Thucydides is famous for the speeches in his work, so rich in arresting generalities. Yet his handling of these speeches has been often questioned and seldom understood. This article illuminates his procedures by considering them within the context, too often ignored, of Thucydides' equally famous “Archaeology,” or account of ancient times, which expresses his criticism of previous writers. It attempts to vindicate his own methods, and in particular his own contribution to the speeches that he presents in the mouths of his characters, with reference to the political character of the speeches as originally delivered as well as of Thucydides' purpose in reproducing them.

The tide of events is increasingly pushing away those stereotypes which depict Africa as a continent of passive, ignorant men and of primitive socio-political organization. “Host to a variety of social, economic, and intellectual stimuli, Africa finds its destiny directed into new and uneasy patterns,” one student has observed. “Such a process is a challenge to Western political practice and belief. Can the content and structures of democratic popular government serve as a medium of reintegration for the many peoples of Africa as they seek to modify their activities and their aspirations in the light of modern practice?”

TheRetreat from liberalism and the rise of fascist totalitarianisms in the interwar period occasioned widespread inquiry into the intellectual sources of the phenomenon. Writers have frequently discovered the “roots,” to use the fashionable metaphor, in romanticism, particularly, German romanticism. Sharp controversies have arisen over the propriety and validity of attributing modern political lunacy ultimately to the romantic mind. A prior question may well be asked, what exactly are the elements of romantic thought which have political significance. This paper seeks to identify and analyze these elements.

The East German government's commemoration in 1983 of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's birth exemplifies its continuing effort to broaden domestic support by arguing over a thirty-year period that the regime's values are deeply rooted in German civilization. The representation of Luther in the German Democratic Republic has evolved from caricature to sophisticated portraiture. Fundamental to this reinterpretation has been the association of Luther with the bourgeois-democratic revolution, a process which the ruling Socialist Unity party claims to have completed in the course of establishing the GDR. Continuing interaction between East and West Germany has complicated the GDR's effort to utilize historical symbols in developing a unified political culture.

In recent years there has been a surprising turn in the discussions by moral philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, and economic theorists, or at least those economic theorists concerned with distribution. After years of treating justice as a value and, therefore, not an object for scientific investigation, it has become necessary to grapple once again with widely argued and mainstream claims that it is possible to articulate and defend, on the basis of reason, a substantive concept of justice with major consequences for politics, constitutional and statutory law, as well as public policy.

For nearly three centuries, Vico's name remained virtually unknown outside narrow philosophical and literary circles; indications are, however, that he is beginning to emerge from this obscurity.1 His resurgence, it seems to me, is by no means fortuitous or the result of mere antiquarian interests. In a striking manner philosophical developments in our time have revived central themes of the Neapolitan thinker; his preoccupation with practical-historical experience and its exegesis reverberates in many facets of contemporary thought—even bypassing the barrier between Continental and Anglo-Saxon perspectives. On the Continent, Vico's legacy had been preserved to some extent in Dilthey's “life-philosophy”; in a more rigorous fashion, the implications of this legacy were exploredby existential phenomenology and hermeneutics with their focus on the human “life-world” and on the significance of prereflective understanding for cognitive operations. Comparable concerns havesurfaced in analytical philosophy. Abandoning (or at least modifying) the quest for an artificial symbolism capturing the structure of the empirical universe, linguistic analysis during recent decades has shifted attention increasingly to ordinary language as the underlying matrix of practical and theoretical endeavors. In a similar vein, philosophers of science have tended to turn from logical calculation and empirical verification to the concrete “context of discovery”—the paradigmatic frameworks in terms of which investigative procedures are sanctioned and research goals formulated.

How shall men know honor in the bureaucratic life? If not at all, we may largely lose sight of a virtue respected in the West, though not unquestioned, at least since Homer. A substantial and evidently increasing proportion of the members of a modem society, including many persons not “clerks” or “administrators” by vocation, works within bureaucracy. Though large organizations differ in the degree of their bureaucratization, for example, in the tightness of routine and control, they have common features which influence their members. These are: the anonymity of each participant, the joint nature of every action, the force of precedent and rules, and hierarchy in relations among members. These features work against honor.

Protestant participation in postwar West German peace movements has markedly outstripped Catholic participation, suggesting that age is not the only important cleavage separating participants and nonparticipants. It is argued that because churches interpret collective experience, they have helped shape individual attitudes and political protest across generations throughout the postwar period. In West Germany, church interpretations of fascism, World War Two, and postwar developments have offered interpretive frameworks and defined the parameters of defense issues for their members. In doing so, churches have provided or restricted ideological, as well as organizational, resources to peace protest within their midst. Similar processes are at work in institutions like parties and unions as well. Although younger generations have sometimes adopted more radical views than their elders, the interplay between generations has taken place in the context of a previous institutional framing of issues.

Despite its centrality to his work, Marx never offered a systematic analysis of the concept of class, leaving his interpreters to distill its meaning from his historical writings. Marx's usage of the term gave rise to a controversy over the respective roles played by objective conditions and subjective experiences in his definition of class. In one view, Marx defined class exclusively in structural terms by reference to the position of its members within the economy; in another, he incorporated their cultural traditions and consciousness into his definition of class. This article assesses this debate in light of Marx's studies of the nineteenth century French peasantry. Although one of the passages most often cited to illustrate Marx's notion of class concerns the peasants, his writings on the peasantry have received scant attention. I shall argue that these writings recommend against the structural reading in favor of the view that Marx assigned equal weight to objective and subjective determinations in his conception of class.

