In their 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace, the Catholic bishops attempted to sway American public opinion against the arms race. Polling data suggest that The Challenge of Peace stimulated a sharp but short-lived reaction against military spending among American Catholics. The message was best received by Catholics strongly tied to their church, reversing a historical correlation between religiosity and nationalism. The pastoral must be judged relatively successful in its mission, particularly in light of the many barriers to attitude change. Greater sensitivity to those obstacles could enhance the success of future efforts at persuasive communication by church authorities.

In the Second Treatise, John Locke presents two stories about the development of political society: (1) the dramatic story of the state of nature and social contract; and (2) a more gradualist account of the evolution of political society “by an insensible change” out of the family group. The relation between these two accounts is analyzed in order to deal with familiar objections about the historical truth and internal consistency of contract theory. It is argued that Locke regarded story (2) as the historically accurate one, but that he believed historical events needed moral interpretation. Story (1) represents a moral framework or template to be used as a basis for understanding the implications — for political obligation and political legitimacy — of story (2). Even if the whole course of the evolution of political institutions out of prepolitical society cannot be seen as a single intentional or consensual process, still individual steps in that process can be analyzed and evaluated in contractualist terms. The task of political judgment is to infer the rights and obligations of politics from this representation of political development as an overlapping series of consensual events.

The race problem is branching out today into so many fields that a preliminary understanding becomes necessary as to the special topic with which the present paper is concerned. Let us first make it clear negatively that the question of the classification of the human races does not come within the scope of this inquiry. The race idea should be distinguished from the race concept which is used in natural science. Furthermore, we are not concerned with the improvement of a given human population through eugenic measures. And, finally we do not intend to deal with the problem of political and social relations between the white and the colored races. When we speak of the race idea we have in mind chiefly the idea as it is used by modern creeds, of the type of National Socialism, in order to integrate a community spiritually and politically.

By examining Xunzi's and Mencius's contrary reactions toward royal transmission by individual merit or “abdication” (shanrang 禪讓), this article attempts to reveal the distinctive features of their respective political theories, which I reconstruct in terms of lizhi constitutionalism and dezhi constitutionalism. Resisting the conventional tendency to capture Mencius's and Xunzi's political theories in such dichotomous terms as idealism and realism, this paper draws attention to the complex mixture of idealism and realism found in both thinkers' constitutional political theories and identifies such common ground in terms of “Confucian constitutionalism.” This paper presents Mencius's idealistic defense of abdication and his realistic resolution of the constitutional crisis latent in it, then it examines Xunzi's refutation of the three conventional rationalizations of abdication, and it concludes by recapitulating the common Confucian constitutionalist ground that Mencius and Xunzi shared and discussing its implications for the study of constitutional theory.

Histories of political theory have framed the story of the emergence of sovereign states and sovereign selves as a story about secularization—specifically, a story that equates secularization with self-deification. Thomas Hobbes's investment in modesty and humility demonstrates the need for, and the possibility of, an alternative secularization narrative. Scholars have long insisted that “vainglory” is a key term for the interpretation of Leviathan. But Hobbes's task is not complete once he has discredited vainglory. Hobbes must also envision, and cultivate, contrary virtues—and modesty is one virtue that Hobbes would cultivate. An analysis of Hobbes's attempt to redefine and rehabilitate the virtues of modesty shows that Hobbes warns against the temptation to self-deification. In Leviathan, the political task is not to enthrone humans in sovereign invulnerability, but rather to achieve the right balance between bodily security and consciousness of finitude.

The practice of Islamic veiling is examined in terms of the notion of freedom. Historically, veiling has been seen by Westerners as the ultimate symbol, if not tool, of gender oppression in Islamic cultures; yet many Islamic women not only participate voluntarily in the practice but claim it as a mark of resistance, agency, and cultural membership. This would seem to pose a paradox for Western feminists, but this paradox stems from a misunderstanding of veiling perpetrated by feminists and nonfeminists alike, as well as from inappropriate conceptions of freedom that dominate Western political theory, and to which Western feminism finds itself indebted. Examining veiling as a multifaceted practice located within varying and complex contexts may develop an understanding of freedom that recognizes the ways in which patriarchal contexts set the parameters within which women express their agency.

