Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India; the former was originally the hardly conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened, whereas the latter was a consequence of that administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt at the same time to be hopelessly their inferiors and in need of their special protection. Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow man and no people for another people.

In 1966, I published a review article hailing Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli as an instant classic. I also expressed some reservations or “second thoughts” about its conclusions. In the intervening years my appreciation for the profundity and originality of Strauss's interpretation has only increased, but many of my doubts have also remained. Here I wish to restate both my admiration and reservations with particular attention to parts of Strauss's chapter on Machiavelli published in the 1972 edition of his History of Political Philosophy, co-edited with Joseph Cropsey.

Let me at the outset state the obvious: Strauss's interpretation of Machiavelli is well — indeed overwhelmingly — supported by textual evidence, given Strauss's manner of reading between the lines. No interpreter, therefore, is entitled to dismiss it out of hand, even if he or she disagrees with Strauss's methodology, in whole or in part. In this respect, Claude Lefort has provided a model for scholars whose philosophical orientation differs widely from that of Strauss. Strauss has given us a truly fresh look at the great Florentine.

“Media, Men and Morality” is undoubtedly an overblown tide, inspired in part by the alliterative propensities of one of the best-known and most vocal of contemporary media critics—former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. The problem it suggests is too vast to be encompassed here, but it is possible to get at some of its aspects in a limited way.

This essay critically explores the efforts of John Stuart Mill and contemporary Millian scholarship to provide a utilitarian justification for a categorical principle of personal liberty. What is distinctive about Mill's argument is its pronounced emphasis upon character development as an essential constituent of happiness; the heart of the argument is that freedom of choice promotes a kind of elevated or worthy human character upon which happiness ultimately depends. Hence, society must be prevented from imposing any conventional or customary morality which would restrict individual autonomy. This case for the sovereignty of personal autonomy is infected with a number of difficulties and ambiguities. Central among these are weighty problems associated with Mill's crucial concept of individuality and its relation to human excellence or nobility of character. The refinements upon Millian doctrine introduced by his current supporters do not, and cannot, resolve its inherent ambiguities.

Between 1940 and 1946, carastrophe befell France and the French Empire. In Europe, France collapsed before the German war machine and submitted to a humiliating treaty and to military occupation. Nor did Liberation and the triumph of de Gaulle's Free French Movement fully revive France's spirit. She had played a relatively small part in the Allied victory and in the conferences of the Powers that sought to restore the peace. The grandeur of France's past, her military tradition, and her civilization meant little in the world of 1946.

SaudiArabia as a state has rarely been an object of interest for political scientists in the West, and the reasons for this are clear. Fluid in the location of her territory, lacking power and a sense of threat to her vital interests, encumbered with a xenophobic religion and a society in compressed transition from a nomadic to a feudal way of life, Saudi Arabia until the mid-1950's was inactive in international politics, even at the regional level. Like the United States and Russia in the early stages of their national development, Saudi Arabia first found her energies absorbed in affairs that could only with difficulty be distinguished as “domestic” or “foreign.” Saudi Arabia's main concern was to consolidate a territorially and socially expanding habitat and thereby to become an Arab state equal in scope with the Arabian peninsula. Specifically, this meant expansion in a south-easterly direction to the outermost limits possible, for Saudi Arabian power was too limited to challenge the more established positions of Great Britain in Iraq and Transjordan in the north. Only when revenues derived from oil resources being exploited by ARAMCO (the Arabian-American Oil Company) provided Saudi Arabia with the economic base of modern power and when revolutionary pan-Arabism gave her a political rationale for exercising her growing power did she begin to pursue a consistent “foreign” policy at the regional level.

A few years ago the word totalitarian was unknown. The popular use of the term has its origin in Mussolini's famous article on the Fascistic doctrine. Mussolini probably took the expression totalitarian from Hegel's Philosophy of Law, where the word is used to characterize the organic unity of the people. “Liberalism,” wrote Mussolini, “negates the state in the interest of the single individual. Fascism affirms the state as the true reality of the individual. It is for the only freedom which can seriously be considered—the freedom of the state and of the individual within the state—because for the Fascist everything is in the state, and outside of the state nothing legal or spiritual can exist or still less be of value. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian.”