The title chosen for this paper1 is to some extent misleading. This is not to be another exercise in clearing the history of the 1930's of the myths that encrust it. Professor Toscano, Professor Wiskemann, and Sir Lewis Namier, more senior and more experienced hands than mine have already performed this task for the Axis. It would be presumptuous to attempt to improve on their work.

This essay provides a contextual reading of Titus Andronicus, paying close attention to the play's collaborative authorship. Peele and Shakespeare are shown to have manufactured a superficially compelling but in reality utterly fake image of the Roman state as an imaginary laboratory for political ideas, especially the elective principle. Topical allusions and deliberate anachronisms encourage the audience to relate the subject matter to the present, viz., late Elizabethan England in the throes of a succession crisis and rent by confessional divisions. Unlike Peele's solo works, which exhibit a potent anti-Catholic bias, Titus remains confessionally elusive. The play invites the audience to reflect on the viability of particular modes of succession without committing itself either way, and shows that it is not institutional structures and processes but those who use and abuse them that make the difference to the state of the polity.

Apartheid and international monetary reform have received much attention in recent years yet littleof the discussion of these issues has linked them in any meaningful way. The call for changes in the international monetary system has been based upon an alleged insufficiency in international liquidity anda need for an adjustment mechanism for secular balance of payments disequilibria. Opposition to apartheid, South Africa's segregationist racial policy, has been based upon humanitarian concern for the condition of black Africans in that country.

In ancient Greece and ancient China, small states engaged in intense military competition and incessant warfare. In such contexts, there was naturally much emphasis on the training of soldiers. One might have expected state-sponsored physical education to develop as a by-product of the need to train soldiers, but the historical record shows that ancient Greek states placed far more emphasis on physical education compared to their counterparts in ancient China. This essay attempts to (partly) explain the divergent outcomes with reference to the idea of citizenship. The first part outlines the practice and philosophy of state-sponsored physical education in ancient Greece and ancient China and addresses the question of why the two ancient civilizations should be compared in this respect. The main body of the article discusses the political differences between ancient Greece and ancient China that help to explain the different outcomes regarding state-sponsored physical education. The last part ends with some normative reflections that may be relevant for present-day societies.

The philosophical framework for Lord Acton's theory of nationality, or to be more accurate his theory of multinationality, derives both from Aristotle and from Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. In Aristotle he found the view that the nature of the state is to be a plurality. Aquinas gave him “a very large element of political liberalism,” while Leibnitz contributed the idea of development, particularly the notion that development involves continuity and progress. Combining these points of view, Acton embraced a patently individualistic position, believing firmly that only the individual man possesses moral and political rights. Classes, races and states are at best chance groupings, at worst tortuous human inventions, and consequently have no inherent rights. It is “easier to find people fit to govern themselves,” according to Acton, “than people fit to govern others.”

This essay argues that Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity provides a morally robust argument for religious pluralism—one which avoids the pitfalls of relativism and official neutrality by elucidating the need for a civil religion of toleration. The work thus contains Locke's friendly critique of his more radical Enlightenment contemporaries who had openly debunked the Bible. This critique is friendly, I argue, because Locke ultimately agrees with Spinoza and Hobbes about revelation, miracles, and religion's psychological causes. While Locke joined these thinkers in a common project to make Christianity less sacrificial and friendlier to enlightened selfishness, his analysis also reveals the need to retain some of its self-abnegating spirit in liberalism's service. But Locke has difficulty accounting for that spirit itself, and this problem in one of liberalism's original theorists may help explain the dissatisfactions and anxieties troubling tolerant societies today.

Leo Strauss wrote only rarely about American thought, but he pointed his students and readers toward the “high adventure” of the American political tradition as a serious encounter with the great questions of political philosophy. Strauss saw American theory as a contest—one fought less between Americans than within them—pitting modernity's “first wave”, with its appeal to reason and natural right, against the more radical individualism and the historicism of later modern doctrine. Religion and classical rationalism, offering their own standards of a right above opinion, had been historically the allies of “first wave”, modernity, but those voices, Strauss recognized, were growing weaker in American life. In recent American teaching and culture, by contrast, Strauss saw that the increasingly dominant ethics of self—interest and success, other political inadequacies aside, were incapable of speaking to the highest aspirations or winning the deepest allegiance of the young. By reviving classical teaching, Strauss also sought to contribute to the rearticulation and reanimation of the American ideal.

Jacques Ellul today lives and works in the French city in which he was born over sixty years ago, Bordeaux. His public life has two major aspects. First, he is a scholar, with degrees in history, sociology, and law. Before the Second World War he was director of studies at the University of Strasbourg until his dismissal by the Vichy government. Now he is professor of history and sociology of institutions at the University of Bordeaux. During the war he was active in the Resistance, and after the Liberation had the chance to begin a promising political career when he served for two years as deputy mayor of Bordeaux under Jacques Chalban-Delmas. But he abandoned that prospect to devote his time fully to teaching and writing. He has written more than twenty books and more than a hundred articles.

Until more or less recently, few students of international affairs have been preoccupied with the theoretical aspects of their field. To the extent that theory is distinguished from history, law and science, this is especially true. Historians have sought to uncover the facts and recite them with the most fastidious regard for the circumstances of time and place. Lawyers have tried to detect in the case law of international agreements and treaties the normative structure of international society. Political scientists have increasingly turned to new scientific methods and statistical techniques designed to measure public opinion and its influence on foreign policy. Few scholars have concerned themselves with the fundamental characteristics of international society or of good or bad foreign policy. In this intellectual environment any explicit, systematic theory of international relations has had to await a threefold development. It has required a broader conception of the proper methods for studying international affairs, a clearer identification of basic concepts and “laws,” and a more serious discussion of fundamental theoretical problems like the relation of theory to concrete problems.