In the 1960s, the New Left sought to transform American society by mobilizing the most oppressed and excluded groups—blacks, the poor, unemployed youths. This article explores both the causes and consequences of the powerful attraction that the American New Left felt for the oppressed and downtrodden. The political thought and actions of the New Left cannot be reduced to psychological motives but must instead be rooted in the New Left's commitment to radical egalitarian social relations and values. While there is much that can be admired in the New Left's deep and sincere concern for the disadvantaged, the New Left's romance with the oppressed also had darker, illiberal consequences that led many in the New Left to excuse and justify the very sort of oppression they had originally sought to oppose.

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.

Strauss devoted his life to the recovery of classical political philosophy. The incentive for this enterprise was what Strauss called “the crisis of the West.” That crisis “consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose,” which was to establish the good society on the basis of reason and science. Twentith-century history revealed that the progressive spread of democracy throughout the world was hardly assured. Moreover, the “good society” of Western liberalism no longer looked unquestionably good. Modern philosophy eventually concluded that reason itself was to blame: not only could reason not establish the good society; it could not even say what the good society is.

John Hilton, Noel Reynolds, and Arlene Saxonhouse have employed statistical authorship analysis to claim that Hobbes authored three anonymously published works. But the authors of the study were not aware of close textual parallels between one discourse and a recently discovered work of Francis Bacon which argue against this attribution and call attention to deficiencies in the method of proof. Compounding this difficulty, they could not determine the stylistic pattern of Bacon, who is a candidate for authorship of the three discourses. It can be concluded that the authorship of at least one of the discourses is still a mystery, and that while the science of statistical wordprint analysis has advanced significantly over the past thirty years, it still has limitations which must be taken into account in any authorship study.

Kant's political philosophy involves more than a deduction of a normative model of institutions from a set of normative premises. Certain empirical premises must be added to Kant's argument. In this paper the author argues that many of Kant's own empirical assumptions are doubtful if not false. A sketch is then made of a model of institutions that can be derived from Kantian normative principles together with more plausible empirical assumptions.

Recurring and fundamental questions about policy-making in the United States focus on Congress' ability to initiate legislation. Does Congress lead? How and when? Are conditions changing to enhance or inhibit congressional initiative?

Nearly all commentators on the legislative process see the president's leadership as natural. But many have argued that he has become the dominant or even exclusive initiator of major legislation. House Republican Leader John Rhodes recently wrote that “Congress has served as little more than a glorified echo chamber for the Executive Branch of government—usually content to approve or disaprove [sic], rarely willing to initiate.” Former Senator Mike Monroney asked, “Is Congress still capable of initiating and enacting its own legislative program?”

When Crane Brinton published his Anatomy of Revolution in 1938, he noted in his bibliography fewer than thirty titles in English that dealt in general terms with revolution. Today a comprehensive listing would include some ten times that number of articles and books, and such proliferation seems likely to continue as scholars go on with their examination of revolution as a theoretical problem and in a number of theoretical and historical contexts. Like Brinton, most have taken a comparative approach, attempting to develop a conceptual framework capable of explaining the nature and the occurrence of all revolutionary movements. More recent studies, however, have moved in the direction of placing revolution in broader contexts.

In this article, I offer a novel account of why compromising in politics is likely to involve the kind of politically admirable but morally wrongful behavior at stake in the dirty hands thesis. On the view I defend, politicians do not dirty their hands just because they compromise on matters of principle. Rather, when forging a political compromise, negotiators can either comply with the requirements of ethical compromise-making or abide by the special obligations they have to their representees, but will struggle to satisfy both demands. As a result, subsequent to such compromises, residual moral claims about how the compromise was negotiated will almost inevitably emerge and compromise-makers will not be able to explain their conduct in a way that can cancel these grievances. It is in this sense that forging political compromises can be “dirty” even if choosing to compromise is the politically responsible thing to do.

This essay contends that we can better understand Andrew Jackson's distinctive account of federalism by looking outside the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian political traditions. More appropriate peers for Jackson, as a constitutional statesman, are John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln. Existing treatments of Jackson miss these connections because they focus primarily on his roles as party leader and reformer, to the neglect of his constitutional statesmanship. A major cause of this neglect is the apparent inconsistency between Jackson's “nationalist” account of the Union in the Nullification Proclamation and his advocacy of “states' rights” elsewhere, a tension that can be resolved by a closer reading of Jackson's rhetoric. Among other things, this redefinition of Jackson's legacy demonstrates that there is no necessary tension between a strong union and meaningful limits on federal power; nor is there a necessary affinity between narrow construction of federal power and state-compact theory.

Involvement in the Congo crisis of 1960 illustrates dramatically an American dilemma in foreign policy: the apparent incompatibility between the nation's emotional rejection of colonialism and the burdens of world leadership which include the consequences of anticolonialism. In 1960 the United States joined the Soviet Union in expediting the removal of the NATO partner, Belgium, from the Congo, helped to increase the power of the United Nations in the Congo at the expense of Belgian interests, and used its influence to destroy the Western-oriented regime of Moise Tshombe of secessionist Katanga. But in 1964 the United States was largely responsible for replacing the United Nations' forces in the Congo with Belgian troops; in 1965 the United States supported Tshombe's government in Leopoldville; and in 1966 and 1967 the United States joined Belgium in an uneasy vigil over the government of General Joseph Mobutu. It is not surprising that its efforts should have been interpreted by communists as American imperialism, by Africans as neocolonialism, and by many allies either as incorrigible naiveté or as hypocrisy.

The facts about friendship (objections a-d) used to support the view that the circumstances of justice are displaced by the circumstances of friendship (the Inverse Proportionality thesis) are, in Aquinas's own understanding of friendship, either not true —(a), (b), (d)—or (in my own view) irrelevant to the Inverse Proportionality thesis—(c).

