The conferences, the spectaculars of European diplomacy between the First and Second World Wars, have contributed some interesting myths to the folk history of the twentieth century. The Munich Conference of 1938, for example, has come to represent to some an act of betrayal, surrender and defeat—an effort to have one's own skin by selling out a small country in a vainattempt to satisfy a dictator's unlimited appetite. The Locarno Conference of October, 1925, has been regarded as an event which brought an end to the conflict between Germany and the Western powers during the World War and its aftermath. Supposedly, at Locarno enemies were reconciled after years of hostility, and a new era dawned: the following four years were a period of harmony between Germany and the West, as foreign ministers from each side conducted personal diplomacy in an atmosphere of good will. These assertions about Locarno have received less scholarly attention than the myth of Munich and deserve critical reexamination. As part of that reconsideration, some measurement might be taken of the level of misunderstanding and malevolence and hope — either genuine or illusory.

Of all the Fabians Sydney Olivier (1859–1943) was the only one who became interested in the extension of Fabian socialism, in one form or another, to the British colonies. One reason for this perhaps is that he was the only one among the first generation of Fabians who was extremely conscious of his mixed origin. “I have,” he once wrote to his wife in 1884, “a rather fatal facility of seeing several sides to many questions at the same time. That is the result, I expect, of my being such a mixture of French, Irish, and Puritan-Saxon blood. I have two or three brains, and one is always criticizing the other. I shall never be a single-minded bigot.” In an age when European civilization was believed to be “everything” and everything else “nothing” such a temperament was highly conducive to the entertainment of sympathies toward non-European peoples and lands. A biographer of the Webbs came very close to saying this. “Sydney Olivier,” she remarked, “with his rich background of culture, tinged with a streak that can only be called romantic, perhaps derived from his Latin heredity, was … the voice predominantly of the moral sense.” And as is usual in several such controversies concerning the Fabian Society, the word of Bernard Shaw can never be neglected. To Shaw the French ancestry of Olivier enabled the latter to form an objective view of the British Empire and its role in history and it also helped him to get along quite well with non-English Britons.

This article offers a new understanding of political justification and American constitutionalism. Previous scholarship relies on philosophical justifications of constitutionalism which regard the American Constitution as the blueprint of the good society. Such claims fail to explain why persons should interpret a constitution that does not conform to their conception of political justice. Scholars could offer better reasons for interpreting an imperfect constitution if they placed greater emphasis on two other models of political justification. Institutional justifications of constitutionalism regard Constitutions as standard operating procedures for allocating the resources available for achieving the good society. Social justifications of constitutionalism regard constitutions as compromises among people of fundamentally different views. By combining philosophical, institutional and social perspectives, scholars might strengthen the case for constitutional obedience and provide better foundations for a theory of constitutional interpretation.

Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who fell from power two years ago, was surely one of the more spectacular leaders of the newly emerging nations, at least in the romantic and dramatic days of their early emergence. Nkrumah had a number of advantages which he exploited to the hilt: his successful drive for independence led the parade in Black Africa; Ghana itself had a head start in development and sophistication fostered by a generous British colonial policy; and the rest of the world was anxious that Ghana and others to follow it succeed in the business of attaining genuine nationhood.

Simone Weil's work has always been appreciated for its evocative beauty, but not always for its potential contributions to political thought. In this essay, we engage in a reappraisal of her political thought, and of her relevance to contemporary politics, by way of her discussion of the power of words. Weil shares much with contemporary approaches that view the world as a text to be interpreted. But for Weil, the power of interpretation carries with it an illusion, exemplified in Weil's example of Achilles watching over his war-work, in which the world can be seen, measured, and shaped according to one's will. For Weil, the illusion of control that accompanies this perspective is undermined by our encounter with a world of physical causes and sensations that impact us, quite without us being able to control them.