Twentieth-century feminist scholarship has largely ignored the foundational role of theology in Wollstonecraft's moral and political philosophy, and its role in shaping the development of her philosophy of the family through three distinct stages. Wollstonecraft was a traditional trinitarian Anglican in her early writings, a rationalistic unitarian Christian Dissenter in her middle writings, and a Romantic deist, skeptic and possible atheist in her late writings. The early Wollstonecraft views the traditional family as a cave that traps humanity in a morass of corruption with no hope of escape except in the next life; the middle Wollstonecraft believes that once the family takes a new, egalitarian form, it can serve as a “little platoon” (to use Burke's phrase) that instills the moral, social and political virtues in each generation of citizens; while the late Wollstonecraft fears that the traditional family is a prison from which women have little hope of escape, either in this world or through passage to the next.

Nato has been a phenomenon in international relations. It is unlike most multinational organizations of the past in that it has survived for a generation, and it has thereby fulfilled, at least, the minimal expectations of its founding fathers. Even more phenomenal for Americans has been the identification of the United States with an idea, a particular group of nations, and an organization which were all repugnant to a tradition that specifically isolated America from Europe. The origins of the North Atlantic Treaty are inextricably linked with the rediscovery of Europe by the United States.

How should institutions be designed so that the votes of the people reflect the general will and not the corporate will of the politically powerful? Rousseau's Social Contract provides us with two mutually exclusive solutions. The first is the more commonly discussed Spartan model where an encompassing public education system eliminates pluralism through social engineering. The second is the often overlooked Roman model of organizing the population into multiple overlapping electoral divisions and checking the power of various interest groups. Rousseau's discussion of Servius's electoral reforms anticipates Madison's arguments about controlling the effects of factions. By distinguishing these two institutional solutions, the article challenges the dominance of Sparta in readings of the Social Contract and supports the broader antiutopian turn in Rousseau scholarship.

Robert Caro's biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson prove fruitful for political theory, particularly when approached in tandem, along the lines of Plutarch's comparative profiles. Building on the supposition that general insights into political power and its ethics lie in biographical particulars, Caro demonstrates that the most exhaustively detailed research of the most extreme subjects can yield otherwise inaccessible findings. Similarities between Moses and Johnson expose common mechanics of accumulating power, converting personal relationships into institutional authority, and show that norms are given effect as tools used by politicians. Contrasts offer the career as a unit of moral evaluation and suggest that although power may corrupt, it also “reveals.” A praiseworthy career should aim at ends distinct from both ideals and means. Assessment depends not only on intents or accomplishments, but on means, weighing their morality against their necessity.

Most of the historical analysis of the American fight for a League of Nations in 1919–1920 centers strictly on the struggle between Wilson and Lodge. In such a narrow approach, certain vital forces at work during this epic struggle have been overlooked or largely ignored. One such case is the story of the Anglo-French attempt to help the American nation out of the partisan deadlock that developed around the League issue. This episode takes on added dimensions as an Allied intervention in the internal affairs of the United States that in the end had a dynamic effect. Additionally, the effort came very close to providing the means for compromise. The story properly began with the signing of the German Treaty in Paris and the departure of most of the American delegation.

Peace in the Near East is essential to the State of Israel, to the Arab people and to the Western world. Peace, as distinguished from an armistice, cannot be imposed from the outside, it can only be the result of negotiations, of mutual compromise and eventual agreement between Jews and Arabs.

The Jewish settlement in Palestine may become a very important factor in the development of the Near East, but it will always remain a comparatively small island in an Arab sea. Even in the event of maximum immigration over a long period of years the reservoir of prospective citizens of Israel is limited to roughly two million, a figure that could be substantially increased only by catastrophic events in the United States or the Soviet Union. Since, however, (apart from the improbability of such a turn of events) the State of Israel owes its very existence to these two world powers, and since failure to achieve a genuine Jewish-Arab understanding will necessarily make its survival even more dependent upon continued sympathy and support of one or the other, a Jewish catastrophe in the two great surviving centers of world Jewry would lead almost immediately to a catastrophe in Israel.

