Every state has a constitution—a body of principles, institutions, laws, and customs that forms the framework of government—but not every state is a constitutional state. The latter is distinguished by a commitment to constitutionalism, which in essence is the idea that political life ought to be carried on according to procedures and rules that paradoxically are in some degree placed beyond politics: procedures in other words that are fundamental. Nothing so positive as a written constitution, but rather the belief that the law as the embodiment of a society's most important values is powerful, characterizes government under the rule of law.

Hobbes's linguistic conventionalism is one of the most obvious themes of his work. But it has not been considered as closely as it should be, given its prominence. I argue that Hobbes reworked quite traditional materials in such a way as to produce a novel doctrine, but that this novelty did not involve him in the implausible claim that issues of scientific truth and proof could be settled simply on the basis of linguistic agreement. Rather, he grounded his conventionalism in the prelinguistic, naturally given experience he called “mental discourse,” and then linked it to the effort to outflank contemporary skepticism. For these reasons, Hobbes's specific form of conventionalism can then be seen to be central both to the limits of his claims and to what he thought could be established with a certainty robust enough to withstand skeptical challenge.

My direct experience with the Bulgarian aspect of the interallied rivalries following the Second World War extended from the planning of postwar policy in the Department of State in 1943–44 through the first year (1944–45) of American participation in the implementation of the Bulgarian armistice.

The study of leadership in local government for small- and middle-sized towns is a neglected phase of political science research. For many years scholars have accounted for the urban boss and machine; but its complementary counterpart at the grassroots has been taken for granted. Millions of Americans prefer to live and govern themselves in towns. Their politics warrants analysis not only because it will continue as a vital and characteristic contribution to our way of life but also because it frequently plays a superior rôle in state and national representation than it numerically is entitled to do

Republican leaders have always sought to “crack” the Democratic South in the hope of making their party a majority one in all of the major sections of the country. The current proposals of Senator Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota for uniting northern Republicans and southern Democrats are not new; they have been tried in the past with little success. This was especially true of the post-Reconstruction years when the memories of Republican ascendancy in the South during die early years of Reconstruction were still fresh and vivid.

Spain entered the twentieth century as a relatively underdeveloped nation still deeply rooted in her traditional past. Spanish life had barely begun to experience the stresses of social and economic transformation that recent scholars have identified with the modernization process. Toward the end of the last century, Spanish industry grew at a rapid pace, particularly in the Basque and Catalan regions, but the nation as a whole continued to lag behind the rest of Western Europe in the years before 1914. Although the recently formed trade union movements expanded in response to the new complex of urban-industrial problems, their organizational and political strength remained ineffective until World War I. In the other regions of Spain an agrarian economy, replete with strong anarchist movements, dominated and determined a social order in which provincialism, widespread subsistence living standards, and extensive illiteracy persisted.

The political thought of Fyodor Dostoevsky grows out of his opposition to nihilism, atheistic humanism, and socialism in much the same way as the philosophy of Plato grew out of his opposition to the sophists. Indeed, the parallel of Dostoevsky's thought with that of Plato is to be seen in some further aspects of this fundamental opposition. Both the Russian master of the novel and the Hellenic founder of political science confronted adversaries for whom “Man is the measure of all things” and each based his opposition on the principle “God is the Measure,” to use Plato's formulation. This declaration, echoing like a thunderclap across more than twenty centuries of history, found consummate expression in the last great work of each writer: the Laws and The Brothers Karamazov.