The history of the secularization of modern culture has yet to be written, and the reasons for this are easy enough to understand. For on the one hand, the mind of the secularized majority has been so deeply affected by the process of secularization that it cannot view that process in an objective historical manner, while on the other, the religious minority has been forced into an attitude of negative opposition which is no less unfavorable to dispassionate study. Nevertheless, it is emphatically a problem which requires an historical approach. The process of secularization was a historical movement no less than the Reformation, a minority movement which was gradually transmitted to wider circles until it eventually won the key positions of social and intellectual influence through which it dominated European society. This movement, which was already known as the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and the accompanying ideology, which later acquired the name of Liberalism, have long been studied by historians chiefly in Germany and France, though in a somewhat piecemeal fashion; but their work has not hitherto been fully assimilated by educated opinion in England and America. Here the tendency has been to concentrate attention on political and economic change, and above all on the American and French revolutions. But we have not paid enough attention to the intellectual revolution that had already taken place before there was any question of a political one. Yet it is this intellectual revolution that is responsible for the secularization of Western culture. This intellectual movement, like most of the movements that have changed the world, was religious in origin, although it was anti-religious in its results. It owed its dynamism to the resistance of a religious minority and its diffusion to the illjudged and unjust, though sincere, action of religious orthodoxy. It is indeed, the supreme example in history of the way in which religious persecution and repression defeats its own object and serves the cause it is attempting to destroy.

The protagonist of Aristophanes's Birds rises from nowhere to become a tyrannos of the first order, but scholars disagree when assessing him. Do Peisetairos's impressive political gifts make him an apt example of competent rule, or does his treatment of his subjects mark him as guilty of hubris and perfidy? While documenting the distinguishing features of this remarkable ruler, it is argued that—Arrowsmith's eloquent essay notwithstanding—Aristophanes does not condemn him. Nor, however, does he recommend Peisetairos's rule, as Henderson suggests. Between these extremes is a more complex via media: if a birdlike populace is to have an empire, they must also embrace a Peisetairos. But it would not be unwise to oppose an empire at such a price, even if the Alcibidean leader who would preside over it cannot be condemned for seeking to rule in the way he imagines to be most advantageous for himself.

The Book of Jonah depicts the tension between justice and mercy. Jonah's peculiar community, the “chosen” people, does not merely provide security and prosperity, but aims to shape the souls of its own members, and, eventually, of all human beings. The parable is optimistic about the possibility of justice in a world of distinct peoples. But on an individual level it is tragic, because Jonah himself fails to reach a practicable view of justice for imperfect but educable fellows and foreigners. He himself remains a distorted human being, deficient especially in his use of language, neither beast nor god, but, in the end, outside any community. As a reading on the highest holiday of the Jewish year, the story has a special place among Jonah's people. Neither homily nor sermon, it is an example of public storytelling as an instrument of education.

Recent scholarship has linked the rise of the Progressive movement in America to the creation of an “administrative state”—a form of government where legislative, executive, and judicial powers are delegated into the hands of administrative agencies which compose a “headless fourth branch of government.” This form of government was largely constructed during the New Deal period. The influential legal theorist Roscoe Pound provides the paradoxical example of a Progressive who balked at the New Deal. While many commentators have concluded that Pound's opposition to the New Deal was based on a departure from his earlier Progressive thought, his opposition was in fact based on a consistent Progressive philosophy. Pound therefore provided a vision of an alternative administrative state, which would achieve the ends of the Progressive vision but without the means of the administrative state.

This article argues, contrary to the analyses of many scholars, that the political thought of the nineteenth-century Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt is neither frivolous nor irrelevant. More specifically, this essay combines biographical information about Burckhardt with an analysis of his major writings in order to challenge the notion that Burckhardt was simply a cultural historian and not a serious political thinker. The central teaching of Burckhardt's life is that the intellectual in mass society can best serve the community, not by direct political participation, but by working for the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral cultivation of the individual. The central teachings of his political writings are that “great men” often rule but unjustly, that successful leaders approach politics as a “work of art” and master the devices necessary to shape their subjects, that culture should not be subordinated to the state, and finally that individualism, class conflict, mass democracy, and the erosion of culture are both unfortunate and inevitable aspects of modernity.

The first issue of The Review of Politics was published in 1939, the year of Hitler's attack on Poland. The new magazine, thus, appeared at the end of one historical period, the interwar years, and at the beginning of the new age initiated by the Second World War. The years, 1918–1939, were themselves years of the working out of the crisis of which the First World War was an issue. That war, inhuman in its demands and protracted shock effects, had finally been sustained by Utopian and revolutionary hopes. The continuing crisis, compounded by that war, had been intensified by the world depression as well as by the period's characteristic political responses to the crisis. Often enough, the center and part of the right preferred to believe that things had not changed and that there was no crisis. On the left, widely enchanted by the Soviet Union's cooperation with history, seen as the ruthless work of justice, there was an astonishing unconcern about human liberty and a blindness to suffering. The right, too, often surrendered itself to the fraudulent conservatism of fascism, to political salvation by violence. So, in 1939, war, notably global in scope, came again.

