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.”

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.

This essay questions whether it is as appropriate as it is common to speak of the federal judiciary as legitimately engaged in “statesmanship”— however that rather slippery concept may be denned or elucidated. Scholars of both the “interpretivist” and “noninterpretivist” schools in constitutional law appear to subscribe to the expectation that judges should be statesmen. Some point to Tocqueville for support of this notion. The argument here is that Tbcqueville is unreliable on this point, for he parts company not only with his contemporary, Joseph Story, but with the framers of the Constitution. The Federalist is examined for its thoughts on the meaning and location of statesmanship in the constitutional order, and it is argued that the essays on the judiciary reveal a conspicuous absence of any expectation that that branch should contain statesmen. Indeed, Publius advances an argument that Congress should act to restrain (through the threat of impeachment) judicial temptations to engage in any adventures that can be called statesmanship.

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.

This article challenges the received view that Woodrow Wilson provided the intellectual foundation for the subsequent expansion of the executive power of the presidency, by examining how Wilson arrived at his later presidentially centered account of American politics in Constitutional Government. Its focus is a memo that Wilson wrote in December 1885 while preparing an essay on “The Modern Democratic State.” Wilson's objectives in using the executive were determined in large measure by a conception of modern democratic opinion leadership that he had worked out before he entered public life. He correctly sensed that executive power, with its decisionistic bias, posed a serious problem for constitutional self-government. By making it subserve opinion leadership, Wilson meant to remove executive action from the apex of modern constitutional government and thus subordinate executive power to deliberative politics.

The involvement of peasants in the rebellions and revolutions of the distant past has been impressive in certain respects, but never acquired quite the importance attributed to it in our own time. In terms of the sheer weight of their numbers, the vastness of the peasants involvement in some internal wars of the past may perhaps never be duplicated. Over twenty million Chinese peasants' were killed in the terrible T'ai-p'ing (1850–1864). Nor was the significance of these colossal figures limited to sheer mass, as the Mexican Revolution illustrates. But never before has so much reliance been put on the peasants for so ambitiously revolutionary plans as in our time. Particularly since the Chinese Communist Revolution, the peasantry has displaced the industrial proletariat as the crucial revolutionary class in the dogma of the most militant Marxists. We have been told repeatedly that Mao, Guevara, Giap, and their disciples have put their hopes in the peasantry and the countryside not merely for radical upheavals through revolutionary wars in underdeveloped countries, but also for global revolution. The role the peasants actually play in such revolutionary wars is among the crucial problems of our time.

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.”

A growing number of political activists and scholars defend the idea of state-based or political-institutional civil disobedience: they locate civil disobedience's agency in state rather than civil society–based actors. Diverging from older ideas of civil disobedience as directed against government, the concept of institutional disobedience raises tough questions its exponents have not yet fully answered. Civil disobedience has usually referred to politically motivated lawbreaking that is morally conscientious, nonviolent, and demonstrates basic respect for law. Because of the modern state's normatively ambivalent traits (e.g., its monopoly on legitimate coercion), political-institutional disobedience is incompatible with minimally acceptable interpretations of civil disobedience's core components. Political-institutional civil disobedience's advocates mischaracterize what they in fact are proposing, namely, disobedience to the law by individual state officials. Such offiical disobedience poses challenges distinct from and probably greater than civil society–based disobedience.

It is no easy matter to do justice to Locke or any other capable seventeenth century thinker: to judge them in terms which are wholly appropriate to them, but which also give due weight to our own necessarily very different needs and preoccupations. Yet if equality is a normative relation which holds in time as well as space (and not a purely pragmatic relation which characteristically fails to hold anywhere at all), there must be a justice which sets a limit to the permissible inroads of all subsequent concerns on the part of other human beings: a personal entitlement to consideration in their own terms and on their own terms before we decide how far to set those terms aside to implement our own purposes in ways which may put their reflections to uses in which they could have held no conceivable stake. So seen the duty is a side constraint on interpretive licence, not an arbitrary restriction of subject matter, or a taboo on cognitive interest. It is fully discharged once we have done our best to grasp what it is they were talking about, and what led them to affirm and deny what they did. After that point, it holds no guarantee whatever (though it may, of course, hold some potential) of contributing further, even heuristically, to our capacity to judge what to make for ourselves of what they affirmed or denied.

The events that are happening before our eyes are less clear than those of the past because we do not know their meaning, their place in the epoch which is developing. We know the isolated facts, but we do not know their significance; we do not know to what whole they belong and therefore we overestimate some and underestimate others. Who could have realized, for example, that the meetings of some obscure Russian revolutionaries in 1903 would mean the formation of a party of world-historic importance? Who could have believed in 1919 that not General Ludendorff but an unknown private of Austrian origin, Adolf Hitler, would become the decisive figure in the history of German nationalism, its leader and, as it seems today, its executioner?

