From 1950 to 1954 American politics were dominated as never before by one man, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and by the phenomenon of “McCarthyism.” Yet many of the questions raised by those years of turmoil and controversy remain unanswered. What was the source and nature of the power that McCarthy wielded over the United States Senate? Why did the members of that body acquiesce, for nearly five years, in his continued abuse of the democratic process? Beyond this, were the McCarthy years aberrational? Did they represent some malfunction in our political machinery? Or were they the natural and inevitable by-product of that system itself?

Some arguments against the law’s special treatment of religion are adapted from Rawls. These overlook the ways in which the abstract rights agreed to in the original position are given specific institutional form at the constitutional stage. Because the rights established in the original position are vaguely specified, liberty of conscience can’t be implemented without reliance on contestable values such as religion. Public reason, when refracted through the four-stage sequence (where it becomes less constraining at each stage of the sequence), is far less constraining than the proponents of liberal neutrality hope. Fulfilling the commitments made in the original position, for people in the world here and now, requires taking account of the values that those people hold. A Rawlsian position thus can support the American regime of religious accommodation.

Let's begin by presenting some newly discovered documents concerning Niccolò Machiavelli. The biographical detail may at first appear overwhelming, but the light these documents shed on the chronology of Machiavelli's composition of The Prince helps to answer some old questions concerning the character of Machiavelli's little treatise. The new documents date from the year 1515. They were drawn up at a time of financial difficulty and profound personal disappointment in the life of the former Florentine secretary and second chancellor. In 1512 Machiavelli had been fired from the chancery of the Florentine Republic. In 1513 he had been arrested on a probably false charge of conspiracy, tortured (although he gave no confession), and then unexpectedly freed in a general amnesty following the election of a Florentine, Giovanni de' Medici, as Pope Leo X. In 1515, at the time these documents were drawn up, Machiavelli was still out of favor. But he was also putting into prose the theoretical work that established the extraordinary reputation still associated with him today.

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the founders of the modern technological world, Francis Bacon, has a penetrating and sustained lifelong engagement with the phenomenon of love or eros. Bacon's reflections on eros come in two stages. He first examines the human and moral meaning of love. Bacon attends to the exorbitant promises of love—to bring us into a perfect condition, to grant us eternity—and finds them confused or unreasonable. Bacon then moves away from an engagement with the simple experiences of love and their promises. Departing from the human perspective, he proceeds to examine love, from the point of view of natural science or cosmology, as a fundamental property or principle of matter. This departure tends to lead, at least in the case of Bacon's followers, if not in Bacon's own case, to an obliviousness to both his cynical and appreciative insights into love.

THANKS to Richard Ellmann's definitive biography of James Joyce we know quite a lot about the genesis and writing of ‘The Dead,’ the concluding story in Dubliners. Joyce wrote no other short stories after it, but in a letter (January 6, 1907) to his brother Stanislaus, from Rome, in which he first referred to ‘The Dead,’ he mentioned it as one of five stories “all of which … I could write if circumstances were favorable.” The others, which seem not to have been attempted were ‘The Last Supper,’ ‘The Street,’ ‘Vengeance,’ and ‘At Bay.’ It must have been immediately thereafter that ‘The Dead’ took precedence in his thought, for in a letter written only five days later he remarked that the news of the controversy in Dublin over The Playboy of the Western World had “put me off the story I ‘was going to write’ — to wit, The Dead.” Shortly afterwards he decided to give up his job as a bank cashier in Rome and return to Trieste, which on March 5, 1907, he did. Apparently he worked at the story intermittently in the ensuing months.

Near the start of her fascinating new book The Lost History of Liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt dryly observes that “available histories of liberalism are seldom helpful” (2). The point is well taken: the historiography of liberalism—largely written as intellectual history—is not particularly coherent, and has only sporadically adopted sound historical methodology. The genre emerged relatively late. The proliferation of the language of liberalism in the nineteenth century, not least in party politics, did not produce theoretically informed historical accounts of particular note. A historiography of liberalism really only developed in response to the perceived “crisis of liberalism” of the early twentieth century. Guido de Ruggiero's 1925 The History of European Liberalism was written in a Hegelian idealist tradition, according to which liberalism was an “organic development of freedom coinciding with the organization of human society and its progressively higher and more spiritual forms.” Coming from a different direction was Harold Laski's The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation, published in 1936. Laski's liberalism was as much a “habit of mind” as a set of doctrines, with a complex history making both “clarity difficult” and “precision unattainable.” An essentialized understanding of liberalism was nevertheless still at work. Laski's liberalism was that the individualist, utilitarian mode of thought necessary to an emerging capitalist society. “The liberal creed, in a word,” he wrote, “is a doctrine woven from the texture of bourgeois need.”

It is paradoxical that an author whose thought is widely recognized to have had a profound influence on such revolutionary thinkers as Locke, Bayle, and Rousseau should be regarded as having himself been an extreme conservative in questions of political practice. Yet such is the almost unanimous judgment of contemporary scholars on Michel de Montaigne. While Montaigne endeavored in the Essays to question radically the grounds of all accepted beliefs and practices, and specifically denounced the unreasonableness and unjustness of many laws and customs practiced in his time, it is believed that he nonetheless opposed all attempts at political innovation or reform, fearing that any such change would only make matters worse.

