The interpretation of Edmund Burke as a laissez-faire economist has a long pedigree but is inaccurate. Rather, Burke is best seen as a moderate Whig who believed that governmental social and economic policy should be based on pragmatic and prudential considerations. However, utilitarian rule-making makes most sense when the rules can be formulated in terms of realizing some more abstract goal. This goal Burke obtained from his reading of the Scotch moral sense writers, who convinced him that man has an innate moral nature which can be improved through association with other men in society. Consideration of Burke's writings on a variety of specific economic and social issues, ranging from poor relief and economic reform to the slave trade, confirms this instrumental interpretation of Burke's economic thought.

The politics of the Union de la gauche dominated the 1977–78 French legislative campaign and the postelection analyses. Undeniably, one of the most intriguing subjects during this period was the strategy of the French Communist party (PCF), its evolution over the previous decade and its apparently conflicting objectives. It wasn't at all obvious, for example, that the Communists wanted to win the elections. Did the PCF deliberately reject the possibility of governing under conditions which it presumed it could not control because of the superior electoral strength of the Socialist party (PS)? This interpretation was widespread in the French and American press after the elections and, of course, was favored by the Socialists. Or was the PCF as dedicated as ever to a democratic transition to socialism through a communist-socialist coalition? Georges Marchais, the party's secretary-general, insisted this was the case before the election returns were in.

Constitutional theory has recently turned to the importance of extrajudicial constitutional interpretation. Yet much of the scholarly debate remains rooted in “legal” views of the Constitution, which continue to give primacy to the Court. This article seeks to go further by articulating a Madisonian view of the Constitution, which resituates questions of interpretation within a larger institutional framework. This Madisonian view suggests that the Constitution calls forth continual debate about constitutional meaning. The “settlement” of constitutional issues is not an essential feature of our constitutional system and, thus, constitutional politics with overlapping views, discontinuities, and essentially unsettled meanings are inherent features of the Madisonian Constitution. Recovering the Madisonian vision is an essential step in restoring both the political branches and the Court to the proper place in the constitutional scheme and, in doing so, overcoming the deeply ingrained myth of judicial supremacy.

Leo Strauss often spoke of Jerusalem and Athens. He never spoke of Rome in the same context, never of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Western civilization, in his view, was fertilized by the dynamic tension between only two, not three, cities. This theoretically unresolvable stress between Jerusalem and Athens was what made this culture unique. Western civilization stood between reason and revelation. For Strauss, it seemed self-evident that this tension, which initially arose when the pious Jews encountered the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, was incapable of intellectual reconciliation but still it remained the font of its cultural vitality.

Charles Taylor has developed a powerful critique of neo-Kantian liberalism and its ontological presupposition, the unencumbered self. According to Taylor, the trouble with deontological liberalism is that its neutral state is incapable of promoting the patriotic virtue that is necessary for the maintenance of liberty. This article responds to Taylor's critique by showing how the citizens of an ideal liberal state acquire a ready willingness to meet their public responsibilities in the absence of a government that promotes patriotism as a good for everyone. In particular, it draws upon Rawls's theory of justice to suggest how liberal citizens naturally develop a deep attachment to the political institutions of their community and to their fellow citizens. The concluding section of the article returns to the relationship between politics and ontology, arguing that unencumbered and situated selves are better understood as alternate moments in the life of the liberal citizen than as mutually exclusive ontological possibilities.

During Pitt's 1785 campaign for moderate parliamentary reform, William Wilberforce supported the government primarily on a moral basis rather than on political grounds. He explained his reasons to a friend, Lord Muncaster, as follows:

It is not the confusion of parties, and their quarreling and battling in the House of Commons, which makes me despair of the republic … it is the universal corruption and profligacy of the times, which taking its rise amongst the rich and luxurious has now extended its baneful influence and spread its destructive poison through the whole body of the people.

THE individual in the twentieth century finds himself dwarfed by two giant institutions which decide his political destiny: the state, with its efficient bureaucrat methodically signing papers that may mean success or failure, life or death, for everyman and his world; the other is the political party, which aspires to control the state by mobilizing the masses. Nineteenth-century bureaucracy tended to be rigid and authoritarian, yet unrelated to popular support and limited in its impact on daily life. The nineteenth- century liberal, suspicious of the state, attempted to protect the individual by further limiting the bureaucrat; the twentiethcentury liberal hopes to use the bureaucrat to limit the privately powerful, whereas the totalitarian party hopes to dominate the state and therewith to dominate everyman. When a monopolistic party controls a monolithic state, the individual seems to have no choice but to flee, to obey or to disappear into a concentration camp. Overt individual resistance appears senseless; overt group resistance extremely dangerous and almost certainly doomed to failure.

Portraits of heroes and leaders have been among the most widely diffused and deeply cherished of all political symbols. The political functions of such portraits grow out of distinctive semiotic qualities that set the portrait apart from other types of symbols. Judging from their public reception, George Washington's portraits — and, we believe, many state portraits — have the qualities of likeness, manifestiveness, moral efficaciousness, and sacredness that traditionally were ascribed to religious icons. From these qualities the state portrait gains a special power to bridge the distances of space and time and bring a society's representative men and women to living presence for its members. By evoking loyalties and attachments not only to the persons portrayed but also to the larger collectivities that those persons represent, state portraits function as important agencies of political integration and solidarity.

There is a striking similarity between the Italy of the cinquecento and today's developing nations. In both worlds, the chief characteristics are internal fragmentations with little or no community of interest, the all-too-frequent rise and fall of political regimes, a disharmonious relationship between government and governed, and the absence of meaningful direction. Flux and volatility are the all-pervasive features.