Why should Plato's philosopher rule? A deceptively simple question, and one that many would contend Plato answered in a straightforward way in the Republic: because justice requires it and the philosopher is just (520a, 520e). Yet, if justice is defined as psychic harmony (443c-444a) and psychic harmony is eudaimonia, and if pure philosophizing makes the philosopher most eudaimon (as several texts indicate) it would seem that descent from the philosophic heights to rule is unjust. Glaucon makes this objection (519d) and Aristotle, dissatisfied with Plato's reply, repeats it. The charge implicit here and in many recent commentators is that Plato provides no satisfying philosophical account of the relation between justice (dikaiosune) and happiness (eudaimonia) and thus no philosophic justification for ruling. For Glaucon and Adeimantus ask that Socrates show that justice-—by which they mean “fair-dealing to others,” the restraint from pleonexia in sociopolitical affairs—makes the just man happy of itself apart from reputation or external reward. Socrates' reply identifies justice and psychic harmony, calling the latter “real” or inner justice. But this is only a relevant reply if some necessary connection can be shown between psychic harmony and justice in the ordinary, sociopolitical sense. Is it necessarily the case that the psychically harmonious or happy man deals fairly with others? For if justice is defined as psychic harmony (well-being or happiness) then the philosopher is most happy philosophizing, and his refusal to rule is not only justified, but justified by Socrates' own argument. The potential embarrassmentthen is that the philosopher in the Republic—the only individual skilled in justification by argument or dialectic—may be incapable of fulfilling the request of Glaucon and Adeimantus. His own unwillingness to rule seems to indicate he doesn't believe in the connection between justice and happiness. Moreover, if the philosopher's dialectical inquiries into the relation between (ordinary) justice and happiness end in failure, then Socrates in fact undermines belief in justice while trying to defend it. If then, as some have claimed,4 the Republic is the true apology of Socrates and of philosophy to the polis, it is surely a disastrous one.

Edmund Burke was at once a chief exponent of the Ciceronian doctrine of natural law and a chief opponent of the “rights of man.” In our time, which is experiencing simultaneously a revival of interest in natural-law theory and an enthusiasm for defining “human rights” that is exemplified by the United Nations' lengthy declaration, Burke's view of the natural juridic order deserves close attention.

Unlike Bolingbroke and Hume, whose outward politics in some respects resembled the great Whig statesman's, Burke was a pious man. “The most important questions about the human race Burke answered … from the Church of England's catechism.” He takes for granted a Christian cosmos, in which a just God has established moral principles for man's salvation. God has given man law, and with that law, rights; such, succinctly, is Burke's premise in all moral and juridical questions.

So much has been written in the past few decades about the United States involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese wars that it is difficult to move beyond the usual arguments and the rather skewed assumptions on which they rest. However, the need for fresh and serious review of these matters is essential to understand the new era of multipolar politics now dawning. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to ascertain persistent patterns of the underlying rationale of the politics of American involvement in Asia; second, to critically analyze United States foreign policy in Korea and Vietnam during the war periods of 1950–53 and 1961–73.

Social or political proposals of the “ideal polity,” some of which amounted to outright Utopias, came to be fairly common during the fourth and third centuries B.C. In addition to Plato's famed Republic (which is said to have been influenced in part by Hippodamus as well as by certain Pythagorean ideas) and Antisthenes' somewhat “unorthodox” social views, Diogenes of Sinope, Iambulus and Zeno the Stoic, for instance, wrote on the “ideal city.” Also, a great many treatises On Kingship, which frequently were nothing more than part of that “mirror of princes literature” which can be traced back at least to Antisthenes, were authored during the same period. But it will be noticed that these relatively early Polities, including that of Zeno, uniformly advocated a small and highly articulated city-state with extremely narrow limits and relatively limited objectives rather than a pan-humanitarian or cosmopolitan ideal. The well-known Stoic cosmopolitanism, which some scholars have called the philosophic corollary of Alexander's conquest, is definitely of later date, later even than Zeno's widely known Republic, which still adheres to the confining notions of the traditional (and fateful) Greek particularism. This, in turn, compels us to distinguish between the early Zeno who in his original dependence on early Cynic teachings apparently shared in this limited outlook, and the late Zeno, who was able to conceive the whole universe as one single great city of gods and men without distinction of race or nationality. It is safe to assume, therefore, that Zeno's Republic is one of his earliest works and perhaps his earliest.

In a powerful series of texts, Hilary Putnam has criticized what he takes to be a prevalent scientistic conception of objectivity in modern philosophy. This article is concerned with two connected facets of this critique, upon which Putnam himself has laid increasing emphasis: the attempt to reconstruct conceptions of ethical and political value in the wake of his criticism of “metaphysical realist” notions of objectivity, and his affiliation with the tradition of pragmatist philosophy. Four principal manifestations of Putnam's concern with ethical and political value are examined: the internalist argument for moral objectivity; the criticism of instrumental reason; the account of a “moral image”; and the “reconsideration of Deweyan democracy.” It is argued that an interpretation of Dewey's moral and political philosophy provides an illuminating vantage point from to understand the shortcomings of Putnam's ethical and political writings.

