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.

In this essay, the investigation of United States images of Spain and Spanish images of North Americans serves as a point of departure in the search for larger patterns in intercultural relations — patterns that encompass far more of humanity than the two countries under consideration. My basic premise is that personal, psychic factors often lie at the heart of images that representative thinkers of a particular culture at a given moment form of other cultures. Personal, psychic factors lie also at the heart of an issue that has been central to history since the dawn of the modern age: the clash between modernity and traditionalism. The essential points of this article could have been made just as well by contrasting the mutual relationships between virtually any two national cultures, providing only that one was rather highly developed and modern, the other relatively backward economically and traditional or even primitive in social-political organization. I base my study on mutual images of North Americans and Spaniards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries simply because this is a subject about which I have thought at some length, even if not in much depth. Finally, if my conclusions have any validity, it derives not so much from historical methodology as from the analyses of Jungian psychology and the use of concepts such as individuation, archetypes, ego consciousness, and the personal and collective unconscious.

This paper focuses on Pascal's controversial pronouncements on justice, force and law. It proceeds, in light of a preliminary examination of historical context, questions of textual interpretation, and Pascal's method and study of man, to show in Pascal's thought a theory of law which (a) rejects rationalist and naturalist explanations, (b) incorporates positivism and by implication what is today called “historicism,” and (c) transcends both positivism and historicism dialectically in a Christocentric biblical view of cosmic order.

InTheYears following the second World War, Western diplomacy was confronted with staggering problems. Some of these have been results of long developments, others of more recent origin. Meetings between Mussolini and Hitler and between the dictators and Western statesmen are glaring examples of a new brand of diplomacy which was characterized by lack of preparation through traditional diplomatic channels. Subsequent events disclosed not only some weaknesses of democracies in international politics but exposed even more the lack of good faith and other destructive tendencies of totalitarian diplomacies. Not only did Western foreign policy fail to answer adequately the challenges of a crumbling world order, but totalitarian diplomacy also erred often and gravely. Mussolini's diplomatic mistakes caused the doom of Fascist Italy and Hitler's blunders contributed greatly to the destruction of Nazi Germany. The Nazi-Soviet deal and Stalin's overextended faith in Hitler are prize examples of diplomatic miscalculations.

Although Dr. Johnson wanted to hear no more of the Punic Wars most of his literate English contemporaries did not agree. Early in the century, to be sure, Thomas Madox found hostility — partly a philosophic revulsion against antiquarian “trash and cinders” and partly a rationalist revolt against the past — to ancient history, and was thereby moved to insist that the knowledge of antiquities could not be impugned without impugning history itself. That this belief had hearty support in succeeding decades is attested by the avid curiosity concerning Herculaneum, the frequent reference in periodicals, and the direct appeal to ancient historians in times of crisis. This “dream of antiquity” changed with the contemporary world. If, at first, archeology—a harmless conversation piece—excited the chief response, threats to liberty, mounting problems of empire, social disorganization, and international anarchy soon drew attention to Greek cities, Hellenistic expansion, and the decline and fall of the Roman Republic and Empire. There was, it is true, but a small harvest of ancient histories, and of these only a few warrant attention. The full measure of devotion must be sought elsewhere: men gained their knowledge of the ancient world not from histories alone but from literature, philosophy, and law.

As a by-product of the Napoleonic wars the Concert of Europe emerged as the institution responsible for the order of the Continent and even for peaceful change. With the admission of France it was a system of equilibrium founded upon a balance of political power among the five Great Powers which acted in the name of Europe as a unity. The Concert of Europe contained elements that were clearly judicial. It was not at all a mere sociological or political fact. But its juridical elements were weak, obscured by the anti-nationalist and anti-liberal tendencies of the founders. Nevertheless, the Concert of Europe enjoyed more success in solving problems peacefully than did the League of Nations, because the former's responsibility as a pouvoir minoritaire, to use Hauriou's concept, was clear and distinct. It is of course self-evident that the existence and efficiency of the Concert depended upon a community of several interests. It is equally obvious, too, that the Concert grew weaker as more material for political conflict between the Great Powers piled up, and the more their general interest gave way to particular and opposing interests. By the close of the century the Concert of the Great Powers was being slowly rent asunder through the formation of the Triple Alliance and the emergence of the Triple Entente. So it was that Europe ‘stumbled’, as Lloyd George has said, into the war of 1914–18.

By 1910 I had been for five years Mayor of Caltagirone, Provincial Councilor of Catania, and National Councilor of the Association of Communes of Italy, as well as one of the leaders of the “Municipalist” movement against State centralization, so that I was never missing from the Congresses of Communes.

The part assigned to me today is a humble one. It is not that of the specialist who diagnoses and prescribes for the disease, but that of the attendant who induces the patient to practise the regimen ordered, by persuading him that, repulsive as at first sight it appears, he will find it in reality not only forțifying, but positively agreeable; that it involves the surrender of no habits or activities which a sensible man ought to wish to retain; and that, if only he will pluck up the courage to give it a trial, bc will end by being astonished that he did not take to it before. I am only too conscious of my inability to utter convincingly the reassuring noises which such a rôle requires; but, in doing business with so experienced and wary an animal as the British lion, an approach which allays his initial alarms is undoubtedly expedient, and, not less undoubtedly, the kernel of his apprehensions is to be found in the region indicated by the title of my essay.

