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.

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.

Looking to the relatively recent “religious turn” in Locke scholarship, this paper argues for an interpretation that reconciles two apparently contradictory aspects of his thought: on the one hand, property rights, thought absolute by many of Locke's readers; on the other hand, Locke's notion of duties of charity. On the basis of a rereading of the “Essay on the Poor Law,” I argue that Lockean charity may ground coercively enforceable distributive obligations. Nevertheless, I contend that the redistributive poor-relief system grounded on the principle of charity does not infringe property rights. The reason for this is that the right to charity and the right to property are both based on Locke's theological commitment to the right of each man to the means of preservation.

Whereas Eric Voegelin's main works from the 1950s to the 1980s are well known and have been widely discussed, his early work has gained academic attention only recently. Voegelin scholars have now entered into a wide-ranging discussion of the specific nature of those early writings. The following reflections seek to contribute to this general discussion by focusing on one of the most interesting—and, at the same time, the most puzzling—of Voegelin's early unpublished texts. Concentrating on the fragment entitled the Theory of Governance, this article will also present certain sources that have not yet appeared in English. Its aim will be to clarify some of the crucial questions and principles of Voegelin's early conception of political science in general. After presenting that conception, the article will indicate that Voegelin's later critique of the modern ideologies of political collectivism has not yet come into focus in this early text.

In this issue we are proud to present eight essays celebrating the lives and works of some of the most pre-eminent political philosophers who wrote in the twentieth century. These essays are authored, moreover, by some of these philosophers' most distinguished students. Their readings can and, no doubt, will be contested; it is characteristic of political philosophy that its materials – textual as well as phenomenological – are subjects of debate.

It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to respond to Alex Zakaras's thoughtful and stimulating article. Although Zakaras takes my work (together with that of William Galston) as a critical target, much of what he says is common ground between us. That includes his basic understanding of value pluralism, his evident support for that idea, and his broadly liberal approach to politics. Moreover, I think that he makes a significant contribution by drawing attention to the relation between pluralism and fallibility, and by focusing on Isaiah Berlin's treatment of Mill in that connection. Zakaras is right that Berlin's essay on Mill has not until now been carefully examined as a resource for the debate about the way pluralism relates to liberalism, and his suggestions about what the essay may tell us in that regard are valuable.

I am grateful to both William Galston and George Crowder for their thoughtful responses. In writing the original essay, I had two goals in mind. First, I wanted to give an accurate reading of Isaiah Berlin's philosophy and to challenge certain misconceptions about it. Second, I hoped to use some of Berlin's insights to contribute to the contemporary discussion of value pluralism and its relationship to liberalism. Neither Galston nor Crowder disputes my reading of Berlin. Galston writes that he “never set out to write as an interpreter of Berlin”; Crowder, too, simply brackets the question of interpretation (see his footnote 1). So I will focus these comments strictly on the problem of value pluralism's relationship to political liberalism.

“Totalitarianism” is a powerful word rich in historical associations and rebounding in current political usage. The four books under review reflect both the term's range of usage and the enduring fascination with the phenomena it described. Totalitarianism's initial terminological siblings, “nazism” and “communism,” are applied chiefly to the original historical subjects that generated them. A close political cousin, “fascism,” long ago escaped its close ideological family and is applied to everything from brutal police to road hogs. In contrast, “totalitarianism,” formerly confined to a narrow political as opposed to a cultural context, is suddenly in play. In recent issues of the New York Times, David Brooks excoriates Iraqi proponents of “totalitarian theocracy” (5/16/2004); President Bush deplores the terrorists’ “totalitarian ideology” (5/29/05), and Condoleezza Rice abhors Iran as a “totalitarian state” (5/29/2005). A Central Asian despot is characterized as a “fragile totalitarian” in a feature by David E. Sangler (5/29/2005), and the group of army officers (the Military Council for Justice and Democracy) that overthrew President Maouya Sidi Ahmed Taya in Mauritania in August 2005 defend their decision “to put an end to the totalitarian practices of the deposed regime.” Totalitarianism is back, but what does it mean?

Should judges play a prominent policymaking role through their exercise of judicial review, or should judicial review be exercised to strike down only those acts that clearly violate the Constitution's text or historical context? Prevailing scholarship maintains that the Constitutional Convention debates provide little relevant guidance with which to answer this question. The truth is essentially the opposite: the Convention delegates extensively considered the role that judges should play in policymaking, particularly during their debate over a proposed council of revision. This essay revisits the council of revision debate. It argues that beneath the delegates' clear disagreements lies an apparent consensus, one heretofore largely unrecognized: that whether or not judges should have been invited to play the policymaking role they would have played as members of a council of revision, they should not play a policymaking role while serving on the judicial bench.

This paper explores some of the basic ideological tenets of former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami, showing how they prevented him from realizing his reform agenda. Ideological inconsistencies and ambiguities exposed Khatami and his allies to criticism from both conservatives and radical reformers. Consequently, many Iranians who once voted for Khatami and his allies boycotted the presidential elections of 2005, paving the way for a conservative to succeed Khatami as president of Iran.

This paper seeks to illuminate magnanimity by examining Shakespeare's Coriolanus in light of Aristotle's account of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics. I contend that contemplation of Coriolanus's similarity to Aristotle's magnanimous man allows us to harmonize two apparently discordant elements of the magnanimous man's character: his seriousness about the good, on the one hand, and his apparently status-oriented intolerance of insult, on the other. Nevertheless, Coriolanus falls short of Aristotle's standard; reflection on his defects reveals that genuine magnanimity requires prudence and a philosophic detachment from the city's moral convictions that Shakespeare's hero lacks.

To European economists, cartels are old acquaintances. Beyond the Atlantic, they have been under discussion since Kleinwaechter, in 1883, made them the object of the first analysis. It was about the time when, in this country, monopolies and trusts were much debated. As early as Europe waxed cartel-conscious, this country became monopoly and trust-conscious. Not that American scholars were unaware of the cartels—no less than Europeans were unaware of the trusts; but it appeared to most that the sin of industry in this country was “monopolies,” whereas the enemies of cartels in Europe were equally inclined to call the cartel the sin of their economies.

In the short-lived days of the NRA cartel-like organizations were entrusted with the establishment of industrial codes for market regulation. They were not called cartels, but actually they functioned, or were supposed to function, like cartels.

This question may be answered by “yes” or “no,” according to one's point of view. Mussolini's Fascism—that of the black shirts, of banners bearing the skull and bones emblem, of the so-called Roman salute, of parades, punitive expeditions with muskets, clubs and castor oil, of the East African Empire and the Albanian Kingdom—may be called dead, even buried. But the Fascism that ante-dates Mussolini, the Fascism of all times and all countries—that brand of Fascism never dies. It adapts itself, instead, to all climates and all temperatures; it dresses according to the fashion, disguises itself and hides. That brand of Fascism has not died because it is deathless.

Contrary to those social scientists who posit a close relationship between corporate interests, the capitalist state, and the nonpartisan research establishment, this paper challenges the linkage thesis through an examination of the early history of the Brookings Institution. As the nation's oldest and most prestigious “think tank,” the Brookings Institution played a multidimensional role in the public policy process. Robert S. Brookings, the capitalist who founded the institution in the aftermath of World War I, played little role in the subsequent history of the institution. Instead, the less reform-minded professional social scientists who staffed the organization shaped the character of the institution. In their defense of the market economy, Brookings economists emerged as leading opponents of the new liberal state.