The American mind has been traditionally more ready to accept the validity of political parties which tend to reflect the complexity of political and economic problems and are not based on any simple ideology. For a nation's mind is not a simple one, nor are its interests capable of simple definition. In a free society, a political party with any claim to national scope and to a lasting identification with the task of solving the particular problems of the country in which it operates, will probably be found to be a composite movement, a meeting ground where different groups bring their different attitudes, a clearing house from which compromises emerge. This is the kind of party to which the United States has grown accustomed. It satisfies an instinctive desire to avoid those clashes on a straight ideological basis which would divide the country and endanger the maintenance of the common foundation and the survival of methods of political action accepted by all.

By exploring Addams's lifelong fascination with work, this essay analyzes the ways in which her understanding of work fundamentally shaped her wider political vision. For Addams, work was the foundation of not only a personal sense of identity, but also a collective democratic character. The workplace had the potential to be the model of a cooperative community, providing a venue for social solidarity and civic reciprocity. By working together, Americans would develop a more cosmopolitan and inclusive politics. In short, the essay argues that Addams's political thought was an attempt to revitalize democracy by giving meaning to work. It concludes by suggesting that her arguments can be applied to many contemporary political problems, and that today's democratic theory and practice would be enlivened by a renewed attention to work.

An important feature of Rawls's theory of justice is the putative separation of justice and desert. It is shown that Rawls in fact presupposes a quite strong theory of desert which provides the key justification for the original position. It is further argued that the theory of desert has implications for distributive shares which contradict those of Rawlsian justice in general and the difference principle in particular. Finally, it is claimed that this contradiction seems to resist any kind of easy resolution since the theory of justice rests upon, hence requires, the theory of desert.

The recent US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have renewed the debate over whether military interventions intended to impose democracy in a foreign state are consistent with liberal principles. The liberal political tradition within the United States has often been divided over this question. At issue is what place, if any, military force should have in a foreign policy dedicated to promoting goals such as the spread of electoral democracy, respect for human rights, and the rule of law.

Intense ethnic conflicts bring to the surface important paradoxes about the function of memory in politics. The capacity to remember is vital for political success, but too much memory, or the wrong kind of memory, stokes the fires of revenge. Successful political action demands both the capacity to remember and the capacity to forget. How and when each comes into play is difficult to formulate conceptually. A classic text in which the politics of memory plays a central role elucidates these issues and suggests central political dimensions of remembering and forgetting. This essay uses the story of Joseph in the Hebrew Bible to explore the politics of memory and to suggest factors that produce constructive and destructive results. It examines two principal forms: prudential and mythic, the qualities of which differ importantly. It concludes with an account of a third form: memory as a step toward political reconciliation.

The conundrum of memory: Healthier to remember? Surely it is best sometimes to forget–though not to forget Kosovo now. Eventual obliviousness may equally free all sides from the hereditary obligation to hate. ... What's happening there now amounts to a religious war between the future and the past. Beware: in that place, the past is a black hole.“ –Lance Morrow1

John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice1 has been widely looked to not only as a substantive account of the meaning of justice, but also as a model of the procedure by which the requirements of justice may be determined. Rawls terms his mode of approach to justice “moral theory,” and apparently subsumes the traditional discipline of political philosophy under this more inclusive science. At the same time, he claims that his approach is Socratic in nature, and that it “goes back in its essentials to Aristotle's procedure in the Nicomachean Ethics” (pp. 49, 51). “Moral theory,” from this point of view, is simply a new name for the enterprise pursued by the great political philosophers from Socrates onwards. But, surprisingly, despite the number of outstanding thinkers who devoted themselves to this enterprise, little progress was ever made in it, for the theories with which we have been left, according to Rawls, remain “primitive and have grave defects” (p. 52). It is Rawls's claim to have developed a “theory of justice” that is superior to any of those devised by previous philosophers, in that it conforms better to the dictates of men's “sense of justice” (p. 52).