Living in the post-9/11 world that we do, it is evident that the contemporary world continues to be very much vulnerable to political disruptions emanating from theocratic politics; and in that sense, any secularist hopes that may have been entertained for a political domestication of religion are far from having been fulfilled. That in turn suggests to us that the concerns that animated the great seventeenth-century struggle against clerical power and theocratic authority are enduring ones, and that we have reason to continue to engage intellectually with critics of priestcraft like Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. Within that broader context, this article concerns itself with Harrington in particular, focusing on his efforts in his polemical writings of the late 1650s to draw resources for Erastian politics from a Hobbes-inspired account of the Hebrew republic.

An orderly and almost bloodless movement brought Guatemala independence from Spain in 1821. The tranquil inception of national existence contrasts vividly with the ensuing century and a quarter, a period marked by turbulence and a multitude of factors tending to retard political and economic development. The 1821 Revolution resulted only in the overthrow of Spanish rule; other traditions of colonial times were not so easily cast aside. Politics continued to be the exclusive domain of long-term, personalistic rulers, while economic policy remained under the control of a numerically small land-owning aristocracy. The political chiefs generally allied themselves with the conservative lords of land. Certainly this was true of Rafael Carrera, the uneducated mestizo who dominated the country for nearly twenty years in the mid-nineteenth century. The same pattern existed during the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, 1898–1920. In spite of a few concessions to liberalism, the construction of many roads, and the redistribution of a small amount of land, there is no doubt that the rule of Jorge Ubico, 1930–1944, relied for its main support upon the arch-conservative landed aristocrats.

Between 1880 and 1914 no other thinker exerted a greater influence upon British thought and public policy than did T. H. Green. Bryce and Asquith have testified that Green's Liberal version of Idealism superseded Utilitarianism as the most prominent philosophical school in Great Britain. And what was more startling, he and his followers proceeded to bring to life the heavy abstractions of the Principles of Political Obligation. For Green converted Idealism, which in Germany had so often served as a rationale of conservatism, into a practical program for the left wing of the Liberal Party. From aristocratic Oxford which Matthew Arnold could still describe as “whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age,” there came a stream of serious young men dedicated to reform in politics, social work, and the civil service, men who would spend their lives in improving the school system, establishing settlement houses, reorganizing charity and the Poor Law, and originating adult education. Green's teaching had an extraordinary effect upon some of the best young men of this generation. A rich literature of memoir and autobiography attests to the great mark he left on the minds and lives of his generation.

Among the German nationalists of the Napoleonic period none had a stronger influence on the practical manifestations of Germannationalism than Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Father Jahn as he was called. He was born in 1778, in the Mark Brandenburg; in the spirit of a new Prussian nationalism, he wrote in 1799 a book on the promotion of patriotism in the Prussian realm,1 which he opened with the characteristic quotation:

Less than a year after Senator Taft died, a foundation was established for the preservation of his ideals. Men's ideals are sometimes confused with their ideas, as is probably the case in this instance, because it is often difficult to distinguish between them. This paper is concerned with both. More specifically, it is concerned with the ideas Senator Taft propagated about foreign policy and the ideals that fostered them.

The debate over abortion in America is at a standstill. The pro-life and pro-choice groups, having settled firmly on incompatible premises, have nothing to say to one another. Their “debate” is only “a battle of bumper stickers between people with their minds already made up.” More importantly, they have nothing to say to all the people in the middle who feel uncomfortable with both positions. If the crux of the abortion issue is choosing between being pro-life and pro-choice, then the undecided citizen who sincerely wants his country to act rightly has the dismal opportunity of deciding whether to be anti-choice or anti-life.

Defining terms is a serious undertaking and one bound to stir controversy. When we decided to devote a book to this task, we were under no illusion that everyone would readily sign on to our proposal. We thought, however, that it was worth calling attention to certain conceptual problems that currently beset the study of American political development (APD). We wanted to underscore the value of tractability in claims about change over time and to demonstrate the benefits of specificity in moving this venerable research tradition forward. We regret that Professor Thomas finds our proposal objectionable, but we are even more concerned that his alternative seems to do little to address the issues that prompted our effort.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the language of subjective natural rights can be found in a wide variety of medieval juristic and scholastic texts. This is part of a general trend in the study of political ideas that stresses the continuity between medieval and modern political values. However, many leading scholars of medieval political ideas maintain that no language of subjective natural rights can be found in Aquinas's political writings, based as they are on a famous objective definition of right (jus) as the object of justice (justitia). Other scholars argue that Aquinas's notion of subjective rights is peripheral to his political philosophy. The essay argues that Aquinas, while commenting on canon law texts, explicitly posits a subjective natural right to marry, based on the natural equality and natural liberty of all human beings. This can be seen by his claim that a slave may contract marriage, even without the consent of the master. This is one example of an instance in which Aquinas refers to specific legal issues in order to explicate his understanding of liberty and right. For Aquinas there are certain areas of liberty or mastery (dominium) that are exempt from all human authority, and wherein a person has rights to decide how to pursue natural human goods.

The thinkers of the French Enlightenment are frequently depicted as political rationalists, meaning that they advocated subjecting all laws, institutions, and practices to the withering light of reason, and discarding those found wanting by its standards. However, two of the most prominent philosophes, Voltaire and Diderot, were in fact opponents of the kind of political rationalism that they are often thought to have embraced. Both of these thinkers rejected the idea of a single “rational” political order, advocated gradual reform rather than wholesale change, and denied that the steady application of reason could produce inevitable or endless progress. In effect the Enlightenment was a “revolt against rationalism” (as Peter Gay has called it) not only in the epistemological, psychological, and ethical spheres, but also in the political one.