We do not know the present, because we do not know die future, and therefore we are ignorant of what will be retained as a lasting trend from the mass and maze of today's happenings.

Politicians and scholars alike have blamed postmodernism—and the identity politics that have emerged in its wake—for the pathologies of the early twenty-first century. Despite his limited defense of the Enlightenment and his disputes with his French contemporaries, I argue that Habermas's philosophy displays many postmodern characteristics that are often overlooked. These include its decentering of the autonomous subject, its skepticism towards metaphysics, and its rejection of stadial philosophies of history. In light of the fact that Habermas adopts weaker versions of many postmodern commitments, I reconsider his disputes with Foucault and Derrida regarding the legacy of the Enlightenment. I conclude that rather than interpreting Habermas as a conservative critic of his more radical counterparts in France, we should instead see these three thinkers as part of a shared attempt to come to terms with the problems of postwar Europe in a public, discursive manner.

Through a new argumentative strategy, this article shows that the claims offered by some contemporary Confucian scholars in support of hierarchical social relations do not hold in contemporary societies. Exegetical disagreements that are arguably difficult to overcome are sidestepped and empirical claims in support of hierarchical Confucianism are assessed. Empirical evidence and recent developments in Western philosophy suggest that social hierarchies are detrimental to key factors for people's material well-being, ethical development, and the political order. Egalitarian social relations organized in a representative democratic system appear to be more suitable for the pursuit of the fundamental aims of a Confucian government which are accepted by the proponents of hierarchical Confucianism.

Eric Voegelin's political theory, which is often understood as “conservative,” actually contains very radical elements. An examination of Voegelin's understanding of the genesis of modernity in more detail than hitherto has been attempted shows that four apparently different accounts of modernity's origins can be isolated in Voegelin's writings. An attempt to synthesize these accounts indicates potentially radical implications for both Christian theology and Western political institutions. Such a synthesis shows that the sources of modern consciousness are inherent in orthodox Christianity, which in turn implies a fundamental reconsideration of Christian revelation and its political impact.

This article examines a recent justificatory argument in defense of liberal political principles. Joseph Raz, in The Morality of Freedom, and Will Kymlicka, in his book Liberalism, Community and Culture, argue that liberalism is not based on skepticism or on an implausible individualist metaphysics, as its communitarian critics have contended. They argue that liberalism can be justified as an essential element in human flourishing. This article examines this justificatory argument for liberalism. It argues that this defense of liberalism fails to support the primacy that liberals accord to autonomy over all other values, but that this failure is instructive.

Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is designed to provide the education necessary to produce citizens guided by the obligations of natural law. A careful examination of his recommendations, however, reveals that his education does not in fact teach children to obey the law of nature directly. Instead, it teaches them to obey the law of opinion or reputation. At the same time, he encourages children to see themselves as rational and therefore free. The law of reputation provides the necessary restraint to balance the desire for liberty, and the desire for liberty ensures that citizens must respect others in order to win their esteem. Respect for others' rights, an essential element of Lockean natural law, emerges from this specific combination of the law of reputation and the love of liberty.

Although at the end of the seventeenth century men were shifting their political terminology from the spiritual to the secular, from God to nature, they still invoked the absolutes of history, law, and scripture. They did not lightly overturn their monarch, but when the necessity for such action arose they sought absolution in concepts which the most rigorous and learned mediaeval theologian would have understood. They appealed to the law of nature but they meant the law of God; and the shift involved no betrayal of absolute standards, no withdrawal from the same ethical doctrines that had nourished their forebears. The time was soon to come when secular phrases expressed a secular outlook, but in 1689 they continued to cover the religious convictions of centuries. As soon as the bars were down and men grappled in hectic controversy, the secular side of their politics diminished and the ethical and spiritual aspects became pronounced.

James Stoner locates my work on Locke as part of a somewhat broader current we might call “Straussian revisionism.” A group of us who were students of, or influenced by Leo Strauss seek “to return to the early moderns” like Locke “for adequate guidance.” He notes that this “return” has something to do with America, for all of us, in one way or another, look to Locke in the old-fashioned way, as “America's philosopher.” I will not presume to speak here for the others he identifies as part of this current, but I believe he speaks correctly for the most part of my own work. My one reservation concerns his attribution of motive: I came to differ with Strauss on the meaning of Locke not because I sought to find “adequate guidance” in Locke, but because over time parts of Strauss's reading of Locke did not seem adequate to me. A consequence of understanding Locke differently is that he has come to look capable of supplying more “adequate guidance” than Strauss thought he could.

I believe there are three main matters on which Stoner disagrees with my “Straussian revisionism.” First, is Locke rather than Hobbes the founder of liberalism? Second, am I correct to argue that Locke grounds natural right differently than Hobbes? And third, can Locke, as I read him, supply us “guidance”? Does he respond to certain deficiencies Stoner identifies?