In the decade spanning 1968 to 1978, the Supreme Court cited the concept of the “new property” in over forty cases concerning the rights of clients in public sector relationships. The term new property first appeared in two law review articles written by Charles Reich in 1964 and 1965, and its primary points have since found favor with a number of political theorists. At the heart of the “new property” idea was the belief that a great many public sector benefits performed traditional functions of property and, therefore, ought to have been redefined as property in the law. Accordingly, Reich argued that public sector grants, including public assistance as well as unemployment compensation and Social Security, should lose their legal status as gratuities or charitable gifts and become instead “property” with all of the constitutional guarantees of due process that adhere to property in our system. This was a most egalitarian project indeed, with implications that went far beyond extending rights of due process. By transforming all men and women into property owners regardless of their private assets, the “new property” paved the way for a political vocabulary which wedded the particular and exclusive language of property with the universal, all-inclusive language of egalitarianism. In most respects this redefinition simply would have expanded the egalitarian direction implicit in past liberal functionalist theories of property, developments which many had already approved.

This study deals with the experiences of the Greens (Die Griinen) during the 1980's as a “new” party in West German state and federal parliaments and specifically with the Green parliamentary groups' relationships with the movement-party. The founders of the Greens sought to organize as a decentralized, participatory democracy. Accordingly, they developed rules to hinder the emergence of a professionalized leadership and to restrict the autonomy of parliamentary groups. Utilizing a comparative approach, the author investigates the extent to which the Greens have become “parliamentarized” by the normalizing forces of the established system at state and federal levels. This study relates the Greens' developmental experiences to the “classic” observations of Duverger, Michels, and others about modern party development. Finally, it reviews the recent perspectives of various intraparty groups about the future of the Greens.

Although “story” and “narrative” are frequently mentioned in Voegelin's account of the structure and dynamics of human consciousness, neither he nor his commentators have closely analyzed in a direct fashion the importance of these terms to that account. This article examines their significance to Voegelin's extended analysis.

THE outlook implicit in eschatology — that worldly events are moving toward a climax in which history will be terminated, and its trends overruled or fulfilled, according to a divine determination — is dim and implausible in the modern mind. The Biblical and Augustinian pictures of the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, and the Last Judgment, are likely to seem the most outworn vestments of religious faith; and even without these particular vestments, many find it difficult to conceive soberly of an ordained end of the world and history. This is especially clear in the case of the nonreligious. Their main ideologies during the past century or more, such as liberal progressivism, socialism, and communism, have all, in their typical forms, presupposed the finality of earthly developments. But even among religious people, the weakness of eschatology is manifest. It is true that there are some theologians, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Rudolf Bultmann, who have been concerned with eschatological ideas. But outside of small, intellectual circles eschatology has been largely monopolized by popular sects tending to specialize in lurid visions of “hellfire and brimstone.” The enfeeblement of eschatology even among the religious is apparent in the political outlook which is perhaps more intimately connected than any other in recent times with religious faith — conservatism. Burke and his followers have had remarkably little concern with the question of history's being ended and overruled. One can feel that in his attack on the French Revolution Burke was thinking less of God's judgment on all of history than he was of what he believed to be His manifest presence in history's residue of traditions and institutions. Thus, neither on the “left” nor on the “right,” and neither among the irreligious nor among the religious, are men today very much inclined to envision their history as subject to any sort of climactic interruption and judgment.

This article examines the contrast between philosophy and sophism in Xenophon's Memorabilia, focusing chiefly on the two dialogues between Socrates and Aristippus. In two crucial respects, Socrates and the sophist appear as opposites. He accepts what the sophist rejects: the obligations and restraints imposed by the city's laws; and he rejects what the sophist accepts: the vulgar notion that everyone knows what the good things are. In the first dialogue, Socrates defends the self-discipline proper to citizen-soldiers against Aristippus' complete rejection of political responsibility. In the second, he points to the substitution of the beautiful for the good as the proper object of philosophical investigation, hi both dialogues, Socrates walks a middle road: he is more political than the sophist, but less so than the politician. Yet he proves to be close to the politician qua philosopher than he is qua citizen.

Plato's Statesman and Laws are usually linked together as “Plato's later political theory.” Yet these dialogues offer contradictory descriptions of the relation between law and reason and thus between political science and philosophy. In particular, the Eleatic Stranger of the Statesman presents an account of the “second-best” regime that differs from that of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws. The Eleatic Stranger's account of the second-best is wrong; his error follows from his view that politics is insignificant for genuinely human purposes. By comparing human statesmanship to animal herding and explicating its nature through the paradigm of weaving, the Eleatic Stranger contends that the true philosopher is too concerned with individual human natures to care for human collectivities. From his perspective, Socratic or Athenian political philosophy is but sophistry.

A neglected issue in the study of modernization is how the person transfers his pursuit of ultimate ends and meanings from religious to secular perspectives. If one could speak of a modern paradigm, it would include, at a minimum, commitments to rationalism and immanence. Unifying debates between classical rationalists and empiricists, Marxists and positivists, and idealists and realists, is the notion that some form of human reason is the court of last resort for disputes, whether reason be interpreted deductively, inductively, instrumentally, dialectically, or vitally; and the belief that ultimate meaning resides, if at all, in the public situation or in history. Modern perspectives demand, then, that the person confronts and overcomes in some way religious desires, such as the wills to immortality, plenitude, and eternal justice. Methods must be devised by which these desires are either channeled into political or historical perspectives, transferred from the public to the private realm, or denied altogether.

