“I have so many feelings and ideas in common with the English that for me England has become a second intellectual home.” So wrote de Tocqueville to one of his English friends, when signs of Napoleonic despotism reappeared in the troubled French skies and alarmed liberals began to worry about final issues and coming dangers.

England and its historical pattern of behavior, its “moeurs”, its institutions and above all the peculiar rhythm of its social development, played a most important part in the general formation of de Tocqueville's thought. The Anglo-Saxon world was in his eyes a fairly bright spot in a gloomy and unhappy European picture, a world from which one could occasionally gather some valuable guiding principles as to the understanding of the continental malady and its possible cure.

Ideology refers to a set of basic assumptions, both normative and empirical, about the nature and purposes of man and society which serve to explain the human condition. At the political level, it is a belief system through which man perceives, understands, and explains the universe as well as nature and the human community. Ideology also guides individual and collective action, sets forth the political goals one may seek and regulates the ways in which they may be obtained, and defines man's rights, privileges, andobligations. Finally, ideology sets the “parameters of expectations.”

What moderns call technology is requisite to liberal democracy, for without the increase of wealth, knowledge, and opportunity that technology provides, the ruling majority could not be an enlightened middle class. Nevertheless, critics point to advancing technology's harmful side, with some hoping to prevent these harms by tight controls and others despairing that technology lies beyond our control. In a neglected 1858–59 lecture and related speeches, Abraham Lincoln wrestled with these issues and their implications for democratic statecraft. Although convinced that “discoveries and inventions” had rescued humankind from savage beginnings, produced abundance, and put genuine democracy within reach, Lincoln recognized that advancing technology alone would not guarantee freedom, but might bring new forms of mastery. Lincolnian statecraft seeks to moderate or limit this advance not through stringent controls, but by a moral teaching that builds on the natural right to oneself and includes a comprehensive doctrine of labor.

No principle commands wider support in political science today than the one which holds that the political scientist's primary task is the construction of theory. Political scientists with little else in common can usually agree on the possibility and desirability of political theory, even though they may disagree vigorously about its nature, source and content. This broad agreement tends to obscure something fundamental, namely, that the very idea of a theory of politics is something peculiar, indeed, something radically problematical. Political life has its own priorities and its own distinctive concerns, and these seem to be at odds with the priorities and concerns of theoretical speculation. The questions that confront the citizen seem to be very different from those that perplex the theorist. A story about the philosopher Anaxagoras serves to illustrate this divergence of the political and theoretical lives as well as the tension between them. It is reported that Anaxagoras took no interest in civic affairs and was blamed for his negligence. When someone asked him whether or not he cared about his country, he replied: “I will have great concern for my country after I have explained the heavens”.

John Carroll was disturbed about the future of Catholicism as he surveyed the scene in the aftermath of the American Revolution. As a supporter of the patriot movement he was pleased that the policy of religious toleration allowed Catholics to participate fully in the political life of the new nation. No doubt he also perceived that the wartime alliance with Catholic France had done much to improve the status of the church among his countrymen. But these positive features were outweighed by the disorganization of the church and the apathy of her ministers. There were only about two dozen priests in the new republic, several of whom were too old to be of any use. But even the younger ones seemed listless and demoralized.

One of the marks of any generation's scholarship is its desire to examine the ideas of important historical figures in the light of contemporary concepts and concerns. One of the marks of a truly significant historical figure is his or her ability to inform and stimulate successive generations as each grapples with the salient issues of its own times. This scholarly dialectic has its dangers and its satisfactions. One danger lies in the temptation to carve one's own interpretation of historical writings immutably into the concrete issues of one's own times, dismissing as secondary or historically idiosyncratic, those ideas which do not answer the needs or fit the intellectual categories of that time. A second danger is that of early obsolescence. The satisfaction of the scholarly dialectic, on the other hand, lies in the discovery of solid foundations in the past for the concerns of the present. This is particularly important when the historical figure in question is one of the nation's Founders, for here the solid foundation supports not only a historical interpretation but can legitimate constitutional interpretation as well.