Traditionally, the epic focused on the heroic deeds of great public figures, but the Romantics remade the genre into something more personal, making the poet himself the hero of their epics. The Romantic disillusionment with politics, flowing from the failure of the French Revolution, lies behind their revaluation of heroism. The turn to nature, which the Romantics present as immediate, turns out to be mediated by their political experience. Wordsworth's The Prelude and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are good examples of the Romantic transformation of the epic and provide a case study in the relation of politics and literature, specifically the politics of literary form.

Following the tradition of social contract theories of the early modern age, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, renewed the notion of the “original position,” that is, a set of behavioral assumptions from which general principles of justice are deduced. José Saramago's novel Blindness enriches Rawls's normative theory by adding behavioral assumptions that help clarify some of the problems raised by the theory's critics and enhance its application to social and political settings.

The present essay sketches the outline and the intention of Hesiod's Works and Days. Hesiod's principal task appears to be the identification (and praise) of the best way of life for his wayward brother Perses, but in carrying out this task, Hesiod speaks of justice and its human and divine supports in such a way as to go well beyond what would be of benefit to his brother. For in the course of his analysis of justice, or as a result of it, Hesiod praises also the life of autonomous understanding, the life that appears to be the poet's own. In crucial ways, then, Hesiod explores the chief themes of what was to become political philosophy, and for this reason, among others, he deserves the attention of all those who are also concerned with it.

It is a terribly responsible task to write on Polish-Russian relations at the present moment. It is a moment of dangerous tension in these relations, perhaps even of decisive crisis. Therefore, everything should be avoided that could contribute on either side to excitement which would be equally harmful to the two countries concerned and to the United Nations as a whole. Since the reciprocal misunderstanding has, to a large extent, historical bases, the more realistic approach to the problem would seem to be simply to forget the whole historical background and to look for an entirely new start.

Rousseau's injection of the human element onto the austere scene of politics drawn in Du Contrat Social comes as a surprise. This element, personified by the legislator in Chapter 7 of Book II, serves two purposes. It dramatizes the political forces in Rousseau's scheme for not the most perfect, but perhaps the best attainable, regime. As the contemporary condition of civic slavery called for radical reform, that is, a regeneration, man must reassure himself that the birth of a good order is possible by delving back to the foundation of government. In doing so man might also learn something about how and why it takes place. The second reason for introducing the legislator relates to the vital threefold functions he performs as the eyes, brain and motive force of the people.

The conventional wisdom on the basic philosophy of the constitutional concept of the separation of powers is well stated in The Federalist. In No. 47, citing the authority of the “celebrated Montesquieu,” James Madison wrote that “the accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Clearly the Founding Fathers feared the corrupting influence of power. As Madison asked in No. 51, “what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Another concise statement of the separation of powers concept is found in the famous remark made by Justice Brandeis in 1926, in his dissenting opinion in the Myers case, that “the doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.”

This paper constructs, within the American liberal consensus, a conceptual frame into which the great paradoxes of American politics can be fitted without significant omission or unexplained contradiction. The foundation of the American liberal consensus is seen to be a Protestant-bourgeois individualism divided against itself. This fundamental division issues into conflicting visions of America as a democracy. In national, legitimizing myth, America is seen as a Protestant-tinctured social democracy organized in terms of sovereignty of the people, confederalism, separation of powers, and popular government. On the other hand, in the ideology of America as a legally functioning state, it is a bourgeois, liberal democracy organized in terms of constitutionalism, federalism, mixed government, and representative government. These distinctions make possible a consistent explanation of the consensus-cleavage paradox that lies at the core of American political life. They also explain the persistent ambiguity that confuses the democratic character of the American political system and also the biformalism of its major institutions.

The international protection of human rights has in recent years become a prominent topic in the literature on international law and on the agenda of international conferences. The explanation for this is not far to seek. The experiences of two world wars and the ‘oppression of dictators’ would in themselves be sufficient reasons for such interest. Re-assertion of the inalienable rights of man serves as a reminder of the truth that man is not meant to be merely a means to the attainment of transient ends. Though the academic character of the many schemes propounded is only too apparent, they evoke sympathy; for they voice widely-felt anxiety over the ever-increasing pressure of organized groups upon the individual, the ultimate basis of life in national and international society. Charters of human rights, suitably formulated in the abstract, have also an undeniable utility value in war and peace. They provide a convenient common denominator for allies who are primarily united in negatives, that is to say, by common enmity towards their adversaries. Once victory has eliminated the unifying element, the functions of such wartime ideologies change. They become ‘artillery of popular excitation’ in the peacetime struggles of world power politics and, like religion in former times, a ‘cloak to shadow divers factious designes.’

We Shall describe first the attitude of the hierarchy towards the Vichy regime just after the armistice, secondly the political and religious resistance of a certain number of lay Catholics to this regime, and finally how this will to temporal independence by Catholic citizens (with the exception of some Catholic leaders who did not grasp the significance of the Pétain government) resulted in a general opposition to the totalitarian pretensions of the “French State.”

In October, 1936, the King of the Belgians, Leopold III, announced that the small Western European state planned to withdraw from her policy of alignment and adopt a policy which was “exclusively and completely Belgian.” Within six months, by the spring of 1937, Belgium signed an agreement with the French and British that replaced the defunct Locarno Pact and released her from the consultations and commitments involved in the Franco-Belgian Military Accords of 1920. The foreign policy of Belgium was altered to one of “independence” or neutrality and the two major powers of the West formally guaranteed her territorial integrity.