In the struggle between Republicans and Democrats for the black vote half a century ago, Joseph W. Martin, Jr., congressman from Massachusetts, played a major role. Using his position as Alf Landon's East Coast campaign manager (1936), minority leader (1939–1946) and chair of the Republican National Committee (1940–1942) he managed to keep the Republican party attractive to many Afro-Americans. Furthermore, the was instrumental in preventing the GOP from abandoning its traditional commitment to blacks in order to win the allegiance of Southern white conservatives. He did this by the type of campaign he conducted, the legislation and causes he supported, and the type of Afro-American he appointed to party positions. As a result it was not until the Martin approach was abandoned in the 1960s that black support for the Republican party plummeted.

Karl Marx's master plan, as originally laid down in the Communist Manifesto, saw the world, led by Europe, moving away from feudal particularism through bourgeois nationalism toward proletarian internationalism. The failure of the Revolution of 1848 meant a flaw in practice, not theory, and Marx saw no need to change the plan. He was waiting for the world to continue in its materially determined direction when events made possible the founding of the First International in 1864. Three years later he wrote Friedrich Engels: “In the next revolution, which is perhaps nearer than it seems, we (i.e., you and I), have this powerful machinery in our hands.”

The assertion that we are living a moment in which a deep transformation of human relations will emerge is no longer commonplace dictum. Everybody talks of crisis, but not any longer in the purely economic sense of disturbances to the process involving production and consumption, but rather in the sense of general confusion and disarray, in the sense of uncertainty before measures taken unsuccessfully, which often provoke greater inconveniences than those to be remedied.

Arguments about Soviet foreign policy usually include a lively debate about whether the Politburo is made up of Marxists or Machiavellians. The defenders of the Machiavellian interpretation of Soviet behaviour insist that the Communists are just “power politicians” carrying out the historic Russian program of expansion under a new guise. Until recently this view has been by far the most popular with American scholars and laymen. Few people here even now would take the position diat the Soviet Union's actions are a blind fulfillment of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist theory. Some would, however, insist that an understanding of this theory will facilitate interpretation of Soviet behaviour. Indeed, some Soviet policies and actions make much more sense when placed within a Stalinist frame of reference than as “power politics.”

In the preface to his doctoral dissertation Marx wrote: “Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus, 'in a word I detest all the Gods,' is her own profession, her own slogan against all the gods of heaven and earth who do not recognize man's self-consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.” Now this attitude of defying God goes hand in hand with an attitude toward the world: one who cannot endure the idea of God's sovereignty often resents even the “givenness” of things with specific natures. It is not just that he senses that they would lead him back to God, but also that they, each with its own inner logos which imposes itself on man, are themselves felt to belong to the detested gods. Such a man approaches these things to destroy their givenness, and to make new objects out of them which reflect himself and his powers, and depend on him. The Austrian art historian, Hans Sedlmayr, describes this attitude as follows:

Dem Menschen, der sich ganz autonom proklamiert, muss es unertraeglich sein, Kreaturen zu begegnen, die offenbar nicht seine Geschoepfe sind. Es ist ein prometheischer und im Grund narzistischer Traum, sich durch Technik und naturfreie Kunst eine menschliche Umwelt zu bauen, in der man nichts und niemandem begegnet als den Schoepfungen des eigensten Menschengestes.

As Gadamer, the “dean” of European philosophy, turns 100 this year, it behooves philosophers and reflective people in general to ponder the relation between philosophy and “good life,” and more broadly between philosophy and natural health. As it happens, Gadamer himself has extensively reflected on this issue, especially in a book titled The Enigma of Health. The essay first recapitulates some of the main arguments of Gadamer's text, focusing on the difference between the growing scientific arsenal of medical intervention (combatting illness) and the unforced and un-constructed maintenance of human health through attentiveness to “nature's way.” The middle section inserts the text into the context of Gadamer's larger opus, exploring particularly the connection between health and such key Gadamerian concerns as “appropriateness,” “natural rightness,” and “mimesis.” The conclusion traces affinities between Gadamer and the teachings of Heidegger and Adorno, while also probing the political implications of his text for the maintenance of human freedom in the face of expertocracy and the reduction of politics to ideological blueprints.

Reinhold niebuhr is perhaps the most influential exponent of a Protestant view of life in modern America. While American Protestants today seem to be shifting their attention from Niebuhr to Paul Tillich, this recent trend is still far from counterbalancing the dominant position held by Niebuhr from the early thirties well into the fifties. And even Tillich's influence is, in a sense, an extension of Niebuhr's, for it was Niebuhr who brought Tillich to this country from Germany in 1933. Also, the latter's ontology is, on the whole, perhaps more complementary than contradictory to the ethics of Niebuhr.

Michael Oakeshott's concerns about political developments in twentieth-century Europe seem to shape his philosophical writings. Yet Oakeshott persistently portrays himself as a philosopher who has little practical interest in politics. This essay argues that Oakeshott's genteel conception of the good life leads him to develop a political doctrine for practical reasons while disclaiming any practical motives. His diagnosis of collectivist politics in the 1930s reluctantly solicits a philosophical defense of a pluralist political order that is hospitable to his ethical ideal. His writings concerning the self, society, and state develop such a defense. Yet for Oakeshott, political engagement is incompatible with gentility because it conflates worldliness with spirituality. Oakeshott, therefore, disavows the practical aspirations that shape his work.