The flood of Roosevelt books sweeps on, bursting the dikes of literary convention. There is nothing to compare with it in all our intellectual history. Frances Perkins, Mike Reilly, Jay Franklin, Louis Adamic, Merriman Smith, Elliott Roosevelt, Henrietta Nesbitt, Robert E. Sherwood (vice Harry Hopkins), and Admiral Mclntire are some of the celebrated members of the inner and outer Roosevelt circle unable to resist the pleas of their consciences or agents to “write a book, just a little book” about the old master. Morgenthau, Byrnes, Farley, Hull, Garner, Ickes, and Stimson have likewise succumbed; the only authentic attraction of most of their Confessions is the author's version of “Life with Roosevelt.” Charles A. Beard, George Morgenstern, John T. Flynn, and others have filed their dissenting opinions. And still the high-water mark is not in sight. The day must surely come, if our forests hold out, when Roosevelt will have a, bibliography as long and detailed as Lincoln's, probably even longer, since the sources will be so much more plentiful and nearer to the surface. Fifty years from now our libraries will be choked with one, two, four, six, and twelve volume “definitive” biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and with countless bright little books bearing transcribed Lincoln titles—The Hidden Roosevelt, The Real Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Man of Letters, The Personal Finances of Franklin D. Roosevelt, They Knew Roosevelt, and The Women in Roosevelt's Life—all contributed by home-grown Roosevelt scholars. We may even have a Franklin D. Roosevelt Quarterly.

In the intellectual history of Russia, Konstantin Leontiev (1831–1891) emerges as a singular and enigmatic figure. Generous and benevolent in his personal relations and a scintillating conversationalist, he encountered antagonism or indifference where his writings and theories were concerned. The extremely unique and even esoteric quality of his thought caused him to exert virtually no influence either in his own day or in more recent periods. He was not a representative member of the Russian intelligentsia; indeed, he beggars assignment to any particular school. Perhaps the best description one can make of him is that of heir to the emotional strain of German philosophical romanticism. His predilection for naturalism and aestheticism are typical of early nineteenth century German anti-rationalist philosophy, as is his emphasis on tradition and organic development. Leontiev lacked utterly the humanistic qualities of the earlier Slavophiles who first appropriated German philosophic influence, and this quality of severity divorces him from the Russian romantic tradition. At the same time, his idealism caused him to be wholly out of tune with the nihilist, revolutionary, and populist tendencies of his own day. A prophet without honour, he was not without merit; his views are most provocative and reward attention. Not the least interesting aspect of Leontiev lies in his attitude towards nationalism; and it is with this facet of his thought that we shall be concerned.

In April 1929 the trustees of the University of Chicago, in the midst of an unprecedented boom on the stock exchange, chose Robert Maynard Hutchins, the thirty-year-old dean of the Yale Law School, to be the fifth president. During the twenty-two years that followed, Hutchins made an impression upon the organization and the life of the young university of a kind such as his sponsors for the office and the newspaper public, which enjoyed the spectacle of a youthful rising star, hardly expected. He made this impression as a student, a thinker and a teacher. He made it not, as the times prompted him to do, by trying to keep the University abreast of the morning newspaper, which is dead the next day, but by trying to raise it toward the philosophical heights of Aristotle and the poetic heights of Homer, whose ideas and words are as fresh now as more than two millenniums ago.

The Soviet Union confronts grave needs for reform because it achieved impressive progress upon old foundations, struggles with a systemic economic slowdown, faces fundamental social and spiritual infrastructured problems, wrestles with a costly overextended empire, and must adapt to the age of knowledge that challenges its centralized control. Soviet leaders recognize the need to restructure the economic and political system, but they consider innovation an ideologically unacceptable hazard to its values, and its control. Change would threaten the primacy of the military share of economic resources, the high priority foreign policy receives to provide legitimacy, and control of Eastern Europe. Only corrections and minor repairs in the economy are likely in a system that lacks a reform mechanism.

The period from roughly 1830 through the 1860's saw the growth of one of the most exotic intellectual movements ever to take root in American soil. Led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England transcendentalists mounted an attack on the social, intellectual, religious and political beliefs which their fathers, not to mention their contemporaries, had blandly held to represent the ultimate of humanwisdom. If the American of the mid-twentieth century sometimes exhibits a distressing fondness for a public recital of national sins and shortcomings, the inhabitants of nineteenthcentury Boston revealed an enviable capacity for regional, if not national, self-congratulation. They surely would have agreedwith Dr. Pangloss that this was the best of all possible worlds, and why not? Was there not good reason to believe, as Oliver Wendell Holmes was later to suggest, that Boston was the Hub of the Universe?

The article explores the issue of economic life within the theoretical tradition of the common good. To clarify the implications of the theory of the common good for economics, the economic philosophy of Yves R. Simon is presented. After clarifying the meaning of Simon's conception of the common good, the implications of the common good for Simon's economic thought are explored. It is argued that, for Simon, the economic system is a common good that undergirds the traditional Thomistic imperative that the use of goods be common. Some of the difficulties which Simon's thought has for market economics are then analyzed, and Simon's thought is used to suggest solutions. In this context, the roles of authority and virtue (particularly prudence) are treated.

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.

Eric Voegelin thought his “paradox of consciousness” was “the key to all his other works,” but no one has yet explored it as such a key. “participation” is the central term in Voegelin's philosophy, and the “paradox of consciousness” reveals the paradox of participation: a participant-partner is simultaneously a part and the whole (albeit in a perspective) of a reality of consciousness, like a marriage, a polity, or the cosmos.

Our nation's bicentennial year 1976 also marks the centennial of the death of Orestes A. Brownson (1803–1876). Throughout his life, Brownson was a lecturer and editor as well as a prolific writer on all aspects of nineteenth-century American life. His voluminous writings are of sweeping range. They include political treatises on American democracy, church-state relations, foreign policy, theological works, social commentaries on slavery, war and peace, the feminist movement, education, economic writings on the relationship between business and government, philosophical critiques of French, German, Italian and British philosophy, literary criticism and aesthetic evaluations of poetry and native American literature.