In the beginning of his Politics Aristotle argues that “man is by nature a political animal.” In fact man is more a political animal than any herding animal, for “man alone of the animals has speech,” “man alone of the animals has reason,” “man alone of the animals has logos.” In other contexts the word logos can also be translated as word, account, argument, or ratio. Logos is connected with the verb legōo which means to speak and to gather, to pick out, to select, to count. The English words collect, select, and elect are related to the same verb. Logosis selected, elected, and chosen speech, meaningful speech, thoughtful speech. The traditional definition of man as the rational animal, stemming from Aristotle, goes back to this statement, that man alone of the animals possesses logos, possesses thoughtful speech. Aristotle goes on to say:

This article investigates whether Aristotelian magnanimity is compatible with Christianity. According to Aristotle, this virtue is displayed in claiming and deserving great honors and accompanied by a disdain for others, all of which looks remarkably like the Christian sin of pride. This article argues that in spite of these apparent difficulties Aristotelian magnanimity is compatible with Christian morality, that the deserving Christian may, without prejudice to the virtue of humility, claim great honors, recognize his own superiority, and look down on others. The article concludes with an account of the contemporary political importance of these issues. Responding to scholarship that argues that Christianity's undermining of magnanimity is responsible for modernity's lack of great statesmanship, it is contended on the contrary that in the modern world Christianity alone can make magnanimous statesmanship possible.

Recently Alan Gewirth has attempted to establish a universally valid foundation for ethics and politics by means of analyzing the “normative structure” of action and what that necessarily entails for any agent. By “normative structure”he means that by virtue of which certain “evaluative and deontic judgments on the part of agents are logically implicit in all action” (pp. 25–26). These judgments, leading finally to a supreme moral principle, are part of what is “conceptually necessary” to being an agent. Anyone who resists making these judgments is guilty of “selfcontradiction” and thus a diminution of his claim to be a rational being (pp. 44, 48).

Although Gewirth considers his approach to be a novel one, it infact exhibits some interesting parallels with the approach of the German philosopher andsocial-political theorist, Jiirgen Habermas. The latter has not written a systematic work on what he calls “communicative ethics,” but he has laid out its basic components. As with Gewirth, the foundation of this ethics lies in a certain “normative force” implicit in action. While there are such similarities of approach between the two theorists, they differ in the specific analyses they offer of action and of what constitutes an agent's claim to rationality.

The political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is rightly considered as marking the end of one era in political theory and the beginning of a new one. Formerly, men had sought and found a guide to political conduct in a basic principle upon which the order of well-being of the state depended. Hobbes broke with the past by postulating the state as simply a rationalization of the needs of men. He analyzed man's psychology and relied on his own observation and ratiocination to establish the best possible state commensurate with mankind's situation, but his supreme emphasis on force and authority left no room for the older constitutional, religious, and traditional safeguards of the citizen. This was the price that Hobbes willingly paid to achieve a secure state during the English Civil War.

In this essay, Lincoln's ideas on democratic leadership are examined in the light of Tocqueville's political theory. In certain respects, Lincoln's words and deeds help to confirm the wisdom of Tocqueville's ideas on the role of leadership in a democracy. But in other respects, Lincoln's thought exposes the weaknesses and limitations of Tocqueville's understanding of democratic leadership. Both Tocqueville and Lincoln believed that the task of leadership was to elevate and educate the citizenry. In order to accomplish this task, they both believed that leaders should rely largely—but not exclusively—on what Tocqueville called the doctrine of self-interest properly understood. Lincoln differed from Tocqueville, however, insofar as Lincoln suggested that leaders in a democracy must remain close to the people's fundamental values and aspirations. Lincoln was such an effective democratic leader in large part because he simultaneously critiqued and embraced those aspects of the American character which worried Tocqueville. Unlike Lincoln, Tocqueville usually failed to recognize the element of mutuality which effective democratic leadership requires.

