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.

Debates regarding obligation in Hobbes have turned on either natural right or natural law interpretations. Both interpretations tend to take up the question of obligation from the perspective of teaching those who contend “for too great Liberty” “how to obey.” But Hobbes also has a second audience, and a second goal in mind: those who contend “for too much Authority” must be taught “how to govern.” From that perspective, a different discussion of obligation emerges. What is revealed is a contiguous set of reflections in Leviathan that pivot on the character of the sovereign and the citizens’ judgment thereof, all of which inform effective obligation and have little in common with received interpretations of obligation. It further reveals a relationship between the failure to manifest sovereign virtue and the natural punishment of pusillanimous and barbaric sovereigns. That is, it speaks to a sovereign virtue ethic in Leviathan.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Oakeshott are often labeled conservative thinkers, and taken to theorize rigid limits to individual agency and criticism. Tracing several modes of affinity between the work of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, one can recognize the conventionality and rule-governed character of linguistic practices and yet affirm a deeply individualistic account of agency and action. Each thinker respectively characterizes the individual as located within a context of action that is richly structured by intersubjective rules and practices. Yet each also recognizes an ineluctable dimension of individuality and contingency to action that surpasses mere rule following or the reprise of conventional practice. The very situatedness of the individual agent within a framework of linguistic practices shared with others provides the friction that enables individual criticism and transgressive political action. Wittgenstein and Oakeshott thus present a perspective on political agency and criticism that is a salient alternative to both conservative and radical views.

Presidential responsibility for foreign policy is something of a commonplace today. Indeed, most analysts see Presidential dominance in foreign affairs as a more or less necessary result of the conditions of the times, which often demand the kind of unified and prompt action which only the Presidency is capable of in the American system. Yet it can be argued that the very factors which have brought Presidential conduct of foreign relations into the national spotlight have simultaneously worked to limit the decisiveness of his control over foreign policy. The period since World War I, and particularly since World War II, has seen the United States becoming more deeply involved in what can be called “positive” policy, policy that requires financial support, or new administrative authorizations, or the assignment of new personnel. And the natural corollary of such policies is the growth in significance of that element of government, which must give legislative authorization for any such undertakings. There has been, in a sense, a reassertion of traditional separation of powers in the area of foreign policy.

Upon close examination of Rousseau's accounts of human development, we find that Rousseau presents us with paradoxical chronologies in which the experience of supposed immediacy from which humans are said to originate always seems to be informed by, and even require, previous mediation. More specifically, reflection, comparison, and imagination are thought to exist only after the onset of perfectibility, but these mediating capacities are always already present in pity and self-love, as well as for the “independent” savage, calling into question the possibility that any human sentiment or condition could be immediately accessible and fundamentally imbuing human life with ambiguity, fluidity, and disorder. Consequently, morality and freedom for Rousseau require the negotiation, stabilization, or management of the unstable “things between” human beings and their experiences, the object world, and others, even as such management is best hidden from view and experienced as given and true.

In recent times, the issues surrounding crime and punishment have seldom been discussed from the vantage point of political philosophy. Instead, they have tended to become the province of lawyers, psychologists, and specialists in ethics or the philosophy of language. Whatever the merits of their respective contributions may be, such writers usually have assumed that the basic questions of political legitimacy and the state's authority to enforce criminal law have been settled. In effect, they ask: given a state which already possesses a legitimate system of criminal justice, whom should the state punish (if it does at all), why, and under what circumstances?

In her well-known piece on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt wrote that “posthumous fame… seems to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones.” It is achieved by “those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification.” If she is right, then there may be some hope that Richard McKeon will one day have his moment. For McKeon (who was, in fact, a friend of Arendt) is eminently unclassifiable. Born in 1900, he studied philosophy both with the great French medievalist Étienne Gilson and with John Dewey. He was a twentieth-century American pragmatist who sought to revolutionize philosophy so that it could deal with the novel challenges of a technological age. Yet he was also a brilliant scholar of classical and medieval thought, who wrote such articles as “Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century,” “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” and “The Hellenistic and Roman Foundations of the Tradition of Aristotle in the West.”

Few historical challenges are so tantalizing as the attempt to account for the crushing blows which descended in ever-mounting crescendo upon the Catholic Church during the first century of Independence in Central and South America, regions where the population had been and remained close to 100 percent Catholic. The present study must begin by braving this challenge so as to place its subject matter in proper perspective.

Centralization and decentralization have been applied in Germany not only to geographical relationships between levels of government and to hierarchical relationships within levels of government but also to hierarchical relationships between levels of government. American-style dual federalism is not a part of the German administrative tradition. Subnational units in Germany have traditionally been responsible for implementing the laws of larger units. With the creation of a German federal state in 1871, the Prussian system became in large part the German system of administration. Today there are five levels of administration in the Federal Republic, and strong parallels can be drawn to the earlier Prussian traditions. In spite of the institutional arrangements for decentralized administration and local self-government, there are complaints about the alleged lack of opportunities for popular participation and overcentralized decision-making. These complaints raise difficult questions concerning the requirements for national standards and equality on the one hand and local citizen demands on the other.

Rousseau speaks of his last work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as an informal record of conversations of his soul with itself in its quest for his—our—naturel purged of artifice and convention. In the course of these conversations he addresses many of the problems that he explores in his other writings: man's place in the scheme of things, hence God, divine justice, immortality; freedom; the contrasts between the active, citizen life and the circumscribed, solitary life; what we owe to our fellows and what we owe to ourselves; amour-propre, shame, and amour de soi; the conditions for individual happiness, its kinds, and how they might (or might not) compose with public happiness. However, in the Reveries he addresses these problems from an explicitly nonpolitical perspective. While he says that he did not reduce his reflections—meditations, reveries—about them to a system, his account of them is remarkably comprehensive and carefully crafted.

