Popular elections are generally assumed to be the crucial element of democratic governments, but the significance of elections is so widely assumed that it is rarely examined. Although studies of voting behavior abound, there are relatively few theoretical or empirical investigations of the effects of voting on the total political system. To clarify our thinking, and as a preliminary to contemporary discussion, it may prove helpful to reexamine some major works of premodern European and American political thought.

In this article, the work of the cultural historian Jean-Pierre Vernant and the philosophical anthropologist René Girard provides grounds for reflecting on Plato's adaptation of tragedy in the Apology, and in particular on Plato's implicit comparison of Socrates with the character of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos. The Apology uses certain thematic and formal elements of tragedy – including systematic ambiguity, dramatic reversal and recognition, and the figure of a hero who is also a scapegoat – in order to expose the paradoxical combination of persuasion and compulsion at the heart of political life and of philosophical passion and aggression in the soul of the philosopher.

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 seeks to refute the prevailing scholarly view that Hamilton, like the Founders generally, lacked a deep concern about slavery. The first part examines Hamilton's political principles and shows that they were not Hobbesian but consistent with the views of more traditional natural law theorists. Accordingly, Hamilton understood that the natural rights of man imposed a corresponding duty to end slavery. The second part examines Hamilton's endorsement of a compensated emancipation, his opinions of the Constitution, his conduct of American foreign policy, his involvement in the state abolition societies, and his economic policies to demonstrate that ending slavery was in fact one of his abiding concerns.

In his address at the 200th convocation of the University of Chicago, June 11, 1940, President Hutchins invited American youth to reexamine the principles which make life worth living.

This enterprise is most urgently necessary in removing the intellectual unpreparedness of the nation. Far worse than the military and economic deficiencies in equipment and armament are the spiritual dissensions among the various groups of our time. In the universal conflict those nations will prevail whose unity results from spontaneous and free devotion to values which are recognized as worth living and dying for. We can reintegrate the nation, when we succeed in breaking the continuous secularization which, parallel to the rapid industrialization after the Civil War, is undermining the ethos of American life. The ethos which made this commonwealth great, was the fighting spirit of enlightenment. The backbone of the political principles of the Constitution, is the spirit of the Christian Law of Nature; that means political freedom as the fullfilment of the rules of the Almighty. This unity between the three spheres: nature, man and God was discarded by the process of secularization. The ethics of enlightenment shifted to the demand for universal comfort and for good living. The attitude of a boundless optimism prevailed which considered history an unending process of perfection. It was thought that this state of continuous improvement would result from the scientific organization of social and political institutions; their progress would eliminate eventually what the less scientific past had ascribed to the finiteness and sinfulness of man.

THE common note of most writing about strategic policy is that it accepts the governmental framework within which strategic policy-making proceeds in the United States as given, largely beyond analysis or substantial change. This tendency is quite natural and justifiable. Military force is presumably in the service of the nation's fundamental values. A nation's form of government is obviously basic to its ideals and purposes. It is important, however, for the defense analyst as well as the interested citizen to approach the relation of military policy and governmental institutions from a reversed perspective, one that seeks to identify the constraints that the American governmental system and the consent requirements that it establishes impose on effective strategic policy development and operations.

Theoreticians have always stood in the vanguard of revolutions with programs which were designed to chart the course for nascent political régimes. When the Third Reich was officially ushered in, enthusiastic exponents of a corporative state (Ständestaat) or corporative organization (ständischer Aufbau) were at hand to act as engineers for an uncharted future—in fact, a future which occasionally offered faint glimpses of perpetuity. Some of the corporative “soap bubbles,” as Max Weber once termed them, quickly burst while others remained intact. Some of the bubble-blowers were swept on by the revolutionary forces or they gathered by the wayside to appraise the residue of their theories. In any case, the period from 1933 to the outbreak of the present war has been sufficient to allow for a survey of the corporative developments in Germany in the light of their theoretical background and institutional expression.

THE election of Leo XIII on February 20, 1878, made a deep and rather favorable impression on the French statesman, Léon Gambetta. Quite inadvertently, he recorded it for posterity when, on the very day of Leo's election, he wrote to his mistress:

They have elected a new pope, the elegant and refined Cardinal Pecci, bishop of Perugia. … This Italian, more diplomat than priest, has overcome all the intrigues of the Jesuits and the foreign clergy; he is pope, and the name of Leo XIII which he has taken seems to me to be a most favorable omen. I hail this occasion so full of promise.

Every age seems to have some dominating central idea, and every particular political system surely has some dominating central idea from which radiate all the institutions, processes, and the texture of life in that country. As Tocqueville long ago said, the dominating idea of our age, and of our political order in particular, is the idea of equality. Equality is therefore at once for us the source of our political benefits and also the source of our defects and dangers. That is to say, every dominating idea is the one that determines for the society its likeliest and greatest benefits and dangers, because the central idea is the one that can do the greatest and most pervasive good and by the same token also the greatest harm. Equality is for us that central principle, the one we have to grapple with and wrest good from, and likewise the principle from which come our greatest dangers. Equality is the political problem for mankind in the present age.

