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.

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.

This paper contends that Locke's educational writings are more robust in their commitment to autonomy than recent assessments of Locke as a theorist of “disciplinary liberalism” suggest. While Locke's account of parental power is conflicted, it is mostly compatible with a liberal, child-responsive approach to education. Insofar as Locke develops a pedagogy sensitive to the pupil's temperament and his rights as a child, he articulates a nuanced understanding of autonomy, shown to be a product of the individual's participation in a community of rational beings. Complicating both received understandings of Lockean liberalism as atomistic and newer claims about the dark forces of socialization it unleashes, this paper gleans from Lockean education the potential of a socially embedded subject, who looks both within and without himself to cultivate a posture of considerable critical independence.

Although Machiavelli argues that “return to first principles” is a necessary and perhaps even sufficient condition for counteracting political corruption, few scholars have engaged in a sustained textual analysis of Discourses III.1, the chapter in which he outlines the meaning of this enigmatic concept. Reassessing Machiavelli's exempla in this chapter will reveal that return to first principles consists in the revival of the ethos of innovation and public-spiritedness that accompanies every successful political founding. This process of renewal entails reviving the psychological forces that initially guide human beings to establish new political orders, including fear of violent death and longing for glory. Existing interpretations of D III.1 have tended to emphasize renewal through fear-invoking punishment, neglecting Machiavelli's examples of renewal through exemplary acts of civic virtue. A careful analysis of instruments and agents of return to first principles will illustrate how both spectacular punishment and virtuous acts of self-sacrifice converge to counteract corruption and foster political innovation.

Rousseau's Confessions is generally regarded simply as his autobiography or, more precisely, as his apology—his defense of his character and conduct against the attacks of his enemies. Yet he himself claims that the work is philosophically significant; the Confessions is intended to be an account of man as he is according to nature. This essay will attempt to uncover the philosophical import of the Confessions especially as it bears upon the question of the individual and society. The Introduction will establish the philosophical context within which Rousseau places his enterprises and will point to the contemporary political significances of that enterprise. In the second section, Rousseau's understanding of himself as a “natural man” will be examined. The third section will show the radical character of the tension between the individual and society as this tension follows from Rousseau's account of the nature of man. Finally, the root of Rousseau's understanding of the political problem having been exposed, Rousseau's status as the champion of the individual's claims against society will be seen to be highly problematic. That is, Rousseau will show himself to be far more critical of contemporary political- and self-consciousness than is generally thought to be the case.

Many readers of Alexis de Tocqueville have noted the ambiguity in his formulation of the term “democracy.” This essay suggests that this ambiguity can be clarified by considering what Tocqueville calls “democratic language”—i.e., the use of generalizations, abstractions, and personifications in writing and speech. Tocqueville investigates these novel linguistic devices to understand the transformation of language in democratic times. More importantly, he employs them to appropriate the Doctrinaires’ formulation of democracy and to criticize their legitimation of the July Monarchy's exclusive government. Yet Tocqueville's use of democratic language is a reluctant one. He finds that the tendency to use abstract and personified concepts obfuscates the political agency of citizens. Wary of the despotic effects of such obfuscation, Tocqueville argues that individuals must practice their concepts. In the context of the July Monarchy, this becomes a call for the extension of democratic rights and institutions.

In The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie has given us a big book. At once learned and lively, it enters the lists not simply of “origins of modernity” stories, but more particularly of those stories that engage the proudly secular and rational self-image of the age. Among the latter, its most explicit interlocutors are Hans Blumenberg and Martin Heidegger, but its effective resonances and dissonances extend, if more subtly, to Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Amos Funkenstein—and perhaps to the likes of Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze, and others as well. Indeed, in its insistent probing of connections between modern science and late medieval theology, this book is arguably in dialogue not only with a range of continental thinkers, but also with such Anglophone philosophers as Whitehead, Collingwood, and E. A. Burtt.

