of its nonalignment. Some of these states additionally refer to their foreign policy in terms of neutralism, which they may often qualify in terms of such adjectives as “positive” or “dynamic” to indicate that they are not passive role players in world politics. Some ventures of neutralists into self-definition have resulted in considerable confusion. As an example may be cited V. K. Krishna Menon's description of India＇s policy:

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China remains the world's only major communist society. Will China's regime go the way of its Soviet counterpart, or might it survive well into the next century and beyond? I do not undertake to answer this question directly. But my analysis of one sector of contemporary Chinese society—the legal system—suggests that the Communist party is losing its tight control over several major areas of Chinese society. In the long-run the party will be progressively weakened by current trends toward legal modernization. These trends encourage more liberal (because noninstrumentalized) forms of political, and not only legal, organization.