The article consists chiefly in an examination of the Republic, but that examination attempts to determine the place of the Republic in relation to Plato's other works (especially the Laws and the Statesman) as well as their place in relation to it. This comparative effort permits a more precise specification than would otherwise be possible of the most important questions which are raised in those works and of the intention of the author in treating those questions as he does.

This paper examines problems of the liberal democratic order through an analysis of the political thought of a neglected American thinker, William Graham Sumner. Sumner argues that the liberal order is inextricably linked to laissez-faire, and is under siege from the closely interrelated threats of socialism, plutocracy, imperialism, and the degeneration of democracy. He recognizes that the liberal-democratic capitalist state has significant deficiencies, including atomization, “cold” economic relations, and a loss of “poetry.” It also seems to depend upon values which are not readily propagated by liberalism. But efforts to address deficiencies through government action amount to attempts to intermix philosophically incompatible elements and serve to hasten the system's collapse. Sumner's work unwittingly suggests that the usual “Lockean” liberal model may be so flawed that a revised public philosophy, with new language and paradigms, is needed for the effective pursuit of his goals of freedom, dignity, and human development.

Most readers have not agreed with Mark Twain in liking Joan of Arc best of all his novels, particularly because his hand is almost invisible in it. He presents the story as a translation by “Jean Francois Alden” of the remembrances of “Sieur Louis de Conte.” He did not think readers would take a work by “Mark Twain” seriously. Only the initials S. L. C. indicate the connection between the actual and the presumed author. Twain considered Joan to be “the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” She was a woman—and a general. She genuinely believed that she was acting on the basis of commands from God. In relating her story, Twain nevertheless shows that nothing human, and certainly no government and no ruler, is entitled to divine honors or right.

This article traces Machiavelli's indebtedness to Sallust in his discussion of Agathocles the Sicilian in chapter 9 of The Prince. In distinguishing between virtù and glory, Machiavelli was influenced by Sallust's discussion of Catiline and Caesar, and of true and false glory, in the Bellum Catilinae. Writing to Caesar at the height of his power, Sallust needed to negotiate a delicate political situation that was in some ways analogous to Machiavelli's own difficult position vis-à-vis the Medici. Just as, in addressing Caesar, Sallust points up the difference between Caesar as he was and as he might have been, so in the example of Agathocles Machiavelli presents the Medici with a choice between mere virtù and the glory achieved by the really excellent men. It was the prospect of this glory that Machiavelli held out to the Medici in the concluding chapter of The Prince.

Advocates for the equality and dignity of LGBT persons often suggest that the immutability of sexual orientation is their strongest argument. I believe that it is a weak one. First, the individual freedom that liberalism accords to people, absent harm to others, as necessary for human flourishing applies to sexuality as well as to other areas of existence. Second, the distinction often made between status and conduct is a false one, and the argument from immutability effectively protects neither. Third, I examine the notion of constitutive choice, arguing that the line between immutability and choice is more complex than many realize. Finally, greater attention to the notion of constitutive choice may broaden liberalism's hospitality to conceptions of the good in ways that better respect human moral agency and autonomy.

Unlike the laws enacted against religious and political dissenters in almost every European state since the Reformation, the Popery legislation enacted by the Irish Parliaments of William III, Anne, and the first two Hanoverians was marked by a near absence of sanguinary punishments. The long period of enforcement, one hundred years, and the areas of human activity regulated distinguish the Irish laws from twentieth-century commitments to ideals of ideological uniformity. Not only were the Irish Popery laws unique in these respects, but they comprised one of the most persistent legislative efforts ever undertaken by a western European state to change a people. Although the Popery laws have been discussed and analyzed since their enactment, such discussions have usually been colored by confessional and political partisanship. Neither polemicists nor serious historians have satisfactorily analyzed either the purpose of the laws or the problems and consequences of enforcing them. While these matters are the principal concern of this article, the writer hopes that his necessarily limited investigation of the Irish Popery laws will invite the attention of social scientists to the other complex human problems created by this legislation.

The recent historical process in Eastern Europe has been the reverse of the evolution in colonial matters. In other parts of the world, former colonies reached a degree of complete independence. In East Europe, formerly independent states acquired the peculiar status of semi-dependent colonies. Nazi Germany applied colonial methods in her dealings with European states and invented various categories of protectorates and semi-dependencies. One of the new categories was that of the countries known as satellite states. This meant that some countries, remaining theoretically sovereign members of the family of nations, lost their independence and particularly their freedom of action in international and domestic affairs. The satellite states were never considered by Germany as equal partners but only as more or less reliable “Hilfs-völker.” Equality and cooperation in international relations was in conceivable to the Nazi mind.

Benedict Spinoza is the first philosophical proponent of liberal democracy. In his Theologico-Political Tractate he calls for the liberation of philosophy from theology and for the subordination of religion to politics. Though Spinoza may have not influenced the American Founding Fathers directly, both the clarity and the paradoxes of his arguments are perhaps the best guide to understanding better the present-day conflicts over religion and politics in the United States. Spinoza's insistence on the prerogative of the political sovereign to exercise absolute authority in the sphere of moral action necessarily complicates religious values. But the “inconveniences” resulting from liberal democracy are justified in terms of justice.