Scholars have generally traced J.S. Mill's interest in the United States to the commercial and democratic aspects of American society. Yet Mill also suggested a third respect in which America was unique: it was the only existing nation founded on the basis of “abstract principles.” This insight provides the key to a fuller understanding of Mill's various writings on America. In his early essays, Mill worried that America's founding principles and institutions were beginning to take on the characteristics of dogma: they were universally accepted, but no longer discussed. Mill responded optimistically to the Civil War because he believed the struggle to extinguish slavery would ultimately restore the meaning or vitality of the founding principles of liberty and equality. With the nation thus “regenerated,” Mill predicted that Americans would soon recognize and address other illiberal aspects of American society, including the subordinate status of women.

Few Presidents in American history established so complete and far-reaching a control over his party as did Woodrow Wilson during the first years of his tenure in the White House.* Indeed, before the end of his first term he had become almost the absolute master of his party, able to effect revolutionary changes in party policy without the previous knowledge and consent of Democratic leaders in Congress and the country. He attained this stature in part by his methods of public leadership—his bold representation of public opinion and his incomparable strategy in dealing with the legislative branch. He won this position of authority also through less obvious and more subtle means—a systematic use of the immense patronage at his command as an instrument by which to achieve effective and responsible party government. Confronted by no entrenched national party organization and no body of officeholders loyal to another man, he was able to build from the ground up and to weld the widely scattered and disparate Democratic forces into something approximating a national machine. Let us see how he used his power to mold the character of his party, and with what consequences.

At a state dinner to mark Ghana’s independence in March, 1957, Kwame Nkrumah first invoked the dramatic device of asking the band to play Ghana’s new national anthem. He then made his point, saying:

Existentialism, for some of its severe critics, represents a temporary outburst of the dark side of man which is indicative of a passing phenomenon of our age and particularly of the postwar angry generation living on the morbid edges of death, anxiety and the absurdity of human existence. They contend that existentialism is not a philosophy or at least not a serious and disciplined philosophy. Professor Henry S. Kariel characterized existential psychology as “negativism,” and its counterpart, behavioral psychology, as “positivism”; and similarly Professor Eugene J. Meehan describes the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl as having sought to find philosophical certainty “in feeling rather than in thought,” an assessment that falsely indicts phenomenology as an irrationalism. I have singled out these two political theorists as representatives of a widespread misconception of existential philosophy and phenomenology, held as well, I suspect, by many American political theorists. This article is not designed as a direct rebuttal to these misunderstandings and criticisms; it is rather an attempt to show what I consider to be the significant and positive contributions of existential philosophy and phenomenology to the foundation of political theory.

I Should like to consider in this essay one particular aspect of the present spiritual crisis—namely, contemporary atheism and its inner meaning, Such a topic, the meaning of contemporary atheism, involves very deep and intricate problems. I do not pretend to dogmatize about them; the views that I shall offer are somewhat tentative views, which originate in a desire to look for the hidden spiritual significance of the present agony of the world.

In an introductory part I shall try, first, to analyze briefly the various kinds of atheism we might have to deal with, in order to characterize more accurately contemporary atheism.

Federalist, No. 10, argues that human beings demand that their opinions concerning their distinctive excellence be recognized as true. This recognition, however, cannot be political. The political realm cannot do justice to the “angel” in man, and the futile attempts to secure such political recognition lead to tyranny. Where does the recognition of one's own humanity occur? The Federalist does not say. Yet it must occur somewhere for political freedom to be regarded as a human good. It is essential for the perpetuation of human freedom that the account of human nature given in The Federalist, which is comprehensive enough to secure political freedom, be supplemented by an account of the human being's transpolitical dimension. Madison provides such an account in “On Property” and in the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. These two sources show that political freedom is for the performance of religious duty, which is discoverable by human beings through their conscientious use of reason and should, therefore, be understood to complete American constitutional theory.

For more than a century* private philanthropy has loomed large on the social horizon of American cities. Their governments, as inept and clumsy as they were politically corrupt, were not readily entrusted with delicate social service functions. Happily for urban welfare, Americans not only extolled the great virtue of charity but conspicuously practiced it. As no other people, they have made relief of human misery a part of their life purpose, devoting time, thought and money to the task regardless of its source: in some calamity of nature or in social maladjustment such as urban poverty, industrial conflict or world misunderstanding. Besides giving for giving's sake as befits religious folk—they have characteristically expected handsome dividends on their investment either in the way of improved character development or in more reasonable and just social arrangements. Many wage-earners and social reformers feared, it is true, that the benevolent enterprise might dull the people's desire for a better economic order. By and large, however, charity in America has been an aid and auxiliary of justice rather than its substitute.

It is not difficult to discern the historic factors which have brought the Middle East into its present position of “crisis area” in the foreign relations of the United States. The reasons why we have gotten from there to here, from the somnolent state of Middle Eastern affairs in, say, the year 1914 and their still sleepy condition in 1939 to the split-second enmities and antagonisms of the mid-1970's have been pointed up by events of recent history. First of all there was the rise of nationalism. Evident in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, it spread slowly to the other Arabic-speaking peoples of the region. Nationalism in the Middle East has become extremely important during the last twenty-five years.

ItIs A well-known human tendency to continue applying remedies after the problem for which they are suitable has been solved. Concentration on a particular difficulty becomes habitual to such a degree that its disappearance may not be immediately realized. And new problems may take its place for some time without being noticed.