This paper explores the contrast between two conceptions of the general will to be found in Rousseau's work, especially in the Social Contract. The first of these identifies the general will with the decisions of the sovereign people as they legislate together; the second conceives of the general will as a transcendent fact about the society which may or may not be reflected in actual legislative decisions. Though these conceptions may be capable of reconciliation in Rousseau's own work, the tension remains and is reflected both in Rousseau's own ambivalence towards democracy and in the different ways his thought has been received and adapted in philosophy and politics.

Although it is four decades since the United States entered World War II, some aspects of the nation's wartime experience are still virtually unstudied. Military and diplomatic historians have labored productively for many years, but historians interested in American social and intellectual developments are just beginning to turn their attention to the wartime era. Recent general studies by Richard Polenberg and John M. Blum are especially welcome since, by drawing greater attention to the period, they should stimulate further research. There is much left to be done because the war affected practically every dimension of American life. The present essay deals with one of its less obvious effects —the way in which it shaped the thinking of a whole generation on the subject of American identity.

The article examines the recent debate on a genuinely realist perspective in political philosophy and argues that the core idea of realism is a certain type of ethical theory. In spite of the notorious polemic against “moralism” in politics that is characteristic of realist thinkers since Machiavelli, political realism as put forth in the current debate is not to be understood as a strictly fact-oriented perspective on politics, but rather as a perspective that itself is founded on a theory of political ethics. This peculiarly realist theory of political ethics can be characterized by its focus on the theoretical importance of political application problems, by a genuine priority principle underlying its understanding of political ethics, by its distinctive understanding of the concept of legitimacy and, finally, by its claim that any form of ethics, as far as it is concerned with political questions, is necessarily ambivalent in character.

This article argues that there has been a movement in Catholic political thought from a position of doctrinal neutrality concerning forms of government — provided that they promote the common good — to an endorsement of democracy as the morally superior form of government. It traces the various theoretical and practical elements in the Catholic tradition that have favored or opposed liberal democracy, giving particular attention to the ambiguity of medieval theories, the centralizing and authoritarian tendencies in the early modern period, and the intense hostility of the nineteenth-century popes to French and Italian liberalism. After analyzing the emergence of neo-Thomistic theories of democracy in the twentieth century and their influence on Christian Democratic parties in Europe and Latin America, the article concludes that John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) and the discussion of democracy by the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes (1965) marked the abandonment of earlier opposition to liberal democracy and a decisive commitment to democracy and human rights.

Declaring his departure from the modes and orders of his predecessors— especially the creators of imaginary republics and principalities (men like Plato, Aristotle and Augustine) — Machiavelli undertakes to show “whoever understands” a new and more promising road to political salvation and personal well-being. So compelling is Machiavelli's rhetoric that we seem to have forgotten just how “realistic” or “moderate” Machiavelli's predecessors we're, and how “unrealistic” or “immoderate” Machiavelli's own teaching is. This essay attempts to bring to light the extremism which underlies Machiavelli's realism and raises doubts about his ability to provide his readers the security he promises.

In recent years, a number of political thinkers in philosophy, political theory and law have defended political theories which are deeply indebted to classical republicanism. Like classical republicans, these thinkers have claimed that a flourishing polity depends upon citizens' exercise of the civic virtues. Unlike classical republicans, some of these thinkers have defended what might be called “political republicanisms”—republicanisms which are also indebted to the methodological restraint of Rawls's political liberalism. The article argues that political republicanism suffers from a viability problem. Its list of civic virtues is too short. More worrisome, the public justifications that would be available to a political republican regime are not sufficient to motivate the development of the civic virtues. Therefore, if we are to be republicans, we should be “perfectionist republicans” instead.

Contemporary theorists critical of the current vogue for compassion might like to turn to Friedrich Nietzsche as an obvious ally in their opposition to the sentiment. Yet this essay argues that Nietzsche's critique of compassion is not entirely critical, and that the endorsement of one's sympathetic feelings is actually a natural outgrowth of Nietzsche's immoralist ethics. Nietzsche understands the tendency to share in the suffering of their inferiors as a distinctive vulnerability of the spiritually strong and healthy. Their compassion, however, is an essential element of the imaginative creativity that Nietzsche holds to be the goal of human existence. Although shared suffering may prove debilitating for some, great individuals must come to affirm their compassion as necessary in achieving accurate knowledge of the human condition.