THE editors of the Review of Politics have asked me to do something that is indicated by the title of this informal essay. It is something that I have long had in mind. Substantially I am asked to assess after the passage of almost twenty years the thesis laid down in The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. Ordinarily the biography of a book or of a writer's ideas had better, in good taste, be left to others. But I hope that I may be forgiven some notes on the nature of that work, because of their relevance not only to this return to the subject, but because of their relevance as well to what seems to me to be a general change in scholarly attitude toward a central problem: the place of ethics and the place of science in that study which Aristotle named by one word, Politics. It is peculiarly a pleasure to contribute this revision of a position to a journal devoted to the high cultivation of that Aristotelian conception. The distinction already achieved by the Review of Politics is in itself a witness of the changed temper of contemporary thought to a deep concern with political values.

In his political writings, Hobbes consistently distinguishes between “natural” and “artificial” commonwealths—those that arise from the family, and those created by mutual covenants. Although he insists that “both have the same right of government,” closer examination of Hobbes's accounts of the family reveals that it is a radically deficient model for the state, and that Hobbes was engaged in a polemic against both republicans and absolutists who claimed that parental power was natural, prior to, and even a model for the power of civil sovereigns. For Hobbes, a state based on parental rule is dangerously unstable, exacerbating the mutual fears of parents and children. The “office of the sovereign representative” defuses this conflict, and within the commonwealth, the family is denaturalized and reconstituted as an educative institution whose purpose is to reinforce the artificial sovereign by schooling both parents and children in the miseries of personal rule.

Although scholars routinely agree that a relative absence of socialism marks one way in which the United States is exceptional, they have argued over why we are distinct in this way. As representatives of an enduring comparative public policy issue, two “camps” of analysts have offered broad, competing explanations resting on cultural and structural variables, respectively. This article implements a strategy for demonstrating: (1) specific cultural and structural independent variables are applied most appropriately to explain specific aspects of policy development, and (2) cultural and structural contributions are thus complementary rather than competing. I proceed by focusing on an exception to the “laggard” character of the American welfare state, the unusual success of the social security program. Dealing with the obverse of the usual “why-America-lags” concern provides a more observable dependent variable, enabling us to highlight the actual operation of distinct cultural and structural forces. I then show how this strategy can be applied to broader questions of American exceptionalism and public policy development.

Liberals and communitarians differ most basically on the justification of values, a disagreement that leads to alternative approaches to social criticism. Liberals insist on cosmopolitan justification, which has universalistic criteria, while communitarians are committed to local justification based on the shared values of particular societies. Although communitarians correctly believe that justification cannot be foundationalist, the universalism of cosmopolitan justification is essential to the defense of values like freedom that are supported by both communitarians and liberals. Moreover, cosmopolitan justification is possible when understood in contextual terms. An exploration of the political implications of the human capacities of rationality and moral agency can derive universal principles as criteria for social criticism.

Although Leo Strauss spent the better part of his scholarly career in the United States, his name remained essentially unknown in this country during his lifetime outside the rather restricted academic circles of political science and Judaic studies. Only in recent years — owing, positively, to the best-selling status achieved by a book by one of his students, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind; and negatively, to several critical reviews of his thought and influence in the semi-popular media —has Strauss's name been publicized to a somewhat wider audience. This article is a response to two of the critiques: Gordon Wood's relatively moderate “The Fundamentalists and the Constitution,” published in the New York Review of Books (18 February 1988), and Stephen Taylor Holmes's less restrained “Truths for Philosophers Alone?”, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (1–7 December 1989)

Although born a slave and held in bondage until past his twenty-first birthday, Blanche K. Bruce escaped the worst cruelties of the Peculiar Institutions. He was born in a slave cabin near Farmville, the county seat of Prince Edward County, Virginia, on 1 March 1841. Youngest of eleven children born to his slave mother Polly, Bruce was an octoroon or quadroon, with light skin and Caucasian features; his father's name and race, however, are apparently unknown.

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries.… Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectively persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire. It spread, and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

Whether, some day, the twentieth century may claim to have inaugurated as fundamental a change in economic organization as did the monetary revolution of the sixteenth and the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century is still an open question. While in most European countries the transformation is evident, and from Spain to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to the Balkan states, it has been intensified under the impact of war economy, American public opinion still hesitates to admit any break with the past. Most people believe that expansion of governmental activities, concentration of economic power, rigidities, monopolies, public indebtedness and taxation as consequential as they are should be evaluated as accessories of an economic system which in its foundation has remained intact. In its very essence, this system is supposed to rest upon the great principles of private property, freedom of enterprise and social mobility.