Aquinas's theological view that there is no merit without (or “outside”) charity can also be expressed non-theologically: when two persons are separated by a wide gap, the actions of the inferior do not lay just claims on the superior unless the inferior is a friend. The inferior's actions become effective in entitling him to just deserts only when proportional equivalence between the superior's and the inferior's actions becomes possible. Proportional equivalence obtains only when the inferior's actions are seen as the common actions of both friends. An action is common to two persons when neither of the persons is merely a part or tool of the other, both cooperate freely, and both share reasons. Friends' actions are common actions.

It must be stressed that this reading of Aquinas's view does not lend support to the notion that friendship takes precedence over justice (“you only have justice if you have friendship first”). In this reading, Aquinas believes that, in the transition from a superiorinferior relationship to a relationship between partners, friendship and the possibility of just interaction arise concomitantly.

More than a century after Nietzsche's proclamation of the “death of God,” some recent books speak alarmingly of “the revenge of God” and the prospect of a “new cold war”—a conflict pitting religious “fundamentalists” against agnostic secularists on a worldwide scale. Remembering the cultural struggles of nineteenthcentury Europe, one might say that today Kulturkampfhas been globalized. At this juncture it seems timely to reexamine the meaning of secularism and secularization and their relation to religious faith.

On January 19, 1950 the People's Republic of China established “a regional coalition Government” in Northwest China, embracing the five provinces of Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, Chinghai, and Sinkiang. This region is of special importance to China because of its strategic position at the nexus of Central Asia where Russian, Chinese and Pan-Islamic interests meet. The political orientation of the people in this area is of fundamental concern to the government of China.

Moslem communities are scattered throughout China, but the largest concentration of these is in China's Northwest. In this region under the present jurisdiction of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee, having its seat of government at Sian, appear to be about half of China's Moslems. Within the region they represent something less than half the total population of about 23 million. The place of the Moslem communities in the Northwest Region determines in part its character and strength, for without the cooperation and loyalty of its Moslem groups, the region is politically weak and a constant strategic danger to Chinese authority and integrity in Central Asia.

In God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought, Jeremy Waldron argues that Locke's defense of human moral equality is inextricably tied to a theological doctrine: “Locke's equality claims are not separable from the theological content that shapes and organizes them.” Moreover, Waldron suspects that this points to a more general truth, namely, that an adequate secular defense of human equality is not possible. He writes, “I actually don't think it is clear that we—now—can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation” (GLE, p. 13). If Waldron's claim of the inseparability of equality and theology in Locke's theory is taken as a claim about what Locke himself thought he was doing, I shall not dispute it, though, as I shall argue below, I do not think that Waldron's argument for this claim is satisfactory. If Waldron's claim is rather about the theory that Locke created, which I take to be a system of propositions whose implications and significance are not necessarily fully known to its author, then I disagree. I think that there is, in Locke's theory, a separable secular defense of moral equality intertwined with the theological defense, but I shall not try to prove that Locke intended this to be a separate defense or even thought (as I do) that it could stand on its own.

The article reviews the role of the Federal Constitutional Court in the shaping of educational policy in the Federal Republic of Germany. It identifies two related, but different, constitutional norms which the Court brings to bear upon its views of the relationship between education and the state: (a) the norm of “equal protection,” which has had a particularly precarious role in the German constitutional tradition as far as education was concerned; and (b) the norm of legitimacy as it relates to the decision-making processes through which educational policy objectives are set and the means for achieving them elaborated. The Court's efforts to make current practices in West German educational policy comply with these norms led the Court to develop its own notion of “legalization” in the twin principles of “statutorization” and “parliamentarization.” Against the background of this development, the article argues that the Court succeeds reasonably well in terms of satisfying the “equal protection” norm, but that it may have underestimated the seriousness and precari-ousness of the legitimacy issue.

In volume 1 of Democracy in America, Tocqueville argues that the energy unleashed by democracy is one of democracy's greatest benefits. In volume 2, his portrait of democracy turns darker, and he recasts the dynamism of American society as an expression of an underlying restlessness. In this paper, I argue that restlessness (inquiétude) is a key element of Tocqueville's mature view of democratic man. Whereas previous scholarship on Tocqueville's view of restlessness either treats the theme instrumentally, by subordinating it to other themes, or seeks to illuminate Tocqueville's debt to other thinkers, this paper examines Tocqueville's treatment of restlessness as an important theme in its own right. Treating this theme in full requires examining his discussions of materialism, envy, democratic morality, and democratic peoples’ experiences of literature and art. Through this examination we see how, in Tocqueville's view, democracy, for all its merits, obstructs the path to human happiness.

As Great Britain passed into the second half of the nineteenth century, she stood on the thresholdof universal manhood suffrage. Precedent for reform had been set in 1832 but in many ways the soul-searching which culminated in the Reform Bill of 1867 was much more traumatic. Rule by a hereditary aristocracy had been weakened in 1832. Narrow suffrage based on property, nevertheless, preserved the principle of elitist rule. Because of this, Parliament was more of an “equalitarian aristocracy” than a modern democratic institution. The system seemed more rational after 1832 but Parliament still represented “property and intelligence” and the political position of the vast majority of people remained unchanged.

This article examines the roles of belief and opinion in Machiavelli's Prince. Political success and failure are effected not only by force and arms but by religious belief in particular, and more generally by the beliefs and opinions of peoples. Princes can also be the beneficiaries or the victims of their own beliefs and opinions. Machiavelli occasionally explicitly states a view as his own belief or opinion such as his belief in cruelty well used or his opinions that a prince should found himself on the people and avoid their hatred. His beliefs and opinions both contrast with common beliefs and opinions and are modified in response to them.