The relationship between pluralism and liberalism has been at the center of recent considerations of Isaiah Berlin's thought. In particular, liberal theorists have asked whether the value pluralism Berlin endorses actually undermines his liberalism. A common interpretive approach resolves this problem by presenting Berlin's pluralism as “limited” rather than “radical,” and therefore capable of serving as a moral foundation authorizing liberalism. I challenge this re-construction of Berlin's work, arguing that such readings are premised on a conception of judgment Berlin does not share. While many of his readers believe that a judgment on behalf of liberalism requires the identification of a transcontextual ground, Berlin invites us to see human judgment as a meaningful practice that occurs in the absence of absolutes yet does not simply mirror local norms. Berlin's defense of liberalism models this kind of judgment—a judgment that is neither mandated, nor ruled out, by pluralism.

In Egypt, as in most developing countries, universities form part of the state system. The university is regarded as a government department. The Egyptian government not only appropriates money for higher education, but also controls the administrative structure of the universities and the higher institutes. Academic appointments as well as promotions and dismissals are in the hands of state officials. This kind of relationship dates back to 1925, when the Egyptian government “nationalized” and created what is now the University of Cairo. This development is closely related to the rise of Egyptian nationalism and the efforts of Egyptian leaders to achieve independence from British rule. Right from the beginning, the university was therefore conceived as an important instrument for the realization of national (political) goals.

The war which Great Britain entered in 1939 has now been won by the United Nations. But for the first of the great partners of the Alliance the costs have been tremendous. Of the £4 billions in overseas investments which Britain possessed before the war, only about £2 billions remain—most of the rest were spent in meeting charges of war goods which had to be purchased during the period of Cash and Carry. Not only has this important source of British income been lost but during the same period Britain built up an external debt of £3½ billions. Britain's great merchant fleet, which lost about 11 million tons by enemy action during the war, has by a prodigious effort recovered 2/3 of its 1937 level of 17½ million gross tons. But the quality of many of the ships is unsatisfactory and at the same time the United States has developed a merchant fleet several times larger than Britain's. In the competition to carry the world's shrunken international trade, Britain will be at a greater disadvantage than it has ever been during the present century. In other invisible exports also she faces serious difficulties; for example, the overseas business of British insurance companies which contributed £12 to £15 million annually to the balance of trade is threatened with restrictions in capitalistic countries and extermination in collectivistic ones. The British export trade which in 1938 contributed about £450 million to the national income and on which Britain depends to a greater extent than any other great country for the maintenance of its standard of living (the fourth highest in the world,) has shrunk by 1944 to 55% in value and 31% in volume of the 1938 level.

ItIs customary to describe the development of political science since the Second World War as a step toward the creation of an empirical science of politics. Not its empiricism, however, but rather its concern for theory is understood to be the defining characteristic of the new way. The prescientific period was also empirically oriented, but it was naive, unthinking empiricism which treated the acquisition of political knowledge as a matter of collecting political facts as one might collect butterflies. Empiricism became scientific, it is said, only when it became theoretical, when its practitioners realized that before they could collect butterflies they had first to fashion a proper net and devise a scheme for ordering the specimens to be caught. At the heart, then, of what we mean today by the science of politics stands political theory, understood as the self-conscious construction of conceptual systems for ordering reality and of hypotheses to explain the interconnections of the parts of these systems. Beside the scientist as survey researcher and statistician stands the scientist as theorist, as author of approaches, frameworks, and models.

Strauss's historical investigation of the use of exoteric writing in Farabi, Maimonides, Halevi, and Spinoza, is in fact his history of the philosophers' exoteric accommodations to the permanent difference in human natures, the difference between the many who require a categorical moral teaching and the few who are capable of ordering their own lives in the face of the hypothetical status of all moral commands. The men of the Enlightenment aspired to render the moral law superfluous for all by constructing a machinery of government powerful enough to compel all to live justly. Strauss critiques this aspiration by leading his reader to face the permanency of the difference between the few and the many. Strauss uses historical scholarship to force the reader to rethink the possibility of contemplation of the eternal or permanent, the possibility that the Enlightenment's historicist epigones have sought to foreclose.