According to Aristotle, nature (physis), habit or custom (ethos), and reason (logos) are the first principles of social explanation as well as the first principles of moral excellence. Just as we explain the order found in a polity as the product of natural, customary, and rationally stipulated kinds of order, so we become excellent persons through our good natural potential, the development of that potential in right habits, and sound ethical reflection upon those habits. For Aristotle, nature and convention are not mutually exclusive; rather, nature, custom, and reason form a hierarchy such that custom presupposes nature, but cannot be reduced to it, while reason presupposes custom, but cannot be reduced to custom. It is argued that Aristotle's account of social order is superior both to the prior Sophistic accounts and to the account in Aquinas. Because Aristotle roots the order of deliberate human action in the order of nature and the order of custom, he focuses his ethical analysis not on the abstract freedom of choice but on the concrete freedom of the person who must act.

This essay explores the work of C.L.R. James in an effort to rethink the democratic import of dialectical thought. James is best known as a West Indian Marxist and the author of The Black Jacobins, but he is also a deeply democratic thinker and a creative reader of Hegel. Alongside the more orthodox Marxist strand of his thought, James develops a mode of dialectical reflection that is attentive to a sense of democratic uncertainty and that aims to enrich political participation among ordinary citizens. By thinking both with and against James, and by exploiting the ambiguities in his postwar writings on dialectics and American democratic culture, I argue that James inspires a kind of participatory democratic ethos grounded in the language and conceptual resources of Hegelian humanist thought and modern dialectical reflection.

Can we gain any fresh insight into the problem of mediating among competing truth claims in political life? This essay will demonstrate that the political theory of Mahatma Gandhi provides us with a novel way to understand and arbitrate the conflict among moral projects. Gandhi offers us a vision of political action that insists on the viability of the search for truth and the implicit possibility of adjudicating among competing claims to truth. His vision also presents a more complex and realistic understanding, than do some other contemporary pluralists, of political philosophy and of political life itself.

Critics of liberal individualism have pointed out the many failures of “atomism” as a method in social and political philosophy. Their methodological criticisms have a tendency, however, to devolve into repudiations of moral individualism as such. In part, this is due to a misreading of Hegel and Tocqueville, two critics of individualism who nevertheless upheld the importance of individual rights and what Hegel called “freedom of subjectivity.” My essay brings these two very different theorists together in order to show how each deliberately dispensed with the ontology inherited from eighteenth-century social contract theory, the better to focus on associational life and public freedom. The end result is not a relapse into the rhetoric of civic republicanism, but a refurbishment of that tradition from the standpoint of modern liberty: the liberty of the individual. This common project links Hegel, the idealist philosopher, and Tocqueville, the liberal-republican, in unexpected but complementary ways.

UNTIL the time Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, the problem of tyranny of the majority had dominated the political thought of no other nation as it had that of America. In the half century before the appearance of Tocqueville's great work, Americans had maintained a virtual monopoly of concern over the question of how popular sovereignty and individual liberty could peacefully coexist. The French Revolution, it is true, raised similar questions abroad, and if we take Burke's concern as representative, we see that he too was seriously troubled over the prospect that democratic tyranny would become the inevitable offspring of popular sovereignty. But despite Burke's eloquent and penetrating analysis, majority tyranny did not become a major preoccupation of English political thought, and to the extent that there was concern with the problem, as in the debate over the Reform Bill of 1832, discussion was confined to the obvious and straightforward issue of whether the suffrage should be extended. In America, on the other hand, the majority problem continued to be a persistent political issue from the beginning and, even today, a host of public questions revolves around the scope of majority rule. Yet for all the attention Americans paid to the majority question before Tocqueville entered upon the scene, they had hardly scratched the surface, and the Frenchman, therefore, was able to suggest an approach that they had not even considered.

Locke is at once a traditional and a subversive author for us. As an authority for the American Founders he stands at the source of our tradition. But he was an authority for those revolutionaries because his political teaching culminates in the last chapter of the Second Treatise, a defense of the right of resistance. Insofar as we remain a revolutionary or rebellious people (with a particular proclivity to tax rebellions), Locke's political teaching lives in us. But insofar as we have become traditional and taken our revolution for granted, even coming to look at our founding with “sanctimonious reverence” and ascribing to our founders “a wisdom more than human,” as Jefferson feared we would, Locke has lost his vitality for us. It is no wonder then that we do not read his defense of the right of resistance with the care it deserves, even as we sometimes see or feel its revolutionary spirit still around us. But careful attention to the structure of Locke's argument for the right of resistance shows that he was more consistent and more radical than is usually supposed.