I outline from a non-foundational standpoint why knowledge does not rest on a circular argument and why the nonunivocality of language is compatible with scientific truth and objectivity. The theory sketch is advanced as the form of scientific theory appropriate to homeostatic systems. A rebuttal to the arguments against my theory sketches of international systems permits a concrete and systematic investigation of why the theory sketch—rather than formal theories of the type of physics or historical generalizations - is the appropriate method. I later explore more briefly how theory sketches apply to other types of homeostatic systems. I discuss how the homeostatic control metaphor informs the vicarious test-in-principle that I employ in the area of moral analysis and why other types of moral analysis, including those of Rawls and Nozick, fail. How my position on moral analysis accords with and differs from that of Aristotle is noted.

The blame for the environmental disaster that threatens to overtake us unless something is done to avert it is often laid at the door of the Bible and the tradition that comes out of it. Typical of this trend is Lynn White's landmark essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), which traces the West's ruthless exploitation of nature to the biblical injunction that human beings are to “subdue” the earth and exercise “dominion” over all other living things. Ironically, White's indictment all but coincided with the triumph of an older theory the object of which was to demonstrate against the Enlightenment that, far from being hostile to modern science, the glory of our civilization and the instrument of its conquest of nature, the Christian tradition was the principal agent of its emergence. Christianity would thus be simultaneously and for the same reason responsible for what is best and what is worst in the modern world. The article challenges the premise that these two theories share, namely, that modern science is a child of premodern Christian thought. It begins with a restatement of what was once the commonly accepted view of our relationship to nonhuman nature and ends with a brief account of the essential limitations of modern natural science.

Though indebted to the social compact for the basic features of his political thought, James Madison found the doctrine inadequate in one essential respect: its failure to provide an account of founding. Of course, this is no simple oversight in liberal political philosophy. It reflects deep misgivings about prudence—especially when understood in its “architechtonic” sense as the height of practical reason—and the inequalities that it implies. Madison addresses this problem in Federalist, Nos. 37–40, his fullest treatment of the activities of the Federal Convention. Here he defends the classical notion of prudence, describing its relationship to the modern science of politics and suggesting how it can be reconciled with modern egalitarian principles.

President Truman's statesmanship consists in the fact that his administration's foreign policy fused moral principle and national self-interest and that his articulation of foreign policy educated citizens in the principles of the American regime and in the nature of the threat to it. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan address vital strategic interests, but Truman's conception of the national interest contained a lucid sense of political meaning and purpose in his understanding that the perpetuation of freedom in America required a resolute defense of republicanism elsewhere in the world. Like Lincoln, Truman was committed to the prudent containment of an expansionist power, and for Truman, as for Lincoln, the survival of the Union meant above all the preservation of a regime devoted to the principles of the Founders. NSC-68 crystallized containment policy, uniting power with principle in a strategy that matched military means to political ends.

This article explores the Spanish franquist regime's attempts to resolve a succession crisis, as the death of Francisco Franco appeared imminent in the late 1960's. It argues that Franco established the mechanisms for a smooth succession to the posts of head of state and head of government. However, these mechanisms failed to achieve Franco's major goal: the continuation of authoritarian rule after his death. Ironically, Franco's apparently ingenious “solution” to the dilemmas of succession facilitated a democratic transition that would have horrified the dictator.

Throughout the ages it has been held that leisure is the basis of culture. This view can be found in the Old Testament and in Plato, in Burke, Marx, Veblen, and in T. S. Eliot. Whether they were glad for it or sad, people seem to have always taken it for granted that in order to have culture one must first have leisure. Applicable to society as well as to individuals, this rule was put concisely by Dr. Johnson as follows: “All intellectual improvement arises from leisure; all leisure arises from one working for another.”

A problem within liberal constitutionalism is determining whether the majority actually consents to its government, and, in particular, to those extraordinary acts that take place in the silence of the law. This paper explores this problem in the U.S. context by presenting Thomas Jefferson's understanding of the impeachment power. Jefferson preferred a theory of impeachment that, like his theory of coordinate review, would allow each department to participate in the impeachment process, because he believed that executive participation would improve the law bringing its own character, or will, to it. As an alternative to the more common political understanding of impeachment, which leans toward legislative exclusivity, and the dominant legal understanding, which tends toward judicial finality, Jefferson's theory offers a way for the people to judge whether a particular act of lawlessness is in the public good.