In the decades after World War Two, most scholars working on genocide focused on particular cases, providing historically detailed descriptions of the causes and patterns of mass violence but rarely branching out beyond a specific case. The study of the Holocaust is typical of this; the vast majority of works on the Nazi genocide had little comparative dimension and instead examined the ways in which anti-Semitism and certain policies condemned disfavored minorities to persecution and extermination. These earlier works are particularly important because they gave us rich understandings of the origins, sequencing, and dynamics of mass violence, as well as the roles of dehumanizing cultural views and ideologies that facilitated extermination. Nevertheless, multi-case studies were the exception, and generally received little attention in the social sciences.

Political and comprehensive liberals are both pessimistic about finding a satisfactory way to resolve the debate over whether and how to expose students in public schools to religion. An examination of John Tomasi's Liberalism beyond Justice and William Galston's Liberal Pluralism reveals that a central cause of this pessimism is the presumption that an education for autonomy must encourage students to become rational choosers of their beliefs. This essay suggests that it is possible to found an education for autonomy on the more modest goal of ensuring that students have a reasonable ability to exit from their communities when they feel that membership is too painful. An education for exit would involve exposing students at the high school level to alternative religious beliefs to ensure they are aware that it might be possible to lead tolerable lives and achieve salvation outside of their communities of origin.

In this paper I consider Strauss's case for philosophy as a “way of life.” Strauss's case rests, I believe, on a view of philosophy first as a quest—an erotic aspiration—for knowledge of the whole and second as committed to a skeptical view of our ability ever to attain to such knowledge. Moreover, can the philosophic life defend itself against its most powerful alternative, namely, the case for revealed religion or does philosophy itself rest upon an act of faith of its own? I argue that philosophy has the resources to defend itself but only once it is understood as an open-ended (“zetetic”) search for truth. Only by returning to a conception of philosophy as “skeptic in the original sense of the term” can philosophy avoid the twin dogmatisms of faith and unbelief.

Christianity has influenced Western culture more than any factor save human nature itself, and yet its influence is now greatly diminished. Reactions to this have usually taken the form of a Hegelian affirmation that Christianity, having served its historical purpose, is no longer important in itself; a nostalgic conservatism which rejects the culture of modernity simply; or a revivalism which ignores it. An alternative view rests on an analysis of culture and the enlightenment process of secularization to which the Church reacted by closing in on itself until the Second Vatican Council affirmed the legitimate autonomy of the secular. The Church itself, partly to blame for secularization through its practical demystification of nature and attempt to coercively supplant all pre- and non-Christian religious experience, should engage modernity while giving witness to human dignity and promoting a more human culture. Such a constructive recovery of Christian culture must avoid both politicization and moralism.

I write to note a fundamental area of agreement with Professors Orren and Skowronek. And yet given this shared concern I think the study of ideas should be at the center of developmental approaches to politics. Professors Orren and Skowronek write, “The time has passed when familiar claims about constitutional foundations and normative commitments can be ventured confidently without serious consideration of confounding evidence. Making inquiries into these areas specific and empirically tractable will be, we think, value added.” I agree with this general assessment. Indeed, I have written a book, The Madisonian Constitution, which seeks to examine tensions within American constitutionalism and empirically trace how constitutional understandings and constitutional change have necessarily been partial and incomplete. In fact, I suggest that constitutional conflict has been an ordinary feature of American constitutionalism precisely because the American constitutional order is structured around agonistic principles and institutions. From the perspective of political science, understanding these tensions might also prove helpful in sustaining the American polity. But let me be clear: I do not think there is an easy foundation to be arrived at in the study of the American polity, or any other polity. Nor do I long for a world untroubled by “facing the facts,” nor for a time untroubled by historicism, positivism, or social science. I do think, however, an at times uncritical acceptance of historicism and positivism has led political scientists unnecessarily to turn away from the study of ideas and values that make up the political community.