Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919) was born into that generation of Germans whose Weltanschauung had begun to accommodate an emerging world of science, technology, nationalism, and power politics. When he entered upon university studies in 1879 the Reich had been established, the German industrial revolution was well under way, and the scientific-historical outlook had begun to replace philosophy as the prevailing national temper. These historical currents were presently gathered into his powerful intellect, bent upon understanding itself and the times. This quest mirrored in an extraordinary way the political tendencies and intellectual moods of Wilhelmian Germany. All of its foibles and conceits, its doubts and ambition were freely exhibited in Naumann's writing. A prose style outstanding in modern German letters for its clarity and easy grace facilitated Naumann's task. Few works in German on political subjects share the literary qualities of Naumann's prose; his personal archive of Wilhelmian times can yield pleasure as well as secrets to the historian.

This essay examines Aristotle's account of justice as a virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics by considering two related parts of it: Aristotle's elevated account of justice as lawfulness and his description of equity as a virtue. I focus on moral rather than legal questions by emphasizing Aristotle's identification of justice as lawfulness with complete virtue, and a broad sense of equity as superlatively good character. Some of the more difficult passages in book 5 prove to be tied together by the question of the goodness of justice and I argue that Aristotle points to a specific confusion in this regard characteristic of virtuous people. I conclude that Aristotle's critique of our ordinary opinions about justice offers crucial, albeit limited, support for the superiority of the contemplative life announced at the end of book 10.

In recent years, scholars have been increasingly applying “behavioral” approaches to the study of Chinese politics. One interesting strain of this is the work of Lucian Pye and Richard Solomon, who stress the study of Chinese “political culture” analyzed mainly in terms of an “authority crisis.” Solomon's explication is the more detailed and elaborate. Part of his thesis is that harmony and peace are “basic and enduring political values in the Confucian tradition,” and therefore “questions of the handling of social conflict constitute a major area of tension in the Chinese political culture.” The Chinese hopes for order and believes that this comes about only through strong authority; without such authority there is luan, “chaos.” But the means required to exercise authority create resentment, and resentment becomes the basis for more luan.

As everyone knows, an enormous revival of interest in Edmund Burke has taken place during the past twenty years or so, the period, roughly, since the end of the Second World War. Scholars, to be sure, have always been interested in him, and he was widely admired for his style, and by some for his “practical wisdom,” during the nineteenth century. But the point is that in our time he has come to be read not merely as one among a large number of other important figures in the history of political thought, but as a thinker of intense, of special, contemporary relevance. Burke is our contemporary, he is an issue, in a way that Locke is not, and Leibniz is not, and even Mill is not. Burke has not receded into what Lovejoy called the pathos of time, by which he meant that benign and even tender feeling we have for thought that is now completely, forever, a part of the past — and so neither defines us nor menaces us.

Since Pearl Harbor, American foreign policy during the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years has receivedalargely negative appraisal from historians. In the aftermath of World War II, the adherents of Wilsonian internationalism dominated the writing of American diplomatic history. The crux of their indictment of the Republican administrations of the twenties was that this country's refusal to participate in collective-security arrangements for upholding the peace was responsible for the breakdown of international order in the years that followed. If the United States had joined the League of Nations, or at the minimum cooperated with the peace-loving nations, Britain, France, and, until the illusions of the wartime alliance collapsed, the Soviet Union, against would-be or actual aggressors, the Second World War could have been avoided. Although this view has continued to have its champions, the hardening of Cold War tensions —and the accompanying disillusionment with the efficacy of the United Nations — spurred a major counterattack upon what George F. Kennan has termed the “legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems.” With the emergence of the so-called realist school came a different—though no more positive—evaluation of the role played by the United States during the age of normalcy.

Max Weber died in 1920, when Communism was in its beginnings and Fascism had not appeared on the scene at all. There can be no question of his having predicted anything like the exact nature of these movements. But he did develop a line of thought which, in connection with his broader analysis of authority, has an important bearing on the understanding of the process by which they came into prominence, and some of the possible consequence of their dominance.

Today the American Foreign aid program finds itself increasingly in trouble. The last Congress slashed $500,000,000 from the fiscal 1967 AID budget. Increasing disenchantment has been expressed by Congress in regard to the unified aid program that was inaugurated by President Kennedy in 1961 to speed economic development throughout the world as one component of “the grand design” for an American foreign policy that was to rally the free world.

That politics should not be a matter either of impulse and whim or of pure ratiocination, hardly anyone will dispute. But there is no settled agreement on the precise role that reason should play in political decisions. Disagreement is aggravated because those who have written on the question usually intended to correct some prevalent error and in their fervor have often fostered other, equally pernicious, errors. As a result, discussion about the nature of political reasoning has tended to oscillate between extreme positions that hardly anyone would uphold consistently. This tendency is illustrated once again in the recent attacks on Rationalism, where the authors, in criticizing the Rationalist misuse of reason, seem to identify all abstract reasoning with Rationalism and appear to distrust all general principles.

The United Kingdom, already beleaguered in the mid-1970's by a number of serious problems—economic, social, political, diplomatic and even climatic—in addition has had to contend with a far-reaching constitutional crisis. Involving the subject of devolution of power (better known as home rule), it has been described as “the most crucial constitutional issue which has confronted the United Kingdom since it came into being.” The controversy over devolution has reached a new level of intensity since November, 1975, when the government, in an effort to resolve the dispute, published a White Paper entitled Our Changing Democracy: Devolution to Scotland and Wales. This article examines the following aspects of the devolution issue: its background, why it has emerged at this time, why the White Paper was issued, reasons for the hostile reaction to the White Paper, the prospects for parliamentary passage of devolution legislation, and the issue's political repercussions and implications, both domestic and international.

SINCE World War II and particularly in the last decade game theory has acquired broad interest, attention, and application by behavioral scientists. Basically, game theory is an attempt to simulate mathematically a situation of decision-making so as to discover the most rational decision. Situations involving two or more “persons” (that is, sets of individuals, groups or environments with isomorphic interests and/or capabilities) can be simulated. Currently game theory is employed in both university and corporate research for studying problems in the areas of economics, sociology, political science, international relations, and militarydefense strategy.

It is as the author of the Ensayo Sobre El Catolicismo, El Liberalismo Y El Socialismo that Juan Donoso Cortés, first Marquis of Valdegamas, is best known. Donoso's reputation as a spokesman of the forces of counter-revolution grew steadily after 1848, and by the time the Ensayo appeared in 1851 he had, so to speak, a readymade audience of both friendly and adverse critics scattered throughout the continent of Europe. But the dramatic clashes of opinion with which the work was received extended its fame beyond the expected limits. For in the Ensayo Donoso not only attacked liberalism and socialism, but, perhaps without meaning to do so, he also offered a challenge to an important segment of Catholic thought and opinion, namely the Catholic liberals. The result was that the conservative publicist who was accustomed to being attacked from the Liberal benches in parliament and by the liberal press in Spain now found his severest critics in a Catholic group which included Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans and whose spokesman was the Abbé Gaduel. Of them Donoso complained to Pius IX that they were “prelates who had turned themselves into journalists.”

The concept of the “generation gap,” like so many notions used to explain the present dislocations in society, has gained wide currency because it is a fundamentally soothing idea. To troubled adults it conveys the implication that the alienation between themselves and their children is a wholly natural phenomenon, inevitable and therefore healthy. It relieves the parent from the need to worry. For the rebellious young themselves the term has ideological uses, again through the implication that what they do is natural and normal, inevitable and desirable.

While numerous methodological and interpretive challenges confront the study of cross-cultural political theory, this essay examines a particular premodern Indian tradition as an example of such difficulties and one way in which they can be overcome. Exploring the problematic ways in which people have interpreted and made use of India's ancient past, it critically examines arguments for the existence of secularism, free elections, and democratic assemblies in the Vedas. Defending what I call a “critical revivalist” position, it is argued that predominant approaches to premodern traditions in contemporary Indian political theory place significant constraints on cross-cultural intelligibility and theory building within the Indian context. To elaborate this point, I shift from a “political” to rājan-oriented categorical register in an effort to reposition current understandings of self-rule (swaraj) in India within a broader rajanical tradition. Finally, this essay explains how contemporary Indian political theory can draw insights from this native tradition without necessarily reverting to familiar Western idioms.

Examining the special relations between On the Social Contract and the Constitutional Project for Corsica, this essay argues that Rousseau conceives of constitutionalism on the basis of his understanding of the “natural development” of any state. What is “natural” is a certain order in which developmental periods best emerge, such that any state's disordered development will always result in its premature “death.” The essay explains four aspects of Rousseau's conception of properly ordered political development: the nature of a state's beginning; the relation between the two “great springs” of human conduct; the influence of external nature on human nature and justice; and the inevitable “end” of even the best state.

There is enormous and unabated interest in Smith's thought partly because he remains—rightly or wrongly—the most important touchstone for the liberal, free-market project. But it is also because his work is so rich and therefore capable of bearing multiple interpretations. In fact, Smith studies is a surprisingly large and competitive field, with its own journal: in 2003 the quantity of secondary literature on Smith could be realistically described as “enough to sink a small boat” (Margaret Schabas, “Adam Smith's Debts to Nature,” in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, ed. De Marchi and Schabas [Duke University Press, 2003], 1) and today it is even larger. Here are three new books to add to that growing literature; all are important additions.

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke intends that gentlemen educated according to his standards quietly dethrone the aristocrats as the model for society. Locke hopes to direct most gentlemen away from a desire to imitate aristocratic manners and toward practical economic goals consistent with the needs of all. The excellent example of the new gentlemen will combine with their good treatment of the lower classes to entice the latter to imitate them. Locke thus hopes to reconcile gentlemen and the common man. Crucial components of this education include a tough physical regimen, the humane treatment of servants, and the re-education of fathers. Locke's educational program supports his political goals in the Second Treatise and is somewhat adaptable to our own democratic age.

I think of reasoning (or deliberation), arts of the self, and micropolitics as inter-involved modalities of private and public life that are not entirely reducible to one another. You reason, alone or with others, when you ask how to realize a set of goals or to modify them in new circumstances. You practice arts of the self after, say, you have acknowledged that some element in your faith promotes unnecessary suffering for others and/or is inconsonant with other prized elements. That element clings to you or you to it even though another part of you would like it go. An Augustinian might call this a will divided against itself.

Diplomacy in the broadest sense is the conduct of foreign relations between politically independent entities through bilateral negotiations, multilateral conferences, or through the forum of multilateral organizations. Although modern means of transportation and communication have greatly diminished the importance of distances and boundaries, for a long time to come man will continue to live in separate political units called states. And in the foreseeable future, inter-state relations will be handled through foreign policy